Chapter8:29Chapter 8
Breaking in, she'd long since learned, was rarely as glamorous as the movies made it seem. Despite all the slick spy thrillers and overproduced Bond knockoffs of the last few decades, reality was a lot duller.
Destiny used to tease her about that, back when things were simpler. Mystique had laughed back then, but the truth was more disappointing than romantic.
Acrobatics and theatrics didn't get you through real security systems. Waiting did. Watching did. People were and always would be the weakest link in security.
She sat perched on a pine branch overlooking the Hydra facility, her avian body blending neatly into the alpine mist. It was an impressive setup, she had to admit.
Hidden in an abandoned Soviet fortress deep in the mountains, half-buried beneath decades of snow and erasure. She'd bet there wasn't a single surviving record of its existence.
From her vantage point, she watched cars roll in and out of the tunnels, headlights carving through the gloom. Guards patrolled in tight, synchronized formations, and once, she spotted a small aircraft dropping onto the runway beside the main compound.
Her scowl deepened. They were much better armed than she'd been led to believe. Her past few run-ins with them had shown nowhere near this level of competence.
All the more reason to crack them open.
A flicker of movement caught her eye. A woman in a lab coat, half-running, half-stumbling under the weight of a box filled with what looked like heavy equipment and folders.
She smiled. Ah, perfect.
Mystique shifted effortlessly, feathers giving way to flesh and fabric as she dropped from the branch. Her form melted into that of one of the countless guards she'd been watching for the past hour. Humanity's love for conformity really did make her job easy.
"Let me give you a hand," she said, voice pitched into the bland, forgettable tone of a tired man doing his duty.
"Oh—thank you!" the woman gasped, relief flooding her face as she handed off part of the load. The boxes were heavy, far heavier than they looked.
Mystique adjusted her grip and nodded toward the door ahead. "After you."
The scientist blinked, then hurriedly swiped her keycard and held the door open. Mystique followed close behind, keeping her stride loose but casual, cataloging every corridor and camera she passed.
It still amazed her how often people made her work easy. Not by weakness or malice—just plain, human carelessness.
As the door clicked shut behind them, she kept pace beside the woman, expression blank, steps measured.
She made sure to memorize the layout in her mind—the number of guards, the size of the tunnels, the rhythm of their patrols.They finally stopped in front of another door. The researcher fumbled for her keycard and swiped it open in one quick motion.Thank you so much for the help!" the woman said, half breathless, as Mystique set the heavy boxes down on a desk. They were filled with folders, all of which she began sorting and typing into her terminal without a moment's hesitation. She didn't even glance back at the guard looking over her shoulder.
Too easy.
"No problem at all," Mystique replied, her borrowed voice carrying that bland, helpful tone of the average grunt. Her eyes, however, were locked on the ID card the woman had carelessly tossed onto the desk beside her coffee mug.
A flick of her wrist, a step back to 'adjust her gloves,' and the card vanished without a sound. On her way out, she discreetly wedged a sliver of metal into the door's latch—just enough to keep it from opening properly behind her.
When she stepped into the hall again, she did so with a new face and pinned the ID card to her chest.
Now dressed in a crisp white lab coat, her new face that of a tired, overworked researcher, Mystique moved deeper into the base's labyrinth of corridors. She adjusted her glasses, walking with the kind of determined hurry that made others instinctively step aside.
She kept her stride steady as she wandered the base, taking in anything of note—until she paused down another hall.
A quick glance into a computer lab showed several other scientists hunched over their monitors, surrounded by stacks of paper, with dozens leaving and entering. She waved her keycard in passing, the magnetic lock clicked, and she slipped into the room with practiced confidence.
All it took was the right posture—focused eyes, tight jaw, purposeful stride—and no one questioned her presence. Another researcher nodded briefly as she passed. Mystique returned it with just enough acknowledgement to seem preoccupied.
At the terminal, she reentered the credentials she'd just memorized and pulled up the internal database. The screen filled with files.
"Tesseract research... mutant genome sequencing... supersoldier prototype schematics," she muttered under her breath.
She'd seen enough horrors to grow numb to most of them, but some lines still turned her stomach. It wasn't even the cruelty anymore, it was the sheer arrogance of these humans. The sheer conviction that they could rewrite the world according to their whims.
She kept her face blank as she scanned through the documents, copying every key name and project detail to memory. No time to pull any of the data. Unfortunate that the ad hoc nature of this infiltration meant she was bereft of her usual tools.
Then two names caught her attention.
Wanda Maximoff. Pietro Maximoff.
She focused on those files, absorbing every trace of their transfer logs, project codes, and experiment details that this researcher could access. They'd been moved after the escape. Typical. But she wasn't about to let Hydra keep her people locked in cages. Not again.
A shout broke through the hum of typing. An older man stalked through the lab, barking orders and slamming papers onto desks.
Time's up.
Mystique logged out and stood, tucking the ID card into her pocket as she turned toward the exit—
"Ashley!"
She froze mid-step.
The man's glare snapped to her. "What the hell are you doing here? Why aren't you digitizing the files I assigned you hours ago?"
She immediately shifted her expression—fear, confusion, the perfect mix of flustered subordination. "I—I was just finishing up, sir, I thought—"Don't think, work!" he barked, waving her off before turning to berate another assistant.stand, propped up by foreign powers who saw it as little more than a pawn. It was an unpleasant feeling, seeing behind the veil and knowing how broken it was. Even worse, from what his few remaining contacts managed to whisper, he could sense the faint movements of others finally closing in to devour Sokovia whole.
"Helmut!" his wife called again, closer this time. "Five minutes! And for God's sake, open a window—I can smell that smoke from the kitchen!"
"Alright, alright!" he said with a small laugh, stubbing the cigar out in the ashtray. Brooding could wait.
Just as he started toward the bedroom, the phone rang.
He frowned, glancing at the caller ID. Baba.
He picked it up. "Father?"
"My son!" his father's voice came through, excited, almost trembling. "Two spirits came to my house today! You must bring Carl—he must be blessed by their magic!"
"…What?"