fic: take the sky from me
Let the merriment continue! Can I just say, I love this AU exchange? :)
Title: take the sky from me
Author: sweetwatersong
A Gift For: inkvoices
Rating: pg-13
Warnings: past character deaths,[minor spoilers]
limb amputation
Prompt used: Apocalyptic AU.
Summary: The end came as an announcement, a promise, a future of burning worlds and expanding stars. The end came and there wasn't enough room to save all of them, weren't enough ships to bring everyone beyond the reach of a hungry red sun.
But it isn't the end, not quite. Not yet. And there are stars still left in the sky...
Author Notes: Title from The Ballad of Serenity by Sonny Rhodes which, you have it right, is from Firefly. Thank you to cybermathwitch for being able to beta at the drop of a hat.
They are not survivors; no one will survive this dying world and its endless turning towards a meeting with their sun. They are the stranded, the abandoned, the last of humanity walking the dust-covered planet.
The Earth was only the human race’s beginning, its origin story and birthplace, a launching place for the ancient colonies now scattered among the stars. It will be the end for those who are still here.
Then again, they've never been good at giving up.
“Help me find this and we may yet make it.” Sif’s armor gleams in the pale yellow sunlight, a promise of protection from the dangers of space and the ground-bound alike. The alien is unafraid of the humans facing her, unafraid of their recovered blasters and sharpened knives, and Natasha’s instincts tell her it is not arrogance that gives her such assurance. That she is not alone, that a handful of other humans already stand in support behind her, likely helps as well. “The Hammer was linked to Thor’s DNA. If we locate it, I can rewrite its code and override those controls. I can summon more help for this world.”
She looks steadily at Natasha and Clint over the diagram she refers to, her fingers resting on the delicate sketch of a beacon that could save them. Likely not all, likely not enough, but some; some of those abandoned by the governments and industries when the doomsday bell finally tolled for their world.
That the bell sounded like dry facts and the fury of thousands is no falsehood of memory or time.
“And it’s here.”
“When we came to assist with the evacuation, we did not count on being caught by the anomaly here. Most of our ship crashed in this place.” The Asgardian glances at the graveyard over her shoulder. The spires and twisted wreckage rise high into the wide sky in a mockery of the skyscrapers and towers of humanity’s great cities, humanity’s greatest accomplishments left for the sun to devour. At any moment, it seems, they too could take off with smoke trails and silence in the roar of the great engines and thrusters. “If it is anywhere, it will be here.”
“Well, that’s more than we’ve had for the last few months,” Clint says, stringing the words out as he catches Natasha’s gaze out of the corner of his eye. He does not need to say more than that; they have rarely needed to say much when it comes to things between them. It is a second chance at escape, it is a promise as tenuous as the ones made by their leaders before they were betrayed, it is just enough hope to make her want to scream. Instead she considers the diagram, the boneyard, the alien who has not yet said the words she needs to hear.
“Who will you take if your help comes?”
Sif meets her eyes, level and unapologetic for her answer.
“All that I can.”
Not all, indeed.
On the tawny morning that brings an Asgardian corpse to light, Sif kneels in the wreckage and cradles the body with her dark hair spilling over her shoulder, hiding her face from the onlookers. There is grief in her silence, terrible and heavy, but hope has been such a fleeting thing to cling to in the copper future of their days; all their expectations have been already tempered by ash and rubble and time.
She takes a breath, her ribcage shuddering underneath the gleaming silver of her armor; when she rises it is with hard determination, her mouth set and eyes flat. “Thor’s Hammer is still out there. Let us find it.”
They do not mention the way her long fingers curve around the remains, pale and slender in death’s grasp.
They draw more people in as they go, word spreading through drifters and skeptics and the ordinary drunks that someone is digging up the boneyard, and they think they’re going to call for help. Those who are starving for hope, those are hellbent on living, those who shook their fists at the heavy spaceships rising ponderously into the sky without them, come to the edge of the excavation site and stand. Some stay, some go, and some lose themselves further in their despair.
Swelling from twelve to thirty to seventy-five, they put their backs and hearts into the project and the earth that will betray them to labor together under the bright golden sky.
“Call me Pepper,” the slender woman says when asked for a name, dark freckles scattered across her face with edges etched like ash into her fair skin. Even in the frantic days of their destruction she possesses a self-confidence that smooths over the dirt on her clothing and the frazzled air to her hair. If this had been decades ago, Natasha thinks occasionally, she would be the leader of a vast corporation or government, overseeing thousands with a deft and queenly air.
Instead the other red-haired woman oversees the search and salvage operation, maneuvering people with a natural touch, soothing feathers and spending long hours into the night hunched over lists of supplies and maps with Sif to discuss likely locations, the next best place to dig. How deep, how wide, how long can we spend there?
No one asks about the inflamed and twisted scar on her shoulder, a spot where it seems fire ate away at the join of humerus to scapula in a brief and dizzying blast. She does not tell them how she earned it in the same way that she does not tell them her given name.
There are many secrets under the light of the dying sun, and with humanity’s last days so easily measured now it is rarely worth it to seek them out.
Lieutenant Colonel Maria Hill arrives with a squad of thirty soldiers, dragging them out of the tar-coated wilderness to stand before the rough fence in formation and parade rest.
