Archive of Our Own

He suspected the reason he'd been given this detail was that no one else wanted to go. 

But really, Wong thought, Night Vale wasn't so bad. Things did go wrong, and often, but more often than not they went right again before he needed to step in. And while routine check-ins tended to unearth things that would be massive problems elsewhere, in this town, he could define “problem” loosely enough that most things slipped through. 

Ultimately, most of the time the assignment boiled down to occasionally poking his head in, making sure nothing was a more than acceptable amount of on-fire, and otherwise going about his business. Truth be told, he had several other assignments that took up more of his time and mental energy, on average, than this one. 

The portal he conjured didn't drop him exactly where he expected. He aimed for the outskirts of town, where it was easiest to slip in unseen and unnoticed, but traveling here seemed to ebb and flow in difficulty, depending on the mood of the town. Sometimes, it drew him in, pulling with a disconcerting sort of mystical gravity, and other times, it would repel him moodily, as though he had found himself at the wrong end of a pair of opposing magnets. 

Today, it dropped him in the dead center of the town, halfway between Big Rico's Pizza and City Hall. The circle of orange sparks drew a few curious stares, but he pretended, with a confidence born of experience, that stepping out of a magical portal into the middle of a busy street was a perfectly ordinary thing to do. It was a simple truth that no matter what you were doing, most people would play along if you acted like you belonged. It was true, to a degree, anywhere, but more true in Night Vale. 

He had, skillfully and carefully and over a period of time, crafted for himself a cover for his visits to the town, and it afforded him a significant freedom of movement. 

“Hey,” Larry Leroy, from out on the edge of town, called to him from across the street. “If it isn't the monument inspector. Something up with the monuments?” 

He raised the clipboard that served as his disguise. “That's what I'm here to find out.” 

Larry Leroy gave him a big thumbs up and a bigger smile. 

He had a system, by this point, for making his way through the town, one that was one part geographical, and one part based on how pleasant he found each area of Night Vale. If he started by the whispering forests and worked his way around and inward, he could end at Big Rico's and order a slice of pizza for the road.

The trees of the whispering forest seemed normal.

Well, not normal-normal, but Night Vale normal. They were trees, and they rustled their invitations and secrets the same way they always did, and nothing seemed especially haunted or on fire or perched on the verge of opening an interdimensional rift in spacetime.

He checked the place off on his clipboard, and prepared to turn to leave when a flash of movement caught his attention. He followed the sound of rustling leaves to a snake, perched low in the crown of a tree and hanging near-exactly above his head. The snake was watching him, draped through the branches of the tree and following him with its eyes, tongue flickering out occasionally to test the air. 

He waved. “Hello.” 

The snake continued to watch him. 

He could tell, more by instinct than any actual recognition, that this was not an ordinary snake. 

He could also tell, from his experience with snakes, that it didn't mean to attack him. 

The snake unspooled from the branches, lowering himself until he began to loop over Wong's shoulder. He allowed it, staggering under the weight as more and more of it rested on him. 

He was grateful that he had chosen to wear this vest today; it was a minor relic, one that braced him against opposing forces, and it allowed him to shoulder a weight he honestly would not have been able to otherwise. Even so, moving around would be a bit more difficult, and he would have to pick out his steps carefully. 

“Are you going to come inspect the monuments with me?” He let some of the humor bleed into his voice, and the snake hissed what seemed to be an affirmative. “All right, then.”

He reached up, rubbed the snake's nose with one finger, then set off with top-heavy steps toward the invisible corn fields. 

They had visited the Night Vale Zoo, the statues outside City Hall, and the Museum of Forbidden Technology—or, at least, the exterior of the museum, as entering was highly discouraged and looking at the technologies outright forbidden—and were making their way across Mission Grove Park to check on the Shape when the sounds of a distant argument made him slow his steps. 

He caught sight of the people arguing before they had a chance to spot him, and he stopped to watch, both out of curiosity and because it could, potentially, be relevant to his purpose here. Both seemed too engrossed in their argument to notice him eavesdropping. 

He recognized the man first, as much by the feel of an unfamiliar magic as from the face he'd seen before on the news. 

“That is Loki,” he said aloud with the recognition. “The one who attacked New York. Isn't he?” 

The snake hissed his agreement.

“Should I be concerned about his presence here?” 

He reached back to gently pet the snake's nose. The snake, for his part, shook his head.

“Hmm.”

Loki didn't seem to be doing anything threatening or in pursuit of world domination at the moment, so Wong settled back to watch, taking the measure of the situation while he pretended to take notes on a vaguely humming obelisk at the edge of the park. 

Neither Loki nor the woman who he was talking to, vaguely familiar and with bright red hair, seemed to notice his presence. He shaped a spell for eavesdropping on his fingers and let it go, fading in a shower of tiny orange sparks before bringing the conversation to his ears. 

“Am I to assume this means you are asking for my help?” Loki asked the woman. The snake flicked its tongue at him when the voices came in clearly, but after an undecided instant, only settled further on his shoulders to listen along with him. 

She nodded. “I can give you more details on the way,” she said, and when she turned, just slightly, Wong finally recognized her profile. Natasha Romanov. One of the Avengers; they must be aware, then, of Loki's presence here, and apparently unbothered by it, if her mannerisms were anything to go by. 

