Avengers: Vengeance

Cleaning Up a Mess

A/N: so I have strep throat. Needless to say, I'm feeling pretty lousy. But my car is okay at least. It just needed a new battery. I've spent a lot of time writing and even more time sleeping. Everyone stay safe and healthy!

Hearing Magneto's explanation of what had happened was enough to incite rage within Thor. "You mean to tell me," he snarled as he advanced upon Magneto and a captive Doom and Amora. "That all of this damage is because of you?"

Amora, who refused to speak due to her broken teeth, shamefully hung her head, hiding her features behind a curtain of blond hair.

"We all had a part to play in rewriting history," Magneto went on. "Know that I had nothing to do with what happened to you and Lumen. My eyes were fixed solely upon mutants."

"And that's supposed to make me less vengeful toward you?" Thor scoffed. "No. You are all guilty of this damage."

"Loki," Dean said in a distant voice. "Is the Loki we saw actually alive? Or is he just a manifestation of this reality?"

"He is quite alive," Doom offered up. "Though he is not the Loki that you have come to know."

Thor scowled. "How can that be?"

"The Tesseract," Tony grumbled. "God dammit. When we went back in time for the stones, Loki escaped with the it."

"Wait- you let Loki run away with that?" Carol asked.

"We got it back! Just...not the one from that timeline."

Thor shut his eyes in frustration. The Loki of that time had never reconciled with Thor and still considered him an enemy.

"Okay, we know that you guys screwed reality up," Steve spoke up. "What I want to know is how we go about fixing it."

"We'll need to go back to the moment the president was assassinated," Doom explained. "We go back there and stop the event from taking place. If the assassination never takes place, we never get a chance to do this."

Steve glared at him. "You're saying you want to fix this?"

Doom shrugged and looked around. "Clearly this has become a reality none of us wants."

While a plan was being formed by many of the others, Dean stared at Natasha, who stood apart from everyone with a blond young woman. Raw emotion churned within him. "When we fix everything, what happens to people like Natasha?" He asked.

"Anyone who was manifested by this reality will cease to exist," Doom spoke in a cold voice. "And anyone who was killed but belongs to our timeline will be restored."

Thor laid a hand on Dean's shoulder. "Fair One. I wish there was something we could do."

Dean swallowed back his tears and turned to the others. "I'm okay."

Reed, who had been recovered alongside Sue just after the battle, cleared his throat. "We need to find the TVA headquarters and reset the timeline to just before the assassination takes place."

"A group of us will escort Magneto there," Kyle said in a decisive tone.

"And the rest of us will stay here with Doom and Amora," Falcon added.

As a small team was selected, Dean stared at Natasha and remembered the very last time he'd seen her alive.

"Do you want to go and talk to her?" Thor asked.

Dean watched as the younger woman embraced Natasha and sobbed into her chest."you say they're sisters?" He asked Sam.

"Yeah. More or less."