“Ms Maximoff. It’s good to finally make your acquaintance,” Sterns said, inclining his head politely.
Her reaction was far outside his expected parameters.
She was on her feet in a second, the flash of recognition that had passed across her face giving way to raw alarm. Next to her, the statuesque blonde woman had moved essentially simultaneously, the two of them side-by-side in combat-ready stances. As they rose to their feet, their hands blazed with energies; wisps of angry red curled their way around Wanda Maximoff’s fingers, while the other woman had threads of gold come together to form constructs resembling a sword and shield—a power he did not recognise.
Their coordination was uncanny. 98 per cent chance that it was unnatural, rather than merely practised: 75 per cent that the two had some sort of mental connection that allowed it, 19 per cent that it was the result of some form of precognition, with a host of much less likely possibilities.
That wasn’t important right now.
What was important, the pulsing probability engine of Sterns’ brain was very quick to point out, was the 72 per cent likelihood that—should he hesitate or fail to respond at all—Wanda Maximoff was about to attack him with a potentially lethal degree of force.
Densely-clustered nodes of synapses flashed and flared, processing sensory inputs into raw data and feeding it into a rapidly expanding set of possible outcomes. Sterns couldn’t see the future, and he knew by now that unaccounted-for factors were throwing his model of Wanda Maximoff far off reality, but he could see her posture, her micro and macro expressions, the tension thrumming through her body as she spent a scant second weighing whether an immediate attack was the best move. There was little time for Sterns to weigh his options—he had to make whatever he did or said count before the probabilities collapsed and she murdered him.
Captain Rogers, to his credit, reacted quickly. The man reflexively straightened in response to the aggressive action, eyes widening slightly as he held up a hand toward the women. “Woah, hey—” It wouldn’t be enough—Wanda was already accounting for the man’s presence, and his shield was on his back, not in his hand. He wouldn’t react quickly enough to intercept the attack if Wanda struck. Pietro Maximoff had been on his feet in a flash, too, and though he was capable of moving fast enough to intercede, there was less than a 5 per cent chance he’d actually make a serious attempt to stop his sister should she attack.
While everyone else gathered around the table was reacting to Wanda and the blonde woman’s aggression with surprise and dismay, some part of Sterns noted that Shuri, the young Wakandan prodigy, had shrunk back in her chair instead, her entire body going rigid. The complexion of her skin had darkened a shade, and her hands were clutching at the arms of her chair hard enough that the metal had deformed under the pressure—a powerful fear response, one that she was having trouble keeping under control. The data point was catalogued and filed away to inform future models.
“I wouldn’t do that, Ms Maximoff,” Sterns said, a clear warning threat in his tone as he met the woman’s gaze evenly.
It wasn’t the ideal approach. It was more than likely that the statement would alarm her further, but it also happened to have the highest probability of him surviving the next thirty seconds.
--
Sterns’ words made me freeze in place.
Dr Samuel Sterns. Mr Blue. The Leader. I’d never been big on comics as any version of myself, but I knew bits and pieces about him, absorbed through cultural osmosis and fan speculation on the internet. I hadn’t known what happened to Sterns after the events of The Incredible Hulk in this universe, but there was one thing I was pretty damn sure of: He was a villain. A really bad one.
Not only that, a superintelligent one who—if I recalled correctly—dabbled in mind control.
“Why?” I asked, my voice tight. “What have you done?” Had he set up some sort of failsafe? Contingencies? Of course he would have.
“What the hell, Red?” Tony said, alarmed. He and most of the others who had been seated at the table had jumped to their feet an instant after I had.
My eyes flicked briefly around the table. I didn’t really know any details about the Leader’s powers or how they worked. If he did have mind control powers, I felt like they probably wouldn’t be strong enough to overcome me with the Mind Stone, but I couldn’t be sure. Was everyone here under his control? What was the best way for me to check while still keeping everyone safe?
“Wanda, stand down!” Steve’s voice rang out clearly as he physically interposed himself between Sterns and me, hand still raised in my direction as he glanced quickly back at the gamma mutate for a moment. “No one’s done anything. This is Dr Samuel Sterns.”
