Chapter Text
Our Father who art in Heaven—
Stay there
And we will stay here on Earth
Which is sometimes so lovely
—Jacques Prévert
Contrary to what she would tell the team that was named after her call sign much later, it was not her customized Earth pager’s distress call that alerted her of what she would later know as the Decimation. There was a power surge from inside her, as if her powers were wanting to break out of her skin, as if it were answering a call. Was it the Tesseract, she wondered. Then it was Talos, looking ashen as much as his green skin allowed, appearing on her personal holodeck as she was hovering above XJ-617’s atmosphere.
“Carol,” Talos croaked, as if it were his first time saying her name. His image on her holodeck then flickered, or it was Talos’ trembling that got worse. The situation room he was in was strangely too quiet. He grabbed his face, shaky fingers pinching, clawing, curling and uncurling. “Carol. What—I don’t—my—my daughter. My daughter—”
Tendrils of glaucous, almost white Alice blue energy were slithering and licking up her skin. It's her reminder of the best of Earth's sky. Million lightyears away from her home planet C-53, the tender blue so small, so gently kept in the depth of her mind and heart, grief appeared as one and the same across species: My family. My home. Gone. Gone.
-.-
Amidst the panic, chaos, and his grief (and hers, too), Talos briefed her as best as he could by relaying what he had gathered from his remaining intelligence on Earth, which had stayed there since their landing in 1995. Even though C-53 was the center of the cosmic purge, its ripples had reached neighboring galaxies. Even Hala was affected, and upon knowing she swallowed down a sliver of sympathy for her erstwhile abductors.
“Carol,” Talos began. Her name seemed to be the only word that he could say without an ounce of devastation filtering in. He clasped his hands behind his back. Even in his efforts to keep his back straight, she could imagine hearing his bones creak under the weigh of his people’s desolation, could imagine his silent plea for her to not rush. To understand. To stay. But what was there to understand about all this? What was here to stay for?
Talos then sighed, knowing that he, too, gave in to the same line of questions. He dropped his face to his palms, elbows on knees, murmuring to himself. His eyes were wild and tortured when he looked at her again. She would have to thank him for not trying to stop her, for not being a hypocrite, really.
He informed her that it would take 42 sulli days nonstop even with her powers to get to Earth. You would’ve burned out all your energy by the time you reach C-53. You might not even make it. Carol, it’s done, he didn’t say.
Talos’ wife and a small band of what was left of his command hugged her one by one when she was about to depart. Carol, stay safe. Carol, stay alive, they didn’t say.
The Skrulls’ new homeworld was quiet. Her ears were merely ringing with words unspoken but heard still. Her name had never sounded so foreign in her alien friends’ tongue. It was, after all, an Earth name.
-.-
She’d expected surprise, shock even, when the occupants in the situation room turned and found her there. What she didn’t expect was how swift everyone snapped into fighting stance a second she finished asking a question of Fury’s whereabout. She recognized one of them as swiftly, though. His face was plastered all over her academy recruitment pamphlets, that’s why.
“Captain Rogers?” What the hell had happened when she wasn’t around?
The man addressed lowered his fists, but he did not relapse into a neutral stance yet. “Steve,” the man next to him spoke. Weight on heels and the balls of his feet despite the leg braces, sharp shoulders, straight back. Fellow serviceman, she concluded. These are some capable survivors, she thought.
Lucky, her mind quickly corrected. Lucky survivors.
“Who are you?” Steve Rogers asked her.
“Carol Danvers.” It was the first time in a while she’d said her own name to Earth ears and in the language she’s native to. “Where’s Fury?” she repeated.
Rogers did not answer. Her gaze slid to the list of names on the holo monitors and their accompanying status of either missing or dead. Her body, already stiff and beat from the flight, went stiffer as she recognized Fury’s name on the list.
A quick briefing and Pepper Potts’ distraught plea later, she was en route to Louisiana. Last time she’d checked, Monica was a reserve airman at the MacDill Base, Florida. Maria’s flight school was still running. She should be safe. She must be safe, she and Monica both, or else Carol wouldn’t know what to do.
