25

"Now, if I let you speak can you please not shout? I am here to help you actually."

Meredith moves her eyes up and down, I take that as yes and allow her to use her head.

"You are not going to harm my son?" are the first words out of her mouth, no wonder Peter loved her so much.

"I have no reason to harm him, in fact, his living aids me a lot," I reply with a straight face.

"What did you say about this father? His father loves him!"

"He never made himself known to him even though he has been back to earth 3 times since he was born. Let me ask you something, do you not find it strange you got cancer so soon after he just left?" I am not really pulling my punches, I need something from this woman and to get it I need her to understand the reality of her situation.

"How, how did you know? I only just found out today." Tears start to form in the corners of her eyes and I am starting to feel like a real jerk, but I need to do this.

"He gave you cancer because he discovered he liked you, unlike the other thousands of child bears he impregnated. And sorry to say it that way, but if you saw some of the races you would not call them women."

"He would never, he knows that would mean Peter would be alone." She is trying to defend him again.

"Let me clear things up for you, in 2 years you die from cancer, he sends space pirates to collect Peter, but because they know what he does to his children, they keep Peter. Many years later he finds Peter, and unlike his other children, he finds Peter can tap into his power. So he decided to imprison Peter and use him as a battery. Great dad eh?"

She is looking at me with a blank look, her mouth is slowly moving up and down. 

"I can give you the chance to change that, I can give both you and Peter the power to defend your family, and yes, I get something in exchange."

I think I broke her, she is staring at me, and even the tears stopped.

"Are you saying you can cure me so I can stay with Peter?"

Wait, that is what she took away from all that?

"Urm, yeah, I can heal you," I say in slight disbelief.

"And you're saying you are not using us to fight Peter's dad?" 

"Well, no, if I am being honest I want to give Peter that thing you were shown in the forest, it is something he can absorb so he will have the ability to defend himself." I do not mind sharing this as the seed is useless to me as it is.

 "And if he uses this 'ability', what will happen to him?" Meredith's voice was a mere whisper, her watery eyes never leaving mine. 

"Peter will become stronger. He'll gain abilities beyond any human comprehension, but he'll remain human in every way that counts," I assure her, at this point, I release her from my control. 

She's silent for a while, digesting what I'd just said. The room filled with an eerie silence as I watched her grapple with the enormity of my proposition. "And you? What do you gain from all this?"

I'm taken aback by her sudden assertiveness. "I gain an ally. And I literally grow more powerful the more allies I have."

A heavy sigh escapes her lips as she reaches for a photo inside her bag. A picture of a much younger Peter beams back at her. "If there's even a chance that Peter can fend off his father's machinations, it's worth it." Her voice is barely audible but laced with determination.

There it is, the maternal instinct to protect, a force more potent than any cosmic entity waging wars across galaxies. 

"Alright then," I say, standing up from my chair. "We have much work ahead of us."

I smile as I reach over to her and gently touch her head, using my Bio-kinesis to change all the cancer cells to healthy ones, at the same time I grant her the abilities similar to Power Man, this is simply to keep her safe with everything that is coming. 

"Done, I removed your cancer cells, and you will find you are a lot stronger, I adapted your muscle fibers so you should find it easy to control your strength."

Meredith looks up at me blankly, "Are you like him? From the stars?"

I smile and shake my head, "I am human, or should I say earthling?"

After some conversation, Meredith agrees to take us to the Forest where Ego shows her his seed, um, twice actually.

Using telepathy I am able to see the location she wants to show me, it is no issue to make a portal that shocks the Quills, it took me a good few minutes to convince them to walk through.

Looking at the young boy I indicate the white seed sticking out the ground.

"I need you to touch that, you will feel it sending energy into your body. Do not resist it, just let it gently enter your body, and do not try to release it. You will need it to stay in your body a few years for your body to get used to it, and start to absorb that kind of power by itself, okay?"

I was right, even standing right next to it I cannot feel any power coming into me, even though it is of a low enough amount for me to be able to normally copy.

Peter looks from me, then to his mom who gently nods with a smile on her lips.

The boy leans down and hesitantly touches the seed, I grin slightly as I see the energy start to flow into him I can feel the same power suddenly appearing in my body, and all the containers on my right hand are starting to fill up again, even the black one is getting some energy.

After standing there for about half an hour we see the seed shrivel up and die, all my containers have upgraded by 1, imagine if I could do this on all the other worlds, oh I wish.

Strangely, I feel like Water and Air are fully under my control. Hmm, I think these filled up originally from Iceman and Storm. That actually makes sense now.

"Are you both ready? I will open a portal to the Island where you will be safe as now the pirates might be coming earlier than expected but we are fully able to defend you there."

Meredith nods, Lilly is ready to greet them and the Island has already made a decent home for them.

One more stop for today, this one should be the easiest one, I open a portal and appear on a sand dune overlooking what seems to be a military base, except for the fact it seems to running on minimal staff.

"The laboratory of Professor Cornelius," I mumble to myself. Reaching out my telekinesis I use it to feel my way around the more broken down side of the base. It does not take me long to find several vials with high-energy fluid in it. I run in at high speed, see the warning sticker on the glass, and know I got it right. I vibrate through the glass and grab all the vials and leave without a trace. I find it so hard to understand why after they found the serum worked on Robert Reynolds, they destroyed all the other samples.

I open a portal to my city home and teleport Hope into the laboratory, then put the vials in the Bio lab and ask Lilly to run a full analysis on them. 

'Joel, the older Black Widow has been investigating S.H.I.E.L.D, she managed to place a program in their system that is meant to lip-read through all the security cameras and gather details on anyone saying "Hail Hydra", I have been able to keep track of on her since then, she seems very interested in ways to recover suppressed memories.'

What the hell is going on here, how could she know about them already, right now I would not be surprised to find out she was looking into what is under the ice in the Arctic?

'Joel, Peggy Carter just disabled the program, she did not discover it, it was like she knew it was there.'

Oh what the hell.

'Give me the widow's residence and current location please.'

'She is actually sitting in the same café you took Jean to.'

I am too tired for running around, let's do this with my mind.

Sitting inside a café across from the shield building in New York is a rather attractive looking red head, it is a pity her demeanour indicates she really does not want company, and at this moment she is very frustrated, for a very long time she never even knew who she was, she just knew she had a certain skill set, then, slowly scattered memories came back to her, but they were all related to the future. Each time she tried to take actions to investigate or prevent those thing she recalled, something, or someone would take actions to make sure they actually happened.

She sighed deeply, it was then she realized there was someone sitting across from her. A young man seemed to be patiently waiting for her to gather her thoughts, but what scared her was she had no recollection of his arrival.