Ahhhh!!!! Too Of The Head Kisses Are So Perfect! Look At The Tail Wag And Closed Pleased Eyes. They Are

My heart is exploding with rainbows and happiness. This is the cutest, most adorable, perfect depiction of this scene. Your art is so damn good. Those expressions!

Rocket let Petra right himself and he took another savoring bite. Petra snuck in a bite or two, but left the majority of the pie to her friend. He kept making happy noises, and he was in ecstasies of delight as he continued to eat. As he scraped up the last bit he could with the utensil, he let his claws skitter around the edge of the dish and turned to look at Petra over his shoulder.

“Is it weird if I lick the plate too?” he asked hunching as if waiting for the rattan cane of his Sire.

Instead of answering, Petra laughed, leaned around him, and licked a line along the edge of the dish. That was all the permission he needed before greedily collecting every last bit of pie with his tongue. -Chapter 5, Entanglement by @hibatasblog. ———

I finally did it!! Now I can read the next chapter as a prize to myself. I hope you like it! The story is so detailed and amazing. I just eat it up. For some reason I kept thinking of a blueberry crumple pie for this. https://archiveofourown.org/works/48617005/chapters/130958833

The systemic elimination of the Native American population did not end with Trail of Tears or the "Wild West." Post Colonialism is still Colonialism, and until one group of people stops devaluing other cultures as less than. I am haunted by the story my great uncle told me that he experienced as a child. He was a small boy during the Great Depression in Northern Georgia. One day he went into his barn and found an ancient, wizened man. He asked the man what he was doing in his families barn. The man told him that this was the spot he was born in, and this is the spot he was going to die in as well. My Great-Uncle went and got his father, and the old man's tale unraveled. The man's family and tribe were removed- forcibly and cruelly by the US government when gold was discovered in North Georgia. The man told them of his hardships and how he had searched for this place. My Great-Grandfather, invited him into the house to eat and stay, but the man wanted to stay in the barn. The family brought him food, and offered him company. He accepted the food, but wanted to be left alone. He died a few days later. Evil actions that took place 100, 200, 500 years before still resonate in the bones of an entire people. The fact that Georgia's Capital building is covered in gold makes me sick- disgusts me. I remember my school books glossing over the Trail of Tears and focusing on the Gold Rush. Some proud state history.

“Kill the Indian, save the Man.”

Native parents from around the world held their very young children’s hands as they walked them to boarding schools and residential schools. Some Native parents were forced to completely sign away their guardianship to principals of these “schools”, or face jail time. Others were visited by policemen, who forcibly seized their children from them. A few were undermined by “Indian Agents” on reservations, who withheld their rations on ration days. Some children never saw their parents again.

Boarding schools were built to “assimilate” the Native population into a white society, targeting their children. It had been assumed that conversion to Christianity and assimilation was “for the best interests” of Native and Indigenous people in Australia, the US, and Canada. The Native children were not allowed to practice skills relevant and appreciated to their cultures, such as carving. They were disallowed to speak in their native tongues, and were often physically, sexually, and psychologically tormented for doing so.

A five year old Native boy is raised by his family to know his hair as an extension of his soul, and that people only cut their hair if they experienced a loss of a loved one, a loss of a relationship, or a loss of oneself. As a stranger cuts off the little boy’s hair in order to better assimilate the child into the sex-based roles of a white male, the Native child is left quietly wondering who it is that has died, where his family went, and why the other children are being beaten for speaking to one another.

Only a small portion of each day was spent learning academically at these “schools”. Most of the day the children were exploited for their labor. How the labor was divided was based upon the Native child’s sex. Native girls were expected to do the domestic labor that was expected of white girls and women, such as cooking and cleaning, and Native boys were expected to perform manual labor, such as farm work, blacksmithing, and shoemaking.  The children would reach a point where they would be “phased out” of these boarding schools for a summer or year at a time and forced to perform labor for private white and wealthy families who did not want these jobs and duties themselves.

Many boarding schools and residential homes had an overwhelming death rate from Tuberculosis, which swept through these schools and homes. Tuberculosis kills it’s victim within ten days. Native children were forced to play and sleep alongside other Native children who had contracted tuberculosis so that they, too, would die. Boarding schools suffered a 50% or higher death rate because of this, effectively reducing the Native population in an attempt to eradicate them.

Maisie Shaw, age 14, was kicked down a flight of stairs by Alfred Caldwell, the principal of the residential school she was forced to stay in and killed.

