Marvelous Meditations #81

The dim light overhead flickered slightly as Nathan hunched over the makeshift workbench, his calloused fingers working with mechanical precision. The sniper rifle in front of him was his own creation—custom-built from the ground up, every piece carefully crafted and fine-tuned for efficiency.

He grabbed the detachable barrel, aligning it with the receiver before attempting to slide it into place. The steel refused to budge.

Nathan exhaled through his nose, adjusting his grip before twisting the barrel slightly, trying a different angle. Still nothing.

His jaw tensed.

He repositioned, applied a little more force—no give. He clenched his teeth, twisting again—nothing. Again. Nothing.

A muscle in his neck twitched.

He tried once more, this time shoving the barrel in harder, frustration creeping into his movements.

Still, it wouldn’t fit.

Nathan’s face darkened, his breathing growing heavier as his patience wore dangerously thin. He adjusted his grip, fingers curling tighter around the metal.

Then, finally, something gave.

But it wasn’t the rifle.

It was him.

With a snarl, he hurled the sniper across the room. The weapon slammed against the storage unit’s steel wall with a thunderous crack, the force of the impact leaving a dent. The barrel followed a second later, clattering against the concrete floor.

Nathan stood there, shoulders rising and falling, breath uneven as he ran a trembling hand over his forehead. He clenched his fingers into his hair, pressing hard against his skull as if he could somehow force the anger out of himself.

It wasn’t just the rifle.

It was everything.

The last year had hollowed him out.

Despite finally bringing justice to one of the bastards responsible for Lily’s death, there was no relief. No peace. If anything, things had gotten worse.

The nightmares were more frequent, more vivid—twisting his memories into something even darker. His emotions, once something he could control with cold calculation, had become volatile. The rage came without warning now, boiling over in waves he couldn't suppress. No amount of quiet reflection, no distraction, no soothing activity did a damn thing to help.

So he withdrew.

Cut himself off.

Told himself he needed time to get his shit together.

Because the first step to fixing a problem was understanding the cause.

And no matter how long he thought about it, no matter how hard he tried to justify it, the answer was always the same.

Ross had died too easily.

Nathan had been meticulous. Every step of his plan to take down Ross was calculated, accounted for, and executed with ruthless precision. He had spent years preparing, anticipating every imaginable variable, eliminating every possible escape route.

It wasn’t enough to kill the man. Death was too merciful.

Ross had spent a lifetime building his influence, surrounding himself with power and protection. He had the kind of reach that could make men disappear, bury scandals, rewrite history itself. But Nathan had torn it all down, piece by piece.

He turned the President of the United States against him.

He manipulated public opinion, exposing Ross’ atrocities until the country saw him for what he truly was—a warmonger, a butcher, a tyrant hiding behind a uniform.

Even Nick Fury, a man with more backdoor connections than any intelligence agency combined, had been forced to sever ties.

Nathan had caged him.

When Ross was finally found guilty—when he stood before the world as a disgraced man—Nathan had planned to rip away what little remained of his pride.

He was going to take him.

Drag him into the depths where no government, no shield, no army could protect him.

And then, he was going to deliver him to the people he had wronged.

The soldiers he betrayed.

The civilians caught in his crossfire.

The mutants, the mutates, the human experiments whose lives he had shattered in his pursuit of power.

Nathan envisioned it down to the last detail—Ross, bound and broken, thrown before them like an offering. The same people he once hunted, persecuted, thought helpless, experimented on, tearing into him, devouring him like the monster he had always been.

It would have been poetic.

It would have been justice.

A final, ultimate mockery—stripping him of his last shred of dignity before his inevitable end.

And yet…

Nathan never imagined Ross would turn into the Red Hulk and force his hand so quickly.

That it would all end so easily.

No suffering.

No reckoning.

Just a fight. A fucking fight.

A few exchanged blows, a brutal finale, and then Ross was gone.

In the comics, Ross had become the Red Hulk—but that transformation had been engineered by Samuel Sterns. The Leader. The man with the gamma-irradiated mind capable of warping biology itself.

But Sterns was under Nathan’s employ now.

And Nathan, for all his paranoia, had kept an unrelenting watch on him. Every move, every breath, every experiment the scientist conducted was scrutinized. If Sterns had been meddling with gamma mutations, Nathan would have known.

