Characters: Teddy, Billy, Kate, and America. Mentions of Loki and Son of Satan
Warnings: minor character death. None of the Young Avengers though. We'll just pretend they all survived somewhere off-screen.
"I have a surprise for you," Loki announces as he steps through the magical force field that separates his apartment from the rest of the world. The air ripples like he's just stepped through water, and for a few seconds the barrier retains a green-tinted afterimage in the exact shape of Loki.
Verity Willis, who is Quite Possibly The Last Human on Earth, doesn't bother to look up from her book. It wouldn't do to indulge Loki's self-importance, and anyway her book, "How to Survive in the Wild Without Even Trying", is much more pressing than Loki's whims these days.
Kamala is not nearly so disillusioned. A red couch sitting rather incongruously in the middle of the floor stretches and bends, unfolding into the form of a teenage girl.
"A surprise?" she asks, perking up from the floor.
"Ta-da!" Loki exclaims with a flourish, offering her, with great fanfare-
her own smartphone.
Kamala frowns, but takes the device from Loki's hands.
"You stole her phone?" Verity asks.
"Thanks for giving it back, but it's kind of useless nowadays," Kamala says carelessly, making as if she will throw the phone behind her.
"Wait!" Loki interrupts, "Turn it on!"
This makes little sense to Kamala, who knows that the phone died weeks ago. She hadn't bothered to charge it again after that, because they're conserving their generator for real necessities, and anyway the phone lines are down and there's no one left to call.
Loki buzzes with an air of anticipation. Kamala turns on the phone.
It chimes the usual 'starting-up' sound, which means that Loki's decided to charge it again for some reason. She punches in her password and her wallpaper comes up- a photo of herself and a Captain Marvel cosplayer she met last Halloween. That girl is dead now, or else so far away as to make no difference to Kamala. Pity. They'd promised to keep in touch.
Kamala idly flips through several screens, looking over her list of apps, glancing at her picture files, before giving up.
"Ok, what did you do?" she asks.
In answer, Loki lifts a single black-nailed finger and points to an icon in the top right corner of the screen.
She has service.
She has 4G.
Kamala Khan has access to the internet!
The sound that escapes her mouth is not entirely human, but then again neither is she.
"OhMyGod, how?" Kamala demands, staring at the impossible phone in her hands. No one's had internet in months! The servers went down with no one left to keep them up, just like the power grid and the cell towers and everything else.
"Yeah," Verity agrees, "How? I wouldn't think there's enough electricity around to power a room full of servers. What'd you do, power them with magic?"
Loki shakes his head, his grin still in full-force. "No, I don't have enough magic for that. I did one better. I convinced the machines that they were running on electricity!" Loki spreads his arms wide, and waits for the girls to realize his genius.
Verity is pretty sure that doesn't make any sense, but Loki's not lying, so it must be true. Somehow, he really did convince a room of machines to run on imaginary energy. Lie-smith, indeed.
Kamala isn't concerned with the how. She's already pulling up her browser on her phone, flipping through her favorites. She doesn't quite know what to do with herself. Sure, no one else will be online, but there's years of content just sitting on the internet that she can access now; movies and music and audiobooks and articles and gifsets and oh, the fanfiction! Loki's given her a little slice of her life back, and she's not really sure what she can do to repay him.
"Now I can show you all of my favorite fics," she says in amazement.
"I know, right?" Loki says.
David Alleyne notices that the internet is back up almost immediately. He's in the best position to notice, certainly. His makeshift office in Genosha is connected to almost every satellite that still orbits Earth, so information technology is the air he breathes these days.
Still, with all that information at his fingertips, David is still having trouble filling in all the gaps in the story of how the world ended. Here's what he does know:
It's kind of amazing how many crises aligned to create the final apocalypse, but it's also kind of amazing that something like this hadn't happened even sooner, if David is being honest.
