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Mack stumbled into his apartment and ran right into his soulmate, "Vic?"
Victor Creed looked up from the couch he was sprawled out on. Seeing Mack, he sat up and patted his leg. Oh no, the last time he did that, he warned Mack that his daughter was going to die. The only reason Hope was alive is because Victor abducted her, she turned up a week later in New York with Mack's phone number stapled to her blanket. With a sigh, the mechanic sat down in the mutant’s lap. Victor wrapped his arms around his mate, "HYDRA lives in SHIELD." Before Mack could respond, he was out.
Waking up in Victor's truck with Hope in the backseat chatting the mutant up, Mack asked "What the-?"
Victor ignored him in favor of talking to Hope. Eventually they pulled up to Charles Xavier's School For Gifted Youngsters. Victor carried Hope in and went straight for the headmaster's office. A man in a wheelchair greeted them flanked by other staff members, Victor said "HYDRA's about to come out of the shadows."
One of the men, the least professional looking one, asked "And that kid's supposed to prove it?"
"No, your telepath reading my mind's supposed to prove I ain't lying." As he spoke, he looked right at the man in the wheelchair. Mack then heard a voice in his head, My name is Charles Xavier. I apologize for not introducing us but I had thought Mr. Creed would have explained the situation to you. Looking around, names popped into his head to go with faces. Charles pressed two fingers to his temple and everyone fell quiet. Hope was staring at the man with red sunglasses, Scott Summers, who smiled back.
When Charles dropped his hand, they all gave him expectant looks "Mr. Creed is most likely correct about the threat and seeing as HYDRA has taken over the defunct Weapon X program, this is indeed our problem. Agent Mackenzie holds no loyalties to HYDRA, I assure you."
"Is that why you wouldn't explain anything? Because you thought I was HYDRA?"
"No. HYDRA is in SHIELD, you work with SHIELD."
"You thought they might have bugged my place?" Victor nodded, he was a man of few words which Mack could usually appreciate. They were given a place in the guest house, which had two rooms.
Victor told Mack that night how he discovered HYDRA when they had targeted baby Hope for being a mutant. The next day, Sabretooth arranged a truce between the X-Men and the Brotherhood to deal with HYDRA. Magneto was as intense as Mack expected but he was also surprisingly polite. Finding out that his ex-wife had agreed to surrender Hope if she tested positive for the X-gene, that his daughter was sold out by her mother hurt more than briefly losing Hope had. Mack stayed away from New SHIELD when they became a legitimate intelligence agency dealing with the Enhanced, although Magneto and Professor Xavier both had a hand in New SHIELD's founding charter. Rather than join the rebuilt agency, Mack stayed at the school. He took over the auto club from Scott Summers and maintained the X-Men's equipment, learning all about Cerebro and the Danger Room from the man who built them. Life was good.