Lucky's scheme had already come to a grinding halt before it had even been put in motion.

He needed the infinity stone out of the Eye of Agamotto for his plan to work, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't get the stubborn, blasted thing out. He tried pulling it, sticking a ruler under the stone and pushing upward, like a lever (which only succeeded in breaking the ruler), and banging the Eye on his desk with all his might like a barbarian until it left a dent in the wood. He pushed and pulled on every little bit of the Eye, hoping there was some trigger that would release the stone, to no avail. He even tried stomping on it. What made it even more infuriating was that the stone looked to be lightly set into an indentation in the middle, like he should be able to yank it out with no problem.

In a burst of frustration, he slung the necklace away, smacking it against the wall, which of course did nothing but leave a scratch in the paint. If he couldn't get the stone out, then he'd have to find something equally small, easy to hide, and incriminating.

Lucky sat on his bed and thought long and hard, afraid that his plan was already shot through, until he suddenly remembered his field trip. The robot who'd been vaporized had an infinity stone on its head. One that the technician had certainly kept as a souvenir instead of turning in, like he was supposed to.

Filled with energy once again, he jumped up from bed and walked out his door to the elevator terminal. He didn't bother to stop at Six's door, even though he was brimming with excitement. There was no way she would approve of this. It was a hundred times worse than anything he'd done so far, even worse than fight night, worse than cheating on his test.

It didn't matter. If he did this right, then no one would ever have to know that he had a hand in it at all. Well, perhaps he might eventually tell Six, once he was in the clear. And once he knew for certain she would never tell a soul that he'd framed Sarge for stealing.

Lucky strolled through the Main Terminal at a leisurely pace with his hands in his pockets, as if he'd just come up for some fresh air… as fresh as the air got in the TVA, anyway. The orange sliding doors of the soul scanning room were shut tight. A sign next to the door read in handwritten scribble: Do Not Swipe! Knock First!

He gave a cautious knock, trying not to look too suspicious. Nothing. Lucky knocked a little louder and pressed his ear against the crack. Either the door was too thick or there was silence on the other side. The longer he hung around, the more likely he was to get questioned.

He was about to knock a third time when the door finally slid open. Saim's work area, with his control desk and clipboard and chair cut down to size just for him, looked as lived in as Mobius' room. To Lucky's delight, his vest was hanging around the back of the chair. Saim craned his neck to look up at Lucky, since the top of his head barely reached Lucky's waist.

He put one hand on his hip and grunted, "What is it?"

Lucky sucked in a breath and let the lie come to him, as easy as any other thought he'd ever had.

"You're Saim, right?"

"Yeah…"

"You're needed on floor H3U, courtroom ninety one."

Saim only blinked at him, then scowled.

"Well, why the hell didn't I get an order from Miss Minutes? My tempad hasn't gone off."

"You did!" said Lucky, matter-of-factly. "The messages weren't going through. The judge sent me."

"Why-"

"You're needed to give an account of a variant's processing."

"But you're just a-"

"I asked to be a judge's assistant for a while during my training, to see what it's like." Lucky gave him a big, cheesy smile. This was fun. "I want to be a judge someday. He sent me here himself to get you."

"Which judge?"

The lie machine that was Lucky's brain momentarily froze. He stared at Saim, his mouth open, searching for anything in his mind, but came out with nothing but random syllables.

"Uh… oh… it was… oh…"

"Ouro Boros?"

"Yes!" Lucky breathed again, relieved.

Saim rolled his eyes and scratched his nearly bald head. "Surprised that son of a bitch hasn't keeled over dead yet." He grunted, then went back over to his chair. Lucky realized, with a pang of desperation, that he was about to fetch his vest before he left.

"They've been trying to call you for thirty minutes. You need to go now!"

Saim threw up his hands and mumbled indecipherable curses as he walked back towards Lucky and out the door.

He waited for a few tense moments after it slid closed behind him, making sure that Saim wasn't going to come back for anything, then rushed to the vest. The infinity stone was right in the front breast pocket, where Saim had left it. The yellow stone felt warm in Lucky's hand, muffled pulses of energy beating through it and sending a tingle up his arm, like the TVA's magic inhibitors were trying to strangle a living heartbeat.

