Despite being a large building with more rooms than Jerrica had time to count, the White House lacked quiet areas where two friends could speak without fear of someone else listening in. If she wanted to speak to Daniel alone, she had to get creative.
She told Gordy, one of Daniel’s personal security team, that she wanted to meet Daniel in the usual private meeting place. Gordy was the only one who also knew about this, the only one she trusted enough to reveal its location to anyone looking to take advantage of her and Daniel speaking openly. She put an appointment in Daniel’s schedule with the prearranged code word so he would know where to go. After that, all she had to do was wait.
Jerrica was early for their meeting and took advantage of the opportunity to clear her head. Being surrounded by politicians all day every day caused her mutation to go haywire at times, particularly when she was either tired or stressed. Up here, on a balcony at the rear of the White House complex, she was able to quiet the chatter in her mind and find a tiny but much need portion of peace. At least Daniel wasn’t going to lie to her and set the chatter off again.
The Avengers still had their direct line to the president - the same one The Wasp had used to verify that he could join the Avengers, to which the president at the time had stipulated Eros must be given a “less provocative” code name.
Starfox used it.
Though Starfox could not be sure, and he might have been projecting, it seemed to him that President Kelley was not thrilled to hear from him. He didn’t try to make excuses - the man knew this was important and he was said to be very competent - but the seeming lack of trust towards the veteran Avenger, 23rd one to join, was simultaneously understandable and offensive. Eros was Thanos’s brother, and reports had indicated that Kelley had been the Mad Titan’s captive for an excruciating two weeks - an absolutely unheard of length for Thanos to keep someone alive, and so he knew his very presence would be disturbing, nut that was what made it all the more vital that he and Eros speak; Kelley had to know something, or had to have the ability to do something, that could very well save the universe - or destroy it.
The meeting was in the Oval Office itself - a place where Kelley had the safety of being on his home turf and the safety of large windows and secret service. But with HYDRA around, nothing on this planet was certain. Eros hated being in an environment where everyone was on edge - he reveled in glorious quests and challenging adventures, but part of the joy was in the companionship. Not like this, which was reminiscent of the Skrull invasion (which reminded Eros of Tyler). Eros had an advantage but was loathe to use his empathy on friends or allies he knew. Either way it left him vulnerable to psionic attack and distracted him from most everything else after a while.
Shockingly, he was one-on-one with the politician in the sunlit room, which meant that remote-controlled rifles were probably trained on the alien from ten different angles. So be it. He was lucky because with thorough searching and x-rays and prior permission from the president himself he had been allowed to bring in the pieces of the rod that had destroyed Tyler. He’d put them in a clear Titanian lockbox.
The first thing he did when he entered the room was to hold it out in plain sight. He did not move any closer.
"Thank you for meeting with me, Mr. President," he greeted carefully. "I’ll try to take up as little of your time as possible, but I need to know everything you can remember. And … I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what happened."
When Eros had resurfaced after Tyler’s death, and he’d felt that little change on the planet or in the stars or wherever it had been, that little strain in the jaw of his mind he didn’t even notice until it disappeared - when he felt that, even though he knew it was coming and had known for a long time , he still didn’t know how to handle it. It was exactly the same as the opposite (and more normal) situation, when a loved one was dying.
This was a bit unfair in a way, too, like he’d - they’d - been lied to. But Death had been discontent with what she had recieved lately. The strange part was that Eros had figured it was because now that she had Mar-Vell, she was content in terms of heroes. Either the danger to existence was so grave that Death herself knew she had to release Mar-Vell, or the two of them had gotten into one hell of a fight and ol’ Marv was in the doghouse.
Yeah. Right. Well at least he now knew how to approach this - sarcastic and cavalier.
But now that he had talked to the President - which had taken far more effort than it should have: their meeting should have been instantaneous because Starfox was Thanos’s brother, but the President had instead delayed and avoided it - most likely because Starfox was Thanos’s brother.
