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“Are you sick?”
Peter’s head whipped up from where he peered down at the holo in his hands, skimming over the words debriefing their next mission. His attention wavered between the text and Mantis and Gamora’s steadily growing conversation.
“My body modifications prevent me from catching illnesses like the rest of you. You know that Mantis.” Gamora sighed and leaned back against the Quadrant’s kitchen countertop, propping herself up with her arms bent at the elbow. Her knees wavered at a level that would likely be imperceptible to others, but was nothing short of a goddamn alarm in his head.
Peter’s eyes trailed across Gamora’s body, as if he expected to stumble across a dagger or gunshot wound responsible for her dreariness and the tacky paleness of her skin. That had to be it. There was no other sound explanation for her sudden change in state.
“Are you though?” Peter set the holo down at the table in front of him, scrutinizing her from where he sat. “Sick?”
Gamora shot him a withering glance and rolled her eyes, settling further back onto her palms. “I do not get sick. Our last mission must have taken a lot out of me, that’s all.”
Peter stood up from his chair and made his way over to her, laying a tentative hand on her forehead to which she promptly swatted before he could take in the heat radiating off of her skin.
“Come on ‘Mora, you’ve never been this way after a mission before. And this wasn’t even the most physically demanding one. Especially not for you.”
Gamora sneered at him and shook her head. “I’m fine,” she hissed, words stinging with a bitterness that cautioned and patronized. Her tone threw him for a loop, and he was left confused at what it was that he had said.
It wasn’t normal for her to get so visibly angry with him. Gamora was typically very good at hiding her emotions, internalizing what she felt until she was ready to come out and discuss the issue directly. She was so often patient with him, communicating whenever he was crossing a line by sending him no more than a simple look.
Gamora rarely snapped at him.
“Quiet, Peter!”
Peter attention jolted away from the music player in his hands, instead turning to look over at his mother from where she sat across from him. Her head was down in her hands, face washed over with an anger that Peter was used to seeing on his grandfather’s, but never hers.
Never hers.
Peter rushed to lower the volume on the Walkman, fiddling with it in his hands with renounced fervor. “I- I’m sorry—”
His mother sighed, running a shaky palm down her face before taking several deep breaths.
“I’m sorry baby. I just.. I have a bad headache, I—”
Peter nodded and turned away from her. He brought the Walkman and his hands down to his lap and cleared his throat.
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re obviously not fine, Gamora,” he whispered, voice caught somewhere in the middle of inexplicable fear and decades past memories.
Peter refused to concede in this argument. He knew that her stubbornness and determination to keep her vulnerability a secret was an impulse that still challenged their dynamic, even after three odd years of being a couple. It was a tough habit to kick, unbreakable without a little push here and there from his end.
Gamora huffed and pushed her weight off of her palms, reorienting herself onto her feet, albeit shakily. “I am not going to say it again. I’m fine, and I’m going to our room.”
She took several feet forward, moving to stomp past him with an irritated sigh.
“Please, jus—”
Without warning, Peter found his arms engulfed with the weight of her, taking him by surprise and sending him stumbling back. His mind raced at an impossible speed, desperately trying to process the situation.
“‘Mora?” Peter shook her in his grasp before lowering them both down onto the floor, desperately cupping the sides of her head as it lolled sideways in his lap. “Gamora! Hey, come on—”
“Peter? What is wrong with her?”
Peter bit his lip in an effort to shake the fear wracking his body in the form of trembling hands and stolen breath. The air was sucked out of his lungs, leaving him heaving for some semblance of relief.
“I do- I don’t know…” Peter jostled her a few more times. He placed his head near her chest and listened intently for a few moments. “She’s still breathing. Come… come here Mantis. I need you to wake her.”
Mantis scurried over to them, dropping down onto her knees and positioning herself beside Gamora’s slumped figure. She placed a single palm against her temple and whispered quietly to herself.
“Wake.”
Gamora woke with a start, thrashing in Peter’s grip as she bolted upright. The wide shell shocked appearance of her stare died down as the adrenaline from Mantis’ powers ebbed away, the same tiredness from before seeping into her features.
“I- What…”
Peter placed a stabilizing hand on her shoulder, willing her to look at him and forcing himself to cease the slight tremor in his limbs. He couldn’t help but notice the way her eyelids fought to stay open, her lashes fluttering as she turned her gaze towards him.
“You passed out…” Peter’s voice cracked with the statement, an unexplainable knot settling itself in his throat. “Still set on convincing me you’re fine?”
Gamora leaned into his helping hand, slumping her shoulders in what registered to Peter as an admittance of defeat. She scoffed half-heartedly, too enervated to keep up her facade.
“I guess I am more than a little tired,” Gamora said.
That was all that she allowed, all that she was willing to admit.