 Other small skeletons of Native children have been found in church basements, which served as residential homes and boarding schools.

Other children were forced into prostitution rings.

Over fifty thousand children in Canada’s First Nations residential schools were beaten, raped, suffered from electrocutions and electroshock therapy, were forcibly sterilized, often medically experimented on, starved, and murdered. 

It wasn’t until 1978 in the US that Native parents won the rights to deny sending their children to boarding schools. This wasn’t that long ago. In 1978, my mother was 21 years old. 

In Australia, the residential homes lasted until 1984.

In Canada, the last residential home was closed in 1996. 

The next Kiss Kiss Bang Bang Prompt is up on AO3! I’ll update it here later this evening after I get done with work. I hope ya’ll enjoy it! Here’s an image to give you a hint what it’s about.

This take is 100% correct. So is this one…

Rocket: Damn, that cutie could do some serious damage… I’d love to manhandle that piece into battle. Boom. Bam. Murdered you, sweetheart.

Drax: Are you talking about your new ion cannon, Rocket?

Rocket: WTF? No, get your mind outta the gutter, you perv. I’m talking about Petra* and Jack’s new slutty selfies on instagram wearing only their matching thongs. Those asses are legit threats to my equilibrium.

*my version of Peter Quill and Blackjack O’Hare who are in a loving yet deeply horny throuple together.

I 100% believe that Rocket would look at gun and dirty magazines with the same level of excitement.

I died. Seriously, I am so pleased with this.

rocket raccoon prompt week ✷ day six bite ✷.⁺⋆˚₊

low-grade spice & fluff | no use of yn | gn reader | drabble | word count: 2,266.

“That’s — a big frickin’ scar you got there.”

Your eyes flare wide and you twist in your seat so fast you nearly spin off it, staring at the stranger who has just hoisted himself onto the barstool next to you. Not because you recognize the voice — you don’t yet, though you will — but just because it’s such a personal remark.

And you’re a little bit sensitive about the scar, if you’re being honest. It’s something of a souvenir.

Then recognition clicks in. Because there he is: short. Covered in fur. Velveteen ears and a dark mask, and a plush ringtail that sweeps behind him. Eyes like red stars.

Cutie.

You stare at him, breath sucked right out of your lungs. He’s got hesitation scrawled and sprawled all over his face: ears flicking down and tail lashing once, nervously. His claws clink against his massive, nearly-empty stein of Xitarish whiskey. 

You tear your eyes away and stare down at the ring of pearly ridges stitched into your arm — like maybe there were answers carved into your flesh there all along, and you’d just never noticed. Or like each toothmark is a lodestar, and together the circle of them can help get you home. 

“Isn’t it rude? To comment on a stranger’s scars?” you breathe out, trying to buy yourself time as all the pieces begin falling together. 

He blinks at you, and shifts uncomfortably. “Uh, Jemiah.” He gestures at the owner of The Boot, who just so happens to be your boss. “Next drink’s on me.”

“Sure thing, Rocket,” Jemiah says warmly — far more warmly than you’ve ever heard from him before. 

You feel your eyes flare wide. “You’re Rocket?” you manage to utter, eyes scrolling up and down him again. “One of the people who bought this damn skull? The pilot — the Guardian of the Galaxy or whatever?”

Somehow he looks even more uncomfortable. “Guardians of the Galaxy. Plural. We’re — a team.”

You exhale slowly — measuredly — and try to loosen all the small feathers of confusion crowding up your head, downy-soft. And as you let go of all those wisps, adrenaline rushes in to take their place: the intoxication of suddenly seeing him. Meeting him — for real this time. Having a name to put with the memory. 

Your smile blows wide. You can’t help yourself. 

“The cutie has a team,” you murmur under your breath, and you feel the blood rush to your cheeks when his eyes sharpen on you. He shifts on his stool, but his shoulders relax a little, and the corner of his mouth twitches. 

“Don’t listen to him, Jemiah,” you call out. “His drink’s on me.”

Your boss ducks to hide his grin even as the cutie in question — Rocket, you think, with a pleased little grin — grimaces. “Wait—“ he starts.

You click your tongue and shake your head, cutting him off and grinning. “Not a chance. You bought this stupid skull out from under the Collector and made it a tolerable place to live? There’s no way you’re buying the drinks. I have to show my gratitude somehow.”

