~~~ Anna Marie (Rogue) ~~~
Cerebro had gone silent.
This silence did not mean peace. Something should be there, had been, its absence was powerful.
Jean stood unmoving, one hand pressed into her temple, the other clenched at her side, knuckles white. Her breath was slow, carefully measured, like she was bracing herself against a heavy weight or the compulsion to vomit. Her skin had gone pale. Not sickly or like she was about to faint, but like something had reached into her and drained the color from her face.
Rogue had seen Jean shaken before. She had seen her stagger out of the Cerebro chamber rubbing at her temples after stretching her mind too far. She had seen Xavier tired, hollow-eyed after a session that lasted too long, his voice a little weaker than usual.
But this wasn't just exhaustion.
This was something else.
Xavier sat in his chair, fingers steepled beneath his chin. He hadn't spoken yet. That was the unsettling.
Jean attempted to swallowed, her throat dry. "I can't reach her."
Xavier blinked once, but it took him a moment to speak. His voice was even, but there were layers to it. "I feel... nothing."
That ain't good.
Cerebro had found her through the noise, locked onto her, placed her somewhere in Lower Manhattan. That had lasted minutes before the signal vanished, before the screaming stopped, before the weight of it was yanked away like a drowning person pulled under.
Not like she had stopped using her powers. Not like she had fallen unconscious.
Gone.
Like she had been erased.
Rogue shifted her weight, arms crossed tight over her chest. She hated this. The not knowing. The uncertainty.
Jean took another slow breath, steadying herself. "I think there's something, or someone, blocking me."
Blocking Jean 'n the Professor, with Cerebro… Ain't ever seen that before.
Jean was one of the strongest telepaths in the world. There weren't many who could shut her out completely.
Whoever had taken that girl, if she had even been taken, was powerful.
She exhaled sharply through her nose. "Magneto's gonna move fast." She said it because someone needed to. "He ain't gonna sit by 'n let anyone else be the early bird."
Xavier sighed, pressing his fingers together. "I know."
She could tell that scared him.
Not that Erik would get to the child first or that the Brotherhood would make their move.
But that this child would learn fear before she learned anything else.
That the first thing the world would teach her was that she was a threat. A monster.
Because children don't stay children. They grow. They listen. They remember.
And if fear was all she knew, it would be all she ever understood.
Rogue swallowed hard.
She knew what a child like that could become.
Xavier exhaled slowly, adjusting his hands. His expression did not change, but there was a gravity in his eyes.
"They will fear her," he said.
Rogue's stomach twist.
Because it was the truth.
Didn't matter that the girl was too young to walk or talk. Didn't matter that this was grief, not a declaration of war.
The world was already looking for a villain.
And now, they had one.
She shifted again. She knew what the professor would say next. She had been through enough missions, enough rescue ops, enough clean-up jobs to know when he had made up his mind.
But this time was different.
This wasn't some teenager in need of a school. This wasn't some kid waking up one day to find out they could fly, or bend steel, or phase through walls.
This was a child.
A baby who had already been marked as a threat.
Who had already hurt people without ever meaning to.
Who would never get to be normal.
A baby.
Rogue swallowed hard.
That could have been her. Could have been any of them.
Xavier straightened slightly. "Jean. Rogue. Logan." His voice was steady again. "We're going to find her."
Jean nodded, but she still looked shaken.
Logan didn't look happy about it, but he didn't argue either.
Rogue glanced at the dark, silent Cerebro console one last time.
Then she pulled on her gloves, flexed her fingers, and nodded.
"Let's go."
~~~ Erik Lehnsherr (Magneto) ~~~
Magneto had seen history repeat itself more times than he could count.
He had lived through it as a boy, standing penned in the camps of occupied Poland, watching clean-cut men in crisp uniforms herd his people like cattle to be slaughtered. Just following orders. He had seen it in America, where they celebrated liberty while fire hoses blasted Black children off their feet to rabid applause. The land of the free and home of the brave.
And now, he saw it again.
A mutant child had been born into the world, and the first thing humanity had done was scream.
Erik stood at the edge of the balcony, staring out over the steel and glass of the city skyline. The world outside was still settling, still reeling from the event. It had shaken the nation. It had brought men to their knees. And already, fear was spreading like a virus.
They would see a weapon.
A thing to be feared.
A thing to be contained.
A thing to be used or destroyed.
