Chapter Text
Peter Quill wasn't sure if he believed in soulmates.
As a kid, his mother would tell him the story of how she met his father. How he was an extraordinary man from outer space who against all odds fell for a simple country girl like her. She reminisced dreamily about how he'd swept her off her feet, and how much of a whirlwind their romance had been before he'd had to return to the stars.
She'd share her memories of their time together as if she were recounting an epic love story. But one thing was missing from hers that was present in all the ones Peter had seen on TV: the colors.
Well seen wasn't entirely right. He saw the sitcoms on TV the same way he saw everything else: in total black and white. But from the way the shades of gray became a little lighter on the screen, he understood what was supposed to happen the first time you and your soulmate touched. He'd lost count of the amount of movies he'd seen where the two leads introduce themselves to each other with a handshake before their eyes go wide and they look at their surroundings in awe, normally followed by them gazing into each others' eyes and one of them wistfully saying "they're so… blue…" or whatever color their other half's eyes were (how did they magically know which color was which? Peter had always wondered).
If his mom had been as in love with his dad as she claimed, then why did she remain colorblind until the day she died?
Nebula was positive that she didn't believe in soulmates.
She didn't believe in much of anything. How could she believe in soulmates or destiny or true love when her life was nothing but a never-ending gauntlet of torture.
The only time she could remember ever thinking about having a soulmate was when she was still a child. Her sister, a few years her senior, had asked her about it once.
"What do you think our soulmates are like?" Gamora wondered aloud as she ran her fingers through Nebula's inky black hair, unknotting it strand by strand. The whole experience was confusing for Nebula. This was the first time in a long time she and her sister had been left alone together (not counting Thanos locking them in a room and having them battle one another for scraps of food) and this is what she wanted to do? This is what she wanted to talk about?
She flinched as Gamora’s fingers brushed the back of her neck. Having her hair played with like this felt nice but her muscles remained tense, half-expecting Gamora to grab her hair and pull her to the floor by it, as she had done before when they fought.
Gamora’s question echoed in the quiet room. Nebula thought about it, heart thrumming with a little bit of hope as she thought about her ideal soulmate.
Someone who will take me far away from here…
Growing up with the Ravagers had taught Peter that seeing in black and white was nothing to be ashamed of.
They were an eclectic bunch. Some of the Ravagers had soulmates that were also part of the syndicate. Some of them were colorblind and perfectly happy that way. Some of them had even found their soulmate but decided to leave them behind for a life of adventure and crime. And then there were others among them who were in perfectly happy and committed relationships despite not being each others' soulmate.
It was refreshing to see people who didn't treat soulmates like such a big deal.
If Peter's eyesight was to stay monochrome forever, maybe that wouldn’t be so bad?
Her eyes had to go, Thanos told her. She wasn't observant enough of her opponents' weaknesses, and she needed to have things made easier for her if she was to ever be useful to her father.
This would be one of countless augmentations her body would go through.
She was restrained in a room she would become well-acquainted with. Nebula had been taught to never cry, especially not in front of her father, but as the metal tools descended towards her, something inside her broke. Tears flowed down her cheeks and she sobbed uncontrollably, begging for forgiveness. She would be a better fighter. A better daughter. She would do anything to prove she was good enough.
Thanos hadn't reacted to her crying, which scared her more than it would have if he'd gotten angry.
"You've had enough chances," he'd told her. He spoke to her as if he were simply putting her in a timeout. "Some children, like you, need help to reach their full potential."
A hellish sharpness pierced the space between Nebula's left eyeball and its socket. She screamed, trying to move but her head was being held firmly in place. A fiery agony spread through her head. Through her mind.
At some point she fell unconscious, and when she woke up, she couldn't see a thing. She had no idea where she was and no one answered when she called out. The area around her eyes burned. Her sobs only made the pain worse, and they no longer produced tears. With the complete darkness and silence, and the rough walls she felt surrounding her as she tried to navigate her way around, the pain was the only proof she had that she wasn't dead.
Someone did come for her, eventually. They picked her up by her arms and she hadn't even protested as she was dragged away. She was taken somewhere else and roughly dropped onto the floor.
"The procedure was successful, sire. But she will remain blind until her body accepts the new eyes."
She feared that she would remain blind forever, but sure enough after a few days, her vision began to return. Fuzzy at first, but soon it was back to the way it had been. Mostly. The monochrome world around her was as she remembered, but everything felt uncannily different… like her surroundings had been brought more into focus. It made her feel nauseous.
The first time she'd seen her face reflected back at her in a window after the procedure, the two jet black orbs that stared back had frightened her.
She realized with an unexpected surge of melancholy that she never even knew what color her old eyes had been.
Kraglin could see in color, Peter learned one day.
