One thing I kept finding myself reflecting on while writing this is that Loki and Nebula are just...really so *young*, when you get down past all their issues. Gamora, too. Yes, they're ferocious warriors, and at this point they're Thanos' trusted assassins, his personal weapons. But when you write them having to interact peacefully with others, or amongst themselves - because even for them, there had to be peaceful, ordinary moments where they weren't doing evil - it really drove home the fact for me that as a result, there's a lot of just living life that they missed out on.
Probably an obvious revelation, I know, but it hit home especially hard writing it.
Loki had a family.
He'd never actually told her as much, of course, but Nebula had quick wits and a good memory. She'd put the pieces together, bit by bit.
The fact that Loki still had a family – actually had one, now, alive and out there somewhere – besides her and Gamora and Thanos was strange enough. Of course, she and Gamora had both theoretically had family before him, but she couldn't remember and knew that Gamora couldn't either. They might as well have been strangers. They might as well not have existed at all.
Thanos normally didn't take those who had anywhere else to turn. If he had to arrange that they had nowhere else to turn, then so be it. Loki had all but fallen into his possession; that much was true. He had sworn his allegiance and served faithfully so far. Nebula, however, could not believe that such a state of affairs would be allowed to continue. Thanos did not tolerate divided loyalties.
Then again, so much about Loki and his place with them was…strange. What was one more curious anomaly? And Nebula did find herself curious, in that way only Loki and all his unfamiliarity seemed able to bring out of her. She found herself wanting to ask – what was it like? To have a mother and a father and a brother? To just…live with them, no service required to prove your worth to the family? To be bound to one another by something more than obligation?
These were all things she had never known and knew she never would. Nebula never asked out loud, however, because she sometimes doubted that Loki did, either. The topic of his family was clearly a sore one, but she'd put the pieces together.
For one, he had a sibling. Brother or sister, she didn't know, but definitely older if the way he regarded Gamora with an almost visceral loathing was any indication. She actively avoided direct confrontations with him in training exercises, now, just because Loki tended to ignore any and all stated objectives for the sake of going after her.
Of course, Nebula couldn't help reflecting with some bitter satisfaction that Gamora hadn't helped her case very much.
The very first training exercise to pit the three of them against one another was an old torment of Nebula's – recovering hidden emblems from a hostile environment. In this case, it was a nest of mountains and craggy, barren cliffs. First one to take all three was the winner, and the two failures would have to take whatever punishment was deemed suitable for the day.
She knew what Gamora would try, of course. So Nebula had hung back, at first, following Loki as she knew Gamora would and trying not to be seen by either of them. Sure enough, when Gamora allowed herself to be found, in a reasonably clear area on the lip of a rise, Loki had closed with her immediately and Nebula had gone unnoticed.
From her hiding place shadowed within a crack in a nearby wall, Nebula watched them fight. Gamora attacked with her swords and Loki with his knives. Ordinarily, that would have made it no contest at all, but she knew that Loki had something neither of them did, something that properly shouldn't exist at all. Loki had magic. Not cybernetics or mutations, actual magic. It was, she knew, a large part of the reason why Thanos had been so interested in keeping him nearby, and a large part of the reason Loki had been designated to serve without undergoing any body modifications as she and Gamora had. Thanos would not risk that talent being disrupted or lost.
Nebula still wasn't sure how she felt about that. She knew how Loki felt about that – he'd been enraged. But Thanos' word was law. Loki had his magic. He was to use it to the full extent possible in Thanos' service, and protect the body that housed it to the best of his abilities.
Nebula, for her part, probably would have been happier if he hadn't been able to keep up so appallingly well with just his magic.
Even then, that was only enough to bring the two lethal assassins onto an even footing. This, of course, provided Gamora the perfect opportunity to make her offer. In the clear, bordering on thin mountain air, Nebula heard the words well enough from her hiding place in the shadows in the distance. She didn't need to, however. She would never forget them.
"Well struck" Gamora gave her bloodied sword and easy twirl. "But we could fight all day."
Loki answered in a growl. "You flatter yourself." From here, however, she could hear that they were both out of breath.
"As do you. But answer me this, Loki." Gamora lowered her swords. "The master trains his children to turn adversity into advantage, does he not?" She slid one back into its sheathe.
