Chapter 6 – To Defy Entropy
I stood on nothing.
There was no ground beneath my feet, no resistance, no sensation of balance or gravity. I didn't feel myself falling, but I didn't feel supported either. I simply was, suspended in a state that refused to acknowledge the rules I was used to.
I didn't know where I was.
There was no light. No sound. No temperature. No pressure. No sense of up or down. Even the vacuum of space had texture compared to this—at least there you could see distant stars, faint pinpricks of light anchoring you to reality. Here, there was nothing to anchor to. My vision found no horizon, no edge, no reference point at all.
For a brief, uncomfortable moment, I wondered if I had ceased to exist in any meaningful way.
But that wasn't quite right.
There was something.
All around me, extending farther than my senses could reach—and farther still than my mind could comfortably contemplate—was something. It pressed in without pressure, filled the emptiness without occupying space. It was everywhere and nowhere, permeating the void in a way that felt both intimate and impossibly distant.
It was familiar, in the way fire is familiar to a devil.
And alien, in the way the universe itself is alien to anything born within it.
I couldn't name it. Every attempt to define it slid off my thoughts like water off glass.
"Energy."
The word echoed across the nothingness, not carried by sound but by meaning. It didn't come from a direction. It didn't grow louder or softer. It simply was, resonating through the void as if the void itself had spoken.
I tried to turn, tried to look for the source, but there was nothing to focus on. No body. No shape. No point in space where the voice originated. Whatever had spoken wasn't something I could see or track with my senses.
Then, suddenly, I could.
A bright yellow glow flared to life at my right hand, sharp and vivid against the absolute darkness. With it came awareness—a presence so vast that my mind instinctively recoiled even as it tried to grasp it. It wasn't hostile. It wasn't welcoming. It simply was, encompassing the emptiness I stood in with the casual inevitability of a law of nature.
And I knew, without needing to be told, that what I was perceiving was only a fragment. A sliver of something far greater, filtered down to a scale I could survive experiencing.
I looked down at myself.
The first thing I noticed was the Mind Stone.
It was embedded in my flesh as if it had always belonged there, its green light pulsing softly beneath my skin. I could feel it threading through my thoughts, brushing against my consciousness, not intruding but connecting. Ideas felt sharper. Awareness deeper. It was as if my mind had been given an extra dimension, one I had never known I was missing.
On my other hand, the Space Stone glowed faintly blue, its light steady and precise. I didn't need to think to understand what it was doing. It was anchoring me—linking two points that should not be able to coexist. One here, in this impossible void, and one back in the physical universe. I wasn't fully in either place. I was straddling both, held in place by the stone's quiet authority over distance and location.
And then there was the Power Stone.
Just over my heart, it burned like a second sun, its purple light intense enough that I could feel it even without heat. Its presence dwarfed the others, not in size but in weight—in significance. I could feel its energy intertwined with my demonic power, not flowing into me and not flowing out of me.
It simply was.
"Who is there?" I asked, my voice sounding strangely small in the endless void. "Where am I?"
"How curious," the presence replied.
The words didn't echo, didn't vibrate the emptiness. They simply appeared, settling into my awareness like a conclusion already reached.
"I can't know you."
I frowned despite myself. Know me? The phrasing felt deliberate, precise in a way that made my instincts itch. I didn't understand.
"You wouldn't," it continued calmly. "Mortals— even those as long-lived as you will be— cannot know the cosmos. Not truly."
I froze.
It hadn't just answered my question. It had anticipated my confusion, stepped neatly around it as if my thoughts were laid bare in front of it. A cold spike of alarm ran through me as I realized what that implied.
It read my mind.
I forced myself not to panic, clamping down on the reflex to reach for my power. My Defenses should have made that impossible. They weren't just protections against intrusion; they were absolute statements of no. No observation. No interference. No awareness beyond what I allowed.
Nothing should have been able to bypass them.
"They must be very good defenses," the presence said, a note of mild amusement coloring the words. "Not many beings can be unknown to me. Certainly not when I actively try to know them."
That did nothing to calm me.
"I don't understand," I said carefully, choosing each word with intent. "I was on Morag. I touched the Power Stone. What is this place?"
"Energy," it replied again, as if the word itself were sufficient explanation. "Power. A realm not even the gods can touch."
The realization settled slowly, heavily. This wasn't a physical location. It wasn't a pocket dimension or some hidden layer of reality I had stumbled into by accident. This was something more fundamental—closer to a concept than a place.
I felt its attention sharpen.
Not focus—there was no sense of direction—but intensify. Like a lens tightening around my existence.
I was being examined.
"You should not be able to be here," the presence said, no accusation in its tone, only certainty. "Very few have ever attempted to touch the Infinity Stones on a level beyond the physical. None but the Celestials have survived the experience."
"I connected my demonic power to the stone," I said. It was the only explanation I had, and even to me it sounded insufficient.
"Yes," it replied immediately. "Quite a curious form of energy."
There was a pause—not silence, but consideration.
"Even when separated from you," the presence continued, "it resists my attempts to know it."
That sent a chill through me.
Whatever this entity was—whatever Energy truly meant—it wasn't used to being denied. And yet my demonic power, something that didn't belong to this universe, stood outside its comprehension.
"What happened to me?" I asked. My voice felt steadier than I deserved, considering how completely out of my depth I was. "What did the stone do?"
"Your essence touched Power," the presence replied. There was a note of amusement in it now, the kind an adult might use when explaining something painfully obvious to a child. "You became one."
The words hit harder than any attack could have.
"I… merged with the Power Stone?" I asked, alarm flaring. "That wasn't—"
"Was that not your intent?" it interrupted mildly.
"I wanted to draw on the stone's power," I said quickly. "To use it. Like a battery."
