"Sun is shining in the sky… there ain't a cloud in sight -"
Tony caught himself humming along, bobbing his head to the upbeat tune. "It's stopped raining," he mouthed, snapping his fingers. "Everybody's in the lane…" One overenthusiastic twirl later, and his feet skidded from under him. He hit the ground with an undignified gasp.
The sling ring slipped off his hand, flew up into the darkening Titan sky - spinning, almost in slow motion. He reached out -
"And don't you know, it's a beautiful new day!"
One hole of the sling ring slipped over his middle finger, and it feebly spun a bit before resting against his palm. His hand remained outstretched. The oncoming night swirled around his hands.
"Hey-ey-ey!"
Man, he was definitely losing it if he was dancing along to… 70's hippie music. "Would you mind turning that shit off!" he screamed at the sky. His heartbeat throbbed in his ears.
In the ship, Nebula turned down the music. The near-silence left behind sunk claws into him.
It hadn't taken long to find Quill's old ship. Once Nebula found it, Tony knew almost right away - she'd powered it up, he'd heard the whine of its secondary engines, but it never flew over the rise to reach him. Tony climbed over the wreckage to see what was wrong. A giant piece of metal from a donut ship had crushed one of the wings and the rear thrusters. Nebula had been going through the ship's systems and testing all the ones she could - including the exterior sound system, apparently - but propulsion engines were shot.
So. They were stuck.
Nebula better have one hell of a plan.
He just wished the grunt work didn't hinge on him. He had been able to make a sad excuse for a portal - it only traveled a foot, but it was big enough for him to walk through, feeling a strange tug at the back of his mind and a tingling in his chest. Not exactly a wormhole to Earth. But it was a start.
A really shitty start.
Tony heaved a sigh, wincing at how it strained his abs, and struggled to his feet. Titanic gravity was a literal pain in the ass. (Titanic. Titanian? Titanium? Whatever. It still sucked.) His feet slid on the gravel, and he dropped the ring in his effort to stay standing -
"Hoo, boy," he wheezed. He put his arms out to either side to balance himself. His ears hissed, and he blinked slowly, shaking his head to clear it. Dehydration, most likely. Stand up once and the world starts to dissolve. Oy vey. Granted, night was falling and the world looked like it was made of murky paint water, but the spots dancing in his eyes had nothing to do with the setting sun.
"Hey, Smurfette," he yelled. "D'you have -"
The world exploded.
"MR. BLUE SKY, MR. BLUE -"
Tony slammed his hands over his hissing ears. The ground was shaking. "Turn it off, turn it off!" he shrieked.
"It's Nebula, Terran!" the alien barked through the ship's intercom.
"WHY DID YOU HIDE AWAY FOR SOOOOO LOOOONG…"
"Fine fine fine, Nebula! Nebula! Jeez Louise," Tony hissed, as the music shut off. "Got any water in there?"
There was a brief beat of true, blessed silence, broken only by Titan's howling wind. "Some," the intercom crackled. "Give me some time."
"Yeah, time," Tony said, under his breath. "Got plenty of that, don't we…"
Titan's sun gleamed on Strange's ring, lying in the dust. It winked green for the barest second, then turned into a lumpy green stone.
Tony took a step closer. "Huh," he said as he looked down.
The stone glimmered innocently at him. Glinnocently, Tony's brain supplied. He nearly laughed, choosing instead to reach down for the green stone. Ring. Stone? No. It was a ring again. Hell. Tony was definitely losing it.
Whatever it was, he picked it up and slotted it back onto his fingers - okay, definitely a ring, a stone wouldn't be able to do that. Giving his hands an experimental wiggle, he looked up and saw the back of Steve Rogers' head.
"Rogers?" Tony said curtly. He tried and failed to keep the question out of his voice, and he hated himself for it. The dying rays of Titan's sun glimmered in Steve's hair - in the clouds, in the hair, and Tony blinked.
The sun was gone?
He huffed faintly, one corner of his mouth twitching. Steve's broad shoulders were just torn metal, his hair a last wink of sunlight before Titan's sun disappeared over the horizon. Okay. Good. That would've been tough to explain. He heaved a great sigh and lifted his hands, muscles burning like they'd been pumped full of nitroglycerin. Tony's fingers twisted, into the best approximation of Strange's gestures that he could recall -
"You're going about this all wrong."
The familiar baritone made Tony scream and whip around. The sight of Peter Parker sitting on a rocky outcrop, holding an English textbook and frowning at it like it had insulted his aunt, nearly made him scream again. He was eerily still. A statue. A photograph.
Peter's mouth moved - the only part of him that moved - and Strange's voice came out. "It's like Apparition," Peter-Strange said. "Think of a destination." The textbook changed to a laptop. "Then find it in yourself to need to be there." The laptop became a Jericho missile, or something shaped like one but weighing little, so little that Peter's body didn't even move - "Then make a portal, and you're there. Poof. Poof. Poof."
