In which Stella and Joe find truth

"Ben!" the obnoxious blonde girl screeched, her hand quivering in front of her mouth.

Nick watched interestedly for a moment, as the pupils of her eyes widened when the adrenaline reached the tiny muscles. He assumed with quite some certainty that Kevin would be able to catch her, might she fall, so he mostly disconnected his attention from the scene. He released the door of the bedroom and closed it, without it making a sound, while he re-focussed on his calculations. The breeding plan in his head was starting to take shape…

Another, small, part of him tried to see reason in Joe's fondness of this Stella-woman, and paid attention. Thus far, it had drawn a blank and it irritated him. He wasn't particularly happy about unsolved puzzles, no matter how insignificant at this moment of time, but it was tolerable when only 2.4 percent of his capacity was wasted on the matter.

"You did that to me?" she said to Ben—who wouldn't look at her—genuinely outraged, "Why would you do that?"

Nick was surprised by the honest anger in her body language, as well as in her voice, but smiled when he realised he had underestimated her. It didn't happen often.
Her love for Joe overruled the affection she felt—or had once felt, he corrected himself—for the blonde loverboy. Interesting. She didn't even notice it herself, but it gave Nick a lot to work with.

Barely a second passed as he came to this conclusion.

"You believe us," Kevin said to the blonde, equally relieved. Nick guessed the tiny smile that crossed the girl's face had something to do with Joe's fondness of her. She was actually quite attractive, when she wasn't glaring.

"I trust you, remember?" She said, gently removing his tanned hands from her upper arms, "and though your story sounds like some bad science fiction story on the internet, I think I believe you. It's all too weird not to be real." She was tense, but truthful.

Smart too, impressive. A 3.6 percent of his attention might be worth it, she deserved some kind of upgrade, on more then just the technological level.

Kevin exhaled in relief, "Well, thank god."

Nick brushed past them, towards the stoic boy, expressing his gratitude to the girl with a tiny smile.
In some ways, she did remind him of Joe and he greatly appreciated that. He… missed, his mind supplied, his brother terribly.

"I believe you asked why?" he said to Stella.
He felt sorry for the betrayal on her face when she nodded, and threaded his fingers through the dirty blonde locks a little more harshly then he would've normally done.

And this was the boy responsible for Joe's abduction.

He pulled Ben's head up harshly.

"Let me introduce you to Benson Edmund Coler, son of the very man who abducted Kevin, son of the the man who kidnapped Joe. The man whose father is trying to use the N.I.C.H.O.L.A.S. project for his own evil goods," Nick said menacingly, the joints in his fingers itching to clench and crush.

Stella stared at Ben with hurt filled eyes. The only thing left of her mouth was a tightly pressed line and she watched stoically when Ben struggled against his bonds, a look of desperation on his face. She was calculating too, he realised.

"I've come to the conclusion that Ben here," Nick continued mercilessly, "was assigned to infiltrate in Joe's life when he stumbled into the project. He found his way through you, Joe's closest friend, and manipulated you. That's the reason for his unwavering attention for you in the last couple of weeks."

"He used me," Stella uttered, her voice stained. She knew Kevin had witnessed her progressing relationship with Ben and believed what he said. There was a brokenness in her voice, an emotion Nick's databases classified as heartbreak, or betrayal. This made him angry, beyond his own recognition for the feeling. Joe loved this girl; therefore, she shouldn't be harmed.

"When things didn't work out for young Mr. Coler, he was punished," the young humanoid gestured to the many bruises and half-healed cuts adorning the nineteen-year-old's body, "Because we certainly didn't do this, I assure you. Then, he was assigned a new mission."

Nick sensed, more then saw, Kevin's hand back on Stella's arm. His eyes were mainly on Coler Jr, but his mind was still busy with the events to come. He would never doubt his own abilities for a second, but there were too many unknown factors; Ben wouldn't talk.

Why did Coler need the key when he didn't have him? Why would he focus on Joe? How much had mother Macy told him about the details of the project?
He mused over every little detail, trying to fit them into place, while the drama in the room continued.

Kevin was trying to soothe Stella, but his words weren't relieving to her.

"Somewhere, he must've cared for you, because he left you behind when he took Joe," He said, misjudging her affections.

"You took Joe?" she whispered, outraged like Nick had presumed. Ben hadn't had much time with her; the little affection he'd won from her heart was to shallow to save him now.

Ben uttered a muffled cry, pulling at the bounds that restrained him. When his eyes finally met Stella's, they were stark blue and suffering.

Nick pulled the gag, an improvised one made out of a washcloth and some duct-tape, from Ben's mouth and watched his captive smack his mouth in search of nonexistent saliva.

