Whatever It Takes

PART THREE: INFINITY WAR

Chapter Twenty Three

18 and in her senior year, Emma was beginning to feel like a senior citizen.

She found peace where she could. She went to her appointments with Dr. Cho and she wasn't too sure if her uptick in crime fighting and patrolling after the events with Toomes was a result of exactly that or if she were just trying to burn off her relentless anxiety and guilt that someone could be getting stabbed to death this very minute and she wouldn't be there to stop it.

Thankfully, there were medications for that sort of thing -and she found that they all taste like shit - but after a bit, they worked. Now Emma was more focused on the fact that she and Peter were the reason that May was losing more hair and Tony's beard was starting to grey. Emma had a strict moral code, or so she hoped, and part of it was basically following May's golden rule: Don't get killed.

But her first rule to follow, the second her eyes would open in the morning, was 'don't think.'

Don't think about what might be on the news or who was mugged or shot last night and you weren't there to take the bullet. Don't think about whether that's a weirdly shaped cloud or an enemy looming over. Don't think about the little old lady who might need help crossing the street.

Until 9:00 A.M. piling into the bus for the Academic Team field trip, just don't think about anything.

So she hadn't entertained the thought that past the weird looking clouds hung a behemoth of a ship in the cosmos. Or that within it, people were being slaughtered one by one. The last of one of the nine realms, gone. The dark overcast expected that evening could have meant a thunderstorm, but Emma would never stop to wonder that the sound of thunder were actually the crack of Thor's own heart; crumpled over his brother's body. And she didn't bother even trying to imagine that the streets she walked with Peter on their way to school would be torn to shreds like paper by aliens she'd never seen the likes of in one of her brother's Sci-Fi films. She wouldn't think about any of this, not even for a second, lest she wanted to up the dose in her meds.

Emma was like Alice. She gave good advice, though she rarely followed it. But unlike her, Emma wouldn't think of any of the impossible but entirely possible things that could happen before she could even smell breakfast.

So first, we'll start with that morning.