Those Who Favor Fire

by The.A.I.1502

In a universe reeling from the Blip, Isabelle Collins is shattered by her brother's death. But humanity's intent on colonizing the stars reveals an undeniable truth - Thanos was the harbinger of something much worse. Isabelle must peel back the layers of her new reality, because this time, the stakes are much higher than half of all life.

27. Rage Against the Dying of the Light

Right, so, warning. This entire set of chapters deals with the First Contact War, and, as such, involves some pretty graphic violence. If I list out each and every atrocity in here, I'm gonna spoil the whole thing, so take it just as a sort of general warning. I usually restrict myself to the violence scale already laid out by MCU, Mass Effect and Agents of SHIELD, which, even individually, come up with some pretty disturbing stuff, so take heed.

I can promise, though, that none of it is gratuitous. Every instance of brutality is there for a reason.

Oh, also, these chapters are long and un-betaed. Any mistakes remain mine.

---

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night; Dylan Thomas

January 6th, 2030 | 18:46:47 [Terran Coordinated Universal]

Shanxi Garrison

Despite the alien sun's best efforts, the sky gets the upper hand and shoves it, inch-by-inch, down the watery horizon. Thaddeus watches it go from the mountainous ledge, feeling an odd sense of kinship with that star.

It knows just how it feels when the universe does its best to make you buckle.

Somewhere in the galaxy, yet only a relay jump away, are the remnants of his retaliatory fleet, trapped in a field of debris. He can take little comfort with their easy win against the alien forces, when it had come at such a heavy cost. Nearly half the fleet that had once been stationed around Shanxi had been wiped out by an anomalous explosion. Even the best scientists on the planet - which isn't saying much - can't explain it.

They'd rushed into this, he admits. It's been only forty-eight hours since the Sokovia was destroyed. Carried away by the fervor of Terra Firma, he'd abandoned protocol to recoup and recon. Instead - barring a token security force around the Shanxi relay - he'd sent out the entire available fleet in a hard-and-fast deployment.

It's the first time baseline humans have the upper hand when it comes to an alien invasion, and he'd made the same arrogant mistakes that the Avengers had made during the Chitauri Invasion, or the Battle of Wakanda.

He hears footsteps behind him, but it's only Betty. "Any news from the retaliatory fleet?"

"They're still clearing the debris," she replies softly. "Right now, even an orbiting screw could prove deadly. But by all reports, Ahern managed to take down a squad to the Roche planet, Altahe, to investigate the emergency beacon signal."

"Roche?"

"One of twin worlds that are so close together, they effectively share an atmosphere. The counterpart is Ontahe."

Thaddeus shakes his head, displeased. "They shouldn't be risking a rescue mission, not right now. Who knows what other astrophysical anomaly might get triggered? Ryder can take care of himself."

Despite his reservations, he has to admit that ICT drills its trainees to adapt to extremely hostile environments. And in the few minutes they'd talked, Ryder hadn't seemed like the kind of man who would risk his fellow soldiers in a futile, near-suicidal rescue mission just to save himself.

But - barring extraterrestrial deception or an SOS - the only conceivable reason Ryder might be calling for attention is if he believes the planet can provide invaluable information. Information that might very well win them the war.

In the distance, silhouetted against the setting sun, is the Triskelion. The aurora flares from the eezo core discharge had disappeared just an hour ago. If he squints, he can make out a shuttle zooming its way into the open bay.

He thinks again of the crates of Asgardian weapons, packed up and returned to the Worthington. Skirting on the edge of legality.

Thaddeus shakes his head. No. He has a duty here, not only to win the war, but to do so in a way that wouldn't compromise his own principles. He won't become a hypocrite.

The sun has finally disappeared down the horizon. But it didn't go down easy. The dying rays of light have slashed their own marks in the atmosphere - jagged lines zigzagging through the clouds, as though chopping the sky into broken, separate parts.

The Triskelion slowly rises, and with a flare of its thrusters, disappears into the twilight.

---

January 6th, 2030 | 20:53:11 [Terran Coordinated Universal]

Shanxi-Theta Mass Relay, Acheron System, Styx Theta

"I didn't even know you could board a mass relay," Barnes mutters, as the shuttle seals itself neatly against the octagonal docking port that juts out of the curved end of the tuning fork.

"Not many attempt it; it's risky, remaining on-board when a ship's hopping," Rambeau says. They check their weapons as the pressure equalizes; they're not expecting trouble, but ready for it.

Their footfalls are eerily flat as they trudge through the tunnel towards the elevator that would lead them down to the master control unit. Transparent polymer walls reinforced with mass effect fields are the only thing that's keeping them from drifting off into vacuum. A HUD pops up on the polymer, faint lines and data blooming outward from the center, spreading across the entire tunnel. "Selvig was here," Rambeau confirms in seconds. "Departure time matches our data."

The HUD winks out of existence, leaving the polymer so clear Isabelle feels no shame in trailing her gloved fingers across it to assure her of its solidity. The others are doing the same, except for Rambeau - though her determined steps and sure gestures indicate she's done this many, many times. "Sokovia would've had maintenance engineers to activate dormant relays, though. Why would they send him?"

"Because he insisted," Peter replies, as they walk towards the airlock on the other end. "They were scientists. Hard to say no to your heroes. We still need to find out what he wanted up here, though."

The airlock opens with a swoosh, and Isabelle finds herself in a medium-sized chamber, illuminated by an unshuttered observational viewport. On the other end is a cylinder fitted with a series of tubes feeding directly into the gyro rings, bundled together by a tight ball of wires. Thick pipes run across the ceiling, most of which lead to a console attached to the paneled walls.

It's immediately obvious that the console wasn't built for anything humanoid.

Low enough to force the user to their knees, it looks nothing so much like a clawed finger, severed at the 'knuckle' and then affixed to the wall. The 'fingernail' portion of it is split down the middle, which then extends wing-like flaps on either end. When Rambeau approaches, parallelogram-shaped holographic screens project above the flaps, while another manifests cuff-like near the first joint.

"Collins," Barnes murmurs, his omni-light illuminating the floor beside an inaccessible, chest-length vent in the left wall.

Isabelle crouches, purses her lips.

There are disturbances in the faint dust. Clear tracks leading to the console keeping Rambeau and Peter busy, which then circle back to the indentation. Something skitters in the darkness beyond, barely audible above the hum of the eezo core. They aim their flashlights, unease curling low in their spines when they find nothing but darting shadows.

"What do you think?" Barnes asks, keeping his voice low. "Maintenance bots?"

She rises. "That's what I'm going with."

They're dealing with enough mysteries as it is.

---

January 6th, 2030 | 21:12:56 [Terran Coordinated Universal]

Med-Bay, SSV Geneva

The smell of blood and disinfectant hangs heavy in the air. The worst of the injuries had been patched up, and his marines - those who had been injured by the anomaly as well as those who had been wounded on Altahe - were sleeping it off. But far too many still, cloth-covered bodies lay in the morgue beyond for him to be comfortable spending a single second here than he has to.

The doctors had only just cleared him for anything more strenuous than lying prostrate, but still Ahern bristles when one of them shoves him onto a wheelchair before allowing him a datapad.

Ross is already on call. Ahern snaps off a salute he doesn't really feel. "General!"

"At ease, Captain. I read through your mission report. Good work down on Altahe."

"Wish I could take all the credit, sir. Ryder was the one who made the bloodbath that was Altahe somewhat worth it." Shifting sands, an alien sun's terrible heat, Ontahe's looming shadow. A silence so deep that only gunfire could shatter it.

He pulls out an OSD, cleaned but for the sand and grit still darkening the grooves on its surface.

On the screen, Ross picks up a datapad, flicks through it. "The reports mentioned the aliens were waiting for you?"

"They discovered Ryder's sabotage with the beacon, but not the OSD itself, thank god. Laid out an ambush. We walked right into a massacre."

Ross' expression is a carefully-controlled neutral. But the displeasure is palpable. "Then I hope it was worth it. You have my sympathies for the men and women you lost down there. Eight, wasn't it?"

"Seven, General. We found Ryder with one foot already in the grave. My medics assure me he'll make a full, quick recovery, though." Ahern swallows. "I'll be taking him under my command when he does."

"I recognize and admire your loyalty to those who have earned it, Ahern," Ross says, not looking up. "But I hope you understand that he isn't truly one of ours."

Ahern's mouth thins, but he bites down on the first sharp retort that leaps to his mind. "I meant he was human, General. These days, that's all the criteria we should care about, I hope."

"That entirely depends on what we find in his data. Scan the files and forward it to Shanxi command. I'll look at it, see what we have to work with." He purses his lips. "S.W.O.R.D. agents have temporarily taken the new relay offline. When they're done, resupply at Shanxi and reinforce the rest of the fleet at the Caleston Relay."

"We're not gonna be caught off-guard again."

"Yes, General." Ahern waits until Ross cuts the call to pull out the omni-tool he'd found jammed into the beacon, along with the OSD. It had shut down as soon as he'd touched it, and even his hackers could find no purchase to force an entry. But if the heat from the 'tool is any indication, it's running some serious algorithms.

Ryder's too unconscious to be of much use, but maybe those S.W.O.R.D. agents might be able to figure out if there's something in his omni-tool that might give them an edge.

---

January 6th, 2030 | 21:14:41 [Terran Coordinated Universal]

Shanxi-Theta Mass Relay

"If Selvig could demand an onboard inspection of any relay in the network, then why choose this one?" Peter asks.

"Because he wanted something only a dormant relay could get him." With that, Rambeau detaches a series of holograms from the console and tosses them over.

"Operational logs," she explains. "Selvig tried accessing the relay's command switches - the main component that pinpoints the various partner relays to create mass-free corridors with across the galaxy. You can't access them if the relay is already active; the process becomes automated by then."

Isabelle scrolls through the data. The scientist had filtered the list by descending order of the amount of dark energy accessed by each relay. "He was trying to find a secondary relay that could transport cargo to the largest number of partners. Why?"

"Because it would be the oldest relay," Peter says. "The first one. The alpha of the entire network."

"Did he find it?"

"Doesn't seem so. It's possible that this Alpha Relay has its own set of controls."

Rambeau gestures for Peter to take over, then walks over to the viewport. Her fingers trace the edges that glow blue from the relay's eezo core. The ghostly ambient light from beyond seems to cast no shadows, giving her features an eerily flat appearance. "Erik would've stood right here," she says in a low voice. "With the shutters opened; he hated feeling cooped up."

Isabelle joins her. Despite the awareness of empty space prickling across her skin, she tries to put herself in the scientist's mag-boots.

See what he saw. Think what he thought.