“That seems unlikely,” he said, “as I am not going anywhere without more information about what this entails.” He crossed his arms, stubbornly, and Romanov sighed. 

“Fine,” she said. “We've been tracking the Hydra infiltration within SHIELD and we think we've identified one of their strongholds. We're hoping to have your help in the raid.” 

Wong's eyebrows crept up, despite himself. At his ear, the snake hissed unhappily.

“And what is special about this raid? You have completed several others without my help.” 

Romanov huffed in annoyance. “I thought you'd jump at the chance to get back at the people who captured you.” 

“Oh, I do love a good bit of revenge, don't mistake me,” he said. “But I will not jump in blind. Don't think you can distract me from my question. How is this different from before, that you would seek out my assistance now?” 

“We think they have the Tesseract,” she admitted, so quietly that he could barely make it out even with his spell. 

Loki, for his part, seemed shocked to silence. At this distance, Wong couldn't read his face, couldn't tell if the expression that flitted across it was anger or fear, or some complex mixture of the two.

“I thought SHIELD had taken it for safekeeping,” he said, something accusatory in his voice. 

“It disappeared from the SHIELD facility where it was being stored,” she said. “The record trail was buried in deeply classified documents, and it ended with someone we believe to be Hydra. We found this place by tracing energy signatures similar to those recorded before your invasion.” 

“I see.” 

“So now I've answered your question,” she said. “Truthfully, even though you can guess how happy SHIELD will be with me for telling you all of that. Now will you come?” 

Loki gave her a sharp look, assessing. 

“No,” he said at last, abrupt and final.

“No?” She sounded…surprised, and upset. “What do you mean, no? I told you, we think they have the Tesseract.” 

“Precisely. I have no desire to be near the cursed thing again, so you'll have to make do on your own. I wish you luck.” 

“Are you serious?” He turned as though to leave, and she reached out and grabbed his arm. Wong tensed, the spell to throw up a shield to protect himself from the backlash dancing at his fingertips. “You destroyed half a city trying to get the thing, and now you're telling me you've gone squeamish?” 

“I want nothing to do with it,” he said, firmly. “And I think you'll find that you cannot compel me.” 

“We haven't been able to tell what Hydra is doing with the Tesseract,” she said, “but we can tell they've been experimenting with it, and it's a safe bet they're making weapons. We need a sorcerer on this.” 

And that? That sounded like his cue. 

Wong stepped forward, lowering the clipboard and raising his other hand in a short wave.

Loki looked from him to the snake on his shoulders, and his hands, which had shot up at the intrusion and taken on an ominous green glow, dropped. “Jormungand?” he asked, and the snake hissed cheerily in response.

“Who the hell are you?” Romanov asked, and her posture had gone wary. 

“A sorcerer,” he said simply. 

“The monument inspector?” Loki asked, looking hilariously bewildered. He reached out one hand, and Wong almost asked what he was doing before the snake, Jormungand, began to uncoil from his shoulders and run up Loki's arm. He had nearly acclimated to the weight, but now, as it was lifted, he became suddenly aware of how much lighter he felt unencumbered.

He raised both his hands, pulling a shielding spell to each, orange and glowing, before letting them drop. Loki looked like he couldn't decide whether to be offended, by the presence of another sorcerer or the obvious eavesdropping or something else Wong could only guess at, before he abruptly made up his mind. 

“There you have it,” he said, gesturing in Wong's direction. “A sorcerer for your ill-advised campaign. Now if you'll excuse me,” he said, straightening as the last bit of snake coiled around his waist, “my son and I have places to be.” 

He stalked away, leaving Natasha to study Wong dubiously.

“You're a sorcerer,” she said at last, when she'd evidently finished her appraisal of him. He suspected, from her expression, that she'd learned less than she would like from her observation.

He nodded. 

“And a monument inspector?” 

“I moonlight,” he said simply.

“Why should I trust you to help us?” 

“One,” he said, “I have sworn an oath to protect the Earth, from threats within this dimension and without. Two,” he added, when she only looked more skeptical, “it sounds like you are out of other options. I would like to think I'm more trustworthy than an alien who tried to conquer the earth with an army of evil drone soldiers.”

“You have a point,” she said. “Tell you what.” She pulled out a sheet of paper; it held a set of coordinates. “You can transport us to where the rest of the team is waiting, you're in.” 

He let himself smile. That should be easy enough.

And while this was not, exactly, within the parameters of his assignment, it seemed like a thing worth investigating. He had, after all, sworn the oath he'd mentioned, and he took it seriously.

A twirl of his fingers and the portal had opened, throwing off orange sparks as it widened. Romanov eyed it warily.

“Something wrong?” 

“No,” she said, bemused. “It's just not what I expected. Loki usually just…” she snapped her fingers, as though to indicate an instantaneous vanishing.

“There are many kinds of magic in the world,” he said. Privately, he weighed whether to elaborate further, and decided not to. 

Sorcerers in general had a reputation for secrecy, one that he suspected stemmed, at least in part, from how frustrating it was trying to explain the vagaries of magic to those who had not studied at least its basics. Far be it from him to contradict a fine tradition. 

