Maya Hansen had spent the last several days in a state that was bad for sleep, worse for concentration, and catastrophic for professional pride.
The television in her lab kept replaying the Battle of New York with the sort of hungry repetition only modern news could manage. Every channel had its preferred angle. Some favoured the portal above Stark Tower. Some favoured the green monster climbing things too large to be climbed with dignity. Some favoured Captain America, who had apparently gone from dead legend to living traffic officer in one obscene turn of history. Most of them, however, kept coming back to the same tall bastard, Lucius Noctis, dropping out of the sky, healing civilians, crushing alien craft, and turning public opinion into a private banquet.
Maya sat at a stainless steel workstation in one of AIM's quieter labs and watched him throw another Chitauri gun platform back through the portal on mute while production reports glowed on the monitor in front of her. None of the numbers improved when she looked at them twice.
Orders were delayed, contracts were under review, and investors were nervous. Three separate private buyers had pulled out of negotiation after deciding miracle potions were more attractive than speculative biological restructuring. A fourth had politely asked whether AIM could offer something competitive with Light Healing Potions on public rollout timelines, which was business language for tell us whether you are relevant or not.
She closed the report, opened it again, and hated the numbers just as much.
On paper, the damage was supposed to be temporary. The LHP, the LSP, and the Strengthening Potion were wrecking demand in the short term because wealthy clients, private clinics, military buyers, and frightened governments all preferred something immediate, visible, and marketable to the public. That part she understood. Anyone with money or influence wanted a bottle that worked today instead of a long development programme with legal risk and a death chart.
What she could not stop thinking about was the longer horizon.
Nobody had truly replicated Erskine's work properly or cleanly, nor with stable, repeatable outcomes that could be industrialised without turning half the intake pool into corpses, lunatics, or patriotic traffic officers. Maya had spent enough years around high ambition and bad science to know exactly where that wall still stood.
Which meant Noctis had either stumbled onto a biological route around it or cracked the code so thoroughly that he had the luxury of pretending not to care.
She watched a replay of him healing a police officer with a look that suggested the man was mildly inconveniencing his schedule.
"Juice, honey, herbs, and market domination," she muttered.
One of the junior analysts at the far bench looked up, thought better of speaking, and lowered his head again.
Maya did not blame him. The whole building had started moving with the strained quiet of a company pretending it was not hearing the walls shift around it.
Her eyes slid back to the television.
The Avengers were all over it. Stark, obviously. Rogers, equally obviously, because the American press would have built a shrine from the man's old laundry if given enough airtime. The Hulk, who was being framed as either a national guardian or a zoning issue depending on which network she happened to land on. And then there was the woman in black spandex, red hair and heart-shaped butt firing pistols at aliens with energy weapons as though stubbornness alone counted as a tactical doctrine.
Maya took another look.
"In fairness," she murmured to herself, "that is an excellent butt."
That still did not answer what exactly Natasha Romanoff had been meant to accomplish in the middle of a sky invasion with two sidearms and a level of commitment that bordered on pathology.
Then again, it was still better than the man with the bow.
Even Captain America, for all the national romance hanging off him like expensive bunting, had somehow ended the battle directing civilian traffic in his own costume. New York had enjoyed that absurdity enough that half the city's traffic officers were now trying some version of the same colour scheme on novelty campaigns and charity drives. Maya had passed two of them on the way into the facility that morning and nearly driven into a kerb laughing.
The door hissed open behind her.
She did not need to turn to know who it was. Aldrich Killian entered rooms as though they had been waiting for him to become complete.
He had come in from one of the lower sites, one of the quiet laboratories where desperate people signed forms they did not understand because hope was still the most reliable leash in medicine. His suit was perfect. His smile was controlled. There was a heat about him now, not literal enough to trigger the alarms in this room, but present all the same. Extremis had rebuilt his body and left him walking with the confidence of a man who believed physiology had finally stopped being a democratic process.
He stopped behind Maya and looked at the screen.
Lucius was there again, larger than life, cold-eyed, immaculate in destruction.
"Still thinking about him?"
Maya leaned back in her chair.
"I'm thinking about what he's done to the market."
Killian moved around the bench and poured himself water from a glass carafe, though she suspected he did it now more for the shape of normality than the need.
"He sells recovery in bottles," Maya said. "Fast, visible and scalable recovery. He hands some out for free, donates a few dozen doses to charity, gets photographed beside children and burn victims, and suddenly he's untouchable. You know what that means for every company trying to sell a future instead of an immediate miracle?"
Killian drank, then set the glass down with care.
"It means investors panic."
