𝑻𝒓𝒂𝒑𝒅𝒐𝒐𝒓 ✘ 𝐍𝐀𝐓𝐀𝐒𝐇𝐀 𝐑𝐎𝐌𝐀𝐍𝐎𝐅𝐅

{4⁴} {SUNSETS, STARS, FIREFLIES}

∆ {4⁴} {SUNSETS, STARS, FIREFLIES} ∆

THE QUINJET RIDE home was silent. The semi-cheerful, flirtatious mood had evaporated as quickly as the cloud of fire had spread, and after they'd got everyone they could out, Roxi had take n up the job of piloting. It was mostly so that she could take a few moments to herself, have a little bit to just let her mind try and process what had happened so that she could deal with it. It wasn't like she was going to crash into anything up here.

Wanda had bee the one to tell her that quiet, picturesque spaces had helped her force her way through the thick wall of memories that surrounded deaths, and had encouraged Roxi to try the same. As she sat there in the cockpit, staring at the clouds that were lit up with dusk, and letting her icy eyes roam the space in between them as she hunted from stars that glimmered weakly as the moon began to rise. It was hauntingly spectacular, as pinks and golds clung onto the distance, draping themselves over the greys, the blues, the reds, the oranges until they lay smothered across the sky, shimmering spectacularly in the slumbering light of the sun.

You would never be able to find another view like this, especially not such a spectacular one. It was unique, and yet so unbelievably generic. It was a sunset. It should've been nothing more, nothing less; simply that. But after the event that had just disrupted any light-heartedness that the team might have been feeling, it was more of a taunt, yet a warning at the same time.

It taunted them, jeered at them that it was so perfect, so unnaturally beautiful, when in fact it was just that It was simultaneously one thing and other at the same time. It was a luxury they couldn't afford, not when so many lives were on the line; not when they caused far more deaths than they ever allowed themselves to see.

Roxi had visited both of the memorials since they had been put up. Both the one in Times Square, and the one in Sokovia. The latter she'd been to with Wanda. The girl had wanted to pay her respects, to have closure on the thoughts that wandered her mind, wondering who else she knew that had died in Ultron's power trip. Roxi had simply wanted to acknowledge the lives that she'd indirectly had a hand in taking. She didn't blame herself for those deaths: she knew better than that. If she did, her black book would be filled with a tide of names that meant virtually nothing to her, and putting unnecessary self-blame on her shoulders. That was one thing that she'd learned how to do well with her years at SHIELD. Blaming yourself for deaths you didn't directly was a waste of time. That was what she'd been told, and she'd never found it in her heart or mind to disagree. It was partly because she didn't. She'd already had far too many things on her mind as a 17-year-old when she came to SHIELD than anyone should have in their entire lifetime.

And yet, she was still here. She was a 32-year-old Avenger sitting in the cockpit of an old SHIELD plane, with the woman she loved sitting in the co-pilot chair in silence as she watched Roxi carefully. She was still here, staring at a sunset in hopes of forgetting, of drowning the negativity in her mind in an ocean of painted colours, rather than the river of rushing blood that seemed so determined to follow her through all her dreams. 

That wasn't true. Roxi didn't dream anymore. Not even of that odd purple-orange field where the fireflies danced with such a toxic allure that she found herself never wanting to wake up. Everything was nightmares now. The screams of those she'd killed, the yells of help from those she hadn't been able to save; they all blended into some kind of awful medley that seemed to carry on the wind any time it drove too hard past her. Far too many normal things had been ruined for Roxi by the way she lived her life, and for the first few moments, she'd  hoped that this sunset wouldn't be one of them.

It dwindled as fast as it came, however, because Roxi found herself staring at what might as well have been a colossal, neon warning sign that shone through the wispy strands of cloud that still clung on, as if they were the last dregs of her hope. It only became stronger as the glimmering pinks and gold slowly darkened to join the red-purple hue that settled at the bottom of the horizon in a band. The stars winked at her through the glass of the cockpit, and Roxi found her eyes fixed on one , that she could barely see, because the last golden-yellow glare of sunlight was disappearing behind it.