“I know who he is,” I snapped, making no move to follow the order. “How is he here?”
--
When Wanda had hesitated, Sterns had felt a flood of relief, though he knew he wasn’t out of danger just yet. He needed to keep her talking. “There’s no need for conflict,” he said, keeping his voice calm as he raised his hands, palms held outward in a gesture of surrender. “Let’s just talk this through.”
Natasha Romanoff touched Wanda on the arm. “Hey, it’s okay,” she said, though her tone was guarded—Wanda’s reaction had thrown her off. From contextual clues and microexpressions, there was a 92 per cent probability that Romanoff expected Wanda to be privy to some sort of privileged information about him. How? Why? “He hasn’t done anything. Ross was holding him prisoner in a military black site. We were looking for you, found him instead.”
“Ross was… okay. Yep.” Wanda’s voice had raised an octave.
Sterns could tell her mind was racing, trying to work out the implications of… something. What did she know, or think she knew?
--
If Sterns was in their heads, it was subtle; otherwise, he’d probably have had them try to restrain me by now. Influence, rather than control? Or I could be entirely wrong. Fuck, I really wished I knew more about the comics and had a better idea of what he might be capable of.
I had a vague idea that he was a technologist of some kind, as well—one that created advanced robots and other inventions. Some part of me felt like I’d seen panels of him using telekinesis, too? That was a lot of potential different powers. The MCU didn’t match up to the comics one for one, either. It could be that this incarnation of him didn’t have mind control at all. If that was the case, then all I had to do was tell everyone…
…What? What could I tell them?
Nat was right. Sterns hadn’t done anything. Not yet, at least. Not that I was aware of. In The Incredible Hulk, he’d been a morally grey character who’d been helping Bruce. Then, after his brain had been exposed to Bruce’s blood, he’d vanished, never to be seen again, for at least the next fourteen years. But, of course, my stupid ass had gone and changed everything, charging through the timeline like a bull in a china shop, and now he was standing in the middle of the Avengers compound and I didn’t know what to do.
I could lie.
There was no possible way for me to explain how I knew he was a bad guy, no specific incident or knowledge I could point to, but I could just… make something up. What if I told them he’d created the Abomination deliberately? No, not enough, and I was pretty sure I’d already said that he hadn’t. Contradicting myself would be bad.
All I needed was a plausible scenario. Everyone here knew about my visions. Sterns couldn’t have earned enough trust in the last couple of days that they’d believe him over me.
--
There was a subtle shift in the woman’s posture and Sterns blinked. There was a 93 per cent chance that Wanda Maximoff, who he’d never met before and—as far as he was aware—had no specific reason to bear him ill will, was about to deliberately lie to her friends in order to sway them against him. Why? It didn’t make any sense.
Oh, she absolutely wasn’t going to like this, and it’d spark some additional suspicions among the others. Still, it was the only thing that dropped the probabilities into an acceptable range.
Sterns’ eyes flicked around the room. “Ms Maximoff is strongly considering whether or not to deliberately mislead you all regarding what she knows about me,” he said, injecting much more confidence and steadiness into his voice than he actually felt.
--
I flinched and my hand immediately went to the Infinity Stone around my neck. Was he a mind reader? A telepath? Fuck, fuck, fuck. I tried to clear my mind of surface-level thoughts, turning my magic inward and sweeping for any sign of an intruder.
The next spare moment I had, I really needed to take a close look at Thena and Gilgamesh’s mental defences and see if I was able to create something similar for myself.
--
“I didn’t read your mind,” Sterns said calmly. “That’s not something I can do. I merely interpreted your posture, microexpressions and a dozen other factors. Please, Ms Maximoff—let’s sit down and talk this through.”
