‘Mom is never wrong.’
Marie comforted herself with this fact as Zane teleported them to the body.
Her mom, having foreseen the congress attack, had gotten someone to pose as a member of the medical examination team that would handle its aftermath.
The guy could push thoughts and feelings into people with physical contact. It was mind control, no doubt about it, considering the sheer absurdities he’d forced people into doing with a simple touch.
Sadly for Glibby—as he liked to call himself—he flew too close to the sun when he tried to push a man into having intercourse with him. Not that he hadn’t done it before to great success.
But unlike those many, many other times, this one attempt was met with staunch refusal, one backed by a mountain of willpower that was followed by a wrath that nearly took his life.
His intended victim visited upon him a beating that left him on the verge of death. He was hospitalized for months, and while he recovered, the lawsuits piled on and on as more of his sordid deeds came to light.
That’s when her mom stepped in, much to Marie’s chagrin. She helped him fake his death and whisked him away to a secure location, citing that his powers might be useful someday.
The whole thing rankled what little heroic sensibilities she had left—her mother’s teachings had cast down the naive, goody too-shoes little girl in her—but she chose to trust the woman as always, and in the end, she’d been right.
Again.
Without Glibby, the only way they’d have gotten quick access to her mother’s latest point of curiosity would involve exposing themselves in some way, shape or form.
Zane’s power took barely a second to work, so they arrived in the cramped patient compartment of the ambulance all the way in D.C. not long after he received the coordinates sent by Glibby.
Their individual reactions upon arrival were entirely different. Marie held her breath at seeing Mason in person and marveled at his size. He was much much bigger than on the screens.
Zane stayed on his feet, his vigilance still going strong while he stood guard beside her mom. As for the woman herself, she sat down and relaxed, like this was simply another vacation or something.
The silence of their arrival was broken when Glibby poked his head out from the front compartment. His expression and mannerisms all agitated.
“Can I—”
“Shut the fuck up and drive.” Her mother cut him off, her tone clipped, cold, and dismissive. Marie knew that tone and she also knew it was more than this degenerate pervert deserved.
Aggrieved, the degenerate supe roamed his pleading eyes over the three of them before doing as he was told.
When the roar of the engine reached everyone and they felt the shift of the vehicle, she felt a look and knew it was from her mom.
“Well? We haven’t got all day. Tell me what you found.”
Marie paid the hint of satisfaction in the woman’s tone no heed and sat down beside her.
“You were right. He’s not dead.”
“Baby girl…”
“I know. I know. Tell me something I don’t know,” she said, mimicking her mother’s tone at the last part.
Sage smiled and shook her head at her daughter’s antics. “Marie…”
“Fine.” The teenage girl sighed, sporting her own smile as she held an open palm over Mason’s prone form.
“His brain’s been shredded, but it's still… intact, at the same time. It’s like… a piece of paper that has been torn to be pieces but the pieces are still stuck together… all in their right places and… slowly merging back together, healing.”
“Hm…” Sage leaned forward. “So some kind of biostructural fidelity coupled with enhanced healing. I anticipated something like this. His head really did blow up—”
“Not entirely.” Marie interjected. “His cranium, eyes, and the tissues and skin around his head are intact. It’s just his brain that got, you know…” She made a wet, splotching sound.
Her mother nodded at the new information and continued. “And now it’s being held in place by his powers and fixing the damage. It’s not outright regeneration, but it’s better than run of the mill super healing.”
“Way better,” added Marie. “From what I can tell, by the time he's done healing, it’ll be like nothing ever happened.”
“Precision and comprehensiveness.” Sage nodded idly. “How long till he wakes up?”
Marie closed her eyes and focused her senses on the rapid, repairing marvel going on her fellow supe’s brain. She compared the feedback with the others she’d obtained on countless prior experiences and formulated an answer.
“A day. Two days, tops.”
Her mom nodded and asked. “Good job. What else?”
“Strength wise, he’s tier 2. But that’s not his full potential. His ceiling’s higher than that.”
“Go on.”
“His limits… I can’t really tell but it should be at least three times his current strength.”
“That’s normal.” Sage said.
Supes could always grow stronger by stressing their powers to the limit. For her, that meant cramming her head full of information till she could barely think and doing it all over again once she recovered.
In this day and age, that was easy to achieve.
For supes with super strength however, they were not so lucky in this regard. To challenge themselves and make their muscles put in work, they needed not only the strength to lift ultra heavy weights, they also needed to maintain the structure of the things they lifted.
