Chapter 3
Nat ducked just in time to avoid the uppercut. She slid her foot out, Gamora jumping over her sweep at the same time that Nat reached for her arm. She flipped the woman over, pinning her arm down for a few seconds before Gamora tapped out.
“We’re even now,” Nat said with a smile. They’d finished the amplifier a while ago, exactly how long she wasn’t sure. Time, it seemed, had forgotten Vormir. She knew, logically, that they’d been on the planet for days, weeks maybe, but it felt like hours at most. Her body seemed suspended, needing neither food nor sleep. With no sun, the atmosphere stayed the same depressing grey, giving no indication of how long they’d been stranded. An infinite amount of time to wait for someone who might never come.
Nat helped Gamora off the ground as the woman begrudgingly accepted her outstretched hand. Once they’d finished the amplifier, they’d searched for the highest mountain on Vormir, only to come back to the very place they’d both fallen from. The Red Skull was nowhere to be found, not that Nat was complaining. They’d set it up, sending out an SOS signal as far as they could, and now all that was left to do was wait.
And by wait, she meant fight.
“How does that move work every time?” Gamora complained, and the two women sat down, silently agreeing on taking a break.
Nat laughed. “Clint still hasn’t figured that one out, either. He complains about it constantly.”
Gamora raised an eyebrow. “Clint? The one who…”
Nat swallowed and nodded, letting her gaze drop to the ground.
“Who is he?”
“He’s…” Nat started, words dying at the tip of her tongue. Who she was to him and who he was to her were two very different things. “He’s my best friend.”
Gamora bit her lip. Nat could see her hesitation, could see the words before Gamora spoke them. She silently wished they hadn’t stopped fighting. “He’s more than that, though, isn’t he?”
“I—he—“ Nat stammered, before sighing. “It’s complicated.”
Gamora nodded. “It seems to me that our closest relationships are always the most complicated.” Nat thought she would elaborate, but she stayed quiet, letting the silence fill the space around them.
With neither of them talking and nothing else to act as a distraction, the silence on the planet became unavoidable. It felt uncanny. The wind howling was the only source of noise, and even that was faint enough that she could barely hear it. Nat had seen a lot in her time on Earth, but this lack of any sort of background noise creeped her out, unnerved her in a way she didn’t ever remember feeling before. The wrongness of it all sent her instincts wild, left her with a desperation to fill the space with sound, with movement, with anything.
“If you don’t mind my asking,” she said, a little louder than necessary, “what’s the deal with you and Nebula? She refused to talk too much about you, but it was obvious that she cared more about you than anyone else.”
Gamora sighed. “We didn’t used to be that way. I — growing up, I made a lot of mistakes. Focused my anger at her because I couldn’t send it toward Thanos. She did the same with me. He made us fight all the time, and we started to resent one another for it.”
“What was that like?” She asked, “growing up with Thanos?”
“It ...it’s hard to explain,” she responded. “He was a monster, obviously. He’s a sadist who thought he was better than everyone else, smarter than everyone else. He thought he was perfect and we were flawed, so he was constantly trying to get us to live up to his idea of what we could be, but it was impossible. And we knew that, and yet…there was still a small part of me that longed for perfection, for that approval. Nebula too. She wanted it more than I did, wanted even an ounce of recognition, but he never gave it to her. She blamed me for that.”
“I’m sorry,” Nat said. “You shouldn’t have had to go through that — no child should have to go through that.”
Gamora shook her head. “I don’t deserve your apologies. For so long, I tried to be the best, tried to be the favorite, if only so I could survive. Nebula and I, we’re close now, but for years I was awful to her. I was convinced that she was just another Thanos, convinced that I had to protect myself and no one else, so I brushed her off. Dismissed her. I let her suffer at his hands because it meant that I didn’t have to. All of her metal parts, all the pain she endured at his hands, could have been avoided if I hadn’t been so selfish.”
“That is not your fault,” Nat said. “You did what you had to do in an awful situation. You didn’t have a choice.”