"Ben," Stella pressed, clenching her jaw when Nick forced the blonde to look at her, "is it true? Are you… Is this real?"

She found the truth in his eyes, even when he refused to answer her, and released a pathetic little cry.

Nick confirmed his own suspicions with a nod; Stella hadn't truly believed their story, not until Ben—who had absolutely no reason to conspire against her with Kevin, Joe and himself—confirmed it.

"Now you know," he said regrettably, and he re-gagged Ben, who didn't even make an attempt to struggle.

"Now I know," She echoed, turning away from the scene with disgust on her face.

Somewhere in the living room, a familiar bark alerted all them. Kevin's head turned towards the sound, but Nick only stiffened slightly, tuning his hearing-sensors to listen further.
A car was turning the corner; they had very little time.

"Quite the remarkable dog you have," He noted dryly, when Elvis raced into the room. The dog pressed his wet nose against Kevin's knee and whined anxiously.

"What's up, boy?" Kevin questioned, crouching down. He didn't notice Nick untying Ben from the chair he'd been seated in.

Nick knew his brother's open mind allowed him to see things in a different light then most humans. Where others would've ignored the dog, Kevin listened.

Nick answered though, for he did doubt the dog's ability to form coherent human sentences.
"We have to get out of here," he hissed, swinging Ben over his shoulder, and ignoring the muffled protest. He anxiously made his way to the bedroom door.

"Our parents are home," Kevin filled in the blank.
He jumped to action immediately, with Stella in his trail only mere seconds later. Tom and Sandy had come home earlier then Nick had anticipated, they must have altered their plans, and though their bedroom was more then sufficient as a temporary prison, it wasn't a handy escape route.

"Stella," he addressed the blonde, "please take Elvis with you, his leash is upstairs, if I'm not mistaken."
She nodded and he saw her hoping for cooperation from the animal. He hoped for the same and immediately decided he didn't like the uncertainty of hope.

"Kevin, take the lead," He ordered, "We'll use the fire-escape."

He opened the door for them and took tail-position as they ran for it, defensive instincts kicking in, but well under control. He didn't want a repeat of last night's episode.

The door opened when they'd only made it halfway up the stairs and Nick knew they would be able to see his feet disappear; feet they didn't know.

"Hurry," He hissed, practically lunging upstairs, and he shot through the door mere milliseconds after Kevin, who pressed it closed.

Nick easily lifted Ben of his shoulders and motioned for Kevin to take him instead, before he approached the broken window. It was the only way towards the fire-escape.

He probably used more force then necessary, when pulled nearly the entire window frame out of the wall, but it would have to suffice.

Stella had found Elvis's leash and Nick was fairly sure they'd make it when they jumped through the hole in the wall first. There was only a chance of point-oh-four that she wouldn't trust them now.
Kevin and Ben were a whole different matter; Kevin was strong, but the Coler boy was a fully grown human male. Nick didn't have much experience with them, but he knew they were heavy. Very heavy; especially when they were muscled.
The offer of switching again when he saw Kevin struggle down the ladder had almost left his lips when a soft, startled gasp drew his attention.

He jump turned around, feeling his defensive mechanisms kick in, but refusing to let them activate fully; he'd learned his lesson.
Everything in him felt like it deflated—a very scary feeling, might he add—when he saw who was standing in the doorstep.

Sandy Lucas; the mother to his DNA.

It took all his technological restraint to stay where he was. He took in her tousled reddish-brown hair and panicked eyes and wanted nothing more then to comfort her.
She'd only seen him once; he'd been introduced as a friend of Joe's. She'd left for a nightly party/convention with her husband somewhere between his arrival and Stella's interruption.
She came home to a partially destroyed house, with none of her beloved son's in sight and him standing in the middle of the wreckage. Not to mention next to partially dried pools of blood. Comforting her was the least favourable option here.

Identical brown eyes stared into each other for a second before Sandy Lucas started to scream. It tore through his body like laser beams.

Nick was out of the window in a flash, where he experienced an emotion alike to the one he'd felt when he lost Joe.
He realised that, despite the genes they shared, she would never know he was—in theory—partially her son.
And she shouldn't ever know. All he brought to those he loved was pain.

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He'd thought the sterile white had been a assault to his eyes, and would've traded it for anything. Some kind of colour, some kind of flaw in the perfect, broken white.
He would've traded it for anything, anything, except this unnatural, painfully bright, blue light. It made his eyes squint and his muscles tense and his head ache like Stella's safety-pins were shoved into the skull.
More then that, it made him remember the soft, pulsing blue of Nick's insides.