I knew it was possible. Red Skull had done something similar with the Tesseract, siphoning power without directly wielding the Space Stone itself. If anything, my plan should have been safer. The Space Stone merely contained energy. The Power Stone was energy.
"You succeeded, then," the presence said simply.
"That's not what I meant," I shot back. "I wanted to refill my demonic power when I ran dry. Not… whatever this is."
It laughed.
The sound wasn't sound at all. The void itself shuddered, the nothingness rippling as if reality had briefly remembered it was supposed to exist.
"Touching primordial forces tends to come with unintended consequences," it said, clearly entertained. "You should consider yourself fortunate."
I didn't feel fortunate.
My instincts screamed at me to leave—to pull on the Space Stone, force myself back into the physical universe, and deal with the fallout there. I reached for it reflexively.
And was stopped.
"You should not do that," the presence said, its tone sharpening just enough to make the warning unmistakable. "Not if you wish to live."
I froze.
"Your body," it continued, "while far more resilient than that of a normal mortal, is still a vessel. It cannot yet withstand the unfiltered output of the Power Stone."
"Then what am I supposed to do?" I asked. For the first time since this began, frustration bled through the fear. "I can't just stay here."
"You connected yourself to a source of infinite power," it replied. "You must learn to control how much of it you are drawing."
And suddenly, something clicked.
The sensation surrounding me—the omnipresent something I had noticed earlier—shifted from incomprehensible to familiar. It felt like my demonic power did when I extended my senses beyond my body. Like standing waist-deep in an ocean I knew how to swim in.
The presence had said I connected my essence to the stone.
Not my body. Not my soul.
My essence.
My awareness expanded in a way that made my breath hitch. I wasn't just feeling my demonic power anymore. I was feeling energy.
All of it.
Not just here. Not just nearby. Across the universe. Motion, heat, radiation, magic, electricity—everything that could be defined as energy now brushed against my perception. Countless stars burned at the edge of my awareness. Worlds thrummed with life. Forces clashed and dissipated on scales both microscopic and cosmic.
It should have shattered me.
"How am I not insane?" I asked quietly. I already knew the answer. My mind—no matter how enhanced—should not have been able to withstand this. Even gods would drown in it.
The Mind Stone pulsed in my hand, its golden light flaring softly.
"The stones are not sentient in the way you define the concept," the presence said. "But they are alive."
Understanding settled in.
"Mind shielded you," it continued. "It filtered the awareness that Power granted you, narrowed it to something your consciousness could survive. Even so, your thoughts were broadcast loudly enough that I sensed them."
I swallowed.
"Who are you?" I asked. My voice echoed strangely, swallowed and reflected by the nothingness around us. "And why are you helping me?"
"Curiosity," the presence replied without hesitation. "Once, I was a scientist. After so long, encountering something I cannot simply know is… nostalgic."
The void shifted.
It wasn't a visual change so much as a conceptual one, like the universe deciding to refocus its attention. The presence that had been everywhere—diffuse, omnipresent, impossible to pin down—began to condense. Pressure built, not physical but existential, as if reality itself were leaning in.
"As for who I am," it continued, the voice now unmistakably coming from a single direction, "I abandoned my name long ago."
Something took shape before me.
"But once," it said, almost thoughtfully, "my name was Galen. A mere scientist from the planet Taa."
The nothingness peeled back.
What stood before me—or rather, what existed before me—was vast beyond comprehension. Not large in the way a mountain or a star was large, but immense on a cosmic scale, its presence dwarfing galaxies the way galaxies dwarfed atoms. It was not flesh, nor metal, nor light, but energy given form. Raw, radiant, and impossibly dense.
To my expanded senses, it burned brighter than the Power Stone itself. Not stronger—nothing was stronger than infinity—but purer. Older. A being forged in an era when the universe was still deciding what rules it would follow.
I felt small.
Not metaphorically. Fundamentally.
Like an insect caught in the updraft of a stellar storm, my existence felt fragile simply by proximity. Every instinct I had—human, devil, something else entirely—screamed at me to flee, to hide, to bow, to do anything but stand here and stare.
And yet, I knew him.
The realization settled over me with chilling clarity.
Galen of Taa.
The man who became something more.
Galactus.
That is what the mortals know me as," the Eater of Worlds agreed.
The words carried no pride, no menace. They were simply a statement of fact.
I stood frozen, staring up at the cosmic apocalypse looming over me. Knowing his name didn't make him smaller. If anything, it made the weight of his presence heavier. This wasn't an enemy I could fight. Attacking him would be suicide in the most literal sense—an ant charging a supernova. Fleeing was just as pointless; there was nowhere in existence Galactus couldn't reach if he chose to follow. Even the stones… even infinity felt inadequate before the Hunger That Never Ceases.
For the first time since I'd acquired them, I truly understood how fragile I still was.
"Now," he said, and the word resonated through me rather than through space, "focus on yourself."
The pressure eased, just enough for me to breathe.
"You are open to Power," Galactus continued. "You must learn to close yourself. To draw only what you intend. Only as little as you can."
A reflexive part of me bristled at that. I hadn't gained access to an Infinity Stone just to sip at it like a rationed resource. The temptation to argue rose immediately.
Another part of me, colder and far more rational, remembered that even a trickle of infinity was still infinity. More than enough to reshape battlefields. More than enough to break myself if mishandled.
And most of me—overwhelmingly most of me—was screaming internally at the idea of mouthing off to Galactus.
So I obeyed.
I turned inward, focusing on sensations rather than fear. I drew on my experience manipulating demonic power, on the countless times I had learned to shape, restrain, and channel forces that wanted nothing more than to consume and be consumed. This was different—vastly so—but not entirely alien. Before, I had learned how to pull power toward myself.
Now, I had to learn how to refuse it.
