Chapter 137
It was around five in the afternoon back at the Avengers compound as we stepped between time zones, the sun creeping slowly toward the horizon. I’d opened a portal on the main lawn in my usual place and, as everyone finished filtering through, I looked around, surveying the damage from the Eternals’ little visit.
Overall, it didn’t seem that bad. The lawn was utterly wrecked, of course. But the only real damage to the main building was up at one of the topmost corners, where some windows had been shattered and a chunk a couple of metres across had been clipped off by one of Ikaris’s stray eye beams. Off to the side, the second floor of the science lab had a gaping hole where Shuri and Carol had burst out.
Tony and Shuri were the last ones through, guiding a bulky containment unit with the Hulk’s body stored away inside. The sorcerers had kept the barriers in place cordoning off the area he’d died in—more work would still need to be done to fully decontaminate it and remove every trace of his blood, but it was safe enough for now.
Carol had returned to the Hoopty. She wanted to be alone for a little while and had the excuse that she needed to start reorganising things to make room for her incoming passengers. Kingo had asked to be returned to Mumbai so he could make proper funeral preparations for Karun. The sorcerers had obliged, though Tony had insisted on fitting him with a tracking monitor. I didn’t really think it was necessary at this point—the Bollywood star had seemed like a bit of a mess, and it wasn’t like there was that much he could do on his own even if he’d wanted to—but there was no point in arguing. The rest of the Eternals had remained at Kamar-taj to mourn their losses and cremate the remains.
It was hard for me to feel much sympathy for Ikaris or Druig, but Phastos… It wasn’t like he had been that bad a person. In the original timeline, he’d managed to push past his despair and find happiness. Love. A family. And none of that would happen now, thanks to me. I couldn’t even remember what the names of his husband or son had been, but it kinda felt a little like I’d wrecked their lives, too, by taking his. And this one wasn’t even at a remove—Phastos’s blood was literally on my hands. I kept replaying it in my head. It hadn’t even felt like I’d been physically present at the time. Like I was watching it on a screen, happening to someone else. Even so, I could still remember how it had felt when my blade had gone through his throat. The blood. The way his flesh had come apart when I’d twisted and wrenched the spear to the side…
The march to the science lab felt like a funeral procession. The other original Avengers fell into step beside the containment unit like pallbearers, the rest of us trailing a little bit behind as we made our way into the building, picking our way carefully through the broken glass on the path. The main gamma lab was on the second floor and we gathered there silently as Tony and Shuri took the containment unit up via the goods lift and guided it into the large, walk-in storage vault that was used to secure all of their dangerous samples.
Once that was done and they’d rejoined the rest of the group, Steve looked over at Maria. “We need to find out what the state of play is. Whether there’s any response being mobilised for what happened here or in Kathmandu, if we need to tell anyone to stand down…”
Maria nodded. “I’ll follow up with Rhodey. I was keeping in touch with him while everything was happening.” Taking out her phone, she tapped at the screen a couple of times, then held it up in front of her as she started a video call.
A few rings later, Rhodey appeared on the other side. “Hey, Maria, what’s up?” His tone was remarkably unconcerned, and sat oddly in the semi-awkward, subdued mood that had settled over the rest of us.
Maria gave him a tight smile. “Hey, can you give us an update?”
“An update on…?”
She paused, exchanging a quick glance with a few of the others before responding. “Kathmandu?”
“Oh,” Rhodey shrugged. “I mean, yeah, there’s probably going to be some fallout to wrangle, but I don’t think there’s anything there the Avengers would need to look into. The IAF touched base with us, initial reports are three Sukhoi and a handful of choppers downed. Looks like all the flight crews ejected fine, though. No loss of life. Not great optics-wise, but that solar event basically fried all their systems. I don’t think it’s something that could have been predicted. Just a freak accident.”