Inside the war room, the Brotherhood worked in silence. Exodus stood at his right, watchful as always. Mystique was already working, tapping into police feeds, hospital reports, scanning every network for a trace of her. The child had been there, for an instant, bright and overwhelming. Then, she was gone.
Someone had taken her. Or snipped the young life.
Neither option sat well with him.
Mystique looked up from the screen, her yellow eyes sharp. "We'll find them."
Magneto nodded once. "We have no more than an hour before the world decides what to do."
SHIELD was already moving. Xavier would not be far behind. Governments across the world would see what had happened in New York and start preparing their responses. The men in 3-piece suits, the ones who whispered in dark rooms and balanced spending reports and casualty sheets, would see this as a turning point.
No registration yet. No camps. Not yet.
But it was just on the horizon.
He had watched the same cycle begin before. Fear first. Then containment. Then something worse.
It was always the same.
Humanity is a small, vicious, and fearful species. They'll smother anything 'different' in the crib.
He pressed his hands against the cool metal railing, fingers curling slightly.
He could still remember what it felt like to be small. To be a boy standing in a field, watching a soldier's shadow stretch long across the dirt in front of him. He could remember the stories he heard when he came to America, of men in white robes who burned homes and strung bodies from trees, of children spat on as they walked into schools, of names scrawled on court documents that would decide who had rights and who did not. He had seen a nation speak of freedom while gutting those who asked for it.
And he had seen what happened to those who waited, who believed in the veneer of justice.
That was what would happen to this mutant.
The world had already decided what they were.
They would not get the chance to choose.
Because the moment humans feared you, they took away your choices.
He turned back to Mystique. "I will go to New York personally."
He would not let history repeat itself.
He would reach them first.
Magneto turned, his cape shifting as he stepped toward the exit.
"They will hunt them. They will fear them. And when the time comes, they will kill them." His voice was calm, certain.
"Unless we reach them first."
~~~ Natasha Romanoff (Black Widow) ~~~
New York wasn't quiet, but it felt like it should have been.
Even with the wail of sirens, the hum of traffic, and the distant murmur of voices, there was something heavy in the air. A pause that hadn't passed yet. A breath still being held. The city had been struck, but no one knew by what. People were still waiting for the next impact, waiting to understand what had just happened.
Natasha Romanoff stood in the operations hub of SHIELD's New York field office, watching as the chaos unfolded across a dozen monitors. Street cams, drone footage, live reports from field agents.
The room was full of movement, voices feeding intel up the chain, agents combing through reports, analyzing, coordinating. No one was panicking, but no one was calm either. They were working in that cold, detached way people did after a disaster, when the immediate shock had passed but the full weight of it hadn't settled yet.
Nobody knew what the hell had just happened.
SHIELD was built on intelligence, on getting the upper hand before anyone else even knew there was a problem.
Right now, they were flush with problems without a single answer.
The first reports had sounded like a mass panic event. Hundreds of civilians collapsed in the streets, uncontrolled hysteria, people sobbing without knowing why. But then came the second wave of reports. The car crashes. The mass transit failures. The suicides.
The subway derailment under the East River. The cardiac arrest cases skyrocketing in Midtown hospitals. The pilot of a commercial airliner who had to be pulled from the cockpit, sobbing, moments before takeoff.
Natasha's eyes flicked to a monitor displaying live NYPD dispatch calls. They hadn't slowed down in the last hour.
"We got another one—East 72nd, self-inflicted gunshot wound, unknown motivation—"
"Medical emergency at Rockefeller, multiple collapse cases—"
"Driver lost control on FDR, T-boned a city bus—"
She had seen fear before. Had caused it.
This wasn't just fear. This was something deeper, something primal.
It had broken people.
And SHIELD still had no idea what or who was responsible.
Fury's voice cut through the noise. "I want satellite tracking on known telepaths in the region. Xavier, Frost, anyone capable of pulling off something like this. Get me their locations in the last hour. I want confirmation they weren't involved."
"We're already on it," Hill responded, scanning through intelligence reports. "Nothing indicates this was an attack, but people are going to treat it like one."
That was the problem.
The people want something to blame, and the fingers were already starting to point.
Natasha watched as one of the monitors replayed a clip from earlier in the day, security camera footage from a coffee shop in SoHo. Patrons sat frozen in their seats, hands trembling around their cups, some weeping openly. One man at the counter gripped his chest like he had been shot, his knuckles going white against the edge of the bar. A woman collapsed against the tile floor, her nails scratching at the grout as though she were trying to hold onto something that wasn't there.
