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Chapter Text

It's his 14th jailbreak when he realizes that impenetrable, colossal fortress of vines and wood is just as indestructible as it seems. 

Rocket had let it have the leftovers of his lunch once and it'd already started following him around. He'd expected it to wear off soon, that the heat of his violent bitterness would melt away any trace of its naive friendliness, but then it–

Its frontal lobe needs refining. It would be a sin to waste anesthetics on it. We must cut its water in half until it speaks full sentences. It needs to stand up straight. It won't notice. It won't remember. It won't know.

–they'd stuck around anyway. Every single one of Rocket's attempts to scare them off drew them a little closer. And closer, and closer, inch by inch, until he found himself climbing onto their shoulder to get a better look of his surroundings or reach an important file some important guard left behind or shelter from the cold hard floor at night.

Or shoot whoever's stubbornly loyal enough to stand in his way.

The bullets don't go through. The shoulder he stands on never bleeds. The limbs they lose grow back under a beam of light and half an hour of rest. They're not loud, they barely eat and don't ask questions (if they do, Rocket wouldn't know anyway). They're a fortress. Indestructible. 

They're not picky about stolen ships either.

Rocket lives in the little distance between the closeness of their arm and chest and gives up on trying to claw his way out. 

He doesn't notice when language starts making sense. 

They travel together and things don't go as irrecoverably wrong as they usually do. Rocket learns that they're a he, and that sometimes I am Groot means “where” and “rest” and “run” and “we” and “Rocket.” 

They understand each other. Rocket doesn't want to - he feels it coming like staring at a snake bite. 

(He scratches the itch, though, and licks the blood off his hands without considering how much it's gonna hurt tomorrow.)

Bounty hunting isn't only reasonably profitable, Rocket realizes, but also fun. He'd realized that a while ago. He verbalizes it to Groot once, on a good night after a good gig. 

“‘S less borin’ than the rest, ya know?” Rocket mumbles from the space between Groot's arm and chest, letting his drunk ass be carried to the ship because this time drinking himself to oblivion was a celebration rather than mourning. “‘Least those rich bastards got some expensive problems.” 

Groot sets him on the tangled mess of sheets and blankets and a pillow that Rocket thinks is a bed, and in the low flashing lights he feels he might be able to sleep a full night. 

Until Groot brings up the bed situation, and hints at the brand new units rattling in their pockets. “What?” Rocket opens an eye. Scowls. Doesn't yell. “Why would I want a ‘real bed’ if this one's fine? Nah, we're saving up. For stuff that matters. Like you letting me sleep.”

“I am Groot.”

“Ugh, I ain't making a dumb list,” Rocket grumbles, and lays on his back, and then starts counting on his fingers. “You got a pen? Good, it's best we just forget it all anyway. New parts. Better food. Uh, new towels, a new oven…”

He nearly says sleeping meds, but Groot saves him, “I am Groot?”

Rocket's teeth shine red and blue under the dim light. His arm covers his eyes. “A garden? On the ship?”

“I am Groot,” Groot shrugs. 

He turns in his makeshift bed. It makes him want to yell, but he thinks of all the spare oxygen that would maybe keep him away from the hysterical vents-checking for more than ten minutes and just yawns in the end. “Goddamn it, Groot… oh, whatever. If you can shove it somewhere in the engine room, I guess. Yeah, yeah, get all thankful and teary-eyed later, I gotta sleep.”

Groot says something that gets caught up in his wide wooden smile, and in the blurry domesticity of it Rocket thinks he might've heard “friend.” He says “huh,” Groot repeats the same three words and now he's sure it's there.

The scarred flesh on his back burns. He winces, sits up and runs off on all fours. 

The wall next to the bed where Groot sleeps is buried in moss and vines, clinging to the metal like tentacles. When Rocket jumps onto his chest, he meticulously curls up in a way that blocks the sticky dampness stuck to his fur and his quivering lips. 

“Don't fucking move,” he mumbles, mean and silver to make up for his wavering voice, but doesn't blast Groot’s arm off when he lays it on his back. 

He wakes up in the same spot. 

Sometimes, Groot doesn't understand his behavior.

(Sometimes, he doesn't get it himself. He thinks it's that dusty, unfinished part of his brain, filthy with spider webs and crumbling walls that makes him toss and turn and yell in his sleep and at whatever's in front of him when he's awake. He thinks it's a malfunctioning issue. He thinks they made him like this on purpose. He thinks. Sometimes, he thinks too much.)

He hides it as best as he can. His best is awful, though, and it's obvious when he pulls his blaster apart four times in a row, because if he doesn't, they'll crash into an asteroid. He only goes to bed when all the numbers on the clock in the panel are even or he'll wake up in a cage. The longer he keeps his hand on the heating engine, the longer an innocent will have to flee. He takes the long way or someone will go for Groot's arms and chop his head off instead. 

Rocket's not trying to protect him. He isn't. Company will never make a difference for him again. Groot’s just a good shield. A good bed. A good listener. He's good. Groot is so, so good, and Rocket's bones were born rotten. 

That must be why they break so easily, and why his skin sometimes tears like wet paper and he has to piece it back up. 

“You don't know how to do it,” he hisses through his teeth, because there's a needle between them and when it isn't there it means it's prickling his skin, so he bites down on it for as long as he can. “And I ain't about to teach you, so get you dumb fucking ass off my face!”

He says things he doesn't want. He means it all until it rolls off his tongue. He does things he doesn't want, too, and every time the cold needle, wet with saliva and sticky with sweat, goes into his skin and comes out red, hot pain bubbles from the bottom of his lungs and spreads like spilled milk to places no one's touched in a long, long time. He remembers every hand. 

(It's where Groot's branches land, light and silent like burning stars in the wide endless space and he pulls everything back together, even though he was never the one to tear it apart in the first place.) 

