Chapter 148
“So, you don’t have any plans for this afternoon?” Bucky asked as I led him over to the lounge area.
Bright, early afternoon light streamed through the windows of the Avengers compound’s common room. Natasha was already sitting tucked into the corner of one of the couches, absorbed in the contents of the tablet she was holding, a mug of fresh coffee resting on the table in front of her. I only had the two of them for a little while. Nat had some strategy stuff she needed to work through with Maria this afternoon, and Bucky had some time booked in with Steve and Sam to do some sort of gun-related training—two things that I was utterly uninterested in.
“I don’t know, I kinda feel a bit bleh,” I said reflectively. “There’s still half of that chocolate cake in Natasha’s fridge, so I was thinking about maybe eating it then vibrating myself until I forget I exist.” I grabbed his arm and moved him ahead of me, putting him where I wanted him before giving him a gentle push to make him sit down.
“What are you doing?” Bucky asked, a hint of amusement in his tone as I arranged him on the couch next to Nat.
“Stay there,” I instructed. Turning, I abruptly sat down in his lap.
He let out a huff of amusement, his hands going to my hips almost instinctively, but before he could say anything else I twisted in place, grinding against him a little bit as I swung my legs up onto the couch. Leaning backwards, my shoulders bumped impatiently against the corner of Nat’s tablet.
She lifted it obligingly so that I could lie back, draping myself over the both of them at the same time. Nat made a small noise of faux annoyance, a smile twisting the corners of her mouth. “You quite comfortable, there?”
“Yep.”
That was a lie. This was actually a bit of an awkward position and I wasn’t super comfortable, but there was no way I was going to admit that. Besides, I was being cute. This was definitely cute.
“I’m not going to be able to stay long,” Bucky reminded me gently. “Five minutes, then I’ve gotta go.”
“Oh! I just remembered, I actually have a shirt for this exact situation,” I said, wriggling in place a little so that I could reach into my pants pocket and retrieve my sling ring. Awkwardly, I spun up a small portal, reached through, and grabbed one of the shirts that was crumpled up in a pile on top of the dresser in Natasha’s apartment.
Dismissing the portal, I half-sat up and started to take off my top.
“Wanda!” Bucky sounded alarmed.
“No one’s here,” I told him. “And, even if they were, it’s not like there’s anyone on the team that hasn’t seen my tits by now.”
Natasha, for her part, didn’t say anything. Giving up on the tablet, she balanced it on the arm of the couch so she could help by taking the top from me as I shucked it off to replace it with the shirt. As I pulled it on, I let out a sharp huff of air, startled by a random jolt of pain.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” I said, scrunching up my nose. Carefully smoothing out the shirt so the print on it was visible, I lay back down, gesturing to it with my hands. The tee had ‘TWO-SEATER’ printed on it in bold letters, with one arrow above the text pointing to my face, and a second arrow below it pointing to my crotch. “Eh? Eh?” I waggled my eyebrows at them.
Bucky let out a small huff of amusement, shaking his head. His fingers traced idle patterns against my hip.
“What?”
“I just…” he trailed off, hesitating for a moment before he gestured to the three of us. “It still just feels a little weird that we’re doing this.”
“Doing what? Are we doing something?” I asked innocently, then perked up and looked hungrily at him. “I’m up for us doing something.”
Bucky glanced at Nat, his eyes a little wider, but her only response was a small snort of amusement and a nonchalant shrug of her shoulders. “I have to go soon,” he repeated.
I lay back again, shifting a little in their laps in a vain attempt to make the position I’d chosen more comfortable. “That’s okay. I’m just teasing. Mostly. But I will say that I think you must be the only guy in the entire world who’d turn down a guilt-free threesome with the Black Widow and the Scarlet Witch. I mean, I don’t mean to slut shame, but it’s a shame you’re not sluttier.”
Bucky chuckled. “I didn’t say ‘no’,” he clarified, picking his words carefully. “Just… not right now. We can talk about things later, maybe.” His hand closed on my thigh and gave it a little squeeze.
