Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“It’s good to see you, Dr. Murry.” Director Margaret Carter’s crisp English accent matched her firm, businesslike handshake. She radiated authority, control. Maybe someday his own stubborn little Margaret would grow into a woman like this. “I trust you know Howard Stark?” She nodded toward the scowling, mustachioed man behind her.

“There’s not a scientist alive who doesn’t know Mr. Stark, at least by reputation.” Alex held out his hand.

The other man begrudgingly took it. “And you’re Dr. Alexander Murry, astrophysicist out of Princeton, great renown, yada yada yada. Peggy seems to think you might be able to advise me.”

“Howard.”

“I mean, no offense, Dr. Murry, your work is incredible, but you have to admit, so is mine, and the supposition that I might need help—”

Director Carter stomped on Stark’s foot.

“Alright, alright, Peg!” He placed a hand on Alex’s shoulder. “I admit it, Al— can I call you Al?”

“I usually go by Alex, but I—”

“Al, I’m stumped. There, I said it.” That he directed at the Director. “I’ve been studying this thing for years, in person, and still can’t make heads or tails. Then I read your papers and you’re there writing it intimate love poetry from across the country.”

Alex ran the history of all his academic publications through his head for anything that could be described this way. “I’m sorry… what are we talking about?”

“The Tesseract.” This Stark and Director Carter said in unison.

“Oh. The tesseract?” He frowned. “A tesseract is just a mathematical concept. What you get when you keep theoretically adding dimensions to space-time. You square a square, you get a cube. But when you square a cube, you get…a hypercube, in a fourth dimension, which Einstein called time. You square that, and— theoretically, at least— you can turn space-time inside out, so that space and time as we know it…warp. Size and distance wouldn’t have the same meaning. You could open a wormhole to the other side of the universe and be there instantly!”

At this Carter and Stark raised their eyebrows meaningfully at each other.

“Did my paper— my paper didn’t really read like love poetry, did it?” It was a legitimate concern. He’d written that paper while things with Kate had been seriously heating up. It was how he’d proposed. If the whole of the universe stretched between us, I would travel through the fifth dimension just to be with you.

But the director merely rolled her eyes and said, “Howard’s just jealous that this is one coy mistress he can’t get anything out of.”

“That confounded blue…thing is not remotely my type, thank you—”

“What… blue thing?” Alex looked from one to the other. “I thought we were talking about tesseracts.”

Director Carter gave him a piercing look. “Dr. Murry,” she said. “You recall the confidentially waiver I had you sign at our East Coast office? What you are about to see is Classified. You must not speak of it outside this facility, not even to your wife.”

“I understand, Ma’am.”

“Good. Lead the way, Mr. Stark.” She jerked her head toward the heavy doors behind her.

Stark opened the doors and led them down a hallway to another, even higher-security door. There was a hiss of hydraulics as he eased it open, then held it for Alex and the Director. It fell closed behind them and sealed audibly.

They stood on a catwalk running around a dim, square room. The room was small, but seemed larger because it was so empty. Most of the light came from the only object in it, a small, blue-glowing box suspended in the center by a cage-like series of rods and wires. Its blue glow pulsed slightly, almost in response to their entrance.

Stark swept his arm in its direction. “Dr. Murry, allow me to introduce: The Tesseract.”

He didn’t know what to make of it. “It’s… a cube.”

“A hypercube.” Stark had traded his previous bluster for a quiet, almost reverent tone. “It behaves exactly as you proposed. Warping the universe around it. It’s even been known to open a wormhole or two.”

Director Carter spoke up from behind them. “The Nazis— or more specifically, Hydra— were using it to power weapons that could vaporize their targets. Your mission is to figure out how they managed to harness this energy, so that SHIELD can use it for the betterment of mankind.”

“Of course.” Weapons. Power. Always the first place government agencies went with science.

He couldn’t pull his eyes away. Was this thing really putting his abstract theories into action? And how? He didn’t even realize he was reaching toward it until Stark’s voice knocked him back to the present.

“You’ll have plenty of time to flirt with it later.” Stark shoved open the door. “Let me show you where you’ll be working, and introduce the rest of this team of morons.”

He led them down another corridor to a room that turned out to be next to the Tesseract chamber at the other end, with a long window overlooking it. A large bank of computer servers lined a perpendicular wall. The center of the room was a mess of tables, equipment, and papers.

“I’ve brought us our astrophysicist!” Stark announced to the room.