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
After his previous statement, the likelihood that Wanda would try an outright lie had dropped precipitously, but there had been varied reactions from the others. Surprise from Rogers, Wilson and Danvers, suspicion from Stark and Barton, confusion from Banner and the large East-Asian man. Shuri’s fear response had intensified slightly, but she was keeping it under control. Determination from Barnes and Pietro Maximoff—95 per cent probability that Sterns’ statement about Wanda lying to them had the opposite effect on those two, firming up their belief in Wanda’s statements. Next to Wanda, however, minute changes in Romanoff’s posture as she glanced between the two of them informed him that there was an 88 per cent chance that the seasoned spy was reading the situation correctly, at least. That was good.
The blonde woman who’d stepped up next to Wanda simply continued to stare at him. She had hardly moved at all since assuming her ready stance. The way she was looking at Sterns was… unnerving. It wasn’t exactly something he could assign a probability to—not something he was getting wholly from the data that his mind was processing—but he had some sort of raw, primal feeling that she was deciding whether the easiest resolution here would simply be to murder him and deal with the fallout of that instead. 85 per cent chance that she wasn’t human.
Wanda came to a decision. “There’s something I know, that I can’t tell anyone about, that leads me to believe that Sterns is extremely dangerous and potentially a threat to us,” she said, speaking carefully and deliberately.
At the very least, the intensity of the red energy that the woman held in her hands had dimmed somewhat. She was keeping it active as a threat display, but there was almost no chance she was going to actually attack him unprovoked now, which was a great relief. On to the next problem.
Which was that, as far as he could tell, there was a 98 per cent probability she was telling the truth as she believed it—at least regarding whatever information she believed she possessed. High confidence. There was a lot Sterns didn’t know about Wanda Maximoff, but there was one thing that had always been relatively clear: she wasn’t a particularly good liar.
Romanoff’s microexpressions shifted once again, this time in the opposite direction. She believed her, too.
What on Earth did Wanda Maximoff think she knew about him? And why was such a vague statement being treated so seriously?
“I thought you said Sterns was innocent?” Barton asked her, his brow deeply furrowed, a complicated expression on his face.
“I need you to tell me exactly what happened. Where you found him. What he was doing. Everything.”
--
I listened carefully as Nat and Bucky described their infiltrations of the US State Department and Camp Zero One, Clint chiming in occasionally to clarify or add a detail. Sterns remained silent throughout, letting them speak, which I was glad of. I relaxed fractionally, letting the chaos magic that had gathered in my hands disperse. Despite my initial alarm at his presence, there didn’t seem to be an immediate threat here. Even so, Thena remained vigilant, a sword of cosmic energy still in her hand.
Ross had imprisoned Sterns, then used him. He supposedly had some sort of advanced predictive power. The way they described it reminded me of a character from another story I’d read a lifetime ago—Tattletale from Worm—though Sterns assigned percentage probabilities to his predictions rather than just running entirely on vibes. Tattletale combo’ed with Dinah? Something along those lines, at least. A potentially dangerous, but not perfectly reliable, power.
“…Okay,” I said. I glanced at Nat. “Have you got a coin?”
“Isn’t that too random?” Pietro asked.
“I’d like to see an example of how strong his predictive ability is,” I responded. “Flipping a coin isn’t actually random, there are just a lot of factors that affect how it lands.”
Nat didn’t have anything, but Steve had a quarter in one of his pouches. I held the coin over the table, watching Sterns carefully. “If I drop this in the next few seconds, what side will end up face up?”
He matched my gaze steadily. Just looking at him like this raised my hackles a bit. One of his eyes was clouded over—he may even be blind in it—while the other sometimes glinted with gamma-green eyeshine that almost made it seem like it was glowing. “There’s a 97 per cent probability that you intend to use a subtle exercise of your powers to deliberately make whichever side I say land face down.”
Well, that was even more unsettling. I lowered my hand. “I don’t like that.”
For the first time since he had arrived, Sterns cracked a smile. It wasn’t a happy one—he just looked tired. “It’s my entire life now. Not something that I can easily turn off.”
That was… kinda awful, actually, for much the same reason it would suck to have an always-on telepathy power. Picking up on every little detail around you and coming up with information you don’t necessarily want. Hey, there’s a ninety per cent chance that guy hates your guts. A ninety-five per cent chance the girl you like thinks you’re pathetic.