A pit of dread sat in his stomach, stealing the words from his tongue and consuming him from the inside out. He simply nodded, clearing his throat and blinking away the wetness he hadn’t noticed through his panic.
“Come on, let’s get you to bed.”
“This is ridiculous Peter.”
Peter gave up on trying to coax her into sitting down for what felt like the twentieth time that hour. His grip tightened around the glass in his grasp; the water rippled with the steady tremor that returned in his hands, leaving him feeling even more tense than before.
“Oh, so now I’m being ridiculous?” Peter meant to sound challenging, but his voice took the tone of a sad whisper that did nothing to help enforce his argument. The dejection in his demeanor appeared to send a brief wave of remorse amidst her eyes, before the sorrowful sparkle in her eyes clouded behind something much stronger.
Something harder to break.
“I did not say that.” Gamora wasn’t big on allowing Peter to use her words against himself. She made this abundantly clear to him many times. Gamora did not like when he twisted her words to feed his self-doubt. “I said that this is ridiculous.”
Peter sighed and put the full glass on their bedside table.
It could become tedious, playing a game of semantics in order to convince her that she was worth all the things that she had been denied. It was hard, trying to convince her that she was worthy of his love when he wasn’t so sure he was worthy of it himself.
“That I’m trying to help you? That I won’t let you sit here and pretend that you’re fine?”
“I’m fine, baby. I’m just a little tired is all.”
“Why mom?” Peter lowered the volume on his Walkman and looked over at her. Her face was twisted with a pain that she had known for months now.
“Just a little headache, Peter. Don’t worry about it.”
She moved one of her pale hands from her lap, reaching over to ruffle his unruly locks of hair. He leaned into her touch, smiling and relishing her presence.
“Is it real bad?”
“No, baby. I’ll be okay.”
“I don’t need you to coddle me, Peter.”
He flinched at the harshness of her words, her tone throwing him from his memory and leaving him oddly disoriented. It felt like he had been awoken from a dream, the kind where you woke up unsure of whether or not it was real, the line between the past and the present blurring together into one indistinguishable blur.
“I’d hardly call stopping you from driving yourself to exhaustion coddling.” Peter shook his head. “Isn’t that what we do anyway? Care for each other?”
Gamora rolled her eyes, all traces of the usual playfulness accompanying the action extinguished. “We do when it’s warranted,” she said, emphasizing each word so as to stress their individual importance.
She knew how to play with words like him. Peter was the conversationalist among them, and it wasn’t unlike him to use words to convince and deceive their enemies. He was usually better at this than her, employing his linguistic cunning to his advantage, but Gamora had years of experience fighting for survival. She knew how to use words to stay alive; she knew when and how to speak in order to be the last one standing.
Like he said before, some habits are hard to kick. Childhood trauma dies hard.
“You passed out in my arms earlier! If that isn’t warranted then I don’t know what is!”
“How was your day with your grandpa, Peter?”
If Peter was being honest, he would’ve told her how awful it was. He would have said that he spent most of the day in her room, curled up in one of her pillows.
Peter wasn’t stupid. He knew something was wrong, and yet they treated him like he was a little kid.
They kept treating him like he wouldn’t be able to handle the truth.
“It was okay. Did you see the doctor?”
“Yes. I don’t want you to worry about that, honey.”
But he did. He couldn’t stop worrying. Something wasn’t right.
“Why don’t you tell me all about your day and then we’ll listen to some music. Sound good, Star-Lord?”
“You seem to not know a lot of things, Peter.”
Something wasn’t right.
“Oh? And what is that supposed to mean, exactly?” The tremor took hold of his limbs even more. His knee jerked and his hands shook at their sides.
“My mods! You act like you don’t understand how they operate, even after all these years! I don’t get sick, Peter. Thanos prevented me from becoming ill my whole life.”
“I know that. But you are sick now. Why are you so afraid of admitting it?” Peter forced a gulp of air down his throat. It was meant to be steadying, but it did little to cease the tightness in his chest. “No one is going to punish you for not being okay.”
The next words blurted out before he had a chance to think them over. His head was consumed by a whirlwind of memories, screaming out something’s not right and she’s lying, she’s not okay. Peter could hardly handle it. He was becoming desperate, willing to say anything to get the truth.
“I am not Thanos.”
The room stilled as soon as the words came out of his mouth. They felt harsher than he ever would have intended, a tang of bitterness, cultivated from his frustration, lacing the innocuous statement. Peter bit his lower lip and willed himself to hold in the sob accumulating in his throat.
“Just get out Peter.”
Peter looked down at his feet, unable to focus on the betrayal on her face, behind her eyes. Gamora seemed to feel the same way, looking straight through him towards their quarter’s entryway.
Peter never meant to hurt her. He just wanted her to be healthy. He just wanted to make sure she was okay.
