every ship is equal, and no one is more powerful than the sea.

[derogatory]

FIVE THINGS MEME

HOW TO PLAY
- Give me as many "five things" prompt for any characters or fandom that you know I'm into
- I will try to write it
- no promises.


COMPLETE
five moments of gay panic for victor
four times victor missed nathan before finding him again (and one time he really didn't)
five disastrous toasts from victor and nathan's big gay wedding
five things about avenger victor and supervillain karolina
five times chase and victor were not friends
five ways victor's bad end could've gone
four successful missions nathan and victor went on (and one that could have gone a lot better)
five moments inside the mentor's lounge
five times victor regretted letting nathan move in

Comments

[derogatory]

iii.
“Space ghosts,” Tony drawls, face inches from the monitor, chin in his hands.

"Yep."

He raises a skeptical eyebrow. "That's a thing?”

“Why would that NOT be a thing?” Quill argues, leaning back as Rocket scowls into the lower half of the viewfinder.

“What, you think your planet’s got a monopoly on the undead?”

“I am Groot,” says the lower left side of the aforementioned speaker.

“Exactly! Completely insensitive. So give us the kid.”

“Can you not. say it like that?” Peter grimaces, hands at the back of his neck. He amends the statement gracefully, “Let us sorta borrow the kid.”

Rocket fixes him with a snarl, “How is that better? You always try and undermine me-”

“uh, Sorry?” Peter retorts, not even slightly apologetic. “But whose plan is this? You just wanted to blow it up.” It would solve the problem, the raccoon supplies. “How would having a bunch of murder ghosts LOOSE in the cosmos solve anything? At least right now they’re contained!”

“He is hardly a child.” Gamora speaks over the bickering, looking through the screen over her teammates’ heads. “Stark, your permission is not necessary. As an adult he can choose to come with us as a contract position until the situation is resolved. Would that suffice?”

“uh,” Nathan finally manages, all eyes on him, coffee undrunk in his hands.





“Space,” Victor reads, as he walks in the door, still looking from the text message to his boyfriend. “Space?” he repeats, voice sounding lost, and Nathan hops off the couch to meet him. Vic just came from a haircut and the situation is a little too serious for Nathan to spend it with his hands over the other guy’s hair. Not stopping him, though.

“Space,” he confirms, fingers working through too much product- what’s the point of having them cut it shorter if you’re going to let them girl it up like that? “It doesn’t sound like a long job.”

“It’s space,” Victor insists, batting Nathan’s hands away. “Time runs differently there, what could be a couple days for you could be like fifty years on Earth.”

Nathan pulls back in surprise, “Shit, really?”

“I don’t know,” Victor bites back, clearly having got started on his sulk fit on the train ride home. “I’ve never been invited.”

“Is it because you get motion sick?”

“No!” he cries, sinking into the sofa, adding hesitantly, “That was one time.” And with more reluctance, “I don’t know, I think it has to do with my dad, he sent out some data to other universes.” He trails off, unwilling to wander from one fussworthy topic to another. “When do you leave?”

“Tonight,” Nathan laughs at the horrified noise that comes out of Victor’s mouth, the deep disappointment written over his features before the cyborg closes the distance between them, eager to make use of the last few hours together.






“Can you promise me you’ll come back?” Victor asks and cringes at how very cheesy that sounds. He buries his face in the mattress, voice muffled, “Space is a pretty big deal, you might be like Carol and decide you’d rather be up there for awhile.”

Nathan crosses his hands over his chest and considers this.

“Sorry, no, I can’t promise that,” he admits and has to muffle a laugh at how fast Victor’s head comes back up, gaping after him. “You’re right, it might be a- Come back here, cut it out.” Victor squirms off the bed, muttering a few ‘fuck you’s as well as some ‘I can’t believe I did that and you’re gonna peace out’ because, as usual, the joke wasn’t half as funny as Nathan thought it would be.

“Hey, come on,” he snickers, reaching out for Victor. “I mean, if you wanna stay up there, we can.” Victor freezes, suspicious, not about to come back just yet. Nathan grins, hopefully in his more charming ways, shrugging, “Sorry, did I not mention you’re coming too? It was part of my terms since I’ll be putting in overti-- ow!” He grimaces at the growing bruise on his shoulder, gripeing that it’s practically domestic battery, swinging those robot fists like that. Victor settles over him, smiling but only slightly less furious.






Far be it for Nathan to respect something like the silence of space. He shifts his weight nervously, the cabin settling into a livable air pressure, before he blurts out, “Do you know if you send footage of a porno in space you get a million dollars?” It hangs high and awkward in the fresh oxygen.

Victor is working frantically to smooth out his helmet hair without a mirror, shooting his boyfriend a short smile.

“It’s cute that we are this far into the future and you think someone hasn’t already cashed in on that,” he says with a facsimile of comfort. Nathan holds his stare, realization setting in. “Yeah, it’s real, I saw it,” Victor coughs, Milano cabin doors sliding opening with a bit of elbow grease, adding hurriedly, “It was okay, we can talk about it later.”






Victor is more or less a “plus one” for this mission, which works out well enough since he spends half of the lightspeed trip to the Klyn throwing up.

(“His friends took him on a speedboat once.” Nathan somberly shakes his head. “It was carnage.”)

Turns out Ronan and Nebula massacred every living person on the Kyln. Which was only sort of A Thing since a majority of the people killed there were thieves and murderers, and mourning any Nova Corps unlucky or unskilled enough to be sent to work there paled in comparison with the casualties over Xandar. So they let the floating prison turned graveyard fester for a while.