Director Carter pulled Alex toward a sandy-haired young man pouring over several sheets of graph paper at the nearest table. “Alexander Murry, meet Henry Pym.”

“Call me Hank.” The young man stood up to shake his hand, peering just as intensely at Alex as he had at the graph paper.

“Pym’s the subatomic expert on this here committee,” Stark put in. “For all your microscopic needs. Atoms, quarks. Bugs, for some godforsaken reason.”

“I told you, Stark, you can learn a lot about the potential behavior of subatomic particles from observing the behavior of colony insects like ants. He doesn’t get it,” Hank spat toward Alex. “He refuses to get it.”

Alex smiled peaceably. “I get it, if it helps. My wife’s a biologist. She’s all about finding patterns in the behavior of living things.”

“You have a wife? Some fellas get all the luck.” The speaker was a slightly balding late-middle-aged man across the room. 

Director Carter sighed and said, “And this is Aloysius Samberly, engineering tech out of the West Coast office.”

“You don’t look all that handsome.” The tech looked Alex up and down as he shook his hand. “How’d you get a wife?”

“Uh— mutual admiration?”

“Don’t pay attention to Samberly, nobody else does either,” Stark said.

“Hey!”

“Do you have any kids?” Hank asked, clearly trying to gracefully draw the conversation into less-contentious territory.

And Alex was grateful for the change. “Yes. Three…and a half. Eight-year-old girl, four-year-old twins, and another on the way.” He beamed. That was the first he’d told the news to anyone outside the family. 

Stark shrugged. “I don’t see the appeal, myself, but I guess the human race needs to perpetuate somehow.”

“Howard, honestly!”

“Peggy does have kids.” Stark smirked at her. “Overachiever, our Director is.”

“And now that you’re all settled out here in New Mexico, I’d better get back to them, and leave you to your space-time warping.” She shook Alex’s hand again, giving him a warm smile. “Thank you for joining us, Dr. Murry. I hope you— and your family— will find yourself at home with SHIELD.”

“It’s…an incredible project, but it’s Classified,” he told the family over their take-out dinner in the motel.

Meg grimaced and said, “You have to do taxonomies?”

He smothered his smile. Only in this family would a child hear the word “Classified” and associate it not with spy movies, but with learning about classification systems from her mother. “No. ‘Classified’ just means that it’s top secret. The government doesn’t want anyone to know what we’re working on, so I’m not allowed to talk about it. So I’m just going to say one thing and then never speak of it again.” He met Kate’s eyes. “If the whole of the universe stretched between us, I would travel through the fifth dimension just to be with you.”

She raised her eyebrows and simply said, “Really.”

“What does that mean?” Meg demanded.

“It means we’ll be staying here in the desert for awhile. Not in this motel— SH—the agency will set us up with a proper house.”

“In the desert!” Sandy announced. The boys had been preoccupied stealing french fries from and then feeding them to each other until that moment. “Wile E. Coyote!”

“I’m the Roadrunner. Beep beep!” Dennys ran across the room and his twin chased him over the beds.

Kate called after them, “I see we’re going to have to study some real facts about desert biomes while we’re here!”

Alex frowned at her then and said softly, “This isn’t going to interfere with any of your projects, is it?” They’d discussed that, even before they were married. He wasn’t going to be the sort of husband who expected his wife to give up her career for the sake of his.

She tsked and waved a hand. “Naw, we’re good. I can do my work here just as easily as I can back in Connecticut.”

“Then why does Father have to do his work here?” Ah, his Megabit. Always questioning everything. What a scientist.

“The government usually uses open desert for experiments they think might be— might require a lot of space. Far from towns.”

“You mean in case it blows up?”

He winced. “Well, that’s one example. But I want to assure you, I’m not working with explosives. Nothing should blow up. The desert is just a precaution.”

Kate gave her a level look and said softly, “Meg, you know the government would never put your father in immediate danger.” That was a lie, of course, but this wasn’t the time to get into issues of military conscription or acceptable losses. “They take every precaution to ensure his work is safe.”

“Believe me, my Megaton.” He looked directly into his daughter’s eyes and smiled his heart into hers. “I have no intention of doing anything that could take me out of your life.”

Meg stared seriously back and said, “Good.”

Chapter Text

Alex imagined working with SHIELD on the Tesseract Project was what it would have been like to work with Edison at Menlo Park. Howard Stark was the Resident Genius who took all the credit, breezing in and out, from project to project and, apparently, state to state, checking in on matters with his own private corporations in between time on the Tesseract. It wasn’t the fairest comparison, truly, from what Alex knew of Edison: Stark worked harder. Somehow, while he was away working on whatever other contracts he had running, he was still thinking about the Tesseract, and would send pages of calculations, or call in with new ideas to try.

