I took a sip of soda in my corner office in the Triskelion and surveyed that which was now mine. SHIELD in shambles, Coulson looking into me, not the easiest trigger if I needed to force some violence to justify a repression but still a viable candidate. I was secure in control of the two man killswitch, between Pierce and Garret, practically belonging to me.
All it took was a few bodies. Fury's had been in several pieces when I checked in on it, but it was his and he was dead. We deleted both his retinal scans. We'd killed a lot of people to be where we were to today - We had ears in half the pockets in the world, eyes everywhere the sun shone, and the major share of the industries of the world counting on us for the supply chain.
Between PRIDE and Hydra, I had influence over almost all high technology and finance, as well as genuinely expansive access to education - Osiris allowed me to offer almost any level of training in penetrated markets - Those students with Osiris PhD-Equivalents could tutor Americans in any subject that interested them. Blessed be the power of me. Of course, the increasing ease of acquiring skill was lowering the demand value of skilled labor. The lowering of the value of skilled labor meant that wages were going down in high-skill countries as we just uploaded the equivalent of years of machinist experience into whoever we wanted. We had managed to get licensed in Poland, which meant that we could deliver the power of instant learning to people all over the European Union if they wanted to stop by. The Osiris Mining expeditions were simultaneously collapsing the extraction companies on Earth. And Osiris' entertainment division was picking up all over the world, inserting people into a video game environment.
In terms of global security, I had ten thousand round a minute machine gun sniper rifles, a fleet of cutting edge planes with energy shields, over two thousand GDT Fireflies. Tony Stark still around, still among the most powerful potential individuals. We had structured a complex set of heavy explosives to be able to Quantum Tunnel them precisely into any position in Earth orbit or atmosphere and blow them up, so Thanos' ships would explode. We had ten times as many Helicarriers as canon.
Victory should've tasted sweet. I wasn't enjoying it as much as I thought I would. It was just running through me like water. Not bitter, but as if it were incidental.
"You going to stare into the distance forever?" Andromeda asked, holding a sleeping Persephone in her arm.
"I'm just thinking," I said, taking a drink. With an office here, we had good reason to move back to D.C., but I didn't want to do that - Our support network was almost entirely in Los Angeles and what wasn't was in Louisiana which, absolutely not, no offense to Louisiana. But Andromeda and Persephone had come along for this trip to give it a test.
"What're you thinking about," Andromeda asked.
"How far we've come." I said honestly.
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"You mean the fact that we are on the verge of the dreams of Hydra for the past thousand years," Andromeda said, "Or that your daughter is two?"
"It's both," I said, even though it hadn't been till that moment. Persephone was two years old now and the most precious thing in my whole world. Her vocabulary was, of course, impossibly large - We had to keep her out of the presence of strangers for too long, and the PRIDE and their kids were sworn to absolute secrecy. She had a carefully maintained brown hair and a soft voice and she was very happy that her momma would be able to carry her until she was thirty.
"Soon," Andromeda said. "South America's pink tide will ebb and our old contacts are in excellent positions to pick up the pieces, Pakistan, India, and Malaysia will move firmly into orbit. With that much political firepower at your command, we'll be able to seize control once SWORD handles Thanos. Thanos is coming, right? And SWORD can handle him?"
"I have no reason to think he's not," I said. "And I'm optimistic it can." Truthfully, I may have gone overboard. I do not think that the canonical army could've held against two thousand burning, flying-teleporting super troops with singularity bombs and targeted machine gun fire support. But I was still hoping we would succeed at finding vibranium in the asteroid belt somewhere and I'd be able to use it with the particle infuser.
"And Persephone," Andromeda said, "is going to grow up the daughter of the most powerful man in the world. Everybody will know her name and everybody will love her, as precious as she is. The only thing she's missing is a sibling."
"It does seem like it's time," I said, without either much dread or enthusiasm. I would love the baby when it came, of course, I had loved Persephone and she had been a shocking gift. A strange grace, perhaps, from God or fate that I no longer paid much homage to. I hadn't been to church since I'd beaten Nicole Arden to death with Andromeda's pistol half a decade ago. Maybe I should go.
Something old and forgotten inside me cursed me and I knew that I should not.
"Have some more enthusiasm," Andromeda said.
"I will be absolutely ecstatic about every step of this process," I swore, "Except the planning part. The making part, the waiting part, the waking in the middle of the night part, I'm sure I'll love it. The deciding to do it part, it's like going to the gym. You know it'll feel good but you don't want to go."
Andromeda laughed at that and Persephone rubbed her eyes and started to wake up.
"If we're going to have a second kid, we have to stay in Los Angeles," I said definitively. The PRIDE kids were normal, which was something that Persephone badly needed. "Can we name the baby something short next time?"
Andromeda pursed her lips, "I was thinking Pericles or Psyche."
I was going to be god emperor of the planet and my children were going to have the dumbest names on it.