Gene laughs a little, grateful for the subject change...well, sort of. He's about to reply with ribbing of his own when the swat lands, and...

...this isn't a one-time thing, is it.

He'd never wanted this to happen.

All he'd wanted was to fix the world, to make it right. Not this. Never this. Never this invasion of these monsters he'd never known existed outside of his childish visions and drawings, never the chaos and destruction and pain.

He'd wanted to return his mother to life and make sure that no child would ever have to endure what he endured again.

Instead, he is now the cause of more death, making more children orphans. Debris falls from the sky over New York as he and Tony and Pepper and Rhodes fight the invaders, destroying their attack ships, and there's no way they can catch everything that falls. No matter what, there's going to be collateral. It's landing on buildings, on the streets, and Gene hopes to whatever gods are listening that everyone on the ground had enough sense to get under cover and well inside the moment the Makluan mothership had appeared in the sky over lower Manhattan.

Somehow, he doubts that's the case.

Every life lost today is on his head, and he knows that. All he'd wanted was to fix the broken world. All he'd wanted was to end war and violence.

And all he'd done was make things worse than they'd ever been.

I'm sorry, Mother.

The light surrounds him, and he dissolves, not sure if he's dying.

I'm sorry.