Chapter Text
Say that I'm hard—that's a truth I'll allow.
Say that I'm callous and cold.
You can't change the past, that was then, this is now,
And my tale's already been told;
When the first words out of your mouth in common Galactic vernacular are hurts, the second thing you learn about yourself (after shit did words just come out of me??) is that you’re probably going to be hurting for a long time if that's the first thing you can register. No other memory before hurts really holds any weight, ephemeral and fleeting, like water slipping between his fingers. He sort of remembers a cluster of warm bodies climbing all over each other in quarters that are far too small, but if he tries to focus on that memory, it’s gone and he’s left with the pain and the agony of a consciousness and sense of self that was forced upon him.
Pain is universal to all creatures and they can all give voice to it, but somehow forming those pitiful noises into a singular word because suddenly his brain can process the basic equations for speech and his newly altered vocal chords agree means he’s a semi-higher lifeform. Congrats. Now deal with the pain of that.
Pain, as it turned out, was an old friend that kept coming back and it had to be too, because he couldn't turn it away like other people could. One week after escaping, he cobbled together a rudimentary x-ray to get a good look at his own insides and see what he was working with- and make sure there were no trackers embedded somewhere he couldn’t see them. He knew about the killswitch on his ticker ever since and figured out how to circumvent it, but that meant only ever being able to do field surgery on himself and tolerating pain when the wounds weren’t severe enough to require it. He outgrew implants and replaced them and bit down on the pain every time because the anesthetic might trigger a reaction.
Eventually he stopped growing and the implants stopped needing to be replaced, but prisons and rough treatment and his own recklessness meant he was always getting injured and always eyeing med-packs with a jealousy ascribed to hungry dogs watching their masters chow down on thick steaks while they get nothing but the scraps.
”Rocket, we have plenty. Just using a fucking med-pack and stop limping around sniping at everyone.” It was a common litany among the Guardians, but he always shrugged it off and let everyone believe he was stubborn. If he told anyone the truth, then they’d want him to go back farther. If he went back farther, they might pity him.
He didn’t deserve to be pitied. The Guardians would look at what he did and only see a poor scared child trying to survive, while he screamed back that the poor scared child they were weeping over was too stupid not to realize he was getting everyone he loved killed. He sat with all kinds of pain and not all of it was physical. Maybe it made him an angry little turd, but that was part and parcel to his personality at this point. No one really noticed, because he cultivated this attitude to keep them from noticing.
And all of that was a roundabout way of saying that Rocket felt like a ship had crashed into his entire body and all the liquor in Knowhere that Quill hadn’t already fucking inhaled wouldn’t dull the pain. In the wake of the golden lunatic’s attack, he collapsed into the remains of his room and tried to sleep it off as best he could. An absence of movement was the vaguest notion of a reprieve, though the damn hole in his wall left something to be desired, filtering in every bit of sound from the other Guardians picking up the pieces because they could heal their injuries with hastily applied med-packs or snap their spine back into alignment with minimal discomfort.
“-why he didn’t take the med-pack,” Peter was grumbling.
“Maybe worry less about what he isn’t doing and more about what you’re actually doing.” That was Nebula. Her voice was drawing closer as if she was headed this way, instead of back out towards the street.
“I said I was sorry.”
“Consider it an object lesson.” Peter’s voice faded out entirely, as lost to the guilt as he was lost to the sauce. Rocket didn’t have the energy to expend telling him that drunk or not, that asshole put him through three walls and came out of nowhere. No one was prepared for that shit. It wasn’t his fault.
Nebula’s foot crunched over splintered glass and shredded metal and Rocket curled up tighter to pretend to be asleep. She hovered like she was using those void-black eyes to stare right down into his very core. “Stop faking. I know you’re not asleep.”
He responded by doing very dramatic snoring sounds that he got so into he forgot that his ribs were aching and he cut himself off with a pained hiss when he pulled on them too hard.
Nebula’s glower had audio somehow, like white noise that hated you. It was really fascinating, honestly. Must be a quirk of her implants.“That wasn’t even a convincing snore.”
“It was real,” he growled, burying his face into the scrap of blanket he'd thrown over a bent blast door that he slept on in lieu of an actual mattress. He couldn't sleep on anything too comfortable. He didn't deserve to either. “What d’you want, Nebs?”