I gasped, eyes wide, my back arching slightly as a faint but visible ripple of glowing energy passed through my Celestial markings. Bucky flinched at my reaction, but I wasn’t reacting to him. A smothering, crushing presence had suddenly pressed down on my chest out of nowhere, the sheer, staggering weight of it unlike anything I’d ever experienced before. Even so, there was an edge of familiarity there, as if I recognised it, somehow.
Nat immediately picked up that something was off. “Wanda? What’s wrong?”
It felt like I could barely breathe.
I stared at the two of them numbly for a half-second, then twisted, red magic flaring in the palms of my hands. A burst of power sent me flying recklessly out of their laps and down the stairs so fast that I almost crashed face-first into the door. Landing hard, I wrenched it open with both hands before stumbling outside onto the lawn, eyes locked on the sky.
It had been a clear afternoon. The clouds above the compound rolled in out of nowhere as if summoned by magic, roaring and boiling furiously, the sky darkening so quickly it seemed almost absurd. Like I was seeing a timelapse, rather than something that was happening in real life. I strained my senses, standing frozen and numb, eyes fixed on the heavens. My heart was hammering hard in my chest, blood rushing through my veins, a faint echo fluttering right underneath my pulse.
Lightning flashed down from the clouds again and again, sharp, echoing bursts of thunder punctuating each strike. The door to the main building ripped open again, Bucky hurtling through with long, loping strides. A second later, as the door started to swing closed, Natasha slammed into it. The two of them ran out to join me on the lawn, following my gaze and staring upwards.
Six blazing white suns appeared in the sky, arranged like the pips of a die, so bright that they cut straight through the heavy black clouds.
No.
No, no, no, no.
The sky parted like the Red Sea, the unnatural cloud cover swept violently away to either side and dissipating as quickly as it had come, to reveal the massive presence behind it. At almost the same time, a blast of wind slammed into the compound like a physical blow, the trees visibly quaking around us. I staggered, almost knocked to the ground by the force of it. Just behind me, Bucky managed to keep his footing as well, but Natasha wasn’t so lucky. Just as her feet were taken out from under her, however, a blur streaked across the lawn and Pietro was suddenly there, catching her out of the air and carefully depositing her back on the ground.
My breath was coming in short, sharp, panicky gasps. I exchanged a wide-eyed look with my brother, then turned and looked back at the face in the sky.
The piece of programming inside of Thena that had taken Arishem’s form had been powerful. I’d seen its strength as a shadow of the Celestial’s own, but now that I was looking up at the closest thing this universe had to capital-G God, the truth of the matter was laid bare before me. Even in that space inside Thena that I’d so carelessly inserted myself into, inside its absolute domain, where it was strongest… it had been nothing compared to the real thing. Less than nothing.
It was almost difficult to conceptualise the six great spotlights staring down at us from the sky as eyes. They felt too big. Impossibly so. Normally, with something that big, that far away, it was difficult to gauge the actual size of what you were looking at. That wasn’t the case, here. I could sense the sheer scale of what was in front of me, somehow. Of who was in front of me.
Arishem the Judge felt vast.
His face was an expressionless, nearly-featureless mask, aside from the glowing orbs of his eyes. It took up a quarter of the entire sky, with his shoulders vanishing below the horizon. His body was made of a combination of craggy stone outcroppings and smoother panels, the redness of it dulled and washed out by the distance and atmosphere between us. Orange-yellow trails of magma peeked through fissures and cracks in his stony shell, visible even from this far away.
The Prime Celestial hadn’t even done anything yet except show up, but his mere presence had an oppressive gravity all of its own, squeezing and constricting my chest, my magical senses practically screaming at me. It wasn’t just the way my Celestial markings had responded to his arrival—I couldn’t fathom anyone on the planet with an ounce of magical sensitivity not feeling this. The Mind Stone pulsed softly at my chest, almost beating with a heartbeat all of its own.