She seemed to accept it, because she nodded, visibly steeled herself, and stepped through the portal.

He followed, doing his best to look unconcerned even as he braced himself for whatever might wait on the other side.

As it turned out, what waited on the other side was most of the Avengers. Which, he supposed, shouldn't have been surprising, given the circumstances. 

He wondered if there was a dignified way to ask Captain America for his autograph. Later, probably.

“This is not my brother,” Thor said, eyeing him in a way that was confused and a bit disappointed.

“He wouldn't come,” Romanov said briskly. “this is…”

“Wong,” he filled in helpfully. 

“He's a sorcerer from Night Vale, and he agreed to help us.” 

“The Monument Inspector?” That was an agent of the Vague Yet Menacing Government Agency. Recently disgraced, if memory served. 

“I am not from Night Vale,” he corrected, which earned him even more quizzical looks.

“You were in Night Vale,” Romanov said. 

“So were you.” 

That prompted a round of confused silence, before she made a face as though to say fair enough. 

“So if you aren't from Night Vale,” and that was Stark, “where are you from?” 

“New York, mostly,” he said. “Sometimes Hong Kong.” 

“So let me get this straight.” Wong assumed, by process of elimination, that the man speaking now was Bruce Banner. “You're a sorcerer.” 

“Yes.” 

“You're from New York.” 

“Yes.” 

“You're…human?” 

“Yes.” 

“And you were in Night Vale, inspecting monuments, when you decided that you wanted to help the Avengers bring down a possible Hydra outpost.” 

“Yes.” 

“And do you want to…I don't know, elaborate on any of that?” 

“No.” 

“Alrighty then,” he said. 

“I vote we let him come,” Stark said.

“Are we sure that's a good idea?” Captain Rogers looked almost insultingly skeptical. “What if he's a Hydra spy?” 

“I am not a Hydra spy.” 

“See?” 

“I'm with Steve,” Banner said. “How do we know this guy isn't working for the other team?” 

“I'm for letting him come.” The speaker hadn't attracted Wong's attention before, but between the bow dangling from one hand and the quiver of arrows sling across his back, it wasn't difficult to guess at his identity. “One, I trust Nat's judgment, and two, it'll be good to have an extra set of eyes and hands with Cap distracted.” 

“Hey.” 

He shrugged. “It's the truth. I don't blame you—if Tony had found secret Hydra documents that suggested they had brainwashed one of my friends into an assassin, I'd be distracted too. But if you're preoccupied with looking for this Winter Soldier, it doesn't hurt to have someone helping watch our back, and yours.” 

“I brought him here, so that's my vote,” Romanov said. 

“Personally, I'd want to know what he's been up to in Night Vale before I felt comfortable including him.” The agent of the Vague Yet Menacing Government Agency, recently disgraced, had drawn his lips together in a thin line. “The town doesn't have much reason to attract innocent snooping outsiders, and whatever he's been doing besides inspecting monuments, he's been at it for a while.” 

“So we're tied.” Romanov looked to the last member of their group. “Thor?” 

The large man blinked at him, once, twice, as though considering, and then smiled. “Welcome to the Avengers,” he said simply, and apparently, that was that. 

“All right,” Stark said, and clapped his hands together. “I guess we'll need to bring you up to speed.”

The story they told was not reassuring, but neither was it the worst he'd heard. Hydra he was familiar with, from stories of the second world war; they were evil, certainly, but the mundane, human sort of evil that their organization rarely faced off against. 

He'd asked why, at one point, early on in his training, when he'd first begun learning magic and was barely more than a boy. The Ancient One had smiled at him, one part fond, another part sad. 

“Why does a man with a flute not build a house?” she had asked him in turn, the words light, teasing, but her tone more serious. “That battle is no less important than our own,” she had continued, “but it is not the one we are best equipped for. We have the power and tools at our disposal to face threats from beyond our dimension that others do not. Likewise, there are those better suited than us to fight the evil that arises from within mankind.” 

She had leaned back, and sighed, staring off into somewhere in the distance further than he could see. “We must choose our battles,” she said, “and trust others to choose the ones we cannot.”

It had made sense, but it had never fully satisfied him. Now, though, the possible involvement of the Tesseract, a power that stretched beyond their own plane, was enough reason to justify his involvement. 

“We have them on the run,” Captain Rogers was saying. “It means they're short on hands, but they'll also be desperate, which only makes them more dangerous. All evidence points to them having the Tesseract for at least a year, and we don't know what they've done or built in the meanwhile. JARVIS pinpointed this as a likely base of operations based on the SHIELD files Tony stole and satellite detected energy signatures, but beyond that, we're going in blind.”

He paused, then, and turned to Wong, looking thoughtful. “You're a sorcerer. Could you use magic to scout ahead?” 

Wong shrugged. “Probably,” he said. “But I travel through large holes in reality that are surrounded by a spinning vortex of flaming sparks. You'll probably lose the element of surprise.” 

“Ah,” he said. 

“We should split up,” Coulson suggested. “We'd cover more ground, and there'd be less chance of someone slipping past us and escaping with the Tesseract.” 