And yet, Ross had still transformed.

Somehow.

Somewhere along the line, something slipped past him, and for the past year, that question had gnawed at the edges of his mind like a festering wound. The uncertainty, the loose end—it was infuriating. But in the end, it didn’t matter.

Because no matter how much it haunted him, no matter how much his mind and body deteriorated under the weight of it—

Nathan still had a job to do.

Ross was dead. But Sebastian Shaw and Nathaniel Essex were still out there.

And they wouldn’t be for much longer.

Nathan wouldn’t rest until every last one of them was buried. Until everything they held dear, every empire they built, every ideal they aspired to—was turned to ash.

He hadn’t spent the past year rotting.

Even in the depths of his own self-destruction, he prepared.

He had ripped secrets out of Omega Red before leaving the bastard to his fate. He had waited, piecing together every sliver of intelligence, every whisper in the underground, until finally—

He had found a way to Sebastian Shaw.

Nathan exhaled sharply, lingering in the dim glow of the storage unit. His fingers flexed once, twice—then tightened into a fist. The rage, the restlessness—it was all still there, pulsing beneath his skin like something alive.

He forced a breath, steadying himself.

Then he stepped toward the exit, his shadow stretching long against the cold metal walls.

...

Rick Flag stormed into the dimly lit bathroom of Maximus Security, his boots hitting the tiled floor with sharp, deliberate steps. His face was set in a scowl, his jaw tight with barely contained frustration.

He’d been looking for Nathan all damn year, and now that he’d finally found him, the bastard was—

Shaving?

Rick’s glare deepened at the sight before him—Nathan, standing in front of the mirror, clad in nothing but a pair of dark boxer briefs, running a razor along his jaw like he didn’t have a goddamn care in the world. His hair was longer than before, unkempt from months of neglect, but his beard was steadily vanishing with each calculated stroke.

Nathan caught Rick’s reflection in the mirror, offering the briefest of side glances before turning back to his task.

"Took you long enough to show up."

Rick’s hands curled into fists at his sides, his expression twisting into something darker—anger, exhaustion, pure aggravation.

"Yeah?" he snapped. "Well, it didn’t take me a goddamn year, that’s for sure."

Nathan hummed in acknowledgment, unfazed. He rinsed the blade under the faucet, tapped off the excess water, and set it down with a quiet clink. Without missing a beat, he reached for a combat knife and began cutting through his overgrown hair with steady, precise movements. Strands of dark brown fell to the floor around his bare feet.

"I have a pretty good idea of what’s been going on," Nathan said evenly, "but that’s not why I’m here." A lock of hair slid down his shoulder as he sliced through another section. "I came to see if you needed anything before I do what I need to do."

Rick scoffed, shaking his head.

"Do I need anything?!" His voice rose, echoing off the bathroom walls. "I’ve been running this company alone since day one, what do you think?!"

His teeth ground together before he sucked in a deep breath, forcing himself to get it under control. He exhaled sharply, jabbing a finger at Nathan. "Do you have any idea how many people have been asking about you?"

Nathan continued cutting, unhurried, each slice of the blade through his overgrown hair clean and precise. His expression remained unreadable, his focus never wavering.

"Like who?" he asked flatly.

Rick exhaled sharply, barely keeping himself from snapping.

"Steve Rogers has been constantly on my ass—"

"Rogers and S.H.I.E.L.D. are just being greedy," Nathan cut him off, his tone as even as before. He shook out a few loose strands of hair before setting the knife down. "I already pointed them to HYDRA’s living archives—a literal goldmine of classified history. As far as I’m concerned, they upheld their end of the bargain, and I upheld mine."

Rick’s expression twisted into a scowl.

"Oh yeah? Then what about your mutant pals?" he shot back. "They’ve been asking about you non-stop."

Nathan let out a slow breath, a hint of irritation flickering across his face. He wiped stray hair from his shoulders and checked his reflection in the mirror. Any decent barber would have scoffed at his work, but it was serviceable. Good enough.

"That’s no different," he muttered, his voice quieter now.

