The Weapons Workshop
Once upon a time, aboard a ship called the Milano sailing quietly between the stars, there was a very small door.
Behind it was Rocket's workshop.
If you pressed your ear against that door, you would hear things. A soft CLANK of metal on metal. The low humming whirr of something spinning up to speed. The occasional satisfied grunt of someone who has just figured out exactly where the last piece goes. And, if you listened very carefully, you might hear a quiet, contented shuffling — the sound of someone who is exactly where they are supposed to be, doing exactly what they were made to do.
Not "made" the way the High Evolutionary had meant it. Made the way anyone becomes themselves: through practice, and preference, and the long patient process of finding out what you love.
Rocket loved building things.
He had known this from the very beginning — before Halfworld, before the bounty hunting, before the Guardians. The first time a machine had been placed in front of him and he had looked at it, truly looked at it, he had felt something light up behind his eyes. He understood it. Not just how it worked, but how it was thinking about working, the logic of it, the particular problem it was trying to solve. He could feel a machine's intention the way other beings felt the warmth of a fire.
His workshop was small by most standards and absolutely enormous by Rocket's. He had filled every shelf with components sorted by type and size and purpose. He had strung three different lights at different angles so that no matter what he was working on, shadows never fell where he needed to see. He had one particular tool — a multi-jointed manipulator arm of his own construction, capable of holding six different configurations — that he used for the finest work, the kind where the tolerances were measured in fractions of fractions of millimeters.
The weapons in various stages of assembly were considerable.
There was the plasma blaster in the corner — technically an artillery piece, but Rocket had designed a backpack harness for it so that he could carry it himself, which he maintained was practical and others maintained was alarming. There was the guidance system for what would eventually become a new type of seeker drone, currently in fourteen careful pieces. There were three different prototypes for an improved stasis field emitter, each one better than the last. And there were the modifications to the Milano's drive systems — not stored here, obviously, because they were installed in the ship, but the schematics for them were pinned to the wall in Rocket's handwriting, which was surprisingly neat for someone who did most things at high speed.
He had rebuilt the Milano's engine coils twice. The first time, he had gotten a thirty-percent improvement in sublight speed, which he felt was a good start. The second time, he had reconfigured the thrust-vectoring system so that the ship could maneuver at angles that should, by normal physics, have been impossible. Star-Lord had screamed during the first test run. Rocket had considered this a success.
He did not talk much about the cybernetics — the implants that had been placed inside him on the Arête, the modifications that lived in his hands and behind his eyes and somewhere in the deep workings of his neural architecture. They were part of him now. They were part of why his hands moved with the precision they did, why he could track a dozen separate variables without losing count, why the sight of a complex mechanical problem filled him with a particular clarity rather than confusion.
He had not asked for them. But they were his.
Everything about him was his, now. That was the thing he had learned, slowly and stubbornly and over a long time, in the years since Halfworld. What you are made from does not determine what you make of yourself.
Groot visited the workshop sometimes and sat in the corner on the small stool Rocket had built at Groot's exact height. Groot never touched anything without asking. He asked by tilting his head and looking at Rocket with a gentle question in his brown eyes.
"Yeah, you can hold that one," Rocket would say. "Don't press the blue part."
"I am Groot," Groot would reply, very carefully not pressing the blue part.
They would sit together like that for a long time — Rocket working, Groot watching, the Milano sailing through starlight — and it was, in the particular language of people who have found their places in the world, a kind of peace.
The most dangerous workshop in three star systems. The best spot on the ship.
Rocket would not have traded it for anything.