Frost
“I guess it was an unlucky jump after all,” Peter murmurs, clinging to the corners of the reflective blanket that Tony managed to find for him. That’s close to the extent of Tony’s first aid skill for shock victims: Keep them warm. Distract them from thinking about the trauma. (Get them to play Tetris, but it’s not like that’s an option right now; his suit’s too low on power to be using it as a gaming console.)
The kid’s still staring out the viewport, and resisted Tony’s suggestion to move further inside. Maybe it’s because his spider sense isn’t so great at sensing incoming dangers from outside the ship—must feel a bit like going blind.
It’s a kind of paranoia that Tony finds all too familiar.
Nebula’s sudden sound of surprise sends a spike of adrenaline through him, and Peter’s breath picks up as they turn to face her. “What?”
“There is a large ball of ice out here.”
Peter gets up, a little shakily, and joins her at the front, leaning over the sensor display. “Like, what, a comet?”
“Unlikely. A comet would be moving, and would contain a mixture of compounds such as ammonia and methane. I have never seen interstellar ice this pure.”
“Pure water?” Tony peers over Peter’s shoulder this time, standing on tiptoe.
Nebula nods.
“That’s what we need for fuel, right?” Peter asks, a little excitement creeping back into his voice. “Maybe it was the jump. Maybe it really was the luckiest place for us to land.”
“Perhaps,” Nebula allows, doubtfully.
It takes some effort to get the giant ball into the reservoir, but they manage it, entirely by maneuvering the ship and thankfully not by needing to go outside. Tony finds himself desperately grateful that he doesn’t have to face the terror of outer space. (Especially given that his suit is critically low on power, and he’s not sure that he’d even make it back to the ship.)
Not five minutes later, Nebula peers closer at the controls. “There is a body in there.”
“Say that again?”
“Did the comet hit one of the… the casualties?” Peter asks, his voice cracking a bit.
“Unlikely,” Nebula says. “And again, it seems unlikely that this would be a comet. But we must get the body out of the reservoir so that the conversion process can take place.”
With little choice, Tony readies his laser welding torch and uses a good chunk of his remaining power—power he’d hoped to use to record some message for Pepper, on the unlikely possibility that the ship made it back to Earth without him—to torch his way through the ice to retrieve the body.
Losing so many so fast has given him a deep and unexpected sense of respect for the dead, even the unknown dead, like this unlucky bastard. As he cuts his way in, he’s careful not to harm the body itself, just to melt the ice around it from bottom to top until the corpse tumbles into his arms.
(He hopes the poor guy doesn’t have some religious taboo against bad haircuts; he couldn’t figure out any way to efficiently free the hair without burning it off.)
The body must be cold, because the frost spreads immediately, and Tony’s grateful for the thermal blanket that Peter had handed him for the extraction. As he hurriedly backs his way out of the tight tunnel he made, the chill air turning his breaths to mist, he gets a better look at the face, bathed in the soft, watery light reflecting through the ice. The skin is blue, covered in raised lines and whorls slightly darker than the rest—some sort of natural design. Whatever sort of alien he is, he’s clearly not the same species as Nebula.
Just as easy on the eyes, though… aside from that giant purple bruise across his throat.
Tony does not want to envision exactly how his death went.
Pushing his mind toward whatever random thing might keep his brain from going there, Tony winds up musing over nicknames again. Just like with Nebula, none of the obvious ones seem to fit: Zhaan, Megamind, Doctor Manhattan. Smurf. He vaguely recalls previews for some 3D screen-candy save-the-planet flick with giant blue CGI guys with facial markings, but that was before he’d started to care about saving the planet, and the whole idea had seemed like so much cliched hippy bullshit (dress it up however you like, he could’ve predicted the whole nature-vs.-greed conflict in his sleep).
(Actually, come to think of it, wasn’t that directly before Afghanistan? Seems like he’d seen that preview during the last new movie he’d watched in… a couple of years, maybe. In the wake of what had been (at the time) the most harrowing experience of his life, he’d gone back to comfort-food films like classic sci-fi: Jurassic Park, The Thing, Tremors, Enemy Mine.)
As soon as he’s clear of the tunnel, he lays the body down within the blanket and attaches the corners to the ropes that Nebula has ready, then climbs up the ladder and out of the hatch and lets Peter quickly haul the poor guy out.