Strange's voice skipped like a scratched CD. "Poof. Poof."
The Jericho missle dissolved into dust - and Peter's hands began to crumble beneath it. He stayed rigid, staring at his hands, Strange's voice pouring from his still-moving mouth. "No," Tony breathed. He staggered towards him. "No, no, no -"
"Poof. Poof. Poof."
Peter's body dissolved right out of his suit, which stayed molded in the shape of his body -
"Poof."
The suit exploded into a vortex of red butterflies, every twitch of their wings smug and insufferable and it was a cloak. Strange's draconian face swam into view above its collar, hidden in the shadow of a Titan night. "For fuck's sake, Tony," he said exasperatedly. His eyes glittered like stars. They were stars. He could see clear through Stephen Strange's fucking head to the night sky above, and they were actually stars - "Come on, Stark, get it together. You built a suit -"
"In a cave!"
Obadiah Stane's voice screamed across the sky, and Tony's entire body flinched. Stephen mouthed along.
"With a box of scraps!"
How -
"You can do this, Tony," said a chorus of voices, from Stephen's mouth; Tony imagined that he could hear, beneath Stephen's baritone, the voices of the Guardians and - and Peter, and -
"Stark."
It was the blue alien chick. "Oh, it's you," Tony said breathlessly, still looking at Stephen. "I'm in the middle of something here, would you mind?"
Nebula tilted her head slowly and fixed him with a calculating stare. She said carefully, "You said you wanted water."
Stephen raised an elegant eyebrow. "You need it, too," he said dryly. "Doesn't take a doctor to see that you look like shit."
"Stark?"
Something strange was in Nebula's voice. "What are you looking at?" she demanded.
"A dragon," Tony blurted out. Stephen's other eyebrow went up. "Or something," he added. In a stage whisper, he gestured at his face and said, "It's the cheekbones." Stephen rolled his eyes.
Nebula heaved a great sigh and grumbled something that didn't quite translate into English. "That does it," she said, pulling something out of her pocket and jabbing it into the side of his neck.
"Hey!" Tony yelped, slapping her away. "What the shit, that hurt! What was that?"
"Something you need," Nebula said curtly. Stephen nodded in agreement, and Tony glared at him. Traitor. "You're talking to thin air. You need sleep."
Tony shrugged. "Thin air, maybe not. Now, thin -" His eyes swept up and down Stephen's lanky body, and the sorcerer crossed his arms. Crossly. Ugh, his head was feeling woozier than ever. "Thin, maybe so. Er - not thin, wiry, you're not complete skin and bone -"
A harsh Titan wind swept through the narrow tunnel made by two broken donut ships. Dust kicked into Tony's face. "Rude," he said to Stephen, and then realized.
There was nobody there.
Stephen Strange was dead.
Who had he been talking to?
What -
"Night night," Nebula said, and she was definitely scowling.
The last thing he saw before he blacked out were two stars, gleaming on the horizon.
And he woke.
He would have sat up, if his abs didn't feel like they'd been turned into concrete. And if there wasn't a narrow ledge just above him, the right height for him to slam his forehead against, grimy with dust and God-knows-what. He lay on a slightly-comfortable mattress, a lumpy pillow under his head, and his brain was... strangely silent.
Tony squeezed his eyes shut. He opened them again, staring up. "Huh," he said softly.
He braced his elbows against the mattress, hissing as his leaden limbs protested, and got out of the small alcove. A bunk, then. He was on the Benatar, and it looked like the inside of a dive bar. Or a pirate ship. In space. From what he could tell, that was an apt job description for the erstwhile Guardians.
Tony shambled down the hall to the cockpit; there were six seats there - he could guess whose they were. Quill, the unseen-and-tragically-dead Gamora, Mr. Clean, bug lady, and two others, one covered in animal hair and the other dusted with pollen. The seats faced a giant viewport that showed a whole lotta reddish-brown sand.
Nebula was perched in one of the seats, idly fiddling with dials on the dashboard. "Whatcha doing, Captain Picard?" he said cheerfully, bracing one of his hands on the back of her seat.
Nebula went still for a moment. "Not an insult," Tony said quickly. "Captain Picard is a fucking badass. Great dude. Real swell. Definitely not an insult." Just a bald joke, he added silently. God, I hope Quill didn't tell them about Star Trek… or did he get abducted before Next Generation came out?
A brief silence. Then Nebula tilted her head in acknowledgement and returned to the dashboard. "I'll take your word for it," she said. One of the screens flashed something; Nebula stared at it and cursed quietly. "I assume you slept well."
