Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The woman who appears outside Quill’s ship glows and flickers like a supernova. She almost looks like one of the Sovereign, eyes and hair and skin all golden and ethereal. She’s got that stern gaze, the kind that Gamora has-- had, sharp steel eyes gazing down from through the ship's windscreen, not affected by the freezing void of space.

Nebula's the one that lets her in; Stark is shaking too much to handle Quill’s ship with delicacy, and he doesn’t have any translator that comprehends spoken or written Universal Standard, as far as Nebula can tell.

The back door of the ship has a dual shield to make sure the Drax Situation from landing on Ego doesn’t happen again, and Nebula and the supernova woman watch each other from either side of the second shield.

She’s strong. A wide frame, well muscled but not overly so. Military training, Nebula’s willing to guess, either Xandarian or Kree, and her suit is Kree made, but coloured incorrectly.

“You're Kree,” Nebula states as she hovers her fingers over the keypad for the second shield.

“I was,” the supernova answers. Her hair dances around her shoulders, a gravitational field of its own. She’s not hovering anymore, but her eyes are flickering, golden light bouncing into her golden ringlets. “I hail from Terra.”

Stark’s clutching his side, leaning on the wall further down in the hallway. He doesn’t have the fuel left to power the nanotech suit, and Nebula knows that the heating and artificial gravity on the ship will go next. A few minutes for her, maybe longer. Less for him.

Nebula types in the keycode and lets the supernova woman in.

“He’s also Terran,” Nebula says, nodding her head towards Stark. “He's only got one cybernetic enhancement, and it’s a prosthetic rather than an addition.” He won’t last long, Nebula doesn’t say. Save him over me, Nebula doesn’t say. He’s the one that doesn’t deserve to die.

The supernova woman nods. She walks towards him, strong and calm, not reaching for a weapon because she knows she doesn’t need to. Stark barely has the energy left to raise his head and look her in the eye.

“I’m Carol,” she tells him, in Terran English, and Nebula recognises the name as of Terran descent. “I’m heading back to Earth. I can help you get there too, if you want.”

Stark meets Nebula’s eyes. His are sunken, dark rings underneath them. He’s thinned quicker than she thought he would, quicker than most sentient creatures, but humans have always been exceptions.

He trusts her, somewhat. It’s-- a new feeling.

He raises an eyebrow. Nebula takes that for the invitation it is.

“The Kree didn't call you Carol,” Nebula tells her as she’s guiding Carol around the ship, figuring out how best she can guide it.

Carol shrugs her jacket further around her shoulders. It seems similar to what Quill wears in the photos of him as a child back on Terra she’s found, the symbol almost familiar.

“They called me Vers,” she says. “But that hasn’t been my name for a long time. I left.”

Nebula stretches her metal fingers. “So did I.”

Vers-- Carol startles slightly, but not much. She sweeps her gaze over to Nebula then back to the packages she’s strapping down. “Are you Kree-born?”

Nebula half-shrugs. She doesn’t know either way.

Carol lands the ship in a specific place on Terra at Stark’s direction. A woman with red hair races out of the building when she sees them, Nebula holding Stark in her arms as they leave Quill’s ship.

“He’s okay?” the woman almost begs. Nebula recognises the way her hands hover around Stark’s face, his chest where his external implant glows through Quill’s shirt.

“He’s severely malnourished,” Nebula answers as best she can. “Dehydrated. He’s been losing blood consistently over the past four days.”

“Losing blood?” a man asks, rushing up beside the woman with a creek from the external implants supporting his legs. “Why?”

“My fa-- Thanos stabbed him.”

The woman snaps her eyes up to Nebula at the slip, but her face softens at whatever she sees.

“He’s freezing,” the man says as he touches the back of his hand to Stark’s forehead.

“Oh.” Nebula blinks down at the red-gold haired woman, the way her eyes are shiny and lined with silver. “Hypothermia affects Terrans quickly.”

The woman’s mouth purses. “Rhodey,” she orders, “Wake Steve up and prep the med bay. Bruce should be able to help. This is private property so you can keep your ship here for as long as you want.” Her eyes are steel too, and she doesn’t have a supernova but her hands are steady as she raises Quill’s shirt to scan Stark’s wound. The man who must be called Rhodey waves over a tank of a blond man who might be Steve.

Carol steps forward. “I can help with the hypothermia somewhat, if you let me into the med bay.” Her fingers glow with stardust and she rests her hands over Stark’s chest. Whatever temperature-sensitive nerve endings Nebula still has sense the warmth radiating off her.

The woman nods. “Stay with him,” she commands and Maybe-Steve reaches out to take Stark from Nebula’s arms.

She shows her teeth. Curls Stark more protectively into her chest.

“He’s trustworthy,” the woman says. “He helped with Thanos.”

“He failed,” Nebula bites. “I can carry him.”

“You’re about to collapse on your feet,” the woman argues. “You'll walk with him.” Her eyes are panicked. She’s got deep bruises under them, same as Stark, but she has surgeon’s hands as she brushes Stark’s hair out of his face.

Steve reaches for Stark again, and Nebula begrudgingly hands him over.

She sits on the ship’s ramp, curled up slightly around the pain in her ribs as they snap back into place. These Terrans are unfamiliar, and Terra is unfamiliar, and Carol is already in the compound, hunting down the one she calls Fury.

Nebula sits in the cool air of the early morning, facing the golden sun that tears up from the horizon, her ribs snapping back into place. The woman who introduced herself as Pepper Potts has given her a Terran food, two curved pieces of bread with protein in between. She holds it with the wrapping between her hand and the food itself.

A pair of footsteps approach from beside her. She doesn’t bother to look up when she hears the slight clack of claws on the ramp.

Rocket’s taken off his shoes. His tail wraps around his feet as he settles down beside her.

“Th'others?” he asks. His voice is croaky like he’s been screaming.

Nebula shakes her head. She hears his claws dig into whatever machine he’s building.

“Groot?” she asks. Her voice sounds croaky like she’s been screaming too.

Rocket just places his hand on hers. After a few seconds or hours, she wraps her fingers in his too.

“Beautiful 'n' forever,” Rocket says at some point, after the sun’s risen and the darkness has been chased away.

“What?”

“The sky,” he clarifies. He’s got one of his inventions in his hand, something already finished as best as Nebula can tell, almost like a card to scan.

She looks out over the horizon, into the blue of this world’s atmosphere. Rocket still hasn’t let go of her hand.

“Never seen anywhere quite like it,” he says, and she can tell it’s a lie.

“It is forever,” she agrees, because that’s how perception works when you’re inside the blue atmosphere. “And beautiful.”

It’s only then that Rocket doubles over and starts crying. Nebula doesn’t let go of his hand.

“I can synthesise enough fuel to get us to the Garden and to the nearest interplanetary trade point,” Rocket decides, half perched inside the very empty fuel tank and checking a tablet he’s gotten Rhodey to hold up for him (usually Groot’s job, but Groot’s-- well.). “I’ll need the Kree girl to give her a li’l boost, but it should work fine enough.”

“What's the closest trade point to the Garden?” Nebula asks. Stark is looking around, more awake than he’s been for days, trying to find a solution to their fuel issue or just poking around their ship.

“What’s this?” he asks, reaching for Quill’s Zune.

There’s a dozen clicks and Rhodey’s worried woah as Rocket’s gun forms, twice his height and levelled at Stark. “Try it, Humie,” he dares with a growl in his voice.

Stark’s suit forms around him, a mix of plates and nanotech. Rocket doesn’t move.

“What’s going on with the ferret?” he asks Nebula.

“The fuck’s a ferret?” Rocket asks at the same time Nebula corrects, “He’s not a ferret.”

“What’s going on with the not-a-ferret?”

“Drop the Zune,” Rocket orders. Stark, out of some misplaced stubbornness or sheer shock, doesn’t. Rocket shows all his teeth. “This baby doesn’t usually kill people, but I’d like to know what the electrostatic charge does to the fucker on your heart,” he growls.

Stark looks to Nebula for instruction. When she nods, he gently lowers the Zune onto the seat next to Quill’s backpack. Rocket holsters the gun and scampers to clutch it to his chest.

“Get off his fuckin’ ship,” he commands to Rhodey and Stark. Nebula firmly guides them out, and pretends not to hear Rocket’s broken sobbing from the engine room.

“Here,” Rocket says. “Eat.”

Nebula takes the bowl in her shaking hands.

“Soup,” Rocket explains, like that wasn’t obvious. “It was on his stove. Don’t like wasting food.”

Nebula takes a sip. It’s spicy enough to burn the back of her nose. Rocket coughs lightly beside her, holding his own bowl.

“Where’s Thor?” she asks.

“Dunno. Figured I’d check on you first.”

“I don’t need a babysitter,” she snaps. He just shrugs and takes another sip from his bowl, wiping down the soup that ended up on his snout.

“I mean, you’ve lost all 'f your family members in about three days flat,” Rocket says. “That must be tough.”

“They were not my family.” Rocket raises his eyebrows at her. She moves her bowl in a slight circle, watching the liquid move around inside. “They weren’t my family,” she repeats.

She raises a hand to her mouth. “They’re all-- dead. They're dead.”

There’s a burning other than the spice from the food, and she hadn’t realised before that these eyes are capable of forming tears.

She doesn’t get up for a long time, and for some reason, neither does Rocket.

“Ravagers, come in,” Rocket tells the comm on the dash when all the Terrans are asleep on the way back. “This is the Benatar, come in. Krag-- Kraglin, come in. Benatar to the Ravagers. Kraglin.”

“Rocket?”

Rocket sniffs hard and Nebula pretends not to hear it.

“It's us,” Nebula confirms to give Rocket some time. “We’re in interplanetary airspace, coordinates D74A P162K489M + 73294JL, travelling to Terra.”

Kraglin audibly collects himself. “We’re just outside Xandarian atmosphere, M31V J00442326 + 4127082.” A pause. “Is Pete--?”

Neither of them answer. Kraglin chokes, sniffs, coughs and he must turn away from the comm because his scream isn’t ear-damaging.

Rocket flicks on their microphone with his thumb but still hesitates a moment before saying, “We’re going to be staying on Terra for a couple days, at least, then we’ll probably go to Knowhere. Can you wait 'til then before you--”

Have the funeral, Nebula knows he means to say.

Kraglin screams again, shorter, before he returns to his microphone. “Yeah. Yeah, ‘course. We’ll wait ‘til yous all get back. Y’all’re-- were-- basically family anyways.”

Rocket hovers his hand over the microphone for a moment before he flicks it back on. “And-- Groot-- The others--” His voice fails him.

Nebula turns on her microphone. Finds she doesn’t have the words. “We-- It wasn’t just--”

“...the li’l guy too?”

“And Mantis,” Rocket adds in that broken tone. “Drax.”

“Gamora,” Nebula finishes. “We’re the only ones left.”

“You two - three - can take some of the spare rooms in the compound,” Stark says, waving over at Nebula, Rocket and Carol.

“I’ve got a cabin here,” Rocket says. He’s testing theoretical hyperspace with his synthetic fuel system, fingers dancing over Quill’s dash and his tablet where it’s plugged into the main screens. Stark’s eyes are dashing across the setup, but he still doesn’t understand any Universal Standard.

Next to him, Ms. Potts softens. “You should sleep somewhere outside of work, Rocket.”

“I am outside a work,” Rocket says. He runs a simulation, swears and starts adjusting his equations. “This is home.”

“Maybe that would have hit harder if you weren’t doing hypotheticals as you said it,” Stark says, crossing his arms and leaning on his hip.

Rocket sighs. Runs another simulation.

“This is pretty normal outside of Earth,” Carol explains. Her voice is tired. “Interplanetary travellers spend enough time on their ships that they don’t have apartments elsewhere. A lot of them don’t have a planet to return to, so you’ll find artificial systems built out of ships.”

Both the Terrans frown.

“Don’t have a planet to return to?” Ms. Potts repeats. “What does that mean?”

“This is his home,” Nebula answers when Rocket doesn’t. “This is home.”

“Can’t sleep?”

Nebula’s in the kitchen. She’s made herself a mug of liquid chocolate, a Terran thing sold on the black market that Gamora loved. The mug says I’m a Super-Luminous Spheroid of Plasma Held Together by Self-Gravity!

Rocket sleeps in sweatpants. His external implants glint in the emergency lights. “Yeah, me neither.”

Nebula knows. She heard him screaming himself awake half an hour earlier.

“I made too much," she says, gesturing to the machine in a silent question.

“‘S’it caffeine?” Rocket asks. His claws clack against the floor as he lopes towards her. He’s fidgeting again, turning what looks like a magnetic door latch into a hand grenade.

“Terran liquid chocolate,” Nebula corrects.

“Ah, I can’t. Makes me puke.”

Nebula drinks from her chocolate. Rocket keeps fiddling with his improvised bomb. The emergency lights flash, and every time they turn on, all of their exposed metal shines.

Everything keeps going in silence until morning.

“--and, uh, Nebula, can you use your ship to divvy up supplies all over the planet?” the man named Steve asks. He’s resolutely not looking over in Stark’s direction, and Nebula almost tells him that if you look away from them you miss how they’re looking at you.

“It’s not my ship,” she says instead.

The Man Named Steve blinks. “Uh-- Rocket’s? Ship?”

Rocket is sitting just outside of the room, next to Bruce-the-scientist and Thor-the-Asgardian. Thor is leaning hard on Bruce-the-scientist’s shoulder, and Rocket is letting him rub the fur on the back of his neck.

Nebula sighs hard. “The ship isn’t designed for intraplanetary travel. We’d be better suited to distributing supplies throughout the known universe.”

The Man Named Steve blinks another couple of times. “Um. It can still travel pretty specifically, right? Or-- You can bring our supplies to Wakanda and pilot some of their ships around the world. They might have supplies that would be best to offer-- the rest of the known universe.”

Outside, through the glass of the window, Rocket lets himself be subjugated to a hug in Thor’s lap. Thor digs his face into the fur between Rocket’s ears as Bruce-the-scientist rubs his back.

“Fine,” Nebula decides. “But there’s somewhere we need to go first.”

New Asgard is small. Smaller than Asgard by enough to cause Thor-the-Asgardian to shrink in on himself as he looks over it.

“It-- We’d already just fought my sister, Hela, when Tha-- when he… happened,” he explains very quietly. “We’ve-- I’ve lost… everyone.”

Nebula knows the feeling.

“Hey, not everyone,” Bruce-the-scientist says with something like a smile. Nebula can tell he doesn’t believe in it, but he gestures out to an Asgardian woman walking towards them with a drunk swagger.

“Strong Girl!” Bruce-the-scientist calls with that false cheer.

“Oh, fuck,” Rocket mutters, and hides behind Thor’s legs. Nebula raises both her eyebrows and may step behind the door frame. Bruce-the-scientist looks between them both in confusion.

Strong Girl gives Bruce a hug tight enough he squeaks. She rests a hand on Thor’s shoulder and looks at him long and hard. He droops forward a little.

“Welcome home, Majesty,” is all she says. He sags a moment more. “Did you kill him?”

Thor nods. Strong Girl smiles, white lines crinkling up with the action, before she notices Rocket’s tail between Thor’s feet.

“Spider Monkey!” she yells, and grabs him up by the tail. He wriggles his best fight but she just stares at him when he levels his gun in her face.

She clicks.

Rocket sags. “Really? End of the world and everythin’, you couldn’t give it a rest?”

“My pockets aren’t getting any shallower.”

“You know the rabbit?” Thor asks, almost smiling.

“Your rabbit owes me four thousand units,” Strong Girl tells Rocket’s direction.

“FUCK,” Rocket yells, throwing up his hands and slamming one against the floor accidentally. “I don’t have four thousand units on me! Saving the world doesn’t pay for shit!” His eyes get a dangerous shine and he snaps up to face the corridor Nebula’s definitely-not-hiding in. “Say, Nebula, you wouldn’t happen to have four thousand units, would you?”

Nebula flips him off. Strong Girl shows all her teeth. “Nebula,” she says, and Nebula growls but steps out around the corner. “It’s been a while.”