“We were an escort for military brass on board one of the L-ships. When it came time to take off, they discovered there wasn’t enough room left for us,” she says with a lifted chin and mottled bruises that race down her temple and under her collar. The scorn in her tone lays bare the knowledge that this revelation had been no surprise to those figureheads at all. “They shot my commanding officer when he tried to see the numbers for himself.”
Natasha studies the soldier quietly. She’s caught glimpses of such escorts and knows the armaments they carried to keep protesters and refugees from scrambling into convoys, into cockpits. It wouldn’t have been impossible for the soldiers to turn those same weapons on the ship, to riddle the hull with lethal holes or knock out the engines and ground it for boarding. As fractured as the wildfire of rumor and news was in the scorched landscape, any whisper of an aborted launch would have sent pulses and hopes soaring. What had it taken them to let that ship take off, racing into the hazy orange atmosphere with all promise of safety?
Her answer is in the set of the men’s jaws, the steel in the women’s eyes. The corners of Hill’s mouth are tight and pinched with the same unyielding conviction that drives those already in the graveyard, sending them to work relentless shifts and endless days. It’s clear from her stance that the women and men behind her are, until the end, under her protection.
Natasha exchanges a glance with Pepper. It’s a subtle tell that the other woman’s clipboard is drawn against her chest as she comes to her own conclusions about the heavily armed squad in front of them; only the promise of Clint’s bow and readied weapons behind the perimeter have made it worthwhile to be so vulnerable. But Sif has trusted them to know more about humans than she does, believes them invested in this as heavily as she is. In the end it is their call.
“And if there’s not room on an Asgardian ship?” Pepper asks, her nerves hidden under a cool expression and her iron spine. The focus of thirty-one soldiers snaps to her with frightening speed, measuring and intent and unified. But Hill’s lips only press flatter, the need to save her people driving her as hard and as clearly as the desire to survive drives Natasha, and none of the women and men behind her shift their hands towards their holstered weapons.
“That’s the point of this, isn’t it? To find help so there will be enough room?”
“If this works,” Natasha interjects smoothly, counting on Clint’s bow, counting on the flags the soldiers still wear like badges of honor on their uniforms. Their planet will kill them, their sun consume them, their leaders abandon them - but the code they live their lives by remains. The Lt. Colonel meets her eyes, her chin still high, the tight knot of her bun pulling strands of dark hair away from her face.
“At this point,” she says with frank honesty, “any chance is better than what we already have.”
Natasha can almost hear Clint muttering, “Ain’t that the truth,” in the back of her mind. When she smiles, slight and fleeting, it is as much for him as the team in front of her.
“We make no promises,” she tells them, Pepper’s own agreement evident in her unfolding body language, “but we’re not giving up.”
Something settles in Maria’s expression.
“Neither are we.”
Pepper and Sif integrate the roster slowly, careful to split up the majority of the soldiers so an overwhelming take-over isn’t an option, careful to bolster the exhausted shifts and keep the best of the secrets hidden away. Wilson and Carter, the two medics who kept their squad alive on the journey, join the small number of those treating the injuries from disuse, distraction, or disease that plague the camp. Maria herself eventually joins Natasha and the women who organize, who debate, who decide what comes next; who lead.
Clint sees them once, the two red-haired women and two dark-haired soldiers gathered around a topographic map and planning out the next dig, the next supply mission. He laughs at them, shaking his head when they look up curiously, and only explains his amusement to Natasha later that night. “I don’t know who I should be more afraid of,” he teases, tearing his dinner roll in half and offering her a piece.
“All of us,” she replies as she accepts the warm bread, its golden crust light on her calloused fingertips, and Clint grins at her like she’s a new sun lighting up the world.
They make a place, make a purpose, make a bid for their freedom; they walk cracked roads and rusted sand for supplies and information, they map and scour the jumbled hulls and fragmented skydrives. The anomaly has made a Gordian knot of the carcasses it drags down, scattering pieces across the gaping wound of its feeding grounds, that last great experiment gone terribly wrong when the technology that would have saved all of Earth’s inhabitants doomed the last of them instead. They learn its ways and uncover more pieces of the alien ship they seek.
They are not the only ones who went looking for a way out.
The boneyard makes for a rich harvest if you are willing to brave its dangers, and the scavengers that come to their dying system to gather up scraps and circuits are often willing enough. They are not the initial starships that descended with missions of mercy, do not board those that can be found and carry them off after the recolonizing ships of humankind. They do not care about the thirsty refugees and final humans shouting for help below them; they keep control of their crafts through lazy and dispassionate fire when mobs rush their positions. They come for a cargo full of minerals and parts, to dig up what remains of the earth’s harvest and the ships lost to its possession.
They come to the graveyard and find it now defended.
Most turn aside in the knowledge of an easier bounty in crumbling cities and abandoned skyscrapers. A few need to be, as Wilson puts it, ‘persuaded.’ But the only one that is allowed near arrives under a violent orange sky, when Clint is the look-out for the dig and Natasha a red shadow beside him. They watch as the deadly Ravager craft skims the perimeter before circling to scope out the defenses, making a lazy loop around the dig - and backs out of range of the evident weaponry.
