"The damage is already done, Ara. Just sit down. Another few hours won't make anything worse for them." Miranda crossed her arms where she leaned back against the observation window of their holding cell.

"Ya know, I thought I'd be happy for you, finding friends and a lover and all, but not enthused about this "feeling like we owe them anything" shit you've got going on right now."

"Need I remind you that you are the reason we are in this position at all? Besides, these are good people. People that might actually be able to offer us some aid. Because if you haven't noticed, we aren't doing that hot on our own anymore."

"Oh, that was made plenty clear to me for that fact that we would have lost every one of our Watchmen if it had not been for that witch you've been holding captive and the sorcerer who appeared from nowhere."

Miranda pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes until she saw stars. "God, I forgot about her."

"You forgot?"

"Look. It's been a bit of a week alright. And the sorcerer. Was he the high and mighty type? Red cape? Sparkly powers."

Ara's narrow eyed glare confirmed her suspicions. "Friend of yours?"

"No. I wouldn't say that. But I get the feeling he knows exactly who we are."

Ara opened her mouth to counter with a biting remark, but a beep interrupted her as the lock at their door slid back. Director Mackenzie and Rhodey stepped into the room, the whir of Rhodey's mechanics the only sound. They both settled themselves opposite of Miranda, studying her, trying to gauge if she stood as a threat now that they had seen a glimpse of the real her.

"Look Miranda, we just want to understand what exactly happened." Mac said softly.

Of course he would try to see the best in her.

Ara scoffed, "Well I guess we could start with the fact that that is not her real name."

All eyes settled on Miranda. She fought the urge to turn her head. Even with the mirrored glass at her back, she knew Bucky would be standing there, watching her, listening.

"Oh?" Mac asked.

Miranda sighed, "It is not."

The room settled back into silence. Miranda squeezed her fingers around the swell of her biceps, and closed her eyes.

"My given name is Mortekaia. And that is my sister, Aristelle."

"Bucky told us he thought that the other woman on the street was your sister as well. Olcora? Was she using...mind control?" Rhodey's words became more and more skeptical as they left his lips. As though he himself could not believe what he was saying.

"Who are you really?" Mac asked, his tone sharp enough to cut. "Because it damn sure ain't an Agent of Shield."

"Aren't I though?" Miranda asked quietly, "Did I not go through training? Pass my tests? I was recruited to your team once too, Mac. You trusted me."

"Trusted. Past tense."

"If I'm going to tell you the truth, I want my team present to hear it. They deserve to know."

"I'm not sure they consider themselves your "team" anymore," Rhodey said.

Miranda swallowed, ignoring the pang in her chest at his words. "Maybe not. But that doesn't change the fact that I want them here."

Someone knocked on the glass against Miranda's back. Mac and Rhodey exchanged a glance before they stood and left the room, locking the door behind them.

"Are you sure this is wise, sister?" Aristelle asked, moving closer to her.

"We are running out of options, Ara." Miranda said quietly. "I trust these people. And you know I do not do so lightly."

Aristelle raised a brow and smirked suggestively at her.

"That's not why," Miranda snarled at her. "God. You are insufferable sometimes."

The door beeped again as Mac and Rhodey filed back into the room followed by Sam and Bucky. His carefully closed expression left her breathless, like someone had laid bricks over her lungs and leaned all of their weight into her. She stared at him with all the intensity that she could manage, trying desperately to will him to look at her. But he did not. He simply settled himself against the far corner, crossing his arms over his chest and staring pointedly into Mac's back.

"Alright. They are here. Now, tell us who you really are."

Miranda let out a long breath and pulled back the chair across from Mac and Rhodey. She dropped herself into it, resigning herself to this fate. "That question comes with a complicated answer."

"Who is your father?"

All eyes shifted to the speaker. Bucky. He was looking right at her now. And while part of her was relieved that he could still bear to even look at her, the other part recoiled at the vehement in his expression, feared that might never go away.

"Who my father is...is a difficult concept to contain within the human language." Miranda rubbed a hand over her breast bone, attempting to will the ache there to reside.

"Try it. We've seen some shit." Rhodey said. "We might get it."

