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Gamora doesn’t remember much of her homeworld. Her father’s deep, booming laugh, the curve of her mother’s smile, playing with the neighborhood children despite the sticky heat that seemed to swallow her planet whole throughout its summer season… half-remembered bits and pieces of happier days that Gamora tries not to dwell on if she can avoid it. After Thanos, she has learned that she must protect whatever she has left of her homeworld. She represses it all as best she can; takes those bittersweet memories and stores them inside herself, someplace even she cannot reach most days. Perhaps if she does this, then nobody can take them away from her. Not Nebula, not Proxima, not the Black Order, not a single living soul under Thanos’s employ this side of the galaxy or otherwise. It’s proven a useful coping mechanism for her thus far, anyway.
There are instances, though, in which she gets a flash of something sudden, something unbidden, and it steals her breath away every time. A glimpse of the childhood that had been ripped away from her, snippets of things her mother once told her, raw and real and commanding her absolute and unwavering attention.
It’s the latter that has been occurring more frequently as of late; almost constantly, even, ever since she’s joined up alongside the rest of her ragtag teammates in attempting to protect the galaxy from harm. She tries to conceal her sudden shifts in mood from the others, especially Peter, but she knows they notice how she can grow quieter than usual almost instantly, how she retreats to her quarters for hours afterward and won’t come out unless something eventually necessitates her participation. Gamora can’t figure out why it’s happening, thinks with a grimace that it might be because she’s letting her guard down – even though doing so goes against the very fundamentals of her training.
You are a sword, Gamora. You do not bend. You do not break.
You do not show weakness.
You are unyielding.
She’s meticulously sharpening her weapons in the Quadrant’s dining area after a particularly filling evening meal (courtesy of Drax, of course) when it happens again. Gamora stops for a moment as she is cleaning Godslayer, takes a moment to rest simply by chance but happens to make eye contact with her reflection glinting off the surface of the sword’s flawlessly polished steel blade, clear as day… and she freezes as she remembers something her mother had once relayed to her.
She hadn’t been doing anything important, Gamora doesn’t think. Maybe putting Gamora to bed one night, maybe braiding her hair one morning. Her mother’s voice had been calm and even as she spoke to a young Gamora of change. Because the Zehoberei had a philosophy about change, didn’t they? They had philosophies for most things, right up until the very end, and her mother had been particularly fond of instilling them in her whenever possible. She had probably assumed that Gamora would eventually pass them on to her own children, in time – that there would be children in Gamora’s future at all, grandchildren for Gamora’s mother to spoil rotten.
How wrong her mother had been.
This memory, though, does not tear Gamora cleanly in half with all the unbridled force of her past remembrances. Rather, it washes over her in a series of muted waves and settles somewhere deep in her belly, takes root and makes a home for itself there. It feels like something might be blooming inside her chest, the subtle force of it causing her eyes to flutter closed for a moment.
Gamora, my sweet, sweet girl.
For a moment, Gamora’s left hand abruptly curls into a fist to stop her fingers from shaking as she recalls her mother’s many terms of endearment for her. So much love, always given freely. She should have appreciated it back then, treasured it instead of taking it for granted. Bottled it up and locked it away, so it could remain tangible forever.
All too often many species have considered change a sudden occurrence, but my sweet girl, they are wrong. Lasting change, good change, is stealthy and slow. It makes itself a part of your life so gradually and beautifully that you do not realize its initial presence at work until it has already come to pass. Your life will change slowly, but it will change purposefully.
When Gamora’s eyes open once again, she inhales deeply and tries to make sense of her now-muddled thoughts. She had always thought of change as something quick. A job could – and oftentimes did – go south in an instant (most likely, Gamora muses, in the same instant that Rocket would decide to blow something up, because her pyromaniac teammate is just that predictable). People could be right in front of you in one moment and irreparably gone from this life the next. She knows she will never, as long as she lives, forget how she almost lost Peter on Ego’s planet. He had been fighting with them, and then he hadn’t; and before she could even begin to rectify the situation on her own terms, the shock of losing him blended seamlessly with the electric shock of Rocket knocking her unconscious to keep her on the ship.
Yes, things for the Guardians changed quickly. Their line of work didn’t exactly afford them much else. But what her mother had described as lasting change, good change – well.
In the very early years of her life under Thanos, Gamora would cry herself to sleep every single night. Her eyes would be red and swollen in the morning, every morning, until one day the Mad Titan decided that he had had enough of her childish antics. He had saved her, after all, hadn’t he? She ought to be showing him gratitude. She ought to be showing him devotion, love, deference.
