I do not own GotG.

Chapter 2: I'll be Reaching for the Stars With You

"Looks like a hurricane came through here." The Terran's voice rasped over the hum of the engine leaking from the opened panel.

Nebula carefully wound the plastic insulation tape over the exposed wire which had been sparking and threatening to blow a circuit to the atmosphere control unit. "Hurricanes occur over water."

Tony let out a burst of laughter that left him wheezing a moment later. "A woman after my own heart," he chuckled out between gasps of pain.

Nebula didn't look up from her work. "If I wanted your heart I would have cut it out while you slept."

His chuckles faded into a breathy laughter that sounded a little wetter than it had before to Nebula's enhanced hearing. "Natasha is going to love you."

She could hear him wandering around the room with uneven steps and inspecting various items that had been strewn about in the crash and then, later, her attempts to find the Terran some way to fight the infection that was clearly trying to take over his body.

"Space is like, a kind of ocean," he offered in a painfully transparent attempt at conversation. "Y'know, this is going to be a much longer trip if we can't even talk to each other."

"It's going to be long either way." She finished sealing off the defiant wire and tucked it away, closing the panel back into place.

"It's still nicer to have someone to talk to."

"Not always." Nebula turned to fix him with a sharp look which seemed to have no effect on him whatsoever.

He had a blanket wrapped around his shoulders which he must have stolen from someone's bed, and his forehead looked sweaty again, despite the fact that the ship was holding at low temperature right now.

"That brings me to a thought I had a while ago- how did I understand you all? Did your human friend Flash Gordon back there teach you all English or something?"

"You are hearing our universal translators," she said, rising to her feet and moving around him to sweep the items gathered on the table onto the floor. "I am not speaking English."

The Terran's eyebrows rose as he danced out of the way of the falling items. "That's handy. Don't suppose you have any extra ones I could tinker with while I'm here?"

"No." With the table cleared, Nebula retrieved the box of outdated medical supplies from where she had stowed it in a nearby drawer. She dropped the box onto the table and motioned for Tony to climb up. "Take off your bandage."

"I usually get dinner first," he grunted out as he draped the blanket onto a chair and hauled himself onto the table where she could see better in the ship's dimmed lighting. The action left him panting as he began unwinding the bandages she had applied on Titan.

He was struggling to get his arms behind himself without further aggravating his ribs and after a moment she smacked his hands away with a snort and took over.

"You're a lot grumpier than my usual nurses," he told her as she worked, apparently incapable of handling any length of silence. "Unless you count Pepper, then I guess this is about right."

The edges of his wound were puffy and red, and didn't appear to have made any progress towards healing beyond what she had done with the Suturim on Titan. It had only been a cycle and a half since he had received the wound, this infection was moving quickly.

She pressed her fingers experimentally against the flesh and he gave a yelp, jerking away from her touch.

"Don't poke it!" he snapped.

"The infection is trying to take hold. It's probably originating from somewhere deep inside of you." Whatever he had been run through with was certainly not very sterile. "I am not a surgeon, and we don't have anything here to kill the infection. You'll just have to take care of it and fight it off on your own."

"Great. I got space-rabies from a giant purple grape. I gotta say, this is not how I was expecting to go out, but don't worry, I'm a fighter. I've been told I'm too stubborn to die."

"You babble a lot," she breathed out, peeling open a new pack of antiseptic. "Is that normal for you, or has the fever affected your brain?"

"Uh... normal, I think. I'd worry more if it stopped-Ouch!" The Terran squirmed again as she scrubbed harshly against the open edges of his wound.

"Hold still."

"Well, you could be a little gentler about it, you know."

"This way will be over faster," she countered, ignoring his complaints and continuing to scrub away the dying flesh.

-x-

"So tell me about these 'Guardians' or whatever- what were they like?"

Nebula opened her eyes to regard her companion coldly. After spending the last half a cycle working tirelessly to keep the ship running, she was finally resting in the captain's seat. Tony was in the seat next to hers, huddled up under the same blanket from earlier, with strict instructions to wake her if something changed on the monitors. A glance around the cockpit proved that those requirements had not been met.

"Nothing has changed," she informed him, making it clear she was not amused, and closed her eyes.

"Sure it did."

Begrudgingly she cracked an eye open again to find him pointing at a series of numbers at the corner of a screen.

"This symbol here. It used to look like a... squiggly star thing, now it looks more like an upside-down happy face."

