“Come on, Okoye, this is no place to die,” he said, and he knew it was the last thing he’d ever say.
T’Challa was not the first of many to turn to ash, but Okoye was the first of many screams, and it echoed across the Universe. Parents, siblings, lovers, friends, mere acquaintances and strangers, screaming because this is too terrifying a way to lose someone. No body to bury, no closure, no trace left, just the dust of dust.
“He was just a kid,” Tony mumbles hollowly. His eyes saw Peter go, disintegrate, dissolve, disappear, but his brain has finally found something it doesn’t understand. How could they have lost? More than that, how could he have let this happen? “He was just a kid,” he echoes.
Nebula just stares, blank-eyed and confused, at the ashen remains of Peter, of Drax, of Mantis. Without warning, she erupts. “I never thought I had anyone to lose!” she screams, “I thought I was alone and I had nobody and then I finally got something to lose,” her voice breaks, and there’s so much modification to her vocal chords she’s surprised it can break, “like I swore I would never— and now they’re all gone and I’m stuck on this rock with you.”
“He was just a kid,” Tony repeats. Then, “What am I going to tell Aunt May?” He has to believe that Aunt May is still down there, waiting for her boy to come back from a field trip, getting worried beyond belief. He has to believe that because it might rip up what’s left of his sanity if he’s the only one left who knew Peter Parker.
Eventually, Nebula screams at Tony again. She doesn’t hate him– with how much she hurts, she doesn’t have any room left in her being for hatred or anger– but she needs to scream at someone because she doesn’t know how else to cope. She screams that her sister is never coming back and she screams that her family is gone and she screams that she hates Thanos and she screams that she’s sorry, sorry, sorry.
Tony repeats, “He was just a kid,” until he’s sobbing into the dirt that used to be a person.
For now, that’s all they can process.
“What are you doing?” Nebula asks lazily when she wakes up. She doesn’t snap or demand like normal, she’s too exhausted from the grieving and the screaming.
Tony is poking a screwdriver into her ankle, and a few loose parts are settled like debris around him. If Nebula was stupider, she would think that Tony has calmed considerably, but she isn’t, and she knows this is the alternative to something much more dangerous. Drax would do something more dangerous. She misses him already, not that they had ever been anything like close, but you miss someone more than you think you will when there’s no chance of ever seeing them again. “Tinkering,” Tony replies blankly.
“With my leg?” She’s not complaining so much as clarifying that he’s not stealing her body parts to tinker with something else. Rocket did that once— shit, Rocket, Groot, what was she going to tell them? They had to still be there, right? At least baby Groot, at the very least baby Groot had to be alive. Nebula knows nothing about familial love except the snippets she gleaned from watching her sister and her band of fools, but she knows that baby Groot means more than her entire life put together.
“You have rocket boots now,” Tony informs her. Nebula vaguely wonders how long she’s been asleep, and how long Stark has been without sleep. It’s got to have been a while, there’s layers of color around Stark’s eyes– red from crying, then purple from exhaustion, then green and blue and black from bruising.
“Can you tinker with something useful?” It’s not quite a biting comment, but it prickles. “Like Quill’s ship? We need to get– you’re from Earth, right?” When Tony doesn’t respond, she pushes “You know people there?”
At that his eyes grow a little wider, “Pepper, Rhodey, Banner, Natasha, Cap’, Wanda…” the names come out like a mantra he’s got to remember. He wonders if Strange knew anyone back home, or more, who he knew. Did he have a girlfriend? A family? Quill said he was half human– did he have ties on Earth? Did Thor survive all of this? Nick Fury’s got to have been old enough to have died before any of this, right? His footsteps over the hill to the mess of Quill’s ship are wobbling and uncertain, but they’re the most determined he’s felt since… was that really just two days ago? Time feels strange on Titan.
Nebula stays where she is, still too tired to move.
It takes Tony another day and a half of ceaseless, sleepless tinkering to get Quill’s ship in enough of a working condition to get them to Earth, which Nebula claims is three solar systems away. He hasn’t eaten, hasn’t done anything but tinker in all that time– and his mind flickers from the complicated machinations of alien technology to the uncertainty and, even worse, the certainty of all that’s happened since he hitched a ride on a flying space donut to save a wizard and his necklace. He shouldn’t have let Peter come along, should have made him go back down. Even if they had still lost, at least the kid would have gotten to enjoy Coney Island one more time.
