tainted dreams | chapter seven
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unedited, so please tell me if you find any mistakes!!
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As she ran to the locked gates, Rosalie felt her heart pump with a sudden feeling of relief. Perhaps it was just her body telling her to slow down, but she knew it was something more.

The fact that Scott was here and the way he desperately asked to be let in, that have Rosalie some faith that they could, in fact, find a solution to their problems.

A solution that they hadn't found in the past five years.

"Who are you?" Scott asked with a frown in his face, probably expecting one of the more influential heroes. And he didn't remember Rosalie from their fight in Germany.

"Rosalie." The blonde opened the gate and motioned for him to drive his van to the entrance of the compound. "I helped kick your team's ass in Germany."

Smirking at his speechless reaction, Rosalie used her powers to speed back to the front door, waiting for Scott's old and slow van to reach her. Once it did, Scott had a funny look on his face which made the blonde laugh out loud.

"Not funny. This van has been parked for five years, it's a miracle it's still funcional."

"Barely." Was Rosalie's reply before guiding him to the office.

Rosalie and Nat never let the building get too dirty. Once Tony left with Pepper, maintenance of every spot of the compound was delegated to the pair and they took that as their most important task. Every weeknd, the women would sweep the floors and wipe the spider webs away.

That last task was never given to Rosalie. Spiders reminded her of everything she had lost.

As soon as they entered the office where Steve and Nat stood, Scott started to pace worriedly around in front of the trio, irritating the living hell out of Rosalie.

"Scott. Are you okay?" Steve asked, always the worried hero.

"Yeah. I'm fine." Scott struggled to ask about something, finally blurting it out after a few more seconds of nerve-wracking pacing. "Have you ever studied Quantum Physics?"

"He's nuts." Rosalie raised his hands in surrender. "There, I said it."

"Only to make conversation." Nat gave her a glare and crossed her arms in front of her chest.

"Alright. So, five years ago, right before Thanos, I was in a place called the Quantum Realm. The Quantum Realm is like its own microscopic universe. To get in there, you have to be incredibly small." Scott nodded as he spoke, making less and less sense as the words splurged from his mouth. "Hope, she's my... She was my... She was supposed to pull me out. And then Thanos happened, and I got stuck in there."

"That's crazy. And really hard to believe." The blonde was still as skeptic as she was before. Noticing how insensitive she had sounded, she coughed and straightened her back. "I'm sorry. That must've been a very long five years."

"Yeah, but that's just it. For me, it was five hours."

Steve and Nat shared a quick bewildered glance. Rosalie's mouth was hanging open at his words. It couldn't be true, could it?

"See, the rules of the Quantum Realm aren't like they are up here. Everything is unpredictable." His attention was directed to Nat's food on the desk. "Is that anybody's sandwich? I'm starving."

He strode over to pick up Nat's sandwich, and bit into it. Rosalie couldn't help the eye roll that followed.

"Scott, what are you talking about?" Steve stepped forward, impatient.

"What I'm saying is, time works differently in the Quantum Realm. The only problem is right now, we don't have a way to navigate it." They started to follow his thinking. "But what if we did? I can't stop thinking about it. What if, we could somehow control the chaos, and we could navigate it? What if there was a way to enter the Quantum Realm at a certain point in time but then exit at another point in time? Like -like before Thanos."

"You can't be serious." The youngest in the room sat back down, exhausted from thinking about Scott's crazy theories. "That's a sketchy way of saying 'time machine', my friend."

"No. No, not a time machine. It's more like a..." He stutters, sweating under Rosalie's judging eyes. "Yeah, a time machine. I know it's crazy. But I can't stop thinking about it. There's gotta be some way."

"I get e-mails from a raccoon, so nothing sounds crazy anymore." Nat nodded the head slowly, assimilating the possibilities.

"And I filter those emails. So you're welcome that you don't have to watch graphic content." The blonde's words caused her friend to laugh.

"So who do we talk to about this?"

The trio shared a look. They knew exactly who they could call, but calling wouldn't be an option. He simply wouldn't pick up the phone.

He hadn't in five years, so he wouldn't do it then.

"Tony." Rosalie whispered. "We could ask Tony."

Speaking the words everyone else was thinking was hard for her. She hadn't seen her father figure in years, the last time being through a bullet-proof glass and with Tony lying on a hospital bed.

It hurt to see their relationship crumble, but it was his decision. After losing her own parents, best friends and the love of her life, Rosalie's reaction to loss was becoming more passive than aggressive.

"Pack a change of clothes, Rose." Nat told her and pat her back. "We have a cabin to visit."

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"I can't believe we're here." Rosalie confessed, heart heavy on her chest. "And you knew where he was all along?"

Nat nodded, regret fisting her heart as the younger woman stared outside the car window, lost in her own thoughts.

