Quicksilver (X-men) One shots

Family Ties

The news reached the Professor early on a Saturday morning, without a lot noise. Hank quietly walked into Charles's office and dropped a newspaper onto the Professor's desk. Charles put down his book and picked up the paper. A deep sigh escaped him as he read the headline "Mutants destroy American Military base. Government giving out funding to military in order to research mutants"

'I'll bet my money that Striker is behind this. He probably lobbied with the government to give him the funding.'

Charles's eyes scanned the rest of the paper and froze in shock as they landed on particularly horrifying sentence.

"Parents or family member of mutants will be rewarded $5000 for handing over their mutant relatives for research."

'Dear god!' the professor exclaimed. 'No matter how threatened the government feels by that attack, how do they feel they can justify this?! A parent getting paid to hand over their child?! It's far too close to slavery for anyone to allow it!'

Hank sighed. 'I know.' He walked over to the window and watched over the young students, playing outside, blissfully unaware of the new dangers ahead. 'I'm sure Striker is over the moon though. Now he won't have to illegally kidnap mutants for his experiments.' He scoffed. 'And the public will probably see him as a hero for being cruel to us.'

'Do the students know?'

Hank turned to the professor. 'Probably not. But it won't take long for them to find out.'

In that moment the door the office opened again, and a very angry looking Erik stormed in.

'This can't be true!' he yelled as soon as he closed the door behind him. The space between him and the professor's desk was soon closed, and the professor could see that his was more scared than angry. 'How could the president ever allow such a horrifying act?!'

Charles sighed. 'I do not know, Erik. I just hope they will leave us alone while all of this is going on. I just hope none of the student's parents will gain the crazy idea to turn their child over for torture.'

Erik sighed as well. 'You and me both my friend.'

Around 10 that night, when all the young students had gone to bed, X-men gathered around in Peter's room. Nightcrawler was nervous, he didn't know what was going on, didn't know he actually had nothing to worry about, but he sensed his friends' nervousness, and just couldn't help it. Scott and Jean sat on the couch, holding each other's hands. Ororo sat on the floor next to Peter while Isabel sat in the only armchair in the room. Jean had invited Jubilee, but she felt sick so decided to stay in bed. It had been easily decided not to invite Raven or Hank. This meeting was secret, and the professor shouldn't hear about it.

'I'm guessing we all heard the news by now?' Scott mumbled.

Everyone but nightcrawler –who looked as confused as ever- nodded.

'What news?' He asked.

Peter sighed. 'The government has decided to openly allow Striker to experiment on mutants. They call it research, we call it torture. On top of that, government is handing out 500 bucks to every parent who hands over their kids to the research center.' He scoffed. 'Maybe Striker won, guys... if this is possible, will we ever be safe?'

'Most of us are, right?' Jean said. Sure she was worried, terrified even, but she knew the situation of everyone around her, and was pretty sure they were safe. 'I mean, Kurt's mother loves him and she isn't in the US so she won't do a thing. Ororo's parents are dead so...' she looked apologetically at Ororo who just shrugged, agreeing that in this case it might not be such a bad thing. ' Scott's parents have accepted the mutation, and my parents well, their attitude is that if I'm not around them, they don't care. 'And Peter and Isabel are too old for their parents to decide, so they should be safe as well.'