บท 86: Chapter 86
After Thanos won, Maggie went with the remaining Avengers.
They left Okoye to her country of ashes and flew away on the Quinjet. No one spoke much. Thor didn't speak at all, and neither did Maggie.
Rhodey had been gentle with her; he removed her broken wings, helped her to the Quinjet, strapped her into one of the seats. He'd tried to get her to speak. After his efforts failed he'd bowed his head and sat down beside her, moving feebly like an old man.
Seven people sat in the Quinjet: Steve, Natasha, Bruce, Rhodey, Maggie, Thor, and Rocket. Nearly the same amount of people that had arrived in Wakanda, but this time… the absences around them were deafening.
Maggie was… Maggie was… maybe not Maggie anymore. Her body had survived, but it was as if the rest of her had crumbled away with half the universe. She wasn't sure what remained: Maggie Stark, the Wyvern, or just a shade of the two.
When her thoughts made any sense at all, they took the shape of Tony's face.
They'd decided to go back to the Avengers Facility. On the way back, Maggie became dimly aware of a buzz of activity – someone had found a pager belonging to Nick Fury, and it was transmitting a signal.
Maggie experienced a drifting thought: didn't we kill Nick Fury?
She couldn't find the energy to follow the thought.
They landed at the Avengers Facility at night. Maggie unclipped her safety harness, stood, and followed the others down the ramp. She identified: pain. Not a broken bone, but some muscle or joint had been wrenched in her back, making walking difficult. The wound in her forehead had stopped bleeding but it radiated a sharp pain whenever her face moved. The base of her skull throbbed.
She followed the others to –her chest grew tight– the workshop. Bruce was talking, holding Nick Fury's pager in his hands like a precious gem. The others listened, faces grim.
It was only after several seconds of silence passed that Maggie realized Bruce had asked her a question. He was watching her, the questioning look on his face gradually turning to alarm at her stone-faced silence. The others turned to look at her. Thor had vanished somewhere.
"Maggie?" he repeated, soft-toned. "Where… where are the power coils?"
Power coils.
Workshop.
Maggie swallowed and stepped forward. It felt like she was moving underwater but she made it to the component shelves other side of the workshop and pulled out two reels of power coils. She turned and then found herself motionless again, staring at the power coils in her hands.
To her left, Dum-E came to life with a trill and an inquisitive beep. Maggie couldn't look away from the coils.
A hand appeared over hers. "Thanks," said Bruce softly. She looked into his eyes, and saw nothing but pain and empathy there. His pain had galvanized him. Hers had hollowed her out. Bruce looked over his shoulder. "Maybe… maybe you guys should get to the med bay, I can take care of this-"
Maggie felt her other hand rest on top of Bruce's, and he looked back at her. Slowly, surely, she tightened her fingers around the power coils and moved to the workbench.
The others started talking again; a buzz of conversation that washed over Maggie. They were all in rough shape after the battle but they all needed to do something. Maggie understood these people, understood that they couldn't just stop. She wasn't sure she was one of them any longer though.
Natasha, Rhodey, Steve, and Rocket left, but it was a while before Maggie realized they were gone.
"To the common room," Bruce murmured when she looked up. "To get eyes on the… on the larger situation."
Maggie turned back to her work.
She helped Bruce Banner isolate the pager in an observation tank and connect it to a continuous power source, bypassing its battery. Dum-E volunteered to hold the pager as they hooked it up. Maggie's fingers performed familiar actions, but new eyes watched it happen.
And then their work was done, and Maggie's fingers fell still.
"You should rest," Bruce said, rubbing his eyes behind his glasses. He looked up and met her gaze, and Maggie felt something inside her twist at the raw grief swimming in his eyes.
She couldn't be in the room anymore. She turned and walked out of the workshop, retracing familiar steps to the Avengers common room. Bruce had said they were looking at the larger situation, and something in her felt drawn to that. Because she couldn't make her brain understand.
