A Lullaby For Gods Chapter XLVI

Karkat explains, while the car continues to weave its way through traffic, about what had happened in the past few weeks, at least as quickly as he can since they’re close to the hospital and need a proper plan for how to get everyone to sneak in.

There is something called a bloodleech, and it’s disgusting and he threw one up once. And it also apparently leeches off of people’s very beings, which is why it’s called a bloodleech. Cecil is infected with it, according to one of their sources, who identified as a Seer.

“A Seer?” Jade asks.

“Yeah, and we’re thinking Seer as in the actual class,” Roxy says, “And they mentioned an Heir once too.”

“So - so this is really about the game,” Jade says. Steve glances at Tony, who just tightens his grip on the steering wheel. There it is again, that term, that game. Steve still barely understands it. “It’s just SBURB all over again.”

“All signs point to it so far,” Kanaya says. 

“Hal says if it is the game, it’s strange this planet is still around,” Roxy says. “Everything is wiped out once a session starts - or, you know, arguably, it’s going to be anyway unless a session is started to rebuild a universe.”

“That still makes no sense to me,” Tony says.

Jade gives him a sympathetic look in the rearview mirror. “A lot of it doesn’t, Mr. Stark. Even I’m confused by it sometimes.”

“It’s possible it’s not this planet’s session,” Eridan says, “We’re not from this session. We’re not from any of each other’s sessions, our paths just happened to cross .”

“It could be another session, yeah,” Roxy says.

“I remember Rose - at least, I think it was Rose - once said this universe doesn’t even have a game,” Jade says. The tension in Tony’s posture lessens. “So if something related to Skaia is going on, then it’s not native to this universe. It’s something else that got brought here.”

“Or fell here,” Eridan says.

“Brought here,” Karkat says. “I think it was brought.”

Tony slows the car to a halt as the light up ahead goes red. Only a few minutes and they would be at the hospital. “Guys,” he says.

Jade focuses on Karkat, though, confused. “Why do you think they were brought here?”

“Everyone else was,” Karkat says, “As far as I know. I’m not sure, actually, but I remember being brought here. It’s not a huge leap to say everyone else might be too.”

“It makes sense if you think about how we were separated in groups,” Eridan says.

“Guys,” Tony says. The light ahead turns yellow.

“Wait,” Jade says, still focused on Karkat. “What do you mean you remember.”

There’s a moment of silence in the car as no one says anything. Tony opens his mouth to, just as Kanaya says, “Karkat remembers.”

The light ahead turns green.

“Goddamn it,” Tony mutters, and then slaps the dashboard twice, loudly, so as to get everyone’s attention. A few people jump in surprise. Davesprite hovers off of Jade’s shoulder to get closer to the second row seat. “Alright, I would love to hear more about this game and about what happened to all of you, but right now, we are so close to the hospital, and I think this discussion is going to be better when the rest of your friends can hear it and you can all talk about it in one sitting, how’s that?” 

“Uh,” Roxy says, “Actually, you do have a point and - fuck, we’re close to the hospital, we need to figure out what to do.”

“Thank you,” Tony says, “We’re incredibly close and unless we go snail-pace, which I refuse to do by the way, we don’t have enough time to think about how we’re going to get inside.”

“Park outside, maybe?” Jade says, “That way we can sit a while in the car.”

“Parking lot ticket booth.”

“Right,” Jade says. Tony is already moving the car forward to catch up with the traffic since he’s being honked at from behind. He goes a bit slower than he was earlier, but not irritatingly slow.

“I have no idea what that is,” Roxy says, “This earth is so interesting.”

“It stops being interesting after a while, especially when you figure out a lot of things are more nuisance than benefit,” Tony says. Roxy snickers. 

“If we have Roxy pull the void over us, we’ll risk still revealing ourselves,” Eridan says, “If I understood right, these…hos-pitt-hals - ” he pauses as he realizes he might have pronounced that wrongly “ - of yours are crowded places.”

“Especially around this time,” Jade says. 

