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Greeting the monster in our easter dresses;
Father says: “bow your head”.
– Tori Amos
In every myth on every planet there’s a good girl and there’s a bad girl, and the good girl gets the prince or the emperor or the queen or the world, and the bad girl gets killed, if she’s lucky.
If she’s unlucky, there are things worse than death.
“No.” Gamora’s voice is a croak; her lips are cracking from dehydration and they’re both watching her blood coil through tubes, coming back into her body changed, brighter, shimmering somehow. Different. Her eyes droop, sluggish, and when she reaches between the pods for Nebula’s hand, her fingertips are sticky-wet with her old boring ordinary blood; the one that doesn’t glitter like a promise of things to come.
“What would you know about anything,” Nebula asks, throat raw. She can’t move anything except her eyes and mouth, upgrades to her nervous system, and she can’t even tell if she’s in agonising pain or if nothing hurts anymore. “How long have you been here?”
“Long enough to know that we can both be the good daughters,” Gamora replies.
Nebula would laugh, if she could. Instead she lies passively, listening to the tubes in her chest gurgle and hum as they breathe and feed her, as they make her better one drip at a time. Gamora’s hand is cool and slick against her own, fingers twitching a little erratically from time to time. Her big sister, who doesn’t want Nebula to be afraid anymore. As if fear is something that can exist here, between one knife and the next.
If she only knew it, Gamora is the perfect example of why she’s the good girl and Nebula isn’t; Gamora’s the one who has time to think about others. Nebula would rip out her sister’s throat right now if she thought it would make all of this stop.
The bad girl doesn’t have the worst options, though. After all, she can always try and take as many people with her as possible, when she finally dies.
-
It is what used to be Nebula’s birthday when her knees rip through. They do not celebrate birthdays with Thanos; Nebula doesn’t recall if she even celebrated them before she arrived here. If she had a family that cared and brought her cake, like the ones her siblings sometimes remember between secretive tears that they will deny in the morning.
Her skeleton is stronger, her joints more flexible with three hundred and sixty degrees of motion, and her bones aren’t really bones anymore, but something harder, lighter, more efficient. The surgeries have taken longer than Nebula can even remember; sometimes she was asleep and sometimes she was awake and sometimes she lay in a bed wrapped in bandages with wires in her eyes and her mouth and her hands and her chest, and Gamora swam into view from time to time with her face torn and bloodied and her skull shaved bare and filled with needles, watching Nebula when she couldn’t speak, offering comfort Nebula didn’t ask for and didn’t want, but didn’t pull away from either.
Her skin, though, cannot hold up to all the adjustments to the bones inside, and even after the grafts and the healing it’s not capable of withstanding what Nebula is learning to do now. She wishes it would grow back thicker, understanding of what she needs now, but it doesn’t, and she’s training with a machine that fires a thousand electric shocks a minute for her to dodge and repel, and it’s her own fault if she doesn’t. The chamber is pitted and scarred, the skeleton of a sibling she never met burned in perfect detail against the wall where they weren’t quick enough. Nebula isn’t like that, though, will never be like that, and she finishes in breathless triumph with her teeth rattling and her fingertips sparked from the couple of hits that slipped through, and when she looks down she’s bleeding oily and dark onto the floor, her skin split across her knees, sagging away from her bones.
She sighs, and bends to see if she can patch it before another round, and hears the skin stretched across her spine tear open like paper. This will not do. This cannot do.
Her father’s expression is impossible to read, as ever, but his smile cascades across his mouth like something glorious, something terrible. By this point Nebula has lost enough blood to leave her as slumped as the doll she may or may not have had as a child, perhaps requiring nothing more than a needle and thread and buttons for new eyes.
“It’s alright,” her father’s voice rumbles, “we will try something new.”
-
Ronan is their father’s ally – not friend, because friend would imply something other than an uneasy truce between them – and he is a presence in their lives as much as Thanos is – that is to say that they see neither of them that often, not unless surgery is directly involved.