Tony frowned and thought back. "Yeah. It was… unusually… dreamless," he said slowly. It was true. It was as if he'd only blinked once and found himself in that bunk, though the exhaustion in his limbs was completely gone.
"Good. I drugged you," Nebula said blandly, and Tony bristled. "You needed it; something in the antiseptics I gave you was giving you some... vivid hallucinations. So I stuck you with a sleeper and some actual Terran medicine."
"You drugged me," Tony said flatly.
"Nothing harmful to Terrans," Nebula dismissed, as if that made it any better. "Quill kept it with his things. His genetics are Terran enough these days that it wouldn't harm him. You slept for about thirteen hours." Tony tried to think about why Quill might need knockout-meds like that close by - ones strong enough to erase dreams, to even ease tension and pain from his muscles. He came up empty.
Then he realized what Nebula said. "Jesus, really? Thirteen hours?"
"Yes. I timed it. I was getting bored, waiting for you to wake up."
Nebula plugged in a code. Something flashed on the screen; it looked like some kind of broadcasting symbol, all radiating ripples, and Tony frowned at it. "How's your progress on the portal?" she asked curtly.
He jerked away. "Right, right," he said uneasily, a faint edge of nausea coming on. He ran a hand over his beard. "Uh. Wasn't so great. Only managed to open one that traveled a foot, and that was weird, I had to stick my head through and look back to see a foot of empty air through my body, that's gonna haunt my dreams…"
He trailed off when Nebula didn't respond. "Yeah, not great," he finally said.
Nebula hummed idly. After staring at the screen for several tense moments, she stood up - Tony swiftly moved out of the way - and glided towards another console. She tugged off one of her fingers, revealing what looked like a space USB, and stuck it into the console. After a while, a flat disc shot out, and she removed her finger. "Here," she said curtly, throwing it at Tony. "Press the button on the edge to start the hologram. Study it."
"Aye aye, Cap'n," Tony said, sketching a salute.
Nebula's eyes glimmered humorlessly, and her shoulder knocked into his as she swept back to her original seat. Yikes. "Just get started," she practically barked, throwing herself into the chair. "We don't have much time."
Alrighty then. Tony glanced around and made for the airlock, strolling down the ramp to the dusty Titan ground. The sun blasted through great maelstroms of churning clouds; every bit of light was like a dagger to the skull. He turned away from the light and the amber sky, slowly pushing his grimy fingers through his hair. Goddamn, he needed a shower. Maybe he'd give the sonic showers a shot.
Then his eyes landed on that rock - the rock that his hallucination of Peter had been sitting on. Swept clean of dust; shadows flickering. Strange's voice coming from his mouth. Damn that had been weird. He hadn't had an exhaustion-fueled hallucination for a long, long while.
Not one that bad since Siberia.
Stop that, Stark.
Stephen's voice hissed in the wind, and Tony jerked around, staring wildly. Nothing - not even a shadow. He groaned and pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes, pressing until he saw technicolor clouds. He was losing it. Losing his fucking mind. On a barren rock in the ass end of nowhere, almost the only living thing there, because Thanos had won and everyone had died, died, died -
He dropped the disk. It hit the ground on its edge, rolled, and landed face-up.
Stephen Strange suddenly shimmered onto the air - a cold blue-white Star Wars-ey hologram, nothing like whatever he'd seen yesterday. There were his hands, crooked just so; there was the ring, a muted shimmer among bluish static. So why couldn't he do it?
Maybe the fucking hallucination was onto something.
Tony looked at the scars on Stephen's hands, visible even in the shitty hologram, and swallowed, turning it off. Come on. Come on. Rhodey made him marathon all the Harry Potter books once. Peter had… His lips tightened, and he adjusted the ring on his fingers. He could remember this. Same principle. Okay. What was it. Decapitation, Defibrillation, Decomposition... His brain grasped for words.
Destination, Stephen's unimpressed voice muttered in his mind.
Right. Destination. Was it Earth? Did Nebula have a map of the United States or something programmed into her? Tony huffed and looked up at the sky, and the more he thought, the more he realized they were fucked.
They definitely didn't think this through. "Nebula?" he called, walking back to the ship.
He found her sitting in the same chair, still staring at the screen. Nothing had visibly changed. He put his hand on the back of her chair - she gave him an irritated glance - and said sternly, "So are you ever going to tell me the plan? Because I need an actual location to go to, you know."
Nebula turned fully and looked at him. "We are going to Terra," she said slowly, as if to a child.
"Yeah, about that," Tony drawled. He clasped his hands together in front of him. "Not going to happen."
