Dance Off For The Galaxy

The story of the Battle of Xandar has been told in many places, in many ways. Historians of the Nova Corps have written long, careful reports about the tactics involved. The Ravagers have a drinking song about it that gets longer every year. The Kree barely speak of it at all, because it is embarrassing to them.

But the version that gets told most often — the version told around campfires on a hundred different worlds when somebody asks how the Guardians of the Galaxy first became famous — is the one called The Dance-Off.

And it starts, as most strange stories do, in a very bad place.

The Dark Aster, Ronan the Accuser's massive flagship, had just plunged through the orbital defenses of Xandar Prime, the capital city of the Nova Empire. The Nova Corps had thrown everything they had at it — hundreds of small yellow Necrocraft, an enormous net of energy across the lower atmosphere — and it had not been enough. The Dark Aster came down in a tremendous crash, splitting two city blocks in half and sending up clouds of orange dust visible from low orbit.

Inside the wreckage, things were as bad as they had ever been.

Groot, the gentle Flora colossus who could only say three words, had wrapped his enormous branches around his four friends in the moment of impact, formed himself into a leafy ball, and absorbed the worst of the crash. The others were alive only because of him. But Groot himself had broken apart. Hundreds of tiny twigs lay scattered across the rubble. Only the tiniest sapling at the center was still moving.

Rocket Raccoon, the smartest engineer in the group, the toughest little fighter the team had, was kneeling next to Groot's pieces with tears running down his cheeks. He was holding two of the twigs in his small paws, trying to put them back together. They would not go.

Gamora was bleeding from a long cut down her arm. She was conscious, but barely.

Drax the Destroyer had been thrown across the wreckage and was lying on his back with his eyes closed, breathing slowly.

And Ronan the Accuser stood up out of the dust.

He was easily nine feet tall. His face was painted with black war paint. He carried the Cosmi-Rod, a massive two-pronged hammer, and now — locked into the head of that hammer — was the Power Stone. The purple gem was glowing so brightly that Ronan's whole body cast a violet shadow on the broken cobblestones. With the Stone in the Cosmi-Rod, he could destroy Xandar with a single tap of the weapon against the ground. Three billion people, gone.

Peter Quill stood at the other end of the smoking crater. His blaster was broken. His helmet was cracked. His friends were down. He had nothing.

He had maybe four seconds to think of a plan.

In those four seconds, Peter Quill — the lost boy from Missouri, the son of Meredith Quill, the half-Celestial idiot who had spent his life running away from real fights — found a kind of courage he had never used before. It was not the courage to fight. It was the courage to look completely, totally, magnificently RIDICULOUS in public.

He reached down to the cassette player on his belt. He pulled the wires up to his collar. He pressed PLAY.

The opening guitar of "O-o-h Child" by The Five Stairsteps drifted out of the rubble, soft and warm, weirdly beautiful in the middle of the smoking ruin.

And Peter Quill started to dance.

He twirled in his red boots. He shimmied. He shook his shoulders. He pointed at Ronan and sang the words, loudly, off-key, on purpose.

"OOH CHILD, THINGS ARE GONNA GET EASIER!"

Ronan stopped lifting the Cosmi-Rod. His mouth opened halfway. He had been about to end Xandar. He had been about to fulfill a vow he had been making since he was a young warrior in the Kree military academy. And in front of him, a small half-human idiot was dancing.

"What are you doing?" Ronan rasped.

"I'm DISTRACTING you, you big turd blossom!" Peter shouted back, throwing in a little spin. He pointed at Ronan again. He moonwalked sideways. He did the move where you put your hand on your hat and the brim flips up, except he was not wearing a hat.

The thing that made the dance work was not the dancing itself. It was that nobody in Ronan's entire warrior career had ever, EVER, treated him this way. Ronan had been respected. Ronan had been feared. Ronan had been begged for mercy by entire planets. He had not been LAUGHED at. He could not even compute it. His whole brain was occupied trying to understand the disrespect.

