CHAPTER FORTY-TWO—December 2039
Those torture scenes in movies, where the victim's eyes get taped open to watch something horrible, that's pretty close to this. The images are gut-wrenching, gruesome, and yet totally separate, apart from me. Whatever is showing has already happened. Maybe it was my fault? Maybe I should feel guilty for being horrified, for being interested, for being numb? I've tuned out. The world has muted. I became assimilated into the horrible things and drift just long enough to forget until—BAM—it's real again.
It means something. It means everything. Every ounce of caring and focus in my body acknowledges and remembers the other side of horrible.
Real feeling. Real sorrow. Real joy.
This cycle rages through me like tides pulled by an unseen moon. Flood or famine. I've lost count of how many times I flow in and out of myself; I just know it will always come back around.
Samantha found it easier and easier to dissociate after the shock wore off. She pleaded for Pepper to trust her, but why should she? Pepper didn't recognize her.
Automated tracks the length of the loading bay were reeling in a thick metal chamber. For balance, Sam latched her foot through one rail and gripped her mother's hand. Several men and women panicked, racing to turn off systems and activate alarms. Chaos.
We have to go. We have to protect her, Sam ordered Missy, who obliged and removed her piercing connection to Sam's brain, transferring her form to encase the struggling strawberry-blond instead.
With half of her right arm still joined to Mistress, Sam activated the Time Stone to move them forward, but Pepper's last-second tug to pull away toppled Sam's footing. Her thought of where they needed to go was interrupted by the lurch of falling off-balance, and Sam flung her other arm out towards the oncoming containment box, and then…
She couldn't describe it.
Her memory was blank or blurry. Sam herself remained blank or blurry for…she didn't know how long. At some point, Sam knew her arm was gone, but it wouldn't grow back. A splitting pain at her side dulled over time. She knew her other hand still held her mother's, and so forward.
Without the help of Missy in her mind, Sam drained. She had to focus on one intention and one intention alone: move forward. Her body was there but unimportant, useless and non-existent if she failed. Before her sluggish and dulled vision, the world played out on fast-forward.
She watched crews with gigantic machines clear the rubble. She watched Stephen Strange, Tony, and Bruce walk the site. She watched families trickle in to leave flowers. Forward. More machines came to level the land, and then trucks of flowers arrived to be placed by gardeners darting around like racing ants.
A mass of people arrived while balloons dotted the site. Maria Hill and Tony got on a stage, and in a flash, they were gone.
Sam was above it all, unknown or ignored, a familiar feeling which comforted her after the last shot rang from Bucky's salute before the crowds left.
She'd lost count of the seasons by then. Without knowing the year, Sam couldn't risk stopping. Forward. If she overlapped her timeline, she could do more damage…more than her crossings had already caused.
Drained, hollowed out, and blank, Sam kept moving forward. She forgot the feel of shelter, the sensation of taste, the connection of conversing. Her hand grew weak in her mother's grasp but never let go. It couldn't.
Just keep moving.
As a concept, time is meaningless. It is the experience of humanity that gives time meaning. If we measure nothing by beginning and ending, there are no points of reference, then there is no purpose to time.
So Sam needed humanity. She imagined she could hear things in the submerged-pressure pulse of the time bubble. Clint and Laura talking across the dinner table. Ty and Dee joking over a board game in the Atrium. Bucky's music lulling her in the moonlight.
Her eyes refocused after yet another daydream, and Strange appeared below her. She didn't want to see him.
Was this how he felt when he witnessed the futures of Thanos? Sam mused that if so, she would have chosen anything that seemed survivable, too. Then she realized they were there. All three of them were really there, looking up to her.
Tony in his full regalia, luminous blue shield outstretched for battle, and Bucky Barnes just as she remembered him: tall, dark, and concerned.
She let excitement fill her once again, and the bubble burst.