Six months in, he caught a glimpse of another side of Howard Stark, when the team came face to face with a new (to them) side of Alex Murry.

“I can’t stay, the children are home alone, because Kate is still in the hospital.” Apparently his grin was bright enough that even these socially-stunted scientists could tell this wasn’t bad news. “I am thrilled to announce the arrival of Charles Wallace Murry. 6 pounds, 11 ounces, 18 inches long, a little jaundiced but otherwise healthy, as is his mother.” He fumbled open the box of cigars he’d brought— he didn’t care for smoking, himself, but it was traditional on such an occasion. He started to babble as he handed them out. “Not jaundiced, Kate’s not, I mean, but she’s healthy, and so is the baby, and I can’t wait to get back and see them again but like I said the older three are home alone with the puppy and that’s a recipe for chaos, and I think I’m babbling, am I babbling?”

Stark frowned at the cigar— probably not the quality he was used to— and then back at Alex, and then said, “I don’t get it. Haven’t you done this three times already?”

“Way to be a wet blanket, Stark!” Hank called from a table away, and Samberly added some “Boooooo!”s for good measure.

“Technically just twice: Sandy and Dennys were two-for-one. But no, Howard, it’s special each time. Every new person is a miracle in and of themselves.”

Stark rolled his eyes. “Well, I’ve never held much stock in miracles. Science is a lot more dependable.”

“Science is a miracle, too,” Alex said. “Just because we can study the whats and hows and break it down to quarks and processes doesn’t make the universe any less miraculous. I believe Einstein said something of the sort: either nothing is a miracle, or everything is. I choose to see the miracles.”

Hank and Samberly, already lighting cigars, applauded his speech, and threw in some good-natured ribbing toward Stark. Howard hmphed. “All right, Miracle Man. Let me call my butler. He’ll look after the other kids while you spend some time with the missus and babe.”

Which went above and beyond what Alex had asked for. Stark may have been a workaholic himself, but he wasn't about to force that on anyone else. He, in his own gruff way, cared about his employees.

It was subtly reassuring, a tiny sign that the Resident Genius truly respected his underlings. And after several more months of work trying to "harness energy" from an enigma that would just as soon swallow any variable placed near it as it would give anything off, Alex was ready to put that respect to the test.

"I think we've been going about this all wrong," he told the others one morning when Stark was in residence. "The Tesseract doesn't create energy. It's channeling energy from somewhere else. We won't understand how until we understand the basic mathematics underlying the Tesseract itself."

"Isn't that what I hired you for?" Stark said with a sharpness that might have intimidated Alex if he hadn't seen his soft side.

"Yes," he said patiently, "and I'm saying, as the man who wrote the paper on tesseracts, we need to dig deeper than we're currently doing. We need to understand how the Tesseract warps space-time. We need to— somehow figure out how to trigger it to open a wormhole, on purpose, and let us see through to the other side."

"That sounds," Samberly placed a hand on the window and stared pensively into the chamber, "dangerous."

"It will be," Alex admitted. "This could put us into contact with aspects of the universe that the human body— that any matter we're familiar with— simply wasn't designed for. Antimatter. Dark Matter.”

“Zero Matter?” Stark perked up. Samberly groaned.

Alex looked between the two, trying to work out what the reaction could mean. “Uh, sure. You’ve worked with it before?”

“Damn stuff lost me my best working hovercar prototype.”

"Oh?"

"But that's clearly a sign that we are the only scientists on the planet qualified to take this thing on." Stark clapped his hands and rubbed them together. "Let's warp space-time, gentlemen."

And so it was decided: they would now focus on the Tesseract as a wormhole gate rather than an energy source.

They relocated to Florida to take advantage of NASA’s work putting humans in hostile unknown environments, and recruited a new collaborator from the Kennedy Center’s team: Janet Van Dyne, who specialized in spacesuits and armor. Their second new teammate wasn’t from NASA at all, but from Howard Stark’s own corporate enterprises: a chemist named Jason Wilkes, although his skill with chemistry was apparently just a perk. “He has more firsthand experience with antimatter than any scientist alive today,” Stark explained. Wilkes seemed reluctant to discuss it.