There’s a twitch in Gamora’s fingers that she clenches them to hide, pulling her shoulders back, raising her chin, and Nebula bites the inside of her lower lip in unison with her sister. Beside her, one of her older brothers coughs something that might be a laugh, because he is a mountain of an adolescent, no matter that every inch of Gamora, of Nebula, is something more than he will ever be. Daughters of Thanos they may be, but nonetheless, they are daughters.
Gamora doesn’t move, doesn’t blink, as Thanos and Ronan consider the schematics of her body, the speed and flexibility wrung out of every muscle, every patch of flesh. Ronan’s mouth twists a little in thought, and his eyes blazing in his shadowy face, and Nebula wonders what he sees. Their father is building a family of warriors, of his own blood or otherwise, but what Ronan’s investment is, she doesn’t know. He’s the one who sets tests for Thanos’ children, who sends them to abandoned planets to search for hidden treasures, leaving blood and torn skin behind them on the rocks, choking up their own lungs when they return home from poisoned air. Perhaps he is preparing them for something, though if he is, his sight seems to reach even further than their father’s does.
Finally, after what feels like hours, Gamora steps out of the scanner, expression unchanging as she tosses her hair over her shoulder and takes her place beside Nebula. This means it’s her turn, and Nebula tries to mirror her sister’s comfortable disinterest and disdain as she walks over, tucking a nervous lock of her own hair behind her ear.
The scanner beeps, splaying Nebula’s internal systems across the screens between herself and her father. She doesn’t blink, doesn’t swallow, as Thanos begins to use quiet phrases such as set-backs, and Ronan inclines his head. But when Nebula grits her teeth and raises her gaze, she realises that Ronan isn’t looking at the holograms of her splitting nervous system. His brittle, too-bright eyes are staring straight through them, at her.
-
They do not bother to learn the names of their father’s assassins, interchangeable men brought in to see that his will is done, whether across the universe or in his own home. When he wants them to train his daughters, Thanos does not much care what happens to them in the process; if Gamora finishes a session having hacked off a stack of limbs, if a slash from Nebula has spilled viscera all over the training room floor.
He can patch his daughters back together, if something similar has happened to them; of course, if he has to, then he will be so terribly disappointed.
Gamora and Nebula can kill as many soldiers as they like, naturally: Thanos would not send them against his daughters if they were not expendable. Nebula has learned her lessons in half a hundred shattered skulls and the man with knives for teeth who Gamora apparently dispatched in the end, while Nebula’s skin was sewn back thicker and without anaesthetic. She’ll know better next time, won’t let her sister be the one with her cheeks dripping with arterial spray, the vanquished bastard sprawled beneath her boot. The next revenge kill will belong to her, if she has to hack her family down to do it; she will not be the weak one left behind again.
This week’s assassin snatches Nebula’s hair, drags her backwards by it until her legs fall out from beneath her to crack against the floor, while her nails tear at his wrists. He laughs, jangled language falling out of his mouth of which she only catches Thanos’ bitch-child. Nebula grits her teeth and pulls until the hair his hands are tangled with is ripped free to fall in black useless coils against the floor. A knife is in her hands before he can recover, and she twists around to plunge it into the artery in his thigh and rip downwards.
It is Gamora who finds her later, still sitting on the floor, sticky and wet with azure-coloured blood. She lingers in the doorway for a moment, before she walks inside, stepping delicately over a dismembered hand that still has locks of black hair tangled around its fingers. She doesn’t blink at the carnage, of course, but comes to kneel beside Nebula.
“What did you-” she reaches toward Nebula’s bare scalp, the hair hacked off hard enough that the skin is gone in places too. Nebula pulls away before Gamora’s fingers can make contact, her eyes catching, not on the frown on her sister’s face, but on the hair that hangs almost to her waist. It’s been cut off a dozen times for Thanos to improve her brain, her vision, her skull, but it grows back thicker each time, curling and lustrous and that gorgeous shade of pink toward the ends. No one has ever yanked Gamora backwards by her hair, and she sees the softening in the eyes of the soldiers that face them, the slightest hint of something at Gamora’s large, clear eyes, the wave of her crowning glory.
