Family
After the house had gradually calmed down following their return, Ajak had asked Phastos to accompany her to the Domo.
She had explained to him that she needed to have a few scans of Druig so she could make sure of something. He hadn't asked many questions, counting on Ajak to know what she was doing.
The hardest part of the whole thing had occured before they could even get to work and it had been to get Makkari to leave the ship's infirmary.
Ajak, however, knew her fellow Eternals and none but her had such an impact on the others that it could even move Thena and Gilgamesh from each others sides if the situation absolutely called for it..
With a steady voice and gentle promises, she had persuaded the speedster to retreat from the room so the could do their work in peace and Makkari had given in, albeit reluctantly.
She may no longer was the leader of their group, for Arishem had left that role to Sersi despite all her protests, but she still held her old authority and she still cared for each and every one of them.
Whether it was her role as healer and guide, or her calming, almost motherly, manner, none of them could tell.
Whatever it was, Phastos had followed her immediately when she asked him to help her with Druig, which was the reason that he was now tinkering with some small devices to fulfill her earlier request.
Meanwhile their mind-controller still lay exactly where Gilgamesh had placed him, on a examination table that, as much as Phastos knew, had only ever been used twice in their long history here on earth and both times had not been pleasant.
Druig had not moved at all and Ajak's hand rested on his chest. Not a few minutes ago, she had poured her golden healing energy into him in another unsuccessful attempt to wake him up. The fingers of her other hand ran through his hair in a way that could be described as comforting and caring.
"All right, take your hands off for a moment" Phastos said.
From his fingers rose a series of variously sized golden implements, that looked like inlaid rings, and took a formation by themselves over Druig. The small machines hovered over the unconscious Eternal's body, emitting a soft, warm light.
Ajak folded her arms across her chest and watched the slow process thoughtfully. It was, to say the very least, unsettling.
"Okay, why am I even doing this? What could my devices tell you more than your skills?" Phastos asked after and called the little machines back to him after a while and some tests.
They folded and rolled under his fingers, reassembling into new shapes, forming a hologram of golden data icons and buttons that their inventor tapped on as if it didn't require any of his concentration at all.
"That's what I'm trying to find out." answered Ajak. She turned to the data from the scans with an unreadable stare as soon as he was finished.
Phastos waited quite a while for her to say something. He couldn't read anything from such scans himself. Bodies that weren't machines but made of flesh and blood instead of gears, wires and hinges, and they were, no matter how they had been made, were quite a mystery to him. He was an inventor, a mechanic, not a healer, that was her role and she seemed quite concentrated on it right now.
After a while; Phastos gave up. He turned to Druig instead and took the position of watching over his still form that Ajak had occupied before.
"I have a feeling I've never seen him so relaxed."
She hummed, never taking her eyes off the screen.
"Thank you, Phastos. Why don't you go down to the others? I'll follow."
Phastos frowned, but he knew better than to ask.
Arguing with Ajak could be very pleasant and intellectually stimulating, but if she didn't want to talk about something or declared a conversation finished, then there wasn't much point in contradicting her.
And besides all of that, he had also planned to call his family before dinner anyway and it was easy to decide whether he wanted to have a pointless discussion with Ajak that would lead him nowhere or spend a few more minutes on the phone with his husband and son.
"All right." he sighed. "You'll know what you're doing."
With that, the automatic doors closed behind him, leaving Ajak alone with her patient and the scans.
He no longer noticed the increasingly tense and worried look in her eyes as he left the ship.
On his way to the porch for some privacy he passed Sersi, who smiled at him once before turning back to her phone. The device seemed to be pretty much glued to her hand and he knew from Sprite that she was probably constantly texting witrh that human boyfriend she had back in London.
Well, he wasn't going to say anything, after all he was planning a hopefully long phone call himself so he stepped outside and closed the door behind him.
Around him stretched a vast landscape consisting of nothing but pastures and the dusty road they had come on, no house in sight other than the one he had just come from.
The cars were parked in a small paved space in front of a paddock where a handful of horses moved lazily through the evening sun. The air was clear. It was quiet. It was peaceful.
Here, in rural South Dakota, where the ranchers' farms were far apart, it had been comparatively easy for Ajak to go unnoticed.
In order for humans to realize that she was never aging, someone would first have to see her regularly. She had created a place to keep her secret, surrounded by her beloved horses and spacious pastures and no houses in at least a few kilometers in every direction. Phastos could not say that he did not like it.
