Hi!
Just a super random one-shot I haven't been able to get out of my head. I have my own personal struggles that may or may not reflect in this story so writing this was very cathartic for me. I feel I've stuck to the true nature of the characters while taking this down a VERY dark path, be warned.
DOES NOT conform to endgame, endgame was bullshit. Steve doesnt go back in time because IT DOESNT SUIT HIS CHARACTER. Natasha doesn't die because SHE DOESNT DESERVE THAT SHIT. Tony may or may not die I've left that open to interpretation.
This story is basically just suicidal thoughts. You've been warned, don't say I didn't warn you. Read at your own risk.
Steve
Captain America had been the world's first hero. The first to have the weight of the world thrust onto his shoulders for him alone to bear. So of course, he was also the first to crumble.
It hadn't been immediate. What with Peggy still by his side and his body still required as it housed their only remaining serum. Then he'd been joined by Bucky, by his commandos, and his best friend had helped take some of the weight off his back, bearing it with him.
When his only friend fell off the train, the weight came back ten fold.
All his power, all the serum running through his veins and he'd been unable to save the one person who'd gotten him this far in life. The one he'd had when he'd had nothing else. Peggy had gotten him through that as well, so in kind when it had been his time he'd helped her through it.
Only it wasn't his time, and he'd lost her too, along with every part of his life.
It was only Fury's missions that kept him from trying to end it himself. He was never free long enough to consider how he'd go about it. He'd thought of nothing else when he'd first been defrosted, unwilling to let go of his world and replace it with this alien one. He thought of pills and ropes and blades, but the sight of the folder and that god-damned cube robbed him of all hope once again. He'd lost everything, and it was all for nothing. The job still wasn't finished.
Once it was, he allowed himself to be bombarded with missions and routines and tasks, having no issue with being kept busy. It was only the fact that he was never alone that kept him from ending his life, and he almost felt as though Fury knew it. Knew that the second Steve was alone, he would be overwhelmed with Bucky's voice and Peggy's eyes and the smell of bars and comradery.
When he saw Bucky again, he almost wondered if he had killed himself. If seeing his friend this way, being forced to fight him was some sick punishment for the crime of taking his own life. He'd refused to fight his demons, so he had to fight Bucky instead.
And when he was sure he wasn't dead, was sure that it was indeed Bucky and somehow he hadn't lost him after all, he found himself renewed. Full of life after 70 years of death, given new purpose in the shape of a broken soldier.
Natasha
Natasha was next, much to the surprise of many. The spy with a thousand faces indeed had feelings. Could hurt and bleed just like the others, only she hid it better. Because she had to.
Unlike the boys, Natasha's life was focused on one thing; survival. From the first memory she had her goal had only ever been to stay alive. She'd never allowed herself time to think of a reason, to wonder if it was even worth staying alive, she simply carried out her mission.
She took the beatings, the starvation, the pills. She did not resist when they chained her to the bed every night, not even as the metal grew tight around her growing wrists and eventually began cutting through her skin. She learned every language, every fighting style, every dance and every tactic of seduction with skill and mechanical efficiency. She was soulless perfection with a ballerina's grace.
When she was told to defend her Russia, she did so without question. Her body, her mind, her soul belonged to them, to the Red Room, and they would use her as needed for their motherland. And she would take it, as she'd always taken everything, because the alternative was death and death to her was worse. Worse than starving, worse than pain, worse than losing every part of yourself before it was ever yours.
Until one day she decided perhaps it wasn't.
Perhaps it was not as bad as she'd been led to believe. Could it be worse than being made to kill your sisters? Worse than being haunted by their screams, their begging? Was it worse than taking strange men inside her before her body had even developed enough to accommodate them? Was being dead in the ground worse than being bent over naked by filthy men who groaned into her flesh and left marks on her skin?
Maybe not.
And when they pulled her womb from her body, she decided it couldn't be worse. She'd thought they'd already taken everything from her. But no. With her womb they'd taken her femininity, her womanhood, the shrivel of humanity she'd managed to keep safe from them. They'd taken her past, her present, and now her future. They'd taken the only use she had besides being their toy. Now, they'd taken everything, and only the weapon remained.
No, death was not worse than this.
So she ran, knowing they would not kill her and hoping she could find someone that would. Months of fights leaving her with only minor cuts and scars to show for it. Her will to survive would not allow her to simply give up and do it herself, she needed to be bested. She needed to be destroyed. Because weapons don't kill themselves.
