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They said that once upon time there was a group assignment in which everyone put an equal amount of time and effort and they were all graded fairly. It was probably a myth.
You could argue that the then newly founded Avengers had put on equal amounts of effort during the battle of New York, despite many jokes at Clint’s expense for showing up with a bow. He had shot an explosive arrow to Loki’s face, that had to count for something.
But the Avengers (the original Avengers, all the new recruits were gone) were dispersed and broken. Half of them in Wakanda, Tony stranded in another planet (how, Tony?) and Clint on house arrest. They were willing to do it, though. To find each other and work together and defeat Thanos and make everything right again.
They probably would. But they were dispersed and broken and it would take time to get together and hatch a plan. Someone was in a hurry.
There was another group. A different group. More traditional. Meaning that there was one obvious leader doing most of the work and giving tasks to the others according to their abilities or lack thereof. They were on a deadline, too. This leader wanted things done in less than half a human life span (one had to think in these terms when dealing with galactic matters). Ideally, the leader wanted things solved by the end of the month.
It could be done. It wasn’t that much harder than a group project with two members working full time, someone with kids, a stoner, and someone with so many activities they can literally only meet Tuesdays between 11 and 12 pm. You just had to know what task to give to each individual.
The Guy Who Does His Part And Is Never Seen Again, Not Even For The Presentation.
“Of course I have a spaceship that can take you to Thanos,” said M’Baku sounding almost offended that anyone could have any doubts about it. Sure, he had been busy fighting the ugly space dogs from hell attacking the capital, and his warriors had been with him. But the Jabarii were very practical people who didn’t like wasting opportunities even when they had no previous interest in them. You had the chance to do something, or grab something, you did it and you will figure out a use for it later.
A battle in the capital seemed like a very good distraction and therefore an excellent opportunity to sneak behind enemy lines and see what the bad guys had brought with them. They had captured two dozens of the weird space dogs from hell, seven samples of weapons and a spaceship, maybe two. (Okay, four, all in different sizes).
“I can’t tell you his location, other than this quadrant.” M’Baku pointed at what appeared to be a random part of space. “I suppose you can ask around once you are close. Say, do you want me to ask the little giant from space?”
M’Baku was oddly proud of being just a half inch taller than Thor.
“No time, but thanks. Send my best to Thor and the others.” Pepper answered, already thinking of her next step.
With all the ensuing chaos, Earth would need the old Avengers to stop things from going further down. Plus, when they first touched down on New York, Thanos’ people had given a weird speech about submitting and accepting a glorious fate and whatnot. There was nothing to indicate that Thanos would content himself with destroying half the universe, he might want to enslave the other half. If that was the case, it would be best to have someone here on Earth to guard her.
The Guy With An Impossible, IMPOSSIBLE, I Say, Schedule.
“This is supposed to be a secret place,” said Clint, arms still looking very good, while holding a crate of something farm related. Possibly potatoes. Might be turnips, she didn’t know. “Also, I’m on house arrest.”
“I know a guy who knows a guy who works for the CIA.” Pepper said, waving a dismissing hand as if it were nothing. “Ross. Not the Secretary of State. I can’t stand that guy. Another Ross, much nicer.”
Clint nodded in acceptance although he still didn’t understand how that explained how they found his whereabouts.
“All right.” He said, because he wasn’t that interested. His kids were upset and he wanted to fix that. That was his priority. “But you know, whatever you are going to say, I made a deal. I can’t even go more than a hundred yards from the house, and our land is larger than that.”
Which explained the white marks on the grass. A hundred yards meant that Clint could go to the tools shed and the machinery building, but he couldn’t go near the fruit trees or even the mailbox down the road.
“I can’t leave.” Clint said plainly.
“What about up?”
“Up?”
“Does the house arrest order say anything about going up?”
It didn’t. They went to the house to check Clint’s copy of the plea deal and it didn’t say anything about upwards restrictions because it was using the standard definition and language of the typical house arrest order, even though it applied to a far from typical individual.