Eros couldn’t be offended by President Kelley’s procrastination. He’d been delaying THIS meeting himself. The Titan had gone and grabbed Genis because this was for real this time (as disturbing as that was) and Genis needed this more than Eros did because Mar-Vell was his father (if one were to look at this resurrection as being about family matters as opposed to an existential crisis on a terrifyingly unimaginable scale). Oh and also so Eros could have an excuse to flee if he wanted. So the two Vells could have quality father-son time (and so Eros wouldn’t have to explain the reasoning behind why making Mar-Vell posthumous adult children was totally not creepy and violating), and so Eros wouldn’t have to be alone with his dearest dead companion. (Good. The charmer’s jocular humor was working perfectly - at least his insanity didn’t fail him.)
He didn’t think he could be alone with Mar. Especially not after — he had a vague recollection of this poor, damaged, weak and fading hero, young and scared, utterly alone and unimaginably brave, who was giving all of his strength away to Eros — and Eros had attacked him with anger and spite and vitriol and pure unadulterated hate. He hoped Mar-Vell didn’t remember.
The Avengers frequency on SHIELD’s bandwidths gave the location of Tyler’s apartment, where the late sailor had said Mar would be staying, and he gave the information to Genis - he didn’t know when the allegedly living Kree would be in, so they met at eight p.m.; the apartment was empty, so Eros broke them in via neat gravitational manipulation of the window pane after making Genis check that there were no alarms.
The apartment was awful, really, but incredibly clean and very much reminded him of Tyler. It also reminded Eros of Genis’s first place in New York this time around - also awful - except with Genis it was compounded by a living mess … one that had improved lately, to the young man’s credit.
There was the couch and then there was the bed. Eros plopped down from his levitation straight onto the couch which creaked mightily, taking out his phone.
It was then that the mischievous Eternal ordered a pizza for delivery. Half cheese, half pepperoni and sausage - Eros didn’t eat meat if he could help it, but the Kree he knew sure did.
"We’ll make ourselves at home while we wait for dad to get home," he teased.
Closed/solo thread that is set after Detroit and just before the Save the President thread.
Other characters mentioned here:
aiming-at-light - Tyler Brandt
savagescholar
Considering Jock had never been on a boat in his life before (he was convinced that the Staten Island ferry did not count), he adapted to life at sea quickly and almost completely. He didn’t experience any sea sickness and while the sailors he was sailing with did not trust him at first, their mistrust of him did not last long.
He mucked in when he could with the chores and every couple of nights or so, he would come out of his cabin to join in with the sailors’ card games. He bonded with the lot of the crew to the point that they called him Jock-Strap and stopped asking what he was doing in his cabin that was so damn important and secretive.
Because that was the whole point for him being on the ship in the first place: his important and secretive mission from S.H.I.E.L.D.
Being out in the middle of nowhere with some of the best tech he’d ever gotten his hands on meant Jock was able to find Hydra’s system of networks easily. What wasn’t so easy was actually getting into them and decrypting them.
He had spent hours couped up in his cabin, his fingers tap, tap, tapping away at various keyboards and buttons, trying to crack the seemingly endless amount of code Hydra had written to protect itself. If members of the crew didn’t drop by every now and again and insist Jock join them for card games, there had been every chance Jock wouldn’t have left his computers alone. Normally when he was working from home, he hated interruptions. Here he was glad of them. Talking with the rest of the crew and hanging out with them helped his brain calm down and get some perspective on what he was doing and why he was doing it.
He sent back reports on his progress (or lack of) to Brandt every Thursday via an encrypted communication channel he had written himself. He also sent reports to Hank McCoy too because Hank had been the one to encourage Jock to help Brandt and S.H.I.E.L.D. in the first place. Jock hated the fact that his progress reports were always so empty, highlighting the fact he was getting nowhere fast.
After a month of practically nothing, everything happened all at once.
