Disclaimer: If you recognise it, it came from the films or the comics, even if I flatter myself that I've put my own spin on things.

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The First and the Last

Peter wasn't sure if he had seriously considered the idea of dying in space before Carol showed up to save him and Nebula, but he was sure he hadn't been prepared for the idea of facing the original Avengers to reveal that one of their number was dead. It had been getting rough on the Guardians' ship towards the end, as his enhanced physiology began to wear down and the ship's supplies were basically down to nothing, but when he and Nebula walked off the ship and Peter had to look at the shaken face of Miss Potts, standing alongside Captain Rogers, Doctor Banner and Colonel Rhodes…

He was almost relieved that he hadn't needed to explicitly tell her that Mr Stark had been turned to dust back on Titan, even if actually seeing her crying had still made him feel the horror of that moment all over again. He'd already had to deal with seeing the Guardians of the Galaxy vanish into nothingness, and the wizard being one of the victims had been another shock, but the moment when Mr Stark held up his hands to reveal how his fingers were falling into nothingness… when Peter realised that he was the last survivor from Earth on that dead planet…

Even if he had to see it every time he closed his eyes, he was desperate to avoid talking about it any more than he had to. He and Nebula had basically had an unspoken agreement not to talk about what they'd lost while they were working on getting the Benatar off the ground and starting back to Earth, trying to focus on keeping the ship going as long as possible with what few resources they had available, only giving up once they were sure they had run out. Peter had wondered if Mr Stark could have done better, but reminded himself that given the injuries Iron Man had sustained while fighting Thanos and his lack of any kind of enhanced healing, his mentor would have probably felt worse by this point.

Back in the compound, the other Avengers had been shocked to see how old he was when he took his mask off, but by this point he was fairly sure none of them were going to make a big deal about it. He'd been allowed some time to check on his own contacts to see who had survived Thanos's attack, but when he walked back into the meeting room to join the Avengers, he was fairly sure his expression made the situation clear to all of them.

"Nobody," he shook his head as he took in the people assembled around him. "My aunt, my best friend, most of my Decathlon team, the girl I… seriously, even my bully got Snapped…"

"…Sorry," Doctor Banner said, nodding in solemn understanding as he indicated a chair. "I… God, I know that sounds so…"

"I get it," Peter nodded at the physicist as he slumped into the indicated chair, looking at the various faces on display around the rest of the room (he looked away when he saw Mr Stark's face among the display). "Everyone we lost?"

"Everyone we knew who was lost," Captain Rogers affirmed, looking regretfully at the images on display. "We're still working out exact details."

"World governments are in pieces, but the parts that are still working have been trying to take a census," the Black Widow put in. "There are potential anomalies in cases such as plane crashes, where we can't tell who was Snapped and who died in the accidents, but from what we can tell, Thanos… did exactly what he said he was going to do; he wiped out… fifty percent of all living creatures."

"And… where is Thanos now?" Peter asked.

"We don't know," Captain Rogers said, arms folded as he leaned on a desk off to the side. "He just opened up a portal and walked through."

Lost for anything else to say, Peter looked around the room and his eyes settled on Thor, wearing surprisingly casual clothes compared to what he'd usually seen the God of Thunder wearing on the news, sitting on a bench with a grim expression on his face.

"Uh… is Thor all right?" he asked.

"Oh, he's pissed," an unfamiliar voice said. Looking around, Peter was shocked to see what seemed to be a racoon wearing what he could only think of as teched-out dungarees, slumped on the floor and leaning against a table. "He thinks he failed. Which, of course, he did, but you know, there's a lot of that going around, ain't there?"

"Uh… hi," Peter nodded tentatively at the creature, his mind flashing back over what he'd heard from the Guardians of the Galaxy about their missing members. "So… you're Rocket, right?"

"Bingo," the now-named Rocket nodded at him. "Quill mentioned me, huh?"

"Yeah…" Peter nodded, deciding not to go into more detail about that; at this point it was probably safe to assume that if people weren't here, they had been Snapped.

"We've been hunting Thanos for three weeks now," Captain Rogers said, drawing Peter's attention back to him. "Deep Space scans, and satellites, and we got nothing. You fought him more directly; did he-"

"He wasn't exactly chatty about his plans for the future," Peter cut the captain off, not wanting anyone to get any mistaken impressions about that particular fight. "The big purple guy was happy to talk about how what happened on his planet proved he was right to try things this way, but he was more about ranting about how everyone else was making mistakes now than talking about what he was going to do next."

"Did he give you any clues, any coordinates, anything-?"

"We lost, all right!" Peter yelled, slamming his hands on the table and standing up to look around the table in exasperation. "And has anyone stopped to think about how this is all our fault?"

"Our fault?" Colonel Rhodes said indignantly. "You know, kid, we did our best-!"