When Sam hit the cold, hard ground, she remembered something else. She was never going back; the other sixty-seven were gone, left behind, and that was truly, wholly her fault.
She was not separate from the world anymore. Sam was here, now, and she could smell burning hair and barbecue. Her arm finally began to grow back as she stared at the grey sky, ears adjusting to the pitch of noise at normal speed. Screaming sounded worse than she remembered.
Bucky's chest hit hers with a thud.
Her ears were ringing. Her arm yanked into the air once again, and the ringing stopped.
Bucky mumbled to her, but Tony was louder.
Head flopped over Bucky's shoulder, her eyes focused on a stamped brick beyond his feet. An anxious surge of belligerent grief filled her.
I'm a murderer. "I know all their names."
The woman on the wall and the man in red disappeared while Sam shook in the soldier's arms. She stared at her lonely, terrified friend while he checked her.
"Stay away from me, sorcerer," Mistress shrieked behind them, backing away from Strange. "You don't give me orders. I am not your toy."
Strange kept his hands relaxed at his side, palms forward. "I did not purposefully—"
"Bullshit." Mistress continued to twitch, stumbling backward. In patches, her face veil failed and became flat silver. Her expression looked pained. "Ne-neb-ebula never—"
"I see you learned your manners from Stark." Strange nudged forward.
"Do not—ot," Missy glitched, "stay—stay back." She gave a glance to Sam and Bucky. "I. I. I. I won't be contr—rolled."
The thrusters fired from her hands. Mistress paved a sloppy path to flee.
Strange moved to attack, or maybe he was trying to help, but Sam wasn't going to let him. She reached pathetically over Bucky's shoulder to fire a warning shot from her palm. Nothing happened.
Her shallow breathes heightened the thunder of her heart rate. True body awareness made her ache all over, from her brittle bones to her shriveled muscles to her burning fingertips and feet, half from the icy air and frozen ground, half from Extremis making her appear whole.
Sam didn't feel whole. Overwhelmed by an onslaught of input and the ability to think outside of move forward, she pieced more together but not without the horror.
Strange had been at the site. Early. Too early in the days after the explosion to know absolutely nothing.
Bucky grabbed her face, seeing her bizarre, blue-rimmed eyes for the first time. "Hey, I've got you. It's ok. You're ok."
"He knew." Her voice was weak, so weak he might not have even heard it, but she turned to Strange all the same. "You stood on that hill for hours."
The sorcerer knelt down to match her whisper. "I knew the Time Stone had been used here, but I did not know that—"
"Liar!" It was the loudest yelp Sam could produce, barely a croak in the quiet snowfall, and the power behind the word fell flat. "You could have warned me."
"How was I to know it was you? Hmm?" The tall cloaked man leaned out of arm's reach as Sam flailed with the strength of a toddler. "When would you have liked to know you took a life? When you were four? Seven? How about when you were fifteen?"
Mad tears dripped from her wide, unblinking eyes. "I didn't mean to."
The sorcerer's calm facade cracked. "Neither did I."
Loathing dripped from her pores like the sweat that stopped years ago, years of carefully tailoring her actions to be beneficial and respectful, subjecting herself to experimentation in order to remove the suspicion of superiority, wasting so much time preparing for a future, having wants and dreams and hopes…
Worthless.
Her existence was a stepping stone for his ego. His choice was infallible. He admitted nothing, relinquished nothing. He never cared. He would never listen.
When Sam finally looked up to Strange's face, she saw the gloss of his eyes. She wanted to scream, to growl at him, to slash new, angry scars over him.
Instead, Sam let out a meek whine, something akin to a wounded pet sulking at the feet of its abuser. She couldn't even make her words have sound anymore.
He nodded before standing, drawing his arms together until the heel of his palms touched then spread them apart in a deliberate arch.
The horizon shattered into hundreds of pieces, light bent and brightened in a vortex of refraction.
Sam fought to rise. Her feet crumbled without muscles to balance. Bucky stopped her fall before scooping her up like a rag doll.
