The Hammer of Skadi was in a sorry state now—and its host was in a sorrier one still.
As Red Skull's daughter, she had nearly been killed the day she was born, and her childhood had been a procession of hellish torments. In the end she had won the right to so much as say her own name, and the name she gave herself was Sin.
Unfortunately, Red Skull had fallen far too quickly. His forces and his followers were absorbed by Baron Strucker, and as the former leader's daughter, Sin became a thorn in the side of Hydra's new masters. She had survived their tireless campaign to hunt her down for seventy years.
There was no denying she was a woman of iron conviction. But iron conviction was no use to her now. Her body had been bored through by Daisy; her soul had been carried thousands of kilometers (over a thousand miles) by the Hammer of Skadi, and even with the energy feeding into her, that soul kept fading regardless.
Forget the hammer—even Skadi herself, the goddess of the bitter winter, could not have called her back to life if she'd been summoned. All anyone could do was watch Sin die.
On nothing but her hatred for S.H.I.E.L.D. and her fury at Hydra, Sin kept her fighting spirit blazing, working in concert with the hammer for five long hours. She held her will together through sheer, unbending resolve, helping the Hammer of Skadi cut down the sea serpents and break the Midgard Serpent's seal.
But human strength has its limit. "Mind over matter" is easy enough to bark from behind an office desk; reality is forever crueler than that.
With her body gone, her soul thinned out by the second, and more than once, when she could not go on, it was the Hammer of Skadi that took on the tearing agony of that dissolving spirit.
Far from drawing power out of its host, the Hammer of Skadi was running a deficit to keep her going.
The seventy years of energy it had soaked up in Antarctica drained away fast, and the half-mechanical hammer began dipping into the reserve the Midgard Serpent had stored within it—energy meant for its own recovery once unsealed—to shape Sin's body of ice and slow the bleeding-away of her soul. On top of that, it had to mend the damage Daisy had dealt it.
The Phoenix power, downgraded by Daisy and wielded as mere chi, had naturally lost a great deal across the board, yet some of its fundamental nature still lingered. Purging that Phoenix flame cost the inherently ice-natured Hammer of Skadi a brutal share of its vitality. And to fulfill its mission, it still had to free the Midgard Serpent as fast as it possibly could.
Sustaining Sin's body, repairing its own wounds, and battling the sea serpents that guarded the sealing site—the cracks across the Hammer of Skadi's surface multiplied, and the energy locked inside it was draining at a frankly staggering rate.
Five hours of fighting bought it the deaths of barely two sea serpents before the hammer could hold out no longer. It was forced to rip space open, fall back to the Earth side, and draw in the seawater of the Mariana Trench, converting it to the power of ice to feed its bottomless hunger for energy.
It was right around then that Daisy and the others hit a snag of their own: Captain America had woken up.
Nick Fury had classified everything about Captain America as need-to-know at the highest level—he hadn't even looped in his old friend Pierce. Under his strict compartmentalization, the agents assigned to watch over Captain America didn't even know whom they were guarding. The one female agent who bore a passing resemblance to the Peggy Carter of old had no idea this man was the Captain America of that era; she most likely assumed he simply looked the part. Even Daisy knew only that Fury had stashed the man somewhere in New York—where, exactly, she had no clue.
For Baldy, Cap's awakening was the headline; a hammer dropping out of the sky could wait its turn. Daisy, for her part, wanted a look at a living, breathing Captain America too. The two of them were of one mind, so Daisy whisked Baldy along by teleport, the better to make a flashy entrance.
They arrived in no time—far faster than in the original timeline. Cap had only just burst out of a building that looked for all the world like a film soundstage, knocking aside two agents in black with black helmets who didn't look like the good guys, when Baldy and Daisy cut him off.
"Captain—" Baldy hadn't even finished when Cap, registering the sudden dark shapes, reflexively threw out a hand to shove him. He didn't use his full strength, though—just a notch above an ordinary man's.
With Daisy at his side, Baldy didn't so much as flinch, and Daisy wasn't about to stand there and watch him get launched across the lot, so she put out a hand and blocked it.
Captain America took one look at her unremarkable appearance, decided he had no wish to fight her, and stepped back of his own accord. Daisy lifted an eyebrow a fraction and made no further move.
While Baldy walked Cap through how the world had changed, Daisy strolled into the soundstage—and the moment she clocked a product logo, her mood soured. These were all Skye Pictures props!
The radio, the ceiling fan, the desk lamp—every one of these heavy, WWII-vintage antiques was a prop from the shoot for Saving Private Ryan. Now the set had a man-shaped hole punched through it, the ceiling fan lay on the floor with two of its blades bent out of shape, and Daisy's heart twinged. Antiques like these hadn't come cheap.
Seeing Baldy finish his briefing, and Cap left standing there in a daze, she beckoned Baldy over.
"These came out of my company, didn't they?" She jabbed a finger at the furnishings, thoroughly displeased. She was always the one helping herself to other people's things; now someone had helped themselves to hers, and broken them besides—Daisy was very much not pleased.
"This is S.H.I.E.L.D. property. S.H.I.E.L.D. holds a seventy-percent stake!"
Daisy wouldn't give an inch. "Then the other thirty percent is mine, personally. And that ceiling fan on the floor happens to be an artifact of real historical value—I want it specially flagged on the ledger!"
The two of them bickered briefly over a busted ceiling fan. The actual point of it, of course, was to pull the freshly woken Cap's attention elsewhere. To snap awake and find yourself seventy years in the future was a crushing blow to a man's whole sense of self.
"I'm going outside to look around." Steve Rogers knew they were keeping an eye on him. He didn't turn back—just left the words hanging and pushed his way out the door.
Daisy and Baldy weren't about to let that go, naturally, and the two of them trailed well behind.
"How would you say he's holding up?" Baldy asked.
Daisy gave him a couple of looks. The Cap before her now carried a weary, fading air; seventy years had still pressed their heavy mark into his inner world. The edge was gone, and the conviction that had once driven him to protect was teetering on collapse. Walking back onto a battlefield would take him some time to get there.
She gave it to him straight. "Body's still strong. But there's a weariness in him. Better to let him take the time to adjust."
Daisy knew Baldy well. Heroes, greatness—in Nick Fury's heart it was all so much hot air. He only wanted to guard the world by his own methods. To Nick Fury, a hero was a partner at the very most—not even a friend.
Gazing out at the dazzling bustle of Times Square, Steve Rogers found his mind grinding to a halt. He had spent all this time treating Nick Fury's words as a lie, and now reality had landed its heavy blow. He couldn't go back.
Steve stood there wrestling with the philosophical questions—who he was now, where he was, all the rest of it. The two figures a little way behind him were wrestling with rather more practical ones: food, clothing, where he'd sleep, how he'd get around.
"Captain America can't be seen in public yet—he can't show his face at S.H.I.E.L.D. as things stand." Nick Fury, too, believed Cap should put in some recovery training for the time being. What Cap needed was somewhere quiet, somewhere with few people and a training ground. His gaze drifted, of its own accord, to a certain someone at his side.