Harmonia's daughters
1500 words, mostly spoilers
also at ao3
Tony and Nebula go to Earth. Nebula’s not that interested in Earth’s welfare per se, but she’s at a loss for where to start to vent her rage and pain and Thanos’s last known location is good enough. Tony offers tech and biomechanical improvements and she’s not sure he has the capacity to do anything she can’t get done better elsewhere, but it’s a way off of that damned rock and it’s something to do.
Tony’s very fragile ability to hold it together is a lot more fragile after they get back to New York to find Pepper Potts and Happy Hogan are both among the Disappeared. He goes straight to his lab and cannot be budged - he’s already decided that the only thing to be done is to undo what Thanos did. That’s how he’s going to save people, that’s how he’s going to get Pepper and Happy and Peter back. This is what Strange put in motion and, damn it, he’s going to do it. Nebula’s seen this kind of madness before and wants nothing to do with it because it’s selfish and pointless.
Frustrated and furious and spoiling for a fight that Tony can’t provide, she goes outside. Manhattan is an apocalyptic landscape with crashed vehicles and shocked survivors wandering around helping others and asking what just happened.
She tells anyone who asks her what just happened, which doesn’t really help. But she does. She can’t be a comfort to anyone, can’t be nice to anyone, but she can extract wounded from crumpled cars and tear open grates so that people can escape from the subway tunnels. She pulls away from every attempt to thank her - or to ask her if she’s an Avenger and where are the others. “Dead,” she tells them and moves on.
When she finally gets back to Tony’s castle, there’s a human-looking woman standing there in a Kree battlesuit who calls herself Captain Marvel and asks where Nick Fury is. “Dead, probably,” Nebula tells her, not knowing who that is. “I think we’re Avengers now.”
Shuri is hard at work in her lab trying to figure out how to speed up the process of extracting the Stone when everything suddenly grows very quiet. Her assistants, chattering in the background as always, fall silent and she turns to look at what they are reacting to, but all she sees is them disintegrating into ash. She grabs her hidden blaster - T'Challa would kill her if he knew it existed - but there is no one there. Not even the Dora who’d been standing guard protecting her. She runs security protocols and all they tell her is that there are no unauthorized personnel…. but that three dozen authorized personnel suddenly disappeared. Terrified, she’s rerunning the diagnostics when Okoye comes running in.
“Your majesty,” Okoye says and takes a knee and Shuri knows what that means, but in the moment she cannot process it.
She doesn’t get a chance to process it for a while. The battle had more casualties than T'Challa and she suddenly has to worry about an entire nation’s welfare instead of just her brother’s. Her mother is alive, thank Bast, and she knows more of what’s to be done, but everyone keeps turning to Shuri for approval and she keeps looking behind her for her father or her brother and there’s no one there.
There is a coronation ceremony, but it is brief and joyless as she stands in the water up to her knees and half-wishes for someone, anyone, to challenge her right to the throne. She stares at M'Baku, but he stares right back and replies in the negative when he speaks on behalf of the Jabari.
Her visit to her Ancestors is too short.
Captain Rogers and the other Outsiders who came to fight leave directly after the ceremony. They have the rest of the world to look after and their own grief to bear. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he tells her sincerely. “Your brother was a good man.”
“As was yours,” she replies and the smile he gives her makes her cry. It makes him cry, too, so she impulsively hugs him before pulling back. She’s the Queen now.
She is also going to be the Black Panther, a promotion that gets much more opposition than her rise to the throne. She cannot be too young for one and not the other, she tells everyone. She has had some training - her father had insisted upon it - and she has the technology to compensate for her lack of experience until she gets some. Nobody agrees and, in fact, they disagree very loudly. In the end, she gives in not because they are right about her not being up to it, but instead because they are right that Wakanda needs a queen who will be around for a while. They need stability after all of the change over the last few years. “There is so much that needs to be done,” Nakia tells her. “They need your whole heart and your whole mind and you should not hesitate to give them that if you are to be a good queen.”
Okoye, who absolutely does not want the job, becomes Black Panther. Shuri designs a necklace for her that is modeled after the stock on the Dora uniform so that it will feel familiar. There are tiny rhino footprints engraved into it that Okoye pretends are beneath her but secretly adores.
Once it’s obvious that Peter’s one of the Disappeared, Michelle allows herself to admit that he was more than a convenient entertainment. Maybe. In the future, perhaps. She grieves him as she grieves her cousins and aunties, as someone more than a classmate. She does her best to push through the pain. Everyone’s hurting right now and not everyone still has family to go home to at night. Some days are more successful than others.
