Fury convoked them in a large elliptical room located deep underground, beneath what appeared to be an abandoned warehouse by the shoreline of New York City. (It was a clever place to hide a super elite military base of operations, John supposed, if not a bit clichéd. Magneto at least had the creativity to put HIS base on the top of a mountain near a busy ski resort.) They were seated around a long table with about a dozen empty chairs left on either side of them. Apparently they intended to use this room for very important SHIELD gatherings - or they were planning on playing a game later that would involved swivelling office furniture.

Fury stood at the head of the table with Major Danvers. They had an enormous file folder open in front of them. Danvers shuffled through the files while Fury flicked a switch that turned on the smart board behind him. Danvers seemed to find what she was looking for and started passing smaller stacks of papers around to the Brotherhood and Pyro.

"Thank you, Major." Fury said once everyone had their own stack of papers. "That will be all. I will see you in Seattle in two weeks."

Danvers saluted him and left the room.

"What you have in front of you is intelligence gathered from one of our undercover operatives." Fury brought up the first page on his smart board and zoomed in to a section outlining a bunch of numerical figures. "There's been a sharp increase in the government's budget towards research on genetics recently."

Toad was flipping through his booklet with a look of boredom. "Yeah, so what?" he said flippantly.

Before Fury could say something that would likely scare the mess out of Toad, the Scarlet Witch spoke up. "How is that news to you? Major Danvers has been genetically altered already. She told me they've been doing tests of this nature since the second World War."

Fury, surprisingly, seemed pleased with her question and left Toad be in his ignorance. "The Super Soldier program was strictly military, and was in the works long before mutants were exposed." Fury turned and circled a section of numbers on his smart board. "The money in this case is being allocated almost exclusively to a science research facility in Great Britain. SHIELD has no previous information the facility itself. As far as we know, it never existed until a few months ago."

Pyro looked around the table at his fellow mutants, wondering if any of them were understanding what Fury was showing them. HE did. He figured the Scarlet Witch probably had an idea as well, as she was frowning more deeply than usual. Toad looked bored. Avalanche was glaring at his paper. Quicksilver was leaning back in his chair with his feet up on the table and Blob just seemed confused. "It's like this," Pyro said, addressing Blob in particular, "your American President is giving a bunch of money to some mysterious British mad scientists for God knows whatever reason. They aren't naturally in the habit of doing that, so it's fishy."

Blob blinked for a moment, then it was like a light turned on in his noggin. He nodded in understanding. "Oh." he said.

God help him, Pyro thought. Blob was a nice enough bloke, but he was slower than an elephant frozen in carbonite.

"Thank you, Pyro, for putting that so frankly." Fury said with an ironic smirk. "Anyway, there's a press conference scheduled next week at the Hampton. The facility, GENESSEX, will be having a presentation of their current research. The founder and lead scientist," Fury tapped the corner of the smart board and brought up a photo of a well groomed gentleman who appeared to be in his early forties, "Doctor Nathaniel Essex will be present along with his assistant. Turn to the last three pages of your booklets."

Pyro did so. The pages contained more photographs of Essex. Some of them also featured a middle-aged woman with tightly wound hair and square-rimmed glasses. She wasn't exactly the attractive little twenty-something sort of assistant that John would have pegged Essex as having. The final page and a brief biography on Essex. Clearly SHIELD didn't have much information on him.

"I'm sending three of you to gather information on Essex, as well as his assistant. Pyro, Scarlet Witch, you will be attending the press conference." Fury handed them each an ID tag and a New York drivers license. "You're already registered. Take the ID tag to the check-in counter." He reached down behind the table and brought up a paper bag, which he threw at Quicksilver.

Quicksilver nearly fell out of his chair trying to catch it, but managed to regain his balance in time. He reached into the bag and pulled out what appeared to be a set of coveralls. His nose wrinkled with distaste. "What the hell is this?"

Fury smiled. "You'll each be given a more detailed set of instructions before the conference. In the mean time, feel free to get yourselves settled in. The mess hall is located on sublevel four. Dinner is at eighteen-hundred hours. Dismissed."

