Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The address his phone leads him to turns out to be an old-fashioned diner in the Lower East Side. None of the staff or clientele immediately ping him as Hispanic...but when two middle-school-age black boys go barrelling through the back, the woman behind the counter yells after them in affectionate Spanish. So he asks about the lunch specials in the same language, and gets told la sopa del día with a dazzling smile.

He orders a chocolate milkshake and a plate of taquitos, and waits for them at the bar, looking around the place once more. A couple other customers at the counter, a few groups of people in the booths. Nobody familiar.

He pulls his phone out of a coat pocket and double-checks. No texts. No changing the place...or the time...or calling the meeting off completely.

How soon is too soon to reach out? How long should he wait if he doesn't want to be pushy?

He finds himself staring out the windows. More than half expecting to catch sight of Marc across the street -- maybe working through another flask, refusing to come in.

When the server sets the plate in front of him, a figure leans on the counter next to him and says (in English), "This one's on our tab, Gena."

He does a double-take so hard he nearly falls off the stool. "Marc--!"

When did he get in? Has he been here this whole time?

(The light-brown military jacket and black trousers aren't exactly eye-catching, but it's not like he's changed his build. Or his face. Or his hair...)

Marc looks at him just long enough to nod. "Hi, Dad."

"He doesn't have to pay for it," says Elias quickly to...the eponymous Gena of Gena's, apparently. He's already reaching into his other pocket, going for his wallet. "I can get my own lunch."

In a perfect deadpan, Marc says, "He's too good to take my money."

Elias winces. "That is not what I--!"

Marc...pats him on the back? Calming. Casual. Like they do this all the time, like it hasn't been more than twenty years since Elias last hugged his son.

"Our tab," he repeats, while Elias's mouth is still hanging open. His eyes flicker down to the cane resting against Elias's knee. "Anything I can carry for you?"

"I can walk, mijo, it's okay. I only bring the cane to make my doctor happy." Sometimes in the evenings Elias gets tired enough that he appreciates the extra balance -- but this is lunch. He can handle lunch.

So he hooks the cane over his forearm, and takes the tray carefully in both hands, and lets Marc lead him to a corner booth.

This can't be where Marc was sitting before. Elias is sure he looked here. He didn't recognize the other person sitting by the window, either (a white woman with long blonde hair, in an off-white blouse with a dark green cardigan), and getting closer doesn't make her any more familiar. But Marc gestures for Elias to sit on the opposite bench, and slides in next to the stranger without blinking.

"Um. Hello." Elias sets his food on the table, and adjusts his glasses. "You're not Layla...?"

"Layla's outside," says Marc. "Ready to be the getaway driver, if we need to make a fast exit." (That should be a joke, but it doesn't sound like one.) "She's here for...call it emotional support."

The blonde holds out a hand, over a glass of cherry soda and what looks like a shared basket of fries. "It's nice to meet you...Mr. Spector? Rabbi Spector?"

"Just Elias, please," says Elias, accepting the handshake with relief.

Even back in the day, it wasn't hard to figure out that Marc needed mental-health support, and Elias knows he never found the right kind. Never even got Marc to the diagnosis he officially has now. Elias has been reading up on it (first the very short list of DID resources Marc forwarded him, then a much longer research dive on his own), he knows there's controversy, but if the treatment is working, it's working, right? And for Marc to be accepting help from a "friend", that's quite the progress he's made...

Marc raises his eyebrows at the blonde. "Okay, you've gotta turn the thing off, he thinks you're a nurse. Or -- a social worker, or something."

Elias picks up the milkshake to cover for his blush. "I didn't say that!"

He has a sip. The blonde waits for him to finish, fully swallowing and everything...then flicks her fingers.

Little ripples of red static flow over them, spiral outward, and bubble around the whole booth.

Elias does another double-take, because all of a sudden that's Wanda Maximoff.

Sokovia Accords Wanda Maximoff. Westview Anomaly Wanda Maximoff. And, most recently, Regent's Park Hex Wanda Maximoff.

Her hair is strawberry-blonde, her cardigan is pale rose, her fashionable long coat is a deep garnet, her lips and nails are vivid carmine. It's not just a palette swap, either; she actually changed her face. (Elias wouldn't have been fooled by just a dye job -- not with the amount of photos/video of Wanda he's looked over by now -- including the switch she already made from brunette to redhead.)

"I'm not interfering with anyone's mind, I'm projecting illusions," Wanda says, before Elias can decide how rude it would be to ask. "Just over us, earlier. Now it's over the whole booth. Nobody looking in this direction will see any faces they recognize from the news. Or hear anything...distressing."

Marc raises his eyebrows. "What are you dubbing in for the audio? A Cheers routine?"

Wanda gives him a disarmingly-cute smile. "Oh, gosh, no. If it's something fun, it'll draw attention. I thought I'd stick with 'rhubarb, rhubarb, peas and carrots, peas and carrots'."

Elias isn't ready to be disarmed. (He even picks up his fork, as if the Scarlet Witch could be held off by cutlery, and pokes halfheartedly at his taquitos.) "How distressing were you planning to get?"

Oh, now they both look at each other in uncomfortable silence. So much for hoping it might be a joke.

"That depends a little on you, I think." Wanda folds her arms on the tabletop and leans forward. "Full disclosure: I have a mental connection open with the boys over here. In case they need to tell me something private. I promise not to go into your mind at all. Unless there's some kind of emergency."

"...Like what?"

"Nothing we expect to actually happen," cuts in Marc. "But on the remote chance you suddenly have a stroke in the middle of the diner, and you can't explain what's going on because you can't talk...? Then yeah, I'm okaying Wanda to psychically check you out."

Oh. Elias's doctor would probably want him to accept that, too. "I...suppose that's fine."

"Also, just so you know," finishes Wanda, "if you think directly at me? I won't be able to help overhearing. Give it a try, if you want."

Elias rifles through a list of possible Inoffensive Small Talk questions, and settles on thinking, HOW DID YOU TWO MEET?

"All right, all right, you don't have to yell!" exclaims Wanda, wincing back. To Marc, she adds out loud, "He asked how we met."

Marc beckons for her to go ahead.

"Well. A few years ago, I was having a difficult time. You see -- I had recently lost my sons." She's all business now, voice steady and even. "I pulled away from everyone...struggled a lot...started falling into a very dark place. The boys here happened to have a job in the area where I was staying. We ran into each other. Got to talking. They convinced me that I had to get help -- before I spiraled completely out of control and started hurting people. You know how much experience they have with that, I think."

Dead silence.

Until Marc bursts out laughing.

"Holy fuck, Wanda!" He doubles over, slapping the table, wheezing with mirth. "Shots fired, right out of the fuckin' gate! Why the hell aren't we payin' you for this, huh?"

Elias realizes he's flinched away, flattening his spine against the padded back of the bench. Marc rests his forehead on the tabletop as he dissolves into delighted snickering. Wanda is eerily still and unblinking, except for how she flashes Marc the ghost of a fond smile.

At last Marc picks himself up...gets a look at whatever gobsmacked expression Elias is making right now...and flashes a get a load of this guy smirk at Wanda, grinning with all his teeth. "Now he's thinking, 'maldición, the goddamn mood swings are back'."

Elias tries to force himself to relax. He knew about Marc's mood swings.

Wanda sits back, raising her eyebrows. "I think we can all admit, from the outside, that's what it looks like."

He's not used to having them happen in front of him, not when it's been so long. But it's not like they're a surprise. If he can just...

"It would probably help if you did the thing."

The smirk falters. Marc grimaces.

"Right, then. I'll start, shall I?"

...says Marc?

...says a whole second Marc, who slides out from behind the first Marc like an optical illusion, settling on the bench beside him. This one has longer curls, and a blue shirt with long sleeves, and speaks with the British accent Marc always used when he was playing...

"Steven?" blurts Elias.

Marc-in-blue -- Steven -- gives Elias a little wave, just from the wrist, and an encouraging  smile. "All right, points for that! One-for-one, good job."

"Oh, like it's hard," scoffs...

...okay, Elias blinked, and now there are three Marcs. 

Neither of the new ones is wearing the brown jacket and black shirt from a moment ago. The one in the middle is in an off-white hoodie, hands folded in front of him, with a precise short haircut and a solemn expression. The last one, next to Wanda, is in a black leather jacket over a white button-down with a vividly pink tie, elbow propped on the table and chin resting in his hand. He's the one who scoffed. Now he's smirking at Elias, from under what must be the world's fastest-growing mustache.

"What?" sputters Elias. "Who--? How?"

"This is, ah. How we look to each other." Steven gestures down the line of them. "People as psychic as Wanda can see us too. Now she's helping us sort of...broadcast it for you."

"I...see."

Elias doesn't let himself stare at Wanda. If she's not just a neutral "broadcaster"...if she's interfering in Marc's mind somehow, playing this up...there's nothing he can do about it.

Instead, he focuses on the figure in the middle. "Marc?"

Marc-in-white's eyebrows jump. "Yeah," he says gruffly. There's something in his hands, a kind of metal ball with interlocking layers; he idly spins them around with his thumbs as he talks. "Hi, Dad."

"Ahhh, golpe de suerte," says the third one darkly. "But yeah. He's Marc. I'm the goddamn mood swings."

"Oh, now, give him some credit," says Steven. "There was a bit of deduction going on there, I think."

His smile is all kinds of encouraging. Elias dares to return it.

(It wasn't just luck, no! Some of the resources Elias has looked through, they talk about "systems" having an original person, a core person, and all the other "parts" forming around the core. So...naturally Marc would be the one in the middle, right?)

"Also," adds Steven, "let's not pretend the rest of us haven't got moods, here."

Okay, so the volatile part wasn't literally introducing himself as The Mood Swings. Elias wasn't sure.

Trying to be polite, he says, "Do you have a name?"

"Do I have a name," echoes the man in black, dripping with sarcasm.

Marc puts a hand on his back. Same kind of calming, steadying gesture he used on Elias at the counter. "It's a fair question. Some of us showed up without 'em."

The third man waves toward Elias. "Yeah, but he doesn't know that!"

"Does that mean -- it's more than just you?" asks Elias carefully. "There are...other parts, in Marc's head?"

All three men flinch.

"All right, down a few points there," mutters Steven, leaning heavily against Marc's side. "It's not just Marc's head, yeah? It's our head."

"And this is everyone you get to talk to," snaps the last part. "And don't call us parts."

Elias turns back to Marc. "I looked at everything you sent me. I did. The websites, the videos...that's where I got it from, that's just the word they use."

"Steven actually curated those," says Marc mildly. And, redirecting the conversation to Steven: "Is he right?"

"Some sources use it, because some systems like the term for themselves," says Steven. "Which is perfectly fine. For them." To Elias: "And now you know we don't care for it. So please don't use it for us again."

Elias nods. "What should I call you instead?"

"Alters," says Marc. In the same breath as Steven says "Headmates," and the other one says "Fuckin' people."

...okay, Elias had imagined them all taking turns, thinking Marc could only "be" one part at once. The idea that they can all talk over each other is -- unexpected.

Wanda, still next to the mysterious one, rests a gentle hand on the sleeve of his jacket. "It might help him personalize you if you gave him your name."

The alter (that word was also in Elias's research, he can remember it) rolls his eyes. "Guess."

"Um," says Elias.

What other movies did Marc like? And what characters were this aggressive, rough-edged and hostile, but still captured his imagination the way Steven Grant did?

The boys never got into anything quite as hard as Tomb Buster, at least not that Elias knew of...but Marc went on a pretty intense space kick for a while, saw all the Star Wars...

This guy isn't going to be Han Solo, is he?

Again, Wanda steps in. "Making him guess might not be a good idea," she says, with more of her Sokovian accent coming through. "One of my boys was named after Pietro."

...That's the name of Wanda's dearly-departed brother.

Oh.

Elias hadn't been on his way to guessing Randall, but now every other name in the world has dropped out of his head.

The mystery alter shrugs off the calming hands of both Marc and Wanda, sits up straighter, crosses his arms, and glares stonily past the end of the table at the view out the window. "Jake. I'm Jake."

...huh, Elias could've guessed that after all. It was Marc's Hebrew name. "Jacobo?"

"Best just call him Jake, Rabbi," puts in Steven, as Jake's lip curls. "Don't make anything fancy out of it."

"All right," says Elias faintly...then notices what Steven called him. "You -- you don't have to stop calling me Dad."

Again with the talking-over-each-other thing: Steven winces and says "Well," at the same time as Jake growls "Fuck no," and Marc says "He really does."

"Think this calls for a different sort of visual aid," decides Steven. He leans forward to catch Wanda's eye across the two alters in between. "Wanda, can we get a flashback montage?"

Wanda flips her wrist, opening her hand around a knot of scarlet plasma. She aims it at her end of the table: the very edge, where it meets the window.

A flatscreen TV rises up out of...

Out of nowhere? The mechanics of it -- like the mechanics of how the bench never got bigger, but somehow has room for three Marcs and one Wanda to sit comfortably in a row -- make Elias's head hurt if he tries to think about it too closely.

It flicks on.

...and there's little Marc, dressed for a middle-school spring day in a camo T-shirt and huge cargo shorts, climbing onto the school bus.

He looks sulky. But he's not hurt, no cuts or bruises or anything, just moody. He drags his backpack past the bench seats with other kids on them, and plops down in an empty row. (Must be from the years when they kept cutting the school district's budget, the tattered green upholstery is held together in more than a few places with duct tape.)

Another little boy fades in next to him.

"Hi!" chirps the second boy -- a second tween Marc, with longer curls, bright blue clothes that fit him better, and an open, friendly smile. "I finished the book last night, and, good news, the dog does not die -- do you want to borrow it, or just have me tell you how it ends?"

"Mrmph," says little Marc, fingers brushing the side of his face.

...It's not visibly cut or bruised, but it's swollen.

"Ooh. Hard luck," says the other boy, who can only be little Steven. "You want the ice pack out my lunch?...No, no, don't be silly, it's no trouble. I'll survive having lukewarm carrot sticks for one day."

He pops open his lunch box -- it's the Tomb Buster one Marc used to have, stocked with PB&J, sliced vegetables, and orange juice. And a napkin, which he diligently wraps around the ice pack, then presses the whole thing to Marc's swollen cheek.

Marc takes over holding it. "The book?"

"Right! Okay, well -- you remember how, in the beginning, there were supposed to be two boys switched places, but it accidentally ended up being three...?"

"Think of me as Marc's childhood best friend," says the adult Steven: cutting in like a voiceover, while the dialogue from the screen fades out. "The kind of friends who practically lived in each other's pockets. Any time he wasn't over at my house, I was over at his."

The school-bus scene cuts to a rainy afternoon in a boy's bedroom. Same layout as Marc's, like it's from one of the neighborhood houses built on the same model as theirs, but stocked with posters and action figures Elias doesn't recognize.

Little Marc picks up a plastic astronaut, narrating something out loud with an intense expression. Little Steven fades into view, watching with a grin.

"In a...slightly different world," narrates present-day Marc, "the neighborhood joke would've been that you picked up an extra son."

Cut to: a bright summer day on the sidewalk in front of the synagogue, little Marc working through a bucket of chalk. Little Steven fades in next to him, and points to a part of the drawing.

...no, wait, the hair lengths have flipped. Little Marc is the one who faded in. Little Steven is the one who grabs a new piece of chalk and starts shading in blue.

