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Nearly 30 years later, and the diner the next town over smelled exactly the same: old, greasy, and kind of like feet.
But his mother had loved this place, so it was where Peter had his first meal after coming back to Ter—no, Earth, his hands still a little dirty from cleaning off the headstone so that he could see her name peeking out from beneath the wildflowers he’d brought (found). He had wiped his hands on the cracked vinyl of the booth, but it doesn’t seem like it made much of a difference to either of them. Ordinarily he wouldn’t mind, but both Gamora and Drax were kind of weird about cleanliness, for scarily similar reasons that had way too much to do with killing people.
While he finished off his pancakes, french fries, and two sides of bacon, Peter examined his suit, checking for rips and tears. The good thing about the timing of this visit was that with all the other stuff falling to the earth during the meteor shower, by the time anyone realized he’d come along for the ride he should be far off-planet. The bad thing was that catching a ride with the Perseids wasn’t like latching the Millennium Falcon onto an asteroid and slipping past the Empire; it was flying through a cloud of sharp objects of varying sizes, some of them sharp and fine enough to cut to the bone before you even knew they were there.
Also, while he knew his equipment would protect him, it was kind of hard to not scream like a girl when all the stuff entering the atmosphere around you caught on fire.
Okay, and he’d had to circle a bit before he landed in the right area, which might ping on someone’s radar, but last he’d heard his home planet was more about moon landings than they were about actually knowing where things landed. What, like the FBI had a space division now? Please. Not that much could have changed.
Except, yeah, the town was a lot more familiar than he’d expected, but in the sense that it kind of looked like the way early years of some of the planets he’d visited with the Ravagers. Still pretty dingy and backwards, sure, and Main Street was holding onto ages of dirt and calling it historical, but some of those shops off of the highway had crazy things in them. Considering his childhood memories were more about people than places, it was a bit of a shock.
This place hadn’t changed much, though. He’d be more thankful about that if he’d been smart enough to order a glass of milk. This coffee was the worst thing he’d ever—okay, not the worst thing he’d ever had in his mouth (oh man, that Askervarian), but it was pretty close. No wonder it was all his mother had ever ordered, come to think of it.
Really, Quill? He jumped, looking around, but no, that was just Gamora’s judgy voice in his head and not across from him. While the crew had been surprisingly supportive of this little pit stop on their way to the next job, none of them seemed keen on coming along, which was probably for the best. He’d seen movies back in the day, he knew what happened to green and gray and, uh, furry and tree people when they touched down on Earth. Isn’t it far more likely that with limited funds she chose to feed you and not herself?
“Oh my God, shut up,” he muttered, reaching into his pocket where the small metal cylinder sat, warm to the touch and ready to light up and vibrate if one side called the other. Either he’d want to go back up or would get in trouble (“The latter is far more likely,” Drax had observed, to Rocket’s glee) or the crew would need him back so they could get the hell out of Dodge (“Thanos… knows of Terra,” Gamora had said, and smiled, but it was not a nice smile) or they’d just want his company (“I am Groot,” snickered Groot, and ever since he’d gotten out of his pot and into his teen years that guy was kind of a sassmouth).
The point was, it was kind of easier to handle coming back as long as he knew he could leave, so he touched it a lot. It certainly wasn’t because he was being sentimental or thinking of family or anything.
“Hey.” With a jolt, Peter scrambled to an upright position, jamming the beacon back into his pocket so fast he almost tore through the lining. “Tammy had to go home early, so I’m your new waitress. You need anything else?”
He looked up at the woman who’d just spoken, because he was an intergalactic man of mystery who knew exactly what pissed-off sounded like in thirty-five languages, but she was probably annoyed at her co-worker and not at him, or at least he hoped so because wow she was cute. Blue eyes, red lips, and brown hair in a braid that fell over her shoulder and emphasized oh man. She’d totally been running around before now; how had he missed her?
“Sorry, what?” he said, shaking his head and looking up at her face again.
