me: still thinking about how so many asgardian civilians were killed with so little regard and how a mass slaughter of refugees is really inappropriate in this political climate, and not to mention they already suffered through so much in the past few days (the destruction of their homeland, the deaths of those that couldn’t reach heimdall), and the optimism they held in making a new home on earth is completely destroyed
How has not A SINGLE ARTICLE yammering about Thanos not mentioned that he breaks his own pitch in THE FIRST FIVE MINUTES. How does nobody in THE MOVIE mention it??
Asgard just lost their whole planet and over 99% of the population. Thanos kills half of the refugees??? HELLO????
Thanos should have shook them down for the Stone and let em go. That would have been interesting!! But no, Russos just really wanted to be Dark™ no matter what, like how does anybody address anything Thanos says with any seriousness at all after that. Even NOT going into how the wealthy kill the planet and anything even INVITING overpopulation as an issue is ignorant and tone deaf, like, “is Thanos full of shit” is done immediately. First shot, it’s over. “he just really believes half the popul–” THERE WERE FIVE HUNDRED AND SEVEN ASGARDIANS LEFT, CARL
my GOD i didn’t even consider it from this angle, this is such a good addition
LIKE, HELLO??? an ENTIRE PLANET is basically reduced to this many people. with the beginning of iw + the snap, the population is a QUARTER of this.
god it’s just so frustrating that right after the movie that humanized the nameless civilians, we get this. and we KNOW these are all civilians, since literally all the soldiers are killed directly by hela.
Post Infinity War, slightly OOC Nebula because I have no idea how to write her. IW didn’t really inspire a lot of ideas for me in terms of fic, but as I was discussing it with doux-amer, part of this came about, so I finished it up. Very rough.
“What would you have done?” he asks. Nebula doesn’t look at him, doesn’t even blink. “With the Gauntlet?”
They are ten jumps away from Earth, or so she’s told him. They are five days out from Titan. (Five days out from apocalypse, and here he sits, flying through space on a dead man’s ship named after an 80′s rock singer with an honest to god cyborg to his left. It’s the perfect set-up for Tony to wake up at any moment.
But he doesn’t.)
Nebula is quiet for a long moment. Nebula is quiet in general – the most she’s ever spoken to him in one go is to tell him exactly how and why Peter Parker had faded away from his hands – but there is something pensive to her silence, so he waits.
“Destroyed Thanos,” she says after a moment, so flat and determined, no question. “Destroyed him and his ship and his ‘children.’“
“Aren’t you his kid?” Tony asks.
“I was,” she answers simply. Tony doesn’t know what to make of that, but he doesn’t ask. He got his answer, sparse as it was. He settles back into his chair and doesn’t watch the stars go past.
They’re between jumps. Nebula is hesitant to put him through too many at once, something about his puny human body being unable to take the strain. On these first few stretches of time between hops, they would drift near planets and Nebula would flip the outbound communicator on. He thinks she was hoping to hear of one planet that was unscathed, proof that Thanos’ power wasn’t absolute, but every broadcast was panicked, hurried, alien words tripping over themselves. After a while, she stopped listening.
Earth had no one to broadcast to. They were alone in their terror and anguish. And Tony is returning to bring back more. Would May Parker still exist, wondering where her son was? Would Wong be holding the Sanctum for a man who wasn’t coming back?
Was Pepper still there? Happy? Rhodey? Vision or Harley or Bruce or Nat or –
What if Steve was gone, too?
(What if the last thing the Avengers ever did was tear each other to pieces?)
He had persuaded Nebula to pilot him to Earth with the promise of other heroes who could help her take the fight to Thanos. There was a fifty-fifty chance that any one of them still remained.
Heads or tails.
“What would you have done?” Nebula asks abruptly, and it takes a minute for his brain to catch up. She still isn’t looking at him.
“Before?” Tony muses. “I don’t know. I had an infinity stone in my grasp before and that didn’t end well for anybody, so I’d like to think I’d just lock it up in a vault, maybe split the stones.” Maybe he’d fix his heart first, maybe he’d end world hunger, maybe he’d – maybe he’d – “I don’t know. Now, though? Now I – I just want Peter back.”
“The child.” It is not a question. Tony nods.
He’d want Pepper safe of course. His team. He’d want the Earth back, six billion plus with all their misery and hope. But Peter is still under his fingernails, in his clothes.
(Peter was barely seventeen.)
Nebula hesitates. For a moment he thinks she’s spotted something, but her eyes slide towards him, never meeting his own but fixing on his hands. “There was a moment,” she says haltingly. “Gamora offered me a chance to join her and her crew. I refused. I was going to defeat Thanos, and she just wanted to be happy. I didn’t want her holding me back. If I wore the gauntlet now, I would not ressurect my sister. I would go back to that moment, and I would say yes.”
Tony thinks of a dozen lost moments then, a cold bunker, a glassed room, a handshake in a park. But his mind stutters on a green lawn, a man in red and blue in his rearview mirror.
“Together,” he breathes. It tastes like ashes.
“Yes,” Nebula whispers back, and he doesn’t mention the tears in her voice.
It’s almost time for the next jump. Ten more, and they’ll be home. Fifty-fifty, he tells himself. Steve’s done more with less.
wupacing 