"Why not -"
"See, this portal business is a little more complicated, from what I can tell," Tony interrupted. "I need an exact location, because if I don't have one, there's a fucking high chance that we might get dumped a bajillion light-years outside of where we're supposed to be, or portal into the molten core of the planet. Not ideal. Besides - I don't know where Earth is relative to Titan, I don't know how the solar system moves proportionally to whatever star system we're in, and -"
He flailed his hands around a little. "It's across a fucking galaxy," he spluttered. "Light years, for fucks sake. I can barely make a portal that goes a foot. This much," he added, holding up his hands for emphasis. Nebula gave him an unimpressed look. "Yeah, I know, it's shit. We don't have the tech or time to physically bend space and make the actual distance shorter. No Wrinkle In Time for us today. I might be able to crank this to a hundred miles, but that's really optimistic."
He shrugged and let his hands fall. "So you better have a plan B, I guess," he said lamely. "I got nothing. I'm not a pro at space portal travel. Actively try to avoid it, in fact."
Nebula only hummed, turning back to the dashboard. "Well, get cracking on that hundred-mile portal," she said blandly, putting in codes and listening to static. Tony threw up his hands in defeat and wandered back outside.
Eight hours, two awkwardly silent meals with Nebula, a few gallons of water, and one near decapitation later, Tony had finally gotten the hang of it.
Night on Titan had fallen again, accompanied by the chilling winds and occasional stars winking through the cloud-smeared sky. He'd succeeded in creating a portal that led from the Benatar to an old courtyard some distance away; when he stepped through it, the sensors in his suit told him that he was a little over 140 miles from the ruined ship. The courtyard reeked of age. Clouds of time rose around his feet, and the world seemed to stand still. There was no dead grass between the paving stones; a grandiose metal fountain was clotted with dust, and had clearly been so for years.
It was like Charn, from that old book The Magician's Nephew - a city lost to time and despotism, never meant to wake. Hopefully there wasn't some crusty-ass Titan queen in a creepy hallway at the back of the palace. That would be tough to fight their way out of.
Tony didn't linger there. He slipped through the portal, feeling that same strange tug at the back of his mind that he'd felt while making it, and let it close. "We got it," he called out as he approached the airlock, hoping Nebula was listening.
She was. "Finally," she shouted. There was a giant clank sound, and one of the panels at the back of the Benatar ground open; a single small ship came out. An escape pod? He saw Nebula in the hatch behind it; she leapt out after the dinky pod and landed heavily on the rocks, dust kicking up around her heels. "About time," she said harshly. "I was wondering if you'd gotten yourself killed."
"Hey, don't knock it if you haven't tried it," Tony grumbled, rubbing his left shoulder. His arm had nearly gone stiff from holding his hand in place, a focal point for each portal. That'd hurt like a bitch for days. "Feel like I got run over by an 18-wheeler. You know what that is, right…?" Nebula merely raised an eyebrow, and didn't even dignify that with a response. Tony sighed and ran a hand through his hair, resisting the urge to start pulling it out. "Never mind. So. What's our plan, Fearless Leader?"
Nebula blinked. "Make a portal," she said.
"Got that -"
"Starting here," she said, pointing at the ground. Tony's eyebrows flew up. "And ending about a hundred miles up."
Tony stared at her, not bothering to mask his disbelief. What the fuck. "What the fuck," he said out loud, for good measure. "That's - that's ridiculous -!"
"Not entirely," Nebula said, her mechanical voice toneless. She crossed her arms and fixed him with a stern look. "Titan's gravity is too erratic for us to launch properly."
Tony offered, "I could probably figure it out -"
"We don't have time for you to figure out alien ship interfaces," Nebula interrupted. The night cast harsh shadow over her, making her eyes nothing but gaping black holes in her skull. "This is faster. Make a portal that leads from the ground to the sky. I'll fly this -" She gave the escape pod a good whack. "-into the portal. It should dump us outside of Titan's atmosphere, and we can get away."
That's not how gravity works, but okay, Tony thought sourly. Titan's gravitational pull would extend far beyond the atmosphere; they'd have a hell of a time trying to escape that. Then again, he realized, looking at the dinky escape pod, he knew jack shit about alien propulsion systems. Apparently they had lightspeed figured out already, the lucky bastards. Maybe they had one crammed into this pod somewhere, as impossible at it may seem.
Well. Maybe Nebula wasn't completely off her rocks. This could work.
"Okay, so, portal time," he huffed, cracking his knuckles. He held out his hands yet again, trying to get himself into the right headspace. Nebula's glittering black eyes watched him intently, her gaze like ants on his skin. He huffed and gave her an unimpressed look. "Could you not do that?" he asked, gesturing vaguely at his face.
"What?"
"Staring at me like you're watching for mistakes like a nitpicky third-grade teacher, can you please stop," he snapped. "It's messing me up."
"Just pretend I'm not here," Nebula said stonily.
"Well, then that'd trick my brain into thinking that I'm actually alone on this planet by myself," Tony said, "and you know, that would really really suck." He felt a small twinge of panic and dropkicked it into the back of his mind. Not now, not now.
