Welllll I did a boo boo, I accidentally posted this chapter under Avenge me. Then when I deleted it to fix it, I deleted the chapter entirely. then I didn't have any of the additions that I made.
now I'm sad.
Crap.
Chapter 21
"You're dead." Clint whispered to himself. He didn't want to see the ghost of his past. He'd never before faced the old man after those years he'd finally put his nightmares to bed once and for all. But there he was. Standing across from him with a nine millimeter in one hand, and a beer bottle in the other.
The ether form of that massive Ronin model had shrunken down behind Clint's father into another accompanying shock. It was his mother, Edith Barton. She sat on the ground with her old flower skirt cascading around her, one fist sailing up toward her mouth where her tar-stained teeth nervously gnawed at it. Her eye was black and blue from where old Harold Barton had slammed his fist into it, shattering the socket.
Clint was eight years old again, watching from the ground as his father strode toward him with that bottle in one hand and the gun in the other. He never told the Avengers about the guns. He'd told them much about his old life once. He even brought them to that haunted trailer in Iowa where he used to live. He told the team almost everything then, with the promise that never again would they ask about the shattered past he'd come from. They held up their side of the bargain.
"There you are. You little, ungrateful, piece of – " His father cursed at him. He lifted the bottle to his lips, and swirled the contents into his mouth, where he swished them through his clenched teeth before swallowing.
"Harold, don't! He's just a little boy, he doesn't know any better." Edith might have screamed, but she wouldn't. She knew better.
"Should teach him better than to defy his old man." Harold said, striding closer. Clint was paralyzed watching him come. The sounds of the others' struggles faded to nothing at all.
He didn't hear as Gamora screamed, Groot's arms suffered detachment, and Rocket fought viciously against his attacker. He didn't see as Loki attempted to murder his own father a second time, or Peter tried dancing and shooting his way out of a second round with Ronin the Accuser. None of them mattered.
Only Harold did. He told himself it was ridiculous. He was a man now, not a child to be bullied, beaten, and belittled. He could defend himself, where that child in his past couldn't. He had to move. Now!
The simple pistol raised, and fired almost too soon for Clint to avoid. But he did spin away, and drew an arrow against his string to bury into his father's chest. The first arrow hit, and absorbed right into the skin. Harold looked down at his chest, and watched as, first the point, shaft, then fletches entered and disappeared. He smiled at Clint in that old, sick way he had.
"Well, someone's been a bad boy."
Clint pulled another arrow. He peeled away from the group to reach his mother, and fired endlessly at the encroaching form of Harold Barton. He hit the gun first, skittering it away. Then he aimed for the man's forehead, snapping it back with a sick thunk of whiplash. Harold recovered from it all, and continued toward him like an unstoppable zombie force. Clint released his bow, and the Alfheimr metal disappeared into thin air. He stooped next to his mother, and grabbed her up, throwing his body between Harold and her.
"It's all right, I have you, now. I can protect you. Just stay back, I can stop this."
"Clint!" She whispered into his ear. He choked up at the sound of it. He hadn't heard the sweet ghost of her voice since the morning she'd died. He wanted to hold her, to cry against her, to save her all at once. But someone stood between him and her, and that was always his father.
"I'm going to kill you for what you did to us." Clint growled.
Harold laughed. It brought a chill to his spine.
"Kill me?! You heard that boy, Eddy? You heard that tone he took with me?!"
Impossibly fast, the visage of Harold came at him. His hand connected with Clint's throat, lifted the archer up, and body slammed him into the sand. He clamped down, bringing his face deadly close to the trapped Avenger. Superhuman strength immobilized Clint like an insect on a scientist's pin. Edith dropped to her knees by Clint's face, stroking his hair with her hand, but doing nothing to rescue him.
"You're worthless to me. Useless to me. What do you call me?" Harold demanded.
Clint gritted his teeth, trying to fight the words through compressed vocal cords.
Harold's free hand chambered back, and rocketed down into the soft spot where Clint's missing rib lay. The breath of oxygen Clint had managed to save, released in a whoosh of air.
"Mr. Barton." Harold seethed. "You call me mister. I ain't your father. You ain't nothing. You ain't worth keeping around to mop the floor with."
Edith smiled, her face still as radiant as the sun Clint saw in her every day of his childhood. She stroked her hand down the side of his face, and said in that soft, whispering voice, "I'm sorry, Clint. You're my baby boy, but you can't save me. No one can save me."