“Excellent! We will depart from your backyard then, and go up until we are outside the stratosphere.”
“What?”
“You are a pilot, aren’t you? You can fly those weird Shield planes?”
“Well, yes.”
“I am sure that the spaceship isn’t much harder.” Pepper smiled. “I still have to go get a few others, so you can have a couple of days to practice.”
“Practice with a spaceship?”
“It should be here in no time. Just tell the delivery guys where you want it.”
The Guy (or Girl) Who Will Do The Whole Presentation Because She Is The Only Person Who Understands All The Parts Of The Project And Also Is Not Afraid Of Public Speaking.
“You must be Thanos” said Pepper, standing at last before the man who had destroyed half the universe. He looked very small. Sure, he was a giant compared to her (and many other space creatures) but he still was too small for all the pain and suffering he had caused.
He looked at her, this beautiful woman standing before him without an ounce of fear. He knew that fearless look because he so very seldom saw it. Even those brave enough to fight him, like Nebula, like Gamora and her idiot boyfriend and his troupe, they looked at him with a healthy dose of fear and hate. There was none of that in the eyes of this woman.
She was holding a small pad with the seal of Stark. Thanos didn’t know anything about her, but he knew the seal. People like Tony were dangerous and full of potential so of course he knew a lot about him. He still wasn’t sure if he regretted leaving him alive in exchange of the stone. He knew Tony Stark to be a danger.
He knew nothing about the woman Tony loved, though, which was a terrible mistake.
“I am Virginia Potts, from Terra” she said with the same smile with which she greeted everyone at an investors meeting. In her other hand she had a white oiled cloth that she unfolded to make a screen held upright with hollow aluminum poles. Very ingenious.
“Please, take a sit.” She put the screen in front of him and with a swift gesture projected the images from the tablet into the screen. It was a bit incongruous, such advanced technology like the little pad in her hands while also using something as rudimentary as a physical screen. It would had been better if she could project the images against the air and make them opaque enough that whatever was behind the hologram didn’t disturb the view.
Thanos was slightly amused by this small human who so fearlessly approached him. He wanted to ask “what it is you want?” or warn her that she should not disturb the Great Thanos, Master of the Universe. But Pepper didn’t give him any time, immediately starting a presentation titled “Effects and Consequences of Destroying Half the Life of the Universe.”
To this day, Pepper still had to deal with people complaining that Tony had stopped building weapons, even if Stark Industries was twice as successful with its intelligent-tech as it was with weapons. Giving presentations to a hostile public was her thing.
Another thing hardly anyone knew about Pepper was that she had majored in Economics. For some reason people thought she had studied Business Administration (understandable) of Interior Decorating (what?). But no, it was Economics. Lots of Maths, you know, and Statistics.
You might ask how had she ended as Tony’s personal assistant, then. She had student loans to pay and she had figured that the position was close enough to a big company that she would still gain useful business experience. Why was she hired was hardly a question. Tony was hard to manage and drove people away.
Pepper’s presentation had such point as: “Life: Definition.” Because Thanos had destroyed all life, not just all intelligent life, meaning there were missing quite a lot of plants and animals and even intestinal bacteria which accounted in some small way for Pepper’s awful mood that week and her urgency to fix this at once. There was also a picture of a black and white dog looking at the camera with her tongue out. Her name was Peonia (Clint’s kid were super weird, but that was a topic for another day) and she had gone missing during the ashening which explained Clint’s willingness to pilot an unknown spaceship to an equally unknown planet.
Point Two was full of graphs and numbers in which Pepper unleashed her Economic self and showed that more than half the life of the universe had been lost. Thanos’ stupid, so stupid, decision of ending lives randomly meant that quite a lot of people had disintegrated while they were doing something important. Like piloting planes or performing surgery or driving Pepper to the Avengers’ compound upstate.
(Seriously, seeing Happy turn to ash in the middle of telling a joke had been the stuff of nightmares.)
There was, of course, a picture of Happy to illustrate Pepper’s point.
