The final battle
Our battle had taken longer than I'd thought, what with all the Grandmaster hi jinx. We were in time for the daily shower, then dinner. Rankings had been displayed rather than the combat order for the next day; I was surprised that we hadn't dropped in the rankings, but the minotaur overseer said that we'd managed to achieve victory over the Grandmaster. That should have bumped us up some, then, but I was too drained to argue. We had a quiet dinner, then found a corner in the courtyard to relax in. When I got up to use the bathroom, I found Pietro waiting outside when I was done.
"I wanted to thank you for what you did," he said with no preamble.
"It was the best choice," I said.
"Maybe, but it means a lot. Barton caught me up, the big events, anyway. I can help Wanda."
"I hope so. Her mental state is sometimes fragile. I worry about her."
"The things she sees in peoples' heads bother her," he affirmed.
"Well, watch your back," I warned. "The Grandmaster may or may not harbor grudges. He may think that giving you back and taking you away again is a fun twist." We walked along in silence a bit. "So what's your codename?"
His grin flicked on. He was a good-looking kid, seemed nice. Maybe Peter could benefit from a role model closer in age than the rest of us. "Quicksilver." He ruffled my hair. "Remember, I came up with it first." He startled me into a laugh. We walked back into the courtyard and I curled up by Steve again.
"Where did you get power from the Allfather?" Thor asked abruptly once.
"Must have been while Mjolnir was being enchanted," I said. "There was a bolt of energy that broke off and hit me. It tingled a bit, but didn't hurt or anything."
"Really," Steve said flatly. "Funny how that hasn't come up before now."
I shrugged a little. "It didn't electrocute me or anything. Didn't even hurt." Steve just sighed and snuggled me to him. I felt like a half-melted marshmallow.
We shared a bunk again later that evening. "What's wrong?" he asked softly, brushing my cheek with his fingers as we lay face to face.
"I believe you when you say you're ok with the choice I made, but I wonder if you'll still feel that way after some time has passed and you've thought about it more," I blurted out. "And I didn't even ask you, and it was important to you too."
"Well, first of all, it was your choice to make," he said slowly. "It was your years in question. And ultimately, the decision to bear children is the woman's. But the kids didn't seem happy as they grew up, and we don't know what happened to the boy, but my guess is that he died, and I think he quit the Avengers, maybe went bad. There was a picture in the girl's office with him, a family portrait that had his face crossed out." I hadn't seen that. "I know that someday I'll have to give up being the field leader. The serum doesn't prevent me from aging, it just made me the best that I could be. I don't want to give that up before I have to, and it looked like you were also doing PR, unmasked, so somewhere along the line your secret identity was blown and you were being trotted out by Promotions." I made a face and he smiled a little. "The reasons I didn't want to have kids before haven't changed. They'd still have been targets for people who want to hurt me. Us. They wouldn't have had the freedoms other kids have. I'd worry about being too absentee." His voice quavered a little. "And it seemed to me that no matter how much we loved them that we couldn't make them happy." He swallowed. "Yes, I would have loved to have had kids with you. Some things aren't meant to be, is all. But our friends are family too, even the irritating ones like Tony. The Avengers will still continue to attract heroes. I only have to look as far as Peter with you to understand that we can still have children even if they're not genetically related to us." He kissed me, lightly. "I think we can all work for a happier future than the one that was shown to us all. Clint said that Pietro helped Wanda stay on track during that dustup with Ultron. It was the right choice to make. Now, get some rest. Something tells me that we're not going to get another chance to have a dance off here." He chuckled. "That was hilarious." I turned over and he cuddled up to me, surrounding me with relaxing, reassuring warmth.
I felt a lot better when I woke up the next morning, which was good, because as we were lining up for breakfast, the combat order was displayed. It was a lot different than it had been.
It called for one big battle, winner takes all, to be held in the evening. Two sides, humanoids against ...well, whatever didn't look humanoid. To the death. The rules were simple: you couldn't leave a being injured; if you hurt them enough to take them out of combat, you had to kill them. After all of one side was annihilated, the living remainder of the winners would be allowed to choose their destinations.
"Wow. Lucky we'll be on the same side," Quill said, his team sitting next to ours.
"At least it will be over soon, one way or another," Gamora said darkly. She must be fun at parties.
"At least you got to be Kevin Bacon," Quill ribbed her.
"That is true, " she conceded. With a small smile.
"Footloose," Quill said to me, seeing how puzzled I was. I grinned.
"Yeah, aside from it being a matter of life or death rather than a moral issue, exactly like that," I agreed, and Quill laughed.
"Where will you go after the battle is over?" Drax asked.
"Asgard," Thor said, looking around at all of us and receiving encouraging nods in return. "A usurper has taken my father's throne, we need to find my wife, and we need to regain an Infinity stone."
"You lost your wife?" Rocket cracked. "Why didn't you just leave her home?" All four of us females looked at him in varying degrees of disdain and/or disgust. "What?" Quill just shook his head.
