NOTE: Today will see a two-part update ahead of a small but genuine chance that I will be unable to update on Monday. If Monday turns out fine, well, today was a bonus round and we'll see a chapter then, too.

. . .

25. The Voyage Home

. . .

Gamora nudged Quill hard in his side with one gloved hand, her long hair draping along her face to finish the job the loose hood had started. Along with her green skin, the disguise muted the absolute storm of internal tension that kept her on edge. Still, she didn't like the way the skinny human with the remarkably abundant, fluffy facial hair kept looking at her. "Quill."

He didn't look away from the tower of small boxes he was rummaging through, his voice distracted. "Guy doesn't see anything weird, Gamora, relax. He thinks you're maybe a shoplifter."

"That's not better."

"Just don't touch anything and he'll eventually realize you're a privacy freak and lay off." He looked off to the side, studying the pile of also out of date CD Walkmans with real but fleeting interest. He still firmly believed the true life of the music was in the white noise that came with good old tape. Well, Mom's life was in there somewhere, if he were going to be honest with himself. He sometimes thought he could hear her voice in the scratchy bits, memories of those good years when he was still so young and she could have lived forever. The walls around him seemed to fade for a moment.

She swatted at him again, bringing him back. "Just digitize your lyrical nonsense and be done with it. Can we move on? We need to discuss our current status."

"Would you just give me five minutes to live here?" He slumped slightly, never sure how to say important things without being a dick about it. "Look, someday let me try and explain to you what all this crap you think is so stupid really means to me, alright? But right now, I need some Creedence and Steppenwolf for the Milano. Maybe try something new. I dunno what-"

"You should try The Black Angels." Beard guy sidled up, hands tucked into the pockets of his jeans. He missed the way Gamora's eye blazed out from her hair at his sudden approach, busy doing a remarkably subtle glance at her hands and the pockets of her jacket. Catching her clean of any stolen product to prove out the only thing he cared about, he went back to grinning amiably at Quill.

"Yeah, man?"

"Psychedelic revival, absolutely tops if you like it old school. Heavy Velvet Underground sound." The beard regarded the towering wall of archaic media. "We got 'em on cassette, even vinyl too. They went all the way with the motif."

"Sold, bro. Hook me up with something good." Quill slapped his gloved hands together before reaching out to gently wiggle out a couple of tiny boxes from the wall. Logistics occurred to him in an afterthought. "You guys still take cash?"

Beard guy shrugged, not surprised by the question for whatever reason. "Cash, Apple pay, coin... We don't do the barter system. We used to."

No option for a galactic credit-transfer seemed to be kind of a given. Quill shrugged that off. "Whatever, dude."

. . .

Quill studied the printed receipt with actual horror before he wadded it up and stuffed it in the first trash can he passed. "Inflation is a bastard." He looked up, glancing at the other people wandering up and down the sidewalk. "Fashion got weird, too. I mean, maybe not that weird? I don't know. My frame of reference is all screwed up. Rocket back with the ship?"

Gamora caught the note in his voice. "You don't want to stay? This is your world."

"Yeah, it is, and I mean... we're gonna keep it alive and all that, but my home's really my ship, Gamora. Jokin' about the record shop aside. I got a whole life out there, I don't want to give it up yet." He shrugged, looking sheepish as he rattled the brand new cassette tapes in the pockets of his red ravager's jacket. There was a lot he never knew how to say, so he didn't try. "So what all's the status, since you were totally gonna beat my ass with it in there."

"Rocket's back with the Milano. No problems with delivery of the loaner. Towed it perfectly right through all flight scans."

"Any problems with the would-be pilot?"

"Seems to think Mr. Coulson's going to handle the short-ranger just fine. I think I agree. He's a good man." She couldn't resist a small chuckle. She'd looked over Rocket's shoulder when some things were being arranged, saw the way Coulson's face lit up at that aspect of the plan. "We do seem to pick up the oddest colleagues."

"Yeah. Ever get the feeling Groot has more to do with Rocket's decisions than anyone wants to admit?" She looked at him sharply, startled by the occasional moment of real astuteness he could have. He was staring up at the solar-panel streetlights with his mouth open. "I just remember how into it Groot was when Rocket was layin' down what happened on some of his odd jobs around this part of space. He really liked the guy. Liked your old jerkass buddy, too."

She looked away, her arms huddling in close around her jacket and causing something to pinch at her hip. She took her hand out to readjust the small sheath she had to keep stuffed under the layers of her clothes. "Groot has more heart than any of us. He's very kind. And I think he needs Rocket just as much."

"Guess that's true." He quit letting his mouth hang like a flytrap. "I'm just glad the friggin' houseplant sprouted back up after the shit with Ronan. 'Kay, ship's good, we're good. I got me some new tunes. What's Rocket's checklist look like from here?"

