First Work: My Head's Above the Rain and Roses id: 12922982

Previous Work: My Kingdom Awaits id: 13270965

Alright, I have a very limited amount of time to get this done, so let's step it out people!


Disclaimer (though I would argue it's somewhat unnecessary): I do not own the Avengers, Iron Man, Captain America, the Incredible Hulk, or any other related recognizable characters and/or properties contained within. All rights go to Marvel Comics, Marvel Studios, and any other interested third party (I don't think I could name them all.) This work contains lines from the Avengers (2012) and draws inspiration and plot points from The Avengers vol. 3 #8-9, #15-16, #24-27, #37, #46, #48, and #50, along with Iron Man vol. 1 #182 and #311, Iron Man vol. 3 #7, Captain America vol. 3 #8, Quicksilver vol. 1 #10, and The Avengers vol. 3 #7. Additional inspiration was taken from the NCIS episode "SWAK" and the Walking Dead episode "Welcome to the Tombs". All credit goes to the respective writers.

The title of this fic comes from the Soundgarden song "Live to Rise". All credit goes to Chris Cornell.

This fic is rated M, but not for sexual reasons (yes, I know you're disappointed.) It contains ideologically sensitive material, draws inspiration from real-life tragedies, depicts a violent domestic situation, and deals strongly with the issue of alcoholism. This is the only warning you are going to get for these topics. If any of this bothers you, DO NOT READ THIS FIC. Finally, this fic depicts relationships that do not comply with cannon have an ideological, moral, or otherwise bigoted opinion about. If you do not like the Steve/Tony pairing or are turned off by the other disclaimers, please do not read this fic. Death threats will be taken seriously.


Monday, March 10th, 1975 (Terran Time)

He kept still as the footsteps got louder. His eyes were squeezed shut, silently willing the Kree soldiers to pass him by. He knew that if they caught him, the rest of the ship would be spared. However, it was far more important to his people's continued survival that he not be caught as he carried with him the key to restarting their civilization.

The Raël had no conflict with the Kree. They were a peaceful race who only wished to live undisturbed. They never sought out trouble, and trouble never found them. That was until the great plague. Almost no one was spared and unfortunately that was the Raëls' own doing.

Early in the Raël's history, they unlocked the secret to gene editing. This allowed them to shape their race to their own design, unlike any other race in the history of the universe had before. They molded all their offspring in their image of beauty – bronze skin, hairless men and women with manes of gold, shockingly bright brown eyes that seemed to shimmer with every movement, and lithe forms more suited to spend endless days in leisure rather than on the battlefield. Any "undesirable" traits were simply edited out before birth. For the longest time, this suited the Raël just fine, until their luck ran out and they were forced to face the dark side of gene editing.

The plague came seemingly from out of nowhere. One day everything was fine and they next, they were burying their relatives; friends; entire towns. Because the Raël hadn't allowed themselves to naturally evolve in such a long time a weak point was created in their immune systems that the disease was able to prey upon. One-sixteenth of the population was still left when Tarquan had taken his family aboard the scouting ship, and most of that population was infected and close to death. The twenty-four people aboard the ship – six men, nine women, and nine children – were the only ones who had never gotten sick.

With their home planet having been taken over by the disease, Tarquan and the remaining Raël searched for a new planet to settle upon. At first, they had sought help from Xandar, however they claimed that no unpopulated life-sustaining planets were available at that time. They offered to settle them on a planet under Xandarian rule but the Raël rejected the offer. They just wanted to live quietly and in peace as they always had, not to be caught up in Xandarian politics and conflict. It was a big universe with plenty of planets to choose from. They'd find the right one, even if it took a while.

While on Xandar, Tarquan had inadvertently learned of a place within the galaxy that housed some of the galaxy's more criminal elements… It was also rumored that anything one searched for could be found on this space station, they just had to know where. Tarquan told the other Raël of this and they agreed it was worth a shot. If they didn't find someone who knew of an uninhabited, life-sustaining planet, they'd surely find something else that would aid in their cause.