“That was one of the Sovereign.”
Oh, so it was gonna be a conversation. Fine. She could have it with his back while he spoke into the blanket. “On frickin’ steroids, but yeah. I’d know those gilt egomaniacs anywhere.”
“He was after you.”
He laughed, which hurt his rubs more than fake snoring ever could. “Yeah. Feels great that I stole batteries ten years ago and they’re still pissed. Talk about not havin’ a hobby. You think maybe they got snapped by Thanos and they’re still in the requisite five years of committing to vengeance? The world’s moved on, man.”
“Rocket, this is serious.”
“I’m as serious as my five broken ribs.” He winced as another sharp pain spiked through his body when he tried to move. Ah. He missed one. Good job, genius. “Six.”
“You know this isn’t about the batteries.” He hated that tone. He’d heard it so often over the five years the two of them spent being the last of the Guardians left- the tragic, yet still somehow completely pissed, tone of a woman who thought she was about to lose something else.
“Maybe.” Rocket just shrugged, which only soured Nebula's mood more. Her fault for coming in here acting like he'd respond any other way. “Hell if I know what though.”
-
He got his answer on the gilded douchebag’s second tour of Knowhere. He arrived without putting him through a wall, but that didn’t make what he did do any less dramatic.
First he bitched and moaned about Nebula stabbing him which made her stab him again, which then made him destroy more stuff and then he finally got to the point. The effectiveness was intensified by the fact that through the whole speech he was holding Nebula up by her throat in the middle of Knowhere.
“I come here on behalf of the High Evolutionary. He only wants his property back. No more harm need be done to your giant head.”
Rocket’s heart skipped a beat.
And then he came out of his hiding place and unloaded the biggest gun he had into Goldie’s pretty face without even considering how fucked up that might be.
Nebula was fine. And as for the golden idiot, well... He walked that off too. Of course he did.
-
“We don’t have anything belonging to the High Evolutionary,” Mantis said hours later after an impromptu funeral for the casualties of this latest attack. The first one had just been structural damage and easily healed injuries, but now there were bodies and a strong sense that this wasn’t going to end easy. That meant a meeting. Yay.
“Did anyone steal anything from him?” Quill asked, carefully, sizing them all up like yesterday he wasn't facedown in his own sick and therefore qualified to lead a discussion. “Anyone at all? Not naming names. I’m just saying that unless it’s something we really, really don’t want him to have, you should give it back…. Or at least come forward.”
“Yeah,” Rocket finally replied, absent of any bite. It was the first time he’d spoken since they found the bodies, still reeling from hearing that name for the first time in over a decade. In that time, he'd had to sit with a new kind of pain- the pain of knowing there was no getting out of this unless he was open and honest, rather than closed off. And if opened that door, who knew what might tumble out of him.
But people were dying because of him. If anything would get him to speak up after so long staying quiet about it, it was that.
Quill dropped his placating hands and made a face. “C’mon, man, I was trying to give you the benefit of the doubt here. What’d you steal?”
He met Quill’s eyes and watched him wilt under his gaze. He must look haunted as fuck. It was only going to get worse from here. “Me.”
-
Telling the truth went over as well as could be expected. He was glad he was still nursing sore ribs so no one touched him, but Mantis was sobbing at the end and Quill, Groot, and Nebula were ready to go to war. All in all, not a terribly shocking turn-out on the spectrum of emotionalisticals.
But Rocket had been thinking while talking if only to detach himself from the shock of the memories and the reality of the situation, and the more he crunched the numbers, the more he realized this wasn’t a war he wanted to leave to chance. “The gilded moron is gonna keep comin’. Maybe next time he nukes the place. I dunno, but I ain’t letting anyone else die ‘cause of me.”
The collective wince of the entire group made his hackles rise and his heart ache at the same time. It was Quill who finally broke the silence.
“So what’re we doing, Rocket? Mantis says she can get the coordinates. We could hunt him down right now.”
Rocket looked to Nebula, who looked back like she could read his mind. Her jaw twitched so hard he thought he saw something spark. “No. That’s not an option.”
“What’s not an option?” Drax looked between them squinting. The hamster wheel he had where his brain oughta to be was spinning like crazy and getting nowhere.