He just wanted the truth, he wanted her to be honest with him.
“There’s something I need to tell you, Peter.”
He had been waiting for this, but as much as he wanted to know the truth before, he didn’t know if he still felt that way.
She made her way over to where he sat at the edge of his bed, sitting down next to him and grabbing one of his idle hands. Her touch was chiller than usual; her warmth seeped out and was replaced with a tacky paleness that would not go away.
Even when he said his prayers like his mom and grandpa always told him to.
“What’s wrong?”
“‘Mora–Wait, listen…”
He couldn’t let her battle this on her own.
Something’s not right. Something’s not right.
“Get. Out.”
His breath came quicker now, his chest inflating and deflating to the sound of his speeding heartbeat. His pulse rang in his ears, an incessant throbbing that made his head feel muffled and murky. “Please don’t do this. I–”
“Peter?”
“I can handle the truth. Just tell me, please …”
“I’m sick, baby,” she said, a few stray tears still clinging onto the black goop she put on her eyelashes every morning. “But it–it’s gonna be okay, Peter. Me and your grandpa, we–we’re gonna figure it out, baby.”
“Peter?”
She stood in front of the mirror, hand fisted in a clump of her golden locks. A small patch of hair had begun to fall out, the paleness of her skin peering out from behind the thinning strands.
She sobbed as she raked her hands through her hair, grip tightening in her curls. A guttural cry escaped her lips, and Peter ducked back to hide behind the wall.
Her cries abruptly stopped, like she had sensed his presence in the hallway.
“S-stop trying to protect me.”
Her next words were lost to him. Lost in the memories, lost in the truth Peter knew she was keeping from him. She was sick. Gamora was sick, but she was protecting him from the truth. Protecting him from the knowledge that he was about to lose her forever.
Just like he lost his mother.
“Peter, breathe.”
He shook his head and stepped back. The pounding in his head was rendering him useless, forming a spotty film over his vision. He wondered if this was how his mother felt when the headaches started becoming debilitating during her final months.
Peter wondered whether Gamora would end up feeling like this, too.
His breath hitched when his back slammed against their closed door. A wave of panic threw itself into the middle of the storm already wracking his mind, the faint sensation of a spear of light stabbing into his chest and
It broke my heart to put that–
Peter barely had time to register the sob that escaped his throat before he crumbled down onto the floor, legs no longer able to support him through the chaos. He wrapped his arms around his knees, backing himself into the corner of the room.
“Yer gonna have to git outta that corner sooner or later kid,” the scary blue man said, cracking Peter a crooked smile and baring his ugly, fang-like teeth. Even scarier were the jumble of unrecognizable words that tumbled out of his stupid mouth.
“I want my mom!”
He knew it was too late, but maybe if they let him go now he’d have enough time to grab her hand after all.
“Look at me, Peter. I’m right here.”
No. He shook his head again, back and forth in a frantic and disheveled manner.
Ego did this, he thought bitterly. Ego’s last act of revenge for soiling his eternal plans was to plant the same disease that murdered his mother into Gamora’s head. That had to be it.
“Don’t leave me,” Peter cried out, rather pathetically, he noted. He didn’t have the time to dwell on the way he sobbed like a child again, too preoccupied by the thoughts running wild in his brain, a mix of past, future, past, future that he couldn’t keep up with. “I can’t lose you too,” he said through each gasp for breath. The light-headedness reared back with full force, sending him spinning again.
“Okay, okay. You won’t lose me Peter. I’m right here.” She was suddenly right by his side, taking to wrapping herself around his midsection and pulling him flush against her. “This isn’t–this isn’t what you think it is, Peter. I promise.”
He shook his head again, passionately, like it was the only thing he knew.
“No, she–she didn’t know what it was at first either. She didn’t know–”
“It’s just a headache.”
“I promise you, Peter. It’s not that. I am certain that it isn’t, and you have to know that I would never keep something like that from you,” she said, her own voice threatening to break as well. The sound of a wet sniffle resounded beside his ear just as she began to place her warm forehead against his shoulder, wrapping her arms even tighter around him.
“‘Mora, you–”
“It’s likely just an issue with my mods,” Gamora said quickly, words muffled with her head down on his shoulder. “They must have gotten damaged in our last battle, and I must have caught a minor bug shortly after. I can have Nebula or Rocket check up on them, make sure for certain.” She looked up at him through dewy lashes, face wrought with heavy guilt.
“Okay,” Peter’s croaked out. He shut his eyes as she went to wipe the tears from his face. Peter took the next few moments of silence to gather himself and attempt to ease his frantic heartbeat.
“That’s it.” Gamora rubbed his side and pressed a kiss to his temple.
