Chapter 233: Furious Contemplations
19th September 2012, New York City
(Jasmine Sayre POV)
But with half of their mutant roster gone, and the decrease in mutant criminals due to the mass migration to Genosha, it proved that SHIELD wasn’t needed for things to remain stable. Fury was doing his best to disprove that, by trying to either recruit or arrest as many mutants as he could.
It was a very dangerous policy to take, not to mention incredibly risky. But, for now, Fury was a man with nothing to lose, and that was a scary thought to have.
If anything, the next few days will prove to be interesting at the very least. I ended up spending hours with Selene, Wanda and Rose, chatting up, making jokes. It was nice to see that the ritual didn’t seem to have affected the way I felt about them. I chose not to overthink things, as the day concluded, and I went to sleep. I’ll worry about it tomorrow. For now, I will sleep and mourn my friend’s death in peace.
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27th September 2012, New York City
(Nick Fury POV)
Nick Fury wasn’t amused, not amused at all. If he would call the last few months as being disasters, he would be understating things, by a lot. SHIELD was sinking and he had no idea why it was happening. It was so sudden, so unexpected, that the director of SHIELD didn’t know where to begin.
He didn’t even know why this happened. No one knew, no one actively targeted the organization anymore than it’s used to. It all started with the alien invasion, where the team he put up, the Avengers, were able to snag a pretty decisive victory with minimal casualties. It was glorious, it vindicated Fury against all the people who doubted his little mad idea. Even if the invasion was mainly stopped by two aliens that he had no control over, Thor and the Morrigan, that they still didn’t know whether they survived the invasion or not. It would have been the highlight of his career. But it was then, that the damn World Security Council decided that it was a good idea to nuke one of the biggest cities on the planet.
And these motherfuckers chose to do this while the situation was obviously contained. He didn’t know what went through these idiots’ heads, but if it wasn’t pure shit, he would give his other eye.
Still, it took some PR miracles, some little donations here and there, and the nuke became an accidental decision from the council who were investigated. Honestly, the organization shouldn’t have even had any nukes. The one fired was part of the ones that were recovered with Rogers and was being studied by the scientists in an undisclosed location. He didn’t want any country to have access to those, so he chose to keep them and not break the fragile peace between nations. He didn’t need to ignite another cold war. Still, they had a couple of missiles on the helicarrier just in case they would need them. They were fighting aliens, after all. Oh, how Fury wishes that he’d just left these missiles at a base somewhere. He wouldn’t be in this position. Maybe he should have just called Carol to handle this. She could probably do it by herself.
If he was frank, Fury was glad that the council was being investigated. The leaked clip visibly showed him objecting to the decision of blowing up New York and doing his best to stop it. He could have used it to consolidate the organization under his banner and stop bureaucrats, that had never been in a fight in their lives, from making decisions that they just didn’t understand. But, of course, things went to shit. The leak happened. Somehow someone got access to their servers – and it wasn’t Stark, he checked – and kept leaking sensitive documents and projects to the public. They weren’t the worst things that his organization had done, but they caused a public outrage at a time that the support for the organization was at an all-time low.
But it was enough to get those UN morons to make a fuss in an attempt to seize power and influence. It’s not as if they did anything that wasn’t part of their charters. They were a peace keeping organization, confiscating dangerous tech, killing warlords, and so on, were part of their job. If someone had leaked even a fraction of the CIA’s database, they would have found pretty much the same things, maybe even worse.
Unfortunately, if politicians cared about one thing, it would be public perception, and right now, SHIELD was being crucified by the public, which meant that they washed their hands of SHIELD or in some cases actually joined the public and attacked SHIELD even more.
These ungrateful fucks! If they had a clue of just how many lives his organization has saved, how many economic collapses they have stopped, how many wars they have averted, they wouldn’t even dare to say anything.
Still, he could have dealt with it, if it wasn’t for Pierce’s unexpected demise. The man had died of a heart attack, a normal one with a regular cause in the autopsy, but the man had never showed any heart troubles during his yearly medical checkups. It made him suspicious and after a bit of investigating, he ended up with the familiar name of Jasmine Sayre. He hadn’t forgotten what he felt the last time he confronted the woman. He felt like nothing, like a prey in front of an apex predator. Jasmine Sayre was dangerous and now she was the owner of one of the biggest companies in the world, certainly the most influential one, at the very least, which doubled her already high threat level.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
He knew, in his bones, that Jasmine had killed Pierce. He tried to prove it and investigated Pierce’s case. He asked to see Sayre, but he was told that she was on vacation abroad for an undetermined period of time. Although Marvel cooperated with the authorities and gave them the surveillance tapes of the day Pierce met up with Sayre and the details of the meeting. Sadly, there was no audio, and Sayre seemingly hadn’t even touched or used any powers on him. Still, all of this might have been an illusion that she had put up to fool the authorities.
