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The first few days go by slowly. Rocket doesn't remember most of them.
Taking off is a wordless unamity, and they don't stay on Earth for more than two Xandarian days.
By the end of the first week, the ship smells like them again. It takes Rocket four to start breathing unconsciously again.
They don't talk about it. They don't talk about the empty seat next to Peter, they don't comment on Nebula's new adjustments that make her look kinder , they don't bring up the way Rocket sometimes bumps his head into their legs in the hallways. They move back into their quarters and don't mention the dusty boxes rotting around the ship. It's late in the evening when Quill asks him about the fuel prices in the past five years, and at the shaky insult he gets for an answer, he thinks maybe it's better to figure it out on his own.
No one needs to say it. They know what they're thinking.
“What's this?”
Rocket's head turns. Sometimes, he still blinks once, twice, three times until he wakes up or the sight is gone. When he opens his eyes, Peter's still there. “A rag,” he shrugs.
“You wanna try again?” Quill's eyebrows are arched and his head is tilted forward. He waves the cloth in his hand and Rocket realizes he needs to think really hard to remember ever seeing anything dirtier than that.
He grimaces, snout wrinkled and teeth exposed. “Something you wiped your ass with.”
“That's my shirt!” Under the dim lights, his eyes are wide. “How did my very white shirt end up like this?”
Rocket scoffs, looks back at the window and clutches the controls like he's just remembered he has a ship to fly. “Well, last time I checked, you didn't need it anymore.”
He frowns so painfully hard Rocket can smell his brain smoking, but then he gets over it and goes on. “You better check again, ‘cause I'm here and half my stuff's either gross or missing.”
“Join the line, stupid,” there's the squeak of soft fabric shuffling against leather, then the thin lines Rocket's eyes have become shooting daggers at him. “You think the ship stops breaking ‘cause you ain't here? That we don't gotta clean up when you're not around? That we only need an engine as long as you live? If you don't want us to use your shit as scrap parts, try not dying next time.”
They glare at each other until Peter's face softens to its limit. He hurls the rag over his shoulder as if it isn't the most disgusting thing left in the galaxy. “Keep your eyes on the controls, then maybe we won't.”
His ears go from pressed flat against his head to mildly droopy, but he keeps his eyes on the controls. Sleep rarely comes easy, so Quill sits there with his million Terran stories, Rocket doubts him and Nebula makes herself tea. Out there, the stars move, the engine hums and nobody dies.
Fighting can only cease for so long.
It's good. It's normal, it's working, it's breathing. Alive. They never really minded all the fighting.
What they do mind, though, is when the ship is almost obliterated into a pile of smoking scraps three times a day. They brush it off until the fourth time, and start thinking maybe Rocket's actually trying to crash the damn thing when they almost hit the same asteroid twice.
“We can fill the wings with explosives,” Rocket grins, whenever they need a plan. “If we crash into that wall,” he suggests at the slightest chance, “if we fly into that planet, if we…”
At first, Peter thinks he simply gets a kick out of watching their reactions or he's just trying to make up for all the years spent without being a reckless bastard. At some point, he realizes maybe Rocket doesn't wanna live there anymore.
Peter's throat burns as the beer goes down, watching the empty sheets that used to be Gamora's side, and he thinks it isn't hard to agree with Rocket at all.
Nebula has this infuriating habit of always knowing where he is. Which is fine, she's been learning for five years, but the problem starts when everyone else decides to pick up on it too.
His tail keeps twitching and his chest hurts from blubbering like a child, and they kinda treat him like one too. Because Drax is sitting up just so Rocket won't have to fight for the softest spot on the couch, they're keeping the lights low because they know his head's throbbing from sobbing like the sun was about to explode and Quill is letting him mess with his Zune all he wants.
Nobody asks. Nobody talks about it.
Rocket holds one of the earbuds and squints as best as he can through wet lashes, then latches onto something that's either Nebula's sleeve or Mantis’ blanket. “This thing's disgusting, Quill.”
“I wonder who's been using it for the past decade,” he mumbles back, eyes closed and arms squeezing the living shit out of Rocket so he knows he's real. There. Breathing.
"Half a decade,” Nebula corrects him.
He feels Peter's chest rumble with a snort against his back. “I know how to count.”
“Then why didn't you?” Drax asks him, and squints when the song comes on. “It's too loud. I don't know how you are able to sleep with such noise.”
“Noise? You call Spacehog noise? Hey, I'll have you know we're talkin’ about Looking Glass, Michael Jackson–”
“And Jesus!”