“Agreed,” the Captain said. “Clint, you, Natasha and Bruce should—” 

“Bruce should go with Stark,” Hawkeye said. “Nat and I can be with you.” 

He frowned. “Why?”

“Because the Hulk likes Tony,” he said simply, “and even if Bruce is getting a better handle on things with his self-help tapes—”

“They're guided meditations,” he cut in, then added “Cecil's been sending them to me,” when the silence that followed grew awkward. 

“Right,” Clint said. “Either way, we want the Hulk with someone he's unlikely to smash if things get out of control. Then you, Nat and I all do best in close quarters. Having us together means we won't get in each other's way.” 

“Okay,” he agreed. “Then that leaves Thor, Coulson and Wong in the last group.” 

Wong couldn't say he had any objections to that, even if he hadn't missed the way keeping him with Thor meant they had one of the few people who wouldn't be phased by his magic in a position to keep an eye on him. Given who had suggested it, he didn't doubt that was intentional. 

Still, Thor was probably the best person to be standing next to in a battle with unknown, malevolent forces. Even if the arrangement was motivated by mistrust, he could hardly complain.

“The Tesseract is our first priority,” Coulson reminded them. “We can't allow it to stay in Hydra's hands. The Hydra operatives themselves are secondary, but try to capture them alive if you can do so safely. We're still trying to get more information on what they've been doing here, among other things.” 

Captain Rogers nodded decisively. “The plan is to make sure no one can escape with the Cube while we're on the move,” he said, and crouched to unroll a simple paper map on a short table in the room. “According to SHIELD files, this base has two exits. If we block them both off,” he drew a small X over each door with sharp swipes of the pen, “we can have Thor create an opening here,” he tapped an outer wall on the far end of the compound, “we can have one team secure the entry point. That way no one's running off while we're distracted.” 

Wong raised a hand slightly to get their attention. “I can bring us through the wall without damaging it,” he offered, because while creating a portal to an unfamiliar place was risky, the other side of a wall was simple enough. “That way we wouldn't need a team to secure the exit.” 

Barton frowned. “Wouldn't that make it so we're trapped in too if you decided to ditch us? Or, I dunno, were injured in the fight? I'm just saying.” 

Wong shrugged. “That is only true if you believe Thor and the Hulk are incapable of breaking through the wall from the inside.” 

He inclined his head as though to say fair point, which it was. 

“So we have a plan, then,” Stark said. “Let's go.” 

The first part of the plan went perfectly. 

They approached the Hydra stronghold on foot, hidden behind a bit of light Wong was able to bend around them; it wasn't enough to fool anyone who knew what to look for, but they likely could have blended into the landscape well enough without magic. Thor blocked off the building's existing exits with very large rocks that he moved with alarming ease, and Wong opened up a small portal to an inconspicuous hallway, just big enough for all of them to slip inside. 

“We won't be able to keep a low profile for long,” Captain Rogers said pragmatically, though he still whispered it quietly enough that Wong could only make out the words through the communicators Stark had passed around just before they left. “Look for the Tesseract. If anyone finds it, let us know. Nobody but Thor tries to pick it up unless you absolutely have to.” 

They nodded their understanding, then their three groups split up, moving in different directions with as much stealth as they could muster, however short they expected that to last. Some had notably more than others, he thought as he listened to Stark's metallic footsteps disappear down the hallway. Beside him, Coulson moved near-silently, and even Thor moved more stealthily than Wong would have expected given his general Thor-ness. He supposed he must have had hundreds of years to practice, though, so maybe he should be less surprised than he felt.

Still, it took perhaps a minute or two for the alarms to sound, at which point staying quiet became fairly pointless. 

Coulson, apparently, agreed, because nearly as soon as the blaring started he picked up the argument he and Thor had been having on the drive over. 

“I still think that if someone sent Loki here, we need to know who,” he said, barely bothering to whisper as they ducked into the first room they passed to investigate. It was lined in lockers, but on inspection, they held only clothing and personal items that presumably belonged to the agents who worked here. Coulson checked each one perfunctorily, in case. “What if they send someone else, or come here themselves? I'd feel a lot better if I knew their reasons.” 

“I do not think that will be a problem,” Thor said confidently, but not convincingly. Less that he seemed unsure, and more that there was something he wasn't saying, some information he was holding back. He stood in the doorway and peered down the hall, looking like he almost wished for the distraction of an approaching fight.

“But we'd like to know for sure,” Coulson said. “You said it was a bet he lost. Who was the bet with?” 

Thor sighed. “It was I,” he said at last, more quietly than Wong had heard him say anything. Which, admittedly, still wasn't terribly quiet, but still. 

“What?” Coulson paused, and dropped a jacket he had been pulling aside; it fell to a small crumpled heap on the floor. “Why?” 

“It was funny,” Thor said, with an ease that still came off as a bit defensive. “The mortals would think 'oh no, he's disappeared in the middle of the air' and be very confused and upset, and run about telling foolish half-true stories of what happened. Hilarious.” He snuck a sideways look at Coulson. “I don't know why you're so upset about it. I am sure all of the mortals involved have perished by this time.”

“It was 1971,” he said back through gritted teeth. “That's approximately forty years ago. Many people from that time are still alive.” 

