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They're all thinking it, but Steven's the one who says it out loud: "That cannot possibly be our guy."
Marc starts them walking -- not because he's dropping the mission, just because people will notice a strange man lurking next to a playground talking to himself. Especially in a town of, what, a thousand people?
"Seven thousand," grumbles Steven. "Am I the only one who looks a place up on Wikipedia before we go there?"
"You know the answer to that, compañero," says Jake. "So -- what are we thinking? Really good act? Identical twin? Señor Paloma just getting senile in his old age?"
"Don't know why it would be an act," says Steven. "A fully grown adult ex-HYDRA murderer isn't going to think 'ooh, better hang about on the playground doing my best mentally-disabled impression, complete with getting one of my pals to play caregiver, just in case an Egyptian god has divinely sussed out my hiding place and sent a magic assassin after me.'"
Marc is pulling out his phone, checking his saved file on the target. The latest photo is almost a decade old, but if you add a few lines on the face and swap the sullen glare for a gaze of childlike wonder, it's him. Has to be. "Khonshu would've warned us if the target had a twin. Or a doppelganger. And he's not screwing up."
Nobody argues with him. None of them are prepared to handle the possibility that Khonshu could've been siccing them on innocent targets. (At some point Jake would've claimed he was prepared, but these days, neither of his headmates would buy it.)
They loop around to the one single street with all the shops on it -- an odd mix of picturesque little vintage buildings and ugly modern grey boxes. Between the buildings, or sometimes over top of the shorter ones, the peaks of the Tatras rise up.
"There's a bunch of different Tatras," says Steven, picking up the thought. "That range is the Low Tatras, specifically."
"¿A quién le importa?" Jake rolls his eyes. Or rather, he rolls their eyes...although when they let themselves relax and sprawl out like this, it almost feels like they're walking side-by-side, each moving in slightly different ways if they want to. "Don't need to know what they're called to appreciate a good mountain."
Marc has a vague, confused feeling that he doesn't have the right to appreciate mountains. He packs up that feeling in a neat little box and shoves it into a mental cabinet labeled Deal With Later. "Maybe the guy has some kind of brain damage. Took a whack to the head at some point between all the murdering and now, might not even remember he did it."
"If that's the deal, probably safer to take him out anyway," says Jake. "Memories have a way of comin' back."
The road arches up into a bridge, crossing over a little river. Steven would love to pause the body, to lean on the metal railing and watch the water flow for a bit, but that's the kind of thing he tries not to indulge in when Marc's co-piloting. "What if he's like us?"
Marc frowns. "As in, multiple people in the body? One is the HYDRA target, another has the IQ of a child?"
"Right. Or -- maybe they're an actual child."
"...that's a thing?" asks Jake.
"Of course it's a thing!" Steven throws up his hands in exasperation. "Happens all the time -- if anything, we're the weird bunch, all being the same age as our body and having basically the same self-image, as long as you don't count Jake's weird mustache dysphoria. Do none of you read any wikis at all?"
"Hell no," says Jake immediately, giving Steven the mental equivalent of a slap on the back. "That's what we've got you for, hermanito."
"Again, we are the same age, you plonker."
They've passed all the shops and gotten to a little park, cobblestone walkway circling around a charming pond with benches popped alongside it, and all of a sudden Marc is exhausted. He knows the other two are taking this seriously, knows their banter is about managing feelings instead of avoiding them, sometimes it even helps keep Marc grounded too (when he lets it) -- but it's not helping now.
He leans heavily on the curved metal back of one of the benches. "Do either of you want to take the lead on demanding Khonshu explain himself, or should I?"
Steven does the mental equivalent of a magnanimous gesture. "Floor's yours."
Got it. Marc straightens up, does a quick scan for other people in hearing range, then addresses the top of the big stone monument at the focal point of the park, which seems like the most dramatic height for Khonshu to perch on. "Khonshu! You need to get the hell out here and tell us what's up with this mission, or--"
"I have made a grave mistake, Marc Spector!"
The god didn't appear on a dramatic perch. He manifested right next to them, still ten feet tall and looming, but with his feet firmly planted in the grass.