“It’s only to be expected that Wilkes and Van Dyne would bond,” Alex told Kate. Since their actual work was Classified, he had to settle for sharing workplace gossip. “They’re not only the two new faces, but he’s the only Colored person and she’s the only woman. But she’s also conventionally beautiful.” It was a statement of fact, and he knew Kate wouldn’t take it the wrong way— her unconventional beauty was always more to his taste. “And Hank is smitten. Absolutely gone on her. Obvious to everybody. But he’s got that temper, you know?”

"Oh, no. He's not being—"

Her eyes widened, and he remembered how some people reacted to their relationship. "Not in a racist way, thankfully! He limits his animosity to moments of obvious jealousy. Otherwise he gets on fine with Wilkes. And Wilkes is an easygoing fellow, happily married himself. He's amused by Hank's outbursts if anything. Janet rolls her eyes at it all and tells them to get back to work."

"Good for her." Kate nodded approvingly.

He wished he could tell her about the ideas his new colleagues were bringing to the table, instead: Wilkes' theories about how the Tesseract tied matter and antimatter together, and Van Dyne's assurances that they could navigate a wormhole without instantaneously combusting if they incorporated antimatter protection into their clothing. This sparked Hank deliberating the potentials of building the ability to control subatomic particles directly into a suit. They were going to see the far side of the universe. How could he not share this excitement with the woman he knew shared these dreams? He made himself think of it as a brilliant surprise, still in progress. Someday he would show her a far-flung galaxy and her eyes would fill with stars of their own. Until then, he would keep that knowledge hidden.

But if Alex couldn't brag about the Tesseract to his family, he could at least brag about his family to the Tesseract team. Wilkes was the only other family man there, and his son was a toddler, so he was open to stories of the Murry kids at their various stages of development. The rest of the team got an earful in the process. With four unique young people growing strong in the Florida sunshine and ocean breezes, he never ran out of something new to share.

On Cape Canaveral they lived in a beach house, and the kids got to swim in the ocean, play in the sand, hunt for crabs with Fortinbras and identify shells with Kate. They toured the Kennedy Center more than once— the twins were particularly excited by the rocket launches. Alex was most excited to introduce Meg to a young lady he’d met briefly at a NASA gathering, who shared his daughter’s large round glasses, hair-colored hair, and angular build, among several even more important things: “Margaret Murry, meet Margaret Hamilton, one of the NASA computers.”

The young woman smiled and said, “It’s nice to meet you, other Margaret! Your father told me you’re very good at math, too.”

Meg’s eyes went wide. “You do math for NASA?”

“Yep. I’ll let you in on a secret.” Miss Hamilton leaned in close to Meg. “We’re using that math to figure out how to fly to the Moon!”

“Wow,” Meg breathed. The look on her face would forever remain one of his most treasured memories.

And the baby, little Charles Wallace, just watched. It was unnerving, how intensely he watched everything going on around him. He didn't seem to react. He rarely made eye contact. But he took in everything, the gears of his mind practically visible as he processed it all. This child was a thinker, a puzzler, a connector of ideas.

If only he could tell them about it.

They thought he might have a problem hearing, at first. That would account for how intently he used his eyes, compensating. And it would account for him not babbling the way their older three had done, mimicking adult conversation, gradually forming sounds into meaningful words, if he couldn't hear conversation to mimic.  

Eventually, when he was three years old and still hadn't uttered a word, they took him to a pediatric hospital in Orlando to have his hearing tested. A round, bespectacled man in a white coat, a Dr. Kirby, led Charles Wallace into a room with a confused mix of electronic testing equipment and children's toys, and shut the door, leaving the boy's parents to wait.

When he opened the door again, Dr. Kirby looked grave. But instead of giving them the results of the testing, he waved a hand toward Charles Wallace, quietly playing with the blocks in the next room, and asked, "Does he often sort things?"

Alex and Kate exchanged a smile. "Oh yes!" she replied. "He knows all his colors."

"And the letters of the alphabet! He puts his lettered blocks in alphabetical order."

"He's particular about fixing things that are out of place, he knows where they go."

Instead of looking impressed, Dr. Kirby frowned more deeply. "The good news is, there's nothing wrong with his hearing." He sighed. "This is a neurological issue. A mental deficiency. Charles exhibits schizoid patterns of the autistic type: that is, self-focused— drawn inward into his own mind rather than properly taking part in the world around him."

That sounded— wrong, somehow. Alex looked at Kate, who raised her eyebrows. "Well, he certainly does like to think. His mind is always working."