This was different, wrong, and he closed his eyes to keep it out. He turned his head from the sight Coler wanted him to see when they walked through the last pair of automatic doors.

He was pretty certain they weren't in the N.I.L. close to JONAS-street anymore.

Rough hands forced his head to straighten and Coler's voice spiked the want for knowledge.

"Watch, dear Joseph, my beloved creations. My guarantee for world-domination."

Joe opened his eyes and stared into the gigantic, misty hall—again, perfectly sterile-white—filled with familiar laboratory tables and tools, along with lab-coated scientists. To his horror, the source—or rather; sources—of the bright blue light were bodies. Naked bodies on the tables.
If he hadn't seen it before, this would've seriously freaked him out.

It still did, actually.

There were dozens of them. Hundreds, maybe. Silent and unmoving like corpses, computers buzzing next to them and attached to tubes and wires of all sizes and colours.

Humanoids.

Joe shivered, and not because of the chill that hung in the room.

Each one had one or two scientists moving around them or reading data from their attached machinery. The scientists feet were invisible, hidden from view by the white fog that drifted two feet from the ground.
Joe noticed the woman with the bun and the knitted eyebrows, the narrow man with the gigantic glasses and the one that had always been nagging Nick with needles. He recognised so many faces from Nick's testing-trial, all in his peripheral vision; he'd gotten quite good at that, lately.

For the first time, he wondered what Coler had told them. What did they think they were doing? Helping out with saving the world through Humanoids?
Joe failed to believe all of them were okay with the idea of destroying it.

"Magnificent, aren't they?" Coler asked him rhetorically.
His eyes behind his glasses flashed a similar kind of unnatural blue, Joe noticed and shuddered.

Joe didn't acknowledge him, like before, but Coler continued nonetheless, knowing his next sentence would startle the scraped, probably scarred for life, young man.

"You'll be pleased to hear that your blood, dear Joseph, is the key to this unstoppable army," Coler's hands, crossed behind his bag, squeezed the tip of his cane pleasedly when Joe's face, tired and submissive, twitched with interest.

Coler started walking through the aisles, surveying his precious new humanoids with smug, yet cold eyes. The seemingly broken boy was forced to follow him by the doctor slash bodyguard behind him.

"I see you haven't completely lost your curiosity. I will have to talk to Penny about that, but it pleases me for now," Coler spoke, swinging his cane like he owned the place.

Which he did, Joe reminded himself.

"You see, Joseph, you aren't the only one in your family with exceptional genes," he said and Joe turned his head towards him, only slightly; he didn't want to miss anything Coler said.

"Do you remember one of the first times you entered Dr. Misa's laboratory?" The CEO asked, expecting nothing but the stoic glance in return, "I believe it was the second, maybe third time you fainted."

Coler was most certainly underestimating him now, Joe realised, by the way he was so shamelessly taunting him freely.

"Dr. Misa, curious and caring as she is, was worried enough to thoroughly examine you when you were under and this involved a lab on your blood. Too curious for her own good, isn't she?"
Joe could say amen to that.

They walked further through the hall filled with humanoids, painfully similar to Nick as he was in the very beginning, though Joe doubted—for obvious reasons—that they were anything alike.

"Your 'Nick' wasn't the first humanoid Macy Misa created," Joe's head snapped up and he cursed himself for Coler's slightly surprised, but bemused expression as he watched him, "He was simply the first to survive the initial programming process."

Coler ran his hands over the exposed skin of some of the humanoids and Joe noticed the N.I.L. logo, Coler's logo, tattooed on their wrists. A cross with a circle.

"I only learned of this later, so she programmed him to her own tastes. Meaning she hardly programmed him at all. His flesh survived the technical assault not only because if the extraordinary advanced DNA we stole from your brother, but mainly because your blood, Joseph, runs through his veins."

Joe couldn't believe his ears. Nick was alive because of him? Nick lived because of his blood. Joe was a part of Nick.
Wow. Just… wow.

He didn't show his surprise, of course and Coler didn't need him to.

"We're not sure exactly how it works, though we will now that we have the source," Coler glanced at Joe again, "but as soon as it comes in contact with our humanoids, it seems to glue their genes together. It keeps it a whole, where our previous experiments simply fell apart. It allows us to program the technology within the biological tissue."

Throughout the man's story, they'd reached the end of the hall, where Coler halted their little party. He didn't say anything anymore and for a moment, Joe seriously feared for what was to come.

A door slightly to their right slid open and Joe swallowed inaudibly when Penny stepped arrogantly over the doorstep.

