Black Knight

"Progress, unfortunately, feels too few and far between." He said before tossing a peace of popcorn into his mouth as the pigeons encroached. It was a relatively nice day for March and they chose to spend it in the park. "Though I suppose there are worst places to be stuck." He added before looking at her and tilting the small bag of popcorn in her direction.

They had spent a lot of time together over the past year. He wasn't sure if it was healthy. Them trying to gain comfort by substituting each other for their partner's company, but he was too afraid to admit it let alone keep thinking about it.

There. It was only a millisecond, but as his hand found its way to the small of her back, Sersi faltered. She loved too deeply. It had always been curse. As a result, she had mostly avoided getting into relationships with humans. They were so finite, so fleeting. Their lives were valuable, but Sersi would spend infinitely more time mourning them than she ever got to spend with them. It had taken a long time to accept that her marriage had changed, and even longer after that to be open to even the idea of moving on. Dane was that idea made real. Even in the fledgling stages, their relationship felt like a breath of fresh air. To him, she was Sersi. Just Sersi. After seven thousand years, it was a welcome change to not just be a child of the Celestials.

As quickly as the moment began it ended, and Sersi was in motion once more. The kettle was screaming shortly afterwards. She carefully poured the boiling water into two mugs. It was instinct to prepare his the way she had become accustomed to, and once she realized what she had done, Sersi paused. "Oh, I must've — well, I'm sorry. I can prepare you another if you'd like? If you like your tea differently, that is. I shouldn't assume."

As he told the tale of Earth-199999's Eternals, Sersi listened with baited breath. Other than the occasional sip from her tea, she mostly sat in silence. It was a lot to wrap her head around. There was a grief that was unexpected and hard to swallow. She mourned an Ajak she had never met and a Gilgamesh she had never seen. She mourned the innocence she hadn't even known she had possessed. The Celestials were against Earth, not protecting it. By aiding them, had Sersi also been against the planet she loved?

"I suppose we'll have to plan for the worst then," she said once he was finished. "Your Phastos is missing with your Sersi, but I can speak to mine. Maybe he can replicate the device they used to stop the emergence. I'll talk to everyone, actually. We haven't been together in ages. That'll be... Well, we'll all do our best." Everything felt incredibly heavy. Sersi craved the reassurances of Ajak and her quiet wisdom. She'd need to contact her immediately — hopefully before she met the fate she had in Dane's world.

His next words hit her unexpectedly. Of course she felt the gap. As soon as she heard what she was capable of, Sersi had been kept up at night. Was she capable of it as well? Perhaps she just hadn't pushed to that point yet. Did potential crackle under her skin, hidden just out of reach? Knowing that she could do more came with a terrible cost: the realization that her mission was in vain. Now, she'd have to have a reckoning within herself. If it came down to it, could she stand as the other Sersi had and rebel against the Celestials?

For the first time, there was the threat of tears that pricked against her lash line. Sersi felt alone more than she'd admit. Her assumed immortality kept her alone. The only others with her longevity had scattered. Losing the Eternals had felt like losing a part of herself. Now, someone believed in her. Someone who wasn't an Eternal and bound to her with the same pointed existence. It meant a great deal.

"Hope for the best prepare for the worst." Dane replied before taking a sip of his tea; made exactly as he liked it. He nodded along listening to her brainstorm bringing the Eternals together and preparing to stop the emergence. A faint smile fought for dominance at the corners of his mouth before he suppressed it. He had never had the chance to see this side of Sersi in his world. The determination, the focus, and not hiding anything. It was nice.

Her sentiments reached his heart. His throat grew tight and his eyes stung as a tear threatened to drip before his hand wiped it away. He was desperate to find a way to bring her back, he just felt powerless. He hoped she was right but he didn't have powers like her. He was just a man with a sword he couldn't control. He felt little hope, but as long as she held a fraction of it for him he'd try to hold on.

"Thank you, Sersi. Truly." He replied as his hand began to reach across the table for hers out of instinct. Once he realized what he was doing his hand quickly redirected to his tea. He brought the cup to his lips and took one last long sip until the cup was empty.

For a long time, Sersi thought she had seen it all. With seven thousand years under her belt, her existence had surpassed what most could fathom. People were born. People died. Entire civilizations gone in what felt like the equivalent of a night. A bleeding heart by default, Sersi had learned over the millennia to acknowledge that the lives of humans were worthwhile no matter how brief they were. She walked among them but was forever cursed by the burden of knowledge and seeming immortality to stand apart.

