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When Cassie opens her eyes, she’s unable to see anything. The space she’s trapped in is small, and confined, and while she’s able to rest her forearms and hands on the top of the enclosure, she cannot straighten her arms at first. She knows that she should be afraid, that the close confines of her enclosure should be triggering a panic attack at the very least. Instead, she is peculiarly, brittlely serene, calmly assessing her options. Fortunately, she knows what to do when captured.
She concentrates, and forces her arms through the satin, wood and dirt to the sky, drawing her knees up and sitting up as she grows. It’s hard. The dirt is heavy and impacted, and for one horrible moment she thinks she’ll never escape. That almost, but not quite, breaks through her preternatural calm, and she can feel her breath catching in her chest. It’s hard to breathe, the air is stale and makes her lungs ache.
Then, squinting against the fall of dirt, she’s able to see the pallid light of the sun, and the air is crisp and cold in her lungs. On any other day, she would have thought it to be a miserable day. That is before she woke up underground. There’s a hint of ice in the wind as it whips around her bare arms, and it is easily the best thing she has experienced in a long time.
The rest is easy; she pulls herself up over the lip of the earth and onto the ground above her. It takes her a moment to recognise where she is; she’s in a graveyard, surrounded by tombstones. She turns around and stares at the tombstone over her own burial place. She wipes the snow away in one jerky movement, and desperately wants to sit down. She doesn’t, but it’s a close thing.
“That is messed up,” she says. She wants to laugh, give voice to the bubbling hysteria that is building up inside her as she struggles to breathe, wearing her best clothes and staring at a mock tombstone for her. It’s not the first time she’s been kidnapped and held captive somewhere, but it certainly is the most disturbing. She can’t remember who took her, or why it’s snowing, but it wouldn’t be the first time that something like that has happened to a superhero. She just needs to go somewhere safe, get warm and her memory will come back to her. Her breathing settles once she forms the plan, and she promises herself that when she’s safe she can cry as much as she wants.
Fortunately, she recognises the cemetery. It’s funny in its way, because that is where Cassie and the other Young Avengers hung out last week, complaining about how it would get cold soon and how they couldn’t come sit here in easily the most morbid teenaged hangout area they could find. The fact that there is old snow on the ground should scare her, but she’s pointedly not thinking about that. It must simply be an elaborate set up, one that puts her squarely in Manhattan and close to her friends.
She decides on Billy’s place instead of Kate’s. Kate lives in a gated community, with checks and security guards, and Cassie is acutely aware that right now she looks like the kind of person that security guards are paid to keep out. Besides, Billy’s home is much closer to a subway station. She smooths her hair out of her face as best she can, reminds herself that New York has seen far stranger things than her today, and walks to the street. Fortunately, she recognises both where she is and that there’s a subway station nearby. She almost slips on the steps a few times, and makes a face. The dress shoes she’s wearing are really not appropriate for snow.
It takes until she’s almost at the turnstile for her to realise that she doesn’t have her metrocard with her, and it’s this realisation that drives her to frustrated tears.
“You dropped this,” someone says above her, with the peculiar accent that Asgardians have. The speaker sounds too young to be Thor, and when Cassie looks up she doesn’t recognise him. He is, however, holding what looks to be a metrocard in his black-tipped hand, albeit one of the newer designs. At least Cassie thinks it is. She frowns, but takes it. If the card’s a trick, there aren’t that many Asgardians around and this one would be particularly easy to describe given the little horned headpiece he’s wearing.
“Why are you doing this?” she says, and the corner of the Asgardian’s mouth quirks in a bitter smile.
“Who can say? Maybe, Cassandra Lang, because I can.”
“This isn’t a trick, right?” she says, studying his face for any suggestion that he might be lying. His expression is guileless, green eyes wide and innocent.
“Not this time.”
“This time?”
“Yours is a story that deserved a happier ending than it got. So you have a second chance.” He shakes his black hair out of his face. “Don’t waste it in the subway.” He disappears at this, literally, which Cassie would be more impressed at if she hadn’t grown up seeing the impossible happen every day when she lived at the Avengers mansion. Instead, she merely stares at the card before sticking it in the turnstile.
