Her best friend was too stubborn to die, somewhere on the distant edges of the galaxy.
And she hadn’t changed at all.
But lord, she also had.
Because she heard Talos speaking casually about how Carol crushed twenty of his best men with her hands bound.
Unsurprising on one level, a whole new kind of terrifying on another. Not the fact that Carol had the capacity to do that; crushed didn’t mean killed, and Maria knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that, even with her brainwashing, Carol had fought to incapacitate, not murder.
No: it was terrifying because an alien race had felt the need to guard her with twenty of their best men. Again with the unsurprising, but that didn’t take away from the pained shock of it.
And she heard Carol’s agonized, conflicted voice telling Talos that she’d seen the ruins on Torfa. Ruins.
Maria could get past the alien planet bit. That, she’d gotten past pretty much right away.
But her best friend, her… her Carol… had walked through untold destruction, places where civilian used to live and work and laugh and play and fuck; blasted to oblivion, left - apparently - in ruins.
And she had seen it alone. Without Maria. Without someone to lie on, someone to cry on, after.
She had her now. She was home, now. But still.
And, then, she’d heard her voice break and seen her eyes burn when she told her former mentor, her former savior, that “you lied to me,” and she felt what that did to her… to Carol’s soul.
Her parents had lied to her. Over and over and over.
That she wasn’t good enough, wasn’t strong enough. That she should make herself small, that it was normal to grow up in a house with so much violence, so much hatred, so much vitriol. That she shouldn’t be friends with that girl down the street, because respectable girls needed to make friends with respectable people, not… them.
And this man had lied to her, too. Similar lies, it sounded like, from the making herself small to making herself too big compared to another race, over and over and over.
She heard it rip through her voice and she felt it tear through her soul - “you lied to me” - and Maria was helpless to stop the pain.
Fury put his arm out when she tried to go protect her, and he was right. Carol had this.
But then she didn’t, and then Maria could only trust, and she would not lose her again, she wouldn’t, not after just getting her back, not again.
She wouldn’t explain to Monica where her Auntie Carol had vanished to, no trace of a body and no trace of goodbye, again.
But she might not have a choice.
It seemed that Carol had spent six years without much of a choice.
She wondered how much, laying together that night and the nights to come - assuming Carol would still want to, assuming she was still… that they were still… - Carol would tell her about the last six years without her.
She’d heard enough - yet not enough, never enough - through snippets of conversations with other people.
She wanted, now, to hear more from Carol.
And she would, she would.
She just had to get all the Skrull refugees out of this alive - Carol just had to get out of this alive - and she would hear it all from her.
She had to.
And she would.