Chapter Text
The desert was undulating from the heat as the sun beat down on it. In the distance, through a glimmering haze, Las Vegas’ strip glistened.
Kai climbed from her car, slamming the door hard, the sound swallowed up by the desert surrounding her, everything sounded muffled out here.
Ricardo, a detective in the 72nd precinct had been complaining all day about this seemingly impossible crime and she was determined to solve it - if only so he would stop whining.
The yellow crime scene tape was staked out around the scene of the crime and she ducked under it, moving farther into the desert.
Several people who had gone hiking had vanished without a trace. But that wasn’t the mystery.
The mystery was that they found them again.
Or, they found their skeletons. Picked clean and shining as if they had been decomposing for decades.
No one knew what could decay bodies so quickly. There wasn’t an acid that could do it without destroying or leaving some type of mark on the bones. There wasn’t an animal who could clean a body so quickly and leave no prints or trace behind.
The precinct was stumped.
But Kai had a sneaking suspicion she might know what was doing it.
Her feet sank into the sand as she walked and the sand blew across her face and exposed arms. It flew around her, swirling around the entire scene. She slid on a pair of sunglasses, trying to keep it out of her eyes.
Her foot crunched on something hard and she looked down.
Well, she’d found another body.
Her foot had snapped a femur in half.
She crouched down, the world around her having gone eerily silent, the mini sand storm dying around her.
Kai brushed away the sand from around the bone, finding more of the skeleton half buried in sand.
The sunlight darkened and Kai froze as the wind picked up again and sand flew around her, moving in one direction.
Up.
Kai didn’t dare look up and flicked her eyes around her, studying the shadow that had blotted out the Vegas sunlight. It wasn’t very big, only about ten feet wide but it was getting closer.
And fast.
Kai shot her gaze upwards just as a wall of sand slammed into her and tore her body to pieces.
“SHIT!” Kai sat up in her car, watching as the sand storm tore apart her illusion. She could easily imagine the kind of affect it would have on a human body.
The sand settled back down on the ground, and the wind died.
Kai sighed, reaching into her backseat and rifling through the weapons there. “How the hell am I gonna explain this one to Ricardo?” She pulled a bow and a single arrow from a quiver full of them. “Oh yes, the sand is literally stripping muscle off of bones,” she said in a high nasally voice. She clicked a button and the sunroof began to open. “Have fun writing that report!”
Kai stood up between her seats, already nocking the single arrow she had chosen. The moment she popped out of the car, she fired it before ducking back inside, clicking the button to close the sunroof.
The arrow whistled through the air and landed dead center in the middle of the crime scene. The sand swirled around it and began to gather again.
Kai clicked a button on the bow and the arrow exploded in a ball of fire.
The sand collapsed back to the ground and Kai squinted at it, wondering if it was safe now.
She took a deep breath and focused, building another illusion of herself and sent it out of the car, moving towards the sand.
The sand opened up and swallowed her illusion whole before it gathered in a huge cloud and shot for the car.
Kai threw the car into reverse, her tiles fighting for grip on the sand as she peeled backwards, the sand cloud gaining on her.
Her phone rang and she flinched in shock before clicking a button on her steering wheel, answering the phone as her car skidded backwards in the sand.
“Hello?” She asked, trying to sound as normal as possible as the sand began to surrounded her.
“Please tell me you didn’t have something to do with that explosion out by the crime scene.” Ricardo’s voice filled the car and she turned down the volume on the speakers that had been blasting music on the drive over.
“Uh,” Kai’s car shuddered as the car began to sink into the ground, “okay, I won’t tell you.”
“Damn it Kai!” Ricardo exclaimed, “how many times do I have to tell you that you can’t just go walking onto any crime scene you want?”
The car was sinking rapidly and Kai climbed up onto her seat, as the windows were blocked out by sand.
Sand began to fill the car, flying in through the AC vent and swirling around her. Kai tucked her shirt up over her nose, trying to keep it out of her lungs as she picked up several of her weapons, slinging them on. “Yeah, yeah, can I call you back? I’m a little busy!”
“Yeah well so am I! Do you know how much paperwork I’m doing after your little stunt at the Bellagio?”
“For the record, you were the one who wanted to know if Oceans 11 was realistic!” The entire car was flooding with sand and it had sunk completely underneath the ground.
Everything went quiet and Kai lit a small glowing ball of golden light in her hand. It seemed it had all stopped. She breathed out a sigh of relief.
