I know that you wanna break my heart of stone
It's been three weeks and a half.
Before he met these unreadable strangers who slowly made the scars on his back burn less and forced him to so unwillingly stop hiding bombs under his pillow or eating treasonous food with a slight possibility of being highly poisoned or promptly crashing his ship into every single solid wall he could find, Rocket wished he'd just simply not wake up one morning. So, naturally, the Guardians had to die first.
He never doubted it was bound to happen, it's just how it perpetually ends. He only wasn't exactly counting on the possibility of it happening to all of them at once.
Maybe telling them it wasn't a competition would've spared him from five torturous years of maddening agony, but sure, corpses aren't known for the courtesy of coming back to life, so he took it as a half-assed apology and swallowed it down. It still tasted bad.
Even now, he kept trying to get angry, and for the first time it never worked. That raging flame of wrath was for once weary and pale. It was hard not to forgive the world when they were in it.
Not much had changed, everything had just been reshaped so fundamentally it was nearly unrecognizable. Now, instead of the freezing silence, he had Peter's unceasing music in every hallway, Drax's laugh resonating in every corner of the ship and for the first time in half a decade, he wasn't lethargically devastated. It was relieving, unreal, achingly impossible and f antastic and he'd never been so bewildered.
Sometimes, he'd just catch his hands shaking. See bodies on the floor and dust in the air whenever it went dark and then his scalp would feel like a nest to a hundred ants, and boy was it getting inconvenient. Whenever he broke down at the dining table like a whiny fucking kid, he needed them to glare at him and say “Get over it, it's been almost a month,” but they were too loving to be cruel and he was too dazed to say it himself.
It was just the merciless shock of having to deal with something he didn't think was real. Of watching ghosts return to flesh and bones outside of a nightmare – his hand wouldn't go through them if he tried to touch them, but none of this should exist because death shouldn't be undone and it shouldn't have happened in the first place. Yeah, he'd get over it. It's been almost a month. But then his eyes wouldn't focus, and his head kept spinning, and it was harder to do anything without falling into a glassy state of panic and, well… Perhaps he needed a little more than a month.
What he didn't need, however, was Drax accidentally kicking his side when he was trying to hide in the storage room.
Drax dropped to one knee. “Rocket?” Shit, he even said his name. He was worried for real.
Rocket felt the familiar fuck off rising to the tip of his tongue, and held it back because he'd never know if he'd wake up tomorrow to a ship full of corpses. The thought made his shoulders shiver harder against the shelf above him. “Hi, Drax.”
Acutely confused pale eyes blinked at him. “Why are you hiding?”
“No one's hidin’!” Alright, enough transparency for a single day. “I was, uh… I dropped a hammer down here.”
Drax cautiously narrowed his eyes. Rocket tried not to curse too loud. “I see no tools of yours in this place.”
“Yeah, I didn't say I found it, I'm looking for it.”
Rocket couldn't seem to accept Drax's reluctance to just buy it. He was trying so hard to look normal, why wasn't it working? Was it just because he was curled up in a layer of dust and dirt? Because he happened to be shaking so horrendously much the shelves were rattling? Because, coincidentally, every breath he took made his whole chest expand for at least half a minute? He really, really didn't understand why.
“Drax!” He heard a voice, heard steps and saw a pair of legs, and for a second he really thought it might be Gamora until he realized. While he shrunk even more, Mantis’ boots grew bigger and bigger as she walked closer. “Have you found more Zarg Nu-- oh…”
She bent down and took a good look at what Drax had just found, which was certainly not Zarg Nuts. The unfathomable black of her eyes swallowed him whole, chewed on him and spat him out and he did nothing but attempt a fleeting glare, but it still lacked all the usual wrath. He was about to crawl back to the sunlight and deny everything to death, but then he saw a noseless wooden face almost rubbing a dozen leaves against his snout, a metallic arm touching the floor in front of him and the unmistakable Zune popping from an unmistakable pocket.
Great. He'd just witnessed the mass discovery of his hideout by the most insufferable paleontologists in real-time.
“Why's everyone down here?” Quill's stupid, ridiculous eyebrows knitted together, like they always had and probably always would. Rocket tried to stay still and not twist like a dying snail. “I'm your captain, by the way, why am I always the last to know everything?”
“It's not our responsibility if you're always late!” Mantis squinted, almost furious and entirely offended like he'd seen so many times before, because they hadn't changed at all and they were there and they were breathing. Five different hearts beating at the same time.