"Do you remember when my daughter interfered with Dr. Misa's pathetic excuse for a testing-sequence?"

Penny's attack, of course he remembered that. How could he not, it had knocked him out for hours too long, worrying his family again.

He winced as he remembered their worry for him over the course of all the weeks he'd been gone.
His parents hadn't questioned him, and neither had Kevin after their fight in the cafeteria, but he nearly lost Stella in the process.

And such great things he gained, Joe mused sarcastically in his own head as he stared into Penny's sneering face.

It was almost the same expression she'd worn that specific day Coler was referring to, he recalled.

Then he realised; if he'd been out for hours that day, then…

"It gave us the time to examine you again and draw a minimum of blood from you," Coler unconsciously added to his thoughts.

Joe stared fearfully at the gaping hole in the wall. Footsteps approached them. He could nearly smell what was going to happen.

"The samples we took from the Scandinavian exchange student and your little girlfriend grew fairly quickly, though slower then usual without Ms. Misa's information."

Coler meant Kevin's friend in the hospital and the pretty blonde girl Joe had saved, Joe realised with horror. Why hadn't he remembered them sooner? He could've known they were part of the project too, especially after he found out about Coler's… evilness.

At the time, he'd thought the assaults stopped because he told Coler about Penny's attack. He had forgotten about them altogether in the weeks afterwards, and when Kevin was released from the hospital—was there still contact between his older brother and his victim-friend?—all his time had been spent with Nick.

Joe fidgeted in guilt. He should've remembered; could've told Nick this before everything happened. It didn't matter that he'd believed Coler's story up until a few hours ago. It didn't matter that, at the time, there had been no reason for him to think of the accidents again.

But now that he'd seen Coler's real face, he regretted never having discussed this with Nick; he would've figured it out.

Kevin had been used to create Nick. That would only mean that Coler had used the DNA of the other two girls, combined with the little amount of Joe's blood, to create other ones.

And he wanted to conquer the world with them.

The man was seriously insane. Dangerous. With very advanced, dangerous weapons, ready at his fingertips.

Weapons that, at that very moment, stepped into their view.

They were tall, blonde and familiar looking females, and Joe swallowed as he realised what Coler was about to tell him.

"Joseph, let me introduce you to Kimmi Heart, Humanoid created from source 7.06; Anya Ülav," He extended his hand towards the white-blonde girl in puffy clothes, who giggled dramatically when she put her pink-tip-manicured hand into his, "And Fiona Skye, Humanoid created from source 7.07; Vanessa Page."

She humanoid that took his other hand was startlingly beautiful, with green eyes, rather then the pale grey of the other one and hair only a shade or so lighter then Penny's, who was standing behind her father.

"It's a shame, really; source 7.05 was pretty extraordinary and served us well, but look around you, Joseph," Coler said, smiling at his creations, "With them, I don't even need Nick Lucas anymore."

Joe swallowed as he turned around, acknowledging the fear housing in his chest as he surveyed the bodies, so many bodies, lying on the tables. They were motionless, but not for much longer.

Joe grasped the bandage on his left elbow and held in a frightened whimper. All of this thanks to his blood that allowed Coler to program the Humanoids to his own will. All these creations with so much potential, doomed to slavery. All thanks to his blood.

Angry tears jumped to his eyes when he realised these Humanoids, Nick's siblings in a way, would probably never know the freedom, the emotions, the life that Macy Misa had given Nick. They were held together, but also bound by his blood that filled their veins.
He wasn't even aware they had those.

All because of his…

No.

Joe gritted his teeth as he turned around to Coler, surprising the man by the fire that suddenly re-lit in his eyes. A burning hatred coursed through his body.
The Misa's had given them their bodies; their source's genes had given them life. Joe's blood was the connection between the two and Coler was the one that wanted to destroy that, their life, and use their bodies and take everything away from them.

He planned to use them to attack innocent people, to take over their civilisation and enslave even more lives, if Joe had interpreted him correctly. People like his parents, his brothers and his friends.
The thought alone enraged him.

And Joe swore, right then and there, that he would stop Coler, no matter what it would take. No matter how much it would cost him, he would put a stop to this and wipe that arrogant smile off his face once and for all.

Joe might have been pretty obvious to the world, but he stopped being that way a long time ago, thanks to the persons Coler had taken away from him. Thanks to Macy, to Stella, Kevin. Thanks to Nick.
He'd never truly hated anyone, never had any reason to, but he did now.

He hated the man with sandy brown hair and piercing blue eyes in front of him. He hated Robert Lincoln Coler more then he'd ever hated anyone.
And he would regret it.