"Infinity stones, though. There's a dude looking for them, wants to own the whole collection, I guess," he said, getting our immediate attention.
"Who?" Thor said tensely.
"Thanos. He's this guy--"
"We know of him," Thor said tersely. "The one who sits on the throne of Asgard has the Mind Stone and intends to deliver it to Thanos."
Quill cursed. We all looked at Steve, who just shook his head as he looked at us and smiled. "Ronan had an Infinity stone from Thanos but double-crossed him." He puffed up a bit. "Yeah, we stopped him, and gave the stone to Nova Prime on Xandar for safekeeping." He paused to reflect. "There was a lot of double-crossing on that whole...thing." We looked around at each other.
"Uh...you want to expand on that?" Tony invited, rather tersely. Best to find out if we'd be betrayed by these guys sooner rather than later.
"Well, Yondu, he's the guy who kidnapped me when I was a kid, sent me out to find this orb. I recovered it and went to sell it instead, which is when I ran into these three." He gestured at Groot, Rocket, and Gamora.
"I am Groot," the little plant guy squeaked.
"I know they have nice fountains on Xandar, but you just can't go around drinking out of them," Rocket argued. "They're not sanitary." In response to our baffled looks, Quill just shook his head.
"Groot has a vocabulary of only four words, but apparently they mean a lot."
"What's the other word?" Wanda wanted to know.
"Once, he said 'We are Groot,'" Gamora said, unexpectedly tender.
"So Rocket and Groot wanted to turn me in for the bounty on me," Quill said, getting back to the explanation. "And Gamora wanted to kill me to retrieve the orb for her father. Thanos."
"He is not my father," she flared up. "He killed my family and...remade me into his assassin. And I wasn't going to give it to him. I was going to get it to the Collector, where it would be safe. And YOU screwed that up."
Natasha was regarding Gamora with interest. It was...interesting how their lives paralleled, at least superficially. "Who's the Collector?" Steve asked.
"He's one of the Elders, like the Grandmaster," Quill said. "Instead of games, he hoards. You should have seen his place. He's got a zoo in there as well as stuff."
"My father sent the aether to him as a precaution," Thor said grimly. "What happened?"
"He opened the orb and his assistant, who apparently had some labor grievances with him, grabbed it and it went off. We got it contained again in the orb, but Ronan stole it and put it into his warhammer." He looked at Thor sideways. "His hammer had a lot longer handle than yours."
To my surprise, Thor flushed. "My brother tricked the dwarves who were forging it and it has a shorter handle than most. But I like it. It's easy to use." I couldn't help it, I started to laugh. It was such a Loki thing to do. Thor rolled his eyes at me.
"Um... so Ronan decided to keep the stone and all that power for himself rather than hand it over to Thanos. Then we fought him and got a hold of the stone ourselves, which we managed to use to kill him. He was a religious psycho kind of guy,' Quill assured us. "So we gave it to Nova Prime. Everybody's happy."
"Except Thanos," Steve said slowly.
Quill spread his hands. "It was the safest place we could think of."
"There are all these places I've never heard of," Tony complained. "We need an atlas."
"I'd settle for a Wikipedia entry," Steve said. We stared at him, then laughed. We don't give him enough credit for adjusting to the 21st century.
"Well, that's something else to worry about, on a different day. Right now we have to focus on getting through our battle royal, all of us," I said, pushing away my tray. Steve squeezed my hand. I grinned at him, then took a drink of water.
"We should join their team," I heard Quill say to Gamora. "See how they look at each other? Why don't you ever look at me like?"
"Because I am not brain damaged," Gamora said tartly. I did a spit take, and everybody began laughing as I mopped Steve off.
"That must be the reason she settled for Rogers," Tony said, cackling. "Harrington, I thought you were supposed to be a genius." Laughing, I flipped him off, which made Quill laugh.
We spent the rest of the day lazing around, we had lunch, then dinner, and finally it was time to suit up. While we were waiting with our weapons to be summoned, I stretched the collar of my outfit slightly. "Honey, when we get back, will you design something different for me?" I asked. "I'm kinda tired of this look." He had me turn around and began braiding my hair, a French braid, close to the head, and tucked the tail up under it.
"So nobody can grab your hair and damage your spine by jerking you around," he said, patting it into place. He shot Tony a look as Tony snickered. "Whatever you want, sweetheart," he said to me, massaging the back of my neck slightly. I let out a contented sigh. Steve has totally ruined me for other men. We walked out onto the sand hand in hand.
We joined a line of humanoids to the left and watched as the non-humanoids formed a line across the arena. There were a lot of them, all shapes and sizes. I recognized the cute fluffy creatures we'd fought, now significantly reduced in number, and felt a pang. No matter who won or lost the final fight, the floor of the arena was going to be washed in death, and for what? Some bored old guy.
