The Ant and the Boot

The depression was bad. Luckily, I was pretty used to depression - and crushing guilt, night terrors, and all those other fun things - so I’d like to think that’s why I handled the days after the fall of Detroit a bit better than everyone else.

That, and my anger kept me afloat. Any time I started to sink too low, I just imagined blasting apart a weaseling, lying, greasy mini-god limb by limb until all that remained was a flailing torso, and the empty void of my guilt was pushed back just a little.

I handled it okay. Very few others did.

Thor turned into an absolute recluse. He seemed to think that he was entirely responsible for what happened because, well, it was his shitty adoptive brother who’d fed us bad information. My poor wife was absolutely shell-shocked, flipping between frantically doing weird house projects that she found on Pinterest and just crying. Banner, unsurprisingly, had a surprise Hulk appearance the day of the events and was still so embarrassed about it that he had pretty much camped out in his lab since then, and Cap... he went through punching bags like an alcoholic went through cheap cans of beer. With the exception of the assassins, who mostly just became more assassin-y, everyone did a shitty job keeping it together.

Dove was the worst, though. She... well, she locked Cap out. She locked me out. After a day or two she locked Thor out. I don’t know if she ate or drank or said a word for probably two or three days, and I know that she set her room on fire more than once.

Because of her, I installed a new protocol called Suicide Watch. It was definitely one of my least favorite things that I had ever invented.

It had been almost four days since Detroit. I knocked on Dove’s door for the third time that day.

“Hey kiddo, pizza delivery.”

No response.

“It’s your favorite - extra cheese. And no olives this time, I promise.”

Still nothing.

I had Jarvis check vitals through the door using my new invention. She was still breathing, at least. High pulse-ox. No blood outside of the body. Still a heartbeat.

I used infrared to check her position. She was there, sitting on her bed. She was definitely awake.

I slumped against her door, sliding until I was sitting on the ground with a soft thump. I set the three-time reheated pizza next to me.

“What’s it going to take to get you to open this door?” I asked the stainless steel. “I know you’re in there. Awake. I’m creepy like that. If I have to I’ll keep sitting here, being annoying. You know I can.”

I rested my head against the cool metal. Part of me wished I hadn’t installed military-grade refrigerator doors everywhere - it had been for safety, sure, and supposedly made the rooms god-proof, but it also made it me-proof.

“I’ll blowtorch your door open,” I bluffed, jingling the handle.

Still no response. I closed my eyes. I sat in the silent hallway for a long, long time.

After a while, my butt started to really hurt.

“I love you, kid,” I murmured, knocking gently on the door with one knuckle. “Please open up - I’m worried about you.”

The lock on the door softly clicked open.

For a moment I wasn’t even sure what to do. I stood up, turned the door handle experimentally - and it swung open, just like that. I stepped inside.

The carpet was gone. The floor was burnt to nothing but blackened steel, the layers under the carpet turned to nothing but a sticky resin that lingered in the corner of the room. Ash clung to the walls.

The bed frame was scorched to nothing.

The mattress was almost nothing but springs.

Dove sat silent, caked in a powdery layer of ash. Most of her clothes were burned to nothing, small ribbons and buttons littering the ground around her; however, she remained unburned, her apparently inflammable long, silvery hair giving her a semblance of modesty.

She also looked absolutely feral, like a witch burned at a stake that had just refused to burn.

“Behold, the Mother of Dragons,” I said in a lame, awkward way, trying to laugh off the very obvious suicide attempt. Thank god she seemed to be as immortal as the rest of them. “Are your eyebrows still there? I hear that they’re usually the first to go. In a fire.”

She reached up and touched her eyebrows, knocking ash from her arms, head, and shoulders.

“Still there,” she replied, voice quiet and raspy with disuse.

“Inflammable eyebrows. Now <i>that’s</i> a perk of godhood.”

She didn’t respond - she just looked down at her toes, as if we both didn’t already know that she’d tried to torch herself in her haze of grief.

