[Great Plains of South Dakota, September 2010]

The house sat close to the mountain range the way a quiet thing sits near a loud one: not hiding, not competing, simply existing in its own register.

It was a small house, modest in every external detail, with a porch that faced west and a view of the plains that stretched far enough to make the horizon feel like a promise.

The morning light was still young, painting the grass in the pale gold of early autumn, and the woman sitting on the porch with her coffee looked like she had been part of this landscape for long enough that the landscape had grown comfortable with her.

She was in her late twenties, or appeared to be. Her dark hair was pulled back loosely and she wore simple clothes, nothing that suggested she was anything other than what she looked like, a woman on a quiet morning with a warm mug and no particular urgency. Her eyes, though, carried something that a woman genuinely in her late twenties would not have had time to accumulate.

She was Ajak, the Prime Eternal. And she was currently smiling at the sky.

The figure came down out of it without warning.

He controlled descent and landing on the open ground in front of the house with a sound like a heavy footstep, dust rising briefly from the impact. He straightened and looked at her.

He was tall, broad-shouldered, and carried himself like a man who had spent millennia being the most capable person in every situation he had ever entered.

His dark hair was cut clean and his eyes were sharp and level. He looked to be in his mid-thirties, which meant absolutely nothing.

He was Ikaris.

"It's been a few decades since we last saw each other, Ajak," he said, crossing the ground toward her.

Ajak stood and they embraced briefly.

"I'm fine," she said, pulling back with the smile still in place. "How are you, Ikaris?"

"Fine." He settled onto the porch steps as she returned to her chair, "So. Why did you want to meet? Is this about the mission?"

"In a way, yes."

Ikaris's eyes moved briefly across the plains, the habit of someone who never fully stopped scanning an environment. "The population hasn't reached the standard threshold yet."

"Come inside," Ajak said, rising. "I'll explain properly."

She refilled her coffee and poured a second cup, setting it on the low table between the two sofas as they settled into the front room.

The house was warm inside, filled with the quiet accumulation of ordinary things, books, a few photographs, small objects placed.

Ikaris accepted the coffee and waited.

Ajak wrapped both hands around her mug and said, "Before we get to Arishem, I want to ask you something. Do you remember what happened a few days ago? When the entire Earth was covered in severe weather. Continent-scale atmospheric disruption. You would have felt it."

Ikaris looked at her with a flat expression. "Hard to miss an effect like that."

"It was caused by one person," Ajak said. "A single man and his name is Ethan Carter."

Ikaris raised an eyebrow, just barely.

Ajak continued, "But he did not stop there. After the weather event, he released a construct into space, a giant phoenix made of blue fire. It left this galaxy. The scale of it was measurable from outside the Milky Way."

She paused to let that settle. "It was a message. He was telling every cosmic entity in range that Earth is his home, and that anything that comes for it will have to come through him first."

Ikaris was quiet for a moment. His coffee sat untouched. "Does Arishem want us to remove him?"

Ajak let out a short, quiet laugh, genuine amusement rather than dismissal. "No. Arishem was very specific about this. He does not want any hostility toward Carter."

She leaned forward slightly, her elbows resting on her knees, her eyes meeting his.

"Arishem said that Ethan Carter has the potential to become an equal to the Celestials. Because of that, Arishem wants us to make contact first. We are to inform him of the Emergence and invite him to be part of finding a solution before he found about the Emergence."

Ikaris stared at her. The silence that followed was not an empty one. It had weight.

"Arishem is afraid of a human," he said finally, and the flatness in his voice was not contempt exactly, but it was close enough to it that the distinction barely mattered.

Ajak's expression did not shift in any dramatic way. Her eyes held steady on his and her voice stayed even. "Remember what Arishem said, Ikaris. Those are his words, not mine. Carter has the potential to become an equal to the Celestials. That means we treat him as such. No assessment of him from a position of superiority and no approach based on the assumption that we are dealing with someone beneath our concern."

She held the look for a moment longer. "We tend carefully."

Ikaris did not look convinced. He looked, instead, like a man who had received an order he intended to follow because it was an order, not because he had arrived at the same conclusion through his own reasoning.

He picked up his coffee, drank once, and set it back down. "So let's meet him then," he said.

"That is why I called you here," Ajak agreed. She stood and moved to the window, looking out at the plains and the easy gold of the morning light across the grass. "I need you to come with me. Together we go to Ethan Carter and open the conversation."

She was quiet for a moment, watching the landscape outside with an expression that had something genuinely soft in it, the look of someone who had been in this place long enough to have feelings about it that went beyond professional assessment.

"This planet is different from the others we have been assigned to," she said. "Different from all of them. The people here..." She paused, searching for the right word, "They have a way of getting into your heart. If you let them."

Behind her, Ikaris stood and moved to the window as well, stopping beside her. He looked out at the same view, the same light, the same long horizon.

"Don't tell me you've grown fond of them," he said, and the tone was not cruel but it was measured.

Ajak turned to look at him. The smile she wore was not apologetic and it was not defensive.

"Like I said before, Humans have a way of getting into your heart, Ikaris," she said. "You just have to let them."

Ikaris returned his gaze to the window but did not respond.

