Warning: Quarantine In Effect

DAY 0: Life Before the Yorkies

**Trigger Warning:** Tragedy & death

Life was great before the virus hit.

No, really, it was.

Before the Avengers had to be careful around every cough, sneeze and respiratory droplet expelled by the New Yorkers around them, life was great.

The team was still budding with promise, ever-growing and ever-changing as teams will naturally do. Everyone had survived the evil mastermind behind the infinity stones gauntlet and lived to tell the tale, so that was pretty damn boisterous and fortunate for them all. Even reformed evil doers existed within the group from Bucky to Loki…which, okay, wasn't all that much but the Avengers took their winnings and their surprises up in their arms like presents for children on Christmas day.

They were appreciative of each other; even while snarky to some, at least for Tony's sake and the inventor's much needed sanity.

They hadn't aged at all, either. Which was weird-but not many of them could complain. Morgan stayed the same age and the demigods did too and Loki was surprised that Thor had let himself go as much as he had with his alcoholism and weight gain but even the brothers were commiserating together more days than not.

It was wonderful. It was the end of the story that they all very much needed. Everything was going great. Just, just great.

And then it happened:

Zyork-85 appeared in the population.

First twenty cases, then fifty, then a hundred: localized, though, so there wasn't too much fuss.

Then it reached a thousand.

Ten thousand.

Three hundred and fifty thousand.

And by then the villains the Avengers would normally be up against began to dwindle.

Civilians began to freak out: buying out all the toilet paper and paper towels from the nearest grocery stores.

Hell, one of them named Jimbo even traveled across state lines to raid the largest supermarket there. Yeah, the team knew of Jimbo, that's for sure.

Civilians began to wear masks of any kind-mostly Halloween masks and maxipads over their central facial features which made the Avengers equally uneasy and uncomfortable.

Loki began chiding the mortals on their insanity, rubbing in the fact that his once believed craziness was nothing matched against the mortals.

Ha, ha, very funny.

And that's how it started, really. Kinda like a joke, which was okay, they reasoned, they acknowledged, it was okay to joke.

But then there was one reported death.

And the joke, yeah, it was still pretty funny.

Then there were twenty deaths.

And okay, you know, the Avengers had some more Intel on the situation than normal civilians, so they knew more about what was going on and how the mainstream media was sensationalizing the virus and what mankind was up against.

So the joke turned a little sour.

So what? It happens. Right?

Then Argentina got hit: fifty thousand deaths.

Africa: nine hundred thousand cases with a death rate of about seventy-five percent.

And this was over the course of a few months.

And then, then the joke wasn't so funny anymore as the numbers climbed, climbed, climbed into the millions.

The Avengers started to look at each other, piled together in New York City, where the new hub of cases was spiraling out of control, packed in like sardines and sitting ducks just waiting to be shot in the head out the back door and assembled into their final cabinets of misery.

They started looking side-eyed at each other, watchful of every hiccup and hyper-aware of every sneeze. The bottles they'd just managed to find off the store's shelves of Purell and hand sanitizer was being carefully manipulated and controlled by the red-headed assassin, with her blonde streaks still visible in her hair, as she gave a muted pursed lip acknowledgement to her fellow teammates and watched with judging eyes, calculating eyes, even, as they would be given a small blotch of the liquid that was meant to, meant to, save their souls.

And then between the hush-hush nature of the virus and the inevitable blowout of the symptoms on the news, the panic continued to ensue. People weren't allowed to leave their homes without surgical masks or, as mentioned previously, some alternative type of mask that would cover their faces to minimize the spread to those who were immunocompromised.

It was supposed to work, they said. It was supposed to be the change they all needed.

But people kept getting sick. People kept going into the Intensive Care Unit with their piles of bloody stool and fluid clogged lungs. They still turned three shades paler than normal and their cognitive functioning decreased to that of a child's.

And worst of all, they just kept dying.

Crime rates began to spike by the third month into the quarantine. The city was on official lockdown with no hope, no light, of being reopened again anytime soon. Criminals began to loot the stores that tried to say they were closed; restaurants without drive-thru were effectively closed for the time being. Stores never really got back their usual amount of toilet paper, making for some unhappy demigods who liked to use rolls of it at one time (yes, we're looking at you, Loki. You may have been a prince before but times are changed now so stop it, please.)

With constraints on the superheroes being able to leave their quarters and the politics of the nation's worldwide leading again and again to closed deals or shortages of meat packing availabilities, job losses and more caskets being produced than was possible to fit in every funeral home across the nation, things were looking glum.

Try as they might to raise awareness, encourage safety in small numbers and social distancing over and over again, the practical use of hand washing and being safe, people still just kept dying.