"And we screwed up because of the stupid Accords keeping us apart when we should have been standing together!" Peter cut the older man off, not sure where all of this was coming from but suddenly unable to stop himself. "Seriously, it was me and Mr Stark trying to protect Doctor Strange when that first alien wizard guy showed up; if you'd all stayed together and not decided it was more important to beat each other up about some stupid legal paperwork-!"

"And I'm sorry about that, but I never wanted-"

"Yeah, nobody wanted this to happen, but if we'd all just tried to put your egos out of the picture maybe we could have found some way to deal with it that didn't just make us slaves to the stupid system!" Peter interrupted Captain Rogers again, a part of him amazed at how much he'd been bottling up about the issues he was only now talking about. "I mean, I've been freaking out about the idea that someone could try and arrest me because I'm not officially in the Avengers even if I trusted Mr Stark to get me out, but maybe if someone had been more willing to apologise we could have all taken out Thanos's first attack and none of this would have happened!"

"I…" Captain Rogers began, before he sighed and stepped back, his head lowered. "You… you're right; I should have done more-"

"OK, I should have specified that this is Mr Stark's fault too."

"Hey!" Colonel Rhodes looked at Peter incredulously. "I thought you were on our side-!"

"I was when I thought it was just the other guys going nuts and Mr Stark wanting to bring them in before someone got hurt," Peter clarified as he looked at War Machine, wanting to make sure everyone here knew where he stood. "When it's about some stupid legislation that means it'd be illegal for me to actually help people… I could understand why Mr Stark thought it was a good idea, but that kind of thing just didn't work."

"It wasn't about that; it was about making us accountable-"

"It's not like you were ever just going out there and beating people up because you felt like it; everything this team did was meant to be about helping people!" Peter protested. "Seriously, did anyone here think it was a good idea to rely on a committee to decide when we should go into action when it can take days to get even a simple legal bill to go through government? We were meant to be Earth's Mightiest Heroes and go out there to save lives; would we really have let some committee stop us if we were really sure we needed to be somewhere? And would having a committee really stop us causing collateral damage when we're fighting someone? I mean, it's not like we choose to do that, but our bad guys aren't exactly going to change the way they do things just because we're suddenly officially supervised!"

The silence that settled over the room was awkward, but at least Peter could feel that he'd made his point. He couldn't say if it had been the time he'd spent talking with Michelle that had helped him think about the whole Accords issues-

Thinking of her reminded him that she'd been another victim of the Snap and he felt a new surge of grief that sent him slumping back into his chair. For a moment the room was silent, but Peter wasn't sure if that was because he'd made a point or everyone else was just too embarrassed to be criticised by a kid to say anything else, but finally the silence was broken by his earlier saviour.

"Right," Carol Danvers said, stepping forward to look around at the rest of the group. "Now that Peter's made his point, I'm going to go and kill Thanos."

"Seriously?" Colonel Rhodes looked sceptically the woman who had just saved Peter from dying in space. "You think it's that simple?"

"You know," the Black Widow stepped in to call after Carol, "we usually work as a team here, and after everything that happened… well, morale's a little fragile."

"We realize up there is more your territory, but this is our fight too," Captain Rogers added, walking up behind Widow to address Carol himself.

"You even know where he is?" Colonel Rhodes added, leaning against a door frame (Peter noticed that he was still wearing those high-tech leg braces; he was kind of surprised Mr Stark hadn't come up with something more compact yet).

"I know people who might," Carol said.

"Don't bother," Nebula suddenly spoke up from the other side of the room. "I can tell you where Thanos is."

"…Excuse me?" Peter looked at Nebula in surprise. "And you didn't mention this before because- right, we weren't exactly ready to go up against the big purple guy all over again…"

"Yes," Nebula nodded at him before glancing at Rocket. "We must confirm something first."

"On it." The racoon stood up and nodded at the blue-skinned cyborg. "I take it the computer's still intact?"

"The ship's hardware was damaged, but the computer core was essentially unaffected."

"Thanos spent a long time trying to perfect me," Nebula explained an hour later, addressing the gathered Avengers with a grim tone that put Peter in mind of when he was trying not to cry after a bad day at school before he first got his powers. "And when he worked, he talked about his great plan. Even disassembled, I wanted to please him. I'd ask 'Where would we go once his plan was complete?'. His answer was always the same; 'To the Garden'."

"That's cute," Colonel Rhodes said, his tone bitter. "Thanos has a retirement plan."

"So where is he?" Captain Rogers asked.

"When Thanos snapped his fingers, Earth became ground zero for a power surge of ridiculously cosmic proportions," Rocket took up the explanation, indicating a small cylinder on the table in front of him that generated a holographic projection of Earth that generated a blue surge of energy from Wakanda outwards. "No one's ever seen anything like it... Until two days ago, on this planet."

"Thanos is there," Nebula said.