In a weird wave of empathy that swept through him, he almost felt connected to the tiny gem… felt sorry for it. The feeling spread, until it wasn't so much odd as a comforting blanket smothering his mind. He didn't need to get rid of it. No. He could keep it himself. Keep it safe. Listen to its knowledge. Become one with the stone…

Lucky gasped and thrust the stone into his pocket. The second he was no longer touching it with his bare hand, the feeling lifted from him, like being pushed roughly back into reality.

That was weird, to say the very least. So many TVA employees had all those infinity stones, and none of them seemed to be entranced by them to the point of distraction.

Lucky turned, ready to open the doors and get out before Saim realized there was no floor H3U, when he stopped, staring at the square archway in the middle of the tiny room. The soul scanner. While he was there, what harm could it possibly do to take one measly picture?

Unless he was a robot, too.

His time was running short. Saim would be back any minute, but Lucky decided his curiosity was much stronger than his fear of being zapped into a pile of dust. He held his breath, readied himself, and jumped into the middle of the scanner.

There was a flash of light so bright that Lucky yelped, absolutely terrified for a moment that he was about to be incinerated. Then, just as quickly as it had happened, it was over. He was still standing, blinking the swirling dots out of his vision as the machine spat out a little square picture. Lucky chuckled nervously. He had a soul the whole time, he knew it. There was nothing to be afraid of. He ripped the picture out, eager to see what color his temporal aura was.

He stared at the photograph, confused. He clearly remembered Saim saying souls were supposed to be one solid color, and yet his clearly had two. A blue aura radiated from his chest, just like it was supposed to… but in the middle glowed a small circle of red, at the very center of his heart. It was much brighter than the blue aura surrounding it, which seemed slightly translucent and weak compared to the fiery, opaque crimson circle. The red energy wasn't coming from the infinity stone. That was in his pants pocket, and no color emanated from there in the photograph, only around his chest. It was almost as if the blue was surrounding the red part, trapping it inside, imprisoning it.

Lucky put the photo in his pocket, unease growing deep in the pit of his stomach, his scheme nearly forgotten. Maybe he hadn't done it quite right. He didn't really know how it worked, anyway. Or perhaps it was on the fritz, like it had been before the class visited.

While his mind raced with possibilities, he didn't catch the sound of the badge swipe beep until it was too late. It took only two steps for Lucky to back himself up against the far wall. The room was too tiny to hide anywhere at all. He had to make a decision, and any decision he could make would be a rash one.

Lucky lunged at the control panel and desperately pressed every single button. The scanner made strange buzzing noises and printed out a blank photograph, the lights went off and on again, and to his surprise, a trapdoor opened under the scanner.

The main door, which had just begun to open, slid shut, much to Saim's chagrin.

"Hey! What the hell!" he yelled, trying to swipe his badge. The swiper let out an angry double beep, keeping the doors sealed shut.

There was only one way out.

Lucky swallowed his fear and leapt down the hole in the floor, making a rough landing on top of a couple of stanchions, sending them to the ground with a clatter.

Before he could even get his bearings, he heard a guard yelling above him.

"Hey, you! Variant! Get up, you're…"

The guard paused as Lucky stood, likely realizing he wasn't a variant at all. Only two guards watched over the huge waiting room, one right next to him and another with a pruning baton pointed at a variant prisoner. The place was covered in a maze of ropes long enough to make a queue for fifty people, even though there was only one variant there at the moment, a surprised looking Skrull wearing a beige jumpsuit and holding a tiny stub of paper.

The guard nearest to Lucky looked up at the hole in the ceiling, as if he'd never seen it before, and scratched his head.

"You're not a… how did you…"

In the time he'd taken to stare at the ceiling, the Skrull in the corner of the room had shapeshifted into an exact copy of the guard next to him, pruning baton and all.

"Damn it, Dorrek," sighed the other guard, his focus off of Lucky. "Not this shit again."