Marc freezes, and for a second Steven and Jake are both shoving each other aside trying to take his place. Jake wins: "You make mistakes now, pendejo? That's not the deal! Do you want us to tell Bast, huh? Because this is how you get--"
"Not a mistake in the target, you weed," snaps Khonshu. Insults or not, he doesn't sound derisive so much as...harried. Afraid. "You must leave this town."
"Yeah, sure, right after you explain--"
A ferocious gust of wind flattens the grass, turns the surface of the pond into a choppy mini-lake. "If you have ever cared to protect your precious 'headmates', Jake Lockley, you will take them away from here now!"
That hits Jake where it hurts. Which is Steven's cue to swap in. "Oh, no you don't. We're not a puppet dancing on your strings anymore, remember? Stop trying to manipulate us and just come clean--"
"Who are you talking to?"
Steven stops cold.
There's a woman not fifty feet away from them, standing in the road that borders the park. Right on the stripe down the middle of it, even. She's got long red hair and a plain maroon hoodie, she's talking English with a heavy local accent, and how did she just show up without any of them noticing?
"Sorry!" says Steven, hunching his shoulders and doing a sheepish little wave. "Didn't mean to bother anyone. Therapist said it's a good exercise -- getting feelings out in the open, and all that. Not sure it's working, but you've got to try everything once, right?"
The redhead gives him a pinched, skeptical frown...then lifts her head and looks directly at Khonshu. "Is the skeleton bird your therapist?"
Khonshu takes a step back. Then another. Dusty vestments flutter in his wake as he starts to run--
The woman does a quiet little flicking gesture with her fingers, and bars of red light spring out of nowhere to arch around Khonshu. The god roars and slams his crescent staff against them, not making a dent.
Jake and Marc are back in full force, legs braced and fists up, a mismatched pair of suit gloves curling into place. They're not going down without a fight. No matter how low their odds of landing even a single punch on someone who can wave a hand and imprison an extradimensional deity in a--
They look at the bars. Do a double-take.
Yeah, they're not seeing things, Khonshu is locked in a sparkly red magic birdcage.
Shame they're busy with a panic-driven emotional shutdown, because in any other moment that would be the funniest goddamn thing Jake's ever seen.
*
...they're in a blinding-white hospital hallway, all three standing in a row, with the redhead facing them down.
She's in a sleeveless maroon dress now, with matching fingerless gloves and tall boots and a curious tilt to her head, looking from one headmate to the next.
Marc has the armor on, already hurling crescent darts at her by the fistful -- Jake has a good old non-magical Beretta, already squeezing the trigger -- all their projectiles go right through the invader, as easily as dropping through the surface of a pond --
-- neither of them are bloody well thinking big enough, are they --
"Everybody take cover!" yells Steven, and thinks big.
Their head has levels. This isn't the top one.
Popcorn-cratered ceiling tiles crack and split and flower open -- the woman barely gets a second to look up, before an entire sea of water slams its way down.
*
They might not have a whole lot of superhuman skills outside Khonshu's healing armor, but they are really goddamn good at psychic walls.
Marc throws his up first. SLAM goes the door of a room on the ward, locking everything else outside the plain white walls.
SLAM goes the door of his and Layla's first bedroom, the windows shuttered and the lights off.
SLAM go the huge stone doors of Khonshu's temple, encasing Marc in granite and moonlight.
SLAM goes the lid of a sarcophagus, holding him too tight to move, letting nothing in.
*
SLAM goes the door of Steven's attic flat, six different locks and deadbolts snapping into place.
SLAM go the doors of a fancy museum bathroom, mirrors giving the illusion of endless width to a space that's narrow and enclosed, thick solid metal that won't bend for anything.
SLAM goes the door of his childhood bedroom, a sacred fortress -- the place where Marc and Jake got hurt was always Marc's room, all of them were safe if they came to Steven's.
*
SLAM goes the driver-side door of an old-school New York yellow cab.
No hiding in a matryoshka of psychic boxes for Jake. SLAM goes his foot on the gas, and he floors it.
*
Steven's door -- not the hall door, the closet door -- creaks the tiniest bit open.
He instinctively puts up his hands, braced for a fight, which is when he notices they're not precisely his hands. The bedroom around him looks exactly as he remembers -- from the same perspective he remembers it -- so perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that he is, suddenly, child-shaped.
The shadowy figure peeping through the crack in the door looks about the same height.
