oh, my friend (i am heavy)

Tony didn’t much care to leave. 

Yes, the red dust ripped his lungs raw with every aching breath, the dirt settling in his hair had a distinctly unpleasant, acrid scent, and the makeshift bandage he’d fashioned for the gaping wound in his side wouldn’t hold him together for much longer. 

It made sense to at least try and go home. He understood there was no logical reason for him to stay one more second on that godforsaken planet. 

But there was ash on his hands. A dark shadow creeping up both arms. A ghost of Peter Parker.

And when he looked at it, Tony also understood there was no worthwhile reason for him to leave that godforsaken planet, either. 

Because he would be going home without his kid. 

The quiet, blue-skinned woman was the first one to move. It might have been minutes, or hours, or days--- Tony wasn’t counting--- before she laid a metal hand on his stiff shoulder and lifted. Carried him across the crimson ground. Deposited his concerningly unresponsive body in the captain’s chair of the ship where he got the distinct feeling he didn’t belong. Pulled him up to sit in someone else’s seat. 

They did not speak. They did not cry. 

She was a competent pilot. Not that Tony really cared, considering that in his mind (which couldn’t stop replaying the memory of Peter’s desperate voice begging Tony to save him, but he didn’t and he’s so sorry, he’s so sorry ), he hadn’t left Titan. He could never leave Titan. Not in any way but physically, at least. Because Peter could never leave Titan. And Tony could never leave Peter.

The coin had been flipped. Fate did not choose as it should have. 

“Stark.” 

He didn’t startle at his name. Maybe he’d been sleeping. It didn’t matter. Peter and red dust and ashes bled into his reality regardless of how conscious he was. There was no relevant distinction between dreaming and thinking. To wonder about it would have been a self-indulgent distraction from the grief hanging just around the corner of the shock that made it bearable to breathe. 

“What?” he asked, on reflex more than anything else. His voice was quiet. Flat. Lifeless. A mirror of how he felt. 

“The ship has stalled. Can you repair it?” Her face was not hopeful for an answer, affirmative or otherwise. 

Odds were, he probably could. And Tony, even though he was only half the hero he pretended to be, couldn’t condemn anyone to death by his inaction. 

So he shrugged. “Let me take a look and I’ll tell you.” 

They worked quiet at first. Slowly, disjointedly— like corpses twitching before rigor mortis. Communicating in clipped little phrases; asking for certain toolboxes, a little help holding up a burst pipe. 

But then the wound in Tony’s side started bleeding through his shirt. He would’ve kept going, but the blue meanie didn’t have the patience to listen to his bullshit pacifications. There wasn’t much he could do to resist. She was much stronger than him. And they started talking as she stitched the wound. Harmless at first. Something simple to distract him from the pain of a sewing needle being pulled in and out of his flesh.

“What’s your name, anyway?” Tony asked, studying the intricate wiring over her onyx colored eye and actively not thinking of the thread crawling across his stomach. “I’m getting pretty tired of calling you ‘Avatar’ in my head.” 

She did not smile in amusement as he had intended, but answered nonetheless. “Nebula.” 

Point for Tony. 

“Nebula, huh? Like astronomy?” 

Her fingers, which had prior been amazingly steady, yanked the next stitch unreasonably hard. He let out an involuntary whimper at the harsh tug. She did not smile, but she smirked a little. 

Another, albeit unintentional, point for Tony.

“Yes,” she said. “Like astronomy.”

“Sorry. That was stupid. I’m not usually this stupid.” Tony huffed in what he intended to register as humor, but it really just sounded like a sigh. He tended to come across as an idiot after major blood loss. “I’m Tony, by the way.”

“I know.” Her expression did not change, even though Tony’s did. His brow furrowed in confusion before she explained, “My father warned us of you after the failed Chitauri attack on New York.”

As if by magic, the pain moved then. Migrated from the stab wound in his side to become an awful, cold ache in his chest. Because Thanos had known Tony as Tony had known Thanos. They’d known one another in the way a blacksmith builds armor to protect against one particular sword. There was no unfair advantage on either side in the way of preparation, at least.

The only difference between them was that Tony had not done enough. The difference was that Tony had lost.

And now they were paying the price. 