She walked into the common room and was greeted by a shuddering gasp.
Pepper. The bright-eyed, tear stained woman stood in the middle of the common room, Natasha's hand on her back as she stared across at Maggie. She must have run into the common room just before Maggie arrived. The others, who'd been in the middle of contacting world agencies and governments, looked from Pepper to Maggie with pain-filled eyes, cautious and concerned.
"Pepper." The word came out as more of a mumble, but she felt some of Steve and Natasha's sharp concern soften.
Pepper didn't run to her. She walked like she too was underwater, or like Maggie was a frightened animal she didn't want to scare off. Maggie could only imagine how she looked to Pepper – standing like a puppet with her strings cut loose, her uniform streaked with blue blood and scorch marks. A long wound stretched from her left eyebrow and up past her hairline, and the entire left side of her head and face was caked in dried blood and grime. She couldn't imagine what her eyes showed Pepper. Perhaps nothing. Because that was all she felt.
When Pepper was just three paces away, Maggie wondered if Pepper would curse her. If she would scream, and cry, and ask how they could have failed so terribly.
Something flickered in her chest. Malfunction.
But then Pepper's hand rested feather-light against her cheek. "Maggie."
Maggie let Pepper pull her into her arms, not making a sound when the movements made her injured body shriek. She just let Pepper Potts hug her, unable to move or speak.
Across the room, Steve and Natasha shared a glance. Information scrolled down the holoscreens in front of them: numbers, maps of countries, holographic faces. Maggie looked away.
Pepper pulled back. "You're hurt."
If she'd had anything inside her other than emptiness, Maggie might have laughed. "Yes."
Pepper took her hand. "Let's go."
Pepper brought Maggie back to her rooms and made her sit on the edge of the bathtub. She'd never seen Maggie like this before; when she'd appeared in the common room covered in blood and ash, dead behind the eyes, Pepper's heart had damn near stopped in her chest. F.R.I.D.A.Y. hadn't been able to tell Pepper much beyond the list of Avengers who had survived in Wakanda. Steve had been able to give her some warning, in amongst explaining with tears in his eyes how the Avengers had lost. "She hasn't spoken since it happened," he'd murmured.
Silences were dangerous, when it came to Maggie.
Pepper brushed Maggie's hair back from her face. Her eyes were fixed in the middle distance, and her hands lay open on her knees. Pepper closed her eyes.
The enormity of what had just happened… it defied belief. Defied understanding. Pepper had watched people fade to ash around her and waited for her turn… only to be left standing, alone, in a world forever changed. It had been less than a day, and the world had just fallen to pieces. People had fallen to pieces. Half the world had survived, but no one had been spared.
She didn't know how to do this.
But Maggie was hurt, and Maggie was bloody. Pepper could look after her. And maybe when that was done, Pepper might have the strength to face tomorrow. Maybe her eyes would no longer ache from crying. Maybe she could hold on to the hope that Tony was still out there.
Pepper turned and filled a bowl with warm water.
When Pepper began to treat Maggie's wounds, Maggie managed to mumble: "You don't have to–"
But Pepper just shook her head. "Let me."
So Maggie let her wipe away the blood and lay bandages on her wounds, let her peel off her bloody armor and bathe her. Let her put her in fresh clothes that smelled of laundry detergent. She let Pepper bring her to the common room – the others had gone elsewhere, who knew where – and sit beside her. Neither of them said a word.
The enormity of it all threatened to drown Maggie, so she forced herself into vacancy again. She let herself pretend that what was real was false, as if she could wield the orange shroud of the Reality Stone. She let herself forget what she'd seen. What she'd lost.
She almost convinced herself.
Space
Tony watched Titan disappear into the black haze of space as he was borne away on the Guardians' clanky spaceship.
He and Nebula had banded together when they found themselves alone together on Titan, their thoughts instantly turning to survival: get on the ship, get the ship moving, get to somewhere they could survive, and then… well, who knew what then. They hadn't spoken much.