I imagined separation. Boundaries. Not walls, exactly, but valves—something that could narrow the flow without severing it. I studied the way the energy around me moved, the way it responded to my presence, the subtle pressure it exerted even when I wasn't consciously drawing on it.
It resisted at first. Not maliciously, but inevitably, like an ocean pressing against a shoreline. I failed again and again, the flow surging the moment my focus slipped. Each attempt taught me something new, even as frustration mounted.
I didn't know how long I stood there beneath the watchful attention of a being above gods. I didn't even know if time existed in any meaningful way within that plane of raw energy. There was no sun to rise or set, no heartbeat to count seconds by. There was only effort, failure, adjustment, repetition.
Thousands of tries.
And then—
It worked.
The pressure eased. The overwhelming flood receded into something manageable. I could still feel the energy all around me, vast and endless, but it was muted now. Controlled. A single droplet flowing from an infinite ocean into my reserves, steady and deliberate.
"I did it," I said, my voice sounding small even to my own ears as I looked up at my unlikely mentor.
"Indeed," Galactus replied. There was something like approval there, understated but unmistakable. "Now, before you leave, you must expel the excess energy within you. This place has shielded you from most of its effects, but once you are fully physical again, it will destroy you."
I nodded immediately. That much, at least, required no explanation.
"And do not attempt to draw upon the Power Cosmic," he added, his tone firm in a way that brooked no argument. "It is not meant for mortal hands."
"I won't," I said at once.
I didn't even let the idea linger long enough to become temptation. Some lines, once drawn, were better left uncrossed—especially when the one drawing them was Galactus himself.
I watched the cosmic leviathan slowly disperse—not leaving, because concepts like departure or distance didn't really apply to a being like Galactus—but refocusing, his attention sliding elsewhere in the vastness of existence. The oppressive weight of his presence faded, not vanishing so much as loosening its grip, like gravity easing after standing too close to a collapsing star.
Only then did I realize I'd been holding my breath.
I let it out slowly, a shaky exhale, and wondered when exactly my life had gone completely off the rails.
This was supposed to be a clean sweep. Simple. Surgical. Go in during the Battle of New York, grab the Space and Mind Stones while everyone else was distracted, hop over to Morag, pick up the Power Stone, and then crush any opposition that dared stand in my way. Three Infinity Stones. Infinite leverage. Untouchable.
Instead, I became a freelance SHIELD agent, dealt with a reincarnated Black Widow, slept with a goddess, and somehow managed to draw the personal attention of Galactus.
I stared into the surrounding void, half-expecting something else ancient and incomprehensible to notice me just to keep the trend going.
I couldn't help but wonder if this was how the older DxD characters felt during canon. Centuries—millennia, even—of relative peace and predictability, and then suddenly, in the span of a single year, everything that could happen did. Gods, devils, fallen angels, ancient conspiracies, world-ending threats, all piling on at once with no regard for pacing or sanity.
At least, I told myself, I'd have some free time once I got back to Earth.
Reaching for the Space Stone, I did so carefully this time, mindful of Galactus's warning. I eased myself back toward the physical universe instead of forcing the transition. The shift was immediate and brutal. Sensation slammed back into me all at once, and with it came a horrifying awareness of how much energy I was holding.
It felt like my body was a glass vessel stuffed full of a star.
Pressure built everywhere at once—under my skin, behind my eyes, in my bones. My instincts screamed that if I tried to contain it, I would simply rupture.
So I didn't.
I let it out.
Power of Destruction poured from me in an uncontrolled surge, instinctively unleashed in every direction. It wasn't a beam or an explosion so much as a spreading absence, a wave of erasure that consumed everything it touched. Matter, energy, space itself—everything unraveled before it, reduced to nothing.
I kept releasing it as I continued easing myself fully back into my body, venting the excess power as fast as it tried to tear me apart. The ocean of energy inside me seemed endless, and the wave of destruction expanded without limit, racing outward into the void.
Only when exhaustion finally began to creep in—when my reserves dipped low enough for weakness to set in—did I allow myself to stop.
Before panic could even take hold, I felt it. The steady trickle from the Power Stone flowed back into me, refilling what I had spent. The sensation was smooth, controlled, no longer overwhelming. When my reserves reached full, I instinctively closed myself again, cutting off the flow just as I had learned.
The first thing I truly noticed then was the silence.
I was floating in nothingness.
Distant stars glittered far away, cold and indifferent. The Space Stone's glow warped reality around me just enough to hold a bubble of atmosphere, allowing me to breathe, but beyond that there was only empty space.
Morag was gone.
Not shattered. Not broken.
Erased.
I hung there for a long moment, quiet awe settling over me as the realization sank in. I had destroyed an entire planet. Even knowing it had been empty—abandoned long before I arrived—the scale of it was staggering. The sheer casualness with which it had happened was almost worse.
Planet-bursting power.
That was what I held now.
Or so I thought.
As I turned my attention inward, examining my reserves more carefully, the truth became clearer. I was stronger. Much stronger than before. My demonic power had grown enormously, roughly tenfold by my estimation. What had once placed me firmly among high-class devils—already an elite tier within the underworld—had elevated me to ultimate-class.
I was now in the same general weight class as the weaker Satans.
The thought alone made my head spin.
I was nowhere near Sirzechs. Even Serafall, with her overwhelming experience and refined control, could probably still beat me. Skill, tactics, and centuries of battle mattered. But the fact that I could even be compared to them now was incredible.
And unlike them, I didn't need to hold back.
I didn't have to ration my power, or worry about burning through finite reserves in a prolonged fight. As long as I exercised restraint, as long as I controlled the flow, I could go all out whenever I wanted.
All the time.
That realization lingered with me as I floated among the stars, equal parts exhilarating and terrifying.
Finally, once the weight of what had happened had finished settling, I teleported myself back to Earth.
"Director Fury," I greeted, stepping out of the spell circle as the last traces of magic dissipated into the air.
