Jessica

Connection Part Six

Where the air was so fine it made the city smell like a dumping ground in comparison, where the snow was so thick the native animals would dig in it to hide from birds, one man with a peculiar suit, one half red and the other black, struggled all the way to a cliff.

He took his mask off to breathe all that clean breeze in. He figured that, once he returned to the city, the pollution he would find there would make him puke. That is, if he got back to the city.

There was someone following him, someone who, matter of fact, had been following him their whole lives. Sometimes fate can be funny for it made the rivals turn out so similar in the way they carried themselves and the fact that they both had lost an eye on the same side. The only difference was the colour of their skins but that's what happens when you come from different mothers.

"You went too far this time, Jake..." said the pursuer as he pointed his weapon at his half-brother.

"So the great Nick Fury can still be biased from time to time. I definitely did worse before..." he replied, not even looking at him.

"This has always been between you and me, you shouldn't have hurt her." he said, holding his weapon tightly with both hands.

"She became a part of this when she started having feelings for you."

This information took Nick by surprise. To find out that anyone could like cold, calculative Nick Fury was something that even he couldn't foresee. Still, he didn't take his eye off the man, it was something that no sane man would ever do.

He scoffed and said: "This is the part where you jump off the cliff, somehow survive and Scorpio makes his grand return in a few months, backing up a new faction."

"Not this time, Nick. Not this time." he whispered, exhausted.

Nicholas pointed his gun down when he heard that. It didn't sound like Jake, the furious Jacob who always fought with him for as far as he could remember.

"Dad was proud of you, so I had to prove my worth. You serve your country in Italy, so I go to Normandy. You become a secret super soldier, so to keep up I get the Forever Compound. You become an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., so I become Scorpio, terror embodied.
All this to prove that I'm better than you and yet every time you manage to beat me and knock that false hope out of me. I have nothing left. Give me your gun, Nick. This is a goodbye."

Nick stared at him with his only good eye in disbelief, he considered talking some sense into him but then he asked himself how many years the two of them had lived, how many friends they outlived. He lost count.

Nick always knew that in the end one was going to kill the other so he couldn't ignore Jake's wish and just handed him his gun in peace.

While Fury was following Scorpio, someone else was following Fury's footsteps, against his wishes. Can you really blame Monica for not listening and refusing to leave him alone as he faced the monster?... Can you really blame her for taking the shot when she saw him with the gun in his hand and Fury disarmed?

Scorpio may have planned to take a bullet but he didn't expect one to hit his vest, making him lose balance and tumble over the cliff's edge. At first he instinctively yelled, then he silenced himself when he realised this was what he wanted.

At first Nick instinctively reached out for him, then he stopped himself when he realised this was what his brother wanted.

In the region where wars started with a bang, a rivalry ended in silence.

"Nick!" shouted Monica as she ran towards him

"What are you doing here?! I told you—!" but before he could finish his sentence, he was pulled into a hug