The Traitor, The Avenger, And The Killer

The Most Dangerous Mutant In The Room

After the incredibly short Shi'ar invasion, it wasn't all that surprising that those who were working to rebuild the mansion — and who later helped with the Avengers Tower — gave Erik a wide berth... with the exception of Tommy, who seemed to have taken a shine to his grandfather since watching him destroy half a fleet of ships single-handedly.

It certainly helped that Erik was doing what he could to encourage Tommy to use his powers, especially as the young man offered his super-speedy help as well as his destructive and explosive abilities in clearing out debris. It was clear Tommy was eating up the attention, despite his protestations to the contrary.

Still, it wasn't long before, slowly, all the heroes who had come together to fight the invasion as well as to do a little rebuilding started to trickle back home. The mansion was basically finished except for personal touches — but those would come later, especially now that the pregnant ladies and the kids were finally allowed to move back in after Noh and Scott had been over the newly-rebuilt security systems. And Kate and Jubilee especially were dying for a project.

In all, it had taken a few weeks to get everything set up, and it was August by the time it really started to feel like home again — right down to the new playroom for the little ones that Scott, Forge, and Noh had designed to be a little kid paradise.

Not everything was replacable, of course, and there were a few losses that caused pause, like Annie's wedding dress, which she had hoped to pass down to Charlie, or Kate's favorite bow, or the copies of Charles Xavier's books — first editions all — that Kate had specially printed for the X-Men.

But despite what they had lost, it seemed that life was starting to return to normal for the residents of the mansion — at last. That morning, Kate was seen at breakfast with a pencil between her teeth and her phone pressed to her ear as she tried to order special edition copies to replace the ones they had lost. Charlie and Chance were playing with the new toys that just about every hero they knew had bought for them to replace the ones they'd lost. Cassie and Tommy were trading jokes as they got ready for a training session with Scott and Logan, who wanted to get them both trained up for when the school year started up so they could be the "senior" members of the junior X-Men — at least in age, anyway. Some of the kids who had actually been at the mansion for a while — like Hisako — would be considered the more "experienced."

And it was obvious that things were getting back to normal when Bobby settled into a seat at the kitchen table and flicked on the news to let it play in the background. It was a little thing, but such a habit for him that he almost didn't even think about it now that they'd only just got the TV set up again. It was almost comforting to have the low hum of news pundits in the background talking about the stock market numbers in the wake of the double alien invasions.

Of course, no one was really paying much attention to the broadcast besides Bobby until the anchor took them to the "top story of the day."

"A ship of obvious alien origin was found in the forest near a private Hawaiian beach early this morning. It's unclear how long the ship has been there, but it doesn't appear to be badly damaged. Authorities are reluctant to say whether or not it is one of the many Kree ships that were shot out of the sky during the recent invasion, but they are investigating the craft's origins."

"Hey, Noh ... that looks like your ship," Tommy said suddenly.

Noh hadn't been paying attention in the slightest and was instead fussing over Jubilee, who was absolutely miserable. The sped-up gestational period of an other-dimensional Kree pregnancy was doing murder to her appetite as well as to her ability to keep any food down, which meant she was both always hungry and always too nauseous to eat — so she was a frequent visitor to Hank's new labs.