Too Little Too Late

Carol Danvers

Fury had called for her on that little pager she had left with him back then. She had not been back on Earth for something like twenty years. Things must have been going really bad. She wasn't expecting something on this scale, although it wasn't really surprising that the universe was in danger. The galaxy was always in some kind of problem one way or another.

Thanos was on his way to Earth for the last two stones. And that was the surprise. Nobody was ready. Earth had just been warned by the God of thunder and a big angry green man and still, for a long while, they hadn't been preparing at all. As if they did not realise what was coming for them. It would be all down to her to save them all. After all she was the most powerful of them. More than the witch. More than the god. Her only regret was to not have taken the flerken with her back then. By the flerken, Goose the cat, she really meant the tesseract. Things would have been a lot different if she had, she realised now. Director Fury might not be the responsible person she thought he was.

Because Fury was dead apparently. "Apparently" being the key word here because the old man had died before. Many times. Miracles did happen for him regularly. Some time after, he would come back as good as new.

Shield was no more, unless you dug a little to find another "dead" man, Phil Coulson, not so dead. Death was overrated, really. Truth was really a concept unknown in the little spy world. Still, Carol would have wanted to talk to Fury. She trusted that old bastard more than the people she had to deal with now. She didn't like any of them.

Those were Earth's "mighty" heroes. Well OK, Thor was mighty but he wasn't from Earth so that didn't count. However, that was the team Fury had put together. Carol hoped he knew what he was doing. She would work with them or around them. A member was missing, they told her. They also said he wasn't very important. A baseline human, without any power or anything. Why was he in the team in the first place then?

It was evident to her that she would be the most powerful of them all. Even more so than the god. But Captain America thought of himself as the sharpest tool in the shed. He had been the leader so far and wanted more than anything for things to stay that way.

She remembered reading about him when she was younger. She never really took those comics too seriously. He had done some good during the second world war, although she doubted that he actually had punched Hitler in the face. They most likely hadn't ever been in the same room. Red Skull was his archnemesis. Even so, Captain America plunged the Valkyrie and saved the day.

Danvers had wanted to be a pilot for as long as she could remember, and that story had always felt wrong to her. Steve Rogers would have had time in his journey to New York to find another way but sacrificing himself. He wasn't a pilot but the radio was in working order. Or he could have, at least, given his approximative location. Maybe she was missing some information there. The comics were portraying him as a tactician. Right now, that was anything but the case. Captain America thought that the Avengers would defeat Thanos easily. She wasn't that stupid. Even with all her powers, she understood that it would be a long and deadly fight.

She would need people to keep Thanos' army busy while she would be fighting the mad titan herself. But for that they would need to lure him where they wanted him to be. Thanos could simply send waves after waves of Chitauri warriors and never set foot on Earth. However, Carol was betting on the titan's ego. He would want to be there to finish them. The ones who dared stand up against him. The galaxy was talking about that Iron Man from Earth but he wasn't there. It didn't take her too long to understand that the "missing" member of the Avenger, the one they had said "wasn't really important", was in reality the one that they needed the most. At the very least to taunt their enemy on Earth's ground.