"Hello?" says Steven. "Sorry, did I scare you? Didn't mean to. I won't hurt you, honest."
"Really?" squeaks the mystery child. "Oh good! I don't wanna hurt you either."
The door swings open a bit farther, and, oh gosh, it's a girl. Long brown hair, ruffly red top, wide eyes. Skin paler than Steven's, and that's all he can say for sure, ethnicity-wise -- though if he had to guess, he'd put her as not-Latina, possibly-Jewish.
Is she a new headmate? Or at least, a headmate that's new to them? Wouldn't be surprising if she didn't front much, probably not a lot of appeal for a little girl, to come out and hang about in a grown man's body...
"I'm Steven," says Steven. "Don't suppose you've met any of us before?"
"Uh-uh," says the girl. "Who are the others?"
"Oh! The grumpy one who wants you to think he's serious all the time is Marc. And the sarcastic one who wants you to think he's careless all the time is Jake. They're a little closed-off with new people, but they're both sweethearts underneath, I promise. I'll introduce you, if you like. Do you have a name...?"
The girl purses her lips, studying Steven like he's an entire wall in the toy aisle and she's been told she can only pick one.
"Wanda," she says at last. "I'm Wanda. So...none of you are keeping the others prisoner, is that right?"
Steven blinks rapidly, taken-aback. "Of course not! Where did you...why would you think...?"
He trails off. The strange girl gazes at him with big doll-like eyes. Water drips off the ends of her curtain of hair, weighs down her ruffles and the cuffs of her jeans, puddles around her shoes.
"You're her," breathes Steven.
He could try to block her out again. Slam another round of doors in her face. But, well, that hasn't exactly worked out so far, has it?
"This isn't right," says the young Wanda. She isn't speaking English any more, Steven realizes -- she's doing the same as the rest of them do at this level, using the language that comes most naturally to her. A childhood first language, maybe? "Three souls, packed into the same body? I was...frightened. For whichever souls were being...subjugated by the others."
"Nobody here is subjugating anybody!" says Steven hotly. "We're a team. We all belong here. None of us are hurting each other. None of us would ever deliberately hurt each other."
Unfamiliar words wash over him, the meaning fed directly into his mind: "You did try to drown me."
Steven folds his arms. Now he's cross. "You are not part of the team. You invaded our head. And you are a full-grown adult who's pretending to be a little child so I'll feel worse about trying to drown you, which is absolutely not cricket."
Wanda has the grace to look abashed about that.
"Look, I can...understand why you'd be...concerned," adds Steven carefully. "This isn't...normal. It's awfully rare, in fact. And it wouldn't be right for everyone. But it does happen sometimes, and it's right for us."
He wonders if there's any point in scolding this girl -- this creepy mystery woman, this magic-wielding force of nature who can singlehandedly lock up a god -- to read a wiki.
Wanda doesn't move, the overall shape of her doesn't change -- but her brown hair brightens, back to its vivid adult strawberry-blonde. "When a person has...suffered...a great deal...the mind can do strange things," she says slowly. "Outside of your own conscious control. It rewrites your memories, your sense of reality, making it into something you can more easily...handle."
Steven shivers, wondering if she's been rifling through his memories on a level he can't feel. "Yeah. Basically. For us, it rewrote one mind into a little group of people. And we're fine with it. Honest."
"A group of people...and one angry skeletal bird?"
"Um -- actually, no. He came along later. He's fine too, though! Mostly."
The girl squinches up her nose, thinking it over.
"Look, if you're -- some kind of telepath vigilante, looking for people to protect from psychic crimes," adds Steven carefully. "It's not like I have any grounds to judge you for the impulse, believe me, but..."
He trails off.
Wanda waits, staring but patient.
A quick mental rearrangement from Steven, and suddenly they're both adult-shaped again, Wanda back in her hoodie, standing in one of Steven's more recent memories. One from not twenty minutes ago, in fact.
With a jerk of his head, Steven indicates the grey-haired man sitting cross-legged in the grass and playing with brightly-colored plastic toys. "Are you -- are you the reason he's -- like that?"
The sky overhead starts to darken. Not with nightfall, but with grim clouds, like a gathering storm.
