Chapter 192: Visitors from Tomorrow and Beyond

[Hell’s Kitchen, DeadEnd Bar, Evening]

The DeadEnd Bar was the kind of place that had earned its reputation not through any particular effort but simply by existing long enough and consistently enough that the neighbourhood had decided to trust it.

The stools at the bar were mismatched and the lighting was warm enough to make everyone look slightly better than they felt.

On any given evening the crowd was a complete cross-section of Hell’s Kitchen: people celebrating things worth celebrating, people drinking through things not worth remembering, people who had simply needed somewhere to be that was not their apartment.

Even the gang members who drifted in occasionally seemed to absorb the atmosphere and settle down.

There was an unspoken agreement about this place, arrived at through no formal negotiation, that it was neutral ground. Common people drank here without looking over their shoulders, which in Hell’s Kitchen was a rarer thing than it should have been.

Didi sat at the far end of the bar with her phone pressed to her ear and an expression on her face that suggested the conversation had been going on long enough to have fully exhausted her patience for the evening.

"Pietro." Her voice was even but had an edge to it, the kind that comes after repeating yourself three times to no effect.

"I am not asking you to stop enjoying your life. I am asking you to think for approximately five consecutive minutes before you do things. There is a difference."

She paused. "No, that is not the same thing. Having a one-night stand with a woman who is older than you are by twenty years is not what I meant by broadening your experiences."

She pause again but longer this time. "I am not being conservative, I am being your guardian, which is a distinction I would appreciate you acknowledging occasionally."

She listened for another moment, then closed her eyes briefly.

"We will discuss this later," she said, and ended the call, looked at her phone for a moment, then dialled Wanda’s number.

It rang. And rang. And went unanswered.

Didi set the phone down on the bar and looked at it.

"I guess it didn’t go so well with the kids?"

The voice came from two stools down. Matt Murdock sat with a glass of scotch in front of him, his dark glasses catching the bar light.

He was in his mid-twenties, law school still ahead of him.

Didi turned to look at him and let out a breath that was not quite a sigh but was related to one.

"You tell me, Matt," she said. "Pietro is not listening to me anymore. He is out every other night, chasing girls, drinking with people I have never met, and when I try to talk to him about it he acts like I am trying to put him in a cage."

She picked up her own glass and took a measured sip. "And Wanda is putting distance between us. She did not even come to a very important family function we had recently. She did not call and did not explain."

Matt turned his glass slowly between his palms, a habit rather than a gesture. "That sounds genuinely hard," he said. "I always figured you could handle anything without losing your footing. You seem like nothing rattles you."

"That is what I thought too," Didi said, and the honesty in her voice was quiet and unperformed. She looked down at her glass. "Apparently teenagers are the exception to most rules."

A small smile crossed her face. "I have guided people through extraordinary things in my existence, Matt. I have sat with people in their most terrible moments and helped them find their way through. But talking to a seventeen-year-old boy who thinks he knows everything and a young girl who has decided she needs space is somehow more difficult than any of it."

Matt laughed, genuine and warm. "Welcome to the parent experience."

"Thoroughly," Didi agreed.

They sat in comfortable quiet for a moment, the bar noise filling the space between them pleasantly.

"Don’t worry too much," Matt said. "Teenagers push against the people who care about them. It’s not because they don’t know you care. It’s usually because they do, and they are trying to figure out who they are outside of that." He took a sip of his scotch. "You’ll find your way with them. I have a feeling about that."

Didi looked at him sideways. "You have faith in someone you know relatively little about."

"I’m a good judge of character," he said, with the slight smile.

Didi’s expression softened genuinely. "Thank you, Matt. That is kind."

Matt set his glass down and shifted his posture slightly, "What about Ethan? Has he been involved in the conversations with Pietro and Wanda?"

Didi’s expression shifted into something more complicated. "He has been very busy recently. There are things he needed to handle that could not wait." She paused. "But once he has room to breathe, I will talk to him about it. They need both of us to be present for this, not just me."

"Makes sense," Matt said. He finished his drink and set the glass down. "For what it’s worth, in about two years I will be a fully qualified lawyer. If you ever need someone in your corner for anything involving the complicated mess of human legal systems, I will give you a significant discount."

Didi smiled at him, "I appreciate that."

Matt stood, settled his coat, and oriented himself toward the door. "Take care of yourself, Didi. And the kids."

"I will," she said. "Good night, Matt."

She watched him navigate through the bar crowd without a single hesitation and disappear through the door.

’I guided countless souls across all of existence,’ she thought, turning her glass slowly on the bar top. ’I shepherded civilisations through their endings and beginnings. And here I sit, genuinely uncertain about how to talk to a teenage boy about life choices.’

She paused. ’If me and Ethan have children of our own one day, I genuinely wonder if...’

