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Chapter 35 – Diamonds are Forever
🕑 Added 2025-08-14 16:21:46 +0000 UTCThe chandeliers cast warm golden light across the marble floors of Le Bernardin's private dining room, where crystal glasses caught the flicker of candles on pristine white tablecloths. Jay adjusted his charcoal Tom Ford suit, the fabric flowing like liquid silk as he pulled out Domino's chair. She looked stunning in a midnight blue dress that hugged her curves perfectly, her alabaster skin seeming to glow against the dark fabric.
"What's with the sudden date?" Domino asked, settling into her seat with practiced grace. Her mismatched eyes studied him with curious intensity.
Jay loosened his tie slightly, offering a self-deprecating smile. "Recently had a breakdown, thought it'd be refreshing to enjoy life—especially with a beauty like you." He gestured to the opulent surroundings. "Life's too short to waste on brooding in dark corners."
A faint blush colored Domino's cheeks, though she tried to hide it behind her wine glass. "How recent?"
"About three hours ago."
Domino paused mid-sip, her eyes widening before she burst into laughter—a genuine, melodic sound that turned heads at nearby tables. "I thought only Wade could be so silly. Now here you are, taking emotional breakdowns and turning them into dinner reservations."
The mention of Wade sent Jay's mind racing. Wade... Deadpool. His expression grew serious for a moment as he considered the implications. A fourth-wall breaker in this world meant variables he couldn't account for, meta-knowledge that could unravel carefully laid plans. The thought was both thrilling and terrifying.
Domino noticed the shift immediately. "Hey, I'm sorry. That was stupid of me, bringing up another man during our date."
Jay's smile returned, warmer this time, his eyes trailing appreciatively over the way her dress highlighted her figure. "Actually, that reminds me. I have a proposition—a bet, if you will." He leaned forward conspiratorially, close enough that she could smell his cologne. "I think I can get you a treasure from an alley nearby, something worthy of someone with your... unique gifts. I finally understand how your powers can help with more than just combat."
Curiosity sparked in Domino's mismatched eyes, and she leaned closer too, creating an intimate bubble between them. "What kind of treasure are we talking about?"
Jay extended his hand across the table, palm up. "Trust me?"
Domino sighed, though her lips curved into an amused smile. "Jealous men really are the dumbest creatures on earth." But she placed her hand in his anyway, their fingers intertwining for a moment longer than necessary.
The familiar sensation of power copy flowed through Jay's fingertips—Domino's probability manipulation settling into his consciousness like a warm, electric current. Domino visibly sagged, her energy temporarily depleted.
"Ice cream," Jay said, signaling the waiter while his thumb traced a gentle circle on her wrist. "The lady needs the best you have while I step out for a moment. I'll be right back."
The Manhattan alley behind the restaurant buzzed with pre-mission tension. Jay pulled the Power Broker mask over his features, the synthetic material conforming to his face like a second skin. His finger found the comm device.
"Go."
Chaos erupted three blocks away as Morlocks poured from the sewers like a tide of forgotten humanity. Caliban led the charge, his pale, gaunt form directing traffic while Callisto's silver-streaked hair whipped behind her as she coordinated the assault teams. Dozens of mutants—some barely recognizable as human—swarmed the Hellfire Club's elegant brownstone.
Civilians screamed and scattered, their evening strolls forgotten in the face of what looked like a monster movie come to life. Car alarms wailed as panicked drivers abandoned their vehicles.
The Hellfire Club's security forces emerged in tactical formation, but they were prepared for human threats, not an army of desperate mutants. Within minutes, the inner circle members themselves stepped onto the battlefield—Donald Pierce's cybernetic enhancements gleaming under the streetlights, Harold Leland's bulk making the sidewalk crack beneath his feet, Teresia's calculating eyes scanning for strategic advantages, and Shinobi Shaw materializing from the shadows with his father's arrogance but none of his experience.
Jay activated his suppression field, normally a thirty-foot sphere but compressed through Adaptive Power to a precise ten-foot radius. The translucent barrier moved with him as he waded into the fight, now with the benefit of selectively neutralizing Hellfire members' abilities while leaving the Morlocks' powers intact.
"Ten minutes maximum," Jay's distorted voice crackled through Caliban's earpiece. "Find Masque and retrieve him. No unnecessary casualties."
Shinobi lunged forward, his usual smirk faltering as his density powers failed him completely within Jay's suppression field. His phasing attempt turned into nothing more than an awkward stumble. Leland tried to increase his mass, his face contorting with concentration, only to topple forward as his power cut out completely. Teresia's enhanced mental faculties flickered and died, leaving her looking around in confusion as if she'd suddenly forgotten where she was. Only Pierce remained unaffected, his cybernetics still functioning.
The Hellfire members quickly adapted, drawing firearms. But Jay's borrowed luck had already begun to manifest—translucent dice spinning lazily in his mental plane, each tumble shifting probability in his favor.
Pierce fired first. His cybernetics locked on with machine precision—right up until the bullet smacked a street sign, pinged off a hydrant, bounced across three car windows, and somehow split his hair perfectly down the middle before burying itself in a hot dog cart. The cart didn’t just burst—it went off like a condiment volcano, drenching him in mustard, sauerkraut, and relish.
