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"Well, what are we gonna do now?"
Malka looks away from Steve as he speaks, her arms wrapped tightly around her waist as she looks at the rubble surrounding them. She and Steve had succeeded—he currently holds Loki's scepter which holds the mind stone. Tony and Scott had run into some...issues involving a very angry Hulk who took the stairs.
For a moment, Malka had remembered what hope felt like. She remembered how light she used to feel at the prospect of victory, how whole she could be when standing next to the people she trusts. She remembered it while kneeling beside a man frozen in time who told her to run.
"You know what? Give me a break, Steve," Tony snaps as he sits in the broken car. "I got hit in the head with the Hulk."
As he paces, Scott scoffs, "You said we had one shot. This? This was our shot. We shot it. It's shot. Six stones or nothing. It's six stones or nothing."
"Scott, calm down," Malka says, her voice as level as she can make it.
Tony nods. "You're repeating yourself, you know that? You're repeating yourself."
"You're repeating yourself," Scott replies. "You're repeating yourself."
"Oh, come on—"
"No, you never wanted a time heist. You weren't on board with the time heist."
"I dropped the ball."
"You ruined the time heist."
"Is that what I did?"
"Yeah."
Malka exchanges an exasperated look with Steve as he asks, "Are there any other options with the Tesseract?"
"No, no, no, there's no other options," Scott says as Malka straightens her spine, narrowing her eyes at a large chunk of concrete laying on the ground. "There's no do-overs. We're not going anywhere else. We have one particle left. Each. That's it, alright? We use that—bye-bye, you're not going home."
Malka bites her lip when she feels Tony's hand smack her arm lightly. "You thinking what I think you're thinking, Mal?" He mutters.
"Seventies."
"Yeah, well, if we don't try, no one else is going home either," Steve says with a sigh.
"We've got it." Tony clambers out of the car and motions to Malka as he steps between her and Steve. "There's another way to retake the Tesseract and acquire new particles. Little stroll down memory lane for all of us. Military installation. Garden State."
Steve's eyes widen. "When were they both there?"
"Seventies," Malka replies. "Hank Pym was working on his particles when I was called in to look at the Tesseract. Two years later would have been when Zola got his diagnosis and..." She clenches her jaw. "I don't remember it clearly enough. It's vague."