“Yes,” Nebula agrees. “We have-- supplies for you.”

“Mhm,” Strong Girl agrees, “I’m sure you do.”

“How’d you know Brunnhilde?” Rocket asks later when they’re prepping for the flight out of the atmosphere and back into Wakanda.

“Who's Brunnhilde?” Nebula echoes.

“You know.” Rocket wiggles his fingers in her direction, “Strong Girl. The Asgardian Valkyrie.”

Nebula feels herself colour. Rocket bares all his teeth in some facsimile of a smile.

“You’re kidding,” he says, pleased as a flerken with flesh. “You didn’t--”

“Shut up!”

“You totally did!” he wails, high pitched and annoying. He throws himself back into his chair and cackles.

It’s the first time she’s heard him laugh since. He starts quiet, snickering to himself, before he huffs out a sharp breath and starts laughing harder, high pitched and he snorts and chokes on something in the back of his throat and it’s ugly and loud and laughter.

Nebula breathes hard out of her nose. It’s not nearly as loud as Rocket’s, but he still glances over at her and shares a tired grin.

The Queen of Wakanda, at first glance, looks much the same as the Queen of the Sovereign. Her skin is darker, and her clothes are white rather than gold, but she stands with the same regal nature, the same tilt to her lifted chin. She has a short trail of armoured women behind her, all well muscled and silent as they walk.

“You’re the Queen?” Rocket asks, and Nebula resists the urge to slap him up the back of his furry head at the disrespectful tone. “Or is it one a the hivemind behind you?”

One of the aforementioned hivemind growls something under her breath in what Nebula’s translator identifies as Terran Xhosa. The Queen silences her with a look. It isn't angry, not like the Queen of the Sovereign’s had been, but stern enough to silence her warriors other than quiet Terran Xhosa apologies.

“I am,” she declares in accented Terran English, “Are you the forces the Avengers have sent?”

“We are,” Nebula answers before Rocket can.

“Heard you need some more hands,” Rocket adds.

The Queen nods. Her eyes sweep over their ship, then over her people, gathered in the city before her. “We would appreciate any help you can offer,” she half-answers. “Let’s walk.”

“Do you both know how to fly our ships?” she asks as Nebula counts the crates they’ll be taking around this planet and Rocket calculates how much fuel they’ll need.

“I was cybernetically engineered to pilot spacecraft,” Rocket answers, and Nebula’s heard him say this before, but she doesn’t think it was this tired last time. “It’ll be fine.”

The Queen nods. She’s got scars on her skin, brushed across her cheek as if by a blade. The Queen of the Sovereign hadn’t had any scars. “Then it would be appreciated that you, Rocket, fly ours and Nebula may fly your own ship?”

Rocket snaps his head up to her with wide eyes. “No-- No, we stay together. We don’t leave each other. We--” His voice breaks in his panic.

“You can't leave us alone,” Nebula says. Then, desperately, “Please.”

The Queen looks at them both, their frayed edges. Her face softens somewhat. “You remind me of my children,” she says softly. “They could never stand to be separated for long either.”

She reaches out and touches Nebula’s cheek, undeterred by her flinch, though it does make her eyes go even softer. “We are never alone,” she tells her. “Just closer or further from others. There’s no distance you can’t breach. Whoever you lost-- They’re just further than usual.”

And she can’t be like the Queen of the Sovereign, because she kneels on the ground in front of Rocket, muddying her white dress. She takes his shaking fist in her hand and slides off her beaded bracelet to wrap it around his wrist. “We can always get closer.”

The bracelet’s a comm of some kind. It’s faster than the one on the ship, and provides a physical projection as well as audio. Rocket takes his apart in the first two hours of having it - vibranium, the type that Nebula didn’t think they had on Earth. He pieces it back together and leaves at sunset.

He doesn’t say goodbye, just turns on the comm link so Nebula can see his face in her palm as he flies away.

He takes Quill’s Zune with him.

They don’t talk much. They have their own jobs to do, Nebula in the isolated spaces of the world and Rocket in the cluttered ones, but they keep their new commlink open, keep each other in their peripheral as they fly.

Nebula turns on hers as she makes herself chocolate in Quill’s kitchen. The mug is stained, now, the chocolate too similar to blood in the emergency lights.

Rocket returns the link about half an hour later. He curls up with his tail over his feet and uses all the vibranium he can steal from the ship to make a miniature nuclear reactor.

Neither of them fall asleep, just start moving again when their sunrises stream through the windows.

“Are you an Avenger?” a child asks. She’s seated in a rolling chair, bags clipped in her arm and tubes in her nose.

“I know them,” Nebula half-answers.

The child shows all of her teeth. She’s missing a pair at the front. “You’ve got the same arm as me!” she declares, showing her metal prosthetic to Nebula.

Thanos took Nebula’s arm off when she was older than this child, after a particularly pitiful fight. This child is paler than both Nebula and Gamora, closer to Ebony Maw or Corvus Glaive, skin like paper. Her hair is dark, stained pink at the tips and it’s so familiar it hurts.

“Yes,” she says.

“Mine got sick,” the child confesses. “What happened to yours?”

It was removed as a form of acute torture, Nebula can’t tell this child with Gamora’s hair and Corvus’ skin and Nebula’s arm. “I needed to be better at flying ships,” she half-lies.

“Woah,” the kid says. “That’s hardcore. You’re my favourite Avenger.”

“You’d like my sister more,” Nebula tells her. “She has hair like yours.”

“She can be my favourite too,” the child declares. “But you’re better.”

Nebula clenches her metal hand.

Rocket sits on the Benatar’s back ramp, moving his bracelet through his fingers. Nebula walks up and sits next to him. Around them, the Dora Milaje take note of their deliveries and their reports, the Queen vanished back inside her palace.

His beads clack as he passes them through his fingers, one at a time. Clack, clack, clack.

“We’ve got ten days Terran time to get to Knowhere,” Rocket mutters. “That’s when they’re hostin’...” He trails off.

Nebula nods.

Clack, clack, clack.

“Here,” a Dora Milaje says to Nebula, holding out a long box. “A gift.”

Somewhere inside, Rocket bangs something hard and swears loud. The Dora Milaje’s mouth twitches.

“What is this?” Nebula asks, taking the box in her hands.

“A prosthetic arm the Princess made for our White Wolf,” the Dora explains. “Neither…”

Survived, Nebula hears.

She opens the box and finds a black and gold arm awaiting her.

“... thank you,” she tries. Then, “Why?”

“You are a warrior,” the Dora says. “I believe the princess would have wanted you to have it.”

Nebula nods. She doesn’t thank her again.

“Here,” Stark says to Nebula, holding out a tiny box wrapped in rainbow ribbon. “A gift.”

He’s looking better. He’s got Ms. Potts to keep him safe and healthy, now, and it shows in the slight flicker of life in his eyes. He’s wearing his own clothes, baggy everything stained by oil and sweat, and Nebula doesn’t tell him that work isn’t a replacement for grief.

She takes the box and ignores how Stark’s hands still shake.

“It’s a gift card,” he explains unprompted. “For Build-A-Bear. Thought Timeless Teddy back there would appreciate it.”

Nebula runs her fingers over the written Terran English on the card. “What is… ‘Build-A-Bear Workshop’?”

Stark grins, but that flicker of life in his eyes is waning. “Why, it’s the only place on Earth where you can experience the fun of making your own soft toy and custom teddy bears! For twenty years, Guests have made special memories--”

“You don’t have to read her the whole website description,” Ms. Potts says, emerging from the building behind him. She meets Nebula’s eyes. “Thank you. For everything.”

Nebula nods. She doesn’t say goodbye.

They do go to Build-A-Bear. She and Rocket both stand outside the glass window, watching the children laugh as they stuff the skins of fake bears full of fake insides and organs, equally horrified.

“See if you can get any money from that card,” Rocket suggests. He’s watching a gaggle of Terran children gleefully select the face their monstrosity is going to have.

“I’m not going in there,” Nebula says. She’s watching a child carefully study the range of hearts to figure out which is best fit for his beast.

“Uh-huh,” Rocket mutters, tearing his gaze away from the window. “You! Gremlin!”

A child pauses, stares down at him with big brown eyes.

“Here,” he says, and flips the gift card towards them. They grab it in shock. He turns and leaves.

Knowhere is emptier than usual. Nebula never realised how loud it was meant to be.

They talk to the Ravagers. Get a headcount. Kraglin’s alive. Cosmo isn’t. Howard isn’t. Aleta is.

“We’re goin’ to do a mass funeral,” Kraglin explains. “A Ravager one an’ a Knowhere one. We figured yous could choose where the li’l guy an’ Gamora an’ Drax an’ Mantis could go.”

Not Quill. Quill gets a Ravager funeral no matter what they say.

“Groot, Drax and Mantis get Knowhere funerals,” Rocket decides. He’s looking down at his Wakandan bracelet, moving it between his fingers, bead after bead. Clack, clack, clack. “They have their own cultures.” He pauses. “Had.”

He’s left Gamora to Nebula. She clenches her fist until she feels her nails pierce skin.

“A Ravager funeral,” she decides. “With Peter.”

Kraglin swallows hard and nods. “Yessir.”

They sit on the ship, side by side. Rocket has the Zune between them, playing Peter’s liked songs. The pile of items to be burned is in the centre of the city, in clear view of anyone who wants to see it. The ships armed with fireworks are around the edges of the city, twelve of them in a circle facing inwards.

“What do you think they’ll do then?” the Zune croons, connected to the ship’s speakers and loud enough for Nebula and Rocket to hear.

Rocket had placed a button-up shirt in the pile for Peter, the soft flannelette one he’d been wearing when the Ravagers found him. A pair of knives for Drax, and a flower for Mantis. A set of orange-padded headphones for Gamora. The pot he’d grown Groot in.

Nebula had left a bag of Terran liquid chocolate.

“I bet they’ll shoot down the plane…”

Rocket reaches out and grabs Nebula’s hand. Someone’s shaking, but Nebula can’t tell if it’s her or him. He doesn’t tear his eyes away from the centre of the city, and Nebula doesn’t either. They just keep going in silence.

“It’ll take you a couple of vodka and tonics,” the Zune sings, somehow quiet and loud at the same time, “To set you on your feet again!”

The fireworks boom as they’re shot, high in the beautiful and forever sky, an explosion of colour and light.

It’s magnificent.

Nebula’s tears pool in the corner of her mouth. Rocket’s wet his fur. Neither of them speak.

Chapter Text

Knowhere funerals are loud. You pour into the streets in your most colourful clothing, drink yourself half to death in some desperate hope to join them, shoot your blasters into the sky from the highest point you can find. There are dozens of them raging outside, screams and blasts and drinks.

“There’re a couple folks out there that’ve already put in distress calls,” Kraglin explains, sweeping up his log onto the windshield screen. “The galaxy really needs ‘er Guardians right now.”

“We need t’fix the ship first,” Rocket says. He’s drunk, Quill’s bottle of A’askavariian Elixir clutched tight in his fist, swaying on his feet with his tail counterbalancing behind him. “Hyperspace’s frickin’ busted. The stardust girl fried the engine.”

Nebula frowns, swishing her Chitauri wine in her I’m a Super-Luminous Spheroid of Plasma Held Together by Self-Gravity! mug. “We need to help them,” she argues.

“W’ain’t helpin’ anyone if we freeze t’death in the middle of No Man’s Land ‘cuz whatever you and Stark did to keep the fuel workin’ kicked the heat-hic-er to hell.” Rocket takes a swig of his elixir, stumbles a step forward.

Nebula throws her finger out at him. “We were keeping ourselves alive.”

Kraglin hisses air through his teeth and glances between them with wide panicked eyes.

Rocket scowls. “Nah, you were keepin’ your little Terran pet alive, you know you coulda hijacked any one’a your pops’ ships and gotten outta there, but you took this one ‘cause he wouldn’t have lasted on those rings a death.”

“I would have died on one of those rings of death,” Nebula growls. “Did your maker forget to upgrade your intelligence from a lower life form?”

Rocket’s face shutters to blank. He scowls without showing his teeth, turns and takes a chug of his elixir. “If you wanna kill yourself as a martyr, knock yourself out,” he calls over his shoulder. “Just don’t do it on my fuckin’ ship.”

“It isn’t your ship.” Nebula is showing all her teeth, hands pressed against the table.

“Isn’t it?” Rocket asks. “‘cause last I checked the guy who owned it before me kicked the fuckin’ bucket.”

Nebula freezes. Rocket scoffs and staggers out of the cockpit.

“Pete woulda died for this ship,” Rocket says. It’s closer to dawn than dusk. Rocket had screamed and screamed and screamed himself awake and Nebula had passed her Wakandan beads through her fingers, one by one by one.

“He died anyways,” Nebula says. She’s been awake for hours now, nursing her bone cold mug of liquid chocolate and working into her hangover.

Neither of them say I’m sorry. Neither of them mean it, either.

“Pass me the screwdriver by your left foot,” Rocket calls over when Nebula steps into the engine room. She’s just showered and is working on reconnecting her robotic hand to her arm, a towel around her shoulders. Rocket’s plugged Quill’s Zune into the speakers and is bopping his head along with a cheerful woman singing in Terran English as he attaches a pair of wires in the hyperdrive engine.

Nebula grabs the screwdriver and hands it over. Rocket mutters a “thanks” and uses it to unscrew a bolt that then releases a burst of steam.

“What are you doing,” Nebula demands. Rocket gives her a glance as he’s reaching behind himself for a multitool.

“We’re the frickin’ Guardians of the Galaxy,” he says. His hands are moving quickly, removing bolts and unscrewing lids and pulling out wires. “We can’t help anyone when we can’t get through a hyperspace jump without burstin’ into flames.”

Nebula stares. Rocket pulls a roll of tape out of his belt and wraps up a fizzing wire. He’s attached the Zune to a charger, taped the wire to the floor like he expects it to be there for a while. Like he expects to be there for a while.

“Can you fix…?” Nebula gestures to the fizzing hyperspace engine.

Rocket scoffs. “There ain’t nothin’ in this universe I can’t fix, Nebula. Need to buy a couple components that are shot right to Hell--” he gestures at a pair of charred lumps of what might have once been metal, “--but it’s not like we don’t have the units to spare now.”

Something like silence settles.

“Gimme your arm.”

“What?”

“Is your translator not workin’? Your arm. Gimme.” He turns and makes grabby hands.

“I’m not entertaining your insufferable need for other people’s prosthetics,” Nebula growls.

“It ain’t about the kleptomania or whatever the fuck,” Rocket growls right back. “The hivemind gave you an arm, di’n’ they? Hell if I’mma let you not use the vibranium one.”

Nebula pauses.

Rocket’s hands are small. Fast. She barely feels them as he disconnects her organic nerves from the synthetic ones.

Neither of them had suggested going to the medbay. Neither of them talk about why that is. Neither of them talk at all, just sit on the floor of the engine room among the crap scattered around the ground. Rocket bounces along to Quill’s music but Nebula can’t help but notice that his hands are steady.

“Alright,” Rocket mutters, lifting up her arm, now separated from her body, and tossing it on the floor. “Hard part done.”

“Barely felt anything,” Nebula notes, rolling out her shoulder.

Rocket shrugs. “Your arm in your room?”

She nods. Pushes herself to standing and wobbles for a couple of seconds because it’s been a long time since she’s not had a limb of metal on her left.

Rocket snickers. Tries to hide it behind his hand but the rat doesn’t realise that raising his fist to his mouth is going to tip Nebula off even without the sound.

She kicks at him. He scampers out of the way, still giggling, and straightens back onto his back feet so he can open the door. He hasn’t changed out of his pyjamas, and Nebula notices that he’s had to cut a hole in the back of his pants for his tail to fit through.

The walk’s short - Nebula’s ‘room’ is more of a refashioned closet, with a mattress crammed in and the shelves being used for personal items over clothes. (The clothes she does use are Gamora’s. Whatever clothes the Ravagers made for her got destroyed with the Eclector.)

