The notification arrived two days after landing.
Carl was standing at the floor-to-ceiling windows of the temporary corporate suite Jack had arranged in Midtown, reviewing the preliminary reports on Hudson Industries' New York market entry, when the System chimed — clean and precise, the way it always did, as if the universe considered interrupting a man during a business review entirely reasonable.
╔══════════════════════════════════════╗
║ NEW SIDE QUEST ║
╠══════════════════════════════════════╣
║ ║
║ The Cave ║
║ ║
║ Objective: Extract Ho Yinsen from ║
║ Ten Rings captivity in Afghanistan ║
║ before his death ║
║ ║
║ Condition: Yinsen must survive ║
║ ║
║ Reward: A-rank Medical Ninjutsu ║
║ Shōsen Jutsu ║
║ (Mystical Palm Technique) ║
║ ║
║ Time Window: Active ║
║ ║
╚══════════════════════════════════════╝
Carl read the notification twice.
Ho Yinsen.
The name surfaced from his fragmented memories of the MCU with the particular clarity that attached itself to characters who mattered — not just to the plot, but to the architecture of everything that followed. The Afghan physician and engineer who had been held by the Ten Rings before Tony Stark's convoy was ambushed. The man who had kept Stark alive with a car battery and a hand-fabricated electromagnet. Who had helped build the Mark I in secret. Who had died buying Stark thirty extra seconds, running into a corridor full of armed men with nothing but a stolen rifle and the quiet certainty that his own death was less important than what Stark might become.
Don't waste your life.
In the original timeline, those four words had redirected the entire trajectory of the MCU. Had transformed a billionaire who manufactured weapons into a man who understood consequence. Had made Iron Man possible, which had made the Avengers possible, which had made — eventually, at enormous cost — the defeat of Thanos possible.
Yinsen had saved the world once already. He'd just done it by dying, which meant the world had never known to thank him.
Carl stared at the notification for a long moment.
The System's phrasing was precise in the way it always was when the objective was genuinely difficult: before his death. Not rescue him from captivity. The distinction mattered. Yinsen wouldn't simply be waiting to be extracted — he was a man who had already made his peace with dying, who would actively choose death over escape if the alternative meant Stark didn't get his thirty seconds. Saving him meant not just reaching the cave, but constructing a scenario where Stark escaped and Yinsen lived. Where the thirty seconds came from somewhere else.
Two problems. One solution that had to satisfy both simultaneously.
It was a significantly more complicated problem than the HYDRA base had been.
Shōsen Jutsu. The Mystical Palm Technique. A-rank medical ninjutsu — the same technique Tsunade used to heal injuries that should have been fatal, to repair cellular damage from the inside out, to keep a body alive through the kind of violence that conventional medicine couldn't reach. In a world where gods threw lightning and men in iron suits fell from the sky, the ability to heal wasn't a support capability.
It was survival infrastructure.
The Naruto world transfer would wait.
Carl dismissed the notification, set down the market report, and reached for his phone.
"Jack. My office. Bring whatever you have on Afghanistan — Ten Rings operational zones, Kunar Province specifically."
A pause on the line. "We don't have much on Afghanistan, sir. It's outside our operational footprint."
"I know. Bring what you have and start building what you don't. And Jack — quietly. This doesn't go through the normal channels."
Another pause. Longer. The pause of a man recalibrating his mental model of what his employer was planning.
"Understood, sir."
---
The permanent residence question had been settled three days before the notification arrived, during Carl and Wanda's second full day in New York — a day that had begun with hotel breakfast and ended with a decision that surprised him in the best possible way.
He'd presented her with options. A penthouse in Manhattan, secure and central, with views that cost more per square foot than most people earned in a year. A brownstone in Brooklyn, quieter and residential. A property in the Hamptons if she wanted genuine distance from the city.
Wanda had listened to all three options with the careful attention she gave to anything that mattered, and then said: "Queens."
He blinked. "That's not one of the options I—"
"I know." She was already pulling up something on her phone — photographs of an ordinary residential street in Forest Hills, tree-lined and unhurried, the kind of neighborhood where people walked dogs in the morning and children played on stoops in the afternoon. The kind of neighborhood that didn't appear in listings aimed at billionaires. "Pietro found it. He's been exploring since we landed." A small pause. "He says it feels like Novi Grad, but with better food."
"Pietro has been in New York for forty-eight hours."
"Pietro has covered approximately four hundred kilometers of it on foot," Wanda said, with the particular tone she used when Pietro had done something that was simultaneously impressive and exhausting to contemplate. "He has opinions."
Carl looked at the photographs for a long moment.
Queens. Separated from Manhattan by the East River, close enough to Hudson Industries' new offices to be practical, far enough from Midtown to exist at a different pace entirely. The borough that most people overlooked precisely because it didn't perform for them — didn't have Manhattan's skyline or Brooklyn's cultural mythology, just the particular livability of a place where actual people actually lived.
In a few years, the neighborhood that would produce Spider-Man.
"You want an apartment," Carl said.
"I want neighbors," Wanda said, in a tone that clarified she meant something more specific than the word usually carried. "People I can talk to. Women who'll argue with me about recipes. Someone who'll knock on the door to borrow eggs and stay for an hour." She looked up from her phone, and there was something in her eyes that wasn't quite a challenge — more like a test she was administering to herself as much as to him. Waiting to see if he would redirect her toward something bigger, more appropriate, more commensurate with what Hudson Industries' CEO was supposed to choose. "I don't want to live behind gates, Carl. I've spent enough of my life behind barriers."
