The silver light under Arthur's skin flickered and dimmed. The Arcane Mage State was running out of fuel.
There was no time to linger. He had seconds left, perhaps less. And then he would be an ordinary man with severe internal injuries, standing on a barren rock in a dead corner of nowhere.
He pressed a hand flat against his coat and felt the cold weight of the Uru box through the fabric. The Reality Stone was sealed inside it. That had been careful work, done properly and done first, with no bare skin allowed anywhere near the ancient parasite.
That crisis was over.
Now he just had to leave this place.
Arthur crossed the dust to Jane. She was still sitting exactly where he had told her to sit, staring at the patch of empty air where an Infinity Stone had recently stopped being liquid. She was shivering.
"Arthur, what—"
"Later. We're leaving."
He took her arm as he passed. She closed her mouth and ran with him.
The invisible rift that had brought them to this world was still where they had left it. It had been there the whole time.
Even then, it had never been on Arthur's list of ways out. Because it was a hole he had not made and could not close, and walking through it with the Aether loose meant the Aether walked right through with him. Out of a dead world with nothing living in it, and into Camden, with a populated city sitting directly on top of it.
That was never an escape plan. That was moving the problem somewhere with seven billion bodies in it.
Now the problem was a pebble in a box, and nothing was chasing them, and the seam of light ahead was only a door home.
They went through it together.
—
November 14, 2013 – Camden
Camden had become an S.H.I.E.L.D. operation while they were gone.
Floodlights on stands. Cable runs taped down across wet concrete. A generator humming under everything, plastic sheeting stretched over the holes in the roof, and the rain still finding its way in regardless.
S.H.I.E.L.D. researchers clustered around the first two rifts, arguing over instrument racks. The third one, the one Arthur had gone through, had four agents standing near it and nothing else. The other two gave off readable energy signatures. This one had never done anything interesting at all.
Then, Jane Foster walked stumbling out of it, panting.
A man burning with silver light stepped out right behind her.
Every head in the building turned at once. And in that moment, with the whole room watching, Arthur's Arcane state went out.
Everything he had spent came due at once. The bruised pathways. The resonance damage. The plain physical toll. All of it landed together.
But Arthur did not go down. Compared to what he had endured on the other side of that seam, this pain was almost restful.
He put one hand on a rusted girder, casually, the way a man leans on a doorframe, and arranged his face into the expression of someone working through a mildly interesting problem. His legs were lying to everyone in the room, and he intended to let them.
"JANE!"
Darcy Lewis reached her first, phones and all, talking too fast and much too loud. Selvig arrived a step behind her.
"I'm fine," Jane said, bewildered by the reception. "Why is everyone like this? I can't have been gone more than an hour."
"An hour?" Darcy's voice climbed. "Jane. You were gone for seven hours."
"What?"
"Seven. They ran three sweeps." Darcy was still going, the words coming out under a pressure that had been building all night. "Three whole search sweeps, and I kept telling them the readings were dimensionally weird, and nobody ever listens to me..."
Jane could not begin to hold seven hours in her head yet, so she reached for the thing in front of her instead. She put both hands on Darcy's shoulders.
"Darcy. Breathe. I'm fine. Arthur came and got me."
Three sets of eyes found Arthur.
"Mr. Hayes." Selvig came forward, and his voice was not steady. "Thank you. Thor left her safety with me. I..."
Pop.
Four agents drew their weapons on the sound with commendable speed and found themselves aiming at a tall woman in a plain dark dress who had appeared out of empty air. She did not so much as glance at them or their guns.
Winky took in the whole room in one sweep, and then everything in her stopped, because she had found Arthur.
She did not need an elf bond to read him. She had nearly twenty years of practice. She saw the grip on the girder and the unnatural stillness of his posture, and her eyes narrowed into something dangerous.
She opened her mouth, fully prepared to shout at him in front of every single person present.
Arthur caught her eye and gave her a very specific look. It was not a command. It was a tired, silent request.
Winky closed her mouth. Whatever she had to say to him, and there was a great deal of it, no part of it belonged to this room.
She crossed the floor, took his arm, and with a pop the pair of them were gone, leaving Jane's group hanging mid-sentence and four agents aiming weapons at some recently vacated air.
The senior agent holstered his sidearm, exhaled through his nose, and reached for his radio, because somebody a long way above his pay grade was going to want to hear about this in the next thirty seconds.
—
The roof was gravel and rain and the orange glow of London soaked up into low cloud. It was coming on ten at night, and the city below was a smear of headlights and wet gold.
Winky set him down gently, stepped back exactly one pace, and let him have it.
"Master has been playing with another one of those terrible stones." Her voice was low, which with Winky was the dangerous register. "Bruised magic channels. Internal bleeding in at least six places, and Winky has not finished counting." Her hands closed into fists at her sides. "On some untrackable planet. Alone. Why did Master not take Winky? Winky is very strong now."
"Winky."
