Gabriel & Clint | Multiverse Theory & One-Sided Intra-Team Intel Sharing

[xp_hawkeye]

Clint and Gabriel meet up for a long overdue discussion about the portal, Clint loses the plot briefly, and then they... do not actually exchange intel, but Clint doesn't mind.

(Note: I am not a theoretical physicist, nor do I know much about multiverse theory beyond what Google gave me. I apologize in advance for the absolute crack in the log below. Consider it an homage to 'science in comics.' <3)


Cafe Nova, an understated eatery in a strip mall, looked like nothing to write home about. With its average bistro decor and lackluster setting, it was the kind of salads-and-paninis place that you might stop for lunch because you had nearby errands, and it was there.

And the food wasn't bad, generally. But, as Gabriel had explained to Clint, the key was to order one of the seemingly out-of-place Middle Eastern dishes scattered across the menu, and then you'd find a real gem.

"Someone told me about this place when I first moved out here," Gabe explained, leaving out that he'd met the man on Grindr. He swirled the straw in his strawberry lemonade. "And when I was still getting the lay of the land, I came a lot, and the husband and wife who run the place seem to like me." He shrugged. "All of which is to say, be prepared for some free dessert."

"Free dessert," Clint said, half-smiling as he took a sip of his cafe mocha milkshake. "Noted." He liked the place. It was exactly the kind of restaurant he only vaguely remembered from his childhood before his parents and grandparents died... and the kind that would've been too fancy for him while he was at the circus, but not the sort of place Andre or Steve would have taken him and Matt. "I don't have any real food hangups, so gimme some recs - what's your favorite thing here so far?"

"You can't really go wrong," Gabe shrugged. "The falafel's pretty good. That chicken wrap sounds really pedestrian but it's, like, amazing. It's basically shawarma, but they don't call it that, and it comes with this garlic sauce that I would eat on literally everything." The revving of an engine caught his attention, and his eyes went to the window, where a teen in a white Mustang was pulling out of the parking lot. "Honestly, I can just order a bunch of stuff for us to share. My only real contribution anywhere near the order of magnitude of, like, explaining whatever it is you're about to explain."

"Sounds like a plan," Clint said, nodding. "So... wormholes. The gist is, like, physics. The idea being that, at its most basic, for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction. For wormholes out in the wilds of deep space, the theory is that they form after a star goes supernova. And while there's all that sci-fi stuff about them being great to travel through to get to other points in galaxies or the universe as a whole, that's all crap. Those wormholes don't have any kind of stabilization, for lack of a better word. That means instead of actually transporting you somewhere, you get like... stretched out until you're nothing but a molecular sheet of former human.

"An Einstein-Rosen Bridge, however, has enough structure to actually lead from point A to point B without killing people. Theoretically." Clint tacked that on at the end because while explaining wormholes and physics to people would be a normal thing to do in a diner, Einstein-Rosen Bridges were still theoretical outside of a very particular group of people who happened to be on a first name basis with a particular Norse god. "The question posed to us, however, is basically taking that theory a step farther. Assuming you have a stable Einstein-Rosen Bridge, what happens if point A remains stationary while point B is flapping around the universe or whatever. How does that fuck with the space-time continuum, not to mention the possibility of its impact on the multiverse.

"Which is, in and of itself, a theory. We're so far up theoretical physics' ass right now..." Clint shook his head. "Any questions so far?"

"You lost me at physics," Gabriel half-joked. He'd somehow forgotten what a nerd Clint was. "Hold on, I don't want the rest of this conversation to be interrupted." He waved over the woman who co-owned the restaurant, who greeted him with a warm smile. He ordered a handful of dips, a mountain of pita, some falafel and a chicken kebab, knowing she'd likely provide something extra. The perks of being a regular.

"Sorry," he said after she'd left. "So, wormholes elongate you out of existence," he ventured, because that was his best of understanding. "This bridge thing, whatever the hell that is..." He picked at his cuticles as he considered. "No, sorry, I don't get any of that."

"No problem," Clint said, reaching for the napkin dispenser. He pulled all the condiments toward himself and then unfolded the napkin so it was as long and then as it could be. "Okay, so that's our wormhole in the wild. You go in one end and, theoretically, maybe your molecules come out on the other side." He slid the ketchup and the mustard bottles to either side of the wormhole. "There's no guarantee you'll make it from point A to point B. An Einstein-Rosen Bridge -- we can call it the rainbow bridge for now, cause that's what the Asgardians allegedly call it -- has a definitive beginning and end."