"Just pretend you're Strange," Nebula suggested. No issues there, Tony thought dryly. "Wouldn't be too hard, you hallucinated him vividly enough the other night that you started checking him out -"
"And we're done," Tony said quickly, bringing his hands up and beginning to sketch a portal. Damn it, he wasn't proud of any of that; those alien antiseptics had fucked him up. He was engaged. And straight. Probably. Okay, his mind was wandering now. Destination, determination, defibrillation. Come on, Stark, you got this. Sparks flew from his hands. He imagined the night sky above him, the glimmer of stars; the distance he wanted stretched within him, a hundred miles coiled in his heart and reaching for the stars.
A hissing, spitting circle of orange fire slowly opened in the ground. Stars lay at their feet. Tony worked his fingers through the fabric of space and held it open, wide enough for the ship to go through. "Okay. We good?" he said tersely, doing his best not to stare through the portal for too long. Last time he'd gone through a portal into space…
Well.
That wasn't so great.
"That's good," Nebula confirmed. "Now just concentrate on keeping it open, and get on the ship."
"I hear and obey, your majesty," Tony said through gritted teeth, slowly lowering his hands. Maybe it was the direction of the portal this time, but keeping it open was harder than the one to the courtyard. It was still sort of the same: a crushing presence in his head, reminding him that the fabric of space is open; do not close it, do not close it.
Nebula keyed open the door to the escape pod and climbed in; Tony followed, still concentrating on the portal. For a moment he looked up at the pitch-black sky. He almost imagined he saw the other end of their portal among the cold white stars.
"Stark. Let's go."
Nebula was sitting in one of the seats; Tony came forward and sank into the other one. "Am I steering?" he asked hesitantly.
"No."
"Come on, I was able to fly a donut ship here after looking at the freaky controls for half a second, cut me some slack -"
"We're not going that far," Nebula cut him off.
"I thought -"
"Shut up and let me do what I have to do!" she barked, slamming her hand on the dashboard. The ship powered up and the airlock hissed shut. Tony could only grab the armrests and stare, wide-eyed, out the viewport as the ship edged forward. Into the ground. Into the sky.
Into space.
Jesus, this was weird. Titan was spread below them, a nasty orange pimple on the face of the cosmos. Tony took a deep breath of canned spaceship air and stared down at it. There it was. A tomb for Titans, but not for the one that mattered. A grave for Peter, for Strange, for the Guardians. Shrouded in the orange haze of its atmosphere; turning, turning, its landforms disappearing into the stark line of shadow between night and day. Splitting the planet in half. His lip curled.
The dashboard crackled. "Pod ID FSMP-3791, you're clear to dock."
Tony whipped around to the viewport and gasped, slamming his back into the seat in efforts to get away. "Nebula, what the fuck!" he shrieked. The side of a massive spaceship loomed before them.
"Sit down and shut up," Nebula snarled. She pressed a few buttons and swiveled the ship, lining up their airlocks. Their tiny pod echoed with the sound of grinding gears and docking equipment. "This was part of the plan."
"Plan?" Tony knew he sounded like a whistling teakettle, but he was too stressed to give a fuck. "You didn't have a fucking plan! 'Get to Earth,' yeah, that was the fucking idea to begin with! I -"
Nebula whirled and grabbed his shoulders. "Stark," she hissed, her cybernetic fingers crushing his shoulders. "these are good people. Put on your fucking suit if you want to feel better about yourself -"
"Didn't need you to tell me that, thanks," he blurted out, slamming his hand on the arc reactor. Nanobots crawled out and encased his body in a familiar embrace, even covering his hastily-glued wound. He'd probably have to get that stitched up. Maybe.
The mask clanked over his face, and his HUD lit up, all sorts of data streaming through it. Right now he had bigger problems.
Nebula powered down the ship and stood up. "Come on, Stark," she said curtly.
"Oh, no. No, no, I'm not 'coming on' until you tell me where we are," he asserted, crossing his arms.
Nebula heaved a long-suffering sigh. "A friend's ship," she said exasperatedly; the way she said "friend" suggested that this person was more of a "passing acquaintance" or "frenemy." Still. Nebula had a stick up her ass the size of the Burj Khalifa, anyone she stooped to call a friend couldn't be too bad.
He still kept the suit on.
"I'm not going to say it again, let's go," she all but snarled.
"Okay, sheesh, coming," Tony muttered, clambering out of his seat. "Though if I get strung up and eaten by your alien buddies, that's on your conscience."
"I've been reliably informed that I don't have one," Nebula grumbled, jabbing a keypad next to the airlock.
"Hey, me too. What a coincidence."
"You're being obnoxious."
"Glad I can help."
