Trouble on the Horizon

She is on her way to a refugee camp, when her ship's communicators start relaying distress messages. One after another, from various different planets that she has helped over the years, the messages come, but they are all the same. People are turning into dust.

She is torn on which signal to respond to first when her pager, the pager, starts beeping incessantly.

When she had told Fury to contact her for emergencies only, she had meant it and he had not contacted her since. He had kept it safe and within reach at all times, she knew that. He had told her that. It was the first time since she had given him that pager, that he had contacted her.

The pager became her sole focus. Fury wouldn't contact her unless the situation was really really dire. The attack on Manhattan by Loki had proved that.

So she mutes her ship's communicators and lands it on the nearest abandoned planet she can find. She is faster without it.

She pockets the pager, letting the beeps spurn her into flying as fast as she can towards Earth.

***

She enters Earth's atmosphere at full speed and lands somewhere in Mexico. It has taken her eight days, eight long days, to reach Earth. She turns off the pager, knowing that wherever the other one was, wherever Fury was, she could track it in the next five minutes.

In the next eight minutes, she is standing behind four people (the only ones in the whole building, she had checked) who are looking at Fury's pager. None of them are Fury himself.

They turn around. Her mind whirls. Fury would never ever let the pager fall in someone else's hands. He knew the monumental risk of even telling someone about it. She doubted that he had told anyone about it.

"Where's Fury?". The words tumble out of her mouth of their own volition. It's the only question that matters right now. These people were either Fury's friends or his enemies. She just had to find out which.

"Who are you?" The blonde woman is the first one to gather her wits about her. She is looking at her with suspicion, a hand on the gun at her waist. An appropriate response, Carol thinks, to an intruder in your building.

"My name is Carol. I'm here to help. Now, where's Fury and what's going on?" Carol thought it best to keep things simple. While she usually didn't mind annoying people and stepping on their toes, this was not the right time. She had seen the state of various other planets on her way here, and it was bad. Whatever had happened, they needed to figure out a way to undo it or find a viable solution to it.

"How do you know Fury?" The blond man beside Natasha asked, an edge to his voice as though expecting a fight to break out.

Carol didn't want a fight, especially now when she remembered Fury telling her about his 'Avengers Initiative', the last time she had come to visit Earth.

"Look, I get it. We're all on edge. We've all lost people. But right now isn't the best time to hear each other's autobiographies, is it? Let's just sit down and figure out how to get out of this mess."

"She's right. Let's sit and discuss this over. No one wants a fight." Colonel Rhodes pipes up from the side and starts herding them to a sitting room.

***

She sits and she stares. Her body is still, her poker face holding but her mind is going at light speed. Half of the universe turned to dust? How do we undo this? Can we undo this?

As she rises from the sea of her thoughts to the real world, she notices that all four of them are staring at her with a mix of emotions ranging from anticipation to curiosity. She does not want to be pulled into what is sure to be an interrogation so she makes the first move.