A group of Ravagers had gone drinking together. Some dive bar on Rajak that Peter had already forgotten the name of. He'd been voted as the designated driver and so he was flying their M-ship back to the Eclector. Kraglin had managed to remain at least somewhat sober and had decided to sit in the cockpit with Peter.
"Here's a trick I learned," he pointed to the console, "if you hold down that red, kinda square-lookin’ button long enough, the air filter will stop makin’ that sputtering noise."
Peter stared at him until Kraglin realized his error.
"Oh, sorry. Just use the third button on the left there-”
“You aren’t colorblind?!” Peter leaned back in his seat and gawped up at Kraglin, fascinated by this discovery.
Kraglin swatted Peter lightly in the back of the head. “Focus on steerin’, please… but no, I’m not.”
“Who’s your soulmate?” Peter put his attention back on steering the ship, but couldn’t quell his curiosity. “Is it anyone I know?”
The older man let out a bark of laughter. “Damnit Pete, I think yer more interested in my love life than I am,” he teased. “Nah, it’s no one you know. Just someone I met back on Xandar. Things didn’t work out…”
Peter shifted in his seat, feeling a little bad for prying now. “I’m sorry…”
Kraglin shrugged it off. “That’s just life. Sometimes people meet their soulmate too soon and you just ain’t ready for ‘em.”
“So… does that mean you wanna give them another chance someday?” asked Peter, feeling a little better about Kraglin’s situation now.
He felt Kraglin playfully kick the back of his seat. “What are you? Some kinda hopeless romantic all of a sudden?” The two fell into silence. It was then that Peter remembered Kraglin’s instructions and finally held down that button to quiet down the air filter. As the sound died down, Peter was able to hear Kraglin faintly mutter.
“Maybe someday…”
Nebula washed the blood off her blade in a fountain, catching a glimpse of herself on the water’s surface. Her jaw clenched the same way it always did when she looked at what she'd become. On the left side of her face, her natural skin tone gave way to shiny gunmetal gray. Where once her eyes contained white there was nothing but two deep, empty black voids.
Her hair had been irrevocably removed by her father after her sister had grabbed it to restrain her one too many times. "To make you and Gamora equal in battle," had been his excuse. That was his excuse for every modification he made to her body.
That had been his excuse when he'd opened up her skull and “improved” her brain by filling it with cold metal devices and attaching wires to her nervous system. She’d had to stay awake for as much of the procedure as possible; injected with a stimulant that prevented her from falling unconscious to make sure the machinery was working as intended.
It felt like it lasted an eternity. Unimaginable pain that she couldn't escape from unless she died, and that wasn't a mercy afforded to her.
When at last it was over, she had barely been able to function. For weeks after, she’d struggled to move or talk; the motions and speech that had once been so natural to her felt wrong, like she had to relearn how to do it all again.
She ran a hand over the back of her head, feeling the metal that now covered part of it.
Her breath caught in her throat. She couldn't stand to look at herself any longer.
Turning away, she was faced instead with the aftermath of her father's carnage. Bodies littered the streets. Screams and sobs rang out in the distance. Her blade was too heavy in her hand. Blood that didn't belong to her trickled down her forehead and into her eye.
Something grabbed her ankle. Looking down, some poor survivor with a mangled face stared up at her.
"Mercy…" they burbled, almost choking on their own gore.
Instinctively, Nebula slashed with her weapon and put them out of their misery.
A stream of black sprayed over the pavement.
As an adult, Peter flew all across the galaxy; meeting new people, going on adventures, breaking hearts…
By the time he hit his thirties, he had loved and left enough people to earn him a reputation as a womanizer, and yet his vision remained monochrome.
He knew that some people stayed colorblind their whole lives. The thought of that used to frighten him, but as he got older, he saw it as more of a blessing. No need to settle if fate didn't tell him to, right?
When Peter first met Gamora, he had no idea how important she would become to him.
What started out as a shallow, purely physical attraction had developed into something a little deeper as he adventured with her and his other new companions.
It was exactly what he had always dreamed of when he'd imagined meeting his soulmate as a kid. A guy and a girl reluctantly working together to achieve a common goal, only to discover that each of them were what the other had been looking for their entire lives.
He was actually a little disheartened that their first touch had not brought color into his world, but ultimately it didn't matter to him. There were plenty of people who had long, successful relationships with a partner who wasn't their soulmate.
Life wouldn't be very fun if you waited around for your soulmate and didn't open your heart to anyone else, would it?
It was humiliating enough being captured by the Sovereign. What added insult to injury was being brought before her sister and her idiot friends and having responsibility for her life handed over to them.
She stood there, exasperated as Gamora bound her wrists with shackles. The Terran man she traveled with, Peter Quill, stood right by them, removing his shirt.
Gamora's eyes wandered towards his shirtless form, drinking him in for a brief moment.
