Nebula Returns

Sometimes the people who need you most are also the ones who are hardest to reach.

This is a story about patience, and about the kind of welcome that doesn't need to announce itself.

The distress signal came in on a frequency that should have been private — a Nova Corps emergency channel, clean and quiet and not the kind of thing that showed up on ordinary scanners. Gamora heard it and went still.

"I know that frequency," she said. "I used it once, a long time ago. Before I left Thanos." She paused. "Someone sent this from the outer docking ring of that station."

"One life sign," Rocket confirmed from the scanner. "Emergency capsule. Whoever it is, they've been in there a while."

Peter looked at Gamora. She didn't say the name. She didn't have to.

"Pull the capsule," she said.

The Milano moved to the station's outer ring, quiet and careful. The capsule came aboard through the lower hatch, clanging against the dock plates, small and dented and emergency-orange. Everyone gathered at a respectful distance. They understood, without discussing it, that this was older than their friendship — something between sisters, something that had started long before any of them had met.

Gamora stood at the capsule door for a long moment. She breathed in once, slowly. Then she opened it.

Nebula was inside.

She was blue and angular and tired in a way that went deep, and some of the mechanical parts on her left arm had been re-fused in haste, and she looked at Gamora with eyes that were braced for whatever came next. She had been braced for things for as long as she could remember.

"Where am I," she said.

"Safe," said Gamora.

Nebula's expression did not change. "I don't need this," she said. "I don't need any of this. I'm fine."

"You sent the signal," Gamora said.

A silence.

"That was a weak moment," Nebula said.

"We all have them," Peter said quietly from the back of the group.

Nebula looked at him. He was standing with his hands in his jacket pockets, not pressing her, just there. She looked at Rocket, who was already examining her arm with the focused expression of a person who cannot stand to see bad mechanical work and will fix it whether invited to or not. She looked at Drax, who had moved closer and was wearing what he considered an open and welcoming expression, which mostly looked like his regular expression but slightly less intense.

"Don't touch me," she told Rocket.

"I won't," Rocket said. He waited three minutes and then touched her arm anyway, and to everyone's surprise she let him, sitting very still and looking at the ceiling while he muttered about whoever had done the previous repair job and whether they had ever met a circuit before in their lives.

Groot brought her water. He set a cup beside her hand without looking at her, without saying anything, and drifted away to the other side of the room. She didn't touch it. Groot brought another one an hour later. Then another. On the third one, she drank it, and Groot happened to be looking at a very interesting spot on the ceiling and didn't notice.

Drax sat nearby and said nothing for three hours. For someone who said exactly what he thought the moment he thought it, this was a form of extraordinary restraint. It was also, for anyone who knew how to read it, a gift: he was simply present. Not demanding anything. Not explaining anything. Just there.

That night, after Rocket's repairs were done and everyone had retreated to their bunks, Gamora sat beside her sister in the quiet of the common room. The stars outside moved slowly past the viewport.

"When we were small," Gamora said, after a while, "and Thanos would take us somewhere new — a new ship, a new station — I was always afraid the first night. I never told you." She paused. "I just needed to know you were in the next room."

Nebula was looking at the viewport. She didn't say anything for a long time.

"I knew," she said finally. Very quiet.

Gamora let that settle.

"You don't have to stay," she said. "I know that. But you can. There is room."

Nebula didn't answer.

In the morning, the Milano flew on through the dark, and Nebula was still aboard. Someone had left a clean jacket outside her bunk — folded neatly, a warm dark color, sized right. Nobody claimed to have done it. Nobody needed to.

She put it on.

It fit.

There are some kinds of welcome that don't knock on doors. They just leave something warm outside and wait to see if you reach for it. The best families — the real ones — know how to do that.

Settle in. You are exactly where you belong.