"That's no indication that he's thinking anything useful, though. What you see is most likely his struggles to think."

That sounded still more wrong.

"Now, there's a lovely facility over in Tampa, The Miriam Beeghley Home for Mentally Ill Children, that can care for him properly."

As the meaning behind the doctor's words sunk in, Alex watched them sink in behind his wife's eyes in tandem. She stiffened. "We're not putting our son in a so-called 'home.' His home is with his family."

"But can you meet his needs? At Beeghley's he'd have nurses trained in dealing with mentally deficient individuals, doctors who can treat—"

"Frankly, Dr. Kirby, I am a doctor. Of biology, yes, but medicine is a subset of that. And I'm confident I can handle raising my own child myself."

"Well, that may be the problem, Mrs. Murry. Dr. Kanner at Johns Hopkins notes that children with autistic schizoid patterns often come from… cold households. Where mothers are perhaps too preoccupied with their own career pursuits to give them the love and attention they need."

Kate's jaw dropped.

Alex fumed. "Now hold on one minute! Where do you get off accusing my wife of child neglect?"

"I'm not accusing her, Dr. Murry"— Alex noted that he was granted his doctorate title, but Kate, equally educated, was "Mrs. Murry"— "I'm merely pointing out patterns that have been—"

"And you think this Beeghley Home can offer my son more love and attention than his own family?!"

"Thank you, Dr. Kirby." Kate put a firm hand on Alex's arm, a firmer press still on her voice. "We'll take all that you've told us into consideration." She steered him away from the infuriating quack and toward their son. "Okay, Charles Wallace, finish your building, it's time to go home." She touched the boy lightly on the shoulder, and, without looking, he raised his tiny hand and placed it in hers.

Alex couldn't help shooting Dr. Kirby a smug look. Too preoccupied for love and attention, my foot.

"It's not true," he said as soon as they were outside. "Don't let fools like him make you doubt yourself. You are both a brilliant scientist and a gloriously warm, loving mother. And wife."

"I know it. I'm not going to stop doing what I do on the assumptions of a man who's never even been to our home to see the love and warmth there. But I am going to read these studies on autistic tendencies for myself. I'm sure we can find a way to help Charles that's leagues better than anything the… Beeghley Home for Mentally Ill Children has to offer."

Even at work, where the team had been successfully triggering the Tesseract and triggering more questions than answers, Alex couldn't stop thinking about the doctor's seemingly grim prognosis. Self-focused, turned in on himself? Just like a tesseract. Hard to understand, even dangerous when provoked, but the potential in that odd inward-turning motion went beyond the limits of human understanding. He wouldn't accept that his son was deficient any more than he would accept that the Tesseract wasn't worth studying simply because studying it was so difficult. He'd meant what he'd told Howard Stark three years before, about seeing the miracles in science: the constant workings of Logos, the Order of the Universe—of God. And God didn't make mistakes. Just because they didn't understand something yet, didn't mean there was no explanation.

He found Kate studying an array of books and papers spread out over the kitchen table when he got home. He kissed her and asked, "How's the research?"

She shook her head. “That depends. On paper, Charles Wallace does fit most of the descriptions of children with autistic schizoid personalities, but—" She covered her face and groaned. “Alex, they’re all so disparaging! The researchers disagree on exactly how much intellectual retardation is inherent in these conditions, but even when one of these children does something brilliant, they brush it off as abnormal. They're painted as hopeless cases, drains on society. But you know and I know that there’s so much more to Charles Wallace than that!”

He placed a hand on her shoulder. "I knew Kirby was barking up the wrong tree the moment he claimed Charles was 'struggling to think.' The boy is clearly—superiorly—intelligent."

"It's almost as if they're pathologizing just— being a scientist. This 'obsessive preoccupation with order and patterns,' here— that's just taxonomic thinking! A vital skill in research!"

Alex frowned over the notes she handed him. “The only truly worrying symptom is the lack of communication. But I was a late talker. Not to this extent, but still."

"I think that may have been where Dr. Kirby was getting his 'cold household' delusions, actually. Maybe not talking much is genetic. They do say a lot of these symptoms show up to a lesser extent in family members."

“Like Meg.” He glanced into the next room at their eldest, who had been spending the past five minutes at least walking back and forth through the rice-strand curtain. “Somehow I don’t think this compulsive sensory-seeking behavior is common among twelve-year-olds, either.”

Kate smiled, fondly but a little sadly. "Yes. Like Meg."

