Chapter Text
“Where did you get this letter?”
Mantis (that is her name, right?) lets out a small yelp, grasping at the railing of the ramp leading up to her ship as Gamora storms into the hangar where the Bowie is docked. For a moment, Gamora almost feels bad for the girl — she’s clearly frightened — but then she remembers the piece of paper clasped between her fingers, and any pity she may have felt washes away.
“I- I believe Rocket found it on board the Benatar, tucked away in your personal quarters,” she squeaks. Mantis can’t seem to look at Gamora as she draws closer; her eyes flick up every few seconds to sneak a glance, but they dart back down as soon as Gamora notices. It’s exasperating. Luckily for her, Gamora is used to this — at least with the Guardians.
She can’t quite blame them.
“No, don’t — I’m not upset , Mantis,” Gamora sighs, rubbing her forehead in frustration. “I just want to know who wrote it. That’s all.”
“Oh,” Mantis breathes, antenna relaxing. She slowly walks away from the ramp and fiddles with her jet-black hair. “Well…I would assume you did, though I have not read it myself,” she admits. finally ( finally! ) meeting Gamora’s eyes. Mantis sways anxiously as her small voice echoes through the mostly-empty hangar. “I did not think it right to. It is…it is not mine.”
It isn’t mine either, Gamora wants to say, but she knows it won’t do any good. She knows, too, that it isn’t true, no matter how much she wishes it was.
To be honest, Gamora is starting to get tired of being mourned. She’s tired of seeing her name attached to words she’s never spoken. She’s tired of seeing her face smiling in photos she can’t remember being taken, her arms wrapped around people she doesn’t recognize. It’s a strange thing, to be treated like a walking corpse, but it’s worse when the ones who grieve you are people you’ve never met.
If she could, she would avoid them — trust her, she’s tried. Gamora doesn’t dislike the Guardians, but her interactions with them have been awkward at best and hostile at worst. It would be easier if she never had to see them again. It would be easier if she could fly halfway across the universe, leaving them thousands of jumps behind her to start a new life in a galaxy where her name holds no meaning.
Unfortunately, the universe is a smaller place than one might think.
Or maybe it isn’t, and the Guardians just keep finding ways to “run into” her at the most inconvenient times. For example, this morning — Gamora happened to meet Mantis in a general store in a trading port on Xandar while stocking up on supplies for Stakar’s ship. After a few minutes of uncomfortable conversation, the girl had shoved a creased envelope into Gamora’s hands before fleeing the store so hurriedly she left the box of engine parts she meant to purchase on the cold tile floor.
The letter Mantis gave Gamora was addressed to him, but the name on the envelope was written in delicate, looping script — the kind Thanos had schooled her in since the day he took her from Zen-Whoberi. Unmistakably elegant. Unmistakably precise.
Unmistakably, undeniably hers.
“Why did you give it to me? Why not Quill ?” Gamora presses, and she notices Mantis stiffen almost instantly. Quill. Gamora can’t help but remember the pathetic puppy-dog eyes he made at her the first time they met. I thought I lost you, he had told her. Gamora grimaces at the memory. What gives you the right, she’d thought, to talk to me like you own me? To look at me like you know me?
(The worst part, as she later discovered, was that he did know her. He knew her far too well for her own comfort.)
“It is not Peter’s, either. You never gave it to him,” Mantis states softly. Sadly. “But I know it was yours. See — it is your handwriting,” she continues, reaching over and pointing to the cursive Peter written on the envelope. “I thought you might wish to read it.” Mantis’s eyes have that awful look in them, that grieving look, and Gamora feels dead all over again.
“I didn’t want to. And it’s hers, not mine.”
“Gamora,” Mantis says slowly, her big, black irises trained on Gamora’s eyes. “It is true that you are not…the same as her. I see it myself. Your feelings…they do not resonate the same way as hers did.” Her brow furrows, as if that fact alone is enough to make her want to cry. “But I think it would be good, perhaps, if you were to understand her a little more.”
Gamora groans. “We’ve been over this before. She isn’t me, Mantis.”
“But she lived in the same world as you,” Mantis retorts. “Struggled through the same childhood that you did. I do not think you are as different from her as you believe yourself to be.”
You have no idea, Gamora thinks, her gaze drifting to the envelope still clutched in her hand.