“What do we do?” Pietro asked. His voice sounded small. Scared.
“I don’t…” I hesitated, licking my lips nervously. I didn’t even know what to say. All my power, all the things that I knew, even the Infinity Stone at my neck, everything… All of it was equally worthless in this situation.
“There’s nothing we can do.” Nat said quietly. “Right?”
My phone started buzzing in my pocket. When I didn’t move to answer is right away, Bucky touched my arm. I nodded dumbly and fished it out. Tony. I tapped the screen to put him on speaker, my eyes returning to the Celestial looming over the world.
“Red! You seeing this? This is him, right?”
“Yeah. Yeah, it’s him.”
“Listen, the Eternals’ tracking signals just flew up out of the atmosphere—Sersi and Kingo. They’re up there.”
Of course they were. I had no idea what had happened, what had caused Arishem to show up, but in practically any circumstance it made sense that the first thing he would do is collect the remaining Eternals.
“What tipped him off, do you think?” Nat asked. “Ajak seemed sure that the alterations Phastos made to her communications orb would hide the fact that anything had happened.”
Bucky frowned. “Do you think he intercepted them first?”
“Hang on a sec.” Fumbling with my phone and pockets for a moment, I hung up on Tony and fished out my sling ring.
As I started to spin up a portal, movement across the lawn drew my eye as Bruce, Sterns, Shuri and Darcy emerged from the labs, Darcy’s “Holy shit!” carrying through the air.
Once Tony was through the first portal, I immediately dismissed it and started on another.
“He’s just… What’s he doing?” Bruce asked as the science team reached us, staring up at the Prime Celestial.
Tony shook his head. “At a guess? Having a bit of a chat with the Eternals.”
“Oh, great.”
I shared the sentiment. Sersi, at least, would argue pretty passionately in our defence, but Kingo? I had no idea what he would say to Arishem. He hadn’t wanted anything to do with anyone, after what had happened. Would he even try to save Earth?
“Wanda,” Steve addressed me as he arrived through the second portal, Sam a half-step behind him. “What’s the situation? What’s going to happen now?”
“I have no idea. I didn’t see enough of Arishem to get a read on how he might react to this specific situation.”
“Tiamut’s still here, so he won’t destroy the planet, right?”
“He can’t leave things as they are, either, though,” Tony pointed out. “Not if he’s aware we’re planning on stopping the Emergence.”
I bit my thumb, mind racing, a dreadful, heavy feeling in my stomach. “I think maybe the best we can hope for is for him to take the Eternals away to examine their memories in detail, like he did in the original timeline. That’d buy us some time, at least.”
“His mind is unknowable to us, as things are,” Sterns said, shaking his head. “We cannot make assumptions here.”
“What’s our worst-case scenario?” Bucky asked.
I didn’t want to answer that. Nat did instead. “He writes off Tiamut as a lost cause and destroys Earth to preserve the secrets of Celestial reproduction.”
“Not that anyone was questioning the Celestial’s planet-destroying credentials—” Darcy started to say. She was hanging over Shuri’s shoulder, eyes fixed on the holographic interface floating above the princess’s palm as she rapidly manipulated the displayed data. “—but a mass that large, suddenly appearing that close to the planet? That should’ve basically ripped the Earth’s crust off like the skin coming off a boiled tomato.” She paused. “Okay, that might be a bit of an exaggeration, but we’re talking about something that could permanently alter Earth’s rotation and orbit around the sun just by being there.”
Shuri nodded, her mouth twisted in a tight frown. “He must be cancelling out gravitational forces on an astronomical scale. The amount of power that would be required to do something like that is absurd.”
…But still, nothing was happening yet. The weight of Arishem’s presence and the tension it was causing was almost suffocating, the seconds crawling by in agonising stillness as a God stood in judgement over the world.
“If he does decide to destroy the planet?” Pietro asked.
“Then I really did fuck everything up,” I snapped out, a bitter edge to my tone. “There’s nothing we can do to stop him.”
A touch at my arm. “This still isn’t your fault,” Nat said quietly.