It’s on one of those not-really-successful days that she gets jumped by Ned, who pulls her into an empty classroom.
“Do you really want to save the world?” he asks her and it’s a testament to how weird things are right now that she takes the question at face value. She tells him yes and he tells her to meet him in front of Peter’s building at five-thirty.
May Parker is too glad to see them. Ned tells her that he is so sorry, but there’s something of his in Peter’s room and he kinda needs it. Michelle sits on the couch with Ms. Parker and lets her talk to her about Peter while Ned goes to look for whatever it is. She’s kinda pissed at Ned for using her as an emotional shield so that he doesn’t have to face Ms. Parker, but she’s also kind of glad to be able to hear stories about Peter, too. Whatever they might have once been possibly able to be in the future, he was still a fascinating creature to study and May Parker is the expert.
She still slugs Ned the minute they’re in the elevator.
“It was necessary,” he tells her, rubbing his shoulder. And then he pulls Spider-Man’s cowl out of his backpack and then shoves it quickly back in before they reach the ground floor.
They go to the food court at the Queens Center Mall and Ned gets them Korean fried chicken “so that we won’t look like we’re planning something. It can look like a date.”
She rolls her eyes, but follows him to the corner by the ramen place because the idea that Peter was Spider-Man is just too weird to believe. Except not really, now that she thinks about it. A lot of his strangeness could be attributed to hiding that kind of secret.
Ned has taken all of Peter’s Spidey-stuff - “he never wanted Aunt May to know” - and he now he hands the bag of it over to her.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” she asks. “Build a shrine?”
Ned expects her to use it, apparently. To save the world. How, he’s not sure, but he’s willing to help. “We might’ve kept a little more than Mister Stark thought,” he confesses, which does not make any of this less ridiculous.
She takes the bag, if only to appease Ned, whose urgency to do this is way too much for it to be just a whim. And then she gets on the bus home, wondering if anyone can tell she’s got a superhero costume in her backpack because it feels like they should.
The person who realizes she took a superhero costume on the Q59 takes a few days to find her. She’s in Rego Park working her way through a veggie plov when a woman slides into the booth across from her.
“Hi,” the lady says. “My name is Natasha. I think we need to talk.”
Also posted at DW.
also at ao3
Tony and Nebula go to Earth. Nebula’s not that interested in Earth’s welfare per se, but she’s at a loss for where to start to vent her rage and pain and Thanos’s last known location is good enough. Tony offers tech and biomechanical improvements and she’s not sure he has the capacity to do anything she can’t get done better elsewhere, but it’s a way off of that damned rock and it’s something to do.
Tony’s very fragile ability to hold it together is a lot more fragile after they get back to New York to find Pepper Potts and Happy Hogan are both among the Disappeared. He goes straight to his lab and cannot be budged - he’s already decided that the only thing to be done is to undo what Thanos did. That’s how he’s going to save people, that’s how he’s going to get Pepper and Happy and Peter back. This is what Strange put in motion and, damn it, he’s going to do it. Nebula’s seen this kind of madness before and wants nothing to do with it because it’s selfish and pointless.
Frustrated and furious and spoiling for a fight that Tony can’t provide, she goes outside. Manhattan is an apocalyptic landscape with crashed vehicles and shocked survivors wandering around helping others and asking what just happened.
She tells anyone who asks her what just happened, which doesn’t really help. But she does. She can’t be a comfort to anyone, can’t be nice to anyone, but she can extract wounded from crumpled cars and tear open grates so that people can escape from the subway tunnels. She pulls away from every attempt to thank her - or to ask her if she’s an Avenger and where are the others. “Dead,” she tells them and moves on.
When she finally gets back to Tony’s castle, there’s a human-looking woman standing there in a Kree battlesuit who calls herself Captain Marvel and asks where Nick Fury is. “Dead, probably,” Nebula tells her, not knowing who that is. “I think we’re Avengers now.”
Shuri is hard at work in her lab trying to figure out how to speed up the process of extracting the Stone when everything suddenly grows very quiet. Her assistants, chattering in the background as always, fall silent and she turns to look at what they are reacting to, but all she sees is them disintegrating into ash. She grabs her hidden blaster - T'Challa would kill her if he knew it existed - but there is no one there. Not even the Dora who’d been standing guard protecting her. She runs security protocols and all they tell her is that there are no unauthorized personnel…. but that three dozen authorized personnel suddenly disappeared. Terrified, she’s rerunning the diagnostics when Okoye comes running in.