Point Three shouldn’t had been part of the presentation because it didn’t really deal with the effects and consequences of ending half the existing life in the universe as the title indicated. Rather, it was an extended explanation of less genocide-involving alternatives to the problem of overpopulation.
(Pepper had met a very amicable monk in Brooklyn who had explained who Thanos was and what he wanted and where she could find more information about his whereabouts. It had all been very informative, if infuriating.)
She cited the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, pointed that Thanos could have created more resources once he got the gauntlet, and even conceded that if he was so invested on having a totalitarian thing going on, he could have enforced a smart system of spending and consumption rather than simply killing millions at once.
She got flushed as she went through those slides. She had had time to mull over it and she was very angry. It had been an awful act of cruelty disguised as mercy and she would not accept it. She would not take anyone dealing abuse saying it was a necessary measure.
Thanos, of course, didn’t like any of what he was hearing (and seeing, Pepper’s slides were very informative and full of graphs). He was sure that he was right and he had sacrificed a lot to that certainty. Anything else was heresy and the pathetic attempt of the weak to stop what to him was inevitable. Suggesting that he was wrong was a deep insult.
Had Pepper though that perhaps she could make him see reason? That he would listen to her arguments, realize the error of his ways and hasten to undo the damage? That he would have the decency and greatness to accept an opinion other than his own?
Maybe. Pepper didn’t seem much of an optimist (she claimed to be a cynic), but maybe she was optimistic enough.
Thanos growled “Enough!” and got up. He took the pad from Pepper’s hands and smashed it, throwing the screen to the ground. He looked at her with that empty stare that had frozen millions in terror. The stare that revealed that he was not seeing people, only numbers, and that killing them would mean nothing to him. It wasn’t murder. It was deleting, erasing, undoing. You could not beg for mercy to he who thought he was already merciful.
Pepper showed no fear. There was a soft satisfied smile in her face, like those secretive smiles of the ladies in the Renaissance.
The Guy Who Is Oddly Obsessed With This One Topic and Has To Work It In At All Costs.
“I see you don’t like what I am saying.” Pepper spoke slowly to conceal her nerves. She couldn’t avoid being at least a bit nervous when standing before a demented purple giant with murderous tendencies. In another planet.
“No. I do not.” Thanos spoke softly too. Soft and easy and unbelievably cruel.
“It’s fine. I got what I wanted anyway.” Pepper said, and she looked so tired then. So tired. It had been such a horrible few days. The world was in chaos, friends were missing, she didn’t know where Tony was, or even if he still was, and her stomach hurt.
“You came all this way…” whispered Thanos. There was no reason to whisper other than he liked to emphasize how unthreatening he found people. Being in control meant that he didn’t have to raise his voice. It was stupid and condescending, but Pepper preferred it to the villains who screamed their motivations like a bad actor bellowing a Hamlet monologue.
“All this way just to spit some angry words.” He went on. Now his voice betrayed some of his anger. “You little fool. You think you understand the world and the universe but you can’t even see the failure under your feet.”
“Oh, no, no.” Pepper said, unaffected by Thanos’ prose. She didn’t even bat an eye to Thor’s lyrical accounts of his visits to the park and the animals he met there. Thanos angry whispering that she was a fool was nothing. “No, I came for the gauntlet thing with the magic stones. The words were because I needed to vent, Clint is very pissed about his missing dog, and also it kept you distracted for a few minutes.”
Funny thing, a pale Thanos turned mauve. He also physically turned to look at the corner where the gauntlet had laid, just a step away from the wooden chair in which Thanos sat. So sure he was that no one would dare coming so close to him, that no one could slip past his vigilant eye, that he had taken the stupid gauntlet off and dropped it on the floor.
Technically, no one had gone near Thanos except for Pepper and she didn’t have the gauntlet. But if the mountain doesn’t go to Muhammad, then Muhammad goes to the mountain. Only it was the other way around. If you couldn’t get close to the purple monster to grab the gauntlet, then you found someone who could make the metal gauntlet come to them.