“Do you want more coffee?” she repeated.
“God, yes—um, yes. Please,” he added.
“Gotcha.” She walked back to the counter and he thought about not watching her go, but it wasn’t like he was sticking around so who cared if he looked like a creep? Besides, the radio had moved from mournful country to classic pop, and whatever was playing had a catchy beat and some sweet background finger-snaps.
“Hey, who is this?” he asked when she came back, and he was definitely not dancing in his seat with motions specific to the lyrics. “She sounds familiar.”
“Seriously?” She rolled her eyes as she refilled his coffee, but there was a smile playing at the corner of her lips. “Madonna? ‘Vogue’? Come on, Vogue, let your body move to the music,” she sang along, and her voice wasn’t the greatest but her enthusiasm was the coolest thing he’d seen since he got back, and yeah, that included the new strip mall.
“Holy crap, do you know every word?” he asked, delighted.
“Dude, this is my iPod, I know all the songs,” she assured him, and he had no idea what that meant but got the feeling it was awesome. “Music is kind of my thing.”
“Oh my God, mine too!” He fumbled, pulled out the Walkman.
She actually looked kind of fascinated. “Retro, dude.”
“Classic,” he corrected, and set the box on the table. “This is the soundtrack of my life. No lie.”
“Well, tell me more about it once I give the assh—gentleman in the corner a refill,” she said with a wink. “My name’s Darcy if you need anything else in the meantime.” She reached into her pocket and dropped a couple of capsules on his table, which turned out to be hazelnut creamer. They transformed the coffee from horrific to mildly drinkable, which was kind of outstanding.
Still, he thought, craning around to look at where Darcy was pouring coffee into an older man’s mug, maybe not the most outstanding thing of the night. He should totally rewind the tape to the middle, just in case.
~~~~~
“Thanks, Darcy Lou,” Henry said, toasting her with the coffee he drank hot and black (ew ew ew). “You’re a real peach.”
“Aw, thanks buddy.” She spun away with a flourish, a long-practiced move that kept her from another solid half-hour of hearing about how the Cardinals were gonna take the pendant this year. While ordinarily she wouldn’t mind a little baseball talk to start an evening shift and even to end it, Henry had a tendency of explaining everything about the game during their little talks, because there was no way a “little lady” like her could know anything about it. On the last game day he’d congratulated her (again) on the man-bait potential of her signed Pujols jersey.
Speaking of man-bait, though, there was certainly some hot new wo-man-bait in here tonight (God, taking any hours she could get, especially if it meant staying late on weeknights, was going to make her go absolute nutcakes by Christmas). Tammy’s last customer had messy light brown hair, adorable scruff, and a keen appreciation for the classic ballads of the ‘90s if his current head-bopping to “MMMBop” was any indication. Sure, his outfit was kinda weird, but Jimmy Thompson had rolled into breakfast last week in overalls and rain boots when it was a sunny 85 degrees and climbing fast. Compared to that, this guy had style.
He also had an appetite for carbs, considering how much he’d demolished on his plates (yep, plural) by the time she took over his section. Darcy kind of liked that in a guy, though, because it wasn’t like he’d have room to talk when she ate every pancake ever. Not the ones here—the owner, Dave, seemed to think that any tub with a cow printed on it was automatically real butter, and syrup didn’t need actual-facts maple anything—but tonight she had plans to go home, fire up the tiny stove in her tiny kitchen, and rock out with some classic griddle cakes.
But first she had to get through tonight. Thank God she had a way to stay busy that wasn’t listening to Henry; ever since one of the girls had snitched about the MSNBC app on her phone, the workplace had become suddenly very uptight about browsing while on the clock. But anyone who wore matching red leather pants and a coat had to be worth talking to, at least until closing, right? Especially when, despite the pep of the next song (Ricky Martin, aw yiss), his hazel-brown eyes peered into his cup and his gorgeous mouth turned down at the corners and—
Right. Darcy to the rescue. Straightening her shoulders (and making sure the girls looked their best), she sauntered back over to his booth.
