Ego Planet

Once upon a time, a boy named Peter Quill had always wanted to know who his father was.

He had grown up without one — taken into space as a child, raised by a crew of space pirates called the Ravagers, learning to fly and steal and dance to the music on his cassette player in the cockpit of a stolen ship. He had spent his whole life with a blank space in the shape of a father, and it was the kind of blank space that never quite went away.

And then one day, word reached the Guardians that his father had found them. His name was Ego. He was ancient and powerful and he lived — and this was the part that required a moment to take in — on a world he had built himself. Because Ego was not just powerful. Ego was a Celestial. A being so old and so vast that he had condensed himself into a living planet and then made himself a walking, talking, human-shaped body so he could go out into the galaxy and meet people.

The Guardians landed on Ego's world, and it was beautiful. The flowers were soft and warm to the touch. The light was golden and gentle. The rivers ran clear. Ego's human-shaped self said exactly the things a person hopes a father would say. He showed Peter how to use the Celestial energy in his blood — golden sparks that bloomed in his palms like small stars.

Drax walked through the gardens of Ego's world and felt, very briefly, something close to peace.

"He is a being of grace and honor," he told Gamora.

Gamora had not stopped being suspicious since they arrived. She looked at Drax with the face of someone who sees what she sees and cannot believe no one else does. She was almost never wrong. She was not wrong this time.

The truth of Ego came out in pieces, the way hard truths often do — first a crack, then a fracture, then everything all at once. He had spent thousands of years planting seeds of himself on worlds across the galaxy, waiting for the moment when he could send his power through Peter's half-Celestial blood and activate them all at once. Every world absorbed. Every life absorbed. All of it becoming more Ego.

"I was incorrect," Drax told Gamora. "He is not a being of grace and honor."

"No," said Gamora. "He is not."

There was no time for more than that. The battle had already started.

Peter would fight Ego directly, golden light against golden light. Rocket rigged a bomb to destroy the power source at Ego's core. Gamora and Nebula faced the long-knotted tangle of their shared history.

And Drax held the line.

The planet itself was fighting back. Ego's living matter came at them in great tendrils, reaching and grasping. CRACK — Drax tore through one with a dagger. SMASH — he shoved another aside. WHAM — he hit a cluster so hard they scattered like broken pottery.

Through all of it, one small figure moved.

Baby Groot. Still growing back from that single twig after Xandar. Barely the size of a houseplant, with quick bright eyes and movements entirely without fear. He was carrying the bomb.

Drax watched him move through the chaos — ducking under a tendril, going around a falling spar, moving toward the core with absolute stubborn calm. He gripped his daggers and kept fighting and did not look away from that small determined figure until it reached the center.

The bomb was planted. Groot's small voice came over the communicators.

The Guardians flew. Out through the fracturing corridors of Ego's core, up through his living layers, out into open space. Behind them, the power source went, and then the core, and then the whole structure of Ego's world came apart in long slow pieces.

On a hillside at a safe distance, Peter Quill stood very still. He had found his father. He had lost his father. Both in the same day.

Drax understood something, standing there in the cold of open space with Ego's planet going dark behind them. Losing something does not require that thing to have been good. The wanting of it is enough. Peter had wanted a father his whole life, and for a few days thought he had one, and now he did not, and that loss was real regardless of what Ego had actually been.

Drax walked over to Peter. He put one enormous hand on Peter's shoulder. He stood there and said nothing at all — the way a tree stays in a storm, not solving anything, just being there with its roots in the ground.

After a while Peter looked up. "Thanks, buddy."

Drax gave a single nod. They stood together until the last light of Ego's world went out, and the stars came back — steady, old, and entirely themselves.

Close your eyes. Sometimes being there is the whole thing. You don't need the right words. You just need to stay.

Sleep well.