Loki's back was to her, but Nebula could see by the set in his stance and hear in the tone of his voice that he remained wary. Wary, but not immediately hostile. He was doomed. "Your point, Gamora?"
She offered him her hand, open and empty. She smiled like nothing was wrong and everything was going to be okay. "So we spare ourselves the pain. We work together, as I think you and I only could. Share the prize, share the praise…it's the only truly sensible course of action, wouldn't you agree, brother?"
They were words that Nebula had once believed could be true. That, she knew, was why Gamora put on this little ruse – to break them of the delusion. It was a kindness, really, even if it took the form of a knife in the back or a shove off a cliff.
Nebula tensed where she hid, waiting for Loki to take her hand. She waited for him to make the same mistake she had, because of course he would. Gamora was just that convincing, just so…perfect. And Nebula found herself torn between vindictive satisfaction that she would not be the only one who was so foolish and twisted sympathy for him already.
Loki did not take her hand. His back was to Nebula, so she couldn't see whatever set him off. Something, however, most certainly did. She could almost hear whatever it was go "snap". He went from motionless to lunging in a blur, with a wild snarl that barely sounded human. Too startled to react in time, Gamora went down with a cry of shock. A tangle of limbs resolved itself into Gamora on her back, Loki on top of her. His boot was pinning one wrist, her other sword had been knocked from her hand. Any attempts she might have made at escaping an otherwise appallingly sloppy grapple were stymied by the fact that Loki was trying to punch and tear at her face with his bare hands and more ferocity than she had ever seen from him. It was some small mercy for Gamora that his knives had been forgotten in the heat of his frenzied rage.
In the clear, almost thin mountain air, Nebula could easily hear what he was snarling and spitting like a maddened animal as he tried to maul her sister.
"Faithless, worthless, wretched, lying, lying…"
There would be no getting in between them, Nebula knew, without getting the same or worse from both. Besides, she realized as she watched that she had just been presented with a perfect opportunity, what suddenly felt like the first one in her life.
The master did train them to turn adversity into advantage, but who said the adversity had to be hers'?
So Nebula left them there, on the ground. She hurried on ahead instead, desperate to seize her chance. So for the first time in her reborn life, when the alert that marked the end of the lesson sounded and transmat energies grabbed ahold of all of them, it was Nebula who stood before Thanos holding the prize and Gamora standing defeated, and Loki as well.
"I'm not sneaking you any food," she told him later. "You've proven you don't deserve any." Besides, no one had shown her any such mercy when she'd been the one condemned to starve for her failures. More to the point, they would both be punished if she was caught defying Thanos so blatantly, or even if he knew that they'd dared give voice to the possibility.
"I wouldn't take anything from you if you did," Loki retorted. "I know better." Then he smiled – a feral sort of smile, showing too many teeth. "Besides. It was worth it."
He would be living the next week on nothing more than willpower to sustain himself, and he thought it was worth it. Because Gamora would be suffering with him.
Nebula wondered, for the first time but not the last, just who he was imagining suffering in her place.
For all that they were pitted against one another, the fact that Gamora had both seniority and Thanos' preference over the two of them meant that Nebula and Loki found themselves strangely on a level with one another. However much they might fight between themselves, it wouldn't change where they stood in the grand scheme of things. It was almost freeing to realize, really, so they generally went somewhat easy on one another just because their energies were better spent elsewhere. They weren't nice to one another by any sane stretch of the imagination. But they were less cruel, and maybe that was all that could be hoped for.
For all that they were made to play at siblings, at family, by unspoken agreement Loki and Nebula avoided the word and all its implications around one another, because the implications were horrible for reasons they never discussed aloud but never really had to.
"Friends" would still have been the wrong word, but it would have been closer.
Loki had a mother, and he adored her. He adored her to the point of madness, perhaps – or that was the only sane explanation for what happened the day she made that particular discovery.
It had been a quiet day, or whatever passed for a quiet day for the three of them. No outstanding missions, no looming threats. It was a day they were meant to spend tending to their equipment and keeping themselves in order.
Instead, on her way back from the flight simulator, passing by his room to hers', Nebula found Loki talking to someone who wasn't there.
