A/N – I'm putting up a trigger warning for this chapter because of descriptions of anxiety.
When Samantha got on the jet, sat down and finally had a chance to think, everything started to hit her. Her father was missing, on board an alien spaceship somewhere. Her friend's boyfriend had just been viciously attacked by aliens. She had no clue if Emma was okay and she was staring across a jet at her ex. Her head hung in her hands.
She lifted her eyes to see Steve gave her that look, the one he always gave when he was worried but didn't want people to know about it. "You okay?" he asked.
She didn't know how to answer that. She definitely wasn't okay. She just didn't want to tell Steve that. She was petrified that the worst had happened to Emma amongst everything else, and she wasn't going to be able to get a hold of Pepper until they landed because she'd lost her phone in one of the two alien attacks, she'd dealt with in the space of three hours. Looking at her arms, she realised she'd been scratching them. She stopped that pretty much the moment she noticed it. "Angry? Yes. Scared? Definitely. Okay? No," she answered truthfully. She looked around her, everyone looked the way she felt, everyone except maybe Natasha but she was always unreadable.
"You want to talk about it?" he asked.
She shook her head. "Steve, if I talk about it, I won't be able to get a hold of myself in time for whatever comes next and that can't happen." She looked over at Wanda, who was clinging to Vision's hand as he lay on a stretcher. She couldn't see a world in which any of her problems added up to something like that. "Wanda needs us more," she said. "They're the priority right now."
XX
When Steve had mentioned that they were going home, Samantha hadn't thought they'd mean home as in the U.S. It didn't exactly click that that was where they even were until she saw Rhodey standing, arms folded, talking with a hologram of the Secretary of State.
"Mr Secretary," Steve said in a low baritone.
"You've got some nerve, I'll give you that," Secretary Ross said as he approached them.
"You could use some of that right now," Natasha said, her face still unreadable.
"The world's on fire, and you think all is forgiven?" The Secretary said, looking specifically at Steve and, for a brief moment, at Samantha.
"I'm not looking for forgiveness and I'm way past asking permission," Steve said.
"And you Miss Stark?"
"Secretary, I have had a very bad day. My father is missing, my friend has been stabbed and I have tried to fend off two alien attacks today. I don't give a crap about whether or not you forgive me for crimes that I did not commit," she answered angrily.
"Earth just lost your best defender and we're here to fight," Steve started, stepping down to the Secretary's level. "So, if you want to stand in our way, we'll fight you too," he said.
"I'll rest then," the Secretary said, turning to Rhodey.
"All over it," he responded, swiping away the hologram. He looked at them as a dinging sounded. "That's the court martial," he said, before smiling. "It's great to see you Cap," he said, bringing Steve and Natasha in for a hug. "Well, you guys really look like crap, must have been a rough couple of years."
"Yeah, well, the hotels weren't exactly five star," Sam joked.
"Well, I think you look great," she heard Bruce say as he walked into the room. "Uh, yeah, I'm back," he said softly.
"Hi Bruce," Natasha managed. She looked shocked – pretty much the only emotion her face had shown in the last couple of hours. When Bruce had disappeared to who knew where, before the fights between Steve and Tony took off, no one had looked harder for him than Natasha. They'd been together and then one day, he just up and vanished.
He played with the cuffs on his jacket, then nodded. "Nat," he said.
"This is awkward," Sam muttered quietly.
XX
Rhodey had led them all into the living space of the Avengers Compound to try and get a handle on where things were at. He kept looking at Samantha with pity in his eyes. She knew it had been a long shot that her dad would be back by now, but still, did his friend have to keep looking at her like that.
"So, we have to assume they're coming back, right?" Rhodey asked.
"And they can clearly find us," Wanda added.
"We need all hands on deck, where's Clint?" Bruce asked.
Who's turn was it to reveal what he'd missed out on this time? "After the whole Accords situation, he and Scott took a deal. It was too tough on their families, they took a deal," Natasha explained.
"Who's Scott?" was Bruce's next question.
"Ant Man," Samantha and Steve said at the same time. Well, that wasn't awkward, not at all. Nope.
"There's an Ant Man and a Spider Man?" Bruce asked, clearly ignoring the awkwardness that had just occurred. Honestly, it was getting tiring trying to figure out what to do while trying to catch Bruce up on two years' worth of stuff. "Okay, look Thanos has the biggest army in the universe and he is not going to stop until he, he gets Vision's stone."
"Well, then we have to protect it," Natasha said.
