𝐀𝐕𝐀𝐓𝐀𝐑 - MCU

VI. THE SACRIFICE PLAY

VI. THE SACRIFICE PLAY
——————

Luna's night had been restless and without much sleep. She tossed and turned in her bunk that had been given to her by Fury. After Tony and Steve had fixed up the helicarrier, it wasn't pummeling to the ground and threatening to crash now, everybody was helping to clean up the inside of the ship.

The broken glass had been cleaned up and the wounded had been tended to. Some agents had been trying to pinpoint where Banner had landed after the Hulk took a swan dive off the helicarrier but with no luck so far.

Clint Barton and some of the other agents were no longer under Loki's mind control, which was one of the few good things to happen but they were still pretty beaten up. The rest of the team had barely spoken to each other. Luna hadn't said anything at all after Phil died. She decided it would be better that she retreated for a while, thus she went to her designated room.

It was small and packed with only a bunk bed, but she didn't mind. The moment she had entered it she collapsed on the bed. The adrenaline had worn off a while ago and she felt exhausted. Even though she felt like she could sleep for a week, her mind decided that she couldn't yet. So she laid in the dark with her eyes closed for a solid hour, tossing and turning.

Her mind kept showing her Phil's dying face. It seemed to mock her. Luna didn't know if she had fallen asleep when she thought she heard Phil say, 'You're useless.'

But it didn't stop, she kept hearing his voice taunting her in the distant, 'You could've saved me.'

When she woke up in the early morning, the last thing she remembered from her restless night was Phil looking at her and saying, 'You're no hero...'

• • •

Luna was still exhausted, although that wasn't a new feeling for her, as she walked into the main area. She didn't pay any attention to Tony Stark, who was standing against a wall, and Steve Rogers, who was sitting in one of the chairs, as she sat down opposite of him at the large, oval table.

She propped her feet on the table as she leaned back in her chair. She was still processing how completely and utterly out of control her life had spun in the past couple days when Nick Fury silently walked in.

"These were in Phil Coulson's jacket," he said, taking out a stack of vintage Captain America trading cards.

Luna's breath hitched in her throat as she saw the red blood stains on them.

"I guess he never did get you to sign them," he directed at Steve and threw the cards down on the table.

Blood was splattered on the corner of the deck.

"We're dead in the air up here. Our communications, the location of the cube, Banner, Thor. I got nothing for you. I lost my one good eye," he said. "Maybe I had that coming."

"Yes, we were going to build an arsenal with the Tesseract. I never put all my chips on that number, though, because I was playing something even riskier. There was an idea, Stark knows this, called the Avengers initiative," Fury spoke. "The idea was to bring together a group of remarkable people, to see if they could work together when we needed them to, to fight the battles we never could. Phil Coulson died still believing in that idea. In heroes."