He'd left the door open, which was unusual for Loki. She'd never met a person so private besides Thanos himself, and sometimes wondered bitterly if it came from not having had everything you were laid bare on an operating table more times than you could count. He didn't notice her when she stepped around the edge of the door just enough to peer inside, which was also unusual. Loki was protective of this space that had been set aside as "his", and had a field of personal space that could extend for yards, for all that he was learning to ignore it.
He also sounded on the verge of tears, which was…less unusual, but getting more so. With Loki, however, tears were only ever a sign of anger, of frustration, too much rage to siphon off any other way. This, however – the look in his eyes, the tone of his voice – as he spoke fast and frantic and stumbling to a point in space that was empty to all of Nebula's senses…could be called nothing short of "anguish".
"I don't know where I am! I don't know what any of these things are! All I know is that I'm so, so far away, I close my eyes and I can't even see the World Tree. He won't tell me, Mother, he doesn't want me to know, if I knew I could find my way back!" He reached out his hands in pleading, closer to supplication. "You found me, don't you know? Can't you see?"
She apparently couldn't. Loki's expression crumbled into something hopeless, defeated. Every part of him seemed to sag with a weakness she'd never seen in him before, not even when he'd been starving or bloodied or chained. "Oh," he said, very quietly. "I see. I should have known."
He drew back, suddenly, just a half-step, and Nebula could imagine whoever he saw there reaching out to him now.
Somehow, she found herself imagining the person – imagined this invisible, ephemeral, caring Mother – as a Luphinoid like her, instead of an Asgardian like him. Somehow, in this stolen moment, she couldn't even find it in herself to berate herself for such weakness.
"Home?" Loki was saying. He said the word like it tasted strange. He closed his eyes for just a moment, pressed a hand to his chest as though bracing himself. Even before he'd opened his eyes to look at his mother once more, tears had started to slide down his cheeks. "Do you mean that? Can I…can I come home?"
Neither of them ever knew what her reply would have been.
One of them should have anticipated what came next, but neither of them had until too late. "Too late", in this case, was marked by the Other's arrival.
As always, she felt it before she saw it, and what she felt was a sickly shiver up her spine like the long, wet tongue of some primordial thing. A split-second later, Nebula stepped back hastily from the door as the air twisted and warped before her eyes, marking the arrival of Thanos' most trusted general. His back was to her when he finished materializing, which told Nebula all she needed to know about just who was in trouble this time.
Even in the middle of his half-heard conversation, Loki felt the Other coming as well. His eyes went wide with horror, his spine rigid. "No," he whispered.
Something happened next – something magical that obviously required a great deal of effort on Loki's part, to the point that he sagged to his knees, panting. On the very edge of hearing, Nebula thought she might have heard something, some high, distant, echoing cry. She couldn't be sure, however, and anyway, there were more important things to concern herself with.
That thought was almost a relief, after the strangeness of the last few moments.
"My lord Thanos demands your presence, Asgardian," the Other hissed, its voice as much in the mind as well as the brain.
Loki looked up at the dark, cowled shape, his green eyes all but glowing with power and rage. "Your lord Thanos can go right to the depths of Hel," he snarled, surging to his feet and lunging for the Other.
They'd all had the monster's clawed, creeping fingers in their heads. They all knew the pain it could cause from barely lifting a finger. It was in no danger from Loki, not really, not when all he had to hand was a blade formed of energy and his power over ice. He was only making the inevitable punishment worse on himself.
Nebula still got there first, bringing her fist down on the back of Loki's neck and activating the electrified grip with a thought. He stumbled mid-charge, convulsing and screaming as well over half a million volts coursed through him, lighting up every nerve and dropping him back to his knees. Nebula let him fall, standing over him and watching as he slumped forward bonelessly, only just managing to catch himself on his hands as well and avoid collapsing onto the floor. There he remained, with a breathless, shuddering moan of pain. She could easily see him trembling.
Not for the first time, and not the last, she was struck with how fragile he could seem, even a moment after having to be shot down like a maddened animal. It was a curious, fascinating thing.
"Nebula," the Other murmured, as though it had only just noticed she was there. Perhaps it had, she thought bitterly. "Your assistance is…gratifying, but unnecessary. I assure you, I have the boy well in hand."