Nebula followed her gaze to Quill’s body and blinked, incredulous. Were her sister's standards really so low as to be attracted to this squishy-looking Terran?
"Sorry if it seemed like I was flirting with the High Priestess," he said to Gamora. “I wasn’t.”
Why must I be here for this? Nebula rolled her eyes.
"I don't care if you were," Gamora insisted dismissively, starting to lead Nebula away towards the rear of the ship.
Quill called an apology after her, but Gamora ignored him (or at least pretended to). Nebula couldn't stop herself from scoffing.
"I didn't realize you’d become so desperate," she condescended. Gamora shot her a glare, looking genuinely angered by her words. Despite that, she remained silent as she began attaching Nebula’s wrists to a metal post. Nebula scowled at Gamora the whole time she was restraining her.
She couldn't wait for her one remaining hand to be free again so she could use it to choke the life out of her sister.
Drax had an unwavering belief in soulmates. He told Peter the story of how he met his soulmate- his wife, Ovette- at a war rally, and had fallen for her as soon as he realized she had no love for music. She had stood by a bonfire, motionless, while the rest of Drax's village yelled battle chants and flailed around to their rhythm.
He'd had this feeling deep inside that she was the one for him; a feeling that had been validated the first time they touched. Drax spoke of how the fire and the sky and the trees had exploded into color, and how those colors had just as suddenly vanished the day Ovette and their daughter Kamaria were killed.
Drax's life was a perfect, albeit tragic, example of a life lived with your soulmate.
Peter dismissed his story. Did Drax think that just because he found his soulmate that he was better than him? That he magically knew better about love and relationships?
People who had found their soulmate could be so up their own asses about it sometimes, looking down on those poor fools who hadn't been as lucky as them.
It was a good thing that the whole soulmate thing was meaningless. Just a chemical reaction in the brain that happened to allow you to see colors.
He knew his heart better than anyone, and he knew it was set on Gamora. And by the spark he saw in her eyes when she looked at him, he believed that hers was set on him, too.
Idiots!
Because of the fox's foolish decision to steal Anulax batteries from the Sovereign, they had been pursued and damn near killed. They ultimately crashed down on the planet Berhert after just barely making it through a wormhole.
The Guardians stood around arguing with one another beside the wreckage of the Milano, Nebula half-listening as Quill and the rodent threw insults at each other.
As her captors bickered, Nebula found her attention being drawn upward. A large, egg-shaped ship was approaching, and no one else seemed to have noticed.
"Someone followed you through the jump point!” In an instant, everyone stopped yelling at each other and assumed a defensive formation, standing back to back in an almost-circle.
She ended up standing between her sister and Quill.
"Set me free. You'll need my help," she said, seeing this as a prime opportunity to get these shackles off.
"I'm not a fool, Nebula," replied Gamora.
Nebula tried to double down. "You are a fool if you deprive yourself a hand in combat."
To her dismay, Gamora wouldn't budge. "You'll attack me the moment I let you go."
"...no I won't." Nebula mumbled. She knew it was unconvincing. A voice in the back of her head derided her for being so poor at deceit.
At that moment, her shoulder grazed Peter Quill's. It was something that she would have barely acknowledged if it weren't for what followed.
All at once, as if a switch had suddenly been flipped in her brain, the world around her burst into color.
What the hell?!
Green leaves. Brown soil. Blue sky…
Her mind felt like it was about to overload from the sheer brightness and strangeness of the colors spiraling all around her.
It was almost too much.
He spoke. "You'd think an evil supervillain would learn how to properly lie."
She spun to face Quill, and for a moment, her current situation was all but forgotten. The danger, the crash, her imprisonment; that was all pushed aside as she grappled with the fact that she could see in color. Soulmates were real.
And he was hers?
He looked at her, and Nebula felt embarrassed that she’d been caught staring. But still, she searched his face (his eyes were green like the forest leaves) for a sign; any hint that he saw the same things that she did.
"What?" he hissed before turning his attention back up to the sky and the descending ship.
Nebula felt numb.
Had his vision not changed? Was he pretending it hadn't?
Her stomach felt like it was sinking. This baffled her because she had never cared about finding her soulmate. She'd spent most of her life believing that she didn't even have one.
The sinking feeling didn't go away. Not when the man on the ship disembarked and introduced himself as Quill's father, not when they'd constructed a campfire as the sun began to set (the colors of the sunset were spectacular. Soft and bright at the same time), and not when Gamora and Quill wandered off into the forest. In fact, the feeling only grew stronger as she watched them leave together.
It wasn't jealousy, she knew that much. Even though he was her soulmate, Nebula didn't magically have feelings for him now or anything like that. But it did piss her off that of all the people her soulmate could have wanted instead of her, it had to be her perfect sister who she'd always been compared to. The favorite daughter, better than her in every way.
Who'd have thought that destiny had a sense of cruel irony…