"No, we have to destroy it," Vision said. He was leant against a wall, clutching at his side. "I've been giving it a great deal of thought, to this entity in my head, about it's nature but also it's composition. I think if it were exposed to a sufficiently powerful energy source, something very similar to it's own signature perhaps, it's molecular integrity could fail," he said, moving closer and closer to Wanda until they were mere inches apart.
"Yeah, and you with it," Wanda replied. "We're not having this conversation."
"Eliminating the stone is the only way to be certain that Thanos can't get it," Vision said.
"I… I'm sorry," Samantha said before fleeing the room, slamming the door behind her.
She needed something to kick or punch or literally do anything violent to right now because she could not cope. Everything was happening all at once and the world was ending and her dad was missing and Vision was asking Wanda to kill him.
She couldn't breathe. It was like everything was building up and had settled on her chest, weighing down on her. She knew that, logically, she needed to focus on her breathing, but logic wasn't something she was thinking about in that moment. Tears streamed down her face and she thought she heard someone calling her name but it was so faint that she couldn't guarantee it.
Someone grabbed a hold of her face and looked her in the eyes. She couldn't focus on the face, her mind was going at a million miles a minute and she couldn't focus on anything and couldn't breathe. "Samantha, focus on my face," the person said, they sounded male. She shook her head, she couldn't do it. "Samantha, you're having a panic attack, look at me," the person said.
"I… I… I… can't breathe," she managed to stammer out.
"I know. Just look at me. Stay in the present."
She didn't know if she could, but she tried. The person's face came into focus and she figured it was Steve. She looked into his eyes, those pools of blue, but unlike normal it didn't calm her. "Count to 10 with me," he said in a soothing tone.
"1," she managed, "2, 3," she noticed her breathing start to steady and she continued "4, 5."
"Good, you're doing so well," he said, and she continued counting. When she finished counting, he asked her what was wrong.
How could he ask that? How did he not know? "I don't know if you've noticed Steve but the sky is basically falling around us right now," she said. "This guy – Thanos – he's not like anything any one of us has dealt with before, and right now, his guys have my dad on that spaceship of his."
"You're worried," Steve said.
"Of course I'm worried. My dad is off in space somewhere, my friend's boyfriend just got stabbed by an alien and I haven't been able to make sure that Emma's okay because I lost my damn phone!" The phone thing really was sticking in her mind because she couldn't figure out at which point she'd lost it. Had it been when she was in New York, fending off alien attack number one or was it when she was fighting aliens in Scotland? Or had she just left it in her bag back in London? It seemed such an innocuous thing given everything going on, but it seemed so important in the moment.
Steve looked at her and handed her a phone that looked as though it came from 2005. "I can't use this, won't it put you at risk?" she asked.
"The Secretary of State already knows where I am and you need to talk to Emma, so make the call," he said, it was more like an instruction so she took the phone.
She dialled Pepper's number and when the older woman picked up and Samantha said who was calling, she was ambushed with all sorts of questions. "Are you okay? When you didn't pick up I thought you might have ended up on the ship with your father somehow or… or worse," she said.
Samantha smiled, glad to hear her stepmother's voice. "I'm fine, a little freaked but I'll be fine," she answered. "Can I speak to Em? I just have to make sure she's okay," she said. Her now eight-year-old had started insisting that everyone call her Em after someone had shown her a James Bond film and she'd seen Judi Dench.
"Yeah, sure," she said before calling for the girl.
"Hi mom! We saw you on the news!" Emma said excitedly. Samantha's heart skipped a beat when her daughter called her 'mom'. It had taken a year of the two of them living together for it to happen, but now every time she said it, the 23-year-old couldn't help but smile.
"Are you okay? Are you being good for Nana Pepper?" she asked.
"Yeah! But Sophia's sad cause we don't know where Grandpa Tony is. When are you going to come see me?" the young girl asked.
Samantha had to bite her lip at that. "I'm not sure sweetie. I have to stay here and help find Grandpa Tony and I have to help Aunt Wanda, but I promise, I will come back to you," she said, the tears starting to stream down her face.
"You promise? You really promise?" she could imagine the sad pout on the little girl's face right now.
Swallowing, Samantha replied. "I triple promise, I love you."
"To the stars and back?" Emma had been asking for confirmation of this ever since she'd learned that the stars were further away from earth than the moon. It was like if she had confirmation that someone loved her that badly, she wouldn't be alone and Samantha really love her that much, more if that was even possible. So it had become their thing.
"To the stars and back," she confirmed.