The airlock hissed open. Beyond was a man who looked like a wannabe punk: shaved head, crooked teeth and a scraggly beard, long leather coat, with a weird red fin crammed onto his head like a mohawk. "Nebula!" he drawled, giving her a crooked grin. "Long time no see."
"You look like shit, Kraglin," Nebula muttered in return.
"Ain't nothin' new there," the man - Kraglin, what a fucking name - said cheerfully. His eyes flickered to Tony and flew open. "Well, goddamn," he said appreciatively. "That's one hell of a bot you got there -"
Tony flipped his faceplate up. "Not a 'bot', you crusty punk," he said harshly. "Human through and through."
"Oh, hell, that's wicked," Kraglin exclaimed. "Sorry 'bout that, you got a real good piece of work on ya." He held a hand out to Tony, who cautiously took it. His jacket fell open a little; Tony saw a deadly-looking red arrow tucked inside. "Kraglin Obfonteri, Ravager captain," he said, shaking Tony's hand. "Good to meet another Terran. Hopefully you're not as much of a loose screw as the other one."
"Thanks for the vote of confidence," Tony said, smirking slightly. "I'm Tony Stark." He tried to think of a title to add to the end, but nothing really seemed to fit. Then he paused and gave Kraglin a skeptical look. "Wait - another Terran?" he said.
The other man nodded and let go; the fin on his head stayed stationary. Made of metal, then? "Knew Peter Quill when he was growin' up," he said, an amused glimmer in his eye. Tony's heart sank. "Gave 'im hell, too. Tell me he's on there somewhere, ain't seen him since the mess with his daddy three years… back…"
He trailed off. The amusement on his face was replaced with slack horror, as he stared at Nebula. She looked back emotionlessly. "Don't tell me," he whispered. "Not 'im."
Nebula nodded once. "No," he said softly. "Goddamnit. I hoped he'd've made it, out of anybody…"
Kraglin slammed his fist into the side of the airlock, and Tony suppressed a flinch. He seemed to have aged ten years. Slowly, his eyes locked on Nebula's, then Tony's, and the cold intensity in them gave Tony an unpleasant chill. "You two," he said quietly, "better get your butts in here and tell me exactly what the fuck is goin' on."
Less than a minute later, Tony's suit clanked through the main parts of Kraglin's ship - named the Hammerhand, for a reason Kraglin didn't have time or energy to explain. Ahead of him, Kraglin and Nebula quietly conversed; he heard Terra mentioned a few times in passing. Other than that the halls were silent. Every now and then, he glimpsed an alien or something through a window, or at the end of another passage, but other than that the massive ship was completely deserted.
He passed a pile of dust and cringed. That would explain it.
Ahead, Kraglin stalked down the hall to a massive open space; it looked like the flight deck of the Helicarrier, back in the day when Tony'd been there last - just deep-fried, grimy and completely disgusting. This ship had been through a lot. "Oi, Gorran!" he shouted down, his voice echoing.
A fuzzy alien with a machine gun strapped to his back popped up from behind a distant console. It let out some ungodly screeching sounds that made Tony clap his hands over his ears.
"Get us to the Terran system, would ya?"
More screeching.
"There ain't no blockade anymore," Kraglin yelled back. "We sailed through whatever's left of Asgard last night! No way in hell that the blockade's still there, come on!"
"Blockade? What blockade?" Tony muttered to Nebula.
"Blanket term for Asgard's protective barrier around their territories," Nebula muttered back. Below them, the alien made a face at the captain and ducked back down. The reminder of Asgard's destruction left a sour taste in Tony's mouth, and he turned away.
A squeaky voice said something over the intercom in an alien language, and the massive viewport suddenly exploded with light. "Huh," Tony said idly, watching the glowing streaks of light blast past. "Guess Star Wars got something right."
Kraglin hummed idly beside him and walked off. Nebula followed, so Tony had no other choice. "You know Star Wars?" he called to the man. "Get intergalactic cable out here?"
"Nah, Quill told me about it," Kraglin said tonelessly. "When we first picked him up, he wouldn't shut up about it. Luke Drywaller -"
"Skywalker -"
"- and all his buddies," he continued, as if Tony hadn't spoken. "He loved that sci-fi shit. Must've been a hell of a shock when he started livin' it."
They turned the corner into a musty room; reasonably large, appallingly stained, with a massive table in the middle. Kraglin sat down in a seat near the end; Tony and Nebula sat down on either side. "Peter was a good kid," he sighed, scratching behind his ear. "Didn't always treat him right, but he turned out fine. How did it happen?"
The question came so fast that Tony, who was staring with vague horror at the stains on the ceiling, was so caught off guard. "What?" he said, bewildered.
Kraglin's gaze was cold and unblinking. "How did he die?" he repeated.
Hell. "It's a long story," Tony said, looking down at the table, away from Kraglin's eyes.