Mantis (unfortunately) notices, and her eyes widen as she leans in towards Gamora expectantly. “Oh. You didn’t want to…Gamora, you did read the letter, didn’t you?”
The hangar is full of heavy silence for a few moments before Gamora sighs and nods slowly.
“And?” Mantis offers.
“And I want to know who wrote it.”
Mantis looks perplexed, now, tilting her head as she frowns. “Did you not see the handwriting on the envelope? I told you earlier, but I would assume the letter—“
“Yes, the script, I know. It looks like mine. It’s just…it has to be a forgery. I can’t have written it.”
“Why?”
Why. Where to begin?
Gamora didn’t know what she’d been expecting when she opened the envelope that morning, but whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t what she found. Mantis was right — the letter was written in Gamora’s handwriting — but its contents were so foreign that they made her head spin. Gamora felt sick, reading her letter to him — to Quill, of all people. What did he do to deserve a letter like this? What did he do to inspire words so raw their honesty sends Gamora’s stomach twisting into knots?
Mantis seems to take Gamora’s silence as an answer. She walks back to the ship’s ramp, sitting down with a sigh as she gazes up at the bars of metal crisscrossing on the hangar’s roof. The silence between the two of them is suffocating. Gamora tries her best not to imagine a time when it might have been easy, when stories and quips and laughter might have flown like water through a sieve.
“Did he — did Quill really love her that much?” she says, breaking the silence. Gods, does she feel pitiful for even asking. Mantis takes in a sharp breath from her side, and for once, the girl doesn’t respond immediately; a few moments pass before she finally nods, turning her head to gaze forlornly at the ship behind her.
“Yes. Very much.”
Gamora already knows that. She is forced to remember it every time Quill looks at her, every time his green eyes search hers desperately for memories she doesn’t have. Gamora wishes he wouldn’t look at her like that. She wishes she’d never have to see him again.
“What about her? Did she…” Gamora asks, her voice trailing off. She already knows the answer to this question, too. It’s desperation more than anything else that leads her to ask it anyway.
Mantis’s face scrunches up, and she looks away again. “I thought you did not want to know about her.”
“I didn’t say that,” Gamora replies, taking a seat next to Mantis on the ramp. Did she? She doesn’t remember. Regardless — this she needs to know.
“But you implied it. I do not understand you, Gamora,” Mantis turns back towards Gamora, her eyebrows knit together in confusion. “One moment you reject anything to do with the person you used to be, and the next you wish to know things that will only bring you closer together.”
“Please, Mantis. Just tell me.”
Mantis frowns. Suddenly, she places a hand on Gamora’s arm, and her eyes widen. “You are scared,” she gasps, a wave of shivers wracking her body as her hand grows cold against Gamora's skin.
“What are you — stop! I’m not — I’m not scared!” Gamora exclaims, tearing her arm away from Mantis’s touch. It smacks against the metal railing of the ramp with a clang, and the terror on Mantis’s face melts away as quickly as it had arrived.
“No, you are! You are scared of y—”
“Stop!” Gamora cuts Mantis off before she can say any more. “You can’t do that to someone without permission!” She knows how she feels; she doesn’t need Mantis to tell her. And she isn’t scared of anything, much less a ridiculous little letter, much less the even more ridiculous Guardians of the Galaxy. She is Gamora, warrior of the Mad Titan. Gamora, Ravager lieutenant. She isn’t scared.
“I was just trying to understand—“ Mantis protests.
“Then answer my question and stop trying to — to dissect me!”
“Your question?” she asks tersely, and Gamora groans in exasperation.
“Did she love him?”
“ What do you think, Gamora?!”
Gamora is so taken aback by Mantis’s anger that she slips off the ramp she’s sitting on. As she steadies herself on the cold concrete, Mantis’s voice echoes through the hangar — do you, you think, think — and she breathes heavily, expression twisted into a mixture of anger and something else. Something quieter.
Now that Gamora is looking at Mantis, really looking, she thinks she can see tears pricking at the corners of her eyes.
“I am- I am sorry for my outburst,” Mantis starts, getting up quickly and offering a hand to Gamora. Gamora doesn’t take it, and it falls limply to Mantis’s side as she watches Gamora stand up on her own. “I have been doing my best to help you. But I fear I cannot tell you what you want to hear.