Sooner or later they all had to think about this topic again and again.
While Kingo had left Sprite behind many years ago and had invented an entire supposed family dynasty for himself to explain his eternal youth, Makkari had mostly hidden herself away from humans.
Admittedly, Druig's method of manipulating an entire village of people over generations so that he didn't seem to be an issue had been a bit extreme but it did fit his ideas.
Thena and Gilgamesh, much like Ajak, had chosen a secluded home that could keep their secret and their peace.
Sersi had moved from place to place and had had to start all over again quite often after Ikaris had left her and what that guy had done afterwards was a mystery to all of them that Phastos actually didn't want to have an answer to.
Nevertheless, he had also thought about the problem at hand again after he had met Ben. How long would they be able to stay in one place? How many moves to distant places would he have to put Jack through one day?
Phastos pushed the thought away and instead fished for his phone in his overly big pocket. He would have to deal with it someday, but now he had a call to make and the thought of it was a whole lot nicer.
Sersi, on the other hand, had meanwhile trotted into Ajak's living room without really planning to, a little lost in her thoughts, still staring at the screen of her cell phone.
She had thought about the best way for her to explain to Dane that she had to miss yet another dinner date for twenty minutes now, and honestly, she felt a little queasy about having to disappoint him again, no matter how patient and understanding he usually was about it. 'No, Sersi. I get it, you have to save the world' he would say and yet she would feel horrible about it.
It was not without reason that she had successfully managed to beat around the bush for the last three quarters of an hour and accordingly she tipped another simple, sweet and mostly meaningless message with an heart emoji behind it, pressed the send button and quickly stuffed the mobile phone back in the pocket of her jeans before her boyfriend had the chance to answer her newest message.
She would read and answer that later when she had found a good way to explain. Probably.
Loud Bollywood music was blaring out of the speakers in the living room because Kingo, however he had done it, had finally managed to persuade the others to watch one of his films with him.
While Gilgamesh had fled to the kitchen after a few minutes with the excuse of wanting to take care of dinner Sprite, equipped with headphones to protect her from another round of Kingo's singing voice and engrossed in the depths of her own cell phone, was sprawled on an old red armchair and seemingly lost to the world around her.
Makkari, after Ajak had expelled her from the infirmary on the Domo less than an hour ago and shooed her away from Druig's side, had reluctantly followed the healer's instruction to take a break.
Sersi was pretty sure that otherwise the speedster would still not have left his side for she could be pretty persistent.
Now, however, she was stretched out on the sofa, propped up by pillows in her back and with her legs laying over Kingo's lap, who enthusiastically explained things to her in sign language that, sometimes more, sometimes less, had to do with the film and its shooting.
When Sersi came to a halt in the door frame to the room, Makkari's head shot up with expectation in her eyes that dissipated a bit as she saw her. Sersi smiled at her anyway, mouthing a sorry, and Makkari returned the gesture before Kingo claimed her attention back to the film.
Thena had taken a seat on the other armchair and at least didn't seem to be completely averse to the movie.
Sersi crossed her arms, leaned against the frame and just watched for a moment, taking in the situation and realizing that it was real. The sight made her smile.
After everything they had been through, all the years of separation, after the painful losses, the betrayal and the barely prevented emergence that could have cost them everything, after the terrible test by Arishem and the time it had taken to pull themselves together again, it was sheer happiness for her to see her family gathered together again in one place and in peace.
That meant most of her family.
She had no idea where Ikaris had vanished to. He had still been with them when they had entered the house, laughing and chatting about all sorts of topics, and she also believed that he had previously occupied the place on the couch on which Makkari had now spread herself out.
Inwardly, she sighed.
She knew it was not an easy situation for him. It wasn't like it used to be and if Sersi was honest with herself, she didn't believe that it would ever be the same again.
Too much had happened between them all for that. Even though Ajak had spoken out for him and saw the blame more in her own hands. Although at least she, Sprite and Kingo would have liked to return to the way they had been with each other before.
But it wasn't their turn to forgive Ikaris. As far as that was possible, they already had.
No, it was on Thena, who was eyeing him suspiciously quite often and on Gilgamesh who was visibly trying but finding it hard to digest the fact that Ikaris had betrayed them all, his family.
It was on Phastos, who was never at a loss for a scathing comment or shying away from reminding Ikaris of his terrible deeds, and on Makkari, who conspicuously often managed to positioned herself right between Ikaris and Druig on the rare occasions that the two of them ever were in a room together nowadays, glaring at him when she thought no one was looking.