As they arrived on Knowhere, Tarquan volunteered to search on his own for information and useful supplies. The others were to afraid to join him. He searched for hours and unfortunately did not produce any leads on a planet. He was, however, able to replenish the ships food, water, and oxygen stores, so at least the trip wasn't a total waste. He was about to return to the ship when a stranger in a red robe unexpectedly grabbed him by the shoulder.

"Heard you've been asking around, looking for a vacant planet." Utterly speechless, Tarquan had nodded in conformation. "I know exactly the place you need to go."

Tarquan followed the creature through the marketplace and into a rather ruddy-looking building. Form there, he was led up a flight of stairs and into a room that looked to serve as a storage space, office, and one-room apartment all in one. In the center of the room sat a man with violet skin and a frog-like face. The robed creature said something to the man in a language Tarquan didn't understand before stepping out of the room. The frog-man then turned his attention to him. Tarquan had never felt so intimidated in his entire life.

He explained the Raël's plight as best he could. The frog-man listened intently, his gaze never leaving Tarquan's face. When he finished the story, the frog-man allowed a stark moment's pause to pass before speaking up in a heavily accented, croaking voice.

"Unfortunately, I'm afraid I don't have any inhabitable worlds to offer at this time." Tarquan's face instantly fell. "However, I think I can offer something better." Tarquan's brow raised in interest. The frog-man chuckled and pulled something out of his desk drawer.

The frog man opened his webbed hand to reveal a small gray disc. Pressing a button on the top a compartment within the disk slid open. Inside was a thin, silvery-blue shard on a piece of white, silk-like fabric. Tarquan still looked skeptical.

"Touch it," the frog-man implored. "Then you will know." Seeing that he had nothing to lose, Tarquan tentatively reached out a finger and did as the man said.

Almost instantly the environment changed around him. He was standing on a platform in the middle of the sea and in front of him stood not the frog-man, but his beloved wife Mikah. His eyes widened in shock. Before he could say anything, Mikah opened her mouth and all at once Taquan was bombarded with information, so much information that he couldn't process it all. He saw entire civilizations rise and fall before his eyes and learned every deep dark secret of the universe. In order to protect himself, he reflexively pulled his hand back, causing his consciousness to return to the safety of the frog-man's apartment.

Tarquan gasped as he tried to regain his bearings. Distantly, he could hear the frog-man croaking with laughter.

"Yeah," the frog-man had said. "That happens to everyone the first time. With practice, you can probably control it. I don't know. I haven't experimented with it." Tarquan gave the frog-man a disdainful look. Once again, the frog-man laughed. "Alright," he said. "But you have to agree that there's a whole lot of information on that thing. Information on things like 'how to start a society' and 'how to make a barren planet livable'. Even if not, you defiantly saw the rise and fall of at least a few groups. You can learn from that. Not make the same mistakes."

Tarquan still seemed hesitant. However, the frog-man offered him an incredibly low price. Only 1,000 credits for this one tiny shard with centuries worth of information on it. That was all that was needed to make the deal worthwhile. Tarquan gave him the credits and returned to the ship with the disc, having forgotten the old saying "if it's too good to be true, it probably is."

As it turned out, the frog-man had forgot to mention that the shard was a sort of psychic flash-drive taken from the Kree, and that the Kree were looking for it. Hence why he offered it for such a low price. He wanted to get it off his hands before the Kree came looking for him, and when they eventually did, he just pointed them in the direction of the poor saps who had fallen for his little charade.

Which led to this moment: Tarquan listened as the Kree walked by, thankfully having not noticed his presence. He allowed himself to release a breath of relief before slinking out of his hiding place, heading towards the escape pods.

The ship's escape pods were designed to hold at least fifty people, so the ship's inhabitants would easily fit in comfortably, even with the two new little additions to their ranks. However, none of the men would be joining the evacuees. It was women and children only. The men were to stay on the ship, doing whatever they could to distract the Kree and prevent them from following the escape pod to the planet below. Although they knew the planet – which went by many names; Terra, C-53, Midgard, Earth, etc. – wasn't uninhabited, it was only a short distance from the red planet they had chosen to colonize, so the hope was that once on Terra they could petition it's government to assist them in completing the final leg of their journey. However, if they wanted to start their lives on this new planet, they were going to need all the information they could get in order to do it and do it right.

