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April 18, 1972
Avengers Mansion

Clint Barton, the Avenger known as Hawkeye, had not known what to expect when he was summoned from the basement combat simulation room to the main floor public conference room by his teammates and friends, Peter and Dane. Since the death of his wife, Natasha, alias the Black Widow, two months prior, Clint had thrown himself into training whenever he was not in action. Since the end of the Kree-Skrull War there had been no action and Clint was tired of training, so he was really hoping this was about a new mission. What he was not expecting was that they had called him up to meet a guest.

Dr. Stephen Strange was not a stranger to the Avengers, having asked them to help save the world with him only a year ago through the mutual connection of Dane Whitman. Dane, the Avenger known as the Black Knight, stood by his friend Stephen now, talking in hushed tones while Peter, the Avenger known as Spider-Man, stood a bit further away. That they were all in costume – or gaudy uniforms, depending on how you looked at them – said to Clint that his earlier hope would come true and this would be about a new mission.

“Bout time you guys came back to get me,” Clint said. “You’ve been up to something all hush-hush for almost a month now and I wanted in on it!”

“Yes…well, sorry about that, Clint,” Dane said. “We were called away rather abruptly, you know.”

“By Strange here?” Clint asked with a nod in Stephen’s direction as he stepped closer. “And you couldn’t come back and get me too, magic man…?” There was something of a hard edge to Clint’s jibs even though he did not intend them, but his voice trailed away at the end when he noticed that Stephen’s enormous red cape was concealing someone behind him. “Who have you got there?”

Peter had quietly stepped up and intercepted Clint as he crossed the room. Now Peter laid his hand on Clint’s shoulder. “Easy, Clint,” Peter said quietly.

Clint’s suspicions were immediately aroused by this and he would have jerked away, had the man grasping his shoulder not possessed the proportionate strength of a spider.

“I could not fetch you, Hawkeye, because it was not I who summoned them this time,” Stephen said. “I was summoned as well, and by someone whose call to action took us to another universe to try and save*.”


At that, Stephen stepped slowly aside. From behind his cloak, Clint could now see the figure seated in a chair behind where he had been standing. It was the impossibly familiar figure of his dead wife, Natasha, and she was staring back at him with tears in her eyes.

Clint just stood there, dumbfounded as Natasha slowly rose to her feet. He was vaguely aware of Peter letting go of his shoulder but he still did not move. Neither did Natasha. The two of them just stood there, staring at each other and unable to be the first to speak. The others just stood where they were, watching them and not knowing what to say either.

Natasha broke the silence first. “Clint, I’m sorry.” After a pause in which Clint was still silent, she added, “I’m sorry we didn’t bring you too, but there just wasn’t time.”

“So…” Clint said, turning to look at Peter and Dane, “you were out saving some other universe?”

“We tried but we wound up just observing a lot. It was too big for us…” Peter said softly.

“We did manage to save the Silver Surfer,” Dane offered. “He was sucked into that other universe by–”

“But there was time to get these guys?” Clint asked, returning his attention to Natasha and ignoring what Dane was saying. “And not me?”

“There wasn’t time to deal with this,” Natasha said. She took a step toward Clint, only to see Clint take a step back away from her. “See? I knew how hard it would be to tell you I didn’t really die.”

“Heck yeah it’s hard!” Clint said with a sarcastic laugh. “C’mon guys,” he said, shooting another glance at his friends as he took another step back. “We just fought Skrulls! Are you telling me you’re not the least bit thinking that this is a shape-changer?”

“Hawkeye—Clint…” Natasha said, taking another tentative step toward him.

“Hey, no real names in front of the non-Avenger!” Clint said. “The real ‘Tasha would know that!”

“I know this is hard to accept…”

“Hard to accept? You were on a spaceship. In space. It blew up. What are you gonna’ tell me? That you jumped out the back in the nick of time?”

“No, it’s more complicated than that. If you’d calm down, I can tell you–”

“I am calm!” Clint shouted, anything but calmly.