"We should just prune him and get it over with," said one of the identical guards.

"Yeah, prune him," said the other one.

As everyone was distracted, Lucky took the opportunity to back away slowly, until he was against the door.

"You have the time collar on the right one, idiot! Use it!" one of the guards was yelling as Lucky cracked open the door and slipped away.

He breathed a sigh of relief as he took off down the hallway. They weren't even going to chase him… he wasn't a variant, after all.

Lucky found an empty public bathroom to catch his breath, leaning over and putting his hands on his knees. He'd gotten away with half of his plan scott free. The little stone seemingly burned a hole in his pocket, like it was eager to touch bare skin again.

He shook that thought out of his head. It wasn't actually alive… he didn't know why it felt that way when he held it, but it surely couldn't be sentient. It wasn't even a robot, it didn't have programming or anything. Despite that, the desire to hold it again was strong, too strong for Lucky to resist.

He warily stuck his hand in his pocket and touched the tiny, hot gem. It once again sent tingles up his fingers and arm, waves of sweet, smothering hypnosis beginning to envelop him.

It saw all, it knew all… such glorious things it could show him! Such beauty there was in the universe, hiding in that little stone! If only he could know it, too! It begged to be used, to be destroyed in a flash of magnificent splendor…

Lucky pulled away with a hiss of pain. It felt like he'd held his hand on a radiator for too long, so long that the pain had turned into numbness. He flexed his fingers, almost expecting to see burn marks, but his hand looked perfectly fine. A glance in the bathroom mirror surprised him as well. He looked pale, a little sweaty, with bags beginning to form under his eyes, like he'd suddenly gotten a case of the flu.

He tried to clear his head and left the bathroom to find an elevator. He'd have to be very careful. Lucky had a feeling that the longer he kept the infinity stone, the stronger the notion of keeping it forever would become. It sent a shudder up his spine, of fear, or of excitement, he wasn't sure. At that moment, he couldn't tell the difference.

He dreamt that he was flying.

It took him a moment to realize he wasn't doing it under his own power. He was dashing through the sky on some kind of hovering craft, a thousand feet aloft, a ruined, burning city beneath him. It had been his doing, he knew, but he barely felt even the slightest twinge of guilt. What did he care for the people down there, suffering and screaming? Humans were a malleable race; once they had calmed down, buried their dead, they would accept their new reality easily. He would be their king. In a few generations, he bet they'd forget all the carnage had ever happened.

The small, guilty ache threatened to grow, but he pushed it deep down inside. There was no time for that nonsense. There would never be time, if he was to become king of that measly planet. They were just humans, anyway; insects, doomed to die.

He gripped his scepter tightly as it sent pulses of muffled energy down his arm. When it had first been used on him, the wonder, the beauty, the sheer glory of impending triumph pulsing through his heart felt enormous, like a weight that he was glad to bear as long as it took to achieve victory. Now, his arm was beginning to ache. The bags under his eyes grew deeper with every hour, his skin paler and more sickly. The voices in his head had turned from encouraging to… frightening. Threatening, even. The scepter wanted him to hurt others, which he'd gladly do even without its prompting, but it also seemed to want him to hurt himself.

It was difficult to breathe against the air rushing around him, but some of that tightness in his chest were his nerves beginning to grate against what very little conscience he had left.

With his target in sight, he jumped from the craft and landed effortlessly on the deck of an enormous building. He knew, without knowing how, that he was to meet someone there. Waiting patiently, though, didn't seem to be getting him anywhere. At least three minutes had ticked by before he grunted out loud with frustration.

"Where the devil is he?" he growled, before storming off into the building.

The living room was a fine one, by human standards. Very minimalistic, and yet with unique designs for its decor and furniture. There was even a little sand garden in the middle of the room. It was disgusting. What was the point of having vast amounts of money if you didn't have vast amounts of treasure to show off to everyone? The most opulent thing in the room was a fully stocked bar off to the side.

"There he is."