And while his whole brain was occupied —

Rocket Raccoon was crawling, very quietly, across the rubble toward a piece of fallen Necrocraft weaponry. He was holding the tiny Groot sapling carefully against his chest with one paw. With the other, he reached the giant cannon.

Drax was waking up. He sat up slowly, his enormous arms shaking, and he saw what was happening.

Gamora pulled herself onto her knees and reached for one of her swords.

Peter just kept dancing. Faster now. Pointing harder. "LOOK AT ME, RONAN! LOOK AT MY MOVES! LOOK AT MY HIPS!"

Rocket got the giant cannon up onto his shoulder.

He fired.

The blast hit the Cosmi-Rod square at the head. The Power Stone burst loose. It bounced across the cobblestones with a clatter that everyone, even Peter, could hear over the music. Klink. Klink. Klink-klink-klink. It rolled to a stop about ten feet from Peter Quill's boots.

Peter dove for it.

He should not have. The Power Stone was one of the six Infinity Stones, the most dangerous objects in the universe. A single human body holding it directly was going to be vaporized within seconds. The energy began to crawl up Peter's arm in waves of purple light, scorching his sleeve, lifting his hair, beginning to tear his molecules apart at the edges.

He held on anyway.

Gamora ran across the rubble and grabbed his hand. The purple light spread to her.

Drax got up and grabbed Gamora's hand. The purple light spread to him.

Rocket grabbed Drax's hand. The purple light spread to him too.

Four friends, linked in a chain, sharing the burden of the Power Stone between four bodies instead of one. The stone could not destroy them as long as they were together. The stone could only do what it was told.

They turned. They pointed the chain at Ronan. They opened their hands.

A single, blinding, glowing purple fist of light blasted out across the crater.

Ronan the Accuser, the Kree warrior who had brought entire planets to their knees, the would-be ruler who had betrayed Thanos because he believed himself more powerful, the carrier of the Power Stone — dissolved. He came apart into purple dust, and the dust drifted up into the air, and the wind of Xandar Prime carried him away.

Xandar was saved. Three billion people lived.

The Guardians of the Galaxy stood in the middle of the crater, hand in hand, smoking gently, alive.

Peter Quill looked at his friends. He looked at the dust drifting away. He pressed PLAY again on the cassette player just to make sure the music was still going. "O-o-h Child" was just ending. The Five Stairsteps had carried him through the entire end of the world.

And he started to laugh.

The Nova Corps arrived a few minutes later. They were absolutely confused. They had been monitoring the battle. They had heard everything on their long-range listening posts. They had to ask Peter, very politely, to explain what had just happened.

"I had a dance-off with him," Peter said. "To save the galaxy."

The Nova Corps officer blinked.

"...A dance-off?"

"A DANCE-OFF, sir," Peter said proudly.

For the rest of his life, Peter Quill would never get tired of telling the story. He told it to Tony Stark when they met on Titan, who refused to believe it. He told it to Thor over a campfire on Knowhere, who absolutely believed it and asked to see the dance. He told it to every new Guardian they recruited, every Ravager who came back into their lives, every bartender on every planet they visited.

And here is the lesson tucked inside the silly story.

Sometimes the bravest thing a person can do is look ridiculous on purpose. Sometimes the most powerful weapon against a very serious villain is not another very serious warrior. It is a kid with a cassette tape, refusing to take the moment as seriously as the villain wants him to.

Ronan had expected war. Peter had given him a dance. And that small, weird, beautiful difference is the reason Xandar still exists today, with three billion ordinary people walking around its sunny streets, completely unaware that they owe their lives to a man in red boots, dancing in a smoking crater to a song about things getting easier.

The Five Stairsteps were right, in the end.

OOH CHILD. Things did get easier. They did get brighter. And the Guardians of the Galaxy walked off into the sunset of Xandar Prime, hand in hand in hand in hand, with one small sapling of Groot already starting to grow.