Erik feels every second of the fifty-four hours he'd trapped himself aboard the relay.

There are no supplies. But he feels no hunger, just as the crew aboard the Sokovia no longer feel hunger - will never again feel hunger. He doesn't feel any thirst or pain, either.

Something beyond his frail mortality is keeping him buoyant. Something that had activated when he'd glimpsed the wraith of Loki's Sceptre on Eden Prime, and had materialized fully when vacuum itself caught fire.

Beyond the observational viewport, wreckage floats idly by - dull metallic gray with seared edges. Shattered chunks of flesh roll through the space, as though buffeted by once-invisible cosmic winds.

In his mind's eye, these disparate pieces glow with shades of yellow, some of which are identical. He can tell with unenviable accuracy exactly which hunk of debris belongs to which ship, like an elaborate version of the card game 'Concentration'.

But the Mind Stone won't allow him to reach out and put the pieces back into a whole again. He had pleaded, bargained, threatened even, for fifty hours, and it had denied him, defied him at every turn.

Shaping Reality was never in its grasp.

"He couldn't leave," Isabelle whispers, swallowing. "He had a shuttle, but he couldn't leave. Not if he wanted to make sure they didn't use the relay to hunt us down."

"You think he might've been the reason why the aliens didn't follow us to Shanxi?" Rambeau asks, her voice betraying just the slightest hint of hope.

Isabelle shrugs. They'd all thought the retaliation was too swift, that Ross should've waited longer, maybe even sent a warning to the Alliance before deploying the Shanxi fleet.

But to Selvig, it would've been an eternity.

"There's something else," Peter calls quietly. "Selvig's last command was to access the drift mechanism of the relays."

"The one that allows multiple ships to emerge from the mass-free corridor without crashing into each other?" Barnes asks. "Why?"

"Can't tell. He hasn't modified or changed anything - just copied the schematics onto an OSD before taking off."

An alpha relay, and now this. What are you up to, Selvig? What's going on in that big brain of yours?

---

January 7th, 2030 | 07:23:44 [Terran Coordinated Universal]

QEC Chamber, T.A.H.I.T.I. Ring

Gagarin Station - Orbiting Demeter, Proxima Centauri

"And you can't give me anything more to work with?" Jane asks.

Dark slashes of redaction cut through the haphazard, unorganized research projected next to Nick Fury's holographic form. The pertaining data files had been within a folder titled 'The Acheron Anomaly' - a freak explosion that had taken out a scientific expedition in that sector of space.

That name's sheer unoriginality tells her that just how agitated the lead engineer who'd assembled the research must've been.

"I'd be happy to declassify them… aboard the Peak."

Jane snorts. "You'd need an official sanction from the Alliance - with whom I'm officially employed - to get me off Gagarin. Wouldn't be too hard either; it's stepping onto the station that's usually a problem for S.W.O.R.D. operatives. Extraction just requires a valid reason. You must really want this on the down-low."

"All the relevant data is in there. Of course… if you're not up for it, maybe the Alliance should brand someone else to be the galaxy's foremost astrophysicist."

"They really should," Jane agrees firmly, making his eyebrows twitch. "Erik Selvig is the galaxy's foremost astrophysicist. He taught me everything I know, but I haven't yet learned everything that he knows."

She misses the look on his face, buried as her own is in the research.

Deep in the edge of the Gagarin Station - the lowest, smallest ring cannibalized from the Peak - is a small, diamond-shaped room. Four narrow metal bridges lead into it, each from a different part of the station. In the center is a pedestal, hooked to four different units of entangled quantum particles, each of which connects to a different location - the Peak, the Asgardian nation of Terra Nova, Alliance Command in Vancouver and Arcturus Station. The expense of installing four QECs along with their paired counterparts had been almost more than the station itself.

"It should be Monica showing me this," Jane says shrewdly. "You don't talk the talk nearly that well, and I know she'd have pointed that out to you. Which means you twisted her arm into letting you have the center stage."

"Nothing so crude, I assure you."

A horrific thought occurs then. "Is she okay?" She demands urgently. "You said she was in Acheron…"

"She's fine," he assures her with complete sincerity. "Frankly, Dr. Foster, you should worry a little bit more about yourself."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Just a feeling. You might be getting a… person of interest in the case to visit you sooner or later. I'd appreciate it if you gave us a heads up."

She stares at him. "What case? This is an astrophysical abnormality - I doubt it was caused by any single person, or even anything sentient!"

"Humor me."

"Fine. Who should I be on the lookout for, and why me?"

"Dr. Selvig." He drops the bomb casually, like it doesn't rock her world and almost off her feet. "I trust you don't need me to answer that second question."

Jane gapes. "Why would you suspect Erik in something like this?" She explodes, violently shaking the datapad as though it would dislodge the common sense Fury had stuffed in and forgotten about. "That's insane!"

"We've uncovered evidence he was in the vicinity at the time, involved in questionable and in hindsight, highly suspicious activities." He raises a hand, forestalling her protests. "We just want to talk. There's an alert out for him across all spheres."

"Thereby herding him straight to me," Jane says bitterly. "You haven't changed one bit, Director."

"I'll take that as a compliment. S.W.O.R.D.'s been tracking him for some time. And we can't make sense of what's going on inside his head. Even you'd have to agree that that's dangerous."

"No, that's eccentric. Erik's the type to run around naked in Stonehenge, he doesn't blow up ships!"

"He once opened a portal that allowed for an alien invasion."

"He was being mind-controlled by Loki's Scepter!"

"Exactly." Fury's eyes glitter like obsidian.

Jane rears. Her conversation with Wong near Charon - so many years ago now - comes to mind. She'd deflected his attention from her own… affliction, but she'd never forgotten his warnings about Selvig.

The Stones very rarely had a positive impact on the universe.

She makes her decision behind eyes squeezed shut.

Maybe that's the problem, a part of her whispers. She's been often accused of wilful blindness.

It doesn't matter, she replies harshly. It's Erik.

That silences the whispers instantly.

"Erik Selvig has always, always done right by humanity," she rasps. "He broke through the Mind Stone's corruption long enough to create a backdoor for the Avengers. Without him, we'd be dead… or worse, living under Chitauri rule. Even you can't claim that much, Director. So no… I won't be giving you a heads-up."

"Dr. Foster…"

"Tell Monica I'll send her my analysis shortly." She reaches for the disconnect.

"Jane." Fury's gaze is unreadable, but somehow softer. It stills her in her tracks. "I'll have a squad on assist at a moment's notice."

She swallows, and cuts the call.

---

January 9th, 2030

Command Center, Shanxi Garrison

Thaddeus gives Ahern an approving nod when he finds his hologram standing at attention. There's no way he's fully recovered from his injuries, and he's going to receive one hell of a reprimand from his onboard doctors for not resting. But it's these small gestures that speak volumes about a man's fortitude.

"General. Any insights on Ryder's data?"

Thaddeus pulls up an adjacent hologram, filled with his analyses as well as his team's. Some of the tech jargon had gone way above his head, but his engineers had seemed excited by it, so he'd left it to them. But for the most part, " - it's more than I'd expected, less than I'd hoped," he admits. "Ryder's gotten us a lot… and yet it's still not enough. Strengths, limitations and tech glimpses aside, we still don't know anything about their motivations."

Ahern's eyes sharpen. "'Galactic conquest' is only a satisfactory answer when your enemy is mindless and being controlled by something else," he murmurs. "But these… birds were disciplined, steady in Ryder's battle recordings, and yet they were individualistic."

"Thus making it harder for us to pinpoint exactly why they attacked us and what they want from us. The fact that we don't know why we're fighting this war bothers me."

"The only way we're gonna be able to find out… is by using the data Ryder got for us."

Thaddeus hums, a line from Sun Tzu's The Art of War popping up in his mind. Foreknowledge cannot be gotten from ghosts and spirits, cannot be had by analogy, cannot be found out by calculation. It must be obtained from people, people who know the conditions of the enemy. He snaps his fingers, instantly summoning the attention of his more tech-minded troops. "Those partial maps of bird colonies - can we extrapolate a relay route and send probes through?"

The engineers look at each other, before bursting into furious whispers. "It's possible, sir. We could have an in-built VI feed in relevant details to the relay before transition, but this carries the same problems as when we sent probes through the Charon relay a couple of years ago. We have no idea if we'll be able to maintain further connection. There's also the risk of detection as we're sending it into an actively hostile system."

Thaddeus nods. "Good point. We need a way to neutralize the tech when operated by non-Alliance hands. Any ideas?"

The quartermaster of the colony, who'd been silent so far, steps forward then. "There's nothing that powerful in our supplies, sir, or even with our fleet. But I could put in a request from the Alliance, though they'll demand a valid reason."

Thaddeus barely swallows the grimace. "We don't have time for the red tape that will be involved. Find another way to minimize the risk and get me those probes. Ahern, transfer to my office comm. The rest of you, dismissed."

But before he can leave, a notification pops up on one of the terminals monitoring Shanxi space. "Sensors detect a freighter in orbit, General. Merchant class."

Thaddeus growls. "The Worthington. Seems like they've been ordered not to take no for an answer."

The quartermaster's eyes bulge. "But sir," he whispers, "- that solves all our problems! That cargo with your name on it had Asgardian weapons and nukes! They've gotta be stronger than ours by several magnitudes at least! Shouldn't we at least consider arming the probes with…?"

"Absolutely not!" Thaddeus' voice is much too sharp, and rings throughout the command center, briefly halting the flurry of soldiers as they stare at him. He resists the urge to squeeze the bridge of his nose. "While I'm sure they'll do the job, the garrison hasn't had the time to conduct any quality checks. Under different circumstances I could waive it, but since we still don't know what caused the Acheron Anomaly, we can't afford to take those kinds of risks."

A moment of silence. "I'll think of something else, sir." But the quartermaster looks dubious.

Ahern's hologram is already in his office by the time he walks in. He waits until the doors are closed. "I heard what you told them. But I think I deserve to know the real reason, sir. I lost good men out there in Acheron, even before the Anomaly."

Thaddeus stares, somewhat reluctantly impressed by the nerve of this man. He'd miscalculated him. Despite being the CO of Shanxi's fleet, Ahern had been only too happy to hand over the reins when informed of the alien invasion. At first, Thaddeus had disdained his lack of commitment to the fight. But then he'd observed the soldier's interactions with his troops, and discovered the truth: Ahern would rather just be on the front lines with his men than order their deaths from behind a desk.

His conclusion had only been solidified by what he'd uncovered of Ahern's service history. If there's anyone who will understand, it's him.

