Work Text:
Gamora is — to use a term — pissed.
She’s been pissed, for a while now. Slogging through spaceport to spaceport with no money and no shower and no hairbrush and no Guardians and no Peter.
Beyond pissed, she’s been furious, indignant, outraged, seething, burning with the angers incomparable to Muspelheim itself, etcetera, etcetera—
But she’s feeling a little extra pissed right now.
“What do you mean, he’s gone?” she snaps.
“He means he’s gone,” Rocket says, snuffling obviously from around her neck. “Not at home, out of town, ain’t in the vicinity.”
“Where is he?” she asks, not a little desperately, as she gently pats Groot on the head while dozens of excited children run around her legs.
“To be with his mother,” Drax answers solemnly.
Gamora has a second of blank, reeling horror, her stomach falling to her feet, before Rocket interjects in a panic.
“Don’t say that, ya damn idiot, s’like yer sayin’ he’s dead! He went to his mom’s planet, ta be with his grandpa. Frickin’ idiot.”
Gamora almost collapses in relief. She pauses. “Wait, he went back?” She feels a flare of sadness. “Without me?”
“As you were deceased at the time and replaced with your angry twin, he had no choice,” Drax nods sagely from the midst of a dozen trailing braids he’s weaving into a little girl’s hair.
“He’ll cry all you want when he sees you,” Nebula says, as if she wasn’t just blubbering herself the better part of the morning.
Her sister’s grown soft in her absence, Gamora notices.
It’s sweet, in a weird way.
“And Mantis, gone too?” she asks.
“I am Groot.”
“Really?” Gamora murmurs, letting Groot twist little vines between her fingers. “Good for her, then.”
“We’ll send a comm to ‘er, I’m sure she’ll wanna wail all over ya too,” Rocket says.
“I could do with a little less wailing, to be honest,” Gamora admits. The noise in Knowhere, while joyous and welcoming, is a bit loud.
The irony that they’ve made Knowhere their home has not escaped her.
She wonders if Peter went and found the little lookout they talked at, once, or if it was too painful.
The hurt in her heart starts to match the hurt in her ears, and Rocket notices her wince, tapping away at — Peter’s Zune, which he now seems to own, for some reason.
The boisterous noise lulls enough for her to recognize the song blaring over the loudspeakers, and Gamora realizes that it’s been over actual years since she’s heard Hatsune Miku, and that makes it all even more depressing.
“You actually enjoy listening to this gibberish?”
And there, there is the object of her ire, the source of her wrath.
“You,” Gamora growls through her teeth at the imposter living her life — no, not even that, she won’t even live her life, will she? No, she’ll go pick up an entire new one while dragging what’s hers along like a damn fish on a hook.
Her other self places a hand on her hip, her eyes narrowed as she evaluates her. Gamora hates her even more, because that’s her pose, the one she makes when she’s thrown off-guard and trying to appear intimidating, and she isn’t even doing it right.
Her hair is a mess. It needs to have at least a little more volume if it’s going to successfully smack Peter in the face when she whips around.
Peter brings back an even more pressing reminder, and Gamora bares her teeth. “So I’m dead for a few scarce years and you move in and take my life? Take Peter?”
“I didn’t take your Peter,” her other self scowls. “I did quite the opposite, in fact.”
Nebula snorts. Gamora stares at them both in faint alarm.
Her sister twitches a shoulder. “Threw him through a sensor screen.”
“You what—”
“I would have thrown my fist in his face, had you not stopped me.”
“You what?!”
Gamora stares at her other self. Imagines her rearing back to punch Peter. Imagines her telling him they’re over, that they never existed, and that they never will. Imagines Peter nodding in that awful, pathetically sad way he does and moving on.
“Oh my god,” she realizes. “You ruined my relationship.”
Her other self rolls her eyes. “I didn’t ruin yours.”
“You’re a damn — a damn homewrecker!”
“I don’t even know what that is!” her counterpart snaps, in a way that’s so terrifyingly familiar Gamora almost sticks her Godslayer through her just to be sure she isn’t one of Thanos’ illusions come to haunt her.
She almost sticks it in her anyways. Trying to hit Peter—
Is that better than having hit on him? Gamora isn’t sure.
“He still loves you, idiot,” Nebula says in her rasping, callous way. “She didn’t homewreck anything.”
“Just Quill’s heart,” Rocket snorts drily.
“Oh my god,” Gamora breathes into her hands.