Peter has to take a break. “That's… not a musician, Mantis. Glen Campbell, Sam Cooke, Fleetwood Mac… uh… David Bowie…”
He goes on. Rocket chuckles, sniffles and doesn't try to freeze it out when something warm and liquid replaces the dull pain in his chest.
They buy a new ship, and suddenly Rocket's sleeping three nights a week. Sometimes four.
“The Bowl?” Drax raises his voice above the cacophony of scattered voices and creaking sounds, like grimacing and narrowing his eyes would improve his hearing.
“The– the Bowie!” Quill yells, and squints right back, and Rocket turns to Nebula with a snicker to make fun of them.
They pick their rooms. Rocket starts to fly with his seatbelt on again. They listen to music, watch movies, try to cook, kick ass and keep Gamora's stuff in the storage room, and don't use it as spare parts.
In a bit, Rocket finds himself craving the stability he's known to despise. He accepts it.
Things start getting back to normal when they let them. Everything throbs and expands. The stations are crowded, the influx is twice as fervent and, lucky for them, so is the crime rate.
There's a gig to get done on Contraxia. Some jackass whose head is worth a fat load of units is waiting to get caught, and they've been waiting to earn a fat load of units. They stop waiting and set the route to the right way.
They choose a spectacularly cold day to fuck around as bounty hunters.
Quill spends a third of the two hours and a half he always (still, it's the same, they don't change) takes to get ready looking for his scarf, but his hands meet half-empty drawers, dead little bugs and absolutely nothing at all.
It's quiet until Mantis’ voice echoes from the living area, “Is he lost?”
“Perhaps he is stuck in the washing machine again!” Suggests Drax.
“Pfft. He's sleeping his ass off, that's what he's doin’,” Rocket alternates between scoffing and yelling. “Quill! Get your lazy ass over here or I'll set this thing to self-destruction mode with you on board!”
Peter doesn't test him. He looks down to glare at him, but his eyes meet something very, very funny. Or, at least, the effect it has on his expression is funny enough to make Drax laugh.
Carefully wrapped around Rocket's neck, warm and tight, is a long, perfectly jaded red scarf.
The jackass gets caught and their paycheck is just as rewarding as it seemed. There's a crowd when they get back, and Rocket hadn't seen one in so long it automatically makes his hand itch for a gun. He holds Nebula's hand instead.
There's also something loud and very much unwelcome and pretty satisfying at the same time which could only be read as praise. The crowd roars and cheers like the snow they walk on is a red carpet (it is, kinda, because there's blood dripping from their clothes like dew in the morning), and nobody's there to kill them.
It's worse, actually. They're there to say thanks for bringing my children back, and can I pet your fur, and are you up for a few drinks, Star-King, and Rocket grips Nebula's hand tighter, his ears pinned to his head. Someone with extraordinarily yellow hands decides it's a good idea to grab and squeeze Peter's ass along the way, and when he whips around it's to shove them off with a twisted grimace like he's either about to snap or throw up.
Rocket didn't miss the world.
(Because the Actual World holds his hand back when he's uncomfortable, and turns around with a grin to either ramble about a musician he's never heard of or make fun of someone's hair, and reaches out a handful of vines and branches without him even asking, and carries him to bed when he passes out in the middle of a project– and damn it, Rocket knows what it is that he missed.)
The wind keeps blowing his fur back like grass, but he doesn't mind. It's too hot.
“–yeah, just give me a… hey, Rocket! Groot's asking about his console!”
Rocket blinks, but doesn't raise his head. His hands are tinkering with a particularly ungrateful wire and digressing right now could be the difference between waking up next morning or blowing up another ship. “You look under the cushions?”
“He told you to look under the…” the wind blows over Peter's voice, through Rocket's fur, between the buildings. He breathes it in.
There's warmth next to his left side, he can tell. There's also the creaking of the ramp, and he knows it sounds low and metallic under someone's feet and high and wailing when someone's taking a seat. Rocket squints. The cold air smells like sweet, strong cologne and leather.
And it stays quiet. The I need to talk to you but I don't know how quiet, and Rocket does what he does best, which consists of inconsistent alternating patterns of fiddling and ignoring.
He feels Quill's head turn. “Is that mine?”
Rocket stills, bristles, breathes in with his entire body and squeezes the scarf around his neck, because he knows it he knows it he noticed he's gonna tell everyone and I'm gonna have nothing they're gon–
He looks up at Quill, whose finger is very clearly pointed at the gun in front of Rocket. His shoulders relax, his hands fall. “Uh, yeah. What's it look like?”