"There's one simple truth I've learned the hard way, Ahern," he says quietly, pinning the other man with his burning gaze. "We might win a few battles by taking the easy way out. But as soon as we even consider using alien tech, we lose the war."

Ahern stares at him for a long moment, his own expression unreadable, before dropping his gaze. "You're probably right, General. But we still need to get rid of them: their very presence is providing too much temptation to the men as it is."

Thaddeus sighs. "I've noticed."

Another pause. "You could threaten to impound the Worthington for cluttering up the orbit during wartime," Ahern says quietly. "Since you've refused to acknowledge their cargo, even with your name on it, they technically have no legal business here. Bit on the borderline of the law, but those kinds of regulations are usually relaxed for situations like this."

Thaddeus turns to look at him. "That's… not a bad idea," he says slowly. "Though… the right to impound isn't just restricted to the commander of the garrison, but any ship captains in the vicinity."

Ahern stiffens, but it's momentary. His jaw works. "Understood, sir. I'll get rid of them."

But Thaddeus has already turned back to his war table. He doesn't even notice Ahern's lack of a salute before his hologram blinks out.

---

January 10th, 2030 | 13:21:12 [Terran Coordinated Universal]

Mess Hall, T.A.H.I.T.I. Ring

Gagarin Station

Despite the warning to Fury, it still stings when Jane is proven right.

She can't find anything with the redacted data. All she has are vague theories - nothing the Director of S.W.O.R.D. would consider useful. She can't quite make the leaps of logic something of this magnitude would require, and it becomes painfully apparent why she was the second choice to examine this.

But maybe that's exactly why Fury had handed it over: because he'd wanted her so over her head she'd be desperate to reach out to the person this data was specifically collated for.

Well, damn him, 'cause he was right.

Activating her omni-tool, she slips into the secure channel that she's been using for months now. Texts only, a few covert images if she's really stuck.

Erik always replies, but her last text had gone unread and unanswered. 'What happened on Eden Prime?'

'Fury's on your tail again,' she types. 'Thinks you had something to do with the explosion in Acheron.' She attaches a blurry screenshot of the Anomaly and presses send.

She gnaws on her lips as the text makes it slow, plodding away through the comm relays. Then, without thinking twice, she sends one final question.

'Did you?'

---

January 10th, 2030 | 23:41:11 [Terran Coordinated Universal]

Cargo Hold, T.A.H.I.T.I. Ring

Gagarin Station

Jane drums her fingers against the console as the decontamination protocols die down, allowing the airlock to usher in her guest.

"I had half a mind to just leave you in the shuttle," she grouses, occupied with the terminal as she works to erase her digital footprints in the cargo-hold, in case any one-eyed pirates in black leather come snooping. "You know how tough it is to hide the presence of one of the most famous scientists in a station built for and manned by famous scientists?"

"Shouldn't that make it easier to blend in?" A familiar voice replies teasingly. Slightly hoarse, slightly scratchy, but still just as beloved.

Only then does Jane's gaze land on her oldest friend and mentor. And what she sees almost makes her take a step back in startled alarm.

His voice is the only thing that remains unchanged about Erik Selvig. A peach-colored cardigan hangs loosely over his near-skeletal body. The dark, plaid scarf around his neck - the one she'd knitted for him - is frayed at the ends, as though he's been tugging the threads loose in his anxiety. And his eyes… His eyes are sunken so deep that she can hardly see their glint under the dark, heavy bags.

"You'd think," Jane replies belatedly, to cover up that split-second reaction. It doesn't quite land, judging by Erik's rueful smile. "But you're gonna have to be low-key for this trip, at least. No adoring fans for you, I'm afraid."

"I find that I rather prefer that, Jane." He smiles wider. "Thank you for letting me in through the side entrance," he gestures to the cargo hold door. "I didn't look forward to having to explain myself to Gagarin's docking authorities."

Jane steps forward then, fingers wrapping around his bicep, digging in. "That text was a warning, Erik, not an invitation! This is the first place Fury would expect you to be!"

"Maybe. But something tells me that his warning to you was a gesture of faith. He might actually trust you now."

Guilt flares up. "A trust you're asking me to betray, just by being here."

"You've never let anyone do what you think is right, Jane. Why should this be any different?"

"Is it, though? Right?"

"And that, there, is why I had to come over. I couldn't go on thinking you might agree with Fury."

She swallows, the shame washing the guilt away. "Now that you're here, in front of me… I, I don't anymore."

"And that alone will make everything worth it."

She nods, looking away. "What about the ship you arrived on? I hope you've paid enough money for the crew to wait around a bit."

"I've paid enough money to ensure I don't need a crew." She turns to him in surprise, so he shrugs. "She's one of those fully-automated, V.I.-run ships. Bit on the small side, but should do what I need it to do."

"Those are really expensive, Erik."

He smiles, his expression inexplicable. "Where I'm going, Jane, I'm not gonna need any funds."

She scowls, hooks her arm through his then drags him out of the hold and into the station proper. "I'm not gonna let Fury imprison you just because he thinks you're some kind of villain now. If you want to blow up some cash, though, I could use another Phase Meter."

They step into the corridors - mostly abandoned at this time of the night cycle. Even if they ran into someone - a highly unlikely possibility - the scientists here were all Alliance, and didn't know jack about Fury's weird vendetta with capturing Erik. They might gossip, but it wouldn't leave the station.

Besides, most of them liked her, owed her. She wouldn't mind cashing in some or even all of her favors if it meant keeping him safe.

"I owe you one, don't I? I'm sorry, Jane. Losing it was a mistake."

"No. You needed to get Izzy out of Svartálfheim. I'd sacrifice a hundred Phase Meters if it meant that no one would be subjected to that hellhole again."

"I wouldn't. She would've been better off had that black hole swallowed her whole." He smiles apologetically at her staggered expression. "I know that's a horrible thing to say. But you needed to hear it, because I don't want you to end up like her. Like me."

"I don't understand. What happened to you? You look like you've aged a decade since the last time I saw you!"

His laugh is chillingly hollow. "Oh, is that all? I expected it to be longer." He shakes his head then, sobering. "I've been trying to close some gates for a while now, Jane. It's… taken a lot out of me."

"Is that a euphemism or something? What gates?"

Erik's eyes are distant. "Isn't it obvious? The gates to Hell."

---

January 10th, 2030 | 23:55:21 [Terran Coordinated Universal]

SSV Geneva

Ahern remembers the Battle of New York like it happened yesterday.

He'd been enjoying a well-deserved shore leave from the US Navy when aliens dropped onto his balcony and started shooting up the street.

He'd been one of the first to shake off the shock and superstition when his service revolver hardly seemed to make a dent on the Chitauri. Snatching an abandoned pulse rifle from the ground, he'd defended his neighborhood the only way he knew how - all the while ignoring the extraterrestrial guts and gore flying in his wake.

Even with Avengers flying around in hi-tech gear, he could tell that humanity was woefully underequipped.

But Ross had made a solid point. Over-reliance on alien gear would only lead to disaster. The General's obvious attempt at building a rapport based on assumed mutual xenophobia had fallen flat though, even if Ahern hadn't let it show.

Because, unlike Ross, Ahern had also seen an alien fighting for humanity.

He doesn't doubt that, if not for Thor going up against his own brother for Earth, Ahern would have succumbed to the same racial prejudice that was suffocating Shanxi even before the attack.

But Ross had made a solid point.

And Ahern would've gone along with it, despite his personal reservations… if the General hadn't tossed him under the bus to save his own hide.

Neither of them can be sure what the repercussions will be of even threatening to impound the Worthington. Post-war analysis will scrutinize every action leaders take during wartime, no matter how inconsequential. And by indirectly ordering a subordinate officer to do it, Ross had ensured that any fallout would land squarely on Ahern' shoulders, leaving him a clear path to personal glory. And if there's no fallout, and only commendation, Ross will have no compunctions claiming the credit for Ahern' - in hindsight, remarkably stupid - idea.

Ahern grinds his teeth as the cool air of Geneva's CIC washes over him. The soldiers under his command mean everything to him. Just the thought of letting one of them take the fall for a call he'd made makes him want to puke.

How can the Thunderbolt do it so easily, so casually?

"Hey, Captain," his newly recovered communications officer, Lieutenant Alec Ryder, calls out from the bridge as he walks through the command center. "We got new orders?"

Ahern stares at him, debating silently. A quote from Sun Tzu's The Art of War runs through his mind. There are roads which must not be followed, armies which must not be attacked, towns which must not be besieged, positions which must not be contested, commands of the sovereign which must not be obeyed.

The decision is easy. "The Worthington's still in orbit, right? Hail them on a secure channel. Tell them I have a proposition for their benefactor."

His eyebrows jump up. "Sir?"

"I'm willing to take the cargo that's got them stuck between a rock and a hard place, but I don't have the proper documentation for it. The mercs can't make that decision alone, so the only way to get our hands on the nukes and bypass Ross is to speak directly to whoever is funding them."

There's silence throughout the CIC, as his men share uneasy looks. They all know what he means. "You willing to take the heat for that, Captain?" Ryder asks, his eyes narrowed.

Unlike the other fresh-faced men under his command, Ryder's no fool. And he doesn't dumb himself down either - something he'd have gotten a lot of flack from any other commander. But S.W.O.R.D. had taught him well.

Ahern takes a deep breath. "It's either me, Ryder… or it's my men."

---

January 11th, 2030 | 00:10:52 [Terran Coordinated Universal]

Astrophysics Lab, Gagarin Station

The changes made post the Alliance's acquisition of the Gagarin had bowled her over the first time she'd stepped onto the station. Nowhere were the differences more apparent than in the research hub, now completely rehauled into a large astrophysics lab.

But she still finds herself anxious for Erik's reaction as he examines her office.

The floors had been replaced with a soft, slightly springy vibranium-derived material that's an interface all on its own. Holograms float at ankle-length: priority notifications vying for attention, arrows indicating directions to different parts of the lab that dart away into shadows when they're no longer needed.

Partitions divide the room into various workspaces. The eastern corner holds a large supercomputer setup, monitoring spatial phenomena for several AUs surrounding the station. Erik runs his fingers lightly across the spectrometers, oscilloscopes and a variety of detectors scattered around the central lab area. He walks over to the clean room, but before he can open the door and enter, something else arrests his attention.

He makes a small sound, and walks to the southernmost end of the hub as though in a dream.

Jane smiles. Sometimes Dr. Selvig is very predictable.

She rounds the corner to what she considers to be the star jewel of the lab - hell, the entire station. The Stellar Cartograph.

An enormous observation window, curved into a hemisphere and divided into rectangular panels. But unlike most such installments, the entire setup is a series of screens that can connect to every space-based telescope humanity has ever deployed. With a few swipes on the nearby terminal, she can access any sector of Alliance space, and observe astronomical marvels as though she's right there.