After two years in Florida, Meg had yet to make any true friends at her no-longer-new school. There'd been playmates, at first, but most of them began making excuses not to play after a get-together or two. And a few of them had then taken up whispering behind her back and scorning her outright, with Meg having no idea what she'd done wrong.

Privately, he and Kate had acknowledged that Meg's awkward emotionality had probably played a part— "schizoid reactivity," as the papers they were reading now put it.

As if sensitivity was a bad thing.

Maybe she just needed to find more patient friends.

Kate smiled wryly. "I suppose it's hypocritical of me to wish she'd hurry up and learn the importance of finding a happy medium already."

"She'll be all right." Alex stood behind her chair and wrapped his arms around her shoulders. "She'll grow into herself and find her place, away from all the schoolgirl drama, in time."

"I just wish she had someone her own age to commiserate with in the meantime." 

"At least she has a family that loves her. Some children don't even have that."

"And yet our 'cold household' is supposedly to blame for all this!" She laughed in that way she had, of belittling the things that genuinely hurt her.

Alex squeezed her tighter and kissed her cheek. "Cold is the last thing I would call you, my dear." They rocked together slightly. "Look at our beautiful family! Meg with her passion and skepticism, the twins with their energy and confidence, and Charles Wallace…well, let them throw this talk of 'schizoid personalities' around all they like. We know that all of this is just…him. His own way of thinking. Yes, he's different, but that's what makes him special! The world needs his difference, his uniqueness, even if we can't understand him yet." 

"And at least we've ruled out a hearing problem." How very Kate of her, to be so practical. It made him warm all over.

"He’ll talk when he’s ready. And even if he’s never ready, he’ll find some other way to change the world. People put far too much emphasis on talking, as if it’s the only form of communication.”

"But it's the form of communication our society revolves around most." She sighed. "As long as we can keep him here with us, instead of at some… sanitarium, and can teach him and treat him as if he will make a difference someday, I'll be satisfied."

After supper most of the family settled in the living room to unwind for the evening. The boys were building with blocks, and Meg was curled on a corner of the sofa allegedly reading a book for school, but her brothers' antics distracted her, and she kept pitching in opinions on what they were doing.

Alex watched them, too. The twins were challenging each other to build higher and higher towers. Charles Wallace—just as they hadn't realized was a problem before the trip to the children's hospital—played differently. He was gathering each block they discarded and lining it up in a system he'd apparently devised himself. Alex couldn't make out what that system was quite yet, but it clearly was a system, as Charles was particular about putting each block back exactly where his brothers, unnoticing, had snatched it from. His breathing was growing heavy, and his eyelids had started flickering— maybe he wasn't yelling "No!" or crying, but Alex could tell that the wilder play of his brothers was beginning to bother him. 

He decided to step in. "Let's play a game."

"Is it going to really be math, again?" Dennys whined. The twins had recently bought into the misconception that "math" and "games" were contradictory concepts, despite having enjoyed his games in the past.

"Everything is math," Meg told him before Alex could. Guess he'd said that before.

"This is concrete geometry." He set five blocks in an asymmetrical structure on the coffee table. "You won't use numbers, just spatial reasoning. Now, pretend there's a mirror right here. Your task is to use the other blocks to build what you would see in the mirror if you were looking into it over the blocks."

"That's easy," Sandy said. He quickly replicated the structure Alex had built.

Alex glanced at Meg, who was frowning but not speaking up. "Meg?"

"No. You forgot the mirror part." She switched the blocks around to make the reflection of the structure.

"Very good, Meg. Sandy— and all of you— don't be too quick to jump to conclusions. Use your brain to work out what a question is really asking before you answer. Let's try one with seven blocks, now."

This was usually how their games went. The twins answered in a straightforward, sensible, average way. Meg caught the alternative possibilities, the nuances, the shortcuts. She was incredibly bright, despite what some of her teachers said based on her late assignments, sloppy handwriting, and stubborn insistence on doing things her own way. That was another thing she'd find less frustrating as she grew into herself— more freedom to think and do things in her own way.

As he'd hoped, Charles Wallace took an interest in what they were doing with his blocks. He also hoped the boy might try to imitate them— to put the lie to the implication that he lacked the ability to truly participate in the world around him.

He didn't expect him to build his own perfect mirror image of the test structure. He certainly didn't expect him to build a second perfect mirror image, but this time from a different side, as if the mirror had moved.

That was far too advanced reasoning for a three-year-old.