“What in the Sam Hill—” Pierce sputtered, pawing mustard out of his cybernetic eye.
Leland, still blinking through pickle juice, decided to charge. Bad idea. His foot landed on a banana peel—probably launched from the cart’s explosion—and he went airborne, crashing through the window of a lingerie boutique in a mess of shattered glass and collapsing mannequins.
Teresia tried to cover him, but got distracted by a street mime who picked that moment to start doing the world’s slowest invisible box routine right in her line of sight. She still fired… and missed, thanks to a pigeon dive-bombing her face mid-shot. Screaming in academic Latin, she stumbled backward straight into an open manhole a city worker had uncovered seconds earlier.
Shinobi, watching all this, decided retreat was the smart play. He tried to phase into the ground—except Jay’s suppression field turned that into sinking waist-deep in wet cement. The harder he struggled, the deeper he went.
“This is impossible!” he yelled, panic cracking through his usual smug tone.
And then, because the universe wasn’t done with him, a construction crane—its hydraulics rattled loose from the earlier chaos—swung around and dumped an entire load of concrete right on his head. When the dust settled, only his perfectly styled hair stuck out, like a monument to awful timing.
"Jesus Christ," Callisto muttered into her comm, her enhanced hearing picking up every ridiculous sound effect. "Power Broker, are you seeing this? It's like the universe has a personal grudge against these people."
"Callisto," Jay's voice cut through the chaos as he stepped over Leland's moaning form, his boots somehow managing to avoid every piece of broken glass and condiment puddle despite the battlefield around him, "bandage the injured. We need them fresh for the sales pitch."
The Hellfire Club's elegant brownstone looked like a war zone painted by a madman's brush—yellow condiments splattered across marble steps, broken lingerie mannequins scattered like fallen soldiers, and a construction crane that had decided to redecorate the front lawn with modern concrete sculpture.
Jay found Tessa—code name Sage—slumped against the mahogany paneling of the library, her normally sharp eyes unfocused and glazed. She looked up at him with the dazed expression of someone whose vast intellect had just been temporarily reduced to normal human levels—a sensation she hadn't experienced in decades.
"Tell Xavier," Jay said, his mask's voice modulator making the words seem to echo from everywhere at once, the electronic distortion adding an otherworldly quality that made him sound like judgment itself, "infiltration isn't his style. Leave that to Mystique."
Sage's eyes widened in recognition and fear, her remaining telepathic abilities immediately identifying the threat level of the figure before her. Her enhanced cognitive and DNA-rooted abilities except for her telepathy —capable of processing thousands of variables simultaneously and holding the memories of decades—flickered and dimmed under Jay's power drain.
Through his Comic Nerd perk, Jay instantly accessed everything he knew about Sage's complicated loyalties. Originally Charles Xavier's spy within the Hellfire Club, she'd been slowly corrupted by Selene's dark magic, psychic tendrils that had wormed their way into her telepathic channels during their first encounter. What Xavier didn't know was that his agent had become a double agent against her will, her enhanced mind making her the perfect conduit for Selene's influence.
‘Odd Selene isn't here tonight,’ Jay thought. The Black Queen's magic would have complicated the operation, sure, but not in the way someone would think.
The elevator chimed softly as Jay reached the penthouse office. Emma Frost stood silhouetted against the floor-to-ceiling windows, Manhattan's glittering skyline providing a dramatic backdrop. Her white business suit was impeccable, her platinum blonde hair perfectly styled despite the chaos below.
"Impressive work," she said without turning around, her Massachusetts accent crisp and controlled. "Though I have to ask—how did you know I'd be here instead of at the Hellfire Club meeting in London?"
"Luck, I guess," Jay replied simply. "But I'm more curious about something else. You were already an adult during the Cuban Missile Crisis. How are you still so young?"
Emma finally turned, her lips curving into a predatory smile. "Diamond is forever, darling."
Her transformation was instantaneous—skin shifting from porcelain to brilliant crystal, refracting the city lights into rainbow patterns across the walls. She launched herself forward with inhuman speed, her diamond fist aimed directly at Jay's masked face.
But Domino's luck was still flowing through his system, and the translucent dice in his mind rolled sixes.
Emma's punch, meant to shatter bone and end the fight instantly, instead connected with the corner of her own antique desk at precisely the wrong angle. But this wasn't just any desk—somehow, impossibly, Emma's prized miniature adamantium letter opener had chosen that exact moment to fall from the desk's surface, displaced by the vibrations from the chaos below, and wedge itself perfectly between her knuckles and the hardwood. The collision created a chain reaction of improbable physics, her diamond fist struck the adamantium with tremendous force, but instead of crushing the metal, the impact created a harmonic resonance that traveled up her crystalline arm like a tuning fork.
The vibration caused her to stumble backward into her high-backed leather chair, which spun around with suspicious momentum and launched her headfirst toward the floor-to-ceiling windows behind her desk. Her perfectly manicured diamond nail—a uniquely shaped crystal formation that had cost more than most people's cars—cracked under the stress and broke off, spinning through the air like a deadly crystalline throwing star.