"If one of 'em was a girl," adds Jake, surprisingly non-hostile for once, "the joke woulda been that they were definitely gettin' married when they grew up."

Cut to: a cramped scene in what looks like a closet. That must be teenage Steven sitting against the side wall, a library paperback propped open on his knees, the only light from his tiny LED reading lamp.

Sure enough, it's the short-haired teenage Marc who fades into view in the shadows next to him. Lying on the floor, a roll of clothes pillowed under his head, either listening or asleep.

"Probably called you 'Dad' by accident a few times, out of reflex," finishes present-day Steven. "Honestly, I might do again. But you're not. My dad, I mean."

Elias nods, trying to keep up. "And Jake...came along later?"

"Jake," says Jake acidly, all sharp edges again, "was the troublemaker from the wrong side of the tracks that these two weren't allowed to play with."

In a more normal voice, Marc says, "Jake was also with us back then."

On-screen, a third boy fades in.

This one gives Elias a jump-scare, because he looks awful. Medical tape holding together a cut on his nose and another on his temple, heavy reddened bruising across his forehead and cheeks, like he's been slamming his face into a wall. Even when Marc was getting into fights at school, he never looked that beat-up.

But teen Jake doesn't do anything aggressive in the scene itself. Just leans over teen Steven's shoulder, on the opposite side from where teen Marc is sleeping, and peers with cautious interest at the book.

It's hard to tell whether Steven knows he's there. The boys don't look at each other, don't start chatting the way Steven and Marc would. The only sign of a change is that young Steven flips back to the beginning of the book.

"I'm Jake. Just Jake," says -- wait, wasn't that Steven? -- oh, of course, he's reading out loud. "You don't need to know my last name, and I can't tell you, anyway. My story is full of small lies. I've changed people's names. I've changed the names of places. I've changed small details here and there. But the big stuff is true..."

"Far as we can tell, I'm the nerd who got us through most of school," remarks present-day Steven. "And these two are the jocks who got us through gym class."

"Yeah, let's sugarcoat the fuck outta this," mutters present-day Jake. "Sure. Gym class. That's what I was for."

Steven sighs. "We're talking him through one thing at a time, remember?"

Looking back at the real(-ish) bench across from him, Elias finds that present-day Marc has pulled back: arms crossed tightly in front of him, jaw set, staring at nothing-in-particular across the diner. Steven is leaning on Marc, hands folded together on Marc's shoulder, chin resting on his interlaced fingers. Jake is still glowering too...but now he's looking at Steven.

It's unnerving. Elias almost tells him to back off.

Before Elias can open his mouth, though, Wanda puts another cautionary hand on the black-sleeved arm. Jake settles back with a hiss.

(Elias still doesn't feel great about Literally Wanda Maximoff being involved in Marc's head. But if this is what it takes to help Marc with regulating his more emotional alters? Maybe it's okay.)

"You...weren't really taking Marc to other parts of town, or other people's houses, right?" he asks, looking at Steven, then back at the screen. It still shows the boys reading in a closet. Looks the same as any other closet -- no obvious evidence of whether it's the one from Marc's bedroom, or not. "You were always coming home?"

"Oh, come the fuck on," snaps Jake. "You knew he wasn't always comin' home."

Cut to: night in Elias's office. The way it looked before the big repainting, so this must be at least twenty years ago.

Teen Marc lets himself in with the spare key. He doesn't turn on the light. Just opens the usual cupboard, feels around inside until he pulls out the sleeping bag and pillow, and unrolls them in the dark.

Elias finds himself waiting for teen Steven to pop up. To turn on a light, or give Marc a smile, or start chattering about something that takes Marc's mind off his troubles. Maybe to calm down Jake, if Jake appears too.

None of that happens. Whatever might be going on in Marc's head, he is, visibly, alone.

...Going by his height and build, this scene must be from only a year or two before he left home. Which puts it after Marc's hospital stay.

(The hospital was supposed to help Marc get better, right? And if he doesn't need to lean on his alters for support, that should be evidence that he is doing better. So...why is this scene just making Elias feel sad?)

"You know what he means, love," says the present-day Steven, gentle but firm. "Physically, there was not a different house that I thought I lived in, no."

"And maybe if there had been, we woulda been safe," adds Jake darkly. "Instead of just tricking ourselves into thinking we were safe, 'cause you didn't realize--"

"Don't yell at him!" exclaims Elias.

Three sets of eyes snap to him, as all three figures freeze.

In the blink of an eye they switch places. Steven front and center, elbows on the table, leaning forward. Marc and Jake standing behind him (no, there shouldn't be space for that between his body and the back of the booth; somehow it works anyway), side-by-side.

"Hi, yeah, setting a boundary, right here right now," says Steven firmly, while Marc wraps an arm around Jake's shoulders. "You are not here to protect us from Jake."

Elias flinches...but doesn't buckle. Hoarsely, he repeats, "He shouldn't yell at you."

"No. Stop. If any one of us actually steps out of line -- that's for the rest of us to tell them, and you to stay out of it." Steven jabs the table with one finger. "Either you keep to your lane, or we turn around and walk out of here, right now. I mean it."

But wasn't this exactly how Elias let them down before? That he didn't protect them? That someone was hurting his son(s), and he didn't stand up for them like he should have, didn't try hard enough to fix it--

"No," says Wanda. Out of nowhere. Sharp and cold.

Isn't this exactly the sort of internal agitation she's supposed to be helping Marc control--

"No," repeats Wanda -- and the temperature around them drops.

This time, literally. Dew forms on the outside of all their mugs. Elias's glasses fog up.

The guys are all looking at her now.

"Wanda," says Marc, a low warning.

"I am not interfering with Rabbi Spector's mind," says Wanda, her Sokovian accent thicker than ever. "I will not force him to respect your boundaries. I am simply making sure he is crystal clear about where your boundaries are."

Steven grimaces. "You've got a wiggly-woo out, Wanda. We can see it."

"...yes." Wanda twists the swirl of red light in her fingertips. "But not for him."

"For what, then?"

She closes her eyes. Presses her lips into a thin line, then takes a centering breath: in through the nose, out through the mouth.

"You boys all have your things to fiddle with." She's got the American accent back, in the lighter tone of a sitcom quip. "Mine just happens to be the fabric of reality."

Bizarrely, the announcement that their friend is casually tampering with basic physics makes Marc and the others relax.

"I--" (All eyes snap back on Elias.) "I will -- keep to my lane."

With that, he closes his mouth and bites his tongue.

"Good," says Marc shortly.

The temperature warms back up. (Fast enough that Elias shrugs off his coat.)

Once Steven seems satisfied Elias isn't going to pick up the argument again, he sits back with a sigh. "We take care of each other. We protect each other. Marc and I both really want you to understand that. Jake would rather take a bullet to the heart than let either of us get hurt. Ask how I know."

There's another long pause while Elias tries to decide if that's a real invitation, or an on-the-spot test of his boundary-respecting abilities.

It ties in with something else he's been deathly curious about, though. So he goes there:

"Do you know because of -- Avenging?"

Steven looks up and behind him, meeting the eyes of Marc and Jake.

Marc nods, and looks to Wanda.

"Bring up the next reel, you think?" she asks.

"Yeah, I guess that's our cue," sighs Marc. "It's time to talk about Moon Knight."

Chapter Text

The new montage, gathered from Marc's (and his alters'?) memories and displayed by Wanda Maximoff as video on a probably-imaginary TV, isn't live-action clips. It feels like something you'd see in the end credits of a movie: a lovely series of stills, lightly-animated, made up like paintings. Realistic enough to tell who's who, but clearly not photos.

"After the Marines, Marc worked freelance for a while," narrates Steven. The three figures are sitting in a row again, this time with Marc on the outside end, Jake in the middle, and Steven next to Wanda. "Ended up on a fateful job, doing security for a group of archaeologists."

A painted encampment set against a desert landscape, a man with greying hair and a fluffy scarf showing Marc something in a book. The brushstrokes suggest an older version of Marc than the one who left home, but still younger than the one sitting across from Elias now.

"Security," echoes Elias dubiously.

The one man might be an archaeologist, sure. What does Elias know from archaeology gear? But flashback-Marc is in off-brand military fatigues. Combat vest, uncomfortably large gun, not a national flag to be seen.

"The kind where you're not supposed to kill anyone. Unless they try to kill us first," says Marc flatly.

"Let's be clear, though: some of his other jobs were about killin' people for money." Jake jerks his head toward the entrance of the diner. "You don't like it, door's over there."

"I don't like it. You know I don't." Elias has had the same objection since Marc first set out to join the Marines. There's never any justification for killing someone. Whoever destroys a life, it is as if he destroyed an entire world. "I still want to hear the rest of your story."

The story doesn't continue. Steven, Marc, and Jake exchange odd looks.

"...Please," adds Elias, in case that's the missing step.

"No, yeah, we're getting back to it," says Steven, distracted. "Just a second."

Why...?

Marc sighs. "Look, we made bingo cards, all right? Tried to predict a bunch of Things Dad Might Say...came up with enough to make a game out of it...and, uh, did. Didn't bring physical copies, but Wanda's tracking them. That was on mine and Jake's."

Whatever Elias expected to hear, that was not it. "You made...bingo cards?"

Jake points at Steven. "His therapist approved."

Wanda does another swirly flick of the wrist. Three cards made of red light materialize in front of each of the three figures -- all the text in the squares blurred out, so Elias can't tell what they say, just that Marc is winning -- then disappear again.

"Could've sworn it was on mine," adds Steven mournfully. "Ah well."

"Your big prediction was, I would say killing is bad?" asks Elias, baffled. "What was the free space, if not that?"

"We can't give you hints about what's on them!" Steven seems earnestly scandalized. "That would be cheating."

A gentle position-swap, so now Marc is in the middle, putting a cautionary hand on Steven's arm. "Let's just get back to the origin story."

"Speaking of killing," adds Jake darkly.

They all turn back to the screen. Elias follows their gazes, heart in his mouth.

If that's why the visuals changed...if this next part involves Marc murdering someone, and they want to spare Elias a glossy 4K rendition of the act...

"So...the job goes south," says Steven. "And Marc takes a hit."

A soft-focus painting of Marc trying to shield the archaeologist from...gunfire? It's stylized as starbursts of light.

"He gets out of there alive...but not well."

The next image is a night scene, washed in purples and blues. Marc is staggering into the shelter of the entrance to a massive structure, clutching his side with one arm, leaning heavily on a pillar with the other.

Elias grips the edge of the table. "This was real?"

Flashback-Marc is still on his feet, but barely. The part of his body that hurts is painted in deep dark shadows, enough that Elias can't see whether he's bleeding through his clothes. Unless...unless that is the blood...?

"How...how bad was it?"

At least when Marc was in the military, Elias knew that if he died on duty, somebody would send a letter and a flag. At least he had that comfort.

If Marc got a fatal injury as some off-the-books mercenary...in the middle of nowhere, hundreds of miles from the nearest hospital...would Elias ever have known...?

He jumps at the feeling of another hand gripping his wrist.

"Dad," says the present-day Marc. "It's okay. We're not dead."

There's a moment when Steven and Jake fade out of view, so it's just Marc. Not in the plain white hoodie, but in the clothes his actual body is wearing. It's really, physically him clasping Elias's hand.

"In the grand tradition of depressed Jews wandering aimlessly in the desert...a god showed up and offered me a deal."

Cut to a high-angled shot over the shoulder of a massive stone statue. A tiny Marc looks up at it from the sand-swept floor. The roof must have caved in long ago -- he's standing in a silver-white spotlight, broken only by the shadow of the statue, crowned with a crescent moon.

"Khonshu?" breathes Elias.

Marc lets go of his hand and sits back, giving him a searching look. The alters reappear on either side of him, sharp and attentive. "You're familiar?"

"I've done some reading about the Moon Knights," admits Elias. "Ever since I met..."

He trails off, unsure. He thinks the Moon Knight he briefly crossed paths with was Marc -- or rather, Steven. But if he guesses wrong, Marc and the others will be offended. And/or tick another box on their bingo cards.

"Well, you read right," says Steven, after a beat. "This is when we start working for Khonshu."

He nods at the screen. It's on a lovely shot of Marc wreathed in a soft glow of white, a cape just starting to ripple outward from his shoulders.

"At the time, he was having trouble reaching any prospective Avatars. So you can imagine how excited he was, to have a three-for-one deal show up on his doorstep."

With that, the flow of painted-movie-credits stills cuts to...a fast-paced action-movie-trailer montage.

One of the Moon Knights, the one they call ortodoxo, bolting down a dark industrial hallway. Grabbing two colleagues and taking a flying leap out the door, before something explodes behind them.

Another, modo oscuro, swooping out of midair to catch one of the New York superheroes (who, in turn, goes by el diablo) after a purple alien kicks them off a building.

The third Knight, reformista -- that was the version he wore in Elias's office -- crouching to stop a young girl mid-sprint down a city street under a glittering rainbow of neon ads, listening intently as she tells him about something up the road.

"The suit is Khonshu's ceremonial armor," narrates Marc. "Enhances our strength, speed, agility. Gives us magic senses. Sometimes we fly."

Ortodoxo again, on a stone-tiled walkway lined with plants, using his cape to shield Sergeant Barnes from a hail of bullets.

Modo oscuro in the exhibit hall of some kind of tech convention, fistfighting two black-helmeted figures, while a woman in Iron Man armor -- is that Pepper Potts? -- zaps a third in the aisle behind him.

Reformista on the roof of an adobe building overlooking a dark desert river, having an animated conversation with...oh, that's Thor. That is literally Thor.

"It does magic healing too," adds Steven. "With it on, we're basically impossible to kill."

"Disappointin' Mamá Spector once again," mutters Jake.

(Elias grits his teeth to avoid telling him off for that one.)

Ortodoxo back-to-back with a woman in gold and red, fighting off a ring of attackers in what is either a tomb or a sewer. It takes Elias a second, he still hasn't seen Layla except in photos, but is that her?

Modo oscuro in a dark muddy forest, with Barnes and a couple others -- the only one Elias recognizes is Sam Wilson, slumped over Barnes' back. Moon Knight checks his pulse, then Barnes carefully hefts the unconscious Wilson into the jet-and-silver-gauntleted arms, and Moon Knight soars up through the leaves into a starry sky.

Reformista in an expanse of grey rock under a pitch-black sky, having an even-more-animated conversation with...oh, the glowing woman hovering a foot off the ground is clearly Captain Marvel.

"Before you get too excited," says Jake sourly, snapping Elias back to self-awareness of how starry-eyed he's getting, "this is the cut that leaves out all the murder. These two figured you wouldn't wanna see it. But we're not here to pretend there wasn't a lotta murder involved."

Of course there was. Elias slumps in his seat. "I...see you were protecting people," he says. "I'm happy about the parts where you were protecting people. I still don't approve of the killing."

If repeating it gets them another hit on the bingo card...so be it.

"If you're thinking of saying something like 'only God can judge'," deadpans Marc, "we have good news for you."

Khonshu is not Elias's God. But Marc knows that.

With earnest curiosity, Steven adds, "Would you still disapprove if we had killed Thanos?"

