As soon as Clint spoke, clutching the gauntlet, Steve sprang into action. "Get those stones as far away as possible!" he said, using Thor's hammer, Mjolnir, to incapacitate an alien.
"No!" Bruce interrupted from his position a few feet away. "We need to get them back where they came from."
"No way to get them back." Tony reminded them. "Thanos destroyed the quantum tunnel."
"Hold on!" Scott's voice said through the fray of violence, as he shrank down from his giant self to his normal height. "That wasn't our only time machine."
Suddenly, we heard a jaunty jingle, almost like... a car alarm. Steve and I had the same idea, using the rubble to push ourselves to higher ground.
"Anyone see an ugly brown van out there?"
"Yes!" A voice immediately answered. "But you're not gonna like where it's parked." We looked up to see that the voice came from the Asgardian woman on flying horseback above us.
Steve nodded, addressing Scott once again. "Get it started. We'll get the stones to you."
"We're on it, Cap," Hope acknowledged. She and Scott shrunk down, which looked almost like they were becoming invisible to the naked eye.
While fighting off our own aliens, we watched as Clint made his way through the battle, avoiding everyone and everything as he tried to get the Stones as far away from Thanos as possible. However, soon Thanos spotted them, and sent some of his aliens directly towards him.
Suddenly, the area around Clint turned purple for a split second, and then T'Challa was standing in front of him.
"Clint! Give it to me."
As T'Challa took his turn to fight his way through the crowds with the gauntlet in his arms, soon, like Clint, he was spotted by Thanos.
"Hey," I felt a hand grab mine. I turned to see Wanda standing beside me, and immediately pulled her into a bone-crushing hug.
"Oh my god, I thought I'd never see you again," I said into her shoulder, tears brimming even though this wasn't the time or place.
"Rogue, I can end this," she said, pulling away from me while keeping a tight hold of my hand. She gave me a look of steely determination, and the anger on her face was palpable. "Thanos has no idea what I'm capable of."
We both turned to look as Thanos's army surrounded T'Challa. They had knocked the gauntlet away from him.
I squeezed Wanda's hand. "Then go show him."
She smiled, using her powers to fly herself between Thanos and T'Challa, giving him the chance to escape.
"You took everything from me."
Thanos glared at her. There wasn't a glimmer of recognition in his eyes, because of course, this version of Thanos was paying for his future crimes. "I don't even know who you are."
"You will."
Wanda used her powers to levitate herself, as well as heavy pieces of debris. She threw them at Thanos, hitting him directly, bringing him to his knees. Before he could stand up, she hit him again and again with both debris and the sole extent of her powers.
As he tried to get away from her, she used her powers to entirely engulf him in her red mist, at the same time that Peter Parker rescued the gauntlet from T'Challa, who was still being chased by the aliens. Luckily for us, Wanda had their master trapped.
"Rain fire!" Thanos commanded, knowing that there was no way he could take Wanda down.
The aliens on his side looked confused, but it didn't take more than a few seconds for them to follow his command – even if it meant putting themselves in danger.
As Thanos's ships fired at all of us, putting us all in danger, Wong and his team created a group of identical portals, shielding us from the attack. But they couldn't shield us completely, and a lot of us got caught up in the blasts, including Peter Parker, who was trapped in the dirt, still holding on to the gauntlet.
Then, as suddenly as the attack began, it ended. I looked up to see that the ship was facing its attack elsewhere, towards something that I couldn't see.
"Um... Is anyone else seeing this?" I asked cautiously. The people who weren't otherwise engaged looked up, seeing what I could see. Nothing.
"What the hell is this?" Sam asked, flying through the sky with a better view than the rest of us.
A bright light flew towards Thanos's ship, tearing through it like it was made of paper. It took a while for any of us to be able to actually see who our savior was. And then it became glaringly obvious.
Carol Danvers.
"Oh yeah," Rocket said, looking up at her.
