The red glow of the portal faded as Nick Fury stepped through into the heart of the Carter Residence—still holding half a cheeseburger in one hand and a bundle of files and a dusty pendrive in the other.
He scanned the place with his one good eye, lips curled in mild amusement. The faint scent of roasted coffee and faint floral air freshener mingled in the pristine space.
"So this is the mythical Carter house," Fury said, tossing the files onto the glass coffee table and glancing around. "The one no government camera can get a visual on. Classified as an anomaly and a whole lot of headache by me."
He strolled slowly to the leather couch and lowered himself down with a grunt. His hand swept over the armrest like he was testing the quality of the furniture.
"I gotta admit—it's good. Real good." He tapped his temple. "And judging by how the space inside doesn't match the outer blueprints, I'd say this crib is at least ten times bigger inside. Magic house, Carter?"
Ethan didn't even look back. Standing by the hallway, he simply replied with a dry smirk, "Or maybe my house just respects me more than it does government agents with eyepatches and trust issues."
Fury snorted. "Still full of attitude, I see."
"Still full of burger, I see," Ethan shot back with a smile, nodding at the cheeseburger clutched in Fury's hand.
Without waiting for another exchange, Ethan waved casually and strolled toward the open kitchen, calling out, "Gonna grab some actual breakfast. You know, fuel up before I decide whether to burn down an organization or just drop it into a black hole."
As he disappeared behind the wall, Natasha Romanoff sighed, folding her arms. Her eyes followed him thoughtfully, tone low.
"Is it just me," she asked Diana, "or is he way too relaxed for a guy whose cousin was kidnapped by a world-wide terrorist network?"
Diana's eyes narrowed ever so slightly. "He's not relaxed. He's just internalizing it. You forget—he isn't a man who lashes out. When Ethan Carter went quiet, it was never a good sign.
It meant the storm was coming—the kind that could shake the world to its core."
She remembered all too well what happened the last time someone pushed him too far…
When the Joker provoked Ethan, chaos followed. And honestly, she had no desire to witness that kind of fury ever again.
She paused, then added, "Which, if I'm honest, worries me more."
Natasha pursed her lips. She knew the type. Ethan wasn't volatile like Banner or arrogant like Stark. He was precise. Calculated. That kind of anger didn't burn—it exploded, silently.
"Still," Nat said, "he's not one to waste time. He's cooking up something in that kitchen besides breakfast."
"Excuse me for a moment," Diana said calmly, turning and walking toward the kitchen.
Meanwhile, Fury turned to Didi and raised an eyebrow. "Are you new here, Miss? I haven't seen you with Carter before."
He kept his tone casual, but his eye already analyzing her every detail.
Fury had learned to trust his instincts—and right now, they were buzzing.
The last time someone had appeared out of nowhere with Carter, it was Diana—and that encounter had left quite an impression. To this day, they still hadn't figured out who she really was.
Now, it was this quiet, seemingly harmless girl. But Fury's gut told him one thing, She was far from ordinary.
On cue, Didi—perched on the armrest of the couch like a cat—gave Fury a polite nod.
"Pleasure meeting you, Mr. Fury," she said warmly. "I'm a guest of this house."
Fury tilted his head, intrigued. "A guest, huh? Never a dull day with Carter."
As Didi followed Diana into the kitchen, Fury leaned toward Natasha and said in a low tone, "Romanoff, I'm telling you. This guy's a goddamn woman magnet. The way he pulls them in… You better keep your toes in check. You don't even know when it'll happen."
Nat raised an eyebrow, unimpressed. "You think I'm that easy?"
Fury shrugged. "Didn't say you were. But gravity doesn't ask permission before it pulls."
....
In the Kitchen, Ethan wasn't actually making or eating breakfast.
Seated casually at the kitchen table, his real work was being done behind the scenes—deep inside the minds of Hydra.
Ethan had no intention of relying on Fury's intel. He didn't get this far by trusting secret agents with track records of faking deaths and manipulating files. He had his own network—his mind.
He projected himself into the psyche of every Hydra operative he'd previously tagged and cataloged. Dozens of minds, one after another, laid bare before him like open books.
One by one, he scanned the consciousness of every known Hydra operative.
He traced operatives up the chain. One mind led to another. Field agents led to supervisors. Supervisors to coordinators. Coordinators to the Board.
Their faces, memories, and brain signatures floated before his mental eye like a cascading archive.
"Let's see what's really going on," he whispered.
A chain of command unfolded like dominos, falling inward toward the central truth.
Most minds had neural blocks—standard issue Hydra brain tech. Compact devices implanted into their skulls, devices embedded into the brain that prevented telepaths from digging too deep.
'Pathetic.'