"Barton!" Loki cried.
Clint heard his voice like a beacon blazing in the fog. He watched as Harold's visage produced another weapon, and felt the reverberation of the gunshot that cut through his mother's chest. A stream of blood splattered the side of his face as the woman turned in the air above him and collapsed. Her hand still draped over his hair.
"NO!" Clint screamed. He worked one of his collapsing arrows out of his pocket, and with a flick of his wrist, extended it. He jammed the arrowhead into Harold's back, causing the man to recoil with the gun still in his hand.
The next shot went wild. His steel grip released from Clint's neck, and the son fought his way out from under him. He called his bow to his hand, and cracked the man across the chin with the limb. He pulled another arrow and fired it into his skull. Then he drew a second, an exploding tip, and fired that with the same ferocity of the first.
He had ten seconds to get out of the way. Clint leaned over and grabbed his mother's body. He dragged her into his arms, and ran for it. The sand slowed him down. The moon pulled at his boots, and sucked at his every step. Loki screamed for him again, But Clint was running the opposite direction, with the woman bleeding and dying in his arms.
The world exploded in light. He threw himself forward into the dirt as everything around them shattered in a hail of shrapnel. Clint set his mother down on a long slab of rock. He cradled her head in his hand, and desperately tried to stop the flow of blood from the gunshot wound his father had given her.
"I'll fix this. I can fix this. Don't leave, again. Madre, listen to me." Clint knew he had to be crazy, but for some reason she felt so real under his touch. She had that same cigarette scent, and the faint wisp of Italian perfume she'd gotten from her mother thirty years before. His adult self fell right back into the eight year old child, wanting to desperately save the one good thing he loved in his life: his mother.
Edith Barton reached up, and stroked the side of his face with the back of her hand. "Bello, bello. My beautiful little boy."
"Don't move. We can get you back on the ship. I'll bring you to Asgard, to Alfheimr, I don't care where. Just hang on for me, ok?"
"Barton, listen to me!" Loki screamed. Something sailed toward Clint's direction, but the archer was too distracted trying to stem the blood flow from his mother's chest wound to care.
"You can't save me," his mother whispered, smiling a little through the pain.
The words struck him to the core. He'd heard them for so long, years even, every single time his father came at her and Clint thought to defend her. She never wanted him to try. Didn't think she was worth saving. She called him young and beautiful, her little boy, but she'd never let him do any more than stand on the outside looking in. In his adult life, Clint often fell back into those same words she'd whispered to him. He'd fought with Tony countless times about them.
"Don't say that, Madre."
Her hand remained on the side of his face. Her blue eyes, a reflection of his own, pierced through him. "My little Iowa boy. One day you're going to go to college. Be my little Hawkeye. My little Iowa Hawkeye."
Loki collided with Clint from behind, tearing him away from his mother and tackling him against the rock slab. Clint flipped onto his stomach, and grabbed the frost giant by the collar.
"Get off me!" Clint fought him.
"She is not real!" Loki fought back. He saw the flash of silver in the corner of his eye and, grabbing Barton's shirt, he rolled them sideways beyond the blade's fall. Edith Barton had a knife waiting along her side, ready to filet Clint alive.
Clint looked back at Loki.
"Believe me now?!" Loki asked.
"I think my dead mother just tried to kill me." Clint said in a daze.
"This Herald of Galactus means to break us by presenting our fears. Though it is not our fears that will murder us, but that which we protect." Loki said. He shoved Barton off, and they made it to their feet beside one another. Harold Barton was gone forever, but Edith recovered, and came limping back for round two. Across the way, Laufey caught Loki's location, and he too approached. Shuddering at his back was Loki's apparent care in the world, someone Barton never expected.
"I will take yours." Loki told him. "I believes our witless fool may need relief of his own."
Clint noticed Drax falling under the weight of, not only his hatred for Thanos, but the two others huddled on the ground behind him. It was his wife and child, murdered by Thanos' order. He might be able to overcome Thanos, but with the emotion of his dead family playing against him, he fell remarkably easy.
"You're right. We're fighting this all wrong." Clint said. He drew an arrow on his bowstring, and sent it reeling between Thanos's shoulder blades. The visage stumbled, and turned to face his new opponent.
"Everyone, switch up! Stop playing into its hand!" Clint instructed.
