Chapter 138
“Tony, I’m fine,” Bruce insisted, sounding exasperated. “Really. I feel great.”
He was lying back on the full-body examination table in the corner of the gamma lab, a holographic real-time topological scan of his body projected into the air just above his reclining form. The setup was heavily reminiscent of the medical interfaces back in Wakanda, which made sense—it was probably something Shuri had put in.
“Bup-bup-bup! Don’t move!” Tony chided, tearing his eyes away from the dense jumble of data displayed on the translucent tablet he was holding. “Hey!”
Bruce ignored him, waving an arm up through the hologram. “It’s all normal, consistent with the last set of scans. No real changes compared to months ago, even. Running these tests over and over again isn’t telling us anything useful.” He let out a huff of air then sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the table and hopping off.
Tony made a frustrated noise in the back of his throat, tossing his tablet carelessly aside as he stepped directly in front of the other man to block his path. Reaching out with a hand, he grabbed Bruce gently but firmly by the arm, moving in such a way that Bruce had little choice but to meet his gaze directly. “…You’re good?” he asked quietly.
“Yeah,” Bruce said, his tone dropping to match his friend’s. His shoulders twitched in a minute shrug. “I’m good.”
There was a charged couple of seconds where they just continued to look at each other, something unspoken passing between them, then Tony stepped in, clutching the other man tightly to his chest for a brief moment. He gave Bruce’s back a few firm thuds with the palm of his hand, then stepped back out of the hug as quickly as he’d moved into it, levelling a finger warningly at the other man instead. “Don’t do it again. Okay?”
Bruce nodded, smiling faintly. “Yeah.”
Tony wagged his finger once more for emphasis, then closed his hand into a fist and tapped it gently against Bruce’s chest. Though he was trying hard to keep everything tightly under control, he really wasn’t very good at hiding his emotions. “One more set of scans. Just so we’re sure.”
Bruce let out a long-suffering sigh. “Fine. Okay. One more. Just one.”
Watching them, I felt tears prickling at the corners of my eyes again—happy ones this time, which was at least a change from the last dozen times I’d cried over the previous twenty-four hours. Nat squeezed my hand and I glanced sideways at her. She smiled a bright, authentically happy smile, as if something genuinely amazing had just happened. And to be fair, it kind of had. This was amazing. It felt a little bit like I’d seen an actual miracle. I certainly didn’t have any explanation for it.
The glass door to the lab slid open and Clint stepped into the room, coming up short just inside the threshold as he stared at Bruce. “Holy shit,” he murmured, wonder in his voice.
“Hey, Clint.” Bruce gave him an awkward half-wave.
Hawkeye closed the distance between them with a few long strides, raising one arm.
The two men clasped hands briefly—Clint started to bring him in for a hug as well, but Bruce demurred, flinching away slightly and giving him a vaguely guilty, apologetic look. “Sorry. I just… I’ve been getting way more hugs today than I’m used to and it’s honestly starting to kinda freak me out a little bit.”
Clint just grinned at him. “Good to have you back, man.”
Bruce started to respond, then cut himself off, a frown creasing his forehead as he studied the other man for a moment. He pointed. “Uh, didn’t you…?”
The other man held up his new arm and grinned again. “What, the great Dr Bruce Banner can come back to life, but regular old Clint Barton can’t even grow back an arm without it being weird?”
Bruce chuckled. “Well, I’m glad. Good for you.” He turned slightly, hesitating as he glanced around at the small crowd that had gathered in the lab.
With Clint here too, that was everyone. Well, all of the actual Avengers plus Sterns and Shuri, at least. The couple of others that were still on-site—Maria and Darcy—would find out soon, too, but we’d started with just the core members.
While Shuri and Sterns had been running the first set of Bruce’s scans, Nat and I had taken a quick sidebar to get some actual clothes on before hurrying back. Now everyone was crowded into the gamma lab once again, sitting on stools or standing off to the side in a mirror to the scene from six hours ago, though the mood was obviously radically different this time around.
“You really didn’t need to get everyone out of bed for this,” Bruce said to no one in particular, rubbing at his arm nervously. He looked a little uncomfortable with being the centre of attention.
“You came back from the dead, Bruce,” Steve reminded him. “This isn’t exactly a normal situation, even for us.”
“I just don’t understand. We must have missed something,” Shuri mused, her eyes scanning a holographic data projection hovering over her palm. “Full brain death, no remaining neural activity. It had been hours. And then you just… came back to life? Just like that?” She shook her head disbelievingly.