I ignored her. Of course it was my fault. Everything was my fault. Chaos magic flared into being, shining brightly in my palms. “If it comes down to it, I might be able to distract him for a little while. Long enough that the sorcerers could evacuate at least some people off-world… Where the fuck is the Ancient One, anyway? What is she doing?”
Was this what she’d been talking about, when she’d told me she was going to die? Was she about to enact some grand plan to protect Earth, a sacrifice play of some kind?
“We need to talk to him,” Steve said. “We need an opportunity to argue our case.”
“You wanna, what, fly a Quinjet up in his face and try to say hi?”
He shook his head. “How many communications satellites and broadcast systems can you get into at short notice?”
“If we’re ignoring FCC fines?” Tony exchanged a quick glance with Shuri. “All of them.”
“I don’t think that’ll work,” I said. “Arishem’s not the sort of god that responds to mortals.”
“We have to try something, though, so, unless you have a better idea…?”
A thought occurred to me. “I might, actually.”
Taking a deep breath, I closed my eyes and brought my hands up to frame the pendant at my neck. Threads of chaos magic dripped from my fingers, reaching into the Mind Stone and drawing on its power. My consciousness started to bloom outwards, picking out the minds of the Avengers assembled around me as glimmering points of light. Focusing, I cast myself upwards, reaching out toward the entity that towered over the planet.
Arishem was impossible to miss, a blazing beacon that lit up the entire world in my mind’s eye. Pushing up towards him, however, I immediately encountered resistance. Not an actual defence—I wasn’t close enough for anything like that to have kicked in. Instead, the weight of his presence seemed to increase exponentially, a crushing gravity that my discorporate consciousness had to actively struggle and fight against to reach up toward him.
Even with the Celestial close enough that I could physically see him, the gulf of space between us felt vast and impassable. And there was always the possibility that, even if I managed to touch his mind directly with the Stone, the result might be more akin to a mosquito encountering a bug zapper than anything else.
This wasn’t going to work.
But what else could we do? We needed to talk to him, but in a way that he would actually listen to us. Broadcasts, communications satellites, whatever—all of that would be meaningless to him. There was no reason for him to pay any heed to the words of mortals.
But I knew some other words that might get his attention, didn’t I?
I’d had an idea, but I needed more power. More cosmic energy. The Celestial structures I’d carved into myself incorporated channels to draw a tiny, controlled stream into my body to power them. They weren’t an actual interface—there was nothing serving as a buffer between me and the Stone—but it would still be safer than doing this completely raw.
Drawing deeply on the well of chaos magic inside of me, I traced the energy channels, outlining them in power, and pulled. An involuntary hiss of pain escaped from between gritted teeth as the channels stretched, flexing and expanding in much the same way that I’d stretched Thena’s mental protections across Pietro and I to shelter us from Druig. It hurt. It hurt a lot.
And then cosmic energy was flooding into me, scorching icy trails through my body as if pieces of dry ice were being dragged across exposed nerves. Was it dangerous to pull so much directly into me? Well, if I lost control, it’d probably lobotomise me. Unlike Carol, I wasn’t lucky enough to have the Phoenix Force to shield me from the full output of an Infinity Stone.
My magic wrapped around the energy, shaping it, fashioning it into Celestial patterns. The fractalline, geometric structures I’d learned while inside Thena, taught to me by the shadow of Arishem… they weren’t just programming. Not just the Celestial’s equivalent of magical diagrams or runes. They were a conceptual language: the power of the divine channelled directly into expressing one’s intent.
And languages could be spoken.
My eyes opened, blazing with power, fixed on the impassive figure above the world. At some point, my feet had left the ground, leaving me hovering several feet above the lawn. Wisps of molten gold and red boiled off me, cosmic energy and chaos magic intermingling and combining.
I was pretty sure that I wasn’t supposed to be able to do what I was trying to do. The language of the Celestials was never meant to pass mortal lips—it wasn’t even something that could be spoken with a tongue or larynx or lungs. But I was the Scarlet motherfucking Witch. My magic bent the rules. Sometimes, it could outright break them.