Nebula’s is – was – patchy and an ugly black like a cheap Sunday funeral, forever missing parts from another probe slid into her brain, and it matted and tangled and got into her eyes and nobody ever pitied her for a moment for being a preadolescent princess who was too pretty for this to be her fate.
It is Gamora who bathes her bleeding scalp, sliced down to the bone, and from time to time her eyes seem full of wet sparks. Nebula doesn’t even think about crying; after all, there can be no more competition if she’s removed it entirely.
-
Gamora gets first blood.
Gets it all over her bunk, in fact, down her thighs, and when she looks up at Nebula, she’s almost startled by the fear in her sister’s eyes. Gamora isn’t scared of anything or anyone; she has pity, which their father hasn’t crushed out of her yet – but he will – but has never been scared.
“Don’t tell him,” she whispers, voice low and urgent. “Please.”
Nebula thinks about pointing out that there is nothing that their father doesn’t know about their bodies, that most of their physiology has been created according to his design, but she’s never seen Gamora look like this, and she mostly wants to hit her sister in the face until she stops, until she returns to being Gamora again: cool and calm and occasionally a little too caring for her own good. She is impenetrable, and Nebula knows what to do with a sister like that. She doesn’t know what to do with the brittle quiver of Gamora’s mouth, the barely-concealed panic.
This would be something to have, of course; Nebula remembers hardly anything of her life before Thanos, and she owes little loyalty to Gamora, who is her sister by the sheer fact that she is in the same place at the same time. Her father is the one who has made Nebula something stronger, something better than she could ever have been: he is the one who should be told this, and quickly. Perhaps for once she’ll get the kind of smile that Gamora, the oldest, the quickest, the strongest, gets. Perhaps Gamora will be the one to let down their father with her own body’s weakness, this time.
“I won’t,” Nebula whispers back, and disgusts herself by meaning it.
-
Their satellite is not a home for idle conversation; if it ever was, it isn’t now. It is for silence, or for shouting; for orders, or for implications. Even the games they played as children usually ended with a victor, someone who had won and could be rewarded accordingly. The one who had lost limped back to try and patch their own wounds, faced with Thanos or Ronan’s disappointment, and perhaps a punishment if they’d lost badly enough.
Nebula coils her fingers in her lap and does not look at Ronan. He is watching her, or he is not watching her, and every time she looks up his glowing purple eyes seem to be staring at her. She has grown up under that gaze, caked with its dark symbolic paint, and she still doesn’t know what it wants from her. Ronan does not watch her the way he watches Gamora, but then nobody watches Nebula the way they watch Gamora. Nebula unnerves them, scares them, but Gamora not only terrifies them, she has their respect. Nobody respects Nebula, for all that they won’t meet her gaze.
There will be plans made later, her father and Ronan’s latest truce patched together in other people’s blood. Gamora does not like Ronan, thought she won’t admit to it aloud; still, it’s there in the curl of her lip, the disdainful slide of her eyes. Ronan massacres children, she spat once, and Nebula didn’t tell her that if someone handed her a knife and a baby, so would she. What does it matter, anymore?
They’re waiting, now, of course, and if Nebula ever knew how to casually converse with a murderer famed across the galaxy she no longer does. Thanos likes to leave people, even his allies, even his family, until the last possible moment, when their anger is thick and useless, congealing in the face of his might. So they sit, and Nebula does her best not to move, not to wonder what it is about her that Ronan always seems to be lingering over, waiting for.
-
It’s hard to recall who decided on the cybernetics: Nebula or Thanos. She thinks sometimes that she asked for this, as her blood and sinews and muscles are stripped out and replaced with wires and metal and chemicals and a hundred other things that do not snap as easily.