…A hundred per cent chance that Ross is going to keep you locked up for the next decade and a half, weaponising your power to essentially hack the political system.
Basically every move Ross had made over the last four years—policy shifts, public appearances, political alliances, even when he became Secretary of State in the first place—had been calculated for maximum advantage. It made a lot of sense and explained how Ross had managed to so successfully fail forward all this time, despite everything. It was a little scary, even, just seeing how much could be accomplished when a bad actor intelligently exploited weaknesses in the system.
There was an extremely good chance that Thunderbolt fucking Ross would have been the next President of the United States. That was a future I certainly hadn’t seen coming and was more than happy to avert. God, Americans sucked at picking presidents.
“You caused the Civil War,” I said aloud, sudden realisation in my tone. “Or at least, you had a hand in it. Maybe you didn’t see everything that happened with Bucky coming, but the mother who confronted Tony, Ross’s actions afterwards… You gave him what he needed to take advantage of the situation.”
Sterns went still for a moment, eyes almost seeming to glaze over, before he spoke again. “You’re talking about… seeing the future? Or an alternate timeline?”
I tensed, cursing inwardly. Stupid, stupid! “You don’t need to know.”
“I think it’s unfair to pre-judge me on something like that without even allowing me the opportunity to defend myself,” he responded. “Especially when it comes to actions you know to have been taken under duress.”
“It’s not just that,” I said. “I have other concerns.”
“That you can’t share with your team.”
“Red, we’ve talked about this,” Tony said. “If there’s stuff we need to know…”
“It’s not that simple, Tony.” I sighed, closing my eyes and massaging the bridge of my nose for a moment with two fingers. “This really isn’t something I can explain.”
“Could you tell one of us?” Steve prompted gently. “We could speak privately—just you and me. You have my word that I won’t share or act on anything you say in confidence. Or if you’d be more comfortable with Nat?”
I bit my lip. This wasn’t the same situation as other stuff I’d been keeping from them. In those cases, it was primarily my worries about unintended consequences, but here… the only way I could do it would be to actually outright explain what I’d been hiding from them from the start: the source of my so-called ‘visions’. How seriously would they even take my word, then? I did intend to talk about it eventually, but it probably wouldn’t be smart to do it until after the major threats had been dealt with. I couldn’t predict how badly the ‘movies and comics’ explanation would undermine the vague authority I’d managed to fumble my way into. Even telling Natasha would potentially affect our relationship, and while I wanted to trust her…
“No,” I said. “I mean it’s literally something I can’t explain. Like, I can’t put the details into words in a way that would make any sort of sense.”
“I understand that my statements may be suspect here,” Sterns interjected. “But for full transparency, I don’t believe that’s entirely true. There is an 83 per cent chance that Ms Maximoff could explain if she wished to do so. She isn’t concerned about unintended consequences. Rather, she believes the information could potentially damage your relationship and cause her to lose face or influence with the group.”
Oh, fuck this guy. My hands balled into fists. “Yeah, and there’s a 95 per cent chance that you’re talking out of your ass, trying to drive a wedge between us so you can…”
“So I can what?”
“I don’t know! Something bad!” I snapped.
“Wanda,” Nat tucked her hand into my elbow, squeezing gently. “It’s okay. Everyone believes you.”
“Sterns is a victim here,” Steve reminded me gently. “And he’s been incredibly helpful in navigating the political fallout here. I just want us to be sure that any decisions the team makes are the best we can do with the information we have available.”
I hesitated. “I never saw what happened with Sterns after the Abomination. Not directly. I just… It’s all second-hand.”
“Things have changed a lot since…” Nat trailed off, talking around my visions. Not that it mattered—it seemed as though Sterns had already managed to get a pretty good idea of what I was working from based on what had already been said. “You’ve said so yourself. Things are harder to predict. How sure are you?”
“And look, I don’t mean to be that guy, Red, but you haven’t exactly been batting a thousand with this sort of thing.”