"We're to rendezvous with him back at the Milano, help him do one more full systems scan, then we get into geosynch outside all local and invasive sensors to sit tight on the go signal. We jump in once this Thor's team goes. SHIELD first, then him, then us. There'll be others, I'm to understand, but not acting on our schedule. After that, it's all up in the air." She adjusted again.

"You all right there?" Quill was looking at her hip with, at least, real concern and not just taking the chance to glance at her rear.

She took her hand away from the knife. "It's nothing."

"New knife? What'd you do, go over to a sports store for a souvenir? Tell me it's got 'Welcome to Earth!' custom stamped on it." He pointed at the hilt where it peeked out, chuckling a little.

"It's not new." It came out too shortly and she sighed when he recoiled, trying to sound apologetic. Nothing to be done for it now. She brought out the small knife and its silvered tip to show him. "I left it behind. A long time ago. I'm more than a little surprised to see it come back to me." She looked down at it herself, noticing no rust nor other mark of misuse on the blade she'd once left on the nightstand of a man she had intended to kill. Loki had taken good care of it since. Her hand closed around the hilt and she put it away again before any of the humans around her caught sight of it, still confused by the various meanings that small act of returning the blade could have. "Partial payment for the flight out, I guess you could say."

"Right." He was looking at her warily, seeing her tension. "You still good with this?"

"Yes, Quill." She looked ahead, her chin nearly coming out too far from her hood. She realized it when a jogger did a double-take, nuzzling herself back down. The earthly clothing was at least warm. She might keep the jacket, too. "It's just having Thanos this close. It cost, getting away from him. Knowing he's right there, knowing I had to sneak onto that grotesque ship of his, even if just for moments... it's unpleasant for me." She exhaled. "And soon I have to do it again."

"Look on the bright side. Next time, we go in shooting."

She did manage a lopsided smile at that, still worried but more than a little touched by his attempt to be comforting. "That is something, I suppose."

. . .

Thor waved a hand over the crystal beacon to double-check its status, glancing next at Heimdall who shook his head. "We remain in stasis," said Asgard's eternally stoic watchman where he stood at the end of the hall. "All are in their places, and those whom I cannot see, I yet cannot see."

"The veil across Latveria?"

Heimdall looked across the golden table towards the scientist Thor had brought with him. The human rubbed his hand along his chin after the question, fidgety in a way that suggested nothing of fear. "Yes, Banner. Often that small realm drifts in and out of my sight and I seldom have had need nor want to look close. But now I do make this attempt regularly for the sake of what comes, and I see that their sorcerer-king knows a few things about mirrors and shadows. He uses magic and satellite both to useful guise. Peel one, the other will remain. I see but darkly now in his kingdom. A troublesome people. And a most worrisome king astride it."

"Mhm." Bruce nodded, mostly thinking to himself and glancing up as Thor furrowed his eyebrows at him in the unspoken question. "Nat told me a few stories, got the usual SHIELD briefs. I also threw out some ideas on new orbital platforms to try and get through over the last few years. Last I heard, we got nothing. Still an empty spot in the world." He reached out and tapped at the crystal with the thick-rimmed glasses in his hand, distracted. "Harmonic resonance on the hertz scale, transposing sound to background radiant energy and back. That's... that's nifty."

"Not our greatest work, Doctor Banner." Thor crossed his bare arms against his tunic, leaning back. "But it will be reliable. When it alights to let us know our other allies are in readiness, we must step forward and land where Heimdall may place us. Then we fight to our last breath, if we must."

"You, me, your buddies, a regiment of the gold dudes... and, and, the blue guys?" Banner laughed a little, awkward and momentarily small amidst the kingdom's splendor. "Giants?"

"Farbauti, Queen of Jotunheim, has granted us a handful of her finest warriors, a token of collaboration between our realms and acknowledgment of the threat Thanos poses." Thor smiled, the intent of it mostly meant for himself. She had all but volunteered them freely to Asgard when the call went out for more to stand against the invading warlord; eight elite warriors and some kind of shaman who bore her closest regard to stand with the rest of their alliance. It was the shaman who had thrown Thor for a loop when they arrived, an enormous but serene and silent figure with runic magework carved with odd beauty all along his great lapis-blue arms. The jotun would abide Thor's orders alone - until such time as they came across Loki, who would also be given priority to command. Only the brothers. The message in that was intended to be clear to the house of Asgard. Odin had hesitated at the offering, but not for long. From there he deferred to Thor, who had accepted the help warmly for the sake of all. Farbauti herself remained in her palace of ice and frozen stone, capable of mustering more at need. She watched meanwhile. Of this, Thor had no doubt.

"Okay. So, giants." Banner nodded, taking that weirdness in with relative good cheer.

Thor clapped him on the back with a chuckle. "In these hours, Banner, among these allies, your other shape will not seem so out of place."

"...Yay?"

. . .