The thought stopped.

She felt it before anything visible happened. A presence settling into the edges of the room like a change in atmospheric pressure, something that did not belong to the normal fabric of this time and place. It was familiar in a way that made no logical sense because she had never felt it before, and yet she knew it the way she knew certain things: directly, without needing to arrive at the knowledge through reasoning. 𝚏𝕣𝐞𝗲𝐰𝕖𝐛𝐧𝕠𝕧𝚎𝚕.𝐜𝚘𝗺

As if on cue, the bar began to empty.

Not dramatically and not in a rush. But one by one, the patrons at every table suddenly remembered they had somewhere to be, pulled out cash, settled their tabs, and headed for the door with the cheerful purposefulness of people who had just recalled a very important prior commitment.

The staff followed, drifting toward the back with their jackets. Even the couple in the corner booth who had been deeply absorbed in each other for the past hour stood up, tucked in their chairs, and left without looking back.

Within ninety seconds the bar was empty except for Didi.

She looked around at the abandoned glasses and the chairs pulled back at odd angles and the door still swinging gently on its hinges.

"You can show yourself now," she said, to the empty room. "Everyone is already gone."

She turned on her stool.

The woman who stepped through the door was beautiful in a way that carried unmistakable echoes.

Black hair that fell past her shoulders, blue eyes that were bright and sharp and warm all at once, a face that had Ethan’s bone structure softened into something that was entirely its own.

She was young, somewhere in what appeared to be her early twenties.

She was also looking at Didi like she was trying very hard to be composed and not fully succeeding, because underneath the composure was something raw and very human.

Didi’s eyes narrowed.

The eyes, the face and the presence she had sensed, familiar in that impossible way.

’Oh,’ she thought.

"What in heaven are you doing here?" she said, and her voice came out sharper than she intended because the sharpness was covering something that was not yet ready to be anything else. "You are not supposed to be here."

The young woman’s composure cracked into a smile that Didi had seen on one other face in the world and recognised immediately.

"What? A daughter can’t visit her mother?" she said. "That seems a bit cruel."

Didi stood up.

She knew. She had always known things about the people connected to her in ways that went beyond the normal scope of knowledge, and this was one of those things arriving all at once with the full weight of certainty behind it.

The woman standing in front of her was her daughter. Hers and Ethan’s, from a future that had not happened yet, which was a sentence that would have sounded impossible to anyone who did not know the people involved.

She walked forward, and her voice came out measured and careful and doing an imperfect job of concealing what was behind it.

"If the daughter is from the future, then yes," she said. "You absolutely should not be here. The implications for spacetime alone would be enough to..."

She stopped, because the young woman had closed the distance between them and wrapped both arms around her.

"I missed you, Mom," she said into Didi’s shoulder.

Didi stood very still for exactly two seconds.

Then she put her arms around her daughter and held on.

They stayed like that for a moment that neither of them counted.

Didi pulled back gently, holding the young woman at arm’s length, looking at her face carefully. "Alright," she said, and her voice was softer now. "Let us start with the basics. What is your name?"

"Lucy," the young woman said, and smiled. "Mom."

"Lucy," Didi repeated, tasting it. "And you cannot tell me more than that."

"Not much more, no," Lucy said. "But I want you to know I am supposed to be here. This visit is not a disruption to the timeline. I checked carefully."

"I imagine your father taught you that," Didi said.

Lucy’s smile returned briefly. "He taught me a lot of things."

She straightened, "Dad became a Monarch by now, You probably already know or will know very soon. From this point forward things will change, for the better, for our family and for this reality. Our family will be involved with the broader multiverse in ways that are going to be significant."

She paused. "But there is something more important."

Her eyes met Didi’s directly and held there. "You have to stop Dad from erasing Death from this multiverse."

The bar was very quiet.

Didi looked at her daughter for a long moment. "Why would your father erase Death from this reality?"

"I cannot tell you that part," Lucy said. "But he will have what feels like a very good reason when the moment comes, and I need you to be there to stop him. Not because his reason is wrong, but because the consequences reach further than he will be able to see in that moment."

She looked at Didi steadily. "You are the only one he will actually listen to when that happens."

Didi held her gaze, turning the information over carefully in her mind. "Alright," she said. "I will stop him."

Lucy’s expression relaxed, just slightly, and she reached forward and touched the locket at Didi’s throat, the one Ethan had given her, pressing her fingertip against it gently.

"Keep this," she said. "It is going to matter more than you think."

"I was not planning to take it off," Didi said.

"Good." Lucy looked at her for a moment, and then the composed exterior shifted again, just for a second, and what showed through was simply a young woman looking at her mother. "And don’t worry about Pietro and Wanda." Her voice was quiet. "You are going to figure it out. You and Dad both. You were always one of the greatest mothers in existence and you still are."