"We got time," Kraglin said. "Jump to earth will be about 43 hours, at the pace we're going. Start from the beginning."
And he did.
The battle in the streets of New York. Strange's capture, Peter - his Peter - stowing away. Getting on board, killing Ebony Maw, then that stupid decision to take the fight to Titan. The words just wouldn't stop spilling out of him, each one seizing something deep inside and twisting. He had to speak. He hoped that his words would make the cold nothingness - the blame - pull away from Kraglin's eyes, because the Ravager captain just sat there and stared.
He couldn't linger on Titan. He just couldn't. So Tony finished lamely, trying not to let the memories drag him down. Still too fresh. "So… apparently Thanos got to Earth and got his hands on the last stone, so… That was all he needed to complete the set. Then…" He waved a hand, the servos of his suit whirring. "Poof," he said lamely. "They were gone. Peter and the Guardians, and Strange, and… and…"
Something caught in his throat. Nebula stood up and left. His eyes stung, and he called back one of the gauntlets so he could scrub away the tears. "And Peter," he whispered. "Peter Parker."
I don't feel so good -
"Crumbled to dust right in my arms," he said, tilting back in his chair and staring at the filthy ceiling.
"He yours?" Kraglin said quietly. A strange kind of quiet, his voice was - not soft with repressed anger, not dull with grief. Tony sat back and looked at him again.
The coldness had dropped away - not completely, but enough for him to know what it was: just a wall, to hide his grief. Boy, he knew that look well. "He might as well have been," Tony said, his voice just above a whisper.
"Guess we both lost a Peter, then," Kraglin said, chewing on the inside of his cheek.
He idly pulled the arrow from his pocket. "We took Peter Quill on when he was eight years old," he explained, scratching random shapes into the table's surface. "His father told Yondu - my old cap'n - to kidnap him and bring him over to his planet, so he could kill him." Tony blinked. "Thing is, Yondu basically told 'im to fuck right off and kept Peter on, for some reason. He grew on us, ya know?"
Kraglin set down the arrow and stood up, wandering towards a cabinet on one side. "Yondu treated us both like his kids," he called over his shoulder. He pulled open the cabinet - a space fridge, then - and pulled out two bottles, wandering back to the table. "Just - more of the tough love kinda thing. More tough than love. So brother by association, I guess."
Kraglin sat heavily and shoved a bottle towards Tony. He gave the space liquor a suspicious look. "So," the Ravager captain said simply. "What was yours like, huh?"
What the hell. Tony slammed a fist on his arc reactor, calling back the bots, and reached for the bottle. Kraglin watched the nanobots scurry over his chest with a seen-it-all face and an appreciative glint in his eye. "Peter Parker was one crazy kid," he said thickly, cracking open the bottle.
"Tell me about it," Kraglin muttered sympathetically.
So they talked, and drank, and drank some more. The two bottles on the table grew to four, then eight, then ten. The alcohol reached into Tony, into a place deep and dark and forgotten, covered over by an artificial sternum and new scarred skin. He wandered backwards through his life, and so did Kraglin. He told Tony of his life on the Eclector, Yondu's Udonta's old ship - all his misadventures and time in jail. Blowing up Quill's dad - and that was a story. Then further back, further down, to Xandar and its three suns.
It was dust and ashes, now. Magma floating in space.
Kraglin's words failed him, and Tony filled the silence. He kept reaching into his past, and when Kraglin didn't understand what he was referencing he reached further and further. To the airport. To Sokovia. To the Mandarin, New York, Vanko, and then…
And then to Stane and that cave in Afghanistan. He spoke of how he couldn't stand to go swimming anymore, because of the way they'd held him under the water until his screams left him in a rush of bubbles. He told him, in great detail, of how it feels to have hands reaching into your chest and pulling your heart out.
"That happened to me once," Kraglin mused, swirling his tenth or eleventh bottle of shitty A'askvariian beer. "I'm Xandarian. We got two hearts and two livers. One time I got hit with…"
"... Yondu's dumbass arrow on accident… 'course, it's my dumbass arrow now, but back then it was Yondu's, and… hey." Kraglin stopped. "You listenin'?"
Tony's head dipped towards his chest. Kraglin stopped and squinted at the Terran. Man, he must be a lightweight. Or couldn't stomach A'askvariian liquor. Or maybe he was a recovering alcoholic, if what he'd been saying was right. Kraglin swore quietly and put his bottle down. Damn, look at him, fucking up this poor man's life even more.
He leaned over the table and shoved Tony in the shoulder. "Hey, you metal motherfucker, you with me?" he called.
The man's head slowly swiveled to rest on his left shoulder. "Crystal," Tony mumbled.
