InsaneJournal

Who: Peter & Gamora
What: Fix the Benatar, attempt to figure their shit out.
When: Just before this post, and after both this and this
Warnings: A couple f-bombs



“Quill, your ship is disgusting,” Gamora tugged on the wire she was threading through the panel behind the sound system, then shoved aside a pile of dirty clothes that the spool had gotten stuck in. “How do you get so many women to sleep with you when it smells like Thanos’s morning breath in here?”

She pushed back a wisp of hair that had fallen in her face, cut and stripped the end of the wire, and secured it in place. “I think I’ve got this….” She wiped her hands on her pant legs, then hit play, The room filled with the sound of moody saxophone in a sweeping melody that seemed designed specifically for the Peter Quill brand of pelvic sorcery. “Oh… that’s how.”

She pushed herself up off the floor and moved to where Peter was working under the aft aerion control linkage. “How bad is it?”

Startled, Peter dropped the socket wrench he was holding, dodged it and then banged his head onto the central altimeter power distributor. “Shit!”

He slid out from under the panel, “Not as bad as it could have been,”. Peter avoided meeting Gamora’s eyes, telling himself that he didn’t feel bad that she didn’t remember what they had been, who they had been to one another. People forgot other people sometimes. It happened. He wasn’t going to take it personally.

“Since we’re here and Stark said they”ll fabricate parts, I’m thinking we’ll do some overhauling while we’ve got Her torn down...cheaper than doing it on Hala.”

Gamora looked around, imagining what the ship would look like after repairs and a deep clean. “She’s really beautiful, underneath the “Ravagers on a bender” aesthetic you’ve chosen. It seems like a home,” she paused, realizing her gaze had landed on the hot tub installed just outside the Captains Quarters, and turned away quickly, glad that her skin tone did not blush.

“Did I…” Gamora searched for a way to word what she was thinking that he wouldn’t mock. The problem was that it all sounded girlish and weak… That she had been hoping to feel some connection to this place she had never been before? That it felt like the best things in her life had already happened to someone else and she could never get them back? “Quill, can we talk about the time travel?”

Peter leaned back against the bulkhead, and tried to think of a way to stall this conversation, but couldn’t….not with the sound of the Swayze filling the cabin, “What do you want to know?” He crossed his fingers hoping that she was going to ask him a question about temporal mechanics and he could legit tell her had no fucking idea.

Gamora pulled off the port access panel to the cooling system and got back to work. “I didn’t actually just ghost you, you know that, right? When Nebula…” she didn’t want to bring her sister into this discussion. “When the Avengers went back in time for the stones, it was.. I think 2 days before we met. So all the things that happened with us… with our team, I mean... I got to experience none of it.”

“Yeah, I get that.” He paused, and fiddled with the wrench, “But I did, all of it.” He pretended to examine a spot on the deck for water damage and then began digging into the tool box for another wrench.

Gamora glanced over her shoulder at him. “I know me being here is hurting you, Peter. If it’s easier, maybe I…” She trailed off. It didn’t make sense to be this attached to a team she was never a part of. Yes, Nebula was her sister, but it wasn’t like they worked together in their time as assassins. But she still didn’t finish the question, because then he’d answer it, and it probably would be easier for her to not be part of his crew.

““I know I have no right to ask you to tell me anything about her, so you can tell me to fuck off if you want, but how did we…? We’re very different people, clearly.”

“It’s not like that…” Peter blew out a long breath and rubbed the back of his neck, before grabbing a smaller Xanderian hex wrench and began loosening the bolts from a floor access port. Except it was like that. It was exactly like that.

The Swayze filled the silence with a soaring “......she’s like the wind”. For the first time, Peter wanted to punch Swayze in the face. He pulled the bolt and continued, “What do you want me to say? It happened and if you can’t figure out why you would have wanted to be with a guy like me…”. The next bolt stuck and he yanked on the wrench hard, scraping his knuckles across the rough decking.

He turned the wrench again and felt the bolt beginning to move, “Why does anyone like anyone else?” As the song ended, Peter continued, “Why did I hang out with a homicidal rodent? Why am I gonna make sure he’s okay in this reality? It’s not because he’s gonna be happy to see me if I ever find him, it’s because we worked.”

Peter was silent as he pulled the rest of the bolts out of the access and then continued as he pried the cover off, “It was kind of like that…. it just happened.”

“If I can’t figure out why I’d have wanted to be with a guy like you,” Gamora made a face as she pulled a tattered hose from the cooling system, and bent to scrounge through the pile on the floor to find one the correct size, and untangled it from the pile. “It’s because you won’t let me. I’m not sure you let anyone see Peter Quill anymore, you’ve buried him in some junk food fueled, adolescent, snarkfest. I need that wrench.”