John found himself following Lance to the weight room after the lot of them got their rooms figured out. There had been five rooms available, and of course there were six of them. Nobody argued that Wanda, Fred and Todd should get their own rooms (Wanda because she was the only girl, Fred because of his size and Todd because of the smell). Pietro insisted on getting his own, which John and Lance didn't argue with. The man was insufferable. That left John bunking with Lance again. He didn't mind so much. He found that he could actually get along alright with the other mutant.

They found the weight room on the third sublevel. It was huge! John imagined that they could train a small army in there. Perhaps that was the point... Lance and John changed into a set of SHIELD standard work-out sweats and set about choosing the weights they were going to lift.

Lance settled himself on a bench and started curling a forty-pound dumbbell with his right arm. John watched him for a moment and tried to guess the size of Lance's bicep by comparing it to his own. He noted, somewhat bitterly, that Lance's arms were a fair deal larger. It was his own fault though. He'd spent the last three years doing less training and more trying to find a steady job.

"You excited about your first mission?" Lance asked with a grunt as he switched the weight to his other hand and carried on with his curls.

John shrugged. He sat down at a leg-press machine and set the bar at a slightly higher weight than he probably should have. "Guess so… It's not the glamorous sort of thing I was hoping for. Y'know, white tux, high-stakes poker game, beautiful women in cocktail dresses…"

Lance actually chuckled a little. "You might try asking Wanda to slip into a cocktail dress."

"And here I thought we might be mates, you start feeding me bad advice."

Wanda's room was spartan to say the least. The floor was concrete. The walls were concrete. The door was a heavy metal alloy. Looking around she felt a chill run through her entire body. She wished she had a window at least, but what was the purpose of a window when you were deep underground?

She found that her bed had been set up in one corner, and her dresser and bookshelves, both empty, leaned up against the opposite wall next to a full-length mirror. A stack of boxes were waiting for her in the middle of the room. Wanda slumped down onto her bare mattress and started sorting through the boxes, looking for her clothing. She found them in three mid-sized boxes somewhere in the middle of the stack. The bottom boxes were labelled 'BOOKS'. She knew they'd be heavy, so she let them be for now.

The mirror turned out to be sliding door which led to a closet, much to Wanda's relief. There were already a few articles hanging up on the crossbar. She pushed them aside so she could get a good look at them. There were three sets of sweats, something that looked like a wet suit, and a long red jacket. Wanda, curious, took out the jacket and held it up. It was very similar to the one she wore when she was a teenager. The sleeves were a bit different.

She hung the jacket up again and set about with getting the majority of her own clothing into the closet. The sweaters, dress pants and jackets all went in. The rest of it, t-shirts, underwear, denim etc… made it to the dresser. It didn't take long. Wanda wasn't much of a clothes horse.

The next thing she did was make her bed up. Once the comforter was on she felt a little less apprehensive about her surroundings. Still, this wasn't home. Wanda lay down on her bed and let her head melt down into her favourite feather pillow. Her hand went unconsciously to the pocket where she had shoved the ID tag she'd received from Fury. She pulled out the tag and held it up to her face so she could get a better look at it.

How they got a picture of her, Wanda didn't care to know. But there she was. A small one and a half inch photograph of her stared back from the top corner of the tag. The tag claimed that her name was Wanda Tompkins, and she was an employee of the Daily Bugle. She turned the tag over and found a barcode etched across the back. The tag itself was suspended on a black ribbon. She slipped the ribbon around her neck and let the tag settle on her chest as she stared up at her concrete ceiling.

This was going to be her life now, was it?

Wanda felt something nagging at the back of her mind as her hand brushed against the cold grey wall to her side. There was something disturbingly familiar about the sensation. Her brow furrowed as she tried to work out where that feeling was coming from. All she got was the sense that she was trying to run through waist-deep oatmeal.

She rolled over onto her side, facing away from the wall. Her reflection in the mirror glared back at her. She looked defeated and tired. Spending hours in a car with Pietro could do that to her, she mused.

On the way to the facility, they drove past a demonstration going on by Central Park. People were hoisting signs depicting green-skinned people on stakes, or with poorly spaced messages of hatred against mutants. Several more people were wearing cut-out paper masks resembling who she remembered as Principal Kelly from Bayville High. The sight had filled her with anger, which was only made worse when Pietro turned to her and not so gently told her "…this is why we can't have normal."