He dreams of royal purple arms pressing against his fur, light and silent, cradling him with a warmth strong enough to burn the back of his eyes and a mouth that only opens to kindly say his name, and wakes up feeling dirty. 

Then Groot shifts underneath him, and Rocket feels soap scrubbing his skin until he pictures bubbles.

Someone hires them. Someone hires them for a shit ton of units. 

They hadn't taken one of Rocket's “boring jobs” in a bit, but they also haven't seen the color of this much money ever since. So they take it. 

They shouldn't have. 

A shiny purple thing in a suitcase. Rocket has the inevitable impulse to get his hands on it when he remembers a pocketful of units will probably shine a little brighter, so he looks away until the urge is gone.

It's easy until they leave. Rocket doesn't see it, doesn't predict it like he always does, he just feels the air get knocked out of his lungs and watches the world turn upside down. Sand presses against his side, then his back, then smacks his head as he rolls one or seven times on the pale ground. He hears a crack and the ground is gone, crumbling beneath him and he falls, falls, falls until his arms grip a solid block of earth rather than air.

He shakes his head and the ringing in his ears still lingers. He squints through the smoking cloud of dust and sees a gun, pointing at him from the solid ground next to the other three. Maybe four. He looks down, the abyss kissing his dangling feet. 

“Fuck,” he grunts, then tilts his head up with a scowl. “Yeah, Groot, just take your time, pal! Pull me up whenever you feel like it, alright?”

There's a groan. His ear twitches, his head is tugged to the side by some breathless force that steals the blood from his veins. Groot’s hanging from a creaking twig, vines stuck to the crumbling rocks and suitcase cradled to his chest in his free arm. Rocket feels heat run down his body like a ring, like he's being scanned at a checkpoint, like time's gonna stop, and then everything goes cold with the hollowness of his lungs. 

His claws dig into the dirt. He hears steps above his head, the rattling of a blaster and the thud of a body hitting the floor, and he can't tell if it's Groot's or Lylla’s. His tongue is heavy. “Let go,” he grits his teeth, gnawing on sand. “I told you to let– no! No, not th– ugh, the suitcase, you shithead! Let go!” 

Rocket reaches for his gun and gulps down air, raising his head and looking for something to shoot shoot shoot, but it's hard to keep steady when his chest won't stop heaving with ragged breaths. He makes out the shape of their ship and aims for what he hopes is the fuel tank. 

He doesn't see if they're in uniforms, if they wear buckets on their heads or white coats smeared with blood. He holds his breath. Pulls the trigger. He doesn't miss. 

When the explosion is done sweeping the ground and shaking the earth, he climbs his way back up with broken claws and cuts on his fingers and holds out his hands. He feels vines. “Groot!”

Now, blood is rushing through him like the sea, hot and fast and violent and he yells and yells even when Groot is right in front of him. “Groot!” His eyes burn with ashes and something else that makes his chest twist like a dirty cloth. He shivers, crawls, yells.

“I am Groot!”

Groot sits in front of him, arms empty (empty) until they pull him close, encircling fur and blood and dirt and whatever else. Rocket looks for tangled fur and metal limbs and finds warm wood and the scent of rain. He clings to it.

“I am Groot,” he says, and Rocket hears sorry and Rocket and friend and he doesn't run. 

They find a way out. Steal another ship. They never see those units, but Groot's alive and breathing. Eventually, Rocket stops shaking. 

Rocket doesn't sleep in his bed anymore. 

The stars swim on the surface of a lake. Rocket gulps down whatever's in his bottle and wipes his mouth.

“Alright, alright, shh!” He bumps his shoulder against Groot's arm, though it's not that simple to sound mean and angry when his voice needs to filter through his grin first. “Don't want that bastard hearin’ us, huh?”

Rocket bites his tongue and hides in the tapestry of vines and moss Groot's made on the rooftop. His wide and expectant eyes don't blink. 

His ear flicks when he hears the door open. The bastard stumbles out of the bar like he's crawling his way out of a gutter, cursing and grunting and limping on the only leg he has left as Rocket wriggles and chokes on laughter. He huffs, looks around, calls someone's name and sways two or three times before gloriously falling head-first into the lake, shaking the lazy stars on the surface and splashing a gush of water on the grass. 

Rocket rolls on his back, bites down his arm to stifle a hysterical wave of chuckles and hugs the bottle to his chest. “Look– look at him, all covered in mud and shit! Oh, man, that's gonna take forever to clean off…” he presses his cheek to Groot's shoulder. Giggles. Curls up against the bed of moss. “Who's the freak now?”

Two months ago, Groot would've given him shit for purposefully targeting someone's most visible and unchangeable weakness just to mock their misery, but he'd given up on the fourth time. A lot changes in two months. Two months is a lifetime.

So now Groot catches his breath after his own laughing fit and stares at the stolen leg, cold against his branches, silver in the moonlight. “I am Groot?

“‘Course we're selling it, numbskull,” Rocket scowls, then blinks. Thinks. “I might buy you that ugly plant you kept eyeing back on Xandar. If you don't bother me too much. And I can get you th– aw, Groot, quit eating your own leaves, I told you! You– ugh, you're gross.”

Groot laughs. Rocket bites back a chuckle. “I am Groot.”

“I don't stink!” he scoffs, discreetly brushes his nose against the fur on his arm and sips at his bottle. 

Groot's arm is a wall against Rocket's side. He leans on it until the pitch black of the sky fades into soft purple.

