"I spy with my little eye..."

"Get stuffed, Pete."

Pete Wisdom sighed as he sat back in his cell. To his left was David North and across the room were Lydia Del Ruiz and Kitty Pryde, Lydia opposite him, Kitty opposite David. None of them were talking, to each other despite the best efforts of Pete, though he didn't quite blame them.

This was not the way he wanted to spend the rest of the day, but then again things were never quite that easy.

"We have to talk about this at some point," said Pete, seeing sixteen different ways of breaking out of here with ease as he looked about the cell.

"The part where busted open my nose?" said Maverick. "Or the part where you shot me in the leg?"

"How about the part where you said I was easy?" said Kitty, and Pete could hear the anger and hurt in her voice.

"And what about the order you gave to Maverick to shoot me?" said Lydia. "I was defending you and you turned on me. Or the part where you were fighting over your ex after being with me."

"I said talk not everyone dump on Wisdom," said Pete wishing he had a cigarette . For a start - Davey - what the hell were you thinking? Kitty's old enough to be to be your daughter."

"Don't you mean..."

"I know what I mean, Lyd. Mav, not only is there me to consider, but what about her father?"

"My Dad won't know."

"Not the balding bloke, you daft tart," said Pete. "I mean Logan. You're one of his best friends and you're doing the closest thing he has to a daugter."

"He'll understand..." muttered Maverick.

"Great, where would you like the flowers sent?"

"Pete," started Kitty.

"Oh yeah, here we go. I am really sorry for what I said, Kit, but damn it all, where was your head."

"It seemed a good idea at the time," she said. "You want details?" Pete looked down, feeling his fist clench a little.

"No," he said. "It's just... he's not your type. And don't you dare take that out of context."

"I..." Pete looked up as she spoke, hearing the uncertainty in her voice. He wasn't doing Maverick down, she really wasn't his type. Doug Ramsey, Peter Rasputin, that Fallon bloke - Maverick didn't fit the profile. Then again, neither did he. "It's none of your business."

"Good comeback," said Pete and looked over at Lydia. "As for you... I had Maverick shoot you so that he could separate you both. As much fun as it was to watch, it's not good to have you at each other's throats."

"Like you and Maverick?"

"Yeah, as I said before I'm really sorry about that, Davey. I'm going with the mind control theory. Everyone seems to suffer it of late."

"Actually it's more chemical based," said Siryn, standing in the doorway. "Guess you guys had fun whole we were gone."

"Tell me you've got something that'll spring us?" said Pete, standing up and pleased to see her.

"Aye," she said. "Marcus is at the office getting' it together. Seems we were given something by Viper to increase attractivness to each other and make us... amorous."

"You and Marcus?" said Pete, which he assumed what everyone else was thinking.

"No," said Terry. "But almost. He has incredible self control."

"He can teach it to us," said Maverick.

"That wasn't your fault either," said Terry. "Seems this stuff once it's been absorbed in to the blood makes people angry. Violent angry."

"Who'd you hit?" asked Kitty.

"Cyclops," admitted Siryn, going red. "I've kind of been kicked off the X-Men roster. They don't turst me, and I had to hack the systems to get the medical info and Cyclops came in..."

"Got pissy about it so you gave him a sonic KO?" said Pete, not trying to hide his smirk. "I bet that was fun to watch."

"Yeah, but it won't do the case for trusting me any good," said Siryn. "X-Force have been cut off from the X-Men, I'm afraid."

"No great loss," said Pete and Maverick at the same time.

"We can prove this and get us out?" asked Lydia. "I'd love to see a breakdown of the chemical."

"I'm on my way to the medlabs," said Terry. "With luck they can compare the bloodwork from when they treated your injuries with the readings we took at the Institute."

"So we have to sit tight," said Maverick and Terry shook her head.

"Longer than you think. Forge is out on a mission with Excalibur, and he's the only one who can get you out, seeing as how X-Force reports directly to the Director."

"Knew that would bite me in the arse at some point," said Pete. "Thanks, Terry."

"No problem. Don't blame yourselves for what happened - it wasn't your fault."

"Yeah," said Pete as she walked away. "We just have to convince ourselves now."

