Origin

Once upon a time, in a far corner of the galaxy where the stars were so thick they looked like scattered handfuls of glitter, there was a small planet called Halfworld.

Halfworld was quiet. Very quiet. It had long ago been a place of great scientific study, where researchers had tried something extraordinary — they had changed animals, giving them minds sharp enough to understand the whole wide universe. Giving them hands clever enough to build machines. They had hoped it would help. Then the scientists left, and their experiments stayed behind.

One of those experiments was Rocket.

Rocket was small, with dark stripes across his face and a thick, ringed tail and ears that could hear a spaceship humming from a mile away. He had the sharpest eyes on Halfworld and the quickest hands and a mind that never, ever stopped working. He could take apart any machine and put it back together better. He could look at a pile of scrap metal and see a starship inside it.

But Halfworld was lonely.

The other creatures on Halfworld did not quite understand Rocket. And Rocket did not quite understand them. He had been made different — made sharper and stranger and more — and that made him feel, for a very long time, like he did not belong anywhere at all.

So he left.

He packed what he could carry, climbed aboard the smallest ship he could find, and flew up through Halfworld's clouds and out into the big, dark, glittering galaxy beyond. He told himself he preferred it alone. He told himself that was fine.

He found work as a bounty hunter — tracking beings who had done something wrong and needed to be brought to justice. He was very good at it. He was fast. He was clever. He had built himself the most impressive collection of blasters and plasma cannons and things-that-went-BOOM that anyone in three star systems had ever seen. Smugglers feared him. Crime lords crossed to the other side of the street. For a small creature, he made a very large impression.

But at night, curled up alone in whatever ship he'd borrowed or repaired, Rocket was quiet. That was the part he never talked about.

And then — one mission, on a day that seemed like any other — he met Groot.

Groot was tall. Very tall. He was a tree — a living, walking, thinking tree from a world called Planet X — and his bark was knotted and deep brown and when he was happy, small flowers bloomed at the tips of his branches. He had enormous hands that could lift boulders and a heart that was even bigger. His whole vocabulary was three words: "I am Groot." He said it softly, loudly, questioningly, joyfully — and somehow, in a way that surprised everyone who witnessed it, Rocket understood every meaning perfectly.

"I am Groot," Groot said, the first time they met, looking down at Rocket with warm brown eyes.

"Yeah," Rocket said. "I know. Me too."

Nobody else quite understood what that exchange meant. But the two of them did. And from that day forward, they were a team.

Rocket and Groot drifted through the galaxy together, taking jobs and getting into trouble and getting OUT of trouble, usually because Rocket had quietly built something extraordinary out of the parts lying on the floor. Then one day, through a series of events involving a prison called the Kyln, a mysterious orb, and a man named Peter Quill — who called himself Star-Lord and wore a red coat and flew a ship called the Milano — Rocket found himself part of something bigger.

The Guardians of the Galaxy.

There was Star-Lord, who was brave and funny and a little reckless. There was Gamora, the finest warrior Rocket had ever met. There was Drax the Destroyer, who was very large and very serious and had never once understood a joke. They were odd and mismatched and none of them had a home to go back to.

But together, they had something better.

Rocket looked around at his new crew one evening as the Milano sailed between the stars. Groot sat beside him, a tiny light glowing gently from a branch on his shoulder. Star-Lord was arguing with the ship's navigation system. Gamora was sharpening her blade. Drax was eating something enormous.

Rocket felt the tightness he had carried since Halfworld begin, very slowly, to ease.

He was still small. He was still strange. He was still the only one exactly like him in the whole wide galaxy.

But he was not alone anymore.

And that, it turned out, made all the difference in the universe.