The Ravager captain sighed heavily, "Yeah, you're toasted," he muttered. "C'mon, let's get you to bed. You gotta sleep this off, c'mon, buddy." He stood up and looped an arm under Tony's shoulders.
"Don't… don't bother," Tony said woozily, slowly shoving Kraglin's arm off his shoulder. His hands grabbed for his arc reactor, missed twice, and finally connected, summoning the suit. "Jus' tell me where to go."
Kraglin squinted at him. "Take a left, then second door on your right," he said slowly.
Tony sketched a drunken salute and staggered backwards towards the door. "Sure thing, cap'n," he said to Kraglin, with a lopsided grin. "Hear that, suit? Keep a'walkin'."
The suit started to walk on its own, slowly marching down the main hallway of the Hammerhand. "See you later, Craggy," Tony shouted over his shoulder. "Nice talk."
"Same here, Shellhead," the man called out. "Don't throw up in your suit!"
Tony's metal footsteps clanked out of sight, leaving the meeting/dining/poker room in dead quiet. Kraglin idly swept up the empty liquor bottles and shoved them in the recycler, picking up his arrow while he was at it. Damn, that was one hell of a story. Terrans really got into some weird shit, for a primitive planet. Maybe he'd swing by someday in peacetime, when this whole mess was over.
Well, he and the good ship Hammerhand were headed there now. And Kraglin, as he moseyed out of the everything-but-surgery-because-goddamnit-he-didn't-want-to-see-what-was-left-of-Hyrghor's-spleen-on-the-table-while-he-was-eating-breakfast-room, cast an uneasy eye at the ansible in the control room.
Now that Odin's rule of terror was technically over, he had a job to do.
Kraglin strode down the stairs, fiddling with the yaka arrow in his pocket, and sat in the seat by the ansible, propping his feet on the control panel. He'd yelled at his crew for doing that before, but he was the captain, dammit - and besides, only four of them were left anyway, after Thanos snapped his fingers and shit. Not a problem. He keyed in a code and waited for the ansible to patch him through.
Chattin' with other ships while warping was sketchy at best and a disaster at worse, but the Sovereigns had figured it out, and the Ravagers had promptly stolen their method. While going lightspeed, you were going too fast for a ship to really communicate with you. So you just guessed. Take estimated trajectory at times x, y, and z, and send your message to the point in warp space where you think the other guy'd be. It worked pretty well, as long as neither the sender or receiver was a complete dumbass. And as long as they had the Ravagers' twice-pirated ansible technology. That did all the work for ya.
As it was, it took the ship's ansible a while to connect. When it finally did, Kraglin could hear the whistle of warpspeed in the background, and grinned. "Hey there, Commander," he said, picking his teeth with one grimy fingernail.
"Captain Obfonteri," Stakar Ogord grumbled on the other end. "Good to hear from you. And by that, I mean very bad. Caught me at a shit time. This better be good."
"Sure is," Kraglin confirmed. He idly looked at his finger and wiped it on his pants. "I learned why half the Ravagers in the galaxy suddenly went poof."
"Why?"
"Thanos. He got all six Infinity Stones."
Silence. "Please tell me you're kidding," Ogord finally demanded, and Kraglin pretended he didn't hear the quaver of fear in his commander's voice.
"Sir, I wish to the seven hells that I was kidding. But hey, on the plus side -"
"How is there a plus side, that deformed purple nutsack got all the stones and -!"
"On the plus side, Asgard got pounded," Kraglin practically shouted over his commander. "The barricade around the Terran system is down. I'm headed there now."
"Oh, isn't that great," Ogord sighed. "About fucking time. They all dead?"
"From what I can tell, yeah," Kraglin said. "I ran into -"
He chuckled. "You're not gonna believe this."
"Try me."
"I ran into the fool idiot that blew the Chitauri to kingdom come a few years back," Kraglin chortled. "He's a Terran. Lemme tell you about this fella. He designed weapons, and got blown up by one of his own missiles a few years back…"
"Tell me later," Ogord interrupted. Kraglin shrugged and went back to picking his teeth. "I want to know about the Terran system."
"Right. You want me to look for your buddy on Earth?"
"Yes. Until I can get there myself," Ogord said. "Scout around. Ask questions. Don't steal anything."
"Yes, mom."
"Try not to get killed or arrested."
"Damn, there goes my bucket list," Kraglin drawled. He ignored Ogord's warning growl and added, "I'll do my best, okay? Talk later, C'mander. See ya."
Ogord hung up. Kraglin dug a persistent hunk of orloni meat out from his teeth and flicked it at the ground, staring out at the streaks and shadows of warp space streaming past. Man, Ogord's buddy better still be around, because if they weren't… that'd be one hell of an awkward debriefing.
Kraglin yawned and made for the stairs. That shitty A'askvariian beer was finally getting to him. This jump would take a while.
