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Carol Danvers knew something was wrong before her pager biped.
Before the tiniest sound from the outdated piece of human technology — she had modified Nick’s, an easy task even for an average soldier when it came to technology. Old, outdated and reliable, like humans seemed to be. She knew something went terrible wrong before Nick aliens invading New York is not an emergency Fury pressed the button on his half of the communication. The call was a confirmation as she ate something that looked like grey slop but tasted nice enough, restless and pacing bare-footed on her shop that needed about forty different maintenance fixes on a daily basis.
For the last couple of hours, something had been bothering her. No. For months even. But it had been insistent and she had been checking all her sort-of-allies trying to point out the source. After all, Carol leaned in the last thirty years that her human-bred intuition was rather effective. Earth was next, she only needed to rest for a moment from travelling the space-typical mind-blowing distances.
It was clawing inside her ribcage with a ferocity that made her check is she wasn’t physically harm in the area a dozen times. It cut into her bones, vicious into her heart and lungs that she expected to spit blue. It was suffocating, and Carol didn’t remember how it felt to suffocate, and she hated not being able to breath even if it wasn’t a quintessential need. Breathing made it hurt more, so she had kept her chest still for the last five hours.
(She’ll keep her chest still for the next five years.
She’ll try to keep her heart still too.)
(She was much more efficient in being the weapon of mass destruction they made out of her than someone able to cope self-inflicted heartbreak.),
Last time Carol checked on Earth, physically, she found a post-battle New York and a Nick Fury that had been experimenting with the Tesseract. He knew what an engine powered by it could do, what could it do directly? As a soldier, she could understand. He knew what was out here, he was smart enough to know there must be people as powerful as Carol — people stronger than her.
He was a human man who wanted to protect his home, his people. The idea of him making weapons born from what created the Annihilator was disturbing, but at least he wasn’t trying to make it out of a person.
(Manufacturing weapons out of metal was dangerous.
Carving weapons not of flesh, blood and bones was cruel.)
Moments before the beep, the thing in her chest was pulling so hard she half-expected to look down and see her chest caving in. But it wasn’t, it felt much warmer than it should when she pressed her hand against it and felt her heart trying to beat itself out from her body. The tension pulled, pulled and pulled and snapped. The recoil was physical.
The Infinity Stones are connected, they communicate, and they can be used together, she was told once, somewhere, she couldn’t recall. People, at best, survive touching them. You’re part of it now. She didn’t believe it.
(Because people died when they entered in contact with the energy from a Stone, like Carol did.
She remembers Death; gentle and soft and welcoming. Then blue pulled her back, or most of her. She thought Carol Danvers, the human — Maria’s friend, Monica’s aunt, Lawson’s skilled pilot, died and stayed with the pretty woman.)
It hurt enough she barely managed to reach the closest bin and throw up the grey slop of a meal, it burned all the way up her throat. She hasn’t vomited from pain since the time she worked three weeks non-stop, mostly in binary state for I have to be fast when destroying one of the last Kree outposts.
It hurt like a missile exploding against her chest, leaving shrapnel embedded all over her flesh, piercing through her heart and lungs and protruding out of her back.
Then it was over.
Then a pulse of similar pain, a ghostly aftermath that made her spit out acid.
Then: bip. From the small battery station she kept the pager when she wasn’t out of the Hoopty. It pulled her from the stunned state she found herself in after the abrupt amount of agony. She almost tripped over her feet, hands massaging her chest in an attempt to sooth the ache.
Nick never called, and Carol could list a dozen times it would have been undertable to ask your intergalactic comically-powered buddy for help.
Carol was out of the Hoopty still putting on her boots, it was almost funny.
Fire was eating her veins before she breached into Earth’s solar system, she tasted blood on the back of her throat as she burned thought the atmosphere. Carol didn’t remember the last time she flew this fast, burned this much energy without prior warm up. It didn’t matter, she located the pager’s location and it took all her experience to not go straight through the planet as she landed. She barely left scorch marks, despite the despair burning brighter than the star in her chest. It took even more self-control to not glow and act like the menacing force she was carved to be as she asked where’s Fury? (Because he was Fury to everyone. He said so.)
Carol Danvers was a one-woman army, and not because she was powerful, because armies are weapons. And this weapon had revenge as its default. She knew it. The first thing she thought was I’ll tear him apart when told about Thanos — the Titan that left destruction behind and she had been busy trying to fix it up, busy trying to be a hero instead of what she was made to be.
(Fury, Nick. Rambeau, Monica.)
(I’ll make him regret it.
I’ll make them regret letting it happen.)
It was more her fault than the children of a team named after a dead woman. A team that had been broken, from what she could understand after being the half-dead Tony Stark back home. They were more than physically separated and had been doomed since deciding to take different sides in a internal civil war.
Not that she cared about the internal politics
(Fury, Nick. Rambeau, Monica.
The claws on her ribcage, the Space Stone calling for its daughter or warning two of the only people she loved were in danger?)
You can’t go alone, it’s dangerous, one of them told her. Lawson had said it was dangerous and that had been the whole reason Carol climbed that test plane. Danger and possible death did nothing to stop her. If killing a star didn’t kill her, a crazy man wouldn’t.
So when Thor killed him, maybe it took mentally reminding herself he’s grieving too, he’s angry too, he lost people too for her to not test how resistant a god was to a rage-filled star.
The stones were gone — they were all gone, she could feel an emptiness behind the crave for blood and killing and causing pain on who caused it. So she took what was left of Carol Danvers, the pilot, the surviving soldier, the woman who forgot who she was, and buried it under the noble duty that was killing her.