"I got this," Rocket says with a dismissive wave of his hands and a shrug. "Go sleep or whatever. We can leave tomorrow," he instructs brusquely. Nebula glares at him for his disinterest in her offer to help him but he turns back to his task of tightening a bolt on one of the bulkheads he'd taken apart for the repairs. "After breakfast," he adds, holding up a wrench for emphasis as he leans back to glance at her.
"Fine," Nebula accepts, knowing it isn't worth arguing with him when he's in one of his moods. She leaves him to his work and instead heads toward the door that leads inside the Avengers Compound, but a figure down on the dock catches her eye. Romanoff, she assesses immediately, clocking the blonde hair with red roots and feminine physique. She amends her destination, heading toward the dock since she'd been intending to check in with Romanoff before they left anyway.
"Hey," Romanoff offers in greeting when Nebula reaches the edge of the dock.
"Hi," Nebula replies with a nod. "Rocket's finishing up the repairs. We'll leave in the morning."
"After breakfast, I assume," Romanoff says with a smirk.
"That's what he said," Nebula confirms.
"Mm," Romanoff hums as she nods.
Suddenly, Nebula's gaze spots some floating lights in the grassy area just off the water. "What is that?" she asks, pointing to the unfamiliar with the Terran phenomenon.
Romanoff smiles at the question. "Fireflies." Nebula frowns as she scans the lights again, never having heard of fireflies. "They're beetles," Romanoff continues, clearly sensing Nebula's confusion.
"Creatures?" Nebula asks, glancing back at Romanoff again. There's an odd softness to her expression that Nebula has never seen on the woman. She's familiar with the grief that permanently lines her expression and the hard edges of her face when she's all business and focused on a task, but the soft edges aren't something she's seen on the woman before.
"Yeah."
"Are they a nuisance?" Nebula asks, still curious about these creatures. She hasn't spent a great deal of time on the planet, but she's already learned of a few other creatures that were irritating. Rhodey had called them spiders and mosquitoes.
"No, not really. They just float around and glow."
"So they serve no purpose," Nebula summarizes. Are all creatures on this planet useless?
Romanoff barks out a laugh. "I'm sure they contribute to the ecosystem in some way," she says with a shrug and a grin, "but I guess you're right. Still, I've always liked watching them, even if knowing the pulsing lights is a mating display makes it weird."
Nebula turns and frowns. "Mating? With the lights?"
Romanoff nods again. "Yeah. Weird, right?"
"Very," Nebula agrees, then pauses for a moment. "Why do you like watching them? Or is watching mating displays a Terran quality?"
Romanoff scrunches up her face in disgust. "No, definitely not. The fireflies are just…" she trails off, searching for an answer before she adds, "pretty."
"So you watch them because they're pretty?"
Romanoff is quiet for a moment, her expression contemplative. Again, Nebula is struck by the softness of her expression. The fireflies are obviously important to her. "And they remind me of better times. They remind me of my sister," Romanoff says.
Nebula's eyes widen. "I didn't know you have a sister."
"Most people don't."
Nebula eyes her for a moment, watching the sadness that flits through her expression. It's imperceptible to most, she knows, but having part of you replaced by pieces of machinery has its benefits from time to time. She wonders why Romanoff is sharing this piece of information with her. "Did you lose her?" she asks, curious if she had more in common with this woman she'd begrudgingly accepted to work with than she'd realized. Perhaps that was why Romanoff had decided to share this apparently little-known bit of information; she knew of Gamora's fate, after all. Perhaps she was trying to bond over a shared understanding of the loss of a sister.
Romanoff nods in answer to Nebula's question. "We were separated as children and then reunited as adults. I…left her behind when I got out of the organization that trained and raised me. Our reunion twenty-something years later wasn't exactly peaceful."
"In my experience, sisters fight more brutally than any others," Nebula offers, remembering the fights over the years between her and Gamora. There had always been something extra between them when they fought, desire to please their father notwithstanding.
Romanoff smiles, her body shaking with her light laughter. "That's true. She was trained by the same organization I was, so we're pretty evenly matched. Good thing too, otherwise she'd probably have injured me pretty badly. She's pretty ruthless that way. Anyway, we reunited and spent a little bit of time together, but then had to separate again."
"Was she a victim of—"
"Yes," Romanoff interrupts her question. "I confirmed it. Pile of dust sitting where she'd last been."