Stephen fake-coughed to get their attention. “If I may…Hawkeye, we would like to believe this is the real Black Widow, but only you can tell us for sure. I have already proposed that I cast a spell, a ‘mind-meld’ spell, if you will. It would allow you both to interact with each other in your own, shared, mental mindscape. There, any attempt at deceiving the other would become immediately obvious and, perhaps by process of elimination, you would arrive at what is true.”

“And if she turns out to be a Skrull, can I give her a mental whoopin’ in this mindscape?” Clint asked with all seriousness.

“You would both be free to interact with each other and your environment as if you were physically present. You could even suffer harm if something happened to your mental self. This ‘mindscape’ will be a pocket dimension created temporarily out of the Astral Plane. You two and your shared thoughts will choose the shape and appearance of that dimension. The Black Widow is willing. Are you, Hawkeye?”

“Let’s do this,” he said.

“Good luck, you two,” Peter said. He and Dane stepped further back.

Stephen began to chant and, as he wove his fingers in the air, they left a faint trail of sparks and smoke behind them. “Aya jai Hoggoth fortaggen guru dai…” Stephen began. The rest of his words began to sound less like words coming from him and more like the walls around them humming with vibration. The sparks lasted and hovered in the air in a visibly emerging pattern that grew in complexity until it was impossible for the eye to even observe it all.

A moment later it was all gone. The room was gone. Their friends were gone. Avengers Mansion was gone. Clint and Natasha stood on what appeared to be a concrete floor surrounded by blackness, though they could still see each other clearly, as if lit by some unseen source of light.

Immediately a stone wall rose up behind Natasha. Immediately after that, a steel wall with a bank vault-style door in it appeared behind Clint.

“Where did those come from?” Clint asked.

“Dr. Strange said we would create our own environment,” Natasha said. “Maybe we subconsciously felt our backs were against the wall…?”

“Is that how you feel? Because I feel like you’re hiding something behind your wall.”

“Okay then, let’s take it down…” Natasha tried to concentrate on wishing for the wall to vanish. It slowly faded from sight but all that was behind it was blackness.

“Is that all this is? Some sort of trust exercise? I don’t see that this is going to get us anywhere.”

“Apparently not. Your wall is still there.”

“Oh, yeah…” Clint said, turning around for a look at it. “How tall do you think that wall is?”

“All the way, it looks like. Clint–”

“Call me Hawkeye.”

“Oh, come on…how am I going to prove to you that I’m real and I’m not dead if I’m calling you Hawkeye? Shouldn’t we be telling each other things only the two of us would know? Like that your middle name is Francis? Or that we decided to name our baby Yelena?”

“My middle name is public record for anyone who found out the rest of name…and I did tell some people about the name Yelena already.”

“Did you take her to be baptized yet?”

“No, I–look…I’m just not comfortable discussing Yelena…”

“Okay…” Natasha said, looking away uncomfortably. There was a long, horribly awkward pause. “I can tell you how I died – I mean, how I didn’t die – but I’m not sure you’re going to find it believable enough to convince you of anything.”

“Well, it would beat standing around here saying nothing,” Clint said sarcastically.

“Eerrrr!” Natasha screamed through gritted teeth, her hands raised in the air. “Why do you have to be so frustrating? I can’t believe you can’t tell it’s really me!” Clint raised a warning finger and looked like he was about to say something angry back in his own defense. To pre-empt that, before a shouting match could escalate, Natasha got her temper under control quickly and said calmly, “Okay, if I can’t convince you with what I know…maybe I can show you things as only the two of us would know it. We can…we can shape this place to look like anywhere, right? Okay…watch…”

Natasha shut her eyes, screwed up her face into a grimace of concentration and thought as hard as she could. Around her and Clint a large open room began to take form and crates began to stack up around them and then a body in a purple bodysuit appeared on the floor next to them.

