a/n: oh snap we hit 700 reviews! ty friends c: also shoutout to my longtime buddy independentalto for the review spam LOOOOL (also in case anyone was wondering, yes we are still bros and yes we have even met irl B) gotta Flex)

anyways! i still lowkey am all out of sorts with what i'm planning to do for endgame so pls be patient with me as i Try to get that story together. I'M GONNA FIGURE IT OUT AS FAST AS I CAN

Rocket and Nebula work through the night to repair the Guardians' ship for departure the next morning, with Carol helping where she can. The rest of the Avengers figure out their game plan, mainly deciding who will go or stay since the Guardians' ship only has so many seats. Since Pepper's busy getting Tony settled into a bed in the lab to stay the night in, Maggie gets to stay up late with the adults. She sits in a chair where Clint's perched on the arm.

"Okay, but you're going to bed by two," Clint tells her in his fake stern voice. Maggie just rolls her eyes. "That's final."

"I think I should stay here," Daisy says, bringing Maggie and Clint's attention back to the group conversation. "I need to get back to D.C. tomorrow."

So far, only Rhodey, Thor, Sam, and Bruce are going for sure—plus Carol, Nebula, and Rocket. That leaves two more open spots. Clint raises his hand.

"I'll go," he says. "I can help more there than I can here."

Bruce and Rhodey nod. Hope and Wanda look at each other.

"Your powers still aren't back," Hope says.

"I think you're needed here more," Wanda says, nodding to Cassie, who's currently passed out on the couch bed behind Hope. "Even without my full powers, I'll be fine."

"Wanda, are you sure?" Clint asks.

"Seeing him again might just be the thing I need to jumpstart them," Wanda says darkly.

That settles that. Though Cassie may have publicly encouraged Hope to go, Maggie's sure that, deep down, Cassie will be grateful to find out Hope decided to stay back when she wakes up tomorrow.

Since the roster has been figured out, the conversation turns more Thanos-centric, which Maggie is more than fine not hearing. She gets up and heads over to the makeshift lab where Pepper's sitting with Tony.

"Is Uncle Tony doing better?" Maggie asks.

Before Pepper can answer, Tony turns over to look at her, awake. Maggie stops in the doorway, suddenly nervous again, just like she felt during their reunion earlier.

"Come here, squirt," he says, his voice hoarse.

She looks to Pepper, who nods with a soft smile Maggie hasn't seen in weeks. Maggie crosses the room to stand by Tony's bedside and Pepper, who's seated. She carefully takes the shaking hand Tony offers into her own.

"I missed your birthday," Tony says, as if nothing else has happened.

Maggie feels tears coming on again, but swallows them back. "That's okay."

"Happy birthday," he says. "I still wanna celebrate. I had a present—unless Pepper already gave it to you."

Pepper shakes her head. "I saved it for when you came back."

"Great." Tony squeezes her hand, then looks to her sling. "So—your first injury in the field?"

Maggie's own laugh sounds foreign in her ears. "Yeah. Good thing it wasn't my writing hand."

"You lucked out there." Tony suddenly coughs, startling Maggie. Pepper holds up a cup of water and brings the straw to Tony's lips so he can drink.

"How long do you have to stay in the lab?" Maggie asks once Tony finishes.

Tony sighs. "'Til Banner M.D. gives me a clean bill of health, I guess. Being trapped in a spaceship for a month causes a lot of 'body trauma,' apparently."

"Tony," Pepper warns.

"Hey, our goodbye in New York." Tony suddenly changes topics. "That was pretty intense."

"It feels like forever ago," Maggie says as the memory resurfaces in her mind. It may have only been a month, but so much has happened since. "I was really scared."

"Me, too, kid," Tony admits quietly. He looks down for a moment, and Maggie remembers that Peter was lost in Thanos' snap. She imagines Tony feels a lot of guilt from that.

"I'm really glad you're back, Uncle Tony," she says. "I missed you."

His eyes start to get a little misty, but he blinks it away and clears his throat. "Yeah. I missed you, too."

Pepper places a hand on the uninjured part of Maggie's broken arm. "I believe it's a little past your bedtime, isn't it?"

"Bedtime?" Tony echoes with a snort. "She's a teenager now!"

"She's still a kid under my roof," Pepper says. "And a kid needs a bedtime."

"Get a load of 'parent of the year' over here."

Maggie initially laughs at Tony's sarcasm, then stops when she processes his words. Parent of the year. Parent.

She lets go of his hand and steps back.

"Fine, I'm going," she says, trying to play off her sudden nerves. "Goodnight."

Before either can respond, she turns and walks out of the lab, heading straight to her bedroom. She walks in to find Cassie already tucked into bed and assumes Hope forced her to move from the lounge.

Maggie slowly gets into her own bed and pulls all the blankets over her head.