There was nothing he could say to that. Nothing that wouldn't have been either platitude or argument, and he wanted to offer her neither.
"Queens," he said. "Done."
The smile that crossed her face was brief and genuine and worth considerably more than the Manhattan penthouse he'd already mentally decommissioned.
---
The apartment building was three stories, unremarkable in the way that things built for function rather than impression often were — brick facade, modest entry, a small courtyard with a bench that someone had left a forgotten coffee cup on. The unit Wanda had chosen was on the second floor: two bedrooms, a kitchen that faced east for morning light, windows that looked onto the street rather than a service alley.
It was nothing like the Hudson estate in Novi Grad. Nothing like the corporate accommodations Carl had been using since their arrival. The most deliberately ordinary place he had lived in two lifetimes.
Wanda walked through it once, slowly, touching the windowsills and running her hand along the kitchen counter the way people do when they're testing whether something is real. Then she turned back with an expression Carl recognized from their wedding day — the look of someone who had finally allowed themselves to want something without simultaneously bracing for it to be taken away.
"This one," she said.
"This one," Carl confirmed.
What Wanda didn't know — what she would never know, because knowing would change the thing she was choosing — was that Carl had arranged the surrounding units. Not dramatically, not obtrusively. Six apartments in the building now housed members of his security detail, their cover identities as ordinary tenants maintained through carefully constructed routines and the kind of unremarkable normality that professional operatives were trained to sustain indefinitely. The building's superintendent had been quietly replaced with a man from Morrison's network. The three best sightline positions in the surrounding buildings had been purchased through shell companies.
The security was invisible. That was the point.
Wanda wanted neighbors, and she would have them — people who would genuinely say good morning in the hallway, accept borrowed eggs, and argue about which restaurant on Junction Boulevard was worth the wait. They simply also happened to be the most capable protective detail Carl could assemble on two weeks' notice.
He didn't consider this deception. He considered it engineering. The life Wanda wanted was real — every part of it. He was simply ensuring it had adequate structural support.
---
Pietro appeared that evening carrying takeout from a Bangladeshi place two streets over, setting containers on the kitchen counter with the authority of a man presenting evidence rather than suggestions.
"The lamb," he announced, "is a fact."
Wanda looked up from the cookbook she'd been annotating — she'd taken to marking pages with small sticky notes that carried observations like too much paprika for Queens and needs testing, ask neighbors — and assessed the containers with the expression of someone who'd long ago learned that arguing with Pietro about food was a commitment of time and energy she rarely had.
"You got enough for three?"
"I got enough for six. I didn't know if Carl would be working or working while technically present." He glanced toward the hallway. "Is there a difference? I'm still figuring out the taxonomy."
"There's a difference," Carl said, appearing in the doorway.
Pietro looked at him with the particular expression he reserved for moments when Carl said something that was technically true but didn't actually address the point. It was an expression Pietro had been refining since the day they'd met — a combination of mild skepticism and the studied patience of a man who'd decided that his brother-in-law was probably not going to spontaneously become less complicated, and had chosen to find this interesting rather than infuriating.
"The lamb," Pietro said again, redirecting with the ease of someone who'd learned that persistence was more efficient than argument.
They ate at the kitchen table with the television on. The Dick Van Dyke Show had migrated from Novi Grad to Forest Hills with the seamlessness of something that had never been about geography to begin with — Wanda had found a streaming service that carried it and announced this with the quiet satisfaction of a problem solved that she hadn't been entirely sure was solvable.
Pietro, who had seen every episode at least four times and could quote most of them from memory, watched with the same attention he'd given them in their parents' apartment. Not because the show was new. Because watching it in a new place made it mean something different — made it evidence that they had arrived somewhere, that the ritual had survived the crossing of an ocean, that the thread their father had guarded was still intact.
Carl watched Pietro watch the screen, and understood this, though he said nothing about it.
"So," Pietro said, during a commercial break, with the studied casualness of someone who had been building toward a question for approximately forty minutes. "Afghanistan."
Wanda looked up sharply. Carl kept his expression neutral.
"I have a business trip coming up," Carl said. "Preliminary market research."
Pietro looked at him with an expression that was doing considerable work. "Afghanistan," he repeated. "For market research."
"It's a developing market."
"It's a war zone."
"Many developing markets are."
Pietro set down his fork with the deliberate care of a man deciding how much energy to invest in a conversation he already knew he wasn't going to win. He looked at Wanda, who was looking at Carl with the particular quality of attention she deployed when she was reading something between the lines of what was being said.
"How long?" she asked.
"A week. Perhaps less."
She held his gaze for a moment. Not with suspicion — with the specific focus of a woman who had chosen to trust someone and was continuously, actively making that choice rather than letting it become automatic. It was one of the things about Wanda that Carl found consistently striking: she didn't trust passively. She trusted deliberately, which meant when she extended it, it meant something.
"Be careful," she said.
Not don't go. Not I need more information. Just the two words, carrying the weight of everything she wasn't saying — the acknowledgment that there were parts of his life she didn't have access to, that she had decided to let him have those parts, and that her only condition was that he come back from them.
"Always," Carl said.
Pietro picked up his fork again. "The lamb is getting cold," he observed, to no one in particular. "Just noting that. As a fact. While we're establishing facts this evening."
Wanda exhaled something that was trying to decide whether to be a laugh or a sigh and landed in the middle.
The episode resumed. Dick Van Dyke tripped over the ottoman. The laugh track swelled.
Carl ate his lamb and thought about Afghanistan.
---
[END CHAPTER 15]
---
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