“Don’t play with it,” Pietro said, pausing just long enough to scold me before resuming pacing back and forth in front of us. “You’ll get an infection or something.”

  “I’m not going to get an infection. And will you stop, please?” I responded, rolling my eyes as I continued to probe at the back of my neck with my fingertips for a few seconds, feeling at the spot where Carol had injected the translator implant. There hadn’t been any pain when she’d done it, and there wasn’t any residual sore spot or so much as a discernible mark. The chip had been loaded into a pen-like device, she’d pressed it lightly against my skin for a moment, and that was it. I hadn’t even really felt it at all.

  “You know I don’t like this. Just… waiting. It doesn’t bother you?”

  After we’d returned from our brief visit to Yelena, Carol had retrieved the implants she’d obtained from her ship and brought them back to the compound. I’d immediately asked for one, but everyone else was a little bit less enthused about getting an alien microchip implanted into their neck for some reason.

  Carol had then headed off to the labs with Tony and Shuri, who wanted to scan and poke at the translators and cybernetics—she’d told them about the protections that galactic megacorps use to safeguard their designs, but it hadn’t deterred them. Tony had promised to pay for new ones if they bricked them. I still didn’t know what the US dollar to universal units exchange rate was like, but I supposed that if anyone could afford it, it was Tony.

  Meanwhile, Pietro, Natasha and I were taking a moment to ourselves in the common area. We were essentially on standby, just waiting for something to happen. Nat was curled up with me on the couch, nursing a mug of coffee (who has coffee at like 4pm? Legitimately crazy person behaviour), one leg pressed up against mine.

  I was still feeling a little pent up, but I did also want to spend some time with Pietro. Once I actually managed to get some alone time with Nat, though… Or Carol. Or both? I hadn’t actually brought that up as a possibility with either of them before, but I was pretty sure they were expecting me to at some point. I mean, I’m me, after all—one of my first proper one-on-one conversations with Natasha had been immediately after she’d rescued Steve and Bucky from me propositioning them for a threesome. Hell, Nat might have already pre-emptively had a conversation with Carol. She was tricksy like that, sometimes.

  “I’m kind of Zen about the whole thing,” I said reflectively. “It’s not like we have any other choice, and over the last few days I kinda had to learn the hard way to let go and not stress myself out over stuff I can’t do anything about.” I turned my head slightly and tapped at the space behind my left ear. “It’s weird that the chip goes in the back of your neck. Shouldn’t it go, I don’t know, here or something? Near the ears. Or the throat?”

  Nat stifled a yawn, covering her mouth with the back of her hand, then snorted. “That’s the weird part for you?”

  “I mean… It’s one of the weird parts.”

  “How does it work both ways? It doesn’t make any sense,” she said, sounding legitimately annoyed. “Okay, it translates what people are saying to you, that’s fine, I get that—you could do it with an earpiece, even. But how does it make you speak other languages?”

  That little detail was weird and unexpected, but it made sense in retrospect. The only member of the Guardians of the Galaxy who actually spoke English was Quill, and yet Tony, Peter and Dr Strange still understood all of the others when they encountered them on Titan during Infinity War. Thanos almost certainly didn’t speak English, either, and I was pretty sure there were plenty of other examples.

  Still, real-time direct translation of stuff you were hearing was one thing, but actually adjusting how you were speaking without any sort of active decision or action on your part? Nat was right, I had literally no idea how that would even begin to work. I knew space tech was stupidly advanced in some respects, but these implants were effectively magic as far as I was concerned, which was funny considering… You know. Me. Magic.

  Pietro stopped pacing to look at Nat. “Huh? What was that?”

  “What was what?” I asked.

  “Pietro, shhh!” Nat shushed him. “It keeps defaulting back to English because you’re talking.”

  I blinked. Man, this was going to take some getting used to. “You weren’t speaking English?”

  “I’ve barely spoken any English at all since you got the implant. I’ve been testing it.”