“Oh,” Thor said simply. “It feels as though it has been longer.” 

“I can't believe this.” 

“We used to play pranks on the mortals all the time,” Thor said, disturbingly more like this was a treasured memory than an admission of guilt. “Why do you think there are so many legends about us?” 

Coulson looked scandalized, and Thor seemed almost relieved when a handful of men in black fatigues with Hydra logos on shockingly brazen display stumbled on their group, shouting first in hostility and then, when they got a better look at the intruders, in alarm. 

Wong knew that it was probably only Thor that had them scared, but he still pretended that the handfuls of magic he pulled into mandalas had added to the intimidation factor at least a little. 

“There's nothing here,” Coulson said half a minute later, when the agents lay in small unconscious heaps on the ground and he finally looked up from his rummaging. “Let's keep going.”

The next stretch of hall was much the same. Behind one door they found an armory, stacked high with a mix of ordinary guns and small energy weapons, each powered by a tiny blue spark that Wong could identify as coming from the Tesseract. They had none of its cosmic power, none of the disturbing near-sentience that the stone itself possessed—they were, near as he could tell, barely more than power cells, and the weapons could probably have been made to work without them—but they were more evidence that Hydra was, indeed, experimenting with the Cube. Studying it, and worse, using it, probably with barely a guess as to what it actually could do. 

Another door led to bedrooms that looked disturbingly like cells, with tiny mattresses on bare frames and scratches and what looked like scorch marks on the walls. They were empty, but Wong couldn't quite feel like that was a good sign. 

They ran into several more groups of Hydra agents, but if the organization had been trying to replicate whatever enhancements they had attempted during WWII, it either wasn't on the soldiers they encountered, or it wasn't going terribly well. By the third group, Coulson complained that they were taking down all the Nazis too quickly for him to participate, and the next time they politely left one for him to punch, hard, with the weight of the gun in his hand behind the blow. 

He panted for one breath, two, then said “I know you let him slip past you.” 

“No, we did not,” Thor said, not very convincingly, and not at all out of breath after the running and fighting. “Your aid in this battle was necessary and appreciated.” 

“Sure,” he said, and shook out his knuckles like they were still stinging. “Thanks.” 

Eventually, the hall they were following started taking them downward, a few steps here, a gentle slope there, until Wong could start to feel the earth pressing in around them even if the dingy walls to either side didn't change. The sounds of scrabbling and footsteps and the occasional burst of gunfire echoing through the thin walls became more frequent and closer, so that Wong suspected that the rest of their group were nearby, being funneled together now rather than fanning out. 

And he was grateful for that, too, because as they went deeper, something in the air grew uneasy. The walls looked exactly as they had, a dim gray that reminded him more of a poorly maintained parking garage than anything, but they also became more oppressive, squeezing in even as they stayed the exact same distance apart. 

And he could feel it, too, the Tesseract. He had been sure, from the moment they had arrived, that it was here; where an ordinary magic object might have a bit of a presence, one you had to train yourself to pick out, the Stones thrummed with an energy that was difficult to ignore, strong enough that he suspected even those without gift or training could sense it, if not make sense of what they were feeling. The Tesseract pulsed bright against his mind's eye, sharper than the placid Time Stone, tucked safely away inside the Eye of Agamotto, ever had. 

Thor, too, had started to look uneasy enough that Wong was sure he had noticed the same. He wondered, briefly, if it felt different to Asgardian senses, or if Thor was frowning at the same sharp mental buzz that felt like it was rattling in his teeth. 

His thoughts were interrupted by a flash of static from their communicator. He stopped and pressed a hand to his ear, listening. 

“Guys?” Stark's voice as it came through the communicators was patchy, interspersed with more static than the advanced tech should've allowed. “There's something here. I think we found—”

His voice cut off abruptly, as did the static, leaving behind only an ominous silence. 

Coulson glanced at the screen of his phone, where a handful of small, blinking marks overlaid on the skeleton of a building plan would supposedly tell him where their teammates were. “Up ahead,” he said, and the three of them surged forward together in unspoken agreement.

It wasn't far. The hallway grew dimmer, walls fading from concrete to rough-hewn stone that must've been dug out well before this use was imagined for the building, and the grating buzz of the Tesseract grew stronger. Their path twisted and then abruptly straightened, and he could see the dim outline of a door up ahead, outlined in a faint red and blue glow.

He realized, suddenly, that there was another magical presence in that room, too strong for him to have missed had anything less than an Infinity Stone been in the building drowning it out. It was the sort of magic that belonged to a person; there was a different texture, a spark of life to it that told him that much. 

It was difficult to say with the Tesseract so nearby, but he thought he could catch an undercurrent of the Stone's power running through the other. Not enough for it to be the source of this second power, but it could have been what unlocked something lying dormant; if his time as a Sorcerer had taught him anything, it was that there were more unseen and undiscovered types of magic in their world than anyone would suspect. 

Although more and more seemed to be waking in recent years, or at least making themselves known. Infinity Stones and visiting Asgardians and undercover Skrull and Arc reactors, supersoldiers and whatever the Hulk was…he wasn't sure whether the world was becoming stranger or just hiding its strangeness less well. So maybe it was less unexpected, that if Hydra were using the Tesseract on enough people they'd eventually find something to unlock. 