She digs out the wooden box from under the bed. Rocket scans the shelves.

When she stands, Rocket’s looking at her old eye - the one Thanos made for her the first time, when her face was smaller. It’s projecting an image, one from maybe fifteen, twenty years ago, of her and her-- siblings. They’d been playing - her, Gamora, Proxima, Cull and Corvus - running around the ruined Titan with their little free time and hiding from each other. They’d even managed to convince Ebony by saying it was testing their stealth and perception. Corvus had just jumped out at Ebony and got thrown into the wall in blind panic, but none of them had bothered to check for broken ribs because they’d been laughing too hard. In the image, Corvus has fallen to the ground in his laughter, and Proxima is doubled over behind Ebony’s shocked expression, hands on her knees as she desperately tries to catch her breath. Cull’s managed to get Gamora to laugh by mirroring Ebony’s face.

Rocket tilts his head at it.

“We were stupid,” Nebula mutters, reaching out to turn the projection off.

“You were kids,” Rocket corrects.

She can’t force her mouth to say she disagrees, so she doesn’t say anything at all.

The vibranium’s light, Nebula reflects as she wanders through the market on Lamentis-1, light enough that she keeps overcompensating and accidentally slamming her hand into things, to Rocket’s constant amusement.

“I could climb onto your arm if you need some more weight,” he suggests, but he can’t hold his laughter in and ends up making a sound like a deflating whoopie-cushion. “No, seriously,” he says at her look, “I could.”

“Are you going to wink with the wrong eye again, too?” Nebula asks with raised eyebrows.

“Nooo,” he says, and winks with the wrong eye. Nebula scoffs.

(She doesn’t notice Rocket’s somewhat disappointed pout by her side.)

“Oi, buttmunch,” Rocket calls over the bench of the Terran wares stall, a few minutes later and a few streets deeper into the planet. Nebula knocks a vibranium pair of knuckles on the counter. “You got a Terran automobile engine?”

The Terran wares dealer glances up from behind their lenses. They’re Spartoi, white hair swept up into an elaborate construction of braids, teeth bared as they regard Rocket and Nebula. “Why the fuck d’you want a Terran automobile engine? Those things are trash.”

“‘Cause the dumbass who made our hyperspace engine used one of them, so,” Rocket clicks his fingers as Nebula lets out a sharp breath of air, “give.”

“Eloquent,” Nebula mutters.

“Hey.” Rocket shows his teeth. “I’m perfectly eloquential.”

“Not even close,” Nebula says as the Spartoi behind the counter laughs.

(She does catch his pout this time, but she assumes it’s in response to being laughed at. She ignores it anyway.)

They go to the train. It won’t take them all the way to Knowhere, but there’s a transport on Arago-7 that can take them the rest of the way. Nebula’s got the bag full of engine parts over her shoulder, and Rocket’s already fiddling with them, turning them into something resembling what they’re missing. The line’s long, but the lines for the trains off Lamentis-1 are always long.

“Yeah, well, the only thing people on this planet want to do is leave it,” Rocket says, and Nebula snorts, readjusting the bag.

“Do you have the tickets?”

“Nah, I dropped them down the chute when you were shaking down that arms dealer,” Rocket jokes, not looking up from the pieces of machinery he’s slotting together. “Thought it’d be easier without them.”

Nebula gives him a hard look, but she’s fighting to keep her mouth from twitching.

“Y’know, like, that dumbass with the bucket on his head over there looks real easy to shake down for some tickets, right, so I thought, well, Nebula will never agree to it unless I give her reason to, and it would just be easier for both of us, if, you know, I just fed them to Buckethead’s asscrack--”

And Nebula laughs. It’s barely anything, barely any noise, and at first she almost thinks she’s choking because her throat spasms oddly and makes a weird sound, but then she recognises the smile and the warmth in her chest and she can’t seem to stop herself.

Rocket’s smiling at her, when she straightens again. Soft and not even showing teeth. He’s stashed his machinery in a pocket and is passing his beads through his fingers, clack, clack, clack.

“What?” Nebula demands. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“‘Cause I’ve never heard you laugh,” Rocket answers, and it’s soft and real and Nebula bristles. “Never knew you could, ‘til I saw that hologram in your room.”

“I’m not a child anymore,” she growls, and he scowls right back at her.

“No, you aren’t a child, ‘cause Thanos tore you apart a hundred times over and you couldn’t be a child, right?” He crosses his arms, looks at her dead in the face. “‘Cause if you were a child that’d be fucked up, and if you were a child it’s his fault, not yours, and--”

Nebula growls. “Shut up!”

Rocket snakes closer to her, his tail still behind him. “And you were stupid for believin’ him, not a child, because if you were a child, then you didn’t deserve what happened to you! And if you were a child, an honest-to-god child who laughed and cried and was only stupid ‘cause children are stupid, then maybe there’s no reason why it happened to you, ‘cause fucked up shit happens completely randomly and you just got fucked by the universe for nothing!”

“Fuck off!” Nebula yells, takes a step closer and revels in the way Rocket’s fur stands up. “You don’t know shit about me! You don’t know what I went through because I was too stupid to just leave! I was weak, and I was stupid, and I wasn’t-- I wasn’t--”

He tilts his head. Looks at her, and looks at her, and says, “We were children, Nebula.”

She finds a sewing machine and some other machine with four spools of thread and a knife. Tests it on some spare fabric that used to be Peter’s clothes. Figures out what they do.

Rocket fixes the hyperspace engine in the room below her. She can hear him swearing and humming along with Peter’s music and scrapping together something salvageable.

She could help. She knows her way around an engine, enough to recognise what Rocket’s swearing at, but--

Nebula guides the fabric under the needle of the machine, sewing the hem. Thanos had taught her some of it, Proxima some more. He’d wanted his children to know how to raise a society without him, had taught them all how to build and sew and cook, how best to repair the resources they had and how to make do with what they had, and Nebula doesn’t like to think that it’s what most fathers do with their children.

In the engine room, Rocket’s started welding. It’s not his strong point, Nebula knows. It makes him twitchy, and makes his hands shake, not a lot but enough to be noticeable when he’s wielding a fire hot enough to melt metal, and he gets twitchier and shakier as he goes on.

Nebula unpicks a button from one of Peter’s shirts. They don’t have buttons to spare, not really, but they have clothes that are never going to be worn again, now. Nebula can’t bring herself to touch Gamora’s clothes, and Drax’s are beyond her understanding, but Peter’s are still there.

Always another but.

“Here,” Nebula says when Rocket comes up from the engine room, covered in engine grease and ash. She holds out the pants she’s been modifying.

“You stole my pants,” he notes, taking them in hand and checking them over. His voice is tired.

“I hemmed the edges of the hole you’d cut,” she explains. “And added a button.”

He moves them through his hands, puts his thumb through the hole she’s fixed and fiddles with the button. “Oh.” He blinks down at it, just once, before he pulls a small box out of his pants. “Here. A battery. Should link up to the eye in your room and keep it going for five Xandarian years or so.”

He’d bought it at the market. She’d thought it was for the engine.

The hyperspace engine is smoother than it used to be. The vibranium arm is lighter. Nebula keeps waking up in the middle of the night, drinking her chocolate out of her mug. Rocket keeps screaming himself out of nightmares and passing his beads through his fingers, clack, clack, clack.

The Wakandan communicators don’t work outside of Terran atmosphere. Rocket buys them portable comm units that work in most known systems (but not Terran - gods know they’re behind on interplanetary technology) and it’s expensive but it needs to be done.

It’s not like they don’t have the units to spare now.

“None of us have heard from you,” Carol says on Grundar, after Rocket and Nebula helped tame a revolution by assassinating the royal they’re revolutionising against. “Half of us thought the two of you were dead.”

“Didn’t realise folks were holdin’ their breath,” Rocket mutters, trying to fix his jammed gun. “Woulda thought they were happy we were gone.”

Carol lands on the ground, her helmet slinking back into the rest of her suit and her hair settling around her shoulders. “Why?”

Rocket snorts but doesn’t answer.

“The communicators we were given don’t work outside of Terran atmosphere,” Nebula explains. “Pass the gun.” Rocket does, and Nebula puts all her weight into the jammed hammer, forcing it to move. She hands the gun back.

Carol watches the interaction with something indecipherable in her eyes.

“It wasn’t always just you two, was it?” she asks.

Neither of them answer. That’s answer enough.

“Are you lonely?” she asks.

Neither of them answer that either.

“Terra’s not a quick flight from here.”

Nebula’s cooking, using the food offered to them on Grundar to make something half-edible for her and Rocket. He’s sitting on the floor in the eating area, fiddling with his tablet.

“What,” Nebula asks, setting the pot of water to boil and preparing the uncooked meat.

“It’s about six hyperspace jumps and two fuel stops,” he explains further. “Assumin’ everythin’ goes smoothly - which it won’t - we’d get there in maybe a month by their sun.”

Nebula rests the meat in the boiling water and doesn’t turn to look at him. “Why would we be going to Terra?”

“‘Cause you wanna check up on your Terran.”

She scowls. “I don’t want to check up on Stark.”

“You sure? ‘Cause I was under the impression that you two were making each other friendship bracelets when Danvers got to you.”

“What is wrong with you?” Nebula yells, finally turning around so he can see the full force of her glare. “We would have died if we didn’t help each other, and then you’d be really alone.”

Rocket clenches his jaw. Shows his teeth. “Maybe I already am,” he growls.

They’re both too prideful to go to Terra.

“We’re dumping half of our stuff out for distribution ‘mong refugees on Knowhere,” Kraglin tells them through the ship’s comm. “Wondered if you’d want anythin’.”

Rocket sighs and pushes his head into his hands. “I dunno. What are you offerin’?”

“Nothin’ you wouldn’t expect. Rations. Clothes. ‘Bout a quarter of our units.”

“We don’t need any of that,” Nebula answers.

“What about Pete’s stuff?” Rocket asks. His voice is muffled by his palms.

Kraglin pauses for a long moment. “We’re keepin’ it with Yondu’s shit.”

Not giving it away, Nebula hears. Not even to you.

“Okay,” Rocket says. He tilts his head back and it hits the back of his chair with a thump. “Okay. Good.”

She loses Rocket.

It’s quick, maybe a minute, maybe three, but there’s an asteroid strike and really the only thing they can do is get everyone into ships and off of the planet, and Nebula’s sector is clear so she reaches down to grab Rocket by his scruff and haul him onto her shoulder so she can run properly and just grabs thin air.

The world freezes.

“Rocket?” she breathes, and then, “Rocket?!”

There’s no answer. There’s no answer.

She turns and runs. Scrambles, tries to remember where she last saw him because she can’t be alone she can’t lose another one she won’t let another one die she can’t be alone--

“ROCKET!” she screams, ducking out of the way of a collapsing building and sliding under a fallen scaffold. “ROCKET!”

He’d been in the financial district, she remembers. They’d filled up a hired ship and he’d slammed his fist twice into the side to send it off and-- and--

“ROCKET, WHERE ARE YOU?!” she screams, screams, and her throat’s hoarse and Thanos murdered Gamora and Thor murdered Thanos and she can’t be alone-- “ROCKET!”

“NEBULA!”

She stops. Turns and sprints towards the voice and doesn’t let herself hope because hope is for children and she’s not a child, she can’t be a child she can’t be alone--

He’s running too, out of a building, gun strapped to his back so he can hold his hands to his mouth or scramble on all fours and--

“Rocket,” Nebula breathes, and rushes forward, falls to her knees in front of him and wraps him tight in her arms, buries her face in the fur on his neck because she’s not alone.

“Nebs,” he sobs, and he’s shaking, and his claws dig into the cloth on her back and neither of them are alone.

Her vibranium hand’s torn off. Her skin is covered in charcoal no matter how much she scrubs. She makes her liquid chocolate every night.

His tail’s broken. His hands are shaking worse than before. He passes his beads through his fingers, clack, clack, clack.

Neither of them use medpacks. Neither of them talk about it.

Neither of them are alone.

“Hey,” Rocket calls one night. He’s bundled fabric up in his hands rather than machinery, and Nebula raises her eyebrows at it over her mug.

“Hey,” Nebula mutters. “What’s that?”

“My-- uh.” Rocket bunches it closer to his chest. “I don’t know how to-- Pete’s sewing machine. You…”

Nebula nods. Reaches out for the pants and inspects them when Rocket hands them over. His hands are shaking, hard. His voice is still rough, the screams still loud in the night.

“You need to fix my hand,” she says. It’s not kind, but Nebula’s starting to realise Rocket survives better with unkind words.

Sure enough, when he shows his teeth, it’s not a scowl.

“Terra’s only one jump away,” Nebula mutters as Rocket fastens her nerves to the makeshift hand he’s managed to whip up. It’s not pretty, and it’s not light, but it’s functional and she’d heard him giggle when he painted it blue, so she keeps her mouth shut.

“Yeah,” Rocket says. He solders a pair of wires together. Nebula does her best to close her fist. Only three of her fingers move. Rocket grabs another pair of wires.

“We’d have to get fuel first,” he mutters. He connects two more pairs of wires into one big bundle, wraps them up in some tape and pulls out the soldering iron. “If we wanted to stay for a while.”

“It would be easy,” Nebula whispers. She clenches her hand, and all the fingers close on her palm.

“Yeah,” says Rocket. “It would.”

“I hate him,” Nebula admits. They’re in the eating area, sitting cross-legged across from each other on the floor. Nebula has her mug in her hands.

“Who?” Rocket is altering the splint for his tail, making it allow more movement while still keeping the bones still. His hands only seem still when he’s moving them, when he’s building something or passing his beads through his fingers. “Your father?”

“Peter.”

Rocket’s hands pause, resume their shaky rhythm. He glances up at her. “Why?”

“He’s arrogant, entitled, self absorbed, and emotional,” Nebula explains.

Rocket rests his tail in his lap. “Okay,” he says. “And why do you hate him?”

“You think I’m lying to you?” Nebula rests her mug in her lap as well.

“Yeah,” Rocket says. “I do.”

Nebula scowls and stands up. Starts pacing the length of the carpet. “I hate him because he’s the reason my sister is dead! And he’s the reason my father is dead, and Mantis and Drax and Groot, and half the goddamn universe!”

Rocket half-snorts. Returns to his splint. “You don’t hate him.”

Nebula scowls. “Yes, I do! We almost had the gauntlet, if he hadn’t-- lost control of his damn temper--!”

“You don’t hate him.” Rocket doesn’t look up at her. Just keeps adjusting his splint. “You’re just tryin’ to convince yourself you do because you think you can’t miss someone you hate. Problem is, you can miss someone you hate, and y’loved somethin’ about him enough to miss him in the first place.”

“You don’t know anything about me!”

Rocket stares hard at his hands. “I know you’ve spent your whole life bein’ tortured, but you held hope because he was perfectin’ you for the better world he was creatin’, and now he’s got that New World, that better world, and it turns out you was never meant to be in that better world at all.”

“Shut up!”

“And you’re angry at him for ruinin’ you and makin’ you and you’re angry at yourself for hatin’ him and you’re angry at yourself again for bein’ angry at yourself for bein’ angry at him because you have damn good reason to hate him and the fact you hate yourself for it shows that you never really got all the way out from under his thumb.”

Nebula growls and takes a step towards him. “I’m warning you, Rocket--”

He tilts his head. “And you’re scared ‘cause it turns out you were made for nothin’ and if you were made for nothin’ then what the hell do you have?”

She makes a wordless noise of anger.

“And, just to round out the freakin’ set, I know you’re tired. You’re tired of bein’ angry and scared and confused and you’re tired of movin’ every day when breathin’ makes it feel like he’s takin’ a jackhammer to your chest again and you’re tired of livin’ in a world without them but you can’t kill yourself because if you did what the hell was the point of livin’ this long in the first place?”

Nebula storms out of the room. Rocket doesn’t stop working on his splint.

“Excuse me?” a young Haizli woman asks, gently touching Nebula’s shoulder. Nebula glares at her hand until she catches the hint and removes it.