He moved away from Edith Barton, leaving her to Loki, and instead drew Laufey away separately. For once his tunnel vision expanded.
Groot needed a hand. Literally. He'd been shaved down by the chainsaw-wielding psychopath to nothing more than a torso and head.
Rocket might have defended him, if he wasn't currently doing everything in his power to scramble up the side of the Milano and out of the scientist's path. Gamora was bent over backwards, while the razor edge of a knife played along her throat. And, a few feet away, Peter was trying to drag his own mother from the swinging hammer of Ronin.
For Rocket and Groot, they were each other's worlds. Replicating their forms made little sense to the peculiar changeling Herald. Gamora's adopted sister, Nebula, appeared as an emotional counterpoint.
Clint avoided Laufey's swinging ice sword, and skid across the sand on his knees to come up behind the chainsaw man. He had an arrow already palmed in his hand, pulled it back and slammed it home in the base of the Herald's neck.
"I am Groooot!" Groot exclaimed in concern.
Clint stooped beside him, dragged the stump under his arm, and took off across the sand. The explosion threw him forward. He hit his hands and knees, dropping Groot, who continued to slide until he stopped beside the scientist's legs. Groot smiled a little at the creature, before falling to his side and clamping onto him with freshly grown splinter teeth. The chainsaw creature disintegrated into the sand.
"Aim for the heads!" He called to the others. "You might have to decapitate them, but aim there first!"
Laufey returned, swinging his ice sword again. Clint dropped, spun around him, and slammed his bow against the creature's back. To his left, Rocket dropped from the side of the ship onto the scientist's shoulders, where he proceeded to rail against him. Gamora threw her opponent forward, moved away, and made a running tackle, which threw Ronin into the dirt and left Peter open. As for his own mother, Clint didn't want to know what Loki was doing to her.
Laufey leaned to the left, brought his sword straight into the air, and slammed it down. Clint barely managed to slip between his legs and avoid being cut in half. He snatched another expanding arrow from his clip and jumped up, scissoring his legs around Laufey's chest and tossing him off balance all at the same time.
With the frost giant in the dirt, he raised the expanded arrow tip, and meant to crash it into the frost giant's neck. Laufey raised his left arm in a frozen fist, and caught Clint in the shoulder. Barton hit the ground. Laufey's hand spread over his chest, and the ice sword raised to pierce him through.
:(:):(:):
The sounds of the waterfall filled the silence that stretched between Natasha and Rinon both. Laice settled her head back onto her paws, and watched them converse with only a mild interest. In the absence of other elves, she'd taken on the task of Rinon's babysitting. The longer Natasha sat across from him, the more she realized he needed it.
Later, if they survived all of this, someone might name it the War of Secrets. It seemed wherever she turned, that was all she came across. More revelations, lies, and hidden truths. The skeletons in people's closets were piling up like a college anatomy lab. Everywhere Natasha turned, another came pouring out.
"Midgard is under attack. How would you know that? You spoke to the Sarhorn too?" She deduced.
Rinon considered what he might say. Where he might normally consider lying, that thought stopped instantly when he remembered Laice's presence. While she was loyal to a fault, she also had a unique intolerance for deceit. She would ferret him out in an instant.
Then again, Natasha had already done the same thing. She could clearly see that private struggle he wrestled over, and waited for him to decide his own truth before calling his tall tales. Before he had that chance, however, Rinon began to stiffen again.
This time was less violent than the first, but still the fit overtook him like a wave. His eyes unfocussed, dulled, and became almost white. Before he receded completely from his conscious state, he extended his hand. He wanted to warn her, to stop her from trying to help him, but Natasha misunderstood his meaning. Despite Laice's snarl, Romanov leaned in and intertwined her fingers in his.
Her body became rock hard as every single muscle spasmed at once. Her face pulled back into a grimace as a silent scream formed in her throat. The snarls of Rinon's guardian faded into the background of the sights Natasha suddenly beheld.
It all happened as the Sarhorn predicted so long ago. It seemed like ages since they'd been standing in that hospital room, surrounding the dying Clint Barton, wondering how the world was all meant to end around them. But here it was; that day, seven years into the future, when everything the universe knew was threatened to die in a vortex that nothing, but the knowledge of Tony Stark, could contain.
They'd been told. They'd been warned. Why were they still so . . . unprepared?