So he was wary, magic already pulled to his hands as the three of them burst through the door.

The first thing he noticed was the Tesseract. It sat on a raised shelf at the far end of the basement room, glittering dully and throwing a dim blue light against the dingy walls, looking for all the world like a jewel glittering in a mud pit. It sat out as though recently placed there, a space designed for use rather than storage. He wondered, suddenly, why no one had put it away at their approach, at least tried to keep it hidden from them. 

The second thing he noticed was the other members of their little raiding party, standing stock-still in the center of the basement room.

The Hulk had shrunk back down into Dr Banner, and beside him, Stark had opened the faceplate of his armor. They both stared into the fixed middle distance, an expression somewhere between terror and blankness fixed to their faces like a mask. The irises of their eyes glowed a dark, simmering red, sparkling like the light of banked coals. 

Thor and Coulson stopped beside him, and somewhere behind them, Captain America and the two spies skidded into the room. Wong almost missed their arrival; his attention was focused on the shadows at the far end of the room, and the figures he could almost make out in the underground gloom. 

There were two, fading into sight as they approached the gathered Avengers, a boy and a girl, he thought. He couldn't make out many details, in the faint blue glow of the Space Stone, but he thought they looked young, young enough for him to wonder what they were doing in a place like this. 

Before he could quite make sense of that, or decide what he wanted to do, the girl's hand shot out and a flurry of barely-contained magic shot towards them, swirling and curling outward in a wild, untamed wave. He flinched back, but it was too quick, too sudden for him to properly react. Thor flinched along with him, but the rest didn't even have time to process as the magical attack overtook them. 

And then the wave reached him, and rather than the blow he had been expecting, had braced himself against, it rushed over him in a soft crescendo, brushing delicately against his eyelashes and the soft skin just below his eyelids. 

When he opened his eyes, the room seemed to have changed; no longer was he standing in the poorly lit basement of a Hydra bunker. Instead, he stood at the edge of a cliff, looking out over a dark expanse that seemed empty and not empty, roiling with a nothingness so thick it was palpable. A terror with no determinate source bubbled up from deep within his core, and along with it the sudden, unsubstantiated but unshakable feeling that something horrible had happened, or was about to happen. He knew, without knowing how he knew, that he had failed, and that his miserable failure had brought waste and ruin to all he didn't see before him. 

Slowly, as though compelled by an unseen force, he tipped his head back to look at the sky above. It was not empty. 

Far off, but also so close he could nearly reach out and touch it, hung a planet of enormous size, lit by no sun. The shadows collected around it thick as smudged charcoal, but they didn't hide the glimpses of ominous figures with faces hooded in ink-black shadows that shuffled slowly and purposefully over the surface. Waves crashed, deserts stormed, overlapping and awe-inspiring and monstrous in their confusion. His muscles went stiff, his tongue felt dry, his heart pounded in his chest like the all-encompassing vibration of something moving deep, deep underground. 

The terror could have frozen him to the spot, locked him in place, but the fact was Wong had been a sorcerer for longer now than he hadn't, and in that time, he had seen things. The human brain has a finite capacity for terror. Wong had stared down other horrors, from within this universe and without, and while they had left their mark, part of that took the form of a protective numbness; he felt the terror, wholly and truly, but between him and it, a thin layer of distance that was just enough to squeeze in some perspective. 

Just enough that he could see the faults in the illusion, recognize the way it was a manifestation of magic and manipulation and his own fear.

He called his own magic and it responded, bright and clean in his hand as he slashed through the illusion. It fell away as though it had been a landscape hung in paper, and quickly as it had come, there was no planet, no cliff, no all-consuming darkness. He was in a dark basement room with scuffed walls and damp floors, lit by a dull purplish-red glow, staring into the face of a girl who looked even younger than before as her eyes widened in confusion and fear. 

“How?” she whispered. “You should not be able to—” 

There was a soft whumpf behind him, and he half-turned in time to throw out one hand and catch the pipe that was swung at his head in his palm. The leather gloves he wore, reinforced as they were, caught the worst of the force, but he could still feel his palm bruising under the impact.

He tore the pipe away, swinging it in an arc back and around to collide with the back of the boy's shins with just enough force to send him sprawling off his feet. 

The girl had recovered from her shock and came charging forward now, both hands glowing with purplish-red sparks as she raised them, but instead of meeting her charge, he raised his own hands, reaching for where her magic still drifted in the air. He spun it around with threads of his own, intertwining them, then took them in his hands like ropes, uncrossed his arms, and pulled. 

His companions, the Avengers, had been staring into space, eyes glowing with the same sparks that hung now off the girl's fingers, presumably lost in their own minds and the terrors they contained as he had been. That tore away in an instant. They shook themselves almost in synchrony as they recovered. 

The girl had stumbled as he wrenched her magic away from the others, and now she froze, staring in wide-eyed horror at the arrow Barton had drawn and pointed at her, quick as thought. Just in the periphery of his vision, he could see the Black Widow pinning her brother down with two guns; it would take only a split section of distraction for him to stand and move out of the way, quick as he was, but Natasha Romanoff was not known for being distractible.