Davesprite starts waving his arms so as to get her attention. Being a bright orange wisp, most of everyone in the car turns to him, even Steve.

“What is it?” Jade asks. Davesprite says something, and Jade has to lean in a little, but then she says, “Oh!” and laughs. “He’s right, I can just teleport us into the rooms.”

“Do they have cameras in the hospital rooms?” Kanaya asks.

“I…think they do,” Jade says. “Hm.”

“Well, whatever we’re doing, we still have to deal with parking inspection,” Tony says, “We need to hide all of you.”

“I think I’ll be fine,” Jade says, “Nearly everyone in New York knows me. Most of everyone who lives in the Safehouse, really.”

“I forgot you guys were in the Safehouse,” Roxy says, “We spent so long looking for that place too…” She trails off, and then adjusts Hal on her nose and snickers. “Yeah, Hal spent so long mapping routes for it.”

“You were looking for us?” Jade asks, and then backtracks, “Sorry, got distracted. The parking inspection is still a problem.”

“Teleport us to a lesser crowded area?” Kanaya asks.

“In the hospital?” Jade asks. “I don’t know which places have lesser crowded areas, and even if I did, we’d still have the problem of how we’re going to get in the rooms.”

Eridan shifts in his seat so he can get a better look at Davesprite, and then the miniature bags Jade has with her. 

“Rogers and Stark are well known in this area, correct?” he asks.

“Obviously,” Tony says. 

Steve just laughs and says, “Yeah.”

“So out of all of us, the three who are least to draw suspicion are these two humans.” Eridan motions to Tony and Steve at the front seats, and then to Jade at the very back, “And you. So you’ll be fine getting into the hospital yourselves.”

“But we need Karkat,” Roxy says, “He at least, out of all of us, has to get in.”

“We can just get smuggled in,” Eridan says,, and gestures to Davesprite. “If soda pop hides in one of those bags, at least if they’re regular-sized, he can just get in the hospital. Unless those are also inspected.”

“That’s…not a bad idea,” Steve says, “I think they’ll just look it over, and when they see it’s mostly clothes, they’ll probably let it through.”

“Or we can hide in pockets,” Roxy says, and then lifts Hal’s glasses, “Which, I’m going to clarify, was Hal’s suggestion and not mine.”

“That could work,” Jade says, “We’d all be inside the hospital already and we’d just have to deal with the cameras.”

“Since we’ll be seen visiting normally, that should lessen suspicion,” Steve says, “It’ll be better than everyone just appearing inside.”

“I’ve never been teleported,” Tony says. He slows as he pulls up by the hospital, ready to make the turn for its parking lot. 

“It’s not fun,” Steve says. “Jade?”

“On it,” Jade says, and holds her hands out in that rectangle shape she’d done with Davesprite earlier. She shrinks down Eridan first - who immediately starts climbing up the seat so he can jump over to her row - and then Karkat, and Roxy and Hal, and Kanaya. As soon as she lets the bags she has return to their regular size, Eridan is pulling down one of the zippers and burrowing inside. 

“Can’t blame him for not wanting to be hidden in a pocket,” Tony says. He slowly moves the car forwards, while everyone else scrambles for hiding. Roxy and Karkat let Steve hide them in his jacket. Kanaya and Davesprite let Jade pick them up and hide them in the pockets of hers. 

The tollbooth lets them in rather easily, which Steve is glad for, although he’s still thankful for Tony’s paranoia about the situation, considering how precariously balanced everything is. Get found out, and be questioned by S.H.I.E.L.D while the kids are detained. Get found out, and acknowledge that there might be an unconfirmed alien threat. Get found out, and acknowledge that there is a game out there that destroys and restarts universes. Get found out, and acknowledge that there are multiple sessions of this game that are running and whose players have converged on earth.

And that’s not even going into the whole bloodleech and hospital attack situation.

Jade lifts the bags carefully as she steps out of the car. “Cecil’s in room 1025,” Jade says, “Dave’s in 1111. We’re going to see Cecil first, right?”