"Sorry," Nebula offers because she knows what it is to lose a sister. Not in the same way, of course, Gamora was gone and never coming back, but she could still understand the feeling of loss.
"Me too," Romanoff answers. They're quiet for a few moments, each watching the pulsing lights float and dance in the otherwise darkening scene. Then Romanoff breaks the silence. "Tell me about her?" she says. "Your sister," she clarifies needlessly after a beat.
Nebula's first instinct is to refuse to answer, but that softness in Romanoff's eyes and expression makes her believe the woman really does want to know about Gamora. I suppose if anyone could understand what it is to lose a sister, it would be Romanoff, she thinks. Nebula doesn't know much about her, but she knows that she'd grown up in circumstances that weren't the norm for Terrans. Stark had mentioned it briefly while they'd been adrift in space, having gotten on a roll of talking and not shutting up for what felt like hours. And so, for reasons she can't really pinpoint, Nebula decides to tell her about Gamora.
"Growing up, my father pitted us against each other constantly," Nebula begins slowly and deliberately. "We fought each time until he declared a winner and the punishment for the loser was for pieces of them to be replaced," she explains with a steely-eyed gaze and a gesture to her face where the machinery was most obvious. She hesitates for a beat before she reveals anything else, hit with a wave of uncertainty and doubt as to why she's sharing these personal things with someone who was effectively a stranger. Distantly, images of her team — absolute idiots that they were — drift to her mind's eye, including her sister. "All I ever wanted was a sister, but she always won and never gave up. I lost so much of myself because of her…but I still wanted her to be my sister."
Romanoff nods, understanding filling her expression. "I know what you mean. My sister had every reason to hate me — and did a little, I think — but she still wanted me to love her. And I wanted her forgiveness, even if I tried to pretend I didn't. It's hard to explain the bond, but it's there even with everything that happened. Still sisters, despite everything." They are quiet again for a beat, then Romanoff asks, "Did you forgive each other in the end?"
"Yes. She— She gave up the location of the soul stone so my father would stop torturing me. She begged him to stop, pleaded for him to let me go."
Romanoff smiles for a second before it falls away and is replaced by a look of sympathy.
"It was foolish," Nebula adds swiftly. "We wouldn't be here, in this position if—"
"She loved you," Romanoff interrupts. "She wanted you safe from that pain. She could do that, and so she did."
Nebula frowns at her simplification. It was an easy equation to understand — her own life was quite obviously not worth that of half the universe. "At the expense of all of this?" she replies immediately in disbelief. She couldn't be that stupid, could she? "My life isn't worth the lives of half the universe," she adds with a shake of her head, verbalizing her thought.
"Maybe in her eyes, it was," Romanoff offers gently, and Nebula startles a bit at the words. She'd wondered them fleetingly on occasion, yes, but had always redirected her thoughts quickly. She knows Gamora had cared. In the end, she'd known that. Had Gamora thought my life worth that of possibly half of all living things? Had she cared that much?
Nebula gives her head a little shake as she lets the thoughts drift away. "I think she would have liked them," she says with a gesture to the beetles, redirecting the course of the conversation. Her mind wanders now to the handful of times that she'd found Gamora and Quill watching a sunset on a horizon, and how at peace her sister had seemed as she'd watched the scenes.
Romanoff smiles again. "You drink?" she asks while holding up a bottle of clear liquid.
Nebula nods warily, her gaze narrowing slightly. "What is it?"
"Vodka. The place where I'm from here on earth — it's practically the national drink there."
Nebula nods in acceptance, prompting Romanoff to offer her a metal cup filled with some of the drink. She holds up the bottle and clinks it to Nebula's cup. "To sisters," she says in a toast, "gone but not forgotten."
Nebula's gaze narrows further but she nods and watches as Romanoff takes a drink from the bottle, roughly the same amount as she'd poured into the cup. Nebula brings the cup to her nose and sniffs the liquid. She frowns, puzzled when she doesn't smell anything of note, and then takes a tentative sip. "This doesn't taste like…anything," she says, confused by the lack of taste. Romanoff just laughs. "Why would anyone want to drink this?"
"Because after a few of these, everything starts to get fuzzy and feel like it matters a whole lot less."
Nebula scowls but finishes off the rest of the liquid and then holds out the cup for a refill. Romanoff obliges and pours some more liquid into the cup, then holds up the bottle again, and Nebula mimics her as she holds up her cup. "To fallen comrades," Romanoff says.