“Your majesty,” Okoye says and takes a knee and Shuri knows what that means, but in the moment she cannot process it.
She doesn’t get a chance to process it for a while. The battle had more casualties than T'Challa and she suddenly has to worry about an entire nation’s welfare instead of just her brother’s. Her mother is alive, thank Bast, and she knows more of what’s to be done, but everyone keeps turning to Shuri for approval and she keeps looking behind her for her father or her brother and there’s no one there.
There is a coronation ceremony, but it is brief and joyless as she stands in the water up to her knees and half-wishes for someone, anyone, to challenge her right to the throne. She stares at M'Baku, but he stares right back and replies in the negative when he speaks on behalf of the Jabari.
Her visit to her Ancestors is too short.
Captain Rogers and the other Outsiders who came to fight leave directly after the ceremony. They have the rest of the world to look after and their own grief to bear. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he tells her sincerely. “Your brother was a good man.”
“As was yours,” she replies and the smile he gives her makes her cry. It makes him cry, too, so she impulsively hugs him before pulling back. She’s the Queen now.
She is also going to be the Black Panther, a promotion that gets much more opposition than her rise to the throne. She cannot be too young for one and not the other, she tells everyone. She has had some training - her father had insisted upon it - and she has the technology to compensate for her lack of experience until she gets some. Nobody agrees and, in fact, they disagree very loudly. In the end, she gives in not because they are right about her not being up to it, but instead because they are right that Wakanda needs a queen who will be around for a while. They need stability after all of the change over the last few years. “There is so much that needs to be done,” Nakia tells her. “They need your whole heart and your whole mind and you should not hesitate to give them that if you are to be a good queen.”
Okoye, who absolutely does not want the job, becomes Black Panther. Shuri designs a necklace for her that is modeled after the stock on the Dora uniform so that it will feel familiar. There are tiny rhino footprints engraved into it that Okoye pretends are beneath her but secretly adores.
Once it’s obvious that Peter’s one of the Disappeared, Michelle allows herself to admit that he was more than a convenient entertainment. Maybe. In the future, perhaps. She grieves him as she grieves her cousins and aunties, as someone more than a classmate. She does her best to push through the pain. Everyone’s hurting right now and not everyone still has family to go home to at night. Some days are more successful than others.
It’s on one of those not-really-successful days that she gets jumped by Ned, who pulls her into an empty classroom.
“Do you really want to save the world?” he asks her and it’s a testament to how weird things are right now that she takes the question at face value. She tells him yes and he tells her to meet him in front of Peter’s building at five-thirty.
May Parker is too glad to see them. Ned tells her that he is so sorry, but there’s something of his in Peter’s room and he kinda needs it. Michelle sits on the couch with Ms. Parker and lets her talk to her about Peter while Ned goes to look for whatever it is. She’s kinda pissed at Ned for using her as an emotional shield so that he doesn’t have to face Ms. Parker, but she’s also kind of glad to be able to hear stories about Peter, too. Whatever they might have once been possibly able to be in the future, he was still a fascinating creature to study and May Parker is the expert.
She still slugs Ned the minute they’re in the elevator.
“It was necessary,” he tells her, rubbing his shoulder. And then he pulls Spider-Man’s cowl out of his backpack and then shoves it quickly back in before they reach the ground floor.
They go to the food court at the Queens Center Mall and Ned gets them Korean fried chicken “so that we won’t look like we’re planning something. It can look like a date.”
She rolls her eyes, but follows him to the corner by the ramen place because the idea that Peter was Spider-Man is just too weird to believe. Except not really, now that she thinks about it. A lot of his strangeness could be attributed to hiding that kind of secret.
Ned has taken all of Peter’s Spidey-stuff - “he never wanted Aunt May to know” - and he now he hands the bag of it over to her.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” she asks. “Build a shrine?”
Ned expects her to use it, apparently. To save the world. How, he’s not sure, but he’s willing to help. “We might’ve kept a little more than Mister Stark thought,” he confesses, which does not make any of this less ridiculous.
She takes the bag, if only to appease Ned, whose urgency to do this is way too much for it to be just a whim. And then she gets on the bus home, wondering if anyone can tell she’s got a superhero costume in her backpack because it feels like they should.
The person who realizes she took a superhero costume on the Q59 takes a few days to find her. She’s in Rego Park working her way through a veggie plov when a woman slides into the booth across from her.
“Hi,” the lady says. “My name is Natasha. I think we need to talk.”
Also posted at DW.