"It means investors panic today," Maya corrected. "Tomorrow, they start asking whether he cracked the serum problem before any of us. Not publicly, they'll ask it quietly. In rooms where men with too much money suddenly become very polite. If he has genuinely solved what Erskine solved, or built something close enough or better to matter, then he isn't selling relief. He's milking the elite while playing saint for the cameras."
Killian watched the screen a moment longer.
"You sound irritated."
Maya swivelled her chair to face him fully.
"He is smart enough to hand out potions in public and selective enough to sell the real leverage in private. He's making himself indispensable while looking charitable. I respect the structure. I hate that he got there first."
Killian smiled faintly.
"That is a healthier reaction than envy."
She almost laughed.
"No, it isn't. It's simply envy with technical vocabulary."
He moved to the main bench and glanced over the latest Extremis data, fingers light on the folders as though their contents already belonged to him morally even before success made it legal.
"I'm less interested in Noctis," he said, "than in what the battle did to fear."
Maya frowned.
He tapped one page.
"People saw New York nearly nuked on live television. They saw aliens, monsters, mutants, enhanced men, gods, and governments looking useless. That kind of fear changes the market." His fingers paused on Tony's name
She studied him.
"And where does Stark fit into your sermon?"
The smile changed, and there it was, not just ambition or strategy, but the older thing, the private rot.
Tony Stark had left him on a rooftop years ago after treating his pitch like an interruption. For most men, humiliation faded. For Killian, it had settled into the bones and started writing long-term policy.
"He fits," Killian said softly, "at the end of it."
Maya let that answer hang.
He continued anyway.
"Stark embarrassed and dismissed me. Left me standing there like a fool. Then he spent years building himself into the face of modern genius while the rest of us were expected to admire the view." His hand closed over the back of a chair, not hard, but enough to show intention. "I will surpass him, not just in invention but in consequence as well."
"By turning yourself into a god?" Maya asked.
Killian looked at her and did not flinch from the word.
"Extremis repaired everything they would have called weakness. My body. My reach. My mind." He leaned in slightly. "Do you understand what that means? Stark's weapons damage men. I build damaged men into something better than weapons."
Maya did understand the sales pitch. That was what made it dangerous.
He was still speaking when he got like this, but not really to her. He was addressing the shape of the future and insisting it would finally apologise for not arriving sooner.
Outside the lab windows, AIM personnel kept moving with false calm. Inside, the television showed Noctis saving another civilian and looking angelic due to the gratitude.
Maya watched both men for a second, one on the screen and one in front of her, and thought the world had begun filling up with entirely too many people who wanted to change history on purpose.
--
The days after the Battle of New York turned strange in the way only mass fear and mass fascination ever did.
Within forty-eight hours, Manhattan had souvenir stalls selling cheap plastic shields, knock-off Iron Man masks, green wigs, and T-shirts featuring silhouettes of the Hulk punching something into the atmosphere. Hair salons were offering Storm streaks, Black Widow red, and what one particularly shameless chain called Noctis volume, which appeared to mean black dye and the confidence to insult strangers while wearing it.
On the same day, Senator Boynton decided the moment required statesmanship and instead produced television.
He sat on a morning programme with a face built for moral outrage and declared that the heroes of the battle, mutants included, ought to take responsibility for the destruction that followed in their wake. If enhanced people chose to intervene in a crisis, he argued, then they could not simply save lives and walk away from the damage, the disruption, the debris, the economic losses, and the broader consequences to civic order.
The media, being professional piranhas with better haircuts, sank their teeth in immediately.
For three days, the question followed every visible survivor of the battle.
Captain America got it while helping clear rubble and direct displaced families into temporary shelter routes. The X-Men got it while hauling beams, moving ambulances, and assisting hospitals overloaded with injuries that ordinary staffing could not process quickly enough. Stark got it outside a press barricade and answered with enough sarcasm to make the clips spread twice as fast. The phrase take responsibility became an infestation.
Lucius heard about it on the third morning while leaving his office in Stark Industries. Reporters were already stacked behind the barrier line outside, waiting for whoever came out in recognisable footwear.
One of them called the question before his shoes fully cleared the marble.
"Mr Noctis, Senator Boynton says heroes should take responsibility for the destruction caused while saving New York. Your response?"
Lucius stopped on the top step.
His expression did not harden. It brightened.
"That moron said what?"
The reporters, who had developed the instincts of scavenger birds around him, sensed blood and became immediately cooperative.
Within seconds, they were supplying him with Boynton's full name, party affiliation, committee assignments, district history, recent interviews, and a surprisingly mean summary of his hair and outfit.
Lucius listened, then turned to the camera bank with the pleasant composure of a man about to commit public cruelty and charge nobody for it.
