In Your Eyes // Steve Rogers

What is The Eye of Agamotto?

He mumbled Doctor phrases and possible treatments I didn't understand, not because of my lack of a Doctorate, but simply because I couldn't focus on his voice. I was hearing whispering voices coming from the necklace on his chest. Overlaps of my name and a single phrase: "Come to me, my love," spoke to me. 

I managed to tear my hands from my ears long enough to point at the Eye of Agamotto. Stephen, understanding the message, dropped his hands. He closed the Eye. 

"Sorry," he said quickly. "Hide behind the shelf. If we want it to focus, I can't control it when you're in it's sight."

Hands rubbing my temples, I shuffled behind a nearby shelf. I tilted my head, allowing a single eye to continue to watch Stephen as he tried to work with the Eye of Agamotto. 

He connected his wrists and spun them, generating three rotating circles around his right arm. He stuck it straight, allowing the other hand to work the magic from the Eye. He waved his hand. The apple on the desk, his focus, degraded. He waved his hand the opposite way. The apple was untouched again. 

Stephen looked to me after he lowered his hands, closing the Eye. "You said you had traveled through time, didn't you? That's likely the cause. Your connection to the stone allowed you to do. Does it continue to let you?"

"Don't know. Not eager to try. Last time I time traveled, I almost broke up my relationship with future me with past me," I said. 

Stephen opened his mouth, then closed it again. "Right. So, this thing can control time. It's a... It's like a..."

"A time stone," I finished, sighing. I patted my hand over my rapidly beating heart. "And, somehow, it's tied to me."

Stephen returned his focus to the book in front of him. He flipped a few pages forward, then opened the Eye once more. He wiggled his hand over the ripped paper, replacing the previously torn page. 

"Can you translate it?" I wondered. 

"'Dormammu,'" he read to me. "'The dark dimension. Eternal life.'"

The words brought on sheets of what appeared to be emerald-tinted mirrors. Echoing booms hit the room as more layered on. Shadows danced through each one, the voices coming from it got louder with every second, until Stephen's curiosity about the odd occurrence was broken by a startled, "No!" from two incoming men. 

Stephen whipped around to face them, but not before widening his eyes at me. 

I hurried to hide further in the library. I ducked behind a cart of books. 

"Tempering with the continuum probabilities is forbidden!" shouted the Asian man. 

"I was just doing exactly what it said in the book," defended Stephen. 

The African man shut the book quickly. He asked, "And what did the book say abut the dangers of performing that ritual?"

"I don't know. I haven't gotten to that part yet."

"Temporal manipulations can create branches in time, unstable dimensions, spacial paradoxes. Time loops! You wanna get stuck living the same moment over and over forever? Or never having existed at all?!" shouted the African man unbelievably. 

Stephen cleared his throat awkwardly. "They really should put the warnings before the spells, I mean--"

"Your curiosity could have gotten you killed," interrupted the Asian man, so calm it was terrifying to even me. "You weren't manipulating the Space-Time Continuum. You were breaking it. We do not temper with natural law. We defend it."