Val Cooper sat in her office at the Commission on Superhuman Activities, wondering how long they could get away with this. Something was bound to go wrong and then they'd be in trouble. Emil Warton was the Director of the CSA and as such it was his call, but she was the Chairman of the Commission, as well Special Assistant to the National Security Advisor of the President of the United States, and they were lying to both men.

She had lied to them before, but this was one moment where she believed that they would be caught in the act and end up discrediting the CSA. After what had happened at SHIELD of late, that was the last thing they needed to happen. She picked up the telephone and put in a call to Warton.

"Emil. Val. About the situation. I want to put in a call to SHIELD. They're the only ones capable of taking down our rogue agent." She deliberately didn't use names because the lines might be being monitored. "We can trust Forge to get the job done and it'd look good in the interests of co-operation." She chewed the end of her pen as she listened to her boss tell her why they shouldn't involve an outside organisation for an internal matter.

"Yes, I understand that," said Val. "However the very remit of SHIELD means they do covert operations and this is a covert operation. I'll personally vet any agents Forge sends to help, because it's getting to be a problem. I've been reading the latest reports and sooner or later someone's going to figure out what we've done." Their rogue agent had been getting bolder and more brazen in every endeavour and he was beginning to look untouchable and the CSA name was being put in to disrepute.

"Yes I read that too. Emil, he's out of control and we don't have the resources to stop him. He's going great guns against the amateurs and such, we're going to have to use experts to take him down, once and for all." She had worked hard to try and get the mainstream superhuman forces to co-operate and on some level trust the Commission on Superhuman Activities, but if he was left to continue with his actions… "Do I make the call?"

"Thank, Emil,." She put the telephone down and surfed the contacts list and pulled up the SHIELD contacts, and looked under Forge, but his name wasn't there and then she looked under Fury. His name was still there and Forge's hadn't been replaced yet and she sighed and punched the number.

"Yes, this is Val Cooper at Commission on Superhuman Activities. I'd like to speak with Director Forge."

"I have a question," said Pete as he laid down on the bunk provided, breaking the silence they had settled in to once more.

"What?" asked Maverick, his voice irritable.

"Dunno if you can help, to be honest," said Pete. "Kitty might. Terry possibly. Cyclops' eye blasts."

"Optic blasts."

"Yeah, them. They're blocked by ruby quartz and that's what his visor and glasses are made of, right?"

"Yeah. This better not be a where do we get ruby quartz from question," sighed Kitty, thinking back to the dumb questions he used to ask when they were dating, as if thoughts occurred to him so he figured he'd voice them anyway.

"Nah," said Pete. "You wear glasses, right?"

"Yeah," said Kitty, unsure of where this was going.

"Well, your gigs…"

"Gigs?" asked Lydia.

"British slang." Maverick's answer was less irritable than his earlier 'what?' Pete noticed. It must be just him, then.

"Figures," said Lydia.

"Anyway," said Pete, ignoring the other two. "Your glasses rest on your nose and ears and sort of hang on your face."

"Yeah, you wear shades, so you're not unfamiliar with the concept," said Kitty.

"So there's a gap between your lenses - the glass - and your eyes."

"So what?" said Kitty.

"Well, it stands to reason Cyclops glasses and visor are the same - so how come his optic blasts are always on when he opens his eyes? Surely his eyes are open and the blasts come out and are blocked by the ruby quartz but the gap means he should always be firing his optic blasts."

"What are you on about?" asked Lydia.

"I'm just saying Cyclops might have been faking it for years, all this 'I can't control my powers' malarkey. Otherwise he wouldn't be able to keep his eyes open. He opens his eyes, the blasts fire, there's a gap. QED."

"We so need to get out of here," said Maverick.

"What about when he sleeps?" said Pete, following his own train of thought.

"He wears special goggles," said Kitty. "I've seen him at breakfast wearing them."

"He wear them all the time?" asked Pete.

"Here we go again," said Lydia.

"Only when he's asleep," said Kitty.

"So when's doing Jean Grey, he wear his normal glasses? Because that'd be weird…" Lydia bit back a chuckle as Kitty looked at the ceiling.

"To think I might have married you," she said. "Jean probably keeps his optic blasts in check with her powers."

"Must be a lousy lover then," said Pete.

"Why say that?" asked Maverick, trying hard to figure out where Pete was going with this one as well.