By the time Maggie wakes up the next morning, the group heading to space has already left. She has no idea how long they'll be gone, but hopes they bring back a solution.

She and Cassie spend the day helping Hope clean up around what's left of the base. It's been in a constant state of mess since the battle a month prior, and Hope figures that with everyone gone for at least a day or two, it's the perfect time to do some tidying. (Plus, it's something to do.)

"And I'm sure Tony will appreciate it once he's up and about," Hope adds, which is more than enough for Maggie to help out.

They change the sheets on their beds, do an ungodly amount of laundry—Hope using the time to teach Maggie and Cassie how to do their own laundry, since they're spoiled, as Hope teases—and rearrange some of the furniture that's been displaced in the chaos. They only stop to eat lunch and dinner.

By their alleged "bedtime", the base looks a lot better, and Maggie has to admit, the cleanliness does lift her spirits a little. Cassie and Hope laughed more today than Maggie's seen in the last month, so she assumes the better vibes have gotten to them, too.

As they settle into their respective beds that night, Maggie and Cassie's conversation finds itself back at the topic of their parents potentially coming back, once the Avengers find the stones.

"I love spending time with Hope, but I really miss my other parents," Cassie admits, staring up at the ceiling. "We were supposed to go on a huge family trip this summer, with literally everyone—Hope and my dad, my mom and Jim, even Hope's parents."

"That sounds so fun," Maggie says. "I wish my family would do big trips like that, but everyone's always busy."

"I can see how that'd be really hard to schedule."

"Even when our parents come back, I feel like everything's going to be different." Maggie picks at a loose thread on her sling. "So much has changed in the past month. Everyone who's still here has changed a lot. Like, Daisy having to become director of S.H.I.E.L.D., and Wanda's powers taking forever to come back."

Maggie can hear the frown in Cassie's voice. "Even if everyone who disappeared comes back, that won't include Vision, right? Poor Wanda."

Cassie has never known Wanda nor Vision particularly well, nowhere near the extent Maggie has, so it's weird to talk about them with her like this. "Yeah, I don't think so. Unless they can rebuild him with the Mind Stone. Then maybe."

Silence fills the room after that, so Maggie assumes Cassie's passed out for the night. She turns until she finds a comfortable position to lie with her broken arm and closes her eyes.

Somehow, simply cleaning up around the base knocks Maggie out for longer than she's slept in a while. The first time she wakes up, it's already light outside, and she decides to go back to sleep. She wakes up again a few hours later to find herself alone in the room.

The clock on the wall is hard to make out from where Maggie's bed is positioned, but she can tell it's late in the morning. Sleep still weighs her eyes down, though, so she decides to just close her eyes and let it happen.

She's later awakened by the same rumble that occurred when Carol brought the Guardians' ship down to the base. She can feel her mind start to wander back to the battle again, however, so she throws the covers off and runs to the window to see what's really happening, squinting her eyes against the harsh sunlight.

Sure enough, the Guardians' ship and Carol are both back in one piece.

Cassie runs into the room then, already dressed for the day. "You're awake!"

In all honesty, Maggie feels like a zombie. She groans, scratching her head. "What time is it?"

"Uh, like three in the afternoon?"

Maggie nearly has a heart attack when she calculates just how long she slept, until she remembers the serum occasionally needs her to recharge like this. Right. Super soldier genes or whatever.

"Anyway, Carol and the others are back!" Cassie grins widely. "So hopefully they have good news."

Maggie yawns into her hand and nods.

By the time Cassie and Maggie hurry outside, everyone's disembarking the ship. Maggie stops by Pepper and Tony, who's set up in a wheelchair. He grabs her hand and squeezes it, eyes brighter than Maggie's seen them since he returned from space.

Clint leads the space group to them, and as they get closer, their crestfallen expressions become clear.

Maggie's heart sinks.

Bruce starts explaining how they found Thanos without the Stones, because he'd destroyed them, and Maggie stops listening after that. Completely zoned out, her thoughts turn to static.

For the first time, in this entire month, the real gravity of the situation hits her. She finally understands that it is really, really real now.

Her parents are dead.

Maggie starts to think of herself as an orphan.

Granted, she's a pretty privileged orphan. She still has adults she can trust to take care of her. But the fact that they aren't her parents casts a dark, venomous shadow over every kind word, every hug and kiss, every act of service they offer her, because the only reason they're doing it is because her real parents are too dead and gone to do it themselves.

As Tony recovers, he talks more and more about getting out. Moving away from the superhero life. Catching a break, for once in his goddamn life. Pepper is, obviously, on board.

He asks Maggie to come with them.

"Legally, you're ours now," he tells her gently one evening, his hands curled carefully around hers. Her arm's been out of the cast and sling for a week already. "We aren't your parents—don't have to be. We would never try to replace Steve and Nat, or want to. But they trusted us to be your legal guardians, if…this ever happened."

She looks down. He pauses.

