Professor George Martin stood in his office, part of his room really, his bed was over there. He looked around at the objects he had accumulated in this life, or more accurately in this reinvention of himself. Books, hundreds of them lining his bookcases and spilling onto the floor. New, old, extremely rare. He had read them all and valued them.
"They're much too heavy," he said to himself, "I'll have to leave them."
His fine oaken desk, used by Heisenberg back in World War 2. The desk where a man dreamed of the Uncertainty Principle and made a choice to sabotage the work of the Nazi nuclear weapon project. A lesson he planned on never forgetting. His hand ran along the smooth edges of it. "Obviously you can't come, but I'll return for you." He patted his desk as if to comfort it.
Journals and papers of his students were stacked next to it. As his gaze fell upon them he smiled at them. A condescending half-smile that still held amusement. He wasted no words on the homework.
There next to the window was an old grandfather clock, polished until it shone. He had found it in Hitler's bunker and had taken it to a small family in France. He had saved their son's life some time before when his platoon had marched across the country. They held onto it for him. In the glass face of the clock he had etched the names of his lost squad-mates in Germany, those Avengers who have fallen, and the X-men that have been lost. As he saw the names his hands balled into fists and his jaw clenched. "More too come... There are always more to come."
He walked to his window where his already packed bag lay next to his trusty M1-Garand, Sophia. She was named after a french revolution girl he had fallen for during the war. She made bullets in the basement of a barn outside of Lyon. After the war was over he had gone to see her, but the barn had been burned and he never found hide nor hair of her. His gun, she had killed Germans, lynchers, tyrants, corrupt police, and even a super-villain. She's been with him for the longest of any of his possessions... and now with the death of Erik, any of his friends as well. His brow wrinkled at that. He took two quick breaths to calm himself. Anger was not going to help anyone.
He turned to look at his room as a whole and took a deep breath. At the calm stillness at the life he had built here, with the X-men. He smiled a sad smile to himself, and enjoyed what he could of his memories before they were made bitter with the deaths of his friends, the horrors of war, and the actions he will soon take. He hoped that moment would last forever, that the war would never start, that he could just stand here until the end of time. He realized later in his life, that that moment would have been it. Before he had to do what had been needed, before the war, and before that battle.
That had been his perfect moment to die.
The moment came. Then moment passed and the professor let out his breath.
He turned to his window again and pulled up Sophia. Her soft sandalwood felt good in the hand and against his cheek. He checked her sights. Still good. He knelt and focused on the light around him. There was too much information at the start, there always is, he quickly focused it down into the visible spectrum. Little flowed in his room with the lights off and the curtains drawn. He created a distortion pattern over the window. At this range it mattered little to him he could see fine out of it, but from a distance it would appear that there was only a dark window there, much like the advertisements over windows of buses.
He pulled his bulky old reliable radio and switched it on.
"Cat, I'm seeing seven SUV's probably more at the gate, one no two tanks, and there are helicopters circling the school. Probably three but that might not be accurate. I'd guess about 200 men easy, and those are only the vehicles i can see. Do you copy? Over." A stylized burst of static set to the beat of 'shave and a haircut' indicated that she had.
He chambered his first round and began to search for snipers. Sophia can't do much against modern armor or even most body armor without custom bullets of which he currently had eight. But she can kill, or at least scare the pants off of, a sniper. His eyes were fixed on a single position in the forest looking for any motion that didn't mesh with the wind. Holding for ten seconds he saw three atypical motions.
"Cat, they have snipers as well. Be careful." Then his eyes moved to the next part of the woods. Three more snipers. Then the next until he had identified 21 potential snipers. That's when the enemy burst through the gate.
Chaos reigned down on the battlefield, but Prism made only a mild note of it. It wasn't his problem, yet. He needed to deal with the threat that most of the ground team can't.
He held his breath. He aimed at the closest sniper and fired. His bullet flew through the air and into the trees. He pulled down to compensate for recoil and fired again. He swung to the next target and fired twice. He repeated down the line. After every four enemies he reloaded his gun from the stack of ammo he had on his windowsill. After twenty seconds and four clips and ten either scarred or dead snipers the room next to his exploded.
A loud rush of noise, he was picked up and slammed against the wall, and then silence. He shook his head to clear it. He had landed in the pile of homework next to his desk. The wall between his room and Allen's was gone loose wood chips were strewn all over his carpet. Prism had a large piece hit his head and was bleeding from his forehead. He couldn't focus. After a second he started moving, right when the second shell went off in his room.
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He doesn't remember the rest of the fight or most of the drive down to Gambit's place. He was told that he had been pulled out of the rubble when people went looking for him and he had been messed up bad. But he was still alive. His left arm had been broken at the forearm in three different spots. Several lacerations from the shrapnel on his face and his clothes were torn.
And apparently there was a concussion that Ulric had missed. They let him drive in this state... He chuckled he had probably argued to let him drive on his own, safer that way. Oh well. He'll try to be careful for the next few weeks here down at Remey's place.
He pulled up to the mansion on his WW2 motorcycle with sidecar a few hours after the others had arrived.
He parked behind the X-calade and limped up to the door. Apparently his leg wasn't feeling so well either. He came through the door and asked where he could find Ulric, he needed some attention.