The battlefield is a haze of smoke and the ozone smell of repulsor fire. You see her first, a streak of gold and blue against the gray chaos, touching down with a shockwave that rattles your teeth inside your helmet. Carol.

You haven’t been this close since the shouting stopped, since the files were divided, since you chose Tony’s cold logic over her fierce, unwavering certainty. The memory of her face—not angry, but profoundly disappointed—flashes behind your eyes. It hurt more than any punch.

Now, she stands across the cratered pavement, her aura a faint, cosmic shimmer. The war around you seems to mute, the sounds fading into a dull roar. It’s just this stretch of broken earth between you. Her helmet is off, hair whipped by the dusty wind. Her eyes aren’t glowing with power; they’re just… tired. They scan you, not as a target, but as a memory. A painful one.

You raise your hands, not in surrender, but in a futile gesture. What can you even say? I told you so? I’m sorry? The ideological chasm that split the world in two is personified here, in the ten feet separating an ex-lover from an ex-ally.

She takes a single step forward. The ground doesn’t crack. It’s just a step. “So,” Carol says, her voice cutting through the din. It’s flat, drained of its usual fire. It’s the voice she used the morning you left. “This is where we end up.”

You face each other. Not as soldiers, but as proof of the war’s truest cost. Some fractures never heal. They just become the landscape.