Ginnie was rather quiet as she moved through the streets of New York. She knew where she was going though part of her didn't want to go her. She had a bouquet of flowers in her hand and a picture frame in her bag. For once, the voice of her 'inanimate friend' was quiet. She didn't even have the usual earbud in her ear, didn't want to hear him even if he did talk. Snow was falling down around her, blanketing the ground in it's white ash. It almost reminded her of an old movie she had seen the other day.


Remaining quiet, she could hear the soft crunch of the snow and that was it. Her own thoughts were surprisingly quiet. The usual equations and commotion that usually went on in her head was replaced with silence, a dreary sort at that. The Hot Tati she had that morning probably helped. Little bits of alcohol always did.

She finally came to a stop in front of a statue and Ginnie stared at it, tears already stinging her eyes. She blinked them back, using the back of her left hand to wipe them away. Despite the cold, she kneeled down in front of the impromptu grave marker and placed the flowers in the ground, trying to make it symmetrical.

Getting the bag off of her back, she took the picture frame out of it, staring at it. It was one of her favorite pictures of them together, one from when she was just becoming Iron Lass. She was on her older brother's back and he was leaned forward. Her arms hung loosely from his shoulders and one of his hands held at her wrists to make sure she wouldn't let go. The other one was holding up a peace sign. The smiles on their lips were so pure, from laughter. Big and goofy. Her fingers gently traced around the picture before she finally put it down, leaning it against the statue and again making sure that the flowers were symmetrical on either side of the picture.

"I'm sorry i couldn't save you," she found herself saying, tears once again welling up in her eyes. "If i had been there earlier, maybe i could have but..." her voice was starting to break and she glanced away from the statue. "I miss you Howie. I dream about you, about what happened. And then i can't sleep. Or i dream about how it should have happened. How you should have lived. And i... i should be dead. Dead like you. Why... why did you have to die. You didn't have to fight that day. You should have been at home. Should have been with us. Why?"

From her wrist, she could just barely make out the words of the AI trying to talk to her. "Miss Stark, it's not your fault." But it was. It was her fault. Or at least part of her had come to believe it was.

Lydia didn't often come here, to the giant crater that used to be the middle of New York. She didn't like it, didn't like what it reminded her of. But it was hard to avoid the place, living in New York as she did. So sometimes, when she was feeling down and wanted to be left alone, she'd fly over and circle a bit before dropping down to one of the memorial sites. There were other heroes memorialized in this particular statue, but she was only interested in two of them. Her parents. There was a small hollow she'd found when she was younger in the middle of the statue, placed perfectly between Kyle and Carol. If she curled up, she could still fit there. It helped that she was almost impossible to see from the ground, nestled in a little bronze hiding spot. Phil always had a difficult time finding her here.

The metal was cold even through her mom's bomber jacket and scarf. But she stayed where she was, resting her head against her dad's torso, trying not to think too hard about what life would be like right now if they were both still here. The one thing she'd stopped trying to not think about was that day. It was televised for all to see. And it was utter chaos on the screen. Lydia squeezed her eyes tight against the memory, knowing it was inevitable but still painful.

She pulled out her dad's sketch book from inside her coat, running her fingers over his rough lines. This one was her favorite. He'd done a rough sketch of her when she was little playing with her mom. it looked so alive even for a small thumbnail sketch, she was in awe of his talent. One day she'd be as good as him. She had her own notebooks now, filling up rather quickly with her own sketches. But she always compared them to his. It was how they bonded.

Hearing footsteps in the snow, Lydia sunk lower into her hiding spot, not wanting to be discovered just yet. She waited quietly for whoever it was to go away. But the footsteps didn't keep going, they stopped. Well that was just fine with her, she wasn't ready to leave yet anyway. Clutching the notebook close to her heart, she closed her eyes again, trying to remember happy times, like in the sketches. Of course then she started to talk. The voice was familiar to her, and she chanced a peek down below. Ginnie had come with flowers for her brother. She'd seen Ginnie only a handful of times since the Battle. Mostly she had been following along in Phil's wake as he was trying to take care of both her and fix SHIELD at the same time.