Once the body is up through the hatch, Peter and Tony work together to lay him out as gently as they can manage. Frost spreads across the metal floor, eerily beautiful; there’s even a fresh layer of frost forming across the guy’s skin. And Tony can’t help but think of cold blue drinks: Sapphire Alpine, Blue Diablo. Frostbite.
Peter shivers, his face drawn with all the innocent sorrow of a boy who’s still not used to death up close. “I wonder what kind of alien he was?”
Glancing their way from the controls, Nebula huffs scornfully. “Well, the frost giant runt. Thanos finally caught up to him. It was only a matter of time; my father does not suffer incompetence, nor make idle threats.”
“You, uh, y-you know this guy?”
“A failed experiment of my father, back when he sent servants to fetch the Stones rather than tracking them down himself.”
“So he was one of Thanos’s flunkies? Huh.” Tony pulls his gauntlet off. “Guess I’m not too torn up that he’s dead.”
Nebula levels a stare at him. “He had little choice.”
“There’s always choice. He chose to serve a madman who wanted to destroy half the galaxy.”
“How easy for you to judge,” she says, holding his gaze. “You merely fought the madman. You’ve never writhed beneath his touch, or felt the hands of his servants digging into your flesh, their tendrils snaking through your very mind.”
Swallowing reflexively, Tony finds himself thrown back to the flood of filthy water up his nose, the struggle against the hands that held him there as his lungs began to burn.
“In Sanctuary, not even death can free you,” Nebula continues, tonelessly, mercilessly. “There is no mercy, no respite, and only one escape: to serve the will of the Titan.”
Anything to make it stop, anything at all, he would have clung to whatever hope they offered him. If not for the incompetence of his captors—if they had watched him more closely, denied him access to certain materials—he would have done exactly what they demanded. Eventually.
No one lasts forever under torture. And Tony, who’d gone from a life of high-rolling decadence to a dark cell in a desert cave, hadn’t lasted even a month.
“This one”—Nebula nudges the body’s shoulder with her foot—“came pre-broken, in body and mind. But my father saw the potential in him, and turned him over to the Black Order for training.”
“Torture, you mean.” The words come unbidden, but Nebula doesn’t even flinch.
“You tortured him?” Peter asks, voice going high.
“Thanos wanted him brought to heel, and the Black Order lives to serve the will of their master. They burned through his defenses, shredded the last of his foolish hope, and helped him learn his place. After that, he stopped fighting off the Other’s control; changing his perceptions was easy enough. But it took them nearly three years to complete the transformation.” She huffs. “In my hands, it would have been over in months.”
It’s Tony’s turn to be incredulous. “You would have broken him sooner? Don’t act like that’s a good thing.”
Nebula lifts her chin. “My reputation as a sadist is well earned. Their methods merely prolonged his torment; I would have spared him that, and made him suitable that much the sooner. It may not fit your concept of mercy,” she adds, her tone chilling, “but I assure you, it would have been merciful.”
“I’ll bet.” Stomach roiling, Tony stares at her, wondering just what sort of monster he’s joined up with, and suddenly wanting to keep Peter as far away from her as possible in a ship this size.
With a careless shrug, Nebula turns back to the controls. “When you are done wailing over the dead, bring the body to the airlock.”
“What?” Peter blurts. “Airlock? Mr. Stark, we’re not just throwing him back into space… are we?”
It’s not like we can bury it, Tony doesn’t say, as he looks down at Frostbite and the short, singed hair that’s left on his head. Nor does Tony mention some of the other facts: They don’t even know if frost giants bury their dead, the body will rot long before they get anywhere close to a planet, and Tony is not in the right headspace to have some dead guy staring at him from the corner of their very small spaceship.
Briefly, he considers strapping the body to the outside of the hull—let space keep it nice and frozen—but just knowing that there’s a body is enough to make the skin between his shoulders itch. Especially now that his brain decided to name the damn thing.
Still, in consideration of the kid’s feelings, and wanting to protect that idealistic mindset for a little longer, he reaches for some nicer way to explain this. Takes a deep breath and opens his mouth—
and then there’s suddenly a strangled gasp that neither one of them made.