“No you don’t understand,” Gamora said, her voice rising slightly, “I had a choice. He used to make us fight, and the loser would get a part of their body replaced. I could have said no, could have let her win so she wouldn’t have to suffer again and again, but I was so focused on keeping myself safe that I never did. I was convinced that she was just as crazy as he was.” She took a breath, and Nat pretended like she couldn’t hear the shakiness of it. “I thought she deserved it. All that pain, I thought she deserved it. Better her than me, I’d tell myself, every time I heard her screams.” She shook her head. “She has every right to hate me.”
Nat put a hand on her shoulder. “You were in an abusive situation. That is not your fault. You didn’t do anything to her.”
“That’s the point, I didn’t do anything. I just sat there and let it happen.”
“And what would Thanos have done if you said no? If you refused? He doesn’t seem like the forgiving type to me.”
Gamora opened her mouth to speak, but closed it before anything came out.
Nat turned, making direct eye contact with her. “Listen, growing up, I — I had to do awful things to survive. I was ruthless and selfish because if I had been anything else, I wouldn’t have made it out alive. I didn’t choose that life, and neither did you. A friend once told me that we make unthinkable choices in the face of unthinkable cruelty, and then we’re the ones who have to find a way to live with it. But what Thanos did to Nebula is not your fault.”
Gamora nodded. “It’s easy to understand that, but it’s a lot harder to believe it.”
Nat nodded. “Trust me, I know.”
“Did they ever forgive you? The people you hurt?”
Nat closed her eyes, willing away the faces she’d spent so long trying to forget. “I don’t know — I’m the only one left.”
They both sat for a moment, the oppressive silence returning. Nat opened her eyes again, staring out at the desolate planet, at the place where she’d fought her best friend for the right to die.
“I’m not very good at this,” Gamora said, breaking the silence and Nat’s lost train of thought. “I don’t usually talk about these kind of things.”
Nat laughed. “Me neither. All I know how to do is throw back the words Clint used to say to me.”
“You talked to him about...this?”
“Yeah,” Nat replied, “it became difficult not to — we were traveling the world, going on missions where we’d have to sleep in cargo planes and on luggage racks. Couldn’t really hide the nightmares from him, and he refused to ignore why I always woke up crying.”
“Did it help?”
Nat sighed. “As much as I hate to admit it, yeah. It did. It was hard at first — brought back a lot of things I’d been trying really hard to forget. But it helped. If I’m being honest, it probably saved my life. It gave me Clint, gave me someone who believed I could be better than I was, gave me someone who always had faith in me, trust in me, even when I didn’t have it in myself. It gave me a family.”
Gamora nodded. “The Guardians, we— well, we’re all our own kind of crazy. We don’t really do that often — talk about the things that have happened to us. I don’t know why. It’s not like there’s a shortage of tragic backgrounds on the ship. I think they look to me for that. They shouldn’t -- I’m a hypocrite. I mean, after we fought his father I kept telling Peter he shouldn’t keep his feelings trapped inside, that he should talk about them, but then I’d refuse to talk about Thanos, not unless it was absolutely necessary.”
“It’s easy to know what you should do; it’s a lot harder to actually do it.”
Gamora nodded. “And Nebula...I don’t even know where to start. How to talk about the past when I’m so ashamed of it.”
“I don’t know if I can help you there — I’m still trying to help myself, when it comes to this stuff,” Nat said. “I mean, it took me years to open up to someone, and even with all the Avengers, with the relationships we’ve built, Clint is still the only one who knows everything. But I don’t know -- maybe it’s time to try and change that.”
Gamora sighed. “Maybe. If we ever get off this planet...maybe.”
They sat for a moment, and Nat realized the silence didn’t feel quite so loud anymore.
“I think,” Gamora said with a smile, “I’ve had enough talking for an eternity.”
Nat stood up. “Shall we get back to business then? I believe the ass-kicking I gave you left us at ten wins a piece.”
“Oh, I’d hardly call that an ass-kicking. More like a lucky shot.”
Nat laughed. “Another go? Best out of 21?”
Gamora smirked. “Only if you want your face to get reacquainted with the dirt.”
The women both stood up, shaking out limbs and getting into position, when suddenly Gamora froze. Nat stared at her in confusion, before following her gaze over her shoulder. She turned to find a stream of light heading straight for them, brighter than anything she’d ever seen.
“Please tell me that’s your friend.” Gamora said, and Nat smiled as the figure got closer, the familiar red and blue of her suit coming into focus.