verb.
To come or go back to a place or person.
noun.
The firing of a weapon to counter a shooter's shot.
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They recoiled from their pasts, and in doing so found each other.
But the universe isn't kind enough to let a moment of peace last.
It took se...
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In all honestly, Kat felt sick. She couldn't remember having felt this nauseous in years, not without good reason – but this seemed as good a reason as any to feel like she was about to hurl her guts up.
Her palms were clammy as she checked over the thick cabling that snaked across the open warehouse floor, horribly aware that the layout was based entirely on her own best guesswork. Even if it had been checked over by others, she still had the most hideous feeling that if this all went wrong, it would be her fault.
Realistically, she knew this didn't all lie on her shoulders, but it certainly felt like that as they inched closed to the first test run of their time machine.
Time machine. Her stomach lurched even thinking the words.
This was beyond ridiculous. How they'd even got to this stage after Tony Stark had advised them against it was a marvel. Even the stop they had made after leaving that house by the lake felt like a surreal dream, but it had to have been real. She didn't usually dream about gigantic green men sitting eating eggs in a diner.
It had to have been real, because here she was, pacing the floor of the compound in the shadow of Dr Bruce Banner – but not the same man she had first met five years ago. Not physically, anyway.
On some level, she had known he was off taking care of his own projects, living his own life. It wasn't odd that she hadn't seen him during the last five years, but she hadn't expected to meet him again looking like this. This hybrid of the man he had been and his Hulk form – which, admittedly she had never witnessed in person, but this was bewildering enough. As he had explained it, he had spent eighteen months fusing the 'brain' and the 'brawn' to create the state he currently existed in, and it seemed to be working for him. He was one of the few people she had encountered since the Snap who actually seemed jovial. He seemed happy, and maybe that was why he had been confident enough to try and help them with this insane scheme.
This time heist, she reminded herself wryly as she followed a cable to the ugly brown van parked in the centre of the shining white warehouse floor in the middle of the compound.
Stepping back and dusting off her hands when she was certain everything was secure, she wondered if she was framing all of this so sarcastically in her mind because she was utterly terrified. Because this was as close as she had gotten to real hope since she had watched their decimated team fly off to the stars to confront Thanos for a second time. Their failure then had broken her. She wasn't sure what would happen if she let herself hope too much this time. If she let herself believe that this was in any way actually possible.
"I think we're ready." She announced softly, stepping back towards the control panel she had spent the last week helping Bruce construct. The heavy calculations she had left up to him, but physically building things? That she could do. It helped that most of the high-tech equipment had already been hauled across the country by Scott. She wasn't entirely sure how she would go about building a Quantum Tunnel from scratch.