“See,” Nathan says, feet resting on the nearest console. “That’s what you don’t wanna do. Not like they got shit else to do. Works ‘em right up into a ghost frenzy.” Peter reaches from the controls and shoves Nathan’s feet aside in one swift movement.

“Can you not be a jerk right now, please?” Victor groans, momentarily lifting his head to give what he hopes is a warning look to Nathan.

“Who’s being a jerk?” he laughs. “It’s sharing my ghost expertise and that’s what they called me here for.”

“You are here to dispel the spirits,” Gamora informs him tersely.

Nathan scoffs. Looking between them, “So what’re you lot gonna do while I’m playing ghost whisperer?”

“It would be more effective to speak over a whisper when dealing with these apparitions.”

Peter shoots Drax a sidelong look before replying, “Cover. Obviously.”

“What cover?” Nathan snits, arms crossed over his chest, a vocal skeptic now that he got past the whole space, shit, we’re actually in space, how are we not floating right now, oh actually this is right boring, how far to the Clit place? “What’s the genius plan for handling them that you had to call me for? I thought I was just talkin them to death, now you’re saying I’m in the line a some kind of ghost fire?”

“Oh, right, harmless ghosts.” Rocket rolls his eyes. “That’s why in the entire history of the galaxy, nobody’s ever had to fight a ghost, and we aren’t getting paid a gigantic bounty to get rid of a prison full of them.”

“Bounty,” Nathan echoes, expression lighting up, though quickly crashing into jealous, underpaid disgust when Rocket sneers,

“Pretty sure you’re salaried, kid.”

“Pretty sure I’m the one who’s going to be in danger here!”

“How much danger?” Victor croaks, face resting against the cool metal of the console, concerned look directed to Gamora, who ignores it.

“Oh, now he wants cover,” Rocket smirks, all canines. “‘cept a couple minutes ago you were saying they’re not gonna take you out. You hearing this, Quill?”

“I’m sitting right next to you,” Peter grumbles, banking a hard left when Nathan’s fuss over a lack of compensation reaches fever pitch. “Hey! We’re taking some junior Avengers into space! Don’t we get any gratitude for that??” and Victor politely takes that opportunity to gratefully throw up on the controls. A cold silence passes over the tensed group, broken by muffled apologies from Victor, face in his hands, this never happened on Leapfrog, what the hell.

“As if that is the first bodily fluid to be spilt on your deck,” Gamora growls. Quill looks accusingly between the team members, eventually settling on Groot with a short ‘you told!’ hissed between them.






Rocket will stay on the ship, citing that he’s clearly not needed on a mission where his strategy was dubbed “stupid and unimaginative.” (“Ineffective!” Peter shouts through the comm link. “I said it’s stupid and ineffective to set off a freakin ghost bomb! If you’re gonna talk shit, don’t misquote me.”)

Gamora and Quill work at prying open a set of security doors while Nathan lingers at his boyfriend’s elbow.

“Feeling any better?”

“Dios, do not touch me, I don’t wanna to puke on a ghost,” Victor groans, teetering uncertainly on the crippled vessel. The doors screech open with the stench of rotting bodies (“Awesome,” Peter gripes, hits a button and materializes his Star Lord mask on, good luck the rest of you jerks) and the team moves forward into the enclosed yard. Nathan can tell he’s stepping on what definitely used to body parts, but instead of looking down his attention is diverted elsewhere.

He’s worked enough with the newfound ghost whispering powers to know when one of them locks onto the living, honing in on a tangible entity. Most of the time they’re just lingering in a spot, not quite moved on or still trying to suss out what just happened to put them all ghostlike. The amount of spirits he’s had to meet eyes with and say, 'Sorry but you got killed by Hawkeye' has become downright tragic, that’s worse news than flat out dying. The Klyn’s different, these fuckers know they’re dead, come to terms with it ages back and they’ve been stewing in that and their own stink long enough to give the air in the prison a viscous layer of anger.

Most of them being psycho criminals before then probably adds to the whole “bad vibes” aspect too.

“Definitely going to be sick,” Victor mumbles, instinctively closing the distance between himself and the immortal who’s squinting for ghosts between the body parts. Nathan’s as sympathetic as the empty outreaches of space they traversed to get here.

“You know you can’t get sick on something that hasn’t got a corporal form,” he points out with a slow sad shake of his head. “You really know shit about what I do.”

“Right,” the cyborg grumbles. “And how much do you know about cybernetics?”

“Nerds,” Quill snaps, one hand up to stop them, the other raising his blaster. “Anyone else just feel the temperature drop, like. a lot?”

“No shit,” Nathan whistles and shoots Gamora’s chest a long look, “Careful love, you’ll poke somebody’s eye out with those.”

“That’s ghosts, right?” Victor whispers, and superhero space threat or not, he still sounds impressed at basic apparition parlor tricks. “They really do that? Lower the temperature?”

“They- don’t,” Nathan wheezes, clutching his neck where Gamora hit him, taking a short break to catch his breath. “Fuuuck. No, that’s not it.” He straightens up, glaring at- to anyone else looking- an indiscriminate point on the wall. “This one just wants to show off. All right,” he calls. “Not that I don’t appreciate giving us some nip slips with Green over here, I can fucking see you, asshole.”

“Is it a lot of ghosts?” Peter asks, pointing the blaster a few various directions, waiting for a general indication where the threat might be.

“It’s an entire space prison and then some, which I think is the textbook definition of a lot, yeah.” Nathan rolls his eyes and Victor, however queasy, shoots him a warning look. Just because you’re around a jackass like Quill is no need to get snipsnappy. “Nothing I can’t handle,” he declares and tries to ignore the way Victor’s mouth tightens.