There’s too much to unpack from what the strange Asgardian said, and Cassie’s mind shies away from thinking about it. The only consequences that come to mind are horrific, and instead she focuses on cleaning the dirt out from under her fingernails with her new metrocard. It’s something of a lost cause — she’s caught her reflection on the window and already knows how much of a mess she looks — but it’s something to keep her attention on. If she thinks, she’ll think about how her memories are all jumbled and how the last thing she remembers is Doom attacking them, and she knows that can’t be right.
“It must be some kind of drug,” she says to herself. She looks up to find that she has an elbow-length of space around her, almost unheard of in a subway. In retrospect, talking about drugs while you look like you went for a dirt bath does make you look like a drug addict, but she’s relieved that Billy’s stop is the next one.
Everything will be better after a shower, her father used to tell her while ruffling her hair. Right now, she believes it. She’ll have a shower, and once she’s in clean clothes she’ll be able to remember what happened after Doom attacked. It’s this thought that helps her put one foot in front of the other through the streets of Chelsea and to Billy’s doorstep.
She knocks on the door a little too loudly, the impact jarring her frozen knuckles. She tucks her hands into her armpits and tells herself soon she’ll have a shower and everything will be okay.
The door is yanked open, and Billy stares at her.
The Billy that Cassie remembers has untidy hair that falls into his eyes, a self-deprecating smile and a proud line to his shoulders that tells the world that he doesn’t care what it thinks about him. He does not have an ear piercing, his wardrobe is not remotely fashionable, and he does not stare at Cassie, eyes wide and horrified and jaw slightly ajar. She doesn’t like this newly fashionable Billy much, especially the way that he seems peculiarly older in a way that she can’t put her finger on, other than he seems to have grown into his features. She doesn’t remember when that happened either, or when his family redecorated the room that she can see over his shoulder. The idea of having forgotten months of her life is horrifying.
“Oh my God,” Billy breathes and says nothing more. He swallows convulsively.
“What?” Cassie says, frowning. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost. I just need a shower. Some jerk tried to bury me alive.”
“Don’t you remember?” Billy says, his voice strained, and then shakes his head sharply as he steps away to allow her entry. “No, of course you don’t. The shower’s upstairs. I’ll call the others.”
“Get Kate to bring some clothes,” Cassie says as she slips past him and heads up the stairs, taking them two at a time. She can feel Billy’s gaze on her and she turns around at the landing. “What?”
He’s staring at her still as if she’s something he’s too afraid to look away from.
“I’ll tell you after your shower,” he says finally. He tries to smile, and it’s terrible. She thinks about shaking the truth out of him.
Instead, she escapes to the bathroom where there is plenty of hot water. It takes two washes to get all of the mud out of her hair, and cleaning under her fingernails is a herculean effort. Her father is not right, however, as the shower does not make everything better. It makes her clean, which helps, but there is something horrible that she cannot wrap her mind around.
The towels are, however, ridiculously soft and fluffy, and the clothes that appear outside the bathroom door still have the faint ozone smell that comes whenever Billy conjures up clothes. It’ll do until Kate brings Cassie’s clothes to her, Cassie decides as she puts on the hoodie and jeans.
It doesn’t escape her that Billy is dressing her in the clothing style that he used to wear. What she isn’t sure about is whether it has to do with whatever is going on. She can hear voices downstairs, familiar somehow, and she heads downstairs.
She doesn’t expect to see her father, looking far older and careworn than she remembered, sitting at the Kaplans’ kitchen table. The last time she saw him, she thought he was dead or dying at Doom’s hand.
Then she sucks in a breath.
She’s clinging to him desperately while he strokes her hair, sobbing hard enough that it hurts. Her father is real and impossibly solid, and so is she, when neither of them should be. Not after what happened.
“Daddy?” she says, her voice breaking. “Daddy, I died.”
“I know,” he says to her hair, and the catch in his voice causes her to start crying in huge, jagged sobs.
She doesn’t know how long she stays in her father’s embrace, but it’s long enough for Billy to make a number of calls to the team and teleport them into the room. One of the calls, embarrassingly enough, is to Billy’s mother. Mrs Kaplan takes one look at the room and starts doling out weak tea to anyone who looked shell shocked enough to need it. It’s comforting, Cassie finds, to hold a mug of tea in between her hands and feel the heat seep into her bones. She is in need of all the comfort she can get right now.
The world has moved on without her, she is told, though they don’t say it as such. It’s horrifying, and she can’t help but shake under the weight of what they aren’t saying. The world not only moved on without her, but barely stopped in its rotation at all, and that was just wrong.
