Chapter 356: The Return
13th June 2013, Avengers Tower
(Tony Stark POV)
Tony ejected himself from the giant suit, staying in his smaller one, and activated the self-destruct of each of the limbs and torso. They exploded in his opponent's face, and he grinned slightly, only for him to feel pain in his gut. There was another sentinel there. How many of these things were left?
Tony fell down, while everything was getting dizzy. He thought that he was going to die, but for some reason, the pain turned to warmth, and his vision started getting clearer. He blinked and saw a familiar redhead appear next to him. He felt a voice in his head, 'Are you alright Tony?'
'Words can't express how happy I am to see you, Grey.'
The redhead chuckled and Tony felt her reading his memories of the events. He normally would have complained about this breach of privacy but considering the situation, he would hold his tongue.
The redhead then turned towards the Red Hulk and waved her hand. The red giant immediately fell unconscious and every sentinel in the park turned to dust. What the hell, Tony has been fighting for his life, and the mutant could just walk there, waving her hands and just beat his enemy and his overpowered robots. Life really wasn't fair.
Tony didn't care that this was ironic considering he was a billionaire.
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(Wanda Maximoff POV)
It has been a week since the infamous Red Hulk incident occurred, and Wanda still had a headache on the matter. The Accords were now officially repelled. The fact that the UN was pressured so easily in a week was laughable. But now, the United States representative of the Enhanced Registration Act turned out to be some insane madman who was obsessed with the Hulk and made a serum that gave him similar powers. Honestly, no one could have made something like that up without having a few screws loose in the head.
That man had to be one something to loudly proclaim his secrets in front of Stark, who he knew was recording him. The serum must have done something to enhance his rage somehow, but holy shit, Ross was a fucking politician. He was supposed to stay calm while manipulating any position to his advantage, and not, you know, turn himself into a rage monster and somehow think that attacking Tony Stark in broad daylight while being filmed was a good idea to keep orders.
All things considered, the Red Hulk wasn't even close to matching the original Hulk who grew stronger the angrier he got. The main issue was the robots that accompanied him. These would have been very troubling for anyone that wasn't either her, Jean, or Jasmine. The suits were surprisingly competent in detecting mutants but also to manipulate their own atomic structure to kill as many mutants as possible. It was very impressive nanotechnology that surpassed even Stark's technology, but it was also very worrying. If these were let out, it was very possible that the mutant race would be hunted down to extinction in a decade or two.
For the first time in a very long time, Wanda felt fear, and she finally understood her mother slightly more. This was the kind of stuff they dealt with frequently, this was what it meant to be a protector of Earth, and if Jasmine hadn't saved her from the asylum all those years ago, and hadn't taken Jean under her wing, then the entire mutant population would have been in severe danger. It opened up the possibility of genocide on a scale that humanity had never seen before, and it was only stopped because of her and Jean. Did Jasmine always feel like this? Like the whole world was pressing down on her shoulder, where taking a day off could set up the end of the world because that's exactly what Wanda felt.
The sad thing was that, while the sentinels were a big issue, they also provided them an opportunity. With the coming battle, an army of sentinels could protect the planet properly, and even then, become a standing force protecting Earth from any external invaders. They only needed to remove the mutant detector and alter the programming for that to work. Wanda had left a sample to Tony who hadn't left his lab ever since he got it.
Bored out of her mind, she took her phone and accessed Genosha's database on the creator of the sentinels, Bolivar Trask. Emma Frost had sent a team to assassinate the genius and wipe out any trace of the project after reading his mind. The man really was despicable; he wished nothing but to destroy the mutant race and dedicated his entire life to fulfilling that purpose. Genosha's scientific division, led by Forge himself, was already modifying the sentinels to serve as a force to protect humanity, with the official manufacturing planned to begin in a few months.
As for the original Avengers, the manhunt on them was called off, but funnily enough, their status as fugitives still wasn't revoked. Ross had practically confessed to releasing the Abomination and sending at the Avengers hoping to apprehend them, and yet they were still technically criminals. So far, they were staying in Wakanda, enjoying the hospitality of King T'Chaka in the most advanced country in the world.
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Jean and she had officially completed their mission. Jasmine had tasked them to prevent mutants from being hunted down like criminals, and either stop or ideally modify the Enhanced Registration Act. The enhanced registration act was no more, and practically every person with powers was united against the mass violation of human rights that almost happened. Sure, it would have been better to start some kind of framework to work on how to handle people with powers, but it was a far better outcome than what could have been.