  “Oh. That makes sense.”

  She narrowed her eyes suspiciously. “You really don’t speak Urdu? Because if you’ve somehow managed to hide the fact that you speak Urdu from me this entire time just so you could eventually pull this as an elaborate prank… I’m not going to lie, I would find that extremely attractive.”

  Pietro was remaining obediently quiet, though he did have a bit of a bewildered expression on his face as he watched us.

  I laughed. “Sadly, no. I do not speak Urdu.”

  She gave me a flat look. “Or Arabic?”

  “You switched? Huh. It’s pretty good at keeping up. I can sort of tell that it’s kicked in—there’s a little bit of a mental mismatch between what I feel like I’m saying in English and the way my mouth is moving, but it’s not too uncomfortable. I’m not sure I’d even notice it at all if I wasn’t thinking about it.”

  “This is actually ridiculous.”

  “How many languages do you speak, anyway?”

  “Fluent in nine, but I can hold a conversation in sixteen.”

  “And you think the translator is the ridiculous one? That’s insane.” I shook my head. “I wonder what the threshold is, or if it can recognise if you’re saying something in a language you don’t really know properly. Is there anything that you only know a little bit of?”

  “I’m a friend. Please. Thank you.”

  I tilted my head to the side. “What was that?”

  “Pashto. Did you understand it? You’re just speaking English again.”

  “Yeah: I’m a friend, please, thank you.”

  Nat yawned again, screwing up her face in annoyance. “Did it somehow know that I might struggle a bit understanding if you just spoke back fluently, so it reverted to a language it knew I’m proficient in? Is it intelligent?”

  “Maybe we should let the science brains figure this one out,” Pietro said with a slight shrug. “Although… можеш ли да кажеш нешто?” Can you say something?

  I grinned at him. “Sokovian. It didn’t translate it.” Pietro had managed to actually hit on something that was really good to know. If I already understood a language, it wouldn’t assume English was the default and translate it anyway.

  “Код мене ?есте.” It did with me. He was smiling back. “Знам да нисмо баш овако много причали после онога што се десило. Али и да?е ми ?е лепо кад те чу?ем да говориш наш ?език.” I know that after what happened, we didn't talk like this very much. But it's still nice to hear you speak our language.

  “Извини,” I said. Sorry. “Мозак ми ?е збркан, па ми ?е тешко.” My brain’s messed up, so I have a hard time.

  He cocked his head to the side, looking at me consideringly. “You were actually speaking Sokovian then, weren’t you? It wasn’t just the translator?”

  Huh. I straightened up. “Yeah, actually, I was. That’s interesting—how’d you tell?”

  Pietro hesitated for a moment, like he wasn’t sure how to describe what he’d picked up on, then Nat poked me gently in the ribs with a finger. “It’s hard to pick, but you’re just a little less sure of your words. You were more confident when you were being translated.”

  My brother nodded in agreement. “Yeah. That, I guess. It just felt a little different.”

  Nat took another sip of coffee, then screwed up her nose a little bit. “I still really don’t think you should have gotten the implant without Tony taking a look at it first. I might not be a neurologist, but I know enough about the human brain, and what that thing must be doing to do what it does, to not want one in my neck until we understand them better.”

  “It’s fine, Nat. There’s absolutely no rush for you to get one—you don’t have to at all, if you don’t want to. But, look, Carol’s had one for like twenty years. They’re not super rare or not well understood. Everyone in space has them.”

  “And if everyone in space jumped off a cliff, would you jump too?”

  In an absolutely uncalled-for fit of pique, my brain conjured an image of Nat dropping from the cliffs of Vormir, and I looked away from her, a sudden tightness in my chest. Stupid brain.

  “Wanda?”

  “Sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s nothing.”

  “If you need to talk—” Nat was stopped mid-sentence by another yawn, her body going rigid as she fought against it.