The announcer announced teams and individuals one last time, then the buzzer for the start of combat sounded. The lines moved toward each other at a walk, but the pace increased until we were moving almost at a run when the lines clashed for the first time.
Interestingly, it wasn't nonstop combat; it ebbed and flowed and there were times when the action all seemed farther down the line and we could rest for a moment. Never for long, though. Steve started to laugh as he saw me cutting and stabbing at something that looked like a mobile patch of moss.
"Emma, we have to get married," he said. "You're the perfect woman."
I finished cutting the carpet to ribbons (and the little spikes it could launch) and pushed back some hair that had become unbraided. "I don't think there's an officiant here, honey," I pointed out, then braced myself for the incoming, which looked a lot like an enormous black slug.
"Did you really just ask her to marry you, Rogers?" an incredulous Tony said, landing by us. "Because that is probably the worst timing in the history of ever. Where's the candles, the wine, the romance?" I swung Nike with all my force at the interstellar slug. It exploded, and I stood there, shocked, dripping slug goo.
"Ew, he said. "You could have just put out a saucer of beer and let it drown," he told me, then took off to help Jim and Sam, who were attacking something that looked a lot like the monolith from "2001: A Space Odyssey."
I started to shake my hands and arms free of the stuff, trying not to think about it too much, so grateful for the mask covering my face. Bucky gave me a handkerchief, then moved away.
"I hate to agree with Stark, but that was pretty lame," I heard him muttering to Steve.
"Well, she didn't say no," Steve murmured back as I wrung out the handkerchief.
Then they had to go back to work as some...thing I couldn't even describe rolled up. Something else got my attention by firing darts at me and I turned in time to see it move on, finding victims in Steve and Bucky. The darts seemed to have barbed heads, judging from the damage caused by removal, and I interposed myself between it and Steve, who had taken the brunt of the attack and was down on the sand. I whipped out the urumi for the first time and started to flay the creature, which tried to get away. Bile rose in my throat, but this was a fight to the death, and I needed to make sure that it was this creature who died rather than one of my team. Specifically, Steve. My attention was diverted as the Grandmaster began to play with the weather conditions, whipping all the combatants with cold driving rain. I wasn't that sad to see it; it helped wash off the slug goo and cool me down, but some of the humanoids and non-humanoids were adversely affected. Then the rain gave way to stinging hail, followed by hard hot winds.
Gradually the lines contracted as combatants fell and the fighting grew more vicious. Nobody was unscathed; I was battered by what looked like a land octopus, kind of, that could hit hard and constrict with its tentacles. I was joined by Natasha and Steve in finishing it off. When I backed away from the carcass, I realize that noise in the arena was dying away.
Our side had won.
I leaned on my poleaxe as it sank in. What's more, all my team were still alive, although some were in worse shape than others. Steve and Bucky had almost finished healing the wounds caused by the dart creature, thanks to their enhancements, but Tony was limping heavily and Thor was bleeding from dozens of cuts. Then the sound of the gong shimmered, and I straightened up.
"The final round has been concluded. The humanoid side is declared the victors," the announcer decreed, and I kept my eyes on my friends rather than the bodies sprawled on the sands. "Come forward to claim your prize." We joined the queue, for the last time in this place.
"Where are we going?" Jim said wearily.
"Asgard," Thor said immediately. "Is that acceptable?" he asked after a minute.
"Anywhere I can get a bath," I muttered. There was some chuckling, but we agreed on our destination. Thor said he had a place in mind where we could clean up and recover before launching our next op. Ahead of us, I could hear Quill's team discussing what they'd do next. "Something good? Something bad?" Gamora laughed.
"How about something profitable?" Rocket groused.
"I am Groot," the plantling declared.
"Money might not buy happiness, but it can buy things that make you happy, and that's pretty much the same thing," Rocket said, and the argument started up again. I smiled, looking up at the stars that had come out unnoticed while we were fighting. It was weird to see constellations I didn't recognize, but they were pretty nonetheless. And I was alive to enjoy them.
"Well, maybe we'll run into each other again," I heard Quill say, and I turned around to see him addressing us. "It seems to be a pretty small universe, all things considered." Steve put out his hand.
"There are still Infinity stones to deal with," he said as they shook. "We'll see you around."
Finally, we were up. I was a little surprised when Hulk stepped up, but when the Grandmaster announced his destination to a sparsely settled planet with significant hazards, I understood. He even allowed us to say goodbye. All Natasha said was "Be happy."
"Will all remaining members of your team be going to the same place?" the Grandmaster asked, and we nodded. Thor told him precisely where we wanted to go, and just before that ripping sensation dislocated us again, the Grandmaster looked at me with those creepy red eyes and smiled disturbingly. I hoped it didn't mean that I'd be seeing him again. Then the black returned. And when I could see once more, we were standing in a cave. It was clammy and dark. I sighed. It didn't look like I'd be getting my bath any time soon.