"So Senator Boynton believes the people who saved thousands of lives in Manhattan should take responsibility for the damage caused while preventing the city from being wiped off the map." He paused and let the stupidity breathe in public. "That is no different from asking the fire brigade to pay for repairs after putting out a burning house. It is the sort of logic one arrives at only through nepotism, inbreeding, or a long private war against intelligence."
A few of the reporters failed to hide their reactions quickly enough.
Lucius kept going.
"Where was Senator Boynton that day? On the front line? In the streets? Pulling civilians out of rubble? Healing the wounded? Fighting aliens?" He tilted his head. "Or was the brave soul hiding under his mother's skirt while better people bled on his behalf?"
The microphones pressed forward another inch.
Lucius's eyes moved across the camera line, cold and perfectly awake.
"You want a serious answer, so here it is. If people like Boynton mean to hold the empowered responsible for doing the right thing while risking their lives, then they can save themselves next time. I will not lift a finger in a future disaster if the reward is to be billed for the honour afterwards."
That hit harder than the insult had.
Even the reporters felt it.
He was not done.
"I would also like to ask the people of New York whether that man truly represents their collective intelligence and moral posture. If he does, then perhaps the city deserves the invaders and getting nuked if that moron is the spokesperson of it."
The silence after that was brief, but total.
One journalist recovered first.
"Mr Noctis, are you saying you will refuse to help in any future emergency?"
Lucius looked at him as though the man had just confirmed several of his worst theories about democracy.
"I am saying I have no interest in rescuing people who scream for help when they need it and howl like animals once they get it. Gratitude is not mandatory. Basic intelligence should be."
Another voice cut in.
"What about your potions? Will you continue supplying civilians?"
He smiled at that, and several cameras zoomed instinctively because every operator there had already learned that Lucius's smile usually made the footage more expensive later.
"No," he said. "As of this moment, I am suspending public sales."
The whole press line lurched.
"I do not care to remain in trade with people who beg on Monday, sneer on Tuesday, and moralise on Wednesday. Let Senator Boynton sell them relief. I am sure his principles distil beautifully."
That statement detonated faster than most bombs.
By midday, every network in the country had lifted the clip. By evening, it had become a moral, legal, political, and philosophical food fight with better tailoring. Call-in radio wanted to know whether the empowered had a duty to intervene in disasters beyond normal citizenship. Editorials split over whether gratitude was owed or whether public power invited public liability. Legal panels asked whether superheroic intervention constituted voluntary assumption of consequence. Moralists asked whether refusing future aid made Lucius a monster. Practical people asked whether anyone had truly expected a selfish mutant with a documented grudge against government black sites to remain public-spirited after being told to pay for rescue work.
The city itself divided according to injury, ideology, and memory, with some people calling him vindictive, some calling him honest, and some simply wanting the potions back immediately without especially caring which moral framework made that happen.
The X-Men and Captain America, to their credit or their curse, continued helping in public. They shifted rubble, visited hospitals, assisted relocations, worked with emergency crews, and kept the image of service alive in front of the cameras long after the battle footage had begun to thin.
Lucius watched that effort from his mansion, one leg crossed over the other, and decided it was admirable in the same way some chronic illnesses were admirable, persistent, self-sacrificing, and terrible for long-term quality of life.
When another reporter managed to get a follow-up question in front of him two days later and asked whether he felt guilty for withdrawing potion sales, Lucius answered without even pausing his drink.
"No. I feel educated."
That quote made the front pages as well.
The backlash only deepened the mark already opening between the empowered and the state. It was not the first clash of its kind, and nobody serious pretended it would be the last, but this one had happened in full public view with alien corpses still fresh in memory and the threat of a government nuclear strike hanging over the discourse like a rotten light.
In one quiet office, Erik Lensherr read the coverage and found the debate deeply satisfying.
In another, Charles Xavier found it exhausting.
In Washington, aides started drafting position papers fast enough to suggest half of them had been waiting for the question long before Boynton was foolish enough to ask it aloud.
At AIM, Maya Hansen watched the same cycle spin across the screens and concluded that Noctis had done something almost more dangerous than saving the city.
He had forced people to say what they really thought about power, gratitude, usefulness, and fear while the memory of annihilation was still warm.
And he had done it because a senator annoyed him.
Which, Maya thought, might be the most scientifically interesting personality flaw in America.
The debate did not end that week; it expanded.
But Lucius had already lost interest in the wider moral architecture of it. As far as he was concerned, the point had been made, the offence had been returned with suitable force, and the public now had the priceless privilege of learning what happened when it insulted its own rescue options.
For a man who claimed not to care for civic education, he was turning out to be remarkably effective at it.