Elias grimaces. Everyone thinks this is a gotcha. As if maybe it's never occurred to him to consider the limits of his principles. As if anyone could spend their adult life as a pacifist rabbi without putting serious, extensive argument into all the angles of would you still disapprove of killing Hitler?

...except that, for everyone he's ever known, the Hitler question is an abstract hypothetical.

And considering everything he's just seen about Marc, what Elias finds himself saying is: "Did you kill Thanos?"

"...No," admits Steven. "We didn't start...getting invited to Avengers parties...until after the Battle of Earth."

"I came close," murmurs Wanda.

Everyone startles.

She's been quiet since the opening of the Moon Knight montage, keeping an eye on the screen with the seriousness of a director. Still watching it now, though it's paused on a shot of ortodoxo on an NYC rooftop (apparently in the middle of offering a slice of pizza to Spider-Man).

"You did?" asks Steven. Marc and Jake lean in behind him, watching over his shoulders. "Don't know if we've heard this one."

"Oh, yes," says Wanda distantly. She has another tangle of neon-red plasma in her hands. Again, not zapping anything with it, just kneading it like high-octane putty. "Twice. I came closer the second time."

"You wanna show us?" asks Jake.

It gets Wanda to shake off her daze, blinking at him. "What? No. This is your time to talk. I'm just...emotional support."

Jake swaps back to the middle of the group, so he can drape himself against Steven's shoulder while giving Wanda a crooked grin. "I know I'd get some real supported emotions outta watchin' Thanos take a wiggly-woo to the face."

"Dad probably won't approve of that either," adds Marc. "But the rest of us will."

It gets a smile out of Wanda, small but fond.

The light trails off her red-tipped fingers to flow into the imaginary TV...

It cuts to an overhead shot of -- as Elias recognizes, based on footage that went public afterwards, shot by the super-science-enabled combatants with the most durable cameras -- the Battle of Earth. Thousands of tiny figures clashing across miles of trampled, lifeless ground: piled with rubble, scarred with crevasses, dotted with little fires. The sky is dark almost to the horizon, clouds parting just enough to let in some wan, sickly yellow sunlight.

Only a few figures are clear enough to name as the camera sweeps past them -- a grimy Steve Rogers wielding Thor's hammer, the not-yet-King Valkyrie riding a brilliantly-white pegasus, the not-yet-dead King T'Challa taking laser blasts and kicking aside opponents as he sprints across the field --

And then, him.

Killer of more people than every other genocidal madman in the history of the galaxy put together. In golden armor. Carrying a blade longer than most humans are tall. Charging.

The camera makes an abrupt drop, halting with an electric flash of red. Thanos comes to a stop, staring directly into it. The view spins back to reveal what he's staring at: Wanda, in a long red coat, pupils blazing like red stars.

(She really is good at this imaginary-film-editing thing, huh.)

Flashback-Wanda snarls something in Sokovian, showing all her teeth. Red-tinged subtitles translate it to English: "You took everything from me."

Cut to Thanos, unimpressed. His subtitles: "I don't even know who you are."

Cut back to Wanda, terrifyingly calm, eyes glowing brighter than anything else from the foreground to the horizon: "You will."

She rises into the air, gestures with both hands, and rips a building's worth of rubble up from the ground to throw at him.

He takes the hits from concrete and earth -- but she comes at him with magic next, and that, he can't take. She shatters his weapon. Drives him to his knees. Lifts him off the ground, and starts tearing the armor from his limbs...

Thanos roars something that translates as "Strafe the field!" Then, "Just do it!"

Overhead, an alien warship charges its weapons.

The bombardment covers the whole battlefield -- they have to, they don't even know where Wanda is! -- and at last they get lucky: she takes a direct hit, from an energy blast designed to blow holes in spacecraft.

Smash-cut to black.

"Oh my days, Wanda, that was amazing," breathes Steven. He's pulled the ends of his sleeves down over his hands, so it muffles the sound as he claps.

"Not a word outta you," adds Jake sternly, jabbing a finger at Elias. (Who winces, but keeps quiet.)

"Could've been better," says present-day Wanda, looking away. "I was fighting angry, not smart. Should've tried to get in his head. Instead of just...hurting him."

"Okay, so -- postgame analysis, that's a thing to learn from," says Marc. "But don't say that means you didn't do great. Because you did."

"And you did learn, too," adds Steven. "What d'you call the Regent's Park Hex, if not fighting smart?"

Elias sits up straight again. Not sure whether it's "in his lane" to ask...but desperately wanting more information about this part.

The official story from the Avengers is that the second Maximoff Anomaly was a gambit Wanda pulled to stop a world-threatening supervillain. Details are scarce. Glitchy video shows her landing like a scarlet meteor on Regent's Park Road, blurry figures running to her side, then one figure taking flight as Wanda forms the Hex around herself and the one that remained.

All the footage is so distorted, Elias had no clue her mystery companion might be Marc, until the internet started connecting dots.

Sergeant Barnes was part of the small crew that oversaw the Hex from outside, and the only person Elias could imagine he had any chance of getting the truth out of. Sure enough, Barnes admitted the whole thing started when Wanda reached out to her friend Marc (and Steven, he named Steven) for help. Didn't reveal much else. Claimed a lot of details weren't his to tell.

A much larger throng of super-powered people gathered in London the day the Hex came down. In the end, most of them didn't actually fight. There was barely any property damage, except the crater from Wanda's arrival.

Depending on which forums you read, this either means the whole thing was a huge cover-up, or her plan was a wild success.

(There was at least some cover-up, but not the way the internet thinks. Somehow the Avengers arranged for "Steven" to be caught on film in half a dozen places before the real Marc got out of the Hex. A music festival...the background of a dance clip by some TikTok influencer...the kiss cam at a rugby game. (Elias suspects that last one was somebody's idea of a joke -- the home team was the New York Knights.))

In the present, the guys and Wanda are going back-and-forth with a parade of silent looks. Meaningful enough that there almost has to be a telepathic conversation going on underneath...

"Look," says Marc at last. "All you need to know about the Hex right now is -- someone tried to take advantage of Wanda, to hurt people. She set a trap for them. We helped -- mostly by being her emotional support. And in the end, we got them to stop."

"Not usin' murder," puts in Jake. "At least -- not this time."

"We used teamwork," says Steven. "The power of friendship!"

"Found family," offers Wanda. (Steven grins and Jake smirks, like that was a punchline? Maybe it's from a joke Elias hasn't heard.)

"A surprising amount of therapy talk," adds Marc ruefully.

Steven puts his thumb and forefinger together, like he's about to garnish a dish with the perfect pinch of seasoning. "And just a touch of autism."

He breezes by it so casually, Elias almost misses it.

Then does a double-take. "A -- what? You're not--"

The guys do the all-freezing-up-together thing. Holding their breaths. Waiting expectantly for him to finish.

Slowly, Elias says, "Is that on the bingo cards?"

Marc sighs. "Stop asking us what's on the bingo cards."

It shouldn't be, right? Elias can't remember ever bringing this up before in Marc's life. Not in front of him. Unless he picked it up from somewhere else...?

He takes a mental step back, and tries to recalibrate. What's something he definitely hasn't said to Marc before?

"You were evaluated for that, when you were younger," he says at last, "and the doctors told us you didn't have it."

Stunned silence.

"...does that count?" asks Jake, ignoring Elias to look at the others on either side of him.

"It absolutely does not." In the blink of an eye, Steven's in the middle of the trio again. "That wasn't a reflexive denial, that was information. That's good! We want this sort of information." He leans forward. "When did we get evaluated, exactly? And why?"

This all started long before there was any Steven Grant playtime...so Elias turns to Marc.

"When you were two or three...there are these, ah, language milestones, children are supposed to hit. You weren't hitting them," he says. "The pediatrician said it didn't have to mean anything. They see it a lot in kids who are raised bilingual -- it's not that you're delayed, it's that you have more language to process. She said we shouldn't worry, just give you a few years, see if you caught up."

"And...did I?" guesses Marc.

"You did," confirms Elias. "And maybe we never would've thought more of it...except, by then..."

Marc swaps back into the center of the group and nods, face grim. "By then you had a two-year-old who was hitting his milestones."

Steven, now on the outside end of the bench, leans against him. (Jake, on the end next to Wanda, is back to glaring at the window.)

Elias nods. Two-year-old Randall was such a talker. Enthusiastically chatting in baby-talk Spanglish at anyone who would listen.

"So in first grade, we had a specialist talk to you. Told her about the language thing. And about how you weren't very social...had this way of shutting down, around new people, or big crowds...sometimes got overly upset over changes to small things." Elias shrugs, spreading his hands. "She told us it wasn't a problem. That some kids are just like that."

"I mean...some kids are just like that," agrees Steven breezily. "Including some of the autistic kids."

He slings an arm around Marc's back, sort of petting him.

"You remember any of this?"

Marc shrugs. "Not a bit."

"It's the truth, mijo," protests Elias. Why would he lie? "Do you want -- I didn't bring these, they're still in Chicago, but maybe, maybe next time -- do you want to see the records?"

"All right, to be clear, I am not accusing you of lying," says Steven, "but I would love to see the records."

(Elias notices, and feels a spark of hope about, how none of the alters contradict him about next time.)

"Never happier than when he's got a pile of research to annotate," says Jake tartly, side-eyeing Elias while nodding toward Steven. "Probably on account of the autism. And we all check in with each other about memories, on account of the amnesia from the goddamn dissociative disorder."

"The, ah, beautifully-edited montages probably make us look more put-together than we are," reflects Steven. "We don't all remember every scene in there. I don't even remember all the scenes I'm in."

Oh. Elias had not picked that up from the videos, no.

"Looking at records helps -- brings things back -- but not always." Steven lets himself a dry chuckle. "Still can't picture any of the times we apparently slept in your office."

Elias catches his breath. "Even though...you've been back to the office."

That was where he spoke with a Moon Knight. During a mission that Barnes said it wasn't his place to talk about, and Wanda hasn't put in any of her clip shows.

Steven hesitates, so Marc is the one who nods: "Yeah. Should probably talk about...that."

"Get your George Romero on, rojita," adds Jake. "Time to roll a zombie movie."

Chapter Text

Wanda's imaginary-ish TV cuts to a rooftop shot of the boxy brick building across from the synagogue, with Moon Knight, modo oscuro, looming over the edge.

It's back to the lightly-animated paintings. Moon Knight's mask is stylized as a solid black shadow under his hood, pierced by two specks of white. His bright-white cape swirls in a wind that doesn't touch the trees below.

"Barnes had my legal name by then," says present-day Marc, a somber voiceover. "He and Wilson found out their next Captain America mission was at your building. Recognized your name. Tipped us off, asked if the Moon Knights wanted in. Jake took point."

A translucent reformista fades in on-screen. Mask off, Flashback-Steven's serious expression clear under the moonlight, hair painted to look fluffier than ever.

"Steven ran support."

Elias waits for a third figure...but it isn't figuring. "Marc...? Where were you?"

"...Asleep."

It's so quiet, Elias is sure he must've heard wrong. "What? Did you say asleep? This, you can sleep through?"

He waves to the screen, now on an artful splash of Jake-as-Moon-Knight swooping out of the air, aiming a boot to the head of the latest group showering him with starburst-gunfire.

"Thank you, Jake and Steven, for being there to protect me on Marc's behalf," says Steven, loud and pointed, half his body draped heavily over Marc's shoulder. "Amazing how you took on all those zombies, and also the murderous cultists with more ammo than brains. I appreciate you, Jake and Steven."

Cut to a dramatic low-angle portrait of reformista sprinting down the synagogue hall. His target: a group of lurching zombies, brilliantly picked-out by the light from Elias's open office door.

"Can't fuckin' win," hisses present-day Jake, sitting back and crossing his arms. "If you had showed, it woulda been all, ooh, Marc, how come you got so violent with the neo-Nazis who shot a bunch of holes in you?"

Cut to flashback-Jake in the parking lot, struggling to get up. Sergeant Barnes crouches on one side of him, visibly urging him to stay down. A transparent reformista hovers anxiously on the other, white suit untouched by the dark shadows smeared on the cement all around them.

Present-Marc is stony and silent, eyes tinged with red.

"Thank you for protecting me from the zombies and the cultists," echoes Elias. He means it! He should've said it already. "I'm happy you didn't let them eat me."

It doesn't seem to help. Steven still looks morose, Jake thunderous, Marc unreadably blank.

"Boys," says Wanda. A flick of her hand, and the TV cuts to a more abstract scene: a background of soft blue painted curves. "You're slipping."

"...Yeah," says Steven, vague and distracted. "We know."

"Maybe you should take a break."

Marc shakes himself, kneading his temples. "Can you just..."

He doesn't finish the sentence. (Not out loud, at least.)

Little white cartoon-butterfly silhouettes start fluttering across the screen.

Wanda puts a hand in front of Jake -- holding him back? -- or maybe it's just because he's the alter nearest to her, because when she taps his chest over the heart, all three take the same deep, steadying breath.

"That wasn't mind control, it's chemical," she tells Elias. "They have an anti-anxiety prescription. I just make it hit faster. Would you like one?"

Shivering, he shakes his head.

"All right. If you ever do, let me know."

The visual of the three alters collapses into one Marc, though he blurs around the edges like a photograph where the color plates aren't all lined up.

"This is the dissociation part of the dissociative disorder," narrates Wanda. "Let's give them a few minutes to ground."

She snaps her fingers at Marc's water glass -- still mostly full, though it's been sitting out long enough to only have a few chips of ice floating on the top. With a frosty crackle it re-freezes into a whole block. He takes it without really looking, closes his eyes, and presses the ice to his temple.

"Eat some of your lunch, Rabbi," advises Wanda, taking a couple of the remaining fries and casually dipping them in ketchup. "The food here is delicious. And talk to me, if you like. About something unimportant. Do you have a favorite sitcom?"

Elias promptly forgets the name of every sitcom he's ever watched in his life.

At a loss for what else to do, he has some of his lunch. (It is, indeed, pretty tasty.)

"Can I ask," he says, after a bit. "You're younger than Marc, right?"

"A bit, yes. Our birthdays aren't that far apart...but I was Blipped, and they weren't."

"So why do you keep calling them 'boys'?"

"...oh." Wanda blinks a few times, thinking back. "Sorry. It's -- it would sound normal in Sokovian. I know it's a little unusual in English, but it slips out when I'm not paying attention. Habit."

Makes sense. That happens between Elias's two languages too.

He ends up telling her some examples, like the cute endearments in Spanish that just sound mean in English...

A moment after he brings up gusanito, the image of Steven re-solidifies across from him, weary but interested. "What, really?"

"Of course, really." Elias gives him a strange look. Steven said this at the synagogue too, that he didn't speak the language, though his accent was perfect..."Why don't you know that?"

Steven sighs. "Most of the Spanish is in parts of the brain I don't have access to." He turns to Marc. "You don't think he...?"

Jake re-solidifies on Marc's other side. "Nah. I've heard el jefe in Spanish -- he means it in the mean way. Lo siento."

What kind of unprofessional boss would be calling his employees "worm"...?

In the middle of the group, still holding the ice to his head, Marc opens his eyes.

"Last time I tried to visit you in Chicago, it triggered a dissociative episode that blew up our lives for the next six months," he says, emotionless but clear. "Nearly blew up my marriage. Didn't pull off another Moon Knight mission for weeks. If it happened during this mission, it would've blown that up too. So yeah, I stayed asleep. Only way these guys could work -- without me dragging them down."