Without this, any attempt at training would fail since the objects would crumble under their own weight. That’s why supes with super strength never trained. It’s why Maeve had such thin arms and why Homelander wore a padded suit.
There was nothing that could challenge them.
“You remember what I said about his heart not beating?” Sage tuned into her daughter’s lengthy breakdown again after breezing past the stuff she already knew.
“Yes.”
“Well, his blood is still circulating, and his lungs are getting oxygen from… somewhere. Mama have you ever seen anything like this?”
The woman answered smoothly. “We always knew his powers would be centered around self preservation, but not to this extent. The super strength and flame manipulation also blindsided us. So yes, I have seen something like this before, but so have you.”
It took Marie a few seconds between looking at Mason and her mom several times before her eyes went wide. She looked at the front of the vehicle before leaving down closer to her mom.
“You’re talking about…”
“The Odessa Project, yes.”
Marie reeled back and gave Mason another long look. “Is he?”
“No. He’s not like you or Homelander.” She answered, crushing her daughter’s fantasies. "He really did get his powers two weeks ago.”
“Then how?”
“I don’t know, but we’re gonna find out.”
Compound V+ was the answer, but she wasn’t going to tell Marie that.
She engineered that variant of the V so she could produce adult supes with powers that matched those dosed as babies.
Her team only produced a few vials according to her orders and she had Zane do a switcheroo with the stock at Sage Grove Center.
It was a perfect plan. Not only would she ruin the Nazi bitch’s stupid plans for an army of supermen, she’d also obtain valuable data on the V+ in the process.
Two birds, one stone.
When Mason escaped and Lamplighter went scorched earth on the place on Vought’s orders, she thought she’d only hit one stone. Turns out she hit not one, not two, but three!
Not only did someone survive the V plus, that same person dealt with Stormfront, saving her the time and effort needed to remove that fossil from the board.
She’d initially given up on the V plus.
After today’s attack on congress, what would come after signified phase one of her plan entering full swing. Now that she had a living specimen before however, her curiosity for the V variant had been reignited.
“We need a sample of his blood,” she ordered Marie.
The young girl read the situation accurately and framed her response accordingly. “Okay.”
She curled the hand she had hovering over Mason and pulled it towards his arm. When the appendage reached the space above his wrist, she flexed her power and beat back the invisible force moving his blood along and keeping his body intact.
At the same time, she broke open his skin and pulled at an invisible string, causing the tiny glob of blood she’d separated from the stubborn, magnetic force to rise from the wound.
Instead of a glob shape though, the blood curled like a band and stayed attached to the wrist, resisting her efforts to separate it from the greater mass that was his body.
She didn’t fret though, trusting in herself, in her powers and what her mother had instilled in her about them.
She was a tier one supe. Homelander tier. The only other in existence.
This little hiccup would not hold her back, and it really didn’t. She exerted more of her will on the stubborn glob and pulled it free after a few seconds of struggle.
Even while holding it above the oblivious donor, she sensed his body tugging at it, pulling it down with a weakened but still intact tether. That force all but disappeared when she mended the cut on his wrist and sealed it shut.
An open test tube got pushed into her sight and she lowered the blood into it. Her mother screwed the glass container shut once it all got in and stuffed it somewhere in her jacket.
“I think… I know why his head didn’t blow up like the others.” Marie said all of a sudden.
“Elaborate,” said her mother.
“The head popper… likely tried, but they found it difficult. Just now when I tried to manipulate his body, it actively resisted me.”
“Yeah, I saw that.” Her mom answered, confused as to where she was going with this.
“No, you don’t get it. It took me seconds to get this tiny amount of blood. And that’s blood. Whatever is keeping his body running works better on dense structures. I’m not even sure I can fracture his skull without at least 10 seconds of focus.”
Based on the display that just occurred, her mother already had the correct number in mind, and it was much higher, but she chose not to share them at this time.
“And it’s not like cracking it will do anything. His power will just hold the pieces in place and let him function normally.”
“Correct." Sage affirmed her daughter's thoughts. "Couple that with his likely inability to feel pain and you have…”
“The world’s most unkillable supe.”
“Nope. That’s still Homelander.” Her mother disagreed and hastily added. “For now. Stop the car!”
Her sudden shout achieved its intended effect. The car slowed to a halt and Glibby poked his head out again.