Wanda turned away from her reflection when she saw a tear trickle down her cheek. Stupid Pietro, being right…

John eventually stopped watching Lance with a sense of jealousy and instead tried his hand at trying to keep up with him. When the larger man started adding another ten pounds to his load, John was beginning to wonder if he hadn't made a big mistake.

The two of them had been chatting here and there as they worked out. John learned that Lance had grown up in various foster homes, as John had for a few years after his grandmother had become too feeble to look after him herself. Lance didn't have much nice to say about any of them. John told him about his Gran, and her cooking. "Canned soup most nights, until the cat went missing."

Their discussion suddenly came to an awkward halt when Lance asked him about one of his former team mates, and John remembered what Todd had said about Lance getting rejected by his girlfriend.

"Which big guy? The hairy one, the French one or the shiny one?" John asked tentatively.

Lance was glaring at the floor as he did yet another leg lift. "The really big guy who turned into metal. What's he like?"

"Oh, Colossus? Not much to tell really. Quiet fellow. Spent a lot of his free time by himself. Why do you ask?" John knew very well why Lance was asking. He wanted to know what kind of guy his girl blew him off for.

"Is he like a giant douche or what?" Lance said with a growl.

John grimaced at his tone. He liked Lance well enough, but what a drama queen! "Not really per se. He had a tendency to leave his dirty socks laying about the common room sometimes."

"Never mind…"

That night, after a rather disappointing dinner of cafeteria mashed potatoes, corned beef and orange soda John holed himself up in the room he shared with Lance and spent a few hours getting his writing desk established. There wasn't much space left after both of their beds had been set up and Lance commandeered a sizable space for his collection of guitars. John had almost given up completely on the idea of having a desk. Thankfully, due to some creative furniture arrangement, a makeshift blowtorch, and the help of Fred, he and Lance were now the proud co-owners of a set of bunk beds. John used the space his bed USED to occupy to give a home to his desk.

Of course, since he was such a charitable room mate, he was going to let Lance have first choice of top or bottom bunk… once he found out about it of course.

Before he left, Fred mentioned to John that the boys were planning on heading out for drinks and invited John to come along. John was honestly touched by Fred's consideration, but politely declined. In all of the excitement of the last few days, John had been neglecting his writing and wanted to get back at it.

So there he sat, turning back and forth in his little office chair, staring at the plain concrete ceiling of his room and waiting for a bolt of inspiration to strike him. He'd been sitting there for the best part of an hour. There was nothing for it. He was completely stuck on this latest chapter. Sure, he had an outline of where he wanted the story to ultimately go, but there had to be more interesting things to happen between point A and point Z. The main character, a buxom raven-haired beauty with psychic powers, couldn't just hop into bed with the haunted poet right away. He needed SOMETHING-

There was a crash from down the hall that was quickly followed by another. John looked away from his computer and strained his ears. A third crash confirmed for him that it was coming from two doors down on his side of the hallway - Wanda's room. His natural assumption was that she was having a temper tantrum. From his understanding she had those often and it was best to just let it pass without getting too close.

The light in John's room began to flicker on and off. Well, that a was probably Wanda as well, though why she felt the need to interfere with the comfort of others was beyond John's understanding. He finally got up from his desk and poked his head out the door to see if she was messing with the electrical on the entire floor. Sure enough, the bulbs hanging overhead in the hallway were bursting and sending shards of glass and sparks flying everywhere. John ducked back into his room just long enough to grab his leather jacket and his boots before he set out to give Wanda a piece of his mind. John slipped on his boots to protect his feet from the glass and draped the jacket over his head.

He found Wanda's door firmly closed. The crashing continued from inside it. Raising his fist, he rapped his knuckles against the door and demanded that Wanda knock it off before he did something about it. The crashing only continued, but this time John heard a loud sob that almost sounded like a cry for help.

What came over him was a sudden sense of chivalry. There was a damsel in distress trapped behind this door and only he was around to rescue her. John was often described as insane by most people who knew him. In reality John had an overactive imagination and a short attention span. He momentarily forgot that he meant to tell Wanda off, and decided his purpose was to break the door down and slay the beast that held her captive.