Sometimes, gigs go wrong. Sometimes, though, gigs end up with breaking out of jail - which, alright, for the twenty-third time, okay -, traveling the galaxy with a group of disastrous assholes, fighting a shiny purple rock and– and sometimes, sometimes gigs end up with Rocket sitting on his knees, cradling a 

Usually life takes more than it gives, but not today. Today, it's given

cold twig out of a pile of dozens of other sticks. He holds that impenetrable, indestructible, lifeless thing against his chest and it doesn't bloom. It does nothing. It's dead. He's dead. 

A hand lands on his head, strokes his fur and he flinches, flinches and doesn't 

us something. It has given us a chance.

bite it. He bites his lip until it bleeds, but not

I have lived most of my life surrounded by my enemies. I will be grateful to

the hand. He tastes the blood. Feels the hand. Cradles the twig. Something's bleeding, bleeding like iron and warm paint inside his jumpsuit, deep under his fur, and he wishes it was Groot. Where there's blood, there's a heartbeat. Rocket had never seen Groot bleed. But how foolish could he

die among my friends.

be to believe that, just because something doesn't bleed, it

(Ooh, child

Things are gon–)

means it's immortal?

(–et easier,

Ooh, child,

Things will…)

The world is blurry. The crowd around them moves in foggy shadows. He blinks, feels some heavy heat sink into the fur on his cheeks and it clears up again. He's cradling a fortress. Indestructible. Immortal. He's–

(He knows he's a walking bomb. He knows he's fragile in the way an explosive is delicate and it was Groot's fault for standing too close. He chokes on tears, closes his eyes, sees himself burning with the Dark Aster in a sticky mess of blood and fur and flesh until he's satisfied.) 

He's pulled up to his feet. Someone's hand squeezes his, plucks his nails out of his palm, and stays even when he hisses and thrashes. Someone asks if he can walk, buddy, and Rocket curses and spits and mumbles a fleeting yes. 

(Someday, yeah, 

We'll put it together and we'll get it undone

Someday, when th…)

Somewhere on a sidewalk, he stumbles over some tree's roots, tangled in the reddish damp soil. 

Rocket sleeps curled up around Groot's pot and dreams of strong arms traced with unwavering ink pressing against his fur, light and silent, cradling him with a warmth strong enough to make his drumming heart settle and wash him over with a wave of protection that leaves him ashamed. 

He wakes up in his bed, with a little plant against his side.

Chapter Text

Rocket. 

To them, he's Rocket. Despite the biting, the arguing, the clawing and the bombs in boxes, he doesn't cease to be Rocket when he starts to be an inconvenience.

He's been Rocket more consistently than he's ever been now, and it makes him question most people’s seemingly severe memory conditions that lead to constantly mistaking Rocket for rat and thing and freak (it makes him feel better for pulling the trigger, makes him wonder if the scars he's left on whoever's survived made his name stick).

His fur's covered the “89P13” written on his skin like new grass after a forest fire, and they don't know it. He's the rubber gloves digging into his ribcage, the blood and the flesh under his claws, the little kid playing tag in a filthy cage, he's a metal corpse, but to them, he's Rocket. 

(He's what he chose to be when 89Q12 became Lylla and he became Rocket. If he closes his eyes hard enough, he hears his name in her voice. When he opens them, it's Gamora's hand on his shoulder and his flesh against his teeth.)

His dreams twirl and his memory blends into a red gush of violence (it sticks to his skin and tangles his fur and makes him want to brush his teeth), they've seen the tender skin on his back and his averted gaze whenever he needs to be patched up after a fight and they call him Rocket. 

The distance narrows. They don't stop calling him Rocket.

He slumps into his chair, head tipping back against the headrest like all his useless ire of a pouting child is gonna solve anything. “Why?”

“‘Cause that's how we'll earn our money, Rocket!” Quill explains, the tired and heavy voice of someone who's been repeating the same thing for the past two hours and twenty six minutes. “How're they gonna hire us if they don't even know us? We need a card, a name, something, dude.” 

“We do have names,” from the other corner of the table, Drax squints. “I am Drax, you are Quill, she is…”

“I'm– that's not wh–”

Gamora's rings shine under the lights when she covers her face with her hands. “We are all going to starve to death.” 

“Could you guys please just pretend to have faith in this? Seriously, just give me five minutes and then you can all get back to moping.” Quill sits back down, runs a hand over his face like he's trying to clean off their contagious hopelessness and it seems to work, because he looks back at them with a glowing smile. “So, we all agree on Guardians of the Galaxy?”

The ship moans and huffs and this time it's certainly not the engine. Quill mumbles a curse and the despair creeps back into his face.

Rocket's scoff comes out a sigh, because he's too busy examining the new leaves growing on Groot's little branches. “No one's callin’ us that.” 

“Someone already did,” Peter reminds him, his voice proudly laced with some great achievement while Rocket winces at the sight of ashes and the smell of burning wood.

“Oh, right, how could I be so ignorant?” His snout wrinkles. “‘Course we just have to use the title some maniac we were supposed to beat to death gave us. To make fun of us. As an insult. Yeah, you were right all along, my arrogance has blinded me.”

“That's exactly the point!” Peter stands up and leans his weight on the table, hands on the surface. “We'll show ‘em. They expected us to fail, didn't they? That we'd only get outta there in a hole in the ground. Well, then the Guardians of the Galaxy will raise them out of that hole whenever they need it. All they gotta do is call.”

Their eyes glow like the stars outside when the room goes quiet. At some point, Drax jumps off his seat, laughs, holds up his glass of Xandarian wine (which is good good, Rocket thinks) and says, “To the Guardians of the Galaxy!”

Peter grins and smashes his glass against Drax's so hard it clatters. Gamora grunts and huffs, but he catches her twitching smile when she joins them. Quill looks at him and says “Rocket,” arm stretched with the glass and a wide smile. 