He laid out a simpler pattern of blocks, one more age-appropriate. "Charles Wallace, which block comes next?" Charles silently added not just the next block, but the next several, until he ran out of table.

His father tried a new pattern of blocks. Charles Wallace nonchalantly continued the pattern.

Alex set up a couple of new challenges for the older kids, then quietly slipped out of the room to find Kate. "Come see what Charles is doing," he whispered.

By the time they made it back to the living room, the harder challenges had been completed, too. "Nice work," Alex told the room at large, not sure who was responsible for what.

"That's just what Charles Wallace built," Dennys said.

"Wait, don't tell us that the baby got it right!" Sandy realized. "I'm still working on it!"

Meg (who had also gotten it right, but this was less surprising) giggled. "Outperformed by a three-year-old. Now who's so smart?"

"Says the twelve-year-old to the eight-year-old." Dennys stuck his tongue out at her. "We're still better at kickball than you."

"We all have our strengths and our weaknesses," Kate cut in firmly. "What's important is that we each do our own best work." She turned wide eyes to Alex and muttered, "which sometimes exceeds everyone's expectations."

"No hopeless cases here," he murmured back.

Charles Wallace continued placing blocks in his own inscrutable system, seemingly oblivious, again, to the world.

The Tesseract Project had taken another remarkable twist in the past few weeks. They'd discovered that there was…something, some solid object, at the heart of the blue hypercube, and that this something was, in fact, creating the Tesseract around it. Whatever it was seemed almost sentient, as if it was taunting them in their efforts to glimpse beyond its wormholes.

Janet and Samberly set about designing ways to defend themselves from the possibly hostile object, Wilkes focused on its potential composition, but the two physicists, Alex and Hank, spent a long time discussing atomic motion and then presented a revised goal to the rest of the team. "I know we've been referring to this as THE Tesseract, but it may do us better to remember that it's really just A tesseract, one being constantly regenerated by this object inside," Alex suggested to the others. "We can learn from it, copy it, but eventually we should figure out how to form a tesseract, anywhere, ourselves— that way we're not dependent on the whims of this particular, somewhat capricious Tesseract."

"And we can do that?" Wilkes raised a skeptical eyebrow.

"We have a lot of bugs to work out," Hank admitted (Samberly muttered "You and your bugs" under his breath), "but the theory— the theory behind it indicates that it should work." 

"Big 'should' there," Janet smiled wryly, "but I think it's worth looking into, at least."

And so for the past week they'd been brainstorming how they themselves might tesser ("Tesser?" "Uh, yeah— it just seemed like the best verb form for the concept." "Oh, it is." "I like it."), how they might force the fabric of space-time to turn inward on itself. Like Charles Wallace. Limitless potential. It just made sense that these two miracles in his life had so much in common.

Kate pulled a large manila envelope from a pile of mail when Alex arrived home one day, and beckoned him out of earshot of the kids. "I had the university send this. These are the perceptual reasoning portions of the Wechsler IQ test. Obviously the verbal component would skew his results," she didn't need to explain to whom the "his" referred, "but if we adjust for just these sections, it will at least give us some quantifiable proof."

Alex nodded. "To show any doctors or other busybodies who try to interfere with our family." He looked over the questions. "A lot of these are not too different from the reasoning games I play with them after supper sometimes. I could administer this while we play, no stress or expectations." He smiled. "Just a father with his incessant math games."

For the sake of veracity, the test had to be administered one-on-one, not in the household's usual after supper free-for-all, so he presented it as a special challenge: each child, one at a time, would see how far they could get with this new set of puzzles he'd found. Meg jumped right in without question. Playing math games with him was one of her favorite pastimes, which probably showed in her well-above-average score. The twins took more convincing, but eventually latched on to the competitive aspect. He didn't tell them that, from a diagnostic standpoint, their scores were too close to make much practical difference, nor that those scores indicated they were anything but the high end of typical— Dennys got to hold one question over the head of his older-by-minutes brother and that was enough for them both.

As for Charles Wallace… well, that he could solve any of these problems at all was why they were giving him this test in the first place. He'd seen what the boy could do. But he started from the beginning, scoring each answer as the test required.

And if the results were anything to go by, Charles Wallace was more than just "superiorly intelligent." He was a certifiable genius. Perhaps one of the greatest minds in the whole history of humanity.

So what if he didn't talk? That was a minor inconvenience compared to the gifts he would surely find some other way to share with the world, eventually.