Nebula nods and clinks her glass to the bottle before drinking the liquid in one go this time, then holding out the glass for another. It was weak as far as drinks went, but it was accessible, which was more than she could say of anything else.
Nebula looks at the beetles once more, hesitating as she watches the ebbs and flows of the lights. "To new teams," she offers, thinking of the makeshift team she and Rocket had become a part of.
Romanoff nods, and then they throw back their drinks.
Nebula watches the pulsing, floating lights from her spot at the edge of the ship's ramp as she waits for Thor to arrive. Quill had decided they were going to start searching for Gamora — well, the Gamora that had come from the other timeline anyway — and Thor had eagerly asked to join. It seemed that he was done leading the Asgardians, leaving the task of ruling them to someone else.
Fireflies. That's what Romanoff had called them, her mind reminds her as she watches the beetles. Her thoughts turn then to her former ally, teammate, and leader. She'd had a suspicion back then that Vormir wouldn't give up the stone so easily. She hadn't known a sacrifice was required, though with hindsight she'd realized that her father would never have killed Gamora if it hadn't been strictly necessary. And she would forever feel guilt over not disclosing that to anyone. Romanoff had been a good leader for them, despite how much she had obviously suffered under the weight of their failure to stop Thanos' actions.
"Ready to go?" Rocket asks gruffly, startling her out of her thoughts. She can see he's carrying a bag filled with some of his favourite Terran snacks that he'd discovered over the past five years. They were set to be gone indefinitely, so he'd demanded time to stock up first before they left.
"Still waiting for Thor," she tells him.
Rocket sighs heavily, clearly annoyed. "Everyone else inside?" Nebula nods. "Why ain't you in there with them?"
Nebula shrugs and sweeps her gaze back over the fireflies. "I need to enjoy the solitude before I'm stuck on a ship with you idiots again," she says dryly.
Rocket looks over at the fireflies and then back at Nebula, shrewd understanding blooming in his expression. "Sucks she's dead. As humans went, she wasn't a bad one."
Nebula nods in agreement. Suddenly, she remembers that he'd stumbled on the two of them as they drank and watched the beetles that night.
"Uh, okay... When did you two become all buddy-buddy?"
Nebula turns to glare at Rocket, who'd interrupted their drinking. "What do you want?"
"Just wanted to tell ya upgrades and maintenance are all done. We can leave tomorrow as planned."
"After breakfast," Romanoff interjects with a smirk.
"Yeah, after breakfast. You gonna judge me for that?" Rocket replies defensively, crossing his arms as a deep frown creases his brow.
"No, no, I like breakfast too," Romanoff replies with a shake of her head. "Hey, maybe I'll make French toast for you."
"What the hell is toast? Why is it French?" Rocket demands.
Romanoff stifles a laugh and rolls her eyes. "Oh, relax. It's delicious, that's all you need to know. Have I steered you wrong yet?"
"Well, that stuff is disgusting," he answers while pointing to the nearly empty bottle, "so yes."
"You promised to bring me better stuff, but you didn't," Romanoff counters, "so you don't get to call my vodka disgusting."
"You're disgusting. All of you. Damn humans," he grumbles as he heads back up the path to the Compound.
"She tell you what those things are?" Rocket asks with a nod to the beetles.
"They call them fireflies."
"I guess they're not awful," he offers, shrugging. "Don't seem like they're useful for anything though."
"They're not," she agrees, "but they're…not bad to look at."
Rocket scrutinizes her for a beat before he decides to let it go. "Almost forgot, got this for you, as requested," he says before he rummages in his bag for a moment and hands over the bottle of vodka. "Though can't understand why the hell you'd want to drink that shit."
Nebula had grown to like it — despite its lack of potency — having shared drinks with Romanoff again on a couple occasions. "Thank you," she replies brusquely with a nod.
Rocket takes that to be the end to their conversation and makes his way up the ramp into the ship, leaving Nebula alone again. She eyes the fireflies for another moment and then twists off the cap of the bottle. She hesitates for a second as Romanoff's toast from that night echoes in her mind — to fallen comrades. Nebula nods once and then takes a drink as she thinks of Romanoff, her former leader, teammate, and...perhaps even friend.
so...thoughts? comments? favourite part?
Nebula is a tough character to write, that's for sure, but I think she and Nat would have a lot of common ground to cover.
more to come, though updates will keep being sporadic because real life never comes with a schedule.