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I. Stories
Mantis likes to sit in the kitchen after everyone’s drifted off, listening to the ship’s soft, metallic whirring and staring at the bottom of her long-empty mug, thinking. It’s peaceful, and it gives her a rare placid moment to take it all in before she’s thrown back into the neverending bustle of her new life in the morning. She is used to being alone, after all. Sometimes she still finds solace in solitude.
She’s taken aback when, after weeks of this, someone finally discovers her nighttime habit.
“Mantis?” Drax asks, just as surprised to see Mantis in the kitchen at this hour as she is to see him.
“Oh, h-hello,” she greets him, looking up abruptly and shoving aside her mug in an inexplicable fit of embarrassment.
“How could you possibly be unable to sleep if you have sleep-powers?” He asks.
“I’m not here because I suffer from insomnia,” Mantis replies, trying to contain the flush in her cheeks at being caught. “I…just like to be here. It is calming at night.” She smiles warily.
“I cannot sleep,” Drax says. “I thought this would be as good a place to not sleep as any.”
“I can help you sleep, if you like,” Mantis offers.
“I would.” He nods. “But…not with your powers.”
“How?” Mantis asks. “I mean, what do you want me to do to help you sleep without altering your emotions?”
“When I cannot sleep, it is usually because I can’t stop thinking about my family,” he sighs. Mantis nods perceptively. She remembers how this seems to haunt him. “It may help me sleep if I could…talk about them.”
“I would be happy to listen, if you wish to talk about your family,” Mantis agrees.
“Have I told you about my daughter’s fascination with the insects of our homeworld?” Drax asks. Mantis shakes her head – no, he’s never told her this story. She listens raptly – it is what, she thinks, a good friend does – and by the time he nears the end of his story, Drax looks adequately drained to make continuing to avoid sleep impossible. She sees him off with a shy wave of her hand, relishing the opportunity to be of service.
Drax remembers that night, and whenever thoughts of his wife and daughter keep him awake, he comes to the kitchen. Mantis is always there, with the chipped mug she shoves aside out of habit when he enters, expectantly waiting. She always listens, and Drax begins to realize that as much of a catharsis the stories are for him, they do Mantis as much good.
She relishes the ability to feel his emotions without so much as brushing her fingertips against him, everything she learns about his past, and the way the stories always seem to bring him comfort solely by their telling. Mantis feels privileged to hear them, privy to a part of Drax that few will ever know.
Even without her abilities, Mantis learns, she can help heal wounds.
II. Coffee
Sometimes, when the team docks planetside, Peter will disappear for the day and materialize hours later laden with as many bags as he can fit on his person.
The first time, Mantis wonders what he could possibly have filled eight bags with (she’s counted, wondering if it would help her discern their contents). She doesn’t want to ask – maybe it was something secret, she thinks – but he sees the way she stares ever so intently at the parcels and pulls out a small, metallic, lumpy package.
“I stock up on Terran food whenever I find it,” Peter explains. “Not in budget, but I bought it anyway. Don’t tell Gamora.”
“What is that?” Mantis asks, gently taking the surprisingly heavy package, embellished with text in a script she’s never seen, and turning it in her hands.
“Coffee,” Peter tells her. “It’s a drink on Earth. Most people practically live off of this stuff.”
“Does it taste good?” Mantis asks. “It must, if it is so important.”
“I guess it depends on the person. But that’s always not why people drink it,” Peter says. “It also gives you energy. Like, a lot of energy. Quickly. People sometimes use coffee to stay awake.”
“May I try some?” Mantis is intrigued at the prospect of this seemingly miraculous, energy-restorative Earth beverage.
“Uh…” Peter looks unsure. “Sometimes it also turns people into hyper nightmare beings.”
“I think that I could handle it,” Mantis insists. “It smells good! I want to try it.”
“Okay,” Peter relents, “but it takes a few minutes to make. You gotta make it in this special machine and I’m pretty sure the one we have is at least fifteen years old.”
Mantis nods. She’ll wait.
They talk on and off as Peter makes the drink, alone though surrounded by the clamor of their teammates returning to the ship. For nowhere near the first time recently, Mantis feels a warm, incredibly foreign feeling she can’t describe. It is cozy and unfamiliar, safe, as if the world has gone all to color after a life spent in monochrome; it is all so different from the coldness of the isolation that she’s always known.