“Rot in Hell, fig face!” Yelled Magneto from the other side of the hill, the gauntlet with the infinity stones resting on the crook of his elbow. His other hand was near his mouth so it could carry his words. “You Arschgeige! You Fickfehler! You took him, you bastard. Just when he was saying that I was right!”
Pepper took the opportunity to put some distance between Thanos and her and make her way to the spaceship. Of course Thanos couldn’t know or understand why an elderly gentleman with enviable hair was yelling abuse at him. She knew. Everybody in the spaceship knew. Magneto hadn’t shut up for the whole trip about how Charles had turned to ash and disappeared just as he was saying “You are right, Erik, but nevertheless-”. Pepper got the impression that they were talking about pizza and Professor Xavier was simply saying that pepperoni was the superior topping, but apparently any kind of agreement or concession was a very big thing between those two.
And Erik Lehnserr had been robbed of the opportunity to gloat.
“Arsch Mit Ohren!! I will destroy you! I will destroy every single member or your sick race! I will burn your planet whole and turn it into salt!”
Pepper didn’t deceive herself. Magneto had come because he was royally pissed with Thanos, but he wasn’t exactly an ally or a good work partner.
The Funny Guy Who Avoids Being The Load Because At Least He Makes You Laugh, You Know?
Magneto was still screaming all kind on insults to Thanos and promising to extinguish the life of everything beloved by the purple monster. All while holding the gauntlet and its precious stones.
He thought about using it. Of course he did.
“No-no-no-no-no.”
A finger inside a red leather glove was moving side to side, inches away from Magneto’s face.
“No-no-no-no-No-NO. Bad. Very bad. Do not use the thing. Miss Potts said not to use it.”
Deadpool had put a gloved hand over the gauntlet, a bit like a host in a TV commercial showing a juice-maker. He was still wagging the other finger.
“Let go” growled Magneto.
“No. Gimme.”
“You dare to oppose me?” Magneto was angry (no wonder he fought about everything with Xavier, including pizza toppings) but he was surprised enough that he had stopped before his hand even entered the gauntlet. Deadpool often had that paralyzing effect on people. “I could stab you with your own sword.” He made a vague gesture of his hand to remind everyone that he could move and alter metal.
“First of all, these are katanas.” Deadpool said in his usual chirpy tone. One had to wonder what did anyone expect when threatening Deadpool. “And second.”
—KI-THUFLE—
“I can stab myself with my own sword. Big deal.”
Magneto was frozen in place, staring aghast at the lunatic with a sword handle sticking out of his chest. Katanas have long blades, so stabbing yourself with one is not a small feat. Neither is to keep standing and talking as if the sword going through your body were nothing more than a fashion statement.
That Other Person Who Actually Worked And Answered To The Emails
Just as Pepper had prepared for the inevitable murder spree of Magneto, she had prepared for Thanos fighting back. Unlikely certain people she knew, she didn’t get close and familiar with a villain taunting him without appropriate backup.
Before departing she had gone to visit Scott Lang, who was also on house arrest and very easy to find. Tony and Rhodney had complained for months about him. About how unfair it was to bring a tiny dude that was practically invisible, about how unfunny his quips were, about tiny dude turning into giant dude and how that was Not Cool. Pepper thought those were all excellent points and she wanted the tiny guy on her side.
She had read the files about him on her way to his apartment. Smart guy, educated, had something close to resembling morals, but he also seemed arrogant and impulsive and she already had a few of those in her team. She couldn’t risk someone blowing up her plan because years of male repression of emotions had made them unable to take an insult smiling.
It didn’t matter because the man Pepper had found was nothing like the man on the Avengers’ files. Thanos’ balancing act had taken the new husband of Scott’s ex-wife. That wasn’t too bad, although Scott kept saying again and again that the bastard was an honorable guy and he trusted him with Maggie and Cassie. He trusted him!
No, the really bad part was that Cassie was gone too. It took Pepper fifteen minutes to figure that out because Scott was a mess and he would keep saying what a wonderful, smart, sweet girl Cassie was, how she liked tigers better than ponies, how she said she wanted to be an entomologist when she grew up. He said everything except that she was his daughter because it hurt too much to say those words.