If time — all the precious seconds & minutes & hours & millennia — had taught her anything, it was that the human heart yearned for connection. Familial, friendship, romantic. The desire to not be alone was staggering, and Sersi herself found that she was no better than them in that regard. Had she not felt that spark early on for Ikaris? Staring out at the stars in the moments after creation, a seed had been planted. They had spent centuries watering it until it bloomed into love. A marriage. What they had was supposed to be eternal, and yet, Sersi now found she couldn't even think about him without spiraling.

But this wasn't about Ikaris. Not right now, at least. Her husband existed in a different world than the one Sersi had been occupying. If Dane and the Eternals from the other reality were to be believed, Ikaris was capable of great atrocities. Ajak — gentle and wise Ajak — slain by hands Sersi thought she had known. A conversation was imminent, but she couldn't bring herself to ask about his whereabouts. Couldn't go there. Not now, at least. Right now she needed to focus on Dane.

After what felt like far too long, the kettle was found. As it filled with water, dark eyes glanced at Dane. "Allergic to shellfish? No, no. I don't think so, at least. As for the socks, well, we've never discussed it at length. I'll keep that in mind if I ever need to buy him a gift. Just to be safe, of course."

Right now, her Dane was in London. Because of the time difference, he was likely asleep. She had come up with some weak excuse for her sudden disappearance. They had never spoken of what she was or just how long her lifespan had been. The last minute absence had been explained away with something along the lines of some artifact, darling. I have to verify it in person. I'll call. Now, Sersi couldn't leave New York. She was trapped and reeling with recent revelations.

"If you don't mind, I have to, ah —" It took a bit of squeezing to get past Dane to where the mugs were. When they brushed up against one another, it was hard to swallow the familiarity that Sersi desperately wanted to believe they had. Instead, she focused on the more pressing matter. "I know your Sersi has some differences. Like in abilities, to start. She transformed a Celestial? I can't do anything like that. It's just rocks and trees and the like for me. I don't want to push you, Dane, but I do think we should talk about Arishem and what happened. Do we need to worry about a possible emergence here? That's why they call it, right? An emergence?"

Sersi was not weak. She knew that she had gifts to give. She also, however, knew her strengths. She was a thinker, not a fighter. The thought of killing a Celestial was almost as unfathomable as the concept that they were on some fools errand that could only end in the death of the planet they had worked so hard to protect.

A fraction of a laugh escaped his lips as their conversation of allergies and wool socks came to an end. His eyes were glued to the counter because seeing her was too hard, too confusing. He missed her. His Sersi. He wished nothing more than for it to be her in front of him, and if he suspended his disbelief he could believe it were true.

As the thoughts of fantasies and disillusions began to fade she brushed against him. Instinctively, he placed a hand on her lower back as she went past. They were too similar. Her warmth. The way the smell of heather and cosmos danced around her, filling him with nostalgia; he'd make a candle out of it if he could.

Fortunately, he was snapped out of his daydream of nostalgia and fantasy as she began asking him a question. Or rather questions. Questions he wasn't necessarily the best to answer under ideal circumstances, but she was the best he had to do so.

"Erm, yes I suppose those would be important things to discuss." He said as he organized his thoughts to respond to her intellectual siege. "I'd like to preface by reminding that everything I know is learned second hand. All that I saw myself was one of the Deviants and seeing-" He swallowed the emotion of the memory before continuing. "Seeing this Arishem take Sersi away." An image he'd never forget for more reasons than one.

He went on to explain as best he could with what he knew; which wasn't as much as he'd like.

What a mess they had found themselves in. For thousands of years, Sersi had been bolstered by a false of sense of security. Her confidence had been born from the fact that it seemed like the Celestial's had given their children a look behind the curtain of existence. The Eternals knew more than the humans they protected. The Eternals — it turned out — may have known nothing at all.

There was a Sersi who witnessed the loss of her fellow Eternals but still became something great. She used her powers to transfigure not only something alive but a Celestial who was trying to emerge. It was a feat she hadn't thought herself capable of but had somehow accomplished nonetheless. That Sersi was learning, growing, evolving.

This was not that Sersi.

The raven haired woman who was letting herself into the flat on the Upper East Side had never dare to defy the Celestial's. Everything she learned had been second hand from multiversal refugees who came from a reality where the truth had already been uncovered. The Sersi who peeled off her coat and hung it on the hall tree was a variant, a version of Sersi who had yet to uncover her potential. She had it inside her, but circumstances had yet to force it to the surface.

Despite her age, there was a hesitance in her motions. It made them sharp and jerky as she gestured around the space. Her primary residence as of late had been London, but she kept the New York City apartment for emergencies. It looked unlived in because it was. Artifacts she had collected over the years lined some of the shelves, but Sersi was still trying to make the space her own.