But now, with the rackety engines boosting them out of the atmosphere, Tony stared down at the red-brown surface and felt his tired eyes burn. He dropped his forehead against the glass of the cockpit.
He couldn't even put words to the complete and utter failure he felt. He'd failed the universe. He'd failed… he'd failed the kid. Please, sir, please don't make me go. It clawed at him, eating away at his body and soul.
Though that could also be the infection.
He coughed, wincing when the movement jostled the stab wound in his side.
"Come with me."
"Jesus!" Tony flinched and whirled around, instinctively moving back when he found the blue, grim-faced cyborg alien just inches away from him. "I need to get you a bell or something."
She frowned. "Why would I need a bell?"
He waved a hand. "Never mind. Come with you where?"
"You're injured." Her pitch black eyes flicked over him. "Come with me to the med bay and I will treat you."
Tony eyed her face. She was so… rigid, utterly hard, as if she lived and breathed for nothing but battle.
"No," he said, "We should – we should double check on the engines, those things might not hold for long–"
"Med bay first. You need treatment."
"Why?" The word slipped out without him meaning for it to, sounding hopeless and small in the space between them. The engines, the infection… did it matter?
Nebula's dark eyes took him in, her mouth firm. After a long moment, she said: "Because there are people waiting for you."
Tony let out a breath. His eyes were burning again. "What if there's not?" Saying the words felt like poison on his tongue. He didn't even want to consider it, but half the universe had crumbled away. When he thought of the people he'd left on earth, the people waiting for him, and considered the fifty fifty odds… it made him feel physically ill. He wondered if not knowing was worse.
Nebula's head cocked. "What if there is?"
Looking back into her dark eyes, Tony suddenly felt a tugging sensation in his gut when he realized who Nebula reminded him of.
Maggie. Maggie back in those first few weeks at the Facility when she'd been hard, and spiky, and bewildered by the world around her. Nebula and Maggie had both been forged out of incredible pain and violence and had moved beyond that to find… a person.
Tony's eyes widened incrementally. Nebula was trying to be a person.
He cleared his throat, swaying slightly. "Okay," he nodded. "Okay. To the med bay, then."
Avengers Facility, Upstate New York
Maggie slept for the better part of a day, curled in her bed. Each time she stirred she closed her eyes and pressed herself back down into unconsciousness. It was easier there.
When she finally woke and couldn't go back to sleep, the world was still torn in two and nothing had changed. Maggie paced into the bathroom, turned, and stood in front of the mirror.
She didn't recognize the woman who looked back. Standing motionless and pale in the shadowed bathroom, dark shadows hung under her lifeless eyes and a deep red wound sliced up through her left brow. She looked like a ghoul in the mirror, an apparition.
Around her neck hung two chains with pendants: one a heavy black bead, the other a pearl that glistened in the low light.
Maggie considered violence. She could see it in her mind's eye: she would hurl her fist into the mirror and it would shatter into thousands of sparkling shards. She'd tear out the sink next, hurl it across the room and into the glass walls of the shower. She'd rip towel rods out of the walls, plunge her hands into the tiled floor and tear it up. Glass shards would dig into her skin, make her feel something. She'd scream. It would be noisy, and bloody, and might put some life in her dead eyes.
What's the point.
Violence would require anger. Maggie couldn't find any of that within herself. She couldn't find anything. She was sure her emotions were somewhere inside her; she could feel them churning through her, scorching her lungs and squeezing her heart, making her hands shake. But it was as if someone had simply snipped away her connection to the emotions, leaving her… floating. Absent.
After staring into her own dark eyes for what could have been hours, Maggie turned and walked out of the bathroom.
There were postcards on the dresser that she couldn't bear to look at. She stepped toward the window overlooking the forest, and sat.
The Avengers left in the Facility were reeling, trying to wrap their heads and their hearts around the enormity of what had been done. But they didn't let anyone slip into solitude.