Didi felt something move through her chest and pulled Lucy into another hug, this one on her own initiative, and felt her daughter go still with surprise before hugging back hard.

"Thank you for coming," Didi said quietly. "Whatever is happening in the future, whatever brought you back here, I want you to know that I love you. Without qualification and without needing to know anything else."

"I know, Mom," Lucy said, her voice muffled slightly. "I always knew."

They held each other for a moment longer.

"Do you want to see your father?" Didi asked, pulling back and looking at her. "He is not impossibly far from here."

Lucy shook her head immediately, the smile returning with something fond and slightly mischievous in it that was completely Ethan. "Not yet. I will see him later. But tell him his kids love him. All of us."

"All of you," Didi repeated, and the plural landed in her chest like a warm stone. "How many are there?"

Lucy’s smile widened. "Enough to keep you all very busy."

Then she began to become transparent, her edges softening, the bar visible through her in slow increments.

"Remember," she said, her voice carrying the slight resonance of someone already partially elsewhere. "Stop Dad. When the moment comes, stop him."

"I will," Didi said. "I promise."

Then Lucy was gone.

Didi stood in the middle of the empty bar and let the silence settle around her. She looked at the space where her daughter had stood, at the faint warmth still present in the air there, and she turned the information over carefully, examining it from every angle.

’Why would Ethan erase Death from this reality? What could push him to that point? And why would Lucy come back specifically to prevent it?’

She did not have the answers yet but she would find them.

Suddenly the temperature in the bar dropped.

Not gradually, not as a comfortable shift, but all at once and cold arrived with intention.

The lights above the bar flickered, stuttering between on and off in an irregular pulse that had nothing to do with the electrical system. Outside the windows, clouds were building in a sky that had been clear ten minutes ago, pressing down over the Hell’s Kitchen skyline with unnatural speed.

Didi did not turn immediately. She walked towards the table, finished what was in her glass, set it down on the bar with a soft click, and then turned around.

The woman standing at the other end of the bar was dressed in black from collar to floor, her hair dark and straight and falling around a face that was striking and wrong in equal measure.

Her eyes were black all the way through, no white, no iris, just depth that went further than any physical eye should go. Her smile was wide and patient and had nothing comfortable in it.

"Finally found you," she said, and her voice came out with many, layered very slightly out of alignment with each other tone. "The one causing the disturbance in my domain. Death of the other side."

Didi looked at her for a long moment. ’Well,’ she thought. ’At least the timing is interesting.’

She turned to the bar, selected a clean glass from the rack, filled it from the open bottle on the counter, and held it out.

"Fancy a drink?" she said pleasantly. "I am told it is quite good. And I suspect this conversation is going to require at least one."

Death moved forward slowly, her eyes fixed on Didi, and did not take the glass yet.

"I should have searched this universe for you sooner," she said. "You and Ethan Carter have been causing a significant headache for me and for others of my kind in this reality."

Didi set the glass on the bar within reach and poured one for herself.

"If the one who sits above this whole reality does not have a problem with me," she said, "then I am genuinely curious why those who operate beneath him are expending this level of energy on the subject."

She took a sip. "I am currently a human reincarnation. I cannot access most of my abilities in this reality. The disruption I am causing is considerably less than you are treating it."

Death’s expression tightened very slightly. "It seems you have no idea what is actually happening in this reality right now."

She moved closer, slowly, her hands folded in front of her, and the smile had faded into something more level.

"You and Ethan Carter are creating problems that go beyond your individual presences," she said. "For me. For the others. For the structure of this reality’s natural order."

"Then tell me," Didi said simply. "Sit down, have a drink, and tell me. Because I am not going to stand here and guess, and I doubt either of us benefits from this becoming confrontational."

Death stopped.

She looked at the glass on the bar. She looked at Didi. She looked at the glass again.

Didi felt it then, beneath the composed exterior and the overwhelming presence that Death was projecting into the room. Something small and very human that did not belong there.

Nervousness.

The cosmic embodiment of Death for this entire multiverse was nervous. Standing in a bar in Hell’s Kitchen talking to a human reincarnation of another reality’s Death, and she was nervous.

’How in the universe,’ Didi thought, studying her carefully, ’does a being like this end up nervous? She is using a human incarnation as her vessel right now. That must be bleeding through more than she intended.’

She said nothing about it. She simply kept the glass within reach and waited.

Death sat down.

She picked up the glass and took a small, careful sip, and her expression shifted very slightly into something that was not quite surprise but was adjacent to it.

"That is," she paused, "unexpectedly pleasant."

"I know," Didi said, and settled onto her own stool, giving Death the space to begin. "Now. Tell me what is actually happening. All of it."