"You can see how we're getting dragged down now, just from thinking about it too hard," says Steven wistfully. "Oh my days, can you imagine where we'd be if she had actually..."

Back to the trailing off mid-sentence.

Elias glances at Wanda, and finds himself thinking in her direction, Are they talking about their mother?

"Not 'their'," says Wanda out loud. "Marc's. But yes."

The spinning-ball toy from earlier is in Jake's hands now. He flicks the metal shells around each other so fast their edges blur.

"Woulda been goddamn poetic if she had showed up," he snarls to no one in particular, while Marc and Steven both look a million miles away. "Gettin' to beat on us as much as she wanted, now that we're too magic to inconveniently die if she went too hard? Sounds like a dream come tru--"

"Stop it!" snaps Elias.

Jake hisses through clenched teeth. Marc and Steven sit up straighter, paying sharp attention to Elias.

He doesn't back down. He agreed not to try to protect the alters from each other! But he never promised he wouldn't protect a woman who isn't even here to defend herself.

"I know your mother had -- troubles," he says, focusing on Marc. "She had a hard time, and she took it out on you, and that wasn't right. And I know, I know I should've done more. It wasn't enough just to make sure you had a safe place to sleep when the two of you needed a break from each other."

(Steven mouths, "Each other"?)

"But she didn't hate you! She would've been crushed if anything happened to you. She loved you, Marc."

"Yeah," says Marc dully. "Sure, Dad."

And Steven mutters, "That's on my card."

"I don't care if it's on your damn bingo cards!" yells Elias.

Too loudly. In a blink the alters swap places again, Jake at the front/middle, pushing off the tabletop and half standing up. Steven's hand snaps to his shoulder, clamping down on the black leather of the jacket, but not pulling him back into place. Marc hovers behind him, jaw tight, a sheen of sweat on his forehead.

Reining himself in, Elias casts a shamefaced look around the rest of the diner. If they're making a scene...

Even the people at the next table don't so much as glance their way.

"Score one for the 'boring conversation' illusion," quips Wanda, in her American-sitcom voice. Her natural accent settles back in as she continues: "Rabbi, listen to me. You cannot solve this. You will not make the boys agree with you about this. All you will accomplish by arguing about it is hurting each other. You can have the argument, or you can have a relationship with your son -- but you cannot have both."

"I don't want the argument, mijo," says Elias plaintively. "I just want you to have some peace."

Jake sucks in a breath--

Marc flips into the center position, so now he's the one half-standing. "Jake -- chill," he says firmly, sinking back onto the bench. "You knew he would say the thing, and he said it. You were right, okay? Good job. We can drop it now. You win."

"...on that point," clarifies Steven. He and Jake are somehow behind Marc's back now; Elias can just catch that Steven has one arm firmly looped through Jake's. "Nobody's won at bingo."

Marc sighs. "We should maybe drop the bingo thing, too."

This time, Elias has the self-restraint to keep his mouth shut. But he's so relieved to see Marc pushing back. 

Can't Marc see that he's the one hurting himself, by holding on to this image of his mother? Can't the alters see they're hurting him by pushing it? Elias wouldn't ask Marc to just forgive all the ways Wendy was unkind to him, but this enduring bitterness is doing him no good, either.

Can't Wanda, as an outside observer, recognize that Marc's memories are filtered through a traumatized child's understanding? Wendy was suffering too, and a nine-year-old can't be expected to grasp that, but an adult should be able to understand and sympathize. Marc doesn't want to hear that from his father, but maybe if a friend was the one giving him some perspective, encouraging him to reconsider...

"They have done that," says Wanda tersely to the air. "They don't need me telling them. They've done it already -- more than you would ever guess. This is the result."

Marc and the others look at her, startled. Then, eyes narrowing, at Elias.

Elias feels himself going red under their suspicion. "I wasn't asking her for anything!" he exclaims, before turning back to Wanda. "I was just having a thought! You can read minds, and you can't tell when a thought is just a thought?"

Wanda presses her red-tipped fingers together, and meets his eyes over the top of them. Sparks of red set her pupils aglow. A chill runs up the back of Elias's neck...

Then her eyes fade back to clear green, and she sighs. "I'm sorry," she says out loud. "He's right. He meant to keep that to himself -- he didn't realize he was thinking loudly enough to hear. I jumped the gun."

"Then we'll let it go," says Steven. Marc and Jake look unconvinced..."No, listen, we will. We've all had thoughts we meant to be private that someone else in this brain picked up, you know how embarrassing that is, it is not fair to jump on it."

He stretches over Marc's shoulder -- no, stretches into Marc's shoulder, so for a moment their arms fully overlap. The physical reality briefly reappears for Elias's eyes: one man, sitting on the bench, grabbing a couple of his remaining fries.

Then it's back to the mental projection, where Steven appears to be handing off the fries to Jake, while Marc rubs his chin in thought. "Okay. Letting it go. Where were we?"

An awkward pause. Elias opens his mouth to answer, then realizes he's not sure either. Something about Moon Knight.

Wanda turns to Marc. "Look, without giving away anything private your father was thinking about...if you've decided you want to roll that last montage you've been arguing about, this is a wonderful opening."

Another pause as they consider.

Then the alters flip places once more: Steven in the middle and leaning forward, Marc and Jake sitting on either side of him. Marc sits back, crossing his arms. Jake licks grease off his fingers.

"So, ah, hi. The thing is." Steven pulls and twists at the ends of his sleeves, like Marc used to do when he was little. "We've had some pretty spirited rounds of discussion, in here, about how much you might remember."

Not where Elias expected this to go. "What? How much I remember about...?"

"Well, the abuse," says Steven matter-of-factly. "That is, when you're all obviously your mum wouldn't have killed you... is that an informed assessment? Or do you not actually remember how bad it got?"

Oh. Right. That's where they were.

"Because, see -- I don't. In fact, sometimes..." He nods to the figures on either side of him. "...these two will actively describe one of the bad things to me, and then the knowledge just...melts away. And, well, I take after you. No offense."

"Full offense," mutters Jake.

"Some offense," amends Marc.

Steven holds up a hand for quiet, and the others both shush.

Elias swallows. "I wish I had that excuse, believe me. But I don't have...what you have. I knew."

"Don't need full-blown DID to have memory issues," counters Steven. "Even one traumatic experience can mess with your brain. No matter how old you are, or how long it lasts, or how quote-unquote 'bad' it is. And, well...it's not as if you haven't had at least one."

"I'm telling you, I remember." Elias turns away from Steven, addressing Marc next to him. "You want me to prove this how? Are you thinking you should tell me about each thing, dwell on the hurt and the anger over and over, just to make sure I know? That can't be healthy. Don't tell me your therapist said that was healthy."

"Don't worry, Dad," says Marc. "We all hate talking about it too."

He reaches into the front pocket of his hoodie, and pulls out...

It takes Elias a second to recognize the chunky case of a VHS tape. (His brain is distracted trying to make sense of how he couldn't tell it was there.) Marc hands it forward to Steven, who sets it on the table in front of them.

The cover insert doesn't have a title, or any real art, just a bone-white pattern that looks like bandages. Like you'd put on an artsy special-edition release of The Mummy. (Like on the oldest version of the Moon Knight armor.)

"I haven't had a VCR in twenty years," says Elias, baffled. He can understand the value of saying something difficult to a camera instead of to someone's face, but..."You couldn't play it on your phone?"

"It's not actually a tape. More of a...convenient physical metaphor." Steven pops it open, revealing a featureless shape inside -- not even an unlabeled tape, just a boxy lump -- then closes it again. "Because, yeah, we picked some of those memories to share. And we all figured you ought to have direct control over how much of them you take in. So. The montage won't start playing unless you physically open the box, and they'll stop right away if you close it."

"Not on the metaphorical TV, either," adds Marc. "This one's for your eyes only."

Cautiously, Elias touches the box. When that doesn't trigger anything nefarious, he slides it across the tabletop toward himself, glancing at Wanda. "You made this?"

"The bo--the headmates had full editorial control," says Wanda modestly. "I just cut it together."

"She's quite good at that," adds Steven, with a flash of pride. "Got a real eye for it."

"Can I take it with me? Watch it later, somewhere private?" Not that Elias doesn't appreciate the magical privacy curtain, but--

"No," snaps Jake.

"Afraid not," agrees Steven. "It's, ah, actually set to disappear when we leave the diner? Goes up in a poof of cartoon smoke."

"You don't have to jump into it right away," says Marc. "We can talk about something else. Circle back later. Maybe share some new vacation photos...?"

Elias looks from him, to the metaphorical tape, to Marc again. "How long is it?"

Marc and the others all glance at Wanda, who fills them in: "Two minutes, twenty seconds."

Well, that's not so bad, is it? Much longer than Elias wants to be thinking about this -- but still, only the length of a respectable movie trailer.

It's not as if he's preparing to stand by and watch while it actually happens again. He just needs to bear witness to Marc telling his story.

Marc needs to tell his story. In a weird magic way, because that's the life he has now, with weird magic powers and weird magic friends.

"You're sure you want me to watch this?" asks Elias.

It takes Marc a couple seconds to answer. "I want you to try."

All right then.

Elias opens the case.

.

.

.

.

...he slams it closed.

"Nine whole seconds," says Marc bitterly. "Wow."

"It wasn't -- she wasn't like that," protests Elias. "She wouldn't do that!"

Marc throws up his hands. "And there it is."

"We knew this might happen," says Steven, trying to rally. "I flipped out too -- we agreed he was allowed to flip out, when he saw what she--"

"I know what she did!" Elias has a white-knuckled grip on the imaginary tape. "I know it wasn't okay! But reality was bad enough! You don't need to imagine it worse!"

Steven leans between him and Marc. "He's not imagining anything--"

"He imagined you!"

For the first time all afternoon Steven flinches back, stricken.

Jake has been silent and unmoving through all this, arms crossed, eyes glaring a hole in something just to the left of Elias's head...

"I say we hit 'im again," he says, sharp-edged and icy. "Harder, this time. Until he learns."

-- and in that second he sounds so much like Wendy that Elias's vision tunnels, heart pounding in his ears.

He doesn't hear whatever he says in reply. It's all a blur.

Jake's eyes go wide, white rings around his irises, pupils shrinking to pinpricks.

Then he's halfway over the table, fist swinging --

⬣

The fist slams against a solid wall of red light, so dense it muffles the thump almost to silence.

Elias spends a moment just heaving for breath, flattened against the back of the booth, fake VHS case held in front of him like a shield.

He can't see anything through the red, and when he settles enough to re-adjust his skewed glasses, he realizes it's not just his eyes. The wall, rising up out of the table about a foot from the edge, is the same opaque red static that enclosed the Regent's Park Hex. Elias checks underneath -- yes, it goes down to the floor too. Poking it with his foot makes it buzz with a row of old-fashioned TV scan lines.

If Wanda can do this in the blink of an eye, why doesn't she just hold Jake back herself?

Elias looks around...and realizes with a start that it's not just one wall. He's fully enclosed, in a blocky six-sided box with a pointed roof. The smallest Hex yet -- practically pocket-size -- bigger than a phone booth, but smaller than an elevator.

Jake isn't the one being restrained. He is.

"Doooon't go anywhere!" exclaims a voice out of nowhere -- a man Elias has never heard in his life, unnaturally chipper, the Platonic ideal of a TV announcer. "We'll be right back, after this!"

Chapter Text

Jake launches himself across the table, Marc and Steven realize a beat too late that he's fronting, Wanda throws up a shield half a second before their fist hits it--

Marc surges forward and tries to tackle Jake out of the body. Jake reacts without thinking, taking a swing at him.

"I've got this!" yells Marc, and rolls with the punch as he drags Jake back into headspace. 

This level of high-stakes Feelings Conversation is exhausting. Marc represses it better, but gods, he needs something physical to clear his head -- probably at least as bad as Jake does.

They jab and block and tussle their way across an internal shore of warm sand.

Wanda peers into their head enough for a version of her to appear on their internal porch swing, where she watches the throwdown for a bit. Apparently she decides it isn't self-destructive enough to need her intervention.

(She lived at Avengers Tower for a while, before the Blip. She knows what it looks like when a couple of tough, combat-trained, emotionally-stunted fighters need to blow off steam.)

Out front, Steven slumps on the table, holding their shared head. "Oh my days, that was awful," he groans. "They did warn me it could get awful...but, wow, was that awful."

Physically, Wanda sits back against the restaurant bench. "Enough that you want to walk out?"

"Just...just give us a minute. All this is still hidden, right...?"

"Illusions are holding steady. Yell as much as you like."

Steven doesn't yell, and he only swats himself in the head a few times before the worst of the turmoil passes.

At least Elias doesn't think Marc's possessed! Puts him ahead of Steven. And Wanda, for that matter!

Steven drags his fingers through his curls and pulls, just hard enough to be grounding, tilting his face up to look over the six-sided column. "Should I even ask what kind of show you put him in?"

"Oh! No show. No altered reality in there at all. I just -- bubbled him."

Steven's focus slides sideways, toward the imaginary TV. It helpfully plays a clip of a Steven Universe villain, restrained in a glittery pink bubble.

"Right," says Steven faintly. "And...he's got air and everything in there, yeah?"

"Elias Spector has plenty of fresh air. He's not uncomfortably hungry or thirsty. He is concerned, but not in serious distress. He..." She gives her fingers a twirl. "...will not need a bathroom break any time soon."

"Ah." Steven wishes he hadn't had to think about that -- but, oof, good job somebody is. "Cheers, Mum."

Wanda ruffles his hair. Then, when Steven thinks about how he could really use a full-blown Mom Hug, pulls him into one of those. "You're such good boys."

The comfort ripples through to Marc, soothing him enough that he eases up on the fight and lets Jake pin him. (That's his story, and he's sticking to it.) He lands facedown on the beach, arms twisted behind his back, Jake's knee digging into his spine. 

Marc turns his head, spits out sand, and says, "Feel better, babe?"

Jake is still heaving for breath. At last he hisses, "Better as I'm gonna."

He loosens his hold...and then they're co-fronting again, projected self-images appearing on the cool tiles of the diner, wearily sitting up. Wanda in turn loosens her hold on Steven, though he stays near her, leaving room for the others to join them.

"Por dios, trust that guy to come up with somethin' we didn't even put on the goddamn cards." Jake doesn't climb onto the bench, just sits on the floor beside it. "I mean--" He gives the padded seat a hearty smack. "Where the fuck does he get off, saying I sound like her?!"

Marc does a double-take.

Jake doesn't seem to notice.

Marc catches Steven's eye -- and, yeah, he's not imagining things, Steven heard it too.

Steven slides back over to the outside edge of the bench. When Jake looks up at him, Steven cups Jake's jaw in his hand, savoring the rasp of the stubble against his soft palm. "Jake, love...did you not do that on purpose?"

"What?"

"Not like you tried to match her pitch..." (If anything, Jake's voice naturally comes out the deepest of all three of them.) "...but the, you know, the intonation..."

Jake wrenches away from him. "You got no idea what Mamá Spector's intonation sounded like."

"But I do," says Marc, sitting low and nonthreatening at his side. Jake whips around to meet his eyes. "And you sounded exactly like Mom. That little snarl, the extra bit of oomph at the end -- buddy, you nailed it, I still have chills. I absolutely thought you did that to fuck with Dad."