“What the–!” Clint exclaimed in alarm as he jumped back. In his hand now was his old compound bow that he had retired almost two years ago. He reached behind his back and felt familiar vanes on his quiver-full of arrows. He allowed himself a half-smile and then glanced down at the floor and the body there. It had taken him a moment but he recognized the man as his old mentor, the Swordsman. Clint bent down to check his vitals and felt he was alive.

“Recognize this place?” Natasha asked as she stepped back into the darkness. “This is the Bleecker Street warehouse* Remember what happened here?”


Clint realized what she meant and started to look around in alarm but it was too late. Before he could do anything else, he felt himself being grabbed by the shoulders from behind and lifted easily off the floor.

“You won’t find me so easy to beat!” came a voice from behind Clint’s ear. He recognized the voice at once, and then a moment later realized he recognized the words too.

“Power Man!” Clint shouted, still confused about how these old partners in crime wound up in this dreamscape.

“Hah! You struggle all you like! You fight to the end!” Power Man shouted as he hoisted Clint still higher into the air and then put Clint in a bear hug. “I like that! It’ll make my victory all the more satisfying!”

Like before, Clint could feel fear clutching at his heart. Knowing how strong Power Man was, the end could come at any moment with Power Man squeezing hard enough to shatter his rib cage. Yet, just like before, Clint instinctively reached back behind Power Man’s head, grasping desperately for a hold and enough leverage to do something to escape the super-powerful hold he was in.

“Release him–now!” Natasha said. She pointed her bracelet at Power Man’s back from behind him and fired her ‘widow’s sting’ at him. It had been a desperate gamble back then; had Power Man not dropped Clint in surprise they might have both been electrocuted. Power Man did the same thing this time as well.

“Hurry, Hawkeye!” Natasha said. “Remember what you did next? When I thought your aim was off and you’d miss?”

“Sure, I did this!” Clint said. He stumbled away from Power Man and spun around. He reached to his back, found an explosive-tipped arrow in his quiver right where he always used to keep it, and fired it well over Power Man’s head to the top of the main support beam holding up the warehouse roof. Almost as fast, he dodged back and to the side as he fired a second exploding arrow just past Power Man’s left knee and took out the bottom of the beam. With a rumble, the ceiling started to cave in right over where Power Man was momentarily paralyzed by Natasha’s electrical blast on full intensity. A third arrow straight to the ceiling only hastened the collapse and caused thousands of pounds of cement and mortar and wooden rafters to start raining in large chunks down on Power Man’s head.

Natasha circled wide around the falling debris, breaking into a run, as she feared she would not see Clint once more walking out on her. But he was. “Clint, wait!” she called after him. “What about the things we said to each other here? When I told you I had come to my senses and the brainwashing had worn off?” She moved closer to him and grabbed his arm, tried to turn him around to face her, but had to settle for moving up beside him and putting her head on his shoulder. “I told you it was the Reds. They had brainwashed me into betraying you, but when it mattered most, my love for you won out. I freed myself from their control! And you told me you wanted to believe me. You must remember this as well as I do. Could anyone else have remembered this so well?” she asked, waving her hands at the ruined warehouse around them.

“You’re forgetting something, though,” Clint said, stepping away from her again. “Both Power Man and the Swordsman were there. Power Man was buried until after we split, but he probably wasn’t even unconscious. He could have heard every word and told anyone.

The warehouse began to dissolve around them. “Is this your doing?” Natasha asked Clint.

In place of the rubble, long wooden pews began to form across the floor in neat rows. The windows brightened, elongated and grew colorful as the glass became stained into various patterns of religious significance.

“Yeah, I figured two of us can play the memory lane game,” Clint said. “You recognize this place?”

“How could I not?” Natasha asked. “It’s the church we were married in.”