"Well telekinesis takes concentration and half the job with sex is the excitement. She gets excited, loses concentration, he pulverises her head with an optic blast. So he mustn't be very good at it."

"Scott has a son," said Kitty, incredulously.

"And I can conduct an orchestra at a concert, and while they'll play the tune it doesn't mean I'm any good at it."

"He probably wears the goggles then."

"How much like Machine Man does he look then?" Maverick bit his lip, trying not to laugh. It wasn't that funny, it was just… He looked at Lydia who was also trying to keep from laughing as well, and they both lost it.

"Oh come one, guys, it's not funny," said Kitty.

"No it's not," giggled Lydia.

"I agree with her," said Maverick, chuckling as he spoke. Pete said nothing, just looked up at the ceiling and smiled. He was getting there slowly.

Colonel Nicholas Fury, Praetor of Hydra, was preparing the next Hydra onslaught against the planet, making it ready for the dominant rise of the forces of Hydra and the rule of Jacob Logan, the child who was now the Shadow King. Already the child was showing the signs of being the son of the father. He had a hirsute resistance to the cold, even though he was only a few days old.

He also showed his fathers recuperative possibilities as the marks from the injections and inoculations that the doctors had given the babe had faded to nothing. They had not conceived that he would already have a healing factor this early in age, but he did and they wondered what else the child would be capable of as he developed, other than speed, strength, heightened senses and unlimited psionic potential.

However that was not Fury's arena. He was a warrior, a fighter and if some people called his activities terrorism then so be it. He did not care, he was fighting for the greater good and he knew that he had once embraced the other side as wholeheartedly as he had embraced Hydra. For years he had been fighting the wrong enemy and he'd never realised it, and he'd built the symbol of their fight against terror in something mythical.

SHIELD.

It had not been his creation and it was not the original incarnation of what it had once been, but he was the one man on the planet who knew the organisation best. Nobody else had served it as he had, nobody else knew the secrets of the Helicarrier. He was old but he had learnt much and he knew that he could turn their own systems against them whenever he so chose. He knew from their agent within SHIELD that the people were shaken by his defection, but that worked in the favour of Hydra and there was a greater symbol of potency that he could use to further demoralise the agents of SHIELD, the one secret that had been denied even to him.

The name of the first director of SHIELD, killed by Hydra at the conception of SHIELD. So swift and brutal had been the retaliation of SHIELD that all the records Hydra possessed on the mission had been lost and years of work had been unable to recover the data, and Fury had never seen the need to use the SHIELD records to try and find out. He would now, and then Hydra would steal the body of the first Director of SHIELD and then hunt down anyone who had been Director of SHIELD and convert them or kill them.

Fury had built SHIELD, he would destroy it.

"Forge!" said Terry as she waited outside the Director's office as Forge came down the corridor.

"Not now, Teresa," he said. She could see that he was tired and that whatever had happened in the Darkness Dimension had taken a toll on him.

"I'm sorry, Director," said Marcus as he appeared behind her. "This can't wait." Forge sighed.

"You'd better come in then," he said and they walked past Forge's secretary and he shook his head. "I'll take my messages later, Nancy." They went in and Forge sat down behind his desk as his two agents stood. "What's the problem?"

"X-Force are in the brig of the Helicarrier under the instruction of Pete Wisdom." Terry looked directly at him.

"Where's Wisdom?" said Forge, his shoulders sagging.

"He's with them," said Marcus. "He told security to take them all in."

"And you were over at Xavier's?" said Forge and Terry nodded.

"That's a story for later," she said. "However it appears that Viper has had a hand in the current predicament."

"Explain," said Forge and gestured to them to sit down, which they did.

"As you know, we were found by SHIELD in a trance state, brought about by the Shadow King," said Marcus. "It seems we were given a derivative of phenylethylamine"

"The love molecule," said Forge. "Oh I can see this is going to end badly already. Delayed action drug, undetectable by our medical people because it's already in the body. How did you find out about it?"

"We were at Xavier's when it affected us," said Marcus. "Ah managed to psionically knock Terry in to unconsciousness before we did anything, and Ah brought her round and we used the X-Men systems to find out what was wrong with us."

"Thank God," said Forge. "I know Sean would have had something to say on the matter." Terry bit back a comment that it wasn't really her father's business but Marcus was older than he was and it would have hurt him. "What happened here?"