Backs out, only to begin flashing its wing lights in a clear pattern.
“What the-” Clint starts to say. When he falls silent Natasha glances at him, searches his face for some explanation of the stricken expression she sees there. “I know that code,” he tells her after a minute, voice rough, but it’s still not an explanation. That comes when the man who climbs out of the ship onto the parched landing strip bears more than a passing resemblance to her lover, even from the hangar where she can cover Clint’s back.
She’s close enough to listen as they greet each other with wariness and surprise, close enough to hear when Barney says, “Get outta this place. Come with me.” In that moment Natasha can taste the recycled ship air, can see the display and star coordinates on the viewscreen as the last of the dust leaves her lungs - until Clint he shakes his head.
“All those ships, all those people - how many do you think can make it off the Earth?” He points to the lights in the sky, the vultures picking at the bones of the dead with little regard for the worms still crawling them beyond an occasional blaster shot. Barney stares at him and says nothing. “Not enough,” Clint tells him. “Not enough. So yeah, we’re looking for Thor’s Hammer, ‘cause if we find it? A few more people are going to survive.”
“And if you don’t?”
He shrugs with one shoulder in a rough gesture that involves more of his body than it ordinarily would, as if he’s shaking off his brother’s presence, his brother’s doubts.
In the world that they are shaped by, blood will only tell so much.
“Then we all die anyway. If you’re going to go, Barney, go. I won’t blame you. But I’m going to stay. If you care, about any of this, about me, you could do something useful for once.”
Barney boards his ship while Clint watches him go, that ultimatum hanging in the air stirred by whirling engine rotors.
From the barren plain of the hangar, she watches them both.
“Natasha,” Clint says with exhaustion when he returns to the fractured concrete structure, but they do not talk about it. They do not talk about it when Clint lays out for Maria and Sif that the Ravager had been his brother and had only stopped by for old time’s sake. No danger, no threat; not to the project. Just to them. Because they do not talk about it, even when so little often needs to be voiced between them, until nothing lies against them but the night.
“He could have gotten us off planet.” Natasha traces a scar across Clint’s collarbone, knowing her voice is only a murmur in the uneasy darkness.
“I know, Natasha, but at what price? He’s running with the Ravagers now. The things that they do...” He exhales and shifts under her hand, his anxiety telegraphed as clear as clean daylight in the tension under her fingers and the twist of his head away from her.
She wants to live. She wants to dig her nails into life and hold on, hold on, hold on; everything in her screams to fight, to make it. They joined Sif’s crusade on the barest promise of an escape, of a future. Once, the dust-coated girl she had been would have leapt on the Ravager’s craft without a second thought and cut her way through any resistance or trace of her own conscience, sure only in her abilities and the boy who would have gone with her. She was that girl not so long ago; she still longs to dig her nails into Clint’s skin and scream - but.
A web ties her now, binds her down to the earth that will revolt against the kiss of the sun and bring them to their knees. Threads invisible to the naked eye stretch from her to Clint, to others, to more than she could have imagined. In the scope of her thoughts they stand like witnesses across the graveyard, unbroken by the long days ahead of them or sorting through the shards of what they have left and refusing to yield. Maria. Pepper. Sitwell. Maya. More; dozens more, who wait for salvation to come from broken machinery, not slaughterships in the sky.
Natasha wants to live, but she can see now what kept her grounded against the promise of the sky.
“When did you become a good man?” She murmurs. She does not need to say she already agreed with him; the fact that she stayed in the depths of the hangar and let Barney turn his back on them is proof enough of that. She does not need to say she trusts him; that has never been in doubt. Now it’s simply clearer that she’s accepted not what is inevitable, because this life never has been, but what she has come to see is right.
Foolish of her, to think she could escape the end of this world unscathed.
Clint huffs at her words as his arm draws her closer, draws her near enough that he can bend his head and press a kiss against her hair.
“I’m the farthest thing from it,” he tells her with the wryness she loves him for, the crooked honesty she cherishes. It is not quite a lie, not quite; they are here, they are staying on the cratered ground that is already turning to ash. And they are not alone.
Natasha tucks up against him, savoring the warmth of his body on hers, and finds what sleep she can.
Four days later they see a Ravager craft delivering a steel-and-bolt crane to the edge of the graveyard, the winches barely winding, the three-inch-thick beams creaking. It is more than they have managed to cobble together for moving the rubble and a single day’s work is now halved.
It is left without comment, and the craft is not seen again.
“Fuck,” he whispers against the grime and sweat-streaked skin of her neck, “fuck, Natasha.”
She works to catch her breath, the cold metal of the steel beam pressed flush against her naked back, while the chatter of the twilight shift begins to roll in through the haphazard walls of this abandoned shelter. Clint doesn’t need to say any more, never has to say any more, but the dust in the air and the lurid red clouds visible through gaps in the sheet metal and their discovery of Thor’s armguard with its weathered white bones speak eloquently enough for both of them. It is desperation, it is a frantic awareness that time is not on their side, it is an attempt to ground themselves in a moment that is so rapidly running out.
Natasha rests her hands on his shoulders, feeling his chest heave against her belly, and holds on.
They are the dregs of humanity, the last of the unwanted, unworthy enough, unimportant enough, unloved enough to be left on the surface of their dying planet when the great recolonizing ships rose into the sky.