"Well, I didn't!" yells Jake, going ashen. "I was just mad! Why the fuck would he care if I pulled a stunt like that, she wasn't beating on him--"

Trying to catch Marc's eye, Steven mouths, do we know that?

Marc doesn't see it. He's too busy trying to calm Jake, and Jake isn't calming. "--just gonna fuck with you, and I didn't -- I wouldn't--!"

Steven turns to Wanda instead. "Might need another magic Xan--"

"Do not try to drug us out of this!" Jake hefts himself up to Steven's level, joining him on the bench -- overlapping with the body, practically in his lap, grabbing his shirt. "At the synagogue -- talking about the Rabbi, I didn't sound--?"

"I -- well -- no! Not like that, no."

That is way more hedging than Jake is okay with. "¿De que cojones hablas? What the fuck did I sound like?"

He sounded like the normal way Jake gets angry -- but Steven has no idea if that's just some other version of how Marc's mum would get angry -- and Marc couldn't even be there, so Steven couldn't judge based on if it triggered him then or not...

...wait. Wait, hold on. Marc couldn't handle being there at the time. But it's been a while, they've survived more and bigger messes since then, and they've all gotten stronger.

Steven cups Jake's face firmly in both hands. "Jake, love, let us think," he says, and tries to...not push, exactly...tries to offer this memory to Marc.

Marc joins them on the bench. He and Steven both reach around Jake to clasp each other's hands. He takes a deep breath, and lets himself listen.

"...Yeah, no. That's not a Mom voice." Easy and confident. Didn't even have to think about it. "That's all you."

Jake can't look at him, afraid to find out it's a bluff.

(It's not, though. Steven can feel the steady conviction underneath.)

Marc, undeterred, starts rubbing soothing circles into Jake's back. "You didn't sound like her earlier, either," he adds. "When you made that sarcastic little quip about how we should've let Dad get eaten? Still just sounded like you."

Which finally makes the pattern click for Steven. "You only came off like her when you were trying to scare him. Of course your bloody Scary Voice is based off hers."

Jake is still hanging onto Steven's shirt. Okay, he doesn't always do the voice, but...that one quip wasn't all sarcastic...

"Yeah, I got that," admits Marc. "But when you had a chance to actually do it, you didn't go through with it. When it mattered, you did the right thing. Thank you, Jake, for letting Steven switch in. Thank you, Steven, for saving my dad."

Stupid cutesy patronizing therapy talk. There's no sweet reassuring way for them to talk about how Jake still wants to see Elias suffer -- wants it every time they get a reminder of how much pain and trauma that man refuses to admit even happened--

"Boys."

Wanda's voice pulls their scattered attention back together. Her legs are drawn up so she can hug her knees, but she looks oddly calm and un-stressed. She gazes at the mini Hex-bubble.

"He's opened the tape again."

Silence. All three headmates turn expectantly to the staticky wall, even though it's too opaque to see inside.

"We've got to let him out, if he watches it all," says Steven softly. 

The whole reason the tape disappears outside the diner is, they wanted to be here when Elias was done, to manage his reaction in person. Besides -- him trying to watch it again is a good thing. If they're not going to appreciate and encourage the good things, why bother meeting with Elias in the first place?

"Is he?" asks Marc. He reaches around Jake once more, to clasp one of Steven's hands. "Watching it all?"

"He hasn't stopped yet." Wanda tilts her head. "He's gotten to the frying pan thing."

Marc and Jake spent a while debating whether to include that. If Steven's trauma-blocking patterns are a clue to Elias's...Steven still can't remember what that one is. They ended up putting just a moment of it in the montage, concealing the graphic details. If he can at least get through that much...

"...And now, the shower thing."

Steven shivers. He unlocked that one just recently; he's had nightmares.

...and you know what, as much as Jake wanted the man to feel bad, as much as he wanted some acknowledgement for any of this...it suddenly hits him that he does not, in fact, want to hear whatever the fuck Elias Spector thinks he gets to say about the shower thing.

"I can't do this," rasps Jake, and disappears into headspace.

So now it's just Marc and Steven.

Marc takes a turn cupping Steven's face, thumb brushing softly across Steven's cheek. "You want to go in after him?"

Steven loops his arms around Marc's shoulders, and leans into the touch. "Do you?"

What Marc wants, mostly, is to make it clear that none of this reconnection with his father is more important to him than Jake is. Which makes a strong point about who Marc should be with.

But. "I'm not gonna leave you alone with Dad."

"Maybe you should," says Steven. "No, listen -- if he calls all the non-core headmates imaginary, and the next thing he knows is, we all pop out of the way to let him have alone-time with his son? That doesn't sound good. Sounds like positive reinforcement for exactly the wrong sort of thing."

"You are so smart," says Marc, "and I love you so much. And...you want to tell him off to his face, don't you."

Steven has the grace to look sheepish. "Might do, yeah."

Marc sighs. "Go easy on him, babe."

"I promise I won't go any harder than I need to," says Steven. "He might feel bad enough already, you know? He did just find out about the shower thing."

⬣

After the images cut out, he stares at the wall for a while. Hard to say how long.

Eventually the red melts away...but the scene beyond it is blurred and distant. Like another TV, with worse tuning.

"Rabbi...?"

He's fine. Really. They don't need to worry about him.

"Wanda -- clearance. For the lightest little bit of mind-reading. Just tell me if he's switching."

"Not like you do. Nobody else is checking in. He's simply...checked out."

Happens sometimes. He'll catch up later.

"Should I pull him back for you...?"

"Best not. It's not healthy to force that. Just give him a minute."

Everything will get done. It always has.

(Was everything getting done, though...?)

"It's fine," says Elias out loud. "Don't worry."

"You back with us?" asks the man across from him. "Tell me five things you can see."

Elias blinks at his son. "Marc?"

"Steven." Right. Blue shirt, long curls. "But I do look a fair bit like Marc, so, close enough. I'll give it to you."

"Your tape." Elias pushes the case back across the table towards him. "I watched your tape. All of it."

"Mmhmm?"

"...She wasn't like that."

(When was there so much blood? And the one time with the hospital -- Wendy didn't cause that -- it was an accident.)

"I wouldn't have missed -- that. I wouldn't."

Steven doesn't take the tape. His hands are busy with the metal toy, idly setting the loops to spin in different directions. "You'd be amazed how much a person can miss."

Speaking of missing...there's nobody visible with Steven (except Wanda). He's still in his imaginary personal outfit, not the real shared-body outfit. But there's no more Jake. No sign of..."Where's Marc?"

"Ducked back into headspace for a bit. That's, ah, the place in our head we go when we're not out here," says Steven. "Pretty sure he's giving Jake a therapeutic hug."

"A...what?"

"Sorry -- I can see you're still tuning back in. Should I talk slower?"

"It's not that," says Elias. "It's -- that sounds like it means -- something specific. But I don't know. What it means."

(Really, it sounds like a euphemism for restraining him. But the others react badly whenever Elias suggests Jake is a problem. So he's trying not to.)

"Oh, it's...getting firm physical pressure, that's a relaxation technique? Could be from a person, could be a weighted blanket or some such -- there's studies about it, if you want to read up." Steven raises an eyebrow. "It's known to be especially helpful for that autism we don't have."

Oh! "I've heard of that. It was...a few years ago, around the synagogue community...there was a whole trend."

(It was one of the health fads Elias got curious enough to try. Most of them never made any difference at all, but he does feel like that blanket helps him sleep better.)

Steven looks reassured that he doesn't have to explain more. "I do realize it's not physical, when we're doing it for each other," he adds. "But it has enough of a mental effect that we feel better anyway."

Elias blinks. "So, earlier...the way you three keep leaning against each other...was that this?"

"Again with the paying attention," says Steven, with what sounds like genuine warmth. "That's good! It's lovely when you notice these things. We really do appreciate it."

He leans forward, curls falling over his forehead, and finally pulls the fake VHS back towards him.

"You want to talk to Marc again?"

"Yes," says Elias immediately. "...Please?"

"Then pay attention to me now." Steven taps the textless art on the cover. "If you're dead set about this not happening -- we can't force you to believe it. Or, well. We can't, and Wanda won't."

(On her end of the bench, Wanda has a quiet sip of her drink.)

"But from now on, keep your disbelief to yourself, yeah? If you need to talk about it, do that on your own time. Preferably with your own therapist. You try again to argue with Marc about it, we're out."

Elias looks unhappily at the tape. "You bring all this to me, then you tell me I can't say how I feel about it?"

"You have said. So we won't bring it up again," says Steven pragmatically. "There's loads of cheerier things we can talk about. The weather. Avengers gossip. Baseball scores. Vacation photos. I know we've been sending you some of those...but only the ones that didn't give too much away. We have some literally magic vacation photos."

"I...would like to see those."

"Aces. Right, then, one last rule: Don't ever compare Jake to Wendy again. Not in front of him, or Marc, or me."

Elias winces. "You want me to believe in these memories, or not? How she sounded, it was in here, and he--"

"Most of those memories were Jake's," interrupts Steven. "Did you catch that? Lot of it was Marc, but...maybe two-thirds Jake."

...Elias did not guess that, no.

"That's what he did. That's what he was for. Little Steven smiled for the family and did all my homework and remembered that I deserved to live, little Marc ran and hid and cleaned everything up and still took hits all the time, and when he couldn't take any more, little Jake swapped in and soaked up the rest."

(Elias is trying to map this to what he understands about DID, and struggling. This makes it sound like Steven was the core, with Marc and Jake protecting him -- and now, in the present, it looks like Steven's protecting them. Is it normal for the roles to switch around like that?)

(...Maybe he's been picturing this all wrong, and the roles were never so clear-cut in the first place.)

"Jake was mad," continues Steven, more softly. "He was trying to scare you. Is it any wonder, the scariest voice any of us know how to do is a Wendy Spector impression?"

A few beats later, Elias realizes that was a real question. "No," he says out loud. "It's not any wonder."

Steven says -- something else. Elias doesn't quite catch it.

Wanda touches Steven's arm and says, "He's thinking."

Which, yes, Elias is -- hard enough to give himself a headache. He takes off his glasses and pinches the bridge of his nose. (He used to bring ibuprofen everywhere, wanting to have it on hand for Wendy's aches and pains. Maybe he should start carrying something for his own.)

"Do you think about all those..." Should he call them memories? Even if they're nightmares, or hallucinations? (They can't have literally happened. He couldn't have missed it if they did.) "...all those scenes...when I talk about her?"

"Yeah," says Steven quietly. "We do."

"Then--" Elias takes a breath. "We don't have to talk about...Marc's mother. You don't bring her up again, I won't either."

It gets a small smile. "They'll appreciate it."

"And...thank you, Steven, for looking out for Marc and Jake."

"All right, all right, don't lay it on too thick." Steven sits back. "Give us a minute, I'll go check on the others."

"Of course," says Elias.

He jumps again when the world goes red -- but, okay, it's just the mini-Hex reappearing around him. Not so scary. Wanda will take it back down soon enough.

Elias makes himself take some slow, deep breaths. He can give them a minute.

⬣

Jake is lying on the headspace bed; Marc is lying on Jake. At first, they don't talk. Marc just tucks his face against the back of Jake's neck, skin warm against skin.

The TV in their headspace living room is streaming the view from their physical eyes and ears. But here on the second floor, with the bedroom door shut, they can barely even hear that it's on.

It's dark and cozy and nice in here. So obviously Marc wants to go back out...

"Maybe later," says Marc out loud. Either Jake is being way too sloppy with private thoughts he meant to keep to himself, or Marc went and got sensitive. "And you wouldn't have to come."

Great. Now they're treating Jake like he's some kind of fragile sensitive child who needs to be protected. He's saying the same thing they told their actual inner child: that she could watch the meeting if she was curious, but she didn't have to.

"You and me still full-on block Steven from watching some things," Marc reminds him. "Does that mean he's a fragile sensitive child?"

Jake huffs in discontent. "We block Steven outta stuff like gory decapitation right in our face." (Most of their fights aren't nearly that gruesome...but, well, sometimes they team up with Wade Wilson.) "This isn't -- he's not even -- maldición, he's just a scared, sad, frail old man. Doin' the same denial two-step he's done our whole goddamn lives."

Besides -- if Marc does go back without Jake, it's gonna look like the others put Jake in time-out. For being so scary and mean, probably. So unfair to poor sweet innocent Elias Spector, who never did anything wrong...

"You know...back in the Ammit fight, when Steven's walls started cracking, he thought he wasn't doing anything wrong," says Marc. "And he wasn't just making excuses for Mom. He was repeating some of her greatest hits."

Jake knows, yeah. They talked this over a bunch, trying to decide if they should mention any of the infighting in their backstory, or just give Elias the impression that they've been a happy supportive team since day one. "Then Steven saw some of your memories. And he turned it around how fast...?"

Marc sighs. "Pretty fast."

But. There are a lot of buts. But it was traumatic on both of them. But if there hadn't been an impending genocide to put the pressure on, they never would've pushed that fast. But Steven backslid on some of it afterwards anyway, and had to re-learn it at a slower pace, and that was still distressing enough that one night it almost melted him.

More silence. Jake contemplates punching something again. Marc plays with his curls.

"Say I want us all to be done for the day," mutters Jake at last. "Say I don't even care how he answers when Steven tells him off, I just wanna apaga y vámonos."

Marc considers it. "Did we cover...everything I wanted to cover? If we didn't...I don't want any of our visual aids to go to waste."

On the one hand, it's an excuse. On the other...Jake has to admit, they all (including Wanda!) did put a lot of work into those visual aids.

To himself, Marc thinks back over the game plan. They talked to Dad in person about being a system. They came clean about being the Moon Knights. They gave him a chance to watch the trauma montage. Is that all of it...?

...A gentle knock on the door.

Marc sits up.

It's Steven, who leads Marc out of the bedroom and down the stairs. Not all the way back into the body; they stop behind the living-room couch, to get a look at what's on the TV.

Their inner child, it turns out, is already watching from the couch. Ruby's internal self-image is wearing an oversized white hoodie: almost the same as the kind Marc has, except that her version comes with floppy fabric bunny-ears.

"Oh," says Marc, when he sees what's on-screen. "If Dad offended you bad enough to get himself re-Hexed -- we should probably just go, huh."

"Didn't ask Wanda to do that," admits Steven, leaning over the back of the couch between them. "But since she did, it's no harm to leave the rabbi in there while we debrief, I think."

His report is about the best Marc could've hoped for. That, okay, Dad hasn't magically stopped believing in or making excuses for Mom...but at least he seems genuinely willing to stop fighting them about it.

"Pretty sure he'd be relieved to move on to a chat about the latest Cubs game..."

(Marc silently passes Steven the knowledge that baseball season hasn't even started yet.)

"...the latest game of whatever season it is, then," says Steven, undeterred. "Or about, you know, the fun Paris photos. But I didn't make him any promises, yeah? Either of you want us to bail at this point -- we can bail."

"I don't want to," puts in Ruby. (Inside their head, she has a Sokovian accent. They're not sure how accurate it comes out when she's using the body, and frankly, they've been afraid to ask.) "This is interesting. I want to see what happens next."

"Wasn't actually including you, Ruby love," says Steven sheepishly.

