Smith crossed to the small refrigerator built into the office credenza and looked back at them. "What would you like to drink? I have tea, cola, whiskey, and champagne."
Pietro said, "Coke is fine."
Wanda hesitated for a moment. "I'd like to try the champagne."
Smith smiled at the contrast — didn't comment on it — and pulled a Coke from the refrigerator, then took the champagne from the cabinet beside it. He set the Coke in front of Pietro, opened the champagne, and poured two glasses.
He raised his glass toward both of them. "Cheers."
Wanda lifted her champagne. Pietro raised his Coke. The three of them touched rims across the desk in a toast that none of them felt the need to explain.
Smith took a sip and set his glass down. "I imagine the question you've been turning over since Yelena knocked on your door is how I know you exist and why I wanted to see you."
Pietro set his Coke down. "We talked about basically nothing else the entire flight here."
Wanda said, "We genuinely can't understand how someone in your position would know about two people living thousands of miles away who have never done anything notable."
Smith looked at them both and said the words he'd prepared.
"After the Battle of New York, I had a dream. I believe it was precognitive — I have reasons to take that kind of thing seriously, based on things I've experienced. In the dream, there were robots everywhere. Thousands of them, across an entire city, and they wanted to destroy the world." He paused. "And in that dream, I saw the two of you. Not as you are now — in the dream, you'd both become powerful enhanced individuals. You were fighting together against the robot army."
He looked at Pietro directly. "I saw you use your ability to protect a child who was in the path of a weapon. You put yourself between the child and the gunfire and took all of it. You saved the child." He stopped. "And then you were gone."
Pietro had been leaning forward with the particular brightness of someone hearing something exciting about themselves, and then the arithmetic had arrived. His expression went through several things quickly. He sat back. "So I became a superhero," he said slowly, "but the way I went out was a bit... hasty."
Wanda reached over and took his hand. "Brother. It was a dream. You're fine."
Pietro nodded and arranged his face into something that said he was fine.
Smith moved on and looked at Wanda. "You were still fighting when the dream ended. You were one of the strongest people on that battlefield, and you were only beginning to understand what you could actually do."
Wanda said, "But in reality, Pietro and I are ordinary people. We don't have any powers."
Pietro asked, with the curiosity of someone who has accepted the premise and wants the details, "What exactly were our abilities in the dream?"
Smith said, "Pietro — yours was speed. Extreme speed. You were very fast."
Pietro murmured, half to himself, "Speed. Like Barry — like the Flash?" He thought about it for a moment. "But if I'm that fast, dying from a bullet is genuinely embarrassing."
Smith smiled and turned to Wanda. "Your ability was a red energy. It looked like magic."
Wanda's curiosity sharpened. "Is magic actually real? There's almost nothing about it online. Though there's Vermillion in the Paragons who controls fire—"
"Magic exists," Smith said. "It's accessible to a small number of people and isn't widely known. That group didn't go through the Paragons selection process — they operate in a different space."
Wanda nodded slowly, then said, with the practical skepticism of someone who hasn't given up her critical faculties yet, "Mr. Smith — you brought us all the way from Sokovia on the basis of a dream. That's a significant thing to do. Dreams can be strange and unreliable." She looked at him steadily. "And unfortunately, neither Pietro nor I have the abilities you're describing."
Smith just smiled. He knew exactly what state the two of them were in — unawakened, unaware, the potential completely dormant. Wanda's skepticism was reasonable given what she knew. It was also about to become irrelevant.
"It was a dream," he said, "but based on what I'm capable of perceiving, I treat it as a precognitive dream. Everything in it has the potential to become real."
Pietro's eyes went wide. "Including our abilities?"
"Including yours."
"Although you're both ordinary right now, the dream gave me enough to go on. I can help you find the power that belongs to you."
Pietro was on his feet before Smith had finished the sentence. "You're saying it's actually possible? That my sister and I could become enhanced — like in your dream?"
Wanda spoke before Smith could answer. Her voice was level and her eyes were serious. "What do we have to pay? If we really have abilities like you're describing — what do we have to do in return?"
Pietro looked at his sister. She was born only a few seconds before him and had somehow ended up considerably older in the ways that mattered.
Smith shook his head and smiled. "You're worrying about something that isn't there. You don't have to sacrifice anything." He looked at them both. "If there's something I'd ask — when the time comes, when you've found your abilities and learned to use them, I hope you'll use them to protect people who need protecting. That's all."
Pietro heard this and felt something in his chest that he would have found embarrassing to name. This was the man he'd admired from a distance for years — the one who showed up everywhere something needed to be done, who built organizations designed to help people rather than control them, who had apparently spent time after the largest battle in living memory having dreams about two nobody siblings in Sokovia and then dispatching a private jet for them. It was exactly what Pietro would have said if someone had asked him what kind of person he hoped GOD actually was.
Wanda's expression had shifted. She'd grown up with Pietro talking about Smith Doyle, and she'd maintained the healthy skepticism of someone who'd never met the person being praised. The gap between the reputation and the reality was supposed to be the point where the skepticism paid off.
It wasn't paying off.
"We're willing," Wanda said. "Both of us. To become people who protect others. That's what we'd choose to do."
Smith nodded. "Then let me help you find what's already yours."
He reached into his storage space and withdrew the Mind Scepter.
The Mind Stone at its tip pulsed with its blue-gold light — not the cold, invasive pulse that Loki had weaponized against Selvig and Barton, but the Stone's fundamental resonance, the oldest and most essential thing it was before anyone had pointed it at a human mind with intent to control. Smith called up a thread of his own ki and ran it through the scepter's housing, connecting to the Stone — not commanding it, but directing it. Asking it, in the language of energy, to do something specific.
Find what's there. Wake it up. Don't add anything that isn't already there.
The light that extended from the gem was warm. It spread over both of them slowly, the way light comes through curtains in the morning — gradual, gentle, without the quality of imposition.