“You mind if I sit?” I asked, already settling on one of the less-warped pieces of charred floor. She shifted, drawing up her legs and wrapping her arms around her bare body. Her wild hair touched the ground when she rested her head flat on her knees.

“So, diving right in to poaching the elephant in the room, you’ve got to come out of here,” I began, gesturing at the blackened walls. Dove looked down at her toes again.

“Look, I get it. This is horrible. It’s bad. There’s no way to describe it, and it just sits in your gut and rots in you until one day it doesn’t. Hiding feels like the right thing to do, but it’s just going to make it worse.”

She still didn’t say anything, so I continued.

“... Despite me being the worst possible example of this, we’ve got to, you know, come together. Support each other. Be a unified front. Fracturing off is just going to make it easier for another Detroit to happen. We’ve got to come together right now and -”

“No, you’ve got to come together,” she interjected, cutting me off with a sharp tinge of iron to her voice.

“What?”

“You’ve got to come together. The Avengers.”

I took a deep breath. Here we go.

“You’re right,” I said, “the Avengers. Which includes you. You don’t get to quit us, and you don’t get excommunicated the second something goes wrong. For better or worse, the entire planet sees us as a lump ticket item, so we win together and lose together.”

Dove’s eyes grew painfully distant - and sad. She dug her fingers into her legs, drawing herself so tight into herself it was like she was trying to capsize into nothingness. She let out a long, shaky breath.

“I was stupid to come here, Tony,” she began. “I’ve been stupid since the beginning. Ever since that day I said that I would come home with you on Asgard - I’ve been so stupid. I should have realized then. And now thousands are dead because of me.”

My stomach dropped.

“Dove, this isn’t your fault,” I interrupted, “Not even a little. In no way, in no universe is what happened in Detroit your -”

“Of course it’s my fault, Tony,” she cut me off again, the iron in her voice growing stronger.

“We’ve been so stupid. Ever since the beginning, we’ve all known deep down that there was only one path for me - we just kept pretending otherwise,” she continued, her voice quiet but filled with a hardness that I’d never heard her use before.

“We keep treating Loki like a human, but he’s not. He can’t be reasoned with like a human. Think about it. I said no to him - and he let a whole city get leveled to the ground, thousands dead, as his response. And the city was gone in under thirty minutes - we don’t have a response time here. What happens if I say no again? He takes out another city? A whole country? Why not the whole planet? He’s not from here, he doesn’t see humans as people, he can literally just pick another planet or realm or whatever to try to take over. Literally the only, the only, thing that we have left to bargain with to keep him from just setting the whole world on fire is that, for some ungodly reason, he’s obsessed with me. And I was fucking stupid enough to just, what? Try to walk away from him? Pretend I had another choice?”

“Dove -” I began. She cut me off a third time.

“I’ve thought about it, Tony. I’ve spent days just… thinking. If I say no - the world ends. If I kill myself - the world ends. And I don’t want him, or this… this fucking piece of him, this child growing inside of me, anymore. It makes me sick. But if I try to get rid of it - the world ends. If I do anything but give him exactly what he wants - the world fucking ends.”

She paused long enough to breath, lifting her head enough to see that she was crying.

“I can stop all of this from happening,” she finished quietly. “It doesn’t matter what I want, Tony. I would have to be the most selfish person in the world to do anything else.”

I let it all sink in for a moment. At face value, she made a lot of really good points. Luckily, I am sentimental, selfish, and stupid enough to ignore them all. It’s part of my charm.

“Alright, before I say anything else, we’re going to start with one thing,” I said firmly. I half walked, have scooted across the blackened floor to rest one hand on her bare knee.

“First. Detroit was not your fault. We didn’t save them, it was over before we knew it was happening - you’re right. But it was not your fault. Hell, even if Detroit was explicitly leveled to hurt you - which we know it wasn’t, because we know that it’s the creepy purple grape god who’s the one who’s actually calling the shots behind Loki and picking the targets - it still wouldn’t be your fault, because it was Loki. Say that Loki was some shitty, normal, human psychopath and he threatened to kill your dog or something if you didn’t do what you wanted, you didn’t do it, and then he killed your dog. You may feel responsible, but you’re still not the one who killed your dog. It was Loki.”

