He woke up feeling good.
Not the complicated good of someone who had resolved something difficult or survived something hard. Just the clean, simple good of someone whose life had, against reasonable expectation, arranged itself into something worth waking up to. The hotel room was the hotel room, the portrait was on the wall where it always was, the city was doing its thing outside the window, and he was stronger than he'd been yesterday, and he was going to see Raven, and the Howard Stark deadline was still two weeks out, and everything was, in the plainest available terms, fine.
He lay there for a moment just letting it be fine.
Then he got up.
---
The woods north of the city served as his testing ground — far enough from any populated area that the work could be done without an audience, yet dense enough that the specific activities involved didn't require explanation. He'd been using a stretch of state forest in Westchester for the past week when he needed space, and he went there now with the purposeful ease of someone who had decided to know where they stood.
The boulder presented itself within five minutes of looking — a granite formation that had been sitting in the same place since the last ice age with the settled permanence of something that had found its spot and intended to keep it. He walked around it, assessed it with the enhanced vision, and ran the estimate.
Three thousand pounds. Probably a shade over.
He put one hand under the relevant edge and lifted.
It came up like furniture.
Not with the working effort of his first month, when four thousand pounds had been his working ceiling with two hands. On one hand, barely any engagement of the muscles that were actually doing the lifting, the boulder moving with the ease of something that had simply decided to be elsewhere. He held it at arm's length and turned it, examining the underside with the idle curiosity of someone who had just confirmed information rather than discovered it.
He set it down.
He looked at his hand.
Stronger, said the relevant part of his assessment. Considerably.
He tried the speed next — climbing to altitude first, the open air above the tree line, the specific clarity of November at a thousand feet. He oriented north and flew.
The sensation of maximum speed was one he'd been developing a vocabulary for over the past weeks — the way the air behaved at the edges of the aura's protection, the particular quality of the horizon moving toward him at rates that kept revising upward. He pushed to the ceiling, felt where the ceiling was, and ran his internal assessment against the previous measurement.
The math resolved to approximately two hundred and thirty miles per hour.
Thirty percent improvement since he'd last checked.
He turned south and came back at a more conversational pace, thinking about this. The trajectory of the growth had been consistent — no plateaus, no leveling off, just the steady accumulation that the solar charging seemed to produce on what was apparently an open-ended curve. He tried to imagine where the line went if he projected it forward a year, five years, a decade, and found the numbers became too large to think about usefully.
He tested the heat vision against a rock face — the intensity had increased, the cut noticeably faster than the last time he'd benchmarked it. Frost breath across a small pond near the tree line: the freeze complete and near-instantaneous, the radius larger than it had been. Vision range: he picked out details on a structure he estimated was four miles distant with the clarity that used to require direct line of sight.
Hearing: a conversation happening in what his internal map placed as roughly six miles north, clear enough to follow.
He sat on a boulder in the woods and thought about what it meant to keep getting stronger with no known ceiling.
He thought about Thanos. The specific quality of that threat — not just the physical, though the physical was significant, but the intent behind it. The cosmic scope of someone who had decided the universe had a problem and had appointed himself the solution. He filed this under future concern with the note that the future version of himself, having several more years of solar charging, would be better positioned to address it.
The Celestials, in whatever form they eventually manifested. The Serpent. The things on the scale of the universe that this universe apparently contains.
He thought about the street-level futures too — the Sentinels, which he felt about with a specific and uncomplicated intensity. The image that lived in the back of his knowledge of what the Sentinel program eventually used. What it used as a baseline. Whose form ended up encoded into machines designed to hunt people who had done nothing except exist with mutations.
He would not let that happen.
He didn't know yet exactly what stopping it looked like — whether it was the program itself, the people behind it, the political infrastructure that funded it. Probably all three, addressed in the right order. He filed this under active planning required, not yet urgent.
Apocalypse. He thought about this with the same careful assessment he tried to bring to things that were genuinely complicated. The power level was one concern — at the current trajectory, he thought he could handle it, at the future trajectory, he was confident. The bigger concern was the way Apocalypse operated, the misleading gravity of his survival of the fittest philosophy that made him dangerous not just as a threat but as an idea. The horsemen, the conversions, the way he found people at their most vulnerable and offered them power packaged as purpose.
