A/N: I'm back so let's kick things into full throttle mode. I got a lot of sleep, and I mean a lot, during the weekend so I think I should be able to go back to working on the last arc of the story.

[COLD CHRONICLES V]

"It is, and at the same time it's not." Draul said, drawing all their attention from Bucky's skin which was slowly losing its purple glow.

"What do you mean?" Ororo asked, fascinated by such a change happening in front of her.

"Watch." Was all Draul said before he formed an ice lance and fired it at Bucky with the latter not moving, wanting to see what else he could do.

The moment the ice touched Bucky, it immediately went inside his body, surprising the audience who had their eyes wide open in shock, only for it to grow wider as Bucky's body became scalding red with intense heat, making them feel as if they were standing a few meters away from a volcano.

"Reactive Adaptation. It's even stronger than my own adaptation since his is purely physical but that by no means means that that's all what he can do. Since he took on the properties of Vibranium means he can also take on the properties of different matter, irrespective of their composition. We would have to test out his current limits thou-"

BANG!

Draul words were cut short as the sound of a gun resounded in the room, cue Yelena pointing the muzzle of a glock in Bucky's direction while said man had a bullet caught between his fingers, sporting an unamused and partly cheshire grin at the teenager.

"Reaction speed likely surpass the speed of sound." Draul noted as he saw exactly how Bucky moved to catch the bullet, almost in an exasperated, yet astonished, ease. "It's highly likely that you still can't control how you adapt to the situations around you, hence…" Draul left the following words unsaid as everyone saw that Bucky's fingertips were already transformed, looking like reinforced steel reminiscent of Colossus' metal form.

"That… Is… Freaking… COOL!!" Yelena almost emptied an entire clip on Bucky if not for Natasha snatching the gun out of her hand and Ororo snatching the other that she drew out from her back.

"It sure is, but that doesn't mean you get to shoot bullets at me." Bucky chastised but there was no heat in his voice as he was more focused on the changes in his body.

"You guys can have your fun later. Steve, it's your turn." Despite the excited atmosphere, Steve managed to keep his cool and sat on the chair, legs crossed as if he was taking a photo.

There was no nervousness, only anticipation rolling off of him. "Same thing I said to Bucky; your imagination is the limit." Steve nodded at Draul's reminder and closed his eyes as the purple hue washed over him.

…

He felt cold, freezing cold that rattled his bones.

He forced his eyes open only to find out that he was trapped in some sort of ice, the cause of his cold hell. Though he was trapped he didn't panic as he knew he could easily escape such bonds which was proven true as he broke through the ice covering him with ease.

He crawled out of the ground only to find himself in the freezing tundra of the Arctic. "Seriously? Should have asked Bucky what the hell he went through."

Steve wasn't a fool. He knew there had to be a reason why he was seeing such things as he could remember that this was where he was dug up thanks to Draul.

This place was a place of regret for him, a constant reminder of what he lost and could never get back, well maybe he could but the price was not one he was sure he could pay.

If only he had been a better shield then none of this would have happened. If only he had stopped the mad man then many people would not have had to pay the price they did.

HYDRA wouldn't have had a way to infiltrate the world once again, poisoning the times with their malicious revenge.

He was a defender and all he could do was sleep while the world burned. Senseless killings happened because he was closing his eyes to them.

The metahumans were shunned and even publicly persecuted because they didn't have a loud enough voice. They didn't have someone with the power he had at their side.

… If only he could have been a better shield…?!!

"A shield." He might not have had the chance to be the best protector like Erskine wanted him to be then, but he more than had enough chance to be now.

He could be the perfect shield.

Steve didn't want anything special. He didn't want a flashy ability or the destructive power to decimate any foe that faced him. All he wanted was the power to better protect his new family and to remain standing strong.

A shield could be many things in the right hands and no other hand was better than Steve's when it came to wielding a shield.

He needed something that no attack could go through but Draul had already stressed it so many times that nothing was absolute in this world, so he settled for what was possible but also within the realms of impossibility.

Steve would admit that he was not one for broad imaginations but he had a concept he could walk with, one Draul had shown so many times. One that would prevent his enemies from reaching him.

It didn't need a shape like his shield since the perfect shield was one that would be able to protect in every situation and as attached as he was with his shield, he knew just how awfully lacking his trusty partner was.

There was no need for a size because the concept was all-encompassing, and as for its attacking power… Well there were more than a thousand ways to kill a man with your bare hands.