"Don't bother." Nebula's voice sounded strange to her own ears, somehow. She didn't look up from regarding Loki. Loki, in turn, was clearly listening, though he did not look up at her. "Let me take him to Thanos for you. I'm sure you've got more important things to bother with, but it's my night off."
"Oh? And why this sudden initiative, my dear?"
She could feel it prodding at her mind, and let it. After all, it would find no sign in her thoughts that she intended to do anything but take Loki to see Thanos, to receive whatever punishment it had been decided he deserved. She did intend to do just that.
Nebula even meant it with all her heart when she kicked Loki as hard as she could in the stomach, though it necessitated her stepping back as he retched violently at the force of the blow, arms moving to wrap around his stomach for all the good it would do. She reached out, grabbed him hard by the hair, and shoved him to the ground for good measure.
Loki fell, and this time, he did not attempt to rise once more.
"Because," Nebula heard herself say, still feeling ever-so-slightly disconnected from the sound of her own voice. "No one may speak of my father that way."
Loki opened his eyes just enough to look up at her, but not enough for her to see anything of what he was thinking in that moment. Nebula stared levelly back, hoping he saw nothing in her either.
There was a moment that could have gone either way, that dragged on until she could feel the weight of it in her shoulders. Then the Other stepped away from the door, and she bit back a sigh of relief as she felt the tension ebb away with it.
"Be hasty, now," it said to her, and Nebula also forced herself not to roll her eyes at the reminder. She knew she'd get him down to Thanos faster than it would, even allowing for all she had to say to him. "The boy's disobedience has brought Thanos to a temper…and we would all do well not to stoke it higher."
"Don't have to tell me twice." She reached down, grabbed him by the shoulder, and hauled him upright, forcing him to stand. "Come on."
She kept a bruising grip on his arm, but was still just a bit surprised that he actually let himself be dragged from his room so easily. Nebula couldn't shake the sense that something had…broken, inside of Loki, when she'd put him on the ground. As so often seemed to be the case with Loki, she wasn't sure how to feel about that. On the one hand, it had probably been a necessary evil. On the other, she still remembered that even the necessary steps were not always pleasant.
She didn't speak even when they were waiting for the elevator at the end of the hall, not until she felt the unhealthy pallor that always marked the Other's attention clear from the air. "Don't fight it," she murmured to him then. "Don't make it worse. And for d'ast sake, don't ever say such things where he can hear you ever again." They both knew that, within the walls of the fortress, Thanos could always hear. Those moments where he might not be listening were nowhere near common enough to trust your fate to.
"You were there," Loki said in a flat, toneless voice. "You saw all of that."
She remembered that this was a point that had not been addressed yet, not really. She also remembered that he had other things he should be worried about, but denial was a powerful force. "I saw something," she said carefully. "I wouldn't say I had any idea what the hell any of 'that' was."
The elevator arrived. The doors slid open, and she gave him a half-hearted shove inside before stepping in after him. When the doors slide shut behind them and she felt them start to descend, down and down and further down, Nebula allowed herself to slump against the wall of the car beside him, deliberately staring at nothing just as he was.
"Was that really her?" she finally dared to ask. "Your…mother?"
She still wasn't sure she'd entirely discounted the idea that he'd had some kind of psychotic break, but he seemed remarkably coherent for someone who had just taken leave of his senses. Besides, Nebula was not so proud that she could not admit that there was a great deal she still didn't know about magic, even if she didn't like it.
"Yes."
"So she's…what, found you?"
"More or less."
"She was looking?"
"Yes." She'd never seen someone look so touched and so miserable at the same time.
Nebula was not good at being gentle, or even really at being nice. When she reached out to clap a hand on his shoulder, however, the gesture was companionable rather than hostile and her intentions were good. "Pray for her sake that she never finds you again." Thanos' reach was boundless, and so was his possessiveness when it came to his children.
Like it or not, they were his children now.
He let her hand linger for a moment before he shook her off. "I know," he said, very quietly. "That's why I sent her away myself."
