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Peter tried not to think about it, after he noticed it. One night he happened to notice Rocket crawling up the wall and the trashcan to access the bathroom counter. Peter realized all the surfaces in the Milano were around the same height, and none of them were accessible to Rocket without work.
He tried to brush it off, thinking that clearly Rocket had been living in a world that was too high for him for a long time and doing just fine, thinking that perhaps the raccoon would feel patronized if Peter were to do something about it, and the petty thought that if Rocket had been inconvenienced this entire time and never said anything, that was the damn bastard's own fault for being such a prideful, chronically insecure asshole.
But when Peter kept thinking about it, he felt it was a little unfair that they were supposed to be a family and didn't live in a place that was accessible to everyone in it. He felt a little guilty that he hadn't taken notice of this problem earlier. And he felt that if his friend had to do parkour just to wash his hands, and he could do something about it, he kind of had an obligation to.
So over the next few days, in what he attempted to make complete secrecy Peter set about the task of planning out a few short staircases to place at the bottom of elevated surfaces. Peter was also not very good at complete secrecy, as he discovered when he set to measuring the distance from the bathroom counter and the floor, at around two in the morning. Rocket had seen him, kneeling on the floor with a measuring tape and chuckled at him.
"What the hell you doing, Quill?"
"It's two am, I could ask you the same thing!"
So it was not a perfect plan. Next he had brought up the spare metal panels that had been in the storage compartment of the ship for years. He wanted to make sure it could support the raccoon's weight without the flimsy metal bending, and ran into the problem of him not knowing how much he weighed.
So one day when Rocket was in a good mood, Peter tried to casually ask, as if it was normal. "Hey . . . Rocket, how much do you weigh?"
Rocket shook his head and gave him a look as if he was crazy. "What?"
"Just-it's a simple question, I don't mean anything by it just-how much do you weigh?"
Rocket glanced down at himself. "Is this about the alcohol last night, cause I have a really high tolerance-"
"No! Do you even know?"
"Of course I know! Like . . . ballpark at least but what's it to you?!"
"Ugh, forget I asked!" Peter gave up and turned to leave the room.
"Everybody in the whole fuckin' galaxy's obsessed with my size, fuckin' bullshit-" he heard Rocket grumble to himself as he left.
Peter had picked up Rocket off the ground before and he was able to estimate fifty pounds on the highest end. He found one panel could support such a weight, so he got to constructing. Unable to locate his own drill he ended up using Rocket's, ensuring that his problems in daring to do something nice for the animal would not end.
Rocket poked his head into the room he was working in and flicked his ears back. "Those are my tools."
"I couldn't find mine," Peter sighed, as he kneeled on the floor, pieces of metal around him with the drill in his hand. "I'm just cutting sheet metal, they'll be fine."
"You always get on me about me touching your stuff!" Rocket pointed out. "What are you doing with 'em anyway?!"
"You don't need to know!" Peter petulantly snapped, leaning into the escalation.
"Agh!" Rocket growled and left in a huff.
Later that night Gamora stood in the doorway, leaning against the frame with her hands folded behind her back. "So . . . what *are* you building?"
Peter sighed and gestured towards the one set of steps he had completed. They were hollow blocks, a foot and a half high and contained three small stairs. "I'm . . . making it so Rocket can reach the counters and shit easier. He's having to like . . . climb onto them all the time. But don't tell him, you know how he is."
Gamora smiled and breathed out a laugh.
"Don't laugh, it actually seems really inconvenient for him!" Peter defended. "And we wanna be . . . accessible or whatever."
"That's not why I'm laughing. It's actually kind of sweet."
"Yeah, and he'll probably still find a reason to get mad at me for it . . ."
Gamora slid down the doorframe into a sitting position. "You and Rocket self perpetuate. He thinks you're mad at him all the time."
Peter paused what he was working on. "He said that?"
"In not so many words."
Peter worked late into the night and into the early hours of the morning to finish the project. He placed one in the bathroom, and two in the common area. He would be lying if he said he didn't keep a close eye on Rocket's door that morning, still running on no sleep whatsoever. When Rocket did finally emerge with bleary eyes and mussed fur and entered the bathroom he stopped in the entrance at the sight of the stairs leading up to the counter.
Rocket turned behind him to look at Peter who quickly looked down. Rocket entered and stepped onto the first step, a bit hesitantly. He rotated his pointy ears downward. Then scaled the other two and turned on the faucet. Peter smiled to himself, and then finally went to bed.
He slept until the afternoon, and no words were exchanged between him and the raccoon about it. Rocket used the stairs around the others, who also didn't say anything, and they blended into the background, like they had always been there. Rocket didn't seem uncomfortable or embarrassed when he used them, and seemed to like the one by the table as a perch when that night, the guardians gathered to eat and play a card game.
When the energy had fizzled out as each one of them became tired and went to bed, Peter and Rocket ended up alone at the table, with Rocket sitting on the top stair.
At that point it felt impossible not to mention it.
". . . you could have just told me." Rocket muttered.
"What would you have said?" Peter prompted.
". . . probably nothing good." the other admitted.
"You seemed like you didn't want to bring a bunch of attention to it, so I didn't want to either."
". . . I guess I should say 'thank you'."
"You could."
". . . don't push it, Quill."
"You're welcome, Rocket."