Even with every possible advantage stacked in my favor—already knowing Earth's precise location, having firsthand experience manipulating the Space Stone, and cutting down inefficiencies wherever I could—teleporting across the galaxy was still an absurdly expensive undertaking. Before Morag, before Galactus, before everything that followed, it would have been flat-out impossible for me.
Even now, it tore through most of my reserves in a single, brutal pull, the sensation of displacement leaving a faint echo in my bones.
Ordinarily, that would have left me drained, shaky, and dangerously vulnerable.
Instead, the moment the spell finished, my reserves refilled.
The connection to the Power Stone—securely stored in my inventory alongside the others—responded instantly, a controlled trickle flowing in until I was back at full strength. No delay. No strain. Just smooth, effortless replenishment.
It was almost intoxicating.
As a bonus, burning through massive chunks of power like this without worrying about permanent depletion was an excellent way to keep pushing my limits. Especially with Soul Talent amplifying the growth. Every extreme expenditure followed by immediate recovery felt like weight training for my very essence.
Fury lowered his gun slowly, though the scowl on his face didn't soften in the slightest.
"You've been gone a month," he said flatly. "It was supposed to be a quick trip. What happened?"
A month.
I blinked once, then nodded to myself. Time really was flexible when Infinity Stones and cosmic entities got involved.
"I already gave you enough existential crises," I said lightly, offering him a small smile. "Are you sure you want to know?"
He stared at me for a long second, clearly weighing his options. Whatever conclusion he came to, it didn't favor me. With a grunt, he turned away, holstering the weapon with sharp, practiced movements.
"Romanoff should be returning from her mission with Rogers," he said instead. "You did not mention her… talent with languages."
Oh. Right.
Devils could understand and be understood by anyone, regardless of language. It wasn't even something I consciously activated anymore—just a passive effect of my nature. Between this life and the last, I'd only really dealt with English speakers, so it hadn't even registered as noteworthy.
"Must have slipped my mind," I said, shrugging casually.
Fury stopped walking for half a second. I got the feeling that he didn't like me very much.
"What are they up to?" I asked.
Fury shot me a sideways glance, the kind that suggested he'd already decided I'd just ask Natasha directly when she got back, but answered anyway.
"We have a lead on the location of the Red Guardian," he said. "They were sent to apprehend him."
Red Guardian.
I frowned slightly, rifling through half-remembered MCU trivia. I'd mostly checked out of the franchise after Endgame, but that name still rang a bell. Soviet super soldier. Captain America knockoff. Loud, overweight, and—if memory served—more bark than bite. Natasha's supposed father figure before the Red Room finished breaking whatever pieces of her childhood were left.
"They'll be fine," I said, shrugging it off.
Even before becoming a devil, Natasha could have handled an out-of-shape super soldier without much trouble. With Steve Rogers backing her up, the whole thing bordered on absurd overkill. If anything, I was more worried about collateral damage than their safety.
My thoughts drifted, unbidden, to the larger picture.
I should probably do something about HYDRA. And the Red Room.
I didn't really care about either organization in the abstract. HYDRA were Nazis—ideologically diluted, sure, more obsessed with control than racial purity these days, but still Nazis at their core. The Red Room was worse in a quieter way, a machine designed to grind children down into weapons and then pretend that was necessary for the greater good.
Normally, that wouldn't be enough to motivate me. I wasn't here to play superhero janitor for the MCU's messes.
But if I was going to keep acting as a SHIELD agent—freelance or otherwise—it was probably in my best interest to clean house. A compromised intelligence agency wasn't just inefficient, it was dangerous. Especially when I was trusting it with people I actually cared about.
Besides, Natasha would want to burn both of those systems to the ground.
And as her King, that mattered.
For all of Rias's many flaws—and there were plenty—she had understood one thing perfectly. A peerage wasn't just a collection of assets, servants, or soldiers. It was family. People you trusted with your back, your secrets, and your eternity.
That was what I wanted.
Not power for its own sake. Not an empire. A family I could stand beside for centuries without growing tired of them. A group bound by choice, loyalty, and shared purpose, not obligation or fear.
If tearing down HYDRA and the Red Room was part of building that future—
Then it was probably overdue.
But how to go about doing that?
I'd earned myself a decent amount of trust from Fury and the Avengers. Enough that they didn't immediately assume I was lying, manipulating them, or playing some long con. Enough that they listened when I spoke. But not enough to take my word alone on something as explosive as SHIELD is rotten to the core and its second-in-command is a HYDRA plant.
That kind of accusation didn't just demand proof. It demanded proof that couldn't be questioned.
I could, of course, solve the problem the easy way. Reach out with the Mind Stone, peel Pierce's thoughts open like a book, and rewrite him into a cooperative little whistleblower. Have him confess everything in front of Fury, name names, point fingers, lay the whole conspiracy bare in one neat package.
And then what?
They'd assume I made him say it.
Even if Pierce led them straight to hidden facilities, secret accounts, black sites filled with HYDRA tech and personnel, the doubt would linger. Of course the evidence exists. He planted it. Of course Pierce is confessing. He's being controlled. Every revelation would just deepen the suspicion that I was manufacturing the truth to suit my agenda.
They'd investigate anyway—Fury was too paranoid not to—but the entire process would be poisoned from the start. Every step forward would come with sideways glances and unspoken questions about how much of it was really HYDRA and how much was me pulling strings.
I didn't want that.
Natasha would believe me. Or, at the very least, she'd stand by me regardless. The binding would ensure that. But that was exactly the problem. If she backed me too openly, too decisively, it would be easy for others to assume her judgment was compromised.
The devil got to her too.
I wasn't about to hand them that excuse.
If I was going to tear HYDRA out of SHIELD, I needed to do it cleanly. Slowly. In a way that left no room for doubt, no convenient scapegoat, and no lingering fear that replacing one shadow organization with another was all that had happened.
