because someone asked for Nebula. and because they really do have quite a bit in common.
"Did you get the intel from Romanoff?" Nebula asks as Rocket makes his way into the cockpit.
"I said I was going to, didn't I?"
"Just checking," she mutters.
"Despite what you might think, I'm not an idiot. I said I was gonna, so I did."
"Okay," she replies with a tightening of her jaw and a glare. Yes, she and Rocket had made some inroads to getting along. But the universe had irrevocably changed thanks to the actions of her father, and so she was falling back on the behaviours and defences that had kept her alive for years.
"It's uploaded," he confirms after placing the communicator the Avengers had given them into the ship's data scanner.
"I'll get started on verifying the-"
"Actually," he interrupts, "Romanoff did that already. From what I can see her work looks pretty solid."
Nebula's gaze narrows. "Are you actually trusting her?"
He shrugs. "I'm not saying we don't look over it, I'm saying it's not bad work for a human."
She eyes him for a moment, uncertain as to why he's choosing to trust her. No one is as distrusting as she is, but after a life of crime he had always been the next most cynical among them. It's out of character for him to be accepting the help in the first place, let alone trusting that it's been done correctly. And trusting a stupid human to do it...
"Don't look at me like that," he spits, clearly uncomfortable with the continued scrutiny. "Verify it, but I'm telling you - it looks like it checks out."
She blows out a heavy, frustrated breath. "Well, it did come from Danvers originally. So I suppose it can't be complete stupidity," she reasons.
"Whatever," Rocket answers, beginning to flip switches and key in the coordinates. "Let's go deal with this. I hate this stupid planet."
"Yes, let's," she agrees readily, strapping herself in before beginning to tap away on the tablet with the information from Romanoff about their mission.
The ship lifts off the ground gently and she glances around the cockpit, an uncomfortable feeling settling in as she sees the empty chairs. She wouldn't say she missed them per se, but she'd gotten used to having the idiots around. But Gamora...Gamora she did miss. Anger flares within her as she regrets being unable to exact her revenge on their father herself. His death had brought no satisfaction with it, and now she's left with a feeling of inadequacy once again.
She shakes her head subtly to clear the thoughts and focus back on her task. Her fingers swipe through the information Romanoff had compiled after receiving the tip from Danvers. Begrudgingly she realizes that Rocket had been right. The work wasn't awful. There were some swaths of information missing - but those were clearly areas she, as a human, would not have known or come across. Everything else was correct, and in some places actually helpful.
"I told you," Rocket says smugly, glancing back at Nebula. "Ain't bad work for a humie."
"There's still much information missing," she argues.
"Oh, give it up. I know you were impressed by Stark's intelligence and mechanical know-how while you two were stranded in space."
"Romanoff is not Stark."
"Good, your eyes are still working," he retorts with a roll of his own eyes. "I'm just sayin' she ain't bad, as humans go."
"Just fly the ship," she replies brusquely, her attention dropping back to the tablet as she begins to fill in the missing pieces of information, pointedly ignoring Rockets assertions.
"You guys staying for a few days?" Romanoff asks glancing up from her desk as Nebula enters the room.
It's been nearly a year since they'd first met and they'd just returned the day before after a few long months traveling the galaxy and sorting out some of the chaos that had sprung up in the wake of her father's success at halving the universe's population.
"Yes," Nebula answers and then pauses. "Rocket hasn't recovered from his hangover yet," she adds, an amused smile tugging at her lips but staying hidden.
Romanoff scrutinizes her for a fleeting moment, almost as though she can see the smile beneath the surface, before she arches an eyebrow in amusement. "I warned him to go slow, but he insisted human alcohol didn't hold a candle to the stuff available out there."
"He's right, it doesn't," she answers succinctly. On the whole, human drinks were paltry in comparison to the vast majority available across the galaxy.
"Still knocked him on his ass."
Nebula tilts her head. "That speaks more to Rocket than to the strength of the drink."
Romanoff holds her gaze for a brief moment before breathing out a chuckle and shaking her head. "You're probably right. Need anything from us?"
"I have completed most of the necessary repairs. I believe Rocket wants to complete a few upgrades before we leave though. I don't know what he needs, if anything."
