The group spread out through Kamar-Taj pulling books, scanning pages, anything related to dimensional travel getting pulled and passed around.
They found nothing useful.
Luke moved through the inner sanctum until he reached the spot where the Time Stone should have been.
Empty.
"Pity," he said. "I thought I would get it."
The Time Stone. One of the most powerful of the infinity gems. If he had gotten his hands on it he could have sacrificed it and pulled something that let him manipulate time directly. A worthwhile trade by any calculation.
But it was gone.
He kept searching, moving through shelf after shelf, and while he didn't find anything related to dimensional travel he found plenty of other things worth keeping.
Mirror dimension spells, binding techniques, several spatial manipulation sequences that had no business being sitting unguarded on an open shelf. He catalogued them as he went.
Then across the room Wanda stopped.
She had been moving through the books quietly, when something caught her attention from one of the darker shelves further back. A sound. Faint, coming from one of the books, pulling her toward it in a way that wasn't entirely her own decision.
She walked toward it without fully meaning to, her hand reaching out ahead of her, fingers extending toward the spine of the book before she had consciously chosen to touch it.
A hand closed around her wrist.
"I would refrain from touching that," Luke said, appearing beside her, his grip light but certain.
Wanda turned, startled. She had been searching on the other side of the room. She didn't remember walking here.
Luke reached past her and took the book from the shelf himself.
He looked at it.
The Darkhold.
"I didn't expect this to be here," he said quietly, turning it over in his hands.
But it made a certain kind of sense. The Darkhold and the Scarlet Witch shared the same root — both originating from Chthon, the elder god who had written his chaos magic into the Darkhold itself and left traces of it in the Scarlet Witch prophecy long before Wanda was even born.
The book hadn't been sitting on this shelf by accident. The moment Wanda walked into Kamar-Taj it had called her, the way it always called to whatever carried Chthon's power.
If these two got properly connected in this universe, they wouldn't be dealing with a zombie apocalypse anymore.
They would be dealing with the Scarlet Witch with the Darkhold's full corruption behind her.
Luke tucked the book under his arm and looked at Wanda.
"You shouldn't touch this. It's one of the most dangerous books in existence, it'll mess with your head before you even realize it's happening," he said, looking at her directly.
"..okay.." Wanda said, eyes still drifting toward the book for a half second before she pulled them away.
Then she looked at him.
"If you don't mind me asking, what exactly is the relationship between my version and you in your universe?"
"You can consider us lovers," Luke said simply.
Wanda stared at him.
She didn't have an immediate response for that. Her mind was already doing the math on everything she had heard since meeting this man — her brother alive, living with him, and apparently her own version had fallen in love with him somewhere along the way.
What exactly had happened in that universe to produce that chain of events she genuinely couldn't begin to reconstruct.
"So how is my brother in your universe?" Wanda asked.
"Loud, cheerful, exactly the way he is," Luke said. "Although recently he went through his first rejection and that hit him harder than anything I've seen hurt him before."
Wanda's expression softened immediately. "Love rejection?"
"Yeah. He always wanted a girlfriend, gathered his courage, confessed," Luke said, glancing at her sideways. "You want to know what response he got?"
Wanda nodded.
"The woman told him she wasn't interested in men," Luke said. "She loves women."
Wanda blinked.
"Pietro lost his entire soul on the spot," Luke continued, completely straight faced. "Just stood there like a dead body. Wanda had to physically drag him back to the house. You should have seen his face. The man looked like he had been told the sun wasn't real."
Wanda stared at him for a full second.
Then she laughed, genuinely, the first real laugh since they had arrived in this universe, her hand coming up to cover her mouth as it escaped before she could stop it.
"And not only that," Luke continued, "when he first got his powers he ran so fast that his clothes just shredded off completely, and he ran the entire way home naked. He is the single greatest source of entertainment in the house."
Wanda laughed harder this time, unable to stop it, shoulders shaking, the image of her brother sprinting home without a single thread of clothing on him apparently being completely consistent with everything she knew about Pietro regardless of which universe he existed in.
"That sounds exactly like him," she managed.
"Every single day," Luke said. "Living with that man is never boring."
"I'm envious of the Wanda in your universe," she said quietly. It wasn't hard to read between the lines of everything Luke had shared — her brother alive, a home full of noise and chaos and someone who clearly looked after all of them. That version of her was living well.
"Well that's how life is," Luke said. "One gets all the happiness and another gets the sadness. Nobody decides who gets which."
"Yeah," Wanda said.
The word landed quietly between them and stayed there as they walked back toward the others.
*****
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