“Oh, fuck off… do I even get a say on this?” He hears laughter. Hears his feet tap against the table when he jumps onto it, and the reluctant clatter of his glass against theirs when he gives into the name he didn't choose, and the people who chose him.

Someone finds Groot's artificial sun lamp on his shelf. 

“‘Cause your room is dark?” Rocket spits, wrath tugging at his snout. “You– you stole Groot's lamp from his stuff ‘cause you couldn't stretch your arm and reach the light switch?”

Drax just blinks. “I often get distracted from my reading when I have t–”

“What if I shove this damn lamp up your ass ‘till it's sticking outta your eyes and they mistake you for a lighthouse? Would that keep you focused? Huh?”

“Rocket,” Gamora stands in the doorway, sharp and still like a blade. “He didn't know”

His eyes narrow. “How come none of you ever know anything? You got contagious learning issues or what?”

“Hey, hey, enough with the yelling,” Peter shows up in the doorway as if he'd been invited at all, cradling a wailing, blubbering Groot in his hands. “Look what you're doin’ to the little guy.” 

Rocket kicks him in the knee and waits until he's bent over and whining to leap forward and steal Groot from his arms. He's used to stealing, just not this gently. “Yeah, I wouldn't be jumpin’ in joy either if someone broke into my room and stole my only fuckin’ source of energy! For two days!”

“Okay, let's not–” Peter blinks like he got kicked between the eyes instead. “Wait, two days? Oh, c'mon, Drax, you can't just…” 

Gamora's resigned sigh means she's letting them banter. Her eyes land on him. “It only took you this long because you didn't tell us,” her silver eyebrows twitch. “We could have helped you find it.”

There's a weird fire in his eyes when he clutches Groot to his chest, too melted to be as intimidating as he'd like it to be and too sharp to be fragile. “The day I ask any of you brainless morons for anything, you can chop off my tail with your teeth.”

He glares at her. She doesn't glare back, just stares. Rocket steals Groot's lamp back, huffs and leaves. 

It's always Quill, it seems. 

(It would be Rocket too if they ever caught him, but he's small and his hands are fast.) 

They have to stop in a corner in the middle of the raging battlefield because Quill's decided to crouch in front of a metal fence, with blood dripping from his nose and a possible broken rib. 

Gamora impatiently tells him to move, Drax is busy crushing someone's head with his bare hands and Rocket is kind enough to remind him he's not in his damn backyard. Peter turns to squint at them with a click of his tongue. “Hold on, it's– it's important.” 

Rocket tilts his head with a scoff, leaning over to the side just to check if he's at least ravaging something worth his broken ribs, and then he sees it. 

It's all curled up in his hands, a bundle of bristled grey fur that seems to be shivering its little ass off. One of its paws is a damp, red mass of flesh stuck in the fence, and Quill winces every time it whines and squeaks. 

“Hey, I know, I know,” he makes a face, rubs its fur and doesn't give up on trying to untangle the fence from its leg. “Just hang in there, bud, we're almost done.”

Rocket keeps staring, waiting for the moment he'll finally snap its neck or step on its head with the heel of his boot, but what he sees is Quill's hand moving it to the other side so it won't run right into the rush of bullets and blades and adrenaline when he manages to set it free. The little thing shudders and runs off - limps - until it's out of sight.

Quill gets up and wipes his bloody hands on his jacket. Rocket doesn't open his mouth until they're back on the ship. 

(When Rocket ducks behind his legs, he's noticed, Quill never asks, and never moves away either.)

He's still good at fixing things, as long as they can't cry. 

“Rocket, how do I fix the washing machine?” Peter grumbles one day, and to cease his unbearable bitching, Rocket gives him a couple half-assed instructions. Until the itch of wearing the same dirty clothes for days after weeks of cleanness kicks in. 

He’s as precise and detailed with his explanation as he possibly could this time, but he notices Quill still squints at the damn thing with a whole community of tools by his feet and gives Rocket some devastated glances from across the room. It's when he starts to think how do I fix this actually means can you fix this for me while I stare at you and breathe on your neck and pretend I'm learning?

He ignores it at first. Then he scratches at his side and some old and new scars bleed, so he gets off his ass and gets to work. 

He's tinkering with some parts when Quill forces them to watch some Terran movie he snatched from his old room on Yondu's ship, curled up against his side of the couch right next to Groot while Drax polishes his daggers and Gamora, somehow, spontaneously gets her hair braided by Peter, who's smiling so hard it definitely has to hurt. 

Drax furrows his brow. “Why is that man screaming?” He points at the screen. “Hasn't he seen the door right behind him?”

“That's ‘cause,” Peter's voice deepens, “he doesn't have the big, fierce StarStar-Lord to save his ass.” 

Rocket hears Gamora snicker in Quill's lap, but when he looks over at her, her face is still as the iron he's fumbling with. He doesn't know why his lips curl up when he speaks. “What for? ‘Cause the big, dumb Star-Munch is fat enough to feed that ugly monster for the two of ‘em?”

Peter's grin comes with a pained huff. He turns to look at Drax and then glances down at Gamora as Rocket's smile widens. “See, that's what I'm saying. It's Star-Lord, jerk, I told you all these explosions would make you deaf one of these days.”

Rocket snickers, and smiles, and this time it's not from reveling in someone's pain. The metal in his back is light. “When d'you say that? I didn't hear you.” 

Something’s shining somewhere. But the ship is dipped in black, so he thinks the light he can feel seeping into his fur is theirs. He wonders if that's how Groot feels. He wonders how long it'll be until that light is taken from him too. 

The hole Lylla’s torn in his chest is getting heavier. Heavier because it's filling up. 

Rocket holds the parts to his chest, slides off the couch and runs away. It's his name that they call out when he leaves.

The one time he forgets to lock his door is when he screams himself awake. 