He stood beside her in the quiet of the small house on the South Dakota plains, looking out at a world he had walked across for thousands of years.

Between them, the coffee cooled. Outside, the light continued its slow movement across the grass.

...

[SHIELD Helicarrier, Meeting Room, Evening]

The meeting room sat in the upper interior of the Helicarrier.

The overhead lights were cold and functional, casting no shadows that were not deserved. The table was long and dark and had hosted enough uncomfortable conversations to have absorbed something of their atmosphere.

Nick Fury sat at the head of it with both forearms resting on the surface and his single eye moving across the faces of the people around him.

To his left sat Natasha Romanoff. Beside her sat Clint Barton, leaning back in his chair with his arms crossed.

Phil Coulson occupied the seat across from them, his jacket still buttoned, his hands flat on the table. Maria Hill stood at Fury's right shoulder, slightly behind him, close enough to hand him information and far enough back to observe everyone else.

Several minutes had passed since the last words were spoken. Fury had spent them looking at the table.

He leaned forward slightly. "So... To summarise all of this. The Red Room widows are now operating independently under an unknown backer who is ordering them to hunt and kill wealthy, powerful men who have been using their influence to do unspeakable things and walking away clean."

He paused. "That's what we're dealing with."

Natasha tilted her head fractionally. "That is the summary. As I told you at the start. I went to meet them this morning. It did not go well." She paused for a beat. "The only reason they agreed to see me at all is because they still consider me family. They wanted to use that to send a message."

Fury's eye stayed on her. "And what would that message be, Romanoff."

"Don't intervene in their work." She said it cleanly, without embellishment. "Whoever is backing them is powerful enough to grant superhuman abilities. Real and dangerous ones. Melina is doing things I have never seen her do before and have never seen anyone without omega-level mutation do."

Clint uncrossed his arms and leaned forward.

"Trust me on that," he said. "We engaged Melina this morning after the failed conversation, and it did not go well for our side. You don't know what it feels like to be that helpless in a fight. I've been in bad situations before, but that was an entirely different category."

The room was quiet for a moment following that.

Coulson looked at Clint, then at Fury. "I am still having difficulty processing the fact that two of our best field agents were neutralised without anything that could reasonably be described as a fight."

He turned his gaze toward Fury fully. "Melina Vostokoff is not a mutant. She has never had powers. If there is someone out there distributing enhancements of this magnitude to non-powered individuals..."

"Then we need to know who." Fury finished it without raising his voice.

He looked around the room, taking each face in once. "We already know the why. The people they are targeting are guilty of things that would make a jury physically ill and they have been getting away with it for decades. We know who is doing it. What we do not know is who is behind them, who is providing the enhancements, and what the full scope of the operation is."

He straightened. "Since what we are looking at clearly involves superhumans at a level we were not prepared for, we need to be smart about how we approach this. That means we put together a team that can meet that level."

Maria stepped forward from her position behind him.

"Director." Her voice was measured, "What about the pendrive and everything we recovered that documents what the targets did."

Everyone looked at her.

She met the looks without flinching. "We are talking about stopping the widows before they reach their next targets. I understand the operational necessity. But those targets are not innocent men. They are people with documented histories of serious crimes who have spent considerable money ensuring that documentation never reaches a courtroom."

She paused. "If we move to protect them before we deal with why they are being targeted in the first place, we are protecting the problem. The widows get to them before we can lock the targets up, and we have nothing to show for it except a body count that the public is going to have complicated feelings about."

The silence that followed had more texture to it than the previous one.

Fury looked at her for a moment, and something in his expression shifted by approximately two degrees in the direction of approval. "Took the words right out of my mouth, Hill."

He looked back at the room.

"Here is what we are going to do. We pull every name connected to the people who have already been killed. We build a list of who is most likely to be the next target based on similar profiles and similar patterns of criminal behaviour. We gather evidence on each of them, documented and solid, and we move to detain them through proper channels before the widows can reach them. That way we remove the targets from the board without anyone else dying."

His jaw tightened. "Simultaneously, I will put together a separate team with the capability to approach the widows directly. Not to arrest them. To confront whoever enhanced them and shut down that operation at the source."

Coulson raised a hand, not dramatically, just enough to mark that he had something to add. "Sir. What about the timeline problem. From what Agent Romanoff has described, the widows are already operational and already have their target list. They have a head start. Moving through proper legal channels to detain people based on financial crimes takes time that we may not have. How do we close that gap fast enough to actually get in front of them?"

Fury was quiet for exactly one second.

"I know a man," he said. "Someone who can process and cross-reference information at a level that makes our current analytical capacity look like a card catalogue."

He pushed back from the table slightly. "I'll go to him directly. He gets us the data we need fast enough to actually move."

Coulson nodded once, accepting this.

Clint glanced at Natasha. She did not glance back, but the slight shift in the set of her shoulders said she had registered it.

Fury stood, which was the signal that the meeting was over. "We have work to do. Hill, start pulling the connection data on the existing targets. Romanoff, I want a full written report of the meeting this morning, every detail, nothing omitted. Barton, get some rest. You look like hell."

Clint opened his mouth.

"That was not an invitation for commentary," Fury said, already moving toward the door.

The room began to empty, and the low hum of the Helicarrier's engines continued beneath everything.