"Good." After a pause, feeling like she should add something, Nebula did: "Well done. You should tell him that. Who knows? It might count for something." That even if he had rediscovered his defiance, he wasn't prepared to be stupid about it. It was impressive to Nebula, at least, that restraint, so hastily reconstructed when she'd seen him so impossibly vulnerable before.
She knew she would have done the same, in his place. She would have been grateful for the chance to do the same.
Loki let out a huff, edged with a humorless laugh. "Perhaps I should," he said. "I suppose my situation can't get much worse now, can it?"
"Of course it can," said Nebula simply. "It always can. But no one will make sure it doesn't except us."
He smiled faintly, but his eyes were distant and sad. She knew he understood, and was glad of it. Like it or not, this was their life now. Better to make the best of it than suffer the horrible, agonizing, screaming annihilation she knew awaited any who tried to run. Better to survive than fall, if only to spite everyone who believed that they inevitably would.
The light over the elevator doors came on, and they felt the car slow to a gentle stop. Loki already looked faintly ill – perhaps Thanos had just made his impending displeasure psychically or magically known, since the Titan still couldn't just flip a switch in Loki's head like he could with his daughters.
"You don't have to come," Loki said quietly, his eyes on the door as though it were some ferocious monster in its own right. As the doors yawned open, revealing straight, dark corridor beyond like a waiting gullet, Nebula could almost see it. "I'm not going to run."
What he meant, of course, was that she'd already seen him laid bare once. He didn't want it to happen again. Nebula sympathized, but ultimately that didn't mean anything. So her reply was to place a hand on the small of his back and give him a perfunctory shove forward. "Yeah, I do," she said, just as quietly. "I volunteered to make it my responsibility to get you down here, damned if I know why. If I let you go on alone, it's my hide on the line for 'losing track of a prisoner'. Again."
They stepped out into the hallway beyond just as the doors slid shut behind them and the elevator left them there. "So I'm not going to lose track of you," she finished simply.
She didn't intend the words to mean anything except as a simple statement of fact. Yet they wound up tasting of something somehow more. She could feel the words hanging in the air between them, far longer than a passing statement should have. Loki looked strangely soothed to have heard them, and Nebula felt a little better for having said them.
Nebula resisted the urge to flinch away when Loki reached out towards her. This proved to be for the best, because all he did was mimic her from earlier, by clapping her on one shoulder, in a gesture that for lack of any better word might be called "companionable." He just placed his hand slightly higher up than she had, however, so that his fingers brushed against the back of her neck, rested there. "I believe you," he said, and this time his smile was less a sickly thing. Bolstered, somehow.
Damned if she knew why.
Especially since she was afraid she did know why, and was damned if it was true.
Nebula let his hand linger for a moment before she shook him off. "Come on," she said, declaring the moment silently ended, for both their sake's. For the look of the thing, if nothing else, she took his arm to tow him smartly along the hall once more to meet his punishment. He went without a fight.
After leaving him kneeling at Thanos' feet, Nebula didn't see Loki again for nearly a week.
When he was brought back to them, deemed fit to serve once more, it was as though the meeting with his mother and his newfound surge of defiance had never happened. Once again, he was Thanos' loyal weapon – quiet, cunning, vicious, obedient. There were times when Nebula wondered if he even remembered that meeting and that moment which had necessitated nearly a solid week of re-education. Perhaps Thanos had somehow wiped his mind clean of it, or else buried it so deep inside that it could never be known again.
He had his ways. Nebula generally tried not to think of how those ways might have been used on her. After all, it wasn't as though there was anything she could do if they had been. It might even have been considered a kindness, in a way, if he had taken the memory away. To free Loki from the burden of knowing that he had a family out there who was still looking for him, who still cared, when in truth they couldn't do a damn thing to change anything now.
If he ever met them again, it could only go one way. Thanos would make sure it only went one way.
Or perhaps her imagination was running away with her, and Loki was just that good at pretending. He wore a second skin on a regular basis, after all. He'd had plenty of practice at lying to himself as well as others.
Either way, Nebula found herself grateful that things went back to normal after that, more or less. Loki was skittish of physical proximity and touch for a while. She saw it in the way he carefully placed himself just outside the reach of whoever he was talking to, if he could, and how his fingers flexed as though itching to lash out if he couldn't.
