The INY Space

The keening reverb of a backlawn and surrounding forest full of cicadas broke up the otherwise hectic run of your thoughts. July twenty-eighth, its summer sun slowly making a descent, leaving behind the sweltering heat in exchange for a fresh evening breeze. It was one you turned your head up towards, taking a deep breath in, holding it for a handful of seconds, and then letting it out as slow as possible. 

Tony was moving about in the kitchen of your private quarters at the Compound. Though the patio doors were closed in an effort to keep the cool central air inside, the sounds of practiced cooking took residence in your awareness. Meat and vegetables sizzling in a cast-iron pan, water turning on and off- several times, no doubt each after he touched some ingredient- the fridge and cabinet doors alike opening and closing a few times over-

Sounds of domestication. Sounds of life. Of family. Of home, though you were reluctant to call it that. …at least it wasn’t the Tower. At least you weren’t in the city any longer. 

Rhodey’s muffled voice gave way to a feeling of amusement, right before a rumble of laughter from Tony. Despite yourself and your tumultuous thoughts, alone outside, you ducked your head and smiled. 

Life had been so complicated and disgustingly awful to all three of you for so long a time it was easy to forget when it was also good. Like this. Right now. As you thought about every moment that had come directly before this one, it seemed easy to forget that Rhodey was still in a wheelchair. Easy to forget that Tony had been deeply betrayed and almost murdered by someone you both considered a close friend. Easy to forget your entire life had imploded from the inside out after so long trying to fight that outcome. 

Well… Now that you all were on the other side of all that, what to do? 

Tony’s answer had been simple. Once you were out of your crying and follow-up catatonic fit (though it was far less than it had been in the very immediate past, so that was progress, right??), he’d poured you a glass of iced tea and sat you on the patio outside. Though you’d both talked about nothing for a little while, he decided dinner was next on the docket. So he attended to that. Rhodey hadn’t been that far behind. Apparently he’d been stationed at the Compound for a little while now, as Tony had been helping him with his physical therapy every single day, and working on some type of braces to help him regain feeling and movement in his legs. This was something you knew, or perhaps more accurately, vaguely recalled Tony telling you about as you’d sat in bed at the Tower. Thankfully he’d told it to you again before starting dinner. 

The two of them had left you alone outside, but maybe that was for the best. It wasn’t like you were really alone, they were mere feet away from you in the other room. You were just alone enough. To think without spiraling. And so, as you got up from your wicker chair and instead laid on the grass, hands behind your head, watching the stars start to twinkle in the slowly darkening sky, you let yourself mentally tumble backwards. Your timeline in this life of greater goods, superheroes and villainy, good and evil, world domination, team building and destruction- it was almost as if in your mind’s eye you were a little dot, bouncing from place to place, years rising and falling underneath you as you leapt from one to the next. 

There was no certainty if you’d ever been normal a day in your life. With an unrecognizable and shadowed past that you assumed had been difficult to recall due to trauma, now you were unsure any of it was real. The only things you knew that were, were practically every moment after your initial acceptance of your own powers. The same ones that you’d used to murder your insideous college professor, and those very same ones that had led SHIELD right to you in doing so. You’d definitely been awake after that. Everything before then felt mired in uncertainty. Were your parents fake? Your childhood? There had been a conclusion, before the ugly mess that had started in May, that you were almost certainly not human. But then what were you? How did you get here? It couldn’t have been that you simply materialized into existence on your first day of college. Maybe it just wasn’t important. Maybe you had some semblance of what could be considered a normal life right up until that very moment. Maybe being unable to recall it was sweet sympathy. Maybe you’d miss a normal life, considering yours now was anything but. A normal person couldn’t live like you’d been living. A normal person wouldn’t be asked to have the weight of the world on her shoulders at all times. A normal person shouldn’t, in fact, deal with anything you’d had to deal with since the 90s. Did that make it better? That you were anything but? Or did it simply make the decision to be done with it easier? Both? Neither? A gust of wind disturbed the tops of the trees surrounding the Compound at the exact same time the sliding glass door of the patio opened. You didn’t have to look to know it was Tony. If only it were by the connection you had that would have made it so simple, but no. Footsteps on the concrete that softened in the grass. A lash of guilt caught you broadside. 

Of course it was Tony, coming out to check on you. Tony could walk. 

His face appeared above you, haloed by the burgeoning whispers of twilight. As he leaned over, he put his hands in his pockets. “You okay out here?” 