She needed to go in battle. Slowly, painfully. The way many of her victims had.
So when she fought the bowman, she couldn't help the thrill that rushed through her. Excitement that perhaps finally someone would end her miserable life as she so desperately needed.
He did not exceed her own skills, but she felt him skilled enough to be able to take her life, so she put up no fight as he aimed his arrow at her head. Finally.
But he did not. It seemed fate would simply not be kind to her.
Instead he spoke of redemption, of freedom. She did not believe him in the slightest, but given she had run herself out of threats in her time on the run she decided there was no harm. Perhaps adding SHIELD's list of enemies to her own would help her in her goal.
It didn't, but her survival instinct kicked back in over the years and she eventually began focusing less on ending her own life, at least until she had done her best to balance out her reign of destruction with atonement. Hoping she could leave the world at least not worse than when she'd found it.
Years later, when she met the Winter Soldier, she wondered if that would've been her own fate. Had she not decided to choose death, would they have chosen it for her in this manner? Stripping her of even her own free will and leaving her their slave for all eternity? The thought made her tremble, always surprised at how much more could be taken from a person that she'd initially thought.
But she was grateful, now, that she'd not succeeded. She'd had the opportunity to know freedom, to know a family. To know the man behind the soldier and unravel him from the works of HYDRA until only James stood before her.
And as she curled herself further into his side, Steve smiling at her from the other seat and Clint with his family all chaotic around them, she thanked the gods again for her will to survive.
Banner
Bruce's attempt at suicide was well known. And no one could really blame him.
He'd set out to save the world, to make it a better place. He'd hoped to use his mind protect people, and instead he'd hurt them. So many of them. A prisoner of his own creation, he could do nothing.
Unlike the others, he'd never been prepared for this. He'd never been a fighter, never wanted to be a hero. His whole life was science; labs and knowledge and data and experiments, that was his battlefield. He never had much, but he was content and perfectly happy being a scientist and working in the background.
Now he was as famous as one could be. He was the monster parents told their children about at night. He was hunted to all four corners of the globe like an animal, sought after by those who wished to experiment on him and use him for their own gain, refusing to listen when he pushed them to understand that he wasn't something that could be controlled. An unstoppable weapon had no targets, no sides. If they got their way, his rage would make him roll over the earth until there was nothing in his path.
Betty had helped keep him somewhat grounded, stable at first. So after losing her of course it only became increasingly difficult to cope. He was alone, being hunted. He could know no one, trust no one, not even himself. Already trapped in his own body and running from those who looked to imprison him further. He didn't want to fight anymore, he didn't want to run. He was just so god damn tired.
When he pressed the gun into his mouth, he felt more peace than he'd ever felt since the birth of the HULK. But he pulled the trigger only to come to, naked and completely unharmed in the middle of nowhere.
Even the peace of death had been stolen from him, and he sobbed and screamed into the dirt until her passed out from dehydration.
Accepting eventually that his sentence was likely a long one, he thought it best to figure out how to contain himself and maybe do some good to atone for his mistakes while he figured out how to rid the world of the HULK, and perhaps himself in the process.
Tony
Tony envied Bruce, on occasion. And he understood him, though few would guess it. He knew exactly what it was like to be haunted by one's destructive legacy, except Tony had no angry alter ego to place blame upon.
Banner's mind had created a monster, Tony's had built weapons.
Between his own designs and his father's he knew he'd never be able to estimate how many people's lives he'd taken. How much innocent blood was on his hands. Maybe more than all the other Avenger's combined, which was saying something considering 3 of them had been bad guys at some point, and Thor had lived and fought over a thousand years. 4 bad guys and a god, led by a hero, what a team they were. Tony wondered if Fury had a thing for villains.
The weight of his crimes on the world hung over him constantly. It stole his sleep, his focus, at times even his sanity. Since understanding the reach of his destruction he no longer knew peace. The closest he got was the soothing numbness he reached at the bottom of a bottle.
His time in the suits made it better. He wasn't stupid enough to believe he could ever even out the scale, but every saved life lifted a small burden from his soul.
But as with any weapon, casualties grew, his list of victims grew. His own victims, victims of his company, of his team. So many victims. All his money and power did nothing to stop the list from growing, and he knew one day that his fights would end in more victims than rescues. Because he was the great Tony Stark, destroying everything he touched.
It hurt worse the closer it got to home. Watching Happy, Rhodey, Pepper suffer at the hands of his enemies. Had he not been so arrogant in his feats perhaps he would've saved his family a lot of pain. He wished himself anonymity often, just as Killian had predicted. He drank himself into a stupor instead.