Currently, the panels stare down the brown, rocky surface of Proxima-D, tinged a faint blue by the planet's atmospheric makeup. Beyond, there's a view of a large, multicolored nebula, scattered with twinkling stars.

Erik doesn't waste any time. Accessing the terminal, he orients the Cartograph towards a sector of space she can't immediately identify. He switches off the legend before she can make out the names of the stars. Even otherwise, it's odd that she doesn't recognize a single one. He must've used an unusual angle of observation.

"What are you looking at?"

He doesn't reply immediately, staring into the distance. "This is brilliant, Jane. I'm surprised you even needed me."

"I'll always need you. But with all of this," she gestures to the state-of-the-art equipment, " - comes a lot of red tape. Sometimes I almost miss living out of a trailer."

"No wonder you aren't making any headway. Held back by rules that exist only in your own head." Inexplicably, he smiles. "Just like in Culver. Looks like you've got one last lesson to learn."

She grins back just as helplessly, caught in nostalgic memories when the universe seemed to be laid out at her feet.

He takes a deep breath. "Tell me what you've figured out."

"Only thing I've been able to confirm is that the Anomaly wasn't an engineering flaw. The explosion was just a trigger. My best guess is that something was already... simmering there." Jane uses the Cartograph to hone in on Acheron. She wasn't able to gain access to real-time data for that system; just a simulation of what she's been given. Fury's interference, no doubt. "Might have something to do with that region being around the galactic core, where the majority of star formation happens."

He fixes his gaze on her. "I'm disappointed, Ms. Foster. You never let lack of information hold you back before."

The lack of her earned title - calling back to when she was just a graduate student - stings, though she doesn't let it show. "Fury..."

"This isn't about him. Or any external factors. You've blinded yourself by refusing to use every tool at your disposal. To solve this mystery, you're gonna need a whole lot more than just science and knowledge. You're gonna need what's inside you, lying dormant. Underutilized."

"What are you...?" She breaks off as it hits her, just what he means. It's another thing they have in common, after all. But it very well might be the most significant, the most dangerous thing. "Erik. What did you do?"

"What I was always meant to. The Mind Stone came to me for a reason, Jane. Just as Reality did, to you. The fact that we survived exposure to the most powerful objects in existence is not a coincidence. They're there, still inside us. Why not use them?"

"Is that what's happening? Are you using it?" She swallows. "Or is it using you?"

He shrugs. "After a while, it makes little to no difference. But right now, if it's any comfort, the Mind Remnant is actively fighting me. It doesn't want me to know, to learn the secrets of the universe. But I'm done letting it control the narrative."

Jane grips the edges of her workstation and closes her eyes. Truth is, the thought has occurred to her. For the most part, she's used the Aether's Remnant to hunt down and close extradimensional breaches, but what if she could use it for so much more?

Turn the tables on fate for once - for wasn't it fate itself that had shoved this down her throat? She hadn't asked for any of it. And if not this, then what else? What was the point?

"It's not the redactions or the lack of observational data that's holding you back, Jane. This isn't something a baseline human can figure out, not even a genius. This is an insight that can only be offered by the Infinity Stones. Don't waste it."

"Maybe you're right," she says tightly, and his eyes light up. "Maybe I should… work with it, instead of fighting it. Until then, though…," she turns to him. "You were right there, Erik. You had one hell of a view. What the hell was out there?" What was it that made Fury sweat?

He deliberates for a long moment. "Knowledge," he says finally. "Truth."

---

January 11th, 2030 | 00:47:35 [Terran Coordinated Universal]

PSV Triskelion

Isabelle debriefs Fury on the elevator ride to the command deck. "Five days up and down this sector, and the only thing we've found out is that Selvig emptied all of his accounts to purchase a corvette - the SSV Finch," she says tiredly. Her eyes are gritty, burning with sleeplessness. "He's led us on a wild-goose chase across the relay network."

"The Mind Stone's covering its tracks," he muses from her omni-tool. "He'll have to stop sometime - for fuel or for food."

"It's not gonna mean much unless we catch him," Barnes mutters. "But find out where he's going, and we can lay an ambush."

"Are you going to let the Alliance know what happened here?" Rambeau asks.

"No. That's Ross' prerogative, and so far, nothing's occurred tells me Shanxi is going to need a boost to its garrison." Isabelle makes a displeased noise, and Fury turns his sharp gaze on her. "We're not allowed to interfere in humanity's affairs, Collins."

She wonders when he'd stopped considering himself as human. Probably around the same time he first set the red tape of bureaucracy on fire. "Selvig never trusted S.H.I.E.L.D.," she says quietly. "He was so paranoid about being press-ganged into working with them that he went deep underground after the events at the Castle. Refused to emerge even during the Charon expedition."

"Which was funded by S.W.O.R.D., a contemporary of S.H.I.E.L.D.," Peter replies, as they step into the cold sterility of the CIC. He's still fiddling with Alec Ryder's omni-tool - the one from Captain Ahern. It's proved a useful palate cleanser when trying to predict Selvig's thought processes end nowhere. "You think that paranoia would've lingered even through the Mind Stone's influence?"

"I hope so, because that narrows down our options, while also implying that he's fighting it. And I can think of only one place he would go if he wanted to get rid of the Mind Stone's influence. One individual he'd trust above all else."

"Jane," Monica breathes, before rushing to the bridge. A moment later, they hear the gentle murmur of the starship as it boots up.

---

January 11th, 2030 | 01:13:15 [Terran Coordinated Universal]

Astrophysics Lab, Gagarin Station

Unlike Fury, Erik has no qualms about telling her everything she cares to know about the Acheron Anomaly, and a lot more besides. The existence of new, hostile aliens should've been more of a shock. But what Jane is struck by the most is Erik's flat, distant tone when he describes the Sokovia's end, and the sheer impossibility that would've been looking at vacuum itself burn. He isn't graphic about it, but she's an astrophysicist; her imagination can fill in the negative space all too well.

For the first time, Jane looks at Erik and wonders: is this what Fury was warning me about? If that's all it was, then she will breathe easy. Not that she's discounting Erik's trauma, but they'll get through this. Together, just as they have before. It'll take time, and maybe Erik will become even more eccentric, but he'll be fine.

He has to be, she promises fiercely. Nothing else is acceptable.

Still, though, there are several gaps in her understanding. And talking about it seems to be helping him - his shoulders are relaxed, and he's even gifted her with small, lopsided smiles that seem almost relieved. As though he's been aching for someone to just get him.

"If I'd known you were looking into the relays, Erik, I could've gotten you on one legally," she chides quietly. Goes unspoken the implication that if he'd come to her, he wouldn't have had to suffer the agony of being stranded in space.

"I…," and for a moment, he looks hopelessly scared and lost. "I didn't think you'd… approve of what I wanted… what I still want, with that knowledge."

She stares at him. "Didn't realize I gave the impression of being judgmental."

"This is the kind of thing that everyone would judge you for. But I couldn't… I couldn't just let it go, Jane. I was there - when the Tesseract opened. And we were lucky, so lucky, that the only thing that walked out of that portal was Loki. Can you imagine if it had been Thanos? Or, or the Dark Elves, or any of the other dozens of threats that have plagued Earth these past few decades - some that we don't even know of!"

She shivers, shying away from the horrific images her genius mind seems determined to put on display. But the desperation on Erik's face frightens her much more than hypothetical pasts. "What was your plan, Erik?"

He takes a deep breath. "I was gonna access the command switches in the alpha relay to connect to every other in the network. Then I was gonna shut them all down."

The worst part of it was, she would realize much, much later, that she could follow his reasoning perfectly. She always had been his best student, and it showed even now, as her neurons followed the connections he had already made ages ago. "You were looking to isolate humanity."

She imagines it then. The galaxy going dark as the mass relays power down for the final time. The universe, springing back to its natural, vast expanse: because since the discovery of eezo, space had shrunk to a dreadfully manageable amount.

She thinks about those billions of humans back on Earth, confused and terrified. Some of them would be flashing back to the beginning of the Decimation. Confusion and panic would reign, but it would die down relatively quickly, because nothing would follow through the potential of that threat. Nothing could. They would be trapped within Sol System for the most part - but nothing would ever be able to sneak up on them again.

And then she thinks of the colonies. Shanxi, Eden Prime, Terra Nova. Scattered, cut off from the homeworld, perhaps forever. For them it would be worse, for years perhaps, but they'd recover. Grow and expand until Earth would become a legend, a distant dream.

"Do you see it, Jane?" He whispers, his gaze following every twitch of her facial muscles as though they betray how she's feeling inside. "Humanity would be scattered, isolated from each other, but that would only be a good thing! They would grow differently, advance differently - and if an enemy ever tried to come through…!"

"… they'd never be able to get all of us simultaneously," she finishes. "We'd never have to worry about extinction."

Yeah, she sees it now. Long term consequences might very well be overwhelmingly positive. But unlike Erik, she wasn't Snapped. She didn't have the luxury of oblivion. She saw friends, colleagues, former lovers - people who she'd touched, and who had touched her - die in those five terrible years. People who might've lived long, fruitful lives otherwise, who didn't get a second chance with the Blip.

And she has no doubt that there would've been more of the same if Erik had managed to access the Alpha's controls.

Would it have been Darcy, back on Earth, crushed beneath the weight of a panicked stampede? Monica, adrift in a ship somewhere in space - a century away from a habitable planet, even with FTL? Isabelle, who had already lost so much, now forever separated from what remains of her family?

Had Erik even spared her a single thought? Proxima Centauri is only four light-years from Sol - but Gagarin was never equipped with mass effect drives. She'd have starved to death long before they were even a quarter of the way home, and only a station filled with corpses would've pulled up beside Earth.

Or maybe the Masters of the Mystic Arts would've made portals and brought them all home, rendering Erik's final excuse for even considering this travesty utterly useless.

Erik is still talking. "I wanted to do this the easy way - with the least amount of bloodshed possible." There's something in his dark eyes that recalls the inexplicable image of a glass window shattering. "Fate, as always, is forcing my hand."

Bile rises up her throat. "Be careful…," a voice that sounds very much like Fury whispers in the silence of her mind. She swallows - the acrid taste of vomit burning her throat, stinging her eyes.

She has made a terrible, terrible mistake.

