#but she's really stubborn and refuses to modify her behavior for anyone

[starthelostboys]

i feel like every time that the boys or star absolutely HAVE to interact with someone on the boardwalk or in town, they make paul do all of the talking cause he’s the youngest of the group and unlike the rest of them, hasn’t completely forgotten what normal human interaction is like

[ks-caster]

The Future is Infinite (Chapter 4)

Chapter-specific warnings: smoking, cannibalism mention, PTSD flashback

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Showered and dressed in a pair of comfortable black pants and a sleeveless shirt with a loose, floppy collar, Octavia emerged from the room when the hands of the clock pointed at a quarter to seven. The king had invited everyone to have dinner with him, and the soup from that afternoon was feeling like she’d eaten it back at home a hundred years ago. 

When she arrived, the room was filling up quickly. She lingered in the doorway, watching Tony converse with a black man whose name she didn’t know; Steve entered from a different doorway and approached them, looking almost hesitant. Based on Bucky’s description and her own assessment, this was… unusual behavior for Steve.

“What’s the story with those two?” She asked quietly as she sensed Bucky coming up behind her.

“Uh,” he hedged, clearly uncomfortable.

“Come on, you people know all of my dirty secrets,” she hissed without any real venom. She supposed she was used to people telling her stories without her there to comment. She couldn’t let it hurt anymore - if she did she’d be consumed by it.

“Okay,” Bucky agreed slowly, “Well, seventy-some years ago, I got captured by a group called HYDRA. They tortured and brainwashed me to work for them.” He was clearly struggling to tell only the facts, and no more, and Octavia already regretted asking, but figured she should trust him to know his own limits and/or tell her to go fuck herself and end the conversation if he needed to. “I was an assassin for them on and off for half a century after they finished modifying me. One of my targets was Stark’s parents. 

“I’m okay now,” he rushed to assure her, though she knew her own expression hadn’t changed. Must be a habit, she thought, remembering how quick Lincoln had been to reassure people of the same thing after he detoxed from his Reaper state. “Shuri and her science team were able to purge all the programming from my head, so I don’t do that anymore. I’m safe to be around people and everything. But when Stark found out I killed his mother, he wanted revenge,” he shrugged, as though agreeing that that was the natural reaction. “Steve defended me.”

“Huh,” Octavia mused. “Guess that would put some strain on a working relationship.”

“Just a bit,” Bucky agreed, his eyebrows twitching up once in acknowledgement of the sarcasm and understatement between them.

“Your name’s Peter, right?” Octavia added, glancing up as the feeling of being watched prickled down the back of her neck. The kid silently crawling his way across the ceiling paused and jumped guiltily to the floor.

“Sorry,” he said, rubbing the back of his head nervously as he walked backwards into the room. “You sounded like you were talking about something serious so I didn’t want to just walk between you.” Looking up at the sound of the kid’s voice, Tony and Steve caught sight of them, Steve waving and smiling, and Tony’s face going hard. He stood abruptly and moved to sit at another table. Octavia felt Bucky’s shoulder slump beside her. 

“Uh, I gotta… go,” Peter said awkwardly before heading towards where Tony had relocated. 

“You clean up nicely,” a vaguely familiar girl’s voice commented as they reached Steve’s table. Octavia turned to see a teen girl dressed in vivid shades of orange approaching them from where T’Challa was sitting with the man in the scale armor. He’d left his ax in a corner of the room, she noted, wondering if she was expected to remove her dagger, which she’d slipped into a long, narrow pocket down her thigh. She supposed someone would tell her if she’d broken a social norm.

“Well, it was my first shower in over a hundred years,” she shrugged, noticing the similarities between the girl and the king and figuring she was most likely a relative. “I should hope there’d be some difference.” She took a drink of something that Steve poured for her out of a jug. It was some kind of fruit juice. The princess’s voice had been the one to say that her cells were mutating, she remembered distantly as the girl casually side-hugged Bucky.

