Current mood:	crushed
Entry tags:	anya stark, inactive - artemis, sammy fury, sarah rogers, team - avengers, toni rhodes

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end
She's been sitting quietly on her bed for three hours now, just staring at it. She turned her comm off first thing, trying to clear her thoughts.

She'd spent ages and all the goodwill she'd gotten from SHIELD trying to find her teammates, and found they weren't on this world.
She'd endured Misha's insistence she just relax, make friends and accept she had a family here now.
She'd started to believe Anya suggesting that maybe, just maybe this was her world now, and had gone through the first stages of mourning her parents and friends.

And she'd been about to ask Anya if she'd help her make plans for her 18th birthday, only a few months away. Her 'sweet 16' was spent invading a Sentinel concentration camp. Freeing all those people was a wonderful feeling, but she also knew most of them wouldn't make it, with or without help from the X-Men and the underground railroad, and they'd almost lost Firefly.
Her 17th was spent in a new world, recently bereft of all the things she'd come to know with the Exiles, along with the fleeting hope of making things ok again. And, of course, watching Anya's birthday party not long before, and feeling horribly out of place.

She'd screwed up her courage, tried to figure out who to invite, and was finally ready to go apologize to her parents at their non-graves, the Tomb of the Uknown Soldier seemed fitting, to ask them to understand that she needed to live her own life. And she'd prepared to ask Anya to help with a real birthday party - and was still debating, with a few butterflies, asking if Anya might even be her 'pretend date' if they did it somewhere private.

And then it showed up, just appearing out of nowhere on her right arm.

She's been in her room since, alternating between crying and trying to find a new reserve of willpower, like she always did. She was a Rogers, after all. This time, it just wasn't there. Only the words it kept telling her.

'Galactus' ship's temporal shields screwed things up, but we're back on track.
You still have work to do, kiddo.
Kiss dreams of a normal life goodbye and let's get back to work.'

Worst of all, she knew exactly what she had to do.