A defender still had to fight unless how would he be able to defend? Steve's answer to that was something other than his ability to defend regardless of whether it can be armed. He needed the perfect weapon, a sword to complement his shield and the answer immediately came to him.

Why need a sword when he was a perfect weapon?

He had his shield, and as the soldier he had always been, all he needed was a command. An order to the battlefield that he couldn't refuse. What defines a soldier's worth if not a trial of blood?

He was but one man, a simple soldier, wielding a shield and armed with nothing else, jumping into war. That was who he was and has always been.

Gaining new abilities and expanding the battlefield to a universal scale wasn't going to change that.

"Really original. You couldn't think of anything else, could you? It won't have much use from here on out you know." Draul materialized by Steve's side and watched him as he created something that was eerily similar to his Proto-adamantium shield, but without the stars and stripes.

"I'm no longer fighting for my country so the stars and stripes don't really matter anymore so I got rid of them. And besides, it was all I could think of." Steve replied as he finished his work, admiring the unoriginal beauty of it.

"I could tell." The two of them fell into a comfortable silence before Steve broke it.

"So are you really Draul? Or something else?" Steve asked with the same casualness he always had around him.

"You noticed? Bucky didn't, so that's 1 – 1. And to answer your question, yes I am but not really at the same time." Seeing Steve made no intention of prodding 'him' on, he continued. "I am the part of Draul that holds supremacy over Power; a segmented part of his consciousness if you will."

"That sorta makes sense." Steve hummed. "So this was all you, or was it Draul?"

"In a way you could say it was both of us as I can't exist on my own without the main consciousness, or the one that assumes the identity of 'Draul', which is the one you all are familiar with. Everything I do is in conjunction with his innermost thoughts. But I think the credit this time wholly belongs to me, *sigh, alright, maybe 80% credit."

Steve was greatly amused as he saw Draul, or rather the part of Draul that was the Power Stone, explaining about himself. It just goes to show how thoroughly fucked up in the head Draul was if he had split personalities for each of the stone.

"As much as I would love to chat with you, Steve, your time is up. Oh and make sure not to spoil the game with the others. Space, the grumpy angry old guy, and I, made a bet on if you guys would be able to differentiate between the slight changes in our personalities, which reminds me; how did you know?"

Oh Draul definitely was on a constant trip if even his subconscious was making bets and even losing against themselves.

Steve chuckled at yet another crazy aspect of Draul. "Honestly, it was just a hunch."

"Great! I lost to a dumb guy's hunch, how hilarious." 'Draul' grumbled before fading away, leaving Steve to witness, as he woke up from what had definitely not been an illusion, the prelude to his wish coming through.

It felt as if he had never left as the sensation of him being seated on a chair came back to him.

"That definitely was an experience." Steve stood up, trying his best to shrug off the dizzy spell that was hitting him full time.

"You okay, buddy?" Bucky held his arm to keep him from tumbling down to the floor.

"Yeah, I think. Feels like I just smoked pot and I don't know how smoking pot feels." Steve complained but he was getting used to it as the seconds trickled on. "What?" He asked as he saw them looking at him with raised brows.

"Steve, it's your eyes. They look almost white now, kinda cool if you ask me." Yelena pointed out before passing him the mirror she got from Draul.

"It's not as exaggerated as I thought it would be. I can live with this." The change wasn't much compared to what he was currently feeling…

Displacement.

He felt as if he was everywhere in the house and it was almost driving him nuts. It was as if one second he was in the room and another one he was outside the house.

"Woah, woah! Easy there bro." The dizzy spell that he was currently experiencing fizzled out of his system as Draul's words entered his ears.

"What the hell was that?" He managed to ask after gulping down a bottle of water. He was half sure he was going mad since he was looking straight at them… while he was facing the ground!

"Spatial manipulation. That feeling of being everywhere at once was the minor omnipresence that comes with it. If space manipulation, and to such an astonishing degree, is the first thing you are currently exhibiting then I'm almost anticipating what you can do after we run all sorts of Yelena-based tests on you." Draul said, paying attention to Steve's condition. "Try focusing on one spot, forget all the information currently being drilled into your head. You have to first be spatially aware of where you actually are before you want to try something like warping." He advised.

Steve followed his advice and focused only on the room they were in, trying his best to ignore every other sensation he was currently getting that was not from this room.

He was finally able to reign himself in, though he still felt slight dizziness due to being able to see them from every other perspective. His omnipresence was now constrained to the room and it would take some practicing for him to learn how to ignore it.

