Content Warning: Impromptu lucid but anesthetized surgery, vague but "on-camera" gore, body horror. References to past surgical procedures including vivisection performed on characters without consent or, in some cases, anesthetic.

Note: Based in movie canon. Contains a reference to events in Gamora and Nebula's tie-in prequel comic.

I'm in the process of reposting most of my GotG fics to here from AO3. This is 4 of 5. On AO3 it is titled "Shit Breaks." I changed it here to follow FFnet's rules regarding titles and summaries.

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When the inevitable happens, the embarrassment almost outweighs the pain.

She wakes up in the galley with her spine tingling, her face and neck on fire, and her friends gathered around looking... very concerned, and that's still strange.

Peter is the one to break the awkward silence, because that's what he does when he's not creating it. "So, uh. The hell was that?"

She takes a deep breath and doesn't try to sit up. It won't end well. "My cybernetics."

Peter's brow furrows. "Does that – do they just do that? Like, a lot?"

"No." Pain lances through her spine and straight into her left temple. She squeezes her eyes shut, considers the situation, and decides there's really no point in sugarcoating things. "Someone turn the lights off."

She listens for footsteps before she continues. "Thanos didn't like the idea of any of us being self-sustainable enough to run off. He used to have his engineers check on us after missions, make any necessary repairs. And make sure we'd need them again soon." Cautiously, she opens her eyes. The galley is dark. She sighs, relieved, and pushes forward. "On my last job before he sent us to Ronan, I let an opponent damage the plate in the right side of my face, so I could be sure of an examination. I knew they would fix anything else they found. I wanted everything to be as stable as possible before I betrayed him."

She pauses for breath, makes an experimental attempt to raise her arm, and winces. Still no. "I'd say it got me pretty far."

There is a very tangible pause before Peter speaks again, incredulous: "You can't just not tell us shit like that, what if –"

"Quill," Rocket growls, somewhere out of her line of sight. "Shut up."

Movement. She quells the instinct to turn her head. "Gamora," Rocket says, startlingly softly, on her left. "How bad is this gonna get if we don't do somethin' about it?"

She exhales, slowly, and takes stock of things. The burning in her face has diminished somewhat and now seems to be holding steady, and she can move her fingers without feeling like her spine wants to be somewhere far away from the rest of her. "It probably won't kill me."

In the pause that follows this proclamation, and in the interest of open communication between friends, she adds, "Right away."

Rocket snorts. "Oh, well, that's terrific. Okay, look, we're in the middle of friggin' nowhere, so right now there's three options I can think of. One: you wait it out and see what happens, which sounds like a barrel'a laughs. Two: you try and fix yourself up, or three: you let me try to help."

Gamora opens her mouth, thinks better of what she was about to say, and closes it again.

Rocket huffs. "Hey, no arguments from me if you go the first or second route, okay? I get it. I'm just sayin'. Ain't exactly a party, tryin' to stick pointy shit in the back of your own neck, and you don't look like you're havin' a great time on the floor here. You want my help, you got it. You want us gone, we're gone."

Her headache spikes, and she hisses through her teeth before she can stop herself. Peter starts to say something and Drax and Groot both shush him, loudly, and she could almost laugh. She takes two deep breaths and says "Everyone but Rocket, leave."

"Wh-"

"You heard her," Rocket says sharply, and in the ensuing shuffle of footsteps she has the mental image of him shoving at Peter's legs to get him out the door.

She hopes dearly that it's accurate.

After a moment, Rocket returns to the side of her head. "Okay, they're gone."

She swallows. "How many times have you done something like this?"

"A few. To myself, mostly. Shit breaks."

"We have completely different types of augmentation," she says, and wonders who she is trying to talk out of this. "We have completely different types of bodies."

A pause. Reluctantly, "Yeah. You'd... You'd have to tell me what to do for a lot of it; I'd basically be an extra pairs of hands. Hands that are highly skilled at not fucking things up inside delicate machinery."

Her heart is pounding in her ears, her head throbbing painfully with each beat. You'd have to tell me what to do.

Would. Would , not will. He's not counting on the outcome of this conversation.

That helps.

"I'm not... not sure I can move," she admits, through gritted teeth. "It's -"

It's painful , is what she doesn't want to say. I can move, I can drag myself down the corridor and it probably won't kill me but it will hurt , it will be the worst pain imaginable, I know because it won't be the first time I've done it and this is my home and that is not supposed to happen here –

– is what she doesn't want to say.

She shuts her mouth and bites the inside of her cheek.

"We could do it here," Rocket says. "I could sterilize the place."

The heat is kicking back up in her face, and the crawling sensation in her back is seeping into her limbs. In a few hours she will lose consciousness again and, in all likelihood, she will not regain it.