Nebula and Gamora both understood. They both even sympathized, and so most importantly they didn't press the point if they didn't have to. They stayed just out of arm's reach if they could. Though Nebula did come across Gamora and Loki talking one night, sequestered away in a corner of the sparring fields. She stayed away and let them talk, even if it kept her too close to hear anything. It was perhaps the first time she'd seen them looking…okay with one another. She could still zoom in enough to see that Gamora was doing most of the talking, and Loki listening quietly.
He looked better the next day, and that was what mattered.
His apprehension of the dark had also been newly ignited, though she only knew it because he refused to sleep closed in his windowless room for a while. Instead, he found nooks and quiet crannies hidden around the fortress – no matter how small, no matter how cramped, as long as there was the faintest bit of light.
As long as those anxieties and hesitations didn't get in the way when there was work to be done, they left him alone about all of it. Loki, in turn, was too proud to allow any of those anxieties and hesitations to get in the way when there was work to be done. So they faded away like echoes, or else were locked away like prisoners in his own head. It was all the same in the end.
In fact, the subject of Loki's family might never have come up again, if they hadn't both been drunk and bored one night. The job had brought them to an open-air tavern at the edge one of the Adjufaran souks. They were waiting for their broker to show up – the topic of trade was information, but they were prepared to add in some violence if necessary. In the meantime, however, there wasn't much to do but sit, wait, and look around.
Loki had been making that last part significantly less dull by making fun of half the bar in an undertone only loud enough for her to hear.
"I wonder how many times his mother had to be surprised by the family dog to produce a son like that," he mused, nodding at a Skrull that was in the middle of a particularly heated discussion with a Z'nox. "Or maybe not the dog. A dog would have a better bark. A large toad, perhaps. Do people keep pet toads?"
"If they start throwing punches, it could put us off schedule," Nebula pointed out, biting back a smile. None of his jokes would probably be half as funny if she wasn't halfway through her fourth Zeero Beero, but she was and so they were. Besides, the drink had put them both in a fairly ebullient frame of mind in general and that was nice, for a change.
Beyond that, her concern was mostly that she didn't want to bother getting up to go and break up the fight if and when – though it was fast looking like "when" –it broke out.
"That's what we paid the bartender for. It certainly wasn't for the drink." He jabbed a finger towards the Rigelian bartender who was so far attempting to ignore the ruckus. "Subduematic behind the bar. Probably scavenged, considering where we are, but that doesn't mean it won't pack a punch even on a Skrull."
"Then I guess we can just get cozy under the table and wait for this all to blow over."
Nebula had lived through a lot of fights, and so had a sense of them by now that went almost to the bone. When insults started flying that were so complex and cultural that her translator circuits gave up in a huff, she motioned Loki off his stool. Fortunately, they'd gotten a table that put their back to the wall – no other sensible course of action, really. So they could duck down underneath it and still have one side covered when the Z'nox ducked the punch thrown by the Skrull and it wound up catching a member of an off-duty Badoon cadre in the back of the head. The Badoon surged to his feet with a curse, his War Brotherhood rising with them, one of them with such enthusiasm that his tail caught and overturned a nearby barstool, dumping the Kaliklaki who had previously been occupying it onto the nearest table where he splatted face-first into a Kree's dinner plate
Nebula couldn't help but smile, watching the chaos unfold like a flower. It really was a beautiful sight, looked at from the right angles. It was a delicate little model of the chaos inherent in life, not to mention the consequences one strike in the right place could cause.
Both were things she tried to live her life by, and had a connoisseur's appreciation for by now.
And besides, it was just fun to watch. It was sometimes nice to remember that she still had the capacity to feel something like that.
Yet there was still business to be done. Nebula risked poking her head a little further out of cover to take in the tumult. "Even if we're here, and Vox gets here before the next supernova, he might not be able to find us," she murmured. "Or at least that could be his excuse."
"Oh, yes, I nearly forgot." Loki raised a hand and gave his fingers a complicated flick, and there was a faint shiver in the air around him that she knew by now marked magic. Nothing changed that she could see, but that didn't have to mean anything.
"There," Loki said, confirming her thoughts after a second. "He'll see us waiting outside. 'We' can keep him there until it quiets down, or direct him somewhere else to meet…and he won't have an excuse to run off, this time."
