Resilience | S. Rogers [3]

16 | HALF A HEART

Captain Marvel Post-Credit Scene

May 2018
Avengers Compound, New York

The remaining defeated heroes got back on the jet with fewer people than they had arrived. Two faces were added to the group. Each got inside with sullen, wretched, depressed expressions, most of them unresponsive.

In her distant state, Rose's brain barely acknowledged that there were fewer trees in the place than before, she barely registered the shake of the Earth as the spaceships that had landed before Thanos left.

On the ride back, she laid against her seat with her lower body limp and upper body stiff. She was too tired to move but she was tense for her mind kept running with thoughts about the recent events, wondering who was still here and who wasn't.

Her stomach churned making her feel sick, she needed to find out who was still alive but was too scared to do so. Rose tried not to focus on thinking about one person for too long so her enhanced intuitiveness wouldn't answer her deepest fears. Though it was inevitable not to notice the bonds —or lack of them— she had to the people closest to her.

Strings thick and strong, short for the people were close in proximity.

Strings stretched but still lingering.

Others had disappeared leaving a void in the ethereal place they used to be.

She didn't have to wait for her sixth sense to tell her anything about them, the lack of the bond's presence called attention to itself providing answers she was not ready to know.

That caused her to succumb further to the desolation which had stopped lingering on her expression only to be replaced by a vacant one.

The feeling worsened by her general sensation.

Quite frankly, she had no words to express it.

Someone had torn away half of her existence, her being, a part she hadn't even realised was there in the first place.

She didn't feel empty.

She felt half alive.

And that was worse.

She was incomplete.

That didn't even come close to what she was feeling, but she couldn't understand it either.

When they arrived at the compound, Rose didn't get up from her seat. She didn't have the strength to move, neither physical nor emotional; and really, she wasn't sure she had a place to go.

Beth—she'd told her that their rooms, though they had been altered in some way, taking out some things and such, they hadn't been occupied. They were still there. But Rose wasn't sure if she would feel comfortable going inside. She didn't go when they arrived there the first time, she didn't want to go there now.