So, here goes my first MCU work. It's set after Infinity War. According to the comics Thanos came from the actual Saturn moon Titan. Though in the movies it's an actual planet somewhere in the Andromeda Galaxy. I'm gonna stick to that, because it leaves me with so much more to write.

That said, have fun reading :)

Leftovers

Chapter 1.
Headless Chickens Keep On Running

Tony has been sitting in this same spot for hours now. At least it feels like hours, might have been minutes, might have been seconds, but who knows, who cares anymore?

Half the universe. Half. That means that there's a 50% chance that… That Pepper is gone. That not her hair is fluttering on the wind but her ashes. That she has fallen apart like the others. Like the Guardians. Like Peter. Like Strange. And what did that man think, giving the stone away for Tony?

The blue girl is pacing up and down. (More than seconds then.) She is the only other left here. Angry and hurt, just like him, but still better off for she is not wounded and stems from this galaxy, probably knows how to get away from this planet, too. Unlike him, who's got a hole in his side, is so very far from home (so very far from Pepper, from knowing…) and has no idea what to do now.

If there is anything left to do but sweeping up ashes.

He needs to know.

Tony tries to rise to his feet, succeeds mostly, and then promptly falls back to the ground. His side. Ah, yes. Curse that.
He tries again, this time the blue girl (he should really ask her name again some time) grabs him by the arm and steadies him.

"Where will you go?" she asks. And he can hear it. Can hear the echo of a lost soul in that calmly spoken question. Can hear her contemplating following him in hopes that he still has some kind of plan because she has none. She doesn't know what to do now.

But neither does he.

"Home," Tony says because it's what he wants, what he hopes he can do despite all odds.

"Earth?"

He only nods because something the size of the said planet seems to constrict his throat. Blue Girl only nods as well. Then starts moving.

Tony follows. He doesn't know where they're going or if she even wants him to follow, but doesn't care much, moving in any way is so much better than sitting still. Hell, even running around with as much sense of direction as a headless chicken feels like getting something done. And Tony really needs to feel like he is accomplishing something. He is running on nothing but hot air and a weak sense of purpose, without that he'll fold from exhaustion.

The skin on his face feels unbelievably hot. He manages not to stumble as he rubs one of the more shiny pieces of his suit as clean as it goes with his shirt and peers at his distorted reflection. Sunburn. (More than minutes then.) Something so mundane, something that should only happen after falling asleep on the beach. It feels so unreal. Just like being on another planet feels like a dream. A nightmare. Why can't he just wake up?

This is not how he imagined interplanetary travel.

This is not how he imagined his life to go.

Blue Girl is fumbling with some tech in her arm and any other day Tony would've been all over the cyborg, fascinated by the working combination of machine and living being, but not today. Today he is sunburned and thirsty, has a hole in his side, is fucking stuck on another planet, his companions and friends dead and Pepper… He really wishes for something to knock him out so he can wake up again to a universe whose inhabitants have not just been spectacularly decimated.

"My ship is still here." Blue Girl reads out what the tech in her arm has detected.

Ah, so that's where they're going. Makes sense, Tony thinks. The others ought to have gotten here somehow, in a different way than he and Peter and Strange did. (And why didn't Peter let go and fall back to Earth, why did he come along to leave Tony with that picture of him falling apart and those words…) They came with Thanos' minion's ship, and that thing was fast, only two days for what should have taken more than his lifetime. Right? Even if he doesn't know where exactly they are, a human ship would've taken much longer, that much he knows.

"Is that-" He coughs, his throat dry, his tongue heavy. "Is that-, that ship, is it as- as fast as that one? As- as Thanos'?" He points at the wreckage they made of the thing, hand nervously twitching, because maybe he won't have to wait for forever to know, maybe he can return home and quick. "I mean, I don't know how far we are from Earth. I don't know our position at all, but it only took two days and…" Blue Girls' sceptical expression has his words run dry again.

"The ship on which they imprisoned me would have been able to make that trip in a couple days time, but I had neither the time nor the means to steal it. All I have is the freight shuttle, and it's fitted with a standard propulsion engine. It's not meant for long distance. We could just barely make it to the nearest inhabited planet and go from there with whatever else transport we can acquire," she admits.

Tony raises a slightly singed eyebrow. "You'd help me and wanna come with me?"

"What else is there left to do for me?" Blue Girl says, the corners of her mouth pulling down. "I failed to stop Thanos. But I can at least help his enemy try to get back on their feet. Save what is left if you can't save it all." She wrings her hands. "Gamora would've done that."

"Gamora was the one Starlord got so angry about, right?" Tony carefully asks. He hates how he knows only so little of everything. There seems to be a story revolving around Thanos that is made of so many strings, he has a feeling he is only a teeny tiny piece in this. And that irks him, because maybe, had he been a bigger piece, had he known more, he would've been more effective in stopping shit from coming down.

"Yes. She was his friend. My sister." Blue Girl explains and her steps speed up, avoiding further questions by making sure Tony has to focus on keeping up with the new tempo. Tony shuts up and follows her lead, he knows that kind of running from your feelings all too well, practices it himself far too often to justify keeping poking at her wounds.

They move further away from the ruins that made the background of their disastrous battle and find Blue Girls freight shuttle. It's an ugly hunk of metal, all square-edged and bulky, not a single streamline in sight. But then it's just a freight shuttle, it's supposed to hold as much freight as possible and there is no air resistance in space anyway. No need for this thing to look as pretty as Tony's sports cars when it's meant as a truck.