Marc and Ruby both turn to the staircase. Jake has come down from the bedroom and is standing a few steps from the ground floor, leaning on his elbows on the railing.

He locks eyes with Marc. "You wanna go?"

"Yeah," admits Marc. "I do."

Partly to give some positive reinforcement for when you don't argue about Mom, you get rewarded with talking to your son.

Partly because...

Look, deep down, Marc has always wanted his dad back. He never had any hopes about that happening while Mom was alive. And the lingering ghost of her could still tear apart the fragile relationship they have now. But if Dad can handle making the effort not to let her...? Marc wants to grab that chance and hold on.

After a long silence, Jake says, "Don't drag it out, but...if you wanna say a lil' goodbye, sure, como quieras. You can even tell 'im he hasn't fucked it up so bad you won't see him again. Just say right now we've gotta go Avenging or something."

"A quick wrap-up might be easier on your dad, too," points out Steven. "Thank him for agreeing to our boundaries, then end the meeting on a high note! Don't give him too much of an opening to stumble into some whole new way of messing us up."

"Thank you, mis vidas," says Marc.

Then he steps back into the body, in the diner, facing the mini-Hex.

"Hi, M--Wanda," he says. "You can take it down now."

With a gesture, Wanda makes the red walls fizzle out.

...There's nobody inside them.

The jacket Elias shrugged off is still sitting on the bench. His cane is still leaning against it. But there's no sign of Elias himself.

Marc's alarm rockets through their head so fast that Steven, Jake, and Ruby all shoot to the front with him. Steven whips around to stare at Wanda. "Where did you put him?"

A small frown purses Wanda's lips. "I...did not."

She's playing with spirals of scarlet energy before Steven can figure out what to ask first -- how is that possible, it was supposed to be safe, did he get lost, did someone take him (but who?), was there a new extremely-localized Blip --

Wanda's eyes glow red as she gazes at something Steven can't see, maybe something on a whole other plane of existence. "Ah. It appears that Khonshu is having a word with him."

Marc stares.

Steven groans.

Jake tries (and fails) not to laugh.

"Shall we go and fetch him?" asks Wanda. "Or would you rather...leave them to it?"

Steven sighs. "Suppose we'd better step in."

Chapter Text

He's somewhere dark and quiet, a gloomy stone chamber with crumbling pillars and weathered floors. The only light is from the sky -- most of the roof is long gone -- and somehow it's night, with no visible moon, just an unnatural number of stars.

Elias turns slowly to take the new place in...and almost falls over, since he's standing on a flight of steps. Years of abandonment have left them covered in sand, gritty under the soles of his shoes. As he takes in how wide they are, he notices a patch that's smeared with...

It's all dark and shadowy enough that it might not be blood.

Did Wanda decide to change the scenery? But there's nothing sitcom-inspired here. No conspicuous hexagon shapes. Not even anything red, unless you count the stain that doesn't have to be dried blood.

Did they put him in a projection of another memory? This does look a lot like one of the scenes from Wanda's slide show: the building where Marc met Khonshu. Although the soft-focus watercolor rendering wasn't this dark, or crumbling, or...

A figure steps out of the shadows -- easily fifteen feet tall, in long desiccated robes and holding a towering staff --

"Elias Spector."

The eldritch form bends toward him, cold stars visible through the gaps in its empty skull --

Of course Elias screams and runs! Who wouldn't?

Luckily the doors haven't fared much better than the ceiling, there's a huge obvious opening to the outside, which Elias bolts for --

And stumbles out onto a world of endless desert. No sign of civilization, not even a rock or a cactus to break up the scenery, nothing but sand dunes visible from here to the horizon, under the light of the night sky --

that's not an Earth sky, it can't be, he knows cities have light pollution but this isn't just more stars, it's like they're in the middle of a nebula, swirls and filaments of interstellar clouds paint the whole thing in unnatural colors, and the pinpoints of white light are all wrong, they're too many, too big, too close --

Elias flings an arm over his eyes to block out the sight, and backs up until he hits the outside wall (of a temple or a tomb, he doesn't know). Just in time -- he leans against it for support as his knees give out.

There isn't a specific prayer for Lord, please don't let the monster eat me, so he starts into a more general prayer for protection. "Hashkiveinu, Adonai Eloheinu l’shalom v’ha’amideinu malkeinu l’chai’im..."

He gets all the way through, and...a brief glance confirms he's still in the horrible unreal nightmare world, but he hasn't been horribly killed yet, so he takes a breath and prepares to start again...

Through the open temple doorway, he hears a distant, echoing voice yell, "Khonshu!"

Elias goes deathly quiet. That sounded like Marc.

He hears three precise thumps, like three sets of boots landing on the stone floor. Then a soft oof.

Marc says the next part at a normal volume, so Elias only barely hears it: "Smooth, babe."

"You hush," retorts...can that be Steven? Raising his own voice, he adds, "All right, pigeon, where did you put him?"

An exasperated sigh, and the eldritch booming monster voice admits, "He went that way."

Footsteps come closer...Elias risks a peek in the direction of the doorway...

A figure steps through -- blank-faced and silver-eyed, the otherworldly light makes it look like a ghost, Elias flinches away with a gasp --

The hood and mask disappear.

"Dad. It's me," says the figure, who all of a sudden is just Marc in the Moon Knight ortodoxo costume. "Let's get you back inside, okay? Come on."

He ends up holding the huge linen cape so it blocks the sky from Elias's view, and Elias, leaning on Marc so heavily he's almost being carried, manages to stumble back into the shelter of the walls.

Marc steers him to a nice soft heap of sand. They both sit. Elias tries to get his breath back.

Two more figures walk past...each wearing one of the Moon Knight suits he's seen in the news (and, all too briefly, in person). They lean out of the crumbling entrance to get a look at the scenery. No screaming or cringing for them, just a low whistle from modo oscuro, while reformista murmurs, "Bloody hell. Is this the Overvoid?"

It's absolutely Steven under that mask. The other hidden face must be Jake's. Somehow, Elias is still getting a view of Marc and both alters at once.

"Yes and no." Is this Khonshu, then? He's still at the top of the steps, looming over the scene below. "It is a place of power for me. Enough that you appear separately here -- by my will, not hers."

He raises his staff, and his beak, to the open roof. Elias spots one last figure: human-sized, sitting on the edge of the broken stone, heels dangling casually over the edge. This part of the sky is (somehow) a normal level of dark, so her outfit, red and glowing, stands out against the velvet black.

"It is...curious," continues Khonshu, "that you were able to break in here at all."

"Who said anything about breaking in?" asks the Scarlet Witch. "Your own personal high priests extended the invitation. I had permission."

Steven steps away from the entryway, his own mask disappearing so Elias can see his face too. He sits next to Elias, on the opposite side from where Marc is, and hands over -- oh, gosh, they brought Elias's cane. "Do not let Khonshu intimidate you. I'll admit, first time he got menacing with me, I also panicked and fled the building -- but eventually I figured out he's not that scary, he just loves to be dramatic."

Jake's mask is the last one to vanish. He stands like a guard in the doorway; his cape flares, casting a long crescent-moon shadow that cuts off some of the otherworldly light.

"Thought we had a deal, paloma," he says, looking up at Khonshu. "You agreed you weren't gonna interrupt. We were mostly thinking 'with a Moon Knight mission', but this? Also a hell of an interruption."

"I did not interrupt your conversation," huffs Khonshu, turning back to Marc and the others. "You were talking amongst yourselves. You had put him aside."

A collective groan from all three Moon Knights. Steven throws up both hands in exasperation. "Can you believe this guy?"

"Unfortunately, yes," says Marc flatly. "All right -- now you've got him. What do you want from him?"

"You wanted to scare him, is what you wanted," says Steven.

Elias leans on his cane and manages, "Well, he certainly got that."

It's the first ordinary thing he's gotten out since they found him. Steven and Marc are both openly relieved.

"I wished to form an opinion about your human father's worthiness from...direct experience," says the old monster slowly. "I consider that goal achieved. Any god who wants to claim him is welcome to take him away."

An odd, puzzled silence.

"Are you tryin' to make a point about the Rabbi's god, here?" asks Jake. "Because let's be real, we already know that guy stopped showin' up in person. Could point to any number of more-deserving folks he didn't show up for. These days, we can point to half-of-all-Jews-in-the-universe he didn't show up for."

"To be fair," says Steven reasonably, "it's not like any of the other deities we know managed to stop that either."

"It is polite to make the offer," says Khonshu. Almost offhand, he adds, "I invited any other gods to come and make a claim on you, Marc Spector, before you took my oath. None did."

Judging by the way Marc's expression freezes, this is new information. "Seriously?"

"Of course."

"I -- I didn't hear anything like that."

"It was not for mortal ears," says Khonshu primly. "But I would not be so rude as to ignore the tradition of segulah mikol ha'amim."

Elias does a severe double-take at an Egyptian deity breaking into perfectly-accented Hebrew --

--while Steven grabs his head and doubles over, gasping in pain.

Jake immediately crouches at his side and pulls Steven into an embrace, drawing the crescent cape around his shoulders. Steven presses his forehead against the chestplate of Jake's armor.

Elias reaches out to offer some comfort too...but he's barely moved when Marc grips his arm with one mummy-wrapped hand, holding him back. "It's okay. Jake's got him. This happens sometimes. Just let him ride it out."

"What happens?" presses Elias, concern roiling in his chest. Is this related to the DID? Is it a symptom of something else? Or did Khonshu...hurt Steven, somehow?

"Well. Did you pick up that Khonshu's not using English?" asks Marc. "Or whatever you're hearing -- Jake usually gets it in Spanglish. He's using Allspeak, same as the Asgardians do, and it comes out as whatever language you're comfortable with. Except. Sometimes he uses a word that doesn't fit in your head."

"But...don't you and Steven have the same head?"

"Okay -- it doesn't fit in your conscious understanding," amends Marc. "If you have more than one of those per head, it doesn't have to hit them all the same."

Does that mean Steven knows the least Hebrew, as well as the least Spanish? Being "the nerd who got them through school" might not include Hebrew school. But no, there are plenty of perfectly-clear ways to translate God's chosen people in English...

"Ooh, my ringing ears," moans Steven. He lets his hands relax, but stays cuddled into Jake's hug, glancing over the black-wrapped bicep to check on Marc. "Seriously? It fit in both your parts of the brain? What did it even come out as?"

Jake exchanges a look with Marc (while pointedly avoiding eye contact with Elias).

Marc gives him a short nod, then sighs. "He said 'dibs'."

...Oh. Elias just heard it in the terms a rabbi would think of.

"So...Khonshu called divine dibs on you," says Elias faintly. Not repeating the Hebrew with this "god." Not when he has options. "And...you swore an oath, in his temple..."

Then, as his brain catches up to an earlier part of the conversation:

"Did Wanda call you priests?"

Marc sighs. "Don't get the wrong idea. It's not like we go around leading services or anything. It's just...yeah, technically, the Avatar job is also that."

In contrast to Elias, who leads a service every week. Who threw himself into a prayer the moment he got here.

"So, then..." Elias swallows. "Is this about..."

At a loss for anyone other way to say it, he puts on an exaggerated voice -- one that doesn't actually come naturally to him, but it's the New York drawl that TV shows and standup comedians always use for a Jewish-parent accent:

"Ooh, these ungrateful Avatars of mine, they never pray, they never visit, would it kill you to hold a ceremony once in a while?... Is it like that?"

Marc and the others look from him, to Khonshu, and back. Startled at first, but as it sinks in...

A rueful laugh from Steven. "Oh my days, you might be right."

Jake rises to his feet again, cape swishing. "You really just tryin' to have a God-off with Hashem, jefe? Or are you trying to put us in some kind of...priest-off?" Adding an incredulous gesture toward Elias's seat in the sand: "With him?"

"Easy, babe," soothes Marc.

Khonshu cocks his massive bird skull. "If we discuss this in front of company, Jake Lockley, you will regret it."

"So let's ditch the company," says Jake, striding forward. Over his shoulder, he adds, "Be right back."

He heads up the ancient stairs, walking across the old bloodstain without looking, and goes deeper into the shadows. Khonshu looks from him to Marc, then, when Marc gestures for him to go on, follows Jake back. They don't completely disappear into the darkness, they're just in the shade of the massive statue (arms crossed over its chest, face too weathered to tell what features it used to have).

"You want to go with them?" Steven looks relaxed and unhurt once more, sitting back and stretching his legs. "It's all right, I'll keep an eye on the rabbi."

Marc hesitates. "Jake's got this. I trust him."

"Yeah, but...if Khonshu really is feeling a bit insecure... he might like to hear from both of you."

A grimace. A nod. Marc gets to his feet, and doesn't walk or even run to catch up with the pair, just takes a single flying leap that carries him over most of the space. Stairs and all.

Of all the questions swirling in Elias's head, the first one that comes out is, "Just those two? Not you...?"

"Khonshu met Marc and Jake first. Didn't get to know me until years later," says Steven lightly. "And, well. I immediately started calling out all the ways he was mistreating them. So that put him off for a while."

Is that a subtle insinuation about how Elias met Marc and Steven first, has known both since they were little, and now Jake is the one who keeps putting him off...?

Maybe not. Steven isn't giving Elias any kind of pointed look; his gaze is still on the little group by the statue. "Don't worry, I think he's come around on me by now. But he's still got a special attachment to those two."

In the shadows, Khonshu has crouched down on one knee, so he's on the same eye level as the two much-smaller humans. There's even a moment when he leans his staff against a nearby pillar, so he can rest a hand on each of their heads.

For an inhuman horror from another dimension, he looks...startlingly parental.

Although, Elias remembers, the alters were very firm about not being brothers...

Elias takes in the way Steven is gazing after Marc and Jake, a fond smile on his face. Thinks about the easy way they hang all over each other, therapeutic benefits notwithstanding. And the casual endearments that have slipped out between them.

"You said I didn't have new sons," he says.

Steven glances sidelong at him. "Mm?"

If Elias is on the wrong track again, they're going to be awfully offended.

("...the joke woulda been that they were definitely gettin' married when they grew up.")

"Do I have...new sons-in-law?"

That gets Steven's full attention. Not angry,  but sharply attentive, searching Elias's face.

"And...how would you feel about that?" Steven asks at last. "If Marc went and got into...a romantic relationship...with some of the people he 'made up'?"

The white-gloved air-quotes on the last bit make Elias wince. "I shouldn't have said that. It was...rude."

Steven nods, and waits expectantly for more.

Elias shouldn't feel good about this, right...? Wouldn't a doctor say it's not healthy to retreat into your own head this much, that it's important to make connections with other people? Did something go wrong in the marriage with Layla -- is that the real reason she's not here -- and instead of trying to get better at dealing with real-world relationship conflicts, Marc is falling back on a nice safe fantasy?

...Except, no, that doesn't make sense. Marc still has conflicts with Steven and Jake. They disagree, sometimes they argue, it takes active communication to hash things out. They've mostly been presenting a united front to Elias, but if anything, it feels like that's because they pre-emptively talked out how they wanted to handle topics they disagree on.

And whenever Marc was the only figure in one of Wanda's flashback scenes, he didn't look healthier or better-adjusted. He just looked sad. And alone.

"Is this good for you? Does it make you happy?" ventures Elias. "If you've found something that's good...I don't understand how it works, but I do want Marc, and all of you, to be happy."

