"REJOICE IN YOUR PAIN, for you have the honour of-"

"Sorry, can you just hold on a second?" Scottie Casey asked. She rolled over slightly, her broken arm crumpled underneath her and causing her to wince at the pain.

"Excuse me?" The alien decked in armour and a cloak asked her, his eyes narrowing as the tall female alien stood slightly behind him with her staff raised offensively.

The small blonde haired girl tried to push herself back slightly, her left hand cradled to her chest as she clenched her teeth slightly at the pain that was echoing through her entire body. She groaned before looking back at the aliens, knowing that she was playing a dangerous game.

"Where is the location of the stone holder?" The man asked, his hands moving through the air and causing a thick shard of metal to drop on her already broken arm. Scottie screamed out in pain, sweat trickling down her forehead and mixing in with the blood from the various cuts that she had splayed across her face.

Oh how she wished she had just stayed in that hideous cell her life had revolved around for two years now. If only she'd just kept her head down.

"You might as well just kill me," she coughed out, blood spilling from her lips and dripping down her chin. Her eyes shined in the light of the fire that crackled around them. She was surprised her breathing hadn't gone yet, but she supposed there must have been some sort of oxygen supply that was keeping her alive, considering the fact they were thousands of feet under a large reserve. "Because I'll never tell you."

The man laughed, his grey skin barely moving as he held his hands in front of him. They folded themselves into a basket, reminding her of how Tony would sometimes do the same when he was concentrating on something.

Please work, Scottie thought. If her plan was to fail she would never get to apologise to the man for leaving him the way she did. But there had been no other choice.

"You humans," the woman started, her blue skin shining in the bare light as she held the staff above her head ready to strike the broken and bloodied girl for the final time. "So easy to kill."

While Scottie had never really been one for snappy one-liners, she knew that if she was going to die then at least she could die with the knowledge that Tony would have been proud of her if he had heard it. Scottie moved her hand that she had been cradling into her jacket out, her head tilting slightly as she clenched her teeth at the resistance her body had built up beginning to crack.

"That's the thing though," the girl spoke, a small smirk landing on her face. "I'm not human, bitch."

Slamming her hand outwards, she stopped resisting. The beam of sunlight shot straight out her palm, slamming into the two aliens who had been peering over at the broken girl. Scottie heaved slightly as the beam stopped, allowing her to notice the hole that she had blown into the side of the building. It took her a second before she realised what she had done.

"Aw shi-" she began to say, but her words were lost in as water cane slamming in through the hole, sending the girl swirling through the water around them.

____

T'Challa sighed as he looked down at his little sister with displeasure. He crossed his arms, rolling his eyes as he moved away from her.

"They are my sandals!" He huffed, fed up of the girl asking him again what he was wearing on his feet. She twitched slightly, her laughter filling the room as she moved to pick up one of the beads from her bracelet, making sure the black orb rolled back into place.

"Brother, they are horrible," she informed him, watching as he peered out of the window at where Nakia stood talking to the White Wolf. The man was collecting his weekly care package, something that he had agreed upon accepting once he had been woken from the cytogenetic coma that had helped fix his brain washing.

"At least he didn't freeze," Shuri teased the man, knowing fine well that she wasn't talking about the ice process. T'Challa rolled his eyes as he prepared to fireback a comeback at his sister.

A small beep from her display in the corner of the lab distracted the siblings from their playful banter. Furrowing his eyebrows as he watched his little sister rush over to the screen with excitement but also confusion in her eyes, T'Challa couldn't help but also mirror her emotions.

"What is it?" He asked, leaning over her shoulder as various graphs on the display seemed to peak up and down repeatedly - what he assumed must have triggered the noise.

"Strange peaks of solar energy have been appearing in the atmosphere for the past three days with no explanation of what is causing it," Shrui began to explain, pointing to where the outer atmosphere was highlighted around the earth. Her brother watched as she motioned to New York, Calcutta, Edinburgh, Tahiti and finally above Wakanda to point out where the solar rays had been reflecting off recently.

He went to ask more about it - especially if they should be concerned about it appearing above their very own country when the doors to the lab were slammed open in a hurry.

"MY KING!" T'Challa and Shuri jumped as Okoye barged into the lab, two others of the Dora Milaje on her flanks. She seemed more stressed out than usual and the siblings instantly picked up on her defensive stance.

"General? What has worried you?" T'Challa asked as he walked towards the woman, his hand instinctively resting on the Black Panther necklace that rested on his neck.

Okoye looked between the siblings before gulping slightly. "I think you better come see this, my king."

_____

Natasha watched as Wanda leaned back on her hands, looking up at the sky as they both stared at the stars. She didn't say anything but simply waited for the Sokovian to break the silence if that was what she wanted.

While they usually didn't stay in the open for this long, Steve had been unable to refuse the request of the grieving teenager. She had lost her brother only three years prior and now she had lost the only person who had been able to fill the hole that he left. The enhanced girl needed this break.

Wanda watched as the constellation shone brightly in the dark sky. She missed Scottie more than she ever would have imagined. It had never been her who knew the constellations by heart, and she had never really chosen to listen to what the girl had pointed out. She had always been more focused on the passion that she had said it with.

"You know," Wanda started, feeling Natasha's eyes flicked across to the other side of the blanket that the two woman were sitting on atop the grass. "I used to think it was a waste of time to sit and watch the stars. They never changed. I never quite understood why Scottie was so excited by them when there is so much more to discover on this planet."

Wanda paused, taking a deep breath before her eyes caught on to a flash of gold that shot across the dark sky above them. Natasha smiled slightly, not having realised that there was supposed to be any shooting stars or meteors passing by recently.

"I didn't know that was forecasted," Natasha murmured, trying to keep the small but limited conversation going. It was the most passionate she had heard Wanda speak in a while.

Wanda furrowed her eyebrows before a small smile crossed her lips. "It wasn't. But she always said that the universe has a funny way of showing us that people never really leave us."

There was a moment of silence before Natasha looked over at Wanda to see the tears glistening in her eyes. The newly blonde woman stretched her hand out, lightly grasping Wanda's as the red-head turned to look at her.

"I miss her too."

They sat in comfortable silence before the familiar sound of heavy boots moving through the grass approached them. The two woman nodded before standing up and brushing themselves down, Natasha tucking the blanket under her arm as they all turned to look at each other.

"Where to now, Cap?"

_____

Scottie gasped as her eyes shot open, water spitting out of her mouth as she clawed at the sandy bank she was lying on. Rolling on to her back as she vomited up water that she had swallowed, she clutched at her stomach in disgust as it almost felt like it was grinding her already hoarse throat.

Clambering to her feet, the girl stumbled slightly as she tried to regain her balance. She wasn't sure how she had ended up in that facility, but she knew that she must have been there a while. She had no idea who this Thanos man was that had seemingly sent his children after her, but she knew it wasn't good if they had travelled to Earth and into an underground top secret bunker simply to find whoever was "holding the stone" or whatever they had requested from her.

Spinning in a circle, Scottie looked around and noticed that there wasn't really much going for her. She had no idea how far she had travelled down the stream - but even with that she had no idea where she was before her stream journey. Wrapping an elastic band from her wrist around her hair, she limped forward with weary eyes.

She didn't know how she was going to get there, but she knew the one place she needed to go.

She needed to get to wherever Tony Stark was and warm him of what was coming.