The rain had thinned to a drizzle by the time the roof gave them back.
Arthur and Winky came down into a courtyard that had rearranged itself around a god. Agents who had spent all night being brisk were finding urgent reasons to work at the far end of the yard.
He took a moment at the bottom to arrange himself, and then crossed at an ordinary pace. Winky walked beside him with one hand hovering near his elbow, ready and unused, and did not comment on the performance.
Thor met him halfway across the wet concrete and gripped his shoulder.
"Are you well?" His eyes moved over Arthur's face, and his voice dropped. "Jane told me what she saw. And I can feel it standing here, my friend. The way your magic sits in you. It is wrong."
"I've been better," Arthur admitted, with a tired half-smile. "But I'm standing."
"What was it? Jane said you pulled something out of her." Thor's grip did not loosen. "What terrible thing in this universe could possibly do this to you?"
"The Aether," Arthur said simply.
Thor went pale. The God of Thunder took a step back, and the rain filled the space where he had been.
"That is not possible. My grandfather sealed it in the dark, in a place no map holds and no road reaches." He shook his head slowly. "How could Jane possibly have found it?"
"The Convergence," Arthur said. "The realms aligning opened a temporary back door straight to it. She walked through it. It had been waiting five thousand years for a body, and she was the first one to come along." He paused. "But it's finished. I have it, and it's secured."
Thor let out a long breath, and then hesitated, and what came next came from nowhere but care.
"Then bring it to Asgard."
"Thor..."
"Hear me out, brother." He spread one hand. "You hold the Tesseract already. The Scepter's stone as well, by my understanding. And now this. Three of the great powers of creation, sitting on one small world, in the keeping of one man." His jaw tightened. "It is too much. For Midgard, and for you. Let my father's vault carry some of the weight. It has held worse."
Four, Arthur did not say. Very few people knew about the Power Stone, and Thor's math was alarming enough with the numbers he already had.
"Taking it to Asgard would be putting Asgard in danger," Arthur said. "But I take the point, and I've already acted on it. Today taught me a lesson. I will be building proper vaults. Not on Earth. In completely different, dead corners of the universe. Deeply hidden, heavily warded, and very far from each other and from anything I love. Nobody will get to them. Including, on most days, me."
Thor turned that promise over in his mind, found it good, and some of the storm went out of his face.
"Then it is resolved." He gripped Arthur's shoulder again, gentler this time. "And Arthur. Thank you. For going after her. I am forever in your debt."
"There's no debt between us." Arthur nodded toward Jane. "But have Asgard's best healers scan her when you get home. The extraction was clean, but that thing still sat inside her for a while, and there is always residue. I'd run them myself, but I'm going to be offline for a few days."
Jane stepped forward before Thor could answer.
"Arthur. Thank you." Her voice had steadied. "I know what my stubbornness cost you today. I really am sorry."
"You're welcome."
He said it simply. Then, because she had the look of a woman preparing to carry this around for the next decade, he added, "For what it's worth, the anomalies do matter for your work. You just happened to fall through the wrong one." The corner of his mouth moved. "Next time, take Thor along on your impromptu holidays to dead planets."
Jane laughed before she could stop herself, and Thor laughed with her, and the matter closed.
"Thor. What do you know about where the Aether originally came from?"
Thor gave him the standard Asgardian account. Bor, his grandfather. The dark realm of Svartalfheim. The Dark Elves broken on the field and turned to dust five thousand years ago, and their weapon taken from them and buried where nobody would ever find it. He recited all of it in the confident, slightly bored tone of a man repeating something everybody had always known to be true.
Arthur did not bother arguing with the official version.
"There was magic on it," he said instead. "Woven right through it. Not Asgardian, and not anything in my library. Elven, if I had to put money on it." He let a beat pass. "And here's the interesting part. It was still working. Five thousand years, and it hadn't decayed at all. Something was maintaining it." He met Thor's eyes. "I don't think the Dark Elves are extinct."
Thor's answer was warm rather than dismissive, which made it harder to push against.
"They are gone, Arthur. My grandfather saw to it himself. They are a dark memory and nothing more."
"Perhaps." Arthur nodded slowly. "But the Convergence and a waking Aether in the same week have me spooked, and I've stopped believing in that kind of coincidence. Mention it to your father when you get back. Humour me."
Thor smiled. "That I can do. I will tell him."
He wrapped an arm around Jane and drew breath to call for the Bifrost.
"Wait." Arthur stopped him. Something had just occurred to him.
He turned to Winky. "Fetch the twins for me, would you?"
Pop. A moment later, pop again, and Wanda and Pietro were standing in a rain-slicked Camden courtyard, thirty seconds removed from a perfectly pleasant New York afternoon. Pietro was still holding half a sandwich.
Wanda took in the floodlights, the federal agents, the God of Thunder, and the specific grey shade of Arthur's face, and her eyes narrowed in a way she had picked up entirely from Eileen.