"So Bucky got Draul's adaptation on steroids as his first ability while Steve got Draul's power over space for his. Can this day get any cooler?" Yelena, like always, was the most excited out of all of them.

"Then why don't you wait till you get yours." Ororo hugged her close to prevent her from clamoring the poor Steve.

[COLD CHRONICLES VI]

"I guess I'm up then." Though she said it in the most casual tone she could muster, she alone knew how much this would mean to her.

Honestly, she didn't really care about having powers. She could kill a lot of metas with just simple assassination tactics, but her skills would prove next to useless in the battlefield she would be venturing into if she were to not sit on that chair.

But did she really have a choice? Ironically, she didn't.

Sure she had options, but when said options were just two polar opposites of 'do or do not', it wasn't really a choice since she was making the decision based on the choices she was given.

If she was given a choice, hers would be that they could just go back to kicking some terrorists ass and not trying to one-up the universe. But she was anything if not flexible.

Regardless of whether it was something she would never have wanted, there was no sign of hesitation as she sat on the chair, choosing family every time over her mental complications. After all, it was just having super sick powers. What could go wrong?

She tossed her erratic thoughts to the furthest recess of her mind. "Beam me up, Draul."

"Sure thing." Once again, the purple fluorescence washed over her and her worldview changed.

Before her was a scene that shook her soul; her body laying splat on the hard stone cold ground at the foot of a cliff, giving her the clue that she must have fallen off and died. But what baffled her other than the obviously aged face of her counterpart was her smiling face even in death.

Someone was at the top of the mountain, hand outstretched, but she was too far away to see who it was.

She had expected to see different things; from planets being destroyed to her family dying in some sick illusion of the possible future. But she never would have thought that her death would be one that would shake her so.

What would have happened if it was someone else that died?

Draul? Bucky? Steve? Ororo? ...Yelena?

The thought itself made her heartbeat increase, one far more terrifying and heart-wrenching than seeing herself in illusion this was, dead.

All this showed her was that while she could think of the most scary nightmare her brain could conjure up, she has never been in a position where she could see it.

She looked around, nothing in sight except the fog at the distance, making it seem as if it was only her and her dead counterpart that were present. Whoever was at the top of the cliff was gone and only the howling cold winds were left.

Vormir.

She had been on this planet with Draul when he went to kill Thanos for the Soul Stone. The only Stone which required a price that Thanos had paid with his daughter.

She didn't know how an older counterpart of her came to Vormir, but the smile on her face as she died told her why.

The Soul Stone and her family.

If there was ever a doubt in Natasha's mind about the way moving forward then this scene completely shattered it. Draul had said that it was highly probable that they would die, especially him, on their path moving forward. He made it seem as if that was the only unchangeable outcome of their endeavor. He tried to be prepared for everything, even death, so why shouldn't she do the same?

Prepare for it so that, if one day the choice was ever presented to her, she would know which one to choose.

"I definitely should have asked either Bucky or Steve what they did." She muttered as she turned away from her dead counterpart.

She wouldn't lie and said she enjoyed what she saw, but she was strong enough not to let it get to her after the initial shock. Death was an inevitability. The reason why it's so terrifying is because no one wants or expects its call. But if one prepares for it, it becomes the same as a regular nightmare… It'll pass after a while.

She mused to herself as she started walking aimlessly. "Maybe I should try the white dye. Or maybe I shouldn't. Don't want anyone to think I'm copying our resident white hair."

She got tired of walking only to turn around an find put that she didn't know where the actual fuck she was. As far as she could tell, she wasn't anywhere near the foot of the cliff she had started at. She couldn't even see a trace of any mountain or rocks when she turns back, instead what she found was a red sun and weird fauna all around her.

"Shouldn't there be like a guide for these type of things?" She sat on the grass, not minding of what could be inhabiting the weird plants around her.

All she did was stare at the red sun making her thoughts to run wild – her past, her current life, and what she hoped for the future.

She was glad she managed to escape the Red Room and was also infinitely grateful to the three men who made it possible. She was over the moon when she managed to find her sister, holding her close like she used to do all those years ago.

She was happy when she actually made a genuine friend in Draul, one who listened to her and gave her advice on how to move forward from her past and work on her present. He even accepted her selfish request of living with him until she could somehow stabilize her life and take care of Yelena. She never thought she would end up living with him for the past few years.