And so he began to beat the grief out of her (or so he thought). Thanos would hit Gamora anywhere he could reach her until she started bleeding. Until she started hitting back. Gamora’s punches had been meager and ineffective, then, her cries small and weak and broken compared to the deafening warrior’s yell she is capable of unleashing now, but it was on one such morning following one of these “fights” that Thanos decided she was ready to begin training. She knew the impetus for this decision had been the (fledgling) murderous glare she’d attempted to pin him with after she carefully wiped the smeared blood off her jaw; after she scraped herself up off the ground and surveyed the tattered remains of her Zehoberei-made purple tunic with dismay.
Thanos thought she was finally ready because for the first time under his care, she’d looked angry. In Thanos’s mind, which was always brilliant in its devious nature yet so infuriatingly simple when it came to understanding the range of complicated emotion that various species can and do possess throughout the course of their miserable, godforsaken lives… Gamora was ready to train because for a single second she looked as though she had moved on from her loss and metamorphosed it into a dull and pulsing anger, a newfound thirst for blood. But a thirst that he could, of course, manipulate: a weapon to serve his own means, not a danger to him – never a danger to him – because Thanos could twist it between his fingers with ease and refocus it toward the realization of the sick fantasy he would never stop talking to her about, the one of balance and order and everything is as it should be, one day soon it will be, and that’s why I took you for my own, Gamora, don’t you see?
The loss of her parents, her homeworld, everything Gamora held dear for the first few years of her life until one day the might of his assorted armies razed it all to dust. He thought she’d just gotten over it.
And so Gamora pretended that she had, just to keep up appearances. To keep herself alive. As the years dragged on, she learned to grieve quietly, inwardly; she let herself become every bit the fierce warrior he wished she’d become so that one day she might defeat him as well. Every cybernetic implant, every broken bone healed and gradually replaced with an indestructible exoskeleton, every sparring match with Nebula that ended with her sister taken away screaming to the ship’s medical ward for yet another procedure that widened the chasm between them… yes, Gamora learned that she would never stop despising her life, but she also learned that she could do it in a way that turned every single ounce of hatred she felt into endless motivation. It was a hatred she learned to live with…
… until she didn’t have to anymore.
When she decided to steal the orb and work for herself for once in her life, she didn’t think it would turn out quite like this. She thought she’d get to a point, sure, but somewhere along the line her ill-fated plan to escape would probably turn out to be just that: ill-fated, ending with her inevitable death or maybe worse – her survival. Never to be trusted again, Thanos would probably torture her bit by bit, or give her to the Order for punishment because he couldn’t be bothered to do much else with a traitor like her. And Proxima would probably make good on every threat she’d casually tossed Gamora’s way over the years, and Nebula would watch with barely-concealed mirth, and that would be it for Gamora, the deadliest woman in the galaxy.
Whatever she had been envisioning when she found herself on her way to Xandar to pry the orb from the hands of one Peter Jason Quill, it really hadn’t been this. Almost a year later and Peter is far from her enemy; he is her friend, dancing along the razor-thin precipice of something more, even, and she is no longer a ruthless assassin working for a genocidal maniac but something akin to a hero. She is still those other things, to be sure, but now she finds herself steadfastly dedicated to atoning for her past mistakes. One day, Gamora will overwrite them all with good deeds until every corner of the galaxy knows her as a trustworthy protector rather than the harbinger of the universe’s many evils.
And when she gets there, she will be with her family. Her chosen family, Rocket and Drax and Groot and Mantis and sweet, kind Peter, who treats her like something precious despite the shadows that linger in the depths of her weary eyes.
Good change.
Lasting change.
It is with a jolt that Gamora realizes something – or, rather, the absence of something. She doesn’t know how she didn’t realize it before, doesn’t know how she could have been so blind, but Godslayer slips from her grasp and clatters to the floor forgotten as Gamora lurches to her feet and goes to stand in front of the dining area’s massive bay window. She presses her still-shaking palms to the cold glass as if this gesture might effectively ground her, stares out at the star cluster they are passing through with empty, unseeing eyes as her mind races to make sense of what her heart already knows.
(How has it taken this long for her to notice?)
(Better yet, how could she not have seen this coming?)
The ever-present pit in Gamora’s stomach is gone.
