Fractured Realities

The Harper household had settled into a fragile rhythm—a symphony of clattering pans, Stark's sarcastic AI quips, and the Winter Soldier's silent prowling. Bucky Barnes, as he now insisted they call him, spent hours disassembling toasters (and reassembling them into alarmingly functional shurikens) while Wulan taught him to roll lumpia with military precision.

"Fold, don't crush," she chided, batting his vibranium hand. "This is art, not combat."

Bucky frowned at his mangled spring roll. "Same difference."

Kirana, meanwhile, appointed herself his shadow. She peppered him with questions—"Can your arm open pickle jars?" "Do robots dream of electric sheep?"—and doodled him as a "metal superhero" in her notebook.

Arlan watched it all from the basement lab, his Nen journal open to a half-scribbled theory: Aura as a stabilizing force against reality warps. The words blurred as Wanda leaned over his shoulder, her chaos magic humming in time with the Stark-tech monitors.

"You're obsessing," she said, plucking the pen from his grip. "Again."

"Hydra's weapon isn't a maybe. It's a when."

"And you'll face it. With us."

A proximity alarm blared. Stark's hologram flickered to life above the desk, unshaven and scowling. "Kid. We've got a code oh-god-why."

The screen lit with satellite footage: Queens Park rippling like water, trees melting into glass, a car floating upside-down mid-explosion.

"Reality's glitching," Stark said. "And it's spreading."

The streets of Queens had become a Dali painting. A mailman cycled sideways up a building. Rain fell in spirals, pooling into neon puddles. Kirana pressed her face to the car window, breath fogging the glass. "Pretty…"

"Deadly pretty," Pietro snapped, speed-reading a StarkPad analysis. "The Tesseract core's gone critical. Whole borough could unravel."

Wanda's glove pulsed, her magic recoiling from the warped air. "It's hungry. Like it wants to… consume."

Bucky stared at the chaos, his human hand trembling. "I've seen this before. In the '40s. Schmidt's experiments—"

"Save the history lesson, Capsicle Jr.," Stark interrupted, landing beside them in the Iron Man suit. "We need to ground the core. Harper—your aura theory. Can it cage this thing?"

Arlan's En stretched, mapping the distortion's epicenter—a shimmering vortex where the park's gazebo once stood. "Maybe. If I can sync my Nen with Wanda's chaos magic."

"Sync?" Wanda arched an eyebrow. "You mean merge?"

"Same difference," he echoed Bucky, earning a rare smirk.

The vortex hummed with stolen physics, its center a pulsing orb of Tesseract blue threaded with Nen's gold. Hydra agents lay unconscious at its perimeter, their bodies twisted into impossible angles.

"Charming," Stark muttered, repulsors charging. "Remind me to bill SHIELD for therapy."

Arlan and Wanda stepped forward, aura and magic intertwining. Gold and crimson spiraled around them, a helix of light that pushed back the distortion. Kirana cheered from Stark's arms, her tiny fists waving glow sticks like a rave fairy.

"Focus," Wanda hissed, sweat beading her brow. "It's fighting us!"

The core lashed out, reality fracturing. A chunk of pavement became quicksand. Pietro yelped, sinking waist-deep until Bucky hauled him free.

"Now, kid!" Stark barked.

Arlan's Nen surged, channeled through Wanda's chaos tendrils. The helix tightened, compressing the core into a singularity. For a heartbeat, the world snapped still—

Then exploded.

Light blinded them. When it faded, the park was whole. Birds chirped. The gazebo stood intact, pigeons roosting on its roof.

Stark's faceplate flipped open. "Did we… un-apocalypse this?"

Bucky knelt, brushing fingers over unbroken grass. "Not quite."

A scar remained—a hairline crack in the air, faintly glowing.

That night, the Harpers gathered around a soto ayam feast, Bucky hesitantly recounting a pre-war memory involving Steve Rogers and a Coney Island hot dog. Kirana fell asleep mid-bite, her head pillowed on Wanda's lap.

"The crack's a weak spot," Arlan murmured, staring at the stars. "Hydra'll target it."

Wanda twirled a chaos-lit sparkler for Kirana's amusement. "Then we guard it. Together."

Stark lingered at the edge of the porch, uncharacteristically quiet. "This isn't over. That core was a prototype. If Hydra scales it up…"

"They won't," Arlan said, too forcefully.

A notification buzzed on Stark's gauntlet. He paled. "Satellites picked up energy spikes in Sokovia. Same signature."

Pietro's fork clattered. "Sokovia?"

Wanda's sparkler died. The unspoken truth hung heavy—Hydra was going home. To their home.

Bucky rose, vibranium hand clenching. "I'll gear up."

Daniel set down his coffee. "We all will."

Whispers in the Cosmos

On a dead planet, a Titan knelt in the ashes of a fallen world. The Infinity Gauntlet glinted on his hand, its power humming a dirge.

"Sir," Ebony Maw intoned. "The Tesseract anomaly on Midgard… it interests you?"

Thanos smiled. "A crack in the universe is a door. And doors… are made to be opened."