Archive of Our Own ^beta

01.

The first time he tries to get home, it’s with the ruined pieces of the Tallus in his hands.

Nate knows he was right when he told Blink not to come back for him; there’s too much risk to that. He had to close the door and lock these worlds away, where no one can get hurt. But the Tallus had stayed behind with him. It hadn’t gone with Blink, and he knows better than to think the Tallus would make a mistake. It may not be sentient, but it’s never really wrong.

So he pulls the shattered pieces of the key to the universe to his lab and he clears off a table. Through shaky breaths and muffled sobs, he assembles the pieces like the world’s most delicate puzzle. In this world, at least, that’s true. Nate taps at it with nanobots and time particles harvested from the surface of his own skin until it sits, fractured but properly reassembled, in the golden cuff that looks weirdly out of place without Blink to wear it.

The Tallus has broken before. They’ve always found ways to fix it. Nate knows how to do this, or at least he thinks he does. He activates the electric tips of his gloves and reaches forward, feeling the thrum of an oncoming jump against his skin as he nears contact.

Nate focuses on the feeling of home. Not the universe he came from, but the world he came to know. The beach with Blink and her aunt; the village he’d rebuilt with Val; the smell of spiced meats and fresh bread and the sound of Wolvie’s laughter.

He taps the surface of the Tallus. A ripple passes through it as the gemstone knits itself back together, and Nate feels joy bubbling up through his chest and pressing against his ribcage.

The world explodes in a bright red light. Reality expands, contracts, dissipates into ribbons. At the center, the Tallus clips out of existence, and Nate feels his body burn as his cells are overwritten.

02.

There is something wrong with Kang the Conqueror.

Nothing feels right. He’s not sure how he got here, a mansion on top of a world that fears him. The empire he holds in his hands is built on the bodies of those who stood in his way. He knows that, at the time, he didn’t care about the cost of the world as long as it was built. But now… Now that price tag sits heavy on his shoulders. He doesn’t know how he ignored the weight for this long.

“Because you weren’t the one who paid it,” a voice offers. Old, familiar, forgotten.

Kang lifts his head to survey the army assembled in front of him. “Who speaks to me? Show yourself.”

No one so much as scratches their nose. Kang scans the rows of identical uniforms, searching for some kind of outlier. He’s so focused that it almost surprises him when he catches it: a specter, a ghost of white outlined in a pink ink.

“Khan,” he breathes, a name he didn’t know he knew. His hands grip the railing in front of him hard enough to crack the stone.

The ghostly mirage of Kamala Khan appears beside him, nodding her head. Her white hair falls over her eyes and the red scarf around her neck flutters in an unseen wind. “A mutual friend sent me. She said you might need a reminder of where you came from.”

“We have… no friends. I am not an ally of yours,” he mutters.

“Kang the Conqueror isn’t,” Khan says. “But Iron Lad was.”

“Kang, sir?” an armed soldier asks warily. “Are you alright?”

Kang knows from looking at him that the man doesn’t see Khan. This is a ghost sent only for him, a haunting that is more than earned on his part. To anyone else, he’s talking to thin air. Kang doesn’t answer; he turns away from the crowd and marches off his podium, headed for his chambers.

Kamala Khan keeps pace. “You can’t run from me.”

“Why not?” Kang demands, swiping a hand through her. “I told you all to leave me alone.”

He did. He remembers that much now. He can see the world exploding, the universes spread out in front of him like loose threads. If they pull on him too tightly, everything could unravel.

But no. This is all a dream. Madness. He isn’t Iron Lad; he doesn’t know Kamala Khan; he is dreaming.

“I am a dream,” Khan says, as if she can read his mind. “That’s how I’m here. You’re dreaming, I’m a dream, and my daughter can connect the two.”

“I don’t believe you,” Kang-not-Nate insists. He falls into a chair, suddenly weak in the knees. His suit beeps at him; his heart rate is elevated. “I’ve never met you.”

He sees it, though. A plane flying over the Atlantic with a bomb inside. Jersey City. A world torn by war, with metahumans and inhumans at the center. A frozen landscape with—with—

“Stop it!” Nate shouts, covering his ears with both hands. “I don’t want to remember!”

Khan snorts. “Bummer. I promised Blink I’d bring you back, and unlike her, I don’t go back on my word.”

She reaches one faded, ink-drawn hand out to him. He flinches back. It isn’t fast enough. Her hand wraps around his wrist, and it feels hot as fire even through the barriers of his suit. The sensation of a jump, of two realities bleeding into one another, overtakes him.

He screams. Khan laughs.

The world splinters into fractions.