Even Richards finally admitted in an interview that he was wrong to support the accords and that he hadn't known how corrupt former secretary Ross really was. However, he still is sure that the Accords themselves, while horrible, were the right step forward. He would have liked for them to be better, but he wasn't the one who wrote them and hoped to slowly change them from the inside over the years.
It wasn't exactly a bad plan. Mathematically speaking, if the Accords were going to get voted and put in place in society anyway, then supporting them while slowly circumventing them was the best option which had the least projected causalities to both sides. Richards, whose life was governed by mathematics, chose the best statistical option and stuck to it. He definitely didn't expect things to get this far, that the data which he used to draw his conclusion was false. The data leak that Jean and Wanda had caused destroyed the credibility of the politicians that voted for the Accords, and Ross' little temper tantrum destroyed its spirit. The Accords were over, and that meant that drafting new laws would become necessary in the close future.
Somehow, things worked out for the best. Wanda had just manipulated the entire planet, and changed public opinion, from the background without really doing anything about it. The US government was trying to get into Trask industries to get access to the Sentinels blueprints, not that they would find anything since the entire project, and countless others related to it, were scrubbed from all databases that Trask knew of.
The mutants had won and yet it didn't really feel like it. The anti-mutant sentiment was too entrained by society after countless debates on it the 'mutant issue' in the media, and it would take a lot for things to calm down. Ordinary humans were afraid that a teenager with powers would kill them on a whim. It was a justified fear, especially before the nation of Genosha was taken over, and started monitoring mutants on a global scale. Fear of mutants died down, but it wasn't gone.
The Accords could have abated that fear of the unknown. After all, if the government dealt with something, then the average person wouldn't need to concern themselves with it. Superhuman crime would become like any other criminal act and punished accordingly, without them knowing of the specifics of it.
Now, without the Accords, the tentative peace was fragile, and something needed to unite both humanity and mutant kind. With the coming conflict, a common enemy for all of the residents of Earth would come. Thanos was coming, and should Jasmine be victorious in her fight, and them in theirs, it would provide a foundation on which peace between the two people would be built, and soon after, the inclusion of the magical world would be smooth.
Wanda could see it happening, and she marvelled at her mother's planning. This was the work of decades of plots and plans that finally converged. Jasmine's off-hand approach to the rising of mutant kind made sense now. There had to be conflict, and Jasmine planned on making it as light and as fast as possible, planning on using Thanos' invasion to unite every living being on the planet.
It was sad that Jasmine's recent apathy made her dismiss her plans and relegate it to them. Her mother would not have given the mutant race's fate to them after planning for so long. She wouldn't have wiped Rose's memories of her the way she did. The Selene incident really shook her up and affected her immensely. Wanda's mother was slowly losing her humanity and there was nothing she could do about it. Was she even functional anymore?
All she had left was her power and her fight with Entropy and it was sad that she didn't see what she's become. Wanda loved her mother, by all the powers in the multiverse, she really did. Jasmine had saved her from her lowest, and Wanda was going to do the same to her. She wouldn't abandon her, the way that she, herself, was abandoned by her own father and brother.
Speaking of Pietro, he had practically gone off the grid for months, and honestly, Wanda couldn't be bothered to track him down. For all his talk about reuniting and becoming a family, the speedster did very little to make that a reality, darting from one part of the globe to another, until slowly, Wanda's willingness to even try to seek him out was getting lower with every conversation. Oh, she still tracked him down to make sure he was alright, but she had given up long ago that they would share a normal sibling relationship. Even Thor and Loki were closer siblings than she was, and they tried to kill each other routinely before Thor had to return him because of what happened after the Ragnarök mess. And well, Loki hadn't even woken up since then, which was starting to be worrying.
Wanda's thoughts were interrupted by a loud sound. She ran out of Sayre Manor to see what was going on until she saw a familiar egg shaped ship get inside the wards with a sonic boom, before stopping a few meters over the ground and slowly levitating down until it landed entirely.
This was Jasmine's ship. Wanda remembered it flying up when her mother left the planet. The door slowly opened up, revealing a staircase. The familiar black-haired and green-eyed woman walked forwards, followed by Hela who looked far more relaxed than she was when they left weeks before. Surprisingly, she was followed by another man that was wearing a red jacket, a woman with green skin, a topless grey man with red marks on his skin, a racoon holding some kind of high-tech rifle, and a fucking walking tree of all things.
Jasmine noticed her and smiled, "Hello there Wanda. Meet my companions, this is Peter Quill, Gamora, Drax, Rocket, and Groot. They're part of a team called the Guardians of the Galaxy. Guys, this is Wanda Maximoff, my daughter."
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