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There’s grass outside the Avengers facility. Green and vibrant, when it’s not been dry for too long – though even when it has, and the blades are all yellowed and withered, Nebula can’t help but marvel at it. Today, however, it is lush and healthy, cool beneath the temperature receptors in her cybernetic augments (– beneath the nerve ends in what’s left of her skin –) as what remains of the sunset burns into embers.
She’s still not used to…grass.
It’s been five Earth years since she first came here, and things like this still perplex her.
She supposes it’s only logical. She’s spent so long surrounded by the harsh steel corridors of battleships and the smog-choked skyscrapers of mechanised worlds that things like plants would feel so foreign to her.
Almost as foreign as being able to just sit still and think about grass.
Almost as foreign as kindness.
One of her sensors registers movement behind her. She doesn’t move, staring out down the grassy embankment, to the sky reflected in the lake below her. She’s far from defenceless, if this is some kind of attacker. A mechanism which hides a weapon, embedded into her wrist, tenses. Ready. Waiting.
Of course, the fact it’s a matter of if – the fact she’s allowed this person to get so close to her – is another sign of how much things have changed in these few years.
Earth is possibly one of the strangest places she’s been, she thinks, and she’s been inside Knowhere .
The figure comes to a stop beside her, keeping a metre away from her. It’s either to give her space, as Rhodey would probably say, or tactical. The latter would be smart – keeping out of reach of an attack. Of course, if she really wanted to, she could take this person down in a moment, no matter how close they want to stand. But she doesn’t want to.
That’s strange too, isn’t it?
She doesn’t want to look up, either. She has no real intention of inviting this person into conversation with her. She came out here to sit in stony silence, and she’d quite like to get back to it. Alone.
“Quiet out,” the person comments. A man. His voice is rough, low, like he’s barely spoken in months and now two words seems like a monologue. Nebula’s face twitches minutely. She recognises his voice, vaguely, but can’t quite place it.
She still doesn’t look up, however.
She isn’t that curious.
Not yet.
“Yes,” she says pointedly instead. “It was.”
The man hums, like he’s trying for amused, but can’t quite make it there. “Yeah. Sorry about that.”
He sounds genuine. But he doesn’t leave, and so Nebula decides he can’t be that sorry.
In fact, he does worse than not leave – he sits down on the grass instead.
She still doesn’t turn, her gaze fixed on the lake and blazing with irritation.
That is another strange thing about humans. Any other species in the galaxy wouldn’t dare to sit beside her like this. And they’d be wise not to – not with her reputation, anyway. But Tony Stark had faced down her fierce expression and taught her how to place a game with a scrap of metal and a table. Rhodey had seen the way every inch of her posture was lined with danger, and taught her how to play basketball. Natasha had looked over her once, matched her serious expression, and told a very deadpan joke that she still didn’t quite understand – but it had made Rhodey laugh.
And this man had seen her unspoken threats of violence and sat beside her.
Perhaps they didn’t see it, she considers. Perhaps humans are entirely socially inept.
But that would be far too easy an answer.
A slight tearing noise catches her attention, and – finally – she turns her head oh-so-slightly to side-eye her companion. She finds him staring at the grass in front of him, fingers twisted in the blades and pulling them up. Perplexed, she looks him over – his dull clothes; the hearing aid curled around his ear; the intricate tattoo that snakes down his arm; the scars scattered across his visible skin. The vague familiarity of his voice slots into place. This is the man Natasha had brought in earlier today, from Tokyo.
Every inch of him is lined with a barely concealed anger.
This, at least, she understands.
She’s heard Natasha and Rhodey speak of him – earlier today, and in the months previous – but even if she hadn’t heard, she’d have known just by looking at him.
Thanos took so much. But from some, he took more than others.
This is a man who has lost everything.
“Just ignore me,” the man mutters. He’s tearing the grass in his hands now, blade by blade, right down the middle, like some kind of destructive tic. His face twists into a scowl. “Nat told me to go and find some company.” The scowl shifts into an attempt at a wry smile, which somehow manages to be strangely fond. “Still always doin’ what she tells me, I suppose.”
Nebula stays silent, but continues to watch him. He still hasn’t looked up.
“But I figured you’d be the least likely to try and talk back at me,” he continues, giving an aborted sort of shrug. “So. I’m just gonna sit here for a bit. Then I’ll leave you alone, deal?”
She says nothing.
“Right.” He holds the torn pieces of grass in his fist for a moment, before gently opening it. The wind catches on it, and it blows away. “Deal.”
Like dust.
The man grimaces, like perhaps he’s made the same comparison.
For reasons that escape her, she opens her mouth. “You are Natasha’s friend.”
The man freezes.
“Yeah,” he says.
She doesn’t understand why – neither of them want to have this conversation, do they? – but her tongue continues to move. “You’re Rhodey’s friend as well.”
The man looks down at the grass again for a moment, and then up at the sky. “Definitely used to be. Not sure anymore.” His expression twists again – dark and ugly. “He shouldn’t be, anyway.”
“Why?” she probes, almost feeling offence on the behalf of Rhodey. Because, as strange as it is, he has become her friend. “Rhodey is a good man.”
“Exactly,” comes the reply. Quiet.
Over time, she’d grown used to keeping her feelings from her face. But here, on Earth, the habit has begun to slip, and she allows a frown to crease her brow. “I thought humans were all about second chances.”
That’s what Tony had said, back in those days on the Benatar. That he didn’t care much for what she’d done before then – just about what she was doing now. What she chose to do going forward.
But the man beside her just scoffs. “Yeah, I know. I used to be the guy handing them out.” He swallows, and looks down. “But some things shouldn’t be forgiven.”
She says nothing.
Had she not said the same thing? Thought the same thing? The humans she’d met so far had refused the argument. She’d believed it to be some aspect of their culture – unwritten laws of their society.
But this man suggests otherwise.
“What would you have him do then?” she asks. “Make you leave?”
The thought of it makes anger bristle within her – who does this man think he is? Who is he to think he can be allowed to wallow in self-hatred when they must come together to take back what Thanos took from the universe? To take back everything they lost.
To take back Gamora, even though she knows she can’t.
Even though she aches to, right down to each component that was so cruelly fused into her.
But the man sighs. Hangs his head. “No. I won’t leave.” Pause. “I can’t.” His fingers curl again into the grass, but he doesn’t pull it up this time. “I have hope now.” A broken smile cracks across his face, and he laughs like he’s hiding a sob. “And I can’t just give up. Not on them. Not on her.”
He clears his throat suddenly, looking away and down at the grass. Nebula keeps her eyes fixed on him. She’s not sure if she’s just curious, or if it’s something else.
There is something rather alluring, she supposes, in seeing another person feel that same pain you have felt. In watching it play across their face in the way it still twists in your insides.
“Yes,” she murmurs, thinking of how she’s had to battle through her childhood, how she’s been torn apart and put together again more times than she can count, how the person she hated the most became the only person she cared about – became her sister. How Thanos took that from her, and how she would do everything in her power to get her back, if she could. How she can only keep going, keep doing what Gamora would have done in her stead. “You can’t give up.”
Not when this man has a chance of getting back what he’s lost.
The man doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then he looks up at her.
His eyes are full of the worst of the last five years, and achingly sad.
“Neither of us can,” he murmurs, like he can barely dare to say it. She wonders, maybe, if she’s just caught a glimpse of who this man was before Thanos completed his work.
“My name is Nebula,” she says. An offering, laid out on the lush grass between them.
The barest hint of a genuine smile tugs at the corner of his mouth.
“I’m Clint,” is all he says.