All at once, the sound cuts out. Nate falls, and Khan isn’t there to catch him.

03.

The world trembles beneath his fist. Kang has conquered, has fulfilled the destiny he was given so many years ago. He had made short work of it, too, as though whatever obstacles there might have been were told to make way for his impending success story.

He fears nothing. He fears no one. Kang stands atop a world torn apart and reassembled to fit a dream that, if pressed, he isn’t sure he ever wanted all that much.

The woman sitting in his window hums her agreement, tilting her head back against the stone of the window frame. “Maybe you should be writing yourself a better story.”

“What?”

He doesn’t remember inviting her into his chambers. She must be connected to someone important, though, if the number of gemstones adorning her person is anything to go by. She glances at him out of the corner of her eye and shrugs.

“Stories aren’t set in stone, you know. We should know.” Her mouth curves upward in a knowing smile. “We’re both living in them.”

Her blue skin is almost luminescent in the moonlight. There’s something about her that’s familiar to him, scratching at the corners of his brain he hasn’t dusted off since he took a new name. He turns away from her and marches toward the door.

“I didn’t ask for company,” he says. “Leave before I call for guards.”

The woman doesn’t stop smiling. Instead, she opens a book sitting in her lap. He didn’t even see it before. “Once upon a time,” she starts. The pages start to smoke. A hazy, pink fog drifts through the air, reaching for Kang’s ankles. “There was a boy named Nate Richards. He came from a land far, far away, in a distant future. But that home was taken from him, and he drifted.”

Kang stumbles toward the door, calling for his guards. The pink smoke continues toward him, though, and the woman keeps reading. Unbothered even by him.

“It took some time, but eventually, Nate found friends. A team of others like him, people without homes to return to. They had a mission. A group of terrible wizards was ruining everything, and Nate and his friends were the only ones who could stop them.”

TJ Wagner looks him in the eye, and she winks. It wrenches a sob from his throat. The pink wraps around Nate’s ankle and sends him stumbling to the floor. He watches as the mist creeps up over him.

“TJ, you have to stop,” Nate insists. The fear is clawing its way up his tongue. “I can’t, I have to stay—"

TJ stood from her seat on the windowsill and walked to him. She kneeled down to pull the helmet from his head, hands brushing the hair back from his forehead. Something about her seemed… unreal, almost. Like a sketch from a storybook. Like she wasn’t really here, after all.

“Nate was very brave, and very strong. He sacrificed himself to save everyone else from the wizards’ terrible spell,” TJ continued, ignoring his protests. “He thought he belonged there. He thought he deserved it. But his friends were selfish, and they missed him too much to let him go.”

Nate’s vision was pink around the edges. His skin was alight with electricity, the familiar itch he’d forgotten he knew. He tried to tell TJ, again, to stop. That what she was doing was dangerous, that it would get everyone killed. The words wouldn’t come.

“So they worked together. They tried to find ways to bring him home,” TJ says. Her hands are cool against Nate’s forehead, her eyes damp. “Because they knew, even if he didn’t, that Nate Richards deserved a happy ending.”

The pink had overtaken him now. He was covered in it, breathing it in, drenched and soaked and trapped. Nate let out a wordless scream and writhed against it. Kamala had tried this, Blink had tried this, he had tried this, and it wouldn’t work. There was no going back. There was never any going back.

The storybook shuts with a loud snap!

TJ is gone. The world is empty, a blank white canvas.

Nate takes a deep breath and prepares himself for another reset.

04.

There is a small creature in his chambers. Kang has blasted it with everything in his arsenal, but it hasn’t made a lick of difference. The thing persists at pestering him with flashes of yellow and blue and ramblings about pie.

“You missed out on the best dinner last night, too!” the thing rambles, rolling out of the way of his latest barrage. “We had empanadas and a cake! There was a chair at the table for you, but the others said you couldn’t make it, so I came to find you!”

“You make,” Kang replies between bullets, “no sense!”

“People tell me that a lot,” it chatters on. “It feels like T’Challa is always telling me, ‘Wolvie, stop,’ and, ‘Wolvie, that’s not your business.’”

Kang freezes.

“Wolvie,” he mutters, so quiet it almost doesn’t pass through the mask’s voice modulator. “T’Challa.”

“That’s us!” the creature exclaims. “I knew you would remember eventually!”

Kang – Nate – reaches up to pull his helmet off. “Wolvie, I’m—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to try and hurt you. But you can’t be here.”

“That’s what T’Challa said, too. But I told him he wasn’t looking at things the right way. We can get out of anything if we just find the right tools,” Wolvie says.

