Chapter 1
The first time Rocket saw her, she was in a glass pod, too small to sit up, too young to cry like she meant it. Just a little thing—barely human anymore—wrapped in wires and meta, blinking those freakishly bright silver eyes.
She looked at him. And then she ate a bug.
No joke. Little hand reached out, pinched a skittering beetle from the edge of the pod, and popped it right in her mouth with a crunch.
Rocket stared.
"Well, that's disgusting," he muttered. "And weirdly impressive."
She just blinked at him again, antenna legs sticking out of her baby teeth.
"Guess I gotta call you Bug now, huh?"
⸻
He wasn't supposed to stop. The whole facility was going up in smoke, alarms blaring, everything burning behind him. But something about her—the metal mesh under her skin, the wild red curls, those bright alien eyes—made him turn back.
She didn't cry when he yanked her out of the pod. Just latched onto his fur like she belonged there and didn't let go.
"You're real lucky I got a soft spot for weird little freaks," he said, adjusting her against his shoulder as he ran. "C'mon, Bug."
⸻
He raised her in the dark between stars. She grew up on broken ships and stolen fuel cells, learning how to disassemble a plasma rifle before she could spell her own name.
Her strength came fast. Faster than Rocket expected. By the time she was four, she could lift a chunk of engine casing he struggled with. She liked fire. She liked loud things. She liked bugs.
And somehow, she liked him.
⸻
One day on Xandar, she tripped over a food cart, bit the ground, and popped up laughing with a chipped front tooth.
"Look, Baba!" she beamed, blood in her mouth, tooth cracked like a busted moonrock. "I got battle damage!"
Rocket snorted. "You got a death wish, more like. You little maniac."
She grinned wider.
Still, he patched her up. Stole a med kit. Built her a mouth guard. Complained the whole time.
But later, when she fell asleep next to him in the maintenance bay of the ship they were temporarily "borrowing," he let his paw rest on her hair.
"You're a damn menace," he whispered, not looking at her. "But you're my menace, Bug."
⸻
The cargo hold stank of old fuel, fried wires, and something Bug insisted was "space cheese." Rocket wasn't convinced that was even a thing, but whatever she'd found fermenting in the corner of the last ship they looted had definitely added a new flavor to the atmosphere.
She sat cross-legged on the floor, her wiry frame tucked into the corner of a busted ventilation panel, legs jittering like a wind-up toy. A piece of scrap metal sat in her lap—a dented vibro-dagger blade she'd been trying to reshape with a blowtorch.
"You're gonna set your pants on fire again," Rocket muttered without looking up from the open panel he was rewiring. "And I ain't fixin' your clothes a third time this week."
Bug glanced up, eyes glowing faintly in the dim light. "Then stop giving me fire."
"I didn't give you fire, I gave you tools. You turned it into fire."
"Semantics."
"Smartass."
She grinned and sparked the torch again. The flame sputtered blue, and her chipped tooth caught the light.
Rocket sighed and reached over to pluck a bolt from her hair. "You gotta stop sleepin' in the parts bin."
"Feels cozy."
"You're deranged."
"Who raised me?"
He paused. "...Fair."
⸻
Their ship—if you could call the rattling mess of scrap and hope a ship—didn't have a name. Bug wanted to call it The Roach, which Rocket refused on principle.
"We're already two weird creatures on the run from science freaks," he said. "Don't need to advertise it with a name that screams 'we eat garbage.'"
"But we do eat garbage," Bug argued.
"That's beside the point."
⸻
On Thursdays—according to Rocket's highly unofficial galactic calendar—they had "Fix-It Day."
It wasn't a holiday. Just a routine. A ritual. Every Thursday, they stopped on some nowhere rock, spread out their busted gear, and fixed what they could. Rocket pretended it was about efficiency. Bug knew it was his way of staying sane.
She pretended she didn't know.
One Thursday, while replacing the cracked fusion coil in a stolen blaster, she asked, "Did you ever think about leaving me behind?"
Rocket didn't look up from the spark plug he was stripping. "Why the hell would I do that?"
"I was a baby. Could've slowed you down."
"You did slow me down," he said flatly. "You screamed. You leaked. You ate a bug, Bug. You were a mess."
She laughed, quiet and surprised.
He set the spark plug down and finally looked at her.
"But I wasn't gonna leave you. You were mine."
⸻
Later, when they sat under the stars of a nameless moon, she leaned against his side, silent for a long time.
"Thanks," she said finally.
"For what?"
"For not throwing me in the trash."
Rocket made a noise in his throat that was probably meant to be a scoff. "You'd just crawl back outta it anyway."
Bug smiled. "Yeah. Probably."
He flicked one of her red curls. "Sleep, Kid. We got a junkyard to raid in the morning."
And beneath that dead sky, with their ship wheezing behind them and starlight dancing off the metal in her skin, they sat—broken, patched together, and exactly where they belonged.