“There’s Cap, my best man,” Clint said, nodding in the direction of where Captain America stood on the side of the dais. It was Steve Rogers, who had worn that identity through the ‘40s and ‘50s, and not the back-up Cap from WWII, Jeffrey Mace, who had been revived from being frozen in ice by the Avengers in ’64. He wore the familiar winged mask, flared red gloves and carried the same famous shield, but otherwise wore a tuxedo for the part. “He was so impressed that I took on you, Power Man and the Swordsman single-handed that he sponsored me for membership in the Avengers after that. But with my criminal record, it was still ’67 before he got my membership approved, and six months after that when we finally got hitched.”

“I remember it perfectly,” Natasha said. The church building was clearer, more distinct now that she added her own memories of it to his. In addition to Captain America, the other Avengers on the active roster at that time were there: Rick Jones, Cap’s new Bucky, and Peter Parker, the Amazing Spider-Man. Both also wore tuxedoes, while Rick retained his domino mask and Peter wore his Spider-Man mask and gloves.

An organ played the familiar tune of “Here Comes the Bride” and Namor, resplendent in his own tuxedo, marched in, as he once had in place of Natasha’s father to give the bride away. Behind him walked Janet Pym, the only founding Avenger present. She was beautiful in her bridesmaid dress, her tail tucked into the crook of her arm and the only indication that she was Monkey, Giant Ape’s partner.

It was a beautiful scene and Natasha was thankful for this moment to see the event from Clint’s perspective, but the loudness of the organ was soon drowned out by the north wall of the church buckling and the windows shattering inwards. Huge, green, metal fists crashed through the old, thick, masonry of the church’s outer wall. The brickwork crumbled quickly, revealing the giant form of the Titanium Man through the opening.

“What?” Natasha shouted.

“Avengers Assemble!” cried Steve Rogers as he sprang toward the Titanium Man. “Fall into a defensive line until the civilians are clear!”

The Titanium Man had a gun-like weapon mounted on each forearm. He held them together and fired. Two spheres connected by a cord were fired simultaneously and quickly broken open to reveal weighted nets. Aimed at Namor, the nets unfurled and wrapped around him, while a second cord leading back to one of the weapons channeled electricity into the nets. ever wearing any kind of shoes – even with a tuxedo – that might have grounded him, Namor took the electricity and grunted in pain.

Rick Jones was escorting the priest to the vestry door when Peter shot webbing past him from his web-shooters and gummed up the door jam.

“No!” Peter called out. “My spider-sense is going off from every direction! Find them cover in here, but don’t try to use the exits!”

As if in response, the vestry door exploded. It was all Rick could do to twist around and block the priest from shrapnel, taking a wooden shard in the back of his shoulder in the process as they dove to the floor.

At the back doorway now stood Boomerang wearing gray military-style fatigues, a matching helmet, and a flak jacket covered in boomerangs. He stepped into the chapel and let a boomerang fly from his right hand, arcing quickly towards Peter, before throwing a second boomerang from his left hand straight at Peter.

“The Masters of Evil?” Natasha shouted, staring at Clint as he notched an arrow in his bow. “They never attacked our wedding!”

Clint, instead of answering, fired an arrow straight at the cord channeling electricity to the nets entangling Namor and snapped it.

The electric lights around the chapel shattered and exploded with sparks that rained down on the heroes. Also crackling with electricity, Electro stood in his bright yellow and green garb at the main doors to block them.

Steve was in close quarters with the Titanium Man now, standing on the right forearm of the giant robot armor suit and about to dig the edge of his shield into a joint. Janet had already torn her bridesmaid’s dress in an awfully revealing way during the gymnastics it took to climb onto the Titanium Man’s back. Her tail-over-the-eyes trick failed to distract her foe, however, and a giant left fist slammed into Steve’s shield, brushing him off to the floor.

Namor had already shredded the nets off of him but found himself the target of further electrocution at the hands of Electro. The lightning bolts hitting him would have killed an ordinary man twice over, but Namor was no ordinary man. Despite his fingers blackening and his ankle wings burning from the amperes coursing through him, Namor was able to reach over from side to side, pick up the pews closest to him, and tossed them across the chapel toward Electro. Though the electrical field around Electro stopped the missiles, the broken debris from them piled up in front of him quickly, giving Namor both cover and respite.

