Arthur sat cross-legged on the workshop floor at three in the morning, the Mind Stone floating gently in the air in front of him.
The Sceptre's golden casing lay discarded on the workbench behind him. The housing might have been useful as a focusing conduit for Loki, but to Arthur, the Stone was the only thing that mattered. The casing was just Thanos's flashy addition. The Stone was eternal.
Now he had to figure out how to use one of the most dangerous objects in the universe to safely give his son superpowers.
Even though Arthur knew for a fact the Mind Stone could give Wanda and Pietro extraordinary power, he had to be careful about how to go about it. He had no idea how Hydra, under Baron Strucker, had succeeded in the other timeline, but that did not matter. He would find his own way, and he would absolutely make certain the process was as safe and painless as possible.
If there was anyone on this planet who deeply understood Infinity Stones, it was him. He knew them intimately. Painfully.
The Space Stone had very nearly killed him at eighteen, after all. It had rewritten his magical core while his body burned from the inside out. He had spent months recovering from that, enduring the reconstitution ritual, losing access to his magic entirely, clawing it back one agonising inch at a time.
When he gained access to the Power Stone years later, he knew better. He approached it with caution, never touching it directly, only ever channeling its energy through carefully prepared crystals that contained fractions of its output. Those successful experiments were the foundation of his confidence now.
But that was him. He could not compare himself to ordinary humans. His body and his will were many, many times stronger.
The reconstitution ritual had remade his body to peak human capability. Years of martial arts and chi training in K'un-Lun had pushed it further. The Iron Fist enhancement, from a replicated Shou-Lao's heart, had pushed it further still. And the Arcane Mage State, channeling Ancient Magic directly through his physical form, was slowly but surely pushing his body toward divine levels.
He had come a very long way from the fragile young man who had nearly been destroyed by the Space Stone. Exposure and experimentation with another Infinity Stone was not going to break him.
The Mind Stone still demanded absolute respect, though. It was fundamentally different from the two Stones he had worked with before. The Space and Power Stones were physical forces. Raw energy that obeyed knowable rules.
The Mind Stone dealt directly with consciousness itself.
It was a field of study that even the most advanced, ancient civilizations in the universe had yet to fully understand.
Still, Arthur was not working completely blind. He knew from the memories of his past life that the Mind Stone could successfully unlock hidden human potential.
So, what Arthur needed to learn was not whether the Mind Stone could give Pietro powers. He knew it could. What he needed to learn was how much exposure, at what intensity, for how long, before the Stone shifted from helpful to lethal.
He needed to find the exact dose.
—-
While Arthur wrestled with one of the six oldest objects in the universe, Nick Fury was wrestling with something considerably less ancient but equally stubborn.
The World Security Council.
Six massive, floating holographic faces glowed pale blue around the sleek conference table, each one looking visibly angrier than the last. They had been shouting at him for the better part of twenty minutes. Fury sat relaxed across from them, calmly sipping his black coffee.
"Director Fury," a councilwoman said, her voice tight. "Are you even listening to us?"
"Every single word, Madam Ambassador."
"Then perhaps you might care to explain why a war criminal who orchestrated an invasion on our planet was permitted to leave Earth without standing trial."
"He is standing trial," Fury corrected smoothly. "Just on Asgard, where he is from."
"That is not acceptable."
"With respect, Councilman, it is the only viable option available. You wanted me to arrest Loki in front of his brother, Thor? You wanted me to put a god in front of a jury at The Hague? Do you have a prison on this planet that can hold him? Because we do not. Asgard does."
Silence fell over the holograms.
Another representative leaned forward. "The Scepter, then. The alien weapon of unprecedented power. Where is it?"
"With the man who took it off Loki."
"Hayes."
"Correct."
"We want it, Director."
"I assumed you would."
"Get it for us, Director."
Fury set his cup down carefully. He looked at each face in turn and let the silence stretch the way only Nick Fury could.
"Let me be incredibly clear about something," Fury said, his voice dropping. "Arthur Hayes does not work for me. He does not work for S.H.I.E.L.D. He certainly does not work for any of you. And he is considerably less patient than I am. If you want the Scepter, you are more than welcome to go and ask him for it yourself. I will watch from a very safe distance."
"Then use Captain Marvel. She has the power to retrieve it."
"She does not work for me either. Same reason. Same exact answer."
The room became quiet.
A third representative spoke, his voice measured and deliberate. "Let me summarise what we have lost in this operation, Director. Thor removed a war criminal from our jurisdiction. The Tesseract no longer exists. Phase Two is dead. The Sceptre is in the hands of a man we cannot control. We also have a woman capable of destroying entire fleets who answers to no government on Earth. The alien wreckage left behind from the invasion was mysteriously disintegrated before we could study any of it. And soon the whole world will be asking very uncomfortable questions about the secret society of magic casters who fought in London." He paused. "You have given us nothing. No prisoners. No weapons. No leverage. No answers."
"You are right," Fury said.
The representatives stared at him.
"This is unacceptable."
"It is exactly what it is."
"We were promised a team. A controlled response force."
"You were promised defenders," Fury shot back. "Defenders showed up. They handled the invasion. That is the only reason this planet is still here and you are still comfortably sitting in those chairs."
"And where are these so-called defenders now?"