Of all the scenarios she’s imagined returning to her family in, there’s been one single, consistent constant. Peter’s there. He’s always there, crying or laughing or both, maybe fainting in one or two of them, but he’s there, and at some point she gets to kiss him, and she can’t goddamn kiss him because her moronic alternate self sent him spiraling into an identity crisis and now he’s gone.
Gamora lands ass-first on the ground with a thud, buries her face in her hands, and tries not to cry.
“Is he that good in bed?” her other self muses.
“I’ll kill you,” Gamora snarls through her hands.
“She might mean it,” Nebula says, “I told you, you were touchy about him.”
“She’s not!”
“I’m not!”
Their fierce denials echo in unison. They turn to glare just as fiercely at each other. Nebula smiles.
“Sisters,” she says fondly, and Gamora has officially left reality as she knows it.
“Well,” she finally says, dragging her hands down her face. “I suppose I’ll have to go fetch him.”
“Ooh, record his face when he sees ya,” Rocket grins.
“I am Groot!”
“He ain’t gonna have a heart attack, he’s not that old. He found out his age thing was all screwy a month back, remember?”
“You can use our ship,” Nebula says. Gamora scowls at the way she says our, as if it isn’t — wasn’t — isn’t Gamora’s ship, too.
“Just let me make sure none of the girls are playing in the engine room, before you leave,” Drax adds.
Gamora drops her head back into her hands. Exhales.
It’s a good thing, really. How much everyone has changed. She’s glad to see it, to see them happy.
But she wants her happiness, too.
“Before I go.” Gamora stands, dusting her hands off. She rolls her shoulders, joints popping, then fixes her other self with a glare. “Sword out.”
Her counterpart blinks. “What?”
“Sword. Out.” Gamora says. “Before I start slicing.”
“Why—”
“You threw my boyfriend into a sensor screen, and then tried to hit him,” Gamora says evenly. Then adds, for good measure, “You dick.”
Her other self scowls. “You would’ve done the same thing.”
Gamora, definitely not remembering how she most certainly did not do anything like stick a knife to Peter’s throat when she first met him, amongst kicking him in the gut and other extensive acts of violence, scowls right back.
“Sisters,” Nebula repeats again, exasperated this time.
Gamora kicks up dirt in her face.
Terra shows up in the viewport bright blue and green before Gamora works up the courage to comm Peter.
She wasn’t planning to, stuck in some wild imagining of a surprise reunion where Peter hopefully doesn’t mistake her as an apparition and blast her in the face. But then she realizes she has no idea where his grandfather’s home actually is, forgot to ask Rocket, and would rather eat rocks than admit to Nebula (and Rocket) that’s she’s at a loss.
So it’s a good thing, then, that she stole her alternate self’s comm unit before leaving.
Gamora might not have been a Ravager, but she lived with one of their better thieves for years, and she can steal too.
Smirking, she taps the comm on and prepares to select whatever Peter’s contact is now.
Except.
Peter’s contact does not exist.
Gamora takes a deep breath. It makes sense. If her counterpart has no relationship with him, then of course she wouldn’t—
“Damn you!” she curses, throwing the communicator against the wall. Stupid, useless alternate self, now she has to go ask for directions.
Gamora has been on Terra — earth — for 48 hours and still has yet to kiss Peter.
The universe, clearly, despises her.
“The universe is an unfeeling mass of matter,” Carol Danvers tells her kindly, dropping them both from the sky. “And you were lucky enough to run into me, so someone’s looking out for you.”
“Apart from your Terran defense?”
“Well, Nick’s alien-paranoid, but it’s not like he doesn’t have a reason.”
“Fair enough,” Gamora mutters. That Thanos set foot on Peter’s homeworld before her — disgraceful.
“Well, here you are,” Carol Danvers tells her, gesturing to the neat rows of brick houses and green lawns. It looks all very domestic. It also looks all very peaceful.
“Thank you,” Gamora tells her. “Truly. I appreciate it.”
“No problem,” Carol gives her a thumbs up. “Maybe invest in an alien GPS next time, huh? I know they exist."
Gamora nods, as if she knew exactly where she was trying to get from the start, and was not, in fact, utterly clueless as to what a bunch of unified states were supposed to be.
“Try not to set off any explosions!” Carol calls at her as she ascends in a beam of bursting light.
Gamora watches her go, not a little envious, then turns for the small Terran house.