"Unless you don't want us to be. Your, uh, guardians, I mean. We'd love it, if you stayed ours, but—if you'd rather go with Clint, or, or Daisy, or Hope and Cassie, or—"

"I want to stay with you."

Her quiet voice ends his ramble. She meets his eyes.

She was born into the Avengers family. But now Tony offers her a choice. And that says a lot about the kind of person he is, she thinks. And is exactly why her parents would've chosen him for this role.

The fact that her parents will miss the rest of her childhood, the rest of her life, weighs heavily on her chest every day. But, maybe the next best thing—if there can even be a thing considered "best" in these circumstances—is to live out those years with the people her parents had trusted to see their jobs through, if they couldn't do it themselves.

Tony's face is overcome with an emotion Maggie can't quite name, but she understands. She pulls her hands from his to instead hug him, repeating her answer into his chest: "I want to be with you."

His arms slowly wrap around her, completing the hug. Tony has always been emotional, but seldom ever a crier, in front of her. For the first time, he lets Maggie in past that emotional wall, as tears fall from his cheeks to her hair.

It's funny. Maggie always dreamed of joining S.H.I.E.L.D. as soon as she was old enough, so she could train to join the Avengers and fight alongside her parents. For thirteen years, that was her dream. But now, after living just a few short months without them, the idea of getting out, getting away, is all she can really think about, too.

But getting out will still take time. And in that time, everyone else works to find their new place in this post-Snap world.

Hope and Cassie return to San Francisco in the summer, to try to return to some semblance of normalcy.

Clint stays in D.C. longer and more frequently, becoming very involved in Daisy's new life as the Director of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Thor and what's left of his people find a new place to settle down since Asgard is gone. Maggie hears it's somewhere in Norway.

Sam eventually heads down south to Louisiana, to stay with his sister and nephews for the foreseeable future.

Bruce pitches the idea of potentially rebuilding Vision to both Tony and Wanda, if it's possible without the Mind Stone. Tony isn't particularly dedicated to the cause, especially now that he plans to retire, but Wanda's all for it, so she and Bruce get to work at the compound. Tony promises to support in any way he can from a distance once they move out.

Wanda's powers come back gradually over the months following their return from space. While she's waiting, she spends time training in combat, especially with Hope and Sam, when they were still at the base. Once they leave, she tells Maggie about her own wishes to eventually leave, too, once she and Bruce can (hopefully) bring Vision back.

Maggie spends the summer exploring the rural area around the base primarily alone, waiting for Tony and Pepper to finalize their moving plans. It should only be a couple more weeks now, last Maggie heard. She finds a small river in the forest out back, and sits there just to think sometimes.

She hated thinking the first few weeks after Thanos' attack. Whenever she stopped to think, her parents and that day were all she could ever think about. And while those thoughts are scarcely ever gone from her mind now, she's come to accept their permanent presence, and tries to think about other things on top of it.

Like the future of the Avengers, or her new civilian life she'll be starting with Tony and Pepper in some cabin in the woods. What the therapist they insist she's going to start seeing will be like. What school will look like for her in the fall. Whether Bruce and Wanda will be able to rebuild Vision without the Stone. Considering if she even still wants to join S.H.I.E.L.D. after high school, after everything that's happened. Daisy had promised to guide her through that, but Daisy feels more distant than ever recently.

She notices a few tiny flowers in the grass next to the water. Their pale colors remind her of funerals, of all things.

They never even held a funeral for her parents, or for anyone. There were just too many of them to grieve. And, honestly, Maggie was okay with that. She didn't, and still doesn't, want to grieve in front of so many people.

But here, alone in the woods, she can grieve privately as much as she wants. So, she picks the tiny flowers, holding them to her chest for several quiet moments, then places them in the stream, watching them slowly drift away. She thinks of all the words she'd said to them that final day, the words she wishes she said to them then, and settles on the simplest ones:

"Goodbye, Mama. Goodbye, Daddy," she murmurs with a sniffle. She suddenly feels a raindrop on her head and looks up just as rain starts to fall. She slowly stands up, watching the drops hit the water's surface. The drops mix with the tears falling down her cheeks.

A few feet downstream, the flowers get caught in some rocks on the side of the river. The rain turns into a downpour. As if all in response to her quiet goodbye.

Which gets her thinking.

Magic took her parents away. So, couldn't magic just bring them back?

She wipes her tears away with a renewed vigor. Maybe it's just too soon after the Snap. Maybe they just haven't realized an alternative way to undo Thanos' Snap without the Stones yet.

"Goodbye," she says again, with a new addendum: "For now."

If she doesn't head back inside soon, she's sure Pepper and Tony will worry. She looks down at the water one last time, and decides to leave her parents with a promise.

"I'm going to bring you back," she tells the water, voice low. "I swear."

a/n: *yeets off to finish the endgame chapters*