Clint stood on the edge of the darkness itself. Here the landscape was little more than dunes of bluish sand swept over outcrops of jagged cliff spears. This desolation marked the epicenter of everything they had prepared for so long. Clint thought he had been removed from it all. The team swore that the archer would never see the heart of. Never see the battle, the evacuations, or anything Galactus-related if they could at all help it. Natasha stood a few paces behind him, watching him consider that utter desolation surrounding them.
She glanced into the sky, where the utter blackness blocked everything from view. The center pit of light, like a star swirling in a dying galaxy, waited to consume everything that was good in the world. In a single decisive blow, everything the fighting force had so carefully set in place, shattered. They could have never predicted the sheer power Galactus returned with. Standing on that bluff, with the gray hues of a dying sky swirling around him in dust devils.
"We're not going to make it." Clint whispered.
Natasha shook her head furiously. "I . . . I can't believe it." She told him. This couldn't be happening. Not now. Not yet. They weren't ready. How did she get here? Where was Rinon? Tony? Everyone? She called out through the comm she felt in her ear. She screamed for the elf to come bck for her. To stop everything. That the time had suddenly come.
Above them, the glow of stars blotted out in masses, as if a fist wrapped its hand around them and squeezed. The world around them was in the midst of an evacuation. Natasha watched the dots of disappearing ships fading into the consumed horizon.
Natasha grabbed Clint's arm, and tugged him back from the ledge. Still, though, he stood firm. Why couldn't he leave? Why wouldn't he go?
"I can't leave." He said.
Natasha squinted at him. Her voice piqued in fragility. "What do you mean, you can't leave? Clint, we are going to die if we just stand here! That thing," she pointed up into the sky at the rapidly expanding void of Galactus. "Is going to swallow this planet and everyone on it!"
Clint stopped looking up into the stars that had disappeared behind the mass of black, and instead looked down into the equally repressive crevice at his feet. "I hid it there. Natasha, the Infinity Gauntlet, it's right beneath my feet. Down in that chasm. I took it from Pym. I had to take it, you don't understand what he planned to do with it. What I did do. This is my fault." He glanced over his shoulder at her. "Natasha, if Galactus gets it, if he swallows this world, that's it for us. For everyone. I have to destroy it."
A cold hand reached into her chest, and clamped down on her heart.
"No!" Natasha said, firm, low, and resolute. "That's not happening, Clint. We planned this. Steve is going, not you. That was the plan!"
Clint tapped the communicator around his neck, and opened a line to the other teams of Avengers. His eyes never left Natasha's, and he never stepped away from that ledge. What could she do to make it all stop? To take this all away? Where was Rinon? Couldn't she go back? Stop all of this now, and go back to that moment on the ship?
"This is Clint. Where are you, Panther?" He asked calmly.
Natasha heard her own radio cackle with the echo of his voice in her ear. Where had that come from? There was a brief, curt reply with a word too fast to understand. Then nothing. Again, the line opened. Steve's voice, frantic in the background, yelling indistinguishable words. The line cut out a second time, and the dread in Natasha's heart filled.
"Again, this is Hawkeye calling Panther. What is your ETA?" Clint said a second time. He looped his thumb under the strap of his quiver, and pulled the strap tighter against his chest. Next, he took his hand, opened the palm, and felt the familiar weight of his Asgardian bow appear.
"T'CHALLA ARE YOU CRAZY!" Steve's voice screamed through the radio. "Clint! Clint, get Natasha, and get the HELL OUT OF THERE!"
Natasha's hand reached up and covered her mouth. Her pupils widened. Was this really happening?
"She is my wife! We are going to save her! Barton can run! She cannot!" Panther cried.
"T'Challa, don't be a fool! This is exactly what the Sarhorn said! Clint? Clint, please, can you hear me? Don't do it! Don't go down there! Clint, please listen to me!" Steve's desperate cries tried to rise above the Panther's mania, but Clint's mind was already made up. He'd decided the day he woke up in a hospital bed, and Peter Quill told him exactly what evil was to come. He'd trained Steve for as long as he could to take his place. To share this horrible fate, but, all the while, Clint knew the truth.
"You don't understand what I have to do." Clint said, even and flat, into the walkie.
"Natasha? Natasha, if you are there, stop him! Don't let him do this! I'm coming! I'll be there in twenty minutes, please give me time. Please! Just get away! Run!" Steve begged.
Natasha couldn't speak. Her eyes fixed on Clint. Couldn't this all end? "No, Clint, I don't understand. How did this happen, how are we here?"
