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Just Another Fool; [Orchard & Spitfire]
Topic Started: Feb 17 2015, 04:15 AM (503 Views)
Toxin
Unregistered

February 16th,
2:30 PM

There was an awful lot of time to sit and reflect on what had gotten him where he was. Each choice, each action, that brought him to this place. To question and second guess everything. Not leaving the Brotherhood, but his decisions making in general. Or lack of decision making. The fact was, he was very much a person that things happened to. When he cut the strings that jerked him around for so long, he immediately went and found another set.

Well, not immediately. He'd spent a few months on his own before he contacted SHIELD. Maybe it would have been smarter to do so earlier on, especially with Exodus in charge of the Brotherhood. There were some that might have qualms with him being killed outright, but there were enough telepaths that all they'd have to do is get ahold of him to ensure he'd be a proper soldier again. And maybe he was fooling himself. Those people might be just as willing to end the life of a deserter like him, past or no past.

Maybe he was fooling himself. That he could actually do something to right some of the wrong in the world. That's all he'd wanted and it'd gotten him in past his eyebrows. Not that he'd had much choice in the beginning, but he'd had his misgivings early on and chances to escape. If he'd walked off after he'd spent that time as a captive on Skrullos they'd never have known he'd made it back. If he'd walked after being teleported into the fucking ocean, they'd have accepted him as a casualty, and they'd never have known. He'd have been clear. Why did he keep on crawling back, when the work he did made him detest his own existence?

Where else would he go? After what he did. What he'd become. Maybe that was what led him to giving himself up to SHIELD in the end. He'd known that he would go back to them if there wasn't something stopping him because it was the only place to go. The only place with people waiting for him. There was no one else left. He could take hating himself, but he couldn't handle being alone.

That was the worst part of lockdown, though it wasn't complete isolation - there were agents from time to time for some reason or another. It wasn't like when he was on Skrullos in any way. Nothing like it could have been. Or how it would have been for a SHIELD agent captive by the Brotherhood if the situation was somehow reversed. He was lucky in his treatment here. Even if they rejected him as a volunteer, as he'd begun to believe after five months passed and there was nothing but silence on that subject. For now he had to be content that he was out of it.
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Spitfire
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The Lockdown was quiet these days. Since the end of the Thunderbolts programme, it had been inhabited by a few prisoners, but nowhere near the same scale. That was what the Raft was for, or CAGE. Jac knew the Lockdown well, having spent the better part of a year in almost total isolation in it. Even locked in her cell for hours, she still knew things. Had seen things through the slit in the door. It hadn’t exactly been...humiliating...but it had given her time to think.

Feeling almost responsible as she headed to the cell, she sighed inwardly. Dressed in her now customary yellow and red suit, Jac wore a SHIELD eagle on her left arm and a Union Flag on the right. Once the thought of skipping around as a SHIELD agent would have revolted her and even now, the speedster wasn’t entirely sure that she was in the right place but...it was a better place. Sort of. Things were complicated. Stopping outside of the cell, the young woman paused before opening up the door with a series of clicks and whirs.

“Hey, Dustin,” Spitfire greeted, almost casually. It had been a while since she had seen him, that day in Central Park. If he had been in Sanctuary when SHIELD had raided the place, then she’d not come across him...Not like Pyro. Pushing away that thought, she folded her arms across her chest and leaned back on against the wall of the cell.

“So, how are you keeping?” he’d been asking about joining up, not uncommon in prisoners who could otherwise expect a long sentence for their deeds. But there were those who meant it and those who just wanted to save their necks. After what had happened with the Thunderbolts, signing on the dotted line was no easier - it never had been easy, but now it was more of a challenge than before to prove sincerity. Their last conversation had been playing over and over in her head and he had seemed so...set on things. Jac wanted to ask just what had brought about such a change, but not yet.

“Hope you don’t mind, but I brought a friend,” jabbing a thumb over her shoulder, she indicated Orchard. How he wanted to react to that was entirely up to him, but personally she considered he was in the friends category, somewhat. After all she had shared some sweets with him. That was not an easy privilege to come by.
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Henry Orchard
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Jac’s thumb indicated a slightly gaunt man in a slate suit and a black suitcase in hand. He slid into the cell and the door shut behind him, the locks and bolts dropped back into place and struck a grim little rhythm. He waited for the beat to die down and took the opportunity to size up their latest prospect.

Quickly he decided that wouldn't be unable to discern anything beyond the information in the file. Some anxiety perhaps, nor any tension and as such perhaps Reed’s defection was all it appeared to be. Then again, Henry was all too familiar with Paris Bennett's approach to double agents.

Nothing to be gained by standing around. Time to get to work.

“She says friend.” he shrugged and moved deeper into the cell. His swagger affected an almost reptilian air, as if his very best imitation of human mannerisms couldn't quite hide his natural slither. He’d spent all of yesterday practising it, he was quite proud.

“I don’t like anyone and no one likes me.” he continued, carefully pulling a chair from under the table the legs scraping painfully along the floor “It’s because I’m the job doer. I do jobs.”

He sat and set the case down on the table, positioning it with such care and precision that his attentions became almost unseemly.

“I’m the company man. I’ve got a suit, a weird briefcase, and a snotty attitude.”