“That letter is yours. Perhaps you…you do not like what it has to say. What she has to say,” she amends, biting back tears. “But that does not mean you get to pretend it is not real. That Gamora was just as real as you are. And…and she was my family, too. Not just Peter’s. She was family to all of us.”
Family.
There’s only one person Gamora has always been able to count on: herself. She suffered through a childhood spent under the watchful eye of Thanos, enduring modifications, experiments, and the constant cruelty of both him and his advisors. Trust is a naive luxury that she has never been rich in.
Gamora can appreciate other people at times. The Ravagers, for example: they watch each other’s backs, they help each other out on missions — little things that make a world of difference while out on a job. But Gamora holds even the Ravagers at arm’s length. It’s better to keep her connections shallow. After all, to keep herself safe, she has realized that she must rely on no one.
But that Gamora had a family . That Gamora was open, honest. No , she corrects — that Gamora was vulnerable. Something about that idea sends a shiver down her spine.
“May I read it?” Mantis asks in a tiny voice, and Gamora snaps back to reality.
“What?”
“I would like to read it,” she asks again, hesitantly looking at Gamora. “The letter y— she wrote to Peter.”
She was my family too.
“Maybe…later. I don’t think I’m ready yet.” No, not yet. Preferably not ever, though she won’t admit that to Mantis now. If it really is hers, the contents of that letter are too honest — too personal — to ever see the light of day. Under any other circumstances, Gamora would incinerate it before Mantis even got the chance to touch it.
She doesn’t do that, though. Maybe it’s out of sympathy. Maybe regret.
Or maybe…maybe curiosity.
Maybe she just wants to know what it must have been like, to be loved so much. To love in return, if the letter is anything to go by. Gamora, the deadliest woman in the galaxy, has until now been resigned to the fact that she will never live as freely nor love as deeply as the people around her. She is, after all, a living weapon; the daughter of the Mad Titan.
But this letter, as ridiculous as it sounds, might just be proof that that isn’t true.
Mantis nods slowly. “I understand. Those words were never really meant for me.” She shoots a pointed look back towards the Bowie, which has been thrumming with the melody of some old Terran song for a few minutes now.
Oh.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“It is just something to consider. I believe it would be good for the both of you.” Mantis’s tone is unnaturally level, and she begins to make her way up the ramp, fingers drumming to the song’s rhythm on the sleek metal railing. She quickly looks back at Gamora, and though she’s smiling, now, something about it feels like a lie. It feels broken. Wrong. Like she’s only smiling because she has no other choice.
“Goodbye, Gamora. Perhaps we will meet again soon.” And oh, that’s what’s wrong. Mantis’s eyes. Her mouth is upturned into a grin, but her wide, dark eyes are dull and blank.
Something she said…something about it wasn’t right.
“Mantis, why did you give me the letter?”
“I told you already,” Mantis says faintly. “I thought you might wish to read it. I am sorry for my error.” Gamora frowns, and Mantis’s fingers keep drumming anxiously. She’s lying, Gamora thinks. She’s lying and she knows it.
“It’s not just that. There’s something else, isn’t there? Something you’re not telling me.”
Mantis is silent for a moment, but soon enough, she sighs in defeat, and her forced smile warps into a frown. “Fine. Perhaps there is. And perhaps it is — it is selfish,” — she spits the word out, lip wobbling — “but I had hoped there was…there was still…that if you read her words, you would…” She shakes her head, choking out laughter with a half-hearted smile.
“I would remember how it felt,” Gamora supplies.
Mantis hesitates, but she swallows her tears and nods. “It was foolish of me. I am…I am so sorry, Gamora.”
All Gamora can muster up is a grunt of acknowledgement, and Mantis turns away, pressing a few buttons on the ship’s exterior control panel. Before long, the door at the top of the ramp slides open. Mantis turns back towards Gamora for one last brief wave before stepping through the door and-
“Wait.”
Mantis turns back, perplexed. The song playing from the ship is clearer now, clear enough that Gamora can make out the words if she strains to listen.
There are places I'll remember
All my life though some have changed
Some forever not for better
Some have gone and some remain
“What was it like…your family?”
This time Mantis smiles — really smiles, eyes and all.
“Oh, it was wonderful .”