Tarquan rushed to the escape pod, just in time to reach the remaining survivors before they departed. Mikah met him at the door. He held her for a few seconds before pulling the disc out of his coat pocket and placing it in her hands. She nodded in understanding of what needed to be done. Tarquan then touched his children's faces in an affectionate gesture before sending them all off inside the pod. The door sealed shut behind them and he could hear the shuttle disembarking. He sighed and a single tear rolled down his face before turning to join the other men in facing the wrath of the Kree.

What Tarquan didn't know was that shortly after the escape pod disembarked from the main craft, an unforeseen electrical issue had sparked a fire. Given that the pod's systems vented in pure oxygen into its main chamber, it didn't take long for the fire to spread. It took only moments for the pod's occupants to be engulfed in flames, completely making the men's sacrifice pointless. It only took a few minutes for the Raël to be completely erased from the universe.

Another thing that Tarquan didn't know? The disc was fireproof.

Charles left the church in a huff. The young lady he'd been chatting up for the past few weeks had invited him to a party that was being thrown that night. Seeing it as a chance to get lucky, he agreed to go, only to find out that this "party" was a church event. He did go inside for a few moments, though. The young woman was indeed very attractive. However, it didn't take long for the church members to – in his view – force their religion upon him, so he stormed out of there. That girl may have been pretty, but she wasn't worth putting up with that malarkey.


From a young age, Charles had been a staunch Atheist. Despite his family's urgings, he never believed in God or Jesus or any other religious figure. He saw them as just as fraudulent as Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. As soon as he could, he left home without looking back, attending Culver University in Virginia, hundreds of miles away from his hometown and family. However, he still couldn't escape the stranglehold religion had on society. It shouldn't have surprised him. It was Virginia after all, a part of the Bible Belt. A lot of people were bound to be religious.

As he got older, his Atheism progressed from the simple denial of a God to vehement opposition to all religion. He would tell anyone who would listen that religion was for the weak. That its enslaved people and normalized a capitalist power structure; giving white men the justification to dominate women and deny the rights of people of color. He thought the United States should be an Atheist state, reject the ideals of capitalism, and turn to communism.

Obviously, his beliefs were rather radical and didn't do much to help him make connections or find friends, so he spent most nights alone, studying the men he admired most: Fidel Castro, Mao Zedong, and Karl Marx. Occasionally he could charm a girl or two, but often it ended much like this night, with him walking the streets back to his dorm room alone.

At least that's what he was doing until some sort of substance came raining down in his face. He looked to the sky but didn't see a single cloud. His eyes burned when they met whatever it was. At first, he thought it might have been dirt, but on further inspection, it appeared to be either soot or ash. As he rubbed the substance between his fingers, he felt something bounce off the toe of his shoe. Looking over, he saw a small gray disc about the size of a bottlecap come rolling into a lopsided landing on the ground. Curious, he picked the item up.

It didn't take long for Charles to figure out the button on top opened a secret compartment. He pressed it and the silvery-blue shard slid out. Confused as to what it possibly could be, he tried to pick it up by pinching it between his two fingers. What followed was completely mind-boggling.

Much like how it happened for Tarquan before him, Charles found himself on a platform in the middle of the sea. Standing before him, however, was none other than Karl Marx himself. Charles opened his mouth to try to say something, anything to his idol, and as he did Karl Max opened his mouth as well, causing the flood of information to surge through Charles' brain.

Instantly he let go of the shard. Amazingly, he didn't drop it or the disc and managed to slide it shut. Charles looked around as he tried to catch his breath. Ash was still raining down from the sky. As far as he could tell, no other mysterious objects had fallen nearby. Quickly, he shoved the disc into his pocket and took off in a full sprint back towards the university. He didn't know what it was or what he had just experienced, but he knew he needed to get back to his dorm before people came, asking questions.

