We Are Groot
Under Peter Quill's bunk on the Milano, there is a grey box nobody has ever been asked to move.
Inside: a Zune music player that Yondu left without a note — which was Yondu's way of saying things he didn't know how to say with words. Three hundred songs. Not his mother's songs exactly, but close enough in feeling that playing them on a quiet night felt like being understood across a great distance. A photograph, folded four times, worn soft at the creases. A playing card, the two of hearts, for reasons Peter has kept to himself.
And at the very back of the box, in a small pot of dark soil: a twig with three green leaves.
Baby Groot had been on the Milano for one month. Six inches tall — you could measure him against the marks on the engineering bay door, where someone had been recording the progress. He had learned to dance in the first week, not playful hopping but the serious and complete dancing of someone for whom movement is a form of truth: eyes closed, arms out, wholly present in the music, answering something only he could hear. He had stolen Rocket's best multitool on at least two confirmed occasions. He drew spirals on the navigation screens. He had figured out the Zune and decided, for reasons nobody had been able to determine, not to tell Peter.
Every person on the Milano tended to Baby Groot in the way they knew how.
Rocket repositioned his pot whenever the ship hit rough air — stopping whatever he was doing, moving the pot carefully, returning to work without comment. Always. Without exception. Just maintenance. Also, entirely, not just maintenance.
Gamora received a Xandarian moonblossom as a gift of thanks from the Nova Corps — a flower from Xandar's southern hills. She placed it beside Groot's pot. Baby Groot studied it petal by petal for a full hour, with the attention of someone who respects plant life from personal experience.
Drax said one evening, to the room rather than anyone in particular: "What Groot did over Xandar was a warrior's sacrifice. He held us when we could not hold ourselves. He has earned a place in the stories I will tell when I have a family again to tell them to." Baby Groot's eyes were closed. He may have heard.
Nobody had put into words yet what "We are Groot" had truly meant — those three words spoken softly in the last moment before the Dark Aster hit Xandar. Not "I am Groot," the announcement, the statement of self. We. All of them together, held in one sentence: the whole group making something that none of them could be separately, bound by what they had shared and what they had survived and who they had chosen to be to each other.
They showed what it meant instead of explaining it. Through the repositioned pot, the moonblossom, Drax's announcement to the room that nobody argued with.
On a quiet night, Peter picked up the Zune and put it on the speakers. CLICK. Music filled the Milano — warm, from Earth, a melody you feel in your chest before you name it.
Baby Groot set down the small screw he had been examining. He climbed to the center of the table on his six-inch legs and stood there.
He closed his eyes.
He danced. Completely. Seriously. In the way of someone for whom dancing is not a performance but a response — because the music had asked something and he answered it with everything he had.
Rocket looked up from his workbench. His hands went still.
Drax set down his blade.
Gamora lowered her reading screen.
Nebula turned her head toward the sound.
They stayed where they were — all of them, in the warm low light of the Milano, with Xandar's distant glow in the viewport and a small tree person dancing at the exact center of everything.
The Milano flew on through the dark.
And the family — the loud, scarred, mismatched, arguing family that had found each other by crashing together and held the galaxy by holding each other — was entirely, quietly whole.
We are Groot.
Sleep now. You are part of a we, too. And that we is right here with you, always.