AutumnXd
patreon
CHAPTER 12
🕑 Added 2025-06-17 15:43:46 +0000 UTCThe next day, San Francisco was buzzing with news of the "accident" at the Krei Tech campus launch. The official story was a gas line explosion, but whispers of the mysterious masked man and the heroic new team of heroes were already becoming the city's favorite new myth.
In a bright, sterile room at San Francisco General, the team gathered around Tadashi’s hospital bed. He was awake, bandaged but in high spirits, cracking jokes as Honey Lemon demonstrated her new backpack, a gift from Ward. With a tap on a holographic interface, a small nozzle produced a perfect sphere of pink, bouncy foam.
"See? An instant stress ball!" she chirped. "He also installed a force-field emitter for emergencies. He thought of everything!"
"Speaking of," Hiro said, looking around, "where is Ward?"
"He went to see Professor Callaghan in prison," Honey Lemon explained, shrinking the foam ball back into nothing. "He said he had some final questions about the spatial data."
"Has he always been so… intense?" Hiro asked. He had spent the least amount of time with Ward and found him to be a fascinating, intimidating enigma.
"He's the most focused person I've ever met," Tadashi said from his bed, his voice filled with admiration. "When we were working together, he was either deep in research or asking questions that made you rethink everything you thought you knew. It's rare to see him just… relax."
"He's reliable," Gogo added, a high compliment from her. "He showed up when it counted."
"Yeah, we'd probably be a smear on the pavement if he hadn't," Wasabi said with a shudder. "That guy is on another level."
On the other side of the city, in a remote, high-security prison, Ward sat opposite a humbled Robert Callaghan. The thick plexiglass and static-filled phone receiver couldn't diminish the immense gratitude in the professor's eyes.
"Ward, I don't know how to thank you," Callaghan said, his voice thick with emotion.
"Giving me your research was thanks enough," Ward replied with a small smile. "Your daughter has woken up. She's under observation, but the doctors say she's fine. She should be able to visit you in a week."
A single tear traced a path down Callaghan's cheek. "That's… that's wonderful." He looked down at the handcuffs chaining him to the table and sighed. "I was so consumed by hatred. If I had just listened to you, trusted you from the start…"
"What's done is done," Ward said. "But you've contributed too much to society for them to let you rot. This incident didn't result in catastrophic loss of life, thanks to your final actions. The sentence shouldn't be too severe. When you get out, you might even be a grandfather."
Callaghan managed a weak, hopeful smile at the thought. After asking his final, complex questions about the portal's energy matrix, Ward left, leaving the professor with a future he never thought he'd have.
Back in the lab, Ward knew his time in this world was ending. He began his final project, a personal souvenir. He forged a small, fifty-centimeter spear of a dense, silver-black alloy. On his head, he wore a slim, silver headband. He looked at the flechette floating before him, and with a mere thought, sent it zipping around the lab. It danced through the air with impossible speed and precision, a silent, deadly marvel inspired by a story from his own world. He was still marveling at its responsiveness when the cold, clear voice echoed in his mind.
«Time limit reached. Prepare to awaken.»
The high-tech lab dissolved into swirling darkness.
Aidan Parker’s eyes snapped open. For a disorienting moment, the intricate patterns of his Queens bedroom ceiling seemed alien. He sat up, a wave of temporal whiplash washing over him—a dizzying sensation of two timelines struggling for dominance in his mind. A month and a half in San Francisco. One night in New York. He took a deep, steadying breath, letting the reality of his own world reassert itself. He glanced at the clock.
"Seven o'clock." Not too late. He closed his eyes again, meditating, easing the temporal dissonance. The first dream, the Real Steel world, had been easier, the time flow nearly one-to-one. This was different. This was a true disconnect.
Knock, knock. "Aidan, are you up?" Aunt May's voice came through the door, interrupting his thoughts.
His eyes shot to the clock again. 7:45 AM.
"Crap! I'm going to be late!" He threw off the covers, the calm of his meditation shattered by the mundane panic of oversleeping. He scrambled into his clothes. "Coming!" he yelled, pulling on a coat and yanking open the door to reveal May’s puzzled face.
"What happened to you? I thought you'd already left," she said.
"Just tired. Overslept," he mumbled, rushing past her to the bathroom.
He was a blur of motion, grabbing his backpack, forgoing a proper breakfast for a piece of toast he bought on the run. The woman at the corner shop looked at him in surprise. "Well, look at you! In a hurry for once."
He arrived at Midtown High just as the final bell rang, swallowing the last bite of toast as he passed the security guard. The campus was nearly empty, and the unfamiliar quiet felt… hollow. Okay, next time, I'm doing this on a Friday night, he resolved.
He slipped into his classroom, enduring the shocked and amused stares of his classmates. "Hey, are you late?" Erica, the girl with glasses who sat next to him, whispered with a schadenfreude-filled grin.
"There's a first time for everything, isn't there?" he whispered back, rolling his eyes.
"Oh my god, you were actually late," she giggled. "This is going to be all over the school by lunch."
The day passed in a haze of familiar routine, a dull throb after the high-stakes brilliance of the past month. But beneath the surface of the city, Aidan could feel it—a tension, a sense of things winding up. The pieces were moving. Something big was coming.
On Saturday, he met Logan for a day of fishing at a quiet, secluded lake upstate. The air smelled of damp earth and pine, and for a while, they sat in comfortable silence, the only sound the gentle lapping of water against the shore.
"So, how's the factory?" Aidan asked, his eyes on his unmoving bobber.
"Good," Logan grunted, cracking open a beer. "It's running smoothly. We've hired a lot of our own, kids who couldn't get a fair shake anywhere else. It’s… good work, kid. On behalf of all of them, thank you."
"We each get what we need," Aidan said simply. "But Logan… there are too many variables with mutants. Too many whose powers are a curse, not a gift. I'm going to develop a vaccine. A cure. Something that can eliminate the X-gene for any mutant who wants to return to a normal life."
Logan went still, his beer halfway to his lips. He understood the implications better than anyone. It was a tool of liberation, but also a weapon of terrifying potential. "If you could really do that… it would change everything," he said, his voice low and serious.
"I plan to," Aidan said. "I'm creating a new company. A medical technology firm. I'll form research partnerships with Stark, Oscorp, and Hammer to give it public legitimacy, but the focus will be entirely on medical breakthroughs. No weapons." He finally looked at Logan, his gaze direct. "But a company that big will need a management team. A security force. People I can trust implicitly, who understand discretion and operate outside the normal rules."
Logan’s eyes narrowed as he understood.
"The X-Men need a safe harbor, a legitimate place in the world," Aidan continued. "My company will need a loyal, capable core to run it. We each have what the other needs." He cast his line back into the water. "Talk to the Professor. Tell him I'm offering not just a partnership, but a permanent home."