“You look sad.” She grinned, reaching across the table to tap his chin up and close his now-open mouth. “People-watching is kind of my job, and detecting sad is a specialty. So, what’s on your mind, sailor?”
“Eh, it’s nothing.”
She pursed her lips, leaning in closer. It gave him a pretty good view, but she was totally okay with that (and not just for tips). “Nice try, mopey-pants. Let’s do this again. You just ate away all the sad with the ultimate comfort food—at least I hope that’s why you did all that with the fries and the syrup and whatnot. Now you tell me why, so you can get it off your chest.”
“Looking at my chest, huh?”
He cringed as soon as he said it, but she only smiled at him. Ugh, even his dorky-surprised-happy face was hot. “Only fair, and it’s pretty nice. Not sure if it’s my top ten, though. I’ve got pretty high standards from my time in the big city.”
He didn’t seem sure what to say about that, fiddling with the rim of the coffee cup as he leaned back. “I used to live here, and my… I thought I had family here. And I do, but they’re, uh, not exactly where I left them.”
“Corner of Elm and Brown?”
“Huh?”
“That’s, uh, where the cemetery is—never mind, I’m bad at references,” she said, waving her hand like she was clearing the air. Stupid brain-mouth filter. “Dude, that’s terrible. Nobody told you they’d died?”
“I’ve been living… not here. Abroad,” he added when her eyebrow arched again. “They probably thought I was dead, too.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. But I, y’know, it is what it is, and I got some… closure.”
“Still not—crap,” she muttered, glancing over her shoulder to where Henry had finally decided it was time to shuffle home. “Let me take care of this. Don’t you dare leave yet, you have a sad and I have to feed chocolate to those, it’s a thing.”
The adorable grin he gave her in response to that helped ease her through helping Henry to his feet despite his over-friendly hands, and seeing his typical 50-cent tip on the table when she did. It even helped her not drop him. But nobody, nobody, could have kept her from rolling her eyes so hard she probably sprained them when Henry paused by Hottie Hotpants’s table, drew himself up to his full height, and declared loudly, “Now Darcy, you run and find someone if it looks like this travelin’ man’s gettin’ too friendly.”
Scratch that; the eyeroll may have slid into incredulous murder-face. The guy’s mouth opened, and he looked a little shocked and a little offended, and Darcy suspected she’d have to intervene but thankfully, all her nice customer said was, “I’m, uh, actually from Fullerton. But hey, you know, you’re looking out for your own and that’s great, really.”
For a moment Henry looked shocked, like he’d just found out that the sun was round, or that women could wear pants. (Not that Darcy could; stupid hokey small-town-Main-Street-polyester bullshit, and anyway, all she had with her were jeans.) Then he continued his slouch toward the door, muttering about “dad-gum boys” and “serpents from the garden.” She’d heard Henry was actually a decent guy, when he wasn’t working through a night at the bar; problem was, night seemed to come earlier and more often for him.
“So you—oh, hey, I can go,” he called out behind her as she walked over to the door and locked it with the keys she’d fished out of her apron pocket, flipping the cracked sign on the door so that OPEN was on the inside. His offer would have been more convincing if he hadn’t been clutching his coffee like a lifeline ever since she’d given him some of her special stash of hazelnut goodness. “If you wanna go home.”
That chased away the rest of the small-town sads, and Darcy gave him a smile in response. “No rush, I’ve gotta finish up cleaning anyway. Brownie or cupcake?”
“Huh?”
“Pie’s gone, but there are still baked goods. On the house. Otherwise the owner’s gonna try and pawn them off on the lunch crowd tomorrow, and that’s just wrong.”
Oh fishsticks, he was even more cute when he did the oh-my-god-chocolate routine. Ugh, she was such a sucker for the sweet puppy routine. “You won’t get in trouble?”
