𝐀𝐕𝐀𝐓𝐀𝐑 - MCU

I. REMEMBER THE FALLEN

I. REMEMBER THE FALLEN
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May 2018

Luna had never had much luck on her birthday, not after her parents and great-grandmother passed, and her nineteenth hadn't turned out to be any different. Fighting a big, purple alien on a different planet and seeing your friends turn into dust wasn't what she had been planning.

Maybe her twentieth would be different. She'd take Wanda out to dinner at a really fancy restaurant, hopefully a ring around both their fingers. Yet, at the moment, there was no hope on the horizon for Tony and Luna to get back to their loved ones.

In a space ship with only two people to talk to, it got boring really fast. Tony had sunk into himself, even the little joys of playing games with Nebula had gotten old. Nebula, surprisingly, still had her hopes. Maybe it was because she spent her entire life travelling in outer space, or maybe it was because most of her body had been replaced with robotics.

Luna was... somewhere in between. Raava was gone. She felt hollow. There was no connecting to her past lives anymore, and she found herself missing that maybe more than anything else. Well, maybe not more than anything. There was still Wanda.

When they finally, miraculously, returned to Earth, Wanda would be there waiting for her. That was the only spark of hope Luna was able to cling onto. Pietro would make a joke out of a bad situation and Derek would tell her everything was going to be alright.

Rations were running out. Water, too. Luna gave it two weeks before they would have to use their own pee to hydrate, she was sure she could figure out how to bend the pure water out. She just hoped it wouldn't come to that, that they would reach Earth at any moment now and finally see their loved ones again. Whatever was left of them.

I can't bend the water out of our pee. I'm not the Avatar anymore, she re-realized every so often when she started to come up with solutions, like a pounding migraine. No water, no earth, no fire. Then, when the pain retreated, she'd forget again, but it was always there, lingering like a dense fog in her mind.

Nebula, after realizing that she was going to be stuck with arrogant goatee and sarcastic bad-bleach-job for a while, had told them what she knew of Thanos' plan. The plan that had succeeded; wiping out half of the universe. They didn't speak much about what would happen if they got to Earth and everybody was gone. They couldn't, it already hurt too much only thinking about it.

It didn't matter much, anyway, because they would probably never reach Earth again. Whatever fuel Quill's ship used was running out, the engine only going on fumes.

Malnourished and exhausted (not so much Nebula, because she was mostly robot), they had resorted to trying to keep themselves and each other sane. Tony had proposed a tournament of a game he had invented; trying to shoot a piece of metal from the table through your opponent's thumbs. Luna had told him to fuck off and was eventually forced to act as referee.

When they would need to start eating each other to survive, Tony was going first.

"Yes, hold your fingers like that—that's it, like a goal. Good," Tony instructed. "Then I shoot this thing right... like... this..." he shot the triangle-projectile right between Nebula's thumbs, cheering himself on.

Luna rolled her eyes, leaning back against the wall, trying not to think of how hungry she was, or how dry her mouth was, or how tired she felt, or how her muscles were aching, or how her head was pounding.

"Now, that's how you play!" Tony said, now putting his hands in the goalie-position. "Give it a try."

Luna suspected that Tony was feeling just as rotten as her. She guessed she appreciated his attempt at raising their spirits. She couldn't care less, though, about some dumb game. She just felt empty. The one thing that had been with her her entire life had been ripped out of her with a snap of a finger.