“Tony, I swear to god—” I stopped, then reached up and rubbed at my eyes with the heels of my palms for a moment, thinking.
What did I know? Sterns was imprisoned by Ross in 2011. The last thing I remembered seeing was set in 2025. If the Leader were to come out as a villain in the MCU in a future project, it’d surely have to be set after that. Had he been imprisoned by Ross that entire time? Fourteen years, and likely longer? Was I sure Sterns was a villain? In the comics he was, but in the MCU… they’d never actually gotten around to using him again, or something had been planned that had later fallen through. Maybe his existence would have just ended up being a background detail—something that might come up as a throwaway line later on, to explain how Ross had become president in a future film—if it ever even came up at all?
Taking a deep breath, I dropped my hands into my lap and looked around the table. “You’re right. I don’t know anything for certain here. This whole situation has caught me entirely by surprise. And if I’m being completely honest, I’m also feeling really overstimulated right now and might not be making the best decisions.”
“Huh,” Tony raised an eyebrow. “That… might be the most sensible thing you’ve ever said.”
“I can be sensible, Tony.”
“Yeah,” Pietro chimed in. “She just chooses not to be, most of the time.”
I glared at him. “Whose side are you on?”
He held up his hands in a mock gesture of surrender. “Hey, I’ve got almost three whole days of teasing to catch up on.”
Nat squeezed my arm again. “I think we need to take a break. Step away for a bit,” she said firmly. “Our options for dealing with the Eternals are limited at the moment, in any case. Wanda will do a sweep with the Stone, like we talked about—if she finds them, we can reconvene and work out an approach, but otherwise we’re probably just going to have to sit tight and wait for them to come to us. Hopefully to talk, not to fight. We can try to get some rest and think things through in the meantime.”
My enhanced hearing picked up the faint sound of a phone vibrating.
I sighed, but nodded. “Yeah, that’s probably for the best.” My eyes lingered on Sterns for a moment. “Please don’t do anything villainous while I try to understand what’s going on here.”
The gamma mutate gave another tired smile at that and nodded. “I’ll endeavour to restrain myself,” he said, then looked at Steve. “Captain Rogers, you’ll want to answer that.”
Steve reached down, fishing his phone out of one of his pouches. His eyes widened fractionally when he looked at the screen, and he glanced back up at Sterns and nodded—confirmation of something they’d discussed as a possibility earlier, maybe?—then answered the call and put the phone to his ear.
“Good afternoon, Mr President.”
Huh.
My enhanced hearing easily picked up the other side of the conversation. “Steve, we need to talk about this situation with Ross.”
“I couldn’t agree more, sir. The team would love the opportunity.”
“I’d prefer a one-on-one chat. I don’t think the whole team needs to be involved.”
Sterns shook his head minutely. Steve gave him another nod of acknowledgement. “I understand that, sir, but you know that’s not how we operate. It’d be for the best if you spoke to all of us.”
There was a pause and a small sigh. “Fine. Now?”
“We can make that work, sir. We’ll have you dialled in to the conference room in five minutes.”
“Just to be clear, Steve—I want to talk to your team. Not Sterns.”
“We can do that, sir. Avengers only. You have my word.”
“We’ll speak shortly.” The call ended.
Sterns let out a small chuckle. “There was only a 26 per cent chance that Ellis would call today. Sometimes, at least, surprises are good ones.”
I stood up. “I’ll leave you to it, I guess.” Nat started to stand as well, but I carefully took her hand off my arm and shook my head. “It’s okay. You’ll be needed here.”
Carol stepped forward from the periphery of the room where she’d been observing proceedings. “I’ll make sure she doesn’t disappear again,” she said lightly.
I glanced toward Thena and Gilgamesh, both of whom were already making motions to follow, then gave Sterns a considering look. “What’s going to happen?”
“There are only a few reasons the President would reach out directly so soon, and the Avengers will be able to apply further pressure here. Ross is about to lose. Hard. High confidence.” The deformed man bared his teeth in an unsettling smile as he stood up. “I only wish I could see the look on his face.”
