She sees him making his way over through the wreckage with blasters in hand, the burn of her tears causing her eyes to slam shut.
The titan’s fingers grip tightly at her hair as Peter’s voice rings in her ears, and she struggles against him, desperate to hear everything, anything he has to say.
She knows she’ll never hear him again.
“I…I told you to go right,” he utters, his eyes glittering with pain as they see her gaze. Perhaps he knows too, that this is the last time.
Their last time, she supposes.
“Now…? Really?” She sputters, her protest cut short in the form of her own desperate scream as her hair is pulled back roughly now, the false sense of…whatever he thought love was all but a distant memory blown away in the spitting fire surrounding them.
“You let her go!” Peter yells out, his eyes filled with rage, and the rage in his eyes is not for her, but for her abuser.
It hurts nonetheless. Seeing that rage on his beautiful face.
If she could, she’d make his pain go away in a heartbeat. Just like that. For all of their family, too. All of them.
She breaks down in tears again, not out of fear, or anger this time, but out of shame. How foolish she’d been, to think that a life without Thanos would come so easily. Foolish to think that she’d escaped from him entirely.
Foolish to think that… that she could love anyone without consequence, without causing them to suffer for what she’d done…what she’d left behind so recklessly.
“Not him–not him, Peter.” Gamora chokes out, her voice a whisper on the wind, but the only thing the wind carries. There’s unspoken things left to imagination once he hesitates.
Me, she thinks desperately, not caring if she sounded insane. Shoot me–you can live another day, please, Peter–
His index finger shakes on the trigger of the gun, and she heaves out a breath.
It’s torture, and she has to mentally applaud the mad bastard behind her for his efforts.
“You promised!” She manages, panting as she beseechingly looks at him, through him, to make him pull that fucking trigger—
“You expect too much from him, Daughter.” Thanos murmurs, his voice a sickly sweet hum above her as he taunts. “She’s asked, hasn’t she?”
“Do it.”
Her heart is going fast, too fast for it to function, and the pain underneath her skin tightens further as she hyperventilates, like if the small garrotte she’d made Nebula months ago had slit into her neck cleanly, not choking but wounding her.
She still hadn’t given it to Nebula. Maybe she could ask someone. One of her siblings. Maybe Proxima? Ebony?
Now she really was going insane.
She bites down on her lower lip as she’s shoved forward, a helpless whimper escaping her as she stares down the barrel of the blaster doomed to end her.
She wants to say goodbye. The words feel so foreign in her mind–their relationship could’ve been so much more…it was so new.
Instead, she sobs into the tension-filled air.
Vows to him that she loves him, more than anything in the galaxy, and grits her teeth as she hears his confession, feels tears spilling down her face as she prepares to die–
As she takes a last look at him and all of their family dead on the ground through the mass of bubbles, there’s a flash of dazzling blue, and she’s back on the Sanctuary.
Back home.