“That’s the goal. We’re on a limited amount of time and we don’t know how long we can be here without being found out,” Steve says, lowly, “And the longer Cecil goes while infected, the lesser our chances of being able to help him.”

Jade nods. “Alright,” she says. She slings the bag Eridan is in on her shoulder and carries the rest in her other hand. “Room 1025 it is,” she says.

-

“Where is he?” Loki asks, just as he and Rose stop outside of Dave’s room, having just gone to the roof to fetch John as he’d been crying for about an hour up there.

The pool master looks relieved to see him. “Still in his room, and he’s calmed down a lot, but I think he’s confused,” they say, “Even I am, I have…no idea what’s going on.” They reach a hand up to pinch the bridge of their nose, sighing.

“We’ll get to the bottom of it,” Rose says.

“Please do,” the pool master says, “He’s inside, he’s talking to Graham and Mrs. H, I think he’s asking about what happened to Cecil.”

“Thank you,” Rose says, reaching out to squeeze their shoulder briefly before rushing into the room. John follows her as she does.

Loki pulls them aside and lowers his voice. “I’m going to need you to make sure everything in the Safehouse is in order. I think you know which to prioritize.”

Sapphrel pauses, their lips thinning to a line, but they nod. “I’m not cut out for this,” they say, “But alright.”

“You’re the one with the lowest profile out of all the entire team, you’ll be less of a target,” he says. 

“What about James?”

“I’ll send Ruben to look after him. We need people no one will expect to have any part in this,” Loki says, “Unless S.H.I.E.L.D’s turned an eye to you both and you just haven’t told me?”

“God, no, and thank fuck, I’d probably have a panic attack,” they say.

He skywalks them to the Safehouse quickly, and the pool master gives him one last nod before making a run for their room, while he pops back into the hospital to pull Ruben aside this time and send him over to James. Rose gives him an odd look when he finally approaches Dave’s bedside, after Mr. G and Mrs. H excuse themselves to give them all time to talk, but says nothing.

He hands Dave his sunglasses, and the boy immediately slips them on.

“Thanks,” he says.

“How are you feeling?”

“Awful,” he says, “And confused. At least I’m pretty sure this is real.”

“I’d vouch for its realness,” Rose says. Dave snorts, amused.

“John called us about what happened and - what exactly happened?” Loki asks, sitting down on the edge of the bed.

“Exactly what I told John,” he says. “I was in this room, and then I…wasn’t.”

“And the room looked like a hellish version of this one,” Loki says.

“Yeah,” Dave says, “The doc asked if I had any other hallucinations earlier and it was pretty much just that, and I kept hearing someone laughing.”

“Do you still hear them now?” Rose asks.

“No,” Dave says, “Thankfully not.”

“Good,” Rose says, relieved. “Good.”

“Have you gone to the odd room since the first time?” Loki asks. He turns, looking around the room and inspecting it, trying to see if anything’s off with it, but nothing sticks out to him. It’s just an ordinary patient’s room, even if the heart monitor is different from the old one it’s had to replace.

“No,” Dave says, “And honestly I think I’d rather just keep it that way.”

“I don’t blame you,” Loki says. “Your…nightmares, if that is what they even are, have been vivid.”

Dave leans back just a bit, wary. “What do you mean?”

“You weren’t waking up,” Rose says, immediately covering for him. “It’d been days, Dave. You missed your birthday. When you did start to show signs of consciousness, all you did was hurt yourself.”

“I tried to look into your mind in order to see what was possibly wrong,” Loki says, “I believe I ended up not only looking into it but being fully immersed into where it believed it was. It was a battlefield there - ”

“ - and everything was trying to kill everything else,” Dave says, “There was so much blood.”

Loki nods. “It was a war zone. I saw you once, but you were terrified and running, and I tried to look for you.”

“I didn’t even know you were there,” Dave says. He looks down at his lap. “How long was I out?”

“A few weeks,” Rose says, “What happened in there?”

