Resilience | ✔

Chapter Thirty-Seven

She opened her eyes.

She was in the kitchen. Stock still a few steps from the door. Still in her suit from Tony.

What the hell?

She blinked, willing the nanotech away from her hand so she could rub her eyes. Her hand—her hand was intact. She was intact. What the hell? What the hell had just happened? Some sort of weird dream or hallucination? She stared at the coffee pot suspiciously. She knew Tony sometimes spiked his coffee with energy drinks, but he'd never brewed it with them before, and he'd certainly never put any sort of drugs in it.

She rubbed her eyes again. She didn't feel quite right. Dizzy, and . . . stiff. Which didn't make sense. Maybe it was because she hadn't slept much last night. She'd never hallucinated from lack of sleep before, but . . . she'd never had to deal with an alien invasion before. Maybe this new level of stress had made something in her brain snap.

Alien invasion. Right. That was still happening. She had to get back in the sun lab, had to keep scanning for people waging war on Earth. No—shit. Fuck, Thanos was here, she had to go help.

But—first maybe some water. Not her coffee.

She took a glass from the cabinet and filled it up at the sink and drained it, staring out at the little garden beyond the window. A bird swooped in and pecked at the bird feeder. She filled up her glass again and drank it more slowly. That weird feeling was gone, that strange atmosphere shift. Did that mean Thanos had left? Shit—what if he'd gotten what he'd wanted?

Or maybe Steve and the others had defeated him. Even with the stones, it was hard to imagine him beating so many Avengers. Especially with Wanda in the mix.

She should radio Rhodey. Wait—she should find Pepper. Apologize for stressing her out. Now that she thought about it, why wasn't Pepper in here? Marley had heard her own voice as she'd thought she was crumbling away, as she called for her stepmother. The fear in it wasn't something someone would just ignore, no matter how pissed they were. Was she okay?

She opened her mouth to call for her stepmom and stopped as she heard voices sounded nearby. Quiet, male. A few sparse sentences. What the fuck? She stood there a moment, paralyzed by indecision. Who the hell would be in the compound right now? She had to think it was no one good—time to call in the big guns.

"Pepper?" she shouted, and the building exploded.

Her suit saved her life.

The nanotech encased her head a split second before she piled into the wall behind her. She couldn't see—she fell, her chin clipping something hard, another explosion hurling her to the side. Something hit her leg—she was falling, falling, and pain flared through her skull and—

When she came to she was surrounded by darkness, flat on her back, her head aching. There was blood in her mouth. Something wet dripped onto her chestplate, a steady plink-plink-plink.

She groaned, because she felt like that was a pretty reasonable thing to do. Being blown up felt like a decent excuse to grumble and complain a little, and it did make her feel a bit better. Her leg throbbed. She flicked on the lights next to her eyes and flinched. There was a massive slab of concrete about a foot away from her nose. When she looked to the sides, she could tell there wasn't much keeping it from crushing her—a wooden beam or two, some scraps of metal. Holy fuck.

"Get me out of here," she blurted, voice constricted.

"There's a tunnel that leads out fifty feet up," F.R.I.D.A.Y. reported. "But it's blocked by a bunch more rubble above you, so you'll have to blast your way out. It's not a guaranteed win—I don't know if shooting anything will cause the rest of the wreckage to crush you. And—"