“He just wants me… And I already told you I don’t want anyone else to die ‘cause of me.” His list was too long already. Add it to the list of people who died right before his eyes and you might gain a fraction of the reasons behind this decision. The last thing he wanted to do was walk back to that maniac.
But he had a plan.
He always had a plan.
Quill sliced his hand through the air. “We’re not letting you go back to him. Pick something else.”
“Not your decision, Pete.” Rocket exhaled. “Look I’m not going there to die, all right? I haven’t seen this dude in over a decade. I don’t know what he’s packing these days. I could get that to you, give you exact specifical details of the goings-on. This guy needs to be stopped, but we gotta do it right and I’m the only one who can.”
“You just said he wanted to lobotomize you,” Nebula snapped.
“I think I can work around that.” He scratched the underside of his jaw. Nervous tic. Bad habit. Massive fucking tell that he wasn’t as confident about this as he appeared to be.
Good luck finding a better option. “When have I ever failed to get out of something?”
See? Logic. The Guardians all exchanged looks, but not a single one could say that he wasn’t an expert at getting himself out of shit. He escaped sire once. He’d do it again twenty more times just to prove a point.
He hoped to all the dead Celestials- because the living ones were douchebags- that he didn’t have to.
-
It took two days to convince the other Guardians to go along with his idea and then another two days to come up with a plan that everyone agreed with. If Rocket weren’t so gung-ho about this and constantly on edge thinking Goldie might come back any minute, they probably would have kept arguing with him. That they didn’t kept him from just going himself and not even waiting for another attack. It wasn't like the High Evolutionary was all that hard to find.
“Would it make you feel better if I took a comm and a tracker with me?” Rocket offered sardonically as Quill made yet another stinkface about the whole thing, only now with more details available to judge.
“Dude, he’s gonna frisk you the second you get there.”
Rocket tried not to think about what else he might do. There were days when he could still feel his hands cupping his head like he was trying to peel the fur and flesh and bone away to get to that precious brain inside there. He was gambling on what had barely a prayer of working and he wasn’t the praying type. “I’ll swallow it.”
“Swallow it?!” Quill looked to the other Guardians. None of them seemed all that shocked by the suggestion, because they were capable of being reasonable and not judgy assholes.
“What? You just stick the thing in an orloni bladder and tie it off. Easy. I’ve done it a hundred times. Ask Nebs. I had to break out of two more prisons why you were blipped.”
Nebula exhaled tiredly through her nose. “One of them was actually an animal shelter. He didn’t even need the lockpicks. I don’t even think it should count as a prison break.”
“There were bars. It was a prison.”
“I don’t care about that. We’re not talking about the Blip. We all agreed we wouldn’t talk about it.” Peter paused and then whipped back towards Rocket just when everyone might have assumed that he could just move on from something he didn't like. “So you just carry orloni bladders on you?”
“You don’t?”
“No! Because it’s disgusting!”
“And that’s why you’ll rot in prison one day and I’m gonna laugh.”
“Can we please focus,” Mantis begged. Her antenna were glowing, which meant she was either going to make them all bark like dogs or bliss them out to settle the disagreement, either either option was just as likely as the other, depending on her mood. Empaths were trouble like that. “This is really dangerous and I don’t want you to get hurt, Rocket.”
His heart clenched in his chest. No. They didn’t want him to get hurt. That was all this was- not a fight for a fight’s sake but because they were angry he was going to throw himself to the wolves because he couldn’t stand pushing this too far. It had to be done. It had to be fixed.
And he had to know exactly what he was dealing with so he didn’t run out blind and get someone hurt. He was too powerful to be underestimated even back then and he’d had time to perfect himself- the fucker- and become even worse. Sure the Guardians were tougher and had beaten nastier things than… than they had been, but he’d never forgotten Groot dissolving away into ash as he reached for him. He never forgot the one who came before him scattered on the ground in pieces. It only took a little slip and then…
He exhaled. “I can probably get you about forty-eight hours max before he lobotomizes me. That’s time enough to get everything you need to bust his ass up.”
“What happens if you can’t?”
Rocket leveled his gaze at Quill; deeply serious, teeth bared. “Then fuckin’ move fast when I call you.”