"For what it's worth," Strange offered in a flat voice beneath deeply troubled eyes, "I'm sorry." A hand pointed to guide Bucky through the kaleidoscope of glassy air. "You'll be safe in there."
Sam felt no hesitation in the swift stride. It felt like nothing, no sharp edge or temperature change. They were through in an instant, and Strange was gone just as quickly.
He barely recognized her. It took a long few seconds for Sam's body to relax, and Bucky watched her blue-rimmed eyes blink, blink, blink until they were brown again. The rage rushed out of her as she looked around, as tiny and sickly as Steve had been before the war.
After taking in the rest of the world, Sam placed her hand gently on Bucky's face, grasping at him like an oasis in a desert, falling lax after such effort.
"You're real?" she choked.
Bucky's stomach dropped, but he kept his hands firmly beneath her knees and back. "You're home." He nodded and returned her smile.
The elation in her face drained. One corner of Sam's mouth sagged. She tucked her arms against her stomach, shrinking into what wasted form was left. Her chest rose and fell softly, but her skin felt cool for the first time Bucky could remember.
"Come on," he said, carrying her to the helicopter.
Bucky was reminded of the time Steve got pneumonia, the same winter his building's gas went out. Buck had bundled him up with whatever could cover him, stuffed two hot water bottles into the wraps with him, and hauled him all the way to Lehigh to recover in Bucky's bunk. Steve complained the whole time, griping about how he could handle it himself, how he didn't need to be babied. Steve would have died if Bucky had listened. Punk.
So Bucky tucked Sam gingerly into the large leather seat and unwrapped his sandwich for her.
Sam stared at the food without moving her hand. Her eyes, prominent beneath sunken lids and stretched skin, watched without seeing.
"You…it's been a week here," Bucky started. "How long has it been…for you? Please—" he pushed at her hand "—go on. Eat it."
Sam stared for a long minute without budging. Bucky's mind raced with where they could go, where he could keep her safe and let her rest, how he could get Stark's stupid heli-computer off the ground without real controls…but he stopped when Sam finally looked up at him.
"More than a week." A smile cracked the corner of her lips. "Coffee?"
Bucky sighed, pressing his forehead to hers while he stifled a frustrated laugh. This family…
"Eat the damn sandwich."
Sam gently nuzzled back after inhaling him for a moment. "Ok, Buck."
The hair at the back of his neck prickled, a shiver passing right up to the crown of his head. He told himself it was from the cold and broke contact to hand Sam her yellow hoodie.
Bucky pointed back at the food, climbing over her to shut the door, and went about getting them to the nearest home he could think of.
Tony struggled to trust his eyes. Pepper was more beautiful than he remembered, and the flutter of her pulse at her neck meant she was alive, leaning over their son with stained red lips from long faded makeup and sweaty hair stuck to her face after labor.
She was magnificent.
She made soft cooing noises to Howard Collins Stark, noises that possibly served to soothe Anthony Edward Stark more.
Maria Collins married Howard Stark back in 1962. They would have been pleased.
Tony realized something much darker while looking down at the round pink face by his wife's glowing chest, and he collapsed in the chair beside her bed.
Maria Stark's soul was with Mephisto, and a year ago he contemplated why Pepper Potts did not appear in a gossamer haze beside her. Tony never imagined the possibility that his wife was actually alive, that he would see her again, but he kicked himself for giving up. There had been breadcrumbs all over for fourteen years, and he had just…
"Come hold our son," she whispered in that delicate tone, the sweet one he'd all but forgotten. Her long neck extended to tilt a smile at him, and the warmth and comfort melted him to his seat. "Honey?"
"Right," he jumped, sliding a hand beneath Howie's little head, careful not to pinch a limb.
Pep helped herself to ice chips at the rolling table opposite them.
Tony remained mute, mind blank and screaming all at once, overwhelmed by his miracles and the rationale behind them.
