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She liked going fast, as fast as humanly possible. It was the main excuse to enlist into the Air Force. Planes were fast. It had nothing to do with shitty family life, that wasn’t that bad (it could be so much worse). It had nothing to do with the shitty experience of growing up a girl like her in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Planes were supposed to go fast and its pilot was supposed to not mind. There was something mind-numbing about defeating the speed of sound.

Meeting Maria was a bonus. Meeting Monica was a bonus.

The Rambeaus being her real family was a bonus.

(She was too good at pretending that things mattered less than they actually matter. She liked to believe that it would hurt less if nobody knew how important they were to her when she inevitably lost them.)

Carol won the race, as she often did, cheating or not. She was a good pilot, of a car and of planes. The adrenaline lit her veins on fire and she welcomed each second of the inferno in the red.

(Decades later, she’d hate that she won that stupid race.)

(Funny, she didn’t know there was a Carol out there that lost the stupid race. But a lot of Carols did win it. There were lot of Carols that lost their Marias.

It was like the universe telling her that it didn’t matter which version of reality, Carol Danvers didn’t deserve a happy ending – not one in which Maria was part of.)

And if it was to save lives, she would fly the plane without a second thought. The dangerous, prototype plane that rran with an engine powered by a mysterious glowing cube. (A dangerously pretty blue glow, the colour of her death). It could explode under her hands. It was far from being ready to be flown safely, but Lawson needed a pilot. She climbed with something like dread on the pit of her stomach, like it was going to explode under her hands.

(Better hers than Maria’s. Maria and Monica could live without her, they had each other and Maria’s family.

She could’t live without them.

It would hurt, she knew, she wasn’t oblivious to the fact she was family yoo, but they’d move on. She’s never move on.)

She was not fast enough to not be shot down by aliens.

Lawson’s blood was blue, and she wanted to shoot the engine. It’d kill Lawson, blue-blooded not human Lawson, and it’d kill Carol, red-blooded and very human Carol. She didn’t have time to register that, to understand she was about to be the lamb meant to be sacrificed to protect something much larger than she’d ever could have imagined.

Maybe she knew she wasn’t going to make it, survive this desperate flight test, so when Lawson’s – Mar-Vell’s – was down, she shot it.

She won the race to her grave.

She was the embodiment of not like other girls.

Starting by bleeding blue but not having blue skin. (She thought she never hated a colour the way she hated blue, maybe it was a weird thing, to hate the colour of her blood and the colour of most of her Kree companions.) There was the glowing fists and photon blasts. There was the humour and emotions she tried so hard to suppress, but still came out because Vers was just... Vers.

She was not like the others. (Maybe she was broken, defective, maybe she lost more than her memory when they killed her family and friends. They took everything.)

And she had personal stakes here.

She wasn’t very obedient, not very disciplined, but the Skrulls took everything from her. Vers didn’t need to be an exemplary soldier, she needed to be a deadly one.

She was doing the same.

(In hindsight: maybe American genes were that strong.)

It was heartbreaking to be wrong. Not annoying, like it would be if it was about a small, inconvenient little thing.

(She would never learn, maybe. Never understand she was always wrong. Accept she was fundamentally broken.)

She wanted to make amends for the damage she caused. Even if it meant leaving her new friend behind, her old friend she didn’t really remember and the kid that looked up to her like she was the reason everything exists.

It was too much.

Emotions are allowed here. She was allowed to feel. 

And it was too much.

They took everything from her.

So she took everything from them.

It was anger first, it was revenge first, it was never about justice. It was about what they did to her, personally. The hazy memories of blood transfusions that burned like her body rejected it, the even hazier memories of testing what she could endure.

It was a about what they made her believe, the lives she took because of them. The innocent blood she drowned in because someone decided a pilot who was meant to die would be a good soldier.

(It was genocide.

Can you even pretend it wasn’t?

Killing the Skrulls.

Destroying the Supreme Intelligence.

Annihilator fitted better than any other name.

Better than Vers, the weapon of mass destruction molded by intergalactic sadists. Better than Carol, the human who died in a sunny afternoon in 1989.)

She was not good enough, never was.

Maria beat cancer once, she won’t do it again. There was nothing Carol could do. She knew the Kree blood had an almost miraculous healing factor – Carol heard about Coulson. But Maria had accepted her fate and Carol was a killer, but she wouldn’t force Maria to go through the same blue inferno she went (when her body was broken and falling apart because no human was made to survive cosmic radiation).

She promises she would be there when Monica came back: she was not.

She was a liar.

Hearing Monica again hurt, her not wanting to talk also hurt. (Carol didn’t deserve her.)

Seeing Monica again hurt, being shot down also hurts. (She was the annihilator, she couldn’t call her kid her childhood nickname)

Everything hurt.

Kamala was just a starstruck kid, like Monica was once upon a time. Carol knows she’d disappoint her soon enough. Maybe for being a flawed human, maybe for not being human enough.

Maybe for forgetting how to not be a weapon first and a hero second.

Like that day, over thirty years ago, deep down, Carol knew the tragedy was coming. What were the chances that she’d get her family back?

Monica looked like a Goddess, the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. And Carol had seen some beautiful, otherworldly things. All grown up and powerful and Maria would be so proud of her. (Maria, because it was too soon for Carol to say that).

(She didn’t have the right to, did she?)

Maybe it was the soft it’s okay that sets her off. That made her decided that it didn’t matter if she was hurt and exhausted. Body aching and the taste of alien blood flooding her mouth.

That was the "the end" in their story and she didn’t want it. She couldn’t handle it.

Perhaps it wasn’t good to leave Kamala alone in the ship, even if Carol’s ship had a pretty easy to use autopilot with the coordinates punched in. All Kamala needed to do was sit and ask to go home.

But it was Monica. But Carol had never been this tired after the explosion decades ago, not even when she was punched in the face by a Infinity Stone.

From all the fighting. The explosion punched a hole in the fabric of the universe itself and she was right there, it was almost impressive that all she got was a couple of rips on her uniform and messy hair, and the blood on her mouth. Then she used a lot of what was left to give Monica energy enough to un-punch the hole.

It was a good justification. It was an excuse.

Emotions made her weak.

She gave everything, knowing that if she reached Monica and kept her on the right universe, she’d need to be dragged back to the ship (again). She flew faster than her body allowed her after being hit and punched and blown away. Fast enough that she wondered if she could tear herself apart.

She wasn’t fast enough.

She was never good enough.

The universe was suddenly empty and cold. Carol didn’t remember feeling cold after meeting Maria. And the last person who knew anything about Carol the human was gone.

She was a star in human form.

But she couldn’t give enough.