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 Posted: Tue Sep 11, 2012 4:03 am
✖▐ A C A D E M Y: Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sleeplessxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxx▃▃ ✖ ▐ S t o r y ↓ ▃▃▃▃▃▃ ▃▃▃▃▃▃▃xxxxxxx Isabella's skewed point of view doesn't seem to be getting any better. If anything, it's getting worse. She's never been one to take words the wrong way...But it doesn't seem like anyone can say anything that doesn't elicit a hard, jaded response.
xxxxxxx▃▃ ✖ ▐ C h a r a c t e r s I n v o l v e d ↓ ▃▃▃▃▃▃ ▃▃▃▃▃▃▃ xxxxxxxIsabella Stone - Angel Reaver
Leonardo Rossi - Captain Kilos
xxxxxxx▃▃ ✖ ▐ D e v e l o p m e n t s ↓ ▃▃▃▃▃▃ ▃▃▃▃▃▃▃ xxxxxxxA conversation between friends.
Coding done by The Bunit, Pics edited by Selena Lucania, Concept for thread approved by AX moderator, Angel Reaver
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Posted: Tue Sep 11, 2012 6:00 am
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Posted: Tue Sep 11, 2012 4:32 pm
That laughing echoed around inside of his head, becoming louder, closer...
Leonardo quickly sat up in bed, gasping for air as if he had been drowning. Quickly his breathing stabilized, and he closed his eyes, telling himself that it was just a dream... or nightmare, rather. The patter of rain on the window didn't help calm him like it usually did - instead, it just brought him back to that day in Laos. His clothes were sticking to him... he had been sweating, quite profusely, actually. His bed was soaked too, now too cold and uncomfortable to sleep in. Leo sighed - this didn't happen to him anymore. At least, it shouldn't have. He thought he was done with that sort of thing in the first weeks at being at the Academy.
The Sentinels reappearing had brought it all back. The memories of SHIELD, Portman... everything. Sleep was harder to come by than it was before when he had to sleep in the library... which now it looked like he would have to do again, only for different reasons. Stepping out of his bed, he walked over to his drawer and pulled out a new pair of shorts and a new t-shirt. Quietly going into the bathroom, he used a towel to dry himself off and then put on the new clothes. At least he felt a little bit more fresh... but the images of the nightmare were still swimming around inside of his head.
Leo looked into the mirror. Bags had started to form under his eyes. Thick stubble had found its way onto his cheeks, making him look even worse than he probably felt. Against his better judgment, he pulled up his shirt slightly, and the first scar wasn't hard to find. The next one wasn't either, and the next one after that, and the one after that... Each had their own little special story or memory as to how they got there. Some were caused by giant mutated mosquitoes; others by crazy shape-shifters. Perhaps one day he could get them removed with plastic surgery, in order to keep the memories from popping up. However, he always felt that the scars were there in order to keep him from making the mistakes he had in the past. If you don't know history, you are doomed to repeat it.
No one really knew what he did before he came to the Academy... well, before the Sentinel attacks, anyways. Of course, the professors knew, as well as Bella, and Aurelie had a hint of an idea, but now it was sort of an open secret. Now Raine, Roland, and a handful of others that had heard the Sentinel knew what he used to do for a living. And in this hectic time that had started since the mall incident, the fact he used to be a government agent had put him off with a few people. Although, he couldn't help but feel that's how it had been since day one: the professors had always dealt with him with a certain amount of paranoia - even Kitty Pryde had initially turned down his offer to teach him Krav Maga.
The awkward conversations about his true identity had thankfully not come up yet... and he was hoping to prolong them for as much as possible. Not just because the missions he went on were classified, but that was a part of his past that he'd like to have buried and filled in with cement.
Maybe if he went downstairs to watch some TV that would put to rest his mind and let him sleep. Stepping out of the bathroom, he quietly crept downstairs, hoping to find the lounge empty, when in fact, he hadn't. Bella was sitting in one of the bay windows, a thin blanket wrapped around herself. Instantly Leo's face fell - not because he couldn't be alone, but because seeing Bella the way she was recently made his heart bleed every time he saw her. She had been the one person who had regarded him as a fellow Alpha despite knowing his dark past - maybe it was because of Veritas. If a HYDRA agent can be redeemed, so too can a SHIELD agent, right?
"Now, I know why I'm not sleeping," Leo started, knowing that she knew he was already standing there, "and I have a really good guess as to why you're not either." He moved over and sat at another bay window near her. Unlike many other people on base, he had been there, done that. For nearly four years he had led a team of mutants much like this one, and he recognized the face she gave, since he had seen it in the mirror a few times.