It’s not until Kate offers Cassie the box of tissues that she realises that she’s crying. She’s not the only one: Eli and Kate are both crying, Teddy’s expression is the carefully neutral one that he keeps when he doesn’t want to cry, and Billy’s gaze has taken on the disconnected stare of the shocky.
In fact, the only one of the team who isn’t visibly traumatised at her unexpected resurrection is Tommy. He is exactly as Cassie remembers, irrelevant and flippant and seemingly utterly disinterested in the emotional display that everyone else is involved in, instead telling her about how Beyonce has released a new album. She didn’t even know how Tommy knew she was a fan.
Of course, the possibility remains that Tommy is a fan.
She returns with her father to the Avengers mansion after everyone has filled her in. She knows now what has happened in her absence, if not why she has returned, and the sheer enormity of that knowledge is crushing. She goes to bed early, surrounded by the stuffed toys that she had no idea that her father had kept, after reactivating her iTunes account to download the new Beyonce album.
*
Cassie can’t hear her father’s response, but she doesn’t think it’s the resounding, angry, denial that she wants from him. Part of her can understand this; she remembers how she died, and she can appreciate that her father would be devastated that he lived when she died. She hates that part, because what she wants is for her father to yell at her mother that she’s wrong, that Cassie will stay here in the only family she has ever wanted, and that he’ll fight her in the courts for custody over her. She had hoped that staying with him for the last few days would bolster his resolve.
Instead, he was bowed down under the gimlet gaze of her mother and her stepfather ever since they arrived at the Avengers mansion. The meeting had initially gone well, until her mother said in a voice that brooked no disobedience that Cassie was to pack up her belongings as she was returning home now. Cassie refused, her stepfather told her that it wasn’t a request, and her father, voice quiet and still, told her to go into her room.
She can still hear them fight, and she can imagine what their expressions and body language would be. Her mother would be glaring in the way that only she knows how, her body language closed off and hostile: arms folded, jaw set and teeth bared. Her stepfather, in contrast, would be explosive: hands flying apace with his quick, snarled words. Her father would be beaten down under these two forces, in part because to his mind they speak nothing more than the truth: she died saving him.
She shrinks into herself, her shoulders hunching against the blow of her leaving to go to a family who cannot and will not understand her. She shrinks further, the teddy bear she’s clutching becoming too large to hold, and then larger than she is.
“Hey!” she hears. It’s Tommy’s voice, which is startling because while Tommy does have access to the Avengers mansion, she didn’t hear him come in. For not the first time she is relieved that she was wearing her superhero costume under her normal clothes, and that it was made with unstable molecules, because she did not know Tommy well enough to get naked in front of him. “You get any smaller and you’ll be the same size as sea monkeys.”
“What are you doing here?” she says.
“I,” Tommy declares, his finger pointed in the air as he gestures for emphasis. “Am on a rescue mission. Where do you want to go?”
“Uh,” Cassie says. She has no idea where she wants to go, other than not here. “Anywhere?”
“Don’t know it,” Tommy says, and if it weren’t for the cocky grin on his face, she would think he is serious. “But I do know where Hell is. What do you think of Norway?”
“Honestly? I’m surprised you know it’s in Norway,” Cassie says.
“It’s called Hell, of course I’m going to know about it,” Tommy retorts. “Besides, do you want to go there or not?”
“No,” Cassie says. “It’s freezing there.”
There’s a shattering of ceramic outside, and Cassie knows that it must be her mother. She had been pretty rough on their crockery during the last stages of the divorce, and now that she had access to the Avengers crockery, Cassie isn't entirely sure that her mother would leave any intact. Her sigh is more of a sob than she would have liked, and she shrinks further.
“I’ll get us out,” Tommy says, seemingly unruffled by the noise or Cassie’s reaction. He reaches out a hand and Cassie climbs on and into a pocket of his jeans. It’s surprisingly devoid of lint, though how he manages to do that is beyond Cassie. She’s just relieved that this time she won’t be choking on tissue remnants. It’s a hazard of being a size-shifter, though one that she had not been told about beforehand. Not that it would have changed matters much, but the idea of Aunt Jan, Uncle Hank and her dad having to wear teeny tiny gas masks before climbing around in the Avengers’ pockets is an amusing one.
Phasing through the wall makes Cassie feel ill in the same way that Billy’s teleportation makes her ill, a sick certainty that reality is far more flimsy and delicate than her senses tell her, and for a moment she thinks she might throw up in Tommy’s pocket.
