Rogue: Annihilation (An Avengers Sequel)

13. I Survived For A Reason

Three Weeks Later

"Come in," I called to whoever was knocking on my door, not bothering to face them. Instead, my mind was focused on the screen in front of me. I wrote something down on a post-it note, sticking it to the relevant part of the picture.

"Some things came for you," Steve said in a voice that sounded defeated – the same way he'd sounded since the Snap.

"Thanks," I replied, barely listening to his words. My work was too important.

Soon I could feel him standing next to me. I looked over at him for the first time, from his disheveled, beard-less, exhausted face, to the box in his hands.

"You should... sleep," I suggested.

He raised an eyebrow at me. "Me? Have you slept for even one night since the... thing happened?"

I shook my head, unwashed hair dislodging from the now-loose bun that I had thrown it up in a week ago. "Nope. But I have to be awake. I can't build a spaceship in my sleep."

Steve looked at the board, at the spaceship that I was designing. I knew he thought it was stupid; everyone thought it was stupid, but I didn't care.

"Rogue..." he said with a sigh.

"Don't start," I warned him, my voice tense. "If you're not helping me, then I don't need your advice, okay?"

"I'm trying to help you," he assured me. "I thought you would be over this by now."

I looked up at him, frowning. "'Over this'? You thought I would stop looking for Tony just because you guys have?"

He dropped the box on the ground with a thud and crossed his arms. "Look, I know you don't want to hear this, but the likelihood that he survived Thanos's Snap is-"

"We did," I cut him off stoically. "We survived. I survived." I shook my head, trying to shake out the bad thoughts. "I lost Nat, and then I lost Sam, Bucky and Wanda. If Tony's gone too, then why? Why am I, of all people, still here?"

"It was random."

"Nothing's random," I said confidently, ripping one of the post-it notes from the picture and putting it in a different place. "I survived for a reason. I survived so that I could find Tony, so that he could help us destroy Thanos and bring everyone back."

Steve nodded, looking around the room before focusing back on me. "I want to bring everyone back as much as you do, you know that. But you're focusing on the wrong things. If we find Thanos, and reverse the Snap, Tony will come back."

"Maybe," I agreed, taking a sip of water from the cup beside my bed. It was tepid and tasted metallic. How long had I left it there? "Or, maybe he's still trapped in space. I can't take the chance that we'll bring everyone back and he won't be with them. I won't let him die in space."

Steve sighed again, sitting down heavily on my bed. I sat beside him, rubbing his arm sympathetically. We'd all lost a lot, and we coped with it in different ways. But the one thing we had in common was the stench of defeat.

"Thanos won," I said aloud, because I thought he needed to hear it. "But we're still here, we can figure out a way to save everyone." I nudged him. "I saved you, didn't I?"

A small smile crept onto his face. "Technically Thaddeus Ross saved me."

I rolled my eyes at the name. Of all the people that the Snap could have taken, why had Thaddeus Ross been allowed to survive it?

"But there's always a way," I persisted, looking at the spaceship again. It was simple, if maybe logistically impossible, but it was a start. Designing it gave me something to focus on, because if all I thought about was the people that I'd lost, I'd go crazy. "Stark would never stop searching for me. I owe him the same courtesy."