The car jerked to the side and she went flying into her window, her head cracking the glass. She wiped the blood out of her eyes, her head throbbing in pain. “Hey Ricardo?” She spoke over his loud ranting in Spanish that she was only half paying attention too. “If you don’t here from me in an hour, give me a call back. K?”
“Don’t you dare hang up on-.”
Kai clicked the button on the steering wheel, silencing Ricardo.
With a jolt, the car went soaring into the air, blown upwards on a geyser of sand.
Kai flew upwards and crashed through the sunroof, sending her flying out of the car covered in glass.
The glass cut into her skin and the sand stung as it swirled around her, trying to rip her apart.
Sand rushed into her nose and down her throat and into her ears and she choked on it as it ripped at her eyes underneath her lids.
She tumbled towards the ground through a cloud of sand and she tried to calm down and concentrate.
The spells around her body shifted, moving just enough to allow huge wings made from golden energy to shoot from her back. She spread them wide, gritting her teeth as the sand ripped at them and banked hard to the right to avoid smashing into the ground.
She flew upwards, fighting through a storm of sand, pushing past it all and breaking out into fresh air.
Kai looked down to see the cloud of sand reforming and billowing rapidly up towards her, like a mushroom cloud. The wind was shrieking as the cloud followed her up, stretching thinner and thinner as it reached for her.
As it shifted, Kai saw exactly what she was looking for, glowing faintly in the middle of the thickest part of the cloud.
She tucked her wings in and dropped, falling rapidly downwards, creating several illusions of herself to confuse the sandstorm.
It reached out for all four of her doubles and stretched even thinner as it bashed apart one after the other.
Kai took a deep breath before she plunged right into the heart of the cloud, aiming for the glowing light that was her goal.
Her hand reached out blindly as the sand tore apart her eyes, she managed to close her hand around the small glowing beacon that had guided her here before she was blinded.
She yanked on it and the sand around her froze before falling back to the ground.
Kai wasn’t far behind.
She plunged into the ground, plowing through the sand and rolling across the ground, the bones in her wings snapping at the joint and her right ankle shattering on impact.
She rolled to a stop, her eyesight fuzzy and unclear, each blink felt like sandpaper rubbing on her eyelids.
Her body burned as her healing magic, the Deiltre she had been born with began to work to fix her broken bones. She clenched her teeth as the bones in her body snapped back into place, making her shriek in pain. Her wings shifted back into place, making her see red but she couldn’t glamour them until they were fixed.
Her eyesight was slowly coming back with each blink as she cried out the sand. She sneezed heavily, rubbing her nose and looking at the sand coming out in her snot. “This sucks,” she groaned and coughed up more sand.
Eventually, she was able to see straight again and her pain faded to a dull ache as her Deiltre continued to work on her body. She slowly sat up, her back still screaming in pain but it wasn’t agonizing any longer.
Kai slowly opened her clenched fist, half expecting the article she had spent weeks hunting to be lost in the sand.
But in her sand caked hand, the tiny sliver of stone glowed pink up at her.
It was as thin as glass and was as sharp as well. It was small, no bigger than her pinky nail but it was better than nothing.
Sirens filled the air and Kai closed her hand around the pink shard, putting it into the pocket of her jeans and turning as Ricardo and Samuel came skidding up in a cop car.
She quickly rebuilt her glamour, hissing in pain as her wings vanished. She lifted a hand, sand falling off of her as she waved to them. “Hey guys!”
Ricardo and Samuel stumbled in the sand as they climbed from their car and came towards her. “WHAT THE FUCK KAI!” He tripped over a bone that had been uncovered by the sandstorm.
Kai slowly got to her feet, using a cactus as a brace and picked out the needles quickly. She tested her ankle and it throbbed painfully but she could walk. “Fancy meeting you here.”
“Stop messing around,” Ricardo was pissed, his face bright red, like he had a bad sunburn. “What happened?”
Kai shrugged, “sandstorm. It blew away all the evidence.”
Samuel narrowed his eyes, “and the explosion?”
Kai shrugged, “who knows.” She turned her gaze to her half destroyed car and sighed, “any chance you could give me a ride back to the city?”
Ricardo ran a hand through his hair, “I’m half tempted to leave you out here.”
“Then who is going to bring you free dumplings on bad days?” Kai smirked at him. She walked towards her half buried car, “I have some things in the back seat that I need though.” She stepped onto the hood and lowered herself down through the shattered sunroof, the glass cutting into her skin but she quickly picked it out, watching as her skin knit back together. She turned her gaze on all of her weapons which had fallen all around the car and closed her eyes for a second, concentrating.