Boomerang’s first thrown boomerang had begun emitting hypersonics that forced Clint and Natasha to cover their ears and struggle to keep their balance. Peter had caught the boomerang thrown head-on at him with webbing while in mid-leap, slung it wide around him, and let it crash into the far corner where it exploded like a grenade. Distracted by the explosion on one side and the hypersonics coming from the other side, Peter barely managed to twist out of the way as Boomerang swung a razor-edged boomerang in his hand at him. As Peter landed on one foot, Boomerang came at him with a fourth boomerang in his left hand, but Peter was faster and he landed a pulled punch on Boomerang's gut that made the villain double over and drop his razor-rang.

The hypersonic boomerang was coming back around right towards Peter, but Natasha managed to focus enough to shoot an electrical blast from her bracelet at the wayward missile that overloaded its electronics and shorted out the hypersonics.

“Namor, trade foes!” Captain America shouted. He launched his circular shield across the room, rebounding off a wall to hit Electro from his unguarded flank.

Namor leapt across half the width of the chapel, tackling the Titanium Man and knocking him back through the wall outside.

“I recognize all this,” Natasha said to Clint. “All these things happened, but you rearranged the details into this scene. Why?”

“To see if you could tell the difference,” Clint said as he walked over towards the giant hole in the wall. Even as he did so, the scene around them grew darker and quieter. Like a distant echo, they could still hear Namor mangling the Titanium Man’s armor with his fists.

Natasha paused before asking, “Then do you believe me now?” Even the rhythmic pounding of Namor’s fists on titanium grew silent. Clint and Natasha could still see each other, but the church around them was plunged into blackness.

Clint pulled another arrow from his quiver, notched it to his bow and turned around. “You know what ‘Tasha knew, think like ‘Tasha thought, but you could have got all that from being a mind-reader, or using a mind-meld spell like this on her sometime in the past,” he said with a scowl. He raised his bow and let his arrow fly.

Natasha twisted hard out of the arrow’s way, knowing that if Clint wanted to kill her, at this range, there was little her dodging could do to stop him. The arrow just missed her shoulder, which meant that, as sure a shot as Clint was, that he had meant to just miss her. Natasha used her sideways momentum and tumbled further away from Clint, but at the same time she knew she needed to put some obstacles between them and she had just helped make all the scenery fade. She concentrated hard as she spun in the air over a second arrow and, before Clint’s third arrow took flight, she had willed a statue of Captain America to appear out of the darkness between them.

A scene began to take shape around them again, this one looking like a gallery of statues. Natasha ducked behind a statue of the Thing, but instinctively ducked after another arrow was fired and was just missed by a steel cord wrapping around the statue that would have ensnared her, too, a second earlier.

“Nice,” Clint said sarcastically. “You try to prove to me you’re Natasha; then you conjure up from memory someplace I don’t even recognize.”

“You refused to come with because there was a game on TV,” Natasha said as she crouched, listening for any sound of motion from Clint to react to. She could recognize some arrows by the sound of how he drew them from his quiver, or how he held them to the bow, but she did not know everything he might have dreamed up in his arsenal. “This is Alicia Grimm’s studio, from the one and only time we ever got invited to one of her shows.”

“So you’re saying I was never there for you?” Clint called back angrily.

Natasha heard him load two arrows onto the bow and dodged back toward the Cap statue as the two explosive-tipped arrows tore the Thing statue apart.

“What about you not being there for me?” Clint continued to rant. “What about making me a widower and a single dad and not even able to look at our daughter because every time I do I see she has your eyes and it tears me up inside!”

Natasha thought about that, realized its meaning and grew hot with anger. “You…bastard!” she cried as she rolled out from behind the Captain America statue into a kneeling crouch, raised her arm and fired an arc of electricity across the studio to Clint’s bow. At this range, the electricity only stung enough to make him lose his grip on the bow and, as he fumbled to take aim again, she sprinted towards him.