---

January 11th, 2030 | 01:22:52 [Terran Coordinated Universal]

Comm Room, SSV Geneva

The hologram of Henry Lawson gets a disturbing glint in its eyes when he hears Ahern's proposal. The why becomes clear soon enough. "Maybe we could come to some sort of an arrangement - a mutually beneficial partnership…"

"Let me stop you right there," Ahern says, snapping up a hand. "Perhaps I didn't make it clear: this is a one-time deal. You've got weapons; I've got enemies to aim them at. I'm most likely going to prison for disobeying direct orders, and that's a risk I'm willing to take - because it's humanity I'm fighting for. Not Shanxi, not Ross, not even Earth herself. Is that understood?"

"And if I refuse?"

"Then I'll end up right where I started, won't I? Having lost absolutely nothing? And we might not win this war, but we'll never know if it was because we didn't have enough data on the enemy or one of the other dozen factors that are already against us. So you do you, Mr. Lawson. But this doesn't make us partners, or allies, or anything else you might be cooking up in your head."

There's a long silence. His whole crew - tapped into the feed with his consent - seem to be holding their collective breath. Hell, even the stars seem still, waiting for Lawson's impassive face to reveal an answer.

Lawson huffs amusedly, swipes at his omni-tool. "You drive a hard bargain, Captain Ahern." The Geneva's sensor array pings with a hologram: a small drop shuttle emerges from the Worthington's cargo hold, making its slow, plodding way towards Ahern' vessel. The shuttle's heat generation is so low that it might very well be invisible against the background of the combined heat produced by the two ships.

The glint in Lawson's eyes morphs into a glimmer of respect. "I hope you find what you're looking for. For humanity's sake."

---

January 11th, 2030 | 01:30:33 [Terran Coordinated Universal]

Astrophysics Lab, Gagarin Station

Not long after the Battle of Sokovia, Thor had come to Jane with a simple question that she never could find the answer to.

Just how much of my brother's insanity came from the Mind Stone?

She'd hated explaining to him that there was no way to measure it, not with the limited data available - which was mostly just footage from the battle and Thor's own memories of growing up with him. Even if she'd had access to Loki's EEGs or MRIs from both before and after exposure to the Sceptre, she wasn't that kind of a doctor.

She still remembers the way his face had fallen. He'd had such faith in her abilities, such hope.

Truth of the matter was: she hadn't wanted to do it. She loathed the thought of finding evidence that would let Loki off easy - even for Thor. The damage he'd inflicted on her, Erik, Clint Barton, Tony Stark and so many others long after the Battle of New York had left her bitter, and she'd wanted him to suffer just as they'd all suffered.

Never did she imagine that one decision of passive malice would come back to haunt her in such a way.

She's pretending to go through Monica's findings, but she's sure her unrelenting grip on the datapad must be giving her away. "So. Have you decided what you'll be doing next?"

Erik had retreated to the Cartograph. Now that she's had time to examine it, she realizes what the display is about. It's the Local Cluster, but from so far away that Sol is buried among all the other, distant stars. The focus point, oddly enough, seems to be the Charon Relay.

At her question, he stirs, raising an eyebrow over his shoulder. "Why, Jane - are you so eager to get rid of me?"

Yes, she doesn't say. Because you terrify me. Because I need to know where you're going… so Fury can know. "I never wanted you here in the first place, Erik," she says truthfully, relieved that her voice doesn't shake. "We got away with it because I'm the only one who opted for night shifts. But I do have colleagues who work here, you know?"

"You always were a workaholic insomniac," he says fondly, the hypocrite. Then he sighs. "You're right. It's been good to see you. But I have taken enough of your time, and procrastinated away enough of mine."

"Where will you go?"

"Somewhere I won't be followed. There are others I'd like to speak to. I'm thinking of heading to Terra Nova next."

"No!"

Her startled exclamation makes him jerk around. Jane's heart is a jackhammer in her chest. She can't let him go to Terra Nova. Neither the Alliance nor S.W.O.R.D. has any jurisdiction in Asgardian space. Valkyrie has always been fond of Erik: she'll take him in and protect him, unaware of his goals. And in doing so, doom her own people to whatever he has planned.

Frigga, the Queen-Mother of Asgard had saved her once, at the cost of her own life. What kind of person would Jane be if she let what remains of Asgard be destroyed because of her mistakes?

Erik's gaze is sharp, suspicious - the shards of glass in his eyes jagged enough to slice a carotid. He won't hesitate, she realizes in dawning horror. Not even for her. "You shouldn't go to Terra Nova," she blurts.

"No?" He whispers.

Once again, she goes for the truth. She's never been able to lie convincingly - not to him at any rate. "Fury's desperate to find you, interrogate you. He probably has troops on Terra Nova just waiting to take you in." She swallows. "If only for my sake, Erik."

He stares at her for a long moment, then sighs and walks over to her. She isn't gonna let her guard down, though. She has been foolish enough today. "I still need to communicate with King Valkyrie, Jane. Something tells me you have an alternative lined up."

She blinks, turns away. This is the gamble - the most dangerous part of this. "Gagarin's got a QEC channel straight to the Asgardian palace on Terra Nova. If you can unhook it, plug it into a portable cell, you'll have a direct connection without actually going there."

Another weighty pause. "Alright then," he says softly, then chucks her under the chin like he used to when she'd been especially brilliant. She barely manages to keep from flinching. "Lead the way."

---

January 11th, 2030 | 02:55:11 [Terran Coordinated Universal]

SSV Geneva, Caleston Relay

"Espionage probes armed and ready."

He crossed the point of no return a while ago, Ahern reminds himself, staring at the bright blue glow of the mass relay. He'd killed his career dead the moment he'd made a deal with Lawson.

It's freeing, having nothing to lose.

"Fire."

---

January 11th, 2030 | 03:00:05 [Terran Coordinated Universal]

QEC Chamber, T.A.H.I.T.I. Ring

The clatter of her boots on the metal bridge is loud in the enclosed space. She can feel Erik's heavy exhales on the back of her neck. She feels strangely drained, as though every footstep is costing her something she can't afford to lose.

Lights flicker on in the chamber ahead, illuminating the diamond-shaped console surrounding a blue-hued holographic projector. Each quarter of the diamond holds a different QEC paired particle that connects to its partner somewhere in the galaxy. Only a single connection can be active at any single time, but removing one QEC installation won't interfere with a call placed on any of the others.

Jane goes to the northwest QEC terminal, above which rotates Terra Nova's crest. She powers it down. Then she kneels and unscrews the control panel at the base, exposing the innards of the QEC installation.

When she rises, Erik's eyes are roving over her face. As though he's seeing her for the first time. Suddenly, he pulls her into a hug. "The things you're willing to do for me, Jane…," he whispers, his voice thick. "I don't deserve your loyalty."

Guilt flares in her heart, sharp and bright. Her arms come up of their own volition to clutch at his cardigan. He's so emaciated that her palms can feel his heartbeat through his back.

I promise you, Erik. I won't let Fury bury you. I hope you can forgive me.

She pulls away, wipes at the wetness on her cheeks and lightly shoves the tools at his chest. "Careful with the merchandise, old man. Wouldn't want the station to blow up just because you've got shaky hands now."

He laughs, fingers tightening around the tools in a perfectly steady grasp. "Where did all this cheek come from?"

She doesn't respond, moves away so he can kneel and take over the actual detachment and transfer of the QEC. The scarf she'd knitted for him sways, disrupting his focus, so with a muffled oath, he pulls it off his neck and drops it on the floor next to him.

Jane swallows and walks as casually as she can to the southeast console, directly opposite to where Erik is. "So," she says, as though relaxed, unconcerned. "I'm thinking that we have no idea what the Aether will make of the Acheron Anomaly. Whether it'll change something, or…," she trails off, shrugging as her unseen fingers fly across the terminal.

The gestures boot up the connection, and she hurriedly dials down the glow of the keyboard. Her heart leaps to her throat. But Erik hadn't noticed, too occupied by his work and her words. "I'm thinking of conducting some preliminary tests before I unleash the Aether," she continues. "Recommendations?"

He hums. "None that you haven't already thought of. Good idea, though. You'll get a wholesome perspective. But remember - what's happening outside this station isn't nearly as important as what you'll discover within it."

"I'm starting to think you're right." And with that, she connects the call.

Fury's figure, majestic and imposing, flickers over the projector. Erik goes stumbling on his rear in surprise, and the motion catches the Director's eye. Both the men stare at each other for a stretched, breathless moment. Then Fury's eyes narrow. "Dr. Selvig."

Erik's eyes close briefly, before he slowly pushes himself to his feet, brushing the dust off his faded trousers. Only then does he meet her terrified gaze. "Oh, Jane," His voice is gutted, wretched. "I do wish you hadn't done that."

"Dr. Foster, hold him there. Reinforcements are on the way."

Fury might as well not exist. It's only the two of them in the room, in the whole universe, trapped together in this awful moment.

Erik doesn't approach her, but Jane still finds herself retreating until her back is pressed against the wall. "You've completely lost the plot, Erik," she whispers. "You need help."

"I did get it," he says. "From you. Until I met you, I was undecided. But you reminded me of what I'm fighting for. Fighting to prevent. You reminded me of the necessity of making hard choices, hard decisions - no matter where it leads."

"Those decisions aren't yours to make, Dr. Selvig," Fury says tightly. "You're a scientist and an explorer, not a warrior."

"We all have a part to play, Director."

"And is yours to be the puppet of the Mind Stone?!" She screams.

"We're all dying, Jane!" He roars. "The whole universe is dying! I can see it, I have seen it - why can't you?"

She stares at him in horror. His question isn't rhetorical; he's actually confused, as though she should be able to see whatever his unsound mind has come up with. "What is that supposed to mean?"

"Examine the Anomaly's data, Jane," he insists.. "You've got all the answers right at your fingertips! You've just gotta start asking the right questions!"

She just shakes her head, tears streaming down her face. "Please, Erik…"

He bows his head. But it's not a gesture of surrender. Just one of understanding and acceptance.

Erik Selvig has been like a father to her almost as long as she'd known him. Certainly more of a parent than her own had bothered to be. Before the Infinity Stones had destroyed their lives and left them immeasurably changed, they had known each other well enough to predict what the other would do before they even did it.

So when Erik darts forward towards the control panel, she can guess his intentions precisely… and knows in her bones that she won't be able to blame the Mind Stone for this.

A horrible, wrenching sound resounds in the chamber, followed by a frightening amount of sparks from the terminal. From the smoke, Erik emerges, his arms cradling a device: a glowing orb trapped within a cylindrical cage.

The portable QEC to Terra Nova.

"Dr. Selvig!" Fury bellows.

Erik looks at her once more with that same roving expression from earlier. She suddenly realizes it's not the look of someone seeing her for the first time.

It's the one of someone about to see her for the last.

---

Security Checkpoint, Gagarin Docking Bay

Isabelle misses the days when she could've just torn the red tape into shreds.