“Like magic,” Pietro said, giving me a meaningful look.
Tony paused at my brother’s words and frowned. “You think the Ancient One knew this was going to happen?”
“Of course the Ancient One knew,” I said a touch of frustration in my tone. She’d stood there, knowing full well that Bruce was going to come back to life, and let us yell at her… Why? For what possible reason?
“Why didn’t she say anything?” Steve wondered aloud. “Why let us think that he was gone?”
“Talking is an action with its own consequences,” Natasha said, repeating what the sorcerer had said to us then. “Telling us then and there would have impacted the way things would have played out. Changed things, somehow.”
Sam shrugged. “She told us we needed to trust that she’d found the best path she could. It seems like she kinda came through on that?”
“Something to ‘prove’ she’s trustworthy, maybe?” Clint mused. “Next time she does something we don’t like, she asks us to trust her again and we’re more likely to go with it?”
Natasha shook her head. “It’d be more complicated than that. There isn’t just our reaction to consider, either—the rest of Kamar-taj was watching how she handled us. Whatever impact she intended this to have, the only thing we really know for certain is that she’s trying to steer things towards whatever she’s judged to be the best outcome.”
“I really don’t like being manipulated,” Tony muttered as he tapped at one of the touchscreens next to the examination table.
“That’s why I make sure you don’t realise when I’m doing it,” Natasha quipped back, shooting him a small smile. “I don’t know. She’s apparently done a lot to keep the planet on track for the last thousand years, mystically speaking.”
Bucky shook his head, a small frown on his face. He was leaning up against the glass wall next to me, on the opposite side from Nat. “Still feels like she could have done more.”
“She…” I hesitated, my eyes flicking over to Sam briefly. “She’s only one person. She can’t control everything.”
Sam gave me a small nod.
Sterns abruptly stood up from where he’d been working. The gamma mutate had been quiet for some time, tucked away over in a corner of the lab to himself. As well as the pair of monitors attached to the table he’d been sitting at, he’d had a tablet propped up as a temporary third screen while he had been poring over reams of data.
I’d already known that—given his expertise and experience—he was probably going to end up helping with the gamma research that Bruce and Shuri had been doing. Of course, he hadn’t been at the compound very long at all before the shit had hit the fan with the Eternals, so he wasn’t up to speed with their existing work. Given what had just happened, Tony had made the call that that needed to change. Quickly. So, while Tony and Shuri had been fussing over Bruce directly, Sterns had been absorbed in catching himself up on the broad details of what they’d been doing over the last few months.
As he rejoined the group, his eyes were fixed directly on me. “Ms Maximoff. You’re sure you don’t know anything about what we saw? The green door?”
“Nothing. I already told you—the Hulk didn’t die in any of my visions,” I said, shaking my head, then hesitated a moment. I did have a vague idea that maybe the Hulk was immortal in the comics, but that was all. There was no context to go along with that and I definitely didn’t know why all of us had had the same dream, or vision, or whatever it was. “I did think that maybe he couldn’t actually die, but when it happened… I wasn’t expecting this.” My eyes flicked over to Bruce for a moment. “I really thought you were gone.”
“There was a burst of gamma radiation when Dr Banner revived,” Shuri said. “Extremely low yield, but measurable. The data on it is with the first set of scans we did when we got here.”
“Yeah, that could explain the shared dream for the three of us,” Bruce said, but he was frowning as he looked over to me. “You two might have felt it. But I don’t get why Wanda would have, too.”
It didn’t seem to make any sense. If it had just been a gamma mutate thing—them reacting to the burst of radiation that had accompanied whatever had happened—that made sense. But why would I have had the same dream?
“I’m still missing a lot of key data. But, hazarding a guess according to what I do know,” Sterns started, gesturing toward me with a small flick of his fingers, his eyes dipping down toward my chest. “The most probable cause is long-term exposure to that.”
I blinked, my hand instinctively going to the locket hanging from the silver chain around my neck. “The Stone?”
“The catalyst for Ms Danvers’ transformation,” he confirmed with a nod. “It was originally the power source for Loki’s sceptre, correct?”
How had he figured that out? The Avengers had complied with Ross’s request to hand the remains of the sceptre over to SWORD, but no one outside of this room whose name wasn’t ‘Hill’ or ‘Fury’ was supposed to know that I’d kept the Infinity Stone that had been powering it. I exchanged an uneasy glance with Natasha, then looked around the room at the others, looking for some direction. Steve gave me a small, barely perceptible nod.
