AN: Thanks for the reviews. Its been a while since this was updated but wedding planning, work, house guests, a flooded basement and other aspects of life kind of got in the way. So, this chapter is really short but I'll try to make the next one longer and put it up sooner. Let me know what you think of it, and feel free to make suggestions for what you'd like to see happen. I can't promise I'll use them, however.
Sometimes Nicholas Fury really hated his job. It was stressful, it was demanding, and Fury thrived on that. It wasn't the workload that got to him, nor the anal details that had to be carefully managed. It wasn't even the considerably grave consequences of his decisions. No, what bothered him was how his job eroded his belief that humanity possessed a certain amount of innocence and decency. He was assigned to look into the death of Japan's most prominent environmental activist. Was it too much to ask that the culprit be some hardened criminal whose offences had become more grotesque with time? Or perhaps it could have been someone who'd seen war and become jaded? No, all evidence pointed towards a seventeen-year-old girl, a high school student. Cases like these made Fury wonder why he even bothered to try. What kind of world was he saving when even its children were corrupt?
The silver lining, if you could call it that, was that there was some indication that the girl was guild. Unfortunately, SHIELD had never been able to find any real evidence that the guilds were more than a myth. Consequently, Fury suspected that the only reason his men were claiming she was guild was because they couldn't figure out why someone would hire a high school homecoming queen from Louisiana to kill a scientist in Japan. The guilds were rumored to be hundreds of years old and the rumors were steeped with superstition. Fury cared little for rumors but the most common claims were that the guilds were well-hidden, long-lived, and relied more heavily on passing their 'trade' down from generation to generation than on recruiting. For Fury this added up to one little fact; if the girl belonged to an organization, they could use her to find the organization and tear it apart. The source of the corruption could be destroyed, but first Fury needed a man whose judgment he trusted implicitly. He was expecting a phone call from that man any minute.
The difficulty was, Fury didn't have much for his friend to go on. They had more suspicions than evidence. To make matters worse, the evidence had started disappearing the day before.
Vote: Who would you like Remy to wind up with (eventually)? Jubilee, Rogue, Kitty, or someone else?
Should Belladonna live on as Remy's ex/estranged wife in New Orleans or should I kill her off?