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Dear Peter,
What I’m asking of you isn’t easy. If our places were switched, I don’t know if I’d be able to do it. Four years ago? Without question. But four years ago, I didn’t know you.
Here’s something you probably don’t know: I’m trying. Trying not to think in absolutes. It goes against all my instincts and conditioning, but then again, so do you. And today, when I made you promise, on your mother even, I swear I almost regretted it.
I don’t. I am sorry, but I don’t regret it.
So I won’t think of me being gone as the one definitive outcome of this, because it hurts you and it hurts me to think about it hurting you. This is just an “in case”. It’s a precaution—something your impulsive ass wouldn’t hurt to learn from.
Thanos is deadly. His poisonous ambition, paired with his determination, means he will not accept failure. Do not try to do anything stupid. Do not attempt to take him on by yourself. I know there’s a brain somewhere deep in your head, no matter how tiny, okay—this is not some child’s play anymore, a level you can beat with a dance-off. The galaxy is safer with you in one piece. If I die, you must live.
Take care of the team. They need you more than you think. Rocket might be a shithead sometimes (all the time), but he cherishes this family; I know it. Mantis understands more than any of us do. Tell Drax everything I just told you. Revenge doesn’t have to be murderous. Sometimes survival is ample revenge. Make sure Groot will be okay. Just don’t let him spend too long on those damn electronics. Or swear. That’s completely your fault, by the way.
Nebula will be back. If she decides she wants to kill Thanos, don’t stop her. Just… mourn her properly.
And of course, the Captain himself, the man-child whose pelvic sorcery I have, unfortunately, succumbed to. In a funny way, I think this has always been inevitable.
When all of this is over, after you find a way to stop him—because there will be one, even if it’s a one-in-a-million chance—take a breather. Touch down somewhere. Maybe even your first home. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I’ve been thinking about Zen-Whoberi and how I might’ve liked to revisit the place I was taken from, if everyone there weren’t already killed. I’m just saying, you might find unexpected things if you return to Earth. Wife, children, the whole shtick. You may scoff. I believe it’s not a ludicrous prospect to think about.
I’ve got something else up my sleeve. I wanted to foil your plans one last time. I do hope you move on without me, but there’s something I wanted to do, and I think it might just be something you want too. If both of us make it out of this, I’ll find the courage to ask—since you’ve always been too scared to go for what you want. But this letter is proof that I didn’t make it out. So I need to make this piece of paper count.
I, Gamora of Zen-Whoberi, hereby take thee, Peter Jason Quill, to be my wedded husband, to have and to hold, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, and even beyond death shall we never part. This my solemn vow.
I had to research the proper Earthly format for that.
I’ve given a lot of thought to what you said, the night I joked about you loving that Zune more than me after watching you dance around the ship to all those love songs with the biggest grin on your face. Do you remember what you said? I do. You said every time one of those songs came on, the lyrics made you think of me. You might be a dumbass, but I’ll admit that there’s a certain charm in that dumbassery.
Peter Quill, I have flown light years’ worth of distances. I have slaughtered men without blinking and held an Infinity Stone (with some help, to be fair) and saved the galaxy a couple times. But my greatest accomplishment will always be giving meaning to your music.
And hey, we’ve traversed the stars millionfold. You’re telling me we won’t find our way back to each other? Sounds implausible to me.
Remember. I love you more than anything.
To the moon and back,
Gamora
——
Three months after Counter-Earth is blown to kingdom come and the team who used to call themselves the Guardians of the Galaxy disbands, Gamora shows up at Peter Quill’s door with regret seared on her face and a letter half a decade old in her hand. Her other hand digs into her side so hard that it’s numb.
She knows it’s too late to make herself presentable: her posture droops with exhaustion, and the leather she wears is dark and torn—she’d ripped out the flame logo herself. She can only hope that the veil of nighttime hides a fraction of how dishevelled she really is.
“Um,” says Peter after a few seconds, rooted to his spot under the doorframe. He stares. And blinks. And stares.
“Can I…” Gamora swallows, the echoing pain behind her forehead morphing into doubt.
“Yeah,” he breathes without any hesitation, turning his torso sideways so Gamora can shoulder into his house.