"The Time Stone," Barton whispered to her. "Natasha, I'm sorry. I did what I thought I had to. I'm sorry."
"Clint…" she whispered.
Clint repeated to Steve what he'd told her. That the Gauntlet was down there, and the only way to stop it was for Clint to go down there and try to destroy it.
"You did your best, Cap. I know that. I always knew this is how it was going to end. I'm sorry I lied to you. I lie to everyone, though. Why should you be special?" Clint reached into his quiver, and extracted one of his elven arrows with Tony's concussive modification. Everything fell smoothly into place. Like bricks forming a wall. This was the very pinnacle of their achievement. The cornerstone of everything they worked so hard for.
Steve's voice echoed back like the voice of a dead man. "Clint… I'm not ready for this. Don't. Not for me."
Clint smiled a little. "What? Your hide not worth me saving, Cap? You know that's supposed to be my line. Who knows? I might miss. Then you'll have to come down here yourself and clean up this mess."
Natasha mouthed the words to him. Her voice flittered away like a terrified sparrow. "You never miss."
"I know I don't." Clint told her. "We gotta let the Cap think he's doing something though."
"Hawk – "
"Steve, I want you to open a communication line to all the other divisions. To the other Avengers. Look, we don't have a lot of time here, and I don't have time for you to keep arguing a point I'm never gonna let you win. I'm tenacious like that. I just want the chance to say goodbye to everyone, my way. When I jump, cut the comms. No one needs to hear what happens next."
Natasha, who at once put distance between them, as if somehow Clint might drag her over the side with him, finally overcame that disdain and pressed into his chest. She circled her arms around his back, and clasped the archer against herself. She expected him to fade away like a specter, to let this entire horrible world she appeared into, vanish. She buried her face into his chest, and begged for everything inside of her that the world might fade away, and she could return to Rinon and Stark and everyone on the Voiya Rose. She felt the air hitch in his chest as the emotion nearly felled him.
Half a world away, Steve opened the comms. Clint leaned into her, speaking into the straight red braid the elves on the ship wove her hair into. He spoke to her, to everyone, all at once.
"It's time for me to go. I wish it could happen some other way. I wish that I could stop this. We all had our parts to play. I don't blame anyone. Not Pym, Panther, or anyone else. You shouldn't, either. I'm doing this because it's going to save the ones I care about. I'm doing this because if I don't, we're all just going to die anyway. Goodbye. And Star-Lord, I made you a new mixtape. The Jackson Five sucks."
Natasha didn't want to laugh, or cry, or have any other emotion beside shock and horror, but Clint forced all those to come out in the same brief words. He took her tighter in his arms, and, against her back, he traced the tiny, sign language symbols he'd designated for her name. It was an overwhelming intimacy that threatened to unmake her all at once. She told Clint to stop. She begged him. It was real, and it was happening right now. Clint wouldn't wait. He'd never wait. He wasn't built for that. But Natasha could stop him. This wouldn't be his last goodbye, not if she could help it!
Looping the invisible wire around his wrist was perfectly simple.
Clint tore himself away. He faced the pit, said not a word more, and launched himself into the air. His freefall came to a sudden, jarring, halt. Clint's body spun in mid air. He twisted, strung up by a thin, tensile force wrapped around his wrist. He threw his head back, and looked up.
"Natasha, what are you doing!?" He demanded. The noose went taut the second he pulled up the slack.
"I can't… Clint, I can't let you go. Don't ask me to do this! There has to be another way!" She demanded desperately. This was all happening too fast!
With one hand, Clint held onto the riser of his bow. With the other, he held the elven arrow. If he released either, he might have no time to pick them up again before he passed by the Infinity Gauntlet.
"Natasha, you have to let me go. It's my time to go. You have to take your knife, and cut this line. I can't do that and save us at the same time. Do you understand me?"
Two eyes, dilated in disbelief, locked with his jasper shards. "I can't do that." She said, shaking her head in a desperate determination.
"You can." Clint encouraged, "You can, and you will. I'm sorry, Natasha. I'm sorry we never had the life that we should have had. I'm sorry for everything the Black Widow program did to you that kept you from really ever loving me. But if you ever did care about me, then do this. Cut the line, and let me save you. If you live, Nat, I live, do you understand? Let me go."
"Clint – "
"Natasha." Barton said, firm and gentle all at once. "Let me go."
