Chapter 6: Ditch the Scene and Watch this City Burn

"Who is that for?" It was Nebula's turn to be the nosy one. The Terran had been recording messages onto the broken helmet of his suit for cycles, and boredom had finally driven her to ask.

"Oh, hey Space girl," he greeted her, lowering the hunk of half-melted machinery back to the floor. "It's for my fiancée, Pepper."

"Someone out there is unfortunate enough to have to marry you?"

Tony let out a chuckle. "Yeah, that's pretty much the usual response I get when I tell people. But she agreed, willingly, I swear."

"That poor girl."

He reached forward to trace his fingers slowly over the face of the helmet. "Yeah." he murmured. "I know."

-x-

"Do you have marriage ceremonies where you're from?"

The Terran was reclining in the co-pilot's chair again, tossing a scrap of now-useless tech up in the air and catching it with his good arm. His left was held tightly against his side, which was still sore from the last time Nebula had cleaned it. The infection was finally starting to find itself on the losing side of the battle and the darkened stains running through his veins were retreating.

"I was raised on Sanctuary with Thanos and his army, but I believe the planet I was born on had such a ritual. Unity ceremonies are fairly common in various forms throughout the galaxies."

"Huh," he grunted. "What are they like? Just the really cool ones. I could use some ideas. We haven't actually planned much."

Her shoulders rolled into an awkward shrug against her own seat. "I wouldn't know. They weren't a subject of interest in my training."

"Pepper wants an outdoor wedding. A smaller one. Close friends and family type of thing. I'm thinking maybe by the ocean. Have you ever been to the ocean?"

"I've been to hundreds of oceans on hundreds of planets."

"Okay, but have you like been to the ocean?"

She turned her head to give him a strange look. He was getting eccentric again.

"Like on a vacation?" he pressed, catching the item one last time then rolling over in his seat to face her better. "A beach day?"

Maybe the low oxygen levels were affecting him more quickly than she had anticipated.

She knew she was going to regret the question even before she asked it, but it was better than the silence of the ship slowly turning into a coffin around them, so she resigned herself for a slew of nonsense and asked. "What is that?"

"A beach day?"

"A vacation."

As predicted, the Terran had spoken at great length of all manner of things relating to Earth's ritual of vacation. From favorite locations to the nearly endless list of games one would most often play there.

"If you thought table football was fun, just wait until you learn how to play board games. Maybe not Scrabble, I'm not sure how the tiles would work with your translator, but checkers, everyone likes checkers. Oh, or card games, like Uno. I'm sure you could memorize the numbers easy enough, you seem very observant."

After he finished listing a number of favored games, he lost himself recounting especially important victories and losses against companions on these vacations in between yawns. He drifted off in the middle of a story about a man named Happy struggling to learn how to do something called surfing.

Careful not to wake him, Nebula removed the piece of machinery from his hands before he could drop it.

As she stood over the sleeping Terran, the shadows underneath his eyes making his face look more hollow than ever in the frozen starlight, she felt a wave of unwelcome pity for the man who would probably never see these things he spoke so fondly of again. Even more surprisingly, came a strange sense of loss at the thought that she would never see them either, and maybe, a small part of her might like to.

She gave herself a violent mental shake, shoving these terrible, senseless thoughts away into the darkest corner she could find. It was just wishes and stories, there was no purpose for her in such a place. She left the Terran to sleep, the piece of tech retrieved from his hands held in a crushing grip as she returned to the common room to lose herself in whatever hopeless project she could find.

It was just another promised garden.

Just another world not meant for her.

-x-

"So what do you usually do for fun when drifting through space? There's no books here, and I haven't seen any T.V.'s, unless one of those little monitors picks up HBO."

Tony gave the tinfoil triangle another flick. It sailed true and landed neatly in the space behind her hands.

"I don't usually do anything for 'fun,'" she snorted, making no secret of how inane she found that question as she lined the piece of trash up on her own side of the table. "If I am not busy achieving my next goal, I am training, or resting."

Another flick. It wobbled in the air, but made its way over his hands to her target nonetheless.

"Fun is just a distraction. It makes you weak and vulnerable." Her mouth echoed the words drilled into her since her childhood, like a programmed response.