Lydia looked down again as Ginnie turned away and decided to make herself known to the brunette. "Because, Ginnie, that's what heroes do." Lydia popped her head up from her hiding place, looking down at the older woman. "They get into fights they've trained for and hope they can stop it before it stops them and goes to destroy more lives. At least that's what everyone keeps saying." She gave Ginnie a sad smile before unfurling and floating down to the ground, pulling her coat tighter around her.

Ginnie hadn't realized she wasn't alone out there. The addition of a familiar voice had her quickly trying to wipe away the tears. She never liked crying in the first place, it always gave her a headache. But that wasn't just it. She didn't like crying in front of people. She had this belief in her head that she had to at least look strong for everyone, seem like she was indestructible, even if she was a simple human, even if she was just like everyone else. But despite her best efforts to wipe away the tears, they still stained her cheeks, still brimmed her eyes.

She pulled her arms close to her body as she looked towards the girl. Lydia. She used to see her a lot before that battle. She remembered days when she was with her mother and father up at Stark Tower with the little blonde flying 'round and 'round. Ginnie had always found her a fascinating subject but, right now, she couldn't seem to let even those minute happy memories fill her head. She couldn't even.remember the last time she had actually seen this girl. Months perhaps? A year or two. It was a seemingly rare occurrence. But even if happy memories of younger days refused to surface, she would be lying if she said the presense of the other girl wasn't, in some way, a small comfort.

Ginnie tried to force a small smile, though it was quite difficult. Her lips just didn't want to pull up in the right fashion for her. She didn't quite know how the smile looked, but she knew it didn't feel right. And one look back at the statue wiped it away completely. "Yeah, that's what i hear. But is it right? I can't even ask if it's fair because i know, just as well as you, fairness hasn't even the slightest of effects on this world. Whether something is fair or not has never quite mattered." Her words faded a bit as she tried to pull her coat tighter around herself, as if it was going to effect the cold seeping in through her bottom half.

Ginnie cleared her throat a little and tried to turn her focus on the other girl completely. She had never noticed how close her brother and Lydia's parents had been when they fell. "Lydia, do you ever wonder if it can be changed? If someone could go back and stop it? I know it would never be a smart move, changing history like that. But if you could, would you?"

Lydia had been feeling a bit more melancholy as of late, hence why she was anywhere near this sad reminder in the first place. Meeting Ginnie here did lift her spirits if only a little. Her father always had something for her to chase after that could fly and turn tight corners on a dime. It was fun. Innocent. Gone. The statue standing above them reminded her of that. But she and Ginnie were what was left. She gave the other woman a moment to compose herself even if she didn't need to. Crying was something they all should do once in a while. Especially for someone like her. Sometimes she thought she had to wear her emotions on her sleeve so people wouldn't think about how she could punch through steel or stand in front of bullets and not even flinch.

"Yeah, life doesn't do fair or right or wrong...those are...human constructs I think my mom said once after...eh. Doesn't matter." Lydia rubbed her arms trying to get some warmth back into them. Her hands glowed slightly, adding to the warmth. She walked closer to Ginnie as she asked her question, looking up at her parents forever immortalized in bronze.

"All the time." She said after awhile. She'd thought about it constantly after it had first happened. Damn the consequences, she'd thought. She was eight and just wanted her parents back. But as she got older, she knew, the world didn't work that way. Nature abhors a paradox, Phil told her. It took her awhile to figure out what that meant. Time travel was messy business. You couldn't change something so dramatically and have everything else come out the same. "All the damn time."

Lydia kicked at the ground, shoving her hands in her pockets like an angry teenager.

It was almost odd. She had never really noticed until that moment how close Howard had been to Carol and Kyle when they died. But seeing Lydia there seemed to make that click. It almost made Ginnie wonder if she would have been able to stop whatever took them as well. Had she gotten to the battlefield just a little bit sooner, could things have been different? Could things still be different? She knew a girl who could time travel, could she stop it all? Would she?

As much as she would like to do such a thing, ask such questions, she also knew that changing the past could have serious repercussions. Everything could be so different, it could even be worse off than it is now. It was possible that the Battle was a necessary evil but Ginnie didn't really care. What she cared about was seeing Howie again. But that was never going to happen.