It was also on Druig who still stubbornly avoid Ikaris's presence whenever and however he could.
She couldn't blame any of them for it. Of course not. He had hurt them, threatened to kill them. He had even tried with one of them and accidentally succeed with another.
But the thing was... none of them had seen his guilt. None of them had looked him in the eye back there, standing on the body of Tiamut the Celestial, they hadn't seen his conflict and hadn't witnessed the moment when he decided to atone.
Not the way Sersi had seen it.
And maybe Thena was right, maybe it was really just her feelings for Ikaris that spoke out of her. But nonetheless, she knew him better than anyone, and she knew he regretted it.
Lost in her thoughts once again, her eyes glued to the TV screen without really seeing, Sersi had failed to notice that Thena had stood up at some point and left the living room, until a loud crash from the stairs startled her.
She exchanged a quick glace with Kingo and Makkari before she whirled around and hastened back around the corner with quick steps, trying not to slip in her socks on the smooth wooden floor in her hurry.
She only still saw how Ikaris got up from the ground again, pulling himself up on the stair railing.
It did not took a genius to figure out what had happened.
Apparently he had come from the upper floor and had made painful acquaintance with the blunt end of a spear that Thena had summoned and was still holding in her hands right now, always ready to fight.
For a moment there, a horrible rush of panic shot up in Sersi and she was all but ready to scream for Makkari's help, but then Thena turned to her and she saw the clear eyes of the warrior goddess and realized that it was not a Mahd Wy'ry attack like she had feard.
She took a deep breath.
"Thena!" Gilgamesh's voice thundered behind her. Apparently he too had been alarmed by the noise and had reached the same conclusion as her. He came to a quick halt beside her. His eyes scurried down the hallway, instantly taking in every detail to properly assess the situation before settling on the blonde woman.
"He started me." Thena said unmoved and unapologetic. At least her weapon vanished into nothing.
"I didn't!" Ikaris snapped back at her. He menacingly took a few steps in her direction but Thena didn't retreat a millimeter. Instead she went into something that could have been described as a fighting stance.
Makkari was probably able to feel all of their heartbeats spiking up from the other room.
"Okay, that's enough for now." Gilgamesh intervened to Sersi's great relieve. Something told her that Ajak would not appreciate the two of them tearing down her farm house.
"Hey, some people are trying to watch a movie here!" Kingo's voice echoed from the living room. Neither of them paid him much attention.
"All right." said Gilgamesh, looking from Thena to Ikaris and back again, always ready to interpose should the situation make it necessary. "I've got a roast in the oven and I really don't want it to burn. And neither do you because there's nothing else to eat today."
Which, in other words, was a demand to calm down and peaceful.
Luckily both feuding Eternals went about it in their own way, both probably unwilling to actually escalate the whole thing.
Thena relaxed her stance a bit and Ikaris snorted and turned away from her.
"Okay," Gilgamesh said. "Now that that's settled, how about dinner?"
"I'll go get Ajak and Druig." Sersi offered hastily and, leaving Ikaris and Thena in Gilgamesh's capable hands, she walked down the hallway to the back door. She had complete faith that if there was anyone besides their former leader who could keep the two of them from going at each other's throats, it was him.
She could very well imagine what had happened, considering that Thena wasn't particularly fond of Ikaris at the moment but that too was a thing that was better dealt with by Gilgamesh.
The transition from Ajak's house to the interior of the Domo was almost like entering another world. In a way it probably was.
She had used to imagine that every time she stepped onto her spaceship, her feet, off the bottom of the earth, touched a piece of her supposed home planet Olympia again.
She didn't know exactly what it stood for now that she knew Olympia had never been real, but, at least for her, it had lost none of its feeling of home, as much as she loved this world and its people.
The Domo provided a place to retreat to, a place of belonging, and the place where it all began. Here they all had a place. And here, to this place, they could all return. Just as Makkari had done after they had parted ways five hundred years ago.
Their speedster had spent centuries making the spacecraft a home in her own way, including her vast collection of human antiquities and artifacts that could still be found in various nooks and crannies everywhere.
Makkari had never been the neatest of them and Phastos still regularly got a startle when he stepped on things that made noise or opened a door and stood in front of a poorly lit statue that looked like it was alive.
Once his high pitched scream had echoed through the entire ship when a complete armor of an ancient samurai came out of a closet in the wall in pieces and almost buried him under it. Kingo and Sprite still hadn't finished laughing about it till today and Gilgamesh had just barely managed to stop Thena from stabbing the alleged attacker with one of her cosmic weapons.