No mind control confessions. No dramatic reveals powered by infinity.
Just the truth, uncovered piece by piece—until even Fury couldn't deny it anymore.
Luckily, I knew exactly how to put them on that trail.
Last edited: Dec 29, 2025
Like ReplyReport
Like Reactions:Daimon Agafo, Rubén Martínez, Burtill
Chapter 7 – Cut Off One Head
I'm an idiot.
When Natasha returned from her mission, I was still circling the same problem over and over in my head, turning it from every angle and somehow never noticing the obvious flaw in my thinking. HYDRA. SHIELD. Fury. Trust. Plausible deniability. I didn't want Fury or the Avengers to think I was manufacturing a crisis just so I could swoop in with forbidden knowledge and impossible solutions. I didn't want to look like a manipulator pulling strings from the shadows for my own benefit.
So, naturally, my solution was to manufacture a crisis and take advantage of it.
My plan, in all its supposed brilliance, had been to track down Bucky Barnes, capture him alongside Natasha, and frame the whole thing as either a coincidence or an assassination attempt that went sideways. From there, we'd "naturally" start digging, pull on the right threads, and uncover HYDRA agents embedded within SHIELD through good old-fashioned investigation. No prophetic warnings. No devil whispering secrets. Just boots on the ground and evidence following evidence.
At the time, it felt clever. Subtle. Responsible, even.
In hindsight, it was the exact thing I was trying to avoid, just with extra steps and a layer of self-deception on top. I didn't want them to think I was creating a situation to exploit, so I decided to create a situation and exploit it while telling myself it was different.
The irony didn't hit me immediately. It crept up later, quiet and unavoidable, and when it did all I could do was mentally wince and accept that yes, I absolutely deserved that realization.
Fortunately, that wasn't the only thing I realized.
For all my grand plans and lofty intentions—Natasha as my Queen, my partner, eventually my head wife—I hadn't actually spent much time with her since reincarnating her. I'd given her one crash course on what it meant to be a devil, explained the basics, answered a few questions, and then promptly vanished into space for a month to collect Infinity Stones and have philosophical conversations with cosmic entities.
Hardly ideal relationship-building behavior.
I half-expected her to be angry when she got back. Or at least annoyed. Cold. Sharp in that particular way she had when she decided someone had disappointed her but wasn't worth confronting yet. If she felt any of that, though, she didn't show it. She was professional, composed, and exactly the same Natasha Romanoff she'd always been—observant eyes, measured movements, and an emotional control that made it impossible to tell what she was really thinking unless she wanted you to know.
That, more than anything, made me uncomfortable.
So I decided to do something radically simple.
I decided to actually get to know her.
I knew Natasha's story from the movies. Her trauma, her guilt, the broad strokes of her past. But even if this universe had lined up perfectly with the MCU—and it very clearly didn't—I wasn't about to reduce a real person to a character sheet just because I'd watched a film once. She wasn't a script. She wasn't a plot device. She was someone who had lived an entire life before I ever entered it.
And more importantly, she was someone I planned to spend eternity with.
That meant I wanted her loyalty to be more than enforced obligation. More than the binding. I wanted her to choose to stay. To see me not just as her King, or her anchor in a supernatural world she never asked to enter, but as someone worth walking beside for the long haul.
If I was going to build a family—my family—then it had to start with actually showing up.
So, after selling some transmuted gold all across the US for a few thousand dollars of pocket money, I asked her out to dinner.
I made sure to space out the sales, keep the quantities small, and rotate locations so nothing looked suspicious. The last thing I needed was the IRS or some alphabet agency wondering why a nobody was suddenly liquidating precious metals like a discount dragon. Once I had enough cash to comfortably pass as "well-off but not absurd," I tracked Natasha down and made the offer as casually as I could.
The binding must have been doing its work—or maybe she just saw an opportunity to gather more information about me—because she accepted without hesitation. No teasing deflection, no polite excuse. Just a measured nod and a simple agreement that told me she'd already weighed the pros and cons before I finished the sentence.
A generous tip and a few discreet favors later, we were vaulted straight to the top of a fancy restaurant's waiting list in downtown Chicago. The kind of place with soft lighting, muted conversations, and prices that quietly dared you to justify your presence. We were shown to a table by the window, the city lights stretching out beneath us like a second sky.
It started off well.
I steered the conversation carefully, asking about her more interesting missions, the ones she clearly enjoyed talking about—the near-impossible extractions, the moments where improvisation saved the day, the rare occasions where things actually went according to plan. I made a point of not asking about her childhood or the Red Room. Some doors weren't meant to be opened casually over appetizers.
She, in turn, asked about my past. I answered honestly where I could and creatively where I couldn't, blending pieces of Millicas's life with my own experiences until the story felt coherent. She listened closely, eyes sharp, catching inconsistencies I hadn't even noticed and filing them away without comment. When she asked about my ambitions, I didn't dodge the question.
I told her the truth.
That I didn't have grand designs for conquest or domination. That I wasn't trying to rule the world or reshape reality into my image. That all I really wanted was to build a peerage—a family—I could spend eternity with without growing bored, bitter, or alone.
She smiled at that. Not a polite smile, but a genuine one, small and warm, like she found the idea unexpectedly charming. She even called it adorable, which I chose to take as a compliment.
Time passed easily after that. Wine glasses emptied and refilled. The city outside darkened as the night deepened. Eventually, we reached dessert, something absurdly rich and carefully plated, and the conversation slowed into a comfortable lull.
That was when she spoke.
"What are you planning?" she asked.
I blinked. "What do you mean?" I replied, doing my best impression of confusion.
She didn't buy it for a second.
"You have a terrible poker face," she said, clearly amused. "You're planning something. I can tell. And from the way you keep glancing at me and then trying to look innocent, it's something you don't want me to know."