Seeing her fist coming, Clint swung to block with his bow, while holding his arrow in his off-hand like an upturned knife. He jabbed forward with the arrow, but it was a feint to buy him a half-second to shift his stance and bring his bow around to swing again.

“You knew it was me the whole time!” Natasha yelled as she swung her foot up and around and kicked the bow out of Clint’s hand. She twisted around quickly, brought her hand up like she was going to fire her ‘widow’s sting’ again at point blank range, but this too was a feint to put Clint on the defensive long enough for her to drop to an offensive stance and lead with her right fist.

“Bull!” Clint hollered back as he blocked the punch and pulled away quickly, anticipating Natasha would follow-through and go for an arm hold.

“No, you’re lying! You’ve been putting me through all this, making me prove myself, to punish me! Punish me for not being dead!” she yelled as she dropped her plan to go for an arm hold and tried to surprise him with a lightning series of straight-on jabs.

“Not for not being dead!” Clint roared back as he blocked half her punches, just took the other half of them, and returned with some punches of his own. “For not telling me sooner! For making me think you were dead and–” it was not until he saw himself punch her in the face that he realized, through all his anger and pain, what this had devolved into. “Oh God!” he cried as he dropped all his defenses and rushed to hug her into his arms. “I’m so sorry!”

“I’m sorry too!” Natasha cried, holding him back. Tears welled up in her eyes, only partially caused by the face punch. “I never wanted to be away from you! You have to know that!”

“Oh, honey, I missed you so much! I love you.”

“I love you too.”

---

EPILOGUE

One hundred million miles from Earth, the Skrull scout ship, Farzog-class, called Gro Dorreg sat in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, scanning Earth communications.

“Supremor,” the communications officer on the bridge said. “There’s an urgent, hyperspace message from the Homeworld. All ships are supposed to pull out of Earth sector at once. No Kree engagements can be risked*.”


“Ridiculous!” Skorz growled. “There are no Kree remaining within a hundred joolz of Earth! But…we must obey the Emperor. Helmsman, plot us a course for the next star out of this backwater system. Communicator, send an encrypted message to our allies on Earth to alert them the back-up plan has been canceled.”

---

Sometime later, on Earth, eleven of the leaders of Zodiac were appearing to each other via closed circuit television. Noticeably absent amongst them was the new Scorpio.

“Where is Scorpio now?” Capricorn asked.

“No idea,’ Taurus said. “We’re still searching, of course, but the more important news is that we just intercepted some sort of message sent to Scorpio’s Colorado installation – from outer space. Since Scorpio was the driving force behind Project Sweep*, I think we can assume now that Project Sweep was influenced, if not conceived, by some alien party. Therefore, I propose we shut down Project Sweep immediately for review.”


“We’ll all want to see proof of this claim, Taurus,” Aries said, “but given the activity of alien races around Earth lately, I don’t think we can treat this claim lightly. I second your proposal.”

“Any objections?” Taurus asked. “Very well, Project Sweep is hereby tabled. The next scheduled stage of the plan was in my territory, so I am alerting my lieutenant now to stand-down.”

---

Shortly, in New York City, Watch-Lord stood in a secret underground bunker with twenty other operatives in modern-day armor and helmets less flashy and stylized than his own. Their weapons were even now powering up for the initial Project Sweep attack. But then, a red light began to flash on the wall-mounted phone.

“Hold on, men,” Watch-Lord said. He picked up the receiver and heard Taurus’ instructions. “Uh-huh. Right, sir. Okay, men! We’ve been given the order to stand-down. Project Sweep is back on stand-by until further notice.”

“Great,” one of the other operatives said sarcastically. “Are we still getting time and a half for mission pay while on stand-by?”

Watch-Lord was half-tempted to ask on the phone when he heard a dial tone. “He’s hung up.”