Natasha appeared in Maggie's room an hour after dawn and wordlessly coaxed her out, across the sun-drenched lawns and to the common room.
Natasha looked… Maggie had never seen the assassin display so much emotion before. It was as if all her shields and pretenses had been stripped away.
The others had gathered in the common room, watching holographic screens with scrolling lists of names and faces. Countries around the world were trying to count, to get some idea of the scope of what was being called the Decimation.
Maggie took one look before she sprinted to the kitchen and threw up in the trash can. She flinched away when Rhodey came to comfort her, so he hung back, just watching.
When she finally straightened, shuddering, she paced back into the common room and planted her feet. "Is there any word from Tony? Or Peter?"
This was more words than she had managed so far, and it made the others look away from their silent vigil over the lists of the dead. The raccoon scratched his chin. Thor was the only one missing, as apparently he'd gone for a walk in the forest.
Steve sat at the main table with his hands clasped before him as if he was praying. "Not yet," he said, his brow pinched and his deep blue eyes on her. Maggie's eyes skittered away from his.
"Oh."
After more discussion – the pager hadn't done anything else, the numbers of the dead steadily climbed, Thanos had not been sighted – Steve made them all go into the kitchen and eat something. Maggie sat silently beside the raccoon, each of them silently putting forkfuls of reheated pasta in their mouths. She couldn't taste a thing.
The next day in the common room Maggie sat motionless on a couch, voices rising and falling like tides around her.
Bruce managed to engage her in a conversation about universal energy readings, in some attempt to quantify the power of the Stones. If she pretended that the numbers were purely theoretical, it didn't feel like she was being slowly crushed to death. She even managed to bring herself to help him with galactic projections and energy readings for a time, but at some point her fingers fell numb and she just stood there, staring.
A warm hand wrapped around her own. Her eyes fell to the point of contact and she followed it, eventually looking up into Steve's face.
Steve's eyes were glowing, burning as he looked at her. Maggie's breath rushed from her chest.
Neither of them had said a word but Bucky was so tangible between them, his loss crackling in the air. And then Sam, and Vision, and Wanda, and Maggie found she couldn't breathe. Tony and Peter and Strange missing.
Like a wildfire, the grief in Steve's eyes seemed to ignite her own. It rose like a boiling, surging tide inside her, and her lip quivered as she felt the scalding pain surge into her heart and burn.
"Steve."
He tugged gently on her hand and pulled her into him, enfolding her in his massive warm arms and holding her tight, as if she mattered. As if by holding her, he was holding himself to the earth.
Maggie wound her arms around him. Her eyes burned and she shook as grief surged through her, impossible and overwhelming in its strength. Her arms shook and her jaw creaked from how tightly she clenched it. And as she finally let herself feel just a fraction of the pain wracking her body, several terrible truths crystallized in her mind:
Bucky was gone.
Tony, Peter, and Strange had still made no contact, which probably meant that they were all gone too.
And though these truths hit her so hard she wasn't sure she could survive them, another truth made itself painfully clear: her grief wasn't special. It didn't hurt more than anyone else's, because everyone in the universe had paid an impossible price. If the number of missing was inconceivable, the amount of pain was beyond comprehension. Maggie dug her fingers into Steve's back.
The selfishness of her own overpowering grief made her stomach roil.
She pulled away. The others in the room had kept working, casting Steve and Maggie only a few empathy-filled glances. She wiped her eyes, even though she still hadn't shed a tear, and Steve stepped back and looked at her with his own tear-stained face creased with guilt and grief.
Maggie wondered, for a moment, if the pain surging through her might bring her to her knees. But then she cleared her throat and looked around. "What can I do?"
After that she tried to be as strong as the rest of them – working beside Bruce on the mysterious pager and on their galactic search, with Rocket's help, and calling all known Avengers and S.H.I.E.L.D. assets to see who was alive and who was gone. Clint Barton had been sighted on a speed camera miles away from his homestead but had since gone missing. Scott Lang didn't pick up the phone.
