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Quill thought there ought to be a curator standing beside the museum-style display box holding the set of awesome crimson-and-gold armor. It had stories to tell.
Then again, it was probably better there wasn’t one. Would have made the armor harder to steal.
He shot the interface off the box, and its glass panel split open obediently like a set of sliding doors welcoming him in.
He stared in awe for a few seconds longer, feeling like a kid standing on his tiptoes to see animals at the zoo, even though the armor was considerably shorter than him. Which was annoying. He wanted to try it on at least once before he packed it into an overhead container on the ship and whisked it off to the galactic black market, but it looked like his body would split it in half if he tried.
He plucked the helmet off the suit. Maybe at least that would fit. Human heads didn’t vary much in size, unless the guy who cobbled this thing together had, like, a gigantic brain—and that just meant the odds of fitting were more in his favor.
He squashed it onto his head, crunching his twisting, gelled bangs onto his forehead. He wondered what he looked like—the helmet had the same kind of aesthetics as his own mask—but he couldn’t see out the eyeholes.
Suddenly, lights flashed on inside, and he saw the room overlaid in cursors and grids like a videogame. This was officially super-awesome.
“Well, hello there,” came a voice. Female. Irish.
“Um, hello?” Quill stuttered, looking around. He saw no one. “Are you in the helmet?”
“I am,” answered the voice. “Call me FRIDAY. What’s your name?”
Quill straightened his trench coat. “Call me Star-Lord.”
FRIDAY paused. “That’s not your real name, is it?”
“Yes,” Quill snapped. “I mean, it’s a pseudonym.” He glared but there was no one to glare at. “What kind of name is FRIDAY anyway? That’s some Addams Family stuff.”
“Funny,” FRIDAY said, though she wasn’t laughing. Maybe she was programmed to be humorless. It certainly wasn’t Quill’s fault that his jokes didn’t land. “Tell me,” she continued. “Are you here alone?”
The other Guardians were scattered on other planets. They couldn’t cram all their personalities into a single ship for too long without something exploding. They were on hiatus.
“No,” Quill lied.
“Hm,” FRIDAY said, calculating. Perhaps literally calculating. “I take it you’re here to steal this suit, then?”
“Are you going to tell on me?” Quill asked. “Because if so, you’re doing a bad job. Silent alarms are supposed to be silent.”
“Unfortunately, all the real alarms are disabled. You must have noticed that when you were breaking in,” FRIDAY said. “Tony makes questionable decisions when he’s been awake longer than five days.”
“Tony? That the guy who lives here? Made this suit?” Quill glanced around to make sure he was still alone. Nothing but powered-down robots watching him with their eyeless chasses.
He knew next to nothing about this place. A gaudy letter “A” twinkled on the outside of the building, maybe standing for the owner’s name—Anthony.
All he really knew was what some snake in a smoky bar had told him over drinks—that on Terra, these Iron Man suits were fetching a pretty price from certain buyers. That, and the fact that this was a great excuse to touch base with his home planet after decades in space.
“Mhm,” FRIDAY answered. “So, is there anything I can say to persuade you otherwise? Implore your morals, maybe?”
Quill shook his head. “Nope! You can go ahead and get out of my head now, Jiminy Cricket.”
“Still a better name than Star-Lord,” FRIDAY sassed, then her voice vanished. But she was nice enough to leave the lights on inside the helmet. Maybe she wasn’t so bad after all.
Quill ripped the rest of the suit off its scaffolding and hefted it into his arms like a sleeping child—a child without a head, but still—and headed back the way he came, ascending from the bottom floor of the lab on a winding staircase.
Who knew what this suit was capable of? If an AI lived in its head, maybe it was more advanced than he gave most Terra tech credit for. He could see why it ran expensive at underground auctions.
On the upper level, something caught his attention and his head snapped in its direction. Then he realized nothing had grabbed his attention; his head had snapped for no reason. Then came a tug. He tripped off course, away from the exit, being led like a dog by the nose, until he found himself plummeting onto a stool at the breakfast bar across the room.
“There you are,” a man said.
Quill looked up. He could finally control his neck again—it had been like a strong magnet was sucking him in. He looked up to see a man with deep craters under his eyes, flexing his forearm with blue spotlights glowing beneath the skin.
“It was about time you came around,” the man said.
Quill froze. This must have been the Tony FRIDAY mentioned.
Steadily, Quill lowered the suit to the floor and straightened up on the stool. “Listen,” he said. “I don’t know how much a heartfelt apology would do at this point, but seriously. I’m really, completely, honestly sor—“
“Shut up!” Tony snapped. He grabbed a plate loaded with dry scrambled eggs from the bar and smashed it on the floor. “You’re always sorry. Always repairing things. Never doing the right thing to begin with.”