“No,” she whispered in quiet horror as she realized they were truly pinned down.

“Surrender, and we will not harm you,” he said, and realized as he did so that he was saying it as much for his allies as their opponents. The Avengers did not have the reputation of those who would strike unnecessarily, but then, reputation was all he knew them by, and history written by the victors rarely recorded the cruelty of which heroes were capable. 

She looked to each of them before her face hardened. “We would rather die than surrender to him,” she said, and the crimson glow returned, floating around her and casting odd shadows in the dim space. 

Wong moved, noting with some relief that while both Hawkeye and Black Widow held their ground, neither fired. 

Before, he had been taken off guard. He had not expected to find sorcery of this type in this dim little hole, and while the girl was poorly trained, her magic was strong. Now, though, he knew what he was facing, and strength alone would rarely win a battle against a skilled opponent, especially without the benefit of surprise. 

And Wong was skilled; he had lived, trained and breathed sorcery for nearly as long as the girl in front of him had been alive. Matched off directly, she didn't stand a chance. He found the place where her magic connected to her will, a place no trained sorcerer would leave unguarded, and pinched it off with a bit of power, just enough to hold her in check for now. He wouldn't have a chance of holding any skilled magic user this way, but here, with this girl who he doubted had received any training at all, it was enough.

The room dimmed as her magic faded, suppressed for the moment, at least.

“What…” she trailed off, looking absolutely horrified. “No. You can't.” 

He saw the moment she truly realized their cause was lost; it flitted across her face, a sharp recognition that had her focusing all her attention on Wong, as though the others around them didn't exist. In a last, desperate attempt she fixed him with the only weapon she had left. 

“Please,” she said, “you don't understand. This man you serve, he is not what you think. He is no hero.” 

She spat the word, as though it was painful for her to even say, but her expression was frantic, searching.

“I serve no one,” he said, as gently as he was able. “I am here to stop Hydra. They cannot be allowed to continue what they're doing.” 

“Let me tell you,” she begged. “I can tell you why we are here. We are only doing what we have to.” 

“There will be time for that after—” 

Wong lifted a hand, and cut the Captain off. “I will hear you,” he said, because it was clear this was important to her.

And also because, for all that he could keep her contained for now, this was not a permanent solution. Eventually he would be distracted, or need to rest, and in their current predicament he was holding the proverbial snake by the tail. It would be better for everyone involved if by the time that happened, she had stopped trying to attack them altogether.

“My brother and I, we grew up during the war,” she said. There was no specifying which war; for those who found themselves caught in wartime, it was always only The War, too all-consuming to those who lived it to need anything else. 

“There was a bombing. Our parents—it destroyed our home,” she said. “But by some miracle the bomb did not go off. Pietro and I were hiding, and it trapped us in. We spent days trapped in that house, alone, not knowing when it would finally explode and kill us both, wondering if each second would be our last. They were the worst days of our life.” 

She was shaking, and it could almost be mistaken for grief, if not for the way she thrust out an accusing finger to point beyond him. “It was his name we stared at for those days, as we waited to die. Staring back at us from the side of the bomb. And I swore to myself, right then, that if by some miracle we survived, we would have our revenge on Stark. For those days, for our home, our family, but most of all, so it would not happen again, to others like us.” 

Wong chanced a glance sideways at Stark. The faceplate of his suit had lowered, and he looked stricken, almost sick.

If Wong had needed any more confirmation of the girl's story, beyond the way it aligned with the general reputation Stark Industries had held until a few short years ago, he didn't now. 

“We were children!” she shouted, still pointing. “And you would live a life of wealth and pleasure while you engineered our deaths from afar. It is not right. It is not fair. And now the world calls you a hero, the great Iron Man, but we know the man inside the suit, and he is no hero. Not after what he did to us.” 

“I think you had best wait outside,” Wong said, halfway over his shoulder, and the girl slumped. He didn't turn to look, but the sound of heavy footsteps told him Stark was leaving. Banner went with him, murmuring quietly, leaving them with the Captain and the SHIELD agents. 

“You don't believe us,” she murmured, the sound small and defeated.

“I do,” he said simply.

When she raised her face to meet his again, it was stained with tears. “Then why? Why protect him?” 

“I am protecting you.”  

She shook her head, choked on a bitter laugh. “If you didn't stop me I could have destroyed him.”

“I know,” he said.

The boy had pushed to sit, slowly and carefully, keeping his hands raised and in plain view. 

“Revenge is like a rock pushed uphill,” Wong said, echoing the words of a former teacher. “For a while, it destroys what is in front of you. But in time, when the effort of pushing it along turns your strength to weariness and you can't support it any longer, it will roll back over you.” 

“What?” she said, and the word came out frustrated and confused. 

“I am giving you the chance to let the rock down slowly,” he said. “While you still can.”

The bewilderment on her face faded, slowly, back to anger, but without the glow of magic from before, she didn't look much like a threat. 

“You want me to let it go,” she said. “Let him go. Do you know what you're asking of us? Can you truly tell me you would forgive him, in my place, just because he has turned into a so-called hero after he had his fill of destruction?” 

“No,” he said simply.

That caught her off guard. She faltered. “What?” 

