The Milano

Once upon a time, a ship called the Milano sat in a docking bay on the planet Morag, waiting for someone who understood her.

She had not always been remarkable. In her factory configuration — years ago, in a shipyard on the edge of Xandar's system — she had been a perfectly adequate M-class starship. Two engines, standard navigation array, reasonable sublight speed, folding atmospheric wings. The kind of ship that showed up in catalogs under "reliable" rather than under "extraordinary."

Peter Quill had found her, years into his life with the Ravagers, and she had carried him faithfully from one side of the galaxy to the other. He named her the Milano. He hung things in the cockpit and left snacks in the cargo hold and treated her, in his way, with the affection of someone who has come to rely on something without quite noticing.

Then Rocket got his hands on her.

He did not ask permission. He never asked permission. One day, on a long layover, Peter came into the cargo bay to find Rocket three-quarters inside the engine housing with tools in both hands and a very focused expression.

"What are you doing to my ship?" Peter said.

"Improving your ship," Rocket said, not coming out.

"I didn't ask you to improve my ship."

"I know. You're welcome."

Peter opened his mouth, considered his options, and then — because there was genuinely no winning this particular argument — went to find something else to do.

The improvements took four days. When they were finished, Rocket ran the Milano through a test flight that made Peter grip the armrests with both hands and stare forward with the expression of someone quietly reviewing their recent decisions. The engines ran cooler and pushed thirty percent harder. The thrust-vectoring array had been rewired so the ship could pull maneuvers that should, by the laws of physics, be impossible for a vessel its size. The navigation computer, upgraded with Rocket's own pathfinding algorithms, was faster than anything commercially available and also, Rocket noted with satisfaction, more argumentative.

"Your ship argues with me now," Peter said.

"Good," Rocket said. "That means it's working."

He rebuilt the Milano twice after that. The first time was on Contraxia, after a bad encounter with a Sovereign fleet left three engines failed and the cargo bay open to space. He worked three days without sleeping, using salvaged parts and a great deal of improvisation, and when the Milano rose out of the dock she hummed. Not rattled. Hummed.

The second time was after Ego's planet, and that was harder. The damage was structural, and fixing it meant taking the ship down to her bones and rebuilding up. The Guardians pooled everything they had for materials. Rocket did the work himself over two weeks, spending long quiet hours in the dock with just the ship and the stars.

He had rebuilt the Milano because she had never let them down, even when the odds were completely wrong. That deserved loyalty in return.

Inside the ship, over those years, he had added other small things. A cockpit lighting modification. A vibration dampener in the cargo bay. And near the engine bay — where the warmth from the drive coils was most consistent — he had installed a shallow curve of hull plating that made a natural seat, exactly three degrees warmer than the rest of the ship.

Groot always went directly there when they boarded. He would settle in with a quiet creak of satisfied wood and a small glow of bioluminescent light, his back against the warm hull, perfectly comfortable.

Peter had noticed the spot once. He looked at it, then looked at Rocket, then decided not to say anything.

He was learning.

"A ship is a machine," Rocket would tell you, if you asked.

But on long nights in deep space, when the others were sleeping and the stars outside were very thick, you might find him in the pilot's chair running idle diagnostics that did not need running, listening to the Milano breathe around him with the sound of an engine tuned exactly right.

He had come from Halfworld, and he had been many places since. But the Milano, sailing through the dark with all her people safe inside her, was as close to a home as Rocket had ever built with his own hands.

And Rocket's hands built the best things in the galaxy.