As Thanos's ship plunged into the sea, Steve called out to her, spotting Peter's struggles. "Danvers, we need an assist here."
She went to work, rescuing the gauntlet from Peter Parker and flying through the air with it, leaving a trail behind as the rest of us tried to keep the army occupied to give her time to get to the quantum tunnel. However, Thanos was one step ahead of us. He threw his sword at the quantum tunnel, causing an explosion that threw us all back, including Carol, who dropped the gauntlet on the ground, less than two feet away from me.
I ran to it and grabbed it, covering myself with an impenetrable force field before Thanos had seen where it landed.
"Rogue, get that back to Danvers," Tony said in my ear as he fought Thanos, with the help of Thor, Steve and Carol. However, Thanos had overpowered all four of them.
As I held the gauntlet in my hand, I realized our mistake. Thanos's army still outnumbered ours. Even if we could make it to the time machine/ugly brown van, he could follow us into the quantum tunnel. After all, he'd found a way to time travel to this point. We couldn't stop him by hiding the Stones. We could only stop him by using them.
"No," I said, not sure if I was talking to Tony or myself. By now, Thanos had spotted the gauntlet in my hands, and had sent his army in my direction. "Get them off me."
"What are you doing?" Steve asked, taking another shot at the purple alien.
"I'm doing what we should have done as soon as Thanos showed up here," I said breathlessly. "I'm gonna use the Stones to decimate Thanos and his army once and for all... forever."
Tony took a break from the fight, flying in my direction.
"Rogue, you're not doing this. You can't... I won't let you."
I shook my head, staring at the gauntlet because I couldn't look at him. "You don't have a choice, this isn't your decision."
"And it shouldn't be yours."
"But it is!" I cried, looking up for the first time. "It has to be, I have to end this." I gestured to the fight around us that was still taking place. "This isn't gonna stop. We're out of time."
I looked at him through the bubble of my force field. He removed the face of his mask, and I knew I'd never be able to forget how broken he looked. And I'd always know that I caused it.
"Don't do this," he begged in a whisper, shaking his head. "Baby, please don't do this. We can find another way. Any other way."
I smiled sadly. If there was any other way, we would have already done it. "Tell Nati that I love her, okay? That I did this because I want her life, her future, to be everything that ours wasn't. I want her to be happy, I want her to laugh every day, I never want her to worry that she's in danger for even a second." I took a breath, wiping away a tear. "And remind her, every single day, that she and her daddy were the absolute loves of my life."
At that moment, Thanos knocked Tony down, trying to get to me where the rest of his army had failed. Tony sprang into action, fighting Thanos with the help of so many of our team members who together, managed to hold him down.
I slipped the gauntlet onto my arm and it shrunk to fit my hand. I screamed out in pain when it connected, fusing with my arm and sending shots of agony up and down my entire left side. It felt like I could feel my skin melting.
"Rogue," I heard an angry voice say. I looked up to see Nat standing outside my force field. "I didn't come back just for you to die."
"Nat, I have to do this."
She shook her head. "Rogue, you don't understand. If you keep that force field up, if you do this alone, you'll die."
Before I could respond, Wanda flew into view. "She's not alone."
One by one, Okoye, Shuri, Nebula and her green sister, the horse-riding Asgardian, Carol, Hope, Maria Hill, Trish Walker, Jessica and Layla appeared in front of me, next to Wanda and Nat, while the male members of our team held back the army.
"If we do it together, we can all take it," Carol assured me.
Nat smiled. "You don't have to do this alone – you never did."
"No one has to die today," Jess said.
Nat held out one hand, her other one holding tightly to my mom's. Slowly, all the women around me joined hands. I let my force field down and held onto her hand, looking around at the battlefield that Thanos had created, the people that he'd taken from us, and the people that I was fighting to save. Even if the girls' plan didn't work, even if I died... it would be worth it.
With my other hand, I snapped.
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So, Rogue snapped. But will she survive?
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