She doesn’t, thankfully.
They don’t go to Hell. Instead, they go to Los Angeles. It takes a matter of seconds, which makes Cassie wonder whether Quicksilver’s self-claimed title of the fastest man on earth is merely because Tommy is not yet eighteen. She keeps this thought to herself.
“Are we visiting Kate?” she says instead, climbing out of Tommy’s pocket once they’ve stopped to reorientate themselves. It’s the middle of town, which looks nothing like New York, and that’s even putting aside the fact that it’s a lot warmer and sunnier. New York is all tall buildings and little laneways, whereas Los Angeles, though it also has tall buildings, is much more sprawled out about it. It’s relaxed, Cassie decides, though she doesn’t think she would want to live there. She can see why Kate wants to be here for a seachange though; it is nothing like New York.
“Don’t miss a trick, do you?” Tommy says, stretching out his calves. “At least we didn’t have to go to flyover territory to see her. I have limits, even for Kate.”
Cassie rolls her eyes, entirely aware that she’s too small for Tommy to see and doesn’t care. “Are you guys still dating?”
“Still?”
“Oh,” Cassie says, feeling inexplicably pleased at the news. “I thought you were. You were kind of … couple-y.”
“Nah,” Tommy says, coming to a stop. Cassie takes the opportunity to climb up from his pocket to his shoulder. “Too static for me.”
“Oh,” Cassie said again. “Did you call beforehand to let her know we were coming?”
“No, why would I do that?” Tommy says.
Needless to say, Cassie is very smug when it turns out that Kate is away on a ‘business trip’, and that there isn't much for them in LA at all. So they left.
“I told you,” she crows when they arrive at San Francisco for no other reason than she wanted to go to San Francisco. “You should have asked first. I always ask first when I see her.”
“That’s a girl thing,” Tommy says.
“These girls can totally kick your ass,” Cassie mutters darkly as she resumes her normal size. “And we will once I tell Kate what you said. And … America? Is that her name?”
“That’s cheating,” Tommy protests as he buys two ice creams and hands one to her. “I’ve heard stories about her.”
“Did they include the Ghostbusters reference?” Cassie says before taking a lick of her strawberry ice-cream.
“Yeah, Billy mentioned it,” Tommy says, devouring his chocolate ice cream at an impressive rate. “He then explained the joke.”
“Did he really think you didn’t know Ghostbusters?”
“Apparently,” Tommy says, before biting into his cone with a decisive crunch. “Guess he thought because I had spent time in juvie I’d never seen a movie before.”
The Young Avengers never really spent much time talking about Tommy’s time in juvenile detention, not really. Cassie isn’t sure why the others didn’t talk about it, but before she died it had been because of helplessness. She couldn’t change what had happened to him, or even really prevent it happening to someone else, and so she didn’t talk about it to remind Tommy of what had been done to him. She had thought it a kindness.
Now, licking her ice cream on Pier 21 at San Francisco, the wind from the bay whipping her hair into knots and snarls, she thinks that this may not be entirely true. The same happens to her to some extent; after the first day where everyone explained to her what had happened, no one would speak of the fact that she had died and been resurrected. She wants to talk about it, to use words to conceptualise what is to her nearly impossible to understand, and no one will hear her.
“Tommy,” she says carefully. “What was it like after we broke you out?”
“You were there,” Tommy says with a shrug. “Are you going to eat that ice cream or let it melt over your hand?”
She hands over her half-eaten ice cream, which Tommy also eats at a furious rate. She would have thought having eaten one, his appetite would be diminished. Or, at the very least, he would have one amazing ice cream headache. Annoyingly, neither seemed to be the case. She regrets giving it to him now.
“You know what I mean,” she huffs.
“We should get back now that the fight’s dying down,” Tommy says instead, which annoys Cassie even further, because he’s right.
Then she wonders how he knows this.
Then she realises that the answer is so obvious that she feels stupid. There’s a reason why Tommy doesn’t live with his parents, and why he refers to them separately if he must at all. It’s like how Cassie refers to her mother and stepfather, and she feels terrible for not realising it sooner. She feels even more stupid when she realises that Tommy has already answered her question of how he coped with being outside: it’s by going out and seeing things, like they’re doing now.