She nods as she leans back in her seat behind her desk, which is covered in books, tablets, mostly empty plates, and a variety of mugs and glasses. Rocket hadn't lied when he said she was a bit slovenly. Clearly the failure to reverse the effects of the stones continues to weigh heavily on her.
Then again, the shadow of that failure looms over all of them...
"You can sit, you know," she offers, startling Nebula out of her thoughts. "You don't need to stand the whole time."
"I know," Nebula answers curtly.
"Okay," Romanoff replies with a casual shrug. "How are things out there? Carol said she was hearing more reports of-"
"She informed us, too."
"Right, of course," she replies slowly before her gaze drops back down to her tablet.
"Why are you doing this?" Nebula asks suddenly. She'd wondered for many months now why Romanoff had inserted herself into the leadership role when she so clearly had fallen into a depression. To be fair, it appeared to be a functional depression since she was still being productive...
Romanoff looks up. "Doing what?"
"This," Nebula answers with a wave of her hands. "Relaying the intel, arranging the holo-calls, leading the rest of your group. You don't need to do it."
"And you don't need to be patrolling the galaxy with someone you once despised, but you are."
Nebula bites off the angry retort that's sitting on her tongue, because as much as she hates to admit it - Romanoff is right.
Romanoff takes her silence as a sign to continue. "No one knows what to do so they're just doing what they can. You and me? We're in a position to impact things on a larger scale than most, so we're doing it."
"Liaising between groups and passing information is not the same as being out there and doing it," Nebula accuses. Romanoff's role in this operation is limited, even if she thinks of herself as their group's leader.
Romanoff scrutinizes her again and Nebula fights the urge to jump up and pin her against the wall, feeling her anger flare in her eyes. That this weakling human would dare to-
"No, it's not the same. But it's what I can do.
Nebula blinks in surprise at her agreement. She agrees?
"It's all I can do," Romanoff adds after a beat.
Nebula finds she doesn't have anything to say to that, and stays silent.
"How did you end up with the Guardians anyway?"
"I wanted to kill my sister," she answers easily.
Nebula finds herself surprised when Romanoff lets out a quick chuckle. "You and I have some things in common it seems. I joined SHIELD and by extension the Avengers because I allowed Agent Barton to get close enough to try to kill me."
Nebula's anger flares once more at the assertion that this human could even begin to understand. "Don't presume to understand me. You haven't lived my life. You don't know what it's like to have grown up as the less favoured daughter of Thanos," Nebula bites back.
"I'm not saying I do. But you don't know anything about me either. You're not the only one to have grown up in a situation that was never going to allow you to be anything but what someone else wanted."
Nebula stares, mind whirring as she tries to suss out the meaning behind Romanoff's words. Why didn't I read those files on the Avengers more closely? she curses silently.
"They stole me away from my family when I was just a kid and raised me in a place where the sole purpose was to train killers. And I wasn't alone there. They stole other girls from their families too. They told us we were sisters under Mother Russia and then turned around and had us fight each other. Sure, at first it was just for training purposes, but then suddenly the stakes were raised and those fights were to the death because we found out that chances were, only one of us was going to make it out of there alive. So in addition to the dozens of men and women I've killed over the years, I have the blood of my own sisters on my hands too. The blood of children ."
Romanoff pauses for just a second to meet Nebula's gaze, something unreadable in her expression, before she continues.
"At first, when I was young, I wanted nothing more than to have my family back. And then, when they beat that out of me, I wanted a sister, or a friend." She pauses for a beat, gaze drifting away. "I wanted to have someone love me . But they took that away too, thanks to a combination of drugs, brainwashing sessions, and some good old-fashioned torture.
"So no, I don't know what it's like to be Thanos' daughter," she says, gaze once again meeting Nebula's and holding it meaningfully. "But I do know what it's like to want for nothing more than a sister. To want to be a person rather than the weapon that someone else made. To hate yourself but be unable to do anything but survive. To want a life rather than just years that you've lived."
Nebula blinks as Romanoff's words roll around her mind. She had known a few facts about the so called Black Widow from the files Rocket acquired for them to learn about their new associates, but she had no idea how dark a past she was hiding. A quick glance at her expression tells Nebula that, like her, Romanoff doesn't share about herself all that often, and that in her haste to explain she'd overplayed her hand. She seriously doubted someone trained from childhood would make such a mistake, unless hampered by emotions - which given the state of depression seemed to indicate just that had happened.