He climbs into the truck ship after Blue Girl and sits down in the second seat in the cockpit. Buckles in as she buckles in. Follows her movements with his eyes and learns how this thing is started up. There is a brief hesitation in his resolve when he figures that he might just have gotten his ass into the metaphorical van of a stranger who promised him candies, but remaining on this hellhole of a planet wouldn't be much better. Whatever Blue Girl might plan can't be much worse than going crazy left behind alone on this dead rock. And then the engine is already firing up and Tony braces himself for a lot of G-forces shaking up his bones, but the shuttle lifts so much more smoothly than any NASA rocket ever did. He absentmindedly makes a note to himself about having to find out what power source this thing is burning, then exhaustion catches up with him after all. He sees strange stars twinkling at him through the windshield, but before he can properly appreciate the view his eyes fall closed and Tony is out.

He wakes up to Blue Girl shaking his shoulder. "Wake up, human!" she says.

"Human's got a name..." he grumbles as he forces his gritty eyes open. "But then we never got to having an introduction, huh?" He holds out his hand (And god how he feels the aftermath of the fight in his muscles!) waiting for her to hesitatingly grab it. "I'm Tony Stark. Nice to meet you!" he shakes their hands.

"Nebula." She shakes his hand back. Then pulls her arm away and turns back to the control system. "We are nearing a planet."

"I'm guessing it's not Saturn? Because you said we're searching for an inhabited planet and I'm pretty sure if Saturn was inhabited then people would've known..."

Nebula just stares at him.

"Alright, so it's not Saturn. You see Saturn is in Earth's solar system and it's got that moon called Titan and Thanos' planet is called Titan, so I kinda hoped we were this close..."

"We are not even in your galaxy, Tony Stark," is the answer he gets, spiced up with a surprising amount of pity. Not that he wants pity. What he wants is to be somewhere near Saturn, because another Galaxy... "But, but- No! How?! This fast- that ship- And... and how- how will we get to Milky Way then, and where the fuck are we?" When has he become such a stuttering mess? He doesn't know but tells himself not being all smooth for once is okay given the circumstances.

"I believe you call this one the Andromeda Galaxy. At least that is what Quill once said. He too keeps talking about a Milky Way when referring to Earth's Galaxy. Kept talking," she corrects herself.

"Can you show me? Does this thing have a map?" Tony starts poking at the console in front of him, but Nebula slaps his fingers away from the buttons.

"It's a freight shuttle, it usually traverses only between ship and planet. It does not have maps." She is obviously annoyed with him.

"Then how did you get to Titan?!" Tony snaps as he rubs his hand where Nebula hit it, trying not to pout.

"I do have a certain amount of maps in my storage." She taps her temple with a single finger. "But only of Andromeda."

"Well, damn it. So we do not only need a ship but also a map?"

"Yes."

"Fantastic..." He huddles back into his seat and drags a hand down his face. His body is still screaming exhaustion and he studiously ignores the throb in his patched-up side. "Okay, so why'd you wake me?"

Apparently no longer in the mood to talk to Tony, Nebula points out the front pane. (He refuses to call it windshield any longer when there is no wind out here.) Among the glittering stars there is a planet, gray and blue and relatively small, or so Tony thinks. He has no scale whatsoever.

"Ah," he says.

As they near the planet's atmosphere Nebula finally deigns to speak to him again. "Morka. I don't know much about it, but planets close to Titan tend to be inhabited by scum."

"Great... I hope we won't have to punch people, I'm still feeling sore all over from our last... fight," he ends lamely, carefully stomping down on all feelings that arise when thinking about their defeat.

"We'll see," is all that Nebula says.

Tony nods to himself, his own thoughts echoing unpleasantly loud in his head in the ensuing silence. He hates silence, he can't even hear the sound of the ship's engine...

"Are all your engines this quiet?" he asks, partly to break the silence, partly because there is a suspicion forming in the back of his mind.

"The engine is not running. We have been out of fuel for a while now and are only drifting. I told you we could barely make it to the next inhabited planet. This is barely making it."

"Ah," Tony says once more. The sole reason why he'd prefer running out of fuel in space over running out of fuel at sea: A tiny push can carry your ship for forever rather than just over the next wave. "Okay, so we need to get some fuel. Or another ship with fuel. And what I wouldn't give for a bottle of water..."

Nebula reaches into a compartment next to her pilot seat, pulling out a sort of canteen. She tosses it to Tony, who scrambles to catch it, not caring about looking undignified in the slightest. His mouth is a freaking desert and there is finally something that might just keep his tongue from being mummified by the drought.

Though what hits his poor tongue is less like water and more like watery slime. Tony reluctantly pulls back, because while despite its liquid-soap like texture this stuff felt good, he's not sure how well his body will fare with being fed this alien stuff.

"It won't kill you," Nebula says as he contemplates where to spit his mouthful. "It didn't kill Quill. Or anyone else. It has the same effects on your body as water and will be the only drinkable thing you can find on some planets. Like on the Chitauri homeworld."

So Tony decides to swallow his mouth full of slush. Nebula could've just stabbed him in his sleep had she wanted him dead. Just like water, it tastes of nothing in particular and has a marvellous soothing effect on his dry throat. He gladly gulps down some more, then hands the canteen back to Nebula. She too takes a swig, then puts the water-slime away. Feeling a little less like dried out shit Tony actually manages to keep his mouth shut and let her concentrate as she sets about landing the ship with only the thrusters for help. Puffing air in every which direction their shuttle goes down.

Tony just hopes that if they survive the landing his second strange planet will be friendlier than the first.