There’d been a whole hell of a lot of that. Asking if you were okay, knowing you weren’t. It had only been a mere six or so hours since you’d come home to him and collapsed on the front lawn in yet another whirlwind of weeping. Still, you were trying to be gentle with yourself. Again, normal people weren’t made to deal with things like you’d seen. Wouldn’t anyone cry endlessly? 

That wasn’t what you were doing then, though, finding a smile as you looked up at him. “Yeah,” you answered softly. “Just finding some perspective.” If only you’d had some sooner. 

Sure, you’d never be normal. And normal people didn’t even get close to your life. But that didn’t make anything about it less terrible. It didn’t make it wrong for you to fall to pieces. Holding it all in wasn’t the answer, though letting it all out at what felt like every opportunity probably wasn’t the best either. 

He chanced a smile back at you. “That so?” Then he cast his gaze skyward. “So long as you don’t tell me you see Mufasa up there.” 

“Listen, if anyone told me I needed to go back right now, they’d get a swift kick in the ass.” You had, after all, announced more than once your utter hatred of what New York City had become for you. Just a graveyard of painful memories and shadows now. While you most likely couldn’t cut it out of your life permanently, you were very set on not returning for a long, long, long time. “Yeah, about that,” the way he led this off left no room for interpretation, holding the last word on a soft note. His gaze returned from the darkening skyline to you once again. “We have a buyer. Paperwork’s ready to start, once you give the go ahead.” 

Sitting up, you wrapped an arm around your legs. “That was… fast.” A little too fast, in fact. “You’d think after everything that place has seen, no one would want to touch it.” The Tower used to be a beacon. If not one of hope, any that was questionable now, definitely one that attracted trouble. 

Tony just gave you a shrug. “Considering I think this is the gift horse we were searching for…?” 

At this you grinned at him. “Sure. Fine. Won’t look it in the mouth.” 

Don’t make something out of nothing, he was saying. Don’t look into who it was. Don’t do research. Don’t try to find ulterior motives. Don’t do anything, in fact. Tony was handling it, so that you didn’t have to. He’d been doing a lot of that lately. Finally he pulled his hand from his pocket and extended it your way. “Come on, honey. Dinner’s ready.” Once your fingers interlocked with his, he lifted with a little lurch of his next words, “I think food cooked with the most important ingredient there is might do you some good.” 

Perching your palm at his chest once you were fully standing, you leaned up and in to brush your nose against his. “Love?” That always did you a world of good.

About as much, in fact, as when he laughed and put his arm around you, “MSG. But we can call it love.” 

                                                                               — 

Conversation between the three of you didn’t need to be carried or forced. There was a certain trivialness to all of it, though, that was wholly apparent. Superheroing, the Accords, politics, Stark Industries, stocks, PR- it was all off limits. Something that was unspoken and yet clearly agreed to by all. And it was… nice, honestly, to be reminded that you lived outside of those things. That, despite all of those things taking up so much space in your life, so much of you, they were not the only things that mattered. They were not the only things you had going on. Not the only things that made you you. You’d had a life before all of that, ruminating on it earlier though you’d tried. It wasn’t your childhood, or even lack thereof, it wasn’t your parents, figures that you couldn’t remember save some phantom pain of their death- it was what came after. You, Tony, and Rhodey reminisced about lives you’d lived so long ago. College stories of the two of them, memories of the three of you meeting up for the first time, of doing the red carpet military walks that nobody liked (yet Tony insisted), dinners that came after weapons demos or when Rhodey was stationed in California, nights in Vegas that Tony took a little too far- 

You had a life outside the bounds of heroism once. Maybe you could again. 

If such a thing were possible, maybe it started that night. And if it somehow were, there were a few things you needed to do before you could settle into the feeling of it. Dinner had been over for an hour or so, and the group had moved back out to the patio. Maybe it had just been your direction, wanting to feel the fresh air, wanting to see the sky for a change. Talk had lulled into amicable silence broken up by random thought now and again. While you and Tony sat next to each other on comfortable loungers, your eyes strayed to Rhodey. His wheelchair. Something Tony was trying to make less of a permanent fixture in his life, but it would take a lot of time still. 

He caught you staring. Some part of you should have felt embarrassed. He had to deal with so much- he probably got this all the time now. Rhodey didn’t get to walk away from it all like you had. Like Tony had, though Tony was a much more accurate comparison for why regular humans shouldn’t have gotten mixed up in heroics in the first place. 

A long sigh escaped you as your eyes trailed up from the large parked wheels to his face. You were certainly scrutinizing, but he didn’t even seem angry about it. He wasn’t sad. Weirdly, you felt this quiet sense of curiosity. 