Fortunately she doesn’t have long to dwell on it, as Tommy crosses the country in a matter of seconds, and vibrates through the wall to deposit her on her bed, before vibrating out through the wall again. She dresses quickly, her clothes over her costume, and not a moment too soon as her mother sticks her head in.
“Cassandra,” her mother says in a voice acidic enough to strip paint. “Seeing as you’ve made yourself at home here, your father has insisted that you stay here for the time being.”
“I thought you’d be happy,” Cassie says on impulse, wanting to make her mother hurt as much as she is. It isn't what she said, but how she said it, and how it slips under her skin like a handful of splinters. “It’s not like you wanted me anyway. The real me.” She leans up on her hands and lets herself grow. Not a lot, but slowly and enough to prove a point.
“That is not you,” her mother snaps. “That’s all his doing, he put these ridiculous ideas into your head and you were hurt because of it.”
“I’d do it again,” Cassie snarls back. “I’d do it a thousand times because it brought dad back!”
“Do you know what you put us through?”
It’s this question that causes Cassie’s temper, never really that far away when she’s talking to her mother, to explode.
“Put you through?” she snaps. “I died! I died and you don’t even care about that! So get out!”
“Cassandra!”
“Get out.”
Her dress is ruined by her dramatic size change, and her neck aches a little from the way she has to crane it to fit in her room, but it’s worth it for the way that her mother is stunned into silence, eyes wide.
Then like a splash of ice cold water, Cassie realises: this is not superhero behaviour. It’s just bullying. She had wanted to be bigger than her mother for so long, so that she could hurt her mother exactly how she was hurt, but now that she is it just seemed small and petty.
“Just … go,” she says heavily, shrinking back to her normal size. “I can’t deal with you today.” She draws her knees up and ignores her mother until she finally leaves.
She might have stayed like that forever if her phone hadn’t gone off. It’s Tommy, asking if she wants to go out with him and David next week. Sure she sends, and why not? She hasn’t really met David, and she’d like to. At least if she’s seeing them, she’s not seeing her mother.
*
She does not expect a quiet boy wearing a collared shirt and a tie, studying the people around him. If it weren’t for Tommy bounding over and announcing his presence by demanding he shout them both coffee, Cassie would never believe it.
“Hello Cassie,” he says once he returns with the coffees. Remarkably, despite her not telling him what she would like, he got it exactly right. She hums with pleasure as she sips without a flicker of reaction from him at her recently undead status. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“And by that he means that in his superbrain he knows everything about you,” Tommy chimed in, draping on David’s shoulder. David twitches, but doesn’t shove him off, which is interesting.
“Is that right?” she says.
“No,” David says.
“Yes,” Tommy says at the same time.
Cassie raises her eyebrows at this. “You guys can’t both be right.”
“I know a lot,” David says.
“And he can Sherlock the rest,” Tommy says.
“Sherlock is not a verb,” Cassie says. Then her lips quirk into a smile. “But I’ll grant it.”
“Thank you ever so much,” David says, not quite rolling his eyes, and Cassie prods his chest with her finger.
“You better believe it.”
This time, instead of travelling far abroad, they stay close to New York. Cassie gets a cupcake from Molly’s Cupcake and is delighted to know they are as good as she remembers. They linger at the Greenmarket, Cassie’s fingers kept warm despite the snow by the constant styrofoam cups of hot cider that Tommy keeps buying her and David while griping about the cost and how they should just move their hands faster like he is.
Finally, they go to Times Square, and it’s here that David drops his suspicions.
“Do you know why someone brought you back,” he says out of the blue. Cassie looks at him curiously.
“That’s not a question, is it?” she says. “You know someone brought me back. Do you know how?”
“Yes,” David says. “You took a lot of Pym Particles when you were younger?”
“Yeah?”
“I’ve read something about this. If you take a critical amount of Pym Particles, you can do remarkable things. Have the strength of someone ten times your size without changing your height. Recovering from injuries.” He pauses, before adding, “Not dying.”
“That can’t be right,” Cassie says. “My dad would have come back if that were right.”
“You’ve had more than him,” David says. It’s not even a question. He knows, and Cassie can understand now why he is probably the most frightening of the Young Avengers. He sees down to the truth of all things. If he hadn’t lost his powers, he could have been anything. Even now, just remembering the information he had for that brief time until his X gene was taken away, he’s frighteningly bright.
“Someone brought you back,” he says. “The question is why.”