As for the meeting, it was to discuss an arrangement that Evanshade had made with Pierce before her death, but one that was not finalized. Apparently, the former secretary of SHIELD planned on using funds from the organization to buy out the company. It was unprecedented, but it would have been a huge win for them. The Marvel Media Company was not only the most influential media company in the world, but it also had a large network of informants that fed it information for the news, a network that SHIELD could have used. Unfortunately, Evanshade died in a car explosion – something that he suspected Sayre was involved with – and left everything to her niece, Jasmine Sayre, who scrapped the deal entirely, as was her right.
Unfortunately, outside of a possible motive, there was nothing he could link to Sayre, other than claiming that she was a mutant, and he had no proof of it. Which meant that to nail that bitch, the only thing he needed was to get proof of her using her powers. Juries were very critical of superpowered individuals in courts meaning that she could still be considered as a suspect. Unfortunately, the woman had disappeared completely which put a wrench in that plan.
Apparently, Pierce’s death was the beginning of the end. There was a ‘freak’ accident in a hotel that killed many of SHIELD’s higher ups in a single night. He had no idea what they were doing there, maybe it was a private funeral between them; they seemed to have been close with Pierce.
However, that didn’t explain why over half the agents in the company quit their positions at once a month later. Sitwell, Garret, Ward, Mallick, Rumlow and so many more. It was horrible and SHIELD was crippled from the inside. Also, something felt fishy about the entire thing. These people didn’t seem to care about the public’s opinion and yet they just walked out one day, resigned, without even saying why they left, only claiming that it was for personal reasons.
The public was against them, their agents were leaving them out to dry. SHIELD was falling, the legacy of Howard Stark and Peggy Carter, was going up in flames and Fury had no idea what to do.
The worst thing though, was the disappearance of mutants all over the world. Most of the mutants who had joined SHIELD had just disappeared one day, along with their families. All the mutants they were keeping tabs on had the same issue. It was worrying, not just for SHIELD, but for the safety of the entire world. The truth is that one of the main reasons the UN keeps funding SHIELD, is because they delay them having to deal with the mutant issue. SHIELD represented a path for mutants to live as agents for humanity, protecting the world from threats while not making trouble for their respective governments. The more mutants joined SHIELD, the less likely it is for there to be mutant crimes on the streets. And the disappearance of mutants showed how little impact SHIELD has made on the issue, which was another black mark on their record.
And to make things worse, mutants disappearing, means that someone is either recruiting or kidnapping them, which means that someone out there has an entire army of mutants at his or her disposal, which didn’t bode well for the rest of the world.
Fury had chosen to double down and keep finding mutants and recruit them before they’re kidnapped, but he was always late, losing a possible asset for SHIELD. Even the Avengers chose not to help him. As a team, they had chosen to keep their distance from SHIELD and all governments to avoid any questions on the missions they’ll be taking on.
It was understandable, but what was surprising was that it was Stark who had made the suggestion to do so, which even Romanoff and Barton agreed to be the right thing to do, especially with how the public still kept crucifying SHIELD today.
It was a low blow; Fury had been the one who gave Romanoff a chance instead of just killing her outright, he was the one who helped Barton set up his family, he was the one who dug up Captain America from the arctic, and he was the one who helped Stark find a replacement for the Palladium in his arc reactor, saving his life. To see this team spit upon everything he had done for them was painful, even if it helped them realize Fury’s dream of an entire team of superheroes from all around the world, protecting the world from the threats from the stars.
As for now, SHIELD needed a win, and it needed it desperately. He needed to catch someone big, someone that the public would hate even more than them. He had no idea where to start, and with the UN vote being so close, he was running out of time.
As Fury was pondering all of this from his office on the Triskelion, Maria Hill entered the room. The woman was one of the main reasons Fury didn’t go crazy in the last few months. She was a rock, efficient and loyal to a fault, and the director of SHIELD appreciated all the effort she made in helping him try to salvage the current situation. For some reason, she had a small smile on her face, “Sir.”
He nodded, “Hill.”
“We have some news.”
Fury nodded and she continued, “the satellites have found Jasmine Sayre in a restaurant in New York.”
The director of SHIELD had a bloodthirsty smile on his face. Well, if an opportunity presented itself, just before the UN vote, he was going to take advantage of it. After all, he had nothing to lose and everything to gain.
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