It’s hot outside, enough that sweat is already gluing her shirt uncomfortably to her back. She feels a sudden onset of self-conscious prickling, standing in the middle of this little Terran neighborhood with her green skin and layers of black leather.
Peter would have a joke, to cut the tension.
Peter also wouldn’t be standing in the middle of the yard like a coward. He’d have rushed in headfirst like an idiot, maybe, but he’d already be sweeping her up in an embrace and exclaiming how happy he is to see her and how much he loves her, were he in her position.
But he isn’t, no, it’s just Gamora with her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth and her shirt stuck uncomfortably to her armpits in the sticky heat, and while she wants to do all that to Peter and more, there’s also the inescapable fact that Peter is currently more acquainted with a version of her who wouldn’t tell her she loves him if you stuck pins in her eyes.
The terrifying thought grips her once again, one she’s been ignoring as best she can.
What if he doesn’t love her anymore?
Nebula would tell her she’s being an idiot. Rocket would smack her upside the head and tell her she’s insulting Peter just by suggesting that.
But her callous counterpart, what would she say? That she managed to stomp Peter’s feelings down enough until he treated her like a normal person?
Gamora doesn’t want Peter to treat her like a normal person. She wants Peter, her Peter, and damnit, she wants to kiss him already because the last time she saw him he was crying and stuck pointing a gun at her head, and that—
Is a horrible way to end a relationship, actually, so she can’t even say anything to her counterpart, now can she.
Except her counterpart threw him through a sensor screen. So, comparatively.
Gamora sucks her breath in, gathers the bits of courage and shreds of energy she has left, and power-walks right through the neatly-cut lawn to the front door.
Headfirst and dumbass like Peter, she thinks resolutely, not letting herself even pause before banging furiously on the door.
“Jesus, hold on!”
Gamora freezes mid-knock.
“If you’re here for Mister Quill, he’s outta town for the weekend, so you’ll hafta leave a note!”
The voice is so dear and familiar she almost collapses on the spot.
In fact, she might do just that, she realizes in a panic, as she hears someone unlock the door.
She might be sick. She’s going to be sick. She’s going to—
Oh.
Her breath goes out like someone punched her.
Peter stares at her, too-short pajama pants hitting just above his ankles, t-shirt boldly emblazoned with a small pink monstrosity of a smiling blob pulled snugly across his chest. His hair, Gamora notes, is both longer and curlier.
It’s a good look.
“Um.” Peter blinks wildly, looking as if she’s landed a moon in his front yard instead of showing up herself. “Hi…?”
Oh god, Gamora thinks in despair. He doesn’t even look at her with the soft little gleam in his eyes. He doesn’t even smile like the biggest idiot she’s ever met on this side of the galaxy. He doesn’t close the space between them with his warmth and he doesn’t even move to kiss her.
No, he just stares at her like she’s a painfully mild acquaintance who may or may not be splitting his heart in two.
That bitch, Gamora thinks, trying not to tear up. Her relationship, in tatters.
“Hi,” she croaks out. “I like. I like your pants.”
Well, damn. That wasn’t what she meant to say.
“Oh.” Peter opens his mouth. Closes it. Looks down at his pajama pants. He looks back up, his face flushing red. “Um, thank you? They were on sale, and I didn’t realize they’d be so…short.”
Peter looks hopelessly lost and hopelessly stupid, toothpaste still at the corner of his mouth and hair sticking off wildly to one side, and Gamora cannot take one single second more.
So she flings herself into his chest and starts blubbering.
“Oh hell— shit, fuck, Gamora, what— shit, um, I can— um, help—”
“You weren’t there!” she wails into his chest. “Even my godawful other self was but you weren’t there!”
“Weren’t where?” Peter sounds terrified, frozen stiff as a board, and he still isn’t even trying to hold her. “Gamora, I don’t — what the hell’s goin’ on? D’you need me to call the Ravagers? Nebula? ‘Cause I have no idea what’s goin’ on, and I’m starting to get kinda scared, and you—”
“No! I want you, you foolish, stupid, moronic—”
Through her blinding tears and hyperventilating, Gamora realizes several things.
One, she has not actually planned for this. At all. In a way that means she’s been so nervous and dead-focused she has neither eaten nor slept in the past…week. Or so.
Two, she is going to murder her counterpart in cold blood for making Peter fall out of love with her.
And three, in all her imaginings of their reunion, Gamora hasn’t counted the thought that she might be the one fainting.
