✞ lets talk about our dead moms
✞ - for my muse to talk about somebody’s death
Uzi frowns. "No he wasn't. Don't BS me."
Peter leans forward in his seat. "Yes he was! If I was gonna make something up, why would it be something so obviously fake? It sounds super fake, therefore." And now he leans back, smirking. "It's true."
"That's stupid," she says, rolling her eyes. "If your dad was a planet, how'd he help make you?"
"Well, y'see, he was a living planet, and he made, a... a guy. And he sent that guy all over the galaxy to have kids with as many people as he could, because he was trying to have a kid that inherited his Celestial genes. And that kid-"
"Was you, right? Dude, c'mon, you're bad at this," says Uzi. She slouches back in her chair, wishing she'd just spent the night working on her Minecraft server like she originally planned.
Peter tries to wave her away, but he keeps coming back. Desperate, thinks Uzi. "What, you think I'm tryin' to impress you or something? You're a stupid teenager, if I was gonna lie to you, it would be about something way cooler, not that my dad was a planet and I killed him!"
That would be a weird thing to lie about.
"You killed him?" says Uzi, the edge gone from her voice.
"Oh, so now you're curious? Yeah, I killed him! Well, me and my team. Guardians of the Galaxy. No big deal. Barely knew him, so it was like. Totally fine." The man falls back, lapsing into silence. "Didn't bother me at all."
She sighs. "My dad's just a normal guy. Khan Doorman, leader of the Worker Defense Force. But when it came time to actually defend, he just locked me in a room with a murder drone. So, yeah. Daddy issues."
"'Least he's still alive."
"I guess. He's been trying to be better, but it's kinda like... Not really something that's easy to fix."
A rare moment of silence descends on the pair, both stewing in their parental trauma. Peter, forced to kill his omnicidal father, and Uzi, forced to to reckon with the fact that her father is just a regular person. Great conversation topic.
"Wait, hold on," says Peter, sitting up again. "Your last name is Doorman?"
Uzi waves her hand, and a crumped-up napkin flies at his head as she grumbles. "Why the hell does everyone fixate on that? Whatever, what about your mom?"
Peter's laugh trails off, and he clicks his tongue. "She died when I was just a kid. Brain cancer."
"Some disease, really hard to get rid of. But here's the kicker, turns out dad put it in her, to make it easier for himself to leave or what-the-fuck-ever. Was a lot easier to kill him after that." Peter runs his hand over his face, sighing. "Can we talk about something that doesn't suck?"
"My mom died when I was just an untrained- just a baby," says Uzi. Her mind wanders a bit, back to photos in her dad's office of quote-unquote happier times. "I didn't even remember what she looked like."
"I said something that doesn't suck, dead moms is-" He slumps into his seat with another sigh. "Didn't know robots even had parents. Wait, so do they, like-"
"They input code into an untrained neural network. Not whatever gross stuff you were thinking of," she says, shooting him a glower. "Anyways, found out, like, a few days before I got here that she wasn't actually dead. She was running around as a little fleshy core unit- well, not running around, she was in hiding. Kind of? I dunno, I haven't really been able to talk to her about it. Finding out she was alive was just..."
It was cool to know her mom wasn't dead. It was less cool to learn that she just... didn't come home, for some reason. Not that she couldn't, just that she didn't. She probably had 'good reasons,' like adults always do for the stupid stuff they do, but that doesn't make Uzi feel any better.
She shakes her head. "We didn't really have a chance to get to know each other or anything yet. Hopefully whenever I get back home. If I get back home."
Another silence descends. Peter is the first to break it after a few minutes, holding his fist in the air. "Parent stuff. It sucks, huh?"
"Sure does. But hey, even with all that baggage, you still became a- what did you say? -Guardian of the Globe, or whatever?" says Uzi.
"Galaxy," says Peter. "And you're still a reasonably well-adjusted brat, so I guess everything worked out in the end."
Uzi stands up in her chair, scuffing the seat with bootprints. "Bite me! This 'brat' saved the whole universe!"
Peter rises to match her glare. "Oh yeah? So did I! Like, four times, and I'm pretty sure four is bigger than one."
"They teach you that on Earth school?"
"Joke's on you! I never went to school."
"Okay, I take back all kind-of-nice stuff I said about you, you're just a regular brat."
"And you're a huge brat!" Uzi pounces on Peter, clinging onto him and sinking her teeth into his shoulder.
"Ow, what the hell is wrong with you?!" says Peter, grabbing at her. "This is real leather, do you know how hard that is to get out in space?"
"Bite me! And your music taste sucks!"
"God, this is why I don't deal with kids!"