You drop your lids to half-mast and raise a brow, hoping he knows that you’re happy to show your gratitude in a few other ways as well. The risk of offering brings a nervous little buzz to your belly. 

As for him — well, you get the sense that he’s a guy who doesn’t let himself flounder very often, but right now his face is flickering between so many emotions that you can’t possibly catch them all. Shock, and then a brief flash of something like smugness, followed immediately by a flash of narrow-eyed skepticism — then a sort of uncertain hesitance, a brief twinge of humor, and finally, a cynical half-sneer. Then he starts right back at the beginning and does it all over again.

It’s fascinating.  

“Did you know,” you say slowly when Jemiah sets down the fresh drinks, “that I work here at The Boot?”

The stranger — no longer a stranger, you suppose; no longer just the cutie — no, Rocket pauses in his cycle of expressions, takes a slug of his new stein of whiskey, and shakes himself out. 

Where the hell does he put it? you wonder. The stein is as big as his whole torso, you think.

But he doesn’t seem buzzed at all. Instead, he casts you a measuring, sideways glance, entirely too alert for your tastes. 

“You don’t say,” he drawls at last, one brow raised as his spine eases a little more.

“Mmhmm,” you say mildly. “It’s my day off.” You pause meaningfully and take another sip of your own drink. “Didn’t used to get days off in Exitar. Or anywhere else on Knowhere, as a matter of fact.”

His eyes track your hands, and flick to your face. 

“Guess the difference is all thanks to you,” you tell him lightly, and tilt your glass toward him. “Here’s to the happy change in leadership.”

He studies you, and waits till you set your drink down again. 

“So. Uh. How long you worked here?” he asks — as if he didn’t already have at least some idea.

You grin into your glass. “Long enough to have developed a very strict set of rules for my survival.”

His ears flick. You’re glad he’s indulging you — playing along for now. “What’re the rules?”

You lean back. “I’m glad you asked,” you tease, and splay out one hand so you can count them on your fingers. “Number one. Avoid the Collector at all costs.”

He snorts. “Well, guess you’re not a complete idiot,” he mutters, and then slashes his red-amber eyes at you and flinches, like he thinks maybe you’re going to be offended. 

But you only wink at him. Not a chance, cutie.  “Number two. Never hide all your units in one place — or on one datacard.”

A smirk curls the corner of his mouth and his nose twitches.

“Three. Always lock your doors behind you. And four, Don’t walk home alone from the Boot.” The smirk slides off his face at that and his eyes flash, so you rush along to the next rule, hoping to lighten the mood again. “Five. Always get customers’ money before you hand them their booze.”

There you go. The little curve is back at the corner of his mouth, even if his brow is still furrowed — almost like he’s distressed. 

You lean sideways and nudge him with your elbow. “And finally, number six.” He looks up at you and his ears tilt, eyes locked on yours like glimmering red stones. You lean so close you know your breath will flutter in the curve of his ear, and you drop your voice to a whisper. “Don’t try to break up fights.”

The pilot rears back, nearly tumbling backward off his stool, and you reach for him before you both catch yourselves. Reeling your outstretched hand back into yourself, you instead gift him a reckless grin and turn to your drink once more.

“It’s not a comprehensive list,” you tell him pragmatically, “and it isn’t in any particular order, but it’s kept me alive this long.” 

“Oh, yeah?” Rocket says, and his voice is suddenly raspy and low. “Even that last one?”

The laughter surprises you, fluttering up behind your ribs and escaping between your lips, soft  and velvety and hushed. 

“I only broke that one once,” you tell him, lifting your glass to your mouth and half-hiding your grin behind it. You can tell your eyes are sparkling, though. “And it’s not like I ever regretted it.”

He makes a sound in the back of his throat. “Sounds like you got a story.”

“Mmm,” you acknowledge, and you keep your voice playful. “It was years ago, now. I knew all the regulars back then — well, I still do, but more of them were jackasses back in the day. And this guy comes in — someone I’d never seen before. Swaggering, carrying a cannon twice as big as himself. Maybe — three feet tall? A true Short King.”

He’s got his stein to his lips and he chokes on a mouthful of whiskey, sputtering. “A what?”

You ignore him, still casting him that teasing half-smile and raising an eyebrow. “He had pretty eyes, and I remember him being more foulmouthed than a landlocked Ravager.”

“Pretty — what?” 