  I nudged her. “You’ve been fussing over me since I got back. How are you feeling? You keep yawning.”

  “I’m fine.”

  Looking at her critically, I steepled my fingers in front of me like I was about to give a villainous monologue. “Ms Romanoff, I know that you’ve been trained to resist breaking in the face of torture, but I am going to stick my tongue in your ear now, and I won’t stop until you give me the information I am looking for.”

  As I moved to grab her, she let out a small noise of alarm and tried to wiggle away. “Okay, okay! I am fine, honestly. I’m just tired. I haven’t gotten a lot of sleep over the last few days. It’s been a bit stressful.”

  “She’s been worried sick,” Pietro piped up. “We all have.”

  “Sorry,” I said, a little chastened.

  “You don’t need to keep apologising,” Nat said. “We know it wasn’t your fault.”

  “It was a bit your fault,” Pietro corrected her.

  I sighed. “Speak of the goddess, Thena’s heading this way.” The Eternal had left the guest quarters and was now heading directly toward the building we were in, probably following our connection.

  “…Is that bad?”

  “What Thena put me through the last few days was… intense.” I gestured to myself, indicating the host of rapidly-fading bruises and almost-healed cuts covering my body. “A lot of this was Ikaris, but really, I’ve looked like this every day since I’ve been gone. Thena didn’t hold back.”

  “Did she do that to your hair?” Nat asked, her tone soft as she leaned forward and put her empty mug on the coffee table in front of us.

  I tried not to flinch, still feeling a little self-conscious about my new look. “Yeah. How’d you guess?”

  Nat shrugged. “Seemed obvious enough from the way it was done—not burned or lasered, so unlikely to have happened during your fight with Ikaris—and it was uniform. All of it, cut away handful by handful. A deliberate hack job.”

  “Yeah,” I said quietly, bringing my knees up to my chest and hugging them.

  “It looks good,” Pietro said. “You don’t need to worry about it.”

  I felt a brief flash of annoyance. “It’s not that, it’s…”

  Nat touched me gently on the arm. “You didn’t get a choice. She didn’t care what you thought, she just did it. It was a violation. A little dehumanising, even.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sorry,” Pietro said. His voice was tight. “I didn’t—”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Та кучка.” That bitch. “What did she think she was doing?”

  “Honestly, I’m not sure yet. There’s something about this whole thing that the two of them have been weirdly evasive about.” I gave a half-hearted shrug. “I don’t know why Thena did half the things she did, but honestly, I wasn’t really able to think real thoughts for a big chunk of it. Training in bouts of like eighteen hours straight may not be the healthiest way to do it, but it really helps if you want, like, an impending sense of doom or to feel like you’re five seconds away from seeing shadowy figures whisper the thoughts of those who came before.”

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  Or—I didn’t say out loud—if you want to hallucinate an AI version of yourself lending you the extra strength to press on. Telling them I’d seen Eliza a few times would really make them worry. Better to avoid that.

  Footsteps heralded the arrival of Thena and Gilgamesh, the two of them coming up the stairs from the ground-level entrance into the common room. Gil gave us a bright smile as they came over. “This place is pretty nice,” he commented, lowering himself onto the couch across from us and relaxing back into it. Thena moved over to the bookshelf against the nearby wall, eyes scanning the titles.

  Pietro shrugged. “Stark is many things, but he is not cheap.”

  “I’ve known many rich men over the years,” Gil said with a slight nod of acknowledgement. “At least Stark isn’t one of the ones that cover everything in gold. No amount of money makes up for having tacky taste in furnishings.”

  “You two seem pretty relaxed,” Nat noted.

  “And why not?” Gil asked with a small shrug. “We’re accustomed to waiting, and whatever will come, will come.”

  “Que sera, sera,” I half-sang. “Maybe you could teach Pietro some of that patience. He’s been wearing a hole in the floor with his pacing.”

