Their son is a toddler now. He crawls around and chews on toys that Jane doesn’t understand but Thor insists that he played with them as a child. Their son looks up at them and grins and babbles in his baby talk.
Thor looks at Jane, amused. “This baby, I like it!”
Jane looks at Thor, coffee cup cradled between her hands, and she gently, hopefully asks, “Another?”
Thor nearly falls out of his chair but he fervently agrees to have another baby with her, and falls even more in love with her quiet, private smile that she hides with her coffee mug, but the mug can’t hide the smiling, crinkled corners of her eyes.
I need to talk about the fact that Bucky’s still got his right hand 100% free and could be punching Spider Man into next Tuesday already. But he still stood frozen, looking shocked as all fucks and lemme tell you right now that that was not because someone’s managed to block his metal fist because lbr the metal arm was never unstoppable before, especially when super-enhanced/-equipped people are involved – so basically he doesn’t take that punch cus he’s actually just now able to hear the other guy’s voice and it clicks that this is just a fucking k i d
I posted it on Pixiv for years ago, but someone who couldn’t sign up for the site ask me to upload Tumblr also. I hope you enjoy and spare me for my imperfect English, thanks.
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 