Tell me what to do.

"I would have to be awake."

There is a very, very long pause.

"Yeah," Rocket says quietly. "...Gamora, I... I really – I'm sorry. If I knew what I was doing I'd –" He clears his throat. "I don't wanna kill you, y'know, is all."

She gives herself a moment to forget that Rocket is here. To think about the options before her and evaluate her feelings on all of them, shoving past the hard-won instinct to ignore those feelings For The Sake Of The Mission.

She is not a weapon, and she is not on a mission, and for just a moment she allows herself to do nothing but breathe.

She closes her eyes again. "If you fuck up the anesthetic," she says, voice low, "I will kill you."

Rocket does not fuck up the anesthetic.

Between the actual, terrifying businesses of, respectively, poking-at-the-robotic-pieces-hardwired-to-one's-friend's-vertebrae and instructing-one's-friend-on-the-specifics-of-how-to-best-poke-at-the-robotic-pieces-hardwired-to-one's-vertebrae, they haltingly make what begins as the most awkward small talk of either of their lives.

Gamora finally laughs.

"Jeez!" Rocket snatches his hands back and leaps away from her. "Warn a guy! Warn the guy rewiring your spinal cord!"

She stifles a giggle against the floor. "It's just – look what we're doing."

"Oh, shit, you're right, how did I miss that?"

"Well, exactly! I mean – I mean look at us, trying so hard not to talk about – about anything that matters, and look what we're doing." It's possible the anesthetic has something to do with this line of thought. Possible. Slightly.

Rocket sighs heavily, and gets back to work. "...Yeah, I guess. So, what, I'll tell you mine and you tell me yours?"

"Some of it," she says. "Maybe."

He mutters something under his breath, meaningless noise, and asks, "Did you feel that?"

"No."

"Good. Move your right hand."

She does.

"Awesome. Okay. You ever been awake for this stuff before?"

"Not for things like this." She hums contemplatively, wondering how much to say. "Small things, routine examinations when nothing was really wrong, sometimes, if they needed me to answer questions. But the big things were mostly..."

She trails off. Rocket doesn't prompt her to continue, and maybe that's why she does. "Sometimes things went wrong. We slipped. We fell. We broke, and Thanos decided we were worth fixing. We woke up when it was done."

She wonders if she should tell him about some of the times Nebula broke, and decides rather quickly that, friends or not, open communication or not, now is not the best time to start turning the vague mutual knowledge that they've all done things they're not proud of into a more concrete I threw my sister to an almost certain death. "Your turn."

"Oh, we're takin' turns? Great. Yeah. I was awake for a lot of it and they didn't always..." He stops, does something complicated that she can dimly feel at the base of her spine. "...Anesthetic was expensive and they had higher priority projects."

He didn't react with any measure of audible horror to her story. She'll grant him the same courtesy.

"T'be honest," he says, after a quiet few seconds, "eventually I kinda preferred it when they kept me awake. Then at least I could see what they were doing."

"...Yeah," she murmurs. "Yeah. Waking up with metal in my face... was... I didn't even remember what had happened, at first, and there were just... plates. Under my skin."

"Speaking of those, how's the thermostat runnin'?"

She blinks, and realizes belatedly that the dim, painless heat she could still feel through the anesthetic earlier is now gone. "They have cooled down considerably."

"Good, good. Almost done. This last connection'll make it really easy to move. My professional recommendation is that you don't until your skin's all back where it's supposed to be."

"I'll take your advice into account, Doctor."

There's a jolt – not painful, really, but a sudden hyperawareness of her capacity for mobility, and the conversation rests there for a while as she concentrates on holding still and he concentrates on closing up the incisions along her back and neck.

It still doesn't hurt, but she can feel it, and the second he gives the all-clear she curls into a tight ball and then immediately uncurls, stretching her limbs as far as they'll go.

Rocket hands her a shirt. They had to cut the one she was wearing earlier off of her, and she is vaguely glad it wasn't one she particularly liked, because she would rather incinerate it than mend it and allow it to remind her of this day every time she pulls it over her head.

She pulls the new one over her head and supposes it won't bother her too much, being reminded of this part, sitting quietly with her friend as they both, for reasons unexplored, fail to leave the galley.

Rocket is cleaning the surgical tools, which she fully expected him to make someone else do. She watches her own blood and spinal fluids soak into a rag. "I hope I didn't need any of that."

"Nahhh." He sets down the rag and waves a hand dismissively. "Plenty left in there, trust me."

Gingerly, she sits up. When that doesn't make anything go horribly wrong, she leans sideways heavily against the wall and continues to watch him work. A smile tugs at the corner of her mouth. She lets it. "I think I do."