But they aren’t going down without a fight.
Natasha watches the trio approach for the last quarter-mile of their journey, their progress slow through the minefield of starships. Unless they have hidden weapons or help, she isn’t worried by their arrival; the crew here at this new pit, Sif notwithstanding, will not be so easily overwhelmed by two women and a single man. Stragglers often approach them when they’re working outside their expanded perimeter and seem most vulnerable. They come to beg for shelter or sustenance, to query for any hope that all is not lost. The sun hanging sullenly in the sky is answer enough to the latter, and only the work of their hands will gain them the former. But they come, and Natasha lets them, because thousands were left on this drought-stricken land and any one of them could be the one to find the Hammer.
Clint has been watching them too, his body braced against the recovery rope slithering into the pit. She doesn’t need to ask what he thinks when the pressure of his shoulder against her hip hasn’t changed, when he hasn’t called down to Sif to alert her to the one-armed man and the women with rifles slung across their carrysacks. The weight of her own blaster is more than an equal match for those.
The trio stops a hundred feet away from the dig. Neither of the women make moves to bring their rifles around although their scrutiny is nearly as intense as Natasha’s. Jagged edges and treacherous footing still lie between them, in front of them, but sound carries easily enough for all.
“We have heard the Lady Sif is here,” the man calls in a voice that might have been thundering before the end of days. His broad shoulders cant to the left as if he is still unaccustomed to the absence of his right arm, his appearance is ragged and unkempt; his blond hair is knotted by the wind, his beard twisted and frayed. But something in his shadowed gaze stops Natasha’s dismissal and holds her attention. Holds Clint’s too, while he stands with the crimson sky spreading behind him like a cloak. “May we speak with her?”
Before either of them can answer him the rope shifts against Clint’s grip. In the span of a single breath Sif has hauled herself up to the edge of the pit to stare with wide, dark eyes at the stranger across the graveyard.
“Thor?” There is a child’s wonder, a woman’s incredulity in the word - and then she is scrambling over the debris, laughing and crying, to meet the other Asgardian halfway.
“You kind of don’t expect to find yourself sheltering an alien,” Jane tells them in the cool reprieve of twilight, the vagrant sun slinking down below the metal mountains. “Then again, given how fast Thor healed after we found him, maybe we should have thought of it sooner.”
“And how cut he was. What?” Darcy asks when Jane gives her an aggravated look. “Standards of personal fitness have gone way down in the last century or two.”
“Anyway, between the shock of losing an arm and whatever the hell got him all the way out to our stretch of land, he didn’t remember much. And it’s not like we were in the thick of things to begin with. That’s why it took so long for us to realize you all were out here, and even longer to figure out what you were after. That was the key to jump-starting his memories, I guess.”
The two Asgardians are still shoulder to shoulder and speaking rapidly in their native tongue. With their translators turned off none of the humans can understand them. With the amount of sheer emotion playing over their expressions, though, it’s not very hard to guess what it is they’re saying. Natasha has picked up a name with varying degrees of anger and denial attached to it - Loki - and another that the discussion seems to be centered on now - Mjolnir. What’s clearer to her than the Asgardian tongue, though, is the wistful and almost impatient way Jane watches Thor. But regardless of affections, regardless of resurrections and reunions, they are all of them still stranded. Thor’s Hammer is still far from their grasp.
And then Thor switches his translator on in a clear effort to include the humans, all the while holding Sif’s questioning gaze.
“Have you tried the northeast corner?” When she shakes her head, dark hair falling over her armor, he frowns. “Whatever happened to the Hammer in the fall, it can no longer come to me. But I have a hunch.”
“It’s more than we’ve had,” Sif tells him, clasping his left hand in hers, and whether it is her influence or their own dreams everyone straightens to listen with a little more liveliness.
The convoluted console lies open to the deep purple sky, the first of the true stars winking in among the searchlights of the scavengers. It is graceful despite its blocky design, elegant even in its bewildering complexity, and it hums with a life that waits for Thor’s touch to direct it. They are all there; Wilson and Cameron and Carter and Everhart and more, so many more, ringing the edge of the excavation pit as the steel-and-bolt crane overhead fades into the darkness. All waiting, all watching, all praying to nothing or everything as Thor pulls up the beacon commands.
A depression appears on the metallic surface of the Hammer’s body: five fingertips and a palm. He meets Sif’s eyes, then Jane’s, before taking a breath through a ghost of a smile. Natasha’s fingers wrap tighter around Clint’s as the Asgardian places his hand on the Hammer, anxiety and nerves warring with each other when the device hums -
The floating handle screams with white light as a beacon races up its length, blasting off to arrow up towards the sky. Fast, faster than thought, fast enough that none of the ships between here and Asgard can stop it; fast as the hope in their hearts.
Clint squeezes her hand back, his heart beating faster against her chest, and they watch it disappear into the night.
They are not survivors; no one will survive this dying world and its endless turning towards a meeting with their sun. But they will not be here when that saga ends, for ships came like promises in a dawn’s new light, gleaming and silver and opening their hulls to take in the people, the civilians and soldiers, those who rushed in with raised hands and those who had been there from the earliest days of the digs.