Tony had been leaning up against a wall, looking… well, looking about as great as the rest of us, but Rhodey’s words seemed to shake him out of it a bit. He frowned, looking over at Steve as he mouthed the words ‘solar event?’. Straightening up, he moved in to hover over Maria’s shoulder. “Hey, bud,” he said, unable to keep the tiredness from his voice. “From what I saw, there looked like a lot of property damage? I might make a call and get some Stark Foundation boots on the ground to help with the cleanup.”
“Oh?” Rhodey seemed a little surprised. “Yeah, sure, I guess—I doubt Nepal will turn the assistance away. Good press for the Avengers, too. Makes sense.”
“Yeah,” Tony responded curtly, already pulling back out of frame. He took out his own phone and started tapping at the screen.
“What about… what happened at the compound?” Maria asked.
Rhodey sounded confused. “Something happened at the compound?”
Maria looked at Steve, then at Sterns. The two men looked at each other, then simultaneously shook their heads.
“Nothing to worry about for now,” Maria said.
“Uh, okay?”
“Let us know if anything else comes up.”
“Will do.”
Maria hung up the call. Tony stared at his phone for a few more seconds, then flicked it toward a monitor attached to the wall next to him. The screen turned on, lighting up with a video report.
“—joint military exercise in Nepal ended in a mid-air disaster,” a female reporter was saying. “The Indian Ministry of Defence has confirmed that several IAF aircraft were downed just outside Kathmandu before a planned training run with the Nepali Air Service. Officials are blaming today’s unexpected solar event for massive electrical interference, which reportedly bypassed safety protocols and triggered an unintentional discharge of weapons systems.” The screen cut to street-level footage showing some of the damage to the area around Kamar-taj, with some first responders picking through the wreckage. “While several aircraft went down in the outskirts of Kathmandu, sparking widespread panic, according to local authorities there have been no reported fatalities. Sixteen people are being treated for injuries.”
Tony tapped his phone again and the video feed paused. There was a brief moment of quiet as everyone digested that.
“This really doesn’t sit well with me,” Steve said eventually.
Sam nodded. “Agreed.”
“Yeah, well, it’s done,” Clint said with a shrug. “Not much else we can do about it, now.”
A few moments of silence stretched out before Steve straightened and looked around the room at everyone. “Alright, people,” he said, raising his voice slightly to make sure everyone was listening. “It’s been a long couple of days and everyone’s running on empty. There’s still a lot we’re going to need to work through, but there aren’t any imminent threats and it looks like everything’s under control for the moment. Stay on site, but I want everyone to take a breath. Twelve hours of relaxation time—Captain’s orders. Clean yourselves up. Eat. Get some real sleep, if you can.” He looked meaningfully over at Tony. “That goes for everyone. I mean it.”
Tony folded his arms a little defensively in front of his chest, hands tucked into his armpits, but he gave Steve a grudging nod.
“We’re all going to need clearer heads to talk through what comes next,” Steve added. “We’ll reconvene first thing in the morning—oh six hundred—and we’ll work out what to do about… everything.”
“Alright. Well, I’m a wreck,” Sam said, stretching his arms with a wince. He’d been healed up by Ajak like the rest of us, but he did still look pretty rough, his suit torn up and covered in scorch marks. “I’m gonna go find my bed and collapse face-first in it.”
Shuri left pretty much immediately, too, giving only a slight bob of her head in acknowledgement, a pensive expression on her face. Maria frowned briefly before hurrying out—through the glass wall, I saw her catch up to the Wakandan princess. They started speaking in low tones as they vanished from view. Sterns and Darcy filtered out after them, which felt like an odd pairing, but they were both staying in the guest quarters at the moment.
Steve’s shoulders sagged slightly as some of the tension he’d been holding left him. “I think I’m gonna go down to the river. Get some air.”
“Want some company?” Nat asked.
“Yeah, why not?” He nodded, then looked at the rest of us askance.
Clint gave him a small nod. Pietro glanced at me and I nodded as well.
Tony made a little bit of a face, waving a hand in a vague, dismissive gesture. “I’m just gonna…”
“Tony…” Steve said warningly.