Maggie's therapist Mai was gone. She called her lawyer Andrea, and closed her eyes when soft sobbing came through the speakers. Diego was gone.
Shirley was gone.
Maggie helped with the numbers. She put her mind to work, even when she felt certain that she couldn't physically stand the anguish wreaking havoc on her body. When she felt the urge to curl over and scream she mapped another energy readout. When her heart physically ached, as if someone had put their hand inside her chest and was squeezing, she helped Natasha map population figures. She sat with Rhodey while he called the DC politicians who'd survived, and practiced deafness when those politicians spoke about Tony as if he were dead. She and Rocket discussed space travel and the potential whereabouts of their missing loved ones, and Maggie tried to ignore her racing heart and gasping breaths.
The Avengers searched for hope. They searched for Thanos.
The hope felt galvanizing, even though Maggie knew it was poison.
Weeks passed.
Maggie was in the common room with Steve and Natasha when it happened. They weren't so much analyzing the data flowing in as standing vigil over it; several African countries had formed an emergency committee and were running a census, so the worldwide number of 'missing' jumped up every minute. Maggie had watched the number tick past three billion yesterday. Even with her head for figures and facts, she could not conceive of three billion lives lost. Three billion heartbeats, three billion names, three billion people who had not seen their end coming. Three billion bodies blown away on the breeze. And that was just on Earth.
It was beyond comprehension.
Maggie stood further away from the holoscreen than Steve and Natasha. They leaned in, as if the scrolling numbers were some kind of sickening magnet, but she preferred the shroud of shadows.
She'd felt hopeless before. Never like this.
"This is a nightmare," Steve murmured.
Maggie looked up. None of them had really tried to contain their horror to words before. They all understood each other; grief was the very air they breathed, and they didn't need to speak it aloud. There were no words to describe this.
"I've had better nightmares," Natasha whispered in reply.
"Hey." They all looked up at the new voice, and Maggie turned to see Rhodey in the doorway. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "So that thing just… stopped doing whatever the hell it was doing."
Maggie stepped out of the shadows, frowning. "The pager? That can't be right." They'd hooked it up to a continuous energy source. That thing could run itself for thousands of years.
Rhodey just shrugged at her.
Sighing, Maggie strode out of the common room to follow him. Steve and Natasha followed close behind her. They half walked, half jogged to the workshop, and the doors slid open before them.
"What do we got?" Natasha called to Bruce, who turned away from his holoscreen and met them in front of the containment tank. Maggie walked up to the glass, frowned at the dead pager, and then stepped around Bruce to peer at the holoscreen. Everything was still in working order; the pager had simply stopped.
"Whatever signal it was sending finally crapped out," Bruce explained.
Steve frowned. "I thought we bypassed the battery?"
"We did," Rhodey cut in. "It's still plugged in, it just… stopped."
"By itself," Maggie elaborated. "Could be it's only designed to transmit for a certain period of time."
Steve's brow lowered. "Reboot it, send the signal again." Maggie's eyebrows rose, but she turned to the holoscreen and started hitting buttons.
Bruce gestured at the pager. "We don't even know what this is-"
"Fury did," Natasha cut him off. "Just do it, please. And tell me the second you get a signal. I wanna know who's on the other end of that thing."
Maggie sensed the presence half a second before Natasha turned and came face to face with it. One moment the lab held just Bruce, Natasha, Rhodey, Steve, and Maggie, and the next, Maggie felt another person standing right behind them.
She whirled and lowered into battle stance within a breath, almost surprised at her own reflex – she hadn't moved that quickly in weeks. Her eyes shot wide open at what she saw: a blonde woman in strange red, blue, and gold armor with a star on the front (that pattern was on the pager, Maggie noted), staring hard at Natasha.
Everyone in the room froze.
"Where's Fury?"