Samuel and Ricardo’s minds were easy to find in the empty desert and even easier to slip inside since she already had a mental string connecting her mind to their minds through her Psychomenti powers. Along with every cop in the 72nd precinct.
She slipped into their minds and as she handed the weapons out to them, she twisted their eyes to see nothing but golf clubs, baseball bats and skis. Doing this was easier than converting the weapons into something else.
She climbed from the car once she had passed all of her weapons out and dug her phone out of the sand. She shook out the sand but it was dead. She sighed, it would take a while for her to use her Deiltre to clone another one.
“Do you coach an entire school's worth of teams?” Samuel asked as they stuffed her weapons into the cop car and she climbed into the back and settled between the deadly weapons that the other two couldn’t see.
They drove back into Las Vegas, passing through the strip and heading farther out into the suburbs where Ricardo pulled the car outside of her house. “Do you need help bringing all this stuff up?”
Kai looked around at all the stuff and then waved her hand, making it all vanish.
“WHOA!” Samuel started to shout but Kai flicked her fingers and pulled on the string between their minds and his face settled back into a board expression. “Have a good day Kai.”
Ricardo blinked his eyes, his own shocked expression fading, “yeah, see you tomorrow for the normal 9-5.”
Kai smiled at them, climbing from the car. Human minds were so easy to mess with.
Ricardo and Samuel drove off and Kai watched them go as the sun began to set, the shadows growing longer and longer. She stepped up to a shadow and her body dissolved into it, leaving the street empty.
The world Kai moved through was dark and cold but after the heat and sun of the desert she welcomed it.
Her clothes snagged on hidden fingers, trying to pull her off her path but she kept a clear image in her mind of her goal.
Only seconds later, she appeared in front of a log cabin in the woods. It was fully dark here and the cicadas were buzzing in the trees.
Kai walked carefully across the ground, moving silently through the forest.
She felt it when she passed through her magical barrier, runes glowed on the trees around her but let her pass into her hideout.
Kai walked into the log cabin and headed for the basement, ignoring the house that was covered in dust and decay except for the places where her footprints led to the basement door.
Kai swung it open and walked down the stairs, more spells glowing as she passed but not triggering. Anyone who wasn’t given her permission to enter would be trapped and tortured until she could get there to kill them herself.
The only two people she had ever let in here were dead now.
She pushed away the thoughts of some of her first friends that she had met when she had landed in this world over seventy years ago and reached the huge metal door at the bottom of the stairs. She typed in a code and carefully swung it open.
A pink light glowed from within and she stepped into her vault.
In the center of the room glowed a half assembled pink stone about as big as an ostrich egg - The Eternity Stone.
The center of it had been carefully assembled but farther out, pieces of the stone floated around, missing the pieces that connected them to the rest of the stone.
Kai pulled the small piece of the stone from her pocket and the entire stone glowed brighter as she held up the shard towards the stone.
It flew into place, clicking together with two other shards floating in the air. The stone shone brighter for a split second before settling back down to the dim light it had been giving off before.
Kai sighed, staring at the small piece she had added to it.
Seventy years of searching.
Seventy years of trying to get back home to the world she had fallen from.
Seventy years of being the only one of her kind.
One hundred and fifteen shards down, who knew how many more left she’d have to find.
And then she could leave this world - this reality - behind and go home.
____________________________________
Kai left the Eternity Stone and shadow travelled back to her house. She landed on her driveway and narrowed her eyes at the black car parked in it.
She turned to her front door where a man in a suit was leaning against the adobe wall. “I heard about the explosion,” he said instead of a ‘hello.’ “And about what you do. Are you a vigilante now?”
Kai gritted her teeth, wanting nothing more than to vanish him into a pocket dimension but if she did that, she’d have SHIELD at her doorstep before she could blink. “It’s a good thing you didn’t go inside. I have a vicious attack animal.” She moved towards her front door and Coulson stepped aside as she swung it open. She didn’t bother telling him to leave, she had learned the hard way that he was persistent. It was better to let him talk and then send him on his way than avoid him.
“You used to be more.” Coulson said and Kai rolled her eyes as she flipped on the lights in her living room. “You helped found SHIELD, you helped fight in World War 2, you used to do work that mattered.”
