I leaned back behind the lab desk, invisible, and let the glow of the monitor paint the inside of my hooded silence.
Kilgrave was dead.
That was the core of it—the thing my body had been bracing around ever since the restaurant incident. The thing that had made me wake up at stupid hours with my teeth clenched and my mind already running defensive scenarios. If he'd been alive, if he'd crawled out of death somehow, he would've come for the only leverage he understood: family.
My mother.
Theresa.
So the primary concern was resolved.
But the file on the screen didn't feel like closure.
It felt like a sequel nobody asked for.
"Cells and genetic material sourced from deceased superhuman subject. Identity: CLASSIFIED."
Classified, my ass. This was Kilgrave. They'd taken his body apart, boiled his horror down into lab samples, and—because the universe is allergic to peace—someone had already turned it into a prototype.
Which meant the real threat wasn't Kilgrave anymore.
It was the idea of Kilgrave.
It was Hydra learning how to manufacture obedience.
And I couldn't ignore that, not if I wanted my mom to ever live a normal life again.
I stared at the results and forced myself to think like a strategist instead of a terrified son.
Okay, Abel. So. What now?
Option one: Leave silently.
Mission accomplished. Kilgrave is dead. Don't draw attention. Don't add "corporate lab break-in" to your list of crimes. Go home. Sleep. Pretend you were at Sean's party the entire time like a normal teenager with normal problems.
This was the smart option.
And I hated it.
Because "smart option" is often just another way of saying "leave the problem for future-you to bleed over."
Option two: Destroy everything.
Set the project back. Burn the data. Smash the equipment. Make it so Hydra has to start again from scratch.
Tempting.
Very tempting.
But also loud. Corporate sabotage triggers alarms, investigations, paper trails, and the kind of attention that turns invisible operations into very visible wars. Hydra didn't play fair, and S.H.I.E.L.D. didn't play honest. If I kicked this nest too hard, I'd get stung from ten directions.
Which led to—
Option three: Take it all.
The thought didn't creep in. It arrived fully formed, sharp as a knife.
Recently, I'd been rebuilding potions from my previous life—Marvel-compatible versions of brews that mattered. I'd made a list of priorities: the ones that were the most useful and hardest to replace.
Felix Felicis. Polyjuice. Veritaserum.
All three were nightmares in this world because ingredients were missing. No convenient magical supply chain. No "just go buy lacewing flies and boomslang skin." Here, everything was substitution and theory and praying you didn't poison yourself.
But this research?
It felt familiar.
Not the morality. The methodology.
Take a phenomenon. Break it down. Identify what makes it tick. Replicate it through controlled processes. Turn something exceptional into something repeatable.
That was potion work, translated into modern biochemistry.
And Veritaserum—true Veritaserum—was essentially neurochemistry with an opinion. It forced honesty by changing the relationship between thought and speech. You didn't just "tell truth." You couldn't lie cleanly. Your mind stopped being able to route around it.
Kilgrave's cells didn't force truth.
They forced obedience.
But the mechanism—altering brain chemistry and behavioral pathways—might be the missing bridge I needed. Maybe not as a direct replacement, but as a catalyst. A component. A substitute for an ingredient that no longer existed.
Worth investigating.
Definitely worth stealing.
Decision made.
I moved silently out of the lab and into the corridor, still invisible, then circled to the open doorway of the active lab again. Three researchers were working inside, tired and focused. Good people, probably. The kind who thought they were solving problems, not creating monsters.
I hated what I was about to do.
But I hated Hydra more.
I raised my wand.
"Obliviate."
Bright white light swept through the room like a clean tide. It didn't explode. It didn't burn. It simply took. Memories of their work on Kilgrave's samples—the breakthroughs, the procedures, the small details that made replication possible—peeled away like labels being stripped from bottles.
The researchers froze.
One blinked, confused, like he'd just walked into the room and forgotten why. Another frowned at the equipment with the expression of someone trying to remember a dream.
Sorry, guys.
This is for the greater good. Probably.
While they were still dazed, I moved fast.
First: the data.
I popped open the computer housing, pulled the hard drive, and slid it into my enchanted pouch. I didn't trust digital wiping. I trusted physical removal.
Second: the backups.
I found external storage units in a drawer, two thumb drives labeled with dates, and a compact server module tucked behind a panel—someone had been smarter than the others and made redundancies. I destroyed what I couldn't carry by crushing it with a controlled Depulso until circuitry snapped and memory chips cracked.
Third: the product.
I went for the refrigerator units.
Inside were sample racks of serum in labeled vials. Some were "test batch." Some were "stabilized." Some had warning stickers that looked like they'd been printed by someone who understood how dangerous this was and had tried, weakly, to be responsible about it.
I didn't take everything.
I took enough.