There was suspicion in her eyes, sharp and practiced, but it wasn't hostile. If anything, it was curious. I could tell she trusted me enough to assume this was going to be a romantic surprise or some dramatic reveal, not a conspiracy involving secret Nazis embedded in SHIELD.
I hesitated. Just for a moment.
That hesitation probably didn't help my case, but in the end I made a decision. I hadn't recruited Natasha just for her combat skills or her loyalty. I brought her in because she was smart, perceptive, and brutally honest when it mattered. I wanted someone who could look at my plans and tell me when I was being clever—and when I was being an idiot.
So I decided to tell her.
"SHIELD has been compromised," I said quietly. "By HYDRA."
"What?" Her tone was flat, controlled, but her eyes sharpened instantly. Not surprise—warning. The kind that said this better be a joke in spectacularly poor taste.
"HYDRA infiltrated SHIELD after the war," I continued, keeping my voice low despite the private booth and the soft murmur of the restaurant around us. "They've been operating inside the organization for decades. Deep cover. Institutional rot."
She didn't react immediately. For a heartbeat, she simply stared at me, weighing my words. Then the shift happened.
The woman who had laughed with me over dessert vanished. In her place sat Black Widow—elite spy, assassin, survivor. Her posture straightened subtly, shoulders squaring, eyes cold and analytical.
"Do you have any proof?" she asked. "We'll need something solid to convince Director Fury."
"No," I admitted. "Not yet. But I know where to find it." I hesitated, then added, more quietly, "You… don't think I'm making this up?"
She studied me for a long moment, searching my face for tells, for cracks. Not suspicion—assessment.
"Are you?" she asked simply.
"No," I said immediately. Then I sighed. "But I kind of assumed Fury and the Avengers would think I was creating a problem so I could solve it."
"I don't doubt Director Fury will consider that," she said. "He's paranoid for a reason. But if you can provide real evidence, he'll take it seriously. You've earned at least that much trust."
I shook my head, frustration leaking through despite myself.
"And you don't think I could be planting the evidence too?" I asked. "Confessions, files, trails—all fabricated?"
She looked at me for a moment longer, then something like amusement flickered across her expression.
"What do you think is more likely?" she asked. "That the man SHIELD already assumes has eyes everywhere uncovered a buried conspiracy? Or that he manufactured an entire decades-long infiltration—paperwork, witnesses, internal consistency—all for his own gain?" She tilted her head slightly. "And what gain, exactly? If you wanted trust from SHIELD or the Avengers, there are far easier ways to get it."
I exhaled and let my head fall into my hands, elbows resting on the table.
"When you put it like that," I muttered, "I guess I was overcomplicating things." I glanced back up at her. "I really do suck at scheming, don't I?"
She smiled then—not the sharp, professional smile she used in the field, but something warmer. Familiar.
"Good thing you have me."
I leaned back in my chair, the tension in my chest easing for the first time since the conversation began.
I really couldn't have picked a better Queen.
After my spectacular failure at spycraft, I decided to do something simpler.
I decided to put together a team.
If I was bad at subtlety, then I'd lean into it and surround myself with people who were very good at the things I wasn't. Planning, intelligence work, technical expertise, and—when it inevitably came to that—cleaning up the mess afterward.
Natasha insisted that we involve Clint. I didn't really understand what a guy with a bow was going to do that we couldn't already handle.
I kept that thought to myself.
Natasha didn't argue emotionally or defensively. She just said Clint was reliable, that he'd already proven he could operate under extreme pressure, and that he was someone she trusted completely. More importantly, she said he was someone who knew how to listen and follow a plan without needing to be the center of attention.
Given my recent performance, I decided I didn't get to argue with that.
Tony was the next obvious pick. I didn't understand much about science and technology—not really. I could use modern tech just fine, same as anyone else, but if you asked me to explain how it worked beyond the most surface-level understanding, I'd be useless. And the less said about the kind of super science heroes and villains casually threw around in this universe, the better.
That probably wouldn't change until I bought Science and Engineering talent, and that was still somewhere down the list.
Tony, on the other hand, lived and breathed this stuff. More importantly, he had Jarvis. If we were going to root out HYDRA agents buried deep inside SHIELD, we needed more than hunches and interrogations. We needed data. Patterns. Cross-referenced records that no human analyst could sift through fast enough.
Jarvis could do that.
And if Tony got suspicious, paranoid, or offended along the way… well, that was just Tony being Tony.
Steve was the last piece, and the one I hesitated over the longest.
If we were going to run into Bucky—and we were, there was no version of this where we didn't—then Steve needed to be involved from the start. If for no other reason than because he would eventually ask me if I knew. And when he did, I didn't want to be standing there explaining why I'd kept something that important from him.
There was also the bigger picture.
I was hoping—perhaps naively—that by having Steve and Tony working together early, before secrets festered and lines were drawn, I could prevent their civil war. I doubted it would still happen – Ultron wouldn't even be created if I had any say on the matter – but even still it was just good sense to try and avoid it.
Especially when it came out that Bucky was the one who killed Tony's parents.
I didn't kid myself into thinking I could fix everything. But if there was even a chance that getting them on the same side now could soften the blow later, I had to try.
If nothing else, I owed them that much.
And speaking of secrets—and the growing pile of them I was apparently very bad at sitting on—I told Natasha about the Red Room.
I didn't soften it. I didn't try to ease her into it. I'd already learned that Natasha Romanoff did not appreciate being handled gently when it came to hard truths. So I told her plainly that Dreykov was alive. That he hadn't just survived, but rebuilt. That the Red Room wasn't a ghost or a legacy network, but an active operation.
She went very still when I mentioned his name.