Ethan's eyes glowed faintly red.
CRACK.
The chips burned out—simultaneously. Noses bled. Eyes rolled. Some convulsed. They didn't die—but some wished they had.
Ethan had evolved far beyond standard telepathy. The Phoenix Force, merged with his own Adaptive Evolution, had elevated his mind to a cosmic scale. Data wasn't read—it was extracted. Compressed. Sorted. Categorized in seconds.
And at the end of that mental maze?
"Sharon Carter," Ethan whispered. "Found you."
He saw her.
Beaten and bound but alive.
But not in the location Fury had marked. That place was a trap—a decoy cell rigged to explode on intrusion.
Maria Hill and Phil Coulson were also captured. In deep underground bunkers, isolated from all signals.
"Not Eastern Europe," Ethan muttered. "Washington D.C."
Buried under a Hydra facility that still wore the mask of a federal research lab.
But that wasn't the worst part.
As his mind peeled deeper, Ethan found the archives. Years of unethical experiments, Attempts to replicate the Super Soldier Serum—some successful.
Ethan had also uncovered the location of Bucky—and the other Winter Soldiers.
One agent remembered a chilling facility in Siberia—rows of cryotubes. Not one, but multiple Winter Soldiers, genetically engineered and enhanced through a twisted evolution of Erskine's Super Soldier Serum.
Unlike Bucky, these weren't men who were broken and brainwashed. These were grown in labs, designed to follow orders with no soul behind their eyes.
Ethan's expression darkened.
Another operative had recently come from a lab near Cairo—where they had been working on a failed derivative of something they called the Sentry Serum. He saw glimpses of a man… a subject who had been injected with something that could manipulate matter itself.
He didn't survive.
Then came a wave of red static.
Another mind. Another monster.
This one had knowledge of a quiet, secret partnership with William Stryker, the man responsible for some of the worst atrocities against mutants.
Mind control programs using Sinister Tech knockoffs.
Human test subjects mutated beyond recognition.
Projects labeled "Chimera," "Thanatos," and "Project: Odysseus."
Children. Teenagers. Entire villages turned into memory holes.
But that wasn't the end of it.
From the deeper minds—those higher up in Hydra's hierarchy—Ethan saw something worse.
A partnership far more insidious.
Hydra had a secret name in their classified blackbook. Nathaniel Essex AKA Mr. Sinister.
Ethan had already pieced together from the memories of Sinister and Stryker that HYDRA had been involved with both of them. That much didn't surprise him.
What did, however, was the revelation that the HYDRA bastards were planning to make a move on him—soon.
They had apparently caught wind that Jean might have played a role in Sinister's downfall—though in truth, it was Ethan's doing. But to the outside world, all signs pointed to Jean. After all, she was the most powerful telepath on Earth.
And since, Ethan had left behind traces of his presence when he mentally dismantled Stryker and his men so that Hydra will be after him. They all believed they could take out Ethan and Jean in a single, decisive strike.
'Naive bastards,' Ethan thought coldly as he stood in the middle of the kitchen, his mind flooded with the intricate rot of Hydra's hidden networks.
He now knew everything. Every experiment. Every name. Every operation. Every corrupted alliance—Winter Soldiers, Sentry Serum, deals with Stryker, mutant experimentation, and even Mister Sinister working in the shadows behind it all.
He hadn't dealt with Hydra until now—partly out of concern for maintaining the canon timeline. But now Hydra had outdone themselves, it was time to return the favor. Fuck the canon.
As his crimson gaze dimmed and he pulled back from his telepathic web, he heard footsteps behind him.
Diana approached with calm but heavy steps, her brow furrowed, concern resting just behind her fierce Amazonian poise.
"Are you alright?" she asked gently.
Ethan blinked before turning to face her fully. His voice carried its usual calm laced with dry amusement. "You're asking if I'm alright? Shouldn't the worry be for the poor bastards we're about to level?"
Diana didn't smile.
Her expression remained serious—too serious. There was something deeper in her gaze than just concern for the battle ahead.
"I'm worried about you, Ethan," she said quietly. "Not physically. But what all this power is doing to you."
His smile faded, replaced with a puzzled raise of his brow. "You're worried because I'm too strong?"
"No," she replied before stepping closer. "I'm worried about what it's doing to you. You've brought people back from the dead. Do you really understand what that power means? When someone can decide who lives and who dies, it's easy to lose the meaning of life itself. Lose the sense of its value. It becomes easy to start playing with fate like it's a toy. Like people are... pieces on a board."
Her voice didn't shake, but the weight behind it was palpable.
Diana had been observing him closely ever since Natasha revealed that his own cousin had been kidnapped and was being held captive. But Ethan barely reacted—no visible emotion, no flicker of concern.