"He had a planet picked out?" Peter looked at her in surprise. "I mean, he chose a planet to retire on?"

"He claimed that he… overdid it… when he attacked this world," Nebula explained. "He found the population to be smaller and more primitive than expected and wiped them all out rather than the intended half."

"And of course, he learnt nothing from that first big screw-up…" Peter shook his head bitterly.

"He told me that it was preserved as a reminder that he needed to take care when bringing balance with his current resources," Nebula shrugged, even as her tone was bitter.

"But you're sure he used the Stones again?" Black Widow cut in.

"Think of it as us tapping into the universe's satellite network," Rocket shrugged. "Possible to trick these sensors if you're careful, but there's a whole system out there for keeping track of things so long as nobody's trying to hide. Once we had the first energy release as a reference point and knew where to look for Big Purple, it wasn't hard to check the backlogs and confirm what planet had been the site of a similar event."

"OK, I'd love to discuss that any other day, but right now…" Doctor Banner cut in, looking anxiously around the room. "If we do this… we'd be going in short-handed, you know."

"And you already pretty much took his army apart before he got the last Stone," Peter put in, feeling a need to offer support. "I think we have a chance."

"Peter's right," Carol said, giving him a smile before she looked around at the rest of the team. "We go and get Thanos, then use the Stones to bring everyone back."

"Just like that?" Doctor Banner asked.

"Yeah," Captain Rogers nodded, exchanging glances with Carol. "Just like that."

"Even if there's a small chance that we can undo this…" Black Widow looked urgently around the room. "I mean, we owe it to everyone who's not in this room to try."

"If we do this," Doctor Banner said, a restrained anxiety in his tone, "how do we know it's gonna end any differently than it did before?"

"Because before, you didn't have me," Carol said, her words simple but direct.

"Hey, new girl, everyone here is about that superhero life," Colonel Rhodes observed, giving her a particularly pointed stare. "And if you don't mind my asking, where the hell have you been all this time?"

"There are a lot of other planets in the universe," Carol said with a slight smile. "And unfortunately, they didn't have you guys."

"And I'm guessing that Thanos wasn't going around advertising what he was planning, right?" Peter put in.

"What do you mean?" Captain Rogers looked inquiringly at Peter.

"I mean… OK, all due respect to the way you guys do things, but speaking as the guy who tries to patrol an entire city by web-swinging, it's not easy to find the big players in a large area even if you know what to look for," Peter explained, hoping he wasn't about to make himself look foolish in front of the more experienced heroes even as the rest of the Avengers were all clearly paying attention to him. "Don't get me wrong, I get that you guys spent the better part of a year or so going after Hydra's leftovers after you took down SHIELD, but you had the database you could use as a starting reference and enough experience to take it from there. When you're got a large territory to cover, no real data to start with, and you can only go so fast each night…"

"You can only do so much," Black Widow observed with a brief nod.

"Pretty much," Peter confirmed. "And even if Carol knew that Thanos was out there… well, if he was actually advertising what he was going to do if he got the Infinity Stones, he'd probably have had a lot more people trying to kill him, right?"

"Fair point; the guy had a lot of people hating his guts when they thought he was just a generic semi-genocidal maniac, and it was still hard for anyone to track him down," Rocket put in with a grim smile. "Seriously, I was on a team with his old favourite kid for the last few years and even she couldn't tell us where he was going to be at any point."

"You would have gone after him?"

"Another guy on the team blamed Thanos for killing his wife and kid and he had a serious vengeance thing; if we could have just gone after the big purple mook, Drax would've insisted that we at least tried to do it," Rocket confirmed, before he gave Carol a brief shrug. "As it is, we dealt with a whole lot of other crap, but it's a big universe and Thanos was always careful about drawing attention to himself. He might halve planets, but he wouldn't personally go after anything that could pass on warnings or seriously fight back unless he felt he had to; he only went this big because he was after the Stones to do everything in one go."

As though it had been a cue, Thor stood up and walked over to stand in front of Carol. As Peter watched, the God of Thunder and the woman who had saved his life stared at each other for a couple of moments before Thor held out his hand over her shoulder. Peter jumped when a large axe-hammer thing flew into Thor's hand- what happened to that smaller weapon he'd used back in New York?- but Carol just stared back at Thor with no reaction.

"I like this one," Thor smiled (and Peter had to fight down the urge to make a comment because that would just make him look childish and he was as much a part of the team as everyone else here and why did he feel hurt at the idea that other people might like Carol?).

"Let's go get this son of a bitch," Captain Rogers said, looking around at the rest of the group.

If this was any other day, Peter would have been practically whooping for joy at the idea of being so casually included as part of the team, but as it was he was left struck by a sense of panic and a desperate prayer that he wasn't about to embarrass himself.

Even if Thanos had basically exhausted most of his forces… would this group be enough to stop him when he still had all six Infinity Stones?