“I don’t think it works like that this time, Wolvie.” Nate drops to the ground with a sigh. Wolvie climbs into his lap almost immediately. It should be comforting, but it opens up an old wound in Nate’s chest that he cannot believe ever closed. “I have to stay. If I go, it puts everyone in danger. Do you understand?”

Wolvie frowns. “Even if we break out of the boxes?”

Nate frowns back. “What?”

Wolvie has always had abilities that confused Nate. He’s learned not to question them too much, but that doesn’t make it less surreal to watch. He sticks out his claws and swipes through the air. With the sound of tearing paper, the fabric of the world itself seems to break apart.

On the other side, Nate can see their own setup, mirrored: Nate in his Kang armor, seated on the floor of his destroyed quarters. Wolvie, sitting happily on his knee.

The other Nate says, “How did you do that?”

The rift closes.

Nate says, “How did you do that?”

Wolvie grins. “It’s like the brackets you can put around words to talk to strangers. Sometimes, if you want to go somewhere, all you have to do is cut the boxes around you. That’s how I got here.”

It doesn’t make sense. Nothing about Wolvie makes sense, and sense tends to be something Nate prides himself in having. He pats Wolvie on the head and says, “Actually, I think it’s probably time for you to go back. Everyone is wondering where you went.”

“Oh. Okay.” Wolvie stands and wobbles over to the wall. He looks down at the stone floor. “Here is good. You should come, too!”

His claws rip through the world with the same torn sound. Wolvie falls through a hole of his own making. Nate waits for the hole to close behind him, for the universe to knit itself back together again. He waits, and waits, and waits. The hole never bothers to close.

Through it, Nate can see the shimmering golden sand and bright blue of the water back home.

Against his own judgement, he starts to crawl across the floor. He gets to the border, the place where the edges of his world flutter like the pages of a newspaper. Down below, Wolvie is splashing around in the familiar waters of the Atlantic.

“Come on, Nate! You can do it!”

Nate knows better. He knows better. Even so, his fingers stretch out toward the fresh air and the sunny skies. He’s just barely made contact when he hears it: the distant rumble of thunder, the wave of static electricity racing toward him.

There isn’t even time to scream. This world – his world, the prison he made – gathers around him like a straightjacket, pulls him back in. It all fades to black, like the last shot of a movie. He already knows what the opening scene was; and, he knows, he’s bound to play through it again.

05.

“I have a theory about you, Nate.”

Kang’s head snaps to the side to glare at the woman who spoke his name. The words die on his lips. The sounds of the training camp spread below them fade to a distant din, a barely-there buzzing.

Clarice Ferguson is frowning at him. Blink is frowning at him.

“I think you feel like you deserve this,” she says, gesturing with one pink hand at the wide spread of soldiers and debris.

“I do not!” Nate insists. “I don’t want this! I don’t— I don’t want to conquer anyone.”

Blink scoffs. “No, I know that. That’s why you’re stuck here. What I mean is, you believe that your place in the world is somewhere that hurts you. You think you deserve to be in hell, forever and ever, because of what some other version of you said you would do.”

“You’re wrong,” Nate snaps.

He turns on his heel and starts for the stairs. He doesn’t want to watch people fighting under his orders, and he doesn’t want to hear Blink telling him what’s wrong with him, and he doesn’t want to be here. He doesn’t. It’s a miserable world and a miserable fate, but he doesn’t get a choice. If he did, he wouldn’t stay.

Blink pops into the air next to him. “Then why aren’t you out yet?”

“I c—” Nate groans. He stops in his tracks and turns to face her. “I told you. I can’t leave. And you promised you wouldn’t try to get me out because it would ruin everything. Me staying is the only way to save everyone.”

Blink has to stand on her toes to reach his helmet. He’s taller here; he’s grown. He doesn’t want to think about it, though, and it’s so much easier to get annoyed at her for pulling off his armor. Everyone keeps doing that to him. He swats at her hands.

“Stop, stop,” he insists. “Stop all of it! Leave me alone, Clarice!”

Blink falls back on her heels with a huff. “No.”

“No?”

“You’re wrong, Nate,” Blink tells him. “You staying here isn’t saving everyone. Most people, sure, but… it means we don’t get to save you.”

“Yeah, well. I’m one person, against the whole multiverse. You can’t get a better success rate.”

He turns and starts marching down the stairs again. Just a little farther and he’ll be hidden in the halls of the compound, and Blink won’t be able to keep up well enough to teleport to him.

“Okay, now you’re being ridiculous on purpose!” Clarice calls after him. Sure enough, she blinks into the air beside him and falls in to match his stride. “Where’s the Nate who always told us how smart he was? How no one could ever beat him at an equation? You can do better than almost perfect. To the Nate I know, anything less would be a disappointment.”