“Yeah, I know, I know. I’ll rest up. Pinky promise. Just gotta check a few things first. See if I can get FRIDAY back online.”
Steve held his gaze for a few seconds, then nodded. “Okay. You should check in with Pepper. Say hi from me.”
“Yeah,” he said, his tone disinterested. Turning away from us, he picked up a translucent tablet from one of the nearby tables and started to tap away at the screen.
Steve’s gaze lingered on Tony’s back for a moment, then he caught Nat’s eye and gestured toward the door. Together, the small group of us that remained—Steve, Clint, Natasha, Pietro and me—headed downstairs and out of the building, turning to follow the path as it traced around the riverside edge of the compound. We walked in relative silence, everyone either too tired or too lost in their own thoughts to say much of anything.
It took us a couple of minutes to arrive at our destination: a short gangway leading out to a floating wooden pontoon. Square-framed lanterns perched at each of the platform’s four corners to light the space, already glowing with a soft white. A simple canvas marquee covered most of it, with several low wooden benches arranged in a three-quarter circle around a low metal brazier in the middle. A pair of sunlounges sat at the far side, angled toward the water.
Most of us sat down on the benches, with Clint wandering over to the far edge of the platform. He stood there for a moment and held his hand out in front of him, flexing his fingers as he stared at them.
“It’s… not ‘funny’. I dunno what the right word is,” I said softly as I sat down next to Nat, pressing my leg up against hers. “I’ve never come down here myself before, to this spot. But I saw it once in my visions. He was here, with everyone else, and they were mourning you.”
“It’s a good spot,” Nat said softly.
Her expression wasn’t sitting right with me. She looked sad, but it didn’t seem like it was enough, somehow. Something was telling me she was putting up a front. A mask, to conceal the full extent of how she was feeling right now, hiding away just how much Bruce’s death hurt.
Fuck.
Steve let out a sigh. “I’d prefer it if we didn’t need a go-to spot for this.”
“I don’t know.” Nat shrugged. “I think it’s kind of nice.”
A minute or two passed in silence.
“Did he have any other family? Apart from the lawyer cousin?” Pietro asked quietly, looking in my direction.
I blinked, staring blankly back at him. For a moment, I didn’t even understand why he would ask me over anyone else here—I’d hardly known the guy, after all. But, of course, there were my ‘visions’.
Nat put her hand on my knee when I didn’t respond right away. “He has a couple of other cousins, but no one else he was really close to,” she said, shaking her head. “No siblings. His parents passed away a while back. He had… issues with his dad.”
Everyone fell silent again.
After a little bit, I leaned into Natasha, touching my temple to hers. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see her lips twitch in a faint, half-hearted smile. Her hand was still on my knee, so I put mine over it and gave it a cautious squeeze. “You doing okay?”
“Yeah.” Again, there was just something about the way she said it. Nat was a phenomenal actress, but I’d spent far too much time with the real her in unguarded moments to not be able to pick up on the fact that, under the surface, she was struggling. “Just processing, is all. What about you? How are you holding up?”
…Was this my fault, too? Was Nat hiding how much this was affecting her because she didn’t want me to feel bad?
“I’m fine,” I lied back. “I didn’t really know him that well. I just… I wish there was something I could do to make this easier for you.” Lifting my free hand, I let a few wisps of chaos magic play across my fingertips. “I’ve got so much power, but it’s all kind of useless here. Is there anything you want? Anything I can do?”
She let out a soft huff of amusement, toying with my fingers for a moment. “What I need, I think, is a week in a sensory deprivation tank. But I’d settle for a coffee?”
“At six pm?” I asked, a little teasingly, then nodded. “I can do coffee.”
“I could do a coffee?” Clint ventured from off to the side, looking hopefully over at us.
I snorted. “Yeah, okay.” As I stood up, I glanced meaningfully toward Steve and Pietro.
“Tea?” Steve asked.
“Sure.”
Pietro gave a small shrug. “Decaf.”
“Alright.” I didn’t need to ask for any clarifications—by this point, I was pretty familiar with how everyone took their beverages of choice. “I’ll be back in a sec.”