She drew her knife, considered the thin line stretching from her wrist to his. She couldn't go over with him. She'd be in his way. He might even miss. He wouldn't want that. Why had she tried to stop him? Only to let this be her decision instead of his? Did she ever think she could really prevent him from taking that leap? Again, they locked eyes.
The twinkle of playfulness, of love, and camaraderie shone in Clint's dark eyes as he gazed up at her. "Good – "
Natasha sliced the line, and fell behind the ledge of grey lunar dust all at once. She felt like a fool who couldn't even watch. She saw the temporary confusion, hurt, and surprise as he released from that line and his arms wind milled in open air. Even in the comms, he never finished saying the word he'd begun to get out.
Goodbye.
Down, the archer fell. Impossibly fast, the Infinity Gauntlet rushed up at him, and Clint struggled to set his arrow back on the string. When he finally got the shot off, he was firing upward at the suspended metal gauntlet.
The explosion blasted out in all directions. He was blinded by the striking blue, red, orange, purple, and yellow light. His body slammed sideways against the crevice wall, before rebounding again and hurling feet first into the jagged, cold rocks below. His legs shot upward into his bent over chest and, all at once, he felt the dual SNAP of his femurs cracking in half. Natasha could hear the sickening snap and thud of his body as it hit the rocks below. He screamed as the pain shot through him.
Above him, Natasha sunk down besides the opening of the crevice. The explosion set off a chain reaction below her. The massive boulders of the crevice walls jumped in their bedrock, and slammed together like immovable slabs. Clint's only entrance, only escape, was blocked off instantly.
She wanted to tear the radio off her neck, but she was frozen in the shock of all she had done. The Infinity Stones fired off around her like six little comets. The Time Stone, Space Stone, Aether, Tesseract and all the rest warring between each other for dominance.
They jumbled in a mass of energized cloud, threatening to tear each other apart. One absorbed the other, and hurled it through time. A second absorbed a third, and shot it through space. One by one, Clint's perfectly placed explosion set off the chain reaction that destroyed the foundation of the Gauntlet itself, and thrust the Stones across the stars again.
Even as they began to scatter, Clint's screams continued to fill her ears. Alone, seeing nothing but Clint's look of fear as he fell away from her, and filled only with his screams, Natasha sank into the blue-hued soil and cried bitter, unforgiving tears. A voice seemed to enter her mind, whispering a single horrifying word.
Mother, it said.
Mother. Her? That couldn't be! She was a Black Widow, it wasn't possible.
The vision faded. More images, memories, took its place. Clint fighting for his life in another desolate wasteland. An explosion of color. Loki screaming into the darkness of the night as his nails dug trenches into a floorboard.
Inhabitants of Alfheimr running, screaming from their homes as a shadow of evil cast over their lands. Then came Earth. She watched the siege take place. New York under attack from the Kree warships. A second influx of evil allies she'd never before seen. And lastly, the very world catching fire.
Natasha pulled herself away, and collapsed against the grass, gasping to find her breath again. From some distant place, Rinon was trying to speak to her.
"Forgive me. Forgive me, you were not meant to see. No one is meant to see. I can hardly contain them now the closer we come."
"Oh my God. He's dead. Clint's dead." She whispered into the grass, shaking from head to foot. She clasped her hands together, trying to get at least them to stop, but having no success at all. Natasha lowered to the ground, and laid on her side. It was too much for her to try and sit up and stop shaking all at once. Her stomach cramped. Something seemed to be squeezing her intestines together like a vice. For a moment of panic, she imagined something there, growing beneath her fingers and screaming in her body. The very panic of it made her scream.
"A vision alone. He yet lives, as far as I am aware."
Natasha couldn't stop shaking, gasping. She watched Clint's eyes on her over and over as she severed that line and watched him drop into oblivion. Her fault. Her fault he died. Her fault they lost him. The Sarhorn never said that it would be her. That second voice in her continued to scream in time with her own troubled mind.
"Is that what you're doing? Is that what you're seeing?" She cried.
"Increasingly." Rinon told her. "I had to leave Alfheimr. The Nine Realms. It has become increasingly difficult to function."
"Is that really what's about to happen to us?" Natasha struggled to clear her mind from that pounding hell reverberating in her skull. Rinon was right with his early words. The visions left a peculiar thrum behind, like a drum beat that matched her heart. The longer she gave it, the more it began to dissipate.
