Good, he thinks, with a little stab of relief; the rifts have done some of the legwork for him, in helping her to believe, in hopefully not chewing off her own leg hoping to leave and find her children again. Because it’s true: their bodies feel different, their abilities dampened and tamped-down like a doused flame, a raging inferno dialled down to embers. Wanda isn’t immersed in chaos magic anymore and he’s not tapped into the heartbeat of the multiverse anymore. Their claws dulled, and thank god for it, in certain cases —

“I’m assuming you don’t mean the quiet of a farmstead in the countryside,” Stephen says dryly; and it might sound like a nudge at the secluded cabin he found her in, and it sort of is, but it’s also his childhood. He grew up in the quiet, the silence. Chattering cicadas. Wind in the fields. Until he moved to the city, which would’ve been a deafening roar for a telepath like her.

“Not the way you mean it.” There’s a beat. Intellectual curiosity muscles its way to the forefront, past his wary suspicion and distrust, his lingering fear, to ask: “Is it a reprieve? That silence.”