First there was Red Skull, come back from the grave (or whatever) to take over the world. Then there were the Sentinels he used to fight off the Avengers, X-Men, and miscellaneous hero-types bent on stopping him. Maybe the Earth still would have been safe if the trouble had stopped there, but no. Red Skull revealed his secret weapon: a zombie virus. Red Skull wasn't terribly picky about what kind of subjects he ruled over, it turns out. So long as the mutants died with the humans, he was perfectly willing to rule over a bunch of drooling undead.
David knew that part firsthand, and from friends of his who were still working with the X-Men in those final days. His talents weren't particularly useful in a fight with a resurrected magical supervillain, but he kept an eye on the fight via satellite imaging. He saw Magneto flee the battlefield in defeat, and he saw him return with an army of villains. David saw Red Skull fall.
Things his satellite view couldn't detect: the zombie virus spreading from person to person. The progression of the disease in each victim: loosing hand-eye coordination, blurry vision, nausea, fever, brain death. These things David learned later, second- and third-hand.
For a week it looked like that would be it: the end of the world, via zombies. The Avengers and X-Men may have defeated Red Skull and his Sentinals, but they were powerless while the rest of the population tried to not die by zombie infection. Maybe it would have been survivable, if the mutants still had their powers. Instead, horror movie buffs punched the air and subsequently bit the dust as the zombies clawed and scraped and chewed their way across the globe.
This is what David infers from news clippings, overheard conversations, and bits of hacked security footage:
With Doctor Strange and the Scarlett Witch weak from the battle and useless to stop the virus, the heroes of Earth got desperate. They realized that they needed a weapon that could kill all the zombies without harming the living or destroying the biosphere. Without magic, they turned to the next best thing: Tony Stark and Reed Richards, left in a room with an unending supply of caffeine and a really good reason to work together.
There simply wasn't enough time for a perfect fix.
Tony Stark's best solution was to modify a posion that the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants developed in the mid 1980's. It was designed to kill off the homo sapiens while leaving the mutant population intact, but production had stalled in planning stages (David is the last person alive who knows that Charles Xavier, for the good of the world, fried the brain of the mutant biochemist who was developing it).
And, well- it did kill all the zombies! But it also proved fatal for humans. Tony himself was the first fatality (David has the security footage to prove it. Sometimes he wakes up at night, shaking, imagining it was him instead of Tony Stark).
After that, no one wanted to take any chances with Earth. While most of the Avengers and X-Men and assorted superheroes tries to distract and hold back the remaining zombie hordes, a B-team of aliens, mages, and extra-dimensional beings gathered up the living humans and arranged the mass exodus of Earth.
It could be worse, David reminds himself, humans could be extinct instead of scattered to the four winds, seeking refuge underwater, or on the moon, or in different dimensions.
It could be worse, the zombies could still roam the streets wearing grotesque parodies of familiar faces.
It could be worse, David could have died as a human. He is incredibly lucky that his X-gene is still active despite his lack of powers. The poison that still fills the air and clings to the ground is harmless to him, and anyone else who isn't human.
"Hey, Earth to Prodigy? You're staring at the screen like it holds the secrets of life, and you know what that means!" Tommy Shepherd begins.
"It's time to play hide-and-seek!" Molly Hayes finishes.
It could be worse, he could be alone.
Teddy Altman is in the habit of keeping his phone charged, if only for the clock, the GPS, and the photo gallery. He certainly isn't expecting to be woken up by a facebook notification three months after the planet became uninhabitable for human life.
Tommy Shepherd has updated his facebook status: "Hollywood lied to me. There were supposed to be a lot more hot chicks at the end of the world."
Loki Laufeyson likes this.
"Billy," Teddy says urgently.
His boyfriend glances over from the driver's seat of the minivan. "It's only been two hours, I'm fine," he says, "it isn't your turn to drive until noon."
"Billy, pull over," Teddy demands. "You have to see this."
Notes: If you like, imagine Deadpool wandering around the Midwest killing off all of the remaining zombies.
David, Tommy, and Molly call themselves "Team Mutant".
This is the first fic I've written where Loki uses he pronouns and I don't know why.