“I’m sorry about your sister,” he ended up blurting out, unable to hold it behind his teeth any longer. Her busy hands stalled. It’s his fault. It’s his fault she’s dead. It’s his fault that they’re all dead. He didn’t do enough, and it’s his fault. “I’m so sorry.”

Nebula blinked, and for a split second, the grief was laid bare in her eyes; an inescapable void of regret and anger and pain. It disappeared as quickly as it came, though she returned to her work against his wound with a newfound vigor. The muscles in her jaw flexed before she responded, too coldly to be comfort, “I’m sorry about your son.” 

Tony didn’t much feel like talking after that. 

But the ship was unbearably quiet in the days to come. It wasn’t just human weakness, either. Tony rationed this on account of how unresponsive Nebula was to all other stimuli besides their little talks and the made-up games to pass the time. It’s always easier to drift into death when you’ve got something to distract you from dying. 

On day fourteen, after the two of them had split a bitter, unfamiliar fruit for dinner and they sat overlooking the stars, something broke in Tony’s chest. And it broke unclean, and jagged, and painful.

“I don’t know why I’m doing this,” he whispered. It didn’t feel right to speak, like it would wake up the ghosts sleeping soundly on the ship. Nebula was probably more aware of them then he was, but he could still feel it all the same--- see it in the wispy branches scattered across the floor, someone’s sword left unpolished on the counter, a leather jacket slung across the seat. Items from people who no longer existed, and their belongings that became nothing more than a symptom of haunting in the wake of them. “I don’t know why I’m trying to survive this.”

Nebula didn’t answer at first, except to turn her head from the cosmos to Tony’s undoubtedly ashen face. She must have seen something in his expression, because the hard lines of her shoulders softened just a little and she said, “For the same reason we didn’t die on Titan.” 

“What’s that?” Tony asked. 

She tilted her head, fixed her gaze on a broken walkman next to her feet. “Life isn’t done making us pay.”

And Tony could have questioned just what exactly they were paying for, but he already knew deep down. They were paying for the sins of being a prophet; of seeing what’s coming and not doing enough to prevent it. The futurist’s curse. 

Tony tried to swallow, but nearly choked on the lump in his throat. “He was just a kid, Nebula.” 

She studied him once again, before asking with the level of caution one would use when defusing a bomb, “What was his name?”

“Peter,” Tony whispered, like it’d tear him open to say it any louder. Maybe it would. “His name was Peter.” 

“Peter,” she repeated. Her eyes looked very, very far away. “I knew a Peter. He was with Gamora. With my sister.”

“Quill, right?”

“Yes.”

Watching the world turn to ash had been like a sword to his stomach; agonizing and brutal. But talking about it was worse; like pulling out the blade. He hemorrhaged and folded his hands over his chest and tried to breathe but couldn’t. Didn’t really want to.

“What was she like?” Tony asked against his own self-interest, knowing it’d make them both feel worse and not caring. Just needing to bleed. “Gamora, I mean.”

There was a long moment of contemplative silence in which Tony thought she wasn’t going to answer, but then she spoke low and quiet: “My sister took after the best parts of my father. I got what was left.” 

Tony shoved down his impulse to ask: What fucking ‘best’ parts? and instead just nodded like it made sense that Thanos was in possession of any redeemable traits.

“You got enough to make it this far,” he ended up offering with a shrug, not knowing what else to say. 

She nodded, turning her gaze back to the infinite, inescapable stretch of stars before them. “Yes,” she agreed. “But not enough to make it worth it.” 

And that, Tony understood. 

By day twenty one, he knew they were doomed. Dead men walking, so to speak. They’d run out of oxygen soon. There was no fuel left in any of the tanks. Nebula forced him to take her share of food at every nightly meal despite his compellingly-voiced protests, but he was starving nonetheless, and if that didn’t get him, dehydration would.

They weren’t angry. They weren’t sad. They’d done everything they could and it was not enough. 

Not exactly an unfamiliar concept to either of them. 

Not after Titan.

“Nebula,” he mumbled after waking from a sleep that felt too long; obviously teetering on the edge of life and death. He knew, odds were, he wouldn’t come out of his next dream still breathing. “I need you to do something for me.”

She came to stand beside his chair, looking down at him with those unreadable, black eyes that Tony had grown oddly fond of over the past three weeks.  “Ask,” she suggested.