Jock had been talking with one of the crew mates, a guy about his age called Bobby, about the Yankees chances of winning anything this year when one of Jock’s machines started beeping. Bobby barely had time to ask what that meant as Jock raced back to his cabin and slammed the door behind him. Finally one of his decryption programmes had hacked into Hydra’s communication networks. One of his screens was filled with messages going back and forth between Hydra agents. The latest was them speculating if Nick Fury was still alive or not.
Jock scrambled to get the newly hacked information sent off to Brandt and McCoy when another machine started to alert him to something else. It’s screen was filled with symbols and characters Jock had never seen before. Instinct told him it was alien. He hit send on the message about Hydra and turned back to the alien stuff. He typed furiously to get any and all translation programs working on it.
One beep meant on more alert. It was a message. It was from Brandt.
Brandt was dead.
Jock slumped in his chair, his hand on his mouth. He didn’t want to believe it. He refused to let himself believe it. What the fuck was he supposed to do now?
Jock wiped his hands over his eyes and got back to work. He continued to send message to Brandt with the hopes that his successor could be trusted with this kind of information. He messaged Hank about Brandt and about the alien discovery. He even messaged his Mom, although he didn’t mention anything about the work he was doing; he needed to contact her as his grief for Brandt got worse.
The machine working on the translations beeped again. Jock turned his head to look at the screen as one word flashed up in bold lettering: THANOS.
Shit. Fuck. Bugger. Crap.
One last round of messages about the translations was sent before Jock bolted out of his cabin to the ship’s helm. “Jock-Strap,” Captain Holmes said cheerfully, “what you doing up here?” The Captain’s cheerful disposition quickly faded when he saw the grim look on Jock’s face.
“I gotta get back to New York, Captain,” he said, pleading with the Captain with his eyes. “The shit is hitting the fan hard.”
“That top secret stuff you been working on, it’s to do with that ain’t it?”
“Yes sir. Please. There ain’t much time to waste. I gotta get back.”
Normally Captain Holmes wouldn’t take orders from strange civilians who were hitching a ride on his ship. Normally Captain Holmes wouldn’t take any orders from anyone other than one of his superiors. Normally Captain Holmes would’ve kicked the hitch-hiking civilian out of the helm. This was not normal.
Getting into S.H.I.E.L.D. was a lot easier than it should have been considering Jock had just walked in off of the street. However a past visit with one of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s agents, Shae Wiley, had taught him a trick or two which happened to have paid off this time around. Bribing the woman on the front desk with a packet of cigarettes was one of them. Promising to come back with more was another. She handed Jock a visitor's pass and even told him where Brandt's office was. According to her, Brandt was the man Jock was looking for.
Jock went up to Brandt's office, his visitor's badge pinned to his chest. No one stopped him, which was just plain worrying. Hydra was supposedly everywhere and no one seemed to think to ask Jock who he was or why he was there in the first place. Maybe the agents recognised him from his previous visit with Wiley, or maybe they didn't give a shit. Jock was glad that he managed to find Brandt's office without encountering any trouble. The last thing he wanted right now was to get arrested. No one believes criminals, even those who managed to stumble onto something big like he had done.
The door to Brandt's office was closed. There was no assistant sat outside to say if Brandt was in, out, with a client, or any of that kind of thing. He waited for a moment, trying to decide what to do before coming to the conclusion he didn't come all this way to wait around on ceremony.
He knocked on the door, counted to three, took a deep breath, and went it.
Fuck everything. Her luck, the time slip and just the world in general. Never had she gone through a slip one hour apart. What was worse, was the fact she was scoping out an apartment to use as a safe house for a client, who was under protective custody until the trial was over. Something to do with the mafia. The building itself was old and seemed to hold quite a bit of history. Dahlia was loving it actually. The room was good enough and just when she was about to leave to talk to the landlord about renting it for a while, it happens.