Mr. Sinister was a different problem entirely — the clones, the mercenaries, the constantly shifting power sets, the specific patience of someone who had been operating on century-long timelines. Annoying was the word that kept coming up when he thought about Sinister. Dangerous and annoying in the specific way of someone who had decided that other people were resources rather than people.
He'd deal with them when the time came.
He'd be stronger when the time came, which was its own kind of plan.
He went back to the city.
---
He walked.
This was not his usual mode in New York — he tended to move purposefully, trajectory and destination, the city as a network of locations rather than a space to exist in. But the morning had put him in the kind of state that walking suited, and he let himself walk without particular destination through the November streets, the city doing its thing around him.
He thought about what his life was like.
He had a hotel room and a backpack with a significant amount of cash and a fabricated legal identity and a Motorola brick phone and a relationship with SHIELD that was three days old and a legitimate business empire developing in Boston and a growing reputation in the criminal underworld of New York as something that moved without warning and left no useful witnesses.
He had Raven.
He turned it over the way he kept turning it over, because it was still new enough to have the quality of something that needed examining to confirm it was real. His girlfriend. He tested the word with the slight internal awkwardness of someone applying a category for the first time and finding the category fit better than expected. Girlfriend was technically accurate and was simultaneously somehow insufficient for the specific person involved, but it was the available word, and he was using it.
He thought about how fast it had happened. Ten days from the first visit to the mansion to now, and in those ten days, everything had moved with a naturalness that made speed irrelevant — not rushed, just unimpeded, two people who had found each other's company straightforwardly good and had proceeded accordingly.
He thought about whether it would last.
He thought about this with the honest attention of someone who knew the question mattered and didn't want to be naive about it. She was complicated. He was eighteen and completely inexperienced and getting stranger by the week as his powers developed. The world they were both living in was not a simple world. The things on his list that still needed doing were not simple things.
And then he thought about the quality of her listening. The precision of what she chose to say. The expression on her face on the mountain trail. The portrait she'd taken with her and the abstract painting she'd left with him, and what each of those choices said about what the other person meant.
He thought: It will last.
He thought it with the specific confidence of someone who had good instincts and trusted them, not the false certainty of someone who refused to consider alternatives. Just the honest assessment of available evidence.
He was confident.
He walked north through the city and let himself be quietly happy about this, which was an activity he was getting better at.
---
The evening hits went smoothly. Two more cartel-connected distribution figures, the chain getting shorter as he worked upward — he was two or three operations from the level where the cartel connections to the political infrastructure would become fully legible. The cash was almost secondary at this point, a side effect of the work rather than a motivation for it, though it went in the backpack out of principle.
He went home.
He lay on the massive bed in the hotel room and looked at the abstract painting on the wall — the warm, movement-filled thing she'd made of him in an afternoon, the version of him that existed in her perception rendered in color and gesture rather than representation. He'd been looking at it for three days and kept finding new things in it.
He thought about heroes who didn't exist yet.
Peter Parker, somewhere in Queens, approximately ten years from being bitten by a spider that was going to change the trajectory of his life. He thought about the conversation he intended to have with Ben Parker when the time was right and what shape that conversation needed to take to preserve what needed to be preserved.
Tony Stark was twenty-one years old right now, probably doing something that would be embarrassing to him later. Steve Rogers was in the ice. Sam Wilson was, what, fifteen? Steve would come back — he'd make sure of that, had already filed it as a priority, the body in the ice being one of the fixed points of his planning.
Natasha Romanoff. Clint Barton. Thor, who was presumably somewhere in Asgard doing whatever Thor did when the Avengers didn't exist yet and there was no reason to be on Earth. Bruce Banner was probably in school somewhere, becoming the person who would eventually have a very bad day in a gamma radiation lab.
He thought about all of them with the specific warmth of someone who had grown up caring about these people in ways that had nothing to do with knowing them personally and everything to do with what they meant. He was in the world where they were going to exist, where they were already in the process of becoming what they would become, and he was — adjacent to it, connected to it, a variable in the picture that none of them knew about yet.
He thought: that's for the future.
The future version of himself, the one who would be stronger and more established and would have had years in this world rather than weeks, would navigate those relationships when they became navigable.
He fell asleep.
He woke up the next morning with the specific quality of someone who knew what day it was and what the day meant.
He looked at the ceiling.
He looked at the painting.
He got up.
Raven, said the relevant part of his thinking, with the consistent, uncomplicated warmth it had been producing for ten days.
I know, said the rest of him.
I'm going.