“If you ever get to Earth... ” he began, fully aware she’d only last a maximum of a week after him but needing pointless reassurance nonetheless. Maybe she’d get lucky. Maybe someone would help her after he was gone. “If you ever get to Earth, I need you to find someone.”

To her credit, Nebula did not mock his request, or tell him it was pointless, or remind him she was mortal, too. She just prompted, “Who?”

A weak, semi-apologetic smile stretched itself across Tony’s face. She was gonna hate this. “Steve.” 

“Steve?” she parroted, bristling predictably. They’d had a lot of time that they’d filled with talking, and Nebula had made it as clear as Nebula made anything that she didn’t approve of Steve Rogers. She had heard the story of Siberia; of a vibranium shield wrenched in an iron chest. Her opinion was unchangeable from that point on, no matter how many times Tony told her of how wonderful the man had been when they were together. Before the Accords and Bucky and the one-contact flip phone. He even brought up the time Steve absolutely butchered the Italian language trying to impress Tony on their fifth date, but she wasn’t swayed by his recounting of ‘Lady And The Tramp’ style spaghetti kisses, as indubitably romantic as it was. “Steve Rogers? The man who nearly killed you?”

Tony hummed. “Hm. That’s the one.” 

“I don’t understand. Do you wish for me to kill him?” There was not even the slightest hint of humor in her voice. If anything, there was an edge of excitement that sent an instinctive thrill of apprehension through Tony’s veins. “I will kill him however you like. It would be my honor.” 

“No!” he exclaimed, shaking his head so hard it sent the room spinning. “No, I do not want you to kill him! Don’t kill anyone--- consider this a formal deathwish that you don’t kill anyone in my name, capiche?” 

“Okay,” she said, sounding decidedly unimpressed. A little put out, even. “Then what do you want for me to do when I find him?”

Tony didn’t have to think long about it. From the moment he’d climbed on that godforsaken spaceship, he realized what he wanted. And he was dying, so he was no longer scared to ask. 

“Tell him I forgive him. That he was a dick, but so was I.” This was easy. The obvious. What came next was harder. More honest. Vulnerable. But necessary. “... And that I died loving him. Remembering him.

“Tell him… I don’t want him to worry, anymore. I’m alright. I’m with the kid.” Against all odds, he felt the corners of his mouth slide up at that. “And I’ll wait for him on the other side until he hurries his big, delicious, American ass over.”

“He could be gone,” Nebula said after a few seconds of profound silence, softer than her normal tone. Somber and sympathetic. “My father could have---”

“No,” Tony cut her off, not harshly but patiently; in the way that people calm children ranting of fearful fiction. “He’s alive.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do.” He spoke the words with an unchallengeable faith; reverent as a priest. It just wasn’t possible. Steve was many things. Dead wouldn’t be one of them for a long, long time. And it didn’t feel like denial to think that (and Tony Stark knew a thing or two about denial.) It felt like stating a fact. “He’s alive.”

Nebula just nodded, wrapped a faded leather cloak around his emaciated shoulders, unbelievably tender, and left without protesting anymore even though it was obvious by the thin-set of her lips that she wanted to. Tony fell asleep not much longer. He dreamt of spiders and shields.

Admittedly, he thought he was dead. There was the blinding, yellow light everyone talks about brewing behind his eyelids--- violent and demanding. 

But it didn’t quite make sense, because he could still feel pain. Sharp, aching, human, living pain, and when he opened his eyes, he didn’t so much see heaven or hellfire as much as he saw a glowing blonde woman levitating in space. 

Forgive him for thinking it was a hallucination at first glance. 

Nebula reached across his small, skeletal chest and fastened his seatbelt to the adjustment meant for small children. They were home before he could fall asleep again. 

The first inhale of Earth’s sweet, clean, abundant oxygen was borderline intoxicating. As soon as it hit Tony’s aching lungs when the ship’s hatch opened to let them out, he had to lock his knees to keep them from caving in relief.

He just tried to keep breathing. Home again. Who’d have thought?

Not Steve, apparently. Not beautiful, healthy, uninjured, safe and alive--- Steve. There was shock etched into each line of his face (which looked remarkably more aged with worry than Tony last remembered it being), almost like he couldn’t believe his stellar blue eyes. Tony didn’t exactly blame him. He’d thought it was a one way trip, too. 