  “You’re not worried about what will happen when the other Eternals come?” Pietro asked, ignoring me. “Wanda said Ikaris nearly killed you all last time you fought.”

  Gil shrugged again. “We’ll talk to them. If it comes to a fight, we’ll fight.”

  “It will come to a fight,” Thena said, abandoning her inspection of the bookshelf to step closer to us, gesturing toward me with a small tip of her head. “Ikaris’s conviction aligns with what Wanda saw in her visions. Even if Ajak herself orders Ikaris to stand down, he would rather kill her than risk anything that might jeopardise the Emergence. He won’t stop.”

  “Yeah,” Gil said with a grimace. “I guess so. No avoiding fighting Ikaris. Best we can hope for is to talk Ajak and the others around.”

  “And if we can’t?” Pietro asked.

  I leaned forward. “I know you two weren’t holding back when we fought Ikaris, but what about the others? If it comes right down to it?”

  “We won’t hold back,” Thena said, her voice firm.

  Gil looked a little bit more conflicted than she did, but still gave a reluctant nod.

  “If that does happen…” Nat started, stifling yet another yawn. “If you can’t talk down Ajak—do we win? Can we beat them?”

  Thena and Gil exchanged a look, hesitating to answer. I spoke instead. “Worst case scenario, we’d probably be fighting Ikaris, Ajak, Sprite, Makkari, and Kingo. Maybe Phastos,” I said. “It’d be rough, but doable. I might be able to take Ikaris on my own, now that I’ve got all my stuff back and I know vibranium’s strong enough to cut him. Carol hopefully could, too. I think we’ve got his number. Honestly, it’s Makkari that worries me most. She’s going to be hard to pin down and could do a lot of damage very quickly.”

  “Makkari’s strong,” Gil said, folding his arms in front of his chest as he leaned back, a thoughtful expression on his face. “But she has limitations. She’s deaf, so she can’t hear things coming.”

  “She can move faster than even she can perceive,” Thena added. “Makkari prefers to attack in short bursts—ramming, shockwaves. She can push herself to an extreme, but it’s hard for her to react or stop when she does. In close quarters, she needs to slow down so she can keep up with what's happening. It makes her vulnerable.”

  I glanced at Nat, nudging her with my leg. “You and the other unenhanced Avengers need to stay out of the main fight. There are just too many heavy hitters. Ikaris almost took my head off with a punch that barely even touched me. One stray hit—”

  “I love you,” she cut me off, gently but firmly. “But I can handle myself. All of us can. We wouldn’t be the Avengers if we couldn’t.”

  “The Widow is an assassin by training, correct?” Thena asked. “Avoid open conflict; prioritise isolating and disabling Ajak. She is a force multiplier we can ill afford to leave unchecked. She is strong and skilled in combat—she is still an Eternal—but you may be able to strike at her effectively while we distract the more powerful fighters.”

  “Right.” I nodded, a little reluctantly. “Basic tactics, target the healer.”

  It still didn’t sit right with me. Even the non-combat focused Eternals were inhumanly strong, fast and tough. The prospect of someone like Nat or Sam getting involved in this fight at all had me extremely worried that they’d just end up smeared across the pavement. If I could…

  Nat sat up as I summoned magic to my hands, giving me a wary look. “Let me try something,” I told her, focusing as I wove the magic into the form of my protection spell.

  It wasn’t going to work. I could see it already. The spell pulled tightly to me, drawing directly on my well of personal energy to empower itself. I could disentangle it, alter the specifics to link to a battery enchantment instead, but it was just too energy-intensive. It’d last minutes, at most, and maybe only for one good hit during that time. A physical barrier needed orders of magnitude more power to run when compared to other ongoing spells I’d woven, and it ate up even more power when stressed. The little battery enchantment that I’d learned from Mordo simply wasn’t designed to handle that sort of load.