At last Steven's face softens again. "We don't understand half the way our brain works either," he admits. "But, yes. This bit makes us very happy."

Movement at the far end of the chamber. Marc and Jake come soaring back over, with Khonshu following at a more sedate pace. Before Elias can decide if he's able to get up now, the new arrivals both drop down to their level: Marc in front of them, Jake at an angle, so he and Elias have Steven between them as a buffer.

Marc only has to make eye contact with Steven for a moment before he says, carefully neutral, "Caught him up on the polycule, huh."

"We agreed we wouldn't hide it if he guessed," says Steven, warm and unselfconscious. "Although, well...technically, he guessed sons-in-law. Which is not quite right."

Of course not. Elias shouldn't have said it like that. Not for gender reasons -- he came around on the idea of two men getting married at least a decade ago -- but not three men, and certainly not when they're in the same...

"Not yet."

...what?

Jake grunts in acknowledgement, and leans forward, past Steven, to address Elias. "Okay, fair warning," he says. "If we have you at the wedding -- which is not totally off the table, although you are on some thin fuckin' ice -- anything we invite you to do, we've promised to ask Khonshu too."

"O-of course," says Elias, automatic and dazed. Like that's just what he expected! A very reasonable approach to a very normal situation! He's certainly not giving himself another headache just trying to absorb whatever is happening right now.

"Well, that works out beautifully!" says Steven, embracing the whole idea without missing a beat. "We could do a whole four-part thing, where Layla's mum walks her down the aisle..."

(Oh! Layla's not gone after all.)

"...and Marc's dad walks him, and Khonshu walks you, and Wanda--"

He breaks off. Too late.

Elias looks from face to almost-identical face, baffled. "What's this about Wanda?"

A flash of red from above.

Elias had almost forgotten Wanda was actually here. Now she descends from the roof in a spotlight of her own making, slow and graceful. Up close, Elias can see more details of her outfit: a carved tiara, long jacket that trails behind her, fingerless gloves and thigh-high boots.

Her heels click gently on the stone when she lands at the top of the dais. Swirls of red sparkles rise up around them, with an elegance that would make a Disney animator weep.

She trots down the steps, nodding her thanks to Khonshu when he sweeps his robes out of her path, pausing when she reaches the trail of dried blood and then stepping smoothly around it.

In a quippy American accent, she says, "Memory wipe still off the table?"

"Yes," chorus Marc and Steven.

"Well..." hedges Jake. (Steven swats him on the arm.) "Ow! Fine, yes."

"Look, we will explain...something," says Marc. "But let's get back to the real world first, okay? Ultraterrestrial nightmare temple isn't the best place for a long conversation. Dad, do you feel up to standing? Wanda, can you make us a door out of here...?"

It takes some effort, leaning on his cane on one side and Marc on the other, but Elias does get to his feet. Jake and Steven rise up on the other side of him. Wanda is using both hands to knead another writhing mass of red light.

"Ready when you are," Steven prompts.

Wanda tucks a lock of hair behind her ears. "Yes. Well."

Even through the sturdy magic armor, Elias can feel Marc tense up. "What is it?"

"Something is...different," says Wanda. "The path we took to get here isn't going back."

An uncomfortable eldritch throat-clearing from the pedestal.

Three pairs of eyes narrow at him. Marc speaks for the group: "All right, what did you do?"

"You may recall...earlier..." Khonshu sounds almost...embarrassed? "...I used the phrase, any god who wants to claim him is welcome to take him away."

"And that was binding?" yelps Jake.

"...Not intentionally."  

Another, louder chorus of groans.

"The Scarlet Witch is a Nexus Being...the embodiment of Chaos magic...with the power to create her own worlds, and the power to destroy them," rumbles Khonshu. "But she is not, technically, a goddess. And I certainly don't want him."

Wanda flicks her fingers in a different way. A half-circle of cushioned, brightly-patterned armchairs manifest in the temple ruin, just in time for Elias to collapse into one of them.

"All right, nobody panic!" Steven sits in the next chair, clapping his hands. "We can sort this. Shouldn't take long. Wanda, you can leave without us and grab some help, yeah? I'm sure Taweret would be happy to step in."

"Taweret is a goddess of women, children, and a substitute goddess of the dead," says Khonshu. (Helpful, because Elias hasn't done a speck of research on that name.) "A living adult man is unlikely to fall in her jurisdiction."

"First you say any god, now we have to worry about jurisdiction?" complains Steven. "Hardly seems fair."

"The rules of etiquette among the divine are old and many, Steven Grant. I could not hope to explain them all. You would hardly be able to track them if I did."

Jake plops himself protectively on the arm of Steven's chair. "Pretty sure you're underestimatin' Steven's hyperfixations."

Marc doesn't sit anywhere, he's too busy pacing. "I mean, yeah -- but maybe let's not hang Dad's safety on testing that."

"How about Thor?" suggests Wanda. "He could make a strong claim to god of non-traditional parenting situations, I think. And he likes you."

Elias remembers seeing Thor in the team-up montage. He thought that was just a professional Avenging connection. He didn't realize it was personal...

Steven shakes his head. "Off-planet right now. We left a wedding message for him at the New Asgard consulate, he hasn't gotten back."

This is miles away from the most important question right now, but Elias finds himself saying, "Is Thor invited to your wedding?"

"No!" exclaims Steven. "That is -- he will be invited, when we get round to sending invitations -- but, gosh, we're nowhere near that yet. We just asked if he knew of any good magic-informed wedding planners."

Wide-eyed, Elias just nods.

"What about Bast?" asks Marc. "What's her jurisdiction?" And, as an aside to Elias: "We're not great pals with Princess Shuri or anything. This would be more of a professional favor."

"Bastet was another goddess of children, or at least childbirth," says Steven. "That, and warriors. She was the protector of Ra, then of the Egyptian pharaohs, then she dumped that lot for the royal line of Wakanda. Got a bit of a sun motif going on...sometimes she was invoked for protection against contagious diseases...nothing terribly helpful to us, I'm afraid."

"Maybe one of the other four that ditched their pantheons for Wakanda?" says Jake hopefully. "I'd ask about the rest of Khonshu's people...but frankly, I wouldn't trust that bunch to keep a cactus watered."

Elias's brain is, once again, doing the thing where it finally processes something from five minutes ago. "Excuse me," he says, louder than he meant to. "What does this claiming mean, exactly? Would I end up -- like you?"

Marc stops cold. Everyone else looks sharply at Elias.

"I'm not saying that to judge your career path, mijo," adds Elias quickly, before the air temperature can start literally chilling again. (He does have judgments. But Marc already knows that. Probably wrote all of them on the bingo cards.) "It's just -- I've sworn an oath already. To my God. And part of it was that I would have no others."

Dead silence in the wake of this reminder. The alters look worriedly at each other.

Under his breath, Jake says, "If this turns into us goin' on a quest to go find Hashem and drag him back from whatever alternate plane he retired to, I am gonna lose it."

Marc looks ashen. "If my first sit-down with Dad in twenty years ends with him getting forced to be Avatar-ized, I'm gonna lose it."

"No. Can't be." Steven starts off hesitant, but gets more sure of himself as he talks it through. "The wording was not that specific. It just said claim. That could mean anything, down to 'claiming you for their side in a dodgeball game'. There's not even any requirement that you accept it! We could get back to Earth, then you could immediately turn round and say 'thanks, but no thanks'."

Wanda, who's been quiet for a while, abruptly turns to Khonshu and says: "Why am I not a goddess?"

Now everyone stares at her.

"It can't be that I'm not powerful enough. I could take you in a fight," continues Wanda. Not bragging, just stating a fact. "Besides, I know any number of gods who've been defeated by other non-gods. Can't be that I haven't had enough worshippers, either." She turns self-consciously to Elias. "I didn't ask for them -- I wouldn't have encouraged them, I promise -- but there have been centuries of prophecies about the Scarlet Witch. How I would have the power to destroy the entire world. Some people were...worryingly enthusiastic about that."

Elias has no trouble believing it. "The more things change, right...?"

She gives him an appreciative smile, then turns back to Khonshu. "And it can't be that the 'chaos' jurisdiction is already full. How many different moon gods are there? Don't answer that, Steven. So -- what am I missing?"

Khonshu finally comes down to join them, dust swirling around the edges of his robes as they trail behind him. Until now, he's been at enough of a distance that you could almost tune out how massive the mummified body is. Elias can feel his heart pounding harder as the ancient being looms.

He doesn't do anything as friendly as "crouching" this time. Just towers over Wanda, who cranes her neck to meet his eye sockets.

"You would claim divinity, little witch?" he asks.

Wanda lifts a hand, grasps at nothing visible, and pulls. Smoothly as a deflating balloon, Khonshu's form begins to shrink. There's a moment when he struggles, as if against unseen wires -- then either he decides to allow it, or he realizes it would be terrible for his dignity to keep fighting and lose.

Once Khonshu is small enough to be on a level with her face, Wanda looks him in the eye sockets and says firmly, "Scarlet Witch."

"Wait, can she just do that?" asks Jake. Looking between Steven and Marc, like either of them might know. "Is that how godhood works? Can anybody do that?"

"Anybody? No," says Khonshu stiffly. "It requires a certain level of power. And a certain level of worship. But there is also an element of...self-identification."

Steven lets out a hysterical little giggle. "Assigned mortal at birth."

And Marc adds, "Wow. No entrance exam for this at all, huh? That sure explains a lot."

Wanda looks from one face to the next. There's a moment where her eyes glow a soft red, and all of them fall quiet.

Elias has a sudden suspicion she's using her bespoke mental connection with Marc and the others, talking about things they don't want Elias to weigh in on...

Marc is the first who goes back to speaking out loud. "Listen, you could hardly do worse at it than Ammit. Or Loki. Or...probably a dozen others Steven could think of."

Steven scoffs. "Only a dozen? Please."

"Might wanna be careful, though," says Jake. "You think what the human race does to witches is bad...just wait till you find out how they handle Jewish People Who Announce They're Gods."

"I've heard a few things," says Wanda dryly. To Khonshu again: "Tell me how to follow the 'dibs' tradition. Not out loud. Don't risk giving the boys more headaches. Just think it at me."

Marc uses the new pause to stalk back over to Elias's armchair, where he takes a military at-attention stance. Steven gets up and stations himself at the other side, with Jake close behind him.

Feels like the sort of situation where Elias should rise too. So he does. Planting the cane in front of him and resting both hands on it, since it feels a bit more formal that way.

Wanda comes over to stand in front of them, flicking the cozy chairs back into nonexistence as she does. "I do have a jurisdiction that covers you," she informs Elias. "But I'm going to try to do this without invoking it, all right? If I did, there's a chance that...well, let's just say, I'm not at a place in my life where I'm looking for an Avatar relationship."

"No, please," agrees Elias (while Steven just full-on shudders).

"Then let's start with the option that implies the least...long-term commitment."

Wanda offers him a hand to shake.

"You were brought here out of a barrier I made, while I wasn't paying enough attention to keep you from being taken. Rabbi Elias Spector, I claim you as my responsibility to bring home."

Chapter Text

Elias sinks back into the booth at Gena's with a sigh of relief. His coat is still there, and when he checks the pockets he finds his phone and wallet, safe and untouched.

His safety concerns are distracting enough that it takes him a second to notice the kid.

She's sitting on the opposite bench: a tween white girl in a hoodie, hair the same red as Wanda has now (although when Wanda herself was eleven or twelve, hers would've been dark brown). Staring at him. Over the rim of the milkshake she was just finishing off.

Elias stares back.

"Ruby," warns Steven, leaning over her and crossing his arms. He's out of the Moon Knight suit, back in his casual clothes, as are Marc and Jake behind him. "That wasn't yours."

"He wasn't finishing it," protests Ruby, pointing to Elias. She speaks with an accent he can't quite place. "Finders keepers."

"Who...is this?" asks Elias faintly.

Jake slides past Steven to sit with the girl, puts an arm around her shoulders, and deadpans, "This is our and Wanda's secret baby."

"Jake!" yelps Marc (while Steven groans). "Don't listen to him, Dad, he's messing with you."

"Is she one of you?" realizes Elias.

An awkward silence...then all four figures fade out, to give Elias the view of Marc's one body sitting on the bench, defiantly wiping chocolate foam off of his (her??) chin.

(They didn't plan for Elias to see this. They must've been afraid he would have a bad reaction. He concentrates on not having one.)

"...We'll buy you another." The group view fades back in, just the three adult men again, Marc in the middle grabbing a napkin to scrub off his face. "Wanda, can you...? And grab a couple of those, los turrones de maní, those peanut things Steven likes? Please."

"Of course." Wanda heads for the counter, before Elias can protest that he doesn't exactly have an appetite. She's back in non-magic street clothes too, though as she crosses the diner, her fashionable red-on-red outfit switches to the more muted colors of her definitely-not-a-famous-Avenger disguise.

The room sways a little. Elias grips the edge of the table. Maybe he does need to drink something. 

"Coming back from another plane of reality can be like that," says Steven reassuringly. "Especially if it's your first time! Physically touching things helps. The extra protein should too."

"We were about ready to pack it in for the day," adds Marc, all business. "But we'll stay and keep an eye on you while you adjust."

A shiver runs through Elias. "You're going? Already?"

It softens Marc a little. "Not forever. Just for today. We can meet up again some other time." (Jake leans subtly against him.) "As long as you...and we...stay off the topics it turns out we can't talk about."

"I will." Elias lets go of the table to re-confirm that his coat is still here, then glances toward Wanda again. She's talking to Gena at the counter, pointing casually at something on a menu, like she's having the most normal day in the world. "This, ah, this just...happens to you a lot?"

"Which part?" asks Steven. "Physical existence getting wibbly on us? Having to sort out some nonsense from the gods? Coming back to our body to find another headmate's been getting into mischief while we were out? For all of those, yes."

"Mostly the part that involves...god-identified beings."

(That's a nice, comfortable thing to call them. Elias will have to use it more often.)

Instead of answering directly, Marc holds out his hand. "Give me your phone."

Confused but agreeable, Elias fishes it out of his coat pocket, unlocks the screen, and hands it over. Marc taps at it for a moment. Then Jake does the "reaching into him" trick, where they don't fully switch positions, but their arms are overlapping. Whatever they're typing, it must be in "Jake's part of the brain."

When they hand the phone back, they've set Elias's Maps app to the address of a synagogue, about one subway stop from here. "You want to go somewhere and check in with yours, that's a good place."

Feeling all warm and fuzzy inside, Elias holds the phone against his heart. None of their texts over the past year have mentioned any kind of temple attendance, and now it turns out they have recommendations. "This is something you do too?"

Awkward silence.

"Haven't been to services or anything," says Steven at last. "One of our...colleagues...is a regular there, is all."

"Well, that is also nice," says Elias firmly.

Of course he'd rather they were going more. And he wants to reassure them, to say that of course they're still welcome, that Khonshu had better not be telling them otherwise. But making Marc feel guilty about not doing enough Jewish things is probably on their bingo cards.

And it is nice that they have Jewish friends! He can be happy about that.

Speaking of their Jewish friends: Wanda comes back to the booth, levitating dessert alongside her. She sets a new chocolate shake and a cardboard takeout box of "peanut things" in front of Elias, hands a second box to Steven, and casually ignores physical reality to walk through the bench behind them so she can sit by the window again.