“I don’t know,” Dave says, “It was just - I don’t even know what was there, but there was so much blood on the ground, and when you touched it, it would just try to get into your skin. I don’t even think it was blood at all, or if it was, it was fucked up.”

Loki remembers the thing that had snaked up his hand and had bloomed into something monstrous with too many teeth. He frowns. 

“There were carapaces fighting,” Dave says. Rose stills. “And then there weer things that weren’t carapaces at all. I don’t know where they came from.”

Rose is silent, thinking. Dave, beside her, is staring at his lap but isn’t seeing it at all.

“I fell into a pool of blood,” Loki says, and she looks at him. “Except it wasn’t a pool, it was way too deep to be one.”

“Fuck,” Dave says, reaching up to pull his glasses off, so he can rub his eyes with the heels of his palms. “God, I don’t know what’s going on.”

“It’s Skaia,” Rose says, voice in a small, disbelieving whisper. “It’s Skaia, isn’t it. That was the Skaian battlefield.”

“Yeah,” Dave says, still rubbing his heels into his eyes slowly. “Yeah, I think it was.”

“No,” Rose says. She stands and puts her face in her hands, drawing in a breath in a hiss. “No, no, no, this isn’t supposed to happen - what even happened to the battlefield that it would manifest like that?”

Strands of her hair are lifting, Loki notices, as if buoyed up by an invisible force, and he can see them start to glow faintly. John, from where he’s sitting by the wall, just watching, shifts nervously. 

“I don’t know,” Dave says. “But whatever happened, it turned Skaia into something that’s not even close to what it originally was.”

He’s still not looking up as he says this, instead just digging his heels further into his eyes, kneading into them the more frustrated he gets.

It’s John who stands and rushes to his side later to pulls his hands away from his face, snapping, “Stop that.” Dave’s eyes look bloodshot and reddened. Loki can see dark red at the inner corners of them. 

“Dave no,” Rose says, inspecting his hands. There’s a tiny bit of blood on them.

“They itch,” he says.

“It’s getting to his head,” John says, “Whatever this is - if it’s the same thing that got Cecil, it’s just getting worse.”

“There’s nothing in my head.”

Loki stills. So do Rose and John. 

Dave’s voice sounds distant, like he’s not really there, and he’s just staring blankly at his hands, unfocused.

“There’s nothing in my head,” he repeats. “I’m fine.”

“Dave,” Rose says, “You nearly crushed your own eyes in.”

“I’m fine.”

John slowly lets Dave’s hands go. “Dave, wake up.”

“But I am awake,” he says, frowning slightly, but still with such unfocus that he looks like he’s half-asleep. “And there’s nothing in my head.”

“Fucking hell, Dave, snap out of it.” Rose grabs her brother’s face in her hands, both of which are glowing slightly. The glow impossibly flickers to black for a moment, before finally steadying on a faint light. Rose’s eyes are fully glowing, and for a second, she looks like she’s radiating with the force of an entire sun.

If the entire sun made Loki feel like he needed to throw up because the air around it felt wrong. 

Dave stares at his sister, wide-eyed, and Loki sees the exact moment he’s brought back to the present, because he immediately squeezes his eyes shut and yells, “Shit!” and trying to wipe the blood off his eyes. There’s thankfully not a lot. 

The glow around Rose fades, and with it, the feeling that makes Loki’s stomach churn, especially when he’d been sitting so close to it. 

“Alright, don’t make it worse, you’ll heal,” John says, prying Dave’s hands away from his eyes again, “You’ll be fine. You’re good. You’re alright.”

Dave struggles briefly before sighing, shoulders dropping and expression actually falling to one of defeat. Then he puts on his neutral facade again, ever the paranoid child, and picks his glasses up to slip them on. 

“Whatever is going on, we need to get to the bottom of it,” Rose says. Her hair isn’t floating around her anymore, and she’s back to normal. No glowing eyes, no glowing hands, no ill aura about her, just Rose. “It’s already gotten two of you, whatever this is.”

“At least we know it’s tied to the game,” John says.