You knew why. It was then that you broke the unspoken rules of engagement. And talked about work. 

“Rhodey, back at the hospital,” you began, almost out of nowhere, no point of conversation bridging the gap between what was said last and this, “you thanked me.” He remained silent and steady. Tony immediately flared with worry but said nothing. “You don’t know what for. Maybe I don’t either. But I think it’s time I told you what happened.” 

If you wanted any chance of unwinding all of this and stepping away from it, you had to start being honest. No more hiding, no more platitudes of I’m okay or we’ll get through this. You had to let it out and then put it all behind you. This wouldn’t fix you, it wouldn’t even be a start, but maybe it’d help. 

When both of them said nothing, you continued. “To get there, I need to start with the fact that we’re pretty sure at this point that I’m not human.” Tony had said he’d never told anyone else about you or what had been happening to you- all his research that had threatened to destroy your trust in him. Bruce knew, and yes Jarvis knew (and still knew more than he seemed able to say at times). SHIELD and your teammates knew just enough. But that left out everything else. 

While you hadn’t started this nervously, even if you weren’t sure how you were going to say this, Rhodey just staring at you finally did make you a little anxious. You drummed your nails on the side of your newest glass of iced tea, all tea and no ice at this point. “...well?” He put his elbow on the table and rested his chin on the backs of his fingers. “I’m reserving judgement. Because I sense there’s a whole lot more. I wanna make sure I get it all before I decide if there's a joke coming or not,” he said with a wry smile. Like this was you admitting something embarrassing that he could make fun of you for. You got what he was doing. Same thing as Tony, really. In an uncomfortable situation they pivoted towards bright spots of levity. Right now, though, you wished he was taking it a little more seriously. Tony, still, seemed nervous but had yet to say anything. 

If you waited any longer, tried to put it together more coherently, it wasn’t going to happen. So with that in mind, you just let it all out, “I used to just be able to make people feel things. Like a ghost of an impression- a hand around your neck guiding you towards a conclusion. I used it a lot to make people more agreeable to me or make them back off me when they weren’t. I’ve probably used it a lot more than I should have, even back then. “But when I started training with SHIELD, whatever it is started growing. Tony started doing experiments- we won’t get into it. I started being able to do more than just feeling what someone else was feeling or directing them towards something else. One of those more recent developments was- …I don’t know. There’s no way to put it into words. But when you fell out of the sky, you died. Or. You were supposed to.” 

This you let sit, giving it the weight it deserved. It also didn’t help that you felt a soft sheen of sweat at the back of your neck, across your forehead, more than just from the summer heat. Your heart was hammering and you suddenly couldn’t look at him. Either of them. 

You really wished one of them would say something but they just sat there in silence. Whatever joking mood Rhodey had been trying to keep had entirely vanished. He now sat with his hand just slightly covering his mouth, pointer finger in a long line against his lips, thumb pressing into his cheek. Staring at you. Even unable to glance his way, you could feel it. When they refused to, or maybe couldn’t say anything you finally did look up at both of them. “Tony said you said you saw an angel. That you thought it was me. That’s why.” There were a lot more specifics here that you were dodging around. Even talking about this was making you feel anxious, like this was some sort of deep secret that you really shouldn’t be talking about. Something ancient. Something forbidden. 

“That’s why- …how? What are we talking about here?” Finally Rhodey collected enough of his thoughts to ask this. Asking you to go into detail. Of course he would. He deserved to know, probably. But… You pushed a breath out, pressing your hands against the table, arching in your chair like you were working a kink out of your spine. “You’ll believe me less if I explain.” “Try me.” There was no getting out of this. For a brief few seconds your eyes shifted to Tony. His arms were now crossed and he was staring just off-center of you. Almost like he was thinking about whether or not he left the oven on but… you knew that wasn’t it. Now or never, you supposed. “I met with Death.” Now Rhodey put his hand up to you, “Okay. Let’s stop there. …what?” A large sense of incredulousness swept him up. Almost as if he’d been humoring you up until now but now he thought you were joking. Or crazy.

Your mouth opened to try and figure out how to expand on this, but it was Tony who spoke with a little shake of his head. Annoyed. “Lady D.” He remembered when Deadpool had proclaimed this- stop ignoring her calls. 

Yet again you sighed but now you let yourself hang back on your chair, almost like you were already exhausted. “Yeah. That’s the one.” “Cut me in here, guys. What the hell are you two talking about?” Rhodey was getting somewhat upset. Seemed a natural reaction to have when being made to face your almost-death. 

