Chapter Text
If there is one thing Nebula hates, it is anticipation.
It’s quiet, unlike terror. She thinks that’s what makes it so hard for her to deal with. Loud things, violent things, are what life with Thanos has made her best in surmounting. She can take punishment better than anyone she knows. Failure is a momentary obstacle. Blood, torture and dismemberment are pedestrian. There’d never been any mystery in the future when Gamora knocked her to the ground, Ebony Maw recorded his hatchmarks, and Thanos’ indigo mouth soured its way downward towards her doom. Whatever agony the installation of her mechanical enhancements caused her, none of it was ever unexpected, and before long the horror of it started to get lost in the wide maw of her anger. There was little to fear of the Mad Titan’s wrath when every deformity he forced on Nebula made her better equipped to kill him. All the more ironic that she’d been the only one at his vigil. She remembers purple blood flecked over her face, giving peace to eyes that’d drowned her in their scorn from her earliest days, the memory a blister of clarity thanks to the harddrive fused to her frontal lobe . . .
Alright. Back to basics. It’s a task and a half to ruminate sometimes. Thanos had taught her a great deal, and the rest of the Guardians the more important things, but self-reflection is something none of them knows a flarking thing about.
Which is about as much as she knows about how to cope with those silent instants, times where the lash doesn’t come and all you’re left to do is wait in the dark and imagine the pain it’ll bring. If there had been any of those moments with Thanos, she’s long since forgotten them. Peter talks a lot about what life on Earth is supposed to be like (sometimes until the rest of them are cringing just from the sound of his voice and Rocket shoves a thermos of Skrull whiskey his way to shut him up). Maybe it’s accurate, maybe it’s not; he hasn’t been there since he was a boy with a brief interlude for Tony Stark’s funeral. Regardless, she thinks what he describes is pretty close to the thing she fears; the dread guillotine between I love you and I love you too, a coldness in the chest as the family pet creeps towards the end of its weird, furry life.
Needles. Peter devoted plenty of discussion to needles. Thanos’ cybernetics combined with her own biology had kept Nebula from getting sick despite numerous visits to planets with hostile biospheres and conflicts utilizing chemical warfare, so she hadn’t been entirely sure what he’d been talking about. Terrans were feebler creatures than Luphomoids (Scott Lang had been evidence enough of that) and needed their antibiotics injected directly into their bloodstreams via a syringe that could be primed with all sorts of chemicals or bacterial concoctions. The modern Guardians had faced down more than a few intergalactic dangers over their years together, and while Nebula’s seen Peter melodramatic and drunk and selfless and earnest, she’s never seen him so apprehensive as when he talked about getting his “shots”. Nebula’s shots usually came out of weapon barrels and blew out the back of her torso. A quick prick in the arm would be literally less than nothing. One more nauseous Terran hangup, Drax would say. She’d be inclined to agree.
Now, staring down the laser scalpel only a few inches from her face, understanding the fear is far easier.
“Can’t we just put one of your medpack designs on it?” Nebula says, hating the shake in her voice. Flark, she can feel the heat from the scalpel’s blade. It’s practically blinding her it’s glowing so bright. “Kraglin says he was able to regrow a finger with one after a knife game.” From the not-murdery end of the tool, Rocket blows a wet raspberry out of his muzzle.
“Kraglin’s an idiot,” he grunts. “Xandies can grow back small appendages ‘n such. Whoever he was playin’ probably cheated. If I slap one on your shiny dome, all it’ll do is grow fresh skin over the metal, and then we’re never gettin’ this crap outta you. The minute we’re done, you can put twelve of ‘em on, fer all I care.” The furry humanoid fiddles at the back end of the scalpel, shifting nondescript bits of metal and wiring back and forth between his digits faster than any cheating gambler on any planet Nebula’s ever seen.
“Do I get to cut pieces out of you after this?” She’s not trying to be rude, just nervous really, but the words come out with a heaviness to them, mean weight leaned on their consonants. They bite. Rocket just chuckles. He’s the only one who appreciates her when she’s difficult. It’s one thing she loves about him.
“Mine don’t come out, Nebs. But if you want to shell out the units for a travel visa to Zenn-La and then miracle yourself enough left over at the end for a surgeon worth his scut to try, I ain’t gonna stop you. Eternity knows this stuff chafes like hell.”
“Flark you.”
“Ain’t you so easy to love.” The scalpel looms white and raw, a crimson furrow in the cosmos ready to pour forth all kinds of scariness. “You ready for this, blue?” No is her first thought. Thanos had put this iron poison in her body. It had been his will, and defying his will always came with some terrible price. There is no mystery in this future, and at the same time it abounds. What is she without this, without him? Undefined? Pliant and weak without the steel he’d melted into her soul? Part of Nebula wonders what he thinks from up above, where the Luphomoid Canopy of Eternal Devastation even now rings with the screeching of the damned. She doesn’t have it in her to question if he’d be proud or disdainful. One of those options had never really existed for her anyway.
Except it doesn’t matter. Thor chopped his stupid purple head off and he’s dead like he should be.
“Y’know, I can rush it, if ya want,” Rocket drawls, shrugging the misshape of his shoulders. “Yer pain tolerance should make for smooth sailin’, and any screwups of mine the medpack’ll fix up anyway. If’n you wanna be done with this as soon as possible.” And then, because he just can’t let a thought out of his grubby arboreal brain without some snark stapled onto it, he coughs. “Not that I . . . y’know. Screw up.”
“Are you sure you don’t want some of Peter’s booze? It might steady your hands.” Grumpiness creases Rocket’s face when the jibe sinks in, the phony kind where you can tell he’s only getting loud and raucous because it’s what everyone expects of him. And he thinks it’s funny. He makes Nebula smile. It’s a small thing she’s still holding up to the light and considering, but it feels good.
“Hey, I been sewing up the whole team ever since Groot went little and forgot howta make his poultice pustules! You think I can’t control a jittery finger with all the big, bad leadspitters I like?” He stabs one of those very same fingers her way.
“I would simply like to keep my eye. I don’t have a cellular stimulator implanted in me and this would be an unpleasant way to find out that they don’t grow back.”
“So, what yer sayin’ is I shouldn’t rush it, in the interest of not wreckin’ these black beauties.”
“Rocket!--”
“Alright, alright!” he laughs, before sliding the square, dark goggles over his eyes and the headphones to Peter’s Zune into the nubs that crown his head. “I’ll be as careful and dexterical as I can manage.” Nebula can just barely hear the Terran singer’s tinny voice kick up into “girls, rock your boys, we’ll get wild, wild, wild” before Rocket gives her a thumbs up and–
She screams. The pain is worse than the Haydron Enforcer Drax had shot her with (that he still didn’t understand the kindness of apologizing for). Old wounds in what skin remained above the eyepiece’s mechanical frame flare into a piteous, crushing despair, so powerful it felt like her skull would cave in and so blinding that the glare traveled through the circuits connecting her corneas and left sunspots on her right eye. It’s the worst thing she’s felt in a long, long time.
But Nebula keeps screaming. She lets the desperation scrape her lungs smooth and the suffering of it split her lips because pain has always been the prelude to transformation. What sounded like helplessness to Thanos has always been the warhorn of her defiance. She may have been taught how to scream against her will, but in that same torment she’d inadvertently stumbled upon emancipation.
She’s shedding him now, birthed into a new and undefined being with pangs loud enough to put fear in a god.
***