Ever since Coulson and Fury went the respectable route, she has encountered increasing levels of bureaucratic nightmare, as though it's all trying to make up for lost time.

"You can't be serious," Barnes exclaims, glaring at their latest obstacle: a security guard.

Even Fury's reach has its limits. He's kept the Alliance out of the loop. Until he can give a satisfying reason for why Isabelle's squad wants in on humanity's foremost scientific space station, there are no strings to pull here.

"I'm sorry, sir, but weapons are not allowed on the station. If you're carrying, then you've got to have a pass."

She fights the urge to strangle some sense into the mulish guard before her, even as the Triskelion finally finishes its docking procedures. From this angle, she can see the airlock opening… but nothing comes through.

The guard's spotted it too. "Is your airlock malfunctioning?"

Barnes takes a deep breath and switches tactics. "Listen, there's someone on your station whose life might be in danger, alright?" He attempts a smile, but it comes out all wrong and seems to put off the guard even more, judging by his raised eyebrow and folded arms. Barnes stops smiling, and the desperation makes its appearance once again.

"Might? So you're not sure?"

Just minutes ago, Fury had forwarded a high priority alert: QEC Chamber, T.A.H.I.T.I. Ring. No details, just a sense of urgency palpable even through that simple text. Rambeau had pushed the Triskelion's drive until it groaned. They'd almost missed the powered-down SSV Finch hiding its ambient emissions in Gagarin's wake before they were disembarking.

"It is in danger! Right here, right now, and if you don't let us through…"

"Sir, I didn't write the rules. What if you're the danger to the station?"

Isabelle looks at him in disbelief. "Do you even know who we are…?" She breaks off when she feels a rush of wind past her. Moments later, the entrance to the station open seamlessly, allowing in an invisible intruder.

"What…?" The security guard mutters, staring wide-eyed.

Isabelle hurriedly activates her comms. "Pete?"

"Yeah, I hacked in to let her through. Talos' trying to pull some strings; gimme a minute."

The familiar silhouette of the station looms over the elongated docking port, muted silver against the black eternity. The torus has been partitioned into several sections - the interior of each having been designed into enormous lab spaces. Only the crème de la crème work here.

The smaller ring of T.A.H.I.T.I. is hidden in the shadow of its flashy, more superior one. With the exception of scientists like Jane, it is run entirely by disguised Skrulls reporting directly to Fury - their activities classified to even the highest of Alliance echelons.

Isabelle stares at the distant stars, feels the ticking of a universal clock winding down, the sands of a cosmic hourglass running out. "We might not have a minute."

---

QEC Chamber

The smoke spewing out of the control panel is painted a strange blue from Fury's hologram. It reminds her of when she'd hiked to a rise in New Zealand, and seen a verdant valley laid out before her, bathed in dawn fog.

It's her best and brightest memory, and she's glad it came to her right now, so near the end. She crouches, her hands disappearing into the machinery, tugging at wires, switching connections, redirecting overloads. "Tell them it was an accident."

"What?" Fury demands. "Dr. Foster, he's getting away!"

"I know. It was a genius move." She grunts in pain as a sharp jolt of electricity runs from her fingers straight to her jawline. "He guaranteed I won't be able to chase him down, even if I wanted to."

"What are you going on about?"

"King Valkyrie, especially, will have some very uncomfortable questions. She commissioned Janet Van Dyne to build the connection, you know? Gagarin's first QEC. Yours came later."

"Doctor…"

"And I'm sorry… I'm so sorry." She looks up and meets his gaze squarely. Suddenly it feels urgent, imperative that Fury knows this - knows just how much she regrets this. "I should've listened to you; I shouldn't have… but you've got this all wrong, Nick. This is so much worse than either of us could've imagined."

"Foster… what's going on?"

"Quantum entangled particles are volatile - delinking them is always a delicate process. But Erik just yanked it out." Her fingers move more urgently now, hastened by the accelerated ticking of a clock only she can hear. "The feedback from the particle on the other end is building up a surge. Powerful enough to… to destroy the facility and the QEC center at Terra Nova. Unless I can contain the energy to one room."

Fury seems to take a step forward, even though his hologram stays put. "Dr. Foster…," he exclaims urgently. "Jane… get out of there. Rambeau is almost there, maybe she can…"

"There's no time. Humanity placed its best in a gigantic space station wired up to a time bomb, Director. And if the only thing I can do is minimize the casualties to just one…," she smiles, " - then that's an easy choice to make."

---

Monica clears the edge of the corridor just in time to watch a figure flying out of the QEC chamber and slamming onto the opposing wall.

"Jane!"

She crashes to her knees beside her. Jane is convulsing violently, and when Monica goes to cradle her, static zings across her nerves. Gritting her teeth, she tugs at her sideways, and slaps her across the face lightly. Eyelids flutter, before snapping open.

Monica flinches.

Jane's eyes are completely black. No irises, no pupils - just a pool of darkness. And it is a pool - the surface rippling in time with her seizures. Even the illusion of depth threatens to draw Monica under and drown her in thick, viscous tar.

The chaos has bled over to the QEC chamber, which is a ruin of broken machinery and electronics. Fury's hologram seems frozen, flickering in and out of existence in its projector. Large bolts of electricity zigzag between the walls and the floor, hitting some resistance at the entrance, which just seems to anger the energy, building it up into something faster. More powerful.

And in the middle of it all lies the yanked out remnants of the connection to Terra Nova.

All this Monica notices instantly, and her eyes widen with horrified realization as the engineer in her pieces together the picture before her.

The surge that had tossed out Jane had only been the first, weakest wave.

Later, Monica wouldn't be able to explain why her first instinct had been to curl around Jane and turn the both of them invisible.

Certainly, it didn't do any good, when the buildup of energy peaked and blew the entire chamber and a significant chunk of the ring into the cold, hard vacuum of space. Bending light, after all, is no help against depressurization.

But the more sentimental of those who would listen to her reports would conclude that - futile and foolish though her actions might have seemed - that very act of mindless, unthinking protection might have saved both their lives.

In the here and now, though, it goes like this: a roar erupts from the chamber.

A wave of heat smacks at her. Sound abruptly disappears - as though sucked into a long tube and bottled up tight. It takes everything with it: the chamber, the air, the artificial gravity.

With a bone-breaking, unbelievably powerful wrench, Monica's yanked through the gigantic hole into space.

Seconds stretch into days. Lungs burn as they empty of air. Saliva boils from a frozen mouth. Jane goes rigid in her arms, a sheen of white rippling across her skin, so sharp it's blinding.

And then, just as suddenly, it all stops.

Monica slams into something that's not quite solid. She finds herself sliding down some sort of a slope or a curve until it levels out. Her ears are ringing, and impossible oxygen floods into her starved, tortured lungs. She feels like a ragdoll, wrung out and raw - her arms not so much holding Jane than locked around her of their own accord.

Blinking tears out of her eyes, she looks at what had saved them.

A white, translucent bubble ripples all around her - anchored to the hole where the QEC chamber used to be. Its surface is springy, slick as rubber beneath their sprawled bodies, but firm enough to bounce off any debris that encroaches too close. Beyond, the distant stars are slightly smeared across the black canvas of space.

It reminds her of the FTL envelope that ships would fall into as they activated their eezo cores.

For a brief moment, she entertains the idea that she had somehow made it. That she might have some unseen, previously undreamt of power. That she'd somehow willed the light into something tangible.

And then Jane Foster grabs her and pulls her close.

---

Gagarin Docking Bay

From the docking port, the only indication of anything amiss is when the Gagarin starts listing.

It's a subtle thing; Isabelle and Barnes only feel it because they've been trained for it. The guard is still lecturing them when his own workstation erupts in alarms. Tuning out his curses, they share a glance and then immediately turn their gazes into space, searching for the culprit.

Barnes finds it first. "There," he points to a point slightly to the east of the main ring. At first, Isabelle sees nothing, just an unusually dense cluster of stars glinting like knife-points in the darkness. "Not stars," he murmurs, reading her mind. "Debris. From the T.A.H.I.T.I. ring."

Isabelle switches her comms. "Rambeau, this is Collins, come in." Only static greets her. She tries another channel, then another, until she runs out. "Rambeau, are you there? Monica!"

"She's not responding," Peter says, having come up from behind her. His skin is the color of pale cheese. "I've tried all the channels. But the ring's a little ways away - she might not have reached in time for…" he swallows. "So maybe we've only lost…" He breaks off, shaking his head.

Jane. Erik. No. "Until I see a body," she says tightly, " - even one floating out in space, we're not ruling anyone out, are we clear?"

Peter nods at her mutely. Barnes, though, is still looking out into space. "Well, we can rule out at least one." He gestures again, and this time, she can follow his target easily. From the shadow of the T.A.H.I.T.I. ring, a corvette flares its thrusters and streaks off into the unknown.

Before she can react, the station lurches hard enough to be felt even by the unenhanced. They stumble, grasping for anything bolted down - the security workstation, the terminals, the fences. In its port, the Triskelion rattles.

"Collins!" Barnes barks sharply. He's staring westwards, as is the guard behind his workstation. Their figures are silhouetted by the brilliant yellow glow of Proxima-D, so huge it's all but covered the viewport stretching across the docking tube.

Not huge, no. Her throat closes up. Near. Far too much for comfort.

Gagarin's falling out of orbit.

Isabelle doesn't allow herself to freeze. Everything's broken down too fast, but so had the stonewall of bureaucracy. "We need to get to that ship, or we lose him."

"What?" Peter stares at her, aghast. "What about the station?"

"A few dozens versus the entire universe, because that is what we risk letting the Mind Stone loose!" She swallows. "That's easy math."

Her comms crackle. "You're not gonna have to make it," Rambeau's voice comes through, thick and hoarse. "I'll stabilize Gagarin."

Isabelle's relief is so great she has to lean against the wall for a moment. Her legs are trembling. "Rambeau, Jane…?"

"In the med-bay." There's an audible swallow. "She did something, I don't know what… but it sealed the breach until the engineers could get to it. The docs will do what they can for her. So you're gonna have to catch up to that prick Selvig."

A non-combatant, trying to stabilize and protect a station full of scientists - sitting ducks, vulnerable to pirates and mercs and god knows what else. Isabelle whirls around to Peter, who pins her with a burning gaze.

"Don't even think about telling me to stay behind…," he breaks off when she tugs him in for a quick hug.

"I was gonna say," she says, shuddering, " - that I might want you to have Rambeau's back, but I think I'm gonna need you at mine. Fury will send reinforcements."