“What,” Nebula demands.

“Your-- uh, you can’t have pets in here,” she says, gesturing towards Rocket. “I totally get if you couldn’t, like, read the sign, ‘cause it’s in Xandarian and that’s not really, like, spoken out here, but--”

“I speak Xandarian,” Nebula says. “He’s not a pet.”

Rocket raises his eyebrows and takes a sip of his Jovian whiskey. “We’re just waitin’ for my ship to get serviced,” he explains, ignoring the woman’s embarrassed squeak. “We’ll be outta your hair in just a minute. You can go back to your fries, kid.”

The Haizli woman squeaks again, nods, apologises, and rushes back to her table, blushing dark blue.

Nebula raises her eyebrows at Rocket. “You didn’t try to murder her.”

He takes another sip of his whiskey. “I don’t know. I’m just… tired.”

“I can’t find it!” Rocket’s hands are digging into her shoulders.

She instinctively reaches out to snap his neck, but manages to stop herself as soon as her fingers touch fur. “What?”

“I can’t find it! I can’t find it!” He’s panicked, slamming his hands into her again and they’re shaking even when they’re moving.

Nebula blinks the sleep out of her eyes, pushes Rocket off of her, and asks, “What can’t you find?”

“I can’t-- Groot’s console! His console! He had it on him when he-- And I took it here-- I can’t find it!”

Rocket’s panicking, running his shaking paws through the fur on his head. Nebula’s never seen him like this.

“Don’t tell me it’s stupid! I know it’s stupid! I know, but-- I can’t, please, I can’t-- I can’t find it! Help me find it!”

“It’s not stupid. You’re not stupid,” Nebula says, and she means it. “Split up. I’ll go starboard, you go port. Meet in the middle, then switch and search each other’s sections.”

Rocket bats at his face, his eyes, makes a valiant effort to hide his tears. “And if we don’t find it?”

“Then we search again. And if we can’t find it then, we go back to the fuelport and search there. We will find it, Rocket. I--” She pauses. Rocket’s eyes are wide. His hands are shaking. “I promise.”

She can’t remember the last time she promised someone something.

It got stuck between the cushions in Groot’s seat. When Nebula hands it to him, Rocket clutches it to his chest and doesn’t speak for an hour.

Ms. Potts meets them in the field. She reaches out and touches Nebula’s shoulder, and Nebula tries her best to smile. Ms. Potts doesn’t seem to buy it.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” she says. “Both of you.” She looks down at Rocket.

“Can’t imagine why,” Rocket grumbles. Ms. Potts tilts her head but doesn’t comment.

“You’re just in time for the anniversary,” she says instead.

The floor goes out from under her feet.

“What?” Nebula breathes. She feels the brush of fur against her hand and realises Rocket has moved beside her.

“The anniversary,” Ms. Potts clarifies. “It’s a year since the Snap on Thursday.”

“No,” Nebula says. “No, that’s not right. It can’t be-- Already--”

Ms. Potts eyes soften. “Yeah,” she whispers. “A year since. It comes fast, doesn’t it?” When Nebula doesn’t respond, she adds, “Tony and I are having a party, to celebrate their lives. You’re both very welcome. We can buy you a dress, or a suit. Whatever you need.”

Nebula needs to leave. She needs to scream. She needs to break something.

Rocket reaches up and grabs her hand. She can’t tell which one of them is shaking.

“A suit,” she chokes.

“What are you?” Stark asks Rocket. He’s brighter than before, skin more flushed, cheeks filled out. He still doesn’t look happy.

“The fuck is wrong with you?” Rocket responds, scowling at him.

“Many things,” Stark says, clapping his hands. “But in this particular case, the U.N.’s categorising all extraterrestrial beings with the aid of Danvers-comma-Captain, but she said she has no idea what the fuck you are, friendo, so…” He throws out his hands. “What are you?”

Rocket stares at him for a moment, then chuckles. “You ain’t gonna find anythin’ else like me out there, Humie.” He tries to go for defiant, Nebula guesses, but ends up somewhere near tortured. “Don’t waste your energy looking.”

“By the way,” Stark mentions as Nebula’s getting measured for a suit, “you’ve got a goddaughter.”

Nebula freezes. “What?”

“Yeah, her name’s Morgan. Two months old.” He picks at his nails. “I figured, since you’re the reason she gets to see her dad, you deserve to be her godmother.”

Nebula stares. She’s-- Children, she hasn’t been around children since Gamora was a child, since Cull had grown up, since Groot--

Nebula stops. Clenches the hand Rocket’s made and breathes in, breathes out.

“Can I see her?” she asks.

Morgan’s small. So unbelievably breakable. Nebula knows she would barely have to clench her fist to hurt her.

She looks up at Nebula, big brown eyes on a tiny face, and reaches up to touch Nebula’s cybernetic eye.

The suit’s Terran, orange to go with her blue skin, silver lines for silver implants. She wears it nicely, according to Ms. Potts, but all she can think about is how close the collar is to strangling her.

“You should go,” the Queen of Wakanda says. Her dress is white, golden accents to match the golden powder dusting her face.

“I’m sorry?” Nebula’s weapons don’t hide well in the suit, but Rocket had lent her a collapsible rifle at her lower back and a pair of knives under either arm.

“You don’t want to be here,” the Queen explains. “You want to be with your brother.”

“All my brothers are dead.”

The Queen tilts her head. “Are they?”

Rocket’s sitting in the cockpit of the Benatar, nodding to himself as Peter’s songs play on the ship’s speakers. His tail’s curled around his feet, tucked up under him. His hands are fiddling with his Wakandan beads, clack, clack, clack.

“You know you can’t hold me forever,” the singer wails, and Rocket glances up at her. He raises his alcohol from the dash, tipping it in a silent salute. “I didn’t sign up with you…”

“A year without them,” Nebula mutters, draping her suit jacket over Rocket’s shoulders. He nuzzles into the fabric.

“This boy’s too young to be singing…”

“They were just kids,” Rocket whispers.

“We were just kids,” Nebula agrees.

Chapter Text

Ms. Potts finds them almost an hour later, convinces them to go back to the party because even though they’re leaving in three hours for Kitson to catch some dumbass with eight thousand units on his head, they’ve still got three hours on Earth and unless they want to invoke her wrath they will spend it talking to people who understand what they’re going through, so help me God.

“You too,” she informs Rocket when they’re in the doorway of the ship and he makes no indication of following them.

“Oh, no, you don’t want me there,” Rocket says. “You ladies go.”

Ms. Potts’ eyes narrow ever so slightly. “Thor brought Asgardian mead,” she says. Rocket’s ears perk up in interest.

Rocket leaves her at the door for the group of people who look the drunkest. Ms. Potts guides Nebula towards one of the two main gatherings, the one with Stark in the centre. She drifts on the edges and glares at anyone who gets close.

“Here,” the man with implants to support his legs says, offering up a cone of a glass with Terran alcohol in it. She nods and takes an experimental sip. When it doesn’t immediately poison her, she takes a longer one. “Rhodey.”

She watches him for a moment before answering, “Nebula.”

“I wanted to thank you,” he says. “For taking care of Tony.”

Nebula watches Stark catch a spilled drink before it hits the floor, handing it back to its owner with a bit of a laugh. “He’s a powerful ally.”

“And a damn lousy friend,” Rhodey finishes. Nebula notices The Man Named Steve attempt to step from his group into Stark’s, only for Stark to move away from him, determinedly not looking over.

“What happened?” she asks.

Rhodey sighs. “It’s years old at this point. UN passed a bill regulating superheroes - y’know, Steve, Tony, all the rest of us. Said that if we didn’t sign it, we’d be put out of commission. Tony signed it. Cap didn’t. They fought. Cap and his crew left, the rest of us tried to make do.” He rubs his thigh with the base of his hand, methodical.

“You signed it?”

Rhodey’s face pinches. “Yeah. I did.” A pause. “Would you have, do you think? If you’d been there?”

Nebula considers. Rocket’s vanished into the drunken group, but she can’t hear screaming yet, so he’s probably not that drunk. “I don’t know your ‘UN’,” she answers. Then, “Terra has managed to go to war with pretty much every intergalactic body that comes here. People who want war want more powerful weapons.”

“And we’re nukes,” Rhodey finishes again, with another sigh. He gives up on massaging his thigh to rub a hand over his face.

Nebula takes another sip of her alcohol. A woman with blonde hair that’s red at the roots catches her eye for a moment in both of their constant scans of the room.

“‘Your UN’,” Rhodey repeats with a bit of a chuckle. “We really are small, aren’t we? Only just figured out the rest of the galaxy exists and desperately trying to get control again. God, we’re just children.”

Nebula tilts her head. “Terrans aren’t the only ones trying to get control of their lives again.”

Rhodey glances at her. “No,” he agrees. “I guess we aren’t.”

“Take this,” Stark says. “Please.”

“What is it?” Nebula asks.

“It’s a communicator,” Stark says. “I’m-- I’m not losing anyone else.”

At about an hour and a half until they need to leave, Thor is thrown across the room, strands of electricity trailing after him. He lands in the bar with a crash, and Nebula starts to push towards where Rocket’s standing, his rifle steady on his shoulder as the last of the shot dies down.

Thor coughs, sits up, and cheers. “Yes, Rabbit! Again, again!”

“Woah, buddy,” Stark says, moving to stand in between them. “I get you’re struggling, Thor, but let’s not commit suicide at my party, okay?”

Thor brushes himself off. “Pssh. A weapon such as this won’t kill me. Again!”

Rocket tilts his head. “You sure, man? You really ain’t s’posed to take more than one of these,” he says, but Nebula can see his sharp grin and the way his fingers twitch on the trigger.

“Ah, I’ll be fine,” Thor says. “Again, Ra--”

He crashes through the door this time, landing halfway to their ship parked on the lawn. He leaves a bit of a crater and a trench as he skids, burning the grass around him.

For a terrifying moment, he doesn’t move. Nebula reaches Rocket and grabs his shoulder. “What the hell are you doing?”

Thor groans and gets to his knees. Rocket shrugs.

“Thor?” Bruce-the-scientist sprints out onto the lawn. “Thor?”

“Not good enough,” Nebula growls.

“I told you you wouldn't - hic! - want me here,” he growls back.

“Who are you trying to prove that to?” Nebula whispers. “Us or yourself?”

Rocket’s ears flatten against his head.

They agree to take Bruce-the-scientist and Thor back to New Asgard as penance. It means they need to leave earlier, but neither of them care that much. Nebula orders Rocket and Thor to the kitchen to sober up as she puts in the coordinates, Bruce-the-scientist hovering over her shoulder.

“Should we really leave them alone?” he asks.

Nebula shrugs. “If they kill each other, I’d prefer they do it in there than in here.”

Bruce dithers for a moment, fiddling with his fingers. Nebula ignores him, lowering herself into what’s usually Rocket’s chair. “Sit down.”

Bruce sits down. Nebula announces the same into the speakers so Rocket and Thor will hear it, then takes off out of the atmosphere.

“We’ll be there in an hour,” Nebula tells Bruce.

“Nebula,” Bruce says. “Can I ask you something?”

Nebula flicks the coordinates onto the secondary screen so she can check on fuel. Bruce takes that as a yes.

“Thanos, he…” Bruce sighs. “Do you know anything about radiation? How that… affects people?”

“Rocket knows more,” Nebula answers. “He was genetically specialised for biochemical engineering.”

“Oh,” Bruce says. “That’s-- bad,” he says.

Nebula shrugs. “It’s life.”

Rocket gives Bruce a scan for gamma radiation, tells him there’s a reason he hasn’t been doing biochemistry but can send the results over. Thor thanks them at New Asgard, asks what he can give them in return.

Nebula raises an eyebrow. “I thought this was us paying you back.”

“Nah, that was his fault,” Rocket says, crossing his arms.

Nebula rolls her eyes and turns to walk back inside. “Come on.”

“Gimme a sec.” He scavenges in his bag for a moment, before he pulls out a pouch of Gamora’s liquid chocolate. “Do you have any more of this? We’d have to sell an arm and a leg to get the units for more of it, and it’s always a pain to get those back.”

Bruce leans into Thor’s side, scrolling through the results of the scan that Rocket had dropped onto his mobile communicator/tablet. Thor smiles.

“We’ve got some,” he confirms. “I’ll be glad to be useful.”

The chocolate tastes the same. Nebula sits in the dining area, legs crossed and hands warmed by the mug. Rocket only wakes half an hour later, and stands in front of her for a moment, hands shaking enough to disturb his shadow.

He crosses the room and sits by her side, tucking his legs up to his chest and leaning on her shoulder.

She freezes but doesn’t push him off.

Rocket sets up the comm unit at the base of the ship on the trip to Kitson. He seems to think it’s a fun challenge to install it during hyperspace jumps, and Nebula can admit that the danger makes her bare her teeth too.

“All right, testing,” he mutters about an hour out from Kitson. “This is the Benatar, calling for the-- uh, the Avengers Base on Terra.”

Nebula crosses her arms next to him. “It’s not doing anything.”

Rocket grunts. Crouches down and checks the wiring. “Think that might be a problem on their end, but then again I can’t tell you what the fuck an aych-dee-em-eye is--”

“--ello?”

Nebula blinks and takes a step back. The blonde haired woman with sharp eyes raises her eyebrows.

“This is the Benatar,” Nebula says. “Testing communication unit provided to us from Terra.”

The woman tilts her head. “This is the Avengers base in Washington DC,” she says. “Receiving your transmission.”

Rocket, a wire bundled in each hand and another pinned down with his foot, glances up at the hologram. “Huh.”

The woman frowns. “Is there someone else with you? I can only see if you’re standing in front of me; the camera needs to be facing you.”

“He’s figuring out the wiring,” Nebula explains. “Who are you?”

“Natasha Romanoff,” she answers. “Black Widow.”

“Nebula,” Nebula responds. “He’s Rocket. We were given this communicator to install on the ship by Stark.”

“Well,” Natasha Romanoff says, “Welcome to the Avengers, I guess.”

“Hey, you never told me your account info,” Rocket mentions on Kitson, scribbling down their information for the units. Their bounty, returned to a very stern mother and glaring daggers at them, mutters something offensive in his language. Nebula ignores him.

“Why would I have?” she asks instead.

“You wouldn’t have,” Rocket answers. “‘S’just that I’m trying to make this even and give you your four thousand units, so if you feel like being less of a hardass for a bit, lemme know.”

Nebula rolls her eyes. “Just transfer all the units to your account and give me access. I won’t steal what I don’t need.”

Rocket tilts his head, ears flicking over to her for a moment. He doesn’t comment, though, just finishes the transaction. “Well, we’ve got enough for a nice meal now. Maybe somethin’ from that D’bari place we passed.”

“Curry,” Nebula decides. “D’bari have a vegetarian curry Corvus always wanted to try.”

“Let’s try it for him,” Rocket agrees, bumping his shoulder into her hip.

“You don’t have an account, do you?” Rocket asks over curry. He offers her his hand sanitiser, and when she declines just uses it on his own hands. “That’s why you didn’t give me your info.”

Nebula picks at her food. “It’s none of your business.”

“It’s a little of my business,” Rocket argues, “considering you’re now using mine. ‘Sides, I figure we’ve gotta get our accounts in order, considering the two of us are livin’ on seven peoples’ credits.”

“Well, that’s your problem--” Nebula pauses. Counts again in her head. “Seven?”

Rocket finally recaps his sanitiser and grabs his spoon, mixing his curry and rice. “Yeah?”

“You, Gamora, Peter, Groot, Drax, Mantis,” Nebula counts on her fingers. “Six.”

“And you,” Rocket adds. “Seven.”

“We were literally just talking about how I don’t have an account,” Nebula argues. “How many hits on the head have you taken?”

“Ha, ha, very funny,” Rocket says, cleaning his hands again before opening a couple of files on his tablet. Nebula watches him log into Gamora’s account, then click to a subsection only labelled For Nebula. He pushes it towards her.