Of all the humiliating days, is her final thought as Peter yelps and she goes down like a rock.
She wakes up to a nervous humming. It takes her a moment to realize that the humming is familiar, at which point she wakes up in a frenzy.
“Peter!” she lurches up with a gasp. “I have to tell you — I’m—”
“I know.”
Peter’s voice is tremulous from where he sits at the edge of the bed he’s kindly let her faint on. At her flabbergasted expression, he waves his comm back and forth with a weak smile. “Rocket told me.”
“Oh.” She flops back on her elbows, oddly disappointed. She squints at him. “You’re…taking this very calmly.”
Peter snorts loudly. “Oh no. You’ve been out for ten hours. I managed to fit four and a half breakdowns in there while you were unconscious. Hyperventilating, lying on the floor, ugly crying over you, all that.”
“Ten hours?” Gamora gapes. “That — that long?”
He nods. Gamora wonders if she should be more embarrassed that she passed out on his grandfather’s front porch, or that she’s spent ten hours snoring blissfully in his childhood bed while he falls to pieces.
Probably the latter.
“So it’s—” Peter cuts off with a wavering voice. “It’s you?”
Gamora stares at the bedding, covered in faded prints of foreign words in bold yellow. She tries not to splinter at the way Peter says you.
“It’s me,” she says, trying to smile for him. “Really, truly. I promise.”
Peter stares at her, half as if drinking her in, half in— what could be suspicion. Gamora’s stomach twists. There’s the sick feeling again.
“Don’t tell me she managed to kill our unspoken thing,” she says, almost hysterically.
Peter stills. His mouth quirks, and it’s finally familiar.
“I remember it being pretty spoken there, at the—”
He cuts off, and his face drops. “At the end,” he murmurs.
Gamora’s heart wrenches.
“It’s not — I don’t—”
Her words stick in her throat, bile threatening to replace them. Hearing the end pass his lips is almost unbearable. As if they’ve ended. As if they’re over. As if—
Peter lets out a shaky breath, bracing his hands on his knees. He meets her gaze, and Gamora’s mouth stalls half-open.
“I love you,” he says, and she almost loses her stomach in the best of ways. “I love you so, so much. But I’ve been…I’ve been trying, to be better. And I know you must’ve been through so much, that I don’t know about, so I just wanna let you know, I get it. If you don’t wanna go right back.”
Go right back? That’s exactly what Gamora’s been trying to do for accursed months. Go right back to Peter and go right back to kissing him. And she realizes, with an incomprehensible glee, she can. He still loves her. Her idiotic alternate self didn’t ruin them and he still loves her, he still cares, and he’s still blabbering on.
“We don’t have to be anything, if you don’t want,” he’s saying, his eyes soft and warm and understanding. “If you want to…go slow, or not at all, I totally get—”
Gamora cuts him off by flipping him neatly onto the bed and pinning him down. He stares up at her wide-eyed as she looms over him, her hands laced tightly in his own.
“I,” she breathes raggedly. “Have been running. All over. The damn galaxy. For months. Looking for you.”
Peter’s eyes go wider, if possible. His lips part, mouth half-open, and it’s enough to drive Gamora mad.
“This is your one chance,” she tells him. “Tell me to get off, or I’m going to take it as a yes and wreck you.”
Peter looks as if she’s already done so.
“Wreck me,” he gasps, surging up to meet her.
Gamora doesn’t need another invitation.
Not that Gamora has any intention of sharing the fact, but he is that good in bed. Her counterpart’s loss, though she can’t bring herself to pity her at all.
You snooze, you lose, to use a term.
Evening finds Gamora sitting next to Peter on the too-small swings of his childhood playground, their hands linked loosely as they sway side side. The metal pole above them creaks with every movement, and she’s forced to bat at her arms every other moment to ward off the hellish little insects here that suck your blood.
Peter lets out a long breath, staring out across the rusted playground with red-rimmed eyes.
“So,” he finally says. “What took you so long?”
She stares at him.
He winces. “Too much?”
Gamora purses her lips. “Maybe too soon.”
“Right, right,” Peter says nervously, looking at his feet.
Gamora squeezes his hand gently. He looks thrilled at the motion.
“The fabric of reality in this world is in shreds,” she finally says. “What has everyone been getting up to in the past years? Time space is a mess.”
“Well, if rumors are true,” Peter mutters. “Then that’d make…sense.”
