Louisiana air is hot and thick, Vers has learnt. The cicadas scream in the trees and the air is heavy with some kind of… incandescence that can only be found in the South. The air smells like iced tea and the sweet smell of grass. It is heavy and slow and the only refuge is inside under air conditioning.
Fury is inside. Monica is inside. Maria is...Maria is not.
She's striding forward, over the vivid, pigmented green grass, her footsteps making hardly a sound.
She stops, close enough to hear her breathing, far enough to be normal.
Vers has a feeling that this isn't a normal conversation.
She doesn't remember her life, here. She knows he had — has? — one. She knows she had the closest thing to a family she might ever experience. She knows she flew. She knows she was happy. She knows Maria was happy, too.
What she remembers is a different story. She remembers fragments, pieces of her life like ghosts, echoes of earth.
She remembers sitting at a booth, drinking liquor, she remembers throwing back her head, belting out lyrics to a song that she doesn't know anymore. She remembers Maria's eyes. She remembers her sitting in the cockpit like a queen does a throne, just daring anyone to stop her.
Her life is a mirror but it is shattered, Vers and Carol. Before, after. Earth, Hala. Separate people, maybe.
"Hi," Maria says, hair falling over her eyes.
"Hi," Vers smiles back, eyes tracking her movements. The sun behind her is a strange kind of orange-yellow, edging to lilac, then dark blue, right above them.
If she closes her eyes she can imagine her life here, then, flying higher than the clouds, Photon and Avenger, together above the troposphere.
There is silence, and the crickets rise in a sudden symphony, their song swelling like the tide, an orchestra of the outdoors.
Vers looks at Maria. She is curved in all the right places, her hips, her mouth, her breasts; hard in all the others, in her eyes, in her core, in her spine.
"I loved you," she says, and knows, with more certainty than she's ever felt in her life, that it is true, she can feel it in her bones, in her brain, buried deep where they had not been able to touch it, twist it, wipe it away. This is a fundamental truth of Carol Danvers, that she loves Maria; more than she loves the sky, more than she loves flying.
Maria looks at her, there's something like hope in her eyes, "yes," she says finally, and it sounds like a prayer, breathed out, promised, something holy and sacred and only lasting between heartbeats.
"Did you?" She asks, and knows the answer.
It's darker now. They have been outside for a long time, and a kind of chill is soaking into her bones. The golden light from the house sends shadows dancing across the grass towards them, and Maria is lit on fire, those curves of hers glided in the color of sunrise.
"Yes," she says again, and Vers — no, Carol smiles.