“…Yeah,” I confirmed reluctantly.
“I was given unrestricted access to the SWORD and SHIELD databases, as well as what was recovered from the HYDRA research base in Sokovia,” Sterns explained. “While the ambient output levels are extremely low—not enough to be directly harmful or require special containment—most of the radiation that power source emits is gamma. And you’ve been directly pulling cosmic energy from it into yourself, to reinforce your abilities, for some time now. Months? And now you have some sort of circuit inside you that’s constantly cycling its power through your body.”
By the time Sterns had finished talking, most of the others were looking at me with varying degrees of surprise on their faces.
I could have kicked myself. How was I always, always, always so fucking stupid? I knew that the Infinity Stones mostly emitted gamma radiation. Hell, the Mind Stone’s gamma signature is how the Avengers managed to track Pietro and I down the first time!
Reaching up, I hurriedly undid the clasp on the silver chain, feeling the disconnection from the circuit inside me as I removed it from its place. I held it a little away from myself, shooting it a vaguely accusatory look as though it had somehow betrayed me.
As I did, I noticed that Sterns had stepped in closer, the faint green glow in his eye seeming just that little bit more intense. Something about the way he was looking at me made me feel vaguely like a specimen being examined under a microscope. “It’s not just that, either, is it?” he murmured softly as he studied my features. “You’ve got a little something else in you, too.”
I shifted in my seat uncomfortably. “I’m honestly a little bit torn between jumping on that straight line and asking you very politely not to say vaguely creepy things like that.”
He smiled faintly and moved back a little. “My apologies, Ms Maximoff.”
“We should… probably check on that,” Bruce said, looking at me with a faint expression of concern on his face. “I don’t necessarily think we need to worry, but it’d be better to do some scans so we can be sure.”
Natasha reached over to give my hand a squeeze as I nodded vigorously in agreement.
Long-term exposure to gamma radiation from the Mind Stone… That hadn’t even been a blip on my radar. It obviously hadn’t caused any problems yet, but now I suddenly had to contend with the thought that maybe keeping an Infinity Stone around my neck for months while channelling its power raw without an interface might’ve been giving me super cancer.
I racked my brain, trying to think of any examples of anyone sticking as close to an Infinity Stone as I had for as long as I had. The Ancient One had obviously been using the Eye of Agamotto for a long time, but she mostly seemed to leave it in the pedestal in Kamar-taj’s library unless she actively wanted to use it. I was pretty sure that when the Eye was closed it fully sealed off the Time Stone’s power, in any case.
“We need to tell Jane Foster she has cancer,” I said suddenly. “Or will have cancer?” Fuck. I’d forgotten all about that. Well, it was certainly a good thing I’d remembered it right now, so that I could also feel guilty about not letting her know about that as soon as possible on top of everything else.
“Dr Foster?” Steve asked, surprised.
“I was thinking about the Stones. She had… there was…” I trailed off. Sterns had remained quiet, watching me closely with obvious interest. Fuck. He wasn’t read in on the Infinity Stones yet, and I didn’t just want to blurt it all out in front of him. “It was a whole thing. Did Thor tell you about what happened with the Dark Elves? The Aether?”
“It made her sick,” Bruce said, realisation dawning on his face. “It gave her cancer?”
“I’m honestly not sure if it was because of the Aether.” Did the Aether give Jane super cancer, or was it just regular normal-person cancer? I had no fucking idea. “I was just trying to think if there were any other times where people got… exposed. I had forgotten that she got cancer at all. It wasn’t for another decade, though, so it might not actually be related. I don’t know.”
It wasn’t a great fit, though. Sure, she’d had an Infinity Stone basically inside her, but that was for a couple of days at most. Though if that was how she’d gotten cancer, that didn’t exactly bode well for me. The Aether had gone to the Collector afterwards, but it wasn’t like he’d been rubbing it all over himself since then, and beyond that, I was pretty sure he wasn’t human, so any point of comparison there would be deeply flawed anyway.
There was only one other example I could think of that might kind of count. It wasn’t a great one, either.
The Red Skull.
He’d been trapped on Vormir for decades with the Soul Stone just out of his reach. I didn’t know exactly how that had turned him into a weird floaty smoke man, but it had to have been a result of the Stone’s influence, right?
That was something I was extremely hesitant to raise, though. The specifics around the Soul Stone were something I’d been deliberately keeping very close to my chest. As far as I knew, only one other person in the entire universe—Gamora—knew where the Stone was. It was probably the second most important secret I knew, only outweighed by the knowledge of how to open the Gates of Eternity.