The Earth was only their beginning. The rest of the universe will be their story now.
Title: take the sky from me
Author: sweetwatersong
A Gift For: inkvoices
Rating: pg-13
Warnings: past character deaths,[minor spoilers]
limb amputation
Prompt used: Apocalyptic AU.
Summary: The end came as an announcement, a promise, a future of burning worlds and expanding stars. The end came and there wasn't enough room to save all of them, weren't enough ships to bring everyone beyond the reach of a hungry red sun.
But it isn't the end, not quite. Not yet. And there are stars still left in the sky...
Author Notes: Title from The Ballad of Serenity by Sonny Rhodes which, you have it right, is from Firefly. Thank you to cybermathwitch for being able to beta at the drop of a hat.
They are not survivors; no one will survive this dying world and its endless turning towards a meeting with their sun. They are the stranded, the abandoned, the last of humanity walking the dust-covered planet.
The Earth was only the human race’s beginning, its origin story and birthplace, a launching place for the ancient colonies now scattered among the stars. It will be the end for those who are still here.
Then again, they've never been good at giving up.
“Help me find this and we may yet make it.” Sif’s armor gleams in the pale yellow sunlight, a promise of protection from the dangers of space and the ground-bound alike. The alien is unafraid of the humans facing her, unafraid of their recovered blasters and sharpened knives, and Natasha’s instincts tell her it is not arrogance that gives her such assurance. That she is not alone, that a handful of other humans already stand in support behind her, likely helps as well. “The Hammer was linked to Thor’s DNA. If we locate it, I can rewrite its code and override those controls. I can summon more help for this world.”
She looks steadily at Natasha and Clint over the diagram she refers to, her fingers resting on the delicate sketch of a beacon that could save them. Likely not all, likely not enough, but some; some of those abandoned by the governments and industries when the doomsday bell finally tolled for their world.
That the bell sounded like dry facts and the fury of thousands is no falsehood of memory or time.
“And it’s here.”
“When we came to assist with the evacuation, we did not count on being caught by the anomaly here. Most of our ship crashed in this place.” The Asgardian glances at the graveyard over her shoulder. The spires and twisted wreckage rise high into the wide sky in a mockery of the skyscrapers and towers of humanity’s great cities, humanity’s greatest accomplishments left for the sun to devour. At any moment, it seems, they too could take off with smoke trails and silence in the roar of the great engines and thrusters. “If it is anywhere, it will be here.”
“Well, that’s more than we’ve had for the last few months,” Clint says, stringing the words out as he catches Natasha’s gaze out of the corner of his eye. He does not need to say more than that; they have rarely needed to say much when it comes to things between them. It is a second chance at escape, it is a promise as tenuous as the ones made by their leaders before they were betrayed, it is just enough hope to make her want to scream. Instead she considers the diagram, the boneyard, the alien who has not yet said the words she needs to hear.
“Who will you take if your help comes?”
Sif meets her eyes, level and unapologetic for her answer.
“All that I can.”
Not all, indeed.
On the tawny morning that brings an Asgardian corpse to light, Sif kneels in the wreckage and cradles the body with her dark hair spilling over her shoulder, hiding her face from the onlookers. There is grief in her silence, terrible and heavy, but hope has been such a fleeting thing to cling to in the copper future of their days; all their expectations have been already tempered by ash and rubble and time.
She takes a breath, her ribcage shuddering underneath the gleaming silver of her armor; when she rises it is with hard determination, her mouth set and eyes flat. “Thor’s Hammer is still out there. Let us find it.”
They do not mention the way her long fingers curve around the remains, pale and slender in death’s grasp.
They draw more people in as they go, word spreading through drifters and skeptics and the ordinary drunks that someone is digging up the boneyard, and they think they’re going to call for help. Those who are starving for hope, those are hellbent on living, those who shook their fists at the heavy spaceships rising ponderously into the sky without them, come to the edge of the excavation site and stand. Some stay, some go, and some lose themselves further in their despair.
Swelling from twelve to thirty to seventy-five, they put their backs and hearts into the project and the earth that will betray them to labor together under the bright golden sky.
“Call me Pepper,” the slender woman says when asked for a name, dark freckles scattered across her face with edges etched like ash into her fair skin. Even in the frantic days of their destruction she possesses a self-confidence that smooths over the dirt on her clothing and the frazzled air to her hair. If this had been decades ago, Natasha thinks occasionally, she would be the leader of a vast corporation or government, overseeing thousands with a deft and queenly air.
Instead the other red-haired woman oversees the search and salvage operation, maneuvering people with a natural touch, soothing feathers and spending long hours into the night hunched over lists of supplies and maps with Sif to discuss likely locations, the next best place to dig. How deep, how wide, how long can we spend there?
No one asks about the inflamed and twisted scar on her shoulder, a spot where it seems fire ate away at the join of humerus to scapula in a brief and dizzying blast. She does not tell them how she earned it in the same way that she does not tell them her given name.
There are many secrets under the light of the dying sun, and with humanity’s last days so easily measured now it is rarely worth it to seek them out.
Lieutenant Colonel Maria Hill arrives with a squad of thirty soldiers, dragging them out of the tar-coated wilderness to stand before the rough fence in formation and parade rest.