Darcy snorted as she rummaged behind the counter. “Please, he keeps his inventory in a password-protected spreadsheet. The day I can’t alter it is the day I go back to using a Speak ‘n Spell as my main tech fix. So, pick your poison.”
He had wrinkled his nose; totes already thinking about it before she even said anything. “Uh… brownie?”
“Good choice.” But she went ahead and set both in front of him, giving him a wink as she headed across the diner to pick up Henry’s dishes and shitty tip.
Well, if nothing else, life here was a routine, she mused as her hands did the work for her, stacking and arranging plates and silverware into one easy-to-carry bundle. She scooped that up in one hand, carefully picking up the near-full glass of water in the other. Man-boy was cute, but the wet T-shirt thing had never been her style. Okay, maybe once, but college, okay?
“How is it?” she called out as she looked down at the dishes, glanced back toward the dining room, and dumped everything into the sink. She could get them later, after the cute guy had left. And if the evening went even better than she thought, well, Mary Ann from day shift owed her for about ten sick kid incidents. Decision made, she moved on, and more importantly back to where (oh my God) he had chocolate all around his mouth.
“Fo good,” he said, just as he inhaled another bite of brownie. It was almost god-like—nope, not going there. “I mean, ferioufry.”
“Sweet,” she managed, as she Did Not Think about Pop Tarts. Ugh, but she so was, because— “I got the recipe from this awesome diner in New Mexico.”
He washed the brownie down with a gulp of coffee, his minimal wince yet another sign of his moral and physical fortitude. It was kind of hard to see what he looked like, all tucked in the booth and wearing that jacket-pants combo, but there was no way he was cut. He was an Ian, and they weren’t—biscuits, now she was thinking of Ian too. What the actual fuck? “New Mexico, huh? That where the ‘big city’ is?”
“Oh, God no,” she said with an eye-roll, “Puente—the place I was, was the kind of one-horse town where the horse is long dead. I’ve lived in London and New York City. Well, for like, two seconds.”
“So… not a lifelong Missouri person, destined to stay here forever and ever?”
“Shockingly, this is not my life’s ambition.” She sat down, took a sip from her cup, smiled around the rim even though now she had kind of a sad too. Luckily, she’d snagged a brownie for herself. “I was a student, and decided to do a summer internship instead of a science class because the only class I could take was taught by this asshole who failed my friend because she wouldn’t put out and ugh, no.”
“Wait, a student? Like college?”
“Culver University, Willowdale, VA. Full scholarship,” she said with a proud grin. “Not that I’m bragging.”
“No, you—you should totally be bragging, that’s really impressive.”
After the double whammy of growing up here and then being surrounded by “real” science and its geniuses, hearing that was… well. Kind of a surprise.
Good surprise, though, just like the glimpse of muscle she caught beneath his collar when he leaned forward to give her all of his attention.
So of course, faced with increased hotness and happy feels, she babbled. “Well, thanks, dude. Anyway, so, internship. Which, due to lots of factors, turned into a two-year world traveling thing where I kept Ja—the professor eating, sleeping, and wearing pants.” Her smile faded. Damn it, Jane. “Then shit went down, and even though her boyfriend came back to stay and then we all set up shop in a sweet pad in New York, she decided one day that things weren’t working with him or the science. That she needed to reboot or something, and I totally get that but it still sucks. So I came back only to find that Culver considered me ‘academically delinquent’ and my scholarship was toast.”
He blinked and leaned back, probably because the murder-face was back. She tried to smooth it out, even if the burning pit of Culver-hatred would never quite die. Oh, she’d gotten them back, sure, but she could spend the rest of her life papering their admissions website with ominous MIDI music/everything that came up when she Google Image searched “noooo GIF”/false but hilarious questions about harvesting incoming students’ souls, and it would never make up for what had happened. And it wasn’t like Jane was any help; wherever she was off finding herself, it wasn’t a place Darcy could get to.