So, you tried to start up again. “Okay. What we know- I’m probably not human. Whatever powers me is semi-adjacent to the things Thor calls the Infinity Stones, but we don’t know the how or why or really even the what. And I’m guessing due to that, my powers have started to allow me to keep people alive when maybe I shouldn’t. …no offense.” To your surprise Rhodey arched a brow and grinned. “None taken.” Then he pointed at you to make it clear, “Yet.” 

Maybe even more surprising was that you managed to find some humor here, and even a smile. Still, you forged on, “It’s difficult to describe, but I basically was holding all the stuff that makes you… you, in my arms. And a figure approached me- very Saturday morning cartoon by the way. Black cloak and everything. She told me to stop interfering. And… to let you go.” Suddenly you realized you were shivering. You hadn’t even told this to Tony yet, though you’d both spoken about it extremely briefly. The way he was staring at you… it was difficult to parse. Even tougher, because he was holding himself together. Steady. Giving nothing away to you that he usually may have. When you sat for too long quietly, Rhodey asked, “And?” with a little sense of trepidation. He wanted you to finish. Swallowing tightly, you tried. “And I didn’t want to. I told her no, basically. Maybe that was selfish. And wrong. But I just… I couldn’t.” Your head craned forward then, mired in a little bit of guilt. What if you’d eternally denied something to Rhodey? What would happen now? 

There would be no reason to believe you. If you were telling this to an interviewer or even a therapist, they’d probably remand you to involuntary state care. A nice square room with padded walls somewhere. It was stupid, honestly, now that you’d said it aloud, it sounded really, really stupid. 

Rhodey startled you though, as he laid a hand against yours atop the table. Your head tipped up and you saw him. All of him then. The light you’d held in your arms, the one you’d refused to give away. Give up on. He served you with two simple words that should have settled your entire world in that moment, “Thank you.” And because you just couldn’t accept it right away, with a little watery burble you asked, “Are you sure?” How could he be? How could he thank you for something he had no idea the impact of? The eventual outcome? He smiled then, giving your hand a pat before retreating. “Yeah. I’m sure. What- you think I’m ready to leave you two idiots behind? Who’ll look after you?” That levity again. Maybe it wasn’t worth it to say anything more now that he’d accepted it. Not to tell him that Death had laughed, had said his cage was irrevocably broken, and that you were being a selfish brat. Actually… about that… “She kind of seemed like she knew me.” Tony and Rhodey looked between each other before setting their sights on you again. Tony was the one who spoke first, “You keep saying she. Honestly- didn’t think the concept of death would be so gendered.” That wasn’t what you were expecting out of him and you just felt yourself shrugging. “Maybe she’s not, I don’t know.” “Yeah,” Rhodey interjected. “Didn’t you say a big black cloak and a scythe?” “Okay- I did not say she had a scythe. Cloak yes. But she pulled it off and- I can’t describe what she looked like for a second.” Real death. Honest death. Unfathomable, horrifying, permanent, and yet comforting all in a single glance. “But then she just… I don’t know- she looked like a woman.” “Someone you know?” Tony was asking. You shook your head. “No one I remember.” “But you think she knows you?” If you didn’t know any better, you’d think Tony was drilling you. New pieces of information for a case you’d told him to put away for a while during that whole escapade with Ultron. You weighed not giving in further, but now was the time to do it, if ever there was one. “She talked about my mom.” “That’s…” Rhodey started but then seemed to second guess it. “...good? Is that a good thing?” Shrugging uselessly with yet another shake of your head, “I don’t know. Does it sound like a good thing that Death is friends with whoever my real mom is?” “Kinda. Yeah.” 

 Considering what you’d done? Maybe he had a point. “Oh- and… also…” Okay. Maybe you’d throw this in there, too. “I kind of… well I think I threatened her a little.” You told her to go away, that was for certain. And you’d denied her a- …well. Maybe better to call it what it was. You denied Death a soul. And she had not been happy about it. Yet she’d offered five more of your closest companions for free. Deals like that didn’t materialize cheaply, either, no matter how free she’d promised it was. Something would come out of that that was likely more horror than help. But for now you couldn’t even begin to speculate. “Honestly…” Tony started. “Least surprising part of this.” He was grinning now but you could see the soft shape of worry that was beginning to emanate from him again. This was a lot to take in. If any of it were to be believed. “Let’s just err on the side of optimism and say that’ll work out fine. Was there anything else that happened before I imagine she vanished into a pile of snakes- or maybe a black cloud?”