As if he weren't lucky enough, the head that peers into his room through his godforsaken open door is a nest of brown reddish hair with green flashlights for eyes. Rocket closes his own before they meet him. 

“Dude, what happened here?” Peter whispers. Rocket knows he has his hand on the blaster attached to his hip, that he's slowly looking around for a threat in the shadows. He knows when he licks his lip. “Everything alright?” 

His eyes stay closed. The bed dips next to him.

“Really?” The hand hovering over his fur doesn't twist his neck. Doesn't crack his skull open. Doesn't even touch him. “I know you're pretending to sleep, you dumbshit, give up.”

He wouldn't, really, but the finger poking his nose made him squirm away instinctively. “You lookin’ to lose your arm, Quill?” 

“Woah, if only you were as tall as you're mean,” he smiles with all the teeth Rocket wants to pull out. “So, I was, uh… I thought I heard something. Did you?’

At first, Rocket thinks he's being made fun of. Then he realizes this is Quill trying to be delicate, and he snarls anyway. “No.”

“Right, ‘cause if you did,” his head moves with his words, shifting like the light from the hallway that swallows his back, “none of us would have a problem looking into it. Y'know.”

Rocket brushes his tongue over his teeth and it isn't enough to clean up all the mud and blood and dirt. His claws dig into the blanket he keeps pressed up to his mouth, his eyes blink at Quill's blueish yellow face in the light's shadow. Stupid. Careful. (Friend.) “Why the fuck would I want anything from douchebags like you?”

He frowns hard enough to feel his fur stabbing his eyes. They burn. He waits for the fist on his snout, the click of a gun, the heel of a boot on his neck, a blood-stained needle, a reminder of who he belongs to. But Quill's hand taps against the sheets, lazy and soft and everything Rocket's not supposed to have. 

(He wants to. He wants the hand to fly to his head like Drax's did when Groot died. He wants to tell him why he sometimes wakes with scratches on his face. He wants to be able to blink without crying. He wants to stop glaring at him like he wants them to hate him.)

Quill stands up. His hand doesn't hurt, doesn't comfort, doesn't. “Yeah, I ain't sure either,” he turns around, and his shoulder touches the unlocked door, and Rocket curls up around the spot he'd been sitting on. “If you ever find out, though, you know where to find us.”

In the morning, Quill notices both sides of his headphones are working again.

Rocket's seen the way Gamora sometimes winces and grabs her shoulder. “Want me to take a look?” He mumbles once, and at the lack of blades pointed at his neck, he heads to the medbay when everyone else's playing or sleeping or arguing. 

She feels him move behind her, his thief hands fast and small and light. “Who is Lylla?”

Gamora looks up at him when his hands stop. He's staring at her, holding the screwdriver in his hand like a gun and shrinking like a sand castle. She shrugs with her intact shoulder. “You talk in your sleep.” 

The warm wind of his breath brushes against her hair. When his hands start connecting wires and bypassing muscle again, they are cold. “She's like us,” he grumbles. “If we were better.”

Gamora doesn't ask anything else. And if she notices the way he sometimes has to stop and discreetly take a shaky breath, she doesn't mention it. She does it too.

In his dreams, the three faces behind the masks are different. The sharp burning pain of scalpels cutting a steady path through his flesh isn't. 

Drax finds him in his workshop, curled up on the bench where he usually passes out between projects, except this time he's decided he needs to rip out all the metal in his body otherwise they're gonna find find find find him. 

His eyes are wide and his nose is running when he exhales heavily against the bench, and there's hot blood bathing his hands (and it's his and Sire's and Floor's and it might as well be the Guardians’, too), but Drax says his name anyway. Like being able to call him is a good thing. A relief. He sits next to Rocket, the hand he dreams of when his subconscious isn't busy with needles and pain and hate finding a spot to scratch on his head. 

Rocket wants to tear him apart. He wants to lay his head on his lap. 

“Don't you touch me,” he huffs through his teeth, rough and raspy and something else that's often supposed to be violent, but isn't. “I'll get you dirty.”

The hand that crushes skulls and punches through walls gently brushes over his fur. Massages every spot that makes him wince. Heals him. “Well, you seem impeccably clean to me.”

His mind says “then you ain't looking right,” but his mouth doesn't. His body inches closer. 

In his dreams, the three different faces step on their masks and get him out of there.

They live together. They get along most days and get over it quickly when they don't. Rocket sometimes sleeps with his door open, no one grabs him by the head with unmoving fingers and sharp rings and they give him things to fix. They say his name. 

He sleeps with his door open most nights. The distance narrows. 

“Oh, you can't be–” the hallway says. Laughs. He almost hears someone's head turn. “Rocket, come see this!”

Rocket doesn't even have time to spiral when he doesn't see Groot in his pot, because there's a little trail of wooden footprints and dirt to be followed on the floor. He follows it. He finds them all first, a bunch of jackasses standing in a circle like that's the only thing they know how to do. They're grinning. Chuckling. Staring at the floor. 

(They're his friends.)

And Groot's grown legs. They're weak and wobbly and he kind of looks like an eyeball who's just escaped from someone's face, but he's grinning even harder than the rest of them and Rocket’s suddenly looking at his old friend again. 

Groot's branches reach up to wrap around Rocket's neck. He brings himself closer and it burns, and burns, and heals. “I am Groot!”

“Yeah, yeah, ‘course I did,” Rocket holds him. He doesn't know why he's laughing, or why the air is cold and sharp when it crawls its way down his throat. “You're makin’ it kinda hard not to see it, you little dipshit.”

Quill kneels on the floor and smiles at Groot like he's an ugly human baby. For once, Rocket doesn't want to mock him. “Yeah, and we're not exactly being too subtle about it either, huh?”