Enough to study, enough to replicate the method if I needed to, enough to understand what Hydra had built and how close they were to refining it.
I sealed the vials in my pouch. The pouch's enchantment dampened magical signatures and insulated temperature well enough for transport.
Fourth: erase the trail.
I smashed handwritten notes. Destroyed calibration sheets. Altered the workstation settings so the next time someone ran the tests, they'd get corrupted results that looked like human error. The lab would be forced to waste time repeating everything.
Three minutes later, it looked like the Kilgrave project had never gotten past "interesting but unstable."
Perfect.
I turned toward the door—
And every alarm in the building screamed.
Red lights flashed.
A klaxon wailed, loud enough to vibrate in my teeth.
Well.
So much for "perfect."
I stepped into the corridor and saw security guards rushing in from both ends—batons raised, taser-like weapons crackling blue. Their faces looked tense, confused. Not "Hydra trained." Just normal guys who'd been told an alarm meant danger and didn't want to lose their jobs by hesitating.
Motion sensors, I realized.
Should've checked for those.
No time to regret it.
"Petrificus Totalus!"
I flicked my wand fast, casting in rapid sequence. Yellow-white light spilled out like scattered petals—each bolt a clean full-body bind. The guards froze mid-stride and toppled like dominoes, stiff and helpless on the carpeted floor.
I didn't feel good about it, but I didn't feel bad either. They'd wake up in hours. Sore, terrified, alive.
No permanent harm.
I scanned for escape routes.
The corridor had doors, labs, a stairwell.
But the fastest option was a floor-to-ceiling window at the end—twenty-one floors up.
If I was already detected, subtlety was a dead concept.
I pointed my wand.
"Reducto!"
The window exploded in a violent spray of glass. Wind roared in, dragging papers and dust outward into open night. Below, the city waited like a hungry mouth.
I stepped toward the opening—
Instinct screamed.
I snapped up a shield without thinking.
"Protego!"
BANG. BANG. BANG.
Gunfire.
Bullets slammed into my barrier and ricocheted away in sparks. The impact rattled my arm like I'd been punched repeatedly by an invisible boxer.
I turned my head.
A man stood at the far end of the corridor with a pistol raised—suit, not uniform. Calm stance. Professional grip. Eyes flat.
Not security.
Operative.
Hydra.
I'd seen that look before in other forms—Death Eaters when they stopped pretending, Aurors when they'd decided you were already guilty, soldiers when killing wasn't emotional anymore.
No time for a duel.
The longer I stayed, the higher the chance of S.H.I.E.L.D. response. Or worse, Hydra reinforcements with actual weird tech.
I swung my wand hard.
"Depulso!"
The Banishing Charm hit him like a battering ram. He flew backward and slammed into the wall. His head cracked against concrete and he slumped, unconscious.
Sorry.
Not sorry.
I didn't wait to see if he'd get up. I turned and jumped through the shattered window.
For one brief, horrible second, my stomach rose into my throat as gravity grabbed me and tried to end the chapter early. Wind screamed past my ears. The ground rushed up with the kind of speed that makes you suddenly appreciate how fragile bones are.
This is either going to work or I'm about to become street pizza.
"Arresto Momentum!"
The spell caught me thirty feet from impact and slowed my fall from "fatal" to "humiliatingly gentle." I drifted down and landed on the roof of a neighboring building, rolled to absorb the last bit of momentum, and sprinted into the shadows.
Behind me, Technology Pioneers' building blazed with red lights.
Alarm still screaming.
Employees would be panicking. Security would be yelling. Hydra would be furious.
Good.
Let them waste time explaining it to each other.
I kept moving, cutting across rooftops and stairwells and alleys, until the noise behind me became just another sound in the city. I didn't portal. Portals leave traces. I didn't Apparate. Apparition still risked leaving pieces of me behind when I was exhausted.
I ran like a normal criminal.
Which felt weirdly insulting after everything else I'd done.
By the time I got home, it was nearly midnight.
I locked my door, checked my windows, and set the enchanted pouch on my desk like it was a live grenade.
Then exhaustion finally caught me.
Not the gentle tiredness of a long day. The hollow, bone-deep exhaustion that comes after your body realizes it survived something it shouldn't have.
I collapsed into bed without even changing.
Tomorrow, I'd analyze the stolen research. Tomorrow, I'd figure out whether this could actually help with Veritaserum substitution. Tomorrow, I'd decide whether to tell Daniel and the Ancient One I'd just escalated from "student" to "corporate saboteur."
Tomorrow, I'd deal with consequences.
But tonight…
Tonight I let myself sleep.
And for the first time in weeks, my dreams were mercifully blank.
No green light.
No screaming.
Just darkness, quiet, and the fragile illusion that I'd bought myself one more day.