“Tony, we can’t even put him in that category though,” Dove began, waving my words away with one ash-covered hand. “He is literally committing genocide. I can stop the genocide. It’s that simple.”

“What, and just let the psychopath with daddy issues win?”

“It’s either that or let the world end,” she said miserably. She looked up into my eyes for the first time that day, resting her hand over mine.

The dark feeling returned. I took a moment to picture myself killing Loki with my bare hands - just a lot of blunt, painful punches, until he no longer looked like himself or even like a person. Just the pulp of an exceptionally ugly grapefruit.

“Okay. Alright. Look, kid. We need to have a serious talk,” I began, grinding my teeth hard enough that I felt a pop in my jaw.

“I know you were doing time on Asgard when this part went down, but I think you’re forgetting a very critical detail of the last time we dealt with Loki: We won. He brought in his army, and his freaky fish-whale things, and his powerful glow stick, and we still won. Six dudes, the NYPD, and the national guards against a literal space invasion. And it worked.

“So, Dove. Everything feels horrible and hopeless right now. You feel it, I feel it, everyone feels it. That’s what puts the ‘terror’ in ‘terrorism’, that horrible, terrified, hopeless feeling. But think about this - all that’s different this time on his end is that he’s got some new tricks because a giant purple grape giving him orders. Meanwhile… his glow stick has half its power because you, the badass that you are, cleaved its powersource literally in two. And this time, we have seven dudes to fight him with instead of just six, thank you once again. And this time, the whole world is looking for him, and assembling their own PDs and militaries and national guards to take him down.”

I looked at her very seriously, squeezing her knee as I leaned forward.

“He’s trying to make you and all of us feel cornered, but fuck ‘em, Dove. There’s always a plan B.”

Dove just stared at me for a long, long moment. But then, finally, the moment broke - with a soft sob and then a wail, she forewent modesty to unfurl her bare body and fling herself into my arms, bursting into tears. I held her tight, working hard to be strategic in where I patted her back and head as to not be a total pervert, and stared at the ceiling.

I knew it was an impolite thing to do while a girl was crying, but I couldn’t help but smile a little. After all, it was the first time in days that I saw her soul return to her eyes.



It took a really, really long time to wash all of the ash and soot off - and even after it was gone, I stayed in the shower, waiting for the water to go cold. Because the building was designed by Tony Stark and equipped with many luxuries, the water never did, so I lost track of how long my shower went. All I knew is that my fingers looked like wrinkled little prunes by the time I got out, and the steam was so thick in the air that it made the sink look blurry.

I was happy that the steam had fogged the mirror so much that I couldn’t even make out the outline of my reflection in the mirror - I didn’t want to see myself, or my abdomen. Right now, even seeing the taut flesh - and thinking about the pregnancy and the father - made me immediately nauseous. After Detroit, the “child” had stopped feeling like a child in my mind. It felt more like a parasite, or more accurately an extension of Loki that was lodged inside me, feeding off me, growing - making Loki bigger and bigger while I turned into nothing but an empty husk for Loki to grow in.

I knew that wasn’t fair. It wasn’t its fault. But it didn’t stop the rolling waves of sick I felt when I fastened the buttons of my jeans and noticed how tight they were getting.

I took them off and put on leggings instead, trying not to throw up.

Put it out of your mind for now, I told myself, taking deep breaths. No more destroying myself over Loki today - I promised Tony.

I promised Tony that I would pretend that there was another way out, even if just for a day. So I would keep my promise and pretend.

After putting on a band t-shirt that Tony had lent me - most everything else was destroyed by my fiery suicide attempt - I pulled back my overly long, overly damp hair into a high, disheveled bun and stepped out to face the world before I could second-guess myself again.