Gamora's hand rests on Peter's arm, and the other lands on Rocket's head as she crouches next to them. She's smiling. She's happy. “You can never be subtle about anything.”

“What? Hey! I'll have you know I can be very subtle when I want t–” he breathes. Then chokes, or snickers, or makes Rocket want to bite until he tastes iron. “Rocket, are you crying?”

He brushes his thumb over his eyes for a second, but he doesn't want to keep his hand away from Groot for too long. “No, I don't– ugh. You're covered in that stinky ass cologne again, it makes my eyes water! How am I gonna help it if you're disgusting?” 

They don't pry. What they do is get closer, and closer, but they never hurt. The throbbing grip on his head never comes. The prodding and stabbing never happen. It's so much, but he wants more. It's frightening. He doesn't show it. 

He's holding Groot. They're holding him, too. 

The hole left in his chest grows heavier, but not deeper. 

Chapter Text

Rocket thinks of death as a mass of bloody flesh with a smile like a moon in the middle.

He shares warm meals with these people now. In his head, he watches bugs and worms crawl out of their eyes when days are suspiciously good, and plays it off with his fondest insults. He feels it seep into his fur and underneath his claws like the blood he couldn't wash off his palms and wonders how long it'll take for it to start bleeding again. 

It’s an accident, when his hands find something warm to grasp. Even the worst of his incurable anger softens when they're the target.

(If he doesn't touch their things, he won't slip on their blood in the morning. If he doesn't eat until their next mission, they'll get paid. If he works until he can't move his arms, they–)

They don't mind the death sentence, and if they do, they never show it. So Rocket holds his breath, keeping his bombs in the right boxes with his name on them as if death doesn't know his scent. He recognizes their handwriting when they leave notes on the walls. He watches Drax hang Groot's drawings on the fridge and doesn't know what he's smiling for, and they don't always get too sore when his tongue bursts into flames to spill out insults. 

He finds himself biting his palm until it bleeds so he won't bite theirs and thinking less about the things he doesn't want anyone to know. He sleeps at least three times a week. Drax calls them “friends” like Groot used to, like Lylla taught him, and his tongue still twists when he tries to say it back.

They’re finding a way to live like people should, and no one talks about it (there's a lot that goes unsaid. Rocket likes it better that way).

He knows he doesn't have to, but he forgets his door unlocked most nights. 

Life is quiet for the next couple months, for Rocket's standards. He implies it accidentally, when Quill's scrolling through possible gigs on a holographic screen. “This one ain't bad,” says Rocket, one of his highest compliments. “Easy money.”

Quill almost drops Groot as he raises an eyebrow. “You call breaking into one of the most crowded space stations on this side of the galaxy to steal five of their ships easy money, right in the Nova’s backyard?”

“What? Maybe we can keep one,” Rocket shrugs, and hears Gamora snicker above him. 

(He's starting to notice what jokes work for each of them. He's starting to choose consciously.)

It lasts a little longer, until it's clear, later, that he's only seen Yondu three times since Xandar, and the third one was when they pulled a frozen body onto their – their – ship.

The world rudely keeps moving when they can't and leaves them behind to pick up the pieces, like parts of a Walkman under the rubble, like shards of an arrow before a planet explodes, disintegrating like the sand beneath their feet that dissolves into itself from above as they leave something else behind, too.

Like delicately maneuvering a freezing body so it doesn't crack.

Rocket counts off the days since it happened, like Yondu's death birthed a new calendar, and he thinks the others do too. He doesn't ask. They don't say it. He's angry and guilty and scared and so glad to be selfish when he feels Groot curl up safely next to him every night. 

(He washes his hands and it all remains, golden battery acid mixed with blood that feels like frozen skin. He washes his hands. He can't steal new ones.) 

It's pushing day five when they have to pause a movie until Quill’s done weeping. Rocket's letting Groot stay up past his bedtime, Mantis is glued to Drax's shoulder and Gamora's hand is tangled in Peter’s hair when she squints, her hand never faltering. “I'm not sure I understand what you mean.”

She's been meeting up with Nebula. Talking things out. Rocket knows because she's happier some days and more frustrated on others. 

“Just…” Quill gestures at something, at them, at the ship, hands drawing a wobbly semi-circle in the air, and they'd never try this hard to understand anyone else. “I mean, the galaxy ain't about to brutally fall apart again. For now. I'm just– all I'm saying is life is too short to die trapped in something you never wanted, so if you guys… y'know, don't wanna hang around anymore, it's…”

The hot blood gushing to Rocket's head goes cold and his ears flatten. His tongue tastes like iron, so he has to spit it out, “You tryin’ to sound like a leader or a loser?”

“Rocket,” Gamora scolds him, foot poking his back. “Peter, no one is here against their will. We don't want to–”

She pauses, eyebrows relaxing like a realization. Like her brain is adjusting to a new language. 

“I know what I want. I want to find a hole in the universe where we can rest. To hide somewhere without wondering when I'll be found,” her hands stop brushing Peter's hair for a second, and she thinks, and then keeps going. “And sleep in sheets that don't smell like blood and sweat.” 

“We must look for the legendary weapons my people have been chasing for centuries,” suggests Drax, honest, crude and soft to match the way he rubs Mantis' back. “They say they are more than enough to slaughter an entire colony of your enemies.”

Rocket's ears flick and the light of a dying planet glows in his eyes. “See, that's what I've been sayin’, but none of you cowards ever lis–” 

“How would that solve the blood problem?” Gamora huffs, biting her lips as if she's unsure weather she's about to laugh or cry.

Rocket asks whose problem it is, exactly, and they continue fantasizing about murder as they lean on each other. Playing and fighting and living, and making plans in between. No one has to admit to staying if they don't talk about leaving.

