The Man They Called Stark
He distracted her with stories.
“It’s incredibly tall, taller than a hundred of you standing on top of one another,” he said confidently.
Her eyes widened.
“Inside the building there are hundreds of machines and gears- all designed by yours truly,” he said, pressing a hand to his chest.
“And, occasionally, there are people. Now those are not made by yours truly."
“What do they look like? Do all the humans look like you?” She asked, her words dripping with wonder.
She pressed a hand to his arc reactor, it’s blue light blending in with her small palm. She stared at the creation, gasping softly as it hummed beneath her skin. She reminded him of the kid.
He laughed, ignoring the thought.
“They wish they could be so lucky. I’m the model for humans, remember?”
“This,” he said with a grin, pointing to himself, “is as good as it gets.”
She giggled as his eyebrows moved up and down.
His quick speech and descriptive words fascinated her. The children whispered and watched with big eyes as he spoke. He smiled softly, resting an arm on the child’s blue shoulder as she made herself comfortable on the seat.
Adaliah grinned and requested another story as the ship passed hundreds of floating bodies. Raaguleh said nothing, grateful for the distraction. Adaliah watched in wonder as he spoke of heroes who defied time and men who grew green (green like her daddy), and jumped onto buildings! They saved his life.
Her long ears moved happily as he spoke, curling around her and peeking up with his voice. She could hear his heart beat when her ears focused past his descriptions. She could hear every word and memorize its meaning.
At the end of each story she asked questions, not realizing with each story fewer children were speaking. Adaliah was so enthralled with his stories she didn’t notice the passing hours or her eyelids growing heavier with each word. The other children had long ago fallen silent, all of them snoring softly.
Until eventually she, too, fell asleep, her head resting against the man’s arm. In the fog between reality and sleep she realized a forgotten question. She’d never asked his name.
Nebula watched the man they called Stark and the blue child with caution.
He was calmer than he’d been during the earthquake. Or the thunderstorm, the fires- whatever natural disaster had occurred. And yet it was cruel and unnatural.
What better way to describe her father?
Repulsion twisted in her gut like a knife. His sick smile came to the front of Nebula’s mind. She had begged and screamed as he’d pulled her body apart. She hated Thanos, hated him.
The only motivator to continue was her rage.
Thanos had killed Gamora. The little girl she’d lived in fear of, the girl she had hated. The girl who’d lost her childhood the same as Nebula.
Her eyes scanned the small group of men, women, and children. Perhaps they were also strangers to one another. War either erased the lines of friends and family, or it emboldened it.
It left nothing behind but thoughts of us and them, right and wrong.
She had walked the lines of survival and death, each time falling closer and closer to her end. She would never forget the years of Thanos ordering she and Gamora to fight. And for what purpose?
Why had they been forced to fight like dogs in the street? She had been no older than the girl speaking to this man, just a child of Adaliah’s age. She watched the dark hair on his face, the even breaths which left him. No father had ever been so kind to her as this man was to Adaliah.
He had held Adaliah close, her blue skin a constant reminder of herself. She thought of the way he had held the boy. She had seen his body disappear, heard his pleas and felt... sorrow for someone, someone she could not call by name.
Nebula had watched children be slaughtered, rounded up like criminals and recruited for an endless nightmare before they fell to the ground. They never got up. She had envied them and their bloody, metallic bodies.
She had been stronger than them, but never strong enough. She hadn’t wanted to be stronger than anyone. She’d just wanted a family.
Watching the man they’d called Stark with the boy, she’d wondered if that was a family. The boy played the role perfectly. He had cried and begged like all of the children Nebula had ever known.
He lasted longer than the others, a mystery she still could not answer. There had been nothing she could do, but her hatred and anger only grew stronger as she watched another child die for Thanos’ cause. Stark had held his fading body close, as if sheer will could hold the boy together
Of course it hadn’t, and as the boy fell to pieces and disappeared from sight she heard him apologize. She remembered the shame of losing a battle, but like Stark, had remained silent. Stark had laid him down, his eyes never leaving the boy.
And she realized it didn’t matter that the boy had stayed longer than the others. His disappearance had been too cruel, and too fast. Stark had remained silent, shaking and pressing his hand to his face until the blasts of rock and metal had stolen him from Nebula’s sight.
Now he sat 10 feet from her.
“I charge extra for pictures,” he said with his closed eyes, smirking.
She frowned, her eyes focusing on the tired man in the flickering light.
“I thought you were asleep.”
He opened his eyes, turning to face her while minding the child’s head. Adaliah stirred for a moment before burying her face into his side. She didn’t shy away from his armor.
“I could never sleep through all this noise,” he said, nodding to the sleeping passengers.
“You likes jokes,” she said, black eyes meeting his.
He sighed as he stretched, not meeting her gaze.
“When I’m not living one, yeah.”
She frowned. “How could you live a joke?”
“It was a...” he laughed.
It was soft and quick to end, as if it shouldn’t have been heard at all. She dreaded the silence which followed. He shrugged his shoulders.
“Never mind.”
His eyes flickered back to the child resting on his shoulder.
He seemed ready to say something, but his eyes changed and he fell silent before she could ask. It was his sorrow which most deterred her. She had her turned away from him as tears had rolled down his red face.
She thought back to their time on Titan; she thought of the boy clinging to Stark as Stark had lied to him.
“You’re alright, you’re alright,” he had soothed.
She had been powerless in Stark’s emptiness. She didn’t like being powerless. Power was something to be coveted, contained.
It was not to be swept away by the tears of a stranger. She was confused, frightened even, to have been so impacted by the humans. Stark had seemed... lost.
Her own emotions had crept up into her throat, taking away her voice as the boy had died.
