I couldn't cope with the tragedy that was the entire Infinity War movie, and this is what came out of it. I never realized how much I loved Quill and Gamora until this movie. This is my first fic for the pairing. Infinity War-compliant, except for a bit at the end that is my own small guess as to part of the plot of the next movie.
The first time she had him in her sights, Peter Quill was only an obstacle. A blockage in her path that she would soon remove.
It was after the slight twist of her hips and the sinking of her teeth into a Xandarian fruit attracted his attention—his interest, like that of other human males, so easily captured—that she realized there was a blockage in his brain as well. He was a man of honor, he said, standing outside the shop of one of the more well-known black market brokers in the galaxy. People called him Star-Lord.
The first time she touched Peter Quill, it was a straight-legged kick to the balls as she nabbed the Orb out of the air where he had so cavalierly thrown it, and it was electrifying. Well, the device he threw after her was, a thin rope that tangled around her ankles and sent tingles of numbness through her calves.
The first time she thought he was an idiot came not long after. Allowing them all to be captured by the Nova Corps, risking the Orb to go back into the Kyln for an antiquated player of music, saving her life not once but twice—once almost at the cost of his own. He was an idiot, with a bloated head and a savior complex.
He was not a survivor. He was rash and stupid and acted on his emotions instead of logic and all too often thought with his dick instead of his brain—if he had a brain. He never would have survived what she had—never would have survived the Mad Titan.
The first time he tried to kiss her, standing close with his Terran music blaring in her ears on a balcony overlooking Knowhere, she almost slit his throat with her sword. She felt only fury then—fury at his treatment of her, fury at how little he thought of her, fury that he ruined what had probably been one of the only intimate moments—moments of actual connection—in her life since her homeworld was destroyed and she had been taken by Thanos.
The first time she saw him as something more—more than an foolhardy Terran who fancied himself a hero, a thorn in her side, an obstacle on her way to foil the plans of her former captor—their ragtag little band was sitting in a circle. "Today, it's given us something. It has given us a chance to give a shit. For once, not run away. I, for one, am not gonna stand by and watch as Ronan wipes out billions of innocent lives."
It would have been different had he said he was doing it for her. That, she could have picked apart, blamed on his fleeting infatuation with her that would disappear as soon as the next being with the requisite parts wandered into his life.
It would have been different if he had done it for the reward Xandar was sure to give them. He was a former Ravager; the exchange of money—or the theft of it, enough to pay for his ship and his girls and his weapons—was what his whole life revolved around.
But no, it was for them. For the countless billions of the galaxy who would be wiped out as Thanos had done to the Zen-Whoberi. As Thanos had to done to her people, her parents, her life. Quill couldn't possibly know how much that meant to her after all these years, and yet he knew.
And then he was an idiot again—a dance-off, of all things, against Ronan the Accuser—but somehow it worked, and somehow she saw it differently this time. Saw him differently. Somehow she understood that his trauma had not turned into a hard exterior with fire within his veins as hers had, but instead a mask, a masquerade of not caring not just about anyone or anything but about the hardships of life in general. Its power to hurt. Its power to take away. She understood, as her skin burned from the inside out and her very being threatened to melt away in a tornado of purple energy, that it was a mask built as a child, a mask that had fit almost too well until he grew to fit the mask instead of the other way around.
And underneath…underneath that mask was someone selfless enough to hold an Infinity Stone knowing it would kill him, and someone with the fortitude to survive it. To take a talking raccoon, a sentient tree, a revenge-seeking Destroyer, and an adopted Daughter of Thanos and turn them into a team. The Guardians of the Galaxy.
It worked, somehow, even after the galaxy was saved. They were, she thought as she waved her hand to turn out the light in Baby Groot's quarters, a group of people just broken enough to create something whole.