It’s not a lot. Barely ten thousand units, accumulated over four years, chipped off from Gamora’s income. But it’s enough to live by for a couple of months if you’re smart enough, a jumping off point to keep you steady until you can get more units on top of that.

Her name blinks at her from the top of the screen. For Nebula.

“She…” Nebula forces her metal hand open before it dents the tablet. “Why?”

Rocket tilts his head to one shoulder, grabbing his spoon again. “She always hoped you’d join us at some point. Or at least that you’d leave him.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Nebula whispers, hovering her fingers over her name.

“I thought she had,” Rocket answers. “But… I guess I should have realised she didn’t get the chance to.”

Rocket sits her down a few weeks later and informs her curtly that he is not doing this shit alone and since she’s better at software she can change their accounts around by his orders. They both sit on the floor, Rocket with a notepad and pen and Nebula plugged into the tablet following his instruction.

“We need to figure out life insurance,” Rocket grumbles after they’ve collapsed everyone’s accounts into Rocket’s and separated spending units from savings. “Pretty sure Drax had some to give to his dependents should he die, which would be Groot and Kamaria, but since they’re both dead, I’m pretty sure I count.”

“Why the hell would you count?” Nebula asks, sorting through the code running across her vision.

“Lower life form, remember?” Rocket clicks his pen a couple of times. “Not certain that they’ll buy it, but I’ve always been a bit in the grey area legally speaking, so I’m willing to bet I’ll be able to get them to cough up something.”

“You’re Groot’s carer as well,” Nebula adds. “You had partial control over his accounts, so the bank will probably let you take the units left for him.”

Rocket clicks his pen at her in a silent thank you and scribbles it down. Nebula ignores that she recognises silent gestures from him now.

“We’ve already accessed everything Gamora left for you, Mantis had jack all to begin with, Ego didn’t exactly pay…” he mutters, tapping his pen on his notepad. “I had control of Groot’s accounts ‘til he came of age… D’you think Pete had anything?”

“What planet would he even be registered on?”

“Well, he’s a Ravager,” Rocket answers. “Do they do life insurance?”

“It’s internal,” Nebula explains. “Unless otherwise specified, the units are split between the entire rest of the Ravagers.”

“And you know that… how?”

Nebula gives him a look. “Because I did research on them before I planned to destroy them for daring to fire on Ronan?”

“Oh, eat glass.” Rocket scratches at the back of his head. His winter coat is coming back in after their stay on Terra, and Nebula would find it adorable if it didn’t mean a frustrating amount of fur scratched away all over the ship. “What about Terra? Do they do life insurance? They should, right?”

Nebula gives a helpless shrug. Rocket smirks at her. “What, you never planned to destroy them for anything?”

Nebula rolls her eyes. Rocket chuckles. It’s an odd kind of peace.

He takes to washing everything on the slow days, cleaning the dishes and their used clothes and scrubbing the walls down hard with Quill’s toothbrush ‘cuz if he’s the one that made this mess, his shit’s gonna clean it. Nebula digs out a bucket from the closet and Rocket squirts water and soap into it, dips his hands and whatever he’s using to clean in there. It gives a break to his poor hand sanitiser, at least, since he can just dump his hands in the bucket before and after eating.

Nebula doesn’t know why he makes such an effort to keep clean. Maybe it’s from his time where he was being built into so often that infection was a daily concern, maybe it’s from something deeper.

(She suspects, sometimes, it’s because he sees things that look like him buried in trash, feeding on garbage, and if he keeps himself clean he’s not like them, he’s worthy of the term sentient.)

So she dries the dishes he washes, hangs the clothes up in the room with the humidifier since Rocket can’t reach easily, keeps replacing the water when it gets dirty. (She’s had a time where infection was a daily concern, too.)

She learns that Rocket can’t cook to save his fucking life and determines that she is going to cook any meal that involves more than two ingredients. That leaves her in charge of food supplies, as far as Rocket’s concerned, so she makes the list of what they’ll need when they stock up at the start of the month. Whenever they land on a planet, they make an effort to have one take-out meal there. It’s something to look forward to.

Some days, Rocket will stay in the kitchen with her as she cooks, washing whatever she needs washed. She wants to think it’s just because he wants something to do with his hands, but they’ve spent over a year together in their own company now and she can guess that maybe he just wants to spend some quiet time with her.

It does something painful to the space underneath her ribs.

Domesticity.

“Should probably pack up everyone’s rooms,” Rocket mentions when they’re stockpiling fuel on Knowhere. “You know, move you into one of theirs, put everything we want to keep in the storage cosplaying as your room. We can keep two spare rooms, and convert the last one into a cargo hold.”

“We already have a cargo hold,” Nebula reminds him.

He scowls. “A fuckin’ nursery then, I don’t know. Better than just leavin’ them there to collect dust.”

Nebula watches the numbers rise on the fuel gauge. “Yeah,” she mutters. “I guess you’re right.”

Carol calls them on the Terran comm after they’ve moved Drax and Mantis’ belongings into storage. Neither of them want to move onto the rest, so they wait in front of the hologram as it flickers with its inability to capture stardust.

“I’m sorry,” she starts.

“Get it out,” Nebula bites.

“The UN wanted information. I looked through the usual channels, and--” She pauses, sighs, and admits, “Your arrest records are public. I know about your-- enhancements, and, and…” She turns to look at Rocket. “And Org--”

“Don’t,” Rocket snaps.

“I’m so sorry,” Carol whispers.

Rocket looks at her, and pins his ears to his head, and runs.

Nebula finds him sitting in Groot’s room, tail curled around his feet and console clutched to his chest with shaking hands.

Nebula makes herself chocolate in the flashing emergency lights. Swishes it around in her I’m a Super-Luminous Spheroid of Plasma Held Together by Self-Gravity! mug.

Rocket screams from his room. She clenches her fingers hard enough to crack the porcelain.

“Shove over.”

Rocket startles awake. The fur under his eyes is wet and he has trouble focussing on her for a couple of seconds. “What?”

“Shove over,” Nebula repeats. “If I lie on your tail that’s your fault.”

Rocket shuffles over. Nebula lifts the sheets next to him and settles in. There’s no pillows, but Nebula doesn’t use them either. She rests her book in her lap and her mug on the bedside table.

“The fuck you doin’ here?” Rocket asks, voice hoarse.

“Shutting you up,” Nebula says. “Go back to sleep. I’m not moving.”

Rocket blinks at her. His fur is pressed against his cheek on one side and Nebula can spot the start of his external implants, silver against the brown on his chest. The panic, she notices, fades from his eyes as he watches her.

“If that’s the hill you want to die on,” he mutters, and rolls over. Nebula takes a sip of her drink.

Neither of them make it through the night, but as Nebula wakes up in a cold sweat, she realises that she actually managed to fall back asleep.

They run into the Ravagers just outside Xandarian airspace, both of them hunting the same target. Rocket gets the target to crashland on Xandarian surface, and Nebula shoots him as soon as the door’s open. They head down to drag the target’s unconscious body back onto the ship, and Stakar Ogord stops them halfway there.

Rocket scowls with all his teeth. Nebula hoists the target further over her shoulder.

“Kraglin Obfonteri has been asking around for you two,” he says. “Asked us for information on your well-being should we come across you.”

“Sounds like his problem,” Nebula answers, and turns to leave.

“Ravager Code says a favour promised is a favour given,” Stakar interrupts. “I already promised Obfonteri the information.”

“Oh, yeah, and you were real interested in the Ravager Code when you tried to fuckin’ murder Yondu and me,” Rocket bites out. “You can pack up your bullshit Code and your bullshit shoulder pads and get the fuck away from me an’ anythin’ of mine.”

Stakar stares down at him. “You murdered sixty-seven of my men,” he growls.

“They murdered themselves first,” Rocket growls back. “We was just finishin’ the job fuckin’ Tazerface started.”

“And my ship? My weapons?”

“It was Yondu’s ship, paid for out of his pockets, and a pretty frickin’ funeral doesn’t mean nothin’ if you don’t acknowledge that you were wrong.” Rocket’s showing all his teeth.

Nebula puts her hand on his shoulder. “Boys. If we’re going to murder each other let’s not do it on Nova Corp’s front lawn.”

Stakar ignores her to scowl at Rocket. “You’re a hypocrite, weasel. Running around from planet to planet, taking bounties you don’t need to try and forget that Quill and the others ever existed.”

Rocket grabs one of his pistols and levels it right in Stakar’s face. “Say that again,” he dares, voice even and flat. “Go on, tell this frickin’ weasel that he’s tryin’ to forget his family existed. Say it!”

“Rocket,” Nebula snaps. “Let’s go.”

Rocket stares Stakar down for a moment, two, before admitting, “You ain’t worth my time.”

Nebula moves into what was Mantis’ room. They move most of Quill’s and Groot’s and Gamora’s belongings into the storage closet she used to be in.

Rocket keeps Groot’s console and Gamora’s sword and Quill’s Zune. He settles them all on his desk, lined up on the back like a memorial. Nebula takes Gamora’s boots, the pair that have slots on the insides for knives.

Gamora’s and Quill’s rooms are left as spares. Rocket stands with his arms crossed in what used to be Groot’s doorway and considers.

The travelling markets have a stall dedicated entirely to plantlife. Rocket tilts his head at it and asks what he can get for two hundred thousand units.

They hire a hover trolley to take everything back to the ship, and fill Groot’s room from wall to wall, flicking on the sunlights already installed in the roof. Rocket’s tail sways behind him, swinging side to side in his joy. Nebula leans next to him.

“He’d have loved this,” she says, because she knew barely anything about Groot but she could tell how much he wanted the world to be kind.

Rocket’s tail touches her ankle for a moment as he turns away. She realises it’s just because he doesn’t want her to see him smile.

“You scream yourself awake too,” Rocket realises one night. Nebula’s squeezing his hand tight enough that it has to hurt, but he doesn’t comment.

“You hadn’t noticed?” Nebula breathes.

Rocket shrugs one shoulder. “I’m used to sleeping through screams.”

Ms. Potts calls them when they’re off from a protection gig on Indigarr, Rocket still washing the gunk out of his fur in the showers. Nebula picks up the call as she scrubs her arm clean with a toothbrush.

“They’re having a memorial service next week, for everyone who was lost because of Thanos,” she tells Nebula. “I thought you and Rocket could come.”

"We can’t,” Nebula answers. “There’s a planet-wide strike on Xarta and we’re protecting the protestors. We’ve got a job after that hunting down a terrorist for the Nova Corp, and Rocket wants to take another job in a warmer system since he’s getting sick of his winter coat.”

Ms. Potts blinks slowly, tilting her head to the side. “I thought you were on the run from the Nova Corp.”

Nebula shrugs. “They need people to do the dirty work, and they pay well.”

“Right.” Ms. Potts crosses her arms. “And you need the money, despite living on a… what, six people’s collective salaries?”

Nebula shrugs. Ms. Potts sighs.

“What are you running from, Nebula?”

“I’m not running from anything.”

“Really? Because you refuse to acknowledge that everyone you knew is dead.”

The toothbrush snaps in her hand. She swears and dumps it on the table. “I’m not refusing to acknowledge they’re dead,” she answers, because she still makes herself liquid chocolate every night before she goes to sleep, and Rocket spends every morning watering the plants in Groot’s room and checking all of them for spots, and they both managed to sleep through an entire night two nights ago.

Ms. Potts raises her eyebrows. “Then what are you doing?”

Nebula sighs. “I-- Rocket and I don’t have the time to mope over everyone we’ve lost. If we… spent all our time just mourning everything that’s been taken from us, we’d be dead. It’s been over a year; move on.”

Pepper tilts her head again. “No one’s going to hurt you anymore,” she says. “You don’t need to run.”

They hover over the protestors on Xarta, ship recognisable at this point, a threat of violence and a promise of protection. They catch up to Nova’s terrorist on Kitson and deliver him back to Xandar in about two days Universal Standard and end up deciding on a course of action somewhere between Xandar and Hala.

“Ms. Potts invited us back to Terra,” Nebula mentions. “They have a memorial.”

Rocket glances over at her from his seat. “Yeah, I guess it would be somewhere near two years for them, huh.”

Nebula hums agreement. Flexes her disassembled hand to see what wires spark.

Rocket brings up a comprehensive list of known warmer systems. “D’you want to go?”

“I don’t need a memorial to mourn,” she says.

Rocket’s ears twitch. “That’s not what I asked.”

They’re three out of six hyperspace jumps there when they get a call from Kraglin.

“Hey, sorry to bother you guys, but them golden fuckers are bombing our supply chain on Knowhere and we’re about twelve galaxies away,” he explains. “You closer?”

“Yeah,” Rocket answers. “Nebs, do you think…?”

Nebula thinks about Ms. Potts, and Stark, and baby Morgan. She thinks about liquid chocolate, and plants in Groot’s room, and the side table on her end of Rocket’s bed. She thinks about Gamora, and Groot, and Peter, and Mantis, and Drax. What they would have wanted her to do with her life.

“Let’s save the galaxy,” she decides.

“Hey.” Rocket sits next to her, watching the flaming ruins of Knowhere’s east sector. Everyone’s evacuated. The potshots were more to convince the Sovereign that the job was done and they could go back to where they came from.

“Hey.” Nebula twists her fingers together. The blue paint on her left has chipped away, leaving her with what looks like blue fingernails.

“You know what day it is?”

She breathes out a harsh breath. “Yeah.”

He nudges her with his shoulder and holds out the wrist with the Wakandan bracelet. “I fiddled a bit. Might have stolen yours when you were sleeping. C’mon.”

She rolls her eyes but holds her wrist to hers. The beads clack, and the shining face of the Wakandan Queen smiles back at them.

“Hello,” she greets. “Where are you both now?”

“Knowhere,” Rocket answers. “About… four systems away from yours?”

Nebula’s hand is shaking bad enough to disrupt the image. Rocket carefully splits it and leaves his hand in his lap, where the Queen will only see his face. Nebula raises a hand to her mouth and lets out a silent sob.

“Hey,” Rocket says, ostensibly to the Queen. “You wanted us to be there. Might not do the whole… ‘memorial’ thing, but that doesn’t mean we can’t see our favourite Terrans.”

He slips his hand in hers and squeezes tight.

“We all have memorials,” the Queen says. “I just imagine yours will look different to mine.”

And because Nebula’s been able to sleep for four nights in a row now, she nods.

Rocket puts a potted plant in his lap, a river lily from the same planet that Mantis was meant to grow up on that he’s been nurturing in Groot’s room. Nebula holds her cracked mug with the last of the original liquid chocolate in it, spiked occasionally with Drax’s scotch that Rocket is drinking from.

Between them, Peter’s Zune plays, an earbud in either one of their ears. On the projected set-up Rocket’s managed to scrape together, a hologram of the afterparty of the memorial service flickers.

“So, goodbye, yellow brick road,” the singer wails, “where the dogs of society howl…”

“I’m gonna miss the dumb fucks,” Rocket admits, leaning over and resting his head on Nebula’s shoulder. His tail rests across her lap.

“You can’t plant me in your penthouse…”

“Yeah,” Nebula agrees. “I will too.”

“What do you think we should do next?”

Nebula considers for a moment, then shrugs.

“I’m going back to my plough…”

Chapter Text

Nebula wakes up to the sound of gunshots. 

“Rocket?” she grumbles, and reaches out, but his side of the bed is empty, cold. Through the darkness of his room, she can’t find the silhouettes of his guns on his bedside. 

She pushes off the blankets, ignores the cold on her bare legs and follows the sound of gunshots. It’s not overly unusual for Rocket to leave halfway through the night, not even that unusual for him to sneak out from under her, but he usually potters along in the kitchen and leaves his pistols behind.

The shots are even and fast, not wild like you’d find in a fight. Nebula twists through the hallways to the gun range. 

“If you’re going to kill the damn target, do it with a silencer so I don’t have to hear it,” she snaps as she leans on the doorway.

Rocket doesn’t respond, just methodically continues firing. 

Nebula frowns. “Rocket?”