“We were an escort for military brass on board one of the L-ships. When it came time to take off, they discovered there wasn’t enough room left for us,” she says with a lifted chin and mottled bruises that race down her temple and under her collar. The scorn in her tone lays bare the knowledge that this revelation had been no surprise to those figureheads at all. “They shot my commanding officer when he tried to see the numbers for himself.”
Natasha studies the soldier quietly. She’s caught glimpses of such escorts and knows the armaments they carried to keep protesters and refugees from scrambling into convoys, into cockpits. It wouldn’t have been impossible for the soldiers to turn those same weapons on the ship, to riddle the hull with lethal holes or knock out the engines and ground it for boarding. As fractured as the wildfire of rumor and news was in the scorched landscape, any whisper of an aborted launch would have sent pulses and hopes soaring. What had it taken them to let that ship take off, racing into the hazy orange atmosphere with all promise of safety?
Her answer is in the set of the men’s jaws, the steel in the women’s eyes. The corners of Hill’s mouth are tight and pinched with the same unyielding conviction that drives those already in the graveyard, sending them to work relentless shifts and endless days. It’s clear from her stance that the women and men behind her are, until the end, under her protection.
Natasha exchanges a glance with Pepper. It’s a subtle tell that the other woman’s clipboard is drawn against her chest as she comes to her own conclusions about the heavily armed squad in front of them; only the promise of Clint’s bow and readied weapons behind the perimeter have made it worthwhile to be so vulnerable. But Sif has trusted them to know more about humans than she does, believes them invested in this as heavily as she is. In the end it is their call.
“And if there’s not room on an Asgardian ship?” Pepper asks, her nerves hidden under a cool expression and her iron spine. The focus of thirty-one soldiers snaps to her with frightening speed, measuring and intent and unified. But Hill’s lips only press flatter, the need to save her people driving her as hard and as clearly as the desire to survive drives Natasha, and none of the women and men behind her shift their hands towards their holstered weapons.
“That’s the point of this, isn’t it? To find help so there will be enough room?”
“If this works,” Natasha interjects smoothly, counting on Clint’s bow, counting on the flags the soldiers still wear like badges of honor on their uniforms. Their planet will kill them, their sun consume them, their leaders abandon them - but the code they live their lives by remains. The Lt. Colonel meets her eyes, her chin still high, the tight knot of her bun pulling strands of dark hair away from her face.
“At this point,” she says with frank honesty, “any chance is better than what we already have.”
Natasha can almost hear Clint muttering, “Ain’t that the truth,” in the back of her mind. When she smiles, slight and fleeting, it is as much for him as the team in front of her.
“We make no promises,” she tells them, Pepper’s own agreement evident in her unfolding body language, “but we’re not giving up.”
Something settles in Maria’s expression.
“Neither are we.”
Pepper and Sif integrate the roster slowly, careful to split up the majority of the soldiers so an overwhelming take-over isn’t an option, careful to bolster the exhausted shifts and keep the best of the secrets hidden away. Wilson and Carter, the two medics who kept their squad alive on the journey, join the small number of those treating the injuries from disuse, distraction, or disease that plague the camp. Maria herself eventually joins Natasha and the women who organize, who debate, who decide what comes next; who lead.
Clint sees them once, the two red-haired women and two dark-haired soldiers gathered around a topographic map and planning out the next dig, the next supply mission. He laughs at them, shaking his head when they look up curiously, and only explains his amusement to Natasha later that night. “I don’t know who I should be more afraid of,” he teases, tearing his dinner roll in half and offering her a piece.
“All of us,” she replies as she accepts the warm bread, its golden crust light on her calloused fingertips, and Clint grins at her like she’s a new sun lighting up the world.
They make a place, make a purpose, make a bid for their freedom; they walk cracked roads and rusted sand for supplies and information, they map and scour the jumbled hulls and fragmented skydrives. The anomaly has made a Gordian knot of the carcasses it drags down, scattering pieces across the gaping wound of its feeding grounds, that last great experiment gone terribly wrong when the technology that would have saved all of Earth’s inhabitants doomed the last of them instead. They learn its ways and uncover more pieces of the alien ship they seek.
They are not the only ones who went looking for a way out.
The boneyard makes for a rich harvest if you are willing to brave its dangers, and the scavengers that come to their dying system to gather up scraps and circuits are often willing enough. They are not the initial starships that descended with missions of mercy, do not board those that can be found and carry them off after the recolonizing ships of humankind. They do not care about the thirsty refugees and final humans shouting for help below them; they keep control of their crafts through lazy and dispassionate fire when mobs rush their positions. They come for a cargo full of minerals and parts, to dig up what remains of the earth’s harvest and the ships lost to its possession.
They come to the graveyard and find it now defended.
Most turn aside in the knowledge of an easier bounty in crumbling cities and abandoned skyscrapers. A few need to be, as Wilson puts it, ‘persuaded.’ But the only one that is allowed near arrives under a violent orange sky, when Clint is the look-out for the dig and Natasha a red shadow beside him. They watch as the deadly Ravager craft skims the perimeter before circling to scope out the defenses, making a lazy loop around the dig - and backs out of range of the evident weaponry.
Backs out, only to begin flashing its wing lights in a clear pattern.