Gone is that unquantifiable heavy feeling, that strange weighted feeling of her combined past, present, and future hanging over her like the unforgiving edge of an executioner’s axe, like a dark looming storm cloud that only signals the presence of death and destruction as far as the eye can see. Gamora has lived with this feeling for so long that she does not remember what it feels like to live without it. She thinks that the last time must have been on Zehoberei, safe in her mother’s embrace and under the watchful gaze of her father. Except now…
Except now.
Now it’s gone. She can’t remember when, exactly, it disappeared, but her mother’s words echo in her mind as she marvels over the space she feels she has inside of her now. When, exactly, had she stopped hating her life?
When had she stopped feeling the contempt that underwrote her every action, every thought, and every feeling? When had she started feeling alive? Why hadn’t she noticed any of these negative emotions dissipating, vanishing into thin air? Why hadn’t she noticed that she could breathe properly again, that she could walk through every crevice of the Quadrant without her guard up, waiting for someone to catch her in an off moment and use that as their chance to wound her? Gamora used to live every day just wishing – no, waiting, for her eventual death to free her from the proverbial prison she had grown to accept as her lot in life.
And now, her fate had changed without her conscious knowledge. Gamora could lay herself down to rest in her quarters tonight and know exactly how tomorrow would play out, because somehow she had developed a routine she hadn’t thought was possible for someone like her to have. She would wake first, never requiring much sleep as an aftereffect of her body mods, and the others would follow suit a few hours later. Everyone would consume at least a couple ration bars each for their breakfasts, and Gamora would spar with Peter for a while afterward and perhaps also watch Rocket build some sort of bomb once she tired of besting Peter in practiced combat. Later on, Drax would school Mantis in the art of holding a conversation with a perfect stranger, and Gamora would laugh from a distance every time Peter vehemently interjected to correct Drax’s teachings lest Mantis end up learning how not to talk to anyone ever, stranger or not. They would all eat dinner clustered together while scanning their holos for potential jobs, and those who did not have a hand in cooking would assist in cleaning up afterward. More often than not, Gamora and Peter would do the dishes together, and every night would end with Peter and Groot dancing around the ship’s de facto living room.
(Sometimes, Gamora would dance too, but only after Groot had been put to bed and only after she and Peter were completely alone.)
This kind of easy domesticity had stolen over Gamora steadily, in a way that made her feel comfortable and wholly unwilling to rebel against her newfound stability. Lasting change, good change. In another life, she thinks she might have liked to be a runner. But now that Gamora technically does possess the opportunity to flee her immediate circumstances at will, she finds that it’s the last thing she wants to do.
“Gamora?”
Peter.
Gamora whirls around from her spot in front of the window as though Peter has caught her doing something unsavory, her eyes focusing again and drinking in the sight of the man standing in front of her. Peter looks nothing short of absolutely disheveled, with smudges of engine grease on his cheeks and nose and sweat clinging to his brow. He must have been helping Rocket with something, or maybe repairing the Milano in the spacious docking bay a few levels below after their latest job gone wrong.
“Are you okay?” Peter takes a few steps toward her, tentatively reaches out and lightly runs a hand down the length of her arm in a soothing gesture she very likely would have recoiled from mere weeks ago.
But instead, Gamora finds comfort in his concern; safety in the easy silence that passes between them. She feels something else shift within her, something else that she cannot quite name but has a feeling that she should be able to, soon. Weaving its way through her bones and working its way into her very core.
Gamora glances up at Peter through her lashes, barely suppresses a smile at the hitch in his breath that results. He doesn’t think she notices these things, but she does. She can’t help it. And soon, she thinks, she’ll be able to tell him. She’ll be able to tell him a lot of things.
“I’m okay, Peter,” Gamora smiles a little as she says this, and his expression clears almost instantly at her reassurance. The sight alone makes her feel a surge of affection for him. “I really am.”
“Yeah?” Peter lifts her chin with his index finger, catches her eye and holds her gaze. The sincerity she sees there makes her feel like she’s burning a little bit from the inside out, though the sensation isn’t at all an unpleasant one. This is perhaps the closest Gamora’s ever been to him, the longest she’s shared the same space as him. It’s a new kind of intimacy that she finds she doesn’t mind, not one bit. It’s just another small part of her new normal, this piece of happiness she’s managed to carve for herself after she’d burned every last remnant of her old life to the ground. A phoenix, rising from the ashes.
“Yeah.”
Your life will change slowly, but it will change purposefully.
If only her mother knew how right she had been.