Mantis is grateful for coffee, she decides, even if she doesn’t like it. It is a chance to feel as if she is a part of something real, for once in her life.
(She is promptly banned from ever touching the stuff again after a truly frightening caffeine rush has her bouncing off the walls for hours, but for the moment, Mantis has nothing but fond feelings towards coffee.)
III. Sightseeing
When Mantis was young, she would dream about other worlds. She’d never seen any planet besides the one she lived on, had nothing on which to base the wish-images she created. But she’d spend her free moments picturing those other worlds in her mind, planets full of beautiful sights and sounds and people she’d created to be the friends she could not have. With time, Mantis outgrew her elaborate daydream world, but never her yearning to see how the real universe compared to the one she’d imagined.
She never thought she’d get that chance.
Now, in just a few months with the Guardians, she believes she must have seen every planet there is. Reality’s got little in common with her childhood fantasies, but even so the universe seems wide and wonderful and full of endless corners to explore. On every mission, she tries to slip away, once the battles have ended and the credits have been transferred, and do what she knows her younger self would have wanted her to do. She owes her as much, Mantis thinks.
Sometimes she finds herself lost, wandering through unfamiliar city alleyways or markets full of pungent, enticing aromas. She’s never seen it as a setback; Mantis always makes her best discoveries when she’s lost. Like the strange, delicious yellow fruit with seeds no one knew were poisonous until it was far too late and two-thirds of the team had been carted off to a Contraxian hospital. Or the young siblings in a public square who’d once recognized her as “that bug lady who just joined the Guardians of the Galaxy!”, at which Mantis swore she nearly fainted.
She saw the best things when she didn’t know precisely what she was trying to see.
It was in those moments of aimless wandering that she couldn’t help but thinking that no matter how different the universe she’d now seen was from the one she’d created, no universe could be better.
IV. Dancing
Love is as much a mystery to Mantis as anything. She’s never truly seen it; it is simply something she knows is out there, but never thought she’d know personally.
She doesn’t now, either, in the most literal sense. But sometimes, when she hears soft music coming from another room, Mantis slips into the doorway. Always, without fail, the music is accompanied by sporadic footfalls, and soft voices, and there are few things Mantis loves more than to watch Peter and Gamora dance, in the middle of the common room when no one’s around.
Mantis notices every detail of their interactions – their soft, contented smiles, the way Peter’s hands rest so incredibly gently on Gamora’s back and shoulder, the way they’ll sometimes, in the midst of an especially emotional moment, touch foreheads, faces separated by the smallest possible expanse. She’s often found herself breathless as she looks on, silently allowing the magic of the scene to pull her in.
She realizes, when she first catches them dancing, that she finally,finally gets it. This is what love looks like.
The thought sends warmth blooming through her chest; though it is not her own, witnessing her teammates so taken by each other feels like a blanket wrapped around her shoulders.
Mantis smiles and hopes that, even if she should never feel it herself, that love like this might never end.
V. Humor
Mantis learns quickly that, if nothing else, if everything is going absolutely and completely wrong, her team can be counted on to make her laugh. There are more instances of this than she’s bothered to keep track of. There was the betting pool she’d accidentally revealed, for one.
Truth be told, Drax and Rocket had probably not intended for her to overhear their exchange about a betting pool they’d set up for themselves involving the romantic status of a certain pair of their teammates. But she’d been in the room; Mantis contended that it was entirely their fault that the cat had been freed of its bag.
“Drax and Rocket are wagering credits on you and Gamora,” she’d casually told Peter one morning. He’d nearly spit out his coffee.
“They have a betting pool?”
“Yes,” Mantis replies. “If you and Gamora reveal that you are romantically involved, Rocket wins six hundred credits from Drax, and vice versa.”
“You know, I really should have seen this coming,” Peter sighs, “and yet I am somehow still disappointed.”
“Why?” She asks.
“Because Rocket’s gonna win, and he’s never gonna shut up about it,” Peter sighs.
“You are together, then?” Mantis perks up. “That is wonderful!”
“Uh…” Peter simply stares at her for a moment. “You didn’t realize that?”