At one point, the Avengers were facing holograms of how thirty million people on the planet had been slowly etched away. It was on par, if such horrors could ever exist, with the Snap that had occurred all those years ago.

People just…disappeared.

There were limited and more limited cases of people surviving the illness. It didn't seem to make any sense, nothing that the medical universities or teaching hospitals tried to do to lessen the blow, lessen the impact, lessen the death seemed to help at all.

People just kept…losing.

They'd fight, but how long can anyone really fight for?

Soon gifted minds were beginning to leave the planet on a scale of such immense destruction and depletion that the grief that surrounded each team member was so large, so taxing, that it jaded them. It changed them.

Now, instead of wary glances of mistrust, there were fears of losing yet another loved one to this disastrous virus.

It didn't seem to matter how important that one person was. How needed they were, how wanted. The virus just left mass destruction everywhere it went.

The brilliant mind of Shuri was the first one the Avengers lost. T'Challa wasn't the same after her death, even after Shuri instructed them all to use her body's immune system for science, to find what mechanisms were being terrorized by the virus and continuing to turn the mortal's own body against them. Still, still there were little revelations.

Everyone felt aghast. Depressed. Scared.

The mission felt more hopeless by the second and Steve Rogers didn't like it one bit.

There had to be something they were missing, some mechanism, some cellular division that was escaping even the most brilliant minds of the world.

There had to be some way to fight against this, too. Fight against it together again.

But each day brought little good news.

Sometimes, scientists were able to make a singular discovery but the information was either shown to be inaccurate or the body's defenses still did nothing to stop the process. It was a virus in real time hijacking mankind and turning their own bodies against themselves.

More and more blood began to bubble to the surface, spilling down the sides of the tanks as bodies upon bodies were placed outside old factories that could no longer work. They just… didn't have enough coffins or caskets or urns to put all the departed souls into.

It was a black and white mirage of terror on the television by that point, just endless photos passerby's managed to send into news stations, stations that were largely working from home on dirty camera systems, just showing the piles of the bodies, like how they once were during the Holocaust, all those years ago.

After a while, the decimation became…ordinary. The desensitization of the whole ordeal was weighing heavily upon every member of society, with particular negative side effects to those in lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

Women and children were held captive in their homes, their abusive husbands and growing narcissist's controlling their every move. Even when they tried to run, tried to escape, either their husband came back or the virus got them. Either way, they didn't stand a chance.

After Shuri passed, it was about two, three, maybe four months later that Maria Hill got infected, too. She was gone within a matter of days. The shock of it all, somehow, managed to swipe through the field and made them all hang their heads a little lower in respect, in solidarity.

Not long after it was Drax, they think, that lost his fight. The details weren't all that clear from Quill on the matter. But the loss effectively shredded any last remains of hope that the team was carrying.

Scott Lang came after, despite how remote the heroes had been, how increasingly small their radius of residency became, they still lost the ant regardless.

No person, no place was safe, anymore and it was a sobering realization.

Tony returned to drinking more in the dim lighting of the tower, alone and to himself on the floor, trying to crumble inside himself. He shirked away from his responsibilities to Pepper and Morgan, no matter how much he said and denied that from being the case. It was how he dealt with his guilt and his grief. And he wasn't ready yet to let that go.

Even Loki was harboring concerned glances in Thor's direction whenever Thor decided he needed to fly with Stormbreaker, get some 'fresh air' he always said. Loki was waiting for the other shoe to drop and just because it hadn't yet, it didn't mean it never would.

So when a third of the population of New Asgard got sick and perished, the two demigods plus Valkyrie were unsettled and distraught.

Thor, as it were, drank more than ever before, fraught with worry that he wouldn't be able to keep him or Loki or Valkyrie safe. The weight continued to climb on, even when Loki was advising his old oaf that self-medicating wasn't the solution (he'd been having the same conversation with Stark, after all). But Thor wouldn't listen.

He needed a drink, he'd say. Just one more drink.

But it was never just one.

=!***!=

The day MJ fell sick, Peter had a crushing sense of doom come over his shoulders. He thought she'd be different, that she'd be spared.

He was wrong.

Ned helped him through the worst of it. In that, he found some solace, some sliver of peace.

Falcon grew sick soon after and then the Avengers were separating themselves from their close capacity to several floors apart from one another in the tower. They barely spoke to one another and the more the quarantine droned on and on the more their minds broke and splintered. The yearning for human contact was overwhelming and Thor found himself taking more drinks and more flights despite Loki's hesitance about him doing so.

"It's all right, brother," he slurred one late evening and Loki quirked an unamused glance at him.

"You say that, yet I have this gnawing feeling that you're not." Loki had observed in response, quicker, too quick for Thor to catch up with.

