For the Fandom Loves Puerto Rico auction in October, I won/bought via donation an illustration by @not-worms of Loki and Gamora sparring from my Loki-in-the-Void fic The Abyss Gazes Also (along with this moodboard for the same fic). I managed to make Loki and Gamora my own new brotp by writing about them meeting on Sanctuary when Loki is in Thanos’s custody and Gamora helping to train Loki back into fighting shape. Below the cut is an excerpt from Chapter 7, in which they meet and start training together.

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About a month after I was brought to Sanctuary, the door to my cell opened, and it was not the Other who stood there, but the strange green-skinned young woman I had seen while returning from my last interview with Thanos. “I’ve been sent to help train you,” she said brusquely, without further explanation.

I had been sitting cross-legged on the floor, reading one of the books I had taken from interdimensional storage … I looked up at the woman without bothering to stand. “Train me to do what?”

“To fight,” she replied tersely. “I understand you’re somewhat out of practice.”

I scoffed. “‘Out of practice’? How could that possibly have happened when I’ve been confined to a tiny cell for weeks on end?”

The woman ignored my sarcasm. “You’re to come with me. Now.”

After taking the time to stow my book back in its pocket dimension, while the woman cocked her head to one side and glared at me impatiently, I stood up stiffly and followed her. She led me through hallways lined with doors like the one into my cell, until eventually we came to a large room whose door was an open archway. She led me into the room, then briefly disappeared into an adjoining side room. She emerged carrying two long metal staves, and tossed one to me. I fumbled it briefly—my reflexes were slowed by weariness and lack of use—but I caught it before it hit the ground. The woman gave me an unimpressed look before she adopted a fighting stance.

The metal staff was lighter than the wooden quarterstaffs I was familiar with, but the principle was much the same. The woman and I circled each other, sizing each other up, before she struck forward with her staff and I parried with mine; and then the match was on.

I decided I might as well try to make conversation. “And here I’d thought I would just be relaxing in a command ship directing a Chitauri invasion from afar,” I said pleasantly.

“I don’t know anything about what Thanos wants you to do,” she said bluntly. She was quick, agile, and surprisingly strong, and I found myself breathing hard just trying to defend myself from her blows; I had barely tried to press any attacks of my own. Out of practice, indeed.

“I see. What do you do for Thanos, exactly? Besides train new, er, recruits for mysterious missions?”

“I do whatever I’m ordered to do,” she said, terse as ever.

“Don’t we all?” I said with a knowing smile. She said nothing. “May I know your name? Or are you ordered not to tell me?”

She looked surprised for a moment and hesitated in her attack; I thought this might be my opening to put her on the defensive at last, but she recovered quickly. “My name is Gamora,” she said after a few moments’ pause.

“Mine is Loki.”

“I know your name,” she said.

Of course. “I’d kiss your hand, except…”

“I’ll excuse it just this once,” she said, the same grim expression never leaving her face.

Did she just make a joke? I was so surprised that I let my guard down, and she managed to land a blow to my side. It hurt some, but I was too pleased at discovering that my sparring partner had a sense of humor to care.

“Careless,” she said, her face impassive as ever.

“Yes, well, I am out of practice,” I said with a sardonic smile.

For a few minutes we continued fighting without speaking. The stone room echoed with the scraping of our shoes on the floor, the metallic clang of our weapons against each other and occasionally the hard clack of one end against the floor, our breathing—mine increasingly labored and beginning to rasp in my throat, hers finally (I noted triumphantly) showing signs of exertion. I was tiring, but I also felt my muscles waking up after weeks during which my only exercise had been pacing around my cell and occasionally stretching to keep myself amused. Gamora got in two more hits—one to my upper arm, another to my thigh—but I also succeeded once in striking her shoulder.  Finally, though, she rapped the knuckles of my right hand sharply with her staff, and I dropped mine with a clatter. Before I could move to retrieve it, she had spun her staff around so that one end of it was pointed at my throat, as if it were a blade. I raised my hands in surrender.

“You may rest for a few minutes,” she said imperiously.

I sat down on the floor with my back against the wall, while she remained standing, one end of her staff resting on the ground. “Water?” I asked, panting a little. She unhooked a small canteen from her belt and handed it down to me. I drank half of it in one go.

“So, Gamora,” I said when I had recovered somewhat, “how did you come to be in Thanos’s service?”

“The same way you did,” she said, her voice carefully neutral. “I was captured.”

“And what did you do before you were captured? Were you a notorious pirate, like me? Or were you a feared mercenary? An infamous intergalactic assassin?”

“No,” she said. “I was a child.”

“Oh,” I said lamely. What does one say to that—‘I’m sorry’? “So—Thanos trained you? To fight, to kill?” For I had no doubt, seeing the flint in her eyes, that she was capable of killing.

“He made me,” she said. “He is—my father.  Or so he calls himself.”

“You mean, he made you the warrior you are.”

“No, he made me. He—altered my body. To be stronger, faster; to heal more quickly.”

Well, that explained how she was able to beat me so easily. “And I thought I knew bad fathers,” I said with an uneasy laugh—a weak attempt to lighten the somber mood that our conversation had abruptly taken on.

“You should not say such things of Thanos,” she said, her stern tone tinged with fear.

I shrugged. “It hardly matters what I say; he can listen in on my thoughts at any time.”

Her face seemed to turn to stone, and I suddenly realized that I should have told her that from the beginning: Thanos could use me to spy on her, to see if she harbored thoughts of rebellion.

“Why do you say you have known bad fathers?” she asked flatly. I wondered if she was actually curious, or simply eager to turn the conversation away from herself.

“My father by blood left me to die as a child,” I said. I made myself sound calm and unconcerned, and for a moment I even felt that way, too. “And my adoptive father—did much the same.”

“Then you are lucky,” she said with just the shadow of a smile.

“That I survived?” Every day since my capture, and quite a few days before then, I had felt just the opposite; but I didn’t need to inflict my self-pity on her—especially knowing what horrors her life had contained. “I think I’m just stubborn,” I said instead.

“Then are you ready to be beaten again, stubborn boy?” she asked, that ghost-smile still hovering about her lips. She kicked my staff up with one toe to catch it in the hand that wasn’t holding her own staff and then tossed it to me, all in one smooth motion.

I caught it this time. “‘Boy’?” I repeated. “I’m probably a thousand years older than you.” I used the staff to support myself as I stood up again, which punctuated my statement in a way I had not quite intended.

“Are you ready to be beaten again, old man?” Gamora corrected, a wicked gleam in her eyes.