Steve stood up so fast when I walked in the room that he knocked over the chair he was sitting in. His face immediately flushed with embarrassment - and so did mine. After the whole city of Detroit and every person who had loved ones living there, Steve was the next person on my list who deserved an apology. True to his character, after he’d returned from the wreckage of Detroit, his first stop had been to comfort me - and I locked him out. For days, despite his pleading through the door. I couldn’t bring myself to - letting him in had led to a whole city being destroyed. I was terrified to let him in again.

“Hey - everyone,” I quickly added, swallowing. Which was lame, since the only people in the communal space were Steve, Tony, and Pepper.

“Oh, hey sweetie,” Pepper greeted immediately, walking across the room to wrap her arms around me in a tight embrace. I returned the gesture, hugging her tightly and breathing in her vanilla-scented perfume.

“It’s great to see you,” she said, pressing a kiss to the side of my head.

“You too,” I replied.

Over Pepper’s shoulder, Steve and I locked eyes again. His eyes were beautiful and blue and filled with a mix of concern and hurt. I wanted to look away, but I willed myself not to. He didn’t look away, either.

I felt my mouth go dry. He swallowed. Finally I blinked and he coughed, turning his head to look down at his half-finished dinner.

“Are you hungry?” he finally said. His voice sounded hoarse.

“Starving,” I replied, letting go of Pepper and lifting my eyes to look at him. I don’t know if he realized the way his tongue lightly brushed over his lips when I spoke.

I may have just imagined it, but there was a palpably painful moment of silence before Tony chimed in.

“Great! Finally, you can eat some of this pizza that I keep ordering,” he said with a theatrical sigh of relief. “Honestly, you wouldn’t believe it - I go through all this trouble to order all these boxes with every combination of toppings I can think of and everyone hides in their rooms and leaves it to go bad in the fridge. An absolute waste.”

“Tony, I will happily take some of that pizza off your hands,” I insisted, tearing my eyes away from Steve to smile at Tony. “Do you happen to have any pepperoni and veggie? I think I need to work my way back up to anything more exotic than that.”

Despite all of Tony’s initial enthusiasm, we all mostly ate in silence - or rather, Tony, Pepper, and I ate, and I watched as Steve awkwardly pushed the remains of an oatmeal-like dish around his bowl. He and I kept catching each other’s eyes while we were desperately trying - and failing - not to look each other. I forced myself to look down - and instead I began to notice the way his arms looked in his henley, cuffed casually but tastefully at the elbow.

They looked good. He looked good.

I asked Tony if he could grab me a glass of water.

“So the others are in their rooms?” I asked, tearing my eyes from the slope of Steve’s shoulders to look at Tony. He shrugged.

“More or less. Banner’s in his lab, but that might as well be his room at this point. I hung out with him earlier today. He’s in a bit of rough shape, but all in all he seems like he’ll be okay - you missed it, but he hulked out a little when… you know. He’s pretty embarrassed about it.”

“Oh no.”

It’s alright, no major damage - well, to anyone, the basement is in shambles. Anyway. The assassins have been in and out, being…” Tony gestured broadly with his hands, looking for the right word, “... Assassin-y. You know, unreadable and mysterious and work-oriented.”

“And Thor?”

“He’s having a rougher time. He comes in and out at least to grab food, but the jolly giant is distinctly less jolly. Think you can help with that?”

I thought and nodded slowly, chewing.

“Of course.”

“And then Cap here has been hitting the gym really hard. How many sandbags do you think you’ve bust open? Twenty? Fifty?”

Steve shot Tony a dark look.

“Hey, it’s not like I mind. We can get more sandbags. Just let me know when we’re running low and we’ll uh… do that,” Tony said, leaning back and shrugging. “And just make sure you sweep up, or we’re going to get a mini Sahara down in the exercise room. Have you ever tried running in the desert? It becomes pretty hard to use the treadmill.”

I couldn’t help but laugh a little at the absurd image. Tony broke into a wide grin.