My brother stood up as I slipped my sling ring out of my pocket and onto my fingers. “Need a hand?”
I waved him off. “Nah, it’s okay. I’ve got it.”
He shot me a little bit of a sceptical look, but sat back down as I spun a portal into being with a brief gesture, the main building’s common room on the other side. Glancing briefly back at Nat—she had shifted slightly and was staring out over the water—I stepped through the gateway, then dismissed it.
The lights were already on. I wasn’t actually sure if they’d been on the whole time, or if they were on a timer or sensor, or if someone else had already come through here and left them on, but—at least when standing in the lounge, facing toward the kitchen—you could easily be fooled into thinking the space had been essentially untouched. That illusion, of course, was shattered the moment you turned around. At the opposite end of the space, cool evening air was filtering in from the broken windows overlooking the lawn and the empty space where a chunk had been carved from the corner of the roof.
Tearing my eyes away from the damage, I moved past the island into the kitchen and started getting things ready—switching on the coffee machine and kettle, retrieving a set of mugs from the cabinet and lining them up on the island countertop, then opening the fridge in search of milk.
A pair of red and white cartons were sitting in the door. One was already open and half empty, so I grabbed it, double-checking the expiry date with a quick glance. I closed the fridge and went to put the carton next to the mugs—not really paying as much attention as I should. The bottom of the carton caught on the edge of the counter and it slipped out of my hand.
I locked up, hand frozen in place, my eyes snapping back as the paperboard container hit the ground, the spout opening and contents glugging out all over the floor. I didn’t move. It felt like I couldn’t. Heat rushed to my face, my vision blurring slightly as I stared at the fallen carton. The milk spread out in an expanding puddle as it finished emptying itself.
After a few long seconds, I squeezed my hands into trembling fists, then forced them to relax again. Mechanically, I retrieved a dishcloth from where it was hanging beside the sink. I reached down, picked up the nearly empty carton, wiped it off, then placed it on the counter before getting down on my knees and using the cloth to sop up some of the milk. It was too much. The dishcloth soaked completely through, leaving a streaky bit of mess still on the floor as I moved back to the sink, turning on the tap to rinse the dishcloth.
I blinked, trying to clear my eyes a little, and felt a tear trickle into the crease between my nose and cheek. My breathing was ragged. I tried to wring out the cloth, but my hands were shaking as I squeezed it, my knuckles turning white.
I dropped the cloth.
My fist lashed out, punching a hole clear through the wall above the sink with a crunch. I wasn’t thinking. Wasn’t really choosing to do it. It was all just… everything felt like so much, all at once, for no real reason. My shoulders shuddered and I let out a sob, a ragged, ugly noise, as I turned around. My hand whipped out as I moved, fingers clawing at the edge of the microwave on the counter next to me for a moment as I flung it from its perch, sending it crashing to the floor.
I took a stumbling step forward and brought a pair of clenched fists down on the kitchen island as hard as I could, wisps of glimmering red energy rippling out from the impacts as the marble countertop cracked. My knees felt weak and I staggered, almost completely collapsing down onto it as a scream of frustration and rage and grief tore its way out of my throat. A flick of my arm to the side swept the row of mugs I’d laid out flying across the room, smashing them to bits against the wall.
I raised my head, tears streaming down my face, and screamed again. A blast of chaos magic sent one of the couches flying across the space, smashing the remainder of the broken window frames as it sailed outside and dropped out of sight to the lawn below. More glimmers of red started to light up around the room, lifting other pieces of furniture into the air.
Slender arms went around me from behind, holding on tightly, Eliza’s whispered voice suddenly in my ear. “It’s okay, breathe, come on. Calm.” Her presence helped, somehow, and I was too distraught to even remind myself that she wasn’t real. Sagging back against her, I shuddered in her embrace as she continued to murmur reassurances. My breath came in sharp, ragged gasps as I fought to try to get my emotions back under control.
“Wanda?”
