Leader Of The Guardians

Once upon a time, a small creature sat in the pilot's seat of a ship called the Milano and looked out at the stars.

He was not what you might expect a leader to look like. He was small — the size of an Earth raccoon, which is what he most resembled, though he had opinions about being called that. He had dark stripes on his face and bright amber eyes and a tail that curled behind him when he was thinking. He was wisecracking and impatient, and he had never once passed a problem without immediately trying to solve it.

He was also, though he would argue with you about this at length, the leader of the Guardians of the Galaxy.

It had happened slowly, the way most real things happen — not with a ceremony or a vote, but with accumulated trust. After the Infinity War. After Endgame. After Tony Stark's sacrifice and the universe's return. The Guardians had regrouped. Some had gone their own ways; new faces had come aboard. And at the center of it, doing what he had always done, was Rocket.

He was the one who stayed up.

When the others were sleeping and the Milano was sailing through the dark, Rocket was awake in the cockpit, running pre-flight checks for a mission still twelve hours away. He knew each Guardian's capabilities and blind spots, and he built his plans around all of it. He noticed, always, when someone was struggling before they said a word. He never called any of this caring.

But it was. All of it.

Groot was beside him, restored and tall. Nebula had found, in this crew, something she had never had before: people who were straightforward with her, who didn't ask her to be something she wasn't. Rocket respected her completely, which was not something he said about many beings, and she knew it.

And in the quiet hours alone with the stars, Rocket found himself thinking the thoughts he did not say out loud.

On Halfworld, a small frightened creature had opened its eyes on a laboratory ceiling and not known what it was.

On the bounty circuit, a furious creature had kept everyone at arm's length, because closeness ended and being alone was something you could choose before it happened to you.

On the Milano, on Xandar, in the Kyln, at Nidavellir, on the grass of Wakanda — a Guardian had been slowly, stubbornly, becoming something other than alone.

The cybernetics the Evolutionary had put in him. The enhanced reflexes, the particular precision of his hands, the brain that held patterns and solutions that no purely organic mind could match. He had resented all of it for a long time — the reminder that he had been made, changed without consent, made different in ways he hadn't chosen.

Then he had looked back at what he built.

The weapon that brought down the Dark Aster. The bomb inside Ego. The Time Heist hardware. The Milano, rebuilt twice, flying better than the day it was made. All of it built by the very being the Evolutionary had made, using the very changes he had made. He had been made different.

And he had been exactly right.

The things that made him strange were the things that made him capable. He was Rocket because of all of it — every piece, even the pieces he had not chosen. Especially those.

He still said what he thought. He still had sharp edges and loud opinions. The Guardians had never asked him to be otherwise.

They had needed exactly him.

And he had needed them.

Family is not the people who made you. The High Evolutionary had made him. But the High Evolutionary had never been family — and Rocket had known it from the first moment in the Kyln when Groot had simply sat beside him without being asked.

Family was the ones who stayed.

Rocket sat in the pilot's seat, engines humming warm beneath his hands. Outside the cockpit, the stars were thick and beautiful, and there were uncountable worlds out there that occasionally needed saving.

"Pre-flight complete," he said to the ship, quietly.

The Milano hummed back.

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

And they flew on, into the enormous bright dark of the galaxy — the most dangerous and capable and loved raccoon in the cosmos, going home to where his family was.

Which was everywhere they were. And always would be.