"We'll be fine." Thor reassured, sloshing a drink in one hand and downing back another pint.

"You keep saying that too, but the truth of the matter is that a third of our population has passed on, showing us that we are not immune either to this pandemic. When are you going to take reality for what it is and be more responsible with your choices? On Valhalla, I sound like Frigga, once more." Loki shook his head in disbelief, even when a pang of the guilt and misery sparked alive again in his soul. How he missed his sweet mother. It had been such a long time since….

But Thor was smirking and tossing another pint back again and Loki bit his lip and walked away because what was the point, really, if Thor wasn't going to listen? Loki felt lost in a world that didn't seem to make any sense. And Loki couldn't begin to comprehend if this planet was as doomed as all the hundreds out in the universe.

He prayed it was only affecting Midgard, for this amount of loss was too much to bear even on his own shoulders.

But if it wasn't… he couldn't deny he felt some comfort in not being alone.

=!***!=

When Peter got sick, everyone held their breath. The human population in the world was now hovering at two billion and three hundred million people left and so the Avengers gathered their last amounts of strength to say goodbye, once more, to one of their own.

And Peter, Peter was in raw, brutal acceptance of it.

He'd told Ned, in a choked whisper, that he'd be seeing MJ soon and that he'd say hello for his friend, that she was waiting on the other side for him and that everything was going to be okay.

He didn't want to go of course, so much like before the Snap occurred, but he'd accepted it. He'd grieved, he'd lost, he was okay with leaving now, too.

Even when his speech failed him and he could only communicate by blinking, possibly perceiving the world around him in the same way he once had, or maybe being an empty husk left to rot away in a bed, stationary and sedentary, he wished for the bright lure of freedom to enter his skull.

And for a while, for a while he thought it had.

Except…it didn't.

Strangely, for no reason whatsoever, Peter pulled through.

Peter…survived.

They hoped, they all prayed so deeply in their souls, that this was the beginning of a new dawn. When the towns and cities across the world had been shredded from their once immense population and popularity, when the world had lost and lost again, when the children had been pushed aside so cruelly, when the parents had been mistaken, when the hazy flash of the sun provided no true warmth, they prayed this was a new dawn.

It's all they had left; all that was remaining.

Hope: nefarious, nefarious hope.

It made the world keep spinning, they believed. And they believed it. Because they had to.

Because what other choice was there?

So maybe this was good news, after all.

Maybe.

But whoever really knew for sure?

And the question still remained, that despite all the adversity that had spread like wildfires over the human population, still they wondered: could they survive this one final fight? Or was this the end of everything as they knew it? Would there ever be normal again? Happiness again?

Whoever really knew?

A/N: So, uh, this happened. You know, to be honest, I never knew how much fun it'd be to just kill off characters one by one, or…let's say I forgot how fitting maniacal laughing is when you do that, ahaha. But yes, this is a NEW fic, that I finally wrote up almost all of it a couple weeks after I had the idea. Basically, I'm coping and not coping with the whole covid-19 thing so in an effort to sort through my own feelings and issues with it, I decided creating a fanfic about similar topics would be an excellent coping mechanism, hence, ta-da!

This fic will be multi-chaptered and not go in any logical order at all. I may even do like journal entry type chapters here and there. And I will DEFINITELY take prompts or ideas from you guys so please let me know what you'd like to see written or who, character-wise, you'd like to see me focus on and all that jazz. I'm thinking we'll skip around days-wise, so like this chapter is Day 0 (and then beyond) and next chapter could be Day 297 and then the next Day 52, stuff like that.

Yeah, but uh, that's all I got. I love that I keep making more work for myself when I should be focusing on other stories and projects. Ohhhh, me, that's how I do. :P I also tried out a different "narration" style for this story so let me know what you thought about that if you've seen my other works, before! :]

Anyways, thanks so much for reading! I don't really have much of this idea fleshed out so if you have any ideas, let me know! Like other symptoms, what it does, how it messes people up, what the world is like in 2093, why they didn't age, etc. I threw in some hope at the very end of this chapter though, so maybe things will be okay? Who knows, we'll find out in time. :B Also, I'm thinking that the rest of the human population aged during this time and I don't really know how the whole "these bunch of characters totally didn't die and are still alive somehow" and how that all works out but uh, if you have tips or tricks, let me know how I can explain that! ;]

My list of fics I am prioritizing to update soon: CeC, CtP, S, AWC. Thanks again for everything!

Written: 4.17.2020; 5.1.2020,

Edited: 5.2.20

Background music: "Meet me on the battlefield" Cover by SVRCINA

PPS I hope you guys are staying safe out there in the real world, with the real virus! xxx

PPPS Let me know if my math is off at all, I've gotten terrible at math since being out of school. D: