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It only starts to bother her after Gamora has been with their ragtag group of convicts-turned-heroes for approximately one month, eight days, and about eleven hours.
Or so Peter tells her. It’s illogical to keep time in space based off his scribblings on a calendar from a trivial planet galaxies away, as the concept of “days” tends to grow muddled quickly when you’re jumping quadrants by the hour, much less months. But Peter challenges them, as he often does, with the question of “do any of you have a better way to keep track of time then?” At which point there’s an awkward sort of shifting, as Rocket only pays attention to bounty deadlines, Drax functions on some vague sense of a prison schedule, also galaxies away, Groot is a child, and Gamora herself...has also only paid attention to mission deadlines, in the past.
“Then don’t bitch about my earth calendar,” Peter grumbles at their ensuing silence. “‘Sides, my calendar has holidays that aren’t about ritual cannibalization or mass arson, so it’s automatically superior.”
“I liked the mass arson,” Rocket mutters, but Peter’s made his point. The Milano crew now operates on his hand-drawn, tiny little earth calendar with its twelve months and oddly-named days, the numbers carefully stenciled from Peter’s memory.
And that, Gamora supposes, is when it starts bothering her.
“You have a remarkably good memory,” she tells him one day — the late afternoon, he’s informed her, even though the sky outside is black as ever, save for the stars streaking past the viewport. He’s just finished explaining to her the oddities of February, as the month gets an extra day this year, for some reason Peter claims is “important” yet can’t seem to remember for the life of him.
“Nah, this is basic earth stuff,” Peter shrugs. “Ask me like, how to spell ‘marsupial’ and it’s a different story.”
Gamora hasn’t the slightest clue as to what a marsupial is, not does she particularly care.
Well. Perhaps she’s a little curious. She’ll save it for another time, though.
“Still,” she says. “You said you haven’t been back to earth since your capture. Have you been keeping track all this time?”
Peter stills, his fingers pausing where they’re just tracing the last lines of the 28 on the rough paper. Gamora’s eyes linger on the faded cut that spans the top of his hand. It’s slow to heal and looks as if it will scar, which makes something odd twist in her chest. She hadn’t been aiming for scarring, when she’d thrown the knife that made it. But the skin of Terrans is so much — softer, than her own.
Peter would bristle if she voiced that, though.
He gives an odd-sounding laugh. “You always get to the good questions, huh.” Something wistful twists his expression, almost bittersweet. “I…like to think it’s right. I tried to keep track, when I first — when they—”
He cuts off, swallowing, and the bitterness becomes more pronounced. “When I came to space. I tried, y’know? But I was a kid, and I was angry a lot, and that doesn’t really…end well, for counting.”
Gamora inclines her head, more than familiar with the note of bitterness that stains his voice. The first days away from your home, the sting of realizing you’ll likely never return, everything changing so quickly and so awful—
She cuts herself off from those thoughts abruptly. There are only dark paths they can lead down, and none of Gamora’s stories of her upbringing contain any amusing anecdotes about murderous, reluctant father figures to dredge out.
Not, of course, that Peter will admit he sees Yondu as such, But Gamora will die before she gives Thanos that kind of validation, either, so she supposes this was a terrible path to take as well. She turns her attention back to Peter, to the messy curl that falls just over his left eyebrow, the copper in his hair highlighted by the Milano’s low lights. Her gaze trails lower, meeting his eyes, and she realizes she’s left him hanging in silence.
“Counting days in space is difficult, even for those fully grown,” she offers.
Peter’s lips quirk. “Yeah. I’m probably way off on the months, much less the days, but it’s nice to have it anyways. It’s not really about being right, y’know?”
She doesn’t, not entirely, because her life is built on the necessity of being right about the moves she makes, the weapons she brings, the words from her lips, the timing of her blade. But she understands the comfort of having something that’s yours, from home, that no one can take from you, so she nods carefully.