"Well," said Terry, "Pete and Lydia were back on the Helicarrier after the incident at the bank…" Forge closed his eyes at the words incident because it usually meant insurance payouts would be required. "And Kitty and Dave were here as well. The respective couples got together and as they were leaving, Pete saw Kitty coming from David's quarters…"

"Oh no," said Forge.

"It get's worse, Ah'm afraid," said Marcus. "A side-effect of the drug is to make people angry. Violent angry and Wisdom and Maverick got in to a fight, which Kitty got involved with and so did Lydia and it turned in to a brawl until Wisdom regained his sense and ended it, having them all locked up."

"No wonder Nancy wanted to give me my messages," said Forge. "This is as bad as anything I saw with X-Factor. You have the proof of this?"

"Right here," said Marcus, holding out a file, which Forge took.

"I'll spring them later," said Forge. "After I catch up a bit. While I know it wasn't their fault, some time to cool off will help them. Thank you." They turned and were walking out when Forge looked up. "What happened with your violent tendencies?" he asked, curiosity getting the better of him.

"Let's just say we won't be welcome at the Xavier Institute anytime soon," said Terry and Forge sighed.

"You've been back two days if that," said Forge as he looked at the X-Force members but his comments were directed at Pete Wisdom. "Two days in which you've run riot."

"To be fair, I wouldn't say run. I kind of found it waiting for me."

"Damn it, Wisdom," said Forge waving pieces of paper in the air. "These are the bills for the damage you caused in the chase of the bank thieves."

"We caught the guy," said Pete. "Job well done."

"Espionage is usually done with a low profile, Wisdom. As a member of Black Air, I'm surprised you forgot that."

"If it wasn't for the petrol station it'd have been fine," said Pete.

"That's debatable, however your actions later to quell the brawl you started are commendable. I realise the fight wasn't entirely your fault, but you don't get a fire without a spark. Understand?

"Yes, sir," said Pete. He regretted the comments he'd made, but then again he'd thought about them before. They were the arguments he'd had with himself when he'd broken up with Kitty all that time ago.

"Okay," said Forge. "Be more careful in the future. All of you." The team stayed silent as the Director told them what was going on.

"First thing is, I've spoken with the X-Men. Cyclops is upset but I think he understands. However there is bad news. Rogue is dead, killed in a battle with the Apocalypse Dawn and there is a service tomorrow."

"They never said," said Terry.

"We've been asked not to attend," said Forge. "They feel our presence would make it something it isn't. I don't understand it and Storm and I spoke for a while, but it's done and decided."

"They can't do this," said Kitty. "We're part of the family."

"Not anymore," said Forge. "They don't see us as an official extension of the X family of teams."

"Would crashing a funeral be in bad taste?" asked Pete.

"Just a little," said Maverick. "We can send condolences and flowers and such?"

"Yes," said Forge. "That would be fine. However you'll be needed elsewhere, so attending won't be an issue."

"What do you need from us?" asked Pete.

"A two tier operation," said Forge. "Wisdom, you and Maverick and Kitty will report to the Commission on Superhuman Activities and meet with Val Cooper. They have a rogue agent on their hands, and would like our help catching him."

"Oh, the irony of that," said Lydia.

"Let's not go there," said Forge. "Lydia, yourself and Marcus and Terry will be involved in another quest. The first director of SHIELD was assassinated at the conception of the SHIELD program back in the day, killed by Hydra. Last night SHIELD files were hacked and documentation stolen as to find out where the body of this hero is."

"Hacked?" asked Kitty. "We need to sort ut computer security."

"Get's better. We were hacked by Nick Fury. He used his codes to get the information."

"Hydra going after the first Director," said Pete. "That's a cheery thought. We got to get there first?"

"Use the same documents Fury used and work out what you can. These papers have the highest clearance on them, and even I've only been allowed to glance at them. Your security rating for this mission will be on a par with the CIA director and the National Security Advisor, and the President wants this taking care of. He's already looking foolish over the loss of Fury, so…"

"Shame he doesn't feel foolish about the economy and stuff," said Lydia, taking the papers.

"There's terrorism afoot, agents, and it's up to you six to nip it in the bud," said Forge. "Godspeed, X-Force, and good luck."