"It's the navigational system. The co-ordinates will change as we make progress across the galaxies."

"Oh." He squinted at the numbers. "Is that what it is? I can't read them."

"You wouldn't be able to understand what they meant anyways."

The cockpit was blissfully silent for all of three breaths.

"So this family of yours-"

"They were not my family," she answered tiredly, hoping to put an end to his curiosity. "They were my sister's."

"Doesn't that make them yours, too?

"Thanos stole us both from our homeworlds when we were children. We do not share blood."

"But you were raised together? So you must have been close, right?"

"Our father would pit us against each other in battle. Whenever I lost to Gamora, he would replace some part of me in the hopes of creating her an equal."

His brows raised as he stared at her as though noticing her modifications for the first time.

She leaned back and closed her eyes once more so she didn't have to see his face while he counted the failures immortalized into her flesh.

-x-

"Hey Nebula, what is this?"

Nebula set her tools down to accept the crinkling silver packet he was handing down to where she sat cross-legged on the floor. "It's food," she told him flatly. "You eat it."

"Yeah, I figured that, but what is it? I can't read the print, and I don't know if it's bad or just taste like shit."

She flipped the bag over in her hand to scan over the sparse labeling. "It's expired." That was disgusting. How had her sister lived with these idiots?

Tony tugged the ever-present blanket a bit tighter around his shoulders. "Expired like 'the grocery store can't sell it anymore,' or expired like 'time to call poison control?'"

A cautious sniff of the contents revealed it was just old, not rotten. "It's stale. You'll be fine." She handed the packet back to the nervous Terran. They couldn't really afford to be picky right now anyways. The Guardians had not kept a well-stocked ship, and they were a long way from fresh supplies, with no working radio and no way to send a hail for help. "Just don't break a tooth."

The Terran gave a grunt of acknowledgment and accepted the bag back awkwardly with his left hand, his right one clinging stubbornly to his side. Now that she looked, he seemed to be hunched over even more than he had been when she had cleaned the wound that afternoon. It was nearing what should be the middle of the night cycle now. He'd done little but sleep in the time between, he shouldn't look so terrible.

She took in a deep breath and let it out with a growl of frustration as she rose to her feet, abandoning her current project. It was hopeless anyways. The communication systems had been smashed and fried beyond what they had to the means to repair.

"Get on the table," she ordered, yanking open the drawer she had stored the medical supplies in with much more force than necessary.

"You can't want to change the bandage again already?" he asked, but struggled onto the table as requested. "How many rolls of that stuff do we even have?"

"It doesn't matter," she grumbled through her teeth, locating the medical kit she was after and returning to peel the bandage up enough to catch a glimpse of the discolored flesh underneath. "Your infection is getting worse."

The edges of the cut were starting to ooze an ugly yellow puss and, underneath, parts were turning a deep purple which was spreading through the nearby veins, creating dark spider-webs lacing ominously up his side.

"Stay here." She stalked off into the ship's bathroom, locating a clean towel and ripping it into strips then filling a cup with hot water from the sink. Next, she tore through the cupboards and drawers until she found the salt. It was standard for most ships to carry some, at least. Most life forms required it to survive, and if you were desperate enough it had other uses. She placed her gathered items onto the table next to Tony, who was holding his side protectively and frowning down at her like he was already dreading what was to come.

When the bandage was unwound and the pus and dead tissue scraped from the wound she dunked a strip of towel into the warm salt water and handed it to the Terran who was laying misty-eyed with pain on the table.

"Soak it now."

He swallowed thickly as he accepted the scrap of cloth and pressed it against his raw flesh.

"We'll have to do this several times a cycle. I'll come back later to help you re-bandage it."

She left him on the table and returned to her hopeless attempt to draw the communication lines back to life long enough to send out an emergency hail.

End Chapter 2

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Chapter 3 Preview: "...The screen was supposed to be displaying the engine's statistics; power input, fuel levels, temperature, and a handful of other useful things. Now it was just displaying a blown up image of the ship's batteries, the words 'POWER LEVEL CRITICAL; FAILURE IMMINENT' flashing over the icon..."

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Chapter 2! I'm not used to writing with such short chapters, so the updates feel so fast. xD (My main project is usually 4-7k/chapter)

Don't take my medical stuff seriously. I am not a medical professional. I have no ground to stand upon there beyond my own experience.

The engines will be dying soon.

-OMaM