“I have catching up to do, I suppose.”
“Mmh. Lots of time for it, though.”
The thought thrills in her chest.
“So you met her?” Peter suddenly asks. “Your uh…alternate-ish self? Younger Gamora, whatever?”
The thrill squelches out. “Unfortunately.”
Peter raises his eyebrows. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She’s a bitch,” Gamora says flatly, staring resolutely into the distance.
Peter snorts, surprised. “She’s not that bad,” he says. “I like her.”
Gamora whips around to stare at him. “Her?” she sputters.
Peter rolls his eyes. “Not more than I like you, but — I mean, she kinda is you, y’know? I’d like any version of you.”
“That makes one of us,” Gamora retorts.
“Hey, cut her some slack. She’s freaked out and I came on like an obsessed idiot.”
“As you would cut your younger, stupider, extremely mislead self some slack, were you to meet him?”
Peter cringes. “You were nothing like me.”
Gamora glares at him.
“Okay, yeah, I’d probably deck my younger self in the face. But I still like her.”
“Well, I don’t have to,” Gamora snaps.
“My therapist says that recognizing your internalized self-loathing is the first step to healing,” Peter says airily.
“I am going to deck you.”
“You can try. I’ve been training with Nebula for a while now.”
“Did she teach you the double sword maneuver?”
“The sandwich one? Yeah.”
Gamora makes an impressed noise. “Maybe I should have called her the homewrecker,” she muses.
Peter turns to her in alarm, his mouth open to protest. He pauses.
“You’re messing with me.”
Gamora gives him a tiny grin that she hates feels unsure. “I am.”
The bright smile that lights up his face is familiar, finally, and Gamora feels something tight ease in her chest. He doesn’t say anything back, but he doesn’t need to.
They were beyond words, at a point.
They could be, again.
Peter is quiet for a moment. He squeezes her hand.
“Wanna see the frogs?”
There isn’t much Gamora knows about Terra beyond Peter’s ramblings, but she does, in fact, know what frogs are.
She nods, and lets him lead her past concrete and gravel roads and through thick trees overgrown with odd moss. She’s quite satisfied, letting him lead. Not knowing where she is, but knowing it’s safe.
It’s why she lets Peter drag her to stand knee-deep in creek water with him, watching tiny green frogs hop here and there. Every so often, they’ll wander curiously onto her fingers, fat throats bulging as they croak at her.
The worm flannel of the pajama pants she’s borrowed bunches heavily around her legs where the fabric soaks in the water. She wiggles her toes, the silty feeling of earth thick between them. Absently, she wonders if Peter will teach her how to sew her flannel pants shorter.
It’s warm, sticky, and humid. In the absence of ship engines and blaster fire, bugs and crickets sing louder than any other sound.
She’d told Rocket she’d fetch Peter. This implies she will be bringing him back to space.
But perhaps, she thinks, as a particularly fat frog warbles at her—
“I like it here,” she tells him after the sun’s set, and dozens of fireflies blink around the water like tiny, bulbous stars.
Peter beams. “It’s one of the better parts,” he says. “It’s pretty boring overall, to be honest.”
Gamora hums. “Maybe boring is nice.”
He cocks his head. “With the right company, yeah."
Heat lightning flashes, carving through the sky like the slender branches of a tree.
“I love you,” she breathes, the words almost lost in the screeching of crickets.
Peter hears her anyways.
The next time the skies explode and the universe erupts into chaos, Gamora is watching it from a tiny, scratchy television propped up on the Quill family’s kitchen table, absently chewing her way through the bowl of Special K Peter poured too much milk in for her.
She watches in dismay as milk spills onto the middle of her over-sized, Zelda-patterned nightshirt, and finds herself far more concerned with hiding the desecration of Peter’s favorite t-shirt than she is the galaxy going to hell again.
A sleepy-eyed Peter slides a stool over, squeaking across the linoleum up next to her, and buries his face into her shoulder.
“Wuz’goin’ on now?” he mutters.
“The usual,” she says, dropping her head atop of his own.
“Hm. We got time for a shower?”
“Maybe.” Gamora yawns. “We’ve got time for the crossword.”
“Sweet.”
Gamora grabs for the remote, points it, and clicks the TV off.
The world will survive without them, for a bit.
And if she’s needed, well, she has the best stand-in one could ask for.
She nods to the stars for her counterpart. “Give ‘em hell, asshole.”