Miranda exchanged a glance with Aristelle, before sighing. Leaning forward and resting her elbows on her knees, she pinched the bridge of her nose. "He is...I don't know how to describe it. He is...god."

"We've dealt with gods before." Sam said.

She looked up, her hand falling down between her knees, and narrowed her eyes at him. "He is not 'a god.' He is the god."

"Like "Jesus" Christ God? The almighty merciful god?"

Miranda looked at Aristelle, frustration brewing. Aristelle shrugged a shoulder as if to say 'You started this.'

"So what you are telling me, is that after all of the debate, all of those wars and prosecution, the Catholics are actually right?" Mac said.

"There is so much scientific evidence backing the theory of the big bang!" Rhodey said. "Not to mention the infinity stones themselves."

Miranda leveled her silver gaze on Rhodey. "Who do you think lit the match that ignited the big bang?"

The room fell to silence and she pushed to her feet. "And no. The Catholics were not right. Not entirely. He never had a son. There were no prophets of my father's, no angels, no holy spirit. There was just us. My sisters and I."

"How old are you?" Bucky asked. The quiet calm of his voice cutting through the commotion in the room.

Miranda smirked at him, hoping desperately to pull even the slightest of smiles from him. "Don't you know you are never supposed to ask a woman her age."

He stared back at her, unamused. She took in a shaky breath.

"But that doesn't really explain who you are," Mac said, tapping his fingers on the table top.

"That is because while 'God' is a more adequate description of what our father can do," Aristelle said, cutting in, "There is another name that has been coined for him for centuries. Though it really described him more as an event than a person, per say." Aristelle looked to Miranda to finish.

"Apocalypse."

The room was quiet. One breath. Then two.

"You said you had three sisters," Bucky said quietly. She could see the pieces falling together in his mind. "So does that mean…"

Miranda swallowed, looking down at her hands. So many times he had been afraid of what she thought of him. Was consumed by thinking that she would see him as the monster. That she would be afraid of what he could do. And all along, she had been the monster. But she had warned him of this, told him so many times that she was no good.

"Four sisters," Rhodey echoed. "Four Horsemen."

Aristelle's smile was savage. "Finally, they catch on. Really, I just don't understand how you could not have suspected something. Especially since she's been shagging tall, dark and handsome over there."

It was like an out of body experience. Watching each face react to her sister's words one by one. Slowly, everyone looked to Bucky. He had frozen in place, his arms crossed over his chest with a thumb pressing against his lower lip in thought. He blinked. A blush seeped up from the collar of his shirt.

Miranda leaned back in her chair, leveling her sister with a look that could have melted the polar ice caps. "Sometimes, you really are just the absolute worst."

Aristelle lifted a shoulder in a mock shrug before responding sweetly. "I do what I can."

"I have suspected something for a while now," Bucky said, his voice small. "But I've seen how things have gone for the Inhumans. Myself even. There are plenty of terrible things to encourage silence over something like that. And she never really gave us a reason not to trust her."

"Of course you would think that," Rhodey spat, "You are the one getting some on the side."

Rage, hot and overwhelming, surged to the surface, and then Miranda was on her feet, standing over him. "If you really knew anything about me, if you knew what I could do... The fact that any of you are even alive should be enough to know you could trust us."

"She's the reason we are still here to discuss this," Aristelle said mildly, inspecting the dark crescents of dirt beneath her fingernails. "If it was my choice we would have been long gone the second you goons pointed a gun at me. She told me we could trust you. That you could help us."

"Which one are you?" Rhodey asked slowly, not wavering under the weight of her anger.

"You can't teleport out of here. We've dealt with an Inhuman like that before." Mac said. The authority in his voice had wavered, and he had shifted away from Miranda just slightly.

"Oh, we aren't Inhumans." Miranda could hear the grin in Aristelle's voice. "We are entirely unique from any other of his creations."

"Which one," Rhodey ground out again, "Are you?"

Miranda set her hands on the table and leaned in close, enjoying the way he fought not to push away from her. "If we really were to truly ride into this world on the backs of horses, my face would be last you'd see."

"Is that why you are here?" Sam asked. His voice small against the whirlwind raging through her mind. "To end humanity?"