The first time she felt the urge to dance, Quill didn't even know she was there. He popped in the cassette alone, the one labeled the Awesome Mix Vol. 1, in the small open space behind the cockpit and set it on low. She watched from the shadows with a hand resting on the hilt of her sword as he—she didn't have the words to describe his actions, but she imagined they were similar to the ones the great hero Kevin Bacon had taken to save the people of Terra from the sticks up their butts. Dancing alone in the middle of the night, Star-Lord didn't look much like a hero.
He looked like Quill.
The first time she allowed him to stand close enough to touch, he was arguing with Rocket about the correct places on the ship to store armed bombs and didn't even notice.
The first time she touched him of her own accord in a way that was more than a fellow Guardian or friend, it was to fix a wisp of light brown hair that had sprung away from the usual gelled spike he kept it in. He held perfectly still, eyes meeting hers and asking questions to which she had no answers.
The first time she held him close, she found him sitting on the Milano's floor, reading his mother's letter with tears slipping down his face.
The first time he held her close, he was attracted by a loud clang from her quarters to find her sword lodged in the wall above her bed and her sitting unmoving on a muss of blankets, muscles tense and immobile.
The first time he touched her hair was the same night, when he eased himself into a sitting position behind her and slowly, as if waiting for her to demand him to stop, collected her black-magenta hair in his palm with gentle sweeps of his other hand. Brushing it out gently between his fingers, he began to braid carefully, slow and calming movements of his fingers that occasionally drifted across the nape of her neck with a feather-light touch, as if on accident.
The first time he slept in her bed, the invitation was silent, a grip of her hand on his wrist as he rose to leave. He lowered himself back down to her level slowly, as if unsure of quite what was happening, and she released him, leaning back to curl up on her side. His pause was long and pregnant with uncertainty, but he gently laid back on the bed too, hand coming to rest on the inner curve of her side, testing the waters. His arm slipped around her waist, legs pulled up to cradle her body, head nestled next to her braided hair, soft puffs of warm breath ghosting across her bare neck.
The first time he broke her heart, the action was both completely expected and blindsiding. Expected, because part of her had always known this would end badly. Expected, because she had watched him slip away to Ego—the father he always yearned for, how could she compete?—from the moment they had landed on this planet. Expected, because after all the pain she had caused in the galaxy under the thumb of Thanos and Ronan, she didn't deserve any unspoken thing.
Blindsiding, because some part of her had believed that the little unorthodox family they had created would be enough for him. That she would be enough.
The first time he healed it, they were standing in the midst of the lights of a Ravager funeral, his arm over her shoulders and hers encircling his waist.
The first time she kissed him, Ego had murdered his mother again in his dreams, leaving Peter sitting in front of the Awesome Mix Vol. 2 watching it spin away in the player. She sat with him quietly, listening to his mother's last gift, and when he finally said, "I'm all right, Gamora," leaned in to press her lips against his temple, the soft tips of his hair tickling her nose.
The first time he kissed her, she was nearly passed out from blood loss from a bandaged stab wound in her side. She had thought he might do something like that all the time she was wavering in and out of consciousness, being dragged back onto the ship by Drax, patched up by Rocket, but it took until he was tucking her into bed, her eyes already closed, for her to feel the light touch of his lips against her forehead. He didn't think she was awake to remember it. She did.
The first time they kissed each other, it was soft and tentative, her hand cupping his face and his tangled in her hair, the other around her waist, gently tugging her closer.
The first time she broke his heart, she asked him for a favor.
The first time she changed the unspoken thing to a spoken thing, she was held in the crushing, hateful grip of Thanos, toes dangling just above the ground, begging Peter to end her life. "I love you," she told him, "more than you will ever know." The pain was clear in his eyes, fear of the action, fear of what horrors would happen to her if he didn't take it.
The first time she woke up from certain death in that eerie red twilight world filled with a flat plane of nothingness, she was determined to wait for him. She trusted she would find him, or he would find her. Someday, she would heal the break in his heart like he had once done hers.
"I love you too."
Please, rant at me about Infinity War. I would love to rant back at you too.