Gamora moves through their teenage years with perfect grace; she does not question her orders, and comes home with her clothes smeared with blood and her knives sparkling clean, a trophy for their father and a soft smile kept to herself when he praises her. Gamora is light on her feet and quick and the more she practices the smoother she is, a delicate dance of murder that you can’t take your eyes away from.
Nebula, younger, different, stumbles a little behind her. It takes time for her body to be taken completely apart and strapped back together again; it’s hard to say, now, what’s left that she was born with.
“He would decide that you were done if you told him you were,” Gamora suggests.
They no longer share adjoining bunks or adjoining pods like the little girl sister best friends they never were; Gamora can be gone for weeks on missions for their father, returning silkily back to take her place as the evident favourite of all of Thanos’ children, not missing a single step until she sees Nebula again, when her mouth tightens just enough for Nebula to notice. There will be no more whispered confessions in the dark, tears shed in matching bandages.
Sometimes Nebula isn’t sure that that happened either; if it’s just a fantasy she created so she doesn’t have to think of herself as a handful of years old with Thanos tearing off her chest and nobody beside her at all.
“I’m not done,” Nebula replies, sharp. Gamora’s skin is silvered with scars, where she got to keep her original flesh, improved and augmented but her very own shell. Nebula sometimes thinks she has little left but the matching blue that her new skin was printed in, and the taste of blood against her back teeth.
Gamora sighs, and looks down at her hands. She looks beautiful, perfect, and then she narrows her eyes and all you can see is your own death gazing back at you. The most dangerous woman in the galaxy.
Nebula doesn’t know what she is, if anything. An afterthought?
“Don’t be jealous, that he ran out of things to do to you,” Nebula snips, and gets up. “I can still be improved, I can exceed this.”
“Nebula-” Gamora twists her mouth, pauses. “Don’t you remember?” she asks instead.
“No,” Nebula replies. “I don’t remember anything.”
“Your family before,” Gamora tries.
“I don’t,” Nebula tells her, and it isn’t a lie. “They didn’t try very hard and they’re not here now. Why waste anything on them?”
They haven’t finished her brain yet, but it doesn’t need to be a computer for Nebula to recall only what she wants. She used to have memories of her family, she thinks, of the original planet she came from, but she doesn’t now. They’re long gone.
Gamora shrugs with one shoulder, her expression blank and cool. “Why indeed?” she asks, moving to her feet in one fluid motion that Nebula could not reproduce no matter how hard she tried. She leaves first.
Nebula grits her teeth and doesn’t blink. It’s strange, the way things work out. She has no idea why she’s the one with blue skin, when green has always been the colour of futile envy.
-
Their brothers are boorish, bombs rather than missiles. Nebula has that to cling to, at least: if her father has little interest in her, he has even less for his sons, thuggish man-mountains who speak little and smash everything in their paths. Nebula sometimes wonders if he even bothered to leave them tongues to speak with; military intelligence is not what Thanos has bred his boys for.
There are other daughters, though they are younger, and Nebula has no interest in seeing which parts of little girls Thanos is tearing off this decade. She doesn’t know what she could offer her sisters, even if she did bother to go and find them; she can hardly say that any of this gets better.
They each have their own story, the children of Thanos: acquired from broken worlds, and taken without a choice to be rebuilt for their family’s glory. Well, anyway, that’s one way of telling the story, and it sounds better than most of the other options. Nebula thinks Gamora still holds most of her story close to her chest: a homeworld that’s gone now, parents that fell in their own blood, and now this. She clings to the beginnings of her life in a way that Nebula can’t understand, doesn’t want to understand. Whoever she was, she isn’t that person anymore.
What do you think about? she asked Gamora once, when they were children who spent most of their lives in machines, wide awake while their skin was stripped back and their organs augmented.