The pull at her stomach and the building tension before she exhales. Now, she was sometime in the past inside an unoccupied home. Which was good. So, she decided to make herself comfortable and just wander around the rooms. Once she entered the bathroom, it happened again when her foot did not touch a floor but empty air and down she went with flailing arms. But this time, a crash landing into a bathtub in the bathroom a floor below. Pain flared from the small of her back, back of her legs, arms to her head.
Stream of curses flew from her lips and seeing starts at the same time, the time traveler was indeed fucked. Even more if the owner was home. Brain rattled, she could not comprehend how it could happen within an hour of the first one. Hopefully, she was back on the same day. If not, she would have to figure it out. And really, really did not want to deal with a disgruntled owner along with the cops.
First, she was going to wait until the stargazing ended along with the pain. "I need a drink....and ice cream"
In human tales, and Eternals’, too, foxes were associated with numerous characteristics: sneakiness, wit and wile. The origin of these anthropomorphized traits came from their greatest ability in nature: to hide, evade and vanish.
Fox that he was, Eros of Titan managed to escape the aftermath of his unsettling cockpit conversation with FBI agent Tyler Brandt quite handily; all it took was a flawless smile and a clever joke about physical and mental exhaustion and then slipping into a meditative state. While there, he distracted himself with thoughtlessness in the same way he distracted himself with mindlessness when awake, never willing to dwell upon things that made him upset. In the back of his altered-consciousness the ghost of feelings brought on by Tyler’s words and eyes started to assemble in chronological order, though nothing new was elucidated to the Titan in this state; none of his confusion (if he’d been describing the emotions of another, he would have involved the word panic) brought on by Tyler came from not knowing what the human had been referring to when rambling; no, what disturbed him was that he knew it all.
Luckily (or not), life as an Avenger was at breakneck speed, which was one of the many reasons the adventurer enjoyed being one. Not only that but the actual repercussions of the Kree shipwreck were intriguing and they closed the door on any suspicion of a Kree-sanctioned attack on their solar system; granted, the doors it opened weren’t inviting but at least Ard-Con was a manageable threat compared to the Empire even in its weakened state. That, of course, was the other opened door – what did they want with Genis?
In between a mission (At Eros’s behest) to recover stolen Chitauri technology and a mission with Silverclaw to plea with the gods of her pantheon, by the time Eros had a moment to spare for that conversation with Genis, the Skrull had come for a surprise visit. Starfox was lucky that he was too preoccupied (and too suspicious) to speak anything about the crash to who turned out to be the traitorous Skrull Syrro. Soon he and Genis would speak of the Kree message meant only for ones with cosmic awareness, but not until Genis’s awareness once again found true north. At least Genis was alive: though the Eternal would outlive his half-Kree son and daughter, he refused to acknowledge their inevitable deaths just as he did those of all he knew and loved (with the exceptions of the ones he thought would live forever – his own people – but who didn’t). He had to or else how could he ever get close to others? The truth might have been that he didn’t and that had his ways of keeping his distance. But this latest scare had been yet another unwelcome reminder that the Vell children were different – they were uniquely special to Eros. Apparently they took after their late father.
Starfox had been up at the Peak with the ‘White’ team during the Skrull invasion and Tyler had been there, too. The tense atmosphere had been in no small part fueled by the normally bubbly Avenger himself due to his hostile, aggressive suspicion towards not-Genis. The possibility that any of them could have been Skrulls also more than justified (though only partially motivated) interacting with Tyler as if their conversation in the Quinjet had never occurred. The conversation hit him at a weak moment, though, when Syrro (apparently to his own surprise) revealed himself. Tyler had turned to look at Eros and so confidently assured the Titan that his adoptive son was okay that it confused the empath’s cottony mind further. Certainly the human had just said it because it was the right thing to say. Certainly it was just a coincidence that Genis – his Genis, the real Genis – contacted his adoptive father mere seconds after Tyler spoke. Starfox’s exit from the situation was far less graceful that time.