“Princess Shuri, Octavia,” he introduced them, squeezing the girl back before letting go. 

“So, you’re the one Strange thinks is the key to saving the universe,” Shuri commented, hooking her foot around a chair from the table opposite and pulling it over so she could sit down close to all three of them.

“Not so sure about that,” Octavia grumbled, taking another long swig of the juice. “I didn’t exactly do such a great job the last time the fate of the human race fell into my lap.” She deliberately refused to think about those days. It was over a century ago, although it didn’t feel like it. 

And it had all been pointless, she supposed, now that they knew that they were far, far from being the only life left in the universe.

“Hey, someone said something about my people and yours sharing an evolutionary ancestor,” she commented suddenly, wanting to change the subject. “And you call yourselves humans too, right? What’s with that?”

“Oh, right!” Shuri exclaimed. “So, there’s this old, old story on earth - about a flood that destroyed all life on the planet, and a few survivors on a vessel that carried them until the destruction ended. It’s called Noah’s Ark.” Octavia frowned in confusion.

“We have a story like that too,” she recalled, “But the captain’s name was Abijah.” She vaguely remembered Bellamy talking about the old myth - and the way the Ark had been named after that ship.

“Exactly!” Shuri exclaimed. “Thor was telling me all about it. A long long time ago, humans lived on a planet called Earth. But there was this huge disaster and the planet was destroyed. They had some warning, and their interstellar neighbors helped them build escape vessels, and sent them off to other planets nearby which, with a little scientific help here and there from Asgard and their allies, could be made to support life. 

“The planet we’re on now is called Terra, galactically speaking. The one you’re from is called Phyra. But most of the human refugees referred to their planets by the names their cultures called the original Earth, and a lot of them have parallel development and histories. Only apparently the people on your planet evolved faster than we did - Thor said that the conditions there were much harsher, so maybe that’s why.”

Octavia refilled her cup and drank again. Had her mom known, she wondered, that there was a glimmer of truth to the mythologies she’d delighted in telling her children?

And if there was so much truth to them, why had no one rushed to their aid when the planet was destroyed three times in a hundred years?

“Wait, she’s from Phyra?” The another voice asked incredulously. Octavia turned to see… a racoon? An actual racoon, sitting on the table from which Shuri had stolen the chair, munching on an appetizer of some sort. “Thought all life was wiped off of that godforsaken rock two hundred years ago by some kind of planet-wide nuclear disaster. They use it as a cautionary tale whenever I try to use nuclear power in any of my awesome custom-made weapons!”

“Well, we’re a stubborn bunch,” Octavia responded, not sure what to think of a talking racoon with custom-made nuclear weapons. His tablemates were the blue woman who’d seemed to know Thanos personally, a… tree? Well, a sapling. With a face. Playing some kind of electronic game. And a shirtless man with grey-ish skin, who was covered in some kind of raised red tattoos.

“Do all racoons talk on this planet?” she checked with Shuri, ignoring the creature’s angry outburst that people needed to quit calling him a racoon.

“No, just that one,” the girl giggled. “Rocket talks, shoots people, and steals prosthetics.”

“Oh, so that was normal back there,” Bucky muttered, rubbing at his metal shoulder. Octavia wanted to ask about his arm - for a prosthetic it sure moved like a natural limb - but the red-and-grey man was talking about how in his planet the racoon was something called a lierjhg, and how tasty they were when roasted over a campfire, and Rocket was even more indignant at the thought that he might be considered edible, and Octavia could taste blood on her tongue, not hers, oh how she wished it was hers instead...

“Hey,” Steve was saying quietly, his hand warm and stable on her bare arm. “Too much too fast?” Octavia blinked hard, relieved that she hadn’t teared up and wondering how long she’d been frozen like that.

She wasn’t hungry anymore.

-0-

The bath was every bit as luxurious as Octavia had expected. She took a deep breath, laying back along the bottom, her body bobbing gently in the hot water, only her toes gently bumping against the side reminding her that she was in a small tub and not an open stream. 