“Keep up, Rocket,” you taunt lightly, tapping a finger to the air just an inch away from the top of his nose, and his eyes go narrow. Everything on his face is suddenly promising retribution, but you’re reckless with glee now.

And you’ll be happy to pay up if he actually comes to collect. 

“I told him that I needed payment up front when he ordered—“

“Get the money before you hand them their booze,” he echoes Rule Five, eyes still hunting you, and you nod with mock-approval. 

“You get it,” you say with a chuckle. “Anyway, his response was just to swipe another patron’s datacard right in front of me and hand it over.” You can still fucking see it: his challenging half-grin, one brow raised.  “I think I stared at him for a full thirty seconds, but this cutie just smirked up at me. Brazen as fuck.”

You laugh softly at the memory, and Rocket — who might as well be your new landlord, you’ve realized — grumbles something under his breath. 

“Anyway, I was kinda smitten,” you admit with a little curve in your mouth, still buzzing the inside of your belly. 

It’s the truth, too.  You’d never thought that raccoon can get it before, but there you were. 

And here you are. 

To your surprise, Rocket goes quiet at that. The pilot of the famous — or infamous — Guardians of the Galaxy, and one of the new owners of Knowhere: still and silent for a long moment. 

Maybe he’ll slip out of his chair and leave, you think, and the flutters in your belly twist in sudden regret. Maybe you’ve scared him off. 

But when he speaks, his voice is like crystallized maple syrup: rich and gritty, waiting to crumble and melt and scrub against your skin.

“He’s why you got into a fight?”

You weigh out your options here. What to say? You’d lost sight of the cutie thanks to his height and the constant surge of new customers, and you’d sort of forgotten about him in the moment, to be honest — though you’re sure you’d have remembered later, alone in your shitty little room — but then you’d heard the sudden cacophonous boom of his enormous augmented cannon. There’d been screaming and crashing, and you’d woven yourself  between the bodies toward the sound. Just to assess, just to figure out what kind of danger you’d been in—

Fucking B’darl — the worst of your regular patrons — had entered into view and suddenly hoisted the cutie right up into the air before slamming him down into the orloni fighting ring. 

You hadn’t thought about it — about anything, really — just thrown yourself through the crowd, toward the fighting ring. By the time you’d gotten there, B’darl had the cutie pinned to the miniature arena’s floor by the throat.  Both the orloni and the f’saki had cowered back, blood-soaked and wounded, from the sudden interference in their battle-to-the-death. 

Looks like you wandered outta the ring, the fucking brute had sneered.Time to go back to brawling with the other vermin, you little monster. 

B’darl had lifted his other fist, easily the size of your entire head.

My money’s on the f’saki, though. 

You’d surged between them without thinking, latching onto B’darl’s massive forearm, knocking his fist to one side.

You shrug. “It was worth it,” you tell Rocket mildly, and take another sip of your drink.

His eyes drop to the ring of teethmarks in your arm again. He opens his mouth to speak, and you cut in.

“My own fault,” you tell him. “I should’ve known the cutie could handle himself. I got in the way.”

You can still remember how his firelight-eyes had stared up at you from behind a mouthful of flesh and blood, stunned and maybe horrified, teeth sunk almost to the bone.  In a worse timeline, maybe you’d have tried to rip your arm away. But here, in this one, you’d curled around him instinctively. Protectively. 

And then he’d reached around you smoothly and snagged B’darl’s ion pistol, and you’d heard the gun go off as he’d squeezed the trigger, blind.

“My only regret is that I lost sight of him in the aftermath,” you tell him with a shrug. You try for a teasing smile but it suddenly feels strained, tense on your mouth. You’d been too flushed with adrenaline when you’d first started this conversation. Now, suddenly, the nerves are present: rattling and twitching behind your sternum. Your fingers shake a little and you clamp them onto your glass. “Didn’t even catch his name.” 

He doesn’t say anything, and you squeeze your eyes shut. When you finally get the fluttering in your vagus nerve under control, you hazard a look up at him. 

His eyes are on your forearm though: the circle of silken raised marks, just three shades lighter than the rest of your skin, and strangely — almost prettily — translucent. His finger reaches out: dark and clawed, his touch like warm leather. You go so still that you can’t blink, can’t even breathe as he paints a ring of warmth on your skin, looping the circlet of scars onto his fingertip like pearls threaded on a string.

The flutters are back, full-force. 

Slowly, Rocket drags his gaze up to yours, sunset-eyes glowing.  “Cutie works.”