My head whipped to the side and I froze, heart hammering in my chest. Sam was standing at the end of the corridor leading to the living quarters.
My face flushed hot again, guilt and shame burning my cheeks, mingling with the muddle of other emotions struggling to let themselves be heard. The wisps of chaos magic flickered out, levitating furniture settling back down on the ground, as I straightened up. Eliza was gone again, disappearing as quickly as she’d come. The sudden absence made me put my arms around myself self-consciously, my eyes dropping to the ground. To the remaining little bit of milk I hadn’t finished cleaning up.
“Hey,” Sam said, his tone gentle as he took a couple of steps toward me. “You’re alright. It’s been a rough day for everybody. We can clean this up.”
“I, uh…” I sniffed, flicking a hand vaguely toward the floor. “I spilled the milk.”
Sam reached the edge of the kitchen island and leaned against it, waiting for a brief moment as I reached up and scrubbed at the corners of my eyes. “You know, this one time,” he said casually, “I had a guy in my support group throw a chair across the room because he dropped his keys. But it wasn’t the keys. It wasn’t the milk. We just don’t get to choose what the last straw is.”
“It’s the spilling.” I swallowed, a fresh wave of hot tears welled up in the corners of my eyes. “Why can’t I stop spilling milk?” I asked plaintively, words tumbling out from between trembling lips.
Sam was quiet again for a moment, maybe waiting to see if I was going to say anything else, then he shrugged. “You’ve got it in your head that you’re responsible for saving the whole world. It’s too much. Eventually, a person reaches their limit.”
“It’s not just this one time, though, Sam. Everything I do is wrong. Always. I want to make things better, but I don’t know how to be what I need to be to make that happen.” Tears were streaming down my face, tracking wet paths down to my chin. “Every time I try to change something? It’s wrong. I try to keep something the same? It’s wrong. I try to fix things and I just keep making them worse! No matter what I do, I lose, and I… I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”
“This wasn’t your fault,” Sam told me, his voice firm. “None of it was. I know it may feel that way—and okay, you saw the future. But that doesn’t mean that every little thing that happens happens because of you. You’re still just one person. You don’t have all the answers, not even if you got to peek ahead. No one does. You can’t control everything. And that’s okay.”
“I was supposed to be…” I trailed off, then deflated with a hot huff of air. He let me take a moment and, when I spoke again, my voice was quiet. Small. “Everyone has this idea in their head of who they think they are, right? Or what they want to be. But what you actually are is the sum of your actions. And I am stuck, here, between this person I want to be—someone who makes things better—and the reality. All this evidence that adds up to me being… something else.”
“Wanda…”
“I feel like I’m cursed. That everything I ever do is doomed to fail and break and hurt everyone around me,” I said, my voice shaking. “Every moment of peace, every second of happiness, it’s all just a countdown to the next time I fuck things up, because that’s just what I do. That’s what always happens.”
“You can do every single thing right and still lose. People might get hurt, but that’s not on you. It’s not a reflection of your worth—we just live in a messy world.”
“It isn’t fair,” I muttered. Even as I said the words, I felt another spike of shame at how childish they sounded.
“It’s not. But what you do have control over is deciding what that means to you. How you take that, learn from it, and keep trying to do better, one day at a time.”
I was quiet for a long moment. “I appreciate the pep talk,” I said eventually, wiping my face with the back of my hand again. “But I need to… I need to clean this up and finish what I was doing. Sorry. My feelings aren’t really important right now—I need to look after Natasha. Make sure she’s okay.”
Sam shot me a sympathetic look. “I get it, but… you can’t save someone else if you’re drowning, too.”
“Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do,” I told him, forcing a half-hearted smile onto my face.
“Can I give you a hand, at least?”
I looked at him, then looked at the mess I’d made. “…Sure. Thanks.”
--
I lurched upwards with a gasp, my mind suddenly snapping back into full consciousness as I sat bolt upright in bed, heart slamming frantically against my ribcage.