  This felt like the same sort of issue that I’d had with deliberately making a Hex. Tying off the spell and keeping it self-sustaining for any reasonable length of time would need a proper anchor, something with a bit more integrity… like the way the Celestial language or programming script or whatever it was worked. I really wished I’d had the chance to get a better look at the enchantments on Mjolnir—the hammer’s magic was reinforced by a base structure of cosmic energy, but I had no idea where to even begin replicating something like that. Sorcerers had complex spellwork arrays and diagrams. Witches had… runes.

  When the other me had fought Agatha Harkness in Westview, I’d replicated some of her protection runes, but I couldn’t quite picture in my head exactly what they’d looked like now. I knew they didn’t match up with the Futhark or anything like that. Maybe I could puzzle out the patterns from first principles, like I had pieced together the protection spell in the first place, but the problem was I’d just be doing things essentially at random. It wasn’t going to be something I could do in a useful timeframe.

  I made a noise of frustration in the back of my throat. How strong would I be right now if Kamar-taj just fucking gave me access to their library? I bet if I had access to even just one of their books on witchcraft, I’d have everything I needed.

  Extending my protection spells to others was out of reach for now, at least. Still, there were other things I could look into.

  I dismissed the half-woven protection spell and looked toward Thena, reaching up to click open the pendant containing the Mind Stone. “That interface you made for the Stone—can you make it again?”

  “Yes.”

  “No,” Gilgamesh said sharply at the same time, jerking forward in his seat. Thena shot him a look. “You shouldn’t,” he said, a slight edge to his tone. “Not while you’re…”

  “I don’t need you to wear it again, or even plug in the Stone,” I clarified. “I just want to take a closer look at it.”

  The two Eternals glared at each other for a moment, then Gilgamesh huffed and waved a hand. Thena closed her eyes and brought her hands up to her head. As she did, threads of golden cosmic energy spilled from her fingers and wove themselves into a helmet around her head. I felt her strain through our connection—she had to push hard to create it. Lifting it off her head with both hands, she held it out in front of herself, but didn’t move any closer to me.

  I stood up, stepping over to her, and reached for the helmet. She didn’t let go of it. “This is at the limits of what my ability is allowed,” she said quietly. “If I release it, it will dissipate.”

  “That’s fine,” I said, focusing on the energy construct with my magical senses.

  It felt… nothing like what I expected, really. There were broad channels, set up in such a way that they’d pull energy from the Stone once it was in place—I’d used magic to draw out cosmic energy from the Stone many times before, and this just seemed like it was designed to do that on a larger scale, pulling as much power from it as possible, continuously. But there weren’t any complex structures beyond that, nothing for that energy to actually do. It just funnelled it all inwards. I was pretty sure that, if anyone but an Eternal put this on with the Mind Stone connected to it, it’d fry them in an instant, blasting their brain directly with the full, unbridled force of the Stone.

  Cautiously, I reached through my connection to Thena. At the same time, I called magic to my hands, touching the Mind Stone at my throat and reaching out to her with that as well, wisps of red energy boiling from my fingertips and crawling up her arms. I gently brushed over her mind and felt her open herself to me, intentionally letting me through her mental defences so I could feel out the shape of the structures that comprised her mind.

  While they were still flesh and blood, Eternals were—on a much more fundamental level—artificial beings imbued with an infinite wellspring of cosmic energy. The Infinity Stones were also infinite wellsprings of cosmic energy. My general prevailing theories were that either Arishem had made the Stones directly himself, or they were a by-product of kickstarting the universe that he leveraged afterwards. Either way, in the early universe, the Infinity Stones had been the tools of the Celestials.

  Those theories, however, raised a pretty obvious question: Why would Arishem stop using the Infinity Stones? Even if they were raw and uncontrolled sources of power that required interfaces and significant effort to leverage properly, they were still incredibly powerful, useful tools. I hadn’t really had an answer to that question beyond weak assumptions that the Celestials had somehow moved past the need for tools, but looking at all of this together—the Mind Stone, the ‘interface’, and Thena herself… I was starting to think that it was less that Arishem had moved past the need for tools, and more that he’d simply started making far more complex and specialised ones.