"It's what we were sent here to do. Eons ago." Aristelle said, her voice distant. Miranda stepped back, straightening. "But...I couldn't do it. I fell in love with this planet, its people. They didn't deserve decimation at the hand of my father's anger. And I coerced Mor into helping me stop him."

"Coerced." Miranda's laugh was sharp. And she knew her words came from an ugly place, but she was angry. So angry. "One day, you just might call it what it was."

Hurt flashed across Aristelle's eyes, but she continued on. "We trapped my father in the void between dimensions. Somewhere that he could not free himself from. But I could not convince my other sisters as I had Mor. They have been desperate their whole lives to please him. To be loved by him. So we had to imprison them too, to save this planet and its people. To keep them from setting our father free."

"And they are free now?"

"Just Olcora, I think. But she will be intent on getting the Terra. It will take more than the power Olcora has to free our father."

"If she reaches this last sister, will she have enough power then?" Mac asked.

"Yes and no," Miranda said quietly, settling against the wall, as far from Bucky as she could manage. "She will still need me. She can tear down all the barriers she wants, but I'm the only one who can turn the key to open that door."

"But if you are the only one who can let him free, how did Olcora get loose?" Sam asked.

Aristelle drew in a long breath. "Trapping our father was an incredible feat. It left Mor with far less power to build the entrapments for our sisters. Black magic is not my strong suit. I did what I could but...it takes incredible power to wield an entrapment spell bound by blood. And we were not able to do it a second and third time. Not so soon after our father's banishment."

"Freeing our sisters is a similar process to summoning a demon. I wove a despicable spell, hoping that such a terrible price would deter others from using it." Miranda explained.

"Are you saying there are people who know about this? About your father and sisters? And the spells needed to free them?" Rhodey asked.

"So you don't believe in witches then?"

"This isn't Salem."

Miranda and Aristelle exchanged a glance. "That was a pretty ugly time. But they were playing around with things that they had no business with."

Bucky shifted where he stood against the wall. "Those women who have been turning up dead in the city. Did you murder them? Were they your...sacrifices?"

Taking a steadying breath, she looked up at him, meeting the blazing intensity of his gaze. "No. But it is my fault."

"If you haven't noticed, Olcora's main ability is mind control. She wields it like an infection. It can spread from one host to the next." Aristelle explained.

"Which makes cults an easy target. Their desperation to belong paired with their dabbling in black magic gets them too close to her. She can reach through her prison and influence them through sheer proximity." Miranda shivered, remembering the girl in the night club bathroom. How heavy the influence had been. "She shows them how to summon demons, gives them a taste of what true power is, and then shows them how to free her with the promise of that power. But the connection is not great. It takes them a while to get it right."

"And then we hunt them down and eliminate the issue before it's a problem." Aristelle finished.

"What happened this time? What changed?" Mac asked.

Miranda swallowed, wrapping her arms around herself. "I got distracted."

"This isn't your fault, Mor. We all failed. It's been so long. We just got...complacent."

The room settled into silence as the others turned over the information.

"This can still be fixed, though. Right?" Mac asked, pushing back his chair and standing. "You said it yourself. She needs Miran-er-Mortekaia," He spoke the name slowly, the word clumsy on his lips, "to set your father free. Until then, we can change the game."

"We need to keep her from Terra." Miranda said. "Terra is her tool. Her chances of succeeding become much greater with her in her arsenal."

"Okay," Rhodey said. "And how do we do that?"

Miranda looked over at Aristelle. She could see the other girl tense.

"We keep her from reaching the Convergence. If she gets that open, she has Terra."

"But we will keep you here, Mor." Aristelle said. "We keep you safe. That's the key here."

Miranda looked up at her, expression solemn. "She will keep killing people, Ara. Until she gets what she wants. One by one she will kill every human on this planet herself if she has to. Then what will all of this have been for? Everything you've done, the sacrifices you've made…It will have been for nothing."

Aristelle pressed her lips into a thin line. "You've never cared before about what I did to get us here…"

"I've done terrible things to keep our father from this planet. Unspeakable things." Miranda's eyes trailed to Bucky where he stood across the room, watching her silently. His expression was unreadable, eyes dark. He had told her once that he wanted to know her, to see her like she had been able to see him. Feel better about yourself now? "I cannot stand idly by and let it be in vain."