Reaching out, he put the ketchup and the mustard bottles atop either end of the napkin. "So the rainbow bridge is stabilized in space and time. You go in the ketchup side, you come out the mustard side and vice versa. Theoretically. The question we're trying to figure out is what would happen if, say, there was a catastrophe of some kind and the ketchup end stayed stable, but the mustard end didn't." Removing the mustard, he shoved all the other condiments in the general direction of the unanchored side of the napkin. "What's that unstable side doing now? Where's it gonna connect? Can it connect at all? Are we looking at a possible permanent connection to a completely different world? Or is it just gonna flap around in the space-breeze hitting other realities or universes all willy-nilly?"

Gabriel's head hurt. He wasn't sure if all of this was beyond his grasp, or if Clint just assumed he knew more than he did. "I don't understand," he said slowly, "what any of this has to do with the mansion?" He was missing something. "There's a wormhole... in the basement?"

After glancing around to gauge how close the nearest other patrons were, he lowered his voice a bit and said, "Yeah, in the Chapel's subbasement. The deal with it is that we used to have a pocket dimension entrance in the subbasement that led to what amounted to a really old, magical storage unit. That storage unit, we're pretty sure, was stable on either end and was somehow positioned directly in the middle of a rainbow bridge, since it had another side that opened onto Glastonbury Tor in England. There was that whole Halloween thing that happened, though, and the pocket dimension collapsed, Topaz got trapped inside -- all that.

"When Topaz came back, and we're still not entirely sure how that happened except for magic, we discovered that our entrance to the dimension was still stable. But the other end... really is just sort of flapping around. We kept it monitored for a while, but then Kitty, Kane, and Molly came up with not only a better modeling/mapping thing to help predict what we've started calling anomalies, but also with a safety mechanism so that, if we hop into the rainbow bridge, we have a way to get back.

"That sort of changed eXcalibur's entire purpose," Clint continued. "We shifted pretty much everything we had involving magical and/or weird stuff over to X-Force for Wanda and Amanda when Topaz transferred there, which left us with a good bit of time on our hands and the ability to figure out how to fix the anomalies. You with me?"

"Barely." He sighed and idly scratched his chin. "I mean, you must know how insane this sounds, right? Half of the words you're putting together don't make any sense."

"Yeah, it's all pretty wackadoo, not gonna lie," Clint agreed, drinking from his milkshake again and leaning back with a sigh. "I guess the main important stuff is basically that there is an unstable wormhole in the Chapel's basement and because of what the dude who put the world back together after M-Day did, it left a lot of problems for a lot of alternate realities. How we get there and why it works isn't the main point. It's that eXcalibur's functioning now as basically an emergency response team. We pick up an anomaly. If it doesn't resolve itself, we go through the wormhole to figure out what's wrong, fix it, and then come back. Otherwise whole realities might collapse in on themselves."

"Right, and this bridge or whatever, it's like... a hose?" Gabriel thought he sensed Clint's skepticism, but maybe he was projecting. He knew how dumb he sounded. "You know, from a cartoon. Like, fixed on one end, but otherwise the water's gushing out and it's just kind of flying and flapping around, occasionally resting on different spots on the ground?"

It was a weird metaphor, but he was a little thrown by hearing the other man talk about M-Day. It was still strange to have it all out in the open like that, let alone to have it coming from Clint.

"Yeah, that's exactly right," Clint said, nodding almost excitedly. "That's what the bridge does. So we hop through, figure out what's wrong, and fix it. It's also led to things like April coming through here? And that didn't create a paradox here because she never existed here and it didn't mess up her original universe or whatever because she was supposed to be dead there. The bridge just happened to touch down and she fell through at a weirdly precisely perfect moment."

"April. Right." Gabriel was only vaguely sure who April was, but in fairness, he hadn't been around much. The job had been demanding. "Sorry, so..." He scratched the back of his neck. Something was nagging at him; the idea of paradoxes and existence. "So what would happen, if, like... the moment wasn't so weirdly precisely perfect?"