Barnes has his omni-tool activated. "Triskelion's LADAR penetrating scans detect a drive core firing up! Selvig is gonna hit FTL in minutes!"

Peter pulls away half-heartedly. "Gagarin's got some time," he grits out. "We don't. It'll take too long to boot up the Triskelion." His muscles feel coiled, as though he's going to try it anyway.

Her eyes catch on a line of circular ports on the far wall. She rushes towards it even before she can register the thought that fired up in her brain. "I got something. Talos lets you peek under the hood of Gagarin's every system, right?" She gestures to the nearby terminal. "Can you calculate the precise velocity an escape pod needs to be ejected at to puncture the hull of Selvig's ship based on his trajectory?"

"Do you have any idea how insane that sounds?" Peter says, fingers already darting across the console. "Calculating now!"

"Won't the shields just deflect it?" Barnes asks.

"Starship shields are designed to repel projectiles traveling at incredibly high speeds - speeds that no human could sustain. Escape pods can't pull that off, but might be able to make a hole. Theoretically, the shields shouldn't even register the breach."

Barnes curses and stares at her. "What are you basing this on?"

"On the assumption that no one would be insane enough to attempt this?"

"Izzy, I've programmed the EP34 pod." A circular port slides open at Peter's words. "If we miss the window, and Selvig hits FTL…"

"Human spaghetti. Got it." Isabelle dives in after Peter and Barnes and secures herself.

With a sudden lurch, the pod slams shut and launches into space.

---

SSV Finch

Those left behind on the Gagarin, if they'd happened to be looking out through the viewscreens, would've seen a small, metallic dot hurtling through space, visible only because it is haloed in fire.

Within the pod, Isabelle is crushed against her seat, her brain trying to squeeze out of her nostrils in a vain attempt to escape the G-forces. The two men sitting opposite her are faring only slightly better.

Peter had rerouted power from all non-essential systems to their speed, which unfortunately included the inertial dampeners. Which means that - besides the horrific press of the universe against her body, she also feels every spin, every micro-collision, and possibly every micro-abrasion against the surface of the hull.

She also feels the sudden slam as the pod crashes into something, the horrific screech of metal as it tears, and the terrifying whoosh of a space depressurizing for a single second before encountering a barrier with a muffled ph-lump.

The pod lurches to a stop. It's so unexpected that Isabelle doubles over and retches until even bile has fled her body in protest of the way she had pushed it.

She lays there, limp against her belts, trembling and dazed.

"Collins." Barnes has already extracted himself. Stepping over her pile of vomit, he pulls her out and up, and hands her a gun. "Can you fight?"

Isabelle wipes a trembling hand over her mouth, then walks over to where Peter has broken through the mangled exit of the pod. She can already hear the blaring alarms from beyond, contributing to her fugue of pain. "Let's hope we don't have to."

---

January 11th, 2030 | 03:22:55 [Terran Coordinated Universal]

Near Caleston Relay

Out there in the cold depths of space, along the accretion disk of the relay, drifts the remnants of the Shanxi retaliatory fleet. Its scanners are peeled for any sign of movement even as the crew grows listless.

The adrenaline that had surged in the aftermath of the Acheron Anomaly and carried them through the loss of their comrades to Erebus System had waned days ago, when no other ships had crossed through the relay. The only action any of them had seen for a while now was when they'd taken shifts for repairs back in Shanxi.

The brief excitement that had bristled through the troops when the investigatory probes had been deployed died just as rapidly when the readings displayed nothing interesting or even remotely titillating from the alien territories.

So when the ping finally registered on ship sensors, no one was expecting it.

It's as though the torpedoes were launched even before the enemy ships dropped out of the relay.

GARDIAN lasers cut through as many as they can reach, but the hull turrets were never designed for such a barrage. And with a collective groan that goes unheard of in the deadened silence of vacuum, most of them fold up, unresponsive to even the most frantic gestures.

What the Shanxi fleet fails to realize, however, is that the torpedoes were never meant to reach them.

Instead, a few hundred miles away from their targets, they detonate.

A tsunami of blue slams into their ships, disabling the inertial dampeners. The shock alone kills dozens of crew members. Weapons go offline, kinetic barriers corrupt - and in one memorable instance - twist inwards, crushing the ship into scrap polymer.

In an instant, the remnants of Shanxi's retaliatory fleet is crippled.

Be careful what you wish for, Ahern thinks grimly, pushing off the bulkhead he'd slammed into. The engineers had been desperate for a ping from the probes - and they'd gotten one, alright; alerting them to the impending enemy reinforcements. They'd barely managed to send a warning back to Shanxi before the torpedo storm.

The Geneva had been at the rear of the fleet, so it had escaped the worst of the bludgeoning.

"Orders, Captain!" His pilot screams.

Beyond the viewscreen, space is nauseatingly warped, bending and twisting in dimensions no man was meant to see, ripping the fabric of reality at its seams. There's no sign of the enemy, but they're there - Ahern had glimpsed their numbers.

The ping had been wrong. These weren't reinforcements. Not unless the enemy was going for overkill against the Alliance.

No. This was an armada.

Ahern squeezes his eyes shut. "Sound... the retreat."

There's a moment of dead silence, before his men burst into action. Ahern connects to the frigates that survived the devastation of the frontline. "Leipzig, New York, Greenwich, Wakanda... you know what to do."

"Aye, Captain. It's been an honor."

And, as a fifth of the fleet kamikazes itself against the enemy, allowing the remaining ships to limp back through the Shanxi-Theta, a cold rage takes root in Ahern's heart.

---

SSV Finch

There's no crew aboard the ship. No helmsman or navigator at the bridge, no XO or armory officers in the CIC. Nothing.

She's heard of these. Small ships ferrying non-essential cargo, manned only by an advanced but carefully shackled army of VIs - their route constantly tracked and monitored by a team of humans somewhere. 'Ghost ships', they were called in some circles - a name that had never made much sense to her, because 'ghosts' implied an echo of a life once lived.

She doesn't need to wonder where Selvig had gotten hold of one, but she doesn't think she wants to know why.

They'd started to sprint, but their footsteps had echoed so eerily in the silence that they couldn't find it in themselves to maintain it for more than a few seconds. Peter heads to the bridge to try and reverse the thrusters. A quick look through the live layout of the ship at the CIC indicates motion and heat in engineering. Selvig has managed to seal off all the stairwells and elevators, so Isabelle hacks the maintenance shafts.

It's when Barnes is punching them a way through to the crew deck when the ship's overhead intercom crackles to life. "Guys, Rambeau just called," Peter says. "Gagarin's stable, for now. But we've got much bigger problems. Remember how Selvig looked up the drift mechanism aboard the relay?"

"What about it?"

"Well, it got me thinking; it makes things easier, doesn't it? Simpler. So much more convenient to have something like that inbuilt into tech that we use but don't really get."

Barnes looks up at that. "Do you have a point, Parker?"

"Yeah. It's not the only safety mechanism that we know of. There's also one in a spaceship's FTL drive."

Barnes tenses. "It uses the same basic logic as the drift mechanism. Avoiding collision by refusing to fire if there's some obstacle big enough in the route you feed it. There's no way to bypass it - it's baked into the core's warm-up process."

"Then how is it that, when I mapped the trajectory of the Finch, it's a straight line ending smack dab on the Charon Relay?"

"Impossible."

"Yeah, that's what I thought. Until I realized that this is a man, who, when desperate enough, is capable of punching holes in spacetime. Getting around fifty-thousand year old tech should've been a breeze."

"You can't…," Isabelle tries, then swallows past the dryness in her throat. "It's Selvig. Why would he… why would the Mind Stone do this?"

Inexplicably, Barnes bristles.

"Something Jane told Monica just before she passed out. He was gonna use the alpha relay to shut down the whole network. Isolate Earth… from those alien attackers, presumably. And when that didn't work…"

"Is it possible that he's intending to stop right at the edge of the relay?" As soon as she asks it, she knows it's a foolish question.

"Have you felt the thrusters reverse? Felt the ship turn around?"

Cold knowledge blossoms to a hard pit deep inside her. "No."

"He's not planning on slowing down, Izzy. I'd bet he already had the Finch's FTL drive modified even before he docked on Gagarin. All he had to do afterwards was fire it up."

"No wonder there's no crew," Barnes mutters. "Didn't want to take anyone else with him."

"So you're saying his visit to Jane - ,"

" - was a suicide note."

---

Engineering, SSV Finch

Isabelle and Barnes hack through the doors and burst into engineering just to hear the tail end of a conversation.

"What have you done, Dr. Selvig?" A vaguely familiar, distinctly female voice asks sharply.

"Only what was necessary," Selvig replies. "Thank you, Your Majesty. We will not meet again."

Rounding past the curve of the eezo core, they almost stumble upon the scientist just as the light of the portable QEC flickers out.

"Gun!" Barnes shouts, just as Selvig scrambles for a pistol and trains it squarely.

Not at them.

But at himself.

"Drop your weapons, please, Agent Collins, Sergeant Barnes," Selvig says. "I'm almost certain Fury wants me alive." His voice is pleasant, serene: as though he isn't at all bothered by the fact that he's got his own gun aimed at his temple.

But god if it isn't effective. "Okay," Isabelle says, immediately twisting her own weapon so the barrel is pointing up. "Okay, look, we're dropping them."

It scatters to the floor with a loud clang.

Barnes doesn't move. "He blew up Gagarin."

"We don't know what happened."

"Oh, he's quite right, Agent Collins. I had no choice. It was the only way to save Jane's life."

The ship's comms crackle on, and an unexpected voice comes through. "She almost got spaced, you bastard!" Rambeau screams.

"But is she alive?"

Rambeau chokes on a sob. "What did you do to her?"

Selvig squeezes his eyes shut. His fingers tighten on the trigger. Isabelle's hand snaps to Barnes' raised arm, locking his fingers so he can't access the trigger then forcefully bringing it down. "Only what was necessary," he whispers again.

"That what you told yourself when you sacrificed scientists - your people - to trigger Prothean traps on Eden Prime?" Barnes demands, his face a rictus of rage. "Or when you abandoned the Sokovia? Or when you trapped us aboard a ship about to slam headfirst into a mass relay?"

Isabelle stares at him. Why does Barnes sound like this was somehow personal?

"I didn't know about the traps. Nor did I force you to come after me. As for the Sokovia…," Selvig's face twists with grief. "I tried. I was so close to getting the alpha relay's coordinates before the aliens attacked. I had a choice; and I thought the right one would be to save the expedition. So I activated the relay. Far too late."

"It was the right one," Isabelle says. "You saved our lives."

"I delayed the inevitable, Agent Collins. Look around you. I let the Stone corrupt my mind, again."