He runs out of shots in one of his pistols, reloads it with one hand while firing with the other. Nebula reaches out and grabs his shoulder. “Rocket.”

He shoots through her arm without looking at her. They both stare at it blankly for a moment, before awareness crashes back into Rocket’s eyes and he shoves her off. 

“The fuck you doin’?” he demands. Nebula belatedly realises that he’s crying.

She stares at him. He’s still in his sleep clothes. His fur is pushed up the side of his face. His hands are shaking violently, but his shots are perfectly accurate in the centre of the targets, steaming away with hours’ worth of torment.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

He blinks at her with wet eyes once, twice. 

He crumples and slides down the wall behind them, face in his hands. Nebula sits next to him. Picks at the skuck stuck between her metallic knee and skin. 

“Do you ever,” Rocket starts. Stops. Thinks. Scratches at where his implant meets his fur on his chest. “D’you have a moment, just one moment, where you failed? And you can’t help but wonder what would’ve happened if you succeeded? How much your life woulda changed?”

Would have been better, Nebula hears. The hole in her arm steams.

“I was nine,” she answers. Swallows. “Thanos had just taken Corvus. We had about a minute and a half.” He’d wanted them to meet their new sibling. Proxima had been carrying Gamora on her hip and Cull was holding Nebula’s hand. Ebony had gotten sick and wasn’t able to leave his bed for more than thirty seconds at a time. 

Father had left them all together for just a minute and a half without him, near the transport Corvus had been brought on. Proxima had met her eyes.

“It would have been more than enough time,” Nebula says. 

Nebula had hesitated. Not for long, not for long at all, but too long regardless.

Rocket moves his gun through his hand. Dissembles it and reassembles it with practised grace.

“I woulda been about three, maybe younger,” he says. “I’d gotten us all out. Torn His fucking face off. If I’d been a second faster, I could have…” He trails off. Nebula rests her head on her knees and looks at the humanoid targets, two of them shot clear through the head, steady and precise, over and over.

Nebula wonders about the ‘us’. She wonders about the deification of the ‘His’. What happened because he was a second too slow. 

“What would have happened then?” she asks instead. “If you were a second faster?”

He mirrors her. Rests his head on his knees and wraps his tail around his feet. 

“We would have stolen a ship,” he answers. “Found a habitable planet. Started a farm, or somethin’.”

“And then?” Nebula prompts.

Rocket closes his eyes. Breathes hard. 

“We would’ve been together,” he admits, and his voice cracks. “We would’ve…” 

He trails off. Nebula runs her tongue over her metallic teeth at the back of her mouth.

“We would have stolen the ship,” Nebula half-repeats. “Run far, far away and tried not to look back.”

“And then?”

Nebula traces the line of her eye with her thumb. “We’d find a small place. A place with enough for everyone, where Thanos never would have looked. Proxima would get us some animals we could shear for clothing. Cull would’ve started a garden. I might’ve helped.” 

They would have been a family, if they ran in that minute and a half.

Rocket rests his head on her shoulder. His ear flattens against the skin. Around them, the ship is very, very empty. 

Terra’s warmer than it was last time they went. Ms. Potts explains that it’s Spring now, and that tends to bring a warmer climate. Morgan tries to repeat ‘climate’ and ends up somewhere near ‘rhino’. 

Morgan’s gotten bigger. She wobbles on her own feet now, hands stretched out and ready to run headlong into walls. She grabs at Nebula’s fingers and tries to eat them. 

She likes to run her fingers through Rocket’s fur and it’s fine until she squeezes his tail as hard as she can and he almost claws her face off because of it. Both Stark and Pepper imply that maybe he should hand baby Morgan back to Nebula, and he picks up on it and goes outside to terrorise their plants.

“I didn’t know he was a gardener,” Stark mentions, glancing out the window to see Rocket weeding with all the vitriol this universe is capable of squeezing into his body.

Nebula doesn’t tell him about the plants on the ship, or the pot burned at Groot’s funeral. Doesn’t tell him how he’s genetically engineered to work in biology, and that extends to plants and anything that might be needed to keep a planet alive. Doesn’t tell him that he’d raised Groot since he was a sapling, how he’s forced himself to learn because maybe, maybe there’s something he can do with the dust that lies somewhere in Wakanda. 

Rocket digs his spade into the dirt and dumps it over the roots on a plant, poking at the worms until they go back underground.

Morgan babbles. Stark laughs and ruffles her hair. She reaches out and Nebula offers a finger for her to chew.

“You’re good with her,” Stark says.

“Gamora was younger than me,” Nebula mutters. “Maturity wise. Zehoberei age slower. Not by much, but when we were younger… And Corvus, too. He’s the youngest of all of us. Was.”

Stark tilts his head. “Corvus is…?” 

“My brother. Black robe. Spear.” Morgan gnaws on her finger with her few teeth. “Twitches his nose when he laughs; it looks stupid.” 

“Murdered Vision,” Stark notes. 

Nebula clenches her metal hand. The hole is wrapped in bandages to keep the re-soldered wires in. “Fath-- Thanos murdered Vision.”

“Did his best to murder Vision, then.”

“And Vision ran him through with his own spear for it,” Nebula snaps. “And you froze Ebony in the void of space, and Banner burned Cull to ash on the Wakandan shields, and the Witch squashed Proxima under a Thresher, and Thor decapitated Father in his own home.” 

Morgan makes a concerned noise. Nebula tucks a baby hair behind her ear. 

Stark tilts his head at her. “After they tried and/or succeeded to wipe out half of all life.”

Nebula shows her teeth, just a little. “And I--”

Morgan babbles. Reaches up with her little pudgy hands and when Nebula lifts her up traces the lines of her eye. Gamora did that, when Nebula was eleven and had just gotten her eye replaced.

“Gamora liked Terran liquid chocolate,” Nebula whispers. “Corvus was borderline vegetarian - he’d always wanted to try D’bari curry. Proxima’s mother taught her to sew. She hated zig-zag stitches. Cull grew up slower than the rest of us - he was a child until he hit twenty. He liked to hold peoples’ hands. Ebony couldn’t handle spice. His powers would always go haywire when he sneezed.”

Stark studies her. “They’re the reason you lost everyone.” 

Nebula bounces Morgan in her arms. “And they were people.” 

Outside, Rocket gently tilts one of the pots so that the flowers are facing the sun.

Stark builds her an entirely new arm from the scrap in his garage. He sits her down on the couch in front of their television and tries to connect it.

She flinches hard as soon as his fingers touch her skin. Doesn’t realise she’s a couple of paces away from the couch until her heel’s brushing against the wall.

“Hey,” Stark says. “You want me to put the arm on you or not?”

“Nebs?” 

The brush of fur against the back of her ankle. Rocket’s hand slipping into hers and squeezing. He smells like soil and shit, and for some reason that grounds her more than Stark’s harried shushing. 

She breathes out hard through her nose.

“Can…” She clenches her hand. Bites her cheek hard. 

Rocket brushes his tail across the back of her legs again. 

“I’ll fix it up,” he declares. “Got more experience than yous with prosthetics anyways.” 

Stark glances between them. “I can’t believe I’m about to take orders from someone who says ‘yous’.”

Rocket laughs. Nebula manages to unstick her hand.

“Will you stay this time?” Pepper asks while Nebula’s fixing up the fence. Rocket’s discovered Stark has prototypes of Rhodey’s legs lying around and is making an effort to find them all in some kind of scavenger hunt. 

“Would you let us?” Nebula asks.

Pepper tilts her head. “Tony might take some convincing. And I don’t think Rocket would be in favour, but we’d let you. You’re our daughter’s godmother, of course we would let you.”

Nebula hears Rocket cackle inside. He’s been shedding all around the house, and their little robot with a knife taped to it is having the time of its life chasing after his footsteps. She can hear it beep too.

“Nebula?” Pepper prompts.

“No,” is Nebula’s honest answer. “We won’t.”

“Why?”

Nebula thinks about her I’m a Super-Luminous Spheroid of Plasma Held Together by Self-Gravity! mug. Groot’s console resting on Rocket’s bed stand. Their plants.

“We already have a home,” Nebula says.

Pepper looks at her, long and hard. “And if you get shot out of the sky?”

“Then we fix it.”

“And if you can’t?”

“Then we take what we can and keep moving.”

“To where?”

“Wherever we can get a ship.”

“And then?”

“What do you mean, and then ?” 

Pepper looks at her for a long, long time. Nebula slams her hammer into the board of the fence hard enough that it cracks. She patches it up with some tape and moves on to the next one.

“Where are you going , Nebula?” she asks. 

“As far away from my father as I can get,” Nebula snaps. 

“What’s a corpse doing chasing after you?”

Nebula-- stops. Thinks about how far in the ground the fence is sitting, how they’ve planted trees intending on watching them grow. The permanence of this place.

Rocket and her keep preparing the ship to get ruined. They know it’s going to happen. 

“Hey, look what I pilfered,” Rocket hisses with barely contained glee, whirling around to show her the contents of her bag. 

Harbulary batteries , she remembers. It was Drax, then. All she’d been thinking about was running as far as she could get, to the far corners of the galaxy where it was just her and enough for everyone and a farm where she could bury all the bodies she’d never turned to see.

“You’re a kleptomaniac,” she informs him. “Lemme see.” 

He shows her Stark’s little robot, beeping happily from its confines in his bag. “I’m namin’ ‘im Kevin, after that idiot Quill loved.” 

She realises with a jolt that she could have that farm, if she wanted. She could turn the bodies into fertiliser. Build a cupboard made for her mug.

Rocket giggles, and it’s much easier to realise that she’ll need to find a planet with enough for two.

“Rocket,” she says. He sobers at the tone in her voice and blinks at her, waiting. 

She breathes every excuse she could have had out through her nose.

“I want a place to bury my bodies,” she tells him. 

“We want it,” Nebula says, pushing her hands into the table top.

The Collector tilts his head. His eyes are dark with his makeup, and his irises are bright in comparison as he glances up at her. 

“Whatever is it you’re asking for?” 

Rocket crosses his arms. She knows it’s to hide how his hands shake. “Knowhere.” 

“The entire planet?” The Collector asks. He feeds off of excitement, Nebula knows, sustains himself on it, and there’s a spark in his eyes as he looks her over. He doesn’t even look at Rocket. 

“Every last public inch,” Nebula says. “This planet is yours. When we’re done here, it will be ours. Understand?” 

“And what…” He runs his hand through his hair, pausing to unknot a piece, “...will you be offering me in return?” 

“What, savin’ your life and your shop ain’t enough payment for you, fuckass?” Rocket demands. 

The Collector finally deigns to lower his eyes. Rocket stares him down.

“Well,” he says, “I suppose your carcass would be sufficient enough. You are rather exquisite engineering, for what you came from--”

He goes flying before he gets to finish the sentence, crashing into one of his recently restored cases and groaning hard. Rocket cocks his rifle and levels it again. His hands aren’t shaking anymore, resting still on the trigger. 

The Collector tries to push himself up. Rocket shoots him again and he goes down. 

“We,” Nebula says with all the controlled certainty of knowing that Rocket’s rage is enough to bring a god to his knees, “are taking this planet. You can keep your shop and your personal residence.”

The Collector opens his mouth but Rocket reloads his gun with a chk-chk . “You wanna make a deal, Whitey, or you wanna start livin’ without a face?”

He’s baring his teeth, something like rage and something like grief in his face.

The Collector raises his hands. 

The apartment they end up settling on is about four hundred thousand units. It’s two rooms if you include the bathroom, squashed between someone who stomps around like an elephant and someone who screams at whatever movie they’re watching like it can hear them.

They put a little flower box on the fire escape. Plant seeds in it that they’re going to watch sprout.

Rocket’s already in the kitchen when she gets there, sitting on the counter and absently swirling around her liquid chocolate in her mug. He offers it to her silently and when she accepts starts passing his beads through his fingers.

Clack, clack, clack.

“What was it this time?” he asks. 

Running. Pink-black hair. Always just out of reach. 

Clack, clack, clack.

“He didn’t teach us to fight when we were children,” Nebula says instead. “He thought it was too damaging for our bodies when we were developing. Before we were ten, he… He taught us to read, and write, and cook and do our hair. Like a father would.” 

Rocket tilts his head. Doesn’t tell her she’s stupid, that Thanos was never a father and never could be, just passes his beads through his fingers, clack, clack, clack.

“He taught me to sew, and, and how to cut vegetables. He was the one to teach me how to use a medpack,” she whispers. 

“What did you need the medpack for?” Rocket asks the silence between them.

“Ebony twisted his ankle,” Nebula remembers, “trying to walk in boots that didn’t fit.” 

Rocket snorts, soft and breathy.

“Gamora…” Nebula pauses and takes a sip from her mug. The chocolate settles in her chest and warms the words when she finishes, “Gamora was always Father’s favourite.” 

“Because she was better at fighting than you,” Rocket remembers.

Nebula shakes her head. “Because she was better at killing,” she corrects. “Maybe it’s because she was already ten when Thanos got her, but she was… She was the most like him. Wanted to be the most like him; always more concerned with being his daughter than our sister.”

“What changed?” Rocket asks.

“What?”

“Well, clearly she stopped being concerned with bein’ his daughter, since she betrayed him and tried to kill him and all that,” he explains. “So, what changed?

Nebula sighs. Takes another sip of her chocolate. “She realised how far he would go for his goal.”

“And what about you?” Rocket asks. 

She could say something honourable. Something about seeing what he was contorting her siblings into and deciding to defeat him at any cost. Breaking free from his manipulation with a triumphant cry. Wanting to join her sister on the side of good, as they always should have.

Nebula shrugs. “I ran out of escape routes.”

“You’ve been quiet,” she notes on the second day, hanging up the clothes that Rocket scrubs clean in his bucket. They’ve decided to forgo jobs for two weeks to try and settle, and she’d expected Rocket to spend every second of them scrubbing this place down.

He grunts. Nebula accepts her pants that he’s washing and pegs them to the line. They keep going in silence, like that first year when it was just them alone.

“He called it a carcass,” Rocket grunts.

“What?”

“Perv McVert back there,” Rocket says, “When he… He called my body a carcass, not a corpse.”  

An animal’s body, not a person’s.

“How do you want to be buried?” Nebula asks.

“What?” 

Nebula pegs one of Rocket’s jumpsuits to the line. Waits for him to think it over.

“I don’t know,” Rocket answers. “Never thought I would be.”

She finishes pegging up everything he’s done and sits opposite him, grabbing one of their dirty clothes to wash it in the bucket at the same time. The water’s muddying, and the soap bubbles up on her arms, leaves lines of white froth.

“Remove all the metal from my body,” she tells him. “Eject me into space and let me freeze like a person.”

Rocket watches her. He barely has any whites in his eyes, but Nebula knows it’s still more than she has.

He scrubs down the shirt in his hands. Works the blood out of the fabric. 

“Bury me with a stone,” he tells the lines of soap on his fur. “All I want is a stone with my name on it.” 

They unload most of the stuff in storage into their apartment. Manage to survive the two weeks and even spend a couple of days more before they get a job on Jotunheim and Rocket mourns the loss of his summer coat.

“We’ll go to Muspelheim when we’re done,” Nebula offers. “Make it a weekend trip.” 

“Ah, you’re too good to me, Nebs,” he jokes, engaging the thrusters and starting up the shields. “How ‘bout this, we swing by the travelling markets and see if they got any of your, uh, what’s it? Chocolate? Before we go to Jotunheim. It’s kinda on our way.”

“Sounds like a plan,” she agrees. Rocket grins.

“Do you ever--” Rocket cuts himself off. Scrapes a little more rust off the top of her prosthetic. There was an illness at the market, some kind of cold that makes infections more likely and puts you in bed for a bit, but Nebula’s trained to keep moving under sickness so they’d gone to stop the Kree from attacking Xandar again, and Nebula had woken up to an itching pain and swelling where her skin meets her prosthetic.

“Do you ever?” Nebula prompts. The bandage on Rocket's hand catches on the scrap of metal he’s using as a scraper. He’d taken a few bad hits during the fight, ones he’d usually dodge.

