Rocket And Groot

Before there were five Guardians, there were two.

Not the kind of two who planned it. Not the kind who sat down and decided to be friends. They had started as bounty hunters who worked well together — one quick with engineering and plans and weapons, one good at being large and patient and almost impossible to damage — and somewhere in years of working across a dozen star systems, the working-well-together had become something much warmer and much harder to explain.

Rocket was, by almost any measure, not easy to get close to. He was sharp and suspicious and quick with a cutting remark, and he kept people at a distance with wit and noise and a constant low-level assessment of everyone around him for signs of potential betrayal. He had been engineered and rebuilt when he was very young, in ways that left him brilliant and quietly certain that no one would stay. He didn't talk about this. He worked around it constantly.

Around Groot, he was different. Not dramatically different — Rocket would strongly object to any sentence containing the words "Rocket" and "softer." But observably different, in specific small ways: he fixed Groot's bark when it cracked in cold space without being asked. He translated every "I am Groot" automatically, without impatience, as if the three words contained entire conversations that only he could hear — because, for him, they did. He complained about things to Groot the way you complain to the sky, not expecting solutions, just needing to say them out loud to something that was listening.

Groot always listened.

On the orbital station Berhert, when the Milano needed an ignition coil and the whole team was pacing the landing bay, Rocket said "I'll find one" and Groot said "I am Groot" and the two of them disappeared into the station corridors without further explanation or invitation.

What the team heard over the next hour: a distant crash. A pause. A louder crash. Then the sound of something large and mechanical being persuaded to come apart by someone who was confident but not necessarily gentle.

Rocket emerged with the ignition coil, wearing the expression of someone who has solved a problem correctly, even if the solution left some marks. Groot walked behind him, and in one long wooden hand he was carrying a small purple flower he had found growing from a crack in the station's outer wall — the kind that grows in difficult places because it doesn't know it isn't supposed to.

He held it out to Rocket.

Rocket looked at the flower for a moment that was a little longer than it needed to be. Then he took it. He placed it in the small holder on the Milano's dashboard — the one that had sat empty since Peter had owned the ship — and said "Let's get the coil installed" and went to work.

The flower stayed in that holder for three weeks.

That was Rocket saying: this matters. This small thing. You, specifically, matter.

During the Kyln breakout, when the plan had gone sideways faster than planned, a heavy containment gate began to drop across the corridor between Rocket and the exit. There was no time to recalculate and no room to slide under it and no way to override the mechanism before it closed.

Groot reached back and caught it.

One arm raised above his head, braced against a gate that weighed more than the Milano, holding it completely still while Rocket ran underneath. He didn't strain visibly. He didn't make a sound. The second Rocket was through, he lowered his arm and the gate slammed down — BOOM — a sound that echoed through the whole cellblock.

Groot brushed off his hands. Carried on.

After Xandar, after the crash, after the dust stopped settling, Rocket moved through the rubble quickly the way he always did when something was too large to process immediately. Moving fast was how he managed things that were too big to stand still next to.

Then he stopped.

The sprout was barely a finger's length, pushing up through broken metal and grey dust with the specific stubbornness of something that had survived what it wasn't supposed to survive, green and small and undeniable.

Rocket knelt. He held it in both hands, very carefully, the way you hold something that could break and also could not possibly break and both of those things are true at the same time.

He didn't move for a long time.

After a while Drax walked over — quiet, for Drax — and stood beside Rocket. He placed one large tattooed hand on Rocket's shoulder, gently, and stood there for a moment. Then he walked away without a word.

Rocket didn't pull away.

That was new. And it was real. It meant the team had become something more than five people sharing a ship.

The sprout swayed in the settling dust.

Just waking up. Just like all of them.

Dream gently now. The best friendships are the ones you grow slowly, without quite noticing.