Unsurprisingly, the sudden movement woke Natasha as well. She quickly hauled herself up into a sitting position next to me, one hand rubbing at my bare arm. “Hey, hey, you’re okay, it’s okay,” she murmured softly. “Just a dream. Whatever it was, it was just a dream.”
It wasn’t a dream.
It was… something. I didn’t know what. But there was a heavy, almost suffocating weight in the middle of my chest. A presence of some kind. My head turned almost involuntarily, my eyes snapping to a spot on the wall in the near pitch-blackness, as if I could see through to the other side. My closest comparison point was the connection that Thena had forged with me, but it wasn’t a good one because this was different. My lips moved soundlessly for a moment—I couldn’t find the words to articulate it. And whatever it was, it was fading fast, dissipating even as I tried to focus and get a better handle on what it even was. Still, I knew exactly where it was pointing. Where it had originated from.
“Bruce,” I said urgently, my breath short and shallow. “There’s something—” I cut myself off, shaking my head to try to clear it as I practically jumped out of bed. My hand fumbled on the bedside table for a moment before I successfully scooped up my sling ring and slipped it on over my fingers.
Nat was up in a flash as well, reaching out an unsure hand to me as I heedlessly spun up a portal. Thin sparks of red came together to reveal the gamma lab on the other side and I darted through. My girlfriend was right on my heels as I swept across the resin flooring to the secure storage vault, the lights clicking on around me as my hands went to touch the cool steel of the door.
“FRIDAY?” I called out breathlessly. “If you’re there—”
The door opened before I’d even finished my sentence and I immediately heard a muffled voice coming from inside the containment unit.
“What?” Nat breathed.
I darted into the room, fingers flying desperately along the little touchscreen display on the side of the unit for a moment. “How—How do I?”
Nat stepped in, shifting me out of the way with her hand. Three quick taps, and the top of the unit separated and slid open.
I stopped breathing for a moment, utterly shell-shocked, my pulse hammering in my ears.
Bruce sat up from inside the containment unit, looking around with a scattered expression on his face. He looked fully intact, his hairy chest miraculously hole-free. “Nat?” He sounded as confused as he looked. His eyes went from Natasha to me and widened slightly. “Er, Wanda? What…? What’s going on?”
“Bruce?” Nat’s voice was a little shaky, raw shock and disbelief painted across her face. She blinked, then reached for him, taking him by the hand to help him out from inside the unit.
I just stared.
Bruce Banner. And he was alive, standing there awkwardly in the ragged remains of his dumb purple stretchy pants.
The moment his bare feet touched the floor, an animalistic whine burst from my lips and I threw myself forward, my arms wrapping around him as I immediately broke down into great, raw, ugly sobs. A rush of heat burned my face, tears flowing freely as I tried to say something—I wasn’t even sure what—but no coherent words made it out.
Natasha’s arms went around us both, and we stood like that for a handful of seconds, squeezing tightly. I managed to lift my head slightly, my vision just barely clear enough to make out Natasha as she looked at me and smiled. Her eyes were red and shiny, too, though she hadn’t broken down into a blubbering mess the same way I had.
“Um. Wanda?” Bruce said, a little awkwardly. “…Could you maybe put a shirt on? Please?”
I realised that he was standing completely rigid, not returning the hug at all. Blinking away the tears in my eyes, I reluctantly prised my arms off of him and pulled away, Nat letting go of us at the same time. As I stepped back, I could see that Bruce was very pointedly averting his eyes from me, looking toward the ceiling.
I looked down at myself.
Oh.
Nat, at least, slept with a light cami on along with her underwear. I, on the other hand, did not.
I replayed the last few seconds in my head, recalling the sheer amount of skin-on-skin contact that had just occurred without me even really registering it, and flushed slightly as I scrubbed at my face with the back of my hand. “Right, sorry, I…” I trailed off, not even really sure what to say. Abandoning the failed attempt at an apology and explanation, I hurriedly spun up another portal and reached through to the walk-in wardrobe in Natasha’s apartment in the city, grabbing a random top to cover myself with.