Out of sight and out of mind was the only way of life for the ageless (and also for the flighty, blithe and delusional). The hero business operated on a need-to-know basis and of course Eros did too, so though there were hints of a grand debacle having occurred while Starfox and the Scarlet Witch were off-planet on what became an unforseen Avengers mission on Solosia, Eros asked no questions. Brandt had dropped off the radar for a while and thus dropped off of Eros’s radar, too – except sometimes right before dawn; right before waking up.
That wasn’t right. It wasn’t true. His last sleeping moments were occasionally reminiscent of his late friend the hero Mar-Vell, not some human government agent Eros had only met a handful of times. And that’s why the ancient Titan was finally here, knocking on a door to the new status that was Agent Brandt having an office at S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ. That was why he couldn’t decide on a facial expression to wear while greeting Tyler. The Eternal was young by the standards of his people, but his thirst for adventure and novelty-seeking behavior had granted him an uncountable plethora of situations both bizarre and mundane from which to draw experience, so he was always surprised whenever something – a person, place, situation, feeling – well, surprised him.
In a week of multiple instances of depreciating bad luck, Fantomex questioned if it was possible to reach a lower plateau of misery than the frequently termed ‘rock bottom.’ It was something that he hadn’t given much thought to after being on top form for so long, getting away with murder, both in the imagined sense and the all too literal way. When you lived amongst the clouds, accumulating a string of victories without ever tasting defeat, one could be forgiven for thinking themselves invincible. Empathy however was not a grace he would be allowed, nor was it something that the thief deserved, and thus the inevitable return to earth had wounded more than his pompous pride.
Cornered and outnumbered, Fantomex was hard-pressed into offering his unconditional surrender. Zapped of spirit, he had fallen prey to a honey-pot trap, the ultimate accumulation of his recent hardships. Fatigue had played a prominent role in his unusually swift acceptance of the all too shady proposal, a task that came accompanied with a suspiciously attractive ransom for services rendered By the time the true intentions behind the proposed job came to light, his avenues of escape had been cut-off and a scrambler engaged which dually interrupted his means to summon E.V.A. and hinder him from using his misdirection by overwhelming his senses, his attempts at resisting pathetically championed in a shorter time than he’d preferred.
Perhaps he should feel honoured that such an elaborate plan had been concocted with the singular intention of capturing him, the authorities forces that collaborated together clearly doing their homework when it came to taking the fight out of him. Realising as he was shepherd into the back of a heavy duty transport that the entire operation was instigated by the combined effort of more organisations with three letter abbreviations in their titles than he’d care to recollect, Fantomex was contented that so many cooperating forces wanted to still his ceaseless tongue.
He watched on as the doors to his freedom, his last hope at a marvellous escape, were slammed shut, partially shutting out the daylight with it. Soon after, a wave of haziness crashed in the recesses of his slipping consciousness, Fantomex barely registering the faces of his temporary escorts as cuffs were fastened around his wrists and ankles. Finally, a blanket of complete blackness mercifully descended beneath closed lids, gripped him in its unyielding clutches and keeping him there for an unknown length of time.
When he did finally came to, aided in part by shafts of moonlight shining directly upon his unmasked visage from windows set high up in an adjacent wall, the fuzzy scene that greeted his unfocused gaze solicited a dissatisfied groan. Day had given way to night beneath his notice, meaning that for a worryingly length of time he had been out of the loop, and allowing his would-be captors the chance to formulate a daunting array of plans to keep him in-house indefinitely. Rolling his head from side to side, waiting for his vision to refocus, Fantomex scanned the bland, white-washed interior of the generic interrogation room. A one-way mirror spanned the length of the wall to his immediate right, whilst across the table from the one he was presently bound to sat another chair.
Perceiving what was to follow, Fantomex called out to the one-way mirror, and the prying eyes hovering on the other side. “Shall we expedite the trivialities of this tried and tested set-up and cut straight to business? I’m already bored.”