Nebula stalks past him vehemently– she oscillates wildly between too exhausted to move and screaming lividity now. Seconds later, she shoves a handful of things into Stark’s work area, where he’s trying to hotwire the ship as best as he can figure out how.
“Eat some food,” she says, and it’s not a suggestion. Nebula knows that she literally runs on batteries, but Stark is just a human, his suit is what uses the batteries. Maybe she knows nothing of compassion, but she does know that Stark can fix a ship much faster than she can, and if he starves to death then she’s all but stranded.
Stark complies and eats the weird candy bars Quill kept in his room without any expression, and then he gets back to work. He can’t see the others– and he’s lost enough pride that he’ll call them all his friends now– or if they’re alive or dead if he’s stuck on this decrepit planet with the techno-alien-rage-lady and the ashes of people that never died. Were never supposed to die.
A memory whispers in his head “If you die, I feel like that’s on me.”
They land in Wakanda– that’s where Rocket’s got the beacon he made for each team member set up. Neither Rocket or Thor need to tell everyone that it’s a friendly alien ship, and not a hostile, because nobody has the will to fight.
Four days on Titan was a half a day on Earth. As far as anyone on Earth is concerned, it’s the first night since the Snap. That’s what everyone is calling it. Half of the population has been ripped out of existence like a kid tore half of the coloring pages out. It feels like a lot more than half.
After taking a head count– Rhodey is alive, Cap is alive, Banner is alive, Thor is alive, Natasha is alive, Clint is alive– the first thing Tony does is call Pepper. Her phone is disconnected, but when he asks Friday, she says that Pepper is holed up in his house in Malibu, but that most phone lines are down because the population drop has left many utilities unattended to. Friday can only see Pepper because of Tony’s surveillance cameras, set up on a private internet server.
The moment they’re on the ground, Tony’s already set up a fake smile for his comrades, determined to portray the billionaire/philanthropist/playboy/sarcastic and untouchable asshole that everybody knows him as, and the fact that he can, that him and Nebula have already had four days to grieve, means they are the most stable people on Earth. That’s not a figure of speech or a hyperbole. Every single warrior, every single Avenger of the past or present, no matter how battle-worn or time-tried, has collapsed in on themselves like a poorly constructed tower in a tidal wave. There are mounds of alien corpses piled high across the golden fields of Wakanda, blood of red and blue stain the dirt in a way that doesn’t seem like it will be easy to wash out, the ashes of evaporated people mix gingerly with the air as if they know they’ll never be able to breathe it again.
Nebula goes to Rocket first, and the fact that it’s just her coming back, and that she would approach him in the first place, says it all. Rocket sobs, but tears don’t actually fall and Nebula does not try to comfort him because she doesn’t know how.
Rhodey had been swimming in layers of grief, confusion, disbelief, and when he sees Tony come through the treeline, he swears he’s back combing the desert in a chopper, seeing Stark’s shoulders slump with the holes he’s earned, and limping with the injuries bestowed on him. It jars him back to reality when the support system his legs are encapsulated in kickstart so he can stand and meet Tony halfway.
“Where’s–” Rhodey decides not to ask about Peter. If he isn’t trailing behind like a puppy then there’s no need to ask where he is. “I’m glad you’re alive,” is what he settles with, and he wraps Tony in a hug. Rhodey has no room for anything but that one honest truth in himself. He’s glad that Tony is alive– that the Snap only killed off half of his team, his friends. He’s got to be grateful for that.
That night, Queen Ramonda offers that everyone rest in Wakanda before deciding where to go next– where will they even go next? What is there to do right now? What could any of them do right now? They take the queen up on her offer, and everyone leaves the dirty, ashen, bloodstained battlefield that feels worse than any before it.