Nebula’s grip tightened in support against his unbroken arm; a silent gesture of comfort. They’d come to understand one another so well, he could practically translate into words the meaning of the slight squeeze: my offer to kill him still stands. He smiled a little and shifted his shoulder against hers in humorous response: No sense in that. I told you he was alive. You killing him would make me wrong.

“Tony,” Steve gasped out, taking a few staggering steps towards him before breaking out into a near-run--- not stopping until he was so close, Tony could count the man’s hundred sun-kissed freckles. “You’re--- Oh, my God, Tony, you’re alive... ”

At his side, Nebula stiffened almost imperceptibly; as if she was taking personal offense at the notion she hadn’t been fully responsible for being the one to prevent his death in the first place but otherwise didn’t react. Tony did his best to reassure her by shifting his elbow a little into her arm. Settle down, Tiger. You’re the hero of my day whether he knows it or not. 

She relaxed. 

“Hi, Steve,” Tony whispered. He hadn’t meant to say it so quiet, so intimate, though his lungs still ached and it was hard to speak with all the emotions taking up a monopolizing amount of space in his chest. “It’s good to see you.” 

Steve nodded, a jerky, desperate thing, and reached his hands forward in an obvious effort to pull Tony to his side. But Nebula was much quicker, and Tony was shoved in a protective hold behind her back before anyone except for her had a chance to get a word in. 

“Don’t touch him,” she snarled. There was the ominous sound of a knife being roughly yanked from it’s holster, and then: “I will kill you where you stand , Steve Rogers.”

“Did we not talk about this?” Tony demanded, his voice muffled from where he was being held behind her but still coming across a little bit incredulous. He didn’t really think she was going to do anything and that she only intended to threaten, however he wasn’t sure enough to take any chances about it. “How many times have we talked about this? I don’t want you to kill Steve, okay? He can help me from here. It’s totally fine, Nebs. Stand down.” 

After a moment of the stiffest silence known to New York, he heard the drawn knife be placed back into its proper place in the holster and felt Nebula’s restrictive grip slacken as she pulled him back around. She still snapped nonetheless, conflicting with the gentleness she used in handing him over to Steve’s open arms, “Fine. Be an idiot, Stark.” 

“That’s my specialty,” he said, and gave a wink he was too tired to be absolutely sure wasn’t a blink. 

She just blinked back. 

Steve’s hands were warm and steady where they settled on his waist and wrist, more carrying him then acting as a crutch. Tony was far too cold, far too tired to protest that he was capable of walking when he knew he really wasn’t. God, he thought to himself. How the mighty had fallen. 

The damndest things will stir up your grief, Tony was realizing. Or had realized many, many times before Peter, but must have forgotten. Because something so stupid as a snarky, internal self-deprecation made him slacken against Steve’s side, finally unable to support the weight of all he’d seen on Titan. All that would never be coming back from there. 

“Tony?” Steve asked, obviously concerned at his sudden halt. “Are you---”

“I lost the kid,” Tony interrupted, not wanting to talk about anything else; especially not something so stupid as whether or not he was alright. He could feel Peter’s phantom hands clutching at his shoulders again; lowering them into the deep, red dirt from which only one of them would rise out of and it was the wrong one, wrong one, he couldn’t breathe. “Peter— I didn’t… I didn’t save him. Steve, I didn’t---”

Steve’s face was the picturesque sympathy; brow furrowed like how it always did after a bad mission, lips curled down in his signature grimace, but there was something worse there still. Deep and disbelieving; his own grief, and for the first time, Tony wondered what Steve had lost. What they both had lost on this planet, not just on a little red one far, far away.

An entirely new lead weight dropped itself down his stomach at the thought.

“Who did we lose?” Tony found himself asking, the words coming free without his permission in a desperate slur. He clutched the tight fabric of Steve’s sweater using his uninjured hand, just needing something to hold onto as the world quite literally fell apart beneath his failure. “Steve, tell me.” 

And Tony knew whatever it was, it was awful if strong and stoic Steve’s fingers were shaking when they came up to hold him closer. “Vision,” he began, which Tony had suspected but it still cracked a substantial piece of his already fragile heart to hear it. “Wanda. T’Challa.” 

