SACRIFICE / P. PARKER

SWEET DREAMS ARE MADE OF THESE

Lately, Ellie couldn't discern her waking life from the nights she spent plagued with nightmares. This time was different. No dream, however savage, could produce the skull-splitting headache that ravaged her being and tore her from sleep's sweet hold.

Ellie reached her hand out to the opposite side of her bed, clawing past her sheets to grab a hold of Peter's sleeve. She kept reaching and stretching until she reached the edge of the bed, tumbling over the precipice and onto the cold tile floor with a hollow Thump!

The air was knocked out of her and she gasped, heaving with great effort to fill the hole punched in her chest, but to no avail. A sharp seething pain bloomed at the place of contact, enveloping her entire body in agony. As if the fire searing through her head wasn't torturous enough. Ellie rolled over on her back, gripping her head and letting out a distressed sob.

"P-Peter," She choked out, wondering where he could have gone or if he was ever there in the first place.

On her hands and knees Ellie dragged herself across the floor, limbs otherwise too weak to bring her to an upright position. Her slender fingers wrapped around the doorway as she sucked in a labored breath, nearly collapsing at the effort. The pain consuming her seared through any coherence of thought.

The slap of bare feet against the floor assaulted Ellie's senses, and she could feel herself cowering away from the sudden outburst, shielding her face with her trembling hands.

"Oh kid," Tony's deep voice sighed, pity dripping from his every word, ushered to Ellie by his dejected tone. "I'm going to help you up now, okay? We are going to get you to the lab and get you through this."

"W-Where's Peter?" Ellie demanded groggily between sobs. "What happened to Peter?"

"Nothing happened to Peter, kid. He had to go home to his hot aunt is all. Now c'mon, up you go."

Tony hoisted Ellie off of the floor with little effort, hooking his arm underneath her legs to cradle her against him. As they moved through the corridors of the tower, Ellie began making out garbled shapes and figures as she blinked, the fire raging in her head relegating itself to an icy numbness.

She felt herself being placed on a regrettably familiar cot in a regrettably familiar room. The same room she had her accident in only weeks before. The reeking smell of disinfectants burned Ellie's nostrils, causing her to whimper and throw her arm over her face.

"Hey, none of that. I need those arms to put stuff in," Tony told her, gently removing her arm from her face and laying them flat on the table. "Now you're going to feel a little pinch."

He was wrong, Ellie felt nothing. It was if all the nerves in her body had spontaneously combusted, leaving her a useless heap of flesh and bones suffering without knowing the truth of it. She laid motionless and without protest as Tony pricked and prodded her without end, trying to diagnose a problem neither of them knew the solution to.

Noticing the lack of reaction, Tony placed a hesitant hand on Ellie's head. "You feeling alright, kiddo? The morphine should be kicking in real soon, so you can't go dying on me just yet."

"No promises," Ellie mumbled weakly, dipping in and out of consciousness. "C-Can you call Peter? I just want to talk to Peter."

Tony smiled at her coyly.

"You're telling me good o'l Uncle Tony isn't good enough company for you?"

"No."

He simpered at her response, rifling through his robe pockets and producing his phone. Tony grimaced at his screen, dragging his finger across the screen rapidly, muttering to himself.

"How many Peter's do I even know?"

Ellie stared in his direction, twitching with anticipation as she heard his fingers tapping on his phone screen.

"Peter Quill? I don't even know how that got here-"

"I know Peter's number by heart," Ellie mumbled, fingering the loose threads at the end of her t-shirt. She reached her hands out, palms open, awaiting the pressure of the phone being dropped in her hands.

Ellie dragged her finger across the smooth surface of the phone screen, repeating a pattern she had memorized well over the years. She pinched Tony's cellphone between her neck and shoulder, her arms weak and sore from her desperate crawling.

"H-Hello?" Peter's husky, drowsy voice stammered out. "Mr. Stark it's a little late for scheming."

"It's Ellie," She whispered out, wincing as she was pricked once more by one of Tony's devices. There was no pain, but the anticipation made her bones itch. "I'm sorry for waking you."

"O-Oh! Ellie!"

She heard the frantic rustling of Peter getting tangled up in his seats as he attempted to sit upright in his bed.

"W-Wh-hat's up? Why are you up so late? Or, early? I guess?"

Tony shouted from his desk, loud enough to be heard from through the receptor. "Ellie's brain is throwing a little tantrum, so I'm running a couple tests."

"What happened?" Peter's voice turned shaky and solemn in the same instant. "I can be over in like 20 minutes! Is it serious? Why isn't anyone telling me what happened?"

"Because you haven't stopped talking," Ellie mumbles not unhumorously, fiddling with the frayed ends of her nightgown. "'M fine Peter, just wanted to hear your voice."

Something swells in Peter's chest, a warmth he cannot describe that blooms into the giddy, child-like feeling as you stumble down the stairs on Christmas morning.

"Well, you should know by now you can hear my dumb o'l voice any time you want, any hour of the day. I'm all yours," Peter told her, a giddy smile playing in his voice. Ellie could imagine it in her head as she closed her eyes.

Sleepy, little Peter, sleeping in his favorite Christmas sweater that he wore even when it was mid-summer. Long lanky legs tangled in multiple blankets he insisted laid across his bed. Anything anyone made for him, Peter kept on display in his room; including all 6 winter quilts her mother had knit for him when they were young. The frayed baseball card her father passed down to him when Ellie wouldn't develop an interest in sports. Ellie closed her eyes and imagined what Peter's room looked like now. Organized chaos, nostalgia built into the structure of the cement walls, the boards of wood on the floor. She knew not the things that adorned the handmade dressers he crafted with Uncle Ben, or the walls they painted all by themselves when they were thirteen. Ellie only knew that it was Peter's room, full of rich history between the two of them. She imagined she was there instead, and she could feel herself enveloped in his arms.

"Ellie?" Peter called out to her. "Did you fall asleep Elle?"

"No," She sighed contently, living comfortably in Peter's room in her mind. "I'm right here."

"Good."

"Can you read to me Pete?"

"Of course. Which one?"

"Surprise me."

Ellie heard the shuffling on the other line as she imagined Peter darting nimbly across his room to his crooked bookshelf, that held all of Ellie's favorite stories when her foster parents couldn't. She liked Peter's voice, she thinks if she were to see one day she would still ask him to read to her. His voice was gentle and vulnerable sounding, yet within it held a liveliness she could only wish to encompass. Ellie only hoped that by being Peter's friend she could become as good as he was. She was drifting off before he even began, but she hung onto his words with the weakened fingers of her consciousness before sinking back into the arms of sleeps hold.

"The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only."

Shapes and words swirled behind her eyelids as they fluttered shut, the gentle staccato of each syllable lulling her into a bittersweet slumber.