I think about the sky, Gamora replied, and Nebula didn’t need to clarify that Gamora was thinking about the sky of her homeworld: there isn’t any sky worth a damn on this planet. Gamora’s homeworld is gone now, and Nebula thinks her own is destroyed too: Thanos does seem to like collecting waifs and strays, then bastardising what is left of them for his own needs. Nebula can no longer remember and can’t even imagine what the little girl who first arrived here first looked like. In fact, most of her arrival here is gone from her mind, let drift or taken, though the terrified screaming of every one of Thanos’ new children can provide a reasonable facsimile of what it was like.
She can still remember the first time she saw Gamora, though; the raw horror when she realised the older girl was wrapped in leaky sticky bandages, her hollow eyes twitching in shame when she saw the way Nebula was staring at her. She shifted away and said nothing. It fell to Nebula to turn to their newest sibling, months later, and snarl you’re next.
After all of this, it seems strange that Nebula would have any vanity left to cling to; and yet when she sees the knives and new panels laid out for her latest operation, the scans on the wall the first time she learns what Thanos will do to her today, she finds the words spilling out: “not my face.”
Her father says nothing, programming the droids that will do the intricate work that his sheer size means he cannot. Gamora’s birthdays are still celebrated, as the favourite daughter, and Nebula remembers the way he smiled and stroked her sister’s hair, heaping praise and presents at her feet. Nebula is tied down with him staring down at her with his stranger’s eyes, and if the shock kills her then even that won’t be permanent.
“Not my face,” Nebula presses again, the last thing she can nearly recognise in a mirror when she bothers to collate who she is now. “Please. We don’t need-”
Thanos steps away, and Nebula curls her fingers, fights against the machines that always remain just a little stronger than she is, just enough to remind her of her place. “Father. Father please, I’m begging you. Father!”
Thanos leaves, and Nebula looks up at the whirring blades coming down to strip her back to her skull and insert the panel that will improve communications, welded to the skin around her eye.
“Not my face!” she insists, fighting until the restraints at her arms give, taking chunks of skin with them, and she reaches up to try and stop the inevitable droid arms reaching down to begin their work. For a moment, she thinks she might get away with it – and then her forearms snap and all she can see are the silver-bright knives before the first one slides into her left eye.
-
They still aren’t sure if this is natural, instinctual, or built, or created from hours of practice. They don’t discuss it; don’t need to, this certainty between them. Back to back, two women wielding twin blades. One blue, one green, but their movements echo one another’s. Nebula doesn’t need to look behind her to know what Gamora is doing; doesn’t need to check her back, because Gamora has that for her.
They may be running out of things to say to one another as they flit around Thanos’ satellite like ghosts, awaiting redeployment, but this can be done without bitterness, without conferring.
It doesn’t matter who they’ve been sent to defeat anymore, not in the scheme of things; Nebula can find anyone’s weak spots, and she can withstand things even Gamora cannot. A knife tries to plunge into her chest, but screech-skids against her metal clavicle, and Nebula plunges her blade through his open, surprised, mouth and out of the back of his head. He is perhaps not dead, she reflects, as he falls, twitching, his green blood frothing out of his lips and his eyes staring wide at horrors Nebula has seen and summarily dismissed long ago. She twists and beheads another soldier of this backwater planet without even looking, feeling her knife sever bone and wrenching her wrist back in a fountain of blood.
There are times to be quick and neat, a swift quiet slice where the blood won’t fall for hours, but this is not one of those times. Ronan asked this favour of their father, and Ronan would like carnage.
Electricity from a lucky gunshot prickles and slices through Nebula’s nervous system, because their father can improve them as far as he wants but he leaves their ability to feel pain intact, a punishment for every last failing. He says that they will learn from it. Maybe they have. Nebula grits her teeth as her bodily systems freeze and then come back online, fizzing and sparking, but any weariness that her limbs were feeling has stopped, recharged and fresh. Gamora would be knocked unconscious by one of those blasts, but Nebula can take them and come back stronger, energised.
