World Milano

Once upon a time, there was a spaceship called the Milano.

It was not the biggest ship in the galaxy. It was not the newest. It had been patched in fourteen different places with metal that didn't quite match the original hull colour, and it had an engine fault that Rocket had attempted to fix six times and that still made a sound like a very tired sneeze every time the ship entered a new sector. It had a cassette deck — an old Earth music machine — hardwired into the flight controls, because Star-Lord insisted on it.

The Milano was named after an actress from Earth that Star-Lord had admired as a boy. Her name was Alyssa Milano. She did not know she had a spaceship named after her.

The Guardians of the Galaxy called the Milano home.

Now, the Milano had many rooms, but the best room for Groot was the cargo bay. The cargo bay had a ceiling tall enough for him to stand upright. In every other corridor, Groot had to tilt sideways and fold in his tallest branches just to move, and even then there were occasional CREAK sounds that made Star-Lord anxious about his ship.

In the cargo bay, Groot could breathe.

At night — when the Guardians were asleep and the galaxy slid slowly past the portholes — Groot settled onto the cold metal deck and rooted, just very slightly, into the floor. Not deeply. Just enough to draw trace minerals from the hull's alloy the way a tree drinks through its roots.

Rocket found out about this and made quite a lot of noise.

Then he checked the hull in Groot's corner. Denser. Stronger. More resistant to corrosion than any other part of the ship. Groot's biology, spread through the night into the metal, had been quietly reinforcing the Milano from the inside.

Rocket stopped complaining.

From the porthole of the cargo bay, Groot watched the galaxy go by.

He saw Xandar's double sunset — two suns setting at different speeds, the horizon turning every shade from bright amber to deep violet before the stars came out. He watched a pulsar sweep the dark like a lighthouse above the greatest ocean imaginable: light, then dark, then light again, regular as breathing. He saw the ribbon nebula of the Kyln region — a long band of glowing gas, lit from within by young stars, every colour in it one that had no name in any language Groot knew.

He pressed his bark palm against the porthole glass. Cold on the other side. The galaxy, immense and beautiful, flowing past in slow silence.

The Nova Corps policed their corner of it from Xandar. The Kree Empire stretched across another. The Sovereign people occupied their golden planet, perpetually offended by everyone else's imperfections. Between all of them floated a thousand independent worlds — outposts and stations and places like Knowhere, the skull-colony, where you could find almost anything if you knew who to ask.

Groot had seen so many of them.

He had come from Planet X — cast out for being too gentle, into a universe that turned out to need exactly that. He had worked the cargo runs and the loading docks, drifted from station to station, and then found Rocket on Xandar. And from Rocket came Star-Lord and from Star-Lord came Gamora and Drax and the Milano and all of it: all of this ordinary, extraordinary life among the stars.

Star-Lord, who played music too loudly and had feelings he didn't always know how to say. Gamora, who was slowly, carefully learning to trust. Drax, who had found his way back to laughter after everything he had lost. And Rocket, his best friend, always three steps ahead, always understanding every word, always nearby.

The Milano was small. It smelled of old machinery and Rocket's projects and the particular scent of someone else's cassette tape music. It made a tired-sneeze sound on every sector entry. But it carried all of them, and it flew, and it came home from every fight with every Guardian still aboard.

One evening, the light from a small nebula filtered through the porthole and fell across Groot, turning his bark every shade of purple and gold.

"I am Groot," he said, to no one in particular.

From four meters away, Rocket looked up from the piece of machinery he was taking apart and putting back together again. He looked at Groot for a moment — lit up by the nebula, quiet and large and content — and then he looked back at his work.

"Yeah, buddy," he said. "I know."

He went back to his work. Groot watched the stars move.

Home doesn't always look like you expect. Sometimes it's a patched-up ship with a broken engine and the best friends in the galaxy.

Goodnight.