“I am so very sorry, Mr. Lang.” Pepper had said. Scott had looked at her with red rimmed eyes, angry and mad and drowning in pain, and immediately volunteered himself for whatever crazy mission she had in mind to destroy Thanos.
Nope. That was a hard pass on Pepper’s part.
“Is there anyone I could talk to? About your suit?” she had said instead, and after two unbearable hours of ramblings she had gotten the name Hope Van Dyne.
Hope was excellent. She had just as much training with the suit as Scott, if not more, and she could keep a level head. Also, she liked the game Mastermind which Pepper loved. Sadly Pepper had never met anyone else who knew about the game or liked to play it. Having Hope with her was great and she planned to keep seeing her after this. It made the trip to find Thanos much more enjoyable too.
But now the monster was coming after Pepper. Furious that a simple human had managed to deceive him and steal his gauntlet, furious that a simple human would dare to stand before him and call him an idiot with a power-point presentation.
Thanos reached his hand. Huge, powerful. A hand that had taken so many lives, a hand that had silenced the god of mischief and taken the light and the life out of him. He could break Pepper with just a touch. Kill her without any need for his gauntlet, any gauntlet. She was small and frail and his hand was so big.
A hand that was now unexplainably turning up, up, up, and back, wreaking the wrist. Then the thumb, moving down and back as if the whole weight of an adult woman were pushing it down past the breaking point.
The Wasp’s suit could fly. How cool was that? It wasn’t a long fly, more like a glide, but she could jump from one arm to the other and give the same treatment to the hand there.
They didn’t kill him. He knew a lot about the infinity stones and they might need that knowledge later, if Pepper’s A to K plans failed. Mostly it was because Pepper didn’t want to offer him an easy out. No, she would leave him alive and she would force him to watch how everything was undone and how his plan had been stupid. If there was such a thing as a Tribunal of the Universe, she might take him there.
They did break every single bone of his hands, though, and quite a few of the little wrists bones and also his left tibia. That last one was just in case he kept trying to give chase. Also, Hope was very upset about Clint’s dog Peonia. She had never met the dog, but it upset her nonetheless, hence the kick.
They got to where Magneto and Deadpool were standing, the latter with the gauntlet balanced on his head like the crown of the Upper and Lower Egypt. Magneto was fuming, but seeing Thanos beaten up by a tiny, tiny, girl had done a lot to improve his mood. He had also melted any metal tools Thanos had in his tent and maybe put the melted metal on Thanos’ ugly face. The aluminum poles of the power-point screen and the mashed up Stark pad were currently embedded on Thanos like pins on a voodoo doll.
And then, they all just went inside the spaceship and left that cursed place. Somebody had painted a male pin-up with a vague resemblance to Tony Stark on the side of the hull. It had probably been Deadpool, but Clint wasn’t beyond suspicion.
The Final Grade
As it often happens, fixing something takes more time and energy than breaking something. Breaking and destroying takes almost no effort and villains should stop feeling so proud of those accomplishments. Thanos had taken half the life of the universe with a snap of his fingers, but a similar gesture wouldn’t bring all the life back. Some people had disappeared while they were driving or, in some terrible, terrible, instances, piloting a plane. You couldn’t just put them back in the place where they had turned to ash. There were also those who had died as a consequence of people disappearing. Plus all the animals and plants.
It was a lot to have in account and they didn’t even have a wizard or similar magic-user nearby who knew how to use the gauntlet. However, Thor was able to do the big parts and Pepper took care of the nuances and five days later everyone was back.
In the meantime they also had to think on what where they going to do with the gauntlet afterwards. Keeping it as it was wasn’t an option because it had taken Magneto seven minutes to begin planning his own genocide after getting the gauntlet (Prof. Xavier was screaming so much). Deadpool insisted that they should all swallow a stone. He said he didn’t want the red one because it would be too obvious, but any of the others would do.
Pepper seriously considered making the Hulk swallow at least one of them.