  My first thought was that the Eternals themselves were a little like living interfaces, but, on reflection, that wasn’t quite it. They had infinite cosmic energy built in, just restricted in scope and specialised to their specific functions. Interface and power, both in one combined package. Each Eternal was almost like… a specialised mini-Infinity Stone?

  The helmet wasn’t an interface, as such. It was more like a power adapter. Thena had used it to plug the Stone directly into herself, like she was a two-Stone Infinity Gauntlet, or maybe it was more like a miniature Uni?Mind? It really wasn’t clear, and I was pretty sure it’d take a lot more than this shallow look to even begin to properly understand the nature of the Eternals. As far as I could tell, Thena had essentially used the Mind Stone to overclock herself, channelling both sources of energy at the same time. It had been far from a perfect fusion of power—presumably because she wasn’t designed to handle the raw nature of an Infinity Stone and she lacked the technical expertise that would be required to smooth things over—so it hadn’t been properly controlled. I could feel the ragged edges where the excessive amounts of cosmic energy had damaged the structures within her. She’d burned herself out.

  I might be able to fix some of it. I’d been taught a fair bit about how those sorts of cosmic energy structures were put together by the shadow of Arishem, and I had the Mind Stone on-hand. Maybe I could even tap into Thena’s power source directly—it was meant to help her regenerate from harm, but the structures designed to actually tell it to do that weren’t functioning correctly.

  The damage was… extensive. Through all parts of her, mind and body. If I could fix it, it would be difficult, time-consuming work, and I wasn’t at all sure that me trying would even be safe. For either of us.

  “You idiot, Thena,” I said softly. “What have you done to yourself?”

  “What I had to,” she said simply.

  I couldn’t really argue with that. I’d almost certainly be dead now, if she hadn’t. “Stop. Enough.” Thena relaxed, and the helmet dissipated, leaving me holding her hands instead. I didn’t withdraw my magic, still feeling out the extent of the damage. “You can’t fight like this,” I said urgently.

  “I must.”

  I shook my head. “No, you can’t. Your internal structures aren’t channelling your power correctly. It’s causing more damage. Making things worse.”

  “I know.”

  Fuck, she was stubborn.

  While I was inspecting the cosmic energy that was threaded through Thena’s being, I checked on her mental protections. They seemed pretty formidable. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get through them if she didn’t want me to. A brute force attack reinforced by the power of the Mind Stone might do it, but it’d be difficult and take time—sadly, I almost certainly wasn’t going to be cracking an Eternal’s defences mid-combat.

  I’d really love to replicate something like it for myself but, unfortunately, it was all Celestial language tied into the same sort of energy structures as the rest of her ‘programming’. Once again, not something I could do without a magical equivalent. I did have the Mind Stone as a source of the right sort of cosmic energy to make something like this, but I wasn’t an Eternal and didn’t have the existing structures to hang it off. I had a lot of experience channelling the Stone’s energies, of course, but I wasn’t knowledgeable enough to understand what the potential implications of carving Celestial coding into myself would be.

  “I might be able to help repair the damage. Ajak could fix this, too, couldn’t she?” I asked, looking between the two Eternals.

  Gilgamesh flicked up his hand in a sharp gesture, the movement tight with frustration. “Probably.”

  “It’s not something the science brains could help with?” Pietro asked.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “They don’t really know much of anything about cosmic energy. Working with Celestial designs has a conceptual component, which isn’t going to be something they can easily replicate—magic works along similar principles. I can’t imagine even Tony and Shuri bootstrapping their way into Celestial-level technology in any sort of useful timeframe.”

  Thena pulled away and her defences went back up, shutting me out. “You cannot afford to exhaust your reserves right now.”

  “Gil’s right, Thena. If you keep pushing like this, you’re going to get yourself killed.”