-
Nebula followed him out when they broke apart to tend to their individual business, despite him saying he needed time alone to get his shit together. He’d made it sound like it was actual, physical shit and not the mental kind, but of course she figured out what he was actually about. He blamed the Blip for that too. It was easy to blame it.
“So you’re really just going to walk into that place with your creator and expect to negotiate?”
Knowhere was crowded at this hour with people meandering with, well, nowhere else to go now that the mines were closed for the day and the nightlife was starting to pick up. Rocket climbed up on a bit of scaffolding so he could walk above her and not risk getting stepped on. “I think I said that about ten times now.”
“I should come with you.”
“Why? So he can take you apart?” He shook his head. “He’ll throw you in a trash compactor, Nebs. I gotta go alone or else he’ll think I’m up to something.”
“And he won’t think you’re up to something now?”
Well. Now that she put it that way… “Maybe not.”
“Rocket.” Fuck, even when she sounded aggrieved she sounded murderous.
“Nebula,” he retorted, mockingly. “Stop arguing. You know you’d walk into Thanos’s evil baddie lair if it meant you could protect us. And if he wasn't dead twice over.”
“I would not.” She was lying. For someone with a face that was fully cybernetic, she had a lot of tells. He loved playing poker with her for this reason. If this failed, that wouldn’t happen anymore.
I’m not gonna fail.
“It’s moot anyway,” she scowled off his ‘I call bullshit’ stare and broke eye contact. “Thanos never cared about any part of me enough to do something like this.”
“Yeah, me and my fantastical brain bring all the nutcases to the yard.” Rocket leapt, caught the overhang on a shop and flipped down to land beside Nebula as she crossed into a less congested space.
“Stop making light of it.”
“I’m not. This is how I talk.”
She whirled on him and words tumbled out of her like she’d been biting them back and they found a crack between her teeth to get through. “What he did to you was worse than anything that Thanos ever did to me.”
He scowled. This was why he wanted this kept secret. People reacted like that. “How d’you figure? I got at least half my original parts. You’ve got… what? A handful of organs that’re still yours?”
Nebula bared her teeth, but nothing would make the words stop. She just managed to make upset sound a lot like murderously angry. As per usual. “I knew the whole time what was expected of me. I knew why it was happening. It was painful and torturous and cruel, but at least I could comprehend it. You didn’t have that.”
His fur bristled and his tail lashed back and forth behind him like a metronome. “It ain’t a contest. Nobody here is competin' for worst fuckin’ childhood. We all got baggage that’s tried to kill us. This is mine. And it’s my fight. And stop looking at me like I’m pathetic. This is why I don’t talk about it.”
“I’m not looking at you like you’re pathetic. I’m looking at you like you’re stupid.”
They held each other’s gazes for a long moment, communicating in silence the way two people who had endured so much together and understood one another could. Rocket wondered if when he flew away out into that forever and beautiful sky he’d chased because he might as well even if he didn’t deserve it and went back to where it started if he’d ever see her again when she finally stormed off in a huff.
Fuck that. I’m gonna live.
If he kept saying it, it would be true.
-
The gilt idiot- who introduced himself this time as the Warlock when he crashed into Knowhere for a third time, which was lovely because Rocket was running out of synonyms for gold and idiot- eventually turned up. He made his pretty flowery speeches in the streets, threatened the populace, and midway through his stupid performance (because if he was going to do something that scared the piss out of him, then at least he was going to do it as annoyingly as possible), he walked out while thumping his chest to make the stupid orloni bladder filled with tech go down better, as nonchalant as anything.
“All right, all right. I’m here. Keep your cape on, douchebag. It’s me you want, right?”
The Warlock stared down at him, blinking like a confused puppy. “...Really?” He looked around like he was expecting some big gotcha ambush. “Is this a trap? I will not be undermined.”
Rocket blew out a long huff between bared teeth. “Look, man, you’ve made it clear you’re gonna keep comin’ back and I’m tired of patchin’ up Guardians of the Galaxy-shaped holes in the architecture.” Tired of running scared. Tired of being the one who survives when I don’t deserve it. Tired of people dying because I'm always too slow or too stubborn or too stupid to get them out.
This had to be done.
At least it was easy to be a dick about it to pretend like the reality of what he was doing wasn’t going to crush him. Always served him well thus far.