Bruce nodded slowly. “Okay. Well, we don’t have any baseline data to work from for Wanda, so tomorrow we’ll start off with just the basics—bloodwork, whole-body counting, vibranium photoacoustic imaging—and go from there. Once we’ve got some initial results, it might be a good idea to call in Dr Cho to do some deep tissue biopsies, too. It might be nothing, but long-term, low-level exposure like this isn’t something we’ve got a lot of experience dealing with, so we should be thorough, just in case. It’ll take time to look at properly.”
“Understood,” Steve said with a small nod. “Getting nonessential personnel like Dr Cho back in the compound is one of the things we’ll need to talk through properly in the morning, along with everything else. Maria will handle it.”
“Yeah… I think we can call it for tonight,” Tony agreed, shooting Bruce a lingering, reluctant glance. “No one’s going anywhere and people still need to get some actual rest.”
Sam nodded, looking a little relieved. “Yeah, lord knows I need my beauty sleep.”
I was still holding the Mind Stone out in front of me, dangling by the chain. Taking a deep breath, I put it back on, feeling the familiar cold thread of cosmic energy entering me again as it reconnected to my mental defences.
“Are you sure—” Tony started to say, but cut himself off at the look I shot him.
“One more day’s probably not going to make any difference,” I said quietly, but I might’ve been saying it more to convince myself than to address his unfinished question.
--
The first half of the next day blew by quickly. The meeting we had first up was a sort of combined debrief and brief, where we went over a whole bunch of different things. Luckily, the Avengers weren’t overly prone to dragging discussions out at these sorts of meetings, but even so, my attention waned, mostly preoccupied with my own internal worries and thoughts about the Mind Stone, gamma radiation, the Phoenix Force, and everything else that I currently had to worry about.
Not too long after that, Carol called in. She’d peeled herself out of the half-melted, half-burnt remains of her suit and scrubbed up well enough—dressed down in a simple, sleeveless white top and dark pants—that you never would have guessed that she’d exploded fifteen hours ago. At her request, I tied off a portal to the Hoopty’s lower deck so that she could clear out a few things that were getting in the way, packing them into one of the Avengers’ storage areas for safekeeping. Once that was sorted, we reached out to coordinate with Kamar-taj. The Ancient One was ‘unavailable’, so it was Mordo that brought the group of Eternals through from the monastery.
Ajak, Gilgamesh, Makkari and Sprite. In the original timeline, a group of Eternals had gone on a similar mission to the stars, seeking others of their kind to reveal the truth to. The composition of this group, however, was almost completely different. In that other version of events, without me messing everything up, Ajak and Gilgamesh had both died and Sprite had been turned into a human, remaining behind to grow up on Earth. The only shared member across both groups was Makkari. Still, things did rhyme.
Sersi was there as well, of course, to say her farewells. Our discussions at the morning meeting had landed with the Avengers mostly being okay with letting Sersi and Kingo both get back to their lives—Bruce’s resurrection had defused a lot of Tony’s vengeful feelings toward them and Kamar-taj didn’t seem to be holding a grudge either, despite the losses they’d suffered. Not that the two Eternals would be unmonitored, of course. Sersi was fitted with the same unobtrusive tracker that Tony had put on Kingo so that we could keep tabs on their movements and while we didn’t know the specifics, it seemed incredibly unlikely that the Masters of the Mystic Arts wouldn’t be keeping an eye on them from now on, too.
About half of the Avengers begged off early, staying only long enough to say some polite goodbyes to Carol and Gil, which was fair enough—it had been a long last few days and people had stuff that needed doing. While those who’d stuck around to give Carol and the Eternals a proper send-off spoke to Ajak and Gilgamesh, Carol and I wandered just around the corner, finding a semi-private spot next to the gardens at the back of the compound’s main building.
Carol folded her arms in front of herself, leaning back against the wall. Her posture was still relatively loose, but I felt like there was a hint of defensiveness mixed in there. When she’d called in first thing this morning, she’d given a general statement that she was doing a lot better now, but it had been hard to tell if she was being completely earnest or putting up a bit of a front for the extended team.
“Are you managing it okay?” I asked quietly.
The corners of Carol’s mouth twitched in a brief, half-hearted smile. “It’s not great,” she admitted. “Honestly, I’m a little bit worried what’ll happen next time I…” she trailed off, raising a hand and clenching it into a fist.
