Chapter 3
It’s cold inside the ship. Getting colder every minute, it seems. Enough so that she can see the white vapor of her breath every time she exhales. It doesn’t really bother her much, the cold. She can take worse. Much, much worse. Her body is more machine now than flesh, and things like cold, thirst, hunger are not much of a concern.
But the human, Stark, is not faring so well. The lack of sustenance and the cold seemed to have sapped every last bit of energy he had, and all he does lately is sit over by the window and look at the stars outside, the occasional weak shivers that wrack his gaunt frame and that same faint cloud of vapor in front of his face – the only signs that he’s still alive.
It riles her, how quickly he declined, the defeat in his posture, in his eyes, in the raspy, barely there voice when he manages to speak. It’s a show of weakness, and she was raised to be intolerant of it, to spurn its every sign. Only…
Only Stark isn’t weak, is he. She saw how he fought, throwing every bit of himself into the battle. She saw him with his head held high in the face of certain death. Saw him pull himself together despite his injuries, despite the loss he suffered…
No, Stark is far from weak. He’s a warrior, stronger in spirit than most she’d seen. She respects him. She… likes him, even though she finds the very notion of such sentiment abhorrent.
And she’s furious as she watches his body betray him now, making him waste away, making him break when nothing else could. She takes that betrayal personally, to an extent that surprises even herself. It makes her want to lash out, for some reason. To snap something, to make someone pay.
But there’s no one. Just a dying human in a dead ship and the cosmos, cold and indifferent around them.
She shakes her head forcefully, dismissing the fruitless anger from her thoughts. Growls her frustration low in her throat, tightening her hold on the two items she managed to dig up in the storage compartment at the back of the ship.
She doesn’t call out as she approaches. Simply squats down beside him in silence, sets her items on the ground.
“They’re beautiful, aren’t they, the stars,” Stark murmurs suddenly, his voice breathy and faint, punctuated by the labored wheeze of inhales. “I used to… used to be afraid of them, you know.” He rolls his head toward her, his bluish lips twitching into a bitter, self-deprecating smile. His gaze drops, lost somewhere in the maze of his own memories – unpleasant, if the light furrow of his brow is anything to go by. “So afraid,” he echoes absently, and she doesn’t even know if he’s talking to her still, if in his mind he’s even here on this ship.
She opens her mouth to speak, to ask him what it is he’s seeing in the blankness of the empty hallway behind her, but just then he blinks, jerks his head to the side, forcefully coming back into the present. Smiles at her, apologetic, before turning his gaze back toward the stars outside.
“Beautiful,” he repeats with a raspy sigh. “Peaceful...”
The sheer amount of melancholy acceptance in his voice makes her skin itch.
“Save your breath, Stark,” she grumbles, picking up the thermal blanket she brought with her and wrapping it around his bony, shivering frame.
He startles when she manhandles him briefly away from the bulkhead to thread the blanket between his back and the cold metal. Looks up at her, a silent question in the wide-eyed, vulnerably open stare. Wary, confused, disbelieving. Like an abused animal that’s suddenly given a sign of affection.
She knows that stare all too well.
She wonders, not for the first time, just how similar the two of them are. Wonders if on the inside this human is just as broken, just as mutilated as she is. Wonders, too, who it was that had scarred him so.
“You’re cold,” she responds to his silent inquiry, huffing with feigned irritation at his sincerely whispered thanks.
She reaches for the second item beside her, her most prized discovery – an oxygen mask and a portable oxygen container.
“Here,” she holds it up for him to see. “They use these when they need to make outside repairs. There were more in the storage, but the other tanks are all empty. This one,” she flicks her fingers at the gauge, “has about 7 hours worth of oxygen left. If you decrease the flow rate, you can make it last longer.”