Kai spun around, her eyes flashing silver for just a second in her anger before they settled back to brown. “It sure as hell matters to the people I save.”
“You just don’t strike me as the type who would help someone out of the kindness of your heart.”
Kai laughed emotionlessly, “There’s a lot you don’t know about me Coulson.” She moved towards a side table and picked up fish food to feed the small goldfish in his tank.
“Is this supposed to be your vicious attack animal?” Coulson asked, studying the goldfish.
“His name is Bubbles,” Kai deadpanned and Coulson studied her, unable to tell if she was joking. “My patience is running thin Coulson. Need I remind you what I did to the last person who pissed me off?”
“No thanks, we were cleaning up the body parts for weeks. You have a nice arm, his heart was found over a thousand feet away from where you originally killed him.”
“Thanks. I workout.”
Coulson’s eyes fell on the picture on the side table next to Bubbles. “Who are they?” He studied the picture of five people smiling at the camera along with Kai.
Kai flicked her fingers and the photo vanished. “Last chance to tell me what’s going on Coulson before I send you back to Fury in a box.”
Coulson turned to her, swallowing. “We found him.”
Kai froze, “found who?”
Coulson passed her a file and she flipped it open, a half submerged photo of the Valkyrie greeted her.
She stared at it, pushing back the memories. Steve, the Howling Commandos and she had attacked HYDRA’s main base and Steve had gone after the Red Skull. He hadn’t returned.
She had spent years trying to find him and the Tesseract. But both of them had been lost to the ocean.
She flipped over the page and swallowed back the lump in her throat as she saw Steve’s body covered in ice. He was laying down, almost as if he was sleeping. He hadn’t died in the initial crash then. He’d probably drowned or starved to death.
She cleared her throat, closing the file. She had spent her life surrounded by death and it had taken her years to get over his death. “Thank you for letting me know. Can I- Can I see his body?” She tried to keep her voice from trembling.
Coulson frowned, “Kai, I don’t think you understand...he’s not dead.”
Kai’s heart stopped. “What?”
“Somehow the serum kept him alive and the ice put him into some sort of hibernation. He’s alive.”
“You’re not joking with me? Because if you are....”
“I’m not joking.” Coulson reassured her, “we want you to be there when he wakes up to explain things. I imagine he’s going to be confused.”
Kai couldn’t keep all of her tears at bay and one slipped down her cheek. “When do we leave?”
“Right now. I have a quintet waiting at the airport.” Coulson said. “Pack up.”
Kai raised a hand and pulled it through the air, like she was unzipping something and a hole appeared in the air. She opened it wider and Coulson’s eyes widened in shock as he looked into a small pocket dimension, about the size of a storage container. She smirked at his face, “you can go in if you want. Although there’s no guarantee I’ll let you back out.” She grabbed Bubbles and put him inside the pocket dimension on a small table. “Okay, let’s go.” She stepped out and sealed up her storage space.
Coulson blinked, “that’s all?”
Kai shrugged, “there’s nothing else I need. None of this is mine.”
“Then who’s house is this?”
Kai shrugged, “I don’t know.” That was a lie, she did know. She had picked out the house and then sent the owners to another city where she had manipulated the CEO of a large company to give them high paying jobs and a house while she lived in their house. But, SHIELD didn’t know that she was a Psychomenti, someone who had the ability to control people's minds, and she wanted to keep it that way. “Let’s go.”
Coulson led her out to the car and she climbed inside as he backed out of the driveway and onto the highway.
“Can’t you go any faster?”
“I’m going the speed limit. Besides, the quintet will get us there in two hours.”
Kai sighed in annoyance, settling back against the car seat. She could’ve shadow travelled but SHIELD didn’t know she could do that either.
All these secrets were beginning to pile up.
And now that Steve was alive… she’d have to make sure he stayed silent about some of the things he knew about her.
He was one of the only two people who knew about the Eternity Stone and her desperate attempt to reassemble it so she could go back home.
She wondered if he’d be happy to see her or if he’d hate her for being unable to save him.
_______________________
Times Square was bustling with tourists and Kai and Coulson were moving through the thick of it, towards an office building on the other side of the square.
The people pressed around them and Kai pushed through them, breaking into their minds to subtly clear a path so she could get to the building where they were keeping Steve.
Before they could reach the building, a blonde man came running out of the front door and agents swarmed around him. Several black cars jumped the curb and surrounded him.