She stops short in the hallway and waits for Peter to catch up to her as she meets the gaze of an old man reading at the table, who stands up in shock as he regards her.
“Pa,” says Peter, looking between the two with a foggy face. “This is Gamora. My…” he trails off and it’s silent for a few seconds. “Um,” he says again. “She’s here because…” He shakes his head this time, cheeks flushing with embarrassment. “I don’t know that either, actually.”
“Wow,” says Pa simply. He beams and clutches his chest. “Pete, when you told me you liked both men and women, I thought that would be the biggest shock of my life!” He laughs heartily. “Now you add aliens to the mix…”
“Hey, I was an alien for, like, forty years of my life,” Peter reasons. “We’ll be in my room. Come on, Gamora.” He leads her down the hallway into his room with a hand on the small of her back.
It feels… oddly comforting. Knowing you’ve got someone who will forever be in your corner unconditionally, even if you don’t know him, not really, even when everything else has gone to shit.
Peter’s bedroom looks exactly how you’d expect a young boy born almost half a century ago’s to look: his too-small bed accommodates bright covers, and the posters that say Star Wars are peeling off the walls. Gamora has no idea how he’s lived like this for three months, but then she remembers the state of the Bowie when she was onboard, Rocket’s bloodstains on the floor and broken glass everywhere from when she slammed Peter into a bunch of display screens.
Only when he closes the door behind them does she remove her hand from her side.
Peter does a second take, then looks down at his hand, which has been stained from the blood on her leather jacket.
“Aw, hell,” he curses exasperatedly, “you’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” but he’s already run into the bathroom to scrounge for supplies. “You always pull this.”
As he sits them both down on his bed and rolls the hem of her shirt up, he launches into a train of frenzied muttering about getting hurt and keeping quiet, and Gamora’s about to remind him that he barely knows her before realising—she does always pull this.
The close call on Jotunheim, then Kitson, even the time Nebula dislocated one of her fingers when she was fourteen. Gamora doesn’t let mistakes get in the way of what’s important, because it’d mean she was no longer the most capable, the sharpest, the best. With the Ravagers, she had tried hard not to be a liability.
But they dropped her anyway, didn’t they?
Now, Gamora watches the intense look in Peter’s eyes as he kneels on the floor and tunes the rest of the world out to stitch her up, brows furrowed, hands steady. And she wonders if, in his timeline, she didn’t have to worry about slowing the team down or using up all the medical supplies. If they really were what they’d claimed to be. Family.
She’s starting to realise future-her got a deal far luckier than she ever deserved.
“Must be really bad,” says Peter quietly, “if you’re not resisting the care.” He looks up at her, eyes greener than a desert mirage. “You gonna tell me what happened?”
Gamora shrugs, suppressing the wince. “You were right,” she says finally, enjoying the way his eyebrows raise in surprise at her words. “They were just a bunch of criminals,” she scorns tersely.
“Gamora, I’m sorry,” Peter exhales. “I would take it back, you know that.”
“Wouldn’t matter.” She looks away so he won’t be able to see the agreement in her eyes. “I came here because I knew I could trust you. Well, because I… used to.”
“Yeah.” Solemnly, he snips off what’s left of the thread. “With your life.”
“I, uh…” she clears her throat, shifting her hand so he spots the corner of the envelope marked with her bloody fingerprints instead of a postal stamp. “I have something for you. It’s from, uh… her.”
Peter’s eyes widen, searching her face for a hint of a lie, as if he’d be able to tell anyway.
“I found it in one of the storage boxes on the Bowie. Recognised my handwriting.” She fixes her gaze on the paper for a long moment. “I know I said I didn’t give a shit about her, but… I wanted something. I wanted proof, and I wanted it to come from myself.” He’s still listening, and she sort of wishes he would interrupt. “She probably hid it somewhere, and you missed it when you were moving ships.”
“From the Benatar.” Peter’s voice is ghastly. He reads the words that say To Peter on the back, and the next words to come out of his mouth are thickened by the lump in his throat.
“That’s the way she wrote her R’s,” he says disbelievingly.
Gamora wants to roll her eyes and make the point that it’s also the way she writes her R’s and he is way too gullible for a supposedly experienced Captain, but his eyes have clouded over with a melancholic type of yearning and all she can do is withdraw her hand right before he can get hold of the envelope.
“I’m not her,” she reminds quietly, “Quill.”
She uses his last name on purpose, hoping beyond reason that it’ll force some kind of distance between them, knock some sense into him.
But it doesn’t work. Because even after everything, even three months after the last time she told him she wasn’t her, she is overwhelmed by the natural urge to call him Peter.
Maybe it’s the letter. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s the name his mother gave him. Once upon a time, or far ahead in the future, or somehow both at the same time, Gamora loved Peter Quill enough to give her own life. And even though she’s not her, will never be her…
She thinks she has some semblance of the right to say his name. And she knows he can see it in her eyes.
“I know,” says Peter, hand still outstretched in anticipation of the letter.
“Do you?” she retaliates in a whisper, the will to fight stitched into her bones.
“Do you?” Peter says, and it shocks her enough for him to take the letter from her slackened hand.
He reads it with his back turned to her and she watches him try to smother his sobs, most probably for her benefit. For three minutes straight after reaching the end, he faces the wall and stands hunched, shoulders heaving.
For the first time since the not-goodbye they shared on the spaceport, Gamora’s not quite sure what to say.
Peter takes a breath as steady as he can muster, then turns. His entire face is flushed with scarlet grief, and there are wet spots on his t-shirt where his tears had fallen.
“Thank you,” he whispers shakily, before clearing his throat and trying again. “Thank you for this.”
Still uncertain, Gamora nods once while avoiding his gaze and watches him cradle the letter like it’s worth four billion units. She’s a little stunned, to tell the truth—she withheld this letter from him for three months, and he’s grateful?
“I have a bone to pick,” she eventually challenges, then quotes, “To the moon and back.”
Peter sucks in a breath and nods, memories once again blurring his irises.
“Moons are pretty close,” Gamora points out, fully aware that she’s being an asshole. “I must not have loved you that much.”
Unexpectedly, Peter chuckles, the sound tinted with heartbreak. “On the contrary,” he says, “you had a pretty good explanation for that.”
“She,” Gamora reminds quietly, but she’s not sure if he even registers it. Not that she would ever admit it, but she’s starting to mind less.
“You said,” he narrates and ignores her exasperated eye-roll, seeing right through her facade, “loving me made you realise the beauty in the ordinary. Back when you went with us on our epic intergalactic adventures, we got ourselves caught up in crazy shit every day. But all you wanted was to love someone to the moon and back, and have that be enough. You found that with me. You found that with us.”
She stares at him, silent. Then, “I did not say that.”
“Word for word.” Peter places his hand on his chest, shaking his head and laughing. “Hand to God. I almost cried.”
“Right, because you’re mentally five years old,” she counters, but can’t seem to help the smirk that takes residence in the corner of her mouth.
Peter wrings his hands for a moment. “Are you leaving?” he asks, and she realises he’s been bracing for this ever since she showed up at his door. She’s never been one to blunt goodbyes.
So she decides not to do it at all.
“I had nowhere else to go,” she settles. “I have nowhere.”
She watches the hope spark in his eye, snuffed out after a single blink, after countless futile letdowns, like the time Thanos taught her to put a candle flame out with her fingers. “You have here,” he says, a little too quickly. “If here works.”
“Here works great,” she says agreeably, starting to pay less mind to his fully exposed heart. “Besides, some idiot version of me decided to write marriage vows on paper, so I guess I’m chained to you now.”
Peter’s smile cycles through disbelief, exultation, love, disbelief again. “You wound me, Gamora,” he jokes, but his voice quivers. She can practically hear his heartbeat. “I swear I’ll help you with the dishes.”
“Somehow, I doubt that,” she says cheekily.
Peter just beams, brighter than any sun she’s ever beheld. All these galaxies, drifts between the streams of time, the brushed shoulders, missed chances, and they’ve returned to orbit each other again.
Maybe the other her wasn’t so far off, after all.
“Well,” says Peter, trying and failing to hide his elation. It’s almost like watching a little kid clap as the plane braces for impact. He wouldn’t heed her warnings about herself, anyway. “My spare clothes are in the top drawer.”
——
When she steps out of the bathroom after changing, Peter looks at her for a long while and she holds her breath, waiting for him to decide that he doesn’t want her here after all, can’t take the heartache that stems from the sight of her face.