Fury turned away from the screen, crossing his arms. "Romanoff."
Natasha straightened, already knowing what was coming.
"You and Barton are going in quiet," he said. "I want confirmation on the source before Xavier or Magneto get their hands on it."
Natasha nodded. "Understood."
Fury exhaled, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "Eyes open," he said. "We don't know what we're dealing with yet."
No. They didn't.
She stepped into the hallway, where Barton was already waiting, arms crossed, weight shifted lazily to one side.
"Tell me we're getting sent on something nice and easy," he said.
Natasha pulled on her jacket. "Manhattan."
Barton clicked his tongue, shaking his head. "Yeah, that's about right." He pushed off the wall. "Bet it's one of those nice, slow assignments. Might even have time to catch a ballgame."
Natasha hit the elevator button. "Sure."
He let out a low whistle. "And here I was worried we'd have to deal with a city destroying mind fucker."
She stepped inside as the doors slid closed.
"Yeah," she muttered. "We sure dodged a bullet."
~~~ Emma Frost ~~~
She had always been able to compartmentalize.
Pain. Suffering. Grief. None of it was new to her. She had learned long ago that emotions, no matter how overwhelming, could be controlled, shaped, and suppressed.
Tonight had been an unwanted reality check.
She sat in the dim light of her penthouse, a glass of amber scotch swirling in one hand, the other pressing lightly against her temple. It had been nearly an hour since the event, but the echo of it still lingered at the edges of her mind.
Even now, she could still feel it.
The grief.
Not a distant, muted kind that dulled over time. This had been raw, an open wound, fresh and bleeding. A sorrow that tore through a person, that hollowed them out from the inside.
The kind that left you gasping.
That could break you.
Emma had been in a business meeting when it hit. A simple investment pitch, one of hundreds she entertained, when suddenly her vision blurred, her breath caught, and the full force of it crashed into her mind.
Not words or thoughts.
Just an empty, screaming absence.
It had been enough to make her stagger, to make her hands tremble against the edges of her chair. She had clenched her jaw, locked down her shields, and closed off her mind as tightly as she could. But it wasn't enough.
For one unbearable moment, she had been drowning in someone else's loss.
And then, just as suddenly, it was gone.
Not faded, not suppressed. Gone.
It was disturbing.
Emma took a slow sip of her drink, letting the warmth settle on her tongue before swallowing. The city was still in turmoil outside. Even from her penthouse, she could hear the distant sirens and the occasional raised voice echoing up from the streets below.
The world was still reeling, trying to process what had happened.
People were already whispering theories.
A psychic attack.
Terrorists.
Some kind of mass hysteria event.
No one understood what had really happened.
No one understood that the most powerful telepathic event in modern history had not been an act of war.
It had been a child crying for her mother.
She closed her eyes, pressing two fingers against her temple, reaching back into the remnants of the psychic noise.
There was nothing to connect to.
But the memory of it was still there.
No words had been spoken. Just the impression of small, feeble hands reaching for something that was no longer there. The need, the terror, the loss so total it eclipsed everything else.
And then, cut off.
Telepathic suppression wasn't impossible, but this had been absolute. It hadn't just hidden the child's presence. It had erased her from every psychic trace, as if she had never existed.
Someone had done this deliberately.
Which meant someone had already found her.
Xavier was surely searching. He would have felt it too. He would be moving to save her.
Magneto would see the child as a sign, as proof of everything he had always believed.
SHIELD was already treating this as a potential attack.
They would all make their moves.
Emma had no intention of rushing into the mess blindly.
She would let them scramble. Let them fight.
And when the dust settled, she would be the one who decided what happened next.
She set her glass down, smoothing a hand over her temple one last time before standing.
The child was out there.
Emma glanced at the city one last time before turning away from the window.
"Let's see who finds you first."
~~~ Madame Gao ~~~
The city had been wounded.
Madame Gao could feel it in the air, in the way people moved, in the way the rhythm of New York had stuttered and broken. The sirens still wailed, and the streets were still restless, but the pulse of the city had changed.
She stood in her private office, the scent of steeped oolong curling through the air as she carefully poured a cup. Across from her, a quiet man in a tailored suit waited with his hands folded in his lap, speaking in hushed Mandarin into his phone.
There had been a disturbance unlike any before.
A force powerful enough to shake the foundations of the city, yet utterly untraceable.