"What happened to you."
It was not a question.
"Long story. Mostly resolved." Arthur waved it off. "How would the two of you like a holiday in Asgard? Leaving now."
"Now?" Pietro's eyebrows went up. "Why? Is something happening? A grand tournament?" He brightened dangerously. "Are you finally letting me ride out with the warriors?"
"None of those." Arthur paused. "But I have a feeling there may be action. There, or here."
Wanda's head tilted. "Is this the same feeling Carol and Ariadne warned me about? The one where you say maybe, and then it happens exactly the way you said it would?"
Arthur laughed.
So did Thor, for entirely different reasons.
"You are being paranoid, my friend. But they are most welcome, gladly and always. Should any danger come, Asgard will handle it easily."
"I trust Asgard to handle it," Arthur said smoothly. "I wouldn't send them otherwise. If nothing happens, wonderful. And if something does, they get real battle experience alongside the finest army in the Nine Realms. That isn't something money buys."
Two sets of eyes lit up like festival lanterns.
"Nobody sane makes war on Asgard while my father holds the throne," Thor said, and put the lanterns out as kindly as it is possible to put out a lantern.
"Then I'm overplanning," Arthur said, and did not correct him.
Because the honest truth was that he no longer knew.
In the future he remembered, the Aether had ridden to Asgard inside Jane Foster, and the enemy had followed it there. He had never understood how Malekith knew. Nobody had ever explained it, and he had never thought to ask the question at a time when the answer might have mattered.
Now the Aether was not the Aether anymore. It was a stone the size of a plum, sealed, sitting in his coat pocket. Would that pull Malekith to Earth instead? He could not think of a single mechanism by which a Dark Elf could sense the thing. He also could not think of one that explained the original version, which was rather the point.
So he was guessing blindly. And he disliked guessing intensely.
But either way, Asgard was the right answer. If the enemy went there, Asgard might need them, and they would learn more in one afternoon than in a year of his training. If the enemy came here instead, Heimdall could put all three of them back on Earth in the time it took to ask.
He turned to Winky.
"Go with them."
"Absolutely not." She folded her arms. "Master needs looking after. Winky is staying right here, and Master is going straight to bed."
Arthur met her eyes.
He sent it through Legilimency, fast and precise. Everything he knew and everything he suspected. Malekith. The ships. The invasion of Asgard.
I need you to keep a close watch on the twins, he added, silently.
Out loud, he said, "I'll be fine. You've seen me come back from far worse than this. Go."
Winky's crossed arms came down slowly. She looked at him for a long, unhappy moment, and did not like any part of it. But she finally went to stand beside an eager Pietro and a quiet Wanda.
Thor raised his face to the storm.
"HEIMDALL!"
The column of rainbow light came down through the rain. When it lifted, Thor, Jane, the twins and Winky were gone, and there were scorched, smoking circles burned into the wet concrete where they had stood.
—
Arthur stood alone in the middle of a muddy London courtyard.
The freezing rain had soaked through his coat, and the cold had teeth in it. The S.H.I.E.L.D. agents kept a wide and respectful distance, clearly acting on standing orders from Coulson or Fury to leave the wizard entirely to his own devices.
Time to go home.
He reached for Apparition, the ordinary wizarding kind, the one he had performed a hundred thousand times without once thinking about it.
A searing spike of agony went through him.
He let go of the attempt at once and put a hand on a rusted fence, breathing carefully until the courtyard stopped moving.
Well.
That was good news.
Back on the dead world, he had run the numbers on exactly this. Drop the Arcane state, take the old road, get Jane out in the half second before the Aether understood that nothing was holding it anymore. He had decided against it because he had not liked the odds.
He had not known the odds were zero.
If he had gambled, the jump would have failed, the state would have been gone, and there would have been nothing at all standing between an Infinity Stone and two bodies. He had come one decision away from losing everything, and he had avoided it by instinct rather than by knowledge, which was not the same thing at all and never had been.
He filed that away with the other things he kept in order to stay honest.
Which still left the small matter of getting home, because there was no version of tonight that ended with Arthur Hayes hailing a taxi to Heathrow.
Possibly he should have asked Winky for a lift before sending her to another realm. That would have been the thought of a man who planned ahead.
No matter. He still had his own ways.
He gathered what focus he had left and began, slowly, to assemble the Arcane state again. He had the capacity for it, barely, and drawing it here, on a living and generous world, would be far easier than scraping it off a dead rock in deep space.
He had pulled in the first thread when a line of golden sparks opened in the rain in front of him.
The ring widened, crackling, and through it came warm lamplight and old wood and the faint smell of somebody's tea. The Ancient One stood on the other side with her hands folded into her sleeves.
"You look like a man who needs a lift," she said mildly.
Arthur smiled, let the gathered magic go, and walked through.
Behind him, the rain and the ruin and the whole long night closed over and were gone.