#richmora

is almost 600 words still a mini-fic? we're gonna say it is. yes.

still accepting from this list!

Earth has more oddities than any other planet that Gamora has ever set foot on — and they range from completely baffling to often irritating, but sometimes charming in their own way.

The latter is something she will never admit, even here in a quiet moment, with Richard as her only witness. It’s not that she doesn’t think it wouldn’t be safe with him — he’s never repeated anything that’s transpired in private between them — but if any credit to the planet is said out loud, that would make it true. She still hasn’t forgiven Earth (or Carol Danvers and Peter Quill, but also Earth in general) for its transgressions against her personally, after all.

But for the moment, she’s content to set that anger aside and allow Richard to give her a tour of one of Earth’s oddities, in the space of land behind his childhood home. Lying side by side in the grass, their arms just barely touching, he’s been teaching her about groupings of stars — the stories they tell, and how, very oddly, the groupings are supposedly made.

“They, uh — they make pictures,” he’d said by way of explanation at one point, as if that could actually explain anything at all.

Still, she’s missed him (something else she’ll never admit, even upon pain of death), so Gamora has humored him, squinting up at the stars and pretending to follow along. She’s even sincerely tried to imagine herself as one of these humans, looking up to the stars and seeing infinite possibilities of shapes and stories. If she’d had a different life, maybe, she could understand imagining such things, or at least the appeal in trying; maybe the Zen-Whoberi had done similar on clear nights once.

She’ll never know, though, will she?

The thought is sharp as a knife, as bitter as poison, and goes down about as easily as either one. She does her best to shove it aside as quickly as possible, and points to the sky, asking in a voice that’s still too tight for her own liking:

“What’s that one?”

“That,” he says, “is the Big Dipper. Supposed to look like a spoon. You start there —” He raises his arm, pointing indiscriminately toward a cluster of stars. It’s supposed to be toward a specific one, Gamora knows, so she, again, nods as though she’s understood, and continues to do so as she follows the movement of his finger. “And then you go down like that.”

When he shifts, his shoulder bumps against hers, it does so softly. Warmly. She likes the feeling.

“Kinda curves up at the end there,” he continues without missing a beat, moving his finger like so. “And there it is.”

She falls silent for a time, squinting harder than ever. Trying, sincerely trying, to spot the pattern — but it’s beyond her. She wonders, briefly, if the human that had decided on this had been intoxicated, and everyone else around them had simply just decided to humor them, as she has been doing with Richard this whole time. That’s, again, something she’ll never know.

But she does know that her patience has worn thin. So, with a sidelong glance cut in his direction, she tells him, bluntly, “That doesn’t look anything like a d’ast spoon.”

Tilting his head, he considers for a beat. “No, you’re right. It really doesn’t.” And then —