“Are you some kind of a celebrity on your planet?” She asked.
Stark raised his eyebrows. “I’m the kind of celebrity who saves lives, so I’d say I’m the celebrity.”
She rolled her eyes, staring at the ship’s lights as he sighed.
“But these days I’m some kind of everything.”
She nodded, her eyes flickering over the ship and its passengers. There was a boy who stirred in his sleep. He was the color of lilacs and lavender, he wore a dirty, brown pair of trousers. He mumbled softly before curling into the side of his sleeping mother.
All of them suffered by Thanos’ will. For al of his plans and his visions, he knew nothing of caring for the innocent- he didn’t know how to care for anyone.
“You were good with them.”
He shrugged, ignoring the comment.
He was a new person, or perhaps he was returning to the person he’d always been. In a matter of hours he had changed from a desperate man to a charmer. She and Gamora lived- had lived, she corrected herself, in strength and ferocity.
He seemed to mock it. She told him as much.
“You say that now. But it’s funny how agreeable materialism becomes when you own five Ferrari’s.”
“Five what?”
He shook his head, almost wistfully. “You’d know it when you saw them.”
He knocked his hand against the wall, the metal echoing throughout ship. Raaguleh turned from her position at the front. She frowned at Nebula before turning back.
“Much flashier than this ship, that’s for certain,” he said.
“This ship saved our lives,” Nebula hissed. “No thanks to you.”
“Well if you’d wanted one of my ships you could’ve just asked," he said.
He spoke again with tight eyes, his mouth a mix of irritation and mirth.
“Of course, I only made Thanos bleed and formed our plan- what would I know about saving people?”
Whatever amusement he’d found suddenly disappeared with his question. His eyes dropped to the ground as he sighed. He pressed his clean hand to his temple.
“See, this is why we should have brought one of my ships. I stock each one thoroughly with alcohol,” he groaned.
“You’ve left Earth once, and you have space ships?”
“Sweetheart, I have everything.”
“My child,” Thanos had cooed over Gamora’s fuming body.
Every hit had been praised, despite Nebula’s screams. It never seemed to matter when Nebula was hurting. She was hushed with a false monicker, as if her broken ribs were no more than a bug bite.
She was not a child, not a 'dear' or 'love.' She was an assassin, a killing machine worthy of no man's wandering eyes or masked insults. Nebula glared at Stark, ignoring the instinct to hurt him more than he had her.
“You have everything?”
He laughed, “I definitely have liquor on my ships.”
For the first time Raaguleh spoke up from her position at the front.
“We do not waste storage space with alcohol.”
Tony put a hand to his chest, not unlike the way he had earlier with the children. His eyes widened as he sat up, mindful of Adaliah’s head. His mouth became an uneven line of questions and disbelief.
“I understand this isn’t Earth, but what kind of people don’t value a strong drink in a crisis?”
He frowned at Nebula, redirecting his attention to the blue woman.
“What’s life without a little fun?”
She frowned, raising an eyebrow, “...Life.”
He scoffed, “Sounds boring.”
She said nothing, crossing her arms as he chuckled. His suit had been repaired by some creation of his own. He shook his head in amusement as the children of war slept. No wonder Stark had tried to fight her father.
Only someone so reckless and oblivious to the consequences would be stupid enough to try.
If he had been better prepared things could be different. Nebula was still surprised she’d managed to drag him on board. He sighed before his next sentence, his eyes focused on her.
“And feel free to warn me the next time you try to make me a human backpack,” he said.
“You mean when I saved your life?”
His mouth twisted to the side and his eyes darted to the ceiling, as if he was deep in thought.
He could picture it now, Nebula's firm hand on his shoulder as the planet died around them. If he closed his eyes he was still there. The ground crumbled and the wind hissed and the flames roared in his ears. The fires were hot. He cursed his brain for so feebly assigning the primitive adjective to the pain and fear and inescapable burning which had been the flames of Thanos' plan.
The flames and the smoke and the ash still cling to him. It was as if he had awoken in the dust of someone before him, an unspoken name taunting his every move. The ash covered him like a shroud, more of it disappearing with every moment.
He stared down at his hand. The lines of his fingers were coated with a fading red and brown, a particularly large patch of russet tracing the lines of his ring finger- god Pepper. Where was she? Had she escaped, or had she crumbled into the air like- his breath tumbled from his mouth, an accident, a mistake, something which shouldn't be here. He shouldn't be here. No, no he had tried already- he couldn't contact her, his signal had faded into nothing before her phone had even rung.
'It's because you're in space idiot,' he thought.
Of course Pepper would answer if she could, but she wasn't receiving his calls. In his heart he knew the only reason Pepper wouldn't answer was because she couldn't answer, and she couldn't answer because he was in space. They would see each other again soon and everything would be fine, everything would be fine. He repeated it to himself until he could no longer feel the burning in his lungs, the panic which bled into his every thought. He stared down at his stained hand.
Soon it would be clean, erasing his only evidence of- he inhaled sharply, closing his eyes. He ignored the anger desperately pushing his anguish to the bottom of his stomach. Some rescue mission.
“No I think I made myself perfectly clear,” he said, his eyes serious and his mouth set in a firm line. “Next time warn me.”
“Life doesn’t come with warnings,” Nebula said coldly. “Should you be so lucky to be informed of your suffering before it occurred you would have had no idea how to prepare.”
She wasn’t sure if she was talking to him or herself.
“If you hadn’t been so weak there wouldn’t have been a problem,” she said coldly.
And with that his eyes lost their anger, falling to something much quieter and far more impactful. He looked away from her before huffing out a short laugh. He looked down at Adaliah’s sleeping form, the child clinging to him in her sleep.
“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” he said.