And all through everything, not once did she wish things were different. Would things have remained the same if she wished it did? That was a question she would never have the answer to.

Draul always said that the universe was no partial judge, so even if she did wish for something, who would answer her?

And besides, this wasn't a fairy tale where the princesses get to make a wish on a star-filled night sky and a fairy or godmother grants it. Wishes were for little girls who didn't know how to get what they want, for someone like her? A bullet to the head or a stab to the jugular and then it's ice-cream the next morning.

But guns and knives were no longer going to help. She needed to upgrade her guns unless she would be benched by her strict coach Draul. What she needed was a way to get what she wanted. If she wanted someone to die, then so be it. If she wanted someone to live, then so be. If she wanted someone to disappear… then so it shall be.

Since the universe won't grant her a wish and since she was too proud to ask it for one, she would make her own desires come true. Whether the universe liked it or not.

She liked her guns, compact and efficient, the same with her knives, and anything she wanted to go for would have to fit the same criteria. Subtlety was the game while deadliness was the aim.

No flashy attacks or big names like the boys craved. She was an assassin. She was more deadly without anyone knowing who and where she was.

She didn't know what she would end up getting but if what Draul said had any merit to it, then she shouldn't have to worry about that since her subconscious knew more about what she wanted and it would fill in the gaps.

She didn't know when it happened but the red sun above her started shining brighter and growing bigger. "That doesn't look dangerous."

"No it doesn't, but the same can't be said about you." Natasha cast a sidelong glance at the origin of the voice and she wasn't even a bit surprised when she saw Draul standing beside her.

If there was ever a person she was comfortable with being inside her head, then it was the man next to her. She kicked Yelena out the first time she tried it and her little sister never tried it again. She wouldn't even let Bucky or Steve anywhere near her head apart from when they shared thoughts during some missions. All surface stuff.

But that guard wasn't up when it came to Draul, maybe because she knew he knew everything there was to know about her or it could be because of his lackadaisical attitude to most things. To be honest, the reason didn't matter. All that mattered was that there was someone other than her sister that she could trust 100%.

"I guess this is somewhere like my subconscious." She said as they both stared at the ominously glowing and growing sun.

Draul shook his head, debunking her conjectures. "This is a domain of my creation. A realm of 'Power' if you may. I did base a part of it from your subconscious, so you are not exactly wrong."

Natasha hummed in understanding at his explanation. That would explain why she suddenly felt peaceful as she laid on the field. "So have any idea what that sun is doing?" His response was only a deadpan look at her question that should have stated the obvious. "Thought so. So we just wait?" She asked.

"It's not as if you have anything better to do. I'm just here to spectate. That and also wondering what you'll manage to pick up. For your information, I got Steve's on my second guess." Draul said.

"You know, I never thought that I would have powers one day. Yes I did fantasize about it at one point, thinking of how easier my life would be if I had something like super speed…" Draul snorted at that but Natasha took no offense since she did chuckle at her own words. "Haha, it would have made a lot of my missions way easier. Probably would have made life ten times more easier… But you know the real kicker?"

"You still didn't choose super speed?"

She burst out a full blown laugh, even Draul had to join in at one point.

"Right. I still didn't choose super speed. It wasn't even something I thought of as important.. Say we die, or we face a foe we can't beat, what will you do?" The laughing mood immediately turned somber as Natasha asked Draul that question.

Draul didn't even think about it for a moment before he answered her. "If you guys die before me, then I'll just lose it and battle it out to the death. If I die too then I'm afraid that's that, unless of course I somehow manage to cheat death. If it's a scenario where I can only save you guys then I'll just rewrite reality and make you forget I ever existed. Would have to take your powers too to make sure no hiccups happen and you somehow, against all odds, remember what should have been."

If she was shocked or repulsed by what Draul said, she didn't let it show at all in her body language. The two remained in silence before Draul's image fizzled out, leaving her alone to watch the now eerily close red sun.

"Idiot."

Natasha opened her eyes, her sight first trailing to an oblivious Draul before she focused on the others, most importantly her little sister who was just a breath away from firing her with questions.

"That… was some experience."

Bucky and Steve nodded at her words as they both agreed wholly with it. "How are you feeling Nat?"

"Besides the disorienting feeling I'm getting? Just fine. You guys might want to keep quiet for a while because by God my head is buzzing." The moment she said that, everywhere became quiet…while Yelena's mouth was still moving.

Read up to 35 chapters ahead at *com/Draul_TheOminous.