A relatively short list, but Tony knew that wasn’t everyone as Steve’s lip started to wobble, balanced precariously on the verge of crying. And Tony knew he shouldn’t pry, should give him space, except it could be Tony’s loss, too. He had to know, as selfish as that made him. “Who else”

For a moment, Steve held his composure. He gave a little nod, shifted on his feet and looked up towards the night sky like there was an answer there as to how not to fall apart. But he must not have found it, because his voice broke as he admitted, “Sam and Bucky, too.”

Oh . Oh, no. 

“I’m so sorry,” Tony whispered, knowing it meant less than nothing and having to apologize nonetheless. It was his fault that Captain fucking America was now without both of his best friends. “Steve, I’m so, so sorry…” 

But Steve just gave a heartbreaking little smile, his denim-blue eyes sparkling with unshed tears, pulled Tony closer as if to affirm he was truly there and said, “I’m sorry, too.”

They stood there for a while, just leaned against one another, seeking comfort as much as they were trying to give it before Nebula’s raspy voice abruptly interrupted from behind them, “Stark, you need to lie down.”

What was it about Tony that screamed ‘I need someone to take care of me like I’m a little kid’? Because if he’d known where to find it, he’d have fucking cut it out. 

“Relax, Nebs,” he shot back, not turning away from Steve for even half a second for the sole purpose of committing every new scar and wrinkle in the other man’s face to memory. “I’m more than---”

“Don’t say ‘fine,’” Steve and Nebula said at the exact same time, but in two entirely different tones, which made Tony break out in a weak laugh as unamusing as it was to the both of them. 

But then that laugh got stuck in his chest; morphing into a cough that felt slick, and wet. He couldn’t quite catch his breath around it, like each inhale slipped between his lungs and out his mouth before he could grab it. 

“Tony?” he heard Steve asking, obviously worried and confused. Firm fingers leaned him forward a bit, but it still didn’t help. He was choking on red dirt and blood. Oh, God, he thought. Not again. 

This had happened a few times after he’d woken up from some particularly bad dreams on the ship, and he foolishly hoped he’d die before he went through it even once more.

“ Tony ?”

His chest ached as if there was new shrapnel there or metal that the doctors had missed. It carved him up and up and up and up and he couldn’t breathe---

“Get out of the way,” Nebula demanded towards Steve, using annoyance as a paper-thin veil for her concern. “I can help him. You can’t.”

There was the sound of her bootsteps clanging against the metal ramp but she wouldn’t get here in time, he was gonna fucking die on dry land from drowning in his own spit and blood and ash and dirt and oh, god, he’d lost the kid---

“Don’t touch him if you want to keep your fingers, Rogers.”

“I’m just trying to help.”

“You’ve done more than enough.” 

“Is he okay? Tony? Are you alright? What’s wrong?”

“He’s choking, you moron. Move! ”

Hands on his shoulders and they felt so real--- Peter had to be grabbing onto him again, lowering them into the ash and Tony knew if he could just hold on tight enough then they’d all be alright--- they’d be okay if he could just breathe but it was all his fault, all his fault- --

“He’s bleeding too much. Do you have a doctor here?”

“Uh—Bruce! Bruce is in the MedBay, he could meet us—“

“We don’t have enough time for that. Get out of my way.” 

He was being yanked up from the ground, up and away from Peter; poor, sweet Peter who was fading up and away with the wind. No. Tony couldn’t leave Titan, couldn’t leave Peter, not again, not ever again. He kicked and struggled with all the strength in his body against two restrictive, dark blue arms, but he was too weak.

He didn’t do enough, and it was all his fault. 

“I could carry him.” 

“And I could kill you. Move, Rogers. I’m not asking twice.” 

“Okay, okay just— just hold on, Tony? It’ll be okay, I promise. Bruce is gonna fix you up, I swear. Just hold on, alright?” 

He couldn’t hold on to Peter. He couldn’t hold on to much at all. He tried. He tried, and he tried, and he tried.

But just as he did with everything that mattered, he failed. 

The sea of red dirt and blood cresting in his lungs spilled up and out his mouth, making reality as ungraspable as ash in the wind. 

He didn’t hang on much longer after that.