Grim swears silently as she realises that, yes, she is leaving a blood trail, and should possibly do something about that.

Or she could just try to kill Thanos, probably fail, and die in the attempt. Well. She ducks out of his shadow, fires one of the chitauri weapons towards Gamora (she's got good aim, even on the move, but someone with good reflexes can probably avoid that), pulls her other gun free, levelling it towards Thanos.-

-He wheels around with surprising agility for someone his size. She manages to get a single shot off with her sidearm, but this does little to deter Thanos as he grabs her and slams her into the debris-strewn floor.

"You. Killed. My. Son."

He punctuates each word by hurtling her about: always keeping a hand clasped tight around her and using collisions with various surfaces in the room to keep her off balance.

Even for someone with a mildly superhuman physiology, this treatment is likely to hurt quite a lot.

Yup. That hurts. Not as much as having electricity applied directly to her muscles through her implants, but enough. The treatment draws muted sounds of pain, like she's trying to not be too loud.

She's terrified now, and it shows, she knew she was going to die, but facing it now? She does not want to. Even if there's no way to get out of it.

She's pliant in his grasp, not even trying to escape, or even protect her body as she's slammed into things. She hadn't wanted to do this, but she hadn't had a choice, and now she's going to die.

She's facedown on the floor when he registers that she's stopped struggling.

He pauses.

Glances over at Gamora.

Something clicks into place. He sees a sudden symmetry. A balance.

Gingerly, he grips her braids between two massive fingers and draws her head back so that he can finally look her in the eye.

There's still rage etched on his features, but it's become more distant somehow.

With the threat of further violence readily implied, he asks: "Who sent you?"

Her face is impressively blank, while her eyes are hopeless, and scared. She hurts, and she just wants it to end. Maybe if she complies he'll kill her faster.

"My- father," she gets out, throat pulled too tight, but not trying to ease the position any. "Got-got hired. To kill you. Sent me."

"I see." Quiet words from a somber giant. "And he sent you alone?"

"Yes," she says simply. There's nothing else to say. She's a weapon to be aimed, and all her father lost if she failed was a gun. And he had plenty of other people willing to take her place.

"Then your father was a fool."

He slams her face back down into the floor grating, hard enough to make her lose consciousness.

The next hours pass in a muddled haze.

She dimly remembers being dragged through the command ship's halls by chattering Chitauri.

Then the sensation of having her possessions stripped roughly from her.

Then the whir of alien medical devices, in a bright room with a chemical smell.

Then pain. Bones getting shoved back into proper alignment.

When she comes full back to her senses, she's laying in a cot on one of the ship's lower levels. A cast encases one of her arms, her other arm's cuffed to a bedrail.

The greenskinned alien woman is sitting up on the cot adjacent to hers, whittling away at a wooden bauble with a small double-bladed knife. It looks like Gamora didn't fully evade that shot from the Chitauri blaster during the scuffle earlier, but has made a nearly full recovery from the plasma burns in the time since.

"Hi."

"...hi," she says. Her confusion might be plain. (She thought she'd be dead by now, but, she supposes, she's a source of information.)

Grim supposes rightly.

"Name and location of your father. Name and location of whoever hired him." It looks like Gamora is reading aloud off of some notes scribbled in ink on the back of her palm. "Who gets sent next when they find out you failed?"

She then settles back on the pillows piled in back of her cot and resume whittling.

"I don't recommend lying. He really doesn't like lying."

So she gives the information as best she can - Damien O'Reilly, spends most of his time shipbound like Thanos, but she can give them a few places he tends to like being, she doesn't know the name of the man who hired them, but she can give a perfect description and location.

"I- don't know," she admits to the last. "It depends on who he can convince is worth it. If he can convince someone it's worth it. But I'd put money on it being Pyre if it's anyone, he's insane enough to take the money Father will offer him."

Gamora nods along, keeping her expression dispassionate.

"Does your species have any special medical or dietary needs?" Gamora asks this one last question after double-checking that the prior interrogation was properly recorded. "I don't know how long he'll keep you here. Might come up."

"Not that I've ever noticed."

"Alright then." Gamora unfurls herself and heads to the door. "Sit tight and don't do anything stupid."

She waits till Gamora's gone before she slips the cuff. (She's never liked being tied in place.)

She changes her position on the cot slightly, draws the shadows to her-

-and fades into them. Feeling a little less exposed.

Time passes. She thinks she can hear guards stationed outside the cramped infirmary room, but none of them intrude.

Eventually, a heavier tread sound from the hallway and then the door slides open.

He regards her present condition: unshackled, enshrouded, but still waiting patiently where instructed to.

"Cute trick."

She fades back into view, eyes lowered, and gives a nod of acknowledgement to his words. "Yes, sir."

Thanos had to stoop down to fit his body through the doorway.

Now he clears a space in the center of the room by yanking the second cot (the one Gamora had curled up on earlier) over to the far wall of the infirmary. He then sits down at Grim's bedside, using the other cot the way a smaller being would use a stool.

"You spoke honestly, earlier. About the ones that sent you." Thanos doesn't elaborate on how he knows this. "Why?"

He sounds genuinely curious, but not disbelieving. And not angry? His calm tone probably comes across as somewhat unnerving, given the circumstances.

"There was no point in lying," she says simply. "You have me here, and if I lied, you could easily make me regret it."

"I could."

Thanos leans in. 

"And I wonder. If that possibility frightens you so, why come here? Did you really expect to invade my home, kill me, and then escape unscathed?"

"I had no choice. And I was certain that if I failed- that my death would be quick."