Chapter 3: I Set Fire to Everyone Around

"Hey space-girl?" the Terran's voice echoed from the cockpit back to where Nebula was taking stock of their supplies. She'd found several stashes of snacks in various and increasingly bizarre places around the ship; under a mattress, behind a drawer full of replacement bulbs and fuses, and even taped to the underside of one of the engine coolant lines. That last one had been discovered by accident when she had been crawling through the engine to check how their repairs were holding up. It seemed when it came to favorite foods, there was little trust to be lost between the Guardians. "One of the monitors is blinking red and making a very unhappy noise."

Nebula quickly abandoned her mental inventory and raced to check on what was happening now.

"It's this one," Tony said as she arrived, pointing at a small screen to his left with a crack running through it from its time on Titan. 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.

"What is it?" the Terran asked, tucking his hand back under the blanket. "Your face is telling me it's not good news..."

"No!" she shouted at the monitor, tapping instructions onto the screen, but it remained frozen stubbornly on the warning screen. With one final strike at the obstinate pad, she whirled and raced to the back of the ship to try to deal with the issue manually.

"WHAT IS IT!?" Tony's voice followed after her. "Do you need help?"

"Stay where you are!"

At the far end of the ship she ripped the panels to the engine open, flinging them across the cargo hold where they clanged against the walls and rattled to the floor while she all but dove into the mess of tubes and wires, clawing everything out of the way of the batteries. One was already blackened and dead, the now hollow casing cracked and melted. The second battery was flickering gold and green and spitting out sparks from large crack through it's center.

It had already been heavily damaged in the initial battle, and held together with little more than hope and luck, and some very creative wiring on her and the Terran's part, but the blast of the first one failing must have done it in.

With a sharp curse she pulled herself out from the mess of an engine and began digging through the ship for anything that might be used to patch the broken battery case. In her haste, she ripped entire drawers from their tracks, dumping their contents onto the table and then flinging everything onto the floor when drawer after drawer proved to contain nothing useful.

"Hey! Whoah! Easy there Tasmanian Devil!" the Terran yelped as he entered the area, just barely dodging the empty drawer she had flung in that direction. "What's wrong? What are we looking for?"

"We have one battery left, and it's leaking. I need something to seal it with." She ripped a storage panel off the wall that in most ships would be used to store smaller spare parts. Inside, she found a pair of headphones and and a novelty glass figurine shaped like a frog. With a scream of frustration she threw the contents on the ground along with every other worthless thing she had turned up, the figurine smashing into a thousand tiny shards at her feet. "How did those idiots survive so long?!"

The tangy smell of fried battery was leaking into the air, and the steady hum of the engines was beginning to stutter and cut out. They were nearly out of time.

"What about this?"

She whipped her head around to find the Terran had been rummaging through drawers on his own side. He held up a roll of some sort of thick blue tape, similar to what she had used before to coat the sparking wire. The fluid in the battery would probably rot straight through it, but it was worth a shot.

"Give me that!" She snatched the roll from his hand and shoved her way back to the batteries, stooping along the way to snatch up a shirt that had been in one of the table drawers for reasons she didn't care enough to wonder about.

The second battery was dimmer now than when she had left it moments ago. With the stolen shirt, she wiped up the fluid oozing from the crack, covering it up with strips of the blue tape as quickly as she dared without risking worsening the break.

It took several layers, but the tape seemed to hold, at least, and the sparks were no longer showering her hands while she worked. She checked the nearby lines for signs of damage she may not have noticed, so focused on keeping their power source alive, then cleared away the blackened remains of the first battery, dragging it out with her.

"So that's what smells like Clint's cooking."

The Terran was leaning over her, one shoulder pressed against the wall for support.

"Do you think the other one will hold?" He had one hand held out to her like he intended to help her up. Like he wasn't only barely managing to keep his own self upright.

She blatantly ignored the offered hand and wrapped the filthy shirt around the burned out shell. "Not for long."

-x-

The second battery gave out on what would have been late afternoon of their second cycle onboard the Guardian's ship. This time, there was nothing either of them could do to buy any more time.

"You know, my father used to be called a war-lord," Tony told her from where he laid next to her on the table, the only safe vertical surface left in the room after they had further torn the ship apart in their desperate attempts to find anything that might help breath life back into the engines.

"How many lives did he take?" She resisted the urge to shove the sweaty, smelly Terran off the table. His breathing was wet and labored in her ears, and she didn't know how fragile he was right now. The impact might harm him enough to influence the tide of his recovery.