“An Asgardian said something,” Cassie says slowly, after a moment. “Loki, I think, from Billy’s description.” She pauses for a minute, trying to recall the exact words Loki used, but she can’t quite do it. He has a particular cadence to his words that Cassie cannot quite put her finger on. Billy had muttered darkly that he did it deliberately while describing what Loki was like, but Cassie wasn’t quite sure that was right. “He said something about a second chance.”
“For who?" David says, his voice suspicious.
It’s a fair question, and one that Cassie isn’t sure she has an answer for.
*
She’s on her way home from school, walking to the bus, when there’s a shadow overhead. She shades her eyes against the sun and squints, for a moment wondering whether she is looking at Iron Man.
It’s not, and her breath catches in her throat. It’s a confrontation she isn’t ready for, and may never be ready for, not the least because she isn’t sure that Nate even sees it coming.
The helmet slides back and retreats into wherever his armour is stored, and Nate stares at her. He’s no older than she remembers, but a lot more tired and worn. In contrast to the others, who wear their pain and grief with the ease and skill of long practice, Nate wears his like too heavy armour.
“Cassie…?” Nate breathes, reaching out an armoured hand as it to make sure she’s real. “Is this really happening?”
“Hi Nate,” Cassie says, trying to be as cool and collected as Kate. She knows, of course, what happened to Jonas. Everyone had told her when she first came back that Nate had lost his temper, had killed the Vision with a blast from one of his lasers.
“So …” Nate says, his hand dropping. The smile on his face is a wavery thing, and he looks like he might cry. “You’re back.”
“I am,” Cassie says, smiling a little. She doesn’t mean to. She wants to be firm as stone. She knows that Jonas is dead and that Nate played a part in that. She wants to know why. She wants to hear it was a mistake, that he had been aiming for Doom. She wants to hear that his suit had malfunctioned and killed Jonas. She wants to hear anything other than ‘yes, I killed it’.
Despite herself, she takes his hand in her own. The metal is cool and hard, and reminds her of the way that it felt to take Jonas’ hand, which just stiffens her resolve.
“I heard about Jonas,” Cassie says, keeping her gaze on him to gauge his reaction. “Tell me it wasn’t true. Tell me you didn’t kill him.”
“This is what you want to talk about?” Nate says, eyebrows rising. “It? Right now? Did someone put you up to this?”
“No,” Cassie says, scowling. “I heard about it, and I want to know. Please. Tell me you didn’t kill him.”
For a moment she thinks he won’t answer, but he surprises her. At first.
“It wasn’t real, Cassie,” Nate says firmly, dismissing her concerns with a wave of his hand. “It was just a robot copy of me. I would know. I made it.”
Cassie lets go of Nate’s hand, and lets her hand fall to her side.
“Jonas was real,” she says quietly. “He had hopes and dreams of what he wanted to be when he was older, who he wanted to be. He might have started being based on you, but he became his own person.”
“It was just a thing,” Nate says, and it’s almost a plea. A plea for her to understand, maybe. A plea to forgive. A plea to accept that Nate was right, and that the being that Cassie loved was merely a replacement for Nate.
Cassie can’t accept that. She loves Nate, and she thinks she might always do. She might not have known him for long, but she knows him enough to know that she loves him with everything she is. She knows how ridiculous it is to love someone who she has only known for two days, but love is complicated and impossible to explain rationally.
She also loves Jonas with everything she is. Unlike Nate, she saw him struggle with defining who he was, and becoming his own separate person. He had downloaded all of her favourite songs because she liked them, but through that had learned what he had liked as well. She had idly thought of maybe they do a joint playlist together, so that no matter what, they both had something they loved to listen to.
It’s all too easy to reconcile the Nate that she knows with the Nate that destroys Jonas out of jealousy and rage. Even now, after his temper has cooled, Nate doesn’t consider Jonas a person, and this Cassie cannot accept. Jonas fought hard to be a person, to define himself in contrast of his predecessors, and to not be either Nate or the Vision, but instead himself. Nate wears his passions on his sleeve and holds onto them tightly for fear he might lose them. He’s always been quick to anger, quick to smile, quick to cry, and slow to forgive.
This is no different.
“Nate,” she says, taking a breath and letting it out slowly as she says his name. It’s a prayer, but for what she doesn’t know. “He wasn’t a thing.”