“What the-” Clint starts to say. When he falls silent Natasha glances at him, searches his face for some explanation of the stricken expression she sees there. “I know that code,” he tells her after a minute, voice rough, but it’s still not an explanation. That comes when the man who climbs out of the ship onto the parched landing strip bears more than a passing resemblance to her lover, even from the hangar where she can cover Clint’s back.
She’s close enough to listen as they greet each other with wariness and surprise, close enough to hear when Barney says, “Get outta this place. Come with me.” In that moment Natasha can taste the recycled ship air, can see the display and star coordinates on the viewscreen as the last of the dust leaves her lungs - until Clint he shakes his head.
“All those ships, all those people - how many do you think can make it off the Earth?” He points to the lights in the sky, the vultures picking at the bones of the dead with little regard for the worms still crawling them beyond an occasional blaster shot. Barney stares at him and says nothing. “Not enough,” Clint tells him. “Not enough. So yeah, we’re looking for Thor’s Hammer, ‘cause if we find it? A few more people are going to survive.”
“And if you don’t?”
He shrugs with one shoulder in a rough gesture that involves more of his body than it ordinarily would, as if he’s shaking off his brother’s presence, his brother’s doubts.
In the world that they are shaped by, blood will only tell so much.
“Then we all die anyway. If you’re going to go, Barney, go. I won’t blame you. But I’m going to stay. If you care, about any of this, about me, you could do something useful for once.”
Barney boards his ship while Clint watches him go, that ultimatum hanging in the air stirred by whirling engine rotors.
From the barren plain of the hangar, she watches them both.
“Natasha,” Clint says with exhaustion when he returns to the fractured concrete structure, but they do not talk about it. They do not talk about it when Clint lays out for Maria and Sif that the Ravager had been his brother and had only stopped by for old time’s sake. No danger, no threat; not to the project. Just to them. Because they do not talk about it, even when so little often needs to be voiced between them, until nothing lies against them but the night.
“He could have gotten us off planet.” Natasha traces a scar across Clint’s collarbone, knowing her voice is only a murmur in the uneasy darkness.
“I know, Natasha, but at what price? He’s running with the Ravagers now. The things that they do...” He exhales and shifts under her hand, his anxiety telegraphed as clear as clean daylight in the tension under her fingers and the twist of his head away from her.
She wants to live. She wants to dig her nails into life and hold on, hold on, hold on; everything in her screams to fight, to make it. They joined Sif’s crusade on the barest promise of an escape, of a future. Once, the dust-coated girl she had been would have leapt on the Ravager’s craft without a second thought and cut her way through any resistance or trace of her own conscience, sure only in her abilities and the boy who would have gone with her. She was that girl not so long ago; she still longs to dig her nails into Clint’s skin and scream - but.
A web ties her now, binds her down to the earth that will revolt against the kiss of the sun and bring them to their knees. Threads invisible to the naked eye stretch from her to Clint, to others, to more than she could have imagined. In the scope of her thoughts they stand like witnesses across the graveyard, unbroken by the long days ahead of them or sorting through the shards of what they have left and refusing to yield. Maria. Pepper. Sitwell. Maya. More; dozens more, who wait for salvation to come from broken machinery, not slaughterships in the sky.
Natasha wants to live, but she can see now what kept her grounded against the promise of the sky.
“When did you become a good man?” She murmurs. She does not need to say she already agreed with him; the fact that she stayed in the depths of the hangar and let Barney turn his back on them is proof enough of that. She does not need to say she trusts him; that has never been in doubt. Now it’s simply clearer that she’s accepted not what is inevitable, because this life never has been, but what she has come to see is right.
Foolish of her, to think she could escape the end of this world unscathed.
Clint huffs at her words as his arm draws her closer, draws her near enough that he can bend his head and press a kiss against her hair.
“I’m the farthest thing from it,” he tells her with the wryness she loves him for, the crooked honesty she cherishes. It is not quite a lie, not quite; they are here, they are staying on the cratered ground that is already turning to ash. And they are not alone.
Natasha tucks up against him, savoring the warmth of his body on hers, and finds what sleep she can.
Four days later they see a Ravager craft delivering a steel-and-bolt crane to the edge of the graveyard, the winches barely winding, the three-inch-thick beams creaking. It is more than they have managed to cobble together for moving the rubble and a single day’s work is now halved.
It is left without comment, and the craft is not seen again.
“Fuck,” he whispers against the grime and sweat-streaked skin of her neck, “fuck, Natasha.”
She works to catch her breath, the cold metal of the steel beam pressed flush against her naked back, while the chatter of the twilight shift begins to roll in through the haphazard walls of this abandoned shelter. Clint doesn’t need to say any more, never has to say any more, but the dust in the air and the lurid red clouds visible through gaps in the sheet metal and their discovery of Thor’s armguard with its weathered white bones speak eloquently enough for both of them. It is desperation, it is a frantic awareness that time is not on their side, it is an attempt to ground themselves in a moment that is so rapidly running out.
Natasha rests her hands on his shoulders, feeling his chest heave against her belly, and holds on.
They are the dregs of humanity, the last of the unwanted, unworthy enough, unimportant enough, unloved enough to be left on the surface of their dying planet when the great recolonizing ships rose into the sky.