@hibatasblog deserves so much more & better than this little ficlet but i am dedicating it to them anyway because they regularly call rocket "short king" and i cannot get it out of my head. deepest love to them & all their writing (please do yourselves a favor and check out their ao3 fics if you have not already)

look i just feel like (1) rocket is a cutie and if you say it in the right tone, he'll be flattered enough to not kill you and (2) there's no way he'd ever forget the stranger who jumped into a fight on his behalf — and probably got scarred for it — back before he met the guardians. which is when the og encounter takes place fyi. forget about the fact that i don't think we know if he had ever been there before gamora brought them along — i headcanon that where two or more lowlifes gather, so too there is rocket.

sidenote oh my god i literally cannot stop with the increasing wordcount. day seven (when i eventually get around to it) is gonna be SHORT. it's a promise/challenge to myself. anyway i think my writing quality peaked with machinery and i'm sorry this is so late

day five. machinery. ✷ day seven. home. rocket raccoon prompt week list

taglist ♡ @evolvingchaoswitch ♡ @glow-autumz ♡ @wren-phoenix ♡ @suicidalshitstick ♡ @pretty-chips

Rocket and Lylla go swimming (in an different multiverse...)

by FlyttOfFancy

Oh my poor sweet raccoon. I’d give him all the pets.

Rocket Secretly Liked Being Petted I

For a moment, Nebula wasn't sure what to think. Then, "You hacked your Cyberbrain?" she exclaimed with a mixture of anger and concern. "Why?!"

Rocket's expression wilted. "Shouldn'a said nothin'... Knew this was a bad idea..." he mumbled. Then, bracing himself as if for retaliation, he answered, "I... it's a piece of code that works on a timer, 'bout half an hour to an hour. It... it sorta half shuts me down, brings 'me' - Rocket - semi-offline, gently; leavin' the... the base animal... but also leavin' enough'a me there so's I can control the base instincts so it don't get scared..."

Nebula puzzled through the jumbled rambling explanation, then, exasperated, asked "What if this piece of code fails?! What if this 'timer' stops working?! You'd never surface again, Rocket! Why would you make such a thing?!"

"BECAUSE WHEN DRAX PETTED ME, I LIKED IT, OKAY, AND I WANTED TO BE PETTED AGAIN!" Rocket suddenly shouted, eyes tearing up. "Because... because I wanted to know what all it was like without me gettin' in the way; all'a my thoughts. "'Touch only brings pain, Rocket! Petting is demeaning, Rocket. It's only for animals, pets, Rocket, and you ain't no animal or someone's pet!' All these awful thoughts, me gettin' in the way. B-But... I saw Quill layin' on the couch in the Milano Commons an' he was 'pettin'' Gamora, he was strokin' her hair an' she looked nearly asleep. I... I wanted that, to know what it was like, this pettin' thing..."

Nebula nodded; she thought she kind of understood? "Just..." she huffed, "when you do this, please make sure someone is with you, just in case..."

Wiping his eyes with his paws, Rocket looked up at her. "Yeah... The other day, when Quill and I were arguing? It was all staged so's I could get him away from you all. I... I got him back to my room, apologized an' then we hashed out a deal..."

This is goddamn beautiful, and I’m just loving every bit of interaction between these two darlings. Also, Rocket should fuck around with every part of Natasha’s car. 🚗

the raccoon, the witch, & the roadtrip. part three. illinois. wisconsin. minnesota.

the raccoon, the witch, & the roadtrip masterlist previous part | next part [est june 4] | main masterlist

angst, comfort, friendship, & fluff for @hibatasblog rocket & wanda | part 3/6 | word count: 1680.

night falls on the outskirts of chicago. wanda and rocket reflect on the horrors of the universe.

During a watch party for Avengers: Endgame on Twitter, Markus revealed the idea to team Wanda with the Guardian of the Galaxy captain actually made it into several versions of the film's script. "We had whole drafts with Wanda on a road trip with Rocket," Markus wrote, "but after the Vision plot in Infinity War, nothing we came up with was anything but wheel spinning for her character." CBR

references dialogue from All-New Guardians of the Galaxy Issue #4 - 6/21/2017

At Rocket’s urging, they’d stopped in a weird little convenience-and-fuel shop that the witch had called a rest stop, and he’d sneaked in behind some other humies and poked through the variety of chargers, converters, headphones, and other piecemeal tech that the rest stop had available for travelers to buy.