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Posted: Wed Sep 19, 2012 11:49 pm
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Posted: Sat Sep 22, 2012 8:52 pm
Her little excuse as to why she was awake made Leonardo frown. There were mixed feelings - disappointment and empathy. She was lying to him... she should know better than to do that. Although there probably were people fornicating in the Observation Tower, Leo knew that Bella had the capacity to tune all of that out.
The sudden movement from Bella as she lashed out and destroyed the clock caught Leo a little bit off guard, but he did well to hide it. The muted sound of the glass falling to the floor and shattering was eerie, to say the least. Her comment afterwards was another botched attempt to divert Leo's suspicions away to a power-related problem rather than a psychological one.
Silence hanged in the air for a few moments as Bella receded more into her blanket, as if it was protecting her. Leo could only look at her with pity and empathy. He'd been there before - plenty of times. He'd led a team, had people under him that became injured... and he had blamed himself for all of it. Every single bruise, cut, and broken bone... Leo counted them as his own - as if his own children had been the ones hurt.
There had been too many times in the past when so much had been asked of him - things had required him to be superhuman, even more so than his mutation allowed. Sometimes the entire world had been placed on his shoulders... and he could see the same weight on Bella's shoulders now. Being responsible for other people can seem exciting at first... until they start to get hurt. When they fall away into the void... and it's all on you.
Bella spoke again, telling him to get a sedative from the infirmary so that he could sleep and be energized for the next day...
"Don't do that to me Bella," Leo muttered. "Don't shut me out." It appeared that he'd have to cut the chatter and get straight to the matter at hand. He took a long, hard look at her before speaking again.
"I know exactly what you're going through... we both know that. I'm still drudging through some of it right now," he started. He had actually mentally prepared for this conversation beforehand... he'd done it every time he saw Bella around campus. "I can probably guess how you're feeling right now. Every day, so much is asked of you. You're pushed to your limits. But I don't think that's what's bothering you the most. You want to know if all of it is worth it. So many of your friends - people you call family, fight and bleed for the cause of making the world a better place. But you need to know if we're really making a difference when it's at such a great cost to us." Tears started to form in his eyes; he was going deep inside of himself here.
The moral lines were a bit more set in stone here at the X-Men... but not at SHIELD. Not under Portman. When he worked for that woman, sometimes he wasn't sure who exactly he was working for, for if he actually accomplished anything as he was riding the plane back to the Helicarrier. The only thing that he did know was that every time he turned on the TV, he only saw more violence, death, and destruction. Every ounce of his being wanted to stop it... but did he? Did anything he ever did deter any of the evil that happened in the world?
He tried to put it in better terms, saying, "You just want to know if your sacrifices mean something. You need to know that if the nightmares you see when you close your eyes help other people sleep at night."
"You just want the world to make sense again."
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Posted: Mon Sep 24, 2012 12:01 am
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Posted: Mon Sep 24, 2012 9:17 pm
Bella didn't seem to be though. She was... too sweet, too innocent for this sort of thing. Leo had been able to deal with loss beforehand... but Bella was starting to get into it now, and having to deal with those sorts of feelings all at once had to be overwhelming. So many times recently Leo had thought of offering to take over the Alphas for Bella... but that would just mean that he thought Bella was an incompetent leader.
She wasn't... she was just going through a rough patch. Some people were born to fight, or were molded into a weapon. For Leo, it was a little bit of both. For Bella, it appeared to be the latter.
He didn't seem to hear her when she told him to stop looking at him. Leo just kept staring straight at her, as if waiting for her to just start spilling her guts. To let her walls down and let it all out. It was a similar stare that he gave during interrogations... but this of course was not one of those. It was almost as if he was trying to stare a hole into her in order to see inside - but he wasn't telepathic, even though many times he wished he was.
She moved closer as the emotion started to pour from his voice - at least that part of her had still remained. That meant that there was still some small part of the old Bella still in there, that she wasn't beyond saving. Then again, there were very few people Leo thought that were beyond saving in his mind. Especially since Bella didn't deserve to fall into the dark abyss that so many had fallen into before her. He looked up to her as the blanket was placed over his feet - the mother hen spreading her wing over her chicks.