MacDill was on the highest alert, Level Delta. The whole southeastern board looked desolate, not unlike its eastern neighbor. The house in Louisiana was empty. Monica’s portrait was plastered on posters on utility poles, trees, walls. MISSING, it said. If seen or found, please contact Maria Rambeau 225-754-3010. Missing. Missing.
She clenched her fists until her nails punctured the leather of her gloves and the muscles in her arms screamed from the strain. The green of her blood that dripped on the wooden floor of the Rambeaus’ porch was a reminder of her alienness. Her distance. Her loss. Maria and Monica were not safe. They were not here. This was not her Earth. She was not home.
-.-
Rogers and Potts sent her some coordinates in space. It was near Titan. They also gave her a name: Tony Stark. Entering the Titan orbit, her comm detector intercepted a weak radiogram. The wave was fainter than what Rogers and Potts had received previously. Primitive means, if measured by Skrull or Kree standard, but it was somewhat familiar to her because it was an Earth technology. A man’s voice, recorded and transmitted from a halted, battered spaceship. As she approached, a flicker of energy waves hit her. Her fingertips tingled. Warmth slithered from her arms to her shoulders and to her neck. Now this, she knew. It’s hers, too, after all.
The Tesseract was calling her indeed.
-.-
Stark wore an arc reactor that ran on an imitation of the Tesseract energy. Her energy reader put the reactor’s output at eight gigajoules per second, equal to the energy produced by eighty barrels of Earth fossil fuel. Pretty impressive for an earth technology, she thought. As malnourished and drained as Stark was, his reactor would sustain him. The Tesseract would not let its host die, just as hers did not.
She gave the reactor a little charge, jolting Stark from his lethargy. He did not remove her hand from his person, but he palmed his reactor in a protective, almost fond gesture. She took no offense. He was still a little too weakened for her liking, but he would live what’s with that kind of pep.
Behind him, the blue woman, Nebula, kept a wary eye on her.
“How far are we from home?” Stark asked.
An infinity away, she thought. “Six sulli days, I think.”
Groaning at her sketchy answer, Stark shifted. She could hear his bones protest. They’re low on food and oxygen, two that Stark needed most, but there’s a Skrull outpost about a sulli day away where they could obtain some temporary sustenance, and from thereon it’s up to her to get the ship to Earth. Human medicine, however, was a different affair.
“And what’s your contingency plan now that you’ve found us? Tow us home?”
To Earth, not home. “Yes.”
He stared at her in disbelief. “Just like that?”
She took his hand away from his reactor and tapped its glass case once, twice. Tiny blue wisps travelled from her fingers to the reactor, giving it another, smaller jolt. It hissed, as if wanting to chase its much stronger siblings.
His eyes widened. “You—”
She threw him an extra blanket. “Sleep, Stark. You need to save your energy.”
-.-
“You in space often?”
She knew he couldn’t see her at the hull while she’s towing the ship, but she still looked at the cockpit direction and rolled her eyes. Chatting time coming, it seemed. While Nebula was rather subdued and quiet, Stark was trying to be anything but.
Stark took her silence as confirmation. “Figures.” A coughing fit, some quiet, then another question. “Seen Absolute Zero yet?”
“No, but I’ve been to the Boomerang Nebula,” she said to her comm.
“Ah, the Bow Tie.” Another cough. “Is it really one degree Kelvin?”
“Guess so.” She recalled that even she, bearer of the Tesseract powers, couldn’t move in the Boomerang Nebula environment. Then again, space was cold because space, barren of atoms and molecules, did not have temperature—created by the movement of atoms and molecules—in the first place. Technically, one couldn’t measure something that did not have anything to measure out. Earth, by far, was the warmest place she’d been to.
"How long have you been space cowboying?"
"A while."
"Met any fellow human?"
"Half-human, yes."
"You know, I'm not necessarily the biggest fan of space."
She frowned a little at that. Children, she knew, were fascinated by space. Adults who were not were often either ignorant or traumatized by something extraterrestrial. Stark didn't strike her as ignorant. What had he witnessed, she wondered. "Not many people are."
Stark was quiet for a longer while before he started again. “Not a fan of tête-à-tête much, aren’t you?" At Carol's silence, he resorted back to deadpanning. "Not complaining, by the way. You do you, glowing space Jesus.”
