Rocket And Groot

Once upon a time, two very different beings sat together in a prison called the Kyln, and decided, without quite saying so out loud, that they would be friends.

One of them was Rocket — small and striped and furious, with a brain full of engineering and a heart full of things he would not show you. The other was Groot — enormous and wooden and gentle, his bark the color of good earth, his eyes warm as August afternoons on planets that had August.

They had met during a bounty job that went wrong immediately, in the way that things went wrong around Rocket — noisily and with a great deal of running. The Nova Corps had arrived. There had been handcuffs. Now here they were.

Groot sat down beside Rocket in the Kyln's grey processing room. He did not say anything about Rocket's size, or why his hands moved with such mechanical precision, or why he bristled when other beings stood too close. Groot looked at Rocket the way you might look at someone you had been expecting to meet — with recognition and warmth, without surprise.

"I am Groot," he said. Which meant, roughly: hello, I'm here, you don't have to be alone in this.

Rocket crossed his arms and said something sharp and dismissive. But he did not move away.

That was the beginning.

They survived the Kyln together. They joined the Guardians together. Rocket planned and built and argued, and Groot held the heavy things and stood beside him and let Rocket's loud, complicated self be exactly that without asking for anything different.

Rocket had spent most of his life keeping people at arm's length. People who got close could leave. Things that mattered could be lost. He had learned this early, and it had kept him safe in the lonely way that armor keeps you safe — protected from harm and also from warmth.

Groot simply did not recognize that wall.

Not because Groot wasn't observant — he was, in his quiet way, extraordinarily so. But he had decided, from that first moment in the Kyln, that Rocket was worth sitting beside. And Groot, once he decided something, was rather like a very large tree in a storm: he bent, but he did not move.

The day that changed everything came during the Battle of Xandar. The Dark Aster — Ronan's warship — was going down. It was enormous. It was going down hard. And the Guardians were inside it.

Groot looked around at his four friends and understood immediately what he needed to do. He started to grow — arms extending outward, wooden branches weaving together, curving over all four of them in a sphere of living wood. Rocket grabbed his arm, eyes wide.

"What are you doing? Groot, what are you DOING?"

Groot looked down at him. In those warm brown eyes was everything: love, and certainty, and not a single shadow of regret.

"We are Groot," he said.

The crash came. Groot took all of it.

Afterward, Rocket sat in the wreckage for a long time before he stood up. Around him the others were shaken but alive. At the center of what Groot had been: a small pot of soil, a few splinters, and one tiny cutting no bigger than his thumb.

He picked it up very carefully.

He said nothing. He went to find something to plant it in.

He carried that small pot through every battle and every flight after that, talking to it quietly in the dark when everyone else was asleep. He told Groot about the jobs they ran and the stars they passed and the things he noticed and the things he felt but didn't usually say.

Leaf by leaf, Groot came back. A tiny sprout. Then two leaves, then four, then a small reaching hand, then a whole small face looking up with wondering eyes.

"I am Groot," Baby Groot said.

"Yeah," Rocket said, and his voice was a little rough. "Yeah, you are."

The friendship between Rocket and Groot is not built on being alike. It is built on a promise made in a grey room in the Kyln: I see you. All of you. And I'm staying.

That is everything.

And some nights, sailing through the dark between galaxies, Rocket would look at the pot on the shelf — Groot now small but steady, glowing faintly — and feel the thing he had never been able to name when he was alone on Halfworld.

He was home.