“You can’t tell me you loved it,” he says. It’s ugly. For all of Nate’s noble qualities, it’s easy also to remember that one day he will be Kang the Conqueror. One day this boy who is staring at her, his face tight and bright with pain and anger, will become a time travelling monster.
But she is not afraid.
“I loved you both,” she says. “I still do.”
“But,” he says.
“Come find me,” she says on an impulse. “Come and find me when you accept that Jonas was as much a person as you and me. Come and find me then. I’ll wait for you.”
“That’ll never happen,” Nate says bitterly.
“I’ll still wait,” Cassie says. “Because the Nate I know, the Young Avenger, wouldn’t pretend someone wasn’t real.”
“You don’t know me,” Nate snarls, his hand jerking up. She can see the energy increasing in the palm of his hand, and it’s unlikely that she can protect herself from it in time.
She waits.
Nate lets his hand drop. “No,” he says. “Even when I’m Kang, you’re one of the people I’ll never hurt.”
“I’ll wait for you,” she says again, this time sealing it with a kiss. “Go. Defy destiny. Come back to me when you cannot ever be Kang.”
Nate nods once, jerkily, before his helmet slides back over his head and he disappears back into the timeline. Cassie watches, not once breaking eye contact, until he is gone, and then her shaking knees give way under her, dropping her to the ground. The pavement scrapes her knees and she can’t stop shivering.
This is not cool. This is not how Kate would react. This is not how a Young Avenger acts.
She calls Kate to come and get her, explains what happened in short, shaky sobs.
It’s not until afterward that she realises that Kate is actually in LA and so can’t get to her without assistance. She can’t bring herself to call for it.
Fortunately, Kate does, and she arrives five minutes later, in a swirl of blue magical energy. “Thanks, Billy,” Kate says with a salute, before picking Cassie up into a hug.
“Did I do the right thing?” Cassie says to the place where Kate’s neck joins her shoulder.
“Yes,” Kate says, as she rubs Cassie’s back while she sobs. “You did the right thing.”
*
“Hello Cassandra,” Loki says, incongruously wearing a scarf over his usual Asgardian attire. Cassie isn’t entirely sure why he bothers, but considering that it’s a match for the one that she is wearing, it’s probably to throw her off balance.
“Here’s your metro card back,” Cassie says, handing it back to him. “Thanks for that.”
“What did you think?” he says, taking the card and making it disappear in a subtle display of green magic. She wonders whether he’ll ever be able to get it back after doing that. If Billy had done it, they’d be going on an adventure to some hell dimension to get it back. Maybe that’s a mastery of magic thing.
“It’s a metro card,” Cassie says, raising her eyebrows. “No one holds strong views on them.”
“I see you all come by this endearing stupidity honestly,” Loki says, rolling his eyes. “I meant what do you think of my restoring your body?”
“What.”
“Oh, it was incredibly difficult. There you were, all these little itty-bitty particles and I had to sew them all back up so that you could come back. It was terribly difficult, but fortunately for you I’m very good with my fingers!”
“You did what? Why?”
“I told you, I thought you deserved a second chance!”
“Yeah, right. What was your real reason?”
“Why does no one believe me?”
“Uh, because your mouth is moving? Spill it. It’d better not be to hurt my friends.”
“No!” is ripped out of Loki to the surprise of both Cassie and himself, judging by his expression. “No,” he says, more quietly, hunching his shoulders. “It’s to make up for hurting them.”
“Go on,” Cassie says, folding her arms. She barely stops herself from tapping her foot. It’s best to keep that in reserve, if Loki continues to ramble.
“I may — may! — have done some very naughty things when it comes to your friends,” Loki says.
“Yeah,” Cassie says. “I got that impression.”
“Then you understand!” Loki says. It’s peculiarly similar to how Nate spoke to her earlier, a plea for understanding for something that she will never understand. “I couldn’t just come back, they’d forgive me before I even did anything to earn it. This …” he shrugs. “I wanted to earn it.”
She stares at him for a moment. She’s aware that this Loki is not the Loki that the Avengers fought. He is a new-formed one, brought about by the old Loki running a scheme and then killing his reincarnation to take over. Billy was very clear on that front. She understands, though, the idea of doing something horrible and wanting to atone. She can’t resent being alive, and while she is sure that she will regret doing this, she is also sure that when the inevitably horrible thing does come, probably by Loki, her friends will be with her and they can all take care of it.
“Come on,” she says, taking his hand. “We’re meeting up for nachos today. You should come.”