Sersi moved unerringly through the many corridors to the room that Ajak had chosen thousands of years ago as their infirmary.
It was one of the least used rooms in the entire Domo.
As long as they had had a healer, there had only very rarely been incidents that actually required prolonged surveillance for either of them, and even fewer after the Deviants were believed to have been wiped out. Sersi could count on her two hands the times they'd actually needed a med-bay, which was a pretty good average for seven thousand years spend on the earth with all it's wars and monsters.
Still, Ajak had quashed any attempt to use the room for any other purpose than the one she had chosen for it, whether it be an expanded laboratory for Phastos, another training room for Thena, or a place for Gilgamesh to grow plants. Not even Makkari had dared to alter Ajak's inner sanctum in the five centuries that she had had the Domo to herself, even though, besides each of their private quarters, not much had been safe from her.
She entered the room and immediately had a strange feeling.
It washed over her as if the air in the room was saturated with it and for a moment she really wanted to turn around and leave again.
Ajak stood almost in the middle of the room and rubbed her forehead, a deep frown carved into her gentle features. Ahead of her was a hologram of some sort in the air. Contrary to Sersi's firm expectation, Druig wasn't back on his feet yet. That was unusual.
"Ajak, is something wrong?"
Ajak's head shot up, her hand instantly swiped through the air and made the hologram she had been so engrossed in disappear. When she saw Sersi she stared at her for a second, her eyes wide as if she'd been caught red handed and Sersi felt the urge to just turn around and leave once more but swallowed it and stepped further into the room and it's strange atmosphere instead.
"Ajak?"
"I didn't hear you coming, Sersi."
That was odd because the automatic door had definitely made a noise, but Sersi didn't question it further.
Instead, she glanced at Druig.
"Hasn't he woken up yet?"
After all, a few hours had passed since they had saved that small town and it's residents from the Deviant attack. Surely he should have regained enough energy for at least a few waking moments. To grab something to eat, for example, anything would have been welcome to her.
Their leader, or rather their formal leader, sighed. She motioned for her to come closer, and Sersi obeyed, stepping forward and standing beside her in front of a sleeping Druig.
Ajak stroked his pale cheek with gentle fingers.
"That is the problem. I healed all his wounds. Physically, there shouldn't be anything that's keeping him sleeping."
Sersi stared at her a little puzzled. "Does that mean you don't know what's wrong?"
"I have my suspicions. I've had Phastos run some scans and his body is still critically low on cosmic energy." Ajak opened her hand and let the hologram flicker back to life again. "He should have regenerated from the Deviant's bite by now, even without my help. Instead the scans say that he is getting weaker."
Sersi frowned and pressed her lips together. She would never forget the faces of her fellow Eternals after a fatal Deviant attack. The grayish skin, the spider's web like dark stains of the veins where golden energy and red blood had once flowed through their bodies, giving them life and energy.
Ajak and Gilgamesh were alive again, but Arishem had still been less than satisfied with their intervention in the emergence. He had given them one more chance to prove the worth of this planet and its people, but he had clearly warned them and not every Ajak could tell if he would revive another of them if necessary or if this was truly their last chance.
"How can that even be? Can't you give him new energy?" that's what Ajak did, after all. She healed by transferring her own energy to others but she only shook her head.
"I tried that. It worked with the injuries but whenever I send new energy to him it seeps away almost as quickly. It's like something is draining him."
Sersi wrung her hands as, not really daring to ask another question. That couldn't really be, right? What could be there to drain him? And what would happen if he ran out of whatever was being stolen from him?
After a while of tense, heavy silence between them, Ajak spoke the words she absolutely hadn't wanted to hear.
"I worry that maybe we were too late."
"What?" Sersi's head snapped up and she starred at her in disbelieve. "You said Thena was quick enough. That he just needed rest.”
"I know what I said and I was sure it was true." she leaned on her hands, her palms planted firmly on the table, and looked thoughtful, obviously trying to find an explanation. "But this condition is also new to me."
"There must be something you can do for him."
Ajak shook her head sadly, her lips where pressed into a thin line and Sersi looked from her to Druig who, all of a sudden, seemed so much paler to her. She could not tear her eyes away, not even while her heart grew heavy for him.
“I did everything I could. The only thing left in my power would be to reboot his body and mind. ... But it would most likely completely erase who he is now."