because fuck you.
Space doesn’t have conventional sound. Cara can’t hear it when she catches her boot against an asteroid, there is no boom or clap, and she can’t hear herself swear aloud when she opens her mouth. It’s silent above the exosphere, and the only thing she can really sense -- thanks to the Kree abilities that’ve morphed around and into her body and mind -- is direct impact. The rock explodes as she recovers and cartwheels forward; her obstacle wasn’t very large in diameter; maybe four feet of space junk, but was enough for her to catch her toe on, acting as a metaphoric speed-bump while she’d been busy working on cooperating with Carol’s flight instincts. Little distractions like this frustrate the laser-focused pilot, and they spook the barely-beyond-novice holding the controls. In this case, Cara’s controls are her fine and gross motor skills.

Marvel (the unified name for the two, she’s come to accept) takes off again, twisting and hoisting and flexing herself along her charted course like a cat chasing down prey; she’s lean and fast and mostly single-minded; tearing her arms down to her sides like a swimmer grasping for more traction, she can feel her hair whip and tangle clumsily across the forehead panels of her helmet (space is cold and inelegant and imprecise), and into her eyes.. The ones that threaten to freeze in their sockets beneath her visors. They won’t, of course; the still-new Kree physiology wouldn’t allow for any sort of death here, but it brings her up here. To the brink. Maybe that’s the thing that’s throttling her forward -- the idea that she can.

Higher, further, faster becomes more than a tagline then. It’s hard to tell which ‘her’ is the one that’s biting into that particular school of thought.

The photon blasts come easily when she flips her body up and around, heels down and out to skid to phantom stability. She dips and bends with a kind of residual feline precision that she attributes to her time in a catsuit instead of one equipped for space flight, arcing through the darkness as a unified whole. Sick, some part of her comments, feeling the well of power somewhere in her gut radiate as she speeds up. The less she thinks, the more she operates as a single, multi-faceted being, and the more powerful she becomes.
The giant’s thrown her clear across the street. It isn’t a great feeling when she crashes through the cement and drywall and glass and steel of the building, but the kinetic energy builds somewhere deep inside, and when she opens her eyes after squeezing them closed in a grimace.. They all but cut the gargantuan being in half with how sharply they burn. This isn’t about us and them or good and evil anymore, she reckons, and when she sears out of the wreckage, looping her arms around the giant’s neck and kicking her foot down on their shoulder.. Cara can smell something gone up in flames.

.. Maybe it’s her; she doesn’t give the notion much thought anymore. She doesn’t bat an eyelash when the helmet materializes over her eyes or when someone fires a magical beam over her shoulder. It’s normal these days, and the fact that she hardly reacts is something worth consideration. A year ago, she was teaching Crossfit classes, guffawing with the boys and jamming her glasses up her nose while she studied at Stanford. A year ago, she was perfectly human, with her tiny house and renovations and batch-cooked meals and a best friend that felt like another limb. A year ago was a year ago, and the poetic part of her needs to just put it to bed. She swings a punch at the giant with enough power behind it to level the building it’d just thrown her into. The giant body hits the ground hard as she sears upward like a fighter jet.

Cara just watches as they fall, suspended in the air like a lethal Christmas ornament, surging and vibrating with the energy beneath her skin.. Alone. She tries not to think about it anymore, but knows she’s failing, staring downward as the giant gets back up. Trembling with anger and fear and certainty in her own abilities.. She cracks her knuckles and dives in again, wailing haymakers on whatever she can get her hands to touch.

She imagines a child’s squealing laughter, pancake mornings, and a too-big-dog in a too-little-house. She waxes nostalgic and indulges in her own loss, trying not to grimace beneath the helmet that obscures her identity. When Supergirl zips by, and Pietro races around below, she’s drawn out of her reverie and delivers another hit -- but this time, it’s accompanied by an anguished cry that no one hears but Captain Marvel herself -- David, swinging her hardest to take down more than just Goliath.
Another week’s end, another Final Boss Battle and Big Hero Moment. She knows the drill. When she sees Thanos, though, a part of her goes feral and ferocious. This is different than the monster of the week, and Cara — Carol — can feel her shoulders pull themselves back. She remembers something she’s read on the internet just then, a sick-sweet smile crossing her features. Something makes so much, unifying sense to the two women in her being. She’s pulling herself up, out of a wallop of a hit from something much bigger than she when she feels the syllables pull strings in her mind.

‘Captain America gets up because it’s the right thing to do,’ the woman had said. ‘Carol gets up becau—’

“Because fuck you.”

Nothing has felt more authentic in the last two months than that succinct rebuke. It’s soft, uncouth and impolite.. And entirely audible in every channel her voice rings out on. Southern and rounded, but shaking with rage. She thinks of Maddy, of Jessica and Jules and Veranke, and the chaos-strewn city his triumvirate is delighting in antagonizing. Nothing political matters. No grudges exist except the one between Carol Danvers, Cara Davies, and the giant, purple nutsack in front of her. Carol’s words regarding the nutsack, not Cara’s. That distinction is promptly drawn.

The nanopanels and atoms reassemble themselves in front of her eyes, illuminating in a way that’d shake most boogeymen from their caves. She is light embodied, unrelenting and undeterred, hurtling toward him for what feels like the umpteenth-and-will-be-final time when the new challenger enters the ring.. With the one entity whose concealing she’d considered her first actual success here in San Francisco.

With the aether in-hand, Galactus nearly stuns Carol Danvers and Cara Davies into submission.
I’m sorry for the way things are. This. Us. Cara’s pacing in the workshop while Wyatt sleeps upstairs; probably a first in their house, and she’s loathe to wake anyone with her troubles. [...] Especially when a giant alien who gets his daily nutrients from ruined civilizations has a big red stone to steal back. She’s tugging on her hair and sliding around in too-large socks while Chewtwo unhelpfully tucks herself on a chair nearby. Cara hasn’t slept in forty-eight hours, and has been back and forth from space more times than any woman really should in a one-week span.

“Friday, bring up that map pinpointing all known attacks on San Francisco — supernatural in origin — in the last 12 months.”

She’s been like this for a year, she muses, splitting her life with a superhero to moderate success. A catastrophic failure, and a resounding one at that, isn’t something she tolerates easily. People are at risk again, and it’s her fault for not burying that stone deep enough. There’s something lonely in the way she stares at the blue-lit hologram, and something knowing in the way the artificial intelligence dims the lights just a little.

“Your heart rate’s up, miss. Tinting blue-light to night-mode now. Automated system maintenance’ll will begin in forty-six minutes, requiring a protocol reboot. You’ll have to take a break. Shall I bookmark the search history?”

There’s nowhere to look to offer Friday a conciliatory glance, so she just keeps staring forward. There is no one to soothe her, or tell her to rest. She should’ve known that carrying the world on her shoulders’d be a lonely business, superhero or not.. And when even Friday moves herself into sleep mode, Cara steps outside and hurtles back to the skies again; a streak of light left to hang in the night sky like a single star to hold vigil over her city. Her people.

Up here, they can’t see her face, and for now, she concludes; it’s for the best.