“Did you want me to see if I can take a look?”
She shook her head, maybe a little bit too quickly, then shot me an apologetic look. “I don’t think that’d be a good idea. I, uh, I don’t think it likes you much.”
I let out an amused huff. “I did get a little bit of a peek at something I wasn’t supposed to. When everything was happening.”
“Yeah. I… It—” Carol stopped, going quiet for a moment as she sorted through something mentally before her eyes dropped to the concrete path. “It almost killed you, I think. I had to hold it back. It was… really hard.”
I gave a small shrug. “As far as ways to die go, ‘in the arms of a beautiful woman’ isn’t the worst of them.”
Carol lifted her eyes from the ground, forcing herself to look at me.
Her expression caught me off-guard, a mix of guilt and worry that made me falter a little bit. “Sorry. Nat doesn’t like it when I make those sorts of jokes either.”
She sighed, pulling her arms a little tighter around herself. “I haven’t…” she started to say, then trailed off again.
I stepped a little closer to her and reached out a hand, moving slowly like I was trying not to spook a wild animal. As my fingers brushed her forearm, she seemed to deflate slightly, her shoulders slumping as her arms unfolded to hang limply by her sides.
“It’s okay,” I told her. “You don’t need to worry about it. I know you wouldn’t have hurt me on purpose.”
“That’s not…” Carol interjected, cutting me off. “It’s not that. It’s… all of this.”
I hesitated, waiting for her to elaborate.
“This was supposed to just be a bit of fun. Some stress relief. You’re cute and funny, and it wasn’t any of my business what you and Natasha do with your relationship. But…”
…Ah. She was breaking up with me. Well. That fucking sucked.
I felt heat starting to rise in my cheeks, the corners of my vision starting to blur a little bit, but I clamped down hard on my feelings. No. Absolutely not. The last few days might’ve been a bit of an emotional rollercoaster for me, but Carol was going through her own stuff right now and it absolutely wouldn’t be fair for me to burst into tears here and make her feel even worse than she already clearly did about it. I could go cry as much as I wanted about it later, once she was gone.
Even though I was trying my best to avoid showing it, something about my expression must have tipped her off to my thoughts, because her eyes widened slightly and she leaned forward, raising both hands in a frantic gesture. “Oh! No, sorry! That came out completely wrong,” she said quickly. “What I mean is… I haven’t really been in a relationship since I broke away from the Kree. Maria and I never really reconnected—we’ll always be best friends, but I don’t think it can ever be more than that again. I’ve had flings, here and there, but nothing substantial.”
“Sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t really get what you’re trying to say here.”
“Wanda, I like you. A lot. And I’ve been thinking about you a lot. And I think I’ve even been feeling a little bit jealous, which is a new feeling for me.”
I blinked. Well, that short-circuited and confused all of the negative emotions that had been building up inside me just now. “Jealous? Of what?”
“Of what you have with Natasha. I think I’ve gotten more emotionally invested in this than I meant to and I don’t really know what to do with that.”
“Oh.”
Oh. A palpable sense of relief washed over me at her words.
“Yeah. And now there’s all this,” she said, frustration leaking into her voice as she flicked a hand back towards where we’d come from. “I don’t know how long I’m going to be gone this time. Ajak’s communication sphere is pointing basically to the other side of the universe. But I have to go, because I don’t know how to control this thing that’s inside of me and I can’t risk what might happen if I don’t get a handle on it. It’s just… shitty timing. It sucks. You know?”
I took a deep breath before letting it out in a long, drawn-out sigh. “Yeah, it definitely sucks. But you’ll come back,” I said, trying to inject a bit more lightness back into my tone. “And when you do, we can work out something that’ll work for the both of us. If you still feel the same way by then, I mean.”
“Yeah.” Carol smiled and gave a small shrug. “I just wish we had more time now, is all.”
There was a moment of silence that was only a little bit awkward. I grinned at her. “Well, I think there’s really only one sensible thing left that we could possibly do about this in the time that we do have.”
“…Oh? And what’s that?”
“We should stay here and make out until someone comes looking for us,” I told her, keeping my tone neutral and matter-of-fact, as though that were obviously the most logical thing we could possibly do in that moment. As I spoke, I moved in a little closer, cautiously putting myself just inside her personal space.
Carol let out a laugh, her eyes sparkling. It was… nice. It felt like it was the first time since the Eternals had attacked the compound that I’d seen her look unreservedly happy. Putting her arms around my waist, she pulled me in, holding on tightly as our lips met.