He had shown real anger when the Joker blew up his company and hotel—raw, unfiltered rage. But now? Nothing. His indifference toward someone so close to him unsettled her.
Ethan looked at her in silence for a moment.
Then he chuckled. Not mockingly. But… genuinely surprised.
Without a word, he stepped forward and wrapped his arms around her in a slow, warm hug.
Diana blinked in surprise but didn't pull away.
"Thanks for worrying about me," he whispered near her ear.
Then he leaned back and kissed her lightly.
Her eyes widened, a confused gasp escaping her lips. "What… what are you doing?"
He chuckled again and kissed her once more, a little longer this time.
Diana didn't resist. Instead, she narrowed her eyes, more in curiosity than anger. "What is going on with you?"
"Sit," Ethan said with a smile before guiding her gently toward the chairs.
Across the room, Didi who just entered leaned silently against the wall, arms crossed, watching with an unreadable expression.
Ethan nodded at her and she nodded back.
With a casual flick of his wrist, he summoned layers of shimmering crimson sigils around the room. Powerful barriers. Not even the gods could eavesdrop through this.
"I think it's time you understood how my powers really work," Ethan began while settling beside Diana. "You think I resurrected people. That I saved lives."
She nodded slowly.
"That's… not exactly true."
Diana frowned. "What do you mean?"
He met her eyes with a flat seriousness. "What I did wasn't resurrection. I just… delayed their deaths. Moved the point of their passing. Like rearranging the chapters of a book—but not erasing the ending."
Diana's brows furrowed further, "Delayed?"
"Yes," he said. "I can't truly 'undo' death. Not on that scale. So… what I did was postpone it. I pushed back the moment of their death. Moved it. Like hitting pause."
He looked her in the eye. "Every single person I saved is still going to die. Sooner or later. I can't erase that. I'm not above death. Not yet."
He took a deep breath. "I don't have the power or authority or cosmic clearance to rewrite the ledger of life and death. If I try, there's always a price. Always consequences. Believe me—I've tried. I've seen what happens when someone tries to save everyone."
His voice dropped.
"I found a corrupted branch of your multiverse. A timeline I accidentally discovered when I was learning to manipulate time."
Her eyes widened slightly.
"I saved an entire timeline by changing it," Ethan continued. "But it became twisted. Reality bent in ways it shouldn't. Lives extended beyond what was natural. Emotions dulled. People stopped living... and become twisted in a way like Joker."
He looked away for a moment while remembering. "It didn't take long for that timeline to collapse in on itself. Because no matter how hard you try… everything has a beginning and an end."
Diana's lips parted, her heart heavy.
She finally understood.
All those lives he 'saved'—they were just borrowed time.
"Every single person I 'saved'… will still die. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But death… will come for them. In a way that's unavoidable. Sometimes… far worse than it was meant to be."
Diana's eyes widened. She leaned and embraced him tightly.
"I'm sorry," she whispered. "I didn't know. I thought you were… losing your humanity."
Ethan smiled and hugged her back. "I'm still me. Still your charming, sarcastic, devilishly handsome guy who's just trying not to screw up the multiverse."
She chuckled softly, relieved.
"Though," he added with a sly grin, "if you're feeling guilty, you could always help me take a shower later. You know—for emotional support."
Diana rolled her eyes. "You're impossible."
"Highly possible," he teased. "You just need imagination."
She pulled back with a smirk, but then turned her gaze toward the quiet girl leaning against the wall.
"And who exactly are you?" she asked Didi, narrowing her eyes slightly.
Didi smiled faintly and tilted her head.
"She's Death," Ethan said, as if it were the most casual thing in the world.
Diana blinked. "...Huh?"
"I'm not saying this metaphorically," Ethan said while leaning back into the seat. "Or rhetorically. Or poetically. Or theoretically. Or in any other fancy way."
He pointed at Didi with two fingers. "She's Death. Straight up."
Didi gave a small wave. "Hey."
Diana stared at her, eyebrows raised, and couldn't even claim to be surprised anymore.
"I thought you said you were a bartender in a goth band."
"I never said that was all I am," Didi said with a grin. "It's less scary that way."
Diana slowly sat again before shaking her head. "This day just keeps getting weirder."
Ethan smiled. "You'll get used to it."
------------
Author's Note:
Hey guys, how did you like the chapter?
First of all, thank you so much for all the reviews and support—it really motivates me to keep going, and I truly appreciate it.
I had planned to post more chapters this week, but work kept me busy. Hopefully, things will settle down, and we can get back on track starting next week.
Thanks again for sticking with the story! Stay tuned—more is coming.