I could see the moment it stopped being information and started being personal. Her expression didn't change much—Natasha was far too practiced for that—but something in her eyes hardened, like a blade sliding into place.
She was furious when she learned that Dreykov had survived. She was livid when she learned he had done it by rebuilding the Red Room from the shadows. And when I told her that he had an entire army of Widows under his control—conditioned, brainwashed, stripped of choice—her anger sharpened into something colder.
Yelena's name was the breaking point.
She didn't raise her voice. She didn't lash out. She just closed her eyes for a moment, inhaled slowly, and when she looked at me again there was no doubt left that Dreykov had just moved to the very top of her list.
We talked it through. Strategically, not emotionally—though the emotion was there, simmering under every word. In the end, she agreed that HYDRA had to take priority. A compromised SHIELD was a threat on a global scale, and if we didn't deal with it first, anything we did against the Red Room could be undermined or buried.
That didn't mean she was letting it go.
We agreed that freeing the other Widows would happen as soon as it was feasible. Not eventually. Not someday. As soon as we could spare the attention.
I mentioned Dreykov's pheromone control almost offhandedly, more as a tactical note than anything else. Natasha's mouth twisted in disgust, but I shrugged it off. I wasn't even sure it would work on devils, and even if it did, it was hardly an insurmountable obstacle. A simple wind spell would disrupt it. Magic tended to be very rude to biological cheats.
With that settled—at least for now—we finalized the plan.
The team was gathered. The target was chosen.
I opened a spell circle, space folding obediently under my will, and with a single step we left behind the familiar world and reappeared at our destination.
Camp Lehigh.
"So, Batboy, why did you bring us here?" Tony asked as soon as we arrived, his voice echoing faintly through the empty compound. He gestured broadly at the cracked concrete, the rusted railings, the faded SHIELD insignia barely visible beneath layers of grime. "I'm not really a fan of museums, and this place has been shut down for decades."
The air felt stale, heavy with dust and old memories. Wind slipped through broken windows and gaps in the structure, carrying the faint smell of damp earth and rusted metal. It was quiet in a way that only abandoned places ever were, the kind of silence that pressed in on you and made every footstep sound too loud.
Steve didn't answer. He slowly turned in place, eyes lingering on the familiar shapes of buildings and corridors that time had hollowed out. For a moment, the soldier vanished and the man underneath showed through—nostalgia and regret flickering across his face in equal measure. To him, this place hadn't been abandoned for generations. It had been alive, busy, full of people and purpose not all that long ago. Seeing it reduced to a ghost town couldn't have helped with the weight of being dragged into a century that had moved on without him.
I glanced at Natasha. She stood a little straighter than the others, expression calm but tight, like a drawn wire. She had asked to take the lead on this operation, and I hadn't hesitated to agree. Not only was she better at leadership—something I would need to work on if I ever intended to lead my peerage into situations that actually mattered—but this wasn't just another mission for her.
For me, SHIELD being compromised was a strategic problem. An inconvenience that needed to be dealt with before it caused bigger issues.
For her, it was something else entirely.
SHIELD was where she had tried to become more than what the Red Room had made her. It was where she had invested years of her life, believing she was working toward something better, something cleaner. The idea that it had been rotting from the inside all along cut far deeper than any operational setback ever could.
"SHIELD has been compromised," she said. "By HYDRA."
Her voice was steady, controlled, but it carried through the empty space like a gunshot.
Everyone snapped to look at her. Tony's flippant expression vanished, replaced by sharp focus. Steve stiffened, jaw tightening.
"Are you sure?" Clint asked.
His tone was measured, but I caught the flicker of tension beneath it. I also caught the brief, suspicious glance he shot my way.
I pretended not to notice.
I hadn't spent much time with him, but I knew enough. Clint was fiercely loyal to Natasha, and he'd already lived through having his will ripped away and used against him. From his perspective, a powerful outsider reincarnating her and binding her to himself probably looked uncomfortably close to history repeating itself. He must have been wondering whether this was really her talking—or if I was nudging her thoughts the same way Loki once had nudged his.
I couldn't really blame him for thinking that.
Natasha nodded, a brief, subtle motion, but there was an entire unspoken exchange packed into it. Trust, confirmation, resolve—everything that needed to be said passed between them in the span of a single look. Then she turned to Tony, all business.
"Did you bring the signal jammer?"
"Got it right here," Tony replied, his armored knuckles tapping against the arc reactor in his chest with a solid metallic clank. The sound echoed faintly through the empty compound. "Portable, military-grade, and very illegal. You're welcome."
"Good," Natasha said without missing a beat. "Have it up and running. Nobody can know we're here."
Steve shifted, his shoulders squaring as the tension finally snapped into focus. "Why?" he asked. "And I thought HYDRA had been destroyed."
Natasha took a slow breath, as if bracing herself before opening a door she'd rather keep closed. "After the war, the U.S. government launched a secret program called Operation Paperclip," she said. "They recruited German scientists, engineers, and technicians. Officially, it was about rebuilding, about staying ahead of other nations. SHIELD, in its early days, was involved."
Tony let out a short, humorless huff. "And in the process, you brought HYDRA into SHIELD," he said. "Why am I not surprised?"
Natasha shot him a glance—sharp, acknowledging—but didn't bother responding. The silence itself was answer enough.
"We are here because one of those recruits was the HYDRA scientist Arnim Zola."
Steve's eyes narrowed immediately, his jaw tightening as the name landed. It wasn't just history to him. It was personal.
"In the years after the war, he managed to secretly rebuild HYDRA inside SHIELD," Natasha continued. "Layer by layer. Cell by cell. He buried it so deep that even people at the top didn't realize what they were standing on. Later on, he passed away—but not before creating a digital copy of his mind."
She lifted her hand and gestured toward the old barracks, half-collapsed and swallowed by shadows, their windows dark like empty eye sockets.