Quill flinched, but that seemed to be the extent of Tony’s wrath. He stepped around the shattered plate, muttering to himself, scratching fingers through his greasy hair. Quill noticed his white tank top was spattered with old coffee stains, and that he smelled strongly of old brew. Even still, he slouched over the Keurig in the corner and punched buttons for a fresh pot.
“Er, you might want to cool it on the coffee,” Quill said.
“You sound like my doctor,” Tony mumbled. “I’ll tell you the same thing I told him: Could be worse. Could be cocaine.”
Quill thought about that, shrugged. He had a point.
“So, um, I guess I’ll just leave the suit right here,” Quill said, easing himself off the stool. “And you can pretend I was never here. Good? Good.”
He started to walk away when he remembered he was still wearing the helmet. He pressed his hands on either side and shoved upward, but it caught on his chin. The thing was too small, after all.
The magnetic suction returned and he stumbled backward, onto the stool again.
“No,” Tony said. “You and I—“ he pointed, but at the wrong person each time—“ need to have a talk.”
It sounded like something a father would say, but nothing about Tony seemed fatherly. He was in his 30s at least, but had the glint of a rebellious teenager in his eyes, like he had never had parents at all. Quill knew the look well enough from seeing it in the mirror.
“All right…” Quill said, playing along.
When he was a kid, his mother had had her delirious days, propped up in the hospital bed. The one lesson Quill learned from that was when someone was taking a trip, you didn’t try dragging them off the path. You walked with them until a detour opened up.
“Talk about what?” he asked.
“This.” Tony stuck out his hands at Quill, gesturing. “I put you in the box! Now you’re teeter-tottering around, heading for the door. What do you think you’re doing?”
In the box… Quill’s stomach dropped when he realized Tony thought he was speaking with the suit, maybe with the AI inside.
He cleared his throat, putting on his best Irish accent. “Getting some fresh air—?” he said, hoping it was an innocuous answer.
“No,” Tony said. He banged his fist on the bar. “No fresh air. Not for you.”
“But I like fresh air,” Quill squeaked, hoping that in a moment he wouldn’t find himself tied to a bed, one ankle hobbled, forever the crazy man’s prisoner.
Tony stabbed a finger at him. “You were going to save those diplomats in Moscow, weren’t you?”
“I—“
“It’s all over the news,” Tony said. “But how many times do I have to tell you that anything from Eastern Europe is a bad idea? Especially if it has the dead eyes of a shark, a Robocop arm, and wants to share a Bomb Pop on a hot day with Captain America’s-Most-Wanted.”
“I—“ Quill stuttered. “I’m going to be honest, I understood 14-, maybe 15-percent of that. Can you give me some context, and maybe a notepad?”
Tony waved his hand dismissively, fell onto a stool on the opposite side of the bar. “I’m making this simple for you,” he said. “No more heroics. Not even if people need you, beg you for help. The butterfly-effect casualties are too high.”
The Keurig chirped, finished. Tony stumbled off his stool as if he were the one being drawn by a magnet now.
Quill stared at the marbling on the bar and tried stitching the shreds of conversation together. Tony mentioned saving people, accidents, shutting away the suit in the box downstairs.
Maybe… he was like Gamora’s old acquaintance, the blue girl, Nebula. But instead of having a cyber-skeleton to be a better killer, Tony had a cyber-exoskeleton to be a better savior.
Quill glanced up. “You’re one of the good guys, aren’t you?”
Tony was sucking coffee straight from the pot. His lips must have gotten used to the burn from practice. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “Used to be.”
Quill nodded. Stood up. “You know, you’re right.”
“That’s a first. You agreeing with me,” Tony said.
Apparently, these kinds of conversations were commonplace. Quill wondered if there always happened to be someone in the suit, or if Tony talked to the AI, or hell, if Tony was just talking to himself, watching his own expression contort in the faceplate of the helmet.
“About what?” Tony clarified.
“About not saving those Turkish orphans.”
“Russian diplomats.”
“I wasn’t really paying attention,” Quill admitted. He lifted the suit on the floor by its armpits and dragged it toward the stairs. “Anyway, I’m doing what you said. Going back downstairs, into the box. No one getting saved today.”
He wondered what it looked like through Tony’s goggles of sleep deprivation, watching the suit he was talking to drag itself away like this. Didn’t matter. Delirium had an excuse for everything.
At the stairs, he hefted the suit into his arms and descended, boots clanging on the slats of stairway metal.
He hadn’t checked, but there must have been another exit down on the lower floor. Had to be. He would even accept an air shaft at this point.
It took him until halfway down the stairs to notice the second pair of footsteps padding down behind him. He glanced over his shoulder and saw Tony lurching like a zombie, the coffee pot dangling from his fingers like brain juice from a recent victim.