Or maybe it was a conscious decision she muses.
"How did you go from that to fighting with the Avengers? Wouldn't you have been an enemy of theirs?"
"I was a part of the group that formed them, and had already been with SHIELD for awhile then."
Nebula fights the urge to roll her eyes and groan at the obvious sidestep. "Well how did you go from a killer to fighting...what is it you humans call it...the good fight?" she presses.
"How did you go switch from doing Thanos' bidding to joining the Guardians?" Romanoff volleys back.
"It is not the same," she huffs.
"Isn't it? We each had someone with enough of a reason to sway us. For me, it was the man who became my best friend. For you, your sister."
"The situations are different."
"Of course they are. But you can't deny there are similarities."
"How did you escape the Red Room?" she asks, ignoring the assertion that they're similar.
"I did their bidding for a long time, but the more freedom they gave me, the more I began to fight against the conditioning. Eventually I got out, but they got me back and layered on some more conditioning. I began to break it again some time later and started to try and work by my own moral code. I was still doing their bidding, but I never killed kids, and tried to avoid the hits that would've left behind kids. But I was tired. Tired of not being free and being unable to shake off the rest of the shit they put in my head.
"My actions got the attention of agencies across the world. The CIA, MI6, Interpol...pick any country and I guarantee they were trying to eliminate me. SHIELD sent Agent Barton to kill me, and when I finally let him catch up to me, I was so tired that I wanted him to kill me, because I couldn't do it myself. But he wouldn't, and he went against his orders and brought me in instead. He was kind, and he offered me a chance to find out who I was as a person, and to work at clearing off some of the red in my ledger.
"They spent months digging out the triggers and conditioning in my mind, and to this day I know there are probably still some in there. But I felt better doing good. I felt better working for people who wouldn't ask me to use my body to get close to a target. I felt better working for people who didn't punish the smallest of mistakes with threats of torture or actual torture. I felt better working for people who were trying to protect people."
She pauses to let out a heavy exhale before continuing.
"And I got so much more than just a job. I got a family, I got friends, I got a home…"
"But you lost all that because of my father," Nebula points out, beginning to better understand where the root of her apparent depression stemmed from. Having lost her own sister, she can understand the swirl of rage and sadness.
"Some, yes. But I think we can fix this."
Nebula scoffs. "You still believe that? It's been nearly a year and we don't have any new leads."
"I have to believe it. Because if I don't… If he gets to win… Then everything…all of this was for nothing." She goes quiet, and the words hang heavy in the air with a weight of responsibility. "Besides, I spent too many years letting the assholes win. It's high time we stop that trend."
"Stupidity and foolishness seem to be common among humans," she comments, because the response reminds her of Quill.
Romanoff laughs. "Yes, I suppose they are. We're certainly not generally revered for our cool use of logic. Most of us tend to let our hearts lead us."
Nebula's gaze narrows. "You say that like you don't do that."
"I didn't used to," she admits. "They trained emotion out of us. It took me a long time to learn it again...to learn how to feel things about people and situations."
Nebula's eyes widen slightly. "You think it's a good thing?"
"Oh, don't get me wrong. Ask any of these guys and they'll tell you I'm the most logical and emotionless of the bunch. And they'd be right. I can still slip my mask of the Widow on and turn the emotions off. But I think I've found a balance. Or, at least I had before all this shit happened."
"And now?"
She pauses. "Now half my friends are dust and the world doesn't make sense anymore. Now I don't know who I am or what I'm doing. But I do know that we can't give up. We owe it to them to keep trying."
Nebula scrutinizes her for a moment, letting the words linger in the air once more. She can see the pain and grief in Romanoff's eyes and knows that she isn't lying. It's unsettling, but Nebula thinks that she might be the one person who could possibly understand what it is to lose yourself before you even have yourself to begin with. To understand what it's like to be left holding responsibilities you didn't want but can't give up. To understand what it's like being moulded into a weapon, even if that weapon is so vastly inferior to herself.
She thinks that maybe , out of all the people she's met in the aftermath of her father's actions, Natasha Romanoff might be able to understand some of her pain.
She finds Romanoff's gaze and holds it unwaveringly. "Then we keep trying," she says with a curt nod and walks away briskly, headed back to the ship.
thoughts? feelings? suggestions? do let me know.