But hey, think about this way. If this works, it’ll be over. HE will be dead and you'll be free of it all.
Yeah. Sure.
Quill caught him just before he could leave, coming so close to just physically grabbing him that Rocket snapped his teeth at him to get him to back up. He pulled back, hands up. “I’m asking you, Rocket… In fact, I am this close to begging you not to do this.”
Fuck, but he looked so earnest. Rocket’s ears lowered, but he kept his nerve. This is for you, Pete. It’s for all of you. It’s for Lylla and Floor and Teefs. It’s for Groot. It’s for Yondu. It’s for Nat. And Tony.
It’s for Gamora.
And for that one alone, surely Peter had to understand. Surely he’d do the same thing so he didn’t lose anyone else. “You gotta trust me here, Quill.”
“I trust you.” Peter’s jaw twitched. “I don’t trust anyone who would do that to you.”
“He can’t do anything worse to me.” A bald-face lie and a bad one at that, but he could take it. He deserved it. The High Evolutionary could do a lot more to them, and that would be the worst pain of all. He couldn't do it again.
The Warlock blew a hole in another wall with his stupid raygun hands. A woman started actively weeping. “Come along, Squirrel! Hurry it up!”
“Didn’t your mother ever teach you patience?” Rocket snapped over his shoulder.
“Of course not! My mother told me as the pinnacle of the Sovereign race I can have what I want when I want it.” And he said it so matter of fact too, like he couldn’t comprehend that his mother would lie about that because she was a crazy woman who couldn’t get over a couple of batteries.
Rocket exhaled. “Yeah, sure. Whatever. I’m comin’.”
He stepped backwards. Peter knelt down to speak to him so that the Warlock couldn’t hear- otherwise he might have slapped him for being condescending. “We’ll be right behind you in the Bowie. If anything goes wrong-”
“I got it, Pete.”
He turned to go and tried not to walk like he was heading to an execution.
It probably looked that way anyway.
-
Rocket took one of the lesser-used pods because there was a high chance it wouldn’t be retrievable when all was said and done and he’d rather not lose one of the good ones. The Warlock flew with him in the cockpit but was stern and silent the whole time, watching Rocket like a predator if predators had sour, scrunched up childish little faces. A few times Rocket dared to break the tense, uneasy silence to ask him questions, but the Warlock only got huffy until he asked him what it even meant to be the Warlock.
That ended up being a whole thing. He finally cut him off and wished he’d thought to steal Pete’s tunes on the way out to lessen the now sulky silence that left him annoyed and with too much time to think about how the ways this could go wrong.
It had to be done. One more thing to learn by rote. You're a frickin' Guardian of the Galaxy, Rocket. This is what you do. You make sure people like this don't hurt anyone else.
No more running.
The jump point burst into being- a dozen hexagonal shapes forming a break in the endless void of space and when the pod tore itself free, he found himself staring at a small blue planet. Were it not for the now smug gilt moron buckled into the seat next to him, he might have believed he'd gone back in time or that he had never left at all. He felt small and uncertain. He wanted to tear himself free of the seat restraints and hide somewhere. The incoming panic attack turned his voice into a whine, preventing him from even making a smartass comment to downplay his feelings.
A voice filled his ears, and fuck it almost sounded like Lylla, which was enough to make him pause. He jerked his head behind him, like he expected to see her standing there, but there was nothing there but discarded pop bottles and other garbage and words that still twirled in his head, sourceless.
But you did. And you learned so much.
You're stronger than you were before.
Maybe he was, but what did it matter? Whatever he did here wouldn't bring her back. It was just his guilt made manifest. Alone and hungry, he'd heard their voices countless times, though usually they were berating him for being a fuck-up, not encouraging him.
He gripped the controls harder and steeled himself through another wave of revulsion and nausea. The Warlock was sulking about him not moving forward and would probably do something about it soon. He needed to pull it together.
No, doing this wouldn't save Lylla or Floor or Teefs... But it would save what he'd managed to salvage instead. That alone was enough to shake him out of the fear that gripped him and began his rapid descent (so rapid that the Warlock cried out in alarm) into the very first prison he ever escaped from.
With any luck, it would be the first one he escaped from twice.