“It appears to be an issue with the mod responsible for providing immunity against infectious diseases,” Nebula said, looking over the Quadrant’s medical scanner. “You’re lucky, you could’ve damaged one of your important modifications instead.”
Gamora narrowed her eyes warningly, rolling down her shirt once Nebula pulled the scanner away. “Is it fixable?” she asked.
“Yes, a rather simple fix at that.”
Peter shuffled on his feet and fidgeted with a loose string hanging from the bottom of his shirt. He had been standing there the whole time, keeping his mouth shut in favor of listening to Nebula’s assertions. “Then what are we waiting for?” he said in a panic.
Nebula spared him a quick glance before turning to face Gamora once more, “What’s wrong with your boyfriend?”
“Leave him alone, Nebula.” Gamora’s tone became exasperated, fatigue causing Nebula’s dry-humor to become less tolerable than usual. “Just answer the question. Can we fix it or not?”
“We could fix it now, but it’s advisable that we wait until the illness passes. Until then you can take solace knowing that you are as susceptible to sickness as your fragile Terran boyfriend and the rest of the lunatics on this ship.”
“Hey!” Peter shouted back at her. His feelings weren’t hurt, he knew that Nebula was uncomfortable with the stifling concern and fear between the two of them (mostly from him) and used insults and back-handed compliments to ease the tension. “You love us, otherwise you wouldn’t spend so much time here.”
Nebula rolled her eyes and began to walk towards the exit. “You’re insufferable,” she said to him. “I’ll get the parts and come to fix your mods in a couple of days. Until then, try not to go catching any more infectious diseases.”
Gamora must have caught the flicker of panic in his eyes because she let out a tense sigh and glared over at Nebula from where she lingered in the doorway. “I’m not going to–That’s not going to happen,” she said, looking back up at him and grabbing one of his hands.
“Ugh, don’t get all gross. I’m leaving.”
Once they were the only two remaining in the med-bay, she gestured for him to sit down on the bed with her. Peter obliged and filled the empty space beside her, still gripping onto her hand clutched in his.
“Why didn’t you tell me what was on your mind, Peter? I could have helped you.” Peter didn’t need Mantis in the room with them to be able to sense the guilt engrossing her. It was evident in the way she looked at him, lips twisted with an apologetic smile that clawed at his heart.
“I- I think at first it was a subconscious fear. I didn’t know how to voice it until… well, y’know…”
Gamora winced, running her hand across her forehead to push back the stray hairs obscuring her vision. “Peter, I am so sorry. All day, you were holding onto that and… You were just trying to help me and I kept snapping at you.”
Peter sighed and squeezed her hand. “It’s alright. I can get a little intense, sometimes. It’s just… ’Mora if you di–”
He cleared his throat.
“If something were to happen to you… if I lost you, ‘Mora, I wouldn’t be able to go on…”
Gamora squeezed his hand back. “You would though, you’re so strong Peter. I know–” She paused, likely sensing that she was going too far, that thinking about her death was too much for him. Peter’s accelerated heartbeat registered to him too late, and he was belatedly able to piece together why it was that she decided to divert the conversation.
“I think,” Gamora began, “I was hesitant to entertain the possibility that my modifications were malfunctioning.” She sighed, guilt snaking its way onto her features again. “I should have just admitted that I was ill, to you and to myself, but in the past–whenever one of my mods stopped working…” She paused, biting her lower lip.
“You’d be punished. I remember.” She told him all about it years prior, through a show of great vulnerability. He remembered feeling the unstoppable urge to shove two twin daggers into Thanos’ eye sockets, and he felt the same way now, if not even more so.
“It’s a reaction I am not proud of. I know I can trust you and the team, you’ve earned that trust, but it still feels like–”
“History repeating itself? Like your past is doomed to be your future and there’s nothing you can do about it?” Peter knew how that felt. He knew the feeling, the crippling fear that he wouldn’t be able to escape sickness and tragedy and death no matter where he turned.
“Exactly.”
“I guess we’re both still a little messed up from our childhoods…”
Gamora nodded and let her lips curve into a smile formed with a mix of amusement and sorrow. “Maybe a little,” she laughed.
Peter noticed the way her eyelids drooped and how she leaned further and further onto him. “Don’t think this means I’m not gonna fuss over you until you get better.”
“Oh is that so?” Gamora said with a yawn.
Peter nodded, new enthusiasm coming to stifle the pains of the day. “Yep! First order of business,” he said, clapping his hands together as if discussing the strategy of a mission, “getting you to bed!” He wrapped an arm around her waist and maneuvered another arm to grab beneath her knees.
“Peter!” Gamora shrieked as he lifted her bridal style in his arms. She giggled and smiled up at him, curls of rich brown and vibrant magenta flowing all around her. The paleness from earlier was beginning to fade, and her skin was encapsulated with renewed warmth.
Peter smiled.