She hadn’t asked why her earth had been abandoned by its interplanetary neighbors - she decided she really didn’t want to know. After being an outcast for being a second child, then being rejected by the Arcadians for being too grounder-like; after losing what little home she’d made for herself again and again and again, always “for the greater good,” she didn’t want to hear one more time about how circumstances had forced the powers that be to make a decision, and she hadn’t made the cut. 

She knew what it was like to be on both ends of those choices, and that there was no good answer. So she left it alone, forcing herself to nibble a few things for a while and make light conversation with Steve and Bucky and Shuri before excusing herself. Strange had told Wong that she had PTSD. Had he said that to the others? She didn’t know if she agreed with him - anyone would have trouble processing the things she’d had to do; why slap a disorder on it? Besides, if anything, she was the traumatic event… 

She stayed in the water until it started to feel cold, then dried herself off, pulling on a long, soft robe she’d found hanging on the back of the door. She wasn’t ready to sleep yet. She’d been unconscious today, and before that had slept a hundred and seven years. That was probably plenty to be getting on with. She pulled the book out of her bag and curled up on the balcony with it, leaning against the railing so she could see the lights and hear the faint sounds of the city below as she read. 

It was the sort of book she’d have loved as a child - magic and mystery and a clear divide between bad guys and good. She wondered why her mother had never read it to her - but maybe the ship’s library didn’t have it. She supposed it was silly to assume that the computer archives would have successfully saved every book ever written.

“Trouble sleeping?” Steve asked, and she looked up to see him on the next balcony over, leaning on the railing and gazing out at the city below, a tiny white roll of paper clamped between his fingers.

“I think I’ve slept enough for a few lifetimes,” she responded dryly, marking her place by carefully folding the corner of a page and standing up.

“See, when I tell people that they give me shit about my health,” Steve said, folding his arms and grinning.

“And you wouldn’t dream of subjecting me to the same, of course,” Octavia suggested, eyebrow raised.

“Of course not,” he responded conspiratorially. He took a step to the side to lean his hip against the railing, pulling a lighter out of his pocket and setting the end of what she finally recognized as a cigarette on fire. “What have I interrupted you reading?”

“The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis,” she responded, showing him the cover.

“Oh, I love that one!” he exclaimed. “Natasha recommended it to me a little while after I was defrosted.”

“No spoilers!” Octavia warned playfully. “They’ve just evacuated the Beaver dam.” Steve raised his hands in mock-surrender. 

“You’re gonna love the ending,” he snorted.

“I said no spoilers! Don’t make me come over there and shut you up,” she growled.

They talked a while longer - Steve talking about what it was like to wake up in the 21st Century after so long away, and telling stories about his and Bucky’s childhood in the 40s. Octavia responded with a few carefully curated vignets of some of her happier moments on the Earth. Phyra. Whatever. Eventually her eyes started to prickle and she yawned.

“It’s after three am,” Steve commented, looking at his watch in surprise. “Think it’s time for me to give sleep another try.” Octavia nodded agreement, and headed back into her room.

The bed was deliciously soft and comfortable - easily the nicest one she’d ever been in. But after about thirty minutes of fruitless tossing and turning, she had to admit that the softness made her feel like she was constantly falling, which in turn made already-elusive sleep impossible to obtain. With a sigh, she got up, pulling the thick fluffy comforter and a couple of pillows off the bed, and made herself a nest on the floor, right in the balcony doorway. With solid ground beneath her and fresh air moving over her face, she was finally able to drift off to sleep. 

Her last thought - which, in the manner of half-asleep musings, she would forget entirely upon waking - was how strange it was that two entirely separate planets, parallel development or no, would somehow generate the exact same book by an author of the exact same name. 

After all, her copy had come from the Eligius ship, and Steve had lived his whole life on Terra.

To Be Continued... 

This chapter is dedicated to @just-ash1 - I didn’t expect people to actually read this and enjoy it since crossovers can be iffy, so thanks for making my day!

[jemilyreial]

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