For here am I sitting in a tin can (far above the world)
Time is an odd thing.
For all its rules and complexities, there really is no rhyme or reason to it. A month can rush by as quickly as a week when fun is being had, while one horrible day can feel like an eternity.
And as for the very specific amount of twenty-two days, well…
Grief has free reign over how those pass by.
Slowly, indecipherably, painfully - and yet Tony knows they’ve fast run out of whatever time the universe had decided to grant in the aftermath of his failure. Between running out of food and the fuel cells finally biting the dust despite all attempts to repair them, he’s absolutely exhausted in a way that runs further than bone-deep.
Thoughts of Peter haunt him constantly: ghostly apparitions that lurk in the corner of his eye, a disembodied voice that seems to echo through the darkened shell of the ship.
I don’t wanna go sir, please, I don’t wanna go I don’t wanna go -
Then there’s the ceaseless void of space outside the windows; a giant gaping maw of cold, twinkling blackness that stretches as far as Tony’s eyes can bear to look. All those years of fearing space and yet terror isn’t the overriding emotion that he feels as he sits in Quill’s chair, marked by a rough PROPERTY OF P QUILL GET LOST ROCKET scratched into part of the paneling, and stares out at the cascading stars and swirls of faraway galaxies.
It’s sorrow. Infinite, inescapable, infused completely into Tony’s soul to the point where he feels almost numb with it, the loss far too great to truly comprehend.
At least he’s not alone in his misery though.
Nebula, though initially stony and silent, had warmed up to him surprisingly quick. Perhaps it’s because he was injured, sweating through a fever from the infection causing chaos in the wound Thanos left him with, or perhaps because she needed the distraction, something to keep her moving.
But really, as she gently pushes the last of the food towards Tony, he likes to think it’s because in this small trap of time, this brief moment of their lives that seems to lasts longer than any other, she’s grown to care for him like he has for her. It goes beyond shared regrets and matching failures, further than their unspoken acceptance of their fate. It’s real, delicate but welcome, and Tony wishes that it didn’t have to end. He’d like to get back home, help fix whatever it is running riot in her circuits that makes her twitch in pain every so often, introduce her to Rhodey -
Rhodey.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/26957788
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