"Living their lives."
"They cannot simply walk away! These are enhanced individuals with no oversight, no accountability, no chain of command. The public will demand answers."
"The public watched those enhanced individuals save two cities in a single afternoon. And so did every hostile power watching from the other side of the galaxy." Fury leaned back, crossing his arms. "They will definitely think twice before setting their eyes on Earth again."
"Is that the point of all this? A statement?"
"If that is how you want to read it, yes."
A long pause. Then a quiet representative who had not spoken until now leaned forward.
"We could easily replace you with someone who is more useful, Director."
Fury smiled a terrifying, thin smile. "You could certainly try."
The room went very still.
He did not need to spell it out. They all knew. He was their only thread to Hayes. Their only connection to Carol Danvers. The only person the wizarding governments would even take a meeting with. Pull that thread, and the entire network unravelled. And that was if they could actually remove him, which was a considerably harder proposition now that Hydra had been cleaned out of S.H.I.E.L.D.
The quiet representative cleared her throat. "We will reconvene next week. There is still the matter of the exposed wizarding world to address. That situation is going to become very difficult, very quickly."
"Looking forward to it."
The holograms blinked out, one after another.
Fury picked up his coffee and finished it in one long swallow.
—
The Council wanted a strategy for managing the wizarding world's exposure. They wanted a strategy for managing the inevitable public fallout. Because as the weeks passed, it became increasingly clear there would be no hiding it.
In these weeks the world had moved on from the alien invasion.
Manhattan's shattered windows were replaced. Craters filled, rubble cleared, scaffolding erected and dismantled. London repaired even faster, with secret help from the wizards. But as the cities healed, and the physical scars healed, people lost interest in aliens. Daily life reclaimed their attention with ruthless efficiency. Commutes, deadlines, mortgages, school runs. The alien army that had fallen from the sky became yesterday's news.
Only the children remembered. Action figures appeared in toy shops. Iron Man in three different poses. A plastic Captain America shield that sold out in hours. Storm Wizard. The Wall. Ice Prince. Children fought over them in playgrounds, argued about who was strongest, and re-enacted battles they had only seen on screens.
But while the children played, the journalists went hunting.
Not for the Avengers, whose identities were mostly known and whose government connections were public. For the broom riders. The unknown ones. The people who had appeared from nowhere, fought with impossible abilities, and vanished back into the population without a word of explanation.
If they could turn falling debris into birds, what else could they change? If they could destroy alien metal with a flash of light, what would that flash do to a person? If they had been hiding for years, decades, centuries, what else were they hiding?
The initial awe drained away. Fear crept in to fill the space it left. Slowly at first, and then all at once.
Arthur watched the cultural shift unfold on the news feeds from his quiet living room.
None of this surprised him in the slightest. It was exactly why the Statute of Secrecy had existed in the first place. Centuries of wizards had understood a simple, ugly truth about human nature: fear and jealousy would always, eventually, overwhelm gratitude.
Show a man something extraordinary, and his first reaction is wonder. His second is suspicion. His third is the need to control it or destroy it.
Arthur had seen this pattern play out before. Not in this life, but in the fragmented memories of his old one. In a parallel corner of the Marvel universe, mutants had faced exactly this. Born with gifts they did not choose, hated for abilities they could not hide. Hunted, registered, imprisoned. And those mutants had been their own or their neighbours' children. Wizards were an entire hidden civilisation with their own government, their own laws, and their own military. The fear would be worse.
He had hoped the alien invasion would change the equation. A common enemy. A shared threat so vast and so terrifying that the differences between magical and mundane would shrink to insignificance. Humanity had always united best when something bigger was trying to kill it.
But it had not worked.
The invasion had been too clean. Too contained. Arthur's own preparations had worked too well. The evacuations had emptied the cities before the worst of the fighting. Extremis had healed the wounded. Carol had destroyed the fleet before the war could drag on. The death toll, while real, was a tiny fraction of what it could have been.
A fraction of what it needed to be, some cold, strategic part of his mind whispered, for a lesson to stick.
He hated that thought. But he could not argue with it.
The damage had not been bad enough. The pain had not been deep enough. People had watched the invasion on their screens and moved on. They had not buried enough of their own to understand how small their differences truly were when measured against the scale of the universe.
His grand plan had failed. And he did not have a better one. Not unless he wanted to become the ruler of Earth and impose unity by force, and that particular path led somewhere he refused to go.
So, for the first time in a long time, Arthur Hayes did not have a perfect answer.
The people whose job it was to govern were trying to find one, though. Amelia Bones was in daily contact with her counterparts in the non-magical world. Meetings were being held. Proposals drafted. The machinery of cooperation was grinding slowly forward. Amelia had even begun discussing stepping aside in favour of someone better suited for this particular challenge. A Muggle-born, perhaps. Someone who understood both worlds from the inside. Someone who could bridge the gap that she, as a pureblood witch, could not fully comprehend.
Arthur let them work. If things spiralled toward catastrophe, he would step in. Until then, the world would have to figure this out for itself. Maybe the politicians and diplomats and ordinary, stubborn, frightened people would surprise him. Maybe better minds than his would find the answer he could not.
He finished his tea, set the cup down, and went back to the workshop. The Mind Stone was waiting. So were his children.