(He’d blamed it on distraction, but she knows how shaky his hands have been getting.)

“Everyone else,” Rocket says, “got-- dusted, or whatever. Except us.” 

Nebula hums agreement. Rocket rummages through his bag for a moment before tossing her a six-pack of anti-inflammatories. She downs one dry.

Rocket fixes the bandage around his hand. “Do you ever wonder if it’s because we’re too machine to be considered alive?” 

“No,” Nebula snaps. “We’re not-- I mean, you’re not… We’re… sentient.” 

Rocket shrugs a shoulder. “You’re sentient. But so’s the chick Stark’s got running his house, and she’s artificial intelligence, so there was no risk of her getting…”

Nebula grabs his hand, as tight as the panic in her chest. “You aren’t artificial. You’re-- Even if you weren’t sentient, you were a lower life form, you had thought. You had thought , like the birds and the f’sakis and the flerkens, and they all…”

“How do you know?”

“We-- There are surveys, we know that those populations went down--”

“No.” Rocket rubs his thumb over her hand. “How do you know I had sentience? Before He made me.” He drags his nail across her skin, just enough to dent. “‘Genetically augmented cerebral cortex’. That’s what it says on my goddamn arrest record, I wasn’t-- Whatever I was, He made me think --”

“Stop deifying him!” Nebula snaps. 

Rocket stutters to a halt. “What?”

“Whoever it was that made you isn’t your god,” she tells him. “And I know you think he is.” 

Rocket stares at her. He has tears caught in his lower lashes and they reflect even more than his actual eyes do. His hands shake, one trapped in hers and the other loosely clutching his scraper. 

She recognises the emotions that flick through his face. The anger at her, for pointing out his flaw. The anger at his maker, for ruining him and making him. The anger at himself, for still saying Him with a capital H.

He leans forward until he’s buried in her chest. Shakes against her as she freezes, and freezes, and wraps her arms around his shoulders in something that’s almost like a hug. 

“What separates Groot from the other plants?” Nebula asks. “Made him disappear when they didn’t?”

Rocket pauses for a long moment before saying, “He had a heartbeat.”

She reaches out and presses her palm to his chest. Feels the humming-bird fast pounding under her hand. Meets his eyes and doesn’t say anything.

In response, he touches his fingers to her chest. She doesn’t need him to tell her the pace of the thump-thump-thump in her ears. 

They end up swooping through most of the Asgardian realms. They do their job on Jotunheim, swing by Muspelheim for a few days to convince Rocket’s body that he doesn’t need a new coat, get some more plants on Vanaheim, happen to get another job on Alfheim that they get paid a hefty amount for and end up getting a free meal from their employer. 

They make their way through the ruins of what was Asgard. Sit together on the deck, passing a drink between them and watching pieces of rubble no bigger than Nebula’s fist bounce off the shields.

“Saw Nidavellir,” Rocket says. “Thanos killed every Svartalf there, ‘cept one. The entire planet had died. Thor had to hold open the entire starport to start it up again.”

“Two realms in as many weeks,” Nebula notes. “Talk about a fall from grace.”

“Lost his mom, his dad, his brother, his sister, his best friend, his planet and about three quarters of his people,” Rocket notes. “Then lost to Thanos. Poor guy’s not got anything no more.”

“Except the scientist,” Nebula argues, taking a chug from her bottle. “The one who’s in love with him.” 

Rocket barks a laugh. “Yeah, ‘cept him. And Bruunhilde.” 

Nebula shivers at the reminder. Rocket laughs at her, too, snickering into the neck of his bottle. She falls back onto her elbows and watches the grime Rocket hasn’t been able to reach on the ceiling.

“I’ve never been to Nidavellir,” she tells him. 

“You wouldn’t like it,” he tells her. “It’s… dark. Quiet. Not quiet quiet, but the kind of quiet where it should be loud.”

“Yeah,” Nebula says. The kind of quiet where everyone’s dead. She’s familiar. 

A piece of rock thunks off the shield. It’s only the size of a finger.

“It must be lonely,” Nebula says, “being the only Svartalf that’s still alive.”

“Yeah,” Rocket agrees, “it is.”

“I’ve never had siblings,” Rocket tells the roof hours later. They’re somewhat close to Nebula’s room, both too drunk to relax fully as they rest on the floor of the hallway.

“Really?” Nebula asks. She’d thought-- assumed, because of the ‘we’, the farm-- “No… batchmates, or…?”

Rocket twitches. Almost absentmindedly runs his thumb across the fur on his forehead. “It ain’t the same. It really--” He clenches his hand into the fist, “-- really ain’t the same.”

Nebula raises her eyebrows but lets it slide, because Rocket responds to probing about as well as she does and she isn’t in the right mindset to sleep alone tonight. Instead she mutters, “I don’t have any siblings anymore. Haven’t for… Since…”

“Since you left,” Rocket finishes. “And they didn’t.”

“Yeah.”

The floor’s cold, Nebula thinks. It has to be, since they’re in space and the artificial heating can only do so much. She can’t feel it. Doesn’t know if she has any temperature receptors left in her back. Rocket’s not made for lying on his back like he is - his legs are shaped wrong, don’t lay flat like Nebula’s do. 

“I’ve got you, though,” he calls. “That’s-- kinda the same, right?”

Nebula thinks about Gamora grabbing her in a hug tight enough to crack her ribs. Rocket squeezing her hand. Cull mimicking Ebony’s expressions to make her laugh. Rocket winking with the wrong eye. Eating D’bari curry for Corvus. Rocket buying her chocolate even though he can’t eat it. Proxima teaching her to sew. Rocket fixing her arm, over and over again. Even Ebony, trying so hard to keep everything tight in his hands. Rocket scrubbing and scrubbing and scrubbing the walls.

“Yeah,” Nebula repeats. “It is.”

They’re on Knowhere again when she realises the date. Rocket’s dealing with their accounts, figuring out interest or something that has him swearing and grabbing a bottle of jack from the pantry. He’s left her in charge of making sure they got paid in full for all the jobs they did, and she checks the dates on their jobs, and--

“It’s the anniversary in a month.” 

There’s a swell of… something under her ribs. Outside of the usual grief, the pain and gnawing longing tearing apart her insides. It’s like a drip, a thick liquid seeping in and patching up the cracks the rage and the desperation have left.

It’s not happiness, she doesn’t think. It still hurts, but in a slower, softer way. An ache, rather than a burn.

Rocket glances up at her. “D’you wanna go back to Terra? Since we couldn’t make it last year.”  

Yes , Nebula almost says, because Pepper and Stark and Morgan will be there, and so will the Queen, and Carol. No, she almost says, because Kraglin is here and Rocket doesn’t like the Terrans all that much. I don’t care , she almost says, because it’s safer to deny feeling anything than try to understand herself. 

“Let’s stay,” she says. “Stay here, at home.”

It’s not home yet. Not really. But she wants it to be.

Rocket smiles. She thinks he might want it to be too.

Rocket and Nebula spend a day patching the Terran comm on the ship through to their apartment, figuring out a way they can get the same call at either or both. Carol had offered to come over and help them. They hadn’t let her. Hadn’t let her come into this place they’re trying to call home.

“What would they find, do you think?” Nebula asks. “If we let them look into what we were.”

“Well,” Rocket hums. “You’re probably more easy to figure out than I am. Humanoid, blue/purple skin, oxygen breathing, omnivorous diet, pretty average maturity rate, mammalian reproductive parts, bipedal.”

“I can think of seven races that can fit that bill easily,” Nebula argues.

“Honestly, the blue and purple skin thing is the… you know, the biggest thing,” Rocket mutters. “And the oxygen breathing thing… Is that rasp organic or did he replace your voice box?”

(Somehow, it doesn’t hurt beyond the liquid ache in her chest.)

“Don’t know,” she answers. 

“Well, if it is organic you’re probably suited for an oxygen compound rather than what you’ll find most everywhere.” Rocket scratches at the back of his ear. “You can have caffeine and chocolate, which is poison to most mammalian species, and means you aren’t Xandarian or Kree.”

Nebula tilts her head. Rests it against the cupboard. 

“Hey, open wide,” he says unprompted. 

She raises her eyebrows. “No.”

“Fine, what kinda teeth do you have, then? Do you got the molars at the back? These ones?” He taps his finger against the teeth at the back of his mouth. 

She brushes her tongue against those teeth and feels the metallic tinge against her taste buds. 

“Not naturally, I don’t think,” she answers. 

“And how many do you have past the pointies that ain’t molars?” 

She feels. “Two.”

He nods. “Omnivore, then, without need to grind your foods…” He mirrors her, resting his head against the cabinets next to them. His ear presses up against it. “Somewhere from the Andromeda system, I’d reckon.”

And that’s…

Thanos had taken them all when they were too young to remember what they were. Gamora was the only one that really knew, the only one good enough to not be destroyed beyond recognition. Nebula had settled for never knowing, had thought she was fine with that, but…

Rocket cares, she realises. He cares about where he came from, because he doesn’t have anything else. He wants her to have that knowledge because he wants to have it.

She crosses her legs and sits properly, tilting her head at him.

“You’d have to come from a planet with a seasonal climate,” she reasons, “because of your winter and summer coat. You can’t have caffeine or chocolate, is there anything else?”

“Some nuts,” he offers.

“But you’re omnivorous,” Nebula confirms. “And you’re meant to walk on four legs, judging by the knees on your bottom ones. You’re mammalian, and have advanced sensitivity in your hands.” 

He nods. His eyes are sad, though. Nebula’s not stupid enough to think that this kind of simple analysis will work for him - she knows, somewhere deep in her chest and in between the lines of words Rocket doesn’t say, that he’s been made on a much more base level than she has.

“Since it’s a seasonal climate, you’d expect only one sun, especially since you seem to be mainly nocturnal and your eyes are better suited for the dark,” Nebula offers. “Somewhere like Xandar or Terra.”

It’s not much, probably nothing more than Rocket’s figured out on his own, but in the dark space between them, lit by emergency lights and the shine of their reflective eyes, it feels like everything.

“I got you something,” Nebula tells him on the anniversary, when they’re both bundled up on their balcony, watching the revelries in Knowhere’s streets (their streets).

“So did I,” Rocket answers with a bit of a smile. “You go first.”

The music’s playing on a wireless speaker, just loud enough for both of them to hear over the screaming below but not loud enough to bother the neighbours. 

Nebula holds out her bag of powder. Rocket takes it in his hands, passes it between them with his inspective gaze. 

“It’s carob,” Nebula explains. “Tastes like chocolate, but you should be able to eat it.”

Rocket smiles.

“Here,” he says, and tosses her a gadget, wires and metal with a clear casing in the middle. “It goes on your arm - your humie’s nanotech should automatically accommodate for it.”

Nebula holds it on her forearm, and the metal folds outwards, back inwards over the wires, snapping the gadget in place. The light over the capsule glows green.

“It converts bioenergy into fuel,” Rocket explains. “As long as you have it on, it’s making fuel, a bit at a time, not enough to be detrimental to your health, but it’s there.”

So she’ll never be stranded again.

“Maybe you’ll get a replacement,” the singer hums. “There’s plenty like me to be found…”

The fireworks explode overhead. 

It’s magnificent. 

There isn’t pain this time, just the liquid ache in her ribs and Rocket’s hand held in hers.

Chapter Text

“Nebula!” Rocket yells, grunting over the sound of the artificial wind blowing through their apartment door. “Grab the - nrf - medpacks!” 

“What did you get into this time?” Nebula yells back over, flicking off the stove and rubbing off her palms on her pants as she starts towards the medical refrigerator. 

“Hey,” Rocket complains, “I didn’t do anything!”

“Sure.” Nebula rolls her eyes and grabs out a medpack, slamming the door shut as she glances over to the kitchen, and--

Nebula freezes, because that’s not Rocket on the table, it’s a woman with blonde ringlets falling off the edge, the gold on her suit shining every colour of the night sky as she moves her shaking supernova hands over the blood pouring out of her suit, staining the leather jacket Rocket’s bunched up and pressing against her wound.

“Don’t--” Carol grunts, weakly pushing away at Rocket. “Don’t waste your supplies on me, I-- I heal fast. It’s fine.”

“You’re full of shit,” Rocket tells her. Nebula rips open the medpack and pushes Rocket’s hands out of the way. “Don’t worry, sweetheart, Nebs’ been on suicide watch for the past three years.”

“You’re not funny,” Nebula says at the same time Carol tells him, “Don’t call me ‘sweetheart’.” He raises his blood-covered hands and backs away. 

“Ready?” Nebula asks, fingers hovering over the power button on the ‘pack. She doesn’t wait for Carol’s answer before turning it on and pinning her down when she flinches. 

“Ow,” Carol croaks.

“What happened?” Nebula demands of Rocket, since Carol’s too distracted by muttering Kree swears to answer.

“Dunno,” Rocket responds. “Found ‘er half-dead when I was taking the trash out. Brought her straight here.”

“Space pirates,” Carol responds, pushing herself up onto an elbow and clutching the ‘pack to her stomach. “Tracked ‘em to Knowhere. They’re selling their shit somewhere on the planet.” 

“Deal with them,” Nebula tells Rocket.

“Done.” Rocket grabs his rifle and his tablet. “Be back in a tick.” 

“Wait--!” Carol yells, but Rocket’s already out of the door. “You can’t…” she adds anyway, “I couldn’t even…”

“He’s booby-trapped the entire place,” Nebula informs her. “And has informants all throughout the planet. The pirates won’t even see him coming.”

Carol purses her lips. “I’m the-- I’m meant to be the most powerful creature on this side of the known systems, I don’t think he…”

“Carol.” Nebula grabs the medpack’s wrapping and starts towards the bin. “Rocket will be fine.” When that doesn’t seem to soothe her, she adds, “He probably won’t even kill them. He likes to play with his food first.”

“Nah, I don’t care about that,” Carol responds, wiping at her face. “‘S’just that… Well, some kinda Captain I am. Couldn’t kill Thanos, can’t even stop some scummy space pirates. What use am I?”

Nebula closes the trash can. Moves to the counter and grabs her bag of powdered chocolate. “You lost someone,” she guesses.

Carol sighs. “Didn’t have many people left to lose.” 

Nebula waits.

“Fury,” Carol admits. “My girl, but that was a long time coming. Our… Our daughter. But, hey, I’m cowboying around with the Avengers now, you know. Not as alone as you are.”

“More alone than you should be,” Nebula returns.

Carol laughs. It’s not a happy sound.

Nebula bundles Carol up on the bed, both of them covered with the blankets to ward off the cold, cradling cups of Terran chocolate. Nebula’s I’m a Super-Luminous Spheroid of Plasma Held Together by Self-Gravity! mug is faded and cracked, but Carol snorts when she sees it. Hers is A Heaping Helping of Gravi-tea . She snorts at that one too. 

Rocket comes home and washes his hands off of blood for a full three minutes before he grabs his Don’t Worry About How Much I’m Eating - I’ve Got a Black Hole for a Stomach! mug and sits with them, absently checking on Carol’s healing injury. 

“God,” Carol mutters. She’s got a milk moustache. “It’s been forever since I’ve had some hot chocolate.”

“Is that what it’s called?” Rocket asks.

“What have you been calling it?” Carol returns with a frown. 

“Liquid chocolate,” Nebula answers. “Terran liquid chocolate.”

“That’s what you call the powder, before you make the drink,” Carol answers. 

“But it’s powder, not liquid,” Rocket points out.

Carol shrugs. “It’s stupid. Sometimes they call hot chocolate cocoa. I think it’s a regional thing, or something. Mom always called it cocoa, Dad called it chocolate.”

“Is it a common drink on Terra?” Nebula asks.

“Yeah.” Carol swirls the drink around in her mug, something like a smile on her face. “When you’re a kid, it’s, like, the go-to drink for when you feel sad. Or you’re having a sleepover.” At Rocket and Nebula’s confusion, she elaborates, “It’s a gathering. Of people, generally all of the same gender - I mean, I only did it with girls. You’d all pick someone’s house and hang out like we are, play truth or dare, and spend the night there.”