Apparently of it’s own accord the case opened and a variety of appendages and organs begun to emerge; spindly little arms unfurling to present strange instruments, bellows and bladders heaving and hissing, spires rising up to shake and spin.

“Ever seen Blade Runner?”
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Toxin
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Dustin remained seated when Jac entered the room, but he sat up properly. It had been about a year since he'd last seen her, and a lot had changed since then. She didn't mention the scales, the fact that he was blue. Well, he'd always had some reptilian characteristics. Perhaps it didn't faze her whatsoever. Or maybe she was being polite.

"I'm... well," he said, and that was true enough. He had started to work through a few things with the therapist. "If the Brotherhood did half of what SHIELD did for me for its soldiers let alone its prisoners-" his face went slightly rigid at that. He had some underlaying anger about the things that the Brotherhood could have done, could have been. For its soldiers, for the damn world. He didn't know shit about SHIELD's prisoners, the ones that weren't compliant like he was, but he didn't ask about that either.

"I don't-" he began to reply when the other agent of SHIELD interjected. And spoke. And- Dustin watched the briefcase do its thing, the instruments... he broke off the stare to return the man's gaze. Almost evenly. He'd seen some weird shit in his life, and alarming people in his time in the Brotherhood. The worst possible thing to do in that life had been to show weakeness and he'd survived for years.

"I haven't," he said, more than a little nonplussed at both what he was seeing and the question. What pop culture he was familiar with was what his college friends had pushed on him, and while he was pretty sure they'd suggested that title to him they also hadn't lived long enough to watch it with him courtesy of the Apocalypse. What did some movie have to do with anything?

"Does that matter?" His eyes flickered to the movements of - whatever it was that was spinning. What the shit was that? Something was hissing in all that and he had to fight the urge to hiss back, like sticking his tongue out at a child sticking their tongue out at him.
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Spitfire
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Jac listened, a passive expression on her face as Dustin said he was well, then commented on the Brotherhood. Then her expression shifted, but only for a second. “Really? Last time I saw you, you’d pretty much drunk all the kool aid…” The last time she had seen him, he also had not been blue. Spitfire had been told about this, about the turn his mutation had taken. It was kind of weird seeing him as such after being used to his previous face, but, well, she had been in the Brotherhood and then lived with the X-men and now SHIELD… Wasn’t like she wasn’t used to obvious mutations. Hell, she had hung out with several reptile-ly mutants alone.

Rolling her eyes as Orchard went off on his tangent, Jac folded her arms across her chest and arched an eyebrow at him before looking back to Dustin. “It doesn’t matter that much, in fact he probably wanted you to say no, as he’s probably about to start showing off a little,” looking back to Henry, the grin was still on her face that translated as, if he wanted to carry on with what he was going to do with his bag of tricks, he might as well.

Rolling her head back front, Jacqueline observed the...former? Brotherhood member. “So, what changed?” she asked him, her tone a little more serious, gentle even. Part of her felt a little guilty for not getting her point across to him better that day in the park, but it had been a pretty messy situation. Even if she had, there was no telling what Pyro might have done, or even how many more people had been waiting in the shadows. Could she have made a difference? It was unpleasant to brood on too much, especially seeing as now Toxin was safe. Safer? After all, were any of them really safe?

“Where do you see yourself in five year’s time?” Part of her hoped that Orchard would join in there, as she’d pay to hear the other Agent’s five-year-plan...
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Henry Orchard
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Henry slipped back into his mind for a moment and found the strand that connected him to the case. The whole device was the product of his extracranial imagination but somewhere in there, under all the vibrating umbrellas and weird bladders, was an ingot of unfettered vorpal.

The PSI-techs had hammered it loose from his own brain wave frequencies and now it should be just soaking up ambient psychic energy, like a tape recorder for Things Unsaid. Theoretically, any unwanted passengers in Reed’s head would show up under later analysis.

In order to maximise the chance of detection they’d formulated a series of protocols to counteract the intricate and subtle design of Brotherhood psychic programming; confuse the living shit out of it. Cue Orchard:

“I, personally,” he began “do not have a five year plan. I operate on a calendar with a scaling numerical base which tracks relative to the the ratings of Equarodian soap operas. Genius.”

To illustrate the point. He leant forward and pushed a finger into his temple, so hard that the skin blossomed from red to pale yellow.

“No one knows what I’m doing. Not bad guys, not SHIELD, not even me. People say, like, hey let’s kill that guy on January the third when he’s picking out his bog roll down at the Seven Eleven. They all roll in there with their expensive rental guns and their weird fetish ammo and I’m not even there. Where am I?”

He gestured broadly, fielding objections from a conveniently non-existent panel of detractors.

“Who can say? Who. Can. Say. Because my January third could be any time. It could be next thursday, it could be today, and it may not even be a time. It could be a feeling. Maybe January third is cinnamon flavour. You can’t go down to cinnamon flavor and kill a guy.”

“That’s why” he pointed to his own face “best spy.”

He sat back in his chair and folded his arms, satisfied of a job well done. Then, he recalled something someone, possibly Jac, had said to him recently about maybe not acting like a crazy person all of the time.

“What I’m saying is” he sat up, and tried to regain even the vaguest sense of authority “You should be sure that this the right move for you. You know, what with all of the Brotherhood still being a thing.”
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