The calm voice came from the other end of the huge living room. Sitting on a luxurious, curving couch in front of a glass coffee table were two men… well, one of them was clearly a man, and the other may have been a man at one point, but had turned into some sort of hideous, green monster. The gigantic… thing… was so huge it looked like his weight was about to break the couch. He picked up a shot glass, dwarfed comically by his enormous hands so that it looked like no more than a thimble, tossed back the bit of alcohol, and gingerly placed the glass back on the table, all while staring straight at him like he was eager to kill him.

The normal man crossed one leg over the other and languidly swirled a crystal tumbler of whiskey, giving him a steady, even look. The sleeves of his shirt were pushed halfway up his arms. His demeanor suggested he was going about a normal day, that the city outside wasn't dying and on fire.

The man on the couch squinted and put one hand on his chest. "You know me, right?"

"No," he replied, patience wearing thin. He knew this was the man he'd been prepared to meet, though. Prepared to kill.

As he crossed the room to the couch, he caught a glimpse of himself in a polished, stainless steel panel. He was dressed in a magnificent outfit, fitted tightly with green leather and gold trim. Though it had been ripped slightly, he assumed while fighting the battle raging on beneath them, it still looked striking on his svelte frame.

He brought up one hand and felt his smooth cheek. L-7 smiled at his reflection. He looked good. Really good. He liked his face very much.

The room, for a terrifying moment, felt like it was melting, spinning, like he'd suddenly gotten drunk and could no longer get his bearings. He stumbled forward, caught himself on the edge of a chair.

The other man jumped up from the couch and grabbed onto his arm to steady him.

"Whoa, easy there," he said, helping him to the couch. His knees gave out. They'd turned to jelly. "You can just call me Tony."

Tony again took his seat next to the green monster, who hadn't stopped glowering at him since the moment he'd arrived.

"Tony," he said, his breathing heavy and labored, "I'm supposed to be here, right? It wasn't some kind of mistake?"

The look on Tony's face turned from concern to confusion. "Mistake? No. You're supposed to remember this. It already happened." He paused, shook his head wonderingly, his eyes never leaving him. "You're really not scared shitless of that jolly green giant?" He jerked a thumb at the gigantic green man, who grunted low, like an ape. "Oh, do you remember your mom? That's a big one."

He shook his head slowly.

"Hmm. What about your name?" Tony asked. "You do know your own name, right?"

He opened his mouth, made an 'L' sound… and nothing else. He had no memory of ever having a name, but he did know, deep in his soul, that it was something he was supposed to have, that everyone was supposed to have. Tears sprang to his eyes as he tried to pull up anything from the abyss forming in his mind. Who was he?

"Come on, now, don't do that," said Tony, attempting to be sympathetic, but still coming off as vaguely embarrassed. "Think real hard. There has to be something you remember. You remembered this place, right?" He gestured broadly to the living room and the scene of destruction outside. "That's something."

"I… I was supposed to take over this place," he said slowly. "I was supposed to be its king."

Tony rolled his eyes and gave the monster an incredulous look, to which the monster didn't respond in the slightest.

"Welp," said Tony, slapping his hands against his knees and standing up with a grunt, "That's going to make this a lot easier." He chuckled wryly to himself, casually strolling across the floor to look outside at the city. "You really, honestly don't even remember your mom… but you remember you were trying to take over the world? That's just…" he laughed again, bitterly this time, then sighed and snapped his fingers, like he was trying to recall something. "Let's see, let's see… what part do you think we should take it from, big guy?"

The giant only furrowed its brow at Tony, as if it was growing impatient. The creature didn't seem to be able to speak at all.

"All right," Tony continued, pacing the room, "you've already come in. I offer you a drink, 'The Chitauri are coming, what do I have to fear?', and I say 'The Avengers,' a little more blah-blah-blah, 'I have an army,', 'We have a Hulk…'"

At that, the green monster eagerly stood, making the couch groan with relief. It was two feet taller than Tony, at full height.

"No, no, not yet, big guy. Be patient."

The Hulk let out another low, threatening growl, showing a set of enormous teeth as he snarled.