The Queen and Shuri are both rulers, present and future, and they cannot show their grief in its entirety– they cannot show their weakness. Ramonda’s smile dims, and Shuri doesn’t leave the lab, but that is the extent of their portrayal of the screaming second loss of a son, of a brother. Such is the burden of rulers, and both women bear it as best as they can. If anyone hears shattering glass or denting metal from the lab, they don’t mention it. If sobs can be heard from the queen’s chambers, they don’t mention it.
Where everyone from the battlefield, the collection of foreigners from America or Asgard or outer space or anywhere else, is huddled, you can just hear little snippets of a painfully strained try at conversation.
Tony is trying to be solid, stoic, untouchable, untouched. “This looks like the family reunion I’ve never had,” he laughs dryly.
Nobody holds the joke against him. They literally can’t find it in themselves to do so.
“I should have just given them time,” Steve is muttering to himself. “They were just kids, they deserved more time.” Out of the blue, Steve’s face lights with something less bright and more desperate, “Tony, how’s Peter?” Tony’s smile falters, fades. Steve doesn’t ask again.
Natasha curls in on herself. She hasn’t felt this broken since her surgery all those years ago. “So, what’s your story?” she asks Nebula. She wants to focus on anything that isn’t the here and now.
“She’s Gamora’s sister.” Rocket says, but that helps nobody– except maybe Tony if he’s in his right mind enough to remember the Guardians asking about Gamora, hearing that she’s dead, Quill stupidly punching Thanos square in his nutsack of a chin– or Thor, who gives a bleak attempt at a smile in her direction.
“Not biologically,” Nebula snaps, “Thanos stole both of us from our homes while he slaughtered our parents. He forced us to fight, and with every loss he would replace some part of me with a robotic enhancement. He said it was to make me better.”
Nobody presses that topic either.
“I was gonna get that guy’s arm,” Rocket says to nobody.
“He would have let you take it,” Steve informs him soberly.
“Thor,” Tony tries, “how’s Asgard? You’re brother still trying to kill us all?” Tony knows that Thor has a family on Asgard, and a people he’s supposed to inherit the rulership over.
“They’re all dead,” Thor tells him flatly, and the tone says he doesn’t want to talk about it.
Banner gives a wry smirk, “Well, not all of them,” he says, attempting to comfort Thor, but Thor just gives him the saddest smile and nods slowly. What nobody sees coming is Banner shimmering out of the conversation, only to be replaced with an exhausted-looking Loki. “There’s no sun to shine on us,” Lokie tells Thor, “but I haven’t left you yet.” To Tony, and to everyone else, Loki adds “and I’m not trying to kill anybody.”
A shocked hush stills the already stagnant conversation. “How long have you been playing as Banner?” Tony demands softly.
“Since the both of us were portalled home by Heimdal. If Banner is– If Bruce Banner is anywhere, he’s hiding out where Natasha first met him in India. That’s where he wanted to be.” Loki is a little nervous about the repercussions of his last visit to Earth, but nobody is going to act on anything so bloody now: Thor needs his brother back much more than anyone else needs revenge.
Thor has no room left for anything except relief. He leans into where Loki is seated to the left of him and squishes him in a hug that might just snap Loki in half. “It’s good to see you,” Thor whispers. He’s crying. Everyone is crying. If only they could get their people back as easily as Thor got Loki back.
Everything hurts, and there isn’t room for anything else but that.
But, as if summoned by their collective heartbreak, a nearly explosive gust of wind knocks everyone down, and in drops a young woman with bright blonde hair cropped short around her shoulders, her eyes are lit up and surprised, and she’s speaking in bullets before her feet have even hit ground.
“Sorry I’m late, Nicky– oh? No Nick Fury? Any of you seen a big man with– oh he probably has an eyepatch now?” She appraises the group with a quirked eyebrow, and pauses on Natasha. “What the heck, you’re gorgeous!” she exclaims, “Can I get your– what do you have on Earth? Cellphones? Can I get your cellphone number?” Natasha is entirely too surprised to respond. “Anyway, where’s Nicky? He paged me, so that means it was a big deal. Is this the thing that Magician told me about before? Uhhhmmm, Thanos or whatever?” This seems to jog her memory, and she stumbles back on her words, “Right, right, half the Universe gone. Now I remember. Okay, then, who wants to help me bring back half the Universe?”