Peter takes it with a softening smile, a wistful little look that makes his eyes seem brighter than usual. Gamora hasn’t quite figured out what that look means, yet, but she thinks she likes it. She appreciates Peter’s ability to let her answer in silence, at the very least. It’s one of the nice things about living with their little ragtag group, she’s been figuring out. The longer they’re together, the more they fall into a comfortable rhythm with each other. Noting each other’s walls, respecting them when they need to be respected, and bashing through them with the delicacy of a blaster bolt when they need broken down.
Though Peter seems to be much better at slipping through the cracks in her walls before she’s even realized it, Gamora muses.
“Should probably get some sleep, okay?” Peter tells her, stretching an arm behind his head as he yawns. “Pullin’ all-nighters works great and all for keeping away the nightmares, but you push it too long and the nightmares start coming into your awake, too.”
There’s nothing but an earnest concern in his voice, casual in the mangled meaning of his words. It’s a far cry, she thinks, from the cold maintenance of planning her sleep schedules for effectiveness. Peter’s concern over nightmares is…refreshing.
Their entire team is refreshing, like waking up from a different kind of nightmare, one that’s held her in a chokehold for so much of her life and she’s only now seeing it for what it was. She’d known Thanos was awful, she’d known her life there was lacking, but the mismatched camaraderie of her team — her friends — and the simple freedom she has among them now leaves her realizing just how bad it was. What she has now — it’s something she treasures dearly.
Peter, in particular, is refreshing in his own way. Peter, she thinks, is good. Silly, and foolish, and an idiot at times, but he’s good in a way she is not. Where she is sharp, he is gentle. Where her eyes are cold, his are warm, kind and always sparking with the beginning of a laugh.
Peter is soft, in a way she could easily break, if she isn’t careful.
Her eyes flick to his hand again, tracing the near-healed cut left by her knife, and she feels that unpleasant something curl in her chest again.
What she has now, she treasures dearly. And whether that’s defending Peter’s little calendar that makes him happy or murdering a dozen assassins sent on Thanos’ orders, Gamora is prepared to keep this. Her freedom, her friends, the soft way Peter looks at her — she’s going to keep it all safe.
Drax tells them of his family, sometimes. Not in the bitter, broken yelling he’d used when they’d first met, speaking only of blood and loss and vengeance. Instead, Drax lets slip little details here and there — a habit his wife used to have, the way his daughter’s laugh sounded, the color of the flowers on his home planet that reminds him of the dye in Gamora’s hair.
He’s sharing the most priceless gift he can with them, Gamora realizes, and she’s surprised at how touched she is. Something shifts in her chest when Drax compares her hair to the flowers his daughter loved. She’s not used to being compared to something so gentle. It’s an odd feeling.
“Every day I’m on this d’ast ship you all get sappier,” Rocket grumbles. “Quill’s gonna be giving me flowers before you know it.”
“I’ll do it,” Peter threatens, stabbing a finger covered in engine oil in his direction. “They’ve got these killer flowers on A’askavariia that’ll knock you out if you smell ‘em. I’ll make you a whole bouquet, ribbon and everything.”
“I’ll shove ‘em down your throat, dimwit,” Rocket growls.
“I will permit you to use my knife wrapping as a ribbon for this bouquet, Quill,” Drax says.
“I’ll lend you an air filter when you tie it,” Gamora says.
Peter pumps his fist in the air. “Teamwork!”
“I hate all of you,” Rocket scowls.
Groot makes a high-pitched noise from his pot, and Rocket’s expression twists up like he’s swallowed the coffee Peter burned the other morning. He turns away, muttering darkly. Drax roars with laughter as Peter starts rambling about plants from his home planet that can eat insects, and Gamora watches the scene with a tangle of emotions in her chest.
She likes listening to her team. She likes hearing stories from their pasts that aren’t cold or angry, ones that bring laughter instead. She just wishes she could share her own.
She has memories, of course. Treasured things she’s tucked away deep within her, hidden from even herself. In the earlier days with Thanos, those memories of her homeworld had been a rare comfort, a pale light to hold close when things got too dark.
In the later days, when the blood staining her hands grew thicker, those memories turned bitter, soured by the thought of what she’d been twisted into. She’d done her best to bury them, to blot out what she was before in order to survive what she’d become. She’d been good at it, but now she finds herself wishing she hadn’t.
Peter’s shared such vivid memories with her — she’d like to share some of her own, as well.
It’s muddled and frustrating, but they are, at least, still there. Fragmented flashes of bright colors, woven into clothing by her mother’s hands. The flutter of air the spin of vibrant skirts made, the smell of dried paint from a paper mask that pressed against her cheeks, the taste of spice on her tongue.
“Hot or bitter?” Peter asks later, as they’re piloting the ship through a particularly boring edge of an asteroid field.
Gamora blinks at him from the copilot’s seat, unfollowing. “What?”
“The spice,” Peter clarifies. “Was it the hot kind that makes your tongue burn, or the bitter kind that tastes a little sweet but with a kick?”
Gamora pauses, sorting through his words. “The hot kind, I think,” she says. “It made my eyes water, I remember. But it was…I liked it.”
“Huh,” Peter nods, fiddling absently at the pilot’s controls, too gently to actually change the course of the ship, but firm enough to make a steady tapping sound. “We’ll have’ta look out for some then, next stopover.” He grimaces, as if tasting something sharp. “Maybe a milder kind, though.”
Gamora is momentarily thrown off-balance by Peter’s casualness — how something as trivial as a fractured memory of something she remembers tasting is worthy taking the time to find, for him. There’s an odd tug in her chest, the kind she’s quickly coming to associate with Peter, and she stifles it before it can take shape.
“Another Terran weakness, then?” Her lips curve as she says it, and she’s rewarded with an amused spark in Peter’s eyes, even as his cheeks flush a dusty pink.
“Some Terrans,” he mutters. “Most of us handle spice just fine.”
“But not you.”
“I can handle it just fine,” Peter protests. “I just prefer the sweeter stuff. S’not weak if you don’t wanna go around breathing fire out your mouth the next hour.”
The image of Peter spouting flames from his mouth is comical, if not somewhat horrifying. Unlike Drax, however, Gamora is more than used to Peter’s fondness for exaggerated metaphors.
“But it would make an exciting move in battle,” she counters.
Peter wavers briefly between narrowed eyes and the tremble of his mouth in laughter, and eventually gives in with a coughing snort, his eyes dancing in the bright lights of the stars above them.
Gamora finds herself pleased. It’s not often that she’s able to make others laugh, and the way Peter’s eyes crinkle at the edges in happiness leaves something warm bubbling in her chest.
“Fine,” he says, laughter still dancing at the edge of his mouth. “Next market we see, we’ll get the hottest damn spice we can find, and you can clean up when I start crying from it.”
“You say that as if it’s an unusual sight for you.”
“Ouch, Gamora,” Peter plasters a hand over his chest in mock-agony. “Sell me out, why don’t you.”
“Not quite yet,” she says. “I still need you for that spice.”
Peter gives another wounded exclamation, and Gamora ignores him, holding back a smile as she leans over to tilt the ship slightly to the right, out of the path of a stray asteroid. Straightening the ship out, she turns back to Peter, pretending not to notice the wide-eyed way he looks at her.
“Now,” she says, instead. “Tell me about your Terran holiday with the earth hog that predicts the weather.”
Peter groans, grinding the palms of his hands against his eyes. “Groundhog, it’s a groundhog, and of course that’s the one you wanna hear about. Won’t look at Halloween twice and you won’t give Valentines the time of day, but Groundhog Day—”
Peter dissolves into another bout of rambling, and Gamora leans back in the copilot’s seat, the edge of a smile now on her face as she watches space slide by, Peter’s voice a pleasant hum in her ears.
She runs her tongue over her teeth, and tries to recall the taste of spice.
The strangest thing about having — a home, if she dares call it that — with these people is how natural it feels.
There shouldn’t be anything normal about it, anything comfortable about the presence of five individuals from drastically different backgrounds with varying positions on morality all crammed together in one spaceship they call home. And that is without even beginning to address their species.
But it is, Gamora finds. It’s not always easy, of course, but it’s easier than anything else she’s ever adjusted to in her life. Bickering with Rocket, training with Drax, deciphering Groot’s language. Crawling into the cockpit late at night to talk with Peter about nothing. There’s a place for her here, one that isn’t shaped by blood and engraved on a pedestal she despises. No one on the Milano will snap at her for a momentary lapse of kindness, for a day she sleeps in a little later. Instead, such instances are simply written off as her being Gamora. Not Gamora, Thanos’ favored daughter and deadliest woman in the galaxy, but Gamora, perpetual nagger of remembering to put away your weapons and late-night enthusiast of stealing Peter’s sugar for her tea. Gamora, who spends entirely too many units on a new jacket and gets away with it because Peter’s eyes do something soft and shiny when he sees how happy she is to have it.
So it shouldn’t really bother her, Gamora tells herself. She’s lucky enough to be here, to have this life free of Thanos in the first place. She’s lucky to have people that share their memories with her, soft and fragile as they are.
So maybe most of her memories are faint and tattered and stained with blood. She can make new ones, now, with these people she’s been lucky enough to find. That’s what matters.
But still, she thinks, Peter’s handwritten calendar and its little doodles around dates seared into the back of her mind. It would be nice, to share things of her own. It could be. It could be — safe. Maybe.
“Hey, ‘Mora.” Rocket’s eyes glint as he fiddles with a wire that tore loose in his blaster during battle. “Trade drinks with me.”
Gamora sips her glass of cheap spaceport liquor cooly. “No.”
Rocket scowls. “You’re no fun.”
“Knowhere,” Gamora says. “Was not my definition of fun."
“One time,” Rocket throws a hand in the air. “One time I get drunk during somethin’ important, and you blacklist me for life?”
“I would prefer that life be long, so yes.”
“Jackass,” Rocket mutters, but there’s no heat in it. Gamora smiles serenely at him, the kind of smile she knows he hates, and turns her attention to the tiny spaceport bar they’re in. It’s open air, so escape routes are plenty — still, it doesn’t hurt to keep an eye out. Not with their reputation.
She throws a glance back across the dusty street, watching Drax and Peter where they converse with the fuel attendant. Peter has Groot’s pot tucked into the crook of his arm, cradled like a recalcitrant child as he gestures wildly at the attendant. She suppresses a wince as his flailing arm nearly smacks Drax across the head. The last thing they need in this spaceport is a brawl, much less a brawl amongst themselves.
Speaking of.
Her reflexes are the only reason she catches Rocket swiping her drink out from under her, but even then she’s too late to stop him from swallowing half of it in one go. Gamora fixes him with the coldest stare she can.
“Rocket.”
“Yeah, yeah, it’s yours,” he says with a grimace. “This is nasty. Worse than the shit they got on Sakaar, and that’s sayin’ something.”
Sakaar sounds vaguely familiar, and Gamora is curious enough to ask. “Your home planet?”
“Hell no,” Rocket snorts. “Sakaar’s the middle of frickin’ nowhere — literally — but it ain’t that bad.”
“I see,” she says. Questions linger on her tongue, but she knows better than to voice them. Asking after Rocket’s home planet would likely be cruel, if not met with a considerable amount of cursing.
Rocket slides his own glass side to side, as if deliberating. “They don’t get it,” he finally says. Gamora looks at him, her eyebrows raised in question.
Rocket jerks his head toward the others. “We’re different people. I mean, obviously, but—” he shrugs. “We come from different places than them.”
“None of us share a home planet,” Gamora says carefully, ignoring the point she knows he’s trying to make. “I don’t think that makes us so alien to each other.”
“For crying — you know that’s not the point,” Rocket rolls his eyes. “The whole ‘lemme open up about my past to you, boo hoo, here’s my soul or whatever’ routine they got going on.” He makes a face. “Like sharing a d’ast room isn’t close enough.”
Gamora winces. Vulnerable is a word she’s fought tooth and nail to earn the right to, but putting it into practice is difficult. She thinks back to the cargo hold on the Ravager’s ship, the dim way the overhead lights made the water in Peter’s eyes shine as they all stood in a circle, firm in their fate.
“I think it’s nice,” she says. “Hearing what makes them who they are, apart from being losers.”
