Title, and chapter titles in reference to 'She's my Ride Home' by Blue October.

Avengers belongs to Marvel.

This is for entertainment purposes only.

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Chapter 1: Strike a Match, Pour Gasoline

After all but herself and the wounded Terran crumbled away, the remains of Titan fell into the familiar silence of a battlefield after Thanos had conquered it. For some time she feared her father would return for her. She kept casting glances over her shoulder as she moved through the wreckage, seeking the whereabouts of her sister's ship, half-expecting to find him standing atop the rubble somewhere, here to take her to the fabled garden he had promised so often when she was a child, or to finish her off once and for all.

A tiny part of her wished he would come and take her away, and her sister would be there waiting in the garden. Together, they would turn against the Titan, finally bring his twisted rein to the bloody end it deserved and then they would vanish together, free at long long last. If he truely had the stones, and it was more than evident that he did, then it should be a simple matter to bring her back from whatever fate she had suffered on Vorimir, right? And it seemed just the kind of unfair thing he would do- they could never be free of him, not even through death. Nebula still did not know how Gamora had met her ultimate end. Perhaps she had turned on their father when they discovered the stone, one final desperate attempt to stop him, and he had slain her there.

It was hard to imagine such a thing. In his eyes, Gamora could do no wrong. It was likely, Nebula would never know how her sister spent her final moments. She could only hope it had been swift.

Nebula wished her sister had just let her die on Sanctuary, and let Thanos's dreams die with her. She could have accepted death, gladly and gratefully, to snatch that finally victory from him.

The ship proved to be in one piece when she found it, but the damage it had taken was extensive, and the power cells were nearly destroyed. Freeing it from the rubble took hours, even with the greatly reduced gravity.

When she had the ship freed she returned to check on the remaining Terran, a bag of supplies slung over her shoulder. He had hardly moved since his companions had vanished. When she had last seen him he had still been curled in on himself, holding his bloody hands against his face as he stared with empty shock at the piles of dust around him. At some point he must have grown too exhausted to do even that, because on her arrival he was laying back, one hand pressed against the wound on his side and his eyes shut closed.

For a moment she thought he might be dead after all, survived the culling only to succumb to his wounds shortly after. It may have been a mercy if he had, but as she drew near he stirred and groaned and opened his reddened eyes to blink up at her.

"Did you find it?" he asked blearily.

"Yes." She kicked aside some rubble to clear a space beside him and sat down. "It's in no condition to fly."

"Yeah," the man sighed while Nebula rummaged around her bag, pulling out a bottle of water which she handed over. "I feel the same."

He took a long sip and immediately choked. Nebula snatched the bottle back so he wouldn't spill their very limited supplies while he rolled over on his good side, hacking and coughing. Once his coughs had trailed away into weak, heaving breaths, she handed it back.

"There's a possibility it can be fixed. Maybe."

"Okay," he rasped out, rolling onto his back with an obvious grimace of pain. "How far are we from the nearest gas station?"

The assassin tipped her head and regarded him strangely as she tried to glean the meaning to his babbling. "Without a jump point, we are at least a hundred cycles from the nearest inhabitable planet or outpost." Longer still for anything useful, but she did not add that part.

"And this ship of yours, I don't suppose getting it 'jump worthy' again is much of an option?" he asked, but he stared up at the sky with blank eyes, obviously knowing the answer already.

"Not a chance." She returned to rummaging around in her bag, removing several packs of bandages, antiseptic wipes, and a handheld machine that assisted in stitching flesh back together. All standard medical gear, if somewhat outdated.

The Terran watched her spread out her supplies with the casual disinterest of someone who wasn't sure if they wanted to survive their injuries or not. It was a look and a notion she knew very well.

"You're more useful alive than dead," she told him, echoing the words her father had told her so many times when she wished for death, but he stubbornly refused to release her life from his possession.

The Terran screwed up his face in pain as she scrubbed the dirt and rust and other nasty things from his wound, cleaning the dried blood away and causing it to bleed again, sluggish and oozing.

"I don't seem to be much use either way," he ground out between clenched teeth.

She ignored his words and splashed his wound with some of their precious water before unraveling the first roll of bandages.

