Day 82
Carol finds him still and silent, silhouetted against the window illuminated by the nebula dancing beyond outside of the space craft. She closes the distance between her and the familiar body in a matter of seconds. She can not see his face, yet she knows who he is in long before before she turns him over to gaze upon his face as pale as star light. Her breath catches in her throat. What is he doing here? How had he ventured this far across the stars? She can tell from one look that he is broken... that he has been broken and glued back together and broken all over again, far to many times. She reaches to feel for a heartbeat, but stops. She hesitates. Fear stops her, the fear of what she will not find. The fear of what will be missing from the once jubilant man.
“Please...” Her whisper is a quiet cry. I cry to him. A prayer to the cold universe to spare him... give him back. She knows him. She knows him like a sister knows her brother. She loves him like family. A long time ago he was that. Her brother, the one she had taken upon her self to protect. Here he was 20 years later cold and limp in her arms. Finding her courage, the courage to be sure of what she has already excepted, she places her fingers on the broken man’s neck.
The universe answers her prayer in form of a tiny, so preciously tiny, weak, so very weak, thump, and then another. Carol slips her arms around him and holds his weak body close to hers. Her quivering hands run through his damp bedraggled hair.
“You are safe... you’re safe...” She is assuring him just as much as she is assuring herself. She clings onto his fragile body even tighter as she rises to her feet. She bares him back through the cold dark ship, she carries him away from his cold metal casket toward warmth and safety. Toward life.
Carol lays his still and feeble body down on her own cot in the safety of her ship. She steers her ship away from what could have been his final resting place. Kneeling beside her friend she begins to care for him. She lifts his head from the pillow just enough to slide the band of the oxygen mask over his head. If not for the slow and uneven fogging and defogging of the mask over his nose and mouth, she would have thought him dead. He had yet to move, flinch, acknowledge anything. It frightens her. He is so weak and fragile, the fear that he may silently slip away is prominent her mind.
“Please stay,” Her plea echoes through her lonely ship. She doesn’t even know if he can hear her, “Please wake up...”
He looks as though he may drift away to place that he will never return from, at any second. She rests her hand on his sunken cheek and smiles sadly. She is glad to see him, but not in this way. The look of pain and brokenness written on his face tells her that the years have not been kind, and that they have taken so much from him. He looks like a man who has given until he has nothing left to give, but continued to give all the same, and the hungry world kept on taking.
“What have they done to you,” Her fingers rest on the cold light glowing through his smeared black tank top. Her question is greeted with a shiver running through his body. Her first instinct is to check the mask to ensure he is still breathing. Movement snatches her gaze away from his pale face. His finger twitches. When she looks back up she is staring into deep, brown, pained eyes.
Tony Stark opened his mouth and spoke.
“I wish I had lived a little longer.”