“Ha,” Rocket grumbles under his breath. “It’s all good and fun for them,” he gestures at the backs of Drax and Peter’s heads, where they’re still attempting to bring the price of fuel down. Drax, Gamora notes with amusement, is having far more luck than Peter for once.
“Sharing your past only helps when you got good memories.” Gamora snaps back to attention at the bitterness in Rocket’s voice. She watches the way his ears lower, his eyes heavy. “No one wants to hear about growing up as a frickin’ lab experiment.”
Gamora looks at the perfect, unblemished skin on the back of her hand, the mods beneath her bones ensuring it remain that way. Her stomach twists. “Or as a weapon,” she murmurs.
Rocket nods his head her way, and she carefully keeps her attention from the bits of his own mods she can see, just edging up over the back of his collar.
“Look at us,” he snorts. “Two miserable bolts in a blaster.”
Gamora tugs the sleeve of her new jacket lower, reminding herself to buy bracers at the next port. “Peter would say we’re peas in a pod.”
“Star Munch would have the dumbest way of saying it on this side of the galaxy.” The bitterness in Rocket’s voice softens, though, and Gamora doesn’t miss the way his eyes brighten as he watches the others, Peter’s hands now carefully cupped around Groot’s pot as he starts arguing with Drax.
“But don’t ever use that one in front’a Drax,” Rocket says.
“Regardless of the others, I am not a fool,” Gamora replies.
“Who’s a fool now?”
“Take a guess, laser brain,” Rocket snarks as Peter approaches them, Drax trailing behind.
Peter taps a finger against his chin. “I’m thinking tiny, furry, uhhh, you.”
Gamora ducks Rocket’s drink as it goes flying, knocked away as he leaps to his feet atop the bar stool. “Who you callin’ tiny, you big ugly—”
“The fuel should cost little now,” Drax says, over the noises of Peter and Rocket’s growing argument. He carefully tucks Groot against him, as if shielding him from the litany of cursing. Gamora, already wishing she’d ordered another drink, latches onto Drax’s words instead.
“Negotiations went well?”
“Negotiations are for weak-willed cowards,” Drax says. “I prefer threatening those who withhold what I want.”
Gamora fixes him with a glare.
Drax clears his throat. “The negotiations went well.”
Gamora nods in approval, allowing her lips to curve into a smile. Peter suddenly slumps onto the bar stool next to hair, waving his back and forth and throwing a final scowl Rocket’s way.
“He bit me,” he says, sounding scandalized. “Do I need to get a rabies shot or something, you think?”
“I do not know this rabies is you speak of,” Gamora says, taking his hand in hers and inspecting it. “But there is disinfectant onboard now, since one of us decided to restock the medical kit.”
Peter beams at her, squeezing her hand in gratitude. “One of us, huh. You’re the best, G’mora.”
He noticeably does not let go of her hand, but Gamora lets it slide this time. Instead, she allows the contact, reveling against her will in the warmth. Then Peter’s had shifts, dancing side to side in movement as Peter always is, and Gamora catches the strip of white that lines the back on his hand, tiny flared edges marking the scar as one from the very knife she wears strapped to her side.
She pulls her hand away, steadfastly ignoring the crestfallen look that flashes across Peter’s face, just before he smooths it back into a careless grin.
Perhaps it’s more than just the memories, she thinks. Maybe what’s bothering her is the blood that stains them.
Just because Gamora has left Thanos and all that he stands for behind, of course, doesn’t mean she’s left violence behind. Or crime, though in their defense, they do their best to keep to a more upstanding kind of morality.
Well, she and Peter do. The others still swing back and forth on their own pendulum of relative morality, but only when it comes to the smaller things. They’re nowhere close to Thanos, and that’s good enough for Gamora.
What is not good enough, right now, is her own inability to go faster.
“Peter I swear, come in,” she hisses into her comm unit. Her own voice is nearly lost over the rapid pounding of her boots against the metal compound floor, the rhythm in tandem with the frantic beating of her heart.
There’s no response other than crackling static, and Gamora grits her teeth. Peter’s sharp cry before his comm cut off is still ringing in her ears, and while she knows he can take care of himself, she knows that a team ought to have faith in each other—
The fact remains that Peter cannot take care of himself like Gamora can. And the guards the mercenaries here have are far more deadly than any of them had assumed when making the plan, and if it’s bad on Gamora’s end, then on Peter’s—
It is considerably bad. She knows it’s bad, because Rocket’s only made a singular joke about inheriting Peter’s belongings if he dies, and even that remark was notedly tense with worry.
“Damn it.”
She was never this vocal in battle before, Gamora thinks as she brings Godslayer up to cut a neat path through the oncoming mercenary’s head. She whips her head to the side just enough to avoid the spray of blood that follows, refusing to break her sprint any more than necessary. The tracker on her wrist is beeping steadily faster, which means she’s close.
Gamora turns another corridor at breakneck speed and tries not to curse again at the body she’s forced to vault over. The wounds look like Peter’s blaster made them — she has to be close. If she can just be on time—
“Stop right there!”
“Where is he.”
The mercenary’s panicked warning and Gamora’s harsh order crack over each other, echoing off the metal walls in a way that would make her head hurt if it wasn’t already thundering. Her hand tightens around Godslayer, but her feet falter, hesitating. She tracks the blaster the mercenary has leveled at her head, cold and calculating. It isn’t so much the weapon pointed at her that brings her to a halt. The range of fire would be easy to clear for her, unless the mercenary is a particularly good shot. Even if he were to somehow land a shot, the current setting, while painful, is one she’d be able to push through.
No, it’s how she knows she can clear a shot from this blaster that brings her to a pause.
“That is not your weapon,” she bites, a frenzied kind of bloodlust building in her. Good, she thinks. If she focuses on that, she can ignore the icy fear sliding down her spine.
Peter would not let his blaster leave his hands so long as he was standing.
The mercenary wipes beads of sweat from his brow with his elbow, but his grip on the blaster doesn’t falter. “It is now,” he boasts. “You wanna fight for it?”
His hand lowers, the blaster now aiming directly at Gamora’s middle. “Or did’ja want the corpse that came with it?”
For a horrible second, Gamora’s world goes dizzyingly sideways. The armored wall she keeps between her and whatever lurks in her heart slips from her grasp, and the stabbing wound of loss hits her so hard she nearly wavers in place.
For a second — then her wall slams back into place, and the deadliest woman in the galaxy fills the wound with vengeance. Her vision flashes white, the red, then utterly clear.
“You will die for that,” she tells him.
The mercenary gives her a sharp-toothed smile. “Not if I—”
His words cut off in a strangled gurgling sound, blood bubbling from his lips. It happens so fast Gamora nearly misses the knife that makes the wound, dragged mercilessly across the man’s throat in a killing blow.
The mercenary goes limp, blood staining his front as Peter releases the grip on his hair, letting the body drop to the ground.
Gamora watches blankly, her mouth oddly numb, as Peter bends over, tugging his blaster from the mercenary’s fingers and wiping it against his shirt, ignoring the blood that stains his own hands.
“Bastard,” Peter hisses.
Gamora blinks once, then twice. She nearly doesn’t recognize him as he is, but for the shock of copper hair and the red of his jacket. Peter moves like she’s never seen before, in sharp, jerky movements that speak of violence. While he appears mostly unharmed save for a dark bruising around his temple, his breathing is ragged, his hands motionless as he clutches the blade with white knuckles. His eyes are burning, yet still colder and darker than she’s ever seen them look.
The hallway is silent, save for the sound of Peter’s breathing and the steady drip of blood.
Recognition begins to dawn on Peter’s face. Gamora watches as the color seeps from his expression, and he gives a coarse, awkward cough.
“Sorry,” he mutters, his eyes snapping away from her. “‘Bout that.”
Gamora opens her mouth, and is surprised to find herself momentarily voiceless.
She watches as Peter rubs his fingers against his shirt, staining the soft cotton with blood. Well, she thinks. Perhaps that is not where her surprise comes from.
She has — misjudged, it seems. This Peter is not gentle — not kind, not soft. Not a refined killer like she is, no, but a killer nonetheless. The cold in his eyes is one she recognizes, and she realizes she misses the light and laughter she’s grown accustomed too more than she’d expected.
Blood, none of it his own, drips from his hands, from his fingers, from the curl that twists just above his left eyebrow. Not a refined killer, she thinks again — but a wild creature threatened is every bit as deadly as one trained by a monster.
Her muscles finally find movement, and she steps forward. Peter flinches, his eyes wild and wary, but he lets her approach, drawing nearer until she takes his hand in her own, gently coaxing the knife from his grip.
“I have a soap,” she says, careful to keep her voice even. “That works well for removing blood from your clothing.”
Peter stares at her blankly, and she tries not to focus on how hollow his eyes look. She nods toward his bloodstained shirt instead.
Peter follows her gaze. A hint of color stains his cheeks, and Gamora feels a flicker of relief.
“Oh,” he murmurs. “Uh, thanks. That’d — that’d be cool. Appreciate it. ‘Cause this is, um, kinda messier than I meant — I didn’t really mean to get it everywhere like that, but my blaster, y’know, and I—” His expression seizes up in frustration. “Damnit, I told Dey we’d be better and I — shit—”
Gamora takes his hand again, ignoring the way Peter flinches ever so slightly. “He was preparing to shoot me,” she says. “So, to look at it, you saved me. Do you regret that?”
Peter stares at her, taken aback. “Of course — of course not, duh, that’s—”
“Then it’s settled,” Gamora cuts across his rambling. “Let’s make our way outside. Rocket will leave us if we miss the meeting point.”
If Peter doesn’t let go of her hand as she tugs him out of the compound, Gamora doesn’t mention it.
“I wasn’t thinking about saving you.”
Gamora gives Peter a measured stare from where she sits next to him on the compound roof, and his eyes go wide, waving his hands frantically. “Not that I — I don’t meant it like that! I’d always think of saving you, obviously, but I just—”
Gamora lets her eyes soften, and Peter slumps. “I wasn’t thinking at all, that’s what I mean. Just like — tunnel vision. Murder tunnel vision, y’know? Like you’ve only got one way outta here and it’s—” He drags a finger across his throat. “—kill ‘em or get killed, y’know?”
“I know,” Gamora murmurs. Peter breaks off on another rambling apology, but she barely hears him.
She’s done Peter a disservice, she thinks. He is many things — kind and idiotic and far too open — but he is not soft. Not the way she’s seen him as. He is one of their ragtag group through and through, thrust into violence and battle as young as she was. He hides it better than any of them, the only one of their group, save Groot perhaps, to dare to reach out with gentleness before guarded caution—
But those same hands that held hers so gently are every bit as capable of slitting throats. He understands violence in a way she’d assumed he wouldn’t, and she’s done him a disservice. Perhaps he would understand.
“I want to ask you something,” she says, cutting over his off-track rambling. Peter quiets instantly, his eyes curious.
“When you look at your past,” she continues, hesitantly. “How do you find it in you to love the memories you have, instead of — instead of letting them hold you back?”
Peter frowns, tilting his head to the side. Gamora watches as the stray curl at the edge of his forehead follows, copper still stained with flecks of blood. “What do you mean?”
“I feel…lost,” Gamora admits, hating the falter in her voice. “At times. This is where I want to be, I know that much, but having a place to call home is unfamiliar.”
“So you’re…not familiar with it, that’s the problem?” Peter tries.
Were it anyone else, Gamora would keep silent. Doubts like this can be a dangerous thing to have, but voicing them is even more foolish. Giving others a hold over what haunts you is as good as handing them your weapon and baring your throat.
But, despite the very obvious fact that Peter just slit a throat himself, Gamora finds herself trusting him.
“No,”she bites out. “Believing it will last, that is the problem. I do not — I don’t want this to be another memory I cannot revisit. I don’t want it to be another thing I ruin.”
“Oh.” Peter goes silent for a minute, staring at his hands where they bounce restlessly against the top of his boot.
“I don’t expect you to have an answer,” Gamora says.
“No, no, gimme a sec,” Peter huffs. He leans back against the wall they’re pressed up against, his eyes tracking the wispy clouds above them.
“So my mom,” Peter says finally, his voice a hint thicker than usual. “She uh, she used to say that if you go through life expecting to be hit, you’ll never know what a kind hand feels like.”
He gives rueful laugh, barely a laugh at all, and Gamora watches him, fascinated by the talk of his mother. It’s becoming less rare that he mentions her, but Gamora doesn’t treasure his sharing her any less.
“I didn’t really get it, ‘specially after I left earth,” he continues. His eyes shutter a bit, and Gamora makes a noise in her throat.
“The Ravagers weren’t kind,” she says.
Peter gives her a dull look. “Neither was Thanos.”
“It isn’t a contest.”
“Sure,” Peter shrugs, but his expression softens. “Point is, while I didn’t get it then — ‘cause god knows I didn’t wanna go around hugging Yondu — I remembered after meeting you. I mean, you all. What it’s like to want to be gentle again.”
Gamora thinks of the way Peter’s always lurking on the edge of others’ space, the way his hands are always poised to reach out instead of push away. She thinks of how he’s always sharing with them, his home, his music, his memories. She wonders what it’s like to be that way, to leave yourself so terribly open to others.
She wonders when she started wanting to reach back this badly.
“The tough part, I guess,” Peter continues, in that terribly sincere way of his that always cuts her to the core. “Is trusting those people enough to let your guard down.”
Gamora is quiet for a moment, taking this in. “I see.”
Peter nudges her in the side, forcing her to meet his eyes. “I trust you,” he says. “Maybe try trusting me not to die on you so easy, okay?”
There are a number of feelings Gamora has in response to this, none of which she decides to acknowledge. “I do trust you,” she says instead. “I let you cook terrible food for me, and I still eat it.”
“Ungrateful, that’s what you are,” Peter scowls. “After everything I do for you, you come after my cooking—”
“I think,” Gamora continues over him, picking her words with care. “That perhaps simply having people to want to be gentle with, is a start for me.”
Peter falters, his eyes going soft and open in the way she likes. “Sounds good to me,” he says, mouth pulling into a full smile.
Gamora finds herself staring at him a second longer than necessary, before finally tearing her gaze back to the horizon. Rocket must have gone to pick up Drax first, she thinks. The Milano is still nowhere in sight, and the sun is already dipping near the horizon. At this rate, Peter and her will be here until dark.
“How d’you feel about clingy people,” he suddenly mumbles, so quietly she nearly misses it.
Gamora frowns. “Clingy?”
“Touchey-feely clingy,” Peter says. “Like, uh, like this.”
There’s a rustling of fabric, and Peter’s head drops against her shoulder, copper hair plastering against the black leather of her jacket. Gamora stiffens at the sudden wave of warmth, and she feels Peter hesitate.
“You can totally shove me off,” he says quickly. His voice is still forcibly casual, but there’s a clear note of panic. “Or punch me if I’m overstepping, just watch the nose, maybe—”
Before she can stop herself, Gamora leans her own head on top of his, an odd beating in her ears as her cheek rests against his hair.
“…or that works, too.” Peter’s voice is barely a whisper.
Gamora feels her lips pull into a smile. “I won’t say this again, but. You think too much, Peter Quill.”
“Yeah,” Peter gives a choked laugh. “Fair, that’s fair.”
They lapse into quiet, heads pressed against each other as they wait for the familiar hum of the Milano’s engines. Peter radiates enough warmth to fuel his own sun, and Gamora feels her eyelids slipping half-closed, content in a way she’s ever so slowly growing familiar with.
Then, because she has chosen to make her way through life with Peter Quill, she’s snapped back awake by his voice.
“Y’know,” Peter says, sniffling a bit. “I could kill for something hot-spicey right now.”
Gamora manages a weary laugh. “Funny,” she says. “I think I’d like something sweet.”
At two in the morning on a particularly dark Monday, Gamora delicately pencils in the name of her own holiday on Peter’s calendar, her handwriting thin and elegant next to his own. It’s only a guess, of course — their planets are so far apart, and her memory is so faded, that the day could have been at any time.
But Peter beams when he catches sight of it, his eyes bright in the way she likes, and Gamora thinks that the date wasn’t quite the point, anyways.