I spoke.
Or, at least, I opened my mouth, even if what came out couldn’t be described as a ‘sound’.
ARISHEM THE JUDGE. PRIME CELESTIAL. I WOULD SPEAK WITH YOU.
It wasn’t loud. Not exactly. But it didn’t need to be—I was directly addressing the Celestial, in a language made of concepts. I spoke to him, and he heard me. He had to have heard me.
Had he moved slightly? It was almost impossible to tell where the featureless spotlights of Arishem’s eyes were focused, but it felt like there was some sort of shift in the gravity that had been pressing down on me since his arrival. There was always a chance that it was just my imagination, but somehow, I felt certain that he was looking directly at me now. Through me.
…For a moment. Then I wasn’t so sure. A handful of seconds crawled by. There was no response, no outward acknowledgement from the Celestial that I’d spoken to him in his own language.
The strain of it all was too much—drawing so deeply on my magic, stretching my Celestial structures beyond their normal limits, struggling under the torrent of cosmic energy pouring into me… My hold of everything faltered and my Celestial structures snapped back into place. It felt like my heart stopped for a moment, a strangled gasp escaping my lips as I dropped out of the air. I stumbled as I hit the lawn, but steadying hands grabbed at me from behind and from the side—Pietro and Bucky, both reacting quickly enough to help me keep my feet under me.
Sagging onto them gratefully, I focused on taking deep, gulping lungfuls of air. It felt a little like I’d been holding my breath the whole time. My hands were shaking. Something wet tickled my lip. I wiped at my face with the back of my hand and it came back bloody. My nose was bleeding.
There was still no response from Arishem. Why? I didn’t understand. The Celestial had definitely heard me. I knew he had. Was he… was he ignoring me?
“If that didn’t get his attention…” I started, trying to keep the tremor out of my voice, then stopped as I looked over at the others, a twinge of confusion twisted inside my gut. Steve’s expression was… “Why are you smiling?”
He tore his eyes away from the sky briefly to glance at me. “Because I can hear it.”
“What?”
“Thunder.”
An echoing roar rolled across the compound. A moment later, a god fell from the sky.
The ground shuddered as—maybe thirty metres from where we were standing—Thor slammed into it in a perfect three-point superhero landing, Mjolnir clenched tightly in his fist. Brilliant arcs of stray lightning crackled over his skin for a moment, earthing themselves around him, the sharp tang of ozone filling the air. Steve was already moving, the rest of us a moment or two behind him as we jogged over to the long-absent Asgardian.
Thor looked awful.
The left side of his head was a mess—there were several small fragments of what looked like jagged, dark green stone jutting out from a ragged gash that had opened his temple, though the blood was long dried and the wound was visibly starting to heal over. His long blond hair hung limp and bedraggled, framing a face streaked with grime and dust. His bare arms were similarly marked with dried sweat, dirt, and traces of blood, and the red cloak hanging from his shoulders was ragged around the edges. Even so, the God of Thunder’s face split into a wide grin as he rose to his feet, lifting his free hand in greeting as we reached him.
“Thor! You okay?” Steve asked.
“Rogers! Yes, I’m fine. A little tired.” He gave a small shrug. “I need to bathe, I think. But fine.”
Above us, a flare of energy split the heavens, moving so fast it was almost impossible to track, and Arishem was gone. The weight that had been pressing down on me since he had arrived vanished at the same time. I looked back at Thor. “Arishem?”
He nodded. “I hopped a lift.”
“No, what—”
“I didn’t miss our Midgardian All Hallows celebrations, did I?”
“Did… I… you…”
“Nah, that’s still a couple of days away. You’re just in time, really,” Tony said, grinning, then gestured to the sky. “It’s good to have you back, bud. But, uh, what happened? Where’d the big guy go?”