“Except Cecil isn’t a player,” Rose says. “Skaia is involved, but it might not just be Skaia.”

“I think it just doesn’t care,” Dave says, “Maybe it just doesn’t care as long as it gets what it wants.”

Then he laughs. “Maybe it just wants death.”

Rose says nothing at that. Neither does John.

Loki, for once, doesn’t know what to say, because there’s really nothing he can think of, when what they might be up against is something that just doesn’t discriminate between anything, and wants nothing more than for everything to be destroyed.

-

There’s only one person inside Cecil’s room aside from the patient himself. Tony thinks it’s probably good that everyone else is hiding right now and can’t see that Jade is lowering the bags, include the one Eridan is hiding in, to hug Kevin, who is the only one present to receive them all as they visit room 1025.

“What are they, um, doing here?” the boy asks, looking at him and Steve warily, which irks Tony a little if only because his job is to save New York and not burn it to the ground, but the kid’s been through a lot. 

“They have a lot of things to explain,” Jade says, lowly. She leans to the side a little to look past Kevin’s shoulder. Tony sees the kid on the bed, a carbon copy of the one standing in front of him, wave. He has a cat on his lap, and a dog sitting in a chair beside him. The whole thing’s pretty Disney-worthy, honestly.  “Where’s everyone else?”

“They went to go check on Dave, he just woke up,” Kevin says, “Although I think there was a bit of an emergency. I haven’t heard much about it, I haven’t really been…away from this room.”

Jade tenses a little at the mention of the emergency but nods anyway. “Where’s Luke?”

“I don’t know if he’s at the Safehouse or Dave’s room,” he says, “You just came from the house, right?”

“Yeah, he wasn’t there,” she says, “I’ll check Dave’s room, then. In the meantime, uh.” She steps aside to make more room for Steve and Tony to let themselves inside. “Steve and Mr. Stark want to see how Cecil’s been doing.”

Kevin just looks at them, very slowly, eyeing each of them from head to foot like he’s doing a full scan. With the dark lines under his eyes and the unnerving focus he’s fixing on them, it actually makes Tony smile stiffly in discomfort. 

“I think we can wait,” Steve says. 

“Yeah, I think we can wait once your other friends are here,” Tony says. He’s not about to throw hands with a rightfully paranoid and protective teenager whose brother nearly died. 

Jade nods, and takes a step back, but then stops. 

“Right,” she says, whispering, “No teleportation when there’s cameras around.”

Kevin raises an eyebrow, but says nothing else, and only watches Jade wave them a quick goodbye, shooting Tony an amused, “Maybe you’ll get to see it live next time, Mr. Stark,” before running for the stairs.

“Damn.”

Steve laughs. “Teleportation is real,” he says. 

“I hate this,” Tony says, under his breath. 

From the doorway, Kevin only keeps his eye on them, leaning back on the frame like a watchdog. 

“To be fair, I thought you of all people had already started working on teleportation when I met Jade,” Steve says, “Maybe as a work in progress.”

“I’ll figure it out,” Tony says. 

“Good luck,” Steve says, grinning. “Oh, I forgot to ask, but I’ve been trying to look things up - ”

“Look at you, learning how to navigate the future and use slang.”

“ - and - shut up - I haven’t been able to find much on whether or not alchemize means anything new today. At least with technology. I just remembered I was going to ask you if it did,” he says.

Tony frowns. “Alchemize?”

“Yeah, Jade said something about…” he pauses, then, “If she and her friends had the right equipment, they’d be able to alchemize anything into existence.”

“Huh.” The only thing Tony can think about, in regards to alchemy, was a lot of fictional novels and shows, but then again, he’s pretty much grabbed shawarma with a god and has heard about teleporters that are able to snatch any object in any point in time and space, so really, this shouldn’t be something he thinks is impossible. “That makes no sense.”

Steve laughs again. “I’ll take that as a no.”

“That’s - that’s most likely in the same vein as the appearifier thing,” Tony says, and then crosses his arms as he stares down at the floor, thinking. The ability to alchemize anything with the right equipment.

