WHAT: Gamora gets new memories from home and is mad about it, and Peter talks her through it WHERE: Knowhere WHEN: This morning WARNINGS: Nothing too crazy? STATUS: Complete
Gamora woke with rage. It wasn’t destructive. It wasn’t loud. The feeling simmered in her chest, seething, burning through the rest of her body as her brain reconfigured itself –because her mind had been taken apart, new pieces added, the old ones trying to figure out where they fit. Her story back home was over. She had died, murdered at the hands of a man who claimed to love her as a father, and what remained of her was a pile of bones far, far away on a barren planet.
But there was another Gamora whose story wasn’t over. A Gamora who was displaced from time. A Gamora that did play a part in defeating Thanos, and in the aftermath ran. She ran from her sisters, the Guardians, Peter. She hid from the enemies that wanted her dead again, their bloodlust of what she’d done as an assassin never waning, and found refuge in others.
Another team. Another family. That Gamora rejected everything she had made for herself; she rejected the good she had tried to do, she rejected the Guardians, she rejected Peter. With reluctance, she accepted Nebula back into her life but that sure as hell hadn’t been the same.
Gamora saw how the universe went on after her death and she saw how her family lived without her – and she saw this version of herself that could have had everything she lost but refused it. And, sure, maybe she came to an understanding as to why these people had mattered to her and why they were important. Maybe that didn’t matter, either.
She walked away anyway. She left them. That Gamora had the chance to have everything she lost, and she hated her. The feeling was raw and nasty, festering like an open wound, and when she sat up in their bed she didn’t have it in her to look at Peter.
I bet we were fun.
Her face was wet when she touched it and all she wanted to do was tear everything apart. The blankets were kicked off. Gamora stomped across their bedroom and went to hit the button that caused their closet door to slide open. It was either cheap or the force behind it was too much; the lit button cracked under her palm, and she went to smash it several times again as if that would make the door open.
The kicking of the covers had awakened Peter from a deep sleep, the stomping had made his eyes flutter open, and the smashing of the button on the wall caused him to blink in mild confusion before checking his armpits - did he smell bad? Did he do something stupid while he was sleeping? As far as he could remember, his dream involved rocking out with Guns N Roses, so he was pretty sure he didn't call out someone else's name or anything. She wasn't even looking at him, so clearly he'd screwed up pretty bad.
"Uh, Gamora," he started, trying to use his 'please don't hit me' voice. He started to slide out of bed and walk towards her, but not too close! Just in case! Biting his lip briefly, he wracked his brain for an idea of what he might've done or said, then just settled on something easy. "It was Rocket's fault."
Gamora should have figured Peter would wake up, but she was also very fucking annoyed that it actually happened – hadn’t she been quiet? She couldn’t tell. The damn button was broken and she needed clothes that weren’t a tanktop and sleep shorts, so that meant she had to wedge her fingers into that crevice between the metal door and frame.
Putting that enhanced strength to use, she pulled. The motion was abrupt and jarring, but she had it open.
“Rocket didn’t do anything,” she spat, but the words were gravel in her throat, sounding too choked and thick to just be from sleep. Gamora grabbed at the first outfit she saw and yanked it from the closet.
Okay, so she was mad, but she wasn't taking it out on him, so that was good. Though one thing Rocket was going to have to do was fix all this. Maybe. Swallowing the small bit of fear at the back of his throat, like any good relationship partner would have at this point, Peter cleared his throat and moved up beside Gamora to look at the things she'd grabbed.
"All right, let me help? Because I think you'll need pants. Though don't get me wrong, you could rock two shirts. Or four. But maybe the I Heart Space Babes shirt is something I should toss." Smiling as supportively as he could manage, he reached into the closet and picked out one of like thirty pairs of black pants and tried handing them to her.
Wait, what was he – “Ugh,” was the sound that came out of her mouth upon the realization that the first ‘outfit’ she grabbed wasn’t even an outfit, wasn’t even her clothes. Gamora bristled, posture radiating anger and the very real possibility of violence.
Then he offered her pants.
Pants. Just pants. No attempt to stop her from whatever her plans were (beyond getting dressed, she wasn’t entirely sure, would she leave?), no motions to overwhelm her with affection. Peter was trying to help. He handled her cautiously and earnestly, and half of her loved him for it while the other half stayed angry, confused.
Her eyes shot up from the pants to his face for the first time this morning, and she remembered. She remembered the relief on his face when they met at the battlefield on Earth. She remembered the grief on his face, years later, when they met again on his ship.
Her throat felt tight. Her eyes watered, and she wiped them before they wet her face again. “Do you remember how people talk about getting memories from back home?” Gamora asked, gaining control of her tone.
"Yeah, sounds like a real mess, if you ask me. Like fast-forwarding a video of your life," answered Peter, casually as he took the shirts from her and started to hang them back up. "There's this old show my mom used to like. It was called 'This is your life,' and people came on to tell the contestant about something between the two of them. Sometimes it was an actual friend, sometimes it was just someone they might've forgotten about. Weird show, but I kinda feel like that'd be a better delivery."
He stopped for a second and caught himself in thought. "Wait, did you?"
“Yeah.” Gamora swallowed. “I did.”