The Terran had succumbed to his exhaustion and fallen asleep before she even finished securing the wrap. She left him there to rest and returned to the ship to see what she could do. He must not have been out for long, however, as he made an appearance a short time later. Wordlessly, he limped his way over to where she kneeled over the remains of the gas-lines, re-working the tubes and repairing the countless cracks and holes. There, he settled down next to her and the sound of his labored breathing kept the pace as they worked in tandem.

-x-

There was no day and night cycle on Titan anymore. The remains of the planet drifted on without spinning, so Nebula measured imaginary cycles with an internalized clock that had been worked into her systems so long ago she could hardly remember a time without it.

By what would have been the midnight portion of the cycle, the Terran had developed a sheen of sickly sweat and Nebula sent him away before he made a mistake on the repairs that could cost them dearly. She found him later, not resting at all, but back where he had battled the Titan, crawling among the wreckage.

"You don't listen to orders well, do you?" she asked as she caught up to him. He was on his knees, sweeping together a pile of dust.

"Nope." His sarcastically happy answer may have had more power if his voice wasn't so tight with pain.

She took a seat on a nearby hunk of what may have once been a building and watched him work. "That was done with the power of the Infinity Stones. You can't bring them back."

"Well you're just a basket of inspiration, aren't you?" He finished scraping together every scrap of dust he could reach and sat back to stare at the pathetic mound of dirt before him. By Nebula's estimation, it may have comprised a quarter of a disassembled person at best, and was hopelessly mixed up with the planet's paler natural dust. "I'm not trying to bring them back," he sighed. "It just doesn't feel right, leaving them here like this."

"Was that your son?"

The question clearly caught the Terran off-guard and he stuttered a few times before answering. "Who? What? No. No, what would make you think that?"

"You held him as he died," she murmured thoughtfully. "He sought you out in his final moments. You seemed close." In her time under Thanos, she had watched many families die.

This earned her a strange look from the Terran, and he glanced around the rubble as though trying to figure out where she had been watching him from. "You noticed all of that? With a moon dropped on you?"

"I am an assassin. Noticing things is how I survive."

"Oh," apparently satisfied with that answer, he dragged a bag out from somewhere behind himself and carefully swept the pile of dust and dirt inside of it. "I have a friend like you, you know, back on Earth."

"There is no one like me."

-x-

By what would have been nearly morning, they doused the gathered ashes with engine fuel which had leaked from the ship, too filthy to be salvaged into anything useful, and lit them on fire.

"My name is Tony by the way," the Terran said, sitting on the ramp of the ship with his arms draped over his knees as he stared into the flames from underneath heavy lids.

"Nebula," she answered from where she leaned against the landing gear nearby, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. The smoke from the ashes billowed up in lazy clumps, and the acidic smell of chemicals stung her nose.

"Oh. That's a nice name. It suits you."

Nebula wasn't sure what to say to that. He was probably half-delirious with fever and exhaustion anyways.

The fire burned its self out, dirt reduced to ash. Nebula didn't see much of a difference, and returned to repairing the ship while Tony stared at the embers.

Mid-morning came and went before they had scrapped together enough of a working engine to get the ship turned on again.

Nebula wasn't even sure, as she helped the Tony hobble his way to the co-pilot's chair, that the batteries would hold long enough to get them out of the atmosphere. The compromised gravity may have been the only reason they succeeded, instead of plummeting back down.

"Wake me when we stop for snacks," Tony muttered as his reddened eyes slid shut. She left him to sleep fitfully in his chair and did what she could to keep the engines running while she ransacked the ship again for any sign of antibiotics.

End Ch 1

Chapter 2 Preview: "...Space is like, a kind of ocean," he offered in a painfully transparent attempt at conversation. "Y'know, this is going to be a much longer trip if we can't even talk to each other."

"It's going to be long either way..."

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So this is my first piece completely unrelated to my GotG/Avengers AU, Astronautical.

The Nebula and Tony scene about killed me. I could watch an entire movie of just what they did there for 21 days, and so this speculation fic was born. I don't know how many chapters it will be. At least until they get back to Earth, and I might include a few small blips after that. They're just, so cute! And I need more of their interactions!

Hope you enjoy!

-OMaM