"Yes, you're very scary," Tony answered placatingly. "Terrifying. Where was I? Oh yeah, so you try hitting me with this thingy-" Tony touched the tip of the scepter with his finger, then flicked it away with a little metallic 'ping', "-doesn't work, by the way… then I deploy the Mark Seven, and your brother-"

"Brother!" he gasped, "I remember! I had a dream, or a vision, or a nightmare, or something, and he was there, and we were fighting, and-"

Suddenly, the Hulk let out a horrifying roar so loud that it reverberated around the room, making the glass and metal fixtures shake. Both he and Tony stumbled away from the couch and away from the Hulk.

Tony put up his hands to the beast, his composure somewhere between soothing and frightened. "Come on, man. Just a little longer."

The Hulk took a step towards Tony, who was now standing between him and the Hulk.

"Sun's getting real low…" Tony continued, his voice wavering ever so slightly.

"HULK NOT WAIT LONGER!" bellowed the Hulk, then punched Tony straight in his chest, sending him flying. He swerved out of the way as Tony came flying backwards towards him and smashed against the bar with a crash. Tony groaned in pain, rolling over onto his side.

The scepter fell from his hand as the Hulk took a few more giant steps towards him. He was too terrified to move. Quicker than he could think, the Hulk grabbed his entire torso in one enormous fist, making him give out a very unmanly squeak of fear. He was as helpless as a kitten as the Hulk lifted him into the air effortlessly with one hand.

"Tony!" he screamed, flailing against the Hulk's grip, to no avail. "Tony, please help me!"

Tony coughed as he brought himself up painfully on one elbow. "Hulk! We were about to get somewhere! We were this close to a breakthrough, man! Put him down."

The Hulk stared at Tony, frowning, nostrils flared, seemingly considering Tony's proposal. He looked back and forth between Tony and the victim squirming in his hand. Then, with a wordless yell, he swung his arm back and threw him face down with all his might…

Lucky screeched as he awoke, damp with sweat. It took everything he had to catch his breath and convince his wildly beating heart to calm down. It was a dream. He was safe in bed. There was nothing there that could hurt him. No monsters.

Lucky sat up slowly in the dim light. The nightmare he'd just had was different from anything he'd had before. For one thing, he remembered everything in excruciating detail. Usually, his dreams had been vague, with faceless people doing things he couldn't comprehend. Even if they were detailed, he'd usually forget them the second he woke up. He remembered how he felt in this dream, just as if it had really happened.

He'd been poised to be a conqueror. A king. And the scepter… the scepter was his tool for domination.

A shiver ran up and down his spine, so cold it was almost painful. He wiped away the sweat still beading on his forehead. It didn't matter how real it seemed. It couldn't possibly be real. None of it made any sense.

He stood, a little shaky on his feet, and went to the bathroom. His reflection was sickly, sweaty, the hollows under his eyes growing even deeper than they were before. A queasy feeling roiled in his stomach. Something was wrong with him.

Lucky went back to bed and opened his desk drawer. The seemingly innocuous yellow stone glowed quietly inside, along with the green time stone set firmly inside of the Eye of Agamotto. They cast an eerie, dim light next to the picture of Lucky's aura, which he'd also tossed in his desk. Cautiously, Lucky used a sock to pick up the yellow stone again. It was definitely hot, even though it had been sitting in his drawer for hours, and seemed to grow even hotter as Lucky held it… as if it could sense him. He put it down. The Eye was a little warm, too, but not nearly as much as the mind stone.

In class, they'd learned about the different infinity stones, and Miss Minutes had warned them over and over that they were dangerous to handle outside of the TVA, that they could even kill you without some kind of magically enhanced container to restrain and direct their powers.

And yet, no other TVA employees seemed bothered when they held bare infinity stones. Why was it only him?

Deep breaths, Lucky told himself, trying to steady his wavering mind. He wished, now, that he'd never gone looking for the stupid thing at all, even though it was the perfect tool to complete his scheme. Well, by tomorrow, he'd be rid of it forever… and hopefully any more strange, horrible dreams, too.