"You can do that?" Nebula asked curiously. "From here?"
"Oh, easily. It's only a few feet." He smiled, clearly pleased with himself as he settled back against the wall, drink in hand. After a moment's hum of thought, he added: "The same way you can see in x-ray and infrared at the same time."
That made sense, actually, in a way very few things about magic had so far. Nebula nodded her understanding, sat back beside him, and settled in to watch the free show for a while. No one noticed them, even when bodies went skidding right past them across the floor. Maybe because of magic, maybe because they just weren't making a nuisance of themselves. It was all the same in the end.
The lulling effects of the alcohol coupled with the mild high that always came with being on the right track to finish a job, all combined to loosen their tongues a little more than they might otherwise be, even around one another. It was Loki who broke their little bubble of silence first.
"This has been…wonderful, in a way," he murmured idly. "Since he found me, I've seen so many things. Worlds and people that I never imagined could exist. I thought the universe was vast when all I knew were nine planets." He gestured out at the bar. "There are at least eighteen different species trying to bash each other's brains out in here, and none of them I would have had any cause to recognize before. I'm…Norns, I'm so far from home that none of you had even heard of Asgard, or Jotunheim, before I told you."
"No we hadn't," Nebula agreed easily. Though, lost in thought as he obviously was, she might as well not have spoken at all.
"And all I've learned…the things he knows, the things he's taught me, so many secrets, so many truths." He turned to face her, reaching out apparently without thought to take hold of her hand, as though he was drowning and she was the only lifeline to hand. In the shadows under the table, his eyes seemed almost to be shining. "We don't have spaceships on Asgard. We've never needed to build them. And now I can fly them! All these different people, food, weapons, stories, and it's barely a fraction of the whole. I could live forever and never know it all! And I…"
All that sudden, manic energy seemed to drain out of him like drink from a toppled goblet. Loki slumped back against the wall once more, his fingers uncurling from around her wrists bit by bit. He stared up at nothing, and she heard a laugh bubbling up in his throat long before it escaped his lips. When it did, it was a slightly hysterical sound, and went on longer than she was used to hearing from him.
"And all I can think, here and now, further from home than perhaps anyone has ever been…is that Thor would have thrown himself right into the thick of this." He nodded at the tumult raging on around them. "He'd probably have had the entire place quiet by now."
Nebula took a gamble. "Your brother was a peacekeeping kind of guy?"
"Oh, no. Just a better warrior than any of these pathetic drunks. He started a fair few tavern brawls all on his own, but he was always there to finish them as well. There was this one day, in an alehouse on Alfheim…"
Only then did he seem to properly realize what he was saying – what Nebula had led him on into saying. For a moment, Loki just looked lost. For an instant, she saw a fleeting glimpse of that same vulnerability that had marked him when he'd first seen his mother again.
Don't stop, she wanted to say. She wanted to hear all those meaningless little stories about a life he'd lived with a real family. After all, if they were true, if that had really once been his life, then being a monster didn't disqualify you from having good things. The Universe didn't care. More than that, if he shared these stories with her, maybe that would let her, in some way, share that life with him.
Nebula had once hacked her own arm off to escape an electrothorn net. Somehow, that hadn't been half as terrifying as the thoughts and wants swirling around her head. All because of him.
Not for the first time, and not the for the last, Nebula was torn between the urge to embrace him and never let go and the urge to slit his throat and watch him bleed out.
"But of course, none of that matters now," Loki said, with a dismissive wave of his hand and a pretense at casualness that didn't entirely ring true. Even so, the moment was gone. "You said so yourself. It will be all the worse for them if we ever cross paths again. Just as well that that eventuality seems vanishingly unlikely, isn't it?"
"Thanos won't let them live."
They were words she'd known were true from the start, but at the time hadn't been able to say them. Even Nebula wasn't entirely without mercy, especially for something like this. He flinched to hear them, and she pressed on. "Because as long as they do…you won't be loyal to him. Not completely. He knows that."