But they aren’t going down without a fight.
Natasha watches the trio approach for the last quarter-mile of their journey, their progress slow through the minefield of starships. Unless they have hidden weapons or help, she isn’t worried by their arrival; the crew here at this new pit, Sif notwithstanding, will not be so easily overwhelmed by two women and a single man. Stragglers often approach them when they’re working outside their expanded perimeter and seem most vulnerable. They come to beg for shelter or sustenance, to query for any hope that all is not lost. The sun hanging sullenly in the sky is answer enough to the latter, and only the work of their hands will gain them the former. But they come, and Natasha lets them, because thousands were left on this drought-stricken land and any one of them could be the one to find the Hammer.
Clint has been watching them too, his body braced against the recovery rope slithering into the pit. She doesn’t need to ask what he thinks when the pressure of his shoulder against her hip hasn’t changed, when he hasn’t called down to Sif to alert her to the one-armed man and the women with rifles slung across their carrysacks. The weight of her own blaster is more than an equal match for those.
The trio stops a hundred feet away from the dig. Neither of the women make moves to bring their rifles around although their scrutiny is nearly as intense as Natasha’s. Jagged edges and treacherous footing still lie between them, in front of them, but sound carries easily enough for all.
“We have heard the Lady Sif is here,” the man calls in a voice that might have been thundering before the end of days. His broad shoulders cant to the left as if he is still unaccustomed to the absence of his right arm, his appearance is ragged and unkempt; his blond hair is knotted by the wind, his beard twisted and frayed. But something in his shadowed gaze stops Natasha’s dismissal and holds her attention. Holds Clint’s too, while he stands with the crimson sky spreading behind him like a cloak. “May we speak with her?”
Before either of them can answer him the rope shifts against Clint’s grip. In the span of a single breath Sif has hauled herself up to the edge of the pit to stare with wide, dark eyes at the stranger across the graveyard.
“Thor?” There is a child’s wonder, a woman’s incredulity in the word - and then she is scrambling over the debris, laughing and crying, to meet the other Asgardian halfway.
“You kind of don’t expect to find yourself sheltering an alien,” Jane tells them in the cool reprieve of twilight, the vagrant sun slinking down below the metal mountains. “Then again, given how fast Thor healed after we found him, maybe we should have thought of it sooner.”
“And how cut he was. What?” Darcy asks when Jane gives her an aggravated look. “Standards of personal fitness have gone way down in the last century or two.”
“Anyway, between the shock of losing an arm and whatever the hell got him all the way out to our stretch of land, he didn’t remember much. And it’s not like we were in the thick of things to begin with. That’s why it took so long for us to realize you all were out here, and even longer to figure out what you were after. That was the key to jump-starting his memories, I guess.”
The two Asgardians are still shoulder to shoulder and speaking rapidly in their native tongue. With their translators turned off none of the humans can understand them. With the amount of sheer emotion playing over their expressions, though, it’s not very hard to guess what it is they’re saying. Natasha has picked up a name with varying degrees of anger and denial attached to it - Loki - and another that the discussion seems to be centered on now - Mjolnir. What’s clearer to her than the Asgardian tongue, though, is the wistful and almost impatient way Jane watches Thor. But regardless of affections, regardless of resurrections and reunions, they are all of them still stranded. Thor’s Hammer is still far from their grasp.
And then Thor switches his translator on in a clear effort to include the humans, all the while holding Sif’s questioning gaze.
“Have you tried the northeast corner?” When she shakes her head, dark hair falling over her armor, he frowns. “Whatever happened to the Hammer in the fall, it can no longer come to me. But I have a hunch.”
“It’s more than we’ve had,” Sif tells him, clasping his left hand in hers, and whether it is her influence or their own dreams everyone straightens to listen with a little more liveliness.
The convoluted console lies open to the deep purple sky, the first of the true stars winking in among the searchlights of the scavengers. It is graceful despite its blocky design, elegant even in its bewildering complexity, and it hums with a life that waits for Thor’s touch to direct it. They are all there; Wilson and Cameron and Carter and Everhart and more, so many more, ringing the edge of the excavation pit as the steel-and-bolt crane overhead fades into the darkness. All waiting, all watching, all praying to nothing or everything as Thor pulls up the beacon commands.
A depression appears on the metallic surface of the Hammer’s body: five fingertips and a palm. He meets Sif’s eyes, then Jane’s, before taking a breath through a ghost of a smile. Natasha’s fingers wrap tighter around Clint’s as the Asgardian places his hand on the Hammer, anxiety and nerves warring with each other when the device hums -
The floating handle screams with white light as a beacon races up its length, blasting off to arrow up towards the sky. Fast, faster than thought, fast enough that none of the ships between here and Asgard can stop it; fast as the hope in their hearts.
Clint squeezes her hand back, his heart beating faster against her chest, and they watch it disappear into the night.
They are not survivors; no one will survive this dying world and its endless turning towards a meeting with their sun. But they will not be here when that saga ends, for ships came like promises in a dawn’s new light, gleaming and silver and opening their hulls to take in the people, the civilians and soldiers, those who rushed in with raised hands and those who had been there from the earliest days of the digs.
The Earth was only their beginning. The rest of the universe will be their story now.