But then he smiles, soft, and his eyes no longer flood over with an inexplicable sadness.
“That was one of your favourites,” he informs, gaze flicking down to the shirt of his she’s chosen to wear.
She fidgets with the hem, explains, “It’s soft.”
His smile grows. “That’s what you used to…” There’s a funny moment when he just stares at her. She ought to be used to it by now, but there’s something about his intensity that accelerates her heart—fear, nervousness, something else. “You know what?” he changes course. “It doesn’t matter.”
Gamora blinks, attempting to hide her surprise. When she rang the bell at his door, she’d already come to terms with the likelihood of being reduced to the ghost of a stranger. But if she’s reading him right, for once, Peter’s the one taking a step forward from what’s past and offering his hand for her to follow.
Perhaps there was a reason she fell in love with him.
“Thank you,” she mouths. It seems they’re doing each other a lot of favours tonight.
“I’ll, uh, take the couch,” he offers, “if you’ll be fine in here alone. Not that you won’t, obviously, I was just thinking you might need company to feel less alone after… you know what, but hey, we’re married—” here, his grin overtakes his face without him meaning for it to— “so this is just gonna be a temporary arrangement until we can figure out something less awkward—”
“You’ll take the bed,” she interrupts, succinct.
“Oh, come on, Gamora, I’m not gonna—”
“I’ll also take the bed,” she says calmly, which shuts him up for a second.
He flounders. “Uh—you sure? Cause I’ll tell you, this thing is small as hell. I really don’t mind—”
But he doesn’t rule the possibility out, which tells Gamora all she needs to know. “Come on, Quill, don’t be childish,” she teases. “Or are you scared?”
He frowns defensively. Gamora decides she likes getting a rise out of him. “Hey, I’ll have you know I am very adult,” he says, and then crawls into his bed on all fours after tucking the letter safely in a drawer. “Do you wanna sleep on the side not stuck to the wall? Cause it might give you a sense of security, or… I’m gonna stop talking before you decide you want to sleep outside after all.”
“Good call,” she smiles softly, hitting the light switch before climbing in and settling under the covers. She lies with her back to Peter, but tendrils of his body warmth still creep over her until she’s wrapped tightly in it, his warmth, his scent, his love. Neither of them can move without touching the other—it’s a compromising position.
Gamora has been in many compromising positions in the past. It is, however, the first time she’s ever felt safe in one.
“Hey,” he murmurs. “Wake me if the stitches tear, or if it starts hurting again, okay?”
For a moment, Gamora basks in the feeling of being cared for by someone without any intentions that aren’t gentle or sincere. Then, almost hesitantly, “Okay.”
“Okay,” echoes Peter. Even though the bleariness of his voice suggests that he’s already half-asleep, he takes great care in wrapping his arms around her midriff, giving her the chance to move away if she wants to. She doesn’t. “I love you, G’mora. Not for who you were, or who you will be. For who you are, who you’ve always been.” His breath fans across the back of her neck like the wonder of spring. “And if you don’t want to respond, that’s okay. Just… get a good night’s sleep.”
When it comes to the concept of love, unfamiliar might be an understatement for a girl like her. But for once, she doesn’t squirm at the thought.
Because this might not be love right now, but that doesn’t mean it never will be.
This is the man who let her into his house when she was hurt, who treated her like she was worth every Ravager captain in the galaxy combined, even when they were on his ship. She has found her way back into the arms of the man she died for.
As a matter of fact, she has a funny feeling that with his roguish smile and smartass quips and unpalatable music references… conquering her lifelong fear of falling will be somewhat inevitable for her.
She’s willing to stick around to find out.
——
So she’s decided to take everything in stride by the next morning, when they pad out into the living room side by side after Peter promises her a glass of juice from the “orange” fruit. He promises that she’ll hate it, so of course she’s eager for her first taste.
So Pa is already sitting at the table with the news in his hands. He looks up as they enter, a touch of shock present on his face, betraying that he’d been doubting whether the events of last night had actually occurred.
So when Peter forgoes a morning greeting and instead says, “Pa, this is Gamora. My wife,” Gamora rolls her eyes.
And she smiles.