"That depends on who you ask. No one, hundreds, thousands..."

"Thanos had slaughtered billions before he ever laid hands on the Infinity Stones."

"I wasn't really trying to compete, it's more like... commiserating."

She said nothing and they lapsed back into a silence made all the heavier by the loss of the ever-present hum of the engines.

"He was an inventor. He made weapons. I mean, he made other things, too, but the weapons were where the money was at, and the controversy."

She closed her eyes and began calculating how long they had until the oxygen ran out.

"He was a real hardass. I was his son, a reflection of him, so nothing I did was ever good enough. I always hated him, but I was also desperate to please him. To prove that I had some sort of worth that I couldn't put words to. He died before I could do that. And then, without even realizing it, I had become him."

The Terran would run out of oxygen long before she did. Her modifications would keep her going for cycles after his body had given up trying.

"I guess my old man won that one after all. But then... I changed. I don't do that anymore." She could feel him shift next to her, bringing up a hand, probably to stare at it with those hollow eyes. "I thought I had changed."

Some not-so-small part of her, a part responsible for her surviving in all the lessons Thanos had thought to bestow upon her, the part the Titan had cultivated so carefully within all his children, whispered that she could extend her own survival by doing away with her companion. He was injured and weak, and she was wasting a lot of resources on a stranger who was probably just going to die in a few cycles anyways. She shoved that part of her aside like she longed to shove the babbling man off the table.

"I have murdered hundreds in my father's name," she offered to distract herself from these thoughts.

"I just told you, this isn't a competition."

-x-

By the night cycle, he began shivering. It started as a faint trembling in his arms and progressed until the tool he'd been using to pry open a piece of tech he was curious about shook from his grip and the sound of his teeth clattering together could be heard throughout the ship. His jaw was shaking so hard, he couldn't even get whatever comment he had in mind out as she pressed her hand against his sweaty forehead, frowning at how cold he felt.

The lack of commentary as she draped his arm over her shoulder and more dragged than carried him over onto the table was not as enjoyable as she had imagined it being. Instead, it made her chest constrict uncomfortably.

Once she had him settled onto the table, she peeled back the bandage and found the spiderwebs of purple had inched their way even close to his heart just in the time since she had last helped him clean and soak it. The flesh which she had managed to urge into regrowth with the Suturim was red and weeping an ugly yellow pus. The infection had a foothold somewhere too deep within him to reach. There was nothing she could do against it, and the feeling of uselessness stuck like a barb in the back of her mind. She had extensive technical knowledge of the anatomy of most living creatures, and knew countless ways she could make him suffer or speed along the process of his death. Destruction and pain she knew very well. Healing, however, was a language she had never really learned to speak.

Still, her hands itched desperately to do something. If nothing else, she could provide him some measure of comfort, perhaps. She had certainly watched enough times from her father's side as the hopelessly dying were given such by their scrambling, weeping loved ones. She had always found the display to be a waste of resources and time. Now, perhaps, she could see why they were driven to such measures.

The ship was unable to provide them with more warmth without risking the last of the life that lingered in the emergency life support. There was just barely enough to keep them from freezing to death without the heat of the engines or any nearby stars to act as suns. She dragged out every blanket or sheet she could find and buried the shivering Terran in them, folding up a faded red leather jacket that she was pretty sure had belonged to the half-terran as a pillow, and left him to shiver it out while she sat in the pilot's chair. There, she stared out at the stars and pretended not to hear his teeth clicking together and his occasional fevered mutterings. She didn't recognize any of the names he cried out for anyways.

End Chapter 3

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Chapter 4 Preview: "...I'd sell my entire company for a cheeseburger right now," he wheezed out as he sat hunched over the table, leaning his weight on his elbows. In his hands, he clasped a bag of Zarg Nuts with the words 'ROCKET'S; DON'T TOUCH UNLESS YOU WANT YOUR OWN NUTS BLOWN OFF!' scribbled across the packaging. The threat seemed null and void now. Not that the Terran could read it, anyways. "What about you, Space-Girl?..."

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Another chapter down! Kind of a downer of a chapter, sorry. I'm hoping to get into the cute stuff again pretty soon.

I'm still getting used to how short these are, too. But I worry if I make them any longer they'll just be confusing since it's more of a 'blips and glimpses' type of story than a detailed straight-through thing. IDK. I overthink things and worry too much sometimes. Anyways,

Thank you so much for all the comments! OMG! They've really been making my days! I appreciate them so much and am so glad that other people are enjoying reading this!

Love!

-OMaM