For one of the first times, she was not alone. The role of hostess felt foreign in the unfamiliar space. Still, she tried to smile. "You're welcome to hang up your coat, if you'd like. I can make tea." Even though she had only met him that night, Sersi knew how he took it. Dane Whitman was both a stranger and familiar all at once. He was a lovely professor and historian affiliated with the Natural History Museum in London. He was her boyfriend, actually, even though there was so much about her that he couldn't know. He was also 3,461.34 miles away at that exact moment and none the wiser to the fact that his variant had just followed Sersi home.

The alt-reality Eternals had done their best to explain what had happened in their home reality, but it was almost too much for Sersi to wrap her head around. From what they had said, her own variant had been kidnapped by the Celestials. Dane had been there, apparently, and witnessed the entire affair. It couldn't have been easy for him to then stand by a Sersi who looked like his but was not. She was keenly aware of this fact, just like how she was aware of the ways in which his similarities to her Dane would trick her mind into thinking they knew one another.

There comes a point when surround by the every shifting tides of strange and change where you grow numb to it. Dane thought he was there. His comfort in his discomfort was one of the only things that helped keep him together. Keeping the brittle shards of his reality glued together just enough to make one twisted mosaic. Then he saw her. Those eye deep and dark like the sea but just as full of life. That lustrous raven hair, each strand identical and even the smell of the shampoo that fluttered about the air panged his heart with familiarity. He could feel the emotion in his throat but forced himself to swallow it down.

This was not his Sersi. This was not the woman he loved. The woman he picked up the sword for. A sentiment he'd need to frequently keep reminding himself.

"Oh... Thanks." He said with a sharp nod and a weak attempt at a pleasant smile. "Tea would be delightful thank you." He responded unraveling the scarf from his neck - a scarf that she gave him - letting it rest on the tree along side his pea coat. He went to unfasten the blade from his hip, but he felt the twinge in the base of the skull as if it were begging not to be away from him. Or was it his subconscious begging not to be away from it? Regardless, he kept the Ebony Blade at his side and followed Sersi into the kitchen.

"Talking is good." He responded with a lingering sense of amusement as his eyes drifted across her many artefacts, envying that the fact that he couldn't exam them. That is until his eyes stumbled upon something equally familiar and foreign. A photograph. It was of the two of them at their favorite pub. So many memories, but it wasn't quite right. They never had a picture in that position or in that outfit. It caused him to feel an unbalanced cocktail of emotions. He may have dwelled in it longer, assessing all the spirits and mixers, if it weren't for her question.

Elsa knew Dane Whitman.

No, scratch that. Elsa knew the Dane Whitman of Earth-616. She was in some fucked up scenario that now required the constant clarification of which reality people had been dropped in from. Elsa knew the Dane Whitman of her own reality after years of crossing paths, but she had never met this variant before. He was a total stranger to her, and she owed him nothing. Unfortunately, he also had a large magical sword he was rather new to. That made him a little more interesting.

Elsa's own blade was freshly polished. It wasn't like she had much else to do. Meeting her own variant was a hundred percent out of the question. All of the multiversal refugees had been told the same thing: keep your head down and don't make waves. They were still looking for answers and explanations, and the last thing anyone needed was a variant complicating things further. And so, she trained. She worked out. She drank watery tea and cursed a God she had never believed in.

Ulysses had never allowed his heir to train in armor or any kind of protective covering. No Bloodstone would ever grow complacent or soft. If the stakes were low, people wouldn't perform to a satisfactory degree. No. The blades were real and they drew blood. Elsa was littered with the cuts from her past — both physical and psychological. Looking at Whitman, however, she wasn't too concerned about him adding to the collection.

He could hear it. It's malicious and hungry whispers licking at his consciousness, just craving to be used. To draw blood. To take life. He had to push it down. Fight the cravings and temptations. He took Blade's advice to heart and grounded himself. Understanding that this weapons craving and thirst was not something he needed to sate. Blade could understand that more than anyone, even his uncle.

He had been staring off, hardening his resolve and controlling his temptations, when Elsa spoke. He shook his head to clear his mind and blinked hard before allowing his eyes to fall on her. He didn't know his reality's Elsa Bloodstone but Eric did, and if she was anything like that one this was going to be a rough session.

He furrowed his brow at the pretty boy comment, not in frustration, more in the way of not knowing what to say. "Eric has taught me a thing or two." He replied with a weak smirk. His eyes lowered to his blade, it was still wrapped in its ceremonial cloth. He wanted to use it. He wanted to feel the power it brought him. He wanted to master it so he could save her.