The King: T'Challa.

Chapter 27: The After Affect.

Emily gripped the porcelain as if the sink might slide out from under her. Fluorescent light hummed. Her reflection stared back: a woman she half-recognised, skin sallow with poor sleep, the blue of her eyes leached to a winter-grey. Bruises faded in constellations along her collarbone and ribs. She looked less like an agent than an afterimage: the person left behind when resolve and illusion burn off.

The mirror juddered. A tremor ran through the glass, gentle at first, then grating, as if the building itself had shivered. Somewhere beyond the bathroom door, voices rose, chairs scraped. Emily pulled on her jacket, wiped her damp palms against the denim, and stepped into the corridor.

They were already moving—Steve, Natasha, Rhodey, Bruce—drawn to the broad panes at the end of the hall. Emily fell in beside them and followed their gaze. The sky was tearing itself open.

A craft broke the cloud, scorched and limping, borne down through the atmosphere by a figure haloed in gold—the light around her more like a star's corona than anything earthly. The ship settled onto the lawn with a mechanical sigh; landing struts bit into torn grass. For a moment no one moved. Then the hatch yawed and two figures appeared: Tony, gaunt and grey under a week's worth of beard, leaning hard on a blue-skinned woman Emily didn't know.

Steve went first. The relief on his face was complicated by something older and heavier. He reached Tony in three long strides, took his weight without a word.

"Couldn't stop him," Tony said, the words dry and flat, a verdict pronounced on himself.

"Neither could I," Steve answered, and that was the end of it—the space between them filling with everything that didn't need saying.

Pepper's voice cut across the lawn, raw with disbelief. "Oh my God." She ran, skidding the last step, hands on Tony's face as if to prove he wasn't a hallucination. Behind them, the raccoon—Rocket, Emily remembered from briefings—sat with the blue woman and took her hand. Their silence was its own kind of mourning.

Inside, the compound felt larger than usual, as if grief had pushed the walls back. Tony sat at the table with a drip taped into the crook of his arm, colour slowly creeping beneath his skin. Steve pulled up a holographic roll call: faces and names spinning in dim blue—Hawkeye's family, the Wakandan relief workers, Peter Parker, T'Challa. Emily looked away when his image bloomed; her stomach emptied itself of air.

"It's been twenty-three days since Thanos came to Earth," Rhodey said, his voice thinner than it used to be. "World governments are in pieces. The parts that still function are trying to take a census."

Natasha stood with her hands hooked into the back of a chair, knuckles chalk-white. "It looks like he did exactly what he said he'd do." She swallowed. "He wiped out fifty percent of all living creatures."

Silence spread like frost. Tony broke it without ceremony. "Where is he now? Where?"

"We don't know," Emily said. "He opened a portal and stepped through. That's all we had."

Tony's eyes ticked past her and landed on a hulking shape over her shoulder: Thor, seated on a bench, staring through the wall at something only he could see.

"What's wrong with him?" Tony asked.

Rocket climbed onto the dais of a chair and scratched behind one ear. "He's pissed. He thinks he failed. Which he did. But that's not exactly a rare condition right now."

Tony blinked at him. "Honestly, until this second I thought you were a Build-A-Bear."

"Maybe I am," Rocket deadpanned.

Steve leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "We've been scanning for three weeks. Deep space, all the satellite net we could re-task. Nothing. You fought him, Tony."