The next step in whatever plan she was trying to concoct for herself was to strip down, get dressed. She had pants. A shirt. It wasn’t her shirt, and she’d never been the type to take Peter’s clothes for herself (they had very different definitions of how often laundry needed to be done, for one) but she didn’t have any intention of giving it back right now.
Her feet dragged her back towards the bed so she could drop her weight onto the edge of it. The clothes hit the ground, and she dug a palm into her eye. “She isn’t me, but she is, and I saw – or remembered?” Gamora didn’t know. Her head throbbed. She was still angry but exhausted all of a sudden, like her body was full of stones dragging her down. “Rocket. The High Evolutionary, and what’s left of his face.”
If there was one thing Peter was proud of about himself, it was that he was pretty quick on the uptake and could process surprising information relatively quickly. Surprising information like hearing Gamora cryptically say that her head was basically full of memories from two different Gamoras. All right, first he had about a hundred questions but wisdom prevailed - he wasn't going to pepper her with them. Yet.
Sitting down on the bed next to her, he exhaled loudly and put his palms on his thighs. "I won't lie, that's kind of fucked up."
Gamora almost asked him to clarify what part was fucked up, but she thought it safe to assume Peter meant that about all of it. She leaned forward, elbows digging into the top of her lap, and she pushed her fingers through her hair.
“I hate her,” she said, and it was outrageously petty and probably untrue.
"She did kind of suck," answered Peter, nodding supportively. "But I mean, different choices and lives and all that. I think we finally had her coming around by the time I showed up here. Still, nothing better than the original." He raised an arm tentatively and paused, wondering if it were safe to do so, then decided to risk it - he put his arm around Gamora.
He'd hurt for a long time at losing Gamora, then hurt again when she'd come back as an asshole. So while sure, he felt he could understand some of that pain she was going through, he knew better than to assume he knew exactly how she felt.
Gamora knew he was right, and she knew how that Gamora felt. She took the plunge to betray Thanos well before she was ready, came into a future that wasn’t hers because she had died at his hands a few years prior - and then to be told who she was by people she didn’t know when she was trying to find out who that even was after Thanos only spurred her to reject what everyone wanted her to be. It was overwhelming. And no one, no one had looked at her like Peter had.
In love. Grief-stricken. Desperate to have her back. It was scary, in a way, for someone she didn’t know to care about her that much.
His arm around her was welcomed, and she straightened her posture to bury her face into his shoulder. “I came back a total dick,” Gamora mumbled into him, almost chuckling around the words. Having remembered herself being cold to the Guardians stung. Seeing their lives without her stung. Not having a future with the idiots that became her family because a maniac threw her off a cliff in the name of love was an ache that was suddenly amplified, and it was full of rot and anger. She had let it fester because Thanos was a lifetime ago for most people, why talk about it - but the memory was still fresh for her. “I knew I wasn’t coming back from Thanos alive. But I never wanted to leave you. I thought we’d have more time.”
There were times to be light-hearted and respond with jokes and there were times to keep his trap shut and be serious. There were even fewer times when Gamora was allowing herself to be vulnerable and he wasn't going to try and 'improve the mood' with one of his jokes. Instead, he just tightened his arm around her and kind of just gestured to the room with his other hand.
"It's not what we expected, but look around. You weren't wrong."
“It’s limited,” Gamora argued, temper rising. It wasn’t meant to be at Peter but he was the only one here with her, and Vallo didn’t have a face for her to shove her finger at and demand that it keep her people. “I don’t know if we’ll have a future here, and if this place sends you back home then that’s it. It’s over again.”
The future she had caught a glimpse of here that did involve her resulted in her death. And while she was aware they stopped their present from going down that road, it was a shit first impression of all the things that could be here.
"Look, I hear what you're saying. I do. But as someone who very really lost you and had to cope with that… that loss? And try to move on? I don't want to let myself worry about what may or may not happen in the future. Because if I do, I'm afraid I'll lose sight of the now, and, Gamora… I'd do anything to keep the now."
And he knew Vallo could mess with them in a variety of ways. Maybe tomorrow he would wake up at one-hundred-year-old Peter. Or turn into an octopus. Or Gamora would be orange - strike that, she would look good in orange, too. Who could really predict any of it? Man, stressing over Vallo's chaos could drive him back to drinking heavily.
“I like the now,” she said quietly, twisting to circle her arms around Peter’s midsection. Gamora knew better than most that Peter was capable of things like deep thoughts and wisdom; she couldn’t say she was surprised at the point he made. She was still upset and still wanted to hit things (a lot of things, so many fucking things), but she had seen what loss had done to him.
And if he had lost Rocket after all of that, she was sure he’d snap. She didn’t want to drag him down to a bad place, let alone her bad place.
Gamora squeezed him. “I want to keep it too, I plan to keep it,” she promised. “I meant it when I said I love you more than anything. I just–hate most things right now, I think. My head hurts.” She sighed. “And I still hate her.”
Squeezing back and once again thanking Vallo for bringing him here (but cursing Vallo for doing this to Gamora), Peter rested his chin on top of her head. He listened to her and counted himself lucky to now be one of 'most things.'
"How about I get you some Tylenol and then we can put her face on a punching bag for you?"