Chapter 7: "Kinship"
The moment Wanda's hands touched the seam, the annex stopped feeling like a room and started feeling like the inside of a held breath.
Crimson light poured into black-gold, not fighting it but *joining* it, chaos recognizing chaos the way two rivers recognize the same sea. For one suspended second, the bruised-sky landscape on the other side of the tear seemed to hesitate — towers of black glass flickering like a picture losing signal, Mordru's throne-that-wasn't-a-throne wavering at the edges.
Mordru's composure cracked for the first time since they'd found him.
"No," he said, and for once there was nothing patient in it. "You don't understand what you're inviting in—"
*"She understands better than you ever have,"* Nabu said. *"You have spent your existence taking power from things too broken to refuse you. She is choosing to give hers freely. That is not a loophole you've ever learned to close, because you have never once needed to ask."*
Wanda's voice, when it came, sounded layered — her own, and beneath it, something vast and formless speaking through her the way Nabu spoke through Kent, except this voice had no name, no shape, only hunger that had never been offered kindness before and didn't quite know what to do with it.
*"It's tired,"* Wanda said, eyes still closed, crimson light trembling at the edges. "The tear. It's not malicious, it's just — it's been left open so long it forgot it was ever meant to close. It doesn't want to hurt anyone. It just doesn't remember how to stop."
"Then help it remember," Strange said, voice tight with effort, both hands still spread wide holding the room's containment steady against a pressure that wanted very badly to become an explosion.
Wanda's brow furrowed, sweat beading despite the freezing air, crimson threading impossibly gentle patterns across the seam's black-gold surface — not force, but coaxing, the way you'd calm something wounded and half-feral rather than fighting it into submission.
"I know what that's like," she whispered, to the tear, to the something vast and directionless bleeding through it. "Being left open. Being told the wound is what you're for now, instead of something that happened to you." Her voice cracked, and Kent — watching, Fate's borrowed body utterly still — felt Nabu go quiet in a way he rarely did, giving the moment room rather than commentary. "You don't have to stay open just because it's the only thing you've been allowed to be."
The tear shuddered.
And then, impossibly, it began — not to close, not yet, but to *narrow*, the frantic pressure of it easing like a wound finally being permitted to scab rather than bleed.
---
Mordru's control snapped.
"Enough," he snarled, and the throne room behind him blazed with sudden violent light, black-gold surging back outward, fighting Wanda's gentling with raw force where patience had failed him. "If it will not open willingly, I will simply take what I need by *force*—"
*"You won't,"* Fate said, and stepped fully between Wanda and the tear, gold light flaring to match Mordru's surge blow for blow. *"Not while I still have a say in it."*
The two forces met — order against whatever twisted amalgam Mordru had made of himself, ancient power against ancient power — and the annex shook hard enough that chunks of ceiling rained down around Strange's straining mandalas.
"You cannot hold this forever, Nabu," Mordru snarled, robes whipping in a wind that came from nowhere and everywhere. "I have had centuries to prepare for this door. You've had *hours.*"
*"Then it is fortunate,"* Nabu said, gold light roaring brighter, Kent's voice entirely swallowed now beneath three thousand years of accumulated, unhurried will, *"that I did not come here alone."*
Wanda's eyes snapped open, crimson blazing, and beside her Strange's mandalas locked into a final, perfect symmetry, and for the first time since the fight began, the black-gold window did not merely resist Mordru's force.
It began, very slowly, to close.
*End of Chapter 7*