But what sort of equipment? And for Jade to have mentioned it like that, that meant that equipment already must have existed. But who made it, and how?

“You have no idea how much I hate that I don’t understand this,” he says.

Steve’s still laughing when two people arrive, who Tony first mistakes as just passing through, but Kevin actually relaxes when he sees them and lets them in after greeting them.

The man, who looks like he is in dire need of sleep, only gives Steve a polite nod, before picking up the bags Jade’s left on the floor to carry them inside (and Tony sees the dog hop off its chair to ask for pets from him) while the woman actually stops and gives them both a warm smile. 

“Hello there, loves, are you here to visit Cecil?” she asks.

“Yes, ma’am,” Steve says, “We’re still waiting for Jade, she said she was looking for Luke.”

“Oh, of course,” the woman says, “He’s with Dave, the poor boy punched out his heart monitor earlier.”

“He what?” Kevin asks, surprised. 

Tony shares a look with Steve. 

“He punched out his heart monitor,” the woman says, “The doctor said it was trauma-induced hallucinations. It might be because of - ”

“Oh,” Kevin says. The woman reaches out to give him a gentle pat on the shoulder, and he sighs. “Right,” he says, “That’s entirely fair.”

“He’s a strong boy, and so is your brother. Everything will work out, we’re dealing with it as best as we can.”

“Thanks, Mrs. H,” Kevin says. 

“It’s no problem, dear,” she says, and then, to Steve and Tony, “Do you boys not want to come in and wait for everyone else inside?”

“We’re fine here, ma’am,” Steve says.

“If you’re sure - oh, here they are.” 

Down the hallway, Tony sees two people with Jade, one he recognizes and the other he’s only familiar with in passing and has only met once before when he’d visited the hospital after the attack. Rose seems to pause as soon as she sees Steve and Tony waiting by Cecil’s door, although she presses on, strides determined.

“Mr. Stark, you’ve met Rose,” Jade says.

“Pleasure to see you, Mr. Stark,” Rose says. 

“Tony’s fine,” he says, “How’s your brother?”

She hesitates, so that probably wasn’t the best thing to ask, but she does answer. “He punched out his heart monitor earlier, but he’s calmed down significantly.”

“What the fuck even happened for him to punch out his heart monitor?” Kevin asks.

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” the tall man - Luke, he thinks - he says.  He turns to Steve and Tony, and from how his posture changes, Tony thinks one wrong word would probably get him to deck them both, Jade’s friends or not.

God, everyone around here is on a hair trigger, which is fair considering the situation, but holy hell.

“May we help you?” Luke asks.

“We wanted to check up on Cecil,” Steve says. “And we have - things to discuss,” he says the last part quietly, “Ones that may concern you.”

Luke shares a look with Rose. 

“Do you think we should call for a War Council meeting?” Rose asks.

“You have a War Council?” Tony blurts out, although he still has the awareness to say it quietly despite the shock.

“We take our job seriously,” Rose says.

Jade laughs, nervous. “I don’t think we can call for a full meeting when we have two people injured. At least not within the comfort of the Safehouse.”

“And we need to be around Cecil,” Tony says, “What we - we’re here for him. This, what we’re here for, it concerns him.”

“Yeah?’ Kevin asks, frigid. Tony has to think for a few seconds so as not to make everyone’s danger meters spike.

“We know your brother is…sick,” he says, softly, “And we know it’s not just any ordinary sickness. We know what it is, and we might know how to deal with it.”

“How,” Kevin asks, voice flat and unamused, but Tony can see just a small glimmer of hope there. Steve gives him a warning look. Don’t fuck this up.

“What do you mean?” Rose asks, “How do you know - are you even sure?”

Tony pauses. “Well, it’s so far the only thing we have, but it might just work,” he says, “As for how we know, that’s part of what we wanted to talk to you about.”

“Alright, inside,” Luke says, motioning his head towards Cecil’s room. “We’re not talking about this here in the hallway like idiots.”