The door nearly fell of its hinges when he twisted the latch and pushed it open. The latch even came off in his hand. He stepped into the room and was met by a flying table lamp that seemed to be aimed at his head. He managed to duck in time and the lamp smashed into the wall behind him. Spinning around, he saw Wanda wide-eyed and breathing heavily as she stood on her bed and pressed her back against the wall farthest from him.

He could see that she had been sweating. Her long black hair was sticking to her face and neck. Her eyes darted in his direction, but she seemed to be staring through him.

John gulped. She looked like a victim of demonic possession. "Uh, Wanda?" He approached the bed with hesitation. He was being crazy. Every fibre of his being was telling him to run. Run fast. Run far. Instead he took another careful step toward the bed while trying to avoid stepping on any of the broken wood chips or glass.

Wanda shrieked. Her hand shot out and her blanket went flying at John like a net. He ducked and barely managed to avoid getting tangled up inside of it. Instead the blanket hit the wall and crumpled uselessly onto the floor.

"Wanda! Take it easy, it's just me!" he shouted this time.

"NO!" she screamed back. "You're not putting me in again! Leave me alone!" With another flick of her finger, her pillow went sailing at John. This time it hit the target. John felt the wind get knocked out of him as the pillow smashed into his abdomen.

John coughed and wheezed as he tried to recover. "I'm not going to bloody touch you, you raving bint!" He would have continued shouting at her, but he saw that her body was starting to take on the tell-tale glow of a charging hex-bolt. He threw his arms over his head protectively. "Sorry! You're not a bint! Try not to hit the face-"

Wanda didn't blast him though. She choked on a sob, squeezed her eyes shut and slid down the wall as she collapsed into her mattress. "Father…"

Damn, John thought. She was having some sort of psychotic flash-back from before Mastermind's memory alteration. John was afraid that she might have residual memories left over. And if she did, she might remember that he was the one who led her into the trap in the first place. This meant he was in BIG trouble.

"Right…" he said, lowering his arms. He took a careful step back, not taking his eyes off Wanda's hunched over form, just in case she snapped again. "I'm going back to my room now, um… you should probably avoid eating whatever it was you ate before you went to bed. Clearly it's giving you nightmares."

She said something, but it was so quiet and her voice was further muffled by her arms, John couldn't hear her clearly.

"Sorry?"

Wanda lifted her head. This time, as she stared in his direction, he could tell she was looking straight at him with her red, bloodshot eyes. "Please don't leave me here…"

"Umm…"

John was at a loss. He glanced around the room. Wanda had completely demolished her furniture, save for the bed. The closet mirror lay in smashed shards across the floor. The lights were still flickering, but at least things weren't exploding or flying anymore. He also couldn't forget that this was the same woman who had thrown him out of a window early that same morning.

"Please…"

"Uh, alright." John carefully stepped over a stack of torn books (he felt something heavy in the pit of his stomach at the mere sight of them) and awkwardly crawled onto the mattress. When he saw that Wanda wasn't going to move to toss him across the room, or skin him alive, he slowly closed the distance between them until he sat next to her. Unsure of what to do next, he wrapped an arm around her shoulders and patted her arm. "There there. Nobody's going to hurt you, love."

Wanda shuddered as she tried to fight back another sob. "I'm sorry, I'll be good," she whispered before curling up in John's reluctant embrace and burying her face into his chest. John automatically tightened his grip on her shoulders. She shook as she continued to mumble softly against the gradually dampening fabric of his shirt.

The whole situation went from strange to unsettling to surreal in a short period of time. A moment ago, John was trying to find the quickest escape route out of there, now he was stretched out on Wanda's bed with the witch herself sobbing into his chest like a frightened child.

John tilted his head to the side to rest his chin against the top of Wanda's head. The free hand that wasn't holding her shoulders reached up and lightly stroked hair. "There there…" he muttered again. "It's alright, love. You're safe."

Things got a little fluffy at the end, didn't they? I do hope you enjoyed it. I had struggled with writing that last part. I wasn't sure if it was too soon for something like that to happen between them or not. Oh well :3