"What if something had happened?" She did not let him get any further. "What would Mistress Eileen do? What would Ele and Tris do? What would Winky do?"
The rain filled the gap where his answer should have been.
"Winky should have felt it." Her voice dropped further. "The moment it went wrong. Winky would have felt it through the bond, and Winky would have been standing next to Master before he finished falling. That is what the bond was for."
"Winky."
"Winky should never have taken the Stone's 'gift'. The pretty words and the freedom and all of it. Winky should have loudly said no, and then today Master would not have been..."
"Winky."
"If Master had died on that rock, alone, because Winky wanted..."
"Winky."
She stopped.
And Arthur, who at that particular moment could barely stay upright, had to be the steady one.
"I wanted you there," Arthur said.
Winky's head came up.
"On that world. Down in the dust, fighting to keep hold of myself, I reached for the artifact I built to replace the bond." He let the memory sit for exactly as long as it deserved. "It called out into a dead place, and nothing answered. So yes. I wanted you there very badly."
He held her eyes.
"And even then, Winky, I did not regret it. Not for one single second. I would do it again. Same afternoon, same order, knowing precisely how desperately I would want it back today."
His voice did not rise. It never did when he meant something.
"The bond was a dark curse. You are family by choice. And the second thing is worth more to me than my life."
"No, Master." Her chin came up, trembling. "Master's life is more important than anything."
"To me," Arthur said, "my family is."
She had no answer to that.
She stood there in the rain with her eyes overflowing and blamed herself anyway, because he had made an argument and she had lost it, and losing it had changed nothing at all about what she felt.
So she made herself a quiet promise instead.
She would train. Properly, the way she had never bothered to since the curse broke, because she had always had power and had never needed skill to go with it. Whatever the bond had done for him, she would learn to do without it. She would never again stand on a roof and be the one who arrived afterward.
Something in her settled, and Arthur saw her face change without knowing why.
Only then did he let himself stop performing.
Which meant sitting down, because standing had stopped being available some minutes ago.
He went down against the low parapet harder than he meant to.
Every other thought went out of Winky's head at once. She was on her knees beside him before he had finished landing, hands already glowing warm and gold, pressing the healing into the cracked places.
"No more talking, Master. Sit still." She sniffed hard. "Master never learns. Winky thinks those Gryffindors gave Master some of their recklessness. Before them, Master was always careful."
Arthur had no reply to that.
She was not wrong. The Slytherin boy who had walked into Hogwarts all those years ago would not have made half the mistakes he had made today. That boy would have built the second container. He would have sent a clone to test things. He would never once have stood out in the open with a live Infinity Stone loose in his hands.
A great deal of today could have been easily avoided.
He sat with that truth, and let Winky work. The cold rain came down on both of them, and neither of them minded it at all.
—
Down in the warehouse, the agents had their updated orders and were moving to interview Dr. Foster properly when the pressure in the building changed.
Thor did not announce himself. He simply became visible at the edge of the floodlights, rain steaming faintly off his shoulders, and nobody stopped him or asked him for identification, because there are advantages to being on the news.
He crossed the floor, took Jane gently by the arm, and walked her out under the lip of the loading dock, where the rain came down in front of them like a curtain the world had drawn for their privacy.
Heimdall had told him she had vanished, and Thor had come the moment he heard.
And then he had been able to do nothing at all. He could not sense a tear in space the way his brother could. He could not follow her through a door he could not see. So the God of Thunder had stood in the rain outside a derelict factory and waited, which was a thing he had never once been good at, and the only mercy in the whole night had been learning that Arthur had gone in after her.
That had been enough to hold on to. Barely.
Jane spoke first.
"Thor, I'm sorry. I ignored the warning."
"We will speak of that later." He pulled the cloak from his shoulders and wrapped it around hers, heavy and warm and faintly steaming. "Are you hurt?"
"I'm fine. I'm okay now." She pulled the fabric closer around herself and looked up toward the flat roof of the factory. "But Thor, I was on a dead planet. There was a red thing in that place, and it got inside me. Arthur came just in time and pulled it out."
"Then he has my eternal thanks..."
"It nearly killed him." She said it flatly, because there was no gentle way in. "I sat there and watched it nearly kill him. He was down on the ground and he wouldn't let me touch him." She swallowed. "It was the first time I have ever seen Arthur in pain."
Thor's expression darkened.
"Where is he now?"
"I don't know. Winky came and took him away." Jane's mouth twitched despite everything. "I've never seen her look like that before."
"Ah." Thor exhaled through his nose with the deep sympathy of hard-won experience. "Then I shall pray for him. I saw that elf angry with Hogun once, and I have taken great care never to be on the receiving end of it since." He looked up through the rain toward the roofline. "They are near. She will bring him down when she is finished with him. Not one moment before."
Jane kept looking up at the roof anyway, at the rain falling through the floodlight glare and going dark somewhere above it.
"He didn't have to come for me," she said.
"No," Thor agreed. "He never has to, but he still does."