Shattered Souls | 18+

12. The Plan

It's their first meeting since the Rogue's have returned, and it's going about as well as Toni could have hoped.

"Thanus?"

Scott opted to be with his family for the first two days he was allowed back in the country. Now he's back on the team, and Toni finds herself wishing he had stayed home.

"Thanos," Toni corrects him. "If my calculations are correct, and they always are, we have about two months before he'll come to Earth to collect the last two infinity stones."

The team is gathered around a long table, with Toni at one end and Steve at the other. They've always had meetings like this, with either her or Steve presenting a mission plan. It's so normal, so ordinary, so familiar Toni wants to scream. Because things aren't normal. Everything has changed.

"And he's an alien..." Scott says.

Toni ignores him. "He's the one who sent Loki and the Chitauri. My best guess is that he'll bring an even stronger army to defeat us." Toni looks at Steve when she adds, "He won't make the same mistakes as last time."

But Steve isn't looking at her. His eyes are on his hands—gloved and clenched together on the table before him. His looks tired—no, he looks exhausted. Toni feels a sting of pity for him—she knows how long he's been fighting. And she knows they have another long fight to go before this will all be over. A memory rises in her mind, unbidden.

"You look tired, Rogers," Toni said.

They were in Clint's farmhouse—the farmhouse no one had known about but had quickly became a second home. Ultron was running rampant across the globe, killing as he went, and Toni's guilt was a palpable thing in the air.

Steve was angry with her.

"Just get some sleep, Stark," Steve said, his voice clipped, lips pinched.

Toni had tried, but she was sharing a bed with Nat and the spy's snoring kept her up. And that, of course, was not the only thing keeping Toni up.

"It's my fault, isn't it." It wasn't a question. It was a fact, and Toni knew it.

Toni was leaning on the doorway of Steve's bedroom—he was one of the lucky Avengers who got a room all by himself. Steve was sitting on the bed, his hands clenched to fists in his lap. He looked so tired. They all did.

At Steve's ensuing silence, Toni couldn't help but laugh.

"Yeah," she said. "That's what I thought. It's always my fault."

Steve finally met her gaze—his bluegreen eyes full of something Toni couldn't understand. "Not always," he said with a small, tired smile. "Just when you create homicidal murder bots."

Toni gave him a smile she didn't feel. "I keep seeing her face," Toni said. When a line appeared between Steve's brows, she added, "The girl with the mind-fuck powers." Toni ran a fingernail across the wood of the doorway. "I killed her parents."

"Your weapons killed her parents," Steve corrected.

Toni shrugged. "Semantics," she said. "My name was on the missile."

"You didn't know," Steve said. "If you did, you would have—"

"But I didn't. I didn't know. I didn't care enough to know. I should have kept her out of all of this."

Steve shook his head. "It's not the same, Toni. I know I've made jabs about it in the past, but that was before I knew you." Steve stood up. He took a step toward Toni. "You are not the mistakes you've made."

Steve took another step forward.

"It's like looking in a mirror, you know," Toni said. "Looking at her-. The Sokovian girl. My parents died in a car crash. My dad was a mechanic—he loved that car. He built it and tore it down and built it up again. He knew it inside and out—if the engine was leaking, if the goddamn air conditioning wasn't working right." Steve frowned—Toni didn't know at the time what that frown meant. "He knew that car. And it still killed them."