"She would've died for real in her own universe and we never would've known about the possibility for an April to exist unless we'd run into one in an alternate reality," Clint answered. Then he tilted his head to the side and waggled his hand a little. "Or, if there was another April here... eventually our universe would have imploded? Basically, it would have created the type of anomaly that eXcalibur bounces around fixing. If we could figure it out and get her back where she came from, we could probably keep our universe from eating itself. If we couldn't..."

Gabriel wasn't sure what to say. He wanted to make a joke about the universe imploding -- it seemed to have a built-in failsafe, given the Xorn of it all -- but that hardly felt appropriate. "And we're sure the universe couldn't tolerate an anomaly? Like, why couldn't it create another universe with two Aprils?"

"That gets tricky, but the gist of it is that two of the same exact person can't exist in the same exact space and time without breaking something," Clint said. "Usually, this is applied to something specific like time travel, which would be running along a single, linear timeline. The problem winds up being that, given the multiverse theory, there's the possibility of branching timelines, right? So like, the theory is that each and every single choice -- to go left or right at an intersection, to say yes or no to a date, to swipe ignore or pick up a phone call -- all have varying consequences and each of those choices has been made, which means from that specific decision, you form the branches. And as more and more choices get made in all of the realities, more and more of the branches form.

"So for example, it's like -- you chose this restaurant for us to meet for lunch. Until you actually made that decision, there were hundreds of places you could have chosen. Up until that point, you're you, right? You make that decision and suddenly you're not just you anymore, you're the you who picked this restaurant instead of the diner down the road that serves breakfast all day. And those decisions get made all the time. So there's no way to know for sure that the reality you're jumping into is actually the same or different from the one you came from because you never know how big or small the choice that changed the reality was, so you don't know if you're exactly the same as the you in that reality or not," Clint said. "I mean, maybe there's a reality where you and I work together -- which was nearly this one, actually. Sydney offered me a job back when the wormhole first halfway blew up the Chapel. Maybe there's one where we don't know each other at all. The point is, why risk a paradox if we don't have to? Because we can never be 100% sure. I'm... also not 100% sure any of that made as much sense out loud as it did in my head..."

"No, I kinda get it." Gabriel wanted to reference Sliding Doors, but this conversation felt more serious than that. "It's just... a lot." He wasn't sure what to say, because the way that he could relate to all of this was through personal experience. But he wasn't sure how much to share with anyone; it still felt too weighty. "I guess I don't understand how a me from a dimension where I went to college can't, like, co-exist with me in this universe without the world ending." He shrugged and picked up his drink. "I mean, I'll take it as written, I just don't get it.”

“Because you might not have been the one to make the decision that changed things,” Clint said. “Functionally, you could be the exact same version of yourself, the other you just took advantage of an opportunity provided to him. And if you’d been given that opportunity, you’d’ve done the same exact thing and wound up going to college. You weren’t what caused the divergence, the branching. Possibly. That’s the theory, at least.”

Gabriel slurped the remnants of his drink. “And it’s all too dangerous to test, so better to snuff out the problems rather than, like, let them see what happens.”

There was a kind of logic to this, he supposed, aAnd he wondered if it was the same principle that had originally governed their inability to mention their kintsugi reality. But he didn’t remember the specifics of that conversation; everything else had sort of drowned it out.

"Pretty much," Clint said, nodding as he reached for the tall spoon so he could eat the parts of his milkshake that were still basically solid ice cream. "I mean, what we're doing right now is all... very, very new. And we're the only ones doing it because having an unstable rainbow bridge just flapping around in the space/time continuum is unprecedented. And we're the only people with access to it -- at least from our end, obviously. So better safe than sorry."

"So are you... going into the thing? Or just waiting for things to come out?"

"We go to the things," Clint said. "Sometimes the things fix themselves, which is nice, but the bigger the anomaly, the more likely we're going to have to go see what's wrong. Luckily, the unstable end seems to usually attach to an area that's near whatever the problem is. We've still got a lot of kinks to work out, like worst case scenarios, but we haven't actually run into those just yet." He rapped his knuckles on the table to stave off a jinx. "But I'd still like to be more proactive than reactive."

"Sounds like you," Gabriel replied, because it did, in this universe and the one before it. "Certainly sounds exciting," he said after a moment. Though he wasn't so sure; his experiences with alternate realities and the things that came from them had largely been negative ones. "Whoever said space was the final frontier didn't know about this."