Just as she was about to crash into the reinforced glass, Jay deactivated her powers with surgical precision. Emma's diamond form flickered back to vulnerable flesh just as she impacted her own reflection in the mirrored surface of the window. The shock of suddenly being human again, combined with the disorientation of her failed attack, sent her stumbling into a collision course with the corner of her liquor cabinet.
The double impact—first the window, then the cabinet—created a perfect storm of confusion and momentum. Emma's eyes rolled back as the combination of physical shock and power suppression overwhelmed her nervous system, and she collapsed to the Persian rug with all the grace of a falling chandelier, her white suit now wrinkled and her perfect hair disheveled.
Jay caught the diamond nail as it spun past his head, laughing despite himself. "Super luck," he mused, pocketing the gem. "Got to love it."
He tried to heft Emma's unconscious form over his shoulder, but due to his exhaustion, grunting with effort, he dragged her down to where Callisto was organizing the prisoners.
"Pack them all into the Morlock holding cells," Jay ordered. "And be careful with the blonde. She's heavier than she looks."
Callisto's scarred face showed a mixture of professional admiration and concerned curiosity. "Power Broker, the level of coincidence we just witnessed... that's not normal tactical luck. What exactly are you not telling us?"
Jay's mask concealed his expression, but his voice carried a note of satisfaction. "Sometimes the universe decides to pick a side. Tonight, it chose ours."
In the sub-basement, Caliban's pale, gaunt form stood guard outside a reinforced cell, his tracking abilities having led them directly to their target. Masque huddled inside, his body bearing the evidence of extensive experimentation. His face—what was left of it—was a patchwork of surgical scars, far worse than the self-inflicted deformities he'd maintained among the Morlocks.
Jay's jaw clenched beneath his mask as he took in the sight. The Hellfire Club's twisted experiments had turned one of the most powerful flesh manipulators into a living laboratory specimen, his flesh bearing the marks of procedures that would have killed a normal human.
"Congratulations," Jay said grimly, his voice cutting through Masque's whimpering like a blade. "You got what you always claimed to want—permanent disfigurement that matches the ugliness of your soul." He stepped closer to the cell, his suppression field encompassing the space. "But your punishment isn't over. It's changing. Get back to work—make everyone's appearance normal. Give our people the faces they deserve, and maybe you'll earn back a fraction of the trust you destroyed."
Masque's head snapped up, hope flickering in his reconstructed eyes. "You... you slaver, you want me to work in these conditions?"
"I'm giving you redemption. Don't waste it, Masque."
Ten minutes later, Jay slipped back into Le Bernardin through the kitchen entrance, having shed the Power Broker identity in a nearby alley for Bobby to take care of. He'd taken a moment to check his appearance in a darkened storefront window, ensuring no trace of his activities remained visible. His suit was immaculate, his hair perfectly styled—the only evidence of his activities being the slight sheen of excitement in his eyes and the diamond nail in his jacket pocket. His temporary copied powers had already faded, leaving him feeling slightly hollow where Domino's probability manipulation had resided in his consciousness.
Domino looked up from her third helping of chocolate gelato, her energy mostly restored. Her eyes sparkled with mischief as she licked the spoon slowly, deliberately. "That was either the longest bathroom break in a date, or you actually managed to find something interesting in Manhattan's alleys."
Jay reached into his jacket pocket and produced the diamond nail, its faceted surface catching the candlelight like a captured star. "Got this off another girl's finger for you. Figured you might like something that matches your... explosive personality."
Domino's eyes went wide, then she burst into delighted laughter. "You're completely insane." She took the unique diamond, turning it over in her fingers, her touch lingering on his hand as she did. "I love it."
She leaned across the table and kissed him, her lips tasting of chocolate and mint and something indefinable that might have been adrenaline. The kiss was longer than he'd expected, more intense, her hand sliding up to cup his jaw as if she was trying to read something in his expression. When they broke apart, she was grinning, but her eyes held a sharp intelligence that suggested she was putting pieces together.
"So," she said, settling back into her chair but not releasing his hand, her thumb tracing patterns on his palm, "ready to tell me what really happened out there? Because unless Manhattan's alleys have gotten significantly more glamorous since this morning, this little beauty came from somewhere much more interesting."
Jay smiled, refilling their wine glasses with his free hand while their fingers remained intertwined. "What makes you think anything happened? Maybe I'm just lucky."
"Honey," Domino said, holding up the diamond nail so it sparkled in the light while squeezing his hand suggestively, "I'm literally a living luck charm. I know the difference between coincidence and chaos." She took a sip of wine, her eyes never leaving his. "But I also know when to appreciate a good mystery and thank you for making this the most interesting date I've had in years."
Outside, sirens wailed in the distance as emergency responders dealt with the aftermath at the Hellfire Club. But inside their private dining room, Jay and Domino simply enjoyed their wine, the tension of the evening giving way to something warmer, more intimate, more promising.
After all, diamonds make memories be forever.
Comments
elph
damn hellfire club got rolled
