❝MR. STARK, THERE'S SOMEONE HERE TO SEE YOU.❞
❝WHO THE HELL IS IT?❞
❝WELL, SIR, SHE SEEMS TO THINK SHE'S YOUR DAUGHTER.❞
❝CHRIST.❞
❝ACTUALLY, IT'S CHRISTA.❞
POST- AVENGERS: AGE of ULTRON; PRE- CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR
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"Mom... please don't die."
Hospital in Iowa - December 31, 2015
Christa Amory didn't exactly think that New Year's day was supposed to be the way it was. Who expects their mom to die just minutes after the ball is dropped, after all?
People kissing, jumping around, blowing party blowers, cracking poppers, drinking fancy liquids in fancy glasses.
Yeah... that wasn't what Christa was doing.
So her mom hadn't been doing that well. Well... that was an understatement. She had been diagnosed with brain cancer almost exactly one year ago, and that in itself was horrid. Christa thought her world was going to end when the doctors told them. But then it had gotten worse, and the treatments had made her mother sick, and the brain cancer had affected some part of her that had messed with her mom's whole thinking process, and Christa had slowly been losing her over an entire agonizing year, and that in itself was even worse than everything else.
Her world was going up in flames far fiercer than she'd ever thought they would be.
"Mom... please don't die."
She'd sat at her chair right beside her mother's bed at the drearily gray hospital--alone for now. She had absolutely no relatives to sit with her, but that wouldn't have mattered right now; at the moment, all she needed was to be alone with her mother. Her right hand was wrapped in her mother's left one, and it was cold--not freezing, not like a body, but like the blade of a knife that had been left next to a fan too long. The hair on her mother's head--it used to be such a lovely color, a shade of rich dark chocolate that almost perfectly matched Christa's--was now gone. And her face... it was so pale. Like all the life had been sucked out of her already.
Eventually, time passed. Her mother woke up just in time for the new year to ring in. People were exclaiming all across the hospital, despite the fact that Christa doubted it was allowed. She gave a small smile to her mother. Maybe it would get better. But then, a few minutes later, things had gone... bad. Her mother's eyes went blank, and her heart monitor went into a flat line. While people were still cheering, drinking champagne or fizzing drinks, kissing, Christa's mother's heart wasn't beating. Christa yelled for doctors to come in, screamed at them with hot, angry tears running down her face, and they ran in and did the best that they could, and tried over and over again to stop it, to fix it, to make Christa's mother stop dying, but it was never enough, never enough.
So Christa had gone home with the social workers that night.
It had all been so long--it felt like decades, all that had happened. Decades and centuries and millenniums and then eons, and it felt like it was never going to stop.
The gravestone read what Christa would later discover to be a lie:
