Rogue: Annihilation (An Avengers Sequel)

33. The Hard Part is Over

We all arrived back at the same time. For us, we'd been gone for hours at least, but in real time it wasn't more than a few seconds.

"Did we get them all?" Bruce asked, looking around at all of us. Everyone was either holding a Stone or looking pleased with themselves.

"We did it?" I asked, a smile creeping onto my face. "You mean this actually worked?"

Jessica rolled her eyes, clutching the Soul Stone. "We don't know if anything worked. All we know is that we have the Stones. We have no idea what will happen when you guys snap your fingers."

"Can you just be optimistic for, like, five seconds?"

"I just threw you off a cliff and had to be optimistic about whether or not you'd be here when I got back," she reminded me, scowling. "That's about as much optimism as I can take."

I crossed my arms. "Don't be so dramatic, I told you I'd be fine."

"Because you know everything that's gonna happen?" she asked rhetorically, pushing the Stone into my hand and storming off in the opposite direction.

I sighed, handing the Stone to Tony and following her footsteps. I found her in a stairwell with her head in her hands, breathing heavily.

"What is it?" I asked, my tone not as sympathetic as it should have been. "You got the Stone, the hard part is over."

She looked up at me, raising an eyebrow. If I didn't know her better, I'd swear she was about to cry. "'The hard part is over'?" she repeated. "Did you seriously just say that to me? Did you honestly just try to diminish everything that you made me do?"

"That I made you do?!" I asked incredulously. "No one asked you to come here, Jess. No one asked you to volunteer yourself to get thrown off a cliff. But I find a way to save your life and suddenly I'm the bad guy here?"

She shook her head. "You know, the worst thing about this whole situation isn't that you don't understand, but that you're not trying to." She breathed out, wiping at her face with her sleeve. "Do you have any idea what it was like to kill her?" she looked me in the eye. "To stare at your friend and know that you're about to take everything away from her? Because let me tell you, Rogue, it freaking sucks!"

"She wasn't your friend," I tried to reason, sitting on the steps below her. "That girl... that Rogue... you never knew her. She was a completely different person to the girl that you met, and the girl that you met is a completely different person to the friend that's sitting in front of you right now."

She nodded, acknowledging me. "I know that. But I also know the person that she becomes. Do you know how it felt to kill her, knowing that she was gonna turn into the only friend I have left?" she asked, her eyes red. "I don't care what you say, Rogue, her eyes were your eyes. Her voice was your voice. And... when I grabbed her and she had a change of heart and tried to fight against me, it was you that I was fighting." She sighed. "It wasn't a sacrifice, Rogue. She wanted it to be, but at the last moment she couldn't go through with it. She wanted to live... so I had to push her. I had to grab her and fight against her electricity. I had to convince myself that this was the only way. And when she was falling, I had to watch you go and face the possibility that I might have killed you. I have the image of you falling from a cliff etched onto my brain, and I can't let go of the fact that I pushed you."

I let her words sink in, retreating further into myself as I thought about what it would have been like the other way around. If I'd had to kill her... could I have done it?

"You were with Kilgrave when I found him," I told her, causing her eyes to widen in surprise. "He ordered you to kill me, and of course, you had no choice. You tried to kill me. And I had to fight you, just like you had to fight me." I sighed. "I get it. I understand. When I was there, in that situation, I couldn't kill you. There was no reason not to, the timeline won't exist soon, the real you would have been fine. But even back then when you didn't know me, I couldn't stop seeing you as my friend. And I couldn't do that to my friend. So I'm sorry," I told her. "I'm sorry for having the idea. I'm sorry for making you go through with it. And I'm sorry for not understanding the effect that killing a friend has on someone."