“You don’t have to follow me,” Quill said. “I’ll be a good suit of armor. Promise.”
“That’s what all the suits of armor say,” Tony said.
They reached the floor.
Quill scanned the room but no doors presented themselves. The only grates were tiny and funneled out of the ceiling, meaning he would have to rocket himself into them with the thrusters on his boots, probably slamming his head in the process, if he even fit.
He inched to the mouth of the open display box at the wall. Tony said nothing about the sparking interface that Quill had blasted off earlier.
“All right,” Quill said. “I’m here. Home sweet home. You can go back upstairs now.”
Tony slurped his coffee. “Get in,” he said.
Quill hesitated. If he actually climbed into the box, there was no telling if it might actually still function. The doors could clap shut and he’d be trapped like a butterfly under glass. Who knew how strong the material was? There was a reason he had shot at the circuits rather than the doors themselves. That was what the smart thieves did.
He tossed the suit across the threshold, into the box. It doubled limply over the scaffolds.
“All of you,” Tony urged.
Quill tugged at the helmet again, but it didn’t come off.
He sighed. Took a deep breath. Said a quick prayer to Cthulhu. Then spun around and whipped out his blaster and aimed it at Tony’s head.
“Can’t. Sorry,” he said. Then, quoting Tony from earlier, “I’m going to make this simple for you. You’re going to take your Nightmare on Elm Street-looking eyes upstairs, sit down, and I’m going to walk out—“
Tony shattered the coffee pot over Quill’s head.
He felt little more than the momentum thanks to the helmet, and luckily it had been long enough that the contents of the pot didn’t scald, but they still warmed through all the layers Quill wore.
He fired wildly, getting his balance back, and machinery on the other side of the room exploded into starbursts, all shots missing Tony.
Meanwhile, Tony did some Ninja Turtle jujitsu, wrenching Quill’s arm behind his back and twisting until the blaster tumbled from his fingers. Then he locked an arm around Quill’s neck and wrestled him to the floor on his back.
The lights inside the helmet flickered. FRIDAY’s voice returned.
“See what happens when you don’t have morals, Star-Lord?” she said.
Then the lights went out. Quill could see nothing, couldn’t see Tony to fight back and get his forearm off his throat.
It only took another minute for things to go dark, for real.
***
Quill woke up later. Had it been an hour? A whole day?
He lay on his back. Something squeezed his leg weakly, like a puppy gnawing just below the knee. He couldn’t tell if it was actually a puppy since the blacked-out helmet was still swallowing his sight.
His body was covered in sweat from bothered sleep, if you could call being knocked unconscious sleeping.
It was worth a shot—he tugged on the helmet, and—pop! The sweat greased it off his chin.
He ate huge breaths, filling his lungs, the comment about liking fresh air from earlier never being truer. He also blinked rapidly, seemingly inside a halo of light.
He sat inside the display box.
But it wasn’t closed. The thing chomping on his leg was the sliding glass doors, attempting to meet each other, failing because of his calf blocking the way, and then trying again, over and over.
It seemed Tony had made a half-hearted attempt to get “the suit” back into its box, dragging most of Quill’s body into the case and asking the doors to shut, but that was the extent of it.
Where was Tony, anyway?
Quill stood and palmed the doors open. Even if they had closed completely, there was no force behind them—he could have easily pushed them apart like curtains. He felt like an idiot for fearing them earlier.
He crept out into the room. No sign of Tony.
He tiptoed up the stairs, ready to strike, and there he saw him.
Tony was plastered to the worktop upstairs, snoring. One hand clutched a cold blowtorch, the other a screwdriver. Quill’s blaster sat in front of him, the chamber toyed open. Clearly, he had crashed involuntarily, right in the middle of making a new discovery.
Quill sneaked over, not taking the loud snores for granted.
An assembly-line arm bowed over and swatted at Quill. He swatted back, then snatched up his blaster and backed away. The arm-on-wheels didn’t follow. It stood guard beside Tony as obediently as a golden retriever, straightening out the blanket covering Tony’s shoulders. Maybe it had even put it there.
AIs were trouble. Quill headed for the exit.
He already had one foot in the elevator when he remembered the suit. It was downstairs, in pieces—he had stepped over it on his way up.
He could easily steal it now that Tony was out cold.
He looked back.
Decided against it.
No matter how much the suit was worth on the black market, it wasn’t worth stealing from Tony for two reasons. The first was he was crazy and might choke him out again. The second was he used it to save people.
As the elevator hurdled him downward to the Earth, he pressed his palm into his forehead. Was he really giving up a payoff because he sympathized with Tony?
He hated to think that. The last time he had gone out of his way to help a stranger—a certain green stranger, waiting for him on another planet, like the rest of the Guardians—was because he was in love with her.