He crouched down, retrieving a sealed garment bag from his duffel on the ground. Unzipping it, he pulled out a sleek, black suit tailored to his needs. As he slid it on, the material settling snugly against his frame, he continued,

"I trained their kids to the point where they can take down someone like Omega Red. They can handle themselves. The security systems I installed will tell me the second Shaw or Essex make a move on them."

He zipped up the suit, rolling his shoulders to test the fit, and finally turned to face Rick directly.

"They don’t need me anymore."

Rick let out a dry laugh, shaking his head in disbelief.

"Bullshit. They don't need you, huh? That why they keep looking for you? That why they keep asking?"

Nathan regarded Rick with an infuriating calmness, his eyes steady and unreadable.

“Why else?” he said, voice even. “My relationship with those people was purely transactional. They got what they wanted. I got what I wanted.”

Rick’s jaw tightened. His fists clenched at his sides.

“Yeah? Well, they don’t seem to see it that way.” His voice was low, heated, barely holding back the frustration boiling beneath the surface. “Neither Steve nor the X-Men came looking for you because of some damn business arrangement. They were worried about you. They wanted to know if you were okay.”

His glare sharpened as he added, “Little did they know, you couldn’t give a shit even if you tried.”

Nathan let out a slow sigh, as if Rick was the one being unreasonable.

“I don’t understand why you’re so upset,” he said, shaking his head. “You know me. You know this is all I have.”

He ran a gloved hand down the front of his suit, adjusting the collar.

“I don’t have time to play house with these people any more than I already have.”

Rick’s teeth ground together so hard it was audible.

“Maybe I’m just sick and tired of your shit, Nathan. You ever stop to think of that?”

Nathan raised an eyebrow, unimpressed. “It was bound to happen sooner or later.”

His lips curled into something that wasn’t quite a smirk, nor was it amusement. It was just cold.

“Good thing I’m done with this company anyway.”

Rick frowned, but Nathan was already turning, checking the fit of his gloves.

“I made sure to wear Maximus Security’s logo when I took down Ross,” he continued, his tone shifting into something almost calculated. “And with the contract I secured with the President, that same logo will be everywhere. Plastered across the country. On every screen, every report, every news cycle about anything incident that's worth reporting.”

He finally looked back at Rick, his gaze sharp.

“Every time people see it, they’ll remember what a monster Ross was. And they’ll curse his name.”

Rick stared at Nathan, disbelief etched into every tense line of his face.

“So that’s it, huh?” His voice was raw, incredulous. “You’re just gonna walk away? Like none of it mattered? Like nothing mattered except your damned revenge?”

Nathan exhaled sharply through his nose, a ghost of a smirk tugging at his lips.

“You talk like anything else ever did.”

He shook his head, as if Rick was the one being foolish, as if the answer was so painfully obvious it didn’t even warrant discussion.

“This company was always yours,” he continued, his voice cool, measured. “The only thing I did was fund it. Everything else? That was you.”

Reaching into the inner pocket of his suit jacket, Nathan retrieved a folded document and held it up between two fingers.

“These are the signed papers officially transferring the company under your name.”

Without ceremony, he stepped forward, slipping the papers into Rick’s hands before turning away. His movements were effortless, decisive, like the matter had already been long settled in his mind.

Rick blinked, his fingers tightening around the papers. It took him a moment to even process what had just happened before he finally snapped out of his daze.

“The hell you think you’re doing?”

His hand shot out, fingers clamping tightly around Nathan’s wrist, his grip strong and unyielding.

Nathan didn’t answer. He didn’t hesitate.

In one swift motion, he pivoted, twisting his body with precise, practiced efficiency. His free hand shot up, striking Rick’s neck with a precise, nerve-deadening chop.

Rick’s body stiffened, his grip faltering instantly before his knees buckled. He was out before he even hit the floor.

Nathan caught him with one arm, sighing as he adjusted his unconscious weight. He dragged him out of the bathroom, laying him gently against the hallway wall.

For a moment, he just stood there, looking down at him.

The company had always been a means to an end for Nathan, a tool to fight in the light, but with Ross gone, it was no longer necessary. Essex and Shaw thrived in the shadows, and they were his next targets.

Almost too quiet to hear, Nathan spoke after a beat of silence—“Goodbye, old friend.”

With that, he turned and walked away, never once looking back.