Sokovia had broken him, but the victims of the building bombing had snapped him back into action. His action of course ending in tearing his own team apart. And then Thanos…
He wondered which of them was the bigger villain. He wondered if Thanos had managed to kill as many innocents as Tony Stark had.
Pepper kept him tethered, because she was a good woman who deserved no pain, and even though her life with Tony had been anything but easy he was far too selfish to give her up, regardless of whether she let him. So he ignored his guilt and abandoned his team to enjoy his retirement after the world was decimated as a result of his failure.
Tony would never kill himself. He was too much of a coward. He'd been given everything from the moment he was born and he would not allow his darkness to take that from him. He took full advantage of his wealth, of his invincibility, of his inability to be touched by governments or any of the higher powers of the world, of the fact that his family had remained mostly whole while those like Clint lost everything. He took every advantage given to him and milked it as best he could, ignoring any guilt that came along with it.
Instead of dying, he allowed guilt and shame to wither his soul until such a time where his body would follow. He allowed Pepper to chase away his dreams and Morgan to soothe his strained heart because he'd already failed the world once and he wouldn't fail his own world too.
Clint
No one would suspect Clint to be anything but happy. To the other Avengers, his life was perfect. His job was often the safest of them all, his home even safer. He had a wife, children, friends. As far as anyone was concerned, he was living the American dream.
But as with all villains, his past often haunted him. Spending his childhood watching his father beat his mother had instilled a fear in him that never left. Finding Laura had helped, his children more so. Figuring out that indeed he could be a father despite his own shitty example had lifted a great burden from his shoulders.
But struggling to split himself between his team and his family had thoroughly exhausted him over the years. Every time he chose one, the other suffered.
Choosing the Avengers during Ultron's reign had stressed out Laura enough to make her give birth almost a month earlier than expected. Choosing his family afterwards and retiring had lasted long enough for the rest of the team to pick sides and tear each other apart. Choosing his own side of the team had landed him in jail and his family in danger, again. And choosing his family the final time had meant him missing out on the fight and losing both his family and his team to Thanos.
No matter what he did, someone suffered.
Now with no team and no family, he drowned in the result of his failure, of letting both sides down. He wanted to join them, his family, Wanda, all those of his team he'd failed the most. It was only Natasha's desperate begging that stopped him, and the sound of Laura's quiet tears in his mind. He would not put Natasha through anymore pain on his behalf, and he would not tarnish his family's memory with his own weakness.
If he could not hurt himself though, he would hurt others. People just as undeserving of life as he. People who hurt others, who killed them. Anyone he believed should've taken the place of his family in the great extinction.
He hoped somehow, in the dark recesses of his mind, that if he killed enough of them his debt to the universe would be repaid. He'd almost died so many times, maybe his family was penance for his continued existence. Maybe if he took enough lives he would earn theirs back, see them again. Because he knew that would be the only way to see them. His family were good, pure. Even if he died, whatever shrivelled remains of his soul were left would never grant him the chance to join them.
Thor
Thor arguably had lost more than any of the other Avengers. All had lost their parents, although not as violently in most cases as Thor had. Unlike Tony, he'd been unable to manage a relationship with all his other responsibilities to the universe. His best friend was dead. His planet was truly destroyed. His people dead or suffering. His siblings both dead by his own hand, both despising him to various degrees. Even his lover had left him, willingly. Thor had nothing left to lose. He'd let that bond him to Steve somewhat, who'd also lost his home and his family and his lover, until of course those things had returned to him in one way or another while Thor still sat with nothing.
Gods could not be killed as simply as humans. Sometimes he wished they were. He wished there was a way to cleanse the world of his presence, the poison that seemed to follow him and destroy everything he ever laid a hand on. Loki, his parents, his team, Earth, Asgard. All the corruption, all the death, it had all started with him. He hoped maybe it would end with him as well.
But death was not for him, so he continued to search, hoping one day he could find a place where his very existence wouldn't reap such brutal destruction.
I did consider doing Wanda and Bucky too but I though it best to stick to the OG 6. They're all kind of happy endings, or at least they end open enough to later get a happy ending. Steve is happy he has Bucky, Natasha is happy she has them all. Tony is good with his family even though he feels shitty. Hulk and Thor I imagine figure it out eventually and Clint does get his family back so all in all not TOO dark? Is it? Lemme know what you think!