Rinon watched her. "You feel it beating against you. I have lived with that horrible pounding for twelve years. It never seems to leave. Now, it has escalated like the approaching doom I sense with my every bone."
"They are going to attack Earth. That's where it's going to happen." Natasha finally sat up, and rubbed a hand against her forehead. She still felt like she was spinning.
"An attack is coming, yes. And very soon."
"That's why you agreed to come yourself."
"La. Banner will be on one of those ships planning to attack Midgard. We will find him then. But if we do not move, very fast, many human lives will be lost. We must evacuate them."
"The evacuation. Why's it happening now? So fast? I thought we had time!"
"I do not know." He used the rock wall to help himself to his feet, and offered a hand to Natasha. "You have misunderstood my intentions in this armada. I have not created it to destroy, but to save. Svartalfheim is a neighbor to Midgard."
For once, Natasha finally felt as if the world of secrets was opening up to her. Taking his offered assistance, she stood across from him. "You made rescue ships."
"I knew they would be necessary, and did so as soon as I could, as many as I could. Alfheimr had not the space for such an endeavor, and we were forced to move closer to Midgard. We might have been found out, but it was a risk we had to take. We have since lost something very dear to us, and I asked Haladarrel to look into it personally when he came to Vanaheim. He wished to elicit Rellya's assistance."
Another revelation. "What happened?" She asked.
"One of our young Eyani` has disappeared. She resided on Svartalfheim, and studied directly under Doodle Bygrove himself. She showed experience, promise. He had great hopes for her."
"She disappeared."
Rinon nodded. "Along with many of our plans, most prominently those pertaining to the elven ability to cloak their devices. One of our ships went missing, and, with it, a great many of our supplies to accomplish such feats. Haladarrel hoped she had taken them to Vanaheim."
"But she wasn't there."
"Nai, and we found no evidence of our work until the attack of the Kree. I fear she has been aligned to their cause."
Natasha tried to imagine the implications of it. Kree weren't often known for kidnapping. They much preferred utter devastation and taking no prisoners whatsoever.
There was, however, one shadow still looming in the dark with which they had not yet encountered. Not only did he have a propensity to collect rare breeds, he also had a track record for stealing himself femme fatales. Perhaps it was time to stop considering Thanos as a background player in their game of war, and begin to treat him like the threat he truly was.
"We have to tell Tony."
Reluctantly, Rinon agreed.
:(:):(:):
He was tired. But not just tired, this thing that fell of him now was an exhaustion wrought by the wings of the horrifying growth necrosing in his abdomen. He occasionally fancied feeling it. The ball of cancer in his liver that radiated a dull, unending pain. Laying on his bed with the bottle of prescription medication by his face, Tony wondered if he had reached the point of needing to take one. The label read, Clint Barton with a physician friend of theirs, the prescriber. Morphine. They were left overs from his cancer treatment over a year ago and Clint had, fortunately, found them before departing off world. He'd been taking them for nearly three months and supplies were running very, very low.
Natasha might not know that the promise of refilling the bottle was one deciding factor for him returning to Earth when so much was left for him to do in Vanaheim. He would need a doctor too. Life was getting too hard for him to manage on his own for very much longer. He needed Banner and, he hoped that somehow he'd finally find his good friend. He was reaching a furious precipice with his own aging process. Soon, there would be nothing he could do to hide his physical changes.
Pepper deserved the truth. She often did, though he tended to resist giving it to her. He planned to come clean when they reached planet side. Clint should come next. He wanted to see his friend, tell him in person. Clint would understand, and God only knew what the man would do after that.
Tony frowned, reaching to the vial and extracted a pair of pills from it. He'd caught as much rest as he could before Natasha began wondering what happened to him. With the two pills heading south, he forced himself out of his bed.
Getting old was overrated. He never thought he'd be old. Being Iron Man was supposed to kill him years ago and in his surprised, it didn't. Now he suffered with the realities of himself, and those around him, falling apart. Pepper had done her second mammogram, Happy had his first prostate exam, Hank Pym had his first heart attack three years ago, and his second not long after. T'Challa was considering leaving heroing behind as the arthritis in his hands only progressed. The list continued on.
The facts were the facts. The Avengers were getting pushed out to let the young guys in. Tony wondered how long it would take for people to forget the name Tony Stark was ever associated with Iron Man to begin with.