When he finally did get back into his room, he slumped to the floor and struggled to catch his breath. He extracted the disc from his pocket and once again inspected it, albeit this time more carefully. He could see that the disc was stained black from the soot, but if he wiped it off it appeared to be light gray underneath. Pressing the button again, he watched as the compartment containing the shard slid out. Hesitantly, he touched his finger to the shard again, only to have the same experience as the previous time. He pulled his hand away as fast as he could and took the object to his desk, wondering what the hell it was and how it worked.

He spent the whole night sitting at the desk, touching the shard and pulling his fingers away, trying to process the information being dumped on him and trying to figure out how to get it to come to him at a much slower, more understandable pace. He started to notice that every time he touches the shard, he'd first be faced with the image of Karl Marx. Every time, he'd be too shocked to speak. It eventually occurred to him that maybe all he needed to do to interface with whatever this shard was speak up. It took a few tries, but eventually, he was able to get over his internal shock and was able to force a word out.

"Wait," he exclaimed just as Karl Marx was about to open his mouth. Marx looked at him then as if surprised. Charles found himself to be surprised as well, but quickly got over it and tried saying more. "That… The information you keep overloading me with, is that how you speak?" That was the first thing Charles thought to ask. Marx's mouth began to open, and Charles was quick to cut him off. "Just nod for yes and shake your head for no." Marx looked at him with a perplexed expression for a few moments, but eventually nodded. Charles let out a breath of relief. That was good to know. "Alright. I'll just keep my questions to simple yes or no answers. Does that work for you?"

Marx nodded.

"Okay," Charles said. "Is there any way you can say all that information a bit slower?"

Marx shook his head.

"Alright. Is there any other way you can communicate other than this?"

Again, Marx shook his head.

"Are you sure about that?"

Marx nodded. Charles threw his head back. He tried to think of some way he could try to communicate with this thing, but he kept drawing a blank. Then, another question came to him.

"Wait, where are we right now? Is this my mind?"

Marx nodded.

"Holy shit," Charles gasped in disbelief. "This is insane… Can you… Can you control what I do?"

Again, Marx nodded. Charles' eyes widened in shock, but he quickly saw how he could use this to his advantage.

"If I let go of the shard for a second and come back, will you not immediately overwhelm me with all that information?" Marx gave another nod and Charles broke his connection with the shard.

Searching through the room, he eventually found a blank yellow legal pad and set it down on the desk in front of him. Taking a pen in his left hand, he again touched the shard with his right, bringing him back to the platform in the sea.

"Alright, I have paper in front of me right now," Charles explained. "And in my left hand, there's a pen. If I asked you a more detailed question, would you be able to take control of my hand and write down your answer?" Marx gave a curt nod and Charles found himself pulling his hand away from the shard and looked down at the paper in front of him. Written in his neat, cursive handwriting at the top of the page was a simple question: "What would you like to know?"

Charles smiled before placing his finger back on the shard again. He looked Marx directly in the eye as he asked, "what would be the best way to install socialism in a capitalist society?" Marx said nothing in response, but Charles could feel his left-hand twitch of its own accord. He didn't move or say anything, not wanting to sever the connection while he was in the middle of transferring the information. Eventually, he felt his hand stop moving and only then did he feel safe to remove his finger from the shard.

Looking down at the page, he found that hours had passed, and he had written several pages, explaining how multiple societies that he had never even heard of managed to successfully adapt communism (or at least, a governing style similar enough to Terran communism.) Reading it all back, Charles found himself lost in thought. He took all the information he'd been given and translated it all into his own ideas and thoughts about how American society was set up and how communism could fit into it. A few of his thoughts he scribbled down on a fresh piece of paper before he had his breakthrough: religion was never the enemy, religion was the answer. What was the best way to introduce Marxism to American society? That would be to infiltrate the church.

When he thought about it, it really made sense. This entire country was filled with religious zealots. All he had to do was tap into their feeble minds and use their false Gods and paper idols to spread the ideas of socialism. It was practically genius!