It’s not ideal, she knows. Unless rescue comes in the next 10 hours or so, all she’s doing is prolonging the inevitable. But the wizard saw the possible future outcomes and he sacrificed a stone for this man. So she has to believe that fate has more in store for him than a slow, inglorious suffocation in space. She has to believe that their signal was heard and rescue will be here soon. And she can do her part in keeping him alive until then.
She moves to place the mask on his face and frowns in confusion when he puts his hand on her arm, staying her movement.
“Save it… for you,” he insists, pushing her arm back.
He’s a human. Outside his battle suit he is no match for her on a good day. And now, with his strength all sapped away by lack of air and food, he’s weaker than a newborn Groot. She can keep going, can dislodge his grip with no more effort than it takes her to swat away a fly.
But she doesn’t want to hurt him.
“My body doesn’t need as much,” she points out instead, trying to make him see the rationale behind this. “I can last much longer than you.” Because the new signal is strong, she’s sure of it. Somebody is bound to have picked it up. Help might be mere hours away.
Her appeal to logic doesn’t work the way she’d hoped.
He huffs – a breathless cross between a laugh and a wheeze. “Then this… should last you… enough.”
“Don’t be stupid,” she mutters, baring her teeth in helpless, irrational anger. Because this isn’t how things are supposed to go. People don’t reject an offer to save them. Not for the sake of another. Not for the sake of her.
She pushes now, forgetting her earlier decision to treat him gently. Brings the mask closer to his face, despite his attempt to stop her.
“You need to breathe,” she snaps. “Let me help!”
He shakes his head minutely, raises his hand higher, weak, trembling fingers tracing the edges of the ugly gaping hole where her cybernetic eye plate used to be. Gently, reverently.
“You’ve… already done… too … much…,” he murmurs, cracked, blue-tinged lips pulling into a soft, rueful smile.
She freezes. Stares wildly at him out of her one remaining eye as everything in her body – flesh and machine – grinds to a stunned, screeching halt.
Stark’s fingers are cold as ice, but his touch is like a press of burning embers against her skin. It sears right through her, melts her at her very core.
She isn’t used to physical kindness. Doesn’t know what to do with it. Doesn’t know how to react.
Gamora was the only other person who ever touched her like that – with that same gentleness, that foreign but uncomfortably pleasant intent to comfort. And the two of them spent years trying to kill each other before that happened; before they decided to unite in their common hatred of Thanos and become sisters for real, to rekindle the fledgling bond of affection they had lost when they were little kids.
And this man, this man is a stranger to her. He doesn’t owe her the kindness she had craved from her sister all her life. His gentleness is… illogical. She can’t understand it. It scares her. It doesn’t… it doesn’t make sense.
Stark’s brow furrows in confusion as he considers her, rigid and spooked before him. But then his face clears in understanding, warm brown eyes crinkling with empathetic regret. His feather-light touch lingers a fraction of a heartbeat longer, as if he were trying to impart something to her, to soothe like one would a wounded, frightened animal. And then his hand falls away, his eyes slipping shut, as his body begins to careen limply to the side.
The abrupt loss of the searing contact snaps her out of her stupor, and she grabs for him before he hits the floor. Settles him back upright, a little too eagerly, a little too rough.
“Foolish human,” she growls, angry without even fully understanding why. Slaps the oxygen mask over his slack face, silently commanding him to “breathe, you idiot, breathe, breathe, breathe!” And sags, almost dizzy with relief, as she sees his worriedly still chest begin to rise and fall in small, halting swells.
Carefully, she tightens the straps at the back of his head, adjusts the oxygen flow on the tank to extend its supply as much as possible while still keeping the human alive. Sits down beside him, shouldering his unconscious weight.
The stars outside the window shimmer silently – cold apathetic witnesses to their plight. How Stark finds them beautiful, she’ll never understand.
She tears her gaze away, rests her head against the bulkhead, closing her eye against the depressing scene.
“They’ll find us, Stark,” she murmurs, even though she doubts her only companion can hear her now. “They’ll find us, you’ll see.”