“No, I would not forgive Stark,” he said. “And I am not asking you to. I am asking you to ask yourself which is more important to you; your vengeance, or your future?” 

Something difficult to decipher, a mixture of rage and pain, flashed across her face. “We have no future,” she said bleakly. “He stole it from us.” 

“You could,” he said. “I am offering you one.” 

She scowled. “Why should we trust you?” 

“The opposite of trust is suspicion,” he said, “and the opposite of hope is despair. You seem like you have had enough of both to last a lifetime.”

“They've kept us alive,” she said, and the words were small, bleak. 

“They have,” he agreed, and she looked surprised, again, at not being argued with. Surprised, and lost. “You can acknowledge that, and be grateful for it, and still let them go if they no longer serve you.”

She looked past him, and he realized she was looking to her brother. The boy pushed to stand, and the look they shared contained an entire conversation that Wong couldn't hope to decipher.

“We have no choice,” he said at last. “Look around. We've lost, Wanda.” 

It wasn't exactly what he'd hoped they would take from this conversation, but it wasn't exactly wrong, either, so Wong let it stand. 

He held out his hand, adopting just a touch of an accent. “Come with me if you want to live.”

“Really?” Coulson complained in a near-whisper somewhere behind him, a jarring reminder that they weren't alone in the room. “A Terminator reference?”

Wong ignored him, and so did the girl. Instead, she took a deep breath, reached out, and took his hand.

Leaving now meant leaving the wrap up to the Avengers, and losing any say in what happened to the Tesseract. The former was no problem; there was little left of Hydra's forces, certainly nothing the Avengers couldn't handle with the twins out of the equation. The latter might be a mistake.

He weighed the options, made a decision, and twisted his free hand, pulling a portal to life in front of them. It opened into the courtyard of the Sanctum, and he and the girl stepped through together, with her brother a half step behind them.

He let the portal fall, and it collapsed shut with a sense of finality. The courtyard was cool and bright, almost overwhelmingly so after the close stale air of the basement they had come from. The twins blinked, and the boy shuddered as he drew in a deep breath. He wondered how long it'd been since they'd seen the sunlight like this. 

They attracted a few curious glances from the trainees running through their exercises in the grass, but no more than that. After all everyone here had seen, a pair of new yet ordinary faces barely registered. 

Still, he only let them gasp and breathe and adjust for a minute before gesturing them forward. He didn't truly think he could surprise the Ancient One, but he thought it better to find her before she needed to come find them. 

She was not difficult to find, which likely meant she was expecting them. He found her on a balcony, seated on a low stone bench with her eyes closed and her face upturned to the sun. 

“You're back late,” she said, a simple statement of fact without judgment.

“There were matters that demanded my attention,” he offered simply.

“They are resolved now, I hope?” 

“Nearly.”

She opened her eyes, then, and waited a moment before she turned to face them. When she did, she scanned the siblings, her expression unreadable. “Where did you find them?” she asked, and her inflection didn't tell him anything about her thoughts. 

“In a Hydra bunker,” he answered honestly. The two leaned slightly closer to each other, as though seeking comfort in the proximity.

She tilted her head. “And you would have us give them power?” she asked, more curiosity than judgment in the question.

“Power they have. I would have us teach them discipline, and judgment, and purpose.” 

She thought silently for a moment. The girl shifted restlessly, looked like she wanted to say something, and then thought better of it, falling still again. 

“Very well,” the Ancient One said at last. “They may stay.” 

Something in him deflated with the pronouncement; beside him, brother and sister visibly relaxed, sharing a look that Wong suspected contained more words than he could guess. 

“Thank you for your generosity,” he said, and their new guests mumbled their thanks after him, hushed and awkward.

“Come,” he said to them, when the Ancient One inclined her head and walked away. “I will show you where you will stay.”

They followed him, almost timidly, to the rooms where they would stay. Whatever fire had inspired their earlier show of resistance had cooled, and without it, they only looked young.

Still, he couldn't forget the power they had demonstrated back in that Hydra bunker, and the desperation that had driven them to use it. Power and desperation were a dangerous combo. However young and uncertain they might look, he couldn't stop himself from wondering if he'd made a mistake in bringing them here. 

But if he had, if it was a mistake, it would at least be the mistake he would prefer to make.

The girl, Wanda, sat uneasily at the foot of her bed, running cautious fingers over the quilt. Pietro looked uneasy enough leaving her for his own room next door that Wong suspected they'd make their way back together before the night was through.

Yes, it would be the better mistake. Better to err on the side of compassion than to let fear rob you of the ability to believe in, or at least to take a gamble on, the possibilities of humanity. 

He'd sworn an oath to protect the world from threats, within and outside of their dimension, but that didn't mean he could lose sight of why he'd done it. Anyone could be a threat, with some arguably more dangerous than others, but acting like everyone was didn't do much to leave you with a world worth protecting. 

Sometimes, giving someone a new beginning meant being open to the different ways their story could go. If the siblings chose to be a danger, he would stop them if he could.

But for now, he would leave them to adjust, to come to terms with finding themselves in a place where there was the safety of firm boundaries, the freedom of a space to return to, and the support of a community that would allow them to choose how the next pages of their story would go.