Keep Your Electric Eye on Me
By Jixie
Avengers: Endgame © Disney / Marvel Studios
For exactly two minutes six and three quarter seconds she is together one Nebula and both Nebulas.
The young, angry, terrified Nebula, surrounded by people but completely alone, crushed by feelings of failure and inadequacy, so desperate for her father's approval that she would do anything for him. Anything.
The older, wiser, also terrified Nebula, who has lost everything but endured, stronger and somehow kinder for it, so desperate to erase her father's legacy that she would give her own life for it.
The Nebula that is both of them, a specter existing only in the neural network between one person separated by time.
They realize in the same instant that this… this link between them will ruin everything. This will be her undoing.
But it's not as if she hasn't been undone before.
It's just a touch over two minutes but it's hours, it's years, it's a lifetime— two lifetimes that have collided together here. This is her past, but it is also her future, and now her present.
they are in her head they are in her head they are in her head
It's been two days and five hours since the last time Ebony Maw probed her mind.
It's been five years, seven months, twelve days, and twenty-one hours since the last time Ebony Maw probed her mind. She hasn't forgotten what it's like— it is impossible to forget something like that— but she'd let herself grow some distance from it. Left it out in the elements to rust, along with so many other things she no longer needed: what it felt like to be bested yet again by her sister, the look of disappointment in Thanos's eyes and irritation etched into his features, the sensation of waking up after surgery knowing that another piece of her has been excised and replaced.
For the younger Nebula it is an unpleasant necessity. For the older Nebula it is a violation. A forceful breach into her innermost self. Younger Nebula doesn't know what privacy is. Older Nebula cultivated it, values it, has just been stripped of it.
and they are inside her head
She wants to scream more than she's ever wanted to do anything, but she's frozen, cut off from the outside world, robbed of agency, and
and she wants to scream and
They're looking over her memories, stopping at that crucial moment, keying it up on a screen. She's reliving it, standing in that quiet little cabin, listening to Thanos explain what he's done and why and how. Nebula's love and yearning for him has curdled, gone sour, turned into loathing and disgust… but there's a part of her that hates herself for betraying him and always will. It's the same part of her that still wants his approval, even now, when she's traversed time and space to undo the work of his hand.
Why the hell couldn't they have excised that part?
Here it comes.
Recognition.
Then he's gone.
"And that is destiny fulfilled," says present-past-future Thanos. Nebula can hear him just as clearly as if she were in the same room, and in a way she is. Nebula doesn't hear him at all, she is too caught up in emotional turbulence, spiraling out of control. She betrayed him. She could never betray him. Yet she's just recalled that memory as if it were her own, and in a way it is. Thanos is dead, and she stood there and did nothing. She did nothing. She did nothing.
they are still in her head
She just wants it to be over.
She wants a lot of things.
She never gets what she wants.
On the ship, a horrified Nebula denies her future, pleading for her life. On Morag, a helpless Nebula is getting reacquainted with despair. And here she'd thought that well dried up years ago.
It ends after minutes— lifetimes— and Nebula is lying on a rough-hewn stone floor in a dark ancient room and Rhodey is gone.
Rhodey is gone.
He has no clue that anything happened. If she can't get back, and they discover she's gone missing, there is nothing they can do about it. Not that it matters now— Thanos knows. He knows and he will come for them. The Avengers, who are broken and strange and impractical, who lost everything but came out stronger and somehow kinder for it. Who first became friends and then became family, at a time when she had none. People she would give her life for. They don't know what has happened but Thanos does and she's ruined everything. Struggling to her feet, Nebula realizes that she's about lose them, too.
But it's not as if she hasn't lost everything before.