There was a dull ache in his chest that made him wince with every breath, and no matter how much he shifted, it wouldn't go away.
Peter was holding his stupid earbuds, widening his stupid eyes with his stupid affectionate concern and leaning his stupid head down. “Rocket, are we supposed to know why on Earth you're all squished under a goddamn shelf?”
“I was fixing the, uh…” But that's not what he said to Drax – damn, what had he even said to Drax again? Oh, well. Too late. The back of his neck was burning, his teeth were chattering and they were right in front of him anyway. “No. No, you're not, honestly.”
He knew Peter was about to protest, but Nebula sighed and hunched over until she had him at eye level. “Fine, enough of this.”
An ice-cold hand clutched onto his arm and before he could even cuss, he was already sweeping the dust off the floor with his body, effortlessly dragged out of the shadows. Normally, he would've resisted, would've fought it off with sharp teeth and bitter insults, if only it weren't for the weight of Drax's hand on his back. If only he weren't still getting used to being able to get out of bed again. If only he could avoid wrapping his arm around Drax's waist because none of this was normal at all.
He was staring at Quill, who was by chance also staring at him just like everyone else in that damn room when it was supposed to be his secret. Fuck. “Okay, what’d you do?” Peter asked, legs crossed and a hand on his shoulder. Rocket's grip tightened around Drax. “Whatever it is, we're not gonna yell at you. Not too much, anyw-- wait, did something happen? Are you hurt? You good?”
“Gee, yeah,” Rocket brushed him off. “Yeah, it's fine.”
He squinted. “Are you lying?”
“I-- no…” but then he'd be lying to his family twice, and he couldn't afford any distance for at least the next few days, and being mean wasn't working anymore, and he'd never see Gamora again, and he learned the hard way that hiding and cowardly turning away was never worth it in the long run and--
He tried his freaking best to sniff very, very silently. “If the slightest, faintest idea of leaving again ever happens to barely cross your dumb fucking minds, you idiots, just know I'll shit on your graves!”
And then he sniffed very, very loudly and was suddenly attacked by ten loving hands that made his not sniffing mission a lot harder. “I mean, it's not like we were trying to, y’know?” Just that would’ve been enough to make him try and break their noses one by one, but Peter said it so softly, so carefully, so indulgently. Rocket didn't decide to sink into Drax's chest, his body did.
“You're always leavin’,” he originally meant to say dying, but it made his breath hitch and his teeth ache. “Everyone, and I'm always burying them.”
“Not all of them.” Drax placed a hand that could slaughter an entire village on Rocket's shoulder blades with all the tenderness ever witnessed by the living. “I cannot speak for those who came before, but not all of them.”
He really didn't mean to hold them like that, nor let himself be held. But their scents filled the room, filled his lungs, filled everywhere, and it was violently fresh and tangible instead of residual love from five years ago. And it hit him, it hit him that they were perfectly intact, perfectly and irredeemably stupid like they'd always been, like he was used to, and it hit him that Gamora's absence was a cold and unshifting permanent truth. Maybe he really did have way more to lose when he chose apathy.
He had the feeling they were edging dangerously closer, and the nasty conviction he wouldn't find the energy to shove them away for the life of him once they did.
“That better?” Peter asked, and Rocket didn't move at all as they piled up against him. There were knuckles softly running down his scalp.
He was about to shamelessly say yes, but then his temporarily forgotten self-preservation kicked in and he had to protect his last bits of dignity by slipping through Drax’s arms. “No, ‘cause there wasn't anything wrong to begin with. You just love to make a big deal out of everything.”
Quill smirked in that god-forbidden way that was so warm and dumb and familiar as though Rocket and Nebula hadn't given him a Ravager funeral five years ago. “How do you sleep at night knowing how much you lie every day?”
“What makes you think I sleep?” Rocket scoffed, though it sounded more like a cough. “Yeah, I appreciate the concern and all, guys, but I kinda gotta go back to work.”
“Hey, are you su--”
“Fine.” He got up on wobbly feet and stumbled to the door, careful not to look back at their faces and finally break down at once – he didn’t wanna get caught on his third lie. “It's fine.”
He'd be fine, though. They could all sit at the table and have a few drinks by the end of the day. By the end of the week, he'd finish updating their weapons (go hibernating for five years and see what it does to technology), and maybe in a month or two, he wouldn't need to sleep with their old clothes anymore. By the end of time, if he was lucky, he'd be able to tell them more without feeling every part of his skin burning to ashes.