The more he thought about these "autistic patterns of schizoid personalities," the less pathological they seemed. Most of the brightest minds in science were also social oddities, with some of the very same symptoms.

Einstein. Ramanujan.

Even his colleagues.

Howard Stark knew nothing of tact and social niceties, but his mind never stopped running over a dozen separate puzzles at once.

Aloysius Samberly had no discernible sense of humor and a complete inability to read a room, but he'd just invented a device that could illustrate a 4-dimensional hypercube in real space.

Hank Pym had a tendency to take everything personally and react disproportionately (much like Meg), but he was currently using Samberly's device to predict the paths of subatomic particles in five dimensions.

Jason Wilkes got excited and rambled whether or not anyone could understand or was even listening, but then you did listen and realized he was spewing forth a formula for an immensely stable ion that couldn't be affected by antimatter. 

Janet Van Dyne got so lost in her head while working that no one could call her back to Earth, until she awakened with full specifications for a suit of this material, that could harness the subatomic particles of the surrounding area into a field that the wearer could manipulate.

No. There was nothing wrong with Charles Wallace. It was the rest of the world that couldn't understand him.

As the project continued, Alex and Hank worked most closely together. The difference between astrophysics and quantum physics might appear as vast as the difference between a galaxy and an atom, but that was exactly why the two fields might as well have been one, as far as the Tesseract was concerned. They were figuring out how to shrink the former to the range of the latter, after all (or perhaps it was the other way around), and size was meaningless. The math matched— inevitably, miraculously. Logos revealed Itself to Humanity a bit at a time with each equation.

Eventually the others had done all they could in their own specialties, and started joining the physicists for more and more auspicious computation parties: he and Hank assigning parts of equations around the table and everyone working out another bit of the puzzle, each piece slotting into place and unfolding into a miracle in five dimensions.

"This is it," Stark exclaimed, studying the work they'd accomplished since his last visit. "We are a mere few calculations away from actually warping space-time!"

"That, or we undergo complete bodily disintegration," Samberly suggested. "Either/or, really."

Everyone groaned and threw balls of paper at him. "I, for one, am doing everything in my power to avoid that possibility," Wilkes said. "That's why I'm double-checking your math."

This was greeted with more laughter than indignation. They were too near to paradigm-shaking revelation to waste time on indignation.

So near. Only one final piece eluded them.

This evening, Kate had dropped the twins off at Little League and taken Meg to find new shoes. Alex sat in the quiet house with Charles Wallace, who was busy, as usual, silently sorting his blocks.

He tried to leave work at work, to focus the evenings on his family, but the deeper they dug, the deeper the tesseract lodged itself in his working memory, twisting in and around and through itself whenever he closed his eyes, and often enough when he was supposed to be looking at other things. The answer was somewhere just beyond what his mind's eye could see. Why was it so hard to spot?

"You don't mind if I work on this problem for a bit, do you, Charles?" Charles Wallace, unsurprisingly, didn't answer. (In words, Alex thought. Obviously he didn't mind, or else he might try to stop him. It's not so hard to understand him, Dr. Kirby, at all).

He spread the notes he'd brought home on the table. Technically it was against his contract for him to have brought anything related to the Classified program out of the SHIELD facility, but how could he leave this behind when the final piece of the puzzle might fall into his mind at any moment? One more piece and he was sure it would snap together.

He pondered it, each step of the puzzle, over and over, waiting for that last piece to somehow click. He started to work the shapes of the tesseract out with his hands, as best as one could in three dimensions. Over and over. Again and again. The answer was there, just on the edge of his comprehension!

He heard a shuffling beside him, and Charles Wallace climbed into the next chair. He peered at his father's hands, then leaned over his notes as if studying them, then looked back at his hands, and back and forth a few more times, frowning in concentration. Then Charles began to imitate the movements Alex had been making. Like he thought they were playing another pattern-completion game, this time with gestures. He even seemed to be twisting the end a bit and adding something new to it.

Then Alex watched more closely.

He blinked.

“Holy cow,” he said slowly. “Charles Wallace Murry. Is that really what comes next?”

The boy made the gesture again, tapping it firmly on the page.

That was it. The Fifth-dimensional Tesseract. From the mouths— or hands— of babes.

Alex let out a long breath.

“Well then. A few more years and SHIELD will have a new recruit I guess. But you do realize this is Classified information?” he said with mock seriousness. “I could get in big trouble for letting you put your…brilliant young mind to this task.”

Charles Wallace pushed the paper toward his father, then climbed down to return to his own blocks.