Peggy Carter's eyes opened slowly, like someone surfacing from deep water, and the first thing they found was him.
She lay still for a moment. This was a dream — it had to be. She'd had this dream dozens of times over the past few decades, sometimes so vivid that waking from it was the worst part of the day.
But she reached for him anyway, the way she always did in the dream, and said his name.
"Steve."
He didn't disappear. He leaned into her touch. The warmth of his skin against her palm was completely, unmistakably real.
Peggy's breath caught.
"You're still alive." Her voice cracked on the last word. "You came back."
"Yeah." His voice was soft, the same voice she remembered. "I'm back."
She reached up and touched his face — the jaw, the cheekbone, the entirely unfair fact that he looked exactly as he had the last time she'd seen him. He looked twenty-seven. He looked like the morning before everything went wrong.
Steve covered her hand with his. "Long time no see."
Peggy Carter shook her head. Tears moved down the deep lines of her face, and she didn't do anything to stop them. "I'm old," she said. "I can't dance anymore. I don't think we get to keep that appointment."
Steve looked at her. The regret in his eyes was deep and genuine and contained no trace of the disgust she might have feared — only the particular grief of a man who had missed something he couldn't get back, and knew it, and loved her anyway.
He didn't say anything immediately. He sat with one hand over hers and let the silence be what it was.
But somewhere in the back of his mind, he was also thinking about the orange sphere in his jacket pocket, and about the information that had arrived in his mind the moment he touched it. The promise it represented — or the claim, at least. He wasn't ready to call it a promise yet. He was a man who needed evidence before he let himself want something.
He needed to verify it. Through S.H.I.E.L.D., through Tony, through someone who had seen the dragon summoned and the wish granted. He needed it to be real before he let himself plan around it.
For now, he stayed where he was, and held her hand, and let the rest of the world wait.
Smith had watched long enough. He shifted his attention away from the nursing home and reached for his phone.
Maya Hansen picked up on the second ring.
She'd been at the Fraternity for two days — not voluntarily, exactly, but not under any duress either. She'd simply done the calculation and decided that walking out into the world with her face on every news channel and her name attached to the AIM program was a worse option than staying somewhere quiet until the initial media saturation died down. She was correct about that.
She came into his office looking like someone who had already prepared her argument.
He let her lead.
"I want to join Universal Capsule Company," she said, before he'd finished pulling out the chair across from his desk. "Continue the Extremis research in a controlled environment, work on eliminating the thermal instability issue. Research results belong to the company. In exchange, I need personal security arrangements."
Smith considered it. Selene's team had already copied the full Extremis dataset from Rose Manor's laboratory — he knew that, which meant Maya's data was no longer uniquely in her possession. Her direct value to him had decreased accordingly.
But the problem she was describing — weaponized Extremis, thermal detonation in the hands of anyone who replicated the formula without resolving the stability flaw — wasn't going to resolve itself. Someone was going to acquire the formula. Multiple someones, probably, given how many parties had been running data extraction at Rose Manor. A scientist working specifically toward a stabilized variant, inside a controlled research environment, was better than the alternative.
"Accepted," he said. "Welcome to the team."
Maya exhaled — not quite relief, but close to it.
He didn't mention the Fraternity itself. That was a different conversation, for a different point in time. Universal Capsule Company was enough for now.
The living room of the Fraternity's residential wing was quiet in the late afternoon. Pietro and Wanda sat on opposite ends of the couch with a small glass bottle on the table between them.
Pietro had been looking at it for about ten minutes. He kept almost picking it up, then remembering that he'd held off this long in order to have this conversation properly.
"You should take it," he said. "It's yours just as much as mine."
Wanda shook her head immediately. "Smith gave it to you. As a reward for the tower. It's not mine."
"You climbed that tower in the cold for three hours—"
"And got a coaching session with Smith, which you know perfectly well I'm more excited about than any bottle of anything." She pulled her knees up onto the cushion and turned to face him squarely. "Pietro. Drink the water."
He looked at her for a moment with the particular expression he'd had since they were children — the one that was trying to find an angle where he could argue the point and couldn't quite locate it.
"If your training with Smith doesn't close the gap—"
"Then we'll find another way. We always do." She nodded at the bottle. "Don't make me ask again. You're driving me crazy."
Pietro picked up the bottle. He pulled the cork, gave her one last look, and drank it in a single motion.
It hit like electricity moving backward — not outward but inward, finding something in the deep architecture of him that had always been running at partial capacity. He felt it the way you feel a pulled muscle release: a sudden absence of resistance that had been so constant he'd stopped noticing it.
Then the room slowed.
Not gradually — all at once. Every piece of the world around him dropped to a fraction of its normal pace. The late-afternoon light through the window moved like something underwater. The faint ambient noise of the building — footsteps two floors up, ventilation in the walls — came apart into distinct, slow waves of sound.
He stood up, more out of reflex than intention, and looked at his hands.
Then he ran.
He was out of the room, down the corridor, around the full perimeter of the residential level, back through the door, and seated on the couch again before the cushion had fully reabsorbed the weight of his departure. He'd let go of the empty bottle when he stood up. It was still falling when he caught it.
Pietro sat very still and let the speed-state release.
The bottle completed its fall. He caught it two inches above the coffee table.
Wanda had not visibly moved. From her perspective, he'd stood up and sat back down.
"How's the change?" she asked, watching his face.
He set the bottle down carefully and worked through the available words. None of them quite covered it.
"Ten times," he said. "I'm roughly ten times faster than I was this morning."
The implications settled over him quietly. He wasn't thinking about combat applications or what this meant for any mission. He was thinking about the fact that, as of approximately one minute ago, the gap between him and a bullet had become a gap that the bullet could not close.
He'd always known, intellectually, that a fast enough target couldn't be hit by conventional fire. He'd been operating well below that threshold, and he'd been relying on his suit to make up the difference.
He didn't need to rely on the suit anymore.
Wanda read something of this in his face. "Good," she said simply.
He looked at her. "I'm still faster than you."
She smiled. "For now."