"Wait." Isabelle's thoughts feel like they're wading through honey. "The Mind Stone. It asked you to save us?"

He nods. "It's loud when it wants to be. But I can shut it out now. With the Charon's destruction… humanity will be alone, but it will be safe." He turns his back on them, looking out into the blue-streaks surrounding the eezo core. "Not long now."

She doesn't know if it's the effects of the pod breach or something else, but her mind just doesn't feel like cooperating. "I don't understand."

"I do." Barnes growls. "You may know the Stones, Collins. But I know brainwashing. Enough to recognise when someone is being controlled...," His gaze flickers to Selvig, "... And when someone isn't."

The implication is slow to descend. "You used the Stone's information database to bypass the FTL drive's restrictions."

His smile is chilling. "Do you know we attribute those safety features to the Protheans? But I have a reputable - at least in this case - source that claims it is much, much older. Now, why would any race want to ensure we reached our destinations safely, and without incident? Why would they care? Answer: they wouldn't. Then why?"

It's Peter who answers. "Because a spiderweb remains benign… until it snaps shut behind you."

Selvig's blue eyes brim with tears. "Don't you think I wish it had never come to this?" He whispers. "If I'd joined the Charon expedition, I'd have suggested against activating our own relay! You of all people, Collins, should know the consequences of opening doors that are better left shut!"

"I can also guess the consequences of smashing a spaceship onto the Tesseract! This isn't the way, Erik!"

"There isn't any other way! I'm the remnant of the Mind Stone, Isabelle - I'm its avatar. And even with ultimate knowledge at my disposal, there's no way out except through."

"You sound like Thanos." Barnes says quietly, his words dropping like explosives. "He rationalized the unbearable, too."

Selvig stares at him for a long moment. "Do you know what I felt when I discovered the secret of Eden Prime, Sergeant Barnes? I felt pity. Pity for the man who knew what it meant to be pushed too far. Because he understood a truth I'm only just realizing." The eezo core has enveloped him in its corona of blue. "Fate? Free will? None of it matters when we face the worst enemy of all. Extinction."

Ultimate knowledge… Why does that ring in her head? The Mind Stone… It's still fighting back. Selvig's deaf to it, so it's using their connection as a mouthpiece. No way out except through. "Monica, can we transit through the mass relay corridor in FTL?"

"Hilarious, Collins, pull the other one, why don't you?"

But Isabelle has already seen Selvig's eyes widening in panic. Triumph rushes through her spine. "The Stone thinks it can be done. Peter, hack into the Finch's bridge, take over. Rambeau, you're on FTL drive duty."

Rambeau sputters over the comms. "It's not possible! You're supposed to give the relay a close approximation of the mass to transit, but FTL reduces that by astronomical amounts. There's a thousand-to-one chance that the ship will be ripped apart!"

She snaps. "We don't have a choice! Our current course isn't just a risk to Sol, but the entire fucking galaxy! Or did you forget what it is that the relays actually do?!"

Another deathly silence, before both Barnes and Selvig jerk in horrified realization. But it's Peter who voices the incomprehensible thought. "It transmits mass… as well as energy. And if we hit it now, the collision of the ship's eezo core to the relay's might just disseminate all that excess energy through the entire network. The entire galaxy would burn."

---

"No," Erik whispers, a violently trembling hand against his mouth, his other grasping the QEC so hard his fingertips turn white. "NO!"

His primal scream startles them into immobility. Just for a second, but it's long enough for him to whirl into action. By the time he fires the gun, it's already too late for her to move.

But she isn't the fastest Transhuman on that bridge.

Something metallic blurs into her vision. The sound of flesh and muscle being shredded echoes in the narrow space. Another shot goes off, but this time she has enough presence of mind to throw herself behind cover, just as something thumps onto the deck.

Only when silence reigns again that she dares to look around.

Erik Selvig is sprawled unceremoniously across the deck - his icy blue eyes glassy, lifeless. Only the hole in his forehead, trickling a rivulet of blood, that glares at her accusingly.

There's a ringing in her ears, or maybe it's the intercom, distorting Monica and Peter's panicked cries. She ignores it as she crawls across the space to the elderly scientist's side and cradles him in her arms.

He's so light, featherweight really - she hadn't noticed he'd lost weight since the last time she'd seen him. Did the starvation start in Eden Prime? Or well before, when Isabelle and Daisy had the gall to intrude upon his safe spaces at the Alliance Academy and drop bomb after mythological bomb on his head? "Why?" she whispers, past the heart trapped in her throat.

"Because," Barnes grunts, almost breathlessly, " - for a scatterbrained scientist, he was an insanely good shot." With that, he crumples gracelessly to his knees.

Isabelle's head snaps up.

Barnes is clutching at his gut, his skin alarmingly pale. His gloves are rapidly darkening with blood, which is dripping down steadily to form a pool of darkness beneath his thighs. "Had to be the armor-piercing rounds," he groans, kicking out at the fallen QEC and missing by a mile.

The realization is like a bucket of cold water.

The Winter Soldier had taken a bullet for her.

---

January 11th, 2030 | 03:54:56 [Terran Coordinated Universal]

M-44 Hammerhead [Underwater Variant]

In Rapid Retreat from Shanxi Garrison

There's a klaxon installed on every colony that no garrison commander wants to hear.

It's been resounding across New Taiyuan for an hour now: an orchestra of horns and organs blaring a single, continuous note into the skies. As though screaming its displeasure at those escape pods tumbling through the atmosphere. They'd escaped the fate of the rest of Shanxi's defense fleet: destruction by the alien force pouring through the new relay.

Thaddeus had refused to mute it - even after all the shuttles, skycars and IFVs had scattered into the night, leaving empty husks of life where there had once been colonies. He'd himself been shoved onto a submersible, but had refused to move below-deck, determined to be a witness to whatever came next.

"Some men understand the necessity of doing what needs to be done," Lawson had said just moments ago. "I thought you were one of them. I was mistaken. One day, General… you'll find yourself being strangled by your own principles."

They'd pulled up under the shadow of a cliff, putting enough miles between themselves and the garrison to be out of the line of fire. Thaddeus stands alone on the deck, gripping the railing with one hand and a datapad in the other, and waits.

He doesn't have to wait long.

The white-hot laser punctures through the stormy, purple-grey clouds like it's slitting open the universe.

And it certainly feels that way when the heat and ash tries to blast him off the deck. He shields himself as best he can, but refuses to cower.

The mushroom cloud has completely enveloped the garrison's cliff. A rumble deeper than thunder confirms his suspicions, as large boulders topple from the shattered mountain, flattening the prefab structures of the colony into large, muddy trenches of ruin.

But the enemy isn't content with the collateral damage. Large lasers sweep across the colony, aimed at the individual buildings that had escaped the initial landslide. Explosions rock the island, the resulting fires high enough to lick at the swollen, pregnant clouds.

As though the aliens want every hint of human existence, human defiance, scoured from the face of the planet.

Something cracks beneath his fingers, and he looks down to find a large break running through the screen of his datapad. It spiderwebs across Lawson's face, pixelating it.

The billionaire gazes at him for a long, steady moment before shaking his head. Through the roar of the explosions, Thaddeus can just make out his last words before Lawson reaches out and cuts the connection. 'You're on your own.'

Thaddeus exhales quietly, and lets the datapad drop into the roiling water. He steps away from the railing, and it seems to be some form of a signal, because a hardtop emerges from the hull above him, curving over the deck to merge with the railing.

As the glass seals them in and the vessel prepares to submerge under the ocean, Thaddeus keeps his eyes focused on the ruin of his domain.

The birds might have taken the stars and the skies, but they won't take the land. Not as long as he has something to say about it. Terra Firma.

And if he has to go about it alone, so be it.

Just then, a small, cool hand slips into his, gripping tightly. Thaddeus looks down and meets Betty's eyes. Her gaze is grim, determined.

And, as though in contempt of the wreckage before him, his answering smile is vicious and triumphant.

---

January 11th, 2030

Engineering, SSV Finch

Isabelle bursts into action. "Rambeau, Parker," she says. Her voice is like a whip, but her arms are gentle as she hoists up Selvig. "Dr. Selvig is dead, and Barnes is shot. You have your orders. Get it done."

She ignores their shock, walks over to the far wall of the bridge and kicks at a wall panel. A capsule-sized stasis pod slides out - there's always one on every deck in every ship, for exactly such a situation. She gently places Erik inside it, folding his arms across his chest and closing his eyes. "I'm sorry," she whispers, before sealing the pod.

Rushing to Barnes' side, she drops beside him and gently tugs away his bloody hands. The wound's smaller than expected, but the round had shredded him on the way out. If she didn't know better, she'd call it shrapnel damage. His enhanced healing would take care of it down the line, but she needs to prevent him from bleeding out in the time being. "First-aid?"

"Ran out a while back," he gasps.

"Same." She purses her lips, pressing down on the wound. The med-bay might have some, but the ship's shuddering implies that they're nearing the end, and she won't make it before the galaxy is wiped out. "We're going to have to cauterize."

Barnes groans, the press of his fingers against hers almost painfully hard. Isabelle's omni-blade manifests a brilliant orange, dimming down to the suitable temperature she feeds in. "Rambeau?"

"I've automated the transit protocols. Can't tell if it worked, though."

Isabelle meets Barnes' gaze. After a moment, he nods. "Guess we're taking that thousand-to-one chance, then."

"Collins, no!"

"Barnes can't be moved, Monica. And I… I won't leave him behind." She swallows. "I'm sorry I got you into this, Pete."

"Don't be," Peter replies. "Nowhere else I'd rather be."

She meets Barnes' gaze. "Couldn't we have reasoned with him?" she blurts, almost involuntarily.

"He was far past that point, Collins."

She swallows down the grief, pushes his hands away, positioning the flat of the blade near his skin. He stiffens at the heat, then slowly, deliberately relaxes. On a holographic camera feed, they watch as the vastness of space warps into a looming mass relay. "You could've been killed."

Barnes' eyes are like a cold fire. "Couldn't have your death on my conscience too."

Isabelle plunges the blade.

And the universe washes away his scream in a ripple of blue.

---

Mass Effect Context

Gagarin Station orbiting above Demeter, Proxima Centauri.

ME canon doesn't specify which system Demeter (humanity's first extrasolar colony), just that it's reachable by conventional FTL from Sol. Time to reach the Charon Relay from Proxima Centauri at FTL is about 25 minutes.

Terran Coordinated Universal (TCU)

Terran Coordinated Universal is the official term for Earth local time. For the purposes of this fic, I'm keeping Shanxi's orbit around its axis and around its sun similar to Earth's, so their standard time-keeping systems match up.