She finally started to tell him how she felt - thoughts Leo had all had before. He'd had his own idealistic views of SHIELD as well - saving the world, catching the bad guys... he was so optimistic, so ready to take on the world. The bitterness he'd had from leaving his grieving town was starting to melt away - he was finding new friends, friends he would trust his life with. But the world wasn't picture perfect. More times than not, horrible things happened in the world. And whatever they did, however missions they went on, it didn't matter, it seemed. Bad people would always kill innocents, and the good would always die much too young.
There was a bigger risk here at the Academy, though. As Bella stated, there were children here - they had been lured here by the promise of a safe haven against a world that hated them and feared them. However, the Academy had been attacked enough times that the building couldn't be defined as a haven... even the SHIELD Helicarrier was safer than this place.
The biggest question seemed to be: was it worth it? All of this... was it worth it, in the end? That was probably the one question Leo wrestled with the most in all his years fighting. And honestly... sometimes he doubted himself.
She ended on a rather despairing note: a complete lack of hope in life. Not wanting for anything... because apparently that was a silly notion. Leo slowly shook his head, knowing that her statement was wrong... in his opinion, at least. His gaze floated over to his digital watch which was always on his wrist, no matter what he was doing.
"Let me show you something," he said, taking his watch off. Pressing a small button on the underside of the watch, the backside popped off, revealing a small piece of folded up paper. Taking the paper out of the watch compartment, he unfolded it, revealing that it was a small, wallet-sized picture of a woman and her newborn child. The quality wasn't good, and not much of the background could be seen, but the different features were still visible - the woman had tan skin and silky brown hair, while the child was a newborn with a slight tan complexion. He handed it to Bella.
"That's from about two years ago," he started to explain. "Her name's Elena. She was the young bride of a drug lord down in South America named Hector. Elena was a mutant, and when she got pregnant, chances were that the kid would be a mutant too. The closer she got to the due date though, the more she realized she didn't want to raise a child in the world her husband was a part of. Elena knew that her husband would eventually use her child as an enforcer. When she was eight months pregnant she managed to escape and contacted the American government for refuge, promising to give vital information about Hector's drug trafficking for safe passage. Since it had to deal with mutants it got kicked up to us.
"Now at this time I'd been going through a rough patch - a new guy on our team got snuffed out on his first mission. Not to mention I was starting to count the amount of broken bones on my team rather than the victories. So when the Elena mission came to us I wasn't exactly motivated to go along with it. I had to though - it was my job, after all. So the team and I went down to meet her, posing as students on vacation. We managed to meet her and secure her in a hotel. We wanted the information on her husband first - then transport would come for her. She gave it all to us, and SHIELD sent a team down to sweep his compound. That's when things started to go downhill... more like a nose-dive, actually. The sweeper team was ambushed - a helicopter was shot down, people were caught or killed... and at the same time, someone tried to kill us in the hotel. We managed to get out with Elena, but since the operation failed and it was now turning into an international incident... we were left out in the cold. We couldn't give up though... we couldn't leave Elena behind to be killed by her husband. Not to mention the fact we had to get ourselves out of there too.
"So we started to make our way north. It wasn't exactly easy... Hector was hunting us something fierce - sending his own hit-team of mutants after us. Plus moving around with a pregnant woman wasn't the easiest thing in the world either.
"We were right at the Mexican border when she started having contractions. And it didn't help that Hector's men were right on us. We split up: two stayed behind to lead Hector's men away, and two of us, including myself, took Elena to maybe the dirtiest freaking hospital I'd ever seen in my entire life. Now listen; birth is not something I'd want to experience again. It was the bloodiest, grossest thing I'd ever seen in my entire life... and it horrified me when the doctor turned to me and said, 'Catch'. But... but when I held that baby in my arms... this is later when we cleaned him off and put a blanket around him..." his voice started to falter as new tears formed, "I - I felt okay. I knew that the world was going to be okay. I knew that it was going to keep spinning. For the first time in a long time... I had... hope. That I knew I was doing the right thing."
Leo paused as the tears became heavy enough to stroll down his cheeks. He stooped his head low and brought his hands over his face like a visor in a futile attempt to hide it.
"She named him Leonardo."
Taking a deep breath, he came back up, sniffling. "I never saw her again after that - SHIELD took her in and put her in protective custody. I keep having these daydreams though... of where they are, what they're doing." He paused again, and then chuckled. "You know... I'm not really sure who took that picture or where it came from. But whenever I'm feeling like I can't take it anymore, or that the weight of the world is on my shoulders... I look at that picture. And it reminds me that all of this... the fighting, the broken bones, the bleeding... it's worth it. It's always worth it. Even if you miss it... even if it's just a small glimmer in this dark and broken world... there's always life. There's always hope."