As I pulled it on over my head, Nat shook her head slowly. “This doesn’t make any sense,” she said quietly. “You were dead.”
Bruce’s eyes flicked down for a brief instant, checking it was safe for him to look away from the ceiling, before he relaxed a bit. “…I was?”
“You were,” I said. “You definitely were. They checked.”
“I guess I got better? Did we win?”
“What do you remember?” Nat asked. The three of us slowly moved out of the secure storage vault and back into the gamma lab proper as we talked.
“I mean, just fragments. Images. Like always. But…” Bruce trailed off, sitting down on a stool in front of one of the tables of scientific equipment that ran the length of the room. “I dunno. There was something. Like a light. A green light, shining through—”
“A door,” I finished his sentence, an apprehensive expression on my face.
“Yeah,” he said, looking a little surprised. “A green door. Below me. Below everything, somehow. How’d you…?”
“I saw it, too,” I said slowly, trying to think back and remember exactly what I’d seen, but the already-vague recollection was already slipping from my consciousness. “I had some sort of dream, I don’t really remember, but… when I woke up, it led me here.”
Hurried footsteps coming from the corridor outside drew my attention. A moment later, Shuri burst into view, wearing a simple, sleeveless black top and matching form-fitting shorts. She stopped in her tracks, eyes wide with shock as she stared through the glass wall of the lab at the three of us. Her lips moved soundlessly for a second, then the door barely had time to slide open as she burst into the room. “Dr Banner?!” she said breathlessly, her voice laden with emotion. “But… that’s not…”
Almost immediately on her heels, another sleepwear-clad figure appeared in the corridor. Samuel Sterns stared through the glass, an unreadable expression on his face, as he slowed from a jog into a more normal walking speed. He was breathing heavily, his eyes locked directly on Bruce, as he made his way to the door and joined the rest of us inside.
“You saw it, didn’t you?” he demanded, something almost hungry in his voice as he stepped across the threshold. “The door. The green door.”
--
Emil Blonsky surged awake, the transformation already taking hold before he had a chance to even be fully conscious of what was going on. Though he was helpless to stop the sudden, systemic mutiny, he flopped sideways off his bunk before his swelling body could break it, landing with a heavy clank on his hands and knees as he tried to control his breathing.
There was the sickening, familiar scritch of bone sliding over bone inside him as his spine elongated, jagged dorsal fins emerging from his back like a row of knives. His body burst out of the remains of his prison scrubs, the material sloughing off like a shedding lizard’s skin. Scales like thick, overlapping armoured plates burst from his skin, running up both of his arms. His blood felt like liquid lead, heavy and searing, the pounding of his heartbeat feeling too large for his chest until his ribcage finished expanding with a grinding crunch.
The whole process—taking Emil from ordinary man to Abomination of titanic proportions—took less than two seconds, though it always felt like much longer. The Raft’s emergency system was already blaring an alarm, his cell cast into harsh red lighting. The grating noise didn’t exactly help with the flare of aggression that accompanied the transformation. Emil pushed it out of his mind, squeezing his eyes shut as he focused on his mental exercises, pushing through the massive rush of adrenaline and cortisol spiking his system, refusing to let himself give in to the intoxicating power coursing through him.
Emil was already starting to shrink again, the transformation reversing itself more slowly than he would have liked, as a dozen armed guards burst into the room beyond the bars of his cell. Weapons were trained on him, the guards raising their voices as they barked warnings and orders. As he controlled his breathing—in and out, deep and deliberate—Emil slowly brought his hands up behind his head, letting himself lie face-first on the ground, complying with the routine instructions as his body re-stabilised.
“Dammit,” he murmured softly to himself.
It was disappointing. He’d been doing so well—it had been months since his last involuntary episode. What happened? He was still coming down off the high of the transformation as he ran back through it in his mind. He’d been asleep. Dreaming? The details were rapidly fading, frustratingly banished by his conscious mind. There’d been a presence in his dream… a familiar one. Banner? Something had happened to Banner.
And there’d been something below him. Below everything.
A green door.