And those thoughts weren't exactly happy ones. With every mile they passed, her thoughts became darker, filled with sadness. Tony had left. He had left her all alone.

At the bank of a beautiful lake stood the cabin where Tony had been living his life for the past five years. Rosalie couldn't help but admire the view.

Their black car stopped and Rosalie could see a person standing near the front steps of the cabin. The man, clearly Tony, was carrying a child.

His child.

Rosalie's breath caught on her throat as Tony sent his daughter back inside the house and waited for them to get out of the car.

"Are you sure you're ready for this?" Nat asked. "You could just stay in the car and wait for us."

"No." The blonde replied dryly. As she raised her head, Nat could see the tears she had been trying to hide. "I need this."

Nodding at her, the four stepped out of the car, looking at their surroundings in awe. All but Rosalie, who started straight ahead with an unreadable look on her face.

It meant that she was concealing her own emotions. And it meant that she was either sad or angry. There was no way to tell which one it was at the moment, but Steve and Nat knew they would find out soon enough.

Tony sighed when he noticed who they were, not looking forward to the discussion about to take place.

No one said 'hello' or asked the typical 'how have you been'. Tony merely asked them to be quick and explain why they were there.

So they could leave as fast as they got there.

As Scott had been the one to come up with the theory, he was the one who explained it all to Tony as Nat, Steve and Rosalie stood beside him like a supportive line of bodyguards, arms crossed in front of their chests and unreadable expressions on their faces.

"Now, we know what it sounds like." Scott shrugged and admitted what everyone had thought at first: that his idea was madness.

"Tony, after everything you've seen, is anything really impossible?" Steve asked sincerely.

"Quantum fluctuation messes with the Planck scale, which then triggers the Deutsch proposition." Tony gestured with his hands and arms, earning him some very confused faces. "Can we agree on that?"

"Sure?" Rosalie replied uncertainly, Scott, Steve and Nat all looking puzzled. Science was barely any of their fields.

"In Layman's terms, it means you're not coming home."

"I did." Scott raised his eyebrow.

"No, you accidentally survived. It's a billion to one cosmic fluke. And now you wanna pull off a... What do you call it?" It was evident that Tony's patience was hanging by a very thin thread.   

"A time heist?" Scott tried to hide his pride, but completely failed.

"Yeah, a time heist. Of course, why didn't we think of this before?" The man's voice was filled with sarcasm. "Oh, because it's laughable? Because it's a pipedream?"

"The stones are in the past. We can go back and get them." Rosalie was getting extremely angry with Tony's attitude.

"We can snap our own fingers. We can bring everyone back." Nat reinforced the younger woman's point.

"Or screw it up worse than he already has, right?" Tony raised his voice and that was it for the blonde.

She exploded.

"At least we have to try. And you know why?" She got dangerously close to his surprises face. "Because we were left to deal with this mess all alone while you ran away and started a new life, forgetting all about your old one."

Everyone was silent as Rosalie tried to regain her posture. Yet, she couldn't, and more words splurged from her mouth.

"You forgot about us for five years. While you were here in this heaven-like property, we dealt with all the shit you decided to leave behind." Tears were fighting their way down Rosalie's cheeks, but the girl didn't mind them. "You left us, you left me... How could you?"

Nat pulled the girl back but she didn't let the older woman grab her. She wiped her tears away, looked Tony -the man she had grown to admire and treat like a father- dead in the eye and spoke to her friends.

"I'll wait for you in the car. I don't want to be here anymore."

And so she did exactly that, patiently sitting in the backseat of Steve's black car. The adults spoke and spoke and spoke, Rosalie not listening to a single word. Her emotions were a mess of tangled strings inside her heart, a mess she did not wish to resolve at the moment.

She just wanted some peace. And she wouldn't have that desired peace until they managed to get everyone back.

It looked like it would take a while.

As they walked back to her after a long half an hour of Rosalie mentally cursing herself and Tony, she didn't even look at the man when he accompanied his former partners back to the car.

But she heard the conversation between Tony and Steve just as he opened the driver's door.

"You said you needed me when you were lost in space." Steve said in a low but threatening tone, his face nearly glued to Tony's. "But you're a hypocrite, you know that? Because Rosalie needed you for five years and all you could do was send lame postcards on the holidays."

Leaving the man behind, Steve re-entered the car and drove them away from the solitary cabin in the woods. What the rest of the heroes couldn't see was Rosalie's face, hidden behind her long blonde hair.

And they couldn't see the tears falling freely down her rosy cheeks, the sadness emanating from her strong enough to create a tornado of emotion.

Tony had turned his back on her, again.

And it hurt more than Rosalie wanted to admit. Because she never opened said postcards, realising that not opening them was easier than reading the fake words on those papers.

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uh ohhhhh, my poor baby. how do you think she reacted? was it "appropriate"?
as always, don't either to vote and comment! it really helps me and keeps me motivated to write (: