Chapter Text
The fuel cells are cracked. Of course they are.
It shouldn’t be a surprise. It really shouldn’t be a surprise, considering how the ship had suffered through a moon crashlanding on top of it, but it is inconvenient as all get out.
“We’re losing power,” Nebula tells him again, this time in the cockpit of the ship, her metal hand gesturing at the screen in front of them. “It was so slow that it wasn’t noticeable until now, but the rate of loss is rising. If we don’t do something quickly, we’re going to run out of power.”
And die here, frozen in space, Tony finishes for her inside the privacy of his own mind.
Perfect. Exactly the kind of thing his nightmares need.
“Alright then,” he says, only wincing slightly as he lifts his hands to rub them together. “Let’s see what we’re working with.”
It isn’t pretty.
Nebula leads him (slowly, because he is still recovering) down to the ship’s engines. Everything is on standby, beyond what they need for basic life support. The cells themselves are kept hidden away under the grating of the engine room floor, and Nebula helps him pull it away in order to get a glimpse of what they are working with.
The set up isn’t actually that different from when he had been working on the SHIELD/Hydra’s Helicarriers, all those years ago (although, back then, the power source had been his repulsor engines, not the fuel cell system that Quill has here.) The actual system itself isn’t that bad. Even the early NASA spaceships had been using fuel cells as a relatively waste free and efficient means of powering their vehicles.
But the cells themselves are damaged.
“Can you fix them?” Nebula asks him, as he darts his eyes over the scene. Given the state they are in— the majority of the stack melted and warped, thanks to a leak— he imagines she already knows the answer to that question.
“Just give me a sec,” he says anyways, reaching his hand up to tap on his nano-unit. He doesn’t have enough nanites to form a full suit anymore, but he lets the nanites swarm up over his head to form a helmet. The edges remain rough and ragged as his helm-display flickers on, scanning the mess in front of him.
“Well,” he says after a moment. “Good news is these run like the alkali fuel cells back on Earth.”
Bad news is those use a liquid electrolyte solution. Fuel cells are pretty simple actually. Hydrogen atoms flow into an electrolyte, get stripped of their electrons, become ‘ionized’, and then carry a positive electrical charge. After that, the hydrogen combines with oxygen (forming a by-product of water), and boom, electricity for as long as you have both hydrogen and oxygen.
And the electrolyte.
That is the problem here. From his scans, it looks like originally, only one of the cells had been damaged, but unfortunately, the leaking electrolyte had not only been hot, but also highly corrosive, and the breach had damaged three out of the five remaining cells. The two non-damaged ones had been overcompensating for the others as they had slowly lost their electrolyte solution, but now the loss is too great, and they are very quickly going run out of power.
If hydrogen or oxygen were the problem, then he could rig up something to supply the cells properly, but with the electrolyte…
He doesn’t have potassium hydroxide on hand, and even if he did, he has no way of repairing the damage done to the other fuel cells. There is simply no way of making them workable again.
He curses in the privacy of his own mind, his eyes flicking frantically over the damage, searching desperately for some kind of alternative solution. But his subsequent scans tell him what he already knows.
The fuel cells aren’t salvageable, and if they don’t do something quick, they will lose the only two remaining functional cells they have.
He lets out an explosive breath and folds his helmet away, the nanites migrating back into the unit on his chest as he turns to look back at Nebula. “I’ll be honest, it isn’t looking good,” he tells her, her face a solid mask of stone as he begins to lay out the extent of their bad situation.
The loss of the fuel cells is a blow. As optimistic as he would like to be, he knows there is simply no way to get the ship functioning. They may have been able to blast off of Titan, but they are now trapped up in space, their power source dwindling dangerously.
Steps, he reminds himself pointedly. He can’t think about dying in the cold void of space. He can’t think about never getting back to Earth again. He can only think about what he needs to do right now, and right now, that includes making sure their last two remaining fuel cells don’t conk out on them.
First step, neutralise the potassium hydroxide.
For most of the spill, the water it had been dissolved in has long since evaporated, which is good, since at least it isn’t hot anymore. It still isn’t safe to touch, but, while Quill’s ship may be lacking in some things, it had come equipped for emergencies, and he finds a supply of acetic acid meant specifically for moments like this.
With that in hand, he and Nebula are able to clean up most of the leaked electrolyte. It is slow, laborious work, and at one point, he is pretty sure that Nebula’s metal hand comes in contact with the corrosive material. She jerks it away almost instantly though, and she doesn’t say anything, so he isn’t sure if she is damaged or not. Looking at her closed-off expression, he decides not to mention it yet.
Besides that incident, the cleanup goes relatively smoothly, and soon it is safe for them to move on to the next step of the plan.
Step two, remove the damaged fuel cells.
Even with the clean up finished, he doesn’t want to risk more leaks — they only have two remaining functional fuel cells after all, they can’t risk them getting damaged. It is a little bit of an operation to remove the damaged cells, but Nebula helps him, her face set in a determined stubbornness as they work together.
There isn’t much talking during most of if, the two of them all too aware of their precarious situation, but Nebula is quick to follow any of his directions as he uses a welder to separate out the damaged cells from the stack, squinting through his protection goggles as he lugs out the now useless units and sets them aside.
Once that is finished, Nebula hands him the reformer, the device imperative if they want to make sure the hydrogen for the fuel cell remains pure, and no pesky CO2 molecules try to make their home inside the cell to form a solid carbonate.
The transfer is a success, and they soon have two fully functioning fuel cells, neither of which are in danger of leaking or breaking down.
Of course, two fuel cells isn’t really enough power to fuel an entire ship, and he spends a few tense hours sitting at the table in the bridge, scribbling out calculations on a flickering electronic screen as he tries to figure out their survival odds.
The cells themselves aren’t enough to get anywhere. If they tried, the cells could probably run the engines for about 48-hours before the limited power strains the engines and damages something else, so that isn’t an option.
Basically, they are dead in the water.
Their problem is power output. The cells themselves put out enough power to run the basic life support of the ship, as well as the computer systems and lights, but it isn’t enough to actually get anywhere. Nebula tells him they need to reach something called a ‘jump point’ if they ever want a chance of getting anywhere… and they simply can’t do that. The only way they are getting to Earth in this ship is if one of them gets out to push.
So, he is trapped on this ship. Not exactly how he imagined spending the last days of his life but… he supposes Nebula gets her wish. Neither of them will be dying on Titan. Instead, he gets to figure out when exactly they will be dying here.
“With my implants, I will be less of a drain on resources,” Nebula tells him flatly, the woman sitting across from him at the table and managing to sound slightly accusatory as she lengthens their survival time by a few days. To be fair, it really isn’t his fault that he doesn’t have cybernetic parts implanted in him that allow him to survive without food or oxygen for longer, but Nebula still glares at him anyways.
She is right that their limited resources are going to be what kills them though.
First, they might run out of food. Of course, they can ration that, and Nebula claims she needs less than him, so that isn’t his biggest concern.
Second concern is water. That, ironically, isn’t really a problem. As long as their remaining fuel cells stay operational, they will have all the water they could ever need. H2O is one of the by-products of the fuel cell’s reaction, and the water is drinkable. It is one of the reasons NASA had experimented with these types of fuel cells, and it means that as long as they are careful, they won't run out of water.
Third, and the real problem, is oxygen. Well, not exactly oxygen, but CO2. It is pretty simple really. The ship has filters that scrub the CO2 they breathe out of the air. Ordinarily, these filters would be replaced regularly when the ship docks somewhere… but they have no hope of docking anywhere anytime soon.
Eventually, the ship’s air filters will saturate, and CO2 will start to slowly poison them. That is the real problem they face, and once that happens, there is nothing he can do, no trick he can pull out of his sleeve that will fix that.
From his calculations, they have about a month before that happens.
oOo
Living on a ship doomed to die is a bit of a trip for the brain. Logically, he knows it is coming, and he knows with great certainty that there is nothing he can do about it. His death is coming, it is only a matter of time at this point.
It is sort of surreal, and part of him isn’t really sure why he doesn’t just, eject himself from the airlock, or find some sort of fancy concoction amid the med-bay supply to help speed up the process but…
But he doesn’t do that.
He knows he only has a month to live, but this isn’t the first time he has been living with a ticking clock counting down to doomsday. He had had a looming death deadline before, back when he had been slowly dying of palladium poisoning. He can remember back then, when he had been sinking deeper and deeper into reckless behaviour, knowing internally that he was running out of time and could do nothing about it.
He and Pepper had had to talk a lot about that time with Judith actually. About why he had kept it hidden, and how each of them had felt while he had been more or less suicidal.
He feels… different, this time.
Maybe it is because the looming death isn’t a secret this time, and maybe it is because there really is nothing he can do about it. No last-ditch efforts to reverse the problem, no late-night brainstorming… it simply is.
He will regret dying though. Mostly he will regret dying in space. No matter how painful it would be to go back to Earth and find out who had died (and see if Aunt May is alive, and then have to explain to her what he had done), he still… he still wishes he could do that.
It is painful, not knowing who is dead or alive, because essentially, he has to mourn everyone. They all might as well be dead, with how impossible it is for him to confirm otherwise. Right now, he is dying, and he is doing it away from all of his friends.
He will never see them again. He will never see Pepper again.
He hadn't known when he had rushed away from her to follow Strange that he would never see her face again. He hadn't known that their last staticky conversation would really and truly be their last.
When he had called Steve in a panic, blurting out confusing instructions about Valkyrie and the scepter… he hadn't known he would never be able to talk to the man again. He had had so much he wanted to say to him first. The Avengers had been spread out before all this— thanks to the Accords. He had been planning to meet with Steve and Bucky again once they got back from their most recent trip to Wakanda.
He had been going to show them his new suit. He had been going to talk to Bucky about a new vibranium arm.
And now, none of that is going to happen. He will never see any of them again, and he hadn't even really said goodbye.
There is nothing he can do about it though, and maybe it is that helplessness that pushes him into a calm acceptance of his approaching death. There is no point in being angry or depressed or panicked right now. It will do nothing to change the situation, and it will just make him miserable.
He isn’t exactly sure if his mindset is the healthiest one. He would need Judith to help him figure out if he is really in acceptance, or if he is just in denial, refusing to feel anything about his situation…
But either way, it leaves him with only one major step left to do before he dies.
Step three: figure out how to live on the ship with Nebula for a month.
oOo
Figuring out how to live nicely with Nebula is a must, considering how small the ship is. They can’t really avoid each other, and they have a month until he dies (Nebula will live a little longer, until her implants can’t cope anymore), so… unless they want this month to be the worst of their lives, they need to get along.
Nebula doesn’t really seem to be against getting along, but she does seem suspicious of him. Her natural hostility towards him has gone down a little, ever since they had worked together to repair the fuel cells, but she still scowls at him when he finally moves out of the med-bay.
He ends up doing it the day after they fix the fuel cells, the day after he knows how long they have left to live. Med-bay might not be haunted by any ghosts, but it isn’t really that comfortable to be living in long-term, so he gives in and searches for new quarters.
The ship has limited space, so in turn, the livings spaces are small. Still, there are six separate, tiny, sleeping quarters. Nebula informs him of two missing Guardians who he had never met— a talking tree named Groot, and a talking fox named Rocket apparently— so it seems each of the Guardians had had their own room.
He ends up taking the one that had belonged to Mantis (because the one that had been Groot’s had been infested with sticks, and Drax and Rocket’s rooms had had far too many weapons in them.) He is pretty sure Nebula takes Gamora’s room.
The rooms are all clustered together, but he only catches a brief glimpse of Nebula’s room, the door remaining closed nearly 100% of the time. He doesn’t know what she does in there, but for his part, it feels kind of weird to be living in someone else’s room, and he tries not to disturb too much of it.
It isn’t like he has a lot of stuff that he needs to store away (only Peter’s ashes, which he keeps on him), so mostly, he just… exists in the space.
oOo
Just because he and Nebula have separate rooms doesn’t mean they can avoid each other. There isn’t really a lot to do on the ship, since it doesn’t really need to be piloted, but they do have one activity that has them meeting face-to-face at least three times every day.
Mealtimes.
They are probably lucky, since they are now two people eating rations that were meant for six people. But, that doesn’t mean they want to be careless with their food, and once he had finished his calculations on their life expectancy, they had turned their focus to rationing their food.
They won’t starve. The ship has enough food to last them the month they have left, but barely, and they have to portion everything out carefully, so as to not make any mistakes.
There isn’t really any point in taking more food, or hording it, but Nebula seems suspicious of him anyways (he is actually beginning to suspect that she is just suspicious in general, and he himself has nothing to do with it). Either way, mealtimes are a communal activity, because Nebula insists on watching him carefully, in case he feels the need to sneak an extra packet of jerky back to his room or something.
He doesn’t really mind her thinly veiled glares, because beyond that, she isn’t really openly hostile. She is extremely protective of the food, but she doesn’t horde it either. He thinks he can trust her not to try to kill him off faster than he is already dying.
So, with that in mind, he decides to see if he can somehow lessen more of that natural suspicion towards him.
He gets his opportunity during their first meal together, when he notices the corrosive burns on the back of her metal hand as she pushes his allotted food towards him, the two of them sitting on opposite sides of the table in the command center.
“Oh,” he says, without thinking, his eyes glancing over the marks left over from the electrolyte they had been cleaning up. “You burned yourself.”
The words come out with no ulterior motive. He isn’t even really thinking of trying to bond with Nebula by fixing the damage, nor is he clueing in to the fact that he might insult her by bringing up the injury. His mouth had moved on its own as soon as he had seen the marks on her hand, and he is rewarded by having her tense almost immediately, her gaze hard and burning as the offending hand jerks away to get hidden under the table.
“It’s fine,” she says tightly. “I will fix it later.”
His lips press together thoughtfully at her response, and he doesn’t say anything for a moment. Instead he reaches for his first food packet, his eyes flicking briefly over the woman across from him as he tears it open.
Nebula’s face is set in a determined scowl, and she doesn’t look at him as she mechanically eats her own food— one-handed. Her other hand is still hidden, and while he thinks it is still functional – she had been using it moments ago after all – it is clear she doesn’t want to talk about it, or acknowledge the damage to the metal servo.
I will fix it later, she had said, and he thinks back to how she had previously told him she is perfectly capable of repairing herself without his help. He doesn’t doubt that, but he does have to wonder why she hasn’t done so already.
The damage to her hand hadn't looked too severe. Even with just a passing glance he already has a few ideas of what could be done for it so… so there must be a reason why Nebula hadn't fixed it yet.
He flicks his eyes over her again, and reaches for some of the jerky in his bag. “You know,” he says casually, keeping his eyes focused on his food as Nebula’s gaze jumps accusingly up to him. “It’s kind of hard to use your hands to repair damage on said hand…” He darts his eyes up to her for a moment and shrugs. “I could…” Not help. “I could try to take a look at it, if you want.”
Nebula scowls instantly at the suggestion, her shoulder’s stiffening. “I can do it myself,” she says sharply, and Tony shrugs again, dropping his eyes back to his food and very carefully maintaining a casual, friendly attitude.
“Sure ya can,” he says, waving a piece of jerky at her. “But, you brought me here to fix the engines, and I’ve done that. There isn’t anything else for me to do.” He stuffs the jerky into his mouth, chewing rapidly. “I'm bored, and I want to be useful.” Nebula still looks skeptical, so he throws in one more lure. “Besides, you helped me with my stab wound, I should return the favour.”
Across from him, Nebula huffs and shakes her head, pointedly looking away from him as she jams her hand into her packet and pulls out a fistful of dried fruit.
Tony lets her sit in silence. Whether or not she really needs help to fix her hand, he won’t gain himself any favours by pushing the issue. If this goes anywhere, it will be up to Nebula.
Quill has an impressive collection of 70s and 80s music on his ship, and he is laying on his bunk a few hours after eating, listening to a few of the songs, when a pair of stomping feet come up to his door.
It slides open as he sits up (his stomach complaining only slightly), and he blinks at Nebula standing in the threshold, her hands on her hips and a defensive glare on her face. “Well?” she says sharply. “Are you going to fix my hand or not?”
Tony can’t help grinning as he swings his legs down off the bed. “That’s all you had to say, Frosty,” he says, rubbing his hands together. By the door, Nebula’s scowl deepens.
He is pretty sure the scowl is mostly a front though, because she doesn’t protest or stop him at any point as he collects the things he thinks he will need and leads her back to the table in the command center.
“Where do you want to sit?” he says, nodding to the table, his tools piled in his arms. If anything, his attempt at giving Nebula some control over the situation seems to heighten her suspicion of him, and he endures several seconds of fierce glares before she finally stalks over to the side of the table she had been sitting at last time.
She sits stiffly, as though angry with him, but he isn’t put off by her hostile exterior. He has had lots of experience dealing with repairing implants, and he knows that allowing anyone near something like this takes a lot of trust.
(He can still remember, when he had gotten home from Afghanistan, and had made a whole new arc reactor, because he had needed something that was fully his, and not made in pain and fear. He can remember that even then, even when Pepper had been thoroughly grossed out, he had still insisted that she help him, unable to say in words that he wanted her to be part of this, that he wanted to trust her with this.)
Of course, while Nebula may remind him a little of himself and his arc reactor, she actually reminds him a whole lot more of somebody else.
He waits until she is settled before stepping up to the table, taking care to set his tools down carefully— instead of dumping them out in a jarring crash— the feel of Nebula’s eyes watching him remaining constant for every tool.
“Okay,” he says, stepping over and sitting down so that he is facing her. “I'm just going to take a look for a moment.” He holds out his hand, waiting for her to reach for him first, and she stares at him in silence for a moment, her jaw clenched.
Ordinarily, her glare might convince him that she is absolutely furious with the situation… but he has seen that look before, and he has learned to read the fear behind it too. In front of him, Nebula lifts her hand, and instead of giving it to him, she sets it on the table, unknowingly further mirroring another scared patient of his.
He can still remember when Bucky had looked like that.
Of course, he had looked a little less angry, and a little more blank, but the base emotion is the same. He can remember how it had been before Bucky had started to trust him, before the man had realised that he wasn’t going to be treated the same way he had been with Hydra. He can remember when he had started to accept that he didn’t have to brace himself constantly for pain anymore.
My father replaced a piece of me with a machine every time I failed him, Nebula had told him, and his lips press together briefly. It isn’t hard to imagine why she and Bucky are reacting similarly right now.
Which only makes the fact that she is even letting him do this at all even more impressive.
And it makes him really not want to mess this up.
To that end, he finds himself narrating his every action, just like he would do with Bucky. He can remember once, after Bucky had grown comfortable with him, he had mentioned how the fact that he and Bruce did something so simple as tell him what they were doing had been almost jarringly different from his experience with Hydra.
“The damage doesn’t look too bad,” he tells Nebula as he looks over her hand, deciding not to touch it quite yet, since she seems to want to keep touching to a minimum. “It looks like you were able to keep the corrosion from getting too severe.”
Across from him, Nebula stares at him for a moment, before looking away. “I could fix it myself,” she says pointedly. “But then I would have to take off the entire hand. This is just easier.”
He nods at her assertion, and reaches for a cloth and some more of the neutralising agent they had been using earlier. “I’m just going to clean it out,” he warns her. “We don’t want any of the electrolyte left behind.” He keeps his eyes focused on his cloth as he asks his next question. “Do you have any pain receptors there?”
Nebula looks back at him with a jerk, her whole body tensing at the question. He doesn’t push it, fiddling with his cloth and the neutraliser as he waits for her to decide how to answer. After a moment she relaxes and looks away again, her voice calm and almost unbothered as she answers him.
“It won’t hurt.”
He nods, although he isn’t sure how much of her words are true, and how much they are a front. “Let me know if it does,” he says, lifting the cloth and moving to her hand. Nebula stares at him, and doesn’t say anything.
He fills the silence with idle chatter, casually informing her of his every move as he cleans out her hand, and then prepares to seal the damage. He doesn’t have the equipment to replace any parts of her hand, but thankfully the damage is mostly superficial, and sealing the cracks should leave it completely operational.
He explains that to her, just like everything else, and it might be his imagination, but she seems to lose some of her outright tension as he works on her. All in all, the session seems to be going rather well.
He is about halfway done, when Nebula speaks up, cutting off his rambled discussion of different types of sealant as she looks at him. “You said you worked on cybernetics before?” she asks, her hand never moving from its place on the table.
He blinks, and lets the topic switch smoothly. “Yeah,” he says, keeping his eyes on her hand. “It’s not very common on Earth right now, but one of my friends has – had – has, a metal arm.” He winces slightly as he struggles with the word tense and moves on quickly in order to avoid thinking about it.
“His was implanted against his will too,” he says, and he can feel Nebula’s interested gaze on him as he works. “He got captured, and his arm was injured, so they replaced it.”
In front of him, Nebula remains silent, and Tony allows his mouth to run as he finishes up on her hand. “He has a new arm now though,” he says, a tinge of pride entering his voice. “I helped design it for him. He says he doesn’t mind his arm now, because it is his now, something built for him that he wanted.”
When he looks up, Nebula’s eyes are almost unreadable, but when he finishes and packs up his supplies, he catches sight of her running her thumb over his repairs, something contemplative in her eyes.
oOo
After that, Nebula seems to mellow out a little. She is still sharp and efficient, but she seems less inclined to believe that he will murder her in her sleep.
A few days after the repairs, he wakes up half convinced she is being murdered anyways though.
She isn’t being murdered, because of course there is only the two of them on the ship, but he realises very quickly that she is having a nightmare, the walls of the small bedrooms doing little to block her gut-wrenching screams.
His breath stutters at the sound and he stares wide-eyed at the ceiling, his mind flashing back to what she had said about Thanos. He swallows uneasily, frozen on his bed in the dark. It doesn’t take much thinking to know that the odds of her taking kindly to him waking her up – or even acknowledging her nightmares in any way – are probably not good.
He always feels awkward about nightmares anyways. It had taken him and Pepper a while to figure out the best way for her to help him through his, and they had trusted each other and genuinely believed that the other person wanted what was best for them.
He thinks it is fair to say that Nebula probably hasn’t had anyone like that in her life.
He doesn’t just want to leave her in the middle of her nightmare though. He can remember being in a similar dilemma a few years ago too, back when he and Steve had been dealing with the political storm that had exploded when Rumlow had blown the UN and Bucky had been arrested.
He can still remember how he had felt, when he had woken up early, only to find Steve in the midst of his own – quieter – nightmare. He had frozen back then too, his mind caught between the realisation of what was happening to Steve, and stuck on trying to figure out what to do about it.
Back then he had been lucky. Steve had woken up on his own, not too long after. But with Nebula… she will probably wake up on her own too, but they are going to be on this ship for a month together. It is almost certain that he will be faced with this dilemma again some time, so he might as well figure out what to do about it.
He tries not to think too hard about what will happen if he gets his own nightmares.
Instead, he makes his decision and pushes himself up, swinging his feet out from the bed in a decisive movement. He doubts waking Nebula up will be a good plan — he is almost certain it will probably get him stabbed again — but he has a different idea.
He slips out of his room and makes his way past Nebula’s. She isn’t currently screaming, but he can still hear her tossing and turning, her staticky breath tight and laboured as she dreams. His lips thin at the sound and he picks up his pace, feeling his way into the command center in the semi-darkness of flickering computer consoles.
“Alright,” he whispers as he pulls up Quill’s music playlist. “Let’s give this a try.”
To be honest, waking up to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” at full volume probably isn’t the most relaxing way of escaping a nightmare, but it is effective.
Two verses into the iconic song and a blue, sleep-deprived, rather irritated looking cyborg marches into the command center, her eyes jumping up to pin him in a glare almost instantly. The irate look doesn’t quite hide the bags under her eyes.
“Why are you playing music in the middle of the night!?” she yells, the growl in her voice cutting clear through the blasting speakers.
“It’s a good song!” he yells back at her, putting on the act of being nonplused, as though what he is doing is completely normal, and not at all related to his roommate’s sleeping difficulties.
Across from him, Nebula doesn’t look impressed by his excuse. The woman looks practically murderous as she snaps at him to turn it off, and spins on her heel as she marches back to her room, probably muttering vaguely threatening phrases under her breath the whole way.
She had woken up though, and she hadn't killed him doing it, so he counts that as a success.
(A week later, when he is busy dreaming about falling through a portal in space, that just so happens to be full of leaking fuel cells, he wakes up to another ear shattering song being played at full volume. He actually laughs when he hears it. It is really, really unfortunate that Nebula is completely ignorant of what it means to Rickroll someone.)
oOo
Despite the looming Deadline of Death that remains constant, a month also feels ridiculously long, and it is probably a very good thing that Nebula is here. If he had to entertain himself this whole time, he would probably end up taking apart something of vital importance out of simple boredom.
It has been long enough now that they are actually playing games together, and he has the pleasure of teaching her how to play paper football.
He probably should have expected her to be competitive.
They sit across from each other at the table, the glare on Nebula’s face more from intense concentration, rather than from hostility now. She lines up the goalpost for him, and he readies his paper football, flicking it with his fingers and watching it arc through the air.
Nebula snarls at it, her hand breaking position and snatching it out of the air, her face a mask of frustration and annoyance as he draws back out of her space.
“You don’t need to do that,” he says quickly, her reaction making it clear that ‘competitive games simply for fun’ have not really been part of her life experience. “You just hold position,” he reminds her, demonstrating with his own hands and letting her flick the football back at him.
“That was close,” he says, when it misses, and Nebula doesn’t say anything back, her scowl of concentration deepening as she readies her next throw. It lands almost perfectly. “That’s a goal,” he tells her, trying not to smile too much. “We’re now one apiece.”
He can feel the game grabbing her, Nebula’s scowl smoothing out slightly as she looks at him, her voice almost gravelly as she stares up at him seriously. “I would like to try again.”
That is the best thing she could have said, and they continue on playing, a flimsy throw on his part giving her an opening to steal the game. “Now you have a chance to win,” he tells her as he readies his goalposts.
Nebula stares at him for a second, like she doesn’t believe him, before she readies herself, an intense expression on her face as she prepares to flick her paper.
“And…you’ve won,” he says, as the paper football lands between his hands. “Congratulations.”
Across from him, Nebula gives a start and stares at him, as though she has never heard those words before in her life, and certainly hadn't been expecting to hear them now. Her reaction of shock is enough to give him the courage to reach out his hand, her eyes following him as he moves.
“Fair game. Good sport,” he says, fighting to keep from externally reacting as Nebula very slowly reaches towards him to accept the handshake, her grip soft and almost hesitant as she touches him. “Have fun?”
Her eyes dart over him for a second, and she gives a cautious nod, her voice softer than usual as it comes out. “It was fun.”
oOo
His progress with Nebula aside, the month slowly creeps by, and he can feel it as his body starts to slow down, everything a little harder, a little more tiring as the air filters start to fail and the CO2 levels start to rise.
It won’t be a painful death, that at least, he is allowed.
But it is coming.
He records a message for Pepper. His nanites can only form the very basics of his helmet, but it works anyways, and through the deepening fog of his mind, he tries to leave his last words to his fiancée. He knows she will probably never get it, but… he wants to say his last goodbyes anyways.
In his last moments, he wants to be thinking about her.
It is harder to breathe now, or— at least, breathing is less effective now— and he can feel himself drifting as he finishes. His head hurts, a dull sort of headache settling behind his eyes, as he lets himself lay down, his heart heavy in his chest and his stomach churning unhappily as he closes his eyes.
(Nebula had actually given him the last of the jerky today. They are running low on food now, but it doesn’t really matter.)
His discomfort and the effects of carbon dioxide poisoning won’t last much longer. He knows there isn’t much time left. He will pass out soon and— and something.
What was it? Something—
Ah, right. He will die first. That’s what it is. And it will probably be hard on Nebula, and— ah. Nebula arrives, and his head lolls to the side as she picks him up, settling him back gently into one of the command chairs. Her movements are almost uncharacteristically slow and gentle as she leaves him, and for a moment, his eyes crack open, the great emptiness of the starry landscape now before him.
In this detached, distant state of mind, the vastness isn’t so scary. It is beautiful really, and it feels somewhat fitting for it to be the last thing he sees as his eyes slip closed.
His mind drifts, his breathing slows, and then—
Behind his eyelids, a white glow starts to grow brighter and brighter.