#this doesnt actually count as me processing my emotional damage lol. i simply refuse to be a child of divorce

[philtstone]

40 (wake-up kisses) Peter/Gamora

i honestly couldnt tell u what this is but i had fun with it. inspired by this amazing fic, which healed something deep inside me. not really spoilers for gotg3 bc this is like, unhingedly removed from canon but also not not spoilers, if u know what i mean

The thing of it is, weirder things have definitely happened to Gamora.

Well -- to her version of Gamora, which is, to use a term, herself. The person whose mind-dream-consciousness she's trapped within is younger, and therefore has had less opportunity to experience weird shit.

Then again, Gamora thinks, there was that whole time travel thing.

"What the fuck," other her is saying. "What the fuck, what the fuck. Get out of my head!"

Ugh.

"I am trying," she says. It's a weird situation. Gamora has always been a little paranoid, to be sure, but even she can admit that her presence in this landscape is quite tangibly not an ordinary dream. She is, literally, in her own head. There are two of them, and it's crowded. She can tell. She can tell. Everyone can tell -- something is very wrong.

And it is not, strictly speaking, Gamora's fault that the fabric of space-time-reality-possibly-also-death is in utter tatters, but it's not like she isn't going to take advantage of it. Her family must be looking for her! Peter must be looking for her! Indeed, she is looking for them! She wants more than anything to be alive right now, and to hold her sister in her arms, and to help Mantis decorate her room, and to laugh over dumb jokes with Groot, and to sing tunes with Rocket, and to kiss Peter on the mouth until she forgets how to breathe and also how to feel sadness. She didn't really think about it too hard when she saw her opening. She just kind of wanted. Full body. Desperately. Death has been super sad, and also super boring.

Oh. Maybe, possibly, that could be a contributing factor to her --their -- sudden predicament. That is, the way she suddenly found herself sharing mind-space with another version of herself, who claims -- irately and with no small measure of panic -- that she was minding her own business, trying to get a decent four hours of sleep in, when she was rudely interrupted by a psychotic parasite.

"Ah!" Gamora makes a loud and offended scoffing noise. "Parasite?! I'm not a parasite, you jerk! I'm me. I'm you, goddammit!"

"No," says other her. "I'm me, and you're in my head! Get out!"

"Why don't you let me out?" she growls back, crossing her proverbial arms. It's weird. Like in a dream, she both does and doesn't have a corporeal body, right now. "You're not even supposed to be here, anyway! This is my timeline!"

"And it's my head!" snarls her counterpart, in a way that is really infuriating if only for the fact that she, Gamora, snarls that way. Who does this idiot think she is, doing it the same?

"Fine," Gamora says to herself. "This is fine. Listen. You wake up from your dream, but when you wake up, instead of being you, you're going to be me. Alright? We understand each other. It'll be fine, because you are me."

"I am not you," snaps ... well, her. "You are dead. You are a weird imposter who has been made up by your crazy friends. You have all these -- these insane experiences and stupid memories! And now they're in my head. I knew I shouldn't have hung around those weirdos for so long --"

Gamora's mouth has dropped open. "Excuse me," she says. "My memories are not stupid. What have you got to offer, death and sadness?"

Other Gamora seems to take great offense at this. "I have great memories!" she yells. "They are very -- pleasant! I feel good things when I think of them!"

Hmph. Please. Gamora was there, okay? So what if there are some new ones sprinkled into the mix. She doesn't have time to explore them now, she's got things to do. Places to be. Peters to kiss.

"Maybe it's a scientific issue," she muses, aloud. "If we got Rocket to zap you with something --"

"I am not being zapped!"

"I would wake up. From this weird dream."

"You are the weird dream!"

She hums to herself; uncomfortably, a small voice at the back of her mind wonders if she really did used to be this transparently aggressive, but she dismisses it, as she has more pressing priorities right now. Animation, for example. Living. Breathing air. Kissing Peter, that is definitely up there.

"Maybe if you pinched yourself," Gamora says. "Oh -- ow!"

Other her looks far too vindictive for her own good. Asshole, Gamora thinks, at the same time her younger self says, "Asshole," aloud.

Well, technically not aloud, as all of this is taking place in her head.

"Stop reminding me," other Gamora grits out.

"Maybe you need to find a tear in space, like a blackhole." That seems too Herculean a task. "Or it's an amnesia thing." No; it's a multiverse, unfortunately. And Gamora refuses to believe she ever used to be such a dick. "Maybe I'm being reincarnated. Denarian Dey once said his cousin believed in that stuff."

Annoyingly, other her has now decided to deliberately ignore her, and is refusing to respond, but instead glaring angrily into the middle distance, which Gamora is realizing is the ugly brown wall of her own bedroom.

Wait -- this is not Gamora's bedroom. Maybe it's just what it looks like in the dream.

"It is mine," over-articulates her evil twin. "And stop calling me that!"

Wait -- but she's just had a brainwave! Evil twins are something that happen in fairytales -- those mythical narratives Peter would relay, that he was told through audiovisual tradition during his childhood on Earth. In Terran myths, the woman trapped asleep in her own body could be awoken with true love's kiss!

Her other self, stuck in this state with her, responds to the slow evolution of this brainwave with a slowly-increasing, compressed, red-hot anger.

"I got it!" Gamora says excitedly, ignoring herself. "Peter can just kiss me awake! He does it all the time -- it'll be easy."

"OH," yells her other self, "WILL YOU JUST SHUT UP!"

Gamora freezes. Through her own muddled emotions she feels the keen and sudden prick of overwhelming negative emotion, so visceral she cannot help but real back. She wasn't expecting such a whole-hearted roar of anger, at any rate.

"What is your problem?" she asks, angrily.

"My problem?" Eyes flashing, tense, curled in towards herself, the bitter tang of something deep within her belly ... "My problem? I just want to live my own stupid life! I'm not you! You're the -- the -- the weird audiovisual myth!"

Gamora blinks, sifting her way through three layers of her own muddled emotions.

A stuttering wave of gentleness seeps into her fingers.

Yes, her younger self was aggressive, and angry, but never more so than when she was jealous, envious, confronted by everything she yearned, so close but so impossibly out of reach.

"Oh," says Gamora.

She feels herself turn away, in this weird dream that is not a dream.

It's still a fucking mess, she thinks. But maybe she can learn to be a little kinder to herself.

"I'm sorry," she says.

Uncomfortably, other Gamora jerks her chin. Then softens by an increment. Then shrugs. Then, finally --

Looks suddenly and oddly guilty.

"Thanks," she says.

"Don't mention it," says Gamora.

"Uh, it's just. Well. About the magical morning kiss thing. I ... might have broken up with him."

And, very instantaneously, all thoughts of self-kindness fly out of Gamora's head.

"You WHAT?!"