But she’d spent a lot of mad getting here, and there was a really hot guy in front of her, and she kind of wanted him to be a traveling man so it’d be easier to get him naked. “So. Here I am, back in the ol’ hometown,” she grinned, toasting him with her mug. “But how ‘bout that Walkman, McChest?”
He blinked at her. “That,” he declared, “is terrible. And I know terrible, believe me.”
“It’s not so bad,” she shrugged. “Tips aren’t bad, and, I mean, free coffee…”
“No, no, the name. McChest? C’mon. That’s just—”
“Don’t be a douche.”
“Be a—okay, I don’t know what that means, but my name is Peter, okay?”
“Peter?” She leaned in close. “Like a dick?”
“No, like the saint, thank you.”
They held eye contact, her lips twitching, his nose lifted in offense. When they giggled in tandem, play-shoving at each other across the table, Darcy began to suspect two things: one, she was maybe in trouble, and two, she should have realized it way, way earlier.
Fortunately, she had gotten really, really good at surviving trouble.
~~~~~
It wasn’t the first time Peter had woken up with a hand around his throat. But it was the first time after he’d had awesome sex with a—oh wait, no, the throat thing had happened, a couple of times actually. Jesus. So maybe it was the first time he’d done both of those things but in a trailer, with another guy lurking on the low-hanging ceiling behind the one currently pinning him to the bed, and in the glow of the shadowy figure’s weapon pointed at his face he could see the asshole—shit, not asshole, Askervarian—looking past Peter to leer at the naked, completely uncovered form of his—
“Oh goddammit,” Darcy slurred, and then she reached beneath her pillow and rolled off the bed in one motion, pulling out something that looked like a miniature bat. Except that when she shoved it against her fast-moving attacker, his entire body locked up into a shaking, spasming ball of what sounded like pain.
“What the hell is that?” he gasped as he dodged the other guy’s blow, coming back to slam a fist on the mass of tentacles on his shoulder. Huh, Yondu was right, that sounded like it hurt (if the high-pitched shriek was anything to go by, but hey, at least he could breathe). “Are you—you’re not a cop!”
“What the hell is that?” she said as she fumbled in the bedside drawer, knocking the little dolls and toys onto the floor. The ceiling assassin had only gotten more stuck to the ceiling, instead of falling, which maybe wasn’t a bad thing since he’d probably land on all of them. “How do you know how to fight these creepy things?”
“They aren’t things, they’re A'askvarii,” he retorted. “The one on the ceiling obviously has on a—”
“Obviously? Jesus, what are you?”
“Human!” he snapped, then grunted as the Askervarian (seriously, was he cursed?) kicked him in the chest with a three-toed foot. “Well, kind of.”
“Kind of?”
He caught the next kick, twisted the ankle until it snapped, and huh, at least that still seemed to be a universal thing, delicate bones in the foot region. “Could you please stop repeating everything I say? It’s”—he deflected a punch, did this guy have noodle bones or something?—”not”—threw the guy into a wall, which made the entire place shake—”HELPING!”
Now the other Askervarian dropped, but that was okay because apparently Darcy had stocked up on military-grade weapons. Whatever she sprayed in the guy’s eyes made him shriek and clap his hands to them, but it took another crackle-flash of the baton before the guy went still. Moving closer to the light of the lamp, Peter could see that he was missing the shoulder bits and that his musculature was much more human than his stupid boots indicated. Shoving the guy out of her way so she could kneel down, Darcy removed the guy’s mask with the same tender care, glowering the whole time. “Well, Ceiling Cat here looks like an Asgardian to me, considering this,” she said, and held up a necklace whose unique style Peter totally ignored in favor of staring at the hot naked girl for completely non-naked reasons.
Which sucked, almost as much as the sucker punch he took to the cheek that sent him crashing to the floor. Hitting his head on the mattress on the way down didn’t help either.
“Really?” Darcy growled, and in the dizzy haze of slack-jawed unconsciousness he felt the bed move as she jumped on it. Another click of the baton and—oh God, the Askervarian, who’d bolted up from the floor and was gills-out hissing, he exploded, green and purple and grey everywhere, and the smell was almost as bad as the taste.