He’d emptied his pockets once they’d gotten back on the road and Wanda had looked at him with a crease between her brows. 

“How did you buy all that?” she’d asked, lips pursed. She always has big eyes, but they’d seemed even bigger then, and he hadn’t been able to quite clock what her expression had meant.  

So he’d just snorted. “Do I look like I carry Terran cash?”

Again, something in the corner of her mouth had flickered.

He’d been able to spend most of Indiana peeling apart wires and twisting them into one, breaking apart plastic hulls, and snapping together pieces of metal. 

“Natasha’s going to kill you,” Wanda tells him when he pries off the plastic facade protecting the wiring for all the fancy controls on Nat’s dashboard.

He shrugs. “Not if she can’t catch me.”

The witch makes that little puff of sound again. “Just — don’t mess with anything but the sound system,” she tells him. “I’m not making this drive without climate control and blinkers.”

He snorts, then points to a little heating coil the size of an old Kree Imperial coin. “What about that? Can I fuck with that?”

She glances over. “The cigarette lighter? Sure.”

It barely takes him any time to hook up the zune, and it’s crooning through Nat’s speakers by the time they hit the outskirts of Chicago. The sun’s long dropped behind the horizon by then, and he tells her they should hole up for the night.

“Danvers ain’t in that much of a rush,” he tells her. “We can take a break. Get some sleep.”

The witch doesn’t seem the least bit concerned about sharing a room with him, which is nice, because most of the time he feels like he’s gotta be on his guard with these baldbodies. He’s fairly certain at least half of the Avengers ain’t got any frickin’ respect for him or Nebs, and it’s frankly demoralizing.

But here he is, sharing a room with the witch. He’s never been one for regular sleep, and he’s got this thing with nightmares he doesn’t really want to inflict on Wanda. So he stays up most of the night, propped dozily against the headboard and fucking around on a datapad. The witch, for her part, pretends to watch some show on the two-dimensional Terran holovid-projector — primitive — then turns it off and pretends to sleep.

Pretends.

He tilts his head down at his datapad and wonders whether or not he should tell her that he can hear her heartbeat. It hasn’t dropped down to a relaxed, drowsy rate yet — in fact, sometimes he can hear it picking up, just for a minute. He wrestles with himself for a good fifteen minutes before he sighs and gets up, crossing the room to lean against the wall with the window. The witch is facing it, and he knows she can sense him, even though her eyes are closed. He leans back against the wall-mounted climate control unit, crossing his arms across his chest and his legs at the ankle while he waits for Wanda give up her silly charade.

It only takes about twenty seconds of him staring at her with one brow raised before she opens her eyes. They’re glowing as blood-crimson as his in this light — but where Rocket knows that his are made of reflective eyeshine, throwing back the flat light from the cracked bathroom door, hers are lit from the inside: whirling firestorms that would light up like furious beacons on even the most lightless of planets. 

He tries to curl the corner of his mouth in a way that says he’s unimpressed, but it’s a lie, and he’s never been good at lying.

“F’you’re not gonna sleep…”

She sighs and sits up, then rises, moving toward him so quickly that he startles: arms unfolding to defend himself, ears flickering flat. But she just comes and pulls the heavy curtains back, staring out into the distance. The glow of the city sits on the horizon, pinned with gemstone-lights. She leans forward, elbows propper on the window sill and hands on her chin.

“I don’t sleep much,” she says quietly.

He hesitates, then leaps nimbly onto the armchair on her other side, so he can peer out the window too.

“Yeah, well, you’re in good company,” he concedes after a moment. “Not sure how anybody does, to be honest.”

She snorts delicately at that, and he startles again. It’s the first time he’s seen that much life out of her — not counting her barely-banked outrage when he’d first called her boyfriend a robot, or the deadly-looking glow in her eyes a few moments ago.

“They think you can look away from the horrors of the universe,” she says emotionlessly, then shrugs. “I suppose—”

“No,” he interrupts flatly. “You can’t.”

She’s silent, and he doesn’t say anything either. They stare out toward the city for longer than Rocket knows — and to be honest, he’s only partly paying attention: sunk moodily into the horrors that plague his own mind. When he shakes himself – fur rippling from nose to tailtip — he’s reminded that he’s not alone. The witch looks as distant as he probably had. He’d been wondering — ever since the Snap — why she’d seemed so separate from her fellow Avengers, but he figures he gets it now. They’re an annoyingly optimistic bunch and she — she’s got her own horrors, too. 