Clint quirked a smile and shrugged, half boyish charm and half actually downplaying whatever it was about himself or his words that'd made Gabriel say that first bit. Then he pointed at the other man with his spoon and nodded. "Yes, that. Exactly. Although they had wormholes in Next Gen. I'm pretty sure... though maybe not. Hm. It's been a while. Maybe I'll have to do a rewatch party or something."

"Next..." Gabriel was puzzled, and then it hit him. "Oh, god, Star Trek?" He groaned. "How is that the nerdiest thing you've said today?"

Grinning widely around the spoon he'd now put in his mouth, Clint shrugged. "I dunno, man," he said, almost managing to keep a straight face as he continued, "But I feel like you might need to sit in on the rewatch party."

Gabriel shook his head. "Absolutely — and I cannot emphasize this enough — not."

"Aw, c'mon," Clint said, wiggling his eyebrows a little. "Season one's a little hard to get into, but once Riker gets his beard, it's all uphill."

"My dude, we live in a house full of geeks who would love nothing more than to share this experience with you." Gabriel shrugged. "I am not one of them."

"Okay, okay. I can see you're more of a Kirk man, obviously," Clint said, laughing now.

"Oh my God." Gabriel rolled his eyes. "You're impossible."

Still laughing a little bit, Clint finished off his milkshake just as he saw their waitress coming toward them with a tray held up on her fingertips. "Yeah, sure," he agreed. "Anything else I can update you on? Gossip? You've got access to all the action reports I do, so I'm gonna guess you know about excursions and everything from the other teams."

"Yes... and I definitely read all those..." The waitress dropped off their food; as he'd expected, there was an extra flatbread that Gabe had not ordered. He smiled in thanks as she filled up their water glasses and took their empty glasses before she retreated back to the kitchen. "See. What'd I tell you?" He grabbed a pita. "Do you have any good gossip?"

"Mm..." Clint picked up a piece of falafel and pondered it for a moment before taking a bite. He hummed a little to himself, enjoying the flavor for a long moment. "You gotta tell me what the last juicy thing is that you heard. I can't just take all kinds of shots in the dark over here."

"Oh please." Gabriel ripped a piece of the pita off and dipped it into some baba ganoush. He lowered his voice. "I'm a spy, Barton. That's an amateur level trap. You've got nothing."

"That assumes I don't already know whatever it is you might've said," Clint pointed out, lowering his voice to match Gabriel's volume. "I'm not part of X-Force, but I'm a spy, too. Or well, I was." He raised his eyebrows significantly. "So we can move on or, in the interest of intra-team communication, I could tell you about how one of my guys in the former Eastern Block let me know that a guy connected to organized crime, terrorism, and the occult is moving a library of magic and magic-adjacent books from Transia to Symkaria sometime this week."

"Hardly qualifies as gossip." Gabriel raised an eyebrow. "But I will happily pass on the tip to someone for whom all those nouns — especially occult and magic — will be far more exciting." Symkaria was, too, outside his network for now, as he hadn't found a reason to turn a trip there into a compelling vacation. Yet.

Clint snorted. "It's gossip for the right kinds of people. He also passed on some intel about another training facility for children along the lines of the Red Room, but for boys. Maybe it is or was under the same umbrella of evil, but who can really tell with Soviet secret agencies and Russian black box sites? His information hinted that it hadn't been nearly as successful as the Black Widow program, but didn't go into detail about it beyond saying the operatives were going to go by the callsign Wolf-Spider. I haven't run into anyone using that, but you never know when something might turn up. I relayed that to Tasha already, though."

"Wolf... Spider?" Gabriel speared a piece of falafel with his fork, then pulled it off the tines with a scrap of pita . "Really? Feels really uninspired."

"Eh," Clint said, shrugging briefly before reaching for his water. "They had a theme. I'm not sure what the timeline on the Wolf-Spider training thing was, though. Waiting for word from my guy... or for Tasha to just swoop in with all the intel necessary." He crooked a grin.

"Wish I had something more to tell you." Gabriel shrugged. "I've been gone a lot, so no good mansion goss. And all my work stuff is just leads but nothing else."

"Nah, we're good. Just tell Marie-Ange I did my sharing-is-caring with X-Force for the week," Clint said, shoving an entire falafel into his mouth. He should probably use some of the sauces provided, but the plain falafel was really good and everybody said he was a heathen carnie trash panda anyway, so why not play it up?

"I'm sure she'll be forever grateful."