"You can talk about it," Pep said casually between chews. "I know more than you might think."
Tony lifted a smile and sad eyes to his wife. "I'm so sorry."
"I know, honey. I am, too."
Tony filled his lungs with a fortifying breath. "Fourteen an' a half years, you've been gone. That's approximately fifty-three hundred days, and from this little guy being here, you experienced it as about two hundred days. One second for every twenty-five of mine—"
"Trapped inside Mistress like some virtual reality hell that constantly replays my daughter's worst experiences," Pepper added as a matter of fact. "Reminded me of that Ava incident Fitz and Simmons loved to talk about, except it wasn't a whole fake world. It was just Sam's and mine."
Tony muttered in agreement. "I think…you…Mistress fed you from Sam while she used the Time Stone. 'S why you and Howie have—"
"We are Extremis-positive now." Pep ran fingers up her forearm with a small "again."
Tony thought back to Pep's description of Extremis when Aldrich Killian transformed her the first time: veins of white-hot pain. She had been strapped down for that, too, hauled around on that cargo ship. Not our best Christmas.
"Sam turned nineteen," Tony offered.
Pep nodded. "Missy showed me." She accepted Howie back into her arms. "I arguably know more about her than you do now." She said, her smile hollow to keep calm. "Thanos, Tony, he was trying to make her his daughter. And I think back to poor Nebula…"
Ah yes, another wretched daughter of an incompetent father. They had passed the time so well, though Nebula glitched repeatedly until one day she did not wake up. He couldn't do it all alone, run the busted Benatar and patch his seeping gut wound, so at some point, he collapsed and resigned to die, thinking of his lost wife. "Not to put too fine a point on it, but Sam kinda met her, on the ship—"
"Technically, Missy did. Strange programmed coordinates and instructions. It felt…poor Mistress. And my god, Tony, I told Sam that stupid story almost every night!"
He nodded, petting his beard, thinking how there was never a truly dull moment in his life.
Pepper stared. "Please. You have to stop dying your hair. You look ridiculous."
Tony snorted at such a simple observation that eviscerated all semblance of who he molded himself into during her absence, yet he knew he would do just that. Anything she said, he would do. Besides, there wasn't enough chlorophyll-heavy green gunk in the world to reverse his aging to match Pep's now.
"Whatever you say," he mumbled into the simple blue blanket, never taking his eyes off her face.
Rocking Howie, Pepper cocked an eyebrow. "So. You didn't gamble away naming rights for this one, too, did you?"
Tony tried to skew his expression towards offense but landed somewhere between disbelief and delight. "If I did, I forgot."
"Didn't make a whole lot of difference last time. Wilson wasn't as drunk as you."
"He cheats at cards. I know it. He knows it," Tony insisted, "and you'll be happy to know, I've never played him again."
"Still a sore loser. Some things never change." They watched Howie stretch his little fingers, reaching arms up to knock his baby cap into his eyes. Pepper giggled, a pure and heartbreaking sound that matched the unbelievability of their existence. She stroked his rosy cheeks. Her expression dropped when Howie's hand gripped her finger.
"Tony," she began in a clear, solid voice, "I know why you thought—why you were afraid…but I wish…"
He knew what was coming, and there was no chance to steady himself before the blow.
"I wanted better for her." Pepper's eyes met his.
He choked on the slew of regular excuses, knowing full well he could not fool Pepper with his pride or white lies. Tony just watched her, draping himself over her blanket-covered lap, squeezed the hand she offered, and let whatever concentrated guilt he'd held onto fall with the tears in his eyes. He nodded into the soft fabric. Overjoyed. Devastated. Exhausted.
And now, the only member of his family not equipped with the healing power of that stupid virus.
A/N: Furiously, and I do mean *furiously* working on the next chapters so that it isn't a month between each. Life. Whatchagundo?
Thank you to recent reviewers, and I am sorry for the wait!