“Now there’s a smile!” he said. “Thank God, I’d been waiting on your smile to brighten up this place.”

Pepper gently reached over and took Tony’s hand. They gave each other one of those silent, conversational looks reserved for those who had either known each other their whole lives or were very much in love.

“Dove, it’s been great to see you, but I feel filthy - I’m going to go take a shower,” Pepper said, touching my shoulder gently as she stood. “Don’t be a stranger, okay?”

“Oh, a shower? I’m coming too, then,” Tony said, standing with theatrical abruptness. Pepper rolled his eyes and he just grinned.

“See you in a bit, kid,” he continued, ruffling my hair as he walked by, I looked at him, wide-eyed. Trying to convey a message that he couldn’t possibly understand.

Don’t leave. Please. Please don’t leave. Don’t leave me alone. I’m not ready to -

They walked out of the room, disappearing down the hallway. A moment later I heard a door latch shut.

I stared at the exit, debating what to do.

While I was distracted debating with myself, a hand gently but firmly wrapped around mine on the table.

“Dove.”

I swallowed, feeling a chill run down my spine as I turned back to the table - back to the hand that held mine. Back to Steve. When I looked up, his eyes were already searching for mine. They held me there, breath caught in my throat.

“You set your room on fire?” he asked gently. I swallowed.

“... Yes.”

“While you were in it?”

“Yes.”

His eyebrows knit together, his lips pressing into a thin, worried line. I could see in his expression the way that he debated what he was going to say next.

“... Please, never try anything like that again,” he said finally, his voice soft and painfully sincere.

“Okay.”

“I mean… I understand why, but… Please. Promise me.”

I swallowed again. The lump wouldn’t leave my throat.

“I promise,” I whispered around the lump. He sighed with relief. His thumb absently stroked the back of my hand. We fell back into silence.

“It wasn’t your fault, Dove,” he finally continued, speaking so quickly that I didn’t have the chance to interject, “I know you think that. I know - but it’s not. It’s him. It’s all him. Nothing you said, nothing you did - no choice you made - you aren’t responsible for the deaths of those people. He was going to find an excuse to do what he did, regardless of you.”

When he said “no choice you made”, his eyes flicked up to mine, holding my gaze even as his face began to flush. He didn’t look away, and I couldn’t. He ran his tongue over his dry lips again and swallowed.

“We’re going to stop him,” Steve insisted, his voice low and soft, leaning closer to me. “We couldn’t stop him this time, but we’re going to stop him. He’ll never…”

He stopped, eyes dropping as he took a moment to consider his words, squeezing my hand. He looked back up.

“... He’ll never touch you again,” he finished, his tone carrying the finality of a promise.

I didn’t know that there were tears running down my face until Steve lifted a hand to wipe them away. He lingered, cradling my cheek in his palm. Part of me wanted to tear myself away, that part fueled by the pure terror that Loki would somehow know -

- And part of me didn’t. Part of me, the stupid part, wanted to believe Steve, and Tony, and all the fools who actually thought that we could win.

“He’ll kill you,” I whispered, “He’ll kill you all if I don’t do what he wants. It doesn’t matter what I want, Steve, I have to -”

He gently silenced me with his lips. My heart beat so hard in my chest that I was sure that it was going to give out.

After a slow, gentle kiss, he pulled back slightly - just far enough to look me in the eye. His eyelids looked heavy, his eyes repeatedly dropping down from my eyes to my lips.

“I’ve always hated bullies,” he said. His breath was warm on my face. “I told him that the first time I met him.”

His gaze dragged from my lips back up to my eyes. His eyes were so impossibly blue.

“He’s already taken so much from the world, Dove. Please, don’t let him take you, too. Let… Let me have you instead.”

My breath stalled in my lungs. He reached forward, hands pressing to either side of my neck, thumbs lightly tilting my jaw up to his. He pressed his lips to mine again, hot and open-mouthed. Starving.

I pressed closer, hands resting on his chest and balling the fabric of his shirt in my fists as I pulled him in. I was starving, too.