She sighs, and stretches: hands gripping the sill, back arched like a cat. “Well,” she reasons. “If neither of us are sleeping, maybe we should get on the road?”

They stop at a roadside diner with outdoor seating and even though the sun is only blushing up the eastward horizon, Wanda insists on eating outside. She’s not trying to get in a situation where someone tells them that Rocket can’t be in a restaurant. She doesn’t have the energy to deal with his fury at the — well, the injustice of it. 

Because he’s not an animal. She’s still not sure exactly what he is, but he’s not an animal. She thinks again of his voice in the darkness beside her in the still-dark hours of the morning:

No, you can’t.

All of the Avengers do it, to some extent or another. Look past some of the horrors. She supposes it’s how they survive.

But she can’t.

She hasn’t been able to look away since she’d been trapped under that bed with Pietro, staring at the Stark Industries missile. She’s been waiting for death ever since. Now, under a rose-and-lavender sky with Rocket, she suddenly realizes that this is why it had been so easy to believe in Ultron’s promises.

Ultron hadn’t been able to look away, either. 

She supposes now that killing people is perhaps the wrong way to deal with it, but she still understands the broken heart at the core of the whole aching dilemma.

She’d started to take her eyes off it, once — the Stark Industries missile and everything else that came after. She’d started to lose sight of all that misery in the softness of Vis’ eyes, and now — now there’s nothing to distract her.

She just wants to look in his eyes again, instead of at — everything else.

But here’s Rocket, and he — she thinks maybe he understands. Strange, that she would find someone else so like her. It apparently took billions of lightyears’ worth of travel and some sort of — of alien mutation or something, but here he is.

They take breaks in Rochester and Sioux Falls, and listen to almost every song on the zune, including repeats from yesterday. Rocket picks up earpods and batteries and a dozen other small devices at every rest stop they pause at, and she doesn’t ask how he gets a hold of them. He tears them apart beside her, legs still swinging in the seat, and she imagines stopping somewhere and picking up a child’s carseat for him. There’s a curl in the corner of her mouth before she recognizes the feeling of it, and it startles her — to know that she’s still capable of smiling.

Rocket reconfigures the little devices into strange combinations that she’s sure are somehow purposeful, seemingly none-the-wiser in regards to her errant, probably-insulting thought and her first smile in years. The quiet between them feels oddly companionable. 

“Rocket,” she says, sometime between stops. “What is this mission Carol gave you, anyway? I need to know how I’m supposed to help you.”

He shrugs, focused on the now-unidentifiable piece of tech in his hands. It moves so fast — flashing metal and chipped plastic, little bundles of wires. “Gettin’ me there’s good enough, sweetheart,” he mutters, then flinches at the same time she shoots him a startled, sideways stare. “Sorry,” he mumbles, grimacing. 

She puts her eyes back on the pavement, the broken white lines sliding quickly beneath and beyond them. “That’s fine,” she says quietly, and he offers a half-shrug.

“Know Nat hates when I call her that,”  he admits, still focused on whatever he’s making. Another quick glance tells her his ears are flattened, though. “Try not to.” She can feel him hesitate before he flashes a sharp grin into her periphery. “Prob’ly can’t just keep calling you witch, though.”

She snorts before she can stop herself: a broken half of a chuckle, rusty and unused. “Why not?” she asks, and he snickers under his breath as the trees go by and the zune repeats another song through his makeshift adapter.

“I think calling her sweetheart is going to be the least of your concerns once she sees how you’ve messed with her car,” Wanda adds, and when he cackles, it pulls something answering out of her lungs: cherry-blossom-bright and unfamiliar, and real. The laugh feels strange in her mouth, absent so long she’d forgotten the petalled shape of it.

Both of them abruptly fall quiet, the sounds of Joan Jett curling through the speakers.

“Did you just—?” Rocket asks, the words crackling off at the end, and Wanda’s hands tighten on the wheel.

“Yes,” she says quietly, although the startle is still in her voice. “I did.”

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We all know Peter is the pet in that relationship.

peter was never seen alive again after this

Amen and preach on.

I say this every time I argue for raising the minimum wage. I never hear anyone else say it and I’m glad I found this.

If you build your business and your bonus on the backs of others who you don’t pay a living wage you don’t deserve to be in business.