Teamwork Guardians

Listen. This is the part that matters most.

Five strangers ended up in the same prison cell in the Kyln, a penitentiary floating in deep space, none of them there by choice and all of them trying to figure out how to escape before things got worse. A half-human pirate from Missouri who called himself a Star-Lord. A green-skinned assassin who had decided she wanted to be something better than her upbringing. A furry creature with enormous mechanical intelligence and a very short temper. A man built entirely of a desire for revenge who had not laughed in many years. And a tree.

They escaped together, which was mostly an accident. They stayed together, which was a choice that none of them would have predicted making.

Here is how the Guardians of the Galaxy actually work, because it is not how most teams work.

Peter Quill pretended to be in charge and was actually reasonably good at decisions in moments of pure chaos. Gamora was the real strategist — she had been trained her entire life by the worst person in the universe, which meant she knew exactly how the worst people in the universe think, and how to beat them. Rocket could build a working weapon out of literally anything, including parts of the prison that were technically load-bearing. Drax believed very firmly in charging at things, and was often correct. Groot held everyone together. Literally, sometimes — with his branches, in the crash on Xandar, when he wrapped himself around all four of his friends and absorbed an impact that should have ended them.

"We are Groot," Groot said once. Just three words. The same three words he always said, in the same quiet voice. But there are a lot of ways to mean three words.

When the Avengers entered the Guardians' world, everything got complicated. Thor crashed onto the windshield of the Benatar and it was a whole situation. Tony Stark and Spider-Man arrived on Titan, and Peter and Tony almost came to blows immediately over who was in charge of a planet they had both just arrived at for the first time.

Peter made a mistake on Titan. When they had Thanos — enormous, purple, dangerous Thanos — almost beaten, almost had the Infinity Gauntlet pulled free — Peter heard the name Gamora. And the grief and rage hit him all at once, and he swung his Quad Blasters, and Thanos woke from the hold Mantis had put on him, and the plan fell apart.

Peter punched the most powerful being in the universe in the face, and it cost everyone everything.

He knew it. He carried that for a long time. Being a Guardian doesn't mean being perfect. It means coming back after you weren't.

After the snap was reversed — after five years of half the universe being gone and then suddenly everyone back, all at once, in a battlefield outside the ruins of the Avengers compound — Gamora returned. But not his Gamora. A version of Gamora from five years earlier, before all of it, before they had ever really known each other. She looked at him and did not recognize him the way he recognized her.

The Benatar flew on. Rocket built better guns. Drax laughed at things that weren't funny to anyone else, which was its own kind of medicine. Mantis, who had joined after the disaster on Ego's planet, continued translating Baby Groot's three words with a patience no one else had. Baby Groot danced on the dashboard.

Peter finally understood something his mother had given him that he had been turning over his whole life: when she called him her Star-Lord, when she pressed a mixtape into his hands with all her favorite songs, she was saying something about who she thought he was. Something that the galaxy had only helped him grow into. He was hers first. Then theirs.

Being a Guardian is not about being right. It is about staying steady. It is about forgiving yourself and each other and trying again. It is about linking hands on the worst day, when the most dangerous object in the universe is trying to tear you apart, and holding on anyway.

That was the promise they had made without knowing it, in the Kyln, when five strangers first looked at each other and decided — against all evidence and common sense — that this group of people was worth staying with.

They kept the promise. Every time.