Nebula looked up, tense, as the door to the ostentatious guest room she'd been given opened without a knock. There was little privacy in Doom's personal domain, and she'd twigged to that fact fast. There were many places in the halls where she felt eyes on her at all times and even with all her senses and sensors alive, she could not trace where they hid. Even here, in the quarters, she often felt them. More of those weird constructs that took their king's face and shape, in all probability. It was a level of vanity and arrogance new even to her, and she accepted it as she did all novelty – with a knife in her hand and her eyes wide and ready.

The woman walked in. The half-construct herself, von Bardas. She looked steadily back at Nebula with a slight bow of her head in greeting. Creepy mostly dead chick.

Nebula waved back with the knife bare in her hand, cheery and utterly false, from where she sat on the too-soft bed. "'Sup?"

"May I sit?"

Oh, now you want to be polite? Nebula showed her thoughts with a smile full of teeth, gesturing to the wood and gold-gilded chair next to the door by way of jabbing the point of the blade towards it.

Lucia dropped easily into it, her cold hands clasped together in her uniformed lap. Metal eyes searched Nebula while her face remained seemingly void of any emotion save those intended to lift up her king. "There will be another meeting shortly. I am sent to make you aware of this. A plan has been selected, and you are requested to be its centerpiece."

The knife flipped in the air, landing lazily back in a blue palm. "I used to have a room like this. Real nice. Pretty. Not as good a view, but that's what happens when you grow up at the hairy rim of space's own asshole. And the thing about that room was that it was so big and so pretty, and anything I wanted, I could have. If I just asked for it. And do you know what I realized real quick?"

Lucia's head lifted in a curious tilt, waiting patiently for the answer.

"The way you get someone to just eat up the full-bore prison treatment is to pretend like it's something special." Flip. Flip. She gave the knife a cockier spin in the air, letting the naked blade land flat against the back of her hand before knocking it back up. A second later and the tip balanced delicately on her tough finger. No blood, just the dip below the nail where it pressed sharp against the synthetic skin. "Not so many questions if you fill 'em up on stuff to keep them from thinking too hard. Oh, we learned that fast back home. And it'd almost always be the first trick pulled on a new arrival. When'd you tweak to it, Lucia?"

"I serve my king in all things." The response was curt and haughty in how fast it was shot back at her. Nebula grinned at the tone, the first real thing she'd heard since she'd gotten here. Maybe there was still someone under the circuits and the rote programming. She still didn't grasp all of why she gave a damn, but the woman nagged at her.

"Not talkin' about him. I wanna hear about you."

"I ser-"

"Ugh. Boring." The knife snapped through the air one more time before landing hilt-first in her palm. It disappeared a split-second later, along with her interest. "Never mind, lady. Get lost. I like to talk with people who still have a mind of their own." She frowned for a moment, hitting on one of the things that was bugging her about Doom versus Thanos. Thanos thrived on willfulness, on the desperate thrashing of those whose throats he was crushing. It amused him. He was a man of order, but not mindlessly so.

This Doom took total, almost antiseptic control. The signs of that fact were all around her, from the 'bots to the woman in the chair. A chill rattled down her spine to match the air's natural bite.

Suddenly, "Did you not ever serve?"

"I never served. Wouldn't call it that, babe." She pulled a knee up to tuck it under her chin, studying the woman. Looking for anything else to shift in that dead, blank face. Why? She didn't know. "I was a slave. I never had a choice, not a real one. They tell you that you do, and that's technically right. You can be a slave, become what they make you, or you can die if you've got the nerve to die screaming for days. And even that's not a guarantee, because the rules went to hell a long time ago. So you'll still be a slave if someone wants you to be. No choice, but they make it look like all the doors are open right up to the end. That's the last cage. Real tough to get out of that one."

Lucia looked back at her, impassive. "But was it impossible?"

Nebula grinned. "I'll let you know by the end of the week, babe."

There it was. A micro-flash of something rushing across the blank features. Something real. Alive. Nebula lifted her face up at the sight of it, eyes narrowing curiously as she tried to track it down.

The woman lifted herself smoothly out of the chair when she realized the sharpness of Nebula's notice, the only sign anything had occurred shown in the swipe of a hand across her face. "I will send one of the guards when it is time. My gratitude for yours freely granted."

"Anytime," said Nebula, leaning back to prop herself up with her elbows. She watched the back of Lucia's tunic disappear in a rustle out the door, damn near forgetting to shut it behind her. She grinned again, outright delighted with the development. There were cracks in any castle, keep, or compound; conduits to slip through unseen and servants to bribe for information. This was a constant, from one end of the galaxy to the other.

She'd just found the first and possibly only exploitable wedge in Doom's pretty palace. Actually, against all expectations, it had found her. A tiny little sliver of something he didn't yet have total control over.

Just in case she'd made the wrong call coming here. Just in case.