Nate growls in the back of his throat. “So maybe I’m not the Nate you know!”

This time, when Clarice pops up, it’s directly in front of him. Her portal closes so abruptly that it slices off the tails of her coat, not that she seems to notice. Again, she stands on her toes and points a finger at him.

“That’s enough, Nate,” she says. “I am your team leader, and I am not leaving you behind. I used your lab equipment to scan diagnostics of the Tallus before I found you. Stop wallowing, use them, and get yourself back home. Otherwise, I’m coming back and dragging you out myself. Got it?”

Nate all but deflates. His fingers twitch at his sides, and he forces himself to take a deep breath. “I’m scared, Blink.”

“Oh, Nate.” Blink sighs and reaches for his helmet again. All the fight has gone out of them both, and he lets her take it off without a fight. Her hands push his hair out of his face, wipe the gathering tears from the corners of his eyes. “I know. I’m scared, too. But if we have to be scared, I want it to be the whole team, together.”

“What if I ruin everything?” he whispers.

Blink shakes her head just slightly. “No, no. If this goes sideways, it’s on me. You’re not ruining anything, Nate. Not in this world or any other one. You find a way out of here, and I’ll find a way to fix everything else. Okay?”

Nate swallows. “Okay.”

“Okay.” Blink smiles and pats him on the cheek. “We love you, you know. Come home soon.”

“I will.”

That’s all he gets. The shimmering gemstone of the Tallus flickers and the familiar red light overtakes Blink, pulling her back to the dimension she came from. All that’s left in her place is the smell of ozone and a hint of static electricity, and the first real bit of hope that Nate has had in a long time.

00.

When he falls onto the soft bed of sand, Nate almost doesn’t believe it.

He closes his eyes tight against bright sun overhead and waits. It’ll come any second now, that electric, spiraling feeling of the universe forcing itself back into the proper shape. He’ll be pulled out of here and thrust right back into Kang the Conqueror, where he’s supposed to be.

Waves crash against the earth. Somewhere else along the beach, a child screams in delight.

Nate blinks one eye open. “Hello?”

Nothing happens.

Hesitantly, slowly, Nate pushes his way to standing. He looks around. The guest house is just a few meters away. The chairs in the sand are empty and the table on the patio is deserted. Maybe he’s in the wrong dimension, after all; maybe this is just some stranger’s vacation house, and he still hasn’t made it home.

He walks on shaky legs across the beach and up the hill toward the street. It’s enough work climbing up that it keeps his brain from buzzing, keeps him from working through all of the reasons why he absolutely ruined this and all of his friends have disappeared and it’s definitely his fault. He barely thinks about it at all, even as he walks up the front steps to their home.

Nate raises a fist to knock on the door. But he hesitates before he makes contact, and then he can’t quite make himself stop hesitating. He stares at the friendly white entryway and his mind goes blank, too overwhelmed with all the possibilities to come up with anything to say or do at all.

“Friend Nate!”

The world comes crashing back into focus all at once. Nate turns around on his heels to find his team – his friends, his home – gathered in the driveway. They’ve all frozen in place, hands full of paper grocery bags and odds and ends. Except for Valkyrie, anyway, who storms toward him with an enthusiasm only she can possess.

“I knew thou wouldst return to us!” she proclaims, bounding up the steps to meet him on the porch. Her arms wrap around his waist, lifting him off the ground in a hug tight enough to crack his spine.

“Hi Val,” he squeaks, apparently incapable of saying much else.

“Hark, teammates!” Val cries, spinning to face the others with Nate still held aloft in her arms. “Our sisterhood is once again reunited! We are thus well-prepared for whatever battles may await us! I recommend a strong ale in celebration!”

Nate can’t help the laugh it startles out of him. “You recommend a strong ale for everything.”

“And it has never led me astray yet, young Friend Nate! Come, thou shall recount thy escapades to us upon the sand!”

He allows himself to be carried down to the shore again, to be set down on a chair. The other exiles seem to shake themselves out of their stupor to follow him; Clarice fusses over whether he has enough food and water, Peggy checks him for injuries, and T’Challa and Wolvie start the process of a bonfire before he has the chance to even say hello.

It isn’t until hours later, though, when everyone is settled in with marshmallows over the fire and sleep building around their shoulders, that Nate lets himself take it all in.

He did it. At least for now, the world isn’t ending. There’s nothing to be afraid of anymore, no big worldly reset dangling over his shoulder. He finally, finally made it home.

Across the fire, Clarice catches his gaze. One bright green eye winks against the dark.