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Posted: Wed Sep 26, 2012 2:50 am
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Posted: Sat Sep 29, 2012 4:29 pm
Other times, he wondered... what if his ability had never manifested itself? If he had never known he was a mutant, and never discovered it? Then maybe he'd be dead... after all, the doctors had told him that it was a miracle he survived the train bombing. He'd always thought that he triggered his mutation somehow in order to survive the explosion... maybe the endurance of a cockroach or something. So there he had it... the ability that saved him placed him on a trail that would lead him to the darkest corners of the earth. He wasn't sure whether to thank or curse God for his mutation... more times than not it appeared that the latter was the correct choice.
There was always the third option... maybe Leonardo was just meant to be this way. Perhaps he had always been wired to do the unthinkable in order to protect people. It was hard to swallow the fact that maybe he didn't have control over his destiny, but then again, did anyone? Leo couldn't control that the train he was on blew up and killed his friends... couldn't control the urge for revenge and wanting to take those responsible.
He told her the story that he rarely if ever told anyone. Actually, now that he thought about it, she was first person outside of SHIELD to hear this. That's how desperate the situation was to him - he needed to pull out all of the stops in order to save Bella from her spiraling desperation.
She slid in even closer to him, cuddling up next to him. She pleaded with him not to cry, to which Leo smiled and chuckled slightly. He was about to speak when she continued, mentioned the Halloween Incident when he had been so close to death. The memory hit him hard, a sharp pang rising in his chest. Instinctively he rotated his left hand, hearing the click. And then his leg started to tingle slightly... all from that time when he was bleeding profusely, one-third of his body in the belly of a mechanical shark. He remembered the look on her face, despite his vision being slightly blurred from all the pain. It had been of... shock, despair. Was that what triggered her depression? The overwhelming sight of a severely injured subordinate was hard to take in. A nosy sigh escaped him... now this was on his shoulders as well. He blamed himself for a lot things... the mall incident, the Sentinel attacks... and now this. The guilt was already rising in his chest...
But then she mentioned the mall incident, when he had taken charge of the Alphas. He didn't see it as a big deal - he was only doing what was natural to him. Looking back though, he could see why Bella held it in some sort of positive view of Leonardo. Some of the guilt started to subside... it was semi-praise coming from the Alpha leader, after all. At least he had done something right... but to him, the wrongs he had done heavily outweighed the rights. Ever since he had come to the Academy, he had only done things wrong - his big-headedness and fighting spirit had only caused pain and torment to those around him. He wasn't used to that - his actions affecting so many around him... and now...
The word Genosha was spoken, and Leo's stomach lurched as he closed his eyes. The SHIELD report on the incident had been rather extensive - video footage, satellite photos, endless amounts of pictures taken of the aftermath... he'd seen every frame, every pixel. He hadn't been there personally... but he'd made it his own mission to find out what happened. He needed to know why his new unit was being formed. The answers he found though, he didn't like.
Bella ended with yet another somber note - his speech on hope seemed to not penetrate the walls that she had built around her heart.
"That memory... the one of Elena... it doesn't hurt me," he tried to clarify. "It heals me. It keeps me going. I wouldn't be doing what I do if I didn't have that with me every day," he paused, going on to the next topic. "I want you to remember back to that day on the beach, however difficult it might be. I know you remember the blood, my bones protruding out of my body... but I want you to remember what I said." He was hoping her mind would go back...Quote: “Let’s… let’s just find the others and get the hell out of here. My…” he took in another deep breath, “my leg and hand will grow back… I promise." Quote: "that’s okay… we just need to get out of here and get home."
He sighed once again. "I wish you could see things how I see them, Bells, I really do. Maybe then you'd understand that everything isn't as dark and morbid as you paint it out to be. There's at least one thing I agree with Xavier on - there is a silver lining. There is a dawn to this midnight. I don't know when it'll come... but it will. It always does. You probably think I'm just being optimistic... but you know where I'm coming from. From everything I've been though, you'd expect me to be the most pessimistic person ever. But I don't let it get to me... I can't let it hold me down. I only take it in... let it make me stronger."
"Because at the end of the day, even if I do fail... even if I die... I'm not going to be kneeling or lying down. I'm going to be standing tall, because at least I'll know I didn't give up."
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Posted: Thu Oct 18, 2012 6:12 am
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