"I don't make a habit of it," says the grown-up Wanda in a flat voice, looking distantly at the man. At their mutual target. "Not my job. Not my right. I don't do that anymore. I stay up in the mountains, plant my trees, don't bother anyone. But he was -- hurting someone. He was right here, in my town, and he was...I looked into his head, and knew he had done it before...and justice never came for him. Was never going to come for him."
Lightning flashes behind the clouds, vivid and scarlet.
"Not without me."
"Uh." Steven fiddles with the cufflinks of his Moon Knight suit. "Funny story, there."
*
Jake is cruising along at a cool 80 when the creepy magic lady in red appears in his back seat.
"¡Mierda!" he yelps, yanking the steering wheel hard to the right. The tires scream like a dying animal, unreal landscape (the cratered gray surface of the moon, except for a highway down the middle) spinning around them.
"Jake, Jake, cool it!" There's Steven next to la bruja, death grip on the back of the driver's seat to keep himself from being flung around the cab. "It's fine, I talked to her, we've sorted some things out -- Jake, please do not crash this car into a landscape that only exists in our head, I don't even want to think about what that would mean for our mental health."
The car screeches to a stop. Or maybe Jake just stops piling up miles of metaphorical open road behind them.
Witch lady has both hands up in placid surrender -- though she doesn't even blink when Jake points his handgun at her, so he doesn't trust for a second that she couldn't kill them with her brain anyway. "If you threatened him into this, rojita..."
Steven puts his hand on the barrel of the headspace gun, eyes rolling so hard he could medal in the eye-rolling Olympics, and pushes it downward. "Oh, no, wouldn't want anyone threatening people."
"He does not threaten me," says la bruja calmly -- and the Beretta turns into a blue-and-orange plastic NERF gun.
"Oh my god, we are not wasting our time on a psychic dick-swinging contest," groans Steven. To the magic lady he adds, "Would you mind terribly just -- stepping outside? We'll meet you out there in a minute."
*
Someone knocks on the outside of Marc's sarcophagus.
They can't get in. He's safe in here. He's fine.
"Marc?" asks a voice, muffled but blessedly familiar. "Marc, love, we're gonna pull you out of here now, all right?"
...oh. It's Steven. Okay. He'll let Steven in.
It takes a couple of shoves, but the heavy stone lid gets pushed back, and then both Steven and Jake are leaning over the bright opening and helping Marc up.
Steven is wearing the Moon Knight suit, his version, mask off so Marc can see his eyes. Jake stuck with the same inconspicuous clothes the body is wearing today, topped by his favorite hat. As always, the way they look in here is different from the body, if only in the small details -- Steven's jawline a bit softer, Jake sporting that mustache he's so into. (Seriously, what is up with that?)
Just them. No doctors, no hippos, no Khonshu, no mind-invading woman with long hair and wild eyes, just them.
Marc falls into a tight hug in Steven's arms. He must look pretty awful, because Jake rubs his back without so much as a snarky comment. "D-did you get her out of here?"
"Asked her politely to leave," says Steven. (Marc chokes on a laugh, because of course Steven did.) "Quick background -- her name's Wanda, she's sort of a retired Avenger, and she's still physically next to the body, but not a threat. In her capacity as a magical ex-superhero, she was just checking whether one or more of us was some kind of telepathic parasite who needed to be destroyed to save the others."
"Shut the fuck up," adds Jake.
Marc glares at him. "I didn't say anything."
"Didn't have to, cariño, I know what's in our head." Jake makes a disapproving tch noise and looks around. "Goddamn mess, is what it is."
For the first time, Marc actually takes in the space around the sarcophagus. It's not the stark white hospital room he expected. Looks more like the dingy metal-walled storage crate he slept in a few times (okay, more than a few). And instead of being basically-empty, it's crammed floor-to-ceiling with boxes and filing cabinets, each stuffed with so much paper that hardly any are properly closed.
Most are taped or Sharpied with handwritten labels: phrases like DEAL WITH LATER and NOT WORTH IT and JUST GONNA SCARE PEOPLE.
"We are absolutely coming back to this later," warns Steven.
Marc hunches over so he can press his face into the curve of Steven's shoulder. "You kill me sometimes, babe, you know that?"
He knows they've got stuff to take care of outside...but Marc doesn't want to leave the hug right away, and his headmates don't make him.