Loki bared his teeth at the world in general. Unfortunately, Nebula knew him too well, by now. She knew that was the look he wore when trying to appear more certain than he was. "Weren't you listening, Nebula? I owe nothing to them, and I know they feel nothing for me. They weren't my family, merely my keepers. Thanos has done more for me than they ever could." He stared down at himself – at everything he carried and, beneath that, everything he knew that had been granted to him for the sake of his service to the Mad Titan.
"Even if I could…I wouldn't go back," he said, almost to himself. Almost as though trying to reassure himself. "I am so much…I am so much more than I ever was. There is no going back now."
They were all the right words. They believed them because they had to.
Nebula still reached over to pat him on the shoulder, without looking over at him. She did so in such a way that her hand rested higher up his shoulder, so that her fingers could linger against the back of his neck. She'd noticed that he seemed to like it when she or Gamora did that to him, for all that he would sputter and try to pretend otherwise.
So she offered him that strange bit of reassurance now, along with the words she spoke next. "I'll do it, if you want. When the time comes. They won't ever have to know you had a hand in it."
She meant the offer sincerely, and she meant well in making it – at least as well as she could. She made it to spare him a pain that neither she nor Gamora had ever had to know. A pain that Nebula believed, deep down in her twisted mechanical heart, that no one should ever have to know.
Loki said nothing aloud in reply – just downed the rest of his drink in one, and let her touch linger for longer than normal. As the fighting slowly died down around them, they even found themselves leaning a little towards one another, so that only the central table leg really properly stood between them.
That, in a way, was answer enough. There was no way to plan for the future, after all, not really. All you could do was shore up your own defenses and try to live through whatever it threw at you. Nebula had learned that a long time ago, and clearly so had he. It was one of those moments of mutual understanding that she'd never really found with anyone else before him.
In the end, it was something quiet, something good…and, most importantly, something that was only theirs'.
The moment ended, of course, as all good things inevitably did. It ended when Loki's eyes went wide with surprise, and she felt a shiver of tension run through him beneath her hand. The surprise quickly coalesced into anger. It was borderline rage, in fact, but directed this time, focused like a lens.
"Damn that little insect!" he snarled, all but bounding out from the under the table and coming up to his feet, his knife seeming to materialize to hand. Nebula was a second slower to follow, but only because she had a few more pieces to put together to understand what was going on.
"Vox is on the move?" she asked grimly, drawing her own blade. The few scattered combatants who were still on their feet looked round at the two of them in surprise. Loki and Nebula ignored them one and all – there was work to be done, now, and life was simpler for it.
"Yes. On the move towards us! With a couple of thrice-d'ast Nova Corpsman to heel!"
"Damn it all!" Nebula swore. The Nova Corps didn't technically have jurisdiction this far out, and Adjufar in particular was notorious for being the frontier of galactic law. There were, however, plenty of warrants out on the two of them already, individually and together. It would certainly provide enough justification for them to move in for the arrest under intergalactic peacekeeping treaties wherever they happened to cross paths with the two assassins, provided that they knew where to look. Vox, damned little imp, had clearly told them where to look. Thanos' business apparently wasn't good enough for him any longer.
Even now, even after everything, Nebula felt a hot stab of indignation and offense at the realization. There were plenty of others, smarter and more timely, who would leap at the chance to offer up their service to the Mad Titan. No one would miss one little weasel in a street full of willing replacements.
She would see to that.
"Wait," Loki barked warningly, as Nebula made to lunge for the door. He flung out an arm that, even moving as quickly as she was, caught Nebula in the chest and held her back a moment. Even as she glared at him, however, it was moment enough for Loki to hurry on: "Let's do this properly. We still have a minute or so before they try to put a couple of ghosts in chains and realize their mistake. Use that time well, and we might just make out all right after all."
He smiled a smile like the glint of light on the edge of a knife. "After all, what does the master always teach us?"
"Turn adversity to advantage," Nebula finished with a wolfish grin of her own. She flipped the knife into a stabbing grip, and turned to make her way to the back door instead. They could circle around the alleyway back out to the front, and turn the tables on their pursuers instead. "But he never said the adversity had to be ours'."
They moved away together, into the night and the gathering storm. After all, there was work to be done.
Special thanks to "Rocket Raccoon and Groot - Steal the Galaxy" for providing a lot of the local color that that last segment. Go and read it. It's a wonderful book.