Rogue: Annihilation (An Avengers Sequel)

1. Better Late Than Never

"OK, I'm going in," I said, my hand poised on the door handle. We were in a building that looked completely deserted, but if they were hiding what we thought, then they were bound to have hidden security measures.

"Chances are, this is another dead end," Katherine the Super Soldier, and eternal pessimist, said.

Wanda glared at her. "Don't do that. We're allowed to have hope, everything doesn't have to end badly."

"It always ends badly," Katherine argued. "We've been looking for this guy for a year and a half-"

"Tell me something I don't know," Jessica Jones, the newest member of the team, interrupted dryly. Unlike Katherine, Jess wasn't present on all of our missions, and she hated the idea of being part of our team. But for the big missions, like finding Captain America, she made an exception.

"Rogue," Stark prompted me, nodding towards the door. The calm tone of his voice instantly decreased my heart rate. After all, we'd broken into buildings a thousand times more secure for a lot less.

"Alarm system?" I thought aloud.

"None that I could see," Sam (Falcon) answered immediately. He'd done a quick survey of the building earlier in the day, making sure that we knew exactly what we were getting ourselves into.

I nodded to myself, opening the door before I could change my mind.

It wasn't the first time we'd gone looking for Steve. Actually, we'd spent over a year doing nothing but look for him – it was our biggest mission. And Katherine was right, usually they were dead ends; wasted opportunities that could have been spent doing something more productive. But this time... something felt different.

The room was shrouded in complete darkness, and it took a while before I could see anything at all. Eventually I was able to make out that the room we were standing in was completely empty – hardly what you'd expect from a creepy underground password-protected chamber.

"I'm trying really hard not to say 'I told you so' right now," Katherine said. Her eyes had already adjusted to the darkness.

I shook my head, dismissing her. "They kept this place off the radar so well that it took us a year and a half to find it," I reminded her. "They're hiding something."

Jessica walked into the middle of the room. "'Something' is a pretty ambiguous way of saying 'Captain America'."

Wanda shrugged. "We don't know that he's here. But if he is, then we need to find him and get him out of here before it's too late."

"If he's here, then he's been here for a long time... I'd say 'too late' has already left the building," Sam said.

A feeling of guilt crawled up my spine, and I shivered. If I hadn't pissed off Kilgrave... if I'd never asked Jessica to help find my mother, none of this would have happened. Steve would still be here. Nat, a best friend so close we were sisters, would still be here.

"Well, better late than never," Stark said, using his Stark Tech glasses to scan the room. "Why does it feel like we're about to make a huge mistake?" he asked under his breath, only to me.

We made eye contact.

"Because we're trying to wake the dead," I told him, a slight smile on my face at the prospect. After everything we'd gone through, and the people we'd lost, it took a long time to stop feeling like something was missing. Our team was an organ wounded so deeply it stopped us from having a beating heart.

But if there was a chance that we could repair the organ, we'd do whatever it took. And the first part of that was finding Steve Rogers.

When he died, we thought he was gone for good. But after discovering that his body had been taken, we hoped that someone had found a way to bring the leader of our team back to the land of the living.