Immediately, Charles set to work writing down all his ideas. Ideas turned to tenants. Tenants turned to gospel. Gospel turned to structure. The structure turned to government. The government turned to faith; a faith that Charles himself didn't believe in but knew that thousands of weak-minded Americans would buy into easily.

From that day Charles Elias Mozzarella ceased to exist. He would be reborn as the prophet of a new religious movement; Daniel Adoniram.


Sunday, September 4th, 2011

The next four decades Adoniram spent trying to get as many people to join his church as he possibly could. The first thing he did to try to further that goal was to relocate to New York City. Since it was one of the largest cities in the world, he had the potential to reach the widest audience. He held different religious events, such as faith healings and conventions that boasted acceptance of all denominations of Christianity, but pushed people to try and join his movement, the Peoples Unity Church of the Supreme Understanding. Many of his churches were set up in low-income areas and neighborhoods with high minority populations. He piggybacked on the civil rights movement, promising equality for all and even asked all attendees to come dressed in their everyday attire, so that way poorer members wouldn't feel alienated or lesser.

Adoniram married one of his followers a few years after officially opening his religion to the public, but despite that, he had numerous affairs with several men and women. If his wife, Margot, knew, she certainly didn't seem bothered by it. She remained faithfully by his side through the decades, unlike his followers.

The Supreme Understanding's membership peaked sometime in the mid-to-late '90s, but once tragedies like the Waco siege and the Heaven's Gate mass suicide started making headlines, it became harder and harder to recruit new members. Eventually, Adoniram became desperate, making doomsday prophecies in order to draw in new members. It did entice fear in some people, but in the end, it made more people leave his religion rather than increased their faith. When he gave the date of May 21st, 2011 as the end of the world and the day came to pass without incident, he saw the biggest withdrawal yet, leaving him with only a few hundred, somewhat skeptical followers. He pushed the date back a few months to September 4th, 2011, in a last-ditch effort to revive his followers' faith in him.

They gathered in the Gantry Plaza State Park in Queens, and patiently awaited whatever tragedy was to come. Outside of a few police sirens and seeing Iron Man fly by at least once, nothing seemed to be happening. Many of the followers stood around looking rather bored and sweaty in the heavy white robes they were wearing. Most had abandoned the hot concrete lookout at which Adoniram was standing in favor of the shade of nearby trees. Margot remained by his side, though she did start fanning herself with a folded-up brochure she'd somehow acquired.

Adoniram could feel the entire world crashing down around him. This was it. He had to admit defeat. His ideas had failed. Everything he had worked for his entire life had amounted to nothing. He turned to face the river, contemplating throwing himself in it and not bothering to even try to swim when suddenly a bright blue light flashed up in the sky.

Rubbing his eyes and looking away for a second, Adoniram was able to confirm that what he saw was real. He glanced over at Margot to see that whatever it was had caught her attention, too. Although it was hard to tell from this perspective, Adoniram was able to make out that the light was coming from the newly-constructed Stark Tower or some other building within that vicinity. At first, he thought it might be some sort of freaky, holographic light show set up by Tony Stark to celebrate the building's completion, that was until a massive hole opened in the sky and creatures on hoverbikes started descending from the sky. Although he had never seen them himself, he instantly recognized them from his many sessions with the shard over the years. These were the Chitauri; actual aliens from outer space.

As they began to attack the city, he could hear the people around him scream and Margot grasp tightly to his arm. Adoniram himself, though, was smiling. This was exactly what he needed. He turned around to face his followers, who once again were crowding the lookout along with a few other shocked bystanders. Gently, he pried Margot's hand off his arm, allowing him to stand with his arms out in a sort of crucifix-like position.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he announced. "This is the apocalypse!"


My Dad's coming to pick me up at nine and it's 8:48 right now so I have to make this quick. Thank you for reading this story and chapter! Please favorite and follow if you like and don't be afraid to leave a review!

Remember kids... Something about power and responsibility! I don't know! I have to go! Bye!


Originally Posted to FFN on 6/15/19