This was not an explosion. There was not a war in the streets. And yet the city had suffered. People had collapsed, their minds crushed beneath something unseen. Men had died without a wound on them. Something had touched their souls, and it had left ruin in its wake.
Gao took a slow sip of her tea, letting the warmth settle before she spoke.
"What do we know?"
The man lowered his phone and cleared his throat. "There is no confirmed source. Not an energy signature or structural damage, Nothing physical. But the effects were real. Suicides. Accidents. The city is reeling, but there is no one to blame."
"There will be," Gao said.
He nodded, already understanding. "SHIELD is investigating. The X-Men are moving. Magneto's people have gone silent."
Expected.
Someone powerful had wounded the city, and now the scavengers would descend.
Gao set her cup down, her fingers resting lightly on the rim. "And our interests?"
"The criminal networks are still recovering. Some of our people were affected, though none fatally. Kingpin is assessing the situation as well."
Gao tilted her head slightly. "And what does he think?"
"He believes this was a mutant. A telepath or something stronger."
Gao smiled. "Of course he does."
It was the easy answer. Mutants were always the easy answer.
And perhaps it was true. But this was different.
She tapped a single finger against the porcelain cup, lost in thought. The event itself had been… sloppy and uncontrolled. That suggested youth and inexperience. But the disappearance? The way the force had been severed so completely, so deliberately? That suggested precision or overwhelming power.
Someone had found the source quickly. And buried it.
She allowed herself a quiet breath, watching the curling steam rise from her tea. The others would rush in, eager to claim what they did not yet understand. They would treat this as a battle to be won, a prize to be seized.
That was their nature.
Gao had no such illusions. She was not a soldier. Not a mutant. She did not scramble like the desperate men of SHIELD or throw herself into grand proclamations like Magneto.
She was patient.
She was careful.
She had built an empire beneath the feet of this city, in its unseen places, in the shadows cast by men who thought themselves powerful. She did not act without purpose.
She lifted her gaze to the man across from her.
"Begin inquiries. Quietly. I want to know who else is looking. And I want to know who found it first."
The man nodded, already dialing.
Gao took another sip of tea, savoring the bitterness.
Let them fight over it.
Let them bleed.
When the dust settled, she would be the one left standing.
~~~ The Ancient One ~~~
The world had shifted.
The Ancient One had not foreseen it.
She stood within the chamber of the Eye of Agamotto, the golden glow of its magic casting shifting patterns of light across the stone walls. The threads of fate, once woven so intricately, had unraveled in ways that should not have been possible.
She had watched time's flow for centuries, had studied its currents, had guided the balance between chaos and order. There were variations, of course. Small ripples. A life saved that was meant to be lost. A tragedy delayed, but never avoided. Some paths were firm, some flexible.
This event fell into none of those categories.
Her fingers moved through the air, forming careful sigils as the Eye of Agamotto flickered, its light unsettled. The millions of possibilities she had seen, the branching futures that had always followed a familiar pattern, were now fractured.
She let the magic carry her forward, sifting through strands of what had been and what should be. The past was untouched. The present was intact. But the future was altered beyond recognition.
Forces that should have been held at bay were beginning to stir. Dormammu. Thanos. Shadows shifting in the corners of reality. The walls between realms would weaken, threats once contained would find their way through. She had always known what battles lay ahead, had always counted on the ones who would rise to meet them.
Now there was emptiness in the threads of fate, gaps where there should have been certainty.
The Ancient One closed her eyes, her hands weaving more complex patterns. The Eye's glow intensified, bathing the chamber in golden light. She sought the nexus points - those critical moments where destinies converge.
One by one, she examined them. The coming of Galactus. The ascension of Wanda Maximoff. The awakening of the Phoenix. Each remained, though altered.
Her awareness shifted to the guardians - those individuals whose presence had always been constants in the defense of reality.
The Eye's light dimmed slightly as she focused on one specific thread. A life whose path she had watched with particular attention. A man whose journey from arrogance to wisdom would prove essential in the battles to come.
The light of the Eye pulsed once, then settled on a vision.
A cold night. A winding road. Rain on asphalt. The sharp turn, the shattering glass, the wreckage that was meant to mark the beginning of a greater destiny.
The thread of fate that should have extended beyond this moment, that should have transformed and strengthened into one of reality's great defenders, simply terminated.
The glow of the Eye dimmed.
Stephen Strange was dead.