Chapter 9: "What's Left Standing"
Dawn found the three of them still sitting in the ruined annex, none of them quite ready to trust their legs with the walk back up the stairwell.
Wanda had her knees pulled to her chest, crimson light finally, fully quiet for the first time in hours, her breathing slow and ragged in a way that spoke less of injury and more of a body remembering, all at once, every hour of strain it had just been asked to survive.
"He's not gone," she said quietly, into the silence. "Mordru. You said it yourself. We closed a door. We didn't end him."
*"No,"* Nabu agreed, and it was mostly Kent's own voice now, tired in a way that had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with being human and having watched several very large things nearly go very wrong. "But a being like that measures victory in centuries. Tonight, he lost ground he'd spent three years buying. That matters, even if it isn't the whole war."
Strange, leaning against a rusted console with his cloak looking distinctly worse for wear, exhaled something that was almost a laugh. "You say that like it's supposed to be reassuring."
"It's supposed to be true," Kent said. "Reassuring was never really Nabu's specialty."
*"An accurate assessment,"* Nabu admitted, dry even now, and Wanda's mouth twitched at the corner — not quite a smile, but close enough to count as one, given the night they'd had.
---
They climbed back up into a Sokovian morning that looked, deceptively, like any other — grey sky, cold wind, the memorial garden's dying flowers nodding in a breeze that no longer felt watched. Hill was waiting at the crater's edge with a car and an expression that suggested she'd spent the last several hours fielding questions from people considerably less patient than herself.
"I'm going to need a report," she said, "that doesn't use the phrase 'dimensional tear' more than once, because Fury reads these things literally and I would like to keep my job."
"I'll do my best," Strange said. "No promises."
Hill's gaze moved to Wanda, taking in the exhaustion, the faint tremor still in her hands, and softened by exactly one degree — enough for someone who knew her only a little to notice, and no more than that. "You alright?"
"No," Wanda said honestly. "But I will be. Eventually. I usually am."
Hill nodded, like that was an answer she respected rather than one she needed to push on, and turned back to the car. "Get in. All of you. I want debriefs before anyone decides to go be heroic somewhere else today."
---
It was Kent, hours later, back in the Tower of Fate's quiet gold-lit halls with the helmet resting once more on its pedestal, who finally asked the question that had been sitting in his chest since the annex.
"You flexed," he said, to the empty chamber, to the presence that never entirely left the back of his mind even with the helmet set aside. "Back there. With Wanda. I've never felt you do that before. Bend, instead of just — holding the line."
Nabu's voice, when it answered, came softer than usual, threaded through Kent's own thoughts rather than layered over them. *"Three thousand years is a long time to believe you have already learned everything a philosophy has to teach you. It is a useful thing, occasionally, to be proven wrong by someone considerably younger and considerably more tired than you are."*
Kent almost smiled. "Careful. That almost sounded like humility."
*"Do not get used to it,"* Nabu said. *"But do not think I didn't notice it either."*
Outside the tower's high windows, the sky over Salem was ordinary and quiet, entirely unaware of how close it had come, hours earlier and half a world away, to being folded into something that would never have let it stay ordinary again. Kent watched it for a long moment, feeling the particular exhaustion of a night that had asked everything of him and given back, in exchange, something that felt almost like hope.
*"He will come again,"* Nabu said, quiet and certain, into the silence.
"I know," Kent said. "But so will we. And this time, we won't be finding out what we're capable of for the first time."
*End of Chapter 9*