"So, what? It was too dangerous
for me to fight against Iron Man
and Black Widow last year because
I was too young and it was too
dangerous, but now some alien dude
wants to destroy the planet and I'm
suddenly totally cool to fight?"
Sequel to...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE | AFTER THE DECIMATION
__________
light thinks it travels faster than anything, but it is wrong. no matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.
-terry pratchett
__________
The news, and what fragments of the government that were left, were calling what happened The Decimation. They were scrambling to take a census, to make sense of what was happening, but there was no sense to any of this. It had been twenty-two days and nothing had even a glimpse of "sense" to it. The anger, the grief, the pain, the hate, the depression that Bella felt? Everything about it was senseless.
They still had yet to hear from Tony, which meant Bella had yet to hear anything about Peter. Even worse, May didn't get to hear anything about Peter. May was clinging onto hope, Bella could tell. She wanted to. She wanted to have hope so bad, but how could she at this point? Tony was smart. All faults aside, he was a genius. If he was alive, he should have gotten them home by now. If he had fallen in The Decimation and Peter hadn't, Peter wouldn't be able to survive space. She couldn't see an outcome where she and May got any semblance of a happy ending, but Bella didn't dare mention that to May.
"You know, that's illegal even when I'm from."
Bella looked from Steve to the bottle of wine she had in her hand. Holding his gaze, she brought the bottle back up to her lips and took a large swig. She'd never had alcohol before — aside from that one glass of champagne at her cousin's wedding the previous summer — but she liked the bitterness of it, and how it didn't quite settle in her stomach. She also figured that the rules didn't necessarily apply anymore, what with the end of the world and all.
"Bella," Steve sighed. He held his hand out. "Come on. Don't do this."
"Don't do what?" she snapped.
"Lock yourself out from the rest of the world."
Just from looking at him, she could tell how exhausted he was. Between taking care of Joey, who screamed at all hours of the night for a mother that would never come, and looking for any sign of Thanos or Tony, he had gotten even less sleep than she had over the past month. He'd shaved his beard about a week ago, but it was growing back. His shoulders were hunched and the circles beneath his eyes were as dark and heavy as Bella had ever seen.
"Don't tell me how to feel," she said. She slammed the bottle down on the table so hard that it wobbled over and spilled its contents all over the table and dripped onto the carpeting. "Shit."
Tears pricked at her eyes. She couldn't do anything right, could she? She couldn't stop Thanos. She couldn't save the people she loved. She couldn't comfort May, or anyone. She couldn't even put down a bottle without spilling it. Hands shaking, she grabbed the old flannel she'd been wearing earlier off the top of the chair and sank to her knees to sop up the mess.