Well. Her left eye is crackling, vision fading in and out, wires short-circuited somewhere. It’s inconvenient, the sudden darkness, but Nebula doesn’t even slow, taking off half a soldier’s head and kicking another one in the chin, his head snapping back as his neck gives way. Losing her sight is nothing new. Nebula has heard that some worlds train their warriors by blindfolding them to teach them how to use their other senses. Thanos’ method was far more straightforward: he simply removed his children’s eyes until they earned them back. He likes to reward the deserving, after all. Nebula isn’t sure how long she stumbled around losing skin and snapping bones and unable to sleep for waking up at every noise, knife in hand, slicing at the darkness in the hope her father would somehow know and approve and let her resume training where she could at least see her punishment coming.
A blow slides off the metal plate in the centre of her skull, and Nebula stabs backwards, twisting to find out why Gamora didn’t prevent that strike from landing. Her sister is collapsed on the ground a few feet away, clothes muddied from enemy boots, chest a ripped-open mess of blood and ribs, firing blasts where she can with the small gun she keeps at her waist, but Nebula can see that she can’t be conscious much longer.
Nebula isn’t sure about what to do with the brittle emotions that snap through her, the ones she thought that she’d stamped out long ago, if they ever existed to begin with.
Ronan wanted carnage, and Nebula doesn’t want to return home without their father’s favourite: she strikes into her blind spot, hearing the squelch of her blade cleaving flesh, and drags it free without taking her remaining good eye from Gamora. She twists, knocking another man’s feet out from under him, and stomps downwards, driving her boot through his skull. There’s no finesse in this, but you can’t stop a rebellion with finesse: stop it with blood, and that’s what they’ll remember.
Gamora is unexpectedly light when Nebula crouches down beside her, hefting her sister up. She’s seen this before, usually as a result of her own actions, and she doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do now.
“Leave me,” Gamora says thickly. “I’d leave you.”
“You wouldn’t,” Nebula replies, and she hates her for it. She runs for their ship, Gamora’s breath rattling in her arms, leaving nothing behind them but a trail of bloody footprints.
In any case: if anyone’s going to kill Gamora, it isn’t going to be these petty nothings.
Nebula’s earned that much.
-
In the end, it’s still Nebula’s fault. It’s always Nebula’s fault.
Gamora’s hair floats in silky pink tendrils in the stasis tank where her body is being healed, tubes fed into her veins, bone and muscle and skin knitting together so quickly that Nebula can watch it happen. She spreads her fingers against the glass, and thinks about how she could plunge her fist through it and run and maybe she could be missing before anyone found Gamora’s body. Maybe she could get away with it after all.
As if there is anywhere that anyone could go where Thanos could not find them.
Her sister looks dead already like this, floating in shimmering liquid while nutrition and blood and oxygen are fed into her body so that all of this can just be another collection of scars, silver against her green skin. There’s something peaceful about it, though, about the dark sweep of Gamora’s closed lashes against her cheeks, the slackness of her mouth that isn’t a smile or a grimace or a determined neutral line. She could be asleep, perhaps.
Nebula doesn’t sleep anymore. She doesn’t eat, she doesn’t bleed. Does that mean she finally wins?
-
The corridors are dark, hollow and echoing, and bereft of anyone who matters anymore. When she was little, Nebula thinks, she sought friendship, companionship, affection. Nowadays she just wants to live long enough to see all of this burn down, her father be left grand ruler of nothing at all.
How she fits into that, where she will go once that has been achieved, Nebula doesn’t consider. She is a weapon of his own creation, and she no longer cares where she is aimed. Gamora swallows before she accepts assignments, the corners of her mouth sticking, but Nebula says no to nothing and volunteers for everything. She’ll never be the favourite or the best, but every time she comes home with bloody hands and another pile of corpses behind her, her father smiles like for a moment he’s almost pleased with what he’s wrought.
She doesn’t want to want that, but she hasn’t found the parts of her brain to rip out to make it stop.