“Oh no no no gross,” she muttered, and he heard her move off the bed toward him, felt warm, slightly damp hands pulling something stringy from the corner of his mouth. “Hey, stay with me, because I’m pretty sure there’s gonna be a round two once whoever sent them realizes what happened. AndI’mnotsurehowlongtheotherguywillbedown.”
“The Asgardian? How—what—” He struggled to his feet, looked around for his coat amidst the colored blurs of the room. He liked his coat. It was nice. Oh God it probably needed a bath. “Are you human?”
“One hundred percent,” she said, “unlike some lying liars. Though to be fair, I may not have been totally honest about that internship. The one that, um, started in New Mexico with the Destroyer and ended with Dark Elves and Malekith in London.”
It was a good thing he was so dizzy, Peter thought as he fumbled for his clothes, because it saved time to already be here, in the warm cozy darkness of what the hell. Time he needed to put on pants. “Pants,” he repeated, slowly, because it seemed very important.
“Yeah, working on it, dude.” A slight groan issued from her side of the bed, and she vaulted up and over the bed to fling the lamp at the Asgardian’s head with a spectacularly loud crash that cast them into darkness. “Oops. Bad life choice. Got a light?”
He pulled the beacon out of his pocket, the cheery green light reminding him of all his poor life choices. Ugh, everyone was going to be pissed, and with his crew that was never, ever a good thing. Especially if he was the one they were all mad at. And what was up with that, anyway? Rocket was way more of an asshole but he never got everyone mad at him because Groot was never mad at Rocket, even when he clogged the toilet or stole things just because he could or started bar fights and then left once they all threw in, not because he didn’t want to fight but because he thought it was funny when everyone came home soaked in booze except him.
“Shiny.”
He snatched the beacon away from her, glaring. “Yeah, and it’s mine, so, y’know…” He flapped his hands at her.
She’d somehow managed to find a shirt—whoa, was that his shirt? how did she even—but the lack of a bra was beautifully apparent when she folded her arms across her chest. “Yours? You mean like all this?” she said, waving a hand around the battered, broken, splattered remnants of her home. “You owe me.”
“Right, let me just pull out the Yellow Pages and call up my lawyer, and then my banker.”
Her eyes were fixed on his hands like he’d done something obscene, which, really, she should know what he and obscene looked like after tonight. All he had done was act like he was dialing a phone, had she never heard of making gestures? “Holy shit, you were abducted by aliens,” she breathed. “You—Peter Quill?”
Peter froze, and the jacket almost slipped off his shoulders. Shock and gunk: bad combo. “How do you—”
“Later,” she said, winding a scarf around her neck and jamming a knit hat on her head. “We need to GTFO.”
“Huh?”
“Get the fuck out,” she over-enunciated. “You’ve got a ride, I’m guessing?”
“Wait, whoa whoa whoa, no.”
She kicked a sheet of metal that had once been part of the wall out of her way, stomping over it with her two mismatched boots. “Hurry up!” she called after him.
“No!”
~~~~~
Approximately seven point six Novan temporal units after the Milano had entered Terran airspace for the second time, Gamora was in the back of the ship that Peter and another lifeform had flown into, her glare firmly in place as she stood before them both. Dealing with Peter on a regular basis had taught her that such an expression was never completely successful in deterring him from folly—nothing was—but the situation well merited it, as he no doubt knew. “Why did we need to enter the atmosphere of a primitive planet that has not even heard of the rest of the galaxy, and why is one of them with you?” she demanded. “Have you—” Her nose wrinkled, and she sniffed. “You smell appalling.”