Kai broke into a run, pushing through the tourists crowding around to see what was going on. “You’ve been asleep Cap,” Fury’s voice reached her, “for almost seventy years.”
She struggled through the crowd, kicking several agents out of her way and leaping over a car.
“I had a date,” Steve was saying as she slid over a hood and landed next to Fury. “Kai?” He stared at her for a long minute.
Kai swallowed, waiting for him to yell. He would hate her for not finding him. “Yeah,” she said cautiously, “it’s me.”
Steve studied her for a long moment and then he gave a hesitant smile. “At least there’s one thing that stayed the same.”
Kai let out a strangled laugh, trying to hold back her relieved tears. He didn’t hate her.
“We’d better get inside,” Fury said, “and let you two talk.”
Kai actually listened to him for once, going back into the building. “Sorry about that wall,” Steve said awkwardly where the agents were cleaning up the man sized hole he’d put in the stage.
They were led to an empty room and the door shut behind them.
“Kai,” Steve said, “I don’t understand. How are you still-.”
Kai put up a hand, “they’re listening to us.”
Steve went silent although she knew he was brimming with questions.
She reached out and pulled him into a hug. “Hang on,” she whispered and vanished into shadows.
All the SHIELD agents watching them saw was a quick blip on the screen before it came back into focus and Steve and Kai kept talking. The agents were oblivious that the two people they were watching talk about mundane things were actually holograms.
Kai held on tight to Steve as they whirled through the shadow world and thudded to a stop in an empty loft in Queens in a large warehouse. Kai had held this property for years but she had vacated it ten years ago when she had left New York. She was glad now that she hadn’t sold it.
“I forgot about that,” Steve shivered from the leftover effect of the shadow world before he spun around to face Kai, “what are you still doing here? I thought you would have assembled the Eternity Stone and opened a portal back to your dimension by now!”
“It’s not easy to hunt down tiny pieces when I don’t have a way to track them. I’ve been playing it by ear for a while and after I fought with you in World War 2 I’ve been keeping my head down.”
Steve ran a hand through his hair, “I can’t believe it’s been seventy years.”
Kai swallowed, “I’ll get the tough stuff out of the way,” she said, “all of the Howling Commandos lived long happy lives working for SHIELD or other government agencies. I kept tabs on them and helped them out when they needed it.”
“And Peggy?” Steve swallowed, fearing the worst.
Kai gave him a long look, “she’s alive.”
Steve took a shuddering breath, “but?”
“She’s in a retirement home in New York, she has alheizmers. Half the time she’s here, and half the time she’s back in World War 2. I used to visit her but her niece asked me to stop coming, apparently I was doing more harm than good since I don’t age and keep sending her into episodes.”
“Can’t you fix her?”
Kai sighed, “my Deiltre work on injuries. I can’t do anything against old age.” Her entire species was immortal, none of them had ever grown old before so there had never been a reason to learn how to heal old age.
Steve swallowed, “can I see her?”
“Of course.”
“What about the stone? Where are you with that?”
Kai shook her head, “I’ve found about half of it but I’ve reached a standstill. It seems the rest of the shards are still hidden. There hasn’t been any major disasters that scream ‘I’ve been possessed by a piece of a powerful weapon from another dimension.’”
“But what about your home? When you arrived here, the entire planet was dying and you had to bring the stone back to save it. How much longer do you have before it's too late for you to save your people?”
“I don’t know.” She rubbed her face, “alright, enough with the depressing talk. Let’s start on things that you’ve missed. First on the list; Star Wars.” Kai forced a smile on her face.
Steve noticed the change in subject but knew better than to press. “Sounds good but first, we need to get back to SHIELD before they find out we’re missing.”
Kai reached out for Steves hand, “for the record, I’m glad you’re alive again,” she said.
“I’m glad you’re here to guide me.” Steve squeezed her hand as they dissolved back into shadows and reappeared back in the white room at SHIELD.
Their holograms vanished as the cameras sputtered. A second later, the door opened. “Hopefully she caught you up on what’s important,” Fury said. “We have a lot to talk about Captain. About your place in the new world.”
___________________________
Coulson rewatched the video, noticing how Kai and Steve vanished briefly twice. There was something they were missing.
“So?” Fury asked, “What do you think?”
“I think there’s something they’re both keeping from us,” Coulson said, “something they don’t want SHIELD to know about.”
“Well, it’s your call if we bring them in on the Tesseract project.”
“I think we should wait, neither of them know we have the Tesseract. It might be better to keep it that way.”