Agent X

Tattoos and rumors

Hacker put her finger over her mouth and pointed at the door to Sheaf. He nodded in understanding and followed her out, much to the relief of the chagrined nurses and doctor shaking their heads at them.

When they closed the door behind them and turned around to face the team, they immediately noticed their downcast expressions and white faces and understood that Tasker had clearly spilt the beans on X.

'Why? Why did this have to happen to him? He was such a great guy!' Leader cried out, and Hacker's heart turned cold at her use of tenses.

'Is. He is such a great guy.' She corrected Leader immediately, 'He's still around here, not dead. Granted, all this isn't really the best of situations, but X is really, really strong. I know that he'll come out of it ever stronger than before.'

Leader looked down in embarrassment, but Hacker didn't have any remorse for what she said. No one should have any doubts that Agent X would be completely fine despite all his experiences.

Tasker sighed beside them. 'Alright, we've all had a hard time these past few days, and this incident has just made things difficult to deal with. Anyways we can't do anything about it now. Let's all just take a step back and let X breathe for a while. I can't even imagine how hard things must be for him.'

They all nodded quietly and slowly dispersed. Hacker shook her head sorrowfully and went towards her room as well. She had already resolved to do as much research on this as possible. Oh, and that map. What was all that about?

She first pulled up the weird phenomena X was going through, and plenty of research was apparently done to show that the brain really did shut down when faced with too much trauma, both physical and mental. All the articles and reports and evidence really broke her heart, and Hacker finally made peace with that topic.

She had more important things to do anyway. At first she tried out various reasons as to why they would release Agent X just like that. One of the top plausible reasons was that since he was in such a mental state, they probably decided to give him back because he had given all the important information he could. Now he could serve better as an example of what happens to people who mess with ACE.

It made her sick to the heart to think about all this, but it was necessary to do so. Only then could she figure out how to help X.

A few of the other reasons she had come up with were quickly dispelled. It was a fact that X could have been implanted with anything harmful for SHADE. Items ranging from trackers and such devices to deadly viruses and harmful chemicals that could very well cause him to explode and take SHADE down with him.

But Hacker knew that Tasker had made sure to follow all protocols pertaining to this situation to make sure X was completely clean before letting him enter here.

Another possibility was that X had been trailed and was being used to find SHADE's entrance, but once again Tasker had saved the day with her presence of mind even in dangerous situations. She had agents trail the vehicle they had come in, and they made sure that no one was following Agent X when he was being taken into SHADE's HQ.

So that only left Hacker's summarization, an analysis she'd formed based on Sheaf's guess. Honestly, it really did seem like a good reason, and she had to remember to congratulate Sheaf on his clever thinking.

But now, there was a more urgent business to take care of. The map drawn on his back was very obviously not done because ACE wanted to see X's back filled with a cool tattoo. Yeah, obviously not.