She nodded at the wrench on the floor next to him, stepped closer, and held her hand out, “I guess what I don’t understand is that if we worked so well, if it meant so much, why have you erased me completely?” She looked around again, “There’s nothing left of me here at all.”

Peter put the wrench into her hand and said, “Look, was I supposed to build a shrine?” He had been called an adolescent enough times, it didn’t even land as an insult.

“You didn’t know who I was. Now you want me to skip straight to the part where I tell you how much…” Peter stopped and started again, “Where I have to figure out which of the shit I did was right and which parts you just ignored because there wasn’t anyone else around.” He put his hand down on the deck and realized his palm was now covered in something sticky.

Wiping the goo onto his pants, he shrugged, “Do you want me to tell you how it felt when the Kree chick asked us for a threesome and you knocked her on her ass and I realized I wasn’t even disappointed, I was glad. Even though it was my favorite bar on Hala and we’re now banned for life?” His lips twisted into a grimace as he realized that what was on his hand was sap from the time Baby Groot tried to eat a taki while Rocket was demonstrating a quadruple barrel roll.

“You want to know how it felt when I looked at you and you were so not dead, and so not into me?” He knew that he had absolutely no right to be pissed off. He knew that whatever he was doing right now, was probably at the top of the list of shit Gamora had put up with because the alternatives were a furry little asshole or dude still mourning his dead wife. He sighed and then felt more irritated, because he sounded like a twelve year old girl.

Gamora swallowed hard. She tried to get herself to turn back to the work she had been doing, tried to convince herself that when the ship was airworthy, she could ask him to drop her off anywhere, the Kyln, wherever, so that maybe he could figure out how to heal from this. But the part of her that was hungry for all the details of the chance she had had to get away from herself, the feral pet of Thanos, and live a life where someone loved her this much… that part refused to turn away.

The song changed in the background, and Gamora swayed almost imperceptibly to the slow R&B beat. “You lost everything,” she said simply. “Me too.” She paused, nothing she wanted to say to him felt like enough. “I’m sorry.”

Peter looked sideways at Gamora and asked himself, for what felt like the four hundred seventy five thousandth time, why her? Why was she impossible to forget when so many others were dismissed as soon as he had his pants back on. She was cranky a lot. She was entirely capable of killing him while he slept…. Or while he was awake for that matter.

He tried to speak and coughed awkwardly, “You don’t have to be sorry.” Pausing he tried to make sense of the three ring shit circus that had erupted in his brain.

“It’s just, you know we had this thing,” he cracked his knuckles, “... and yeah, it was kinda weird sometimes, and it wasn’t easy because your dad and my dad, and the raccoon and then Groot and the dancing lights and it was a lot.” He swallowed, “But you know, I figured it was gonna be a thing. The kind of thing that we could count on.”

He touched her hand cautiously, “It’s a lot.” There was so much he wanted to say, but memories of his mother, of his grandfather, his joy at being reunited with his father, and the betrayal he’d felt when he’d realized who the Celestial really was; the loss of Yondu, the only real Daddy he’d ever had mixed with memories of Rocket and Groot, and poor shy Mantis flooded him. Overriding it all were the memories of the first time he’d heard Gamora really laugh and the way she had felt against him when they danced for the first time. He felt hot and clammy.

And then he thought about all the people in Avengers Tower who were gone, without warning, without explanation and with no way for anyone who loved them to say goodbye. He didn’t even know them, but he knew Nebula, he knew what pain looked like and what grief felt like.

“I need to warn you. I think I might hurl.”

“You didn’t eat those leftover burritos for breakfast, did you?” Gamora knelt next to him, putting the back of her hand to his forehead the way she remembered her mother doing a lifetime ago. “You can’t eat 3 day old food, you don’t have Drax’s digestive system. You need to take care of yourself.”

She suddenly became aware of how she sounded, and exactly how close she was to him, her knee brushing his thigh. She told herself to take her hand away from his face, but her body had decided it was no longer taking instructions from her brain, and instead of moving away, she sat awkwardly touching him, her hand moving to stroke the scruff on his cheek.

“Peter...” she trailed off, not sure whether she intended to continue the lecture on proper nutrition.

“They weren’t that old. Nothing was growing on them,” Peter said in an irritated tone, the hand on his cheek felt familiar and it made him think of how well they had always fit together. He grabbed her hand, and interlaced their fingers.

“You don’t remember sitting under Groot’s branches do you?”