Kevin thankfully doesn’t protest, in fact retreating inside the room first. Tony and Steve step in, and Tony goes to where the man from earlier has placed the bags to look for the one Eridan is in. He’s aware of a faint bark from the dog in the room, but there’s a gentle shush after.

Behind them all, the door closes and he sees Rose and Luke write on the air, leaving trails of purple and green, respectively, as their fingers glide and form the markings.

“What the fuck,” Tony says.

Steve is squinting at the sigils, even when they disappear so fast since Luke and Rose just quickly snap their fingers after. “Wait, what are those, they look familiar - ”

“Seiðr,” Rose says, “Or, well, runework used to channel seiðr to achieve something.”

“In this case, we’re proofing the room,” Luke says, and then aims his hand towards one of the cameras in the corner and snaps his fingers, “And fooling the cameras.”

“You can do that?” Tony asks, this time unashamedly loud. “How does that - how does that even work, is it magnetic interference - ”

“It’s just magic,” Rose says, grinning cheekily. 

“There’s a science to magic, it’s just unexplained physics,” Tony says.

Jade laughs. “One day, Mr. Stark. One day.”

“Done,” Luke says. “Graham, if you would get the blinds.”

The man from earlier, the exhausted one, goes over the window to close all the blinds, leaving the fluorescent lamp above them their only light source.

“Alright,” Luke says, standing up to his full height and crossing his arms. “What did you want to talk to us about?”

Jade makes her way over to where Tony is.

“Fooling the cameras means they’re not going to see anything they don’t have to see, right?” Tony asks. 

“Yes.”

He turns to Steve, who nods.

“Okay,” he says. 

He sets down the bag he has in hand and opens it, slowly, in case Eridan has moved up near the top and might get snagged by the zipper. He hasn’t, although he does pop his head up from under two folded shirts and starts climbing out of the bag like he’s just swam in a lake somewhere.

“What the hell…” Kevin trails off, watching Eridan slide off the edge of the bag and use the momentum to roll on the floor and land on his feet. Afterwards, he stands and straightens out his jacket, before inspecting the room and all the strangers in it.

“Is - ” Rose steps forwards to get a closer look, and for a moment, Eridan’s fins flatten on the side of his head (absolutely fascinating, thinks Tony), but he seems to recognize her. “Is that a troll?”

“A what?” Tony mutters.

Steve approaches and reaches into his jacket’s pockets, slowly, and crouches down as he lowers Roxy and Karkat onto the floor, next to where Eridan is. Roxy has to make sure Hal doesn’t fall off her face.

Rose draws in a breath and puts a hand over her mouth to muffle a sob. 

She kneels, slowly, just as Roxy looks up at her.

“Mom?”

The others are watching, intrigued now. Cecil and Kevin are leaning forwards to get a look, eerily in sync, and Mrs. H looks fascinated by the tiny little mutants on the floor, one of them waving enthusiastically. Graham looks like he doesn’t know whether to be interested or unnerved, while holding back the dog so it doesn’t try and snatch up the tiny humans it’s seeing. The cat is just ignoring everything, which is good, Tony thinks.

Luke is silent, simply observing.

Davesprite, before Jade can even get him out, simply phases through her jacket pocket so he can hover over Rose’s face.

“Davesprite?” Rose laughs, disbelieving. Tony sees the bird mutant give her a thumbs up. “Oh my god, what happened - why are you here, how long have you been here, what happened to all of you?”

“We had to sneak them in since we wanted to make sure there wouldn’t be any footage of them anywhere,” Steve says, “In case S.H.I.E.L.D decides to use it against them.”

“I - okay, that’s fair, but - how long have they been here, all this time, I thought we were the only ones - ”

Rose stops, just as she turns to Jade, hoping to have her friend answer all of her questions since her brain is working a mile a minute right now. Instead, though, she just stops and stares at Jade’s palms, where Kanaya is slowly standing and straightening out her skirt.

She looks up, and Rose’s tears start to fall.

“…Kanaya?”