For a few moments, nothing but silence filled the lab. Maggie considered activating her repaired nanotech wings.
Finally, Bruce spoke. "Lady, who the hell are you?"
The woman stepped forward and everyone bristled. There was something dangerous in her eyes, like a hawk sizing up its prey. "Where's. Fury."
"Gone."
The woman froze mid-step and turned to look at Maggie, who'd let the word slip without really intending for it to happen. The woman eyed Maggie for a long moment, gauging the truth in her eyes, and then Maggie saw pain – sharp and raw – flood into the woman's face. She lowered her hands.
"Who are you?" Steve asked. "The pager signal went out to you? How do you know Fury?" There was hope in his face.
The woman turned to him and sized him up. "Who are you guys?"
Rhodey cleared his throat. "Perhaps we'd better take this elsewhere."
While the strange, brusque woman ("Call me Carol") explained herself in the Avengers common room, Maggie didn't really listen. So, Nick Fury had had an ace up his sleeve the whole time. It didn't really matter now – he'd played it too late.
But then she heard: "I've been travelling across the universe-" and that sparked an idea. She looked up and met Rocket's eyes. His ears had perked up.
Maggie stood bolt upright, not caring when she almost overturned the nearby coffee table. 'Carol' turned mid-sentence and frowned at her.
Maggie met her eyes. "We need you to find some people."
Space
"This thing on?" As the dull blue light of the helmet's holographic scanner ran over him, Tony contemplated how he must look: starved, bruised, exhausted. A shade of the man he was meant to be. A shade of Iron Man.
He leaned back. "Hey Ms Potts – Pep." He let out a sigh when his back rested against the unforgiving metal behind him. "If you find this recording, don't post it on social media. It's gonna be a real tearjerker." He looked into the helmet's flickering eyes. "I dunno if you're ever gonna see these. I don't even know if you're still…" he shut his eyes. "Oh, god I hope so."
He shook off the desperate wishing. He'd been doing it for three weeks, it never helped. "Today's day… twenty one? No, uh, twenty two. You know if it wasn't for the existential terror of staring into the literal void of space, I'd say I'm feeling a little better today. Infection's run its course, thanks to the blue meanie back there." He glanced sideways, a half-smile on his face.
"Oh, you'd love her," he said, turning back to grin at the helmet. "Very practical. Only a bit sadistic." He reached up to scratch his chin. "Reminds me of Maggie," he said, finally voicing the realization he'd made that first day on the ship. For a long moment he just stared into the middle distance, not sure what to say next. He'd addressed these little messages to Pepper not because it was easier but because… he wasn't sure. Maybe because it was easier to pretend everything was okay if he imagined Pepper on the other end of the line, instead of Maggie with her dark and serious eyes. Maggie who'd lost so much in her life. Maggie who didn't deserve to watch her brother dying.
He let out a shuddering sigh. "I hope you're listening too, Maggot." God, he hoped. He'd already lost her once. "Said I'd see you on the other side, didn't I?" His voice cracked in a half-laugh. "Sorry."
He shook his head, fighting off the tears that were always so close now after… after…
"So the fuel cells were cracked during battle," he said, veering back to the facts. Facts he could handle. "And we figured out a way to reverse the ion charge, bought ourselves about 48 hours of flight time… uh, but it's now dead in the water. One thousand light years from the nearest 7-Eleven." He grimaced. "Oxygen will run out tomorrow morning… and that'll be it."
He leaned forward again, rubbing one hand across his jaw. "Pep, I… I know I said no more surprises, but I gotta say I was really hoping to pull off one last one. But it looks like… well. You know what it looks like." He closed his eyes. "Don't feel bad about this." He rubbed his forehead to stave off the headache he could feel forming behind his eyes. "I mean actually if you grovel for a couple weeks, and then move on with enormous guilt…"
His head fell into his hand, hiding his eyes from the camera. "I should probably lie down for a minute. Rest my eyes." He looked back into the helmet's eyes, ignoring the own burning in his own eyes. "Please know… when I drift off it'll be like every night lately. I'm fine. Totally fine."