Peter snickers, head on Gamora’s shoulder in the same way his life is in her hands. He breathes like his home is where they are, like any ship would do, like all the loss was worth whatever this is, and folds a used tissue in his hand. “Alright, guys, I get it. This whole thing was–” he pauses, and then swallows. “It's the first thing I've done that wasn't a mistake.”

Rocket glances back at them and bites down a grin, bites down the urge to say it was never about the galaxy anyway, and doesn't tell them what he wants. It's unfair to ask for what he already has. 

When scalpels seem to poke his bones in his dreams more often, Rocket looks for things to fix. When his hands start hurting, he forgets who hurt them first. 

“Rocket,” says Drax from the hallway, and Rocket thinks that's what the silver of a blade wants to sound like. “You must not stay up at such–”

“Don't tell me what to do,” his ears flatten, fangs brushing against his lip when he scowls just like his thumb draws shaky circles on the rectangular mess of parts and wires he's holding, cradled to his chest like a dead bug.

The steps approach slowly with the warmth of closeness against his fur as it stands on end, and he doesn't need words to know where Drax's eyes land first.

“I didn't steal nothin’ this time,” Rocket lies, squeezing the keycard to his chest like he can still hear it dreaming of blue skies and big ships and being called by real names.

Drax lowers to his knees like he would if it were his daughter, his heavy hands light where they broke Rocket's spine once, and the keycard that thumps with his heartbeat urges him to bite. He ignores it with clenched fists and something sour like guilt when Drax speaks, “It wouldn't matter if you had.”

Rocket dries his eyes on his knees. When he wakes up in the morning, he feels his hands clean for the first time since Ego. 

“But wouldn't it be a bad thing?” 

“They've done bad things first, Mantis,” Quill shrugs, throwing a tiny red ball at Groot and waiting for him to throw it back like he wished Yondu would. “Listen, either way, I'm not letting them get away with it, man. They owe me ten units!”

Gamora glances at them from where she's training, stopping Drax's fist without looking at him. “Ten thousand?”

Rocket's smile suddenly widens (he's working on more emergency suits, because they're six now and Yondu is dead and there's only five spare ones and–), so Quill tugs at his tail under the table and hums loudly to drown out any unwelcome observations. “It– ah, I'm sure they would've stolen ten thousand too if they had the chance!” 

“If you had ten thousand units, that is,” Rocket kicks at his ankle.

Whatever obscenity Quill is about to say dies on his tongue when the music changes. “Rocket– no, dude, c'mon, not this again, I'll–”

Rocket snickers (he laughs more often than he growls, now), sitting on the Zune and reveling in the way Quill's bared teeth turn into a pout. “Yeah, you'll what? Lose another bet? When you do better, Star-Turd, you can think about picking songs again.”

Peter scowls. “You realize this thing’s literally mine, don't you?”

“It's hard to forget, ya know, that's why everything sounds so shitty,” even then, there's no hands around his wrist, no one bashing his head into the table, no threats to open him up and fix what's rotten. Quill lets him have it. Rocket gets off the Zune and cradles it to his chest like a key without a door. 

There's a huff above their heads, and then the swirl of clammy red hair in the air as Gamora wipes sweat off her forehead. Rocket watches Peter's frustration vanish into stupid and thirsty admiration, and Gamora frowns like she does when she wants to pretend her heart never beats. “Who is it we're hunting now?”

Peter clears his throat, and then speaks with half a functioning brain. “It's, uh… I bought these assholes some booze at a bar once and they never paid me back.”

She narrows her eyes as much as possible so they won't notice her lips twitching. “You are out of your mind.”

“We've always been,” Rocket grins, proud or apologetic or somewhere in between. “Look, I'm just sayin’ we should track down their ship, fill it with explosives, and then I'll sneak into the vents to–”

“To get your ass blown up in the process?’ Quill scoffs. “No way, you dumb shit, we're keeping you. We gotta…”

Rocket stops, feeling the cold and sharp hollowness of staring at a snake bite. The certainty that there's no going back is blunt and invariably merciless. Behind his eyes, his fur gets sticky with blood. In front of him, he sees the hands that would scrub it right off. 

(It's weird, accepting something he's been given. He's too used to taking it.) 

He notices the Zune's getting damp. He stops squeezing it before the screen shatters. 

“Hey, Rocket!” Peter waves, tripping on branches that could've been Groot when he starts walking faster. “I got something to show you!” 

Rocket walks down the ramp and they meet halfway through. “I fixed your stupid jet boots,” he blocks the sun with a hand as he looks up, and then lies. “You better find someone else if you ever feel like breaking ‘em for the fourth time.”

Quill grins with the sunlight on his teeth. Drax is helping Gamora carry a ton of new supplies to the ship, and they hear Mantis and Groot playing inside. “I found that song you've been looking for.”

Rocket sees his eyes (or Yondu's) on the Zune and thinks this is the life they died to have, and doesn't speak until morning.

If anyone asks, they'll tell the Nova Corps sometimes moons just explode on their own. If anyone asks, they'll say it was all a calculated risk, and never a mission gone wrong. 

Rocket finds Groot right before the last ship heads to the station nearby, greasy with oil and blood and resonating in circles with cries from the wounded. Groot's left side and shoulder are smoking like a twig after a bad crash, brave and shaky with damp eyes and clenched little fists. Rocket curses and sniffles and chatters his teeth as he scoops him up, counting to three in his head like when Sire shot Lylla, one two three times he got his friends killed. 

He doesn't find anyone for so long that he starts eyeing the piles of bodies when he scrambles past them. He's already seeing through the rusty bars of a cage when he runs into them by chance, all breathless and bloody and putting out the fire still burning on their clothes. 

Peter turns to them first, and Rocket can see his mouth moving before he hears his voice. “Where the fuck were you two?”