Thor stretched, wincing slightly, then let out a loud sigh. “Bathing first,” he said, waving the other man off. “Then I will regale you with tales of my great deeds.”
--
After Thor had taken some time to clean himself up, we brought the last few members of the team in and had a big mutual debrief. On our end, we gave him the Cliffs Notes about what had happened with the Eternals here on Earth. Some of it he already knew—he’d been up there when Arishem had scooped up Sersi and Kingo and, while arguing Earth’s case, Sersi had had to explain Ajak’s absence.
For Thor’s side of things… Well, there was a lot, and he was more of a bragging storyteller than the sort of person to give a concise explanation of things. To cut a long story short, he’d gone to Omnipotence City to speak with the Celestials there, as had been the original plan. Following on from that was a series of events that, were this the actual MCU, would probably have constituted their own movie, as Thor sought an audience with Arishem himself. This had culminated in a task being laid before him—to seek out and slay Hargen the Measurer, a Celestial that had somehow gone rogue. Or been corrupted by something? It wasn’t clear, but there was something about the situation that meant Arishem would not or could not deal with the problem directly: the rogue was a stray nail and Thor was a convenient hammer.
Thor spent more time boasting about the blow-by-blow of the hunt and fight than he did the rest of the story combined. He was, of course, immensely pleased with himself for killing the thing. It was apparently very rare for a Celestial to die a violent death, so slaying one in one-on-one combat, even one that had apparently been weakened significantly by whatever had happened to it, was going to raise his own legend to even greater heights. The pieces of stone lodged in his head were actually pieces of the Celestial (a couple of scans later, it was clear that they’d pierced his skull and actually fused into the bone—they weren’t coming out, not easily at least).
With the rogue Celestial handled, Arishem had agreed to consider the matter of Earth’s Emergence. He’d brought Thor with him and, when they’d arrived, the fact that only Sersi and Kingo were here had very obviously caught the Prime Celestial by surprise. Sersi had mostly explained what had happened, telling them where Ajak had gone and what she intended. As far as Thor could tell, Arishem hadn’t seemed angry, but neither was the gargantuan, near-featureless entity particularly easy to read, which was fair enough.
The Prime Celestial hadn’t directly explained his plans to the thunder god, but from what he had said it seemed like his plan at this stage was simply to return to the World Forge and examine Sersi and Kingo’s memories in detail. He appeared very interested in whether or not Ajak would be successful in rallying other Eternals to her cause, and what her approach would be when she finally petitioned him directly.
Sersi being gone meant that our backup plan for dealing with the Emergence was dead in the water, of course. If there had even had been a chance we could’ve still pulled it off at all, with Arishem now aware of what had happened. Even so, overall, things honestly seemed… okay?
Despite the initial scare of the Prime Celestial’s sudden appearance, it didn’t look like we were much worse off than we had been a day ago. In fact, as some were quick to point out, this could even have been a good thing—not only did we no longer need to worry about what would happen if Arishem found out what had happened, but we had some evidence that he seemed open, at least, to the idea of Ajak’s plan. And with him positively inclined toward us thanks to Thor’s deeds… Well, with any luck, things would go well for Ajak and the combined weight of everything together would be enough to sway him. Though I had no idea what Arishem would do if he did decide to change his grand design, or how he might go about sparing Earth from the Emergence without compromising Tiamut’s birth.
As we were wrapping things up and a few of the others were talking back and forth about what sort of public statement the Avengers needed to put out about the giant entity that had appeared over the planet, I noticed that Thor was looking at me. Staring, really, his brow furrowed.
The intensity of his gaze made me squirm a little bit, feeling self-conscious. “What?”
“There’s something different about you,” he mused. “You seem… Hm.”
Pietro, next to me, chimed in. “Is it the hair?”
Thor snapped his fingers and nodded, as if that was exactly what he’d been searching for. “Yes! Of course. You cut your hair.”
Even so, when the group filtered out a few minutes later, splitting up as we each went off to do our own things, the thunder god gave me one last lingering look as I stepped outside, a pensive expression on his face.