He pointed at the helmet, and could only manage his last few words in a whisper: "I dream about you. Because it's always you."
Before he could say anything else he reached down to switch off the recording, ignoring the way his fingers shook.
Time to rest, he thought dully. It'd be just like all those times in the workshop, when he passed out on the hard metal and Maggie worked on into the dark hours, watching over him. That would be okay, he thought. Just like home.
Tony pulled his jacket over his shoulders and laid out on the metal floor of the cockpit, resting his head on his arms. The helmet rested in front of his heart, and the stars shone brightly behind him.
He closed his eyes.
When the woman named Carol jetted up into the sky with a blast of light, the others were left to wait.
Maggie wasn't optimistic. She ran the numbers in her head as a strange sort of reassurance: Rocket had four missing friends, out in space somewhere, and Maggie had three. Quill, Gamora, Drax, Mantis, Tony, Peter, and Dr Strange. With the fifty fifty odds, statistically, there should be three or four of them left. And there were already reports of entire families that had escaped the Decimation, a glimmer of hope against the entire families that had been wiped out.
But Maggie had seen the Time Stone on Thanos's gauntlet, and she knew who would have stood in his way long before he got the chance to snap his fingers. She knew what that meant.
Haven't I lost enough?
Angry, Maggie tamped down the selfish thought. The numbers and hopeless bargaining cycling through her mind were beginning to make her feel like she was bleeding from somewhere vital, so she turned back to emptiness. Just for a while. It was safer.
Rocket's improvised scanners had picked up a new immense surge of energy, so Maggie and Bruce helped him with readouts and energy quantification long into the night and through the next day. In the late hours of the afternoon Maggie noticed that there were grey spots in her vision and her balance was compromised, and she remembered that she'd been awake for three days straight.
Bruce put a pause to their work and they all went to get whatever rest they could. On the way out, Maggie met Rocket's eyes and saw a similar selfish hope there, though his was less blanketed in careful emptiness. She nodded once, and then turned away.
Maggie only slept a few hours before she found herself sitting in front of the window again. She'd locked herself in her dark room, with just the light of the stars and the moon over the forest to illuminate her face.
When she closed her eyes she saw bodies crumbling to ash, so she just stared out into the night. She could pretend, here. She did her very best to experience no thoughts at all.
So when the walls of her solidly-built room trembled slightly, Maggie didn't notice. She just looked on into the dark night.
Steve sprinted out onto the lawns, leading Rhodey, Natasha, and Bruce. Pepper was already out there, shivering in the cold as she stared up at the slowly descending spaceship. The metal ship looked beaten up and a few hard knocks away from falling apart, but Steve's heart shot into his mouth at the sight of it.
Carol brought the ship into land, gently touching down and turning off whatever glow it was that kept her moving. Steve tried to read her face, but then the ship's landing ramp dropped down with a clang and he saw who waited inside.
He broke back into a run.
Tony looked frail and exhausted as he was helped down the stairs by some kind of blue alien, and he looked at Steve with something like disbelief when he appeared to support him down the rest of the way. He smelled like sweat and leather, and his body shook under Steve's hands.
"I couldn't stop him," Tony said. His voice sounded… stunned.
"Neither could I."
Steve wanted to get Tony to the med bay, but at that Tony let out a breath and came to an abrupt halt, turning to face him. Purple shadows ringed his eyes, and Steve could barely stand to see the horrified expression on his face.
"I…" his voice was barely a whisper. "I lost the kid." His jaw trembled at the admission, and Steve felt his heart sink. He knew they'd lost, knew what they'd lost, but to see the truth written bare on Tony's face made it real.
"Tony, we lost…" he shook his head.
Tony's brow pinched and he cleared his throat. "Is, um…" Before he could get the question out Pepper appeared beside him, flustered and wide-eyed. Steve watched sheer relief flash on his face.