“I do not know how to interpret social cues,” Mantis reminds him.
“Oh. Right. But thanks for the tip,” Peter says. “I’m gonna go start never letting them hear the end of this.”
Mantis receives a thorough talking-to from Rocket the next morning; Gamora, who is nothing short of enraged to discover that her teammates are betting on her relationship status, has to forcibly remove him from the room before he becomes unnecessarily violent.
(She thanks Mantis for the tip. Mantis admits that she’d never meant to reveal anything, but Gamora doesn’t seem to care.)
They laugh about that later, years on into the future when no such bet needs to be made. But Rocket, Mantis swears, is still upset that his gambling scheme was disrupted.
And then there was the attempted marriage.
Drax has always liked to discuss his homeworld’s marriage customs. He has regaled the team countless times with stories of the ritual combat that took place at weddings on his planet, telling the same incessantly confusing story about a cousin’s wedding (he was defeated by a challenger, the story goes, and his jealous brother tried to run off with his bride, who promptly attacked the cousin’s brother and fled) so many times that every one of the Guardians could retell it in their sleep. Drax has frequently suggested that Peter and Gamora incorporate the tradition into a wedding ceremony he is always convinced was imminent. They always decline, but he never ceases to make the suggestion. It’s almost inevitable, everyone acknowledges, that Drax’s fascination with his planet’s nuptial traditions is going to end in disaster.
It does, once; somehow, in a logical leap far beyond anyone’s comprehension, he misinterprets an innocuous romantic exchange between Peter and Gamora as his homeworld’s traditional betrothal gesture.
Mantis has to hold in her laughter every time she remembers the look on the couple’s faces when Drax had congratulated the two heartily on their “engagement” and once again pitched his ritual-combat idea. They’d tried to tell him, repeatedly, that what had actually happened between them had meant far less than he thought it did. Their protests fell on deaf ears. The next time they found themselves planetside, he’d even gone so far as to drag them to the nearest institution that seemed “official” and attempted, to everyone’s utter confusion, to have them married.
Yes, he’d been rather disappointed when he realized that nothing of the kind had actually occurred, but the memory of Gamora’s unmistakable, though repressed, urge to draw a knife on Drax upon realizing what he was doing, coupled with Peter’s slight disappointment at her lack of enthusiasm for the idea of being forever stuck with him, more than make up for it.
Mantis barely knew the feeling of laughter before she met the Guardians; but now, with them, it is a freely given gift, one never in short supply.
Life is too short, Mantis decides, not to take advantage of it, to laugh through misfortune. Every one of her teammates has borne unimaginable suffering, and yet they find the humor in everything; it is a skill Mantis wishes to learn, for it seems far superior to hanging her head as she has all these years. And she certainly does not lack for teachers.
+1: Empathy
Mantis wonders for a time if she brings the team that has given her so much anything of value. Yes, she can help them sleep, or ease their heartaches. But she is hardly useful, she thinks, in battle, and sometimes it is difficult for her, having been nothing but alone all her life, to wonder if belonging is something of which she is capable.
But she sees, soon enough, where she was wrong.
With time, it seems, the team’s interactions become a bit less caustic; hard edges are sanded down. Though few of her teammates will ever be truly gentle, there is something softer, more compassionate, about the way they interact.
The screaming matches don’t end, but now they are less frequent, more good-natured. It seems as if the team’s understanding has improved.
Mantis figures it’s just the effect of time and shared trauma at first. They’ve been through so much together, she conjectures, that they’ve simply bonded. But they haven’t. Eventually, she starts to realize, after a few odd comments here and there, that perhaps she has more to do with the Guardians’ increasingly empathetic demeanors than anything else.
She can’t see it. Mantis has never been an influencer; she’s simply in the background, where she’s always assumed she is meant to be. But perhaps that – sensitivity, a sort of gentleness – is what she brings to the team that it lacked before, she concludes.
She is an empath, after all, and a powerful one. Most of her teammates possess the emotional intelligence of lumps of metal. Mantis thinks, liking the idea more than she admits, that maybe she’s helping to shape those metal lumps.
After all, hearts are malleable, she thinks. They don’t stay the same.
Sitting in the kitchen once again, staring into her beloved mug, chipped with four years of wear, Mantis smiles.