Ginnie looked over to Lydia, trying to seem curious, though really she just wanted a distraction. Any distraction. "You can tell me," she said softly. "After what?"

She tried to keep her eyes on her, keep them away from the statue. The snow was starting to make Ginnie's legs go numb. One less thing to feel. "Ned tries to tell me that talking about the past and... vocalising how it makes me feel is supposed to help. I'm not sure but it could help you if you did. And I'm not one to tell others, you know that."

Her thoughts went back to time travel a moment. She could pursue the topic but, let's face it, it wouldn't help anything. Not a damn thing and, no matter how appealing it might be, it wasn't feasible. But she could still wonder, right? Wondering might help, probably not, but one could hope.

((OOC;; I'm sorry that this post isn't my best quality. I had a rough morning but, like, i didn't want to let my day mess with my muse completely. I hope it's okay enough, though, otherwise, i can change stuff.))

Talking about the past never really helped her, but Lydia had only ever tried it with two people. And as much as she loved her little hodgepodge family that she had right now, she wasn't sure how to talk about it. Sure on some level, James got it, but he was always on the look out for some form of revenge. He could have that one day, but she knew she'd never get any sort of satisfaction if an opportunity came to her to take down Darkseid or Thanos. She didn't have that kind of motivation. Both her parents had instilled the fact that death should always be a last resort, after she had exhausted every single option. She also knew she was nowhere near powerful enough to deal with those guys on their own and she didn't feel like going on a suicide run. So she had made peace with the idea of revenge a long time ago.

"My mom and dad had come back after evacuating a planet..." Lydia continued after some prompting. "Galactus was there. To eat it, obviously. I could tell they had been having a discussion the entire journey back, never agreeing on an end point. My dad was so mad, he said it was just wrong to make refugees out of an entire planet. That it was wrong that the guardians did nothing to stop him. And my mom immediately whipped around and said, 'Could you stop a hurricane? A tornado? An earthquake? No. Galactus is a force of nature. Right and wrong do not factor into this. Right and wrong and being fair are not something that feed Galactus. The most we can do is get out of the way.' And my dad looked like he wanted to argue more but thought better of it. And it's stuck with me. Life isn't fair, it has no concept of fairness."

Lydia stood quietly for a moment, letting the cold seep in as she dimmed the slight glow she had. "So, yeah, I can think about getting them back all I want, but life...it wouldn't be fair enough to let me keep them."

Ginnie shifted slightly in the snow so that she could better see the usually bubbly blonde. She noticed the glow that had been forming around Lydia but she didn't comment on it. She was sure it was due to the emotional duress of being asked about her family. Or something like that. She couldn't be completely sure. Telling differences in emotions had never been her forte, not really. No, her forte was with machines, computers, mechanical sort of things, not people. It was something she was determined to learn more about, try to figure out someday.

She listened closely to every single word that the girl said and, on one hand, she kind of agreed with Kyle's perspective on that. If there was some way to stop Galactus, surely they could have found it. Why constantly have to evacuate people, make them loose their homes? There was a better way, a different solution, wasn't there? But, no, of course not. Because everyone knew there was no real way to stop a force like Galactus. No matter how much people might hope for it, wish for it. There was no chance of it in the end.

Still, she couldn't help but make a small face at the lesson there. Life wasn't fair. And Ginnie knew that, deep down. She knew, from more than just a 'philosophical' stand point as well. And yet, on some smaller, deeper level, all the logic in the world couldn't change the fact that she wanted to believe that life could be fair, that it could be just, defined by its rights rather than its wrongs. In a perfect world, maybe that was possible. But this wasn't a perfect world, not by a long shot.

She didn't quite understand the next action she tooj but her body seemed to running on its own. She quietly stood up and, after taking a few steps towards Helen, she wrapped her arms around her to pull her into a hug. "Whether it's fair for us to be able to keep the ones that matter in our lives, like Carol or Kyle or Howard, it doesn't mean we can't hope, can't imagine what it would be like if things were different, if they could be different, even when they can't be. We can always have our hopes and dreams, though."