“Like we should stop wasting our money on crappy weaponry,” says Quill, and Rocket realizes he's hunched over, almost curled in on himself with his hands nearly blue squeezed together in his lap. “Three shots and then boom, we already gotta waste even more on repairs.”
Rocket shrugs, and his hands go back to work on command. “Things break, Quill.”
Peter licks his lips and looks away. He's trying to get closer, his words hovering over the subject like a dark cloud. “It's just– I thought it'd be kinda relevant. To try and avoid any more deaths, y'know.”
Rocket doesn't shrug, but his hands keep working. “Well, people die, Pete.”
He goes back to fixing Peter's blaster, the only, only thing he knows how to do besides yelling and stealing and killing and hurting, and sees Lylla and Teefs and Floor whenever he shoves something back into place. He glances at the Zune Quill's just dug up from his pocket and wonders if he's thinking about Yondu, or his mom, or Gamora. He'd never ask.
Something slides against his neck, pulling at his fur. Rocket frowns and paws at the scarf. “You tryna strangle me now?”
Quill finishes draping half the scarf over his own neck, but doesn't speak until he's sharing earbuds with Rocket. Which is stupid, Rocket thinks, because now he's only got one functional ear to listen to whatever bullshit he has to say. He almost wishes he was deaf. “I'm just guessing if I share my stuff with you, you'll stop stealing it. I'm freezing here, you asshole.”
“Not my damn problem,” Rocket scowls, then wipes away a little snowflake that's melted in his fur and started trickling down his cheek.
It's not snowing anymore.
He stiffens. Every time he blinks, the heat around his eyes melts into something liquid that sticks to his fur. So he stops blinking, and the world blurs, and the warmth next to him inches closer until there's a whole ass hand on his shoulder. An arm around his back. A family waiting on the ship. A heartbeat next to him.
“So, I'm hellbent on this sharing thing,” Quill sputters, using his remaining hand to almost rub the Zune in Rocket's face. “Okay, a while back, two… three weeks ago? Anyway, I was looking through this thing, and then I thought ‘hey, I don't remember showing them this one band,’ and I think you'd really like ‘em, ‘cause they got some sick guitar solos and they're always angry at someth–”
“I know, ” Rocket spits, and realizes that if he growls, Quill won't notice his voice wavering. “I know who they are! I know every single voice on your fucking planet, ‘cause I've heard everything you got on there over and over, for years, every day! Don't tell me who they are!”
Peter blinks. “Well, I'm sorry? It's not like we were planning… what're you mad at me for?”
“‘Cause you– you won't stop dying!” He groans, and shivers, and closes his fist until it hurts. “All of you! Why can't you– what's… what did I do?”
It's just one breath and his chest heaves, every exhale ends up in coughing, every blink is wet. There's a heart thumping against his ear and Rocket thinks he'll kill him, he'll sink his claws into Peter's chest, break tissue and veins with sharp teeth and go for his neck, but then he turns and throws his face into leather and skin and sobs.
“Oh. Oh, shit,” Quill hisses, and it's helpless and muffled, and the harder Rocket tries to choke it back, the faster the tears start to pour. It's funny, how much he hates losing. He should be used to the damn thing by now.
Something other than wrath and grief squeezes his lungs, and then it speaks. “Hey, Rocket, no. No one… nothing's gonna end this time. Alright, yeah, dying's an ugly ass habit some of us have, but I'm trying to get clean, okay?”
Rocket sobs, sniffles and croaks out something that's either a “fuck you” or “thank you” or something else entirely, and stops trying to punch him. In a while, the burning in his chest fades and his head starts hurting. In a while, he realizes he's probably warm enough that Quill stops shaking. In a while, Quill runs out of textbook reassurances and starts humming along to the song. In a while, Rocket finds out it'd be okay to pull away and leave.
But it's a fleeting, fragile life. He's not gonna waste it with pride.
When Peter's hand comes back intact from a full back rub, he does it again. “I can feel you wiping your nasty little nose on my scarf, y'know.”
Rocket grabs a handful of red cloth and blows his nose. “You still want it now? Huh?”
There's laughter, there's fingers buried in his fur and there's a grimace in Peter's voice. “Ugh, what's wrong with you? Yeah, yeah, I guess it's yours now. Jerk.”
He can't really laugh, so he makes a noise that could be a cough or a snort. Out there, in the wind, it doesn't really matter. It's all they have.
Nothing, and so much he can barely afford it.
Rocket stays and doesn't bite the hand on his shoulder. He wants it there. Some part of him is still a little too hollow, and it's all a little too close, but it makes breathing a little easier.