“Get out and get lost motherfucker,” Sage said while she shared a knowing look with her daughter. Marie nodded at her mother and they put the creep out of their minds. In an hour, he'd be no more.
They heard the sound of a car door opening and shutting before a pair of feet hightailed it away. Zane got a look from Sage and knew what it meant. He stepped close to the ladies with both arms reaching for their shoulders—
“Wait.”
Marie’s mother knew her daughter couldn’t help herself. She sighed and said. “Go ahead.”
Almost if she’d have snuck it in had her mother refused, Marie palmed Mason’s face with both hands and closed her eyes.
Her powers, honed with years of training and top of the line medical knowledge, coalesced around the miraculous scene in his brain and added more power to the operation.
A perfect, albeit lengthy restoration that should have taken twenty more hours finished with just a moment of concentration. All that remained was for the patient to wake up now.
For that, they couldn’t be around. So Marie sprang up quickly and gave Zane the nod. The male supe nodded toward her mom and she turned to see the woman holding Mason’s phone.
“What? Mom! We should go!”
“Relax. Even if he wakes up there’ll be some short term amnesia.”
“Uhh… I don’t see how that helps us.”
“It doesn’t. There… done.” Her mother put the phone back in Mason’s coat pocket. The deputy director of the C.I.A. needed better protection for her contact details.
“Zane…”
The supe grabbed their shoulders and they were gone, leaving a lone Mason whose eyelids had begun to flutter.
.
.
.
.
“Like a Phoenix rising from its ashes, we’ve just received confirmation that Mason Von Sloan, the young supe who kicked up the storm that led to the hearing at congress and the bloody massacre he himself fell victim to, has awoken. Yes, ladies and gentlemen. Mr. Sloan is alive, as can be seen in the footage. So far he’s the only confirmed survivor and many are wondering as we are, if he survived because of his powers. Did Compound V really give Mason the power to come back after seemingly dying. Tune in for more—”
Mallory looked up from her phone at the subject of the news standing in the doorway of his hospital room, clad in a gown that looked a bit too small.
The call Marie’s mother made to Rayner ended up being unnecessary.
A short while after Glibby secured Mason and drove off, Mallory and Neuman quickly noticed his absence. Rayner immediately got to work tracking the new phone they gave him while the former deputy director chased him down with a couple of agents.
None of them knew what Vought could possibly want with Mason’s dead body, but they’d already taken a shot at the corporation and missed. They couldn’t also fail on a simple task such as securing a body.
When Rayner came through with the location, Mallory and the agents floored it.
They reached the site not long after. There, they found the ambulance parked by the side of the road and a not-dead Mason standing outside of it, utter confusion written all over his face.
He immediately grew defensive when they slammed their car doors and advanced on him. Mallory waved for the agents to stand back and called out his name. When he replied with “who’s Mason?” the older woman knew she had to work fast.
This hadn’t happened before in her lengthy experience, but a supe who didn’t know he was a supe was too ripe a recipe for disaster. Fortunately for her, what he seemed to be suffering from didn’t make him violent or stubborn.
In fact, he became pliable and agreeable to almost every order. When she held his arm and pulled him forward, he went along with it and simply asked “who are you?” and “where are you taking me?”
They took him to the hospital and had him checked out. The doctor diagnosed him with something called severe global amnesia, though based on the little interaction they’d had with him, it seemed to be fading fast.
That was attributed to him being a supe since they were known to heal faster than normal but the doctor asked for an MRI anyway. It was hard to get Mason to change his clothes in this state, but they managed it with some nurses and got him to lie down for the scan.
Mallory was particularly curious about what the results would show. Because she’d been present at the hearing when the heads of the victims turned into tomatoes stuffed with explosives.
Mason’s head didn't suffer the same fate, but when they checked his pulse and breathing, they confirmed he had indeed died and assumed the damage he suffered was internal.
A trip to the morgue would’ve told them more, but they ended up here.
Anyway, the doctor’s report was not at all what she imagined. According to the man, Mason’s brain was in a single piece and showing signs of healing. He proposed that they’d likely see some improvement in his condition in a few hours.
On that, he turned out to be wrong.
A single hour after they assigned him his own hospital bed and room, Mason came rushing out of it with eyes filled with a familiar clarity yet unfamiliar intensity.
You’d think he wanted to get his hands on whoever put his brain through the grinder. No, he rather wanted his phone, making the retired agent wonder who he needed to call so urgently.