She let the jab fly as the ship was nearing the Kree outpost. Which, to no one’s surprise, was empty. Whether it was abandoned prior to the Decimation or its dwellers fell victim to it as well, she didn’t know, didn’t want to know. The ship creaked none too gently as she landed it on an airway. She left to recon the lone building in the outpost, found a few packages of Krylorian beans and frozen drinkable Sakaaran aloe leaves, and a dated but working holo transmitter in one of the chambers.
Punching in her codes to the transmitter, she waited for Talos to appear on the holodeck. As he recognized her grim expression, his face fell. “Oh Carol, I’m sorry.”
She didn’t think she had anything but a scream to return his sympathy, so she barreled on instead. “What did you have for me?”
Talos frowned, but he kept up. “It happened everywhere to everyone. Your people, mine, all of the universe. Half of the universe is missing indeed.” He’d refused to say gone again since the first time he did. “My intel recovered some energy traces to Titan II, but I can’t confirm anything until I get more information.”
“He must be there.”
“He might.”
“He must be there.”
“Carol,” Talos hissed tiredly. “He still has the Stones, and he can use their powers again. You’re but one Stone power. One!” She stilled, and Talos flinched at his own outburst. Gradually recomposing himself, he sighed. “Look, there’s no stopping him now. If you get a hold of him, and I say this very specifically—if you get him, it’s you against him and the Stones.”
“Good enough for me. Subdue him, take the Stones, and get them away from him, right? So I’ll break his fingers, cut his hand, kill him. Easy does it.”
“You’ll break his fingers, cut his hand, kill him,” Talos repeated incredulously. “Will it undo anything?”
“Will doing nothing do?”
“I lost my daughter!”
The scream reverberated in the chamber, bouncing against the wall and piercing her ears. It was in Skrullian, but she got it just the same. In the onus of a loss, language felt thin as grief undressed it. Again, she clenched her fists. Again, she felt the holes in her gloves that she herself created.
Talos looked at anything but her. “Carol, you know I’ve lost, too.” The transmitter stuttered, his image blurring. “But my people are still here. I can’t walk away from that. I know your—” he paused, hesitating though now looking at her, “you are concerned about C-53. Believe me, I know how it feels. But I’d also like to think you do know you’re more than welcome here.”
The holo flickered again.
“I will do the right thing, I promise.”
Stark eyed her suspiciously when she returned to the ship, but thankfully he said nothing when he accepted the beans and aloe leaves. He offered her an aloe leaf back, which she took with no words as well. He knew she didn't need it, she knew. Sitting next to him in the cockpit, she took a bite. She had not sat down since she got to Earth and back in space again. She hadn’t had the chance to slow down or rest either.
The aloe tasted horrible, just as she remembered. The stars were out, as ever. The cosmos was dark, as ever. Space was cold, as ever.
-.-
The first thing Stark did once the ship reached the team's headquarter was ripping Rogers a new hole before he collapsed to the floor, wheezing, head almost bumping into Carol’s knees. Potts transferred him to a nearby recovery room, and Rogers had holed himself in his room ever since. Carol slipped into Stark’s room when Potts left for a bathroom break. The serviceman from earlier, James Rhodes, sat next to Stark’s bed, and Rhodes raised both eyebrows as he saw her entering.
“Hey there, glowy,” Stark greeted with a rasp. “How did I do back there?”
She found it hard to not roll her eyes often around Tony Stark. “Nine out of ten for the outburst. The conking out could’ve used some more polishing, though.”
“My, she’s got some sarcastic bones in her.” Stark grinned. Then he pointed at Rhodes. “Have you met Rhodey here? He’s my favorite.”
“Tony,” Rhodes chided gently, partly out of embarrassment.
“By the way, do you want some good CliffNotes recap of our recent gigs? We can help with that. Christ, who was president when you visited last? Clinton? Bush Sr? Were the Towers still there? Christ. Rhodey, you start. I’ll jump in for the footnotes.”
Footnotes. Right. She would make sure that 3.2 million people would not be mere footnotes. She would do the right thing whatever it took. She would do the right thing.
Starting from calling 225-754-3010.
-.-