"That copy is down there," she said. "And it has the information we need to root HYDRA out. Names. Structures. Everything they've been hiding."
The wind stirred again, rattling loose debris across the concrete, and for a moment the abandoned base felt less like a ruin and more like a grave—one that still had something very dangerous buried inside it.
"Let's go," Steve said, already turning and heading toward the barracks, long strides eating up the cracked concrete as if momentum alone could keep the past from catching up to him.
"There's more," Natasha said.
Two words were enough to stop him cold.
Steve turned back slowly, and whatever he saw on her face made his posture stiffen. The confidence he carried so naturally faltered, replaced by something wary, almost braced. Natasha didn't look uncertain. She looked grim.
"Among Zola's projects was the Winter Soldier," she said. "A super soldier acting as HYDRA's personal assassin and special agent."
Tony tilted his helmet slightly, the faint whine of servos filling the pause. "A single super soldier?" he said lightly. "How are we ever going to manage?"
The joke fell flat.
Natasha and Steve locked eyes, neither of them speaking. There was a shared understanding there, heavy and immediate, stretching back decades. Then Natasha looked away first and continued.
"His name is James Buchanan Barnes."
Steve froze.
It wasn't subtle. It was as if someone had reached inside him and pulled the power out all at once. The color drained from his face, his breath catching halfway to his lungs.
"That is not possible," he said, the words hollow, brittle. "Bucky is—"
"Alive," Natasha finished. "He was experimented on by HYDRA. Made into a super soldier and brainwashed. They kept him frozen in cryostasis and only released him when he had a mission."
Steve staggered, one hand slamming into the wall of an old building to steady himself. Dust shook loose from the decaying structure at the impact. His shoulders trembled, just slightly, but there was no mistaking the horror in his eyes as the truth settled in. His best friend. His brother-in-arms. Turned into a weapon by the very people they had fought and bled to stop.
Silence stretched, thick and suffocating.
"As if we didn't already have plenty of reasons to take them down," Tony said at last, forcing a weak chuckle. "What's next? They stole Christmas?"
Natasha's gaze snapped to him.
"...What?"
Even through the armor, even with the voice modulator smoothing everything into metal and static, the dread in his voice was unmistakable. He already knew. Some part of him had connected the dots before she ever spoke.
"In nineteen ninety-one, your father managed to recreate the Super Soldier Serum," Natasha said. "HYDRA learned this and sent an agent to acquire the formula."
Tony didn't move. The helmet didn't tilt. The repulsors didn't hum. He just stood there, silent, as if acknowledging the implication might make it real.
"It wasn't a car accident, Tony," Natasha said softly. "They had your parents assassinated."
The armor stood unmoving, a shell around a man who suddenly had no idea what to do with the ground dropping out from under him.
A long moment passed before Tony spoke again. When he did, his voice was cold, stripped of humor and pretense.
"This agent," he said. "Who is it?"
Natasha hesitated for just a fraction of a second. Not because she didn't know, but because she understood the weight of what she was about to say. We had already talked about this—about how secrets like these had a way of tearing teams apart when they surfaced at the worst possible moment. Better to lay everything out now.
"The Winter Soldier."
Tony and Steve moved at the same time.
Steve turned toward Natasha, a desperate, almost reflexive motion, as if sheer will might undo what she had just said. His eyes searched her face, clinging to the hope that he had misheard, that there was some clarification coming, some correction that would make the world snap back into place.
Tony snapped his gaze to Steve.
The helmet hid his expression, concealed every twitch of muscle and flicker of emotion, but it didn't matter. The tension in his stance, the way his shoulders squared and his hands curled slightly, was unmistakable. Anger. Shock. Betrayal. All of it coiling together behind layers of gold and red alloy.
For a brief, dangerous moment, I genuinely thought they were going to come to blows.
And maybe they thought so too.
Unlike the version of events I remembered from the movies, these two hadn't had years to build a foundation of trust, grudging respect, and shared battles. They'd known each other barely over a month. Not enough time for old wounds to scar over, not enough time for loyalty to outweigh raw emotion. Just enough time for ideals to clash.
Natasha, who had almost certainly seen this exact scenario playing out in her head long before we ever set foot in Camp Lehigh, stepped in before either of them could say something irreversible.
"He was being controlled, Tony," she said.
Her voice was calm, measured, but firm.
Clint stiffened beside her, the reaction subtle but immediate. I wasn't the only one who caught the unspoken comparison hanging in the air—the memory of Loki's scepter, of a man stripped of his agency and turned into a weapon against his will.
Tony, however, didn't look comforted.
"If what you say is true…" His voice came out as a low, distorted growl through the armor's speakers. "He killed my parents."
"Tony, he didn't do—" Steve started, stepping forward, desperation bleeding into his voice.
"Don't!" Tony snapped.
The word cracked through the air like a whip.
Steve stopped short, jaw clenched, fists trembling at his sides. He looked like a man being torn in half—caught between defending his best friend and facing a truth that threatened to shatter everything he thought he understood about the world he woke up in.
An uneasy silence settled over the group.
Tony stood rigid and unmoving, clearly forcing himself to breathe, to think, to keep from doing something he couldn't take back. Steve, meanwhile, looked ready to fight for Bucky on sheer instinct alone, even as doubt gnawed at him from the inside out.
No one else spoke.
So I did.
As an outsider—someone who wasn't bound by the fragile balance of the Avengers' internal dynamics—I didn't have to worry as much about bruised egos or saying the wrong thing.
"We can decide what to do later," I said, my voice cutting cleanly through the tension. "Right now, we have work to do."
I let the words hang there, solid and unavoidable.
HYDRA was still out there. Zola was still waiting. And if we let this moment tear us apart, then they'd already won.
Like ReplyReport
Like Reactions:Daimon Agafo, Rubén Martínez, Uzah and 817