Rocket feels Groot tug at his fur, stuttering when he whines. “Where were w– we were looking for you jerks!”

“Rocket, dude–” he watches Peter deflate and sigh so he won't yell in front of Groot and wonders why the world's starting to spin. “Right, so maybe we should work a bit more on our communication here…”

He doesn't know how, but they're back on the ship when he blinks again. He just watches them talk about money and stealing and helping an entire station evacuate before a moon collides into it, petrified by the kind of cold he only feels when his heart’s drumming in his throat. Someone says “good job” and “did you get everything” and “where's my Zune” like it was nothing and Rocket wants to kill kill kill them and then jump right into the thrusters. 

Gamora's hand around his wrist is like Lylla's metal one when she leans down to him, and he's vaguely aware that the soft skin he'd been clawing at switched to the cold leather of her jacket. “Rocket, what's going on?”

“I just wanna know,” He's panting through his teeth, shoulders sagging like he's allowing wrath to bloom, like the gaps between metal and bones are flooding with cold water, “why you dickheads always try so hard to die!”

They stop to stare at him, wide eyes shining in a way that's only directed at a fucking idiot. “Oh, Rocket,” Mantis starts, stepping forward as if he doesn't kill whatever he touches. “Fear is an entirely common reaction to–”

“It ain't fear,” his snout wrinkles, and he forgets how anger is supposed to sound. “You'd be the ones shitting your pants if you weren't so fucking stupid, ‘cause people die if I don't leave! You can't– you don't get to keep me around just so I can bury you later!” 

One two three, one, two, three, four of them around him, the fifth one on his shoulder, and between a growl and a sob they're pieced together like a cracked mug or a protective sphere of branches that dies like a shield. Drax is the first to kneel, to pull him in with hands larger than those that twisted his insides and bones and Rocket wants to feel his own skin break under his fangs for melting into them. His eyes sting, but they feel wet when he blinks.  

“Woah, hey, that's not what's going on here,” Peter lies to him anyway, despite all the biting and arguing, the name-calling and and the stubbornness, despite the tears and snot dripping onto his jacket. “You don't gotta think about that, okay?” 

Nothing this gentle could ever last, he knows that. He can worry about it later. 

His cheeks are boiling with shame, but they're buried in their arms. He counts to three, and there's no gunshot following their reckless tenderness. 

Quill drools on the pillow he’s hugging when he sleeps, face red and stupid like a child. 

Rocket feels him shift, watches him blink twice, hears him clear his throat when his groggy voice doesn't come. “Hey. You good?”

Quill's hands stay where they are, close to his body and away from Rocket's. Rocket thinks calm and friend and danger, but his mouth says, “You tell anyone about this, you'll wake up missing your teeth.”

Peter's smiling with his eyes closed, comfortable like the scratch marks on his skin don't itch anymore. “You could do anything, Rock. You could go anywhere.” 

It's only when he crawls closer that Peter's hand (careful and steady and all that Rocket shouldn't deserve) moves to scratch behind his ear, staying even after he's able to blink without seeing their bodies cold and still outside a collapsing planet. So he keeps his snout buried in the pillow he's stealing and looks for a voice that's just as obstinate as it is indifferent, but it shakes and breaks as it scratches its way out of his throat anyway. “I wanna keep you idiots, too.” 

His wounds don't crack open beneath the hands of someone who couldn't possibly feed him more patience, so he sleeps in the distance between Peter's chest and Gamora's back and they let him stay until he decides to leave. 

With gritted teeth and a wrinkled snout, Rocket finds himself liking it better when they're all home. 

His tongue says home when he wants to say ship, sometimes. He hears Quill mindlessly replace the word “friends” with “family” once, and shows all his fangs in a smile when he realizes he won't leave it alone for the next month. He waits for them at the table every morning and every night, and trust is a shadow that crawls into his side and sleeps safely like a warm cat. 

He lets it. Affection gives him no other choice. 

It takes a little bit of effort and just a bit more patience for Groot to be almost one year old, and now Gamora knows how to work through his cybernetics better than he used to when he was alone. The boxes full of weapons and explosives with his name on them are always in the same place, so he runs out of excuses to leave them on their dining table. Sometimes, he uses the lyrics to their favorite songs to make puns or win arguments, and sometimes they understand each other's silence better than any word. 

There's some kind of peace that being known always replaces with anxiety, and Rocket’s scared most times, but flinches less often when they reach out to scratch the back of his head. He still screams himself awake sometimes, and they still find excuses to stay up with him until his eyelids get heavy again. 

“I don't know about your zarg-nuts, Drax,” says Peter, chin brushing over Rocket's head every time his mouth moves and spinning the Zune in his hands. “That thing's too expensive anywhere else, and I sure as hell don't think anyone on Knowhere's too eager to see our faces anytime soon.”

Rocket opens the eye that's not squished against Peter's chest, tail swishing to remind Mantis to keep on petting. “Expensive? Who said anything about buying?”

Quill raises an eyebrow and his chest stops moving until he's sure Gamora's not about to explode them with a glare, and Rocket hopes they can't notice what their endless patience means to him. “I mean…” Quill's lips twist, then break into a smirk. “I guess we've been too nice for too long, huh?”

Rocket swallows, worried that Groot can feel his arm shaking. His ear flicks and the music fills it, fills him, fills every empty space they haven't healed yet. “What if we fuck it all up for the hundredth time?”

“Then we go back home,” Gamora tilts her head up and looks at them with silver eyes in the dark, shining like the moon's smile, “and find a better place to steal.” 

In a way, Rocket wonders if the friends he's gotten killed would ever forgive him for feeling the sun on his fur even in the dim light of their ship. Still, he latches onto arms that rarely bleed and never draw blood, and says, “Hey, Pete. Turn that up.”