*
Wanda and the man with three minds sit together on a bench, watching the breeze push ripples across the little pond.
Their bird-skulled friend is too dangerous for her to just let wander around her town, but Steven said (over a lot of shouted denials) that he'd be frightened for them if Wanda made him leave. As a compromise, he's been forced to shrink to the size of an actual pigeon, and Steven holds the birdcage in his lap.
"So...to be sure that man would never hurt anyone again, I wiped his mind and overrode his free will. When you were simply planning to kill him." Wanda doesn't make her usual effort to harden her Sokovian accent into an American one. Not when her visitors have three different accents, and seem to cope with it just fine. "Which is better, do you think?"
"How should I know?" complains Marc. "What is this, philosophy class? Not a real big practical dilemma for me, I only know how to do the one."
If there are people who love him, they'd probably rather the mind-wiping, thinks Steven.
(A mental conversation this clear, Wanda can pick up without even trying. She's not sure if they know she's listening.)
Probably be better off with him dead, though, counters Jake, whether los idiotas know it or not.
It gets him a sort of psychic elbow-to-the-gut from Steven. All right, let's save this argument for later.
Out loud, Steven adds, "Listen, we're not going to...rat you out to anyone, or scold you for taking the law into your own hands, anything like that. Be a bit rich of us to get in someone else's way on that. But...it might be good for you to talk to someone, yeah? Keep things in perspective, reality-check yourself. Khonshu's last guy never did, and he ended up pouring broken glass in his shoes and starting a murder cult."
Wanda raises her eyebrows. "Who do you talk to? Each other?"
"Mostly," admits Steven. "I really have got a therapist. I'm the only one who talks to her directly, but the others get spillover benefits out of it. And...we lucked into an amazing wife."
"I had an amazing husband, once," says Wanda softly.
"Yeah?"
"He is...no longer with us."
"Oh. I'm sorry to hear it."
"Mm."
Birds chirp in the distance. The shadows grow longer as the sun sinks. The bars of Wanda's improvised birdcage sizzle as Khonshu yanks at them.
"Don't know how much of this you've looked at already," offers Steven, "but...they've got a whole superhuman therapy practice set up in Wakanda. The sorcerers in Kamar-Taj might be more on your level magic-wise...but I'm not sure how hot their mental-health care is, to be honest with you. You could try New Asgard? The god-types up there know all about the intersection of personal trauma and..." He wiggles his fingers, in a passable imitation of Wanda throwing a hex. "...phenomenal cosmic powers."
"I'll look into them," says Wanda.
(Mostly to get these guys off her back. Mostly.)
On an impulse -- it's reckless, maybe even self-sabotaging, but the book in her cabin flashes across Wanda's mind and she comforts herself with the knowledge that she can wipe their memories if it implodes badly enough -- she adds, "Do you have any thoughts on who would know the most about...hearing voices from another plane of existence, calling you for help?"
"Um...yeah." Marc reaches into his jacket pocket, which makes Wanda tense until she realizes he's just pulling out a phone. "Actually, yeah. Ever been to San Francisco?"
"No."
She gets flashes of Steven and Jake having an internal argument -- something about tourist spots and Wikipedia -- but what Marc shows her on the screen is a YouTube video. "Gonna give you this guy's number, okay? Go to San Fran, ask him to bring his best friend and meet you at some nice neutral spot. A karaoke bar would be a hit. Tell him Moon Knight said you should talk."
He doesn't let Wanda hold the phone, so she studies the screen carefully, committing the man's face and the video's title to memory. It is a very particular problem she's having, after all. If there's any chance someone on the planet has an equally-particular solution? It's probably worth her time to check.
"I will," she says out loud. "I think...I really will. Thank you. I...I'm glad you came here."
"Yeah? So'm I." Steven slips two fingers through the bars of the cage and pats the tiny Khonshu on his bony head. "See that, pigeon? It all worked out in the end."
While the little god booms with colorful-but-empty threats, Wanda turns over a plan in her mind.
Getting to San Francisco will be easy enough. It's only an ocean and a few national borders, nothing she can't cross.
But there's been some supernatural activity in the city over the past year or so, hasn't there? Nothing the Scarlet Witch can't handle, of course -- she's just a little worried about someone stealing her book.
Might be safer all around, she decides, if she just leaves it behind.