Sense8 AU
Easily in Touch
So over the last week, I’ve been marathoning all of Sense8. I have to say, I love the premise, and the way it was handled in that show, and I look forward to the finale. All of that said, the show inspired this AU which I’m going to say now will not be exactly the same. For one thing, the everyone is born at once thing I just can’t make work in the MCU, but I’ve found ways around that, so HERE WE GO. World details at the bottom.
Tony Stark is the same person he always was here, but because his life took a turn, everything is a little different. When he was 23, the Winter Soldier was free of his leash long enough to try a last-ditch escape maneuver that led to him waking his first cluster of kids, which just happened to be Tony’s. He was caught shortly after, before the child cluster could really understand what was going on, and that group had to find their way on their own. Bucky’s cluster consisted of Steve, as well as six of the commandos, most of whom, over the years, were convinced he was dead and his presence when he was able to get off the drugs and cryo were just echoes.
His child cluster is more conflicted given he created it when supposedly ‘dead’. Tony, at the very least, is always alert to these days, and has put no small amount of searching into trying to find their ‘parent’.
Tony’s cluster consists of Rhodey, Pepper, Bruce Banner, Clint Barton, Jane Foster, Stephen Strange, and Kevin Thompson aka Kilgrave (who in this world has his powers come from having his sensate ability overamplified to hell and back and tweaked to affect non-sensate which has a mind control effect. Sensate are immune to his abilities, even ones who aren’t active.)
Steve, upon being found and woken by SHIELD, is the parent of another Cluster Tony has a rather large amount of contact with, as they were activated in the middle of Steve panicking that everyone was dead. Steve, as a result of this, is actually much less unstable, as he has not been alone since this panicked bout of mental flailing.
That cluster consists of Natasha, Sam Wilson, Peter Quill, Hope Van Dyne, T’Challa, Helen Cho, Jemma Simmons, and Leopold Fitz. Suffice to say that Peter Quill was Not Expecting That.
And finally, Tony, after some of the events that made a mess of everything and led to an approximation of the MCU (Though things kind of went off the rails fairly quickly things like alien invasions and alien artifacts and seriously awkward misunderstandings still happen) Tony decided to try his hand at birthing his own group of Sensate. This was around 2014 for him.
This ended up consisting of Wanda (though that was rough at first), Pietro, Peter, Harley, Darcy, and Three others who were born between ‘93, when Darcy born, and 2001, when Harley was born. (Really, it’s prime unnamed character space)
The actual MCU on the other hand… Obadiah slipped through the cracks because he was a sensate too and Tony ended up leaning on him… and was still tricked by him. So things are the same, but different, and Tony was never dealing with his traumas alone, nor were anyone else from his cluster, which, hey, means Kevin never turned into a supervillain. Silver lining!
Now, the basics of how the AU works. Each cluster is of 8 people who are connected on a quasi-telepathic, empathic, and physical even over long distance sort of situation, who can feel each other’s pain typically even if they don’t want to if it’s bad enough, and if they reach out, can talk to each other without help across the world or even into space. It can’t be intercepted, but it can be stopped, and if you’re not conscious no one can reach you. People inside these clusters can let others in their group use their skills and can understand all languages one in their group can as that person can. The amount of intimacy is a doozy.
In this AU, instead of everyone being born at the same time, the births are still staggered for canon birthdays, but it’s an unbroken chain, wherein the older one isn’t born until the next one is existent in a pregnancy. Only unbroken chains can have their latent genes activated in this AU.
In person eye contact with people outside your 8 makes you able to speak to, and physically poke at, others outside your cluster. You can’t make them stop once you initiate that so that could suck if they’re an asshole.
In this AU the serum only works on people with the genes that let them be sensate. It’s why the Serum was largely a failure, and also extends to Extremis. Killian and Maya tried to overcome a genetic bias they didn’t know was there with Extremis, and it’s why they couldn’t get it to stabilize. It’s also why Tony could fix it.
Birthing a cluster, as it was never explained in the series, for the sake of this AU works as such: The person ‘birthing’ actively reaches out into a spot in their mind that hums with ‘potential’ and tugs on it. This, in turn, sends out a signal to 8 people not of their choosing, all over the world, and immediately forges a brand new connection between them and those people, while imprinting some of who they are onto those people, thus it being a parent style bond, before those people fight through the process of acclimating to each other. The parent is supposed to help smooth this out and make the whole thing less scary.
Ideally, everyone gets along, but it doesn’t always work that way, and the bond in no way changes the personalities of anyone involved. If someone is a HYDRA asshole, then their cluster has to figure out how to deal with that.
Chemicals can be used to block connections as well as unconsciousness, and in this AU rather than being a separate species, the sensate are more of a widespread mutation, so to speak, and should someone bring mutants into the mix, those mutants could also be this, as a cross of genetics. Either way, Sensate folks are kind of a secret handled with care while political ones have tried to work out how to make it so that they could safely come out of hiding.