  “I am a goddess of war, child,” she said, her tone suddenly razor-sharp. “Do not presume to lecture me on the dangers of battle.”

  I huffed, irritated, and released the magic I’d still been holding. “Sure, fine.”

  Nat started to say something, but the moment she opened her mouth, she yawned again instead. She clapped a hand over it, obviously irritated with herself.

  “Alright, that’s it,” I said, glancing at her for a brief moment before I exchanged a wordless look with Pietro. He gave me a slight nod. “I’m going to take Nat to bed, then. Get some rest.”

  Gil sighed, clearly not particularly happy with the way that conversation had gone. I wondered if he’d hoped that I’d have more success talking sense into Thena than he had. “Probably a good idea,” he said. “Get some sleep while you can. We’ll wake you if anything happens.”

  “Really, Wanda, I’m fine. I just had coffee. I’ll be—”

  I ignored her, leaning down just long enough to slip my arms around her and sweep her up into a bridal carry. “Come on. Let’s get some rest.”

  “This is completely unnecessary,” she muttered. Despite the verbal protest, she made no move to stop me or try to escape, only tensing slightly as her jaw cracked open in yet another long yawn before resting her head against my shoulder. It looked like she was practically half-asleep already.

  Carrying her in my arms, I headed over to the corridor leading to the Avengers’ living quarters. Just before we started down it, Pietro appeared beside me, his voice quiet. “I’m glad you’re safe.”

  “I think ‘safety’ is still a bit of an open question right now,” I replied. “But we’ll manage. We’ll talk more later, okay? Can you wrangle the Eternals in the meantime?”

  Pietro made a bit of a face, lips pressing together as he glanced back toward Thena. “I can’t stand that woman.”

  “Yeah… I get that.” I gave him a bit of an awkward shrug, trying not to overly jiggle my human cargo about too much. “Please just keep an eye on things.”

  He nodded, then looked at Nat and let out a small snort of amusement. “Fine. Go on.”

  I bobbed gratefully, then turned and headed down the corridor toward Natasha’s quarters. She gave a quiet grunt of annoyance as I shifted my grip on her to open the door, maneuvering her through the doorframe and using my foot to push it closed again behind us.

  Nat’s quarters at the compound were pretty basic—she didn’t keep a lot of personal effects here. There was just a simple bed, desk, dresser, and a window with a view out across the compound grounds, currently concealed behind a heavy, light-blocking curtain that kept the room fairly dark. I stepped over to the bed and carefully propped Nat up on the edge.

  She let out a loud sigh, her eyes fluttering open as I knelt to take her shoes off. “You don’t need to fuss over me,” she protested, though there was no actual force behind it.

  “You fuss over me, I fuss over you,” I said easily, looking back up at her. “That’s the deal, yeah?”

  Natasha leaned forward and gently rested her forehead against mine for a moment. “That’s twice you’ve been kidnapped now. It’s getting to be a habit,” she said softly. “You really scared me this time, you know? I thought…”

  “I know.” My throat tightened. “I’m sorry.”

  “Try not to do it again?”

  I huffed out a laugh that wasn’t really a laugh, then pulled away so I could finish undressing her. “No promises.”

  Once I’d stripped her down to her underwear, she clambered over and stretched out fully on the bed, kicking her feet to get them under the thin blanket. I took my pants off and climbed in beside her, curling up with my arm resting lightly across her middle. She snuggled into me, eyes already closed. It didn’t take long at all before her breathing fell into a steady rhythm.

  There was a lot going on. I still had no idea what to do about Sterns—if I even should do anything at all—and the Eternals situation could develop at any minute. But, for now, none of that really mattered. I lay quietly in the semi-darkness, focusing on the warmth of Natasha’s body against mine and the steady rise and fall of her chest. Just being near her again was comforting in a way that I couldn’t fully describe. Even so, it was still some time before I was actually able to fall asleep.