"Oh my god," Pepper gasped, and pulled Tony in for a desperate embrace. After a moment of stunned stillness, Tony's shaking arms lifted to hold her. His eyes closed.
Steve took a breath. He hadn't seen his old friend in years. He'd expected a reunion one of these days, but this – Tony, gaunt and starved, clutching the love of his life with a look of sheer relief and grief on his face – was far from what he'd imagined.
Tony pulled back and pressed a kiss against Pepper's tear-stained face. "It's okay," he whispered.
It wasn't okay. Behind them, Rocket sat beside the blue alien on the landing ramp and took her hand.
Steve turned back to follow Pepper and Tony inside, only to see Tony looking around the people on the lawn with a look of steadily growing horror. Everyone else was so relieved to see him alive and standing on solid ground again that they didn't realize the conclusion he'd drawn until he managed to croak out: "Maggie?"
Pepper nearly hit Tony in the face in her haste to whirl around. "She's okay!" she gasped, her eyes shooting wide. "Oh god, Tony, no – Maggie's alive." Steve mentally kicked himself – he should have reassured Tony right away.
Tony sagged. "Where is she?"
Pepper's eyes clouded and she stroked her fingers down Tony's arm. "Inside."
Maggie didn't move when she heard her door open. She wasn't sure if she could ever move again – the star-dusted sky seemed hypnotic, pulling her in and filling her with emptiness. She didn't know how long it had been since she blinked.
But then she heard two scuffing, unbalanced sets of footsteps, and someone took in a labored breath. Maggie tore her eyes away from the sky and looked over her shoulder.
Within the next second she had shot to her feet and leaped across the room to the doorway, even as her whole body seemed to sag with relief. She felt as if she'd been punched in the gut. She couldn't breathe.
She seized Tony by the shoulders and froze. He looked so much smaller, with dark shadows hanging on his face and his own eyes glimmering with tears. Beside him, Pepper's mouth trembled in something that might have been a smile. Maggie pressed her fingers into Tony's shoulders and swallowed thickly, her heart chugging sickly in her chest.
She could see it in Tony's gaunt and haggard face: Peter is gone.
One more future turned to ash in her mouth.
Tony opened and closed his mouth, just staring at her as they stood together inside her room. He shook his head. "Maggie, I… I'm so-" his breath caught on the word sorry and suddenly he was crying, his shoulders shuddering under her hands and his breaths sounding like they were cut out of him with knives.
Maggie finally found herself able to move again, so she gently guided him to sit on the end of her bed so he didn't fall over. He was shaking and covering his eyes with one hand as if he could hide from what had happened, and Maggie noted that he would need to go to the med bay soon. But for now…
She sank down beside her brother and pulled him tight into her arms, feeling his shaking sobs shudder into her own chest. Pepper watched them from the doorway, fingers pressed to her mouth.
With Tony's clammy skin under her palms and his tears and grime smudging her clothes, Maggie felt her shroud of unreality slip away. For a moment she clutched at it, like a blanket keeping out the dawn light. But then Tony's arm slid around her back and his head rested on her shoulder. The shroud ripped away to reveal a horrific hollowness in her chest that demanded to be felt – it swelled, crushing the breath from her lungs and making her gasp. For the first time since Thanos had snapped his fingers, Maggie began to cry.
"It's not your fault," she rasped out, because Tony had known this was coming and he'd done everything he could. The world had let him down. She wished she knew what to say to make this better for him, but there was a hole where that light inside her used to be. Every fiber of her being jarred with the desperation of how unfair this was. She rested her face against the top of Tony's head.
Now that she'd started crying she didn't think she could stop – her eyes began to ache and her throat hurt but still tears streamed down her face. Tony's fingers dug into her back. They held each other desperately, uncomfortably, all elbows and shuddering chests and holding on too tight. It felt like dying.
Maggie had never felt so hopeless.
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