"Boys, you've got a little..." Once she has the guys' attention, Wanda touches a spot on her cheek. The group view fades out, so Elias can see Marc's body is still wearing a smudge of chocolate. "Right there...Here, let me."

A napkin whisks out of the holder, a blob of water floats up out of their half-empty glass to wet it, and Wanda catches the result. You'd think she could just magic away the stain itself? But no, she dabs it off their face by hand.

Marc (or whoever?) offers up their cheek and holds still. Not really needing the help, but indulging her anyway. Wanda gives them a fond smile.

...Elias has enough sense not to ever, ever mention this, but: in that moment, she's the one who reminds him of Wendy. Back before they lost Randall. Back when she was well. When the boys would get into some mess or another, and she didn't mind fussing over them.

Wanda even called these three "boys" again.

And...they're thinking about having Wanda take the place Wendy abandoned, in this wedding they're planning. (Elias still can't quite make that fit in his head.)

Some sort of...roleplaying...thing? Another therapy technique, maybe? That's...well, at least it wouldn't be the weirdest thing Elias has seen today...

Though in retrospect, it would make Jake's little "secret baby" quip really disturbing.

Unless...?

(They're still with Layla, but if certain online gossip about the Moon Knights is true, there is some sort of openness there...)

Keeping his mouth firmly shut, Elias thinks, Wanda, if this is the sort of adult situation that a father never needs to know the details of, please make sure you never, ever tell me.

Wanda breaks out in a coughing fit.

The plural view snaps back into place, so Elias can see all three men hovering anxiously over her. She's still pink in the face when she's recovered enough to say, "Yes -- I think it's time -- for what really happened -- in the Hex."

"The Hex?" echoes Elias. "Sergeant Barnes said you were in stasis...until the Avengers woke you up, and..." His heart sinks. "...And this was a lie to keep me from worrying."

"Not a lie," says Marc. On either side of him, Steven and Jake lean in close. "Just...not the whole story. Physically, yeah, that's what happened."

Wanda's imaginary TV screen rises back up in front of the window.

"Mentally, though...? That's one of the times we were on a different plane of reality."

Wanda picks up the thread. "You already know...someone tried to possess me. The Hex was a trap, to keep her contained."

The TV fades in on a nighttime view of the gazebo-sized magical construct, blocking most of Regent's Park Road. Its walls cast a red glow over the mostly-dark shops on either side.

"Well, she did her best to turn it around. Made a psychic trap-within-a-trap, caught us all in that. Hoping she could figure out a way to break free, while we were...occupied."

Oh, no. "Did she -- was it bad?"

"Other way around," murmurs Steven, as the camera view zooms in. "She tried to make something we wouldn't want to leave."

The shot of the little Hex dissolves in a slow transition...

...to a disarmingly-normal kitchen, containing a young version of Marc, around the age he was when Randall died. It's not from their real home in the '90s, but Elias could easily believe it was the kitchen of any of his friends.

He's at the fridge, frowning at a carton of milk, turning it over to read a different part of the label...

"Something wrong, Steven?" asks on-screen Wanda, walking into frame. "Is it past the best-by date?"

She's not a younger version of herself. She's -- well, the age she is now, which is around the age Elias was in the '90s. Wearing jeans and a red checked blouse with the sleeves rolled up.

"I don't know, Mum," says...is this little Marc doing Steven Grant playtime, or is this little Steven? "Is [STATIC] before today, or after?"

Wanda takes the carton and gives it her own inspection. "Looks like the date got smudged somehow," she decides. "Not a problem! We'll just have to check the old-fashioned way."

She twists off the cap and sniffs the inside.

"Ugh!" she exclaims, making a face so horrified that Steven bursts out giggling. "Good catch, Steven! We couldn't put this in, it would completely ruin the brownies. Go check the fridge for something else, all right?"

"Let me smell!" pleads a new voice.

Oh -- this is the different plane of reality part. A little version of Jake comes into frame and makes excited grabby-hands at the milk. He's almost identical to little Steven, but there are differences in hairstyle and expression that Elias can recognize by now, and in place of Steven's blue plaid button-down he's wearing a black T-shirt with Han Solo screen-printed on the front.

Wanda hands him the carton. Little Jake takes a whiff, lets out a theatrical "Bleeeaaaugh!", then immediately turns around and shoves it in the face of...

...well, that can only be little Marc, in a white T-shirt screen-printed with Buzz Lightyear. He scrambles back with a yelp, then an accusatory "Mom!"

Wanda chides Jake not to torment Marc, then redirects him to disposing of the spoiled milk in the sink, next to a counter piled with half-mixed brownie ingredients.

Steven rummages in the fridge for a replacement while the other two watch the bad stuff flow down the drain, both alternately icked-out and fascinated, all three of them so carefree and unhurt and happy...

Elias doesn't know when the tears started, just that he takes a breath and chokes on a sob.

"Dad, hey." (He turns away, hugging his coat and trying to get ahold of himself, but hears Marc get up anyway.) "It's okay. We're okay." (A hand on his back. He tries to shake it off. Or maybe he just shakes.) "Privacy illusions are still up, nobody's gonna see -- can we have a hug? Please?"

When he says it like that, what can Elias do, except fall into Marc's arms and bawl all over him for a while?

(They should've had that -- their whole childhood should've been that, no death, no traumas, no everything falling apart -- Marc should've had that, and RoRo should've had that, and Wendy should've had that...)

Marc holds him tight, and occasionally murmurs soothing things in his ear, which Elias eventually calms down enough to hear. They're okay. Everyone is safe. There was a fight to get out, but by then their friends were helping. They remember the rest of it as a nice mental vacation. It's okay.

When the worst of the body-wracking sobs have passed, the voice coming out of Marc's mouth switches to Steven's. "Anything we can do to help...? If you're not up for saying it, just think it at Wanda."

He's far too choked-up to even try speaking. Thoughts and feelings pour out in a torrent. How she'll make any sense of it, he doesn't know.

(...and Wanda lost her sons too, right? Wanda and her boys should've had that...!)

(A soft, insubstantial presence beside him. Full disclosure, we have it now, whispers Wanda into his mind. We got the same luck as...half of all families in the universe, give or take.)

"He's grieving that he wasn't able to give you the real version of that," she adds out loud, from her real seat on the far bench. "He wants you to know that he's sorry."

(Wanda, in turn, is sorry she can't share her luck with...oh, this is what she's claimed as "her jurisdiction." Everyone whose world ended the same way hers did.)

The man hugging Elias lets out a long breath. Marc's voice comes out next: "Thanks, Dad."

(Elias can't resent her for it. Just take better care of your miracle than I did of mine.)

"...Coulda given us some of it." Wait, is that Jake now? Quiet enough that he might be talking to himself. "Without her. Just with you."

It almost starts Elias crying again.

He's sorry he couldn't, but he couldn't! They couldn't have left her -- she wouldn't have made it alone, the depression would have gotten to her (Wanda, don't tell them this) -- of course Marc had his own struggles, but he lived! Bad enough he lost his brother -- then, what, Elias should've made it so he lost his mother too? (Maybe they already found out somehow--) How would he ever have come back from that? Who could think that was better? (--but if they haven't, let me at least keep protecting Marc from this...!)

Wanda speaks directly into his head again. Do you know she would have died? I'm not looking -- I'll trust what you tell me. Are you sure?

He knows, he knows. (Moments from two especially-bad ambulance rides flash across his mind. Of course he's sure.)

They never found out, whispers Wanda into his mind, and I won't tell them.

Out loud, she says, "All of you were in a terrible, painful situation with no simple answers. Maybe there was a best way out, but it wouldn't have been an easy one. I'm glad you're out of it now."

A hum of appreciation from...okay, the next speaker is Steven. "You get that from your therapist?"

"Was it obvious...?"

Elias has calmed down to the occasional sniffle, though he probably looks like a wreck. He's shivering, his eyes feel swollen, and it's hard to breathe. He doesn't want to let go.

He loves Marc so much. And loves Steven so much. And...he'll just have to do his best with Jake.

"...Maybe you don't try to get to any synagogue tonight." That's Marc again. "Maybe you just...go back to your hotel and take it easy. That's our plan. Well, not a hotel -- we're crashing at a friend's place -- but same idea."

Elias nods miserably. It's a good plan. He feels like he's been awake for a week. And the dull ache in his knees, the one that usually goes away after he gets a chance to sit down, it's not going.

On the other hand...he does want to get to temple. Much as his God can listen from anywhere, there's a comfort in the building and the community that you just don't get from praying in a rented room...

"Would it be all right if I walked him there?"

For the first time in a while, Elias raises his head. Marc (or, whichever alter is running the body right now?) looks up too.

"Can't remember the last time I went," says Wanda, with a self-conscious shrug. She's kneading another tangle of red magic. "And, you know, after today...I should probably make sure I won't burst into flames when I step across the threshold."

The red sparkles as she does a little finger-flip. Suddenly Elias is holding a damp handkerchief.

"Besides: this way, you won't have to worry if he gets there safely."

Marc loosens his hold, without letting go, so Elias has enough breathing room to wipe his face. "You want to talk to Dad alone, huh."

The images of two alters fan out behind him. "Not planning to trade embarrassing baby pictures, I hope," says Steven lightly.

Jake crosses his arms. "If you got somethin' new to tell him off for, do that in front of us."

"It's not you I want to talk about, I promise," says Wanda. "There are some...things I've been meaning to ask a rabbi? I could start from scratch with another one, but, well. They would have a lot of backstory to catch up on."

⬣

The Knights leave the diner first.

As they cross the busy street outside the window, it doesn't take any mind-reading for Wanda to notice Elias doing little double-takes. Watching "Marc alone" and reflexively trying to find his companions.

Their body disappears around a corner, though Wanda keeps her own mental link with them as they rendezvous with Layla. Before disconnecting, she asks them, Do you want to drive past here on your way? I can point out the scooter, tell your father when to wave.

(Elias is currently looking up their transit directions. Wanda takes advantage of his distraction to put a subtle blessing on his cane. His knees will make the trip.)

After a quick internal consult, Steven answers for the group: We already said goodbye for the day -- let's hold to that. Healthy boundaries all around, yeah? Doesn't have to be long until we say hello again.

⬣

There is still some backstory Wanda has to lay out before her questions make any sense. 

They're making their way down into the subway station when Elias stops her. "I'm sorry, this sounds -- complicated," he says. (They both lean against the wall to let a group of faster walkers charge past.) "I mean, it sounds fascinating -- I do want to hear it some time! -- but it deserves my full attention. And I -- right now I can't give it that. Sorry."

The next part isn't out loud, but he definitely thinks it in Wanda's direction:

I'm afraid I didn't realize you actually had questions.

"You thought it was just an excuse to babysit?" asks Wanda, amused. They come to the platform, pausing near a bench...then it hits her: "Oh. You thought I wanted to talk about..."

Awfully self-centered of me, I'm sure, thinks Elias ruefully.

Wanda does a quick, feather-light scan over all the minds in range -- just to confirm nobody here is planning on making this harder by jumping in front of a train today -- then thinks, Did you ever talk about it? With anyone?

A little. Not much. And not in any detail, really.

It might help to start, thinks Wanda. But...probably not with me. It hasn't actually changed what I think you should've done.

Even while actively trying not to look, Wanda can feel the churn of Elias's thoughts as he processes that. Weighing her disapproval against all the concerns and fears and traumas that led to the choices he made -- choices he's probably re-litigated with himself on a hundred sleepless nights already.

"What kind of world would it be, if we just abandoned the people we love in their darkest hours...?" asks Elias out loud. The internal struggle doesn't show up in his voice. It just comes out measured and calm, like the opening of a sermon where he's about to spend an hour explaining the answer. "I won't ask you to talk about Marc, but -- where would your friend Sergeant Barnes be, if nobody who loved him had stood by him when he needed help? Where would you be?"

Bucky's story is mostly not Wanda's to tell, but...

We do have some idea about that last one, she thinks. If you'd like to hear it.

Nervously, Elias nods.

(On the far side of the track, a busker with a guitar abruptly switches to playing one of Wanda's theme songs.)

Best-case scenario: spiraling into a mental-health crisis so powerful it dragged an entire small town in with me. Worst case: terrifying rampage across the multiverse, possessing alternate versions of herself, thinking she could murder her way to a world where her sons were still alive.

"...oh."

I needed help, and eventually people got it for me, adds Wanda, still mind-to-mind, as their train pulls in. But they also worked on getting me safely away from the people I was hurting. The other version of me, we got her safely away from...well, everyone in existence. We did manage to pull her out of her crisis, in the end. But if we hadn't...

A flare of interest from Elias. How did you do it?

That's another whole cinematic scene on Wanda's highlight reel. She resists the impulse to just play the whole thing. Honestly? We set her up to realize that her grief over her dead sons was leading her to traumatize her still-living ones.

They file with the other passengers onto the subway car. Elias sinks into one of the seats nearest the door.

Wanda finds a handhold and stays standing. I hoped that would reach her. But I knew -- thanks to Marc and Jake, specifically -- that it might not.

(There was a moment, before it sank in...a look they saw on the other Wanda's face...the kind of anger Marc still sees from his mother in his nightmares. The same anger this Wanda only sees when she plays back her memory of fighting Thanos.)

And if the only way to protect her victims had been at her expense...? I was ready to choose them. Wanda hesitates over the next part, then decides to go ahead and spell it out: Which means I know the well version of her would have chosen them.

Elias takes that in.

Whatever he's thinking, it's quieter this time around. Maybe...too quiet? And he looks like he might be giving himself another headache.

All of which is familiar enough that Wanda decides, you know what, the Knights would probably ask her to take another look.

...and sure enough, the dissociation has kicked in.

But of course that's so much more dramatic than what Wendy was dealing with, thinks Elias distantly. (To the extent he's thinking at all.) It doesn't compare at all. Marc and Jake were stressed and upset and sometimes hurt, but never in that much danger. It was nothing so bad that they...and Steven, and Ruby, and whoever else is in there...couldn't be sympathetic, if they really tried.

He hasn't fully retreated into his own mental sitcom. He still feels the heartbreak and remorse of not protecting them better. But the worst parts of his wife's abuse...the ones he had blocked out until he watched that montage, and then refused to believe...? They've slipped away again. The images have blurred and faded, like sidewalk-chalk drawings in the rain.

(Wanda could put it all back. It would be so easy. Replay the montage directly into his head, and engrave it in the forefront of his thoughts, so deeply that he'd never be able to forget again.)

(The Knights would definitely beg her not to do that.)

She sticks a hand in her coat pocket, summons a wiggling knot of chaos magic, and fiddles with it to help her focus. Doesn't look like Elias has lost other big parts of his day. Most importantly, the boundaries he agreed to are still clear -- use these specific terms while avoiding those ones, don't get in the middle of system arguments, don't bring up Wendy at all -- and there's no sign that he intends to break them. That's enough to build on.

...and this is their stop.

"This is us!" realizes Wanda, pulling him to his feet.

"Oh!" says Elias, coming back to full awareness with a self-conscious laugh. "Rescuing me again, thank you."

And he follows her in the right direction.

He's not fast. But with a little patience and a little help -- specifically, the way Wanda subtly zaps the doors to keep them open long enough -- he gets through in the end.