Chapter Text
the chicago skyline used to be beautiful. she can remember being really young and sitting on the roof with nat, sometimes xai, and just looking at the lights from their home. watching them flicker, watching them move. knowing each speck of light was a car, a home, an office, a person behind the luminescence making it shine.
riri used to shine. now she feels like a part of the shadows, their darkest depths that the sun purposely tries to hide.
she was going to be the next tony stark. a better tony stark. now her suit won’t even listen to her because her accidental-ai-slash-dead-best-friend-slash-manifestation-of-her-consciousness got upset at her, which it shouldn't be able to do because it was an ai. it wasnt supposed to feel.
but it was natalie. and natalie used to feel, feel bigger and bolder than anyone riri had ever met before.
what did it say about her that her own manifestation-of-consciousness ran away from her?
riri looked down at the pavement below. the street was dark and dingey; there were no cars, the storelights were off with their closing and the streetlights were broken or dim.
there was no city light here. no life.
the hood was going to come for her. for her mother, her friends. she knew all too well who he’d be after - there were slim pickings, after all. she’d already gotten the rest of her friends and family killed.
or my friends’ parents, a voice added bitterly in the back of her mind. can’t forget literally getting the ruler of the most powerful nation in the world killed.
maybe that was why she’d tried so so hard at MIT to get her suit to work. in wakanda, it had been her attempt to lessen the guilt from her mind, to make it up to shuri - hell, to the wakandans - for pretty much killing their queen and starting an inter-species war. she’d made the vibranium detector, after all. if she hadn’t, then none of this would have ever happened.
maybe she’d still be at MIT. maybe the world would be a better place. riri liked to tell herself she’d make the change she wanted to see in the world, but…
she was doing a pretty shitty job of it. every good thing she tried to do ended with someone she loved being hurt, or someone being killed. it happened to her father, to natalie, to her stepfather, to the queen and all of the wakandans and those who died in the battle she caused, it happened to stuart when she agreed to meet the hood, it happened to john and now even the replica of her dead best friend.
riri managed a hoarse laugh at that. what kind of world did she live in? where was she?
when she was young and tony stark was her biggest idol, things were so simple. it was equations and wires and current flows and nuts and bolts. now the puzzle was made of pieces she couldn’t even identify, and she’s pretty sure the picture she’d trying to build doesn’t match the box she had opened.
it wasn’t that what she did ‘wasn't making a difference’, it was, but that difference always seemed to be a worse outcome. every. single. time.
maybe she should have been one of the people to disappear in the snap. she should have stayed gone. maybe be one of those people to appear right in front of a moving train or bus or something, die the second she got back. that way the path of destruction and hurt she’d cause would have been ended right then and there.
she stood up, eyes never leaving the pavement down below, toes hanging just over the edge of the ledge.
maybe she sound just… take herself off the board entirely. her mom could get over it. xai pretty much already had, and considering how he reacted after seeing nat?
he probably wanter her gone. scratch that, he definitely wanted her gone.
riri the genius, the headlines were meant to say, helped shaped the ever-changing world with her ingenuity and unparalleled intelligence.
expelled MIT student/ironman-wannabe dead at 19 they’d say. finally took the fall herself after making everyone else take it for her.
the weight of her sneaker on her foot was heavy as she let it dangle over the side of the ledge. falling would be easy. it wasn’t like she’d never fallen before. she’d fell from the sky more times than she could count on both hands. she’d just… never really hit the landing, y’know? never crashed without the weight and protection of the suit.
well, she’d consider what she’d done in gary’s shop on that day crashing, pretty damn hard, too, but everyone knew how that had ended.
maybe being with them again would be nice. or the silence that would come. or the weight of freedom from the chain’s she’d bound herself in. whatever the hell was meant to come after life, anyways.
riri rocked back onto the heel of the one foot she had on the ledge.
she rocked onto the tips of her toes, leaning over the edge as she stared down.
maybe the broken remnants of her family wouldn’t even have time to mourn her. they’d be dead already, killed by the hood or one of the crew.