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“Scanner confirms it. He’s in there.” Peter threw the device to one side in frustration. “Shit!”
“I’ll go…”
“Uh...probably better leave this to me, Gamora.” Peter said, hand held up to stop her as she made for the hatch.
“He will have questions.” Gamora pushed Peter to one side and started the climb towards the hatch. “I know better than you what just happened.”
“Do you know better than me what is and isn’t safe to touch inside an M-Class grav chamber?”
Gamora sighed with her whole body, before climbing down and stepping back from the hatch.
“Right.” Peter smiled, and replaced Gamora on the ladder.
It had been a freak ion storm. Had the sensors not been on the fritz they would have seen it in time. As it was, now several of the Milano’s systems had joined the sensors in fritz-ville, although that was the least of Peter’s concerns right at that moment.
Number one priority was the fact that two of his crewmates were, for want of a word, cyborgs. And cybernetic implants, as it turned out, got along with ion storms about as well as ship systems did.
Gamora had recovered quickly, her enhanced cybernetics resetting almost instantly, so that all she suffered was a brief moment of paralysis followed by a quick and (not that she would admit it) painful case of pins and needles.
Rocket was a different story.
Without his cybernetics, Rocket was a raccoon. A raccoon that had suddenly found himself paralysed and surrounded by metal walls and predators.
A raccoon who, as soon as his skeleton was back on line, had run for his life.
How Rocket had managed to get inside the grav chamber was anyones guess, and Peter filed away a mental note to check the internal hull later for areas where desperate claws had ripped through it.
“Rocket?” He called, his voice echoing back off the machinery and circuits that surrounded him. The heat of the room wrapped around the thief like a thick blanket, and it wasn’t long before his palms were moist, bad news when crawling on your hands and knees around electronics.
“Come on buddy. You in here?”
Sure enough there came a response, a chirping sound, twisted and gruffed, that lead Peter to his team-mate curled up in a foetal position on the floor, arms wrapped around himself and knees so tightly pressed in that he was practically a quivering ball.
Upon seeing Peter he chirped again.
“Hey there little guy.” Peter knew that Rocket hated being called that, but right now this wasn’t Rocket he was dealing with. It was clear from his eyes and the lack of vocalisation that not everything had finished coming back online yet.
The thief held up his hands as he slowly approached the frightened creature, his movements so deliberately slow that a quick glance might have thought him standing still. All the time Peter maintained eye contact with Rocket who, in turn, kept both eyes wide and fixed on the Terran.
“That’s it." He said in a light voice. "I’m not going to hurt you.”
As Peter got closer, the Raccoon flinched into a sitting position and scurried backwards until he hit a wall, where he curled up again, arms wrapped around his head as if by making it so he couldn't see Peter, Peter wouldn't be able to see him.
The movements, and how he hid now, were Humanoid, not Raccoon. So something was coming back.
Which meant that Peter was now dealing with a creature not yet able to fully comprehend the information and memories soaring through his mind.
“Hey, it’s me. Quill? Star-Lord? You know, we’re the Guardians of the Galaxy?” Peter risked moving a little faster, now that Rocket’s escape routes were limited. “I’m not going to hurt you, okay.”
And that was when the Raccoon launched at him.
“Woh!” Peter just managed to stop Rocket from scratching his eyes out, although the faint trickle of thick moisture that he felt run down his cheek told him how close a call it had been before he was able to get the struggling carnivora at arms length. “It’s okay. Just, I’m not going to hurt you! I’m your friend, remember. FRIEND. Come on!”
The semi-conscious raccoon continued to bite and scream, and while Peter was more than capable of stopping himself from getting hurt, Rocket coming through the experience without a twisted bone or five was becoming less and less likely as he forced Peter to tighten his grip.
“We’re friends, Rocket. You. Me. Gamora. Drax. Groot.”
And the struggling stopped.
“Yeah. You know Groot? Some circuits back on line there?”
“Groot?”
“Oh thank all God’s listening.” Peter nearly dropped the Raccoon in sheer relief. “Welcome back, Buddy.”
“Groot.” Rocket blinked, eyes darting in each direction. “Groot.”
“Okay, that was premature. Taking it back.”
And Rocket started to sob.
A memory flashed through Peter’s panicked mind. Screaming, scared, crying and kicking and picking a fight, and Yondu had held a hand to each of his shoulders and taken it all, every punch and kick endured without a single defensive move or returned blow. And when the adrenaline had exhausted, and the child was scared and sobbing and then what had Yondu done?
What had Yondu done?
“That’s it. I know you’re scared but everything’s okay now, boy.” He said, mirroring his mentor word and movement as he sat down on the floor and pulled the raccoon towards him, so that he was sat in Peter’s arms, head rested against his shoulder.
“See. I kept you safe and I’ll keep you safe. I wont hurt you, so you don’t hurt me. Ain’t no one gonna hurt here. You’re safe. We look after our own on this ship.”
“Friends.”
“Yeah. Friends.” Peter rocked slightly. “You, me, Gamora, Drax and Groot. We’re friends. Understand?”
When he felt a nodding movement against his shoulder, he couldn’t help the sigh of relief. Almost instinctively his hand slid up to cup the carnivora’s head, thumb stroking fur “Okay. Let’s get you back.”
When Peter started to move, so did the raccoon, panicked hands grabbing the edges of his shirt.
“Or we can stay here.” Peter said, settling back down. “Here works.”
“Quill?”
“I’ve got you.”
“W’happened?”
“Ion storm. You and Gamora went blue screen for a bit, but you’re both going to be fine.”
“Groot?”
“He was a little freaked, but he’ll bounce back.”
Rocket nodded, his eyes unfocused.
“You okay?”
“Don’t matter?” Rocket muttered. “Just a machine. Bunch of circuits and implants you can switch on and off like a bulb.”
“Pretty sure if you hit me hard enough on the head, I’d reset to.”
“You’re real. I’m just a frickin’ thing.”
"No you're not." Peter leant back slightly, so that he could look down at the Raccoon. “You’re my friend. You’re my teammate. You’re not a machine, you build machines. Really cool machines that do really cool, complicated things. And last I checked frickin’ things don't save galaxies, frickin’ people do.”
The face that looked up at him was so lost, vulnerable, that Peter instinctively tightened the embrace.
“And you look pretty real to me.”
The raccoon rested his head back against the thief’s shoulder and if Peter felt the moisture that seeped through his shirt he said nothing.
"Don't let go."
"Wasn't planning to."
In any other situation, Peter knew that Rocket wouldn’t have dared let anyone who wasn’t Groot touch him, much less hug him while he cried. It was a sign of how frightened and hurt he was right then, having been forced to consider the very reality of his existence. His sense of self was in doubt right now, and Peter knew that it would take more than one hug and a few words to fix that. They were in for a rough few days.
And he vowed to see his friend through it.
It wasn’t much longer before Rocket, much like the child Peter had done in Yondu’s fatherly arms, had cried himself out and fallen asleep. The thief continued to hold him, a thumb stroking the fur on the side of his face, unconscious of time passing, until he heard Gamora’s call from the hatch. His sleeping team-mate still in his arms, he carefully crept back to the hatch. All the time he kept up his gentle litany of whispered nonsense.
“You’re safe. We look after our own on this ship.”