“They better not try to re-assign us off of field work,” said another. “The only reason I switched to field work was because the dental coverage was better and I’ve got an appointment for a new crown next week.”

Watch-Lord looked around at the company he had to keep these days and missed holding the Black Widow hostage. He sighed. “That’s it. I’m quitting this business.”

---

At that very moment, above the Zodiac bunker where Watch-Lord was thinking seriously of a career change, was the street where the Astrologer was out walking. The man known as the Astrologer had been out on the streets for awhile now, having escaped jail time for his cooperation in a police investigation of Zodiac. The Astrologer’s sanity always seemed to come and go, and this week, he was marching the streets while carrying a sign that read, “The end is near!”

A police van drove past where the Astrologer had stopped for a moment’s rest on the sidewalk. The van, transporting a prisoner, proceeded to drive a half-block further before a rubber clown nose stuck to the back door of the van exploded. Its hinges broken by the explosion, the door was kicked off from the inside and a man agilely jumped out of the still-moving van before it could screech to a stop.

“Ha!” the man cried as he ran off the street and tried to blend into the crowd on the sidewalk as much as his prison uniform allowed. “They thought they could hold Eliot Franklin, but the Clown will have the last laugh on them all!”

As the guards from the van fanned out to look for their escaping prisoner, a blue blur of light whizzed down the street, circled around the van, and then zig-zagged through the crowd, alarming everyone with the gusts of wind it kicked up. After it reached the Clown, he felt himself grabbed by the back of his shirt and pulled back into the open street before he knew what was happening to him.

“Aww…nuts,” Eliot said as the guards bore down on him. The blue blur slowed down enough to be visible as Pietro, the mutant speedster known as Quicksilver.

“I trust you can handle this?” Pietro shouted to the guards. “I have a party to get to–”, but if there was more to that thought, Pietro was gone before he could say it.

---

Pietro kept speeding along until he reached Avengers Mansion. There, his sister Wanda was just exiting a taxi cab. She wore a fashionable dress and wide-brimmed hat, not at all like the costume of the Scarlet Witch.

“Before you say you beat me here – I was delayed,” Pietro said.

“Uh-huh,” was all Wanda said, with a mocking smile.

“I was! There was a prisoner who escaped from a police van…”

They compared notes on their way up to the front door where they were greeted by Janet Pym, alias Monkey, though dressed in a colorful blouse and skirt instead of her costume.

“Jan! I didn’t know you’d be here!” Wanda exclaimed and hugged her.

“I may not be an active Avenger anymore, but you know if someone tells me there’s a party, I’m there!” Jan said with a laugh and a swish of her tail. “Come on in!”

“Is anyone else in costume?” Pietro asked.

“Oh, about half of everyone is. Don’t worry about it,” Jan said as she ushered them inside.

“In the library again?” Wanda asked.

“No, Natasha wanted it in the public conference room…something about it having special significance, though I haven’t asked why yet.”

The three of them moved slowly through the gallery and passed the child-like android they called the Vision, standing against the wall in sleep mode and looking like a statue. They came, at last, to the doorway to the conference room where a banner had been hung reading, “Welcome home, Natasha.” Dane was at the doorway, in armor and with the Ebony Blade sheathed at his side, but missing his helmet and cape. Dane was talking to Rick Jones, out of his Bucky costume and wearing the more garish clothes of a hippie with just a pin on his chest resembling Captain America’s first shield.

Inside, Natasha stood in the center of the room, her baby Yelena in her arms. She still remembered her adventure through time and meeting a future adult version of Yelena, but that seemed more like a dream now. This was real.

Clint held his wife by the shoulder. She had told him all about her adventures, lost in time, by now and he accepted them as fact. Around them were more of their friends – Peter and Gwen, Tony and Marianne, Steve and Betsy.

“Welcome home!” Wanda said as she came over and gave Natasha a quick hug and a kiss on the cheek.

“Nice to be with you again,” Pietro said.

“Nice to be with you too,” Natasha said to everyone.

---

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The End...

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