"Yeah," Tony retrieved the folded up wrapper and twirled it around in his fingers. "You look about ready to drop dead there. Any second now."

Nebula stiffened, suddenly alarmed, then caught sight of his soft smile. Oh, he was just joking. As her heart slowed to its regular pace and she forced her tense muscled to unwind, he seemed to realize what he had done and a flicker of guilt crossed his now-perpetually tired eyes.

"Come on," he moved the subject along, mercifully pretending he hadn't noticed her flinch. "You must have something you enjoyed doing? I'm a workaholic myself, but there was always at least something about the work I enjoyed."

She cursed herself for her childish reaction and fought the urge to reach across the table and physically shake the pity from his eyes. Suddenly she didn't want to play this stupid game anymore.

"I should be working on the ship." She rose from the table and deliberately turned her back on her companion to retreat to the cockpit where she could tear apart something real in place of her feelings.

"Nebula?" The Terran's voice trailed after her, quiet and uncertain through the silence of the dying vessel.

She ignored him and found a panel along the edge of the console which could be pried open, and settled down on the floor in front of it, wishing, not for the first time, that there was anywhere on this ship to be alone.

Soft footsteps shuffled into the cockpit after her, hesitating in the middle of the room. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to do that. I'm always putting my foot in my mouth. It's a special talent of mine."

With a grunt of pain, he lowered himself down to sit on the floor between two of the seats, close enough to speak, but too far to touch. He had brought the little piece of trash with him, and fiddled with it as he spoke. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"No."

"That's okay. I get it."

A long stretch of silence followed, punctuated only by the rattling of wires and the soft crinkling of the tinfoil triangle as the Terran carefully unfolded and refolded it.

"Do you want me to go?"

She said nothing, half-way through the process of losing herself in the work. If she pulled herself back enough to answer, she would have to start over again.

The Terran stayed. He bundled a corner of his blanket up to make a pillow and leaned against a nearby seat. There, he remained silent and watched her through eyelids that refused to stay open for long. Eventually the sound of his soft snoring alerted her that he had fallen asleep.

-x-

"I used to enjoy reading."

Tony snorted and jolted awake from where he had fallen asleep against the chair nearly a quarter cycle earlier. "Wha?" he breathed out, rubbing at his neck which was probably sore after beung held so long in such a poor position.

When her latest project had proven as useless as all the others, she had moved to lay in the pilot's chair again and stare up at the galaxies surrounding them.

"My father allowed it, so long as I was studying something useful, and sometimes it would give me an edge over my sister. If I knew something useful that she didn't, he might look at me for a moment like I was... real."

She didn't know why she was telling him this, the words tumbling out of their own accord. Perhaps because they were both going to die here anyways, so there was nothing more to be lost.

"When even that wasn't enough to let me defeat my sister in combat, he had my mind enhanced, over and over again, so I could process faster, remember better, so I could bypass the need to read at all and download information directly into my mind. I don't enjoy reading anymore."

The stars through the windshield above stared back at her, as though counting all the things her father had taken from her.

Slowly, Tony pulled one hand from the shelter of his blanket and held it out, the tips of his fingers brushing up so close to hers that she could feel the air they had disturbed against her skin. She kept her face turned towards the stars as she opened her own hand and he slipped his inside. His skin was warm, and calloused, and alive. After a moment he gave her hand a light squeeze and then let it go. His hand tucked back under his covers as his eyes blinked closed. A soft snoring once again filled the cockpit.

Nebula furrowed her brows. He'd left something behind in her palm. When she lifted it up, she found the little triangle of trash sparkling back at her. It crinkled as she closed her fist around it and rested her hands across her stomach. Something almost like a smile, soft and painless, tugged at her lips as she finally closed her own eyes and allowed herself to rest as well.

End

Chapter 7 Preview: "...Does it seem a little colder in here to you?"

"Another fuse blew on the atmosphere control unit some time this morning cycle."

"Oh," he repeated. "That's great. I was worried my fever was coming back..."

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A long delay on this one sorry. I've been busy IRL and trying to pay attention to my other projects as well. I very much still intend to finish this, at least through rescue and probably with some stuff after they get to Earth as well.

Thank you again so much for the comments! They just make my day whenever I see them!

-OMaM