Gamora has given up trying to talk to her, because there is nothing left for either of them to say. When they have missions together, they can communicate without words, without even looking at each other; they complete what needs to be done, and don’t help each other if one of them falls behind. Perhaps as children they were equals, but they are not now, and the way Gamora smiled at her was at best naïve and at worst cruel, a crumb thrown down from her glory. That she is still preferable to their other siblings, brutal and boorish and brainless as they are, is merely another tiresome truth that Nebula has made her peace with by simply not thinking about it.
Her mistake, she thinks, is that she wanted her father to be a father, the kind in stories who prizes his children above all else, loves them best and would give anything to protect them. Those fathers do not exist: Nebula doesn’t recall who she had before Thanos, but she knows Gamora’s first mother and father were not exactly shining paragons of parenting. Gamora told her that, once, a dark night or an endless morning, needles and wires and she lived to regret it. Nebula keeps her ammunition close and ever-ready; she’s not the favoured one, and she clings to what she has. She may not be loved, but she is required. She will do what Gamora cannot and will not, however much she may pretend she’s the perfect assassin, Thanos’ heir and his will made flesh. Gamora retains things that Nebula threw away a long time ago, if anyone cared to notice things like that.
Nobody notices much about Nebula anymore, but for her blades and her snarls and the bodies she leaves behind.
-
Gamora’s nails draw the thick purplish blood out of the warrior’s shoulders, his battalion tattoos splintering easily under the drag of her touch. Her mouth is harsh against his, angry, devouring, her eyes open where his are closed. Her decision, then, or at least the idea of it.
Nebula shakes her head and turns away, disinterested in her sister’s latest attempts to disobey while never letting their father know. A half-rebellion that Nebula would join in with, if she cared enough anymore. As it is, she doesn’t bother with rebellion anymore: it either will not be noticed, or it will be crushed, brutally, instantly, and irrevocably.
It’s a thought, though. Not fucking her father’s latest allies in order to try and gain some attention, because she has no interest in either of those things, and in any case she is more synthetics than flesh now; but that Thanos has rebuilt his daughters to be the best they can possibly be, and yet. And yet.
Whatever is left of Gamora’s internal organs, Nebula cannot be sure; it’s been a long time since she saw her sister’s scans, had them shown off in front of her, and she no longer knows if Thanos continues to adjust her with the regularity he adjusts Nebula. While parts of Nebula remain organic, welded to her cybernetics, Thanos stripped out everything he found superfluous: her reproductive organs were the first ones to go. She still has her lungs, augmented to make them less easy to pierce and to increase their capacity, but her digestive system has been missing for so long she doesn’t even recall the eating process; perhaps she never had it to begin with. Thanos might want grandchildren one day, to continue on a legacy, but he hasn’t left Nebula with the means to create one, and she knows she’s not alone in this relentless stripping of her internal organic systems.
And yet Thanos has still left her in the form of a woman, hasn’t he? Nebula’s body was his property long before puberty, her skin had been replaced before her hormones would alter her from child to adult. And yet Thanos has modelled her with breasts – more metal than flesh, missing nipples and malleability and the ability to feed the children she cannot bear – and a curve to her hips, and in a body crammed with computer systems and wires and weaponry, he’s left this curious space between her legs, hollow of anything. Thanos formed his daughters into women, and for all that he wanted them to be warriors, weapons, he left them fuckable, didn’t he? Half his sons have been left without penises, all the better to build up their aggression, but every daughter has an open space between her legs, a cunt that has somehow survived intact.
Gamora is choosing to use hers in a way that pleases her; Nebula considers her own, and why it was left alone, and her left eye display informs her that her heartrate has increased, that adrenalin is spilling into her bloodstream. Nebula knows: she can feel it, shuddering in her chest, almost like a real emotion.
