Cape Issue [a Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel Story]

Chapter 1: Starting at a Loss

The Carrelli home had not changed much in the time between second grade and when Kamala Khan was eighteen years old, in the year 2023. The familiar family had moved out of an apartment and into a house, but the Carrelli home had not changed much; the interior showed people of habit in their habitation — there was a collection of technology going back decades, maintained and improved by necessity and the curiosity of a residential technical genius. A few things were new, but almost nothing in the past three months – in which Kamala spent on a mission into deep space on a rare instance where she let the Avengers call on her from their reserves. Being an Avenger at a bygone time, and being dissatisfied with it, was the basis of the decision to become a Champion, but even some of her Champion teammates were on the space team that lasted up until the past week.

Kamala wondered how her fellow Champions were doing back on solid ground when the Universe wasn't ending like in the kinds of cataclysmic "all hands on-deck" events that the Avengers saw more than once a year. For her, the adaptation back to Earth wasn't so easy. She'd been to space before. It wasn't the gravitational shift that brought her down; it was that one new thing had become a fixture in the Carrelli home while she was away and it reflected a moment that happened without her around.

"My Way" played from the CD speaker as votive candles flickered behind glass beside a framed picture of Giacomo "Pop-Pop" Carrelli. The house was filled with burdened mourning and reverential celebration. Pop-Pop, who had been a constant and practically one of her own family, had passed four days before the Avengers' shuttle made it to the ground. Nonna received her with heaving sobs which couldn't dampen her matriarchal warmth.

"Kamala, thank God. How's college treating you, sweet girl? They feeding you okay?"

Nonna sniffled and Kamala patted her on the back in a hug neither party rushed to finish.

"It's just orientation," Kamala lied. Orientation was supposed to happen, but another potential End of the World got in the way. "But, by the time I heard about Pop, I was stuck. I was worried you'd be mad at me."

Nonna let out one forced laugh, emphasizing a total scoff at the very idea.

"Mad atchu?! Kamala, Giacomo only knew how to suffer in silence. He never wanted to be trouble to anybody. If we weren't paying the hospital bills, I don't think I would have known! How about that? You don't feel bad, baby. We hoped he'd pull through, but he didn't and only Angelo, Bruno, and me were in the room when Giacomo didn't have anything left in him. I'm not mad at anybody. I'm mad at life for right now, but not you."

"Still..." Kamala trailed off. The self-blaming was seeping in so deep that she didn't have any argument — only a guilty feeling prompting her to form one. Out of anybody, Bruno probably would have called on her to say goodbye. She didn't see him around anywhere. Was he mad at her?

"Still he would be happy you're here and you gonna make a difference in this world, right?" Nonna patted her on the cheek and dried her tears, Nonna looked around the crowded room. "Your parents around here somewhere?"

"I last saw them by the door. They brought me over," Kamala told her and she wasn't far off before another familiar face came forward and replaced the space Nonna had vacated.

Salvatore Passeri was a heavyset, bronze-skinned man with thick, curly hair on his hands, arms, his head, and under his flat, bulbous nose in a neatly-trimmed mustache. Each of his eyebrows were of equal volume to his mustache, but less curled, and sat above sparkling, honey-colored eyes. He wore a checkered print shirt and blue jeans. His hands were like catcher's mitts, but the care he had with them played into his trade; he'd inherited a toy shop from his father, who taught his son how to make what a factory assembly line couldn't or wouldn't. The proprietor of Passatempi Toys was at the gathering with his young daughter, Stella. He was an old family friend of the Carrellis who, in turn, became a family friend of the Khans after them. It was the condition of the Inter-immigrant exchange.