Gamora had been about to argue with him about his ideas on sanitation but stopped when he took her hand. She shifted so she was sitting next to him and stretched her legs.

“I wish more than anything I did,” She whispered, laying her head on his shoulder.

She couldn’t help thinking about Nebula and how much she must be hurting, and about how badly her own death had hurt Peter over and over. And how terrified she was that one of them would disappear from this place before she opened up enough to experience anything for real.

“I want to trust your version of me was right about us. I want to trust that this,” she squeezed Peter’s hand, “works no matter the time or reality.” She sighed and closed her eyes. “I thought I needed to know everything about the past to be sure, but that’s not helping either of us.”

He sat there for a moment, listening to the small creaks and sighs of the Benetar, “So no shit, there we were, our whole world was on fire and we were falling. Rocket,” Peter swallowed hard as he remembered the moment when he’d seen his friend hanging from the flight belts, motionless and for once, quiet and still. “I carried him to the middeck.” Again, Peter paused remembering how very light the Half-Worlder had been in his arms.

Clearing his throat, Peter continued, “I don't know how you managed to do it, but you dragged Drax’s giant ass over and then Groot…..” Peter’s voice dropped, as the memories of that day rushed through him. It was almost as if he could smell the burning twisting metal and hear the scream of the wind as the ship dropped from the sky.

“So, yeah…..Groot, he came up behind us and he just grew and grew around us. His branches twisted together and surrounded all of us. They started to block out the fire and the wind and then these little lights started to float around us.” Quill squeezed Gamora’s hand, “I remember thinking they were just like the fireflies that I used to chase in my granddad’s backyard. Weird, the shit you think of when you’re pretty sure you’re going to die.”

“Then Rocket…..., he woke up and he was telling Groot no.” Peter paused again and blew out a long breath, the memory of Rocket’s tears burned into his mind, “That’s when I realized that Groot was going to let himself die trying to save us.” He stared at the opposite bulkhead for a long moment.

“You know I didn’t think it would work, then Groot’s face lit up and he said, ‘We are Groot.’

Peter looked down at the small hand in his, “I still didn’t think we’d survive the fall, but right then I figured that even if we didn’t, it was okay. Because we were all together.”

Gamora tilted her head up to watch Peter while he told her about what she guessed was one of their worst days. She realized she had done this every moment since she met him. She was either watching him, or knew exactly where he was in relation to her every moment. Like he was the sun in her solar system, she had subconsciously been re-centering her life these past few days.

Her heart ached for him; she had been right when she said he had lost everything. He ended up here alone on a damaged ship, half his team missing, the other half with a life on this world that he hadn’t been a part of. And then she had been horrible to him, just to cover up the fact that she was attracted to him in a way that made her feel stupid, and girlish, and a million light years from her comfort zone.

She had already known that all her questions were actually her asking him to be the man that she had fallen in love with in that other life, rather than just a shell broken open by grief. But she also needed to be the Gamora that fit into his world, which had never been about just the two of them. She had to figure out her place in this family. And that meant putting their family back together

“I know I don’t understand this break in reality at all, but I’m not leaving without you again,” she said softly, “The rest we can figure out. We’ll find them.” She knew these were huge promises to make, and it was far too soon to be making them, but she was tired of having her reality controlled by someone else.

Peter’s jaw tightened. He gave Gamora’s hand a quick squeeze and then abruptly stood up, “You can’t promise that.”

Stepping away, Quill started tossing tools back into their box, “We need to head back. Nebula and Drax could be gone already.” He knew that he was being a weapons grade asshole. He knew that the Holy Hoff and Patrick Swayze, Lord of Romance were looking down at him in disapproving horror, but he couldn’t stop himself. He needed time. He needed to figure out why everyone around him left as soon as he let himself give a rat’s ass about them and he needed to make sure that this goddamn ship could lift off if they needed her to.

Gamora sighed, pushing herself up from the floor. She had to be the first woman in the history of the Benatar that Peter Quill got alone in his ship and didn’t even attempt a move on. She had just assumed that was the part that would come after the unexpected pouring his heart out. “I never asked for these stupid girl feelings,” she muttered under her breath as she wound up the extra speaker wire and hoses and stowed them. “I could have just stayed a heartless assassin, but noooo.” She managed to not slam doors like a petulant teenager, but only out of sheer force of will and the deep need to not make Peter feel even worse.

“I know you don’t want handouts from Stark,” she said as she finished, “But he has a cleaning company that’s already signed an NDA. We need this place to be liveable for all of us. I’ll set it up, okay?”

“Yeah. Do that,” Peter knew he’d screwed this up, he just didn’t quite know how. He really wished there was something he could kick.