Saying nothing, Peter jerked his thumb over his shoulder, to where the young Terran woman similarly coated in what appeared to be A’askvarii innards was speaking through some sort of antiquated device she held to her cheek. “—anyway, Thor, when you get this, and I hope it’s still recording because I just flew into a spaceship, just, um, do your best to convince Stark or the powers that be to not go all crazy. And maybe, like, obliterate my trailer, though it breaks my heart cause man that place is full of all my feels. But yeah, also full of organs now, so. Love ya, big guy.” She hung up, turned toward them with a bright smile. “Wow, now that’s fast travelin’, space cowboy.”
Gamora whirled back to Peter in stunned disbelief. “You—” Then she realized what one of those words in the girl’s stunted, childish communication had been. “Thor?”
“Why're we stopped, Gam, what's the big hold-up?” demanded Rocket, sauntering down the walkway toward them as he scratched his ears. The girl stared at him, and he glowered, crossing his arms over his pajamas. “What’re you looking at?”
“That is a big-ass gun,” she breathed, and Peter grinned, and oh, this was trouble, Gamora knew it to the coldest depths of her bones. “I wanna touch it.”
“Oh. Uh. Well.” Rocket coughed into his fist, looked at every corner of the cramped space but the ones occupied by people. “That’s kinda personal.”
The girl nodded sagely. “Got it, no offense meant, dude.” Now she turned to Gamora. “Hi, I’m Darcy Lewis, Terran badass, friend of Asgard, and all-around awesome person. Looks like I’m going to be traveling with you for a while.”
Peter exhaled, turning around to look at her with the gentle, caring, considerate look that Gamora had long known was a bold-faced (but selectively useful) lie. “Actually, are you sure you don’t—”
The Terran did something with her fingers against Quill’s leg, and just like that, he was silent. Gamora might have adopted the maneuver for herself, were it not so obvious that the move first required intimate knowledge of the victim. “Nope, we’ve talked about this, not taking the chance that those assassins weren’t for me,” she informed him with far more patience than the situation merited. “Just imagine what would happen if Prince Thor of Asgard knew you’d ditched his now-probably-favorite human to meet her doom. I told Thor all about you guys first,” she added as an aside to Gamora, “because sneaky is well and good and actually kind of hot, but you can’t BS a BS’er.”
Quill stared at the girl, and that was definitely attraction on his part, and the Terran—she blushed, grinning at him with her lip caught between her teeth. “Gamora, you sure about this?” Rocket said in a tone that despite its ambitions was anything but a whisper, jerking his thumb toward the two of them.
Before she could vocalize any of the varieties of “no” that had risen in her throat, the girl smiled. “I know how to cook.”
Rocket looked up at Gamora. “Don’t,” she told him.
He looked at Quill. Damn it all. “She lyin’?”
“Nope. Darcy is the real deal.”
The girl—Darcy—preened. “Yes, I am.”
“We could use a cook,” Rocket muttered with the same subtlety as his earlier query.
Opening her mouth to repeat her refusal, Gamora paused. The situation with Asgard was… delicate, considering how unhappy they had reportedly been about the destruction of Tivan’s collection. It seemed they had given him some items for safe-keeping and neither part of the word had proven true. Unfortunately, thanks to the kind efforts of the Nova Corps, everyone knew just who was responsible for that particular event. Being a so-called hero was often inconvenient.
She had also learned that none of the idiots she traveled with was able to wield a knife or pan as anything other than a weapon. Gamora herself was far too busy to indulge in such menial tasks. But if the girl was willing…
“Okay, so, taking the scary silence as a yes,” Quill said, and he cupped his hands around his mouth to bellow, “DRAX! GET HER GOIN’!”
“Oh, good,” Darcy sighed as the ship lurched into motion, “I’m pretty sure one of Tony Stark’s new death robots that he just debuted on CNN was about to get all up in our business. So!” she said cheerfully, blowing a kiss to Peter’s gobsmacked face. “Tour time?”
“Death robots?”
“Death is a minor exaggeration.” She looked up at Gamora, eyes bright and hopeful. “Don’t supposed you’d know where a lady can take a post-self-defense shower around here?”