-
Nebula is old enough and trusted enough to be allowed free rein with her scans and the machines that edit her body; she can maintain her own systems now, tweak things that slow her down in battles, and Thanos checks regularly to make sure that she’s still functioning at her peak. Back when she and Gamora still spoke in something other than snaps and glares across rooms, Gamora suggested that perhaps she could attempt to undo some of Thanos’ more extreme works, but Nebula has never bothered. There’s still something left of Gamora, beneath the silvered scars and the limbs that can bend in ways limbs were not designed to. Nebula cannot be given back her body or her mind, because there’s nothing left to restore. There is nothing to be gained from going back, only from pressing forward.
No one tries to stop her when she barricades herself in a laboratory, her father and Ronan scheming together on a planet far from here, and Gamora creating rivers of blood on a cold empty moon where Nebula wasn’t invited.
Nebula is not Gamora, is not the favourite, but she isn’t stupid. Her brain is better than most people’s, functioning at three times the speed, and she can connect the inevitable truths together.
It doesn’t completely make sense that Ronan would choose her when Gamora has always existed alongside her, but maybe Thanos never wanted to part from his favourite, offered his other daughter as a substitute. Ronan has always watched Nebula, taken a close interest in her development, and perhaps it’s vanity to consider that there was a greater reason behind all of that beyond Ronan’s collaboration with their father on his legacy project, but perhaps it isn’t.
She has always been the most obedient of daughters, but she was made as a weapon, and she won’t be turned into a concubine. She won’t.
It’s simple enough for Nebula to programme the machines to do what she wants; she has herself strapped down, because anaesthetic is still an impossibility on Thanos’ satellite, and it’s okay: she wants to feel this. Wants to know that she did this because she chose it, chose something for herself for the first time in perhaps her entire life.
The pain is excruciating and then it isn’t, and Nebula keeps her head tipped back and watches her heart rate and breathing and adrenalin fluctuate on the display in front of her left eye. Watches as her body goes into shock and her heart restarts itself three times over, little letters appearing to suggest that she disengage herself from this situation and seek somewhere to recover before returning to the battle. She laughs between her gritted teeth, the sound strangled and desperate, because she can’t escape; perhaps wouldn’t even if she could.
-
In the end, it is Ronan who discovers that Nebula has filled up the space between her legs with knives: when his fingers draw back from their swift uninvited invasion of her cunt, they’re slick with blood, and it isn’t hers.
She meets his gaze squarely; he hasn’t spoken a word since coming here, pushing her over and cramming his hand between her thighs, and he has really underestimated a daughter of Thanos if he somehow believed that that would ever work. Gamora might be the one searching for affection or rebellion with a simple flirtatious slide of her hips or mouth, but it’s on her own terms, her own choice. Perhaps if Thanos had desired Nebula to submit to Ronan’s wishes, he should have left her with the capacity to want to.
All that wasted space. Nebula filled up the gap where her womb no longer is with a grenade, the passage up to a non-existent cervix with blades. As weaponised and dangerous as the rest of her, now; knives readily to hand should she need any, and the rest of her guarded against intruders. She’s had a lot, over the years: she will not have any more.
She waits for Ronan to speak, but he doesn’t. His eyes flicker, and perhaps he is about to demand what this means, that his carefully created woman wasn’t supposed to arrive recalcitrant and impossible to penetrate. Nebula doesn’t blink, because she doesn’t know how to blink anymore, and in the end Ronan leaves her without looking back.
Nebula and Gamora flit around Ronan’s ship, loans or allies or safety nets, whatever you wish to call them, and it is different here to their father’s home. Still dark and unfriendly and unwelcoming, and there is still nothing to say to one another; but there is something different here, something that can perhaps be built on, given time and adequate investigation.
Nebula is a weapon, and always has been. Created, primed, and ready to let fly at a moment’s notice. Her father is not here, though, and Ronan seems not to know what to do with her, and weapons are only as good as the hands that control them. Perhaps, after all of this, after all these years of puppetry and blood, Nebula will try wielding herself.