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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The blinding elation of discovering that their attempt at time travel actually worked lasted for a few hours, but it didn't take long for the real, tangible problems that they still had to face to rise to the surface.
As Steve had said, they had figured out the how, they now needed to work on the where and when.
Because now they actually had to plan to track down the Infinity Stones. And they had all of space and time to work with, but a limited number of Pym Particles to send them there.
It was a challenge to even know where to begin, to say the least.
Having sat through hours, days even of briefings on each stone, on their specific powers and the locations they had been scattered throughout over the course of the last few years, Kat was sure her brain was about to start leaking out her ears. Her head swam with terminology that was far above her pay grade. Space, Time, Soul, Power, Reality, Mind... It was more than she could wrap her thoughts around, but she wasn't the only one. Thankfully, it seemed that at least one person on the team had some knowledge of at least one of the stones, or had encountered them in some capacity. Thor, in his own rambling way, had been the one to introduce them to the Aether, the form of the scarlet Reality stone. Rocket had encountered the Power Stone on his travels, and seemed to know where it had been stored on some distant planet for a number of years before it was stolen. Nebula's briefing on the Soul stone's location had been suitably harrowing, her knowledge stemming from the fact that Thanos had killed her sister in pursuit of it.
The Time Stone had been in the possession of Dr Steven Strange in the years leading up to the Snap – Tony had seen him make use of it in that final battle on Titan. The Space Stone had been at the root of too many of Steve's adventures during the War, when it had been in HYDRA's possession. Then SHIELD had taken over storage of it until it found itself at the centre of the attack on New York in 2012.
The only stone that Kat had encountered personally had been the Mind Stone, when she had worked frantically alongside Shuri to remove it from Vision's forehead in Wakanda five years ago. She had recounted that fact softly to the room, smothering the shudder that had threatened to run through her when she thought of that day. When she wondered if, had she worked a little faster, they would even be sitting in this situation now. But she couldn't linger on that thought. She had already done so for far too long.
Before it had found a home within the synthazoid, though, the Mind Stone was another that had been in HYDRA's possession. They had kept it in Sokovia, where Wanda had been granted her powers along with her brother. The facility where Kat would have been working, had she not attempted to flee from HYDRA in 1992 and been trapped in cryostasis as a result. Before that, it had been in the hands of Thor's brother. A weapon he had used in his attempts to take over the Earth.
Save for Scott, every person in the room had found themselves encountering the stones at some stage within the last decade – or more, for some.
However, that also presented the issue that so many time-travel movies loved to exploit. The stones featured so heavily in their own timelines, and just dropping back into those situations would cause a myriad of issues, especially if they found themselves face to face with their past selves.