“Sounds a lot like what we’re doing,” Rocket notes. He’s leaning against the bed frame. The metal of it shines the exact same sheen as the metal in his chest. “‘Cept for that, uh, truth or dare. What is that?”

Carol snorts, just slightly, shifting her shoulder back as she adjusts to get more comfortable. Her ringlets tumble over her chest. “It’s a game,” she says, with a smile up at the roof. “I’d ask, say, Nebula, I’d go, ‘truth or dare?’ And she’d pick one, and if she chose dare I’d tell her to do something and she’d have to do it, and if she chose truth I’d ask a question and she had to answer, you know, truthfully.”

“Held by what power?” Nebula asks around a sip of her hot chocolate.

“I don’t know,” Carol answers. “Children’s magic? The rules of the game?” She shakes her head. “It’s stupid. I don’t know.”

The silence holds for a second, two, just the sound of Knowhere dancing along below them.

“Eh, fuck it,” Rocket mutters. “Carol, truth or dare?” 

She blinks, then smiles, soft. “Truth.”

“Now I ask you…?” Rocket checks.

“Yeah. Anything.”

“Okay. Uhhh… You ever kissed a girl?”

Carol goes red from hairline to the neckline of her suit. Rocket laughs at her. Nebula takes another sip from her mug. 

“Yes,” Carol admits. “Yep.”

“Who?” Nebula asks.

“That,” Carol declares, “is not part of the question. My turn, Nebula, truth or dare?” 

Rocket chuckles at the sudden change of topic, nuzzling a little further into the doona as Nebula considers the best course of action. She decides on just copying Carol in saying, “Truth.”

Carol thinks. Visibly settles on, “How’d you two meet?”

“My father had lended Gamora and I to Ronan,” Nebula explains, cautiously neutral. “When ordered to collect the Power Stone, Gamora defected, got arrested, and ended up joining with the Guardians of the Galaxy in order to keep the Power Stone out of Ronan’s hands. I did not; we ended up fighting.” 

“What happened to get you to join them?” Carol asks. 

Nebula freezes.

“That,” Rocket repeats with a bit of a smile, “is not part of the question.”

Carol rolls her eyes. “Yeah, guess I earned that.” 

“Rocket,” Nebula starts. “Truth or dare?”

At some point they migrate from the bed back down onto the floor, mugs abandoned on the bedside table and medpack resting on Carol’s stomach even though it’s probably not needed anymore. 

Carol’s thrown an arm over her eyes and has her legs under the kitchen table. Rocket’s lying on the kitchen table, tapping a tune with his fingers on the wood. Nebula’s still half leaning on the bed, legs sprawled out in front of her. 

“Truth or dare?” Rocket asks Carol.

“Dare,” Carol decides.

“Uh…” Rocket taps out a tune on the table. “Fuckin’... Spin around twenty times.” 

“That’s pathetic,” Nebula snaps.

“Yeah,” Carol agrees. “Have some creativity. I heard a kid recently got dared to eat a slug and ended up in the ER ‘cuz it almost killed him. Or maybe it did kill him.” 

“I can dare you to eat a slug if you want,” Rocket responds. “Or take a hit from my rifle, if you’re going for a ending-up-in-the-ER angle.”

“No, no, no need for that,” Carol protests, struggling up from her place under the table and ending up slamming her head into it before she manages to get to her feet. She starts spinning, little trails of light following after her, and Nebula finds herself counting the spins out loud, like Thanos had her do when she was washing her hands as a child.

Carol gets to twenty, groans, and collapses back to her spot, just barely avoiding the corner of the table as she goes. “Dizzy,” she mutters. Rocket laughs at her. Nebula chuckles. Carol points an accusing finger at her. “Nebs. Truth or dare.”

“Dare,” Nebula decides. Carol hesitates.

“HA!” Rocket points at her. “It’s hard! It’s hard, isn’t it?!”  

She raises a middle finger at him and tells Nebula, “Make us some more cocoa.”

“ Pathetic ,” Rocket whispers. Carol slaps him across the back of the head. 

Rocket picks truth. Nebula pours the milk in the mugs and asks why he chose his name. 

“I saw a rocket in the sky where I, uh, lived. At the time. And me and my… friends, we always wanted to fly off into the sky. Said I’d make them a rocket,” he answers, something longing in his voice. Nebula adds some extra carob into his drink.

Carol picks truth. Rocket asks her what her daughter was like.

“She’s so brave,” Carol starts, wistful and grieving, “and adventurous. She’s so much like me, her mom, wanted to fly since she was yay tall. But she’s better than us, you know, whip smart, ready to do massive things with her life.” She pauses. “Was better than us.”

Nebula turns the frother on. It hums and buzzes as it works. 

Nebula picks truth, too, just to round out the set. Carol deliberates for a long moment before asking, quiet and careful, “Does it still hurt?”

Nebula doesn’t need to look over to know that she’s staring at the mechanical arm. 

“Yes,” she answers. It’s simple, really. 

Rocket picks dare. Nebula gets him to take the fucking trash out like she’s been telling him to do for the past week and gets rightfully bullied for her lack of creativity. Carol then picks dare and Rocket grins sharp enough that she has immediate visible panic.

“Let me give you a haircut,” Rocket demands. Carol makes a face like, oh, that’s not so bad .

“What the genuine fuck is that?!” Carol shrieks. 

Rocket grins with all his teeth and flicks a lever that makes the second set of blades fling out and start spinning. “This li’l thing? Just a little barber shop instrument I bartered off a crazy old guy on Sakaar.” 

Nebula places her hands on Carol’s shoulders to hold her to the chair. “You were dared to do this,” she reminds her.

“I regret ever introducing you two to this game,” Carol informs them, eyeing up Rocket and his sixteen whirring blades of death. “You’ve-- You’ve cut someone’s hair before, right?”

Rocket slinks closer to her, a pleased little rumble in his throat. “Yeah, of course, of course,” he says, hovering the blades right around her head.

“He has lived almost exclusively with a tree,” Nebula informs her. 

“Hey, that’s not fair,” Rocket protests, “I live with you too.”

“Still no hair to cut,” Nebula responds. 

“No backing out now,” Rocket sing-songs, and starts on Carol’s hair. 

They let her stay on the couch for the night, as long as she cleans up the golden ringlets strewn across the floor. She snores lightly as she sleeps, and apparently the stab wound took a lot out of her because she’s asleep before either Nebula or Rocket are.

“What do you think?” Rocket asks, quietly enough that Carol won’t wake up.

“She’s powerful,” Nebula admits. “A useful ally.”

“Yeah,” Rocket says. “Yeah.” 

They sit there in silence for a moment, Rocket absently preening his tail with his claws as Nebula flicks through her novel. 

Nebula realises Rocket wasn’t really asking about Carol’s tactical advantage. In the din of the polluted night, she’s shining like an imploding star, gold and pink and blue and colours Nebula’s eyes aren’t calibrated to see. Her snoring is light, and her light flickers over her face just long enough to see the puddle of drool she’s left on her pillow.

It’s endearing. 

They eat breakfast together at a diner that owes them a favour. Carol has all the pocket change of a three-time-divorcee that hasn’t rubbed their two brain cells together and signed a prenup a single time, so Rocket pays, somehow the most settled of all of them.

Kraglin drops in just as they’re leaving. 

“Who’s this?” he asks, hanging back from the rest of the Ravagers bustle in around a big table. 

Carol quirks one hand to the side in something like a wave. She’s got an amused smile to her face, the same one when they checked who hadn’t been to space before, like she’s glad she knows more than they do.

“Kraglin,” Rocket acknowledges, “this is Carol.”

“A friend,” Nebula finishes.

Kraglin grins wide. “Hey, look,” he says, “these two losers have got themselves some more loser friends.” He pales. “Not to, uh, say you’re a loser, ma’am, or-- or you, Nebula, you’re both very--”

Rocket interrupts him by laughing. Carol laughs too, and Rocket bounces up on Kraglin’s shoulders to bully him further. 

Nebula smiles. It’s easy to ignore the pain and the chill of the metal in her shoulder and knee and wrist and chest as warmth seeps into her ribs.

They go back to the compound on Terra. Carol’s heading past there into the Andromeda system, so they give her a lift then say goodbye when they land. 

The compound’s empty. Very empty. Rocket flicks up his tablet to search for heat signatures and scampers off in the direction of one, leaving Nebula to wander off in the direction she thinks the bunks are in.

She ends up in a room with padded bags hanging from the ceiling, padded floors with just enough spring to them to be dangerous, and a woman with hair that’s red from her scalp and blonde on the tips wrapping her fists. 

She looks up. Sharp eyes. 

“Wanna spar?” Natasha Romanoff offers, nodding over at the mats in the centre of the room. 

Nebula assesses her. She thinks of the days fighting Gamora on Titan, thinks of the sharpness in that gaze. Thinks of how horrified Pepper had been when she found out why Nebula’s half-made from metal.

“Okay.” Nebula steps out towards the mats. 

Natasha Romanoff raises an eyebrow but just finishes wrapping her gloves before she walks out to meet her. “Do I have to clarify that it’s not to the death?”

“Couldn’t hurt,” Nebula admits, and goes to sweep her legs.

Natasha Romanoff is good at what she does. Clean, sharp, taught. It’s almost like Gamora, Nebula can admit, but Gamora was always more wild than this, more desperate. Nebula’s able to hold her own, but Romanoff is fast. Fast enough that it takes a couple of minutes for Nebula to feel sturdy enough to mention, “You’re missing some people.”

“ Bruce ,” Romanoff starts, sweeping out at Nebula’s feet, “has decided that he has better things to do, science-wise, than hang out here, Barton thinks that the best use of his time is assassinating people, and no one’s scene Thor since your flying fox shot him out of the building.” 

Nebula fakes left and hits her hard in the side with a metal hand. “So you’re alone.” 

“I’ve always been alone,” Romanoff promises, blocking Nebula’s next hit.

“You’re a liar,” Nebula tells her.

“It’s my job to lie.”

“You’re only your job?” 

Romanoff swings around her, wrapping her legs around her shoulders and slipping a wire out of her arm to pull across Nebula’s throat. “I was made a weapon,” she growls. “Every day of my life I was made into a weapon only to serve a purpose for the man that tortured me!” 

Nebula slides a hand behind her and a hand under the wire and tosses Romanoff off of her, rolling to her feet. “That’s all you’re going to be?” she demands. “Every day, I had to fight Gamora, knowing I would lose, and every day a piece of me was ripped out and replaced with a machine! If I could hit him with an entire goddamn ship, you can get your act together and stop fucking lying!”

Romanoff slides between Nebula’s legs, wrapping behind her and bringing her to the ground. “He reprogrammed my sister’s brain so she would spend every day not even knowing how not to fight!”

Nebula dislocates her shoulder to throw her leg over Romanoff’s back and flip them over. “I was so sure I was in the right that I almost murdered my sister! She would be dead at my hand if Peter hadn’t--!” 

Romanoff throws her away, both of them sliding to a stop on either side of the mats. 

“I LOST EVERYONE !” Romanoff screams.

“SO DID I!” Nebula screams right back. 

They stare at each other for a moment, chests heaving, before Romanoff puts her hand on her face and starts laughing or crying, a smile on her lips but tears in her eyes. 

“What a pair we make,” she chokes out. Nebula shows her teeth around the burning at the back of her throat. 

Natasha Romanoff takes her out for food. Nebula leaves a message for Rocket and whoever he’s managed to terrorise, and Romanoff does the same. The food place she chooses has a wall of glass windows separated by booths, able to both provide a good hiding place and vantage points. Romanoff curls up with her feet on the cushion in the corner where she can see the entire café and most of the street visible through the glass.

They talk. Romanoff gets an earl grey tea with two sugars, if you please, and Nebula orders a hot chocolate, which Romanoff corrects to a Mexican hot chocolate because you’ll like it, I promise.

She does. It burns on the way down.

“How friendly are you with Stark?” Romanoff asks, delicate in the way that tells Nebula she already knows the answer.

“We spend time together,” she answers anyway. “His child is my goddaughter.” 

“Right,” Romanoff says. She takes a careful sip of her tea. “Because you saved his life when the both of you were stranded on Titan.”

“Yes.”

“And why did you save his life?”

Because she’s always been more weak-willed than her siblings. Because as much as Thanos tried to tear it out of her, her heart always clenches when she sees someone die. 

“He has a wife,” Nebula lies, “and friends. He didn’t deserve to die alone.” 

Romanoff hums and turns her cup around in her hands. 

Nebula raises her eyebrows. “You disagree?”

“Not necessarily.” Romanoff takes another sip. “But I can name some people who would.”

“The man named Steve,” Nebula notes.

Romanoff nods. “Rogers and Stark’s relationship is… complicated. Layered. They’ve both made piss-poor decisions and have all the emotional communication skills of toddlers, which doesn’t help.”

Nebula takes a sip. Romanoff sighs.

“Stark has trouble remembering there’s a world outside of him, and Rogers has trouble forgetting it,” she explains. “He’s… Long story short, he’s from a different time and got unwillingly transported here, so he sees his life in that past time as his full life, and now is just a type of… prolonged epilogue, so to speak.” She takes a drink. Licks her lips clean. “So Rogers sees Stark as an estranged colleague, and Stark sees Rogers as a close friend.”

Nebula nods. Romanoff doesn’t take her sharp eyes off the windows, keeps her voice pointedly neutral.

“Stark’s also heard about Rogers for his entire life; to him, ‘Captain America’ is a hundred year old legend his father used to terrorise him. In reality, up here…” She taps her temple. “Steve’s twenty five, a bit more. Depressed. Alone, trapped in war after war. And he hasn’t seen how far Stark’s come. Doesn’t know how bad he was a decade ago, so can’t acknowledge that Stark’s put in a lot of effort to be better than he was, just knows he has a long way to go before he’s… as good of a man as Rogers wants him to be. That’s without the privilege thing.”

“Privilege thing?” Nebula prompts after a moment of silence.

Romanoff sighs again. “Stark’s not had an easy life, but he’s born into billions of dollars for a company he barely has to run-- doesn’t run, anymore, but still benefits directly off of. Rogers lived in the Great Depression - a period of time where money was incredibly hard to come by - as an orphan before he was eighteen, with more disabilities than he has fingers.

“So that’s not a great start,” Romanoff admits. “But, about half a decade ago, a bit longer, Rogers… got better. Found people. Wilson, his boo from that past time of his life, his girl from then, too. It wasn’t… great, there were complications involving the boo, but he was happier. Wilson helped with the depression, and just the knowledge that his boo was out there was enough for him, and he was visiting his girl bi-weekly, but…”

She sighs. Tilts her head on the glass. “The Sokovia Accords were a Лошадь мочи. Rhodes has told you some?”

Nebula nods. “A bill passed by the UN to regulate superheroes. You were… against it?”

“In the end.” Romanoff takes another long drink, closes her eyes for a moment before continuing. “Rogers’ girl died the day they were announced. Then, with the big fighting between Stark and Rogers, suddenly Stark was trying to take away Rogers’ people that he’d worked so hard for. Almost got Soldat-- Almost got his boo. Did get Wilson, for a bit. We all got away in the end, managed to live a life for a couple of years before Thanos happened, but when he did…” She takes a breath. Two. “Rogers lost Wilson and his boo. Stark didn’t lose anyone, got to make his family bigger, have your goddaughter.”

She sets her cup down on the table and leans her head on the back of the booth. Asks the ceiling, “Is it really unreasonable for him to say, fuck Tony Stark, and fuck his happy ending ?” 

I lost everyone , she’d screamed. 

“No,” Nebula agrees. “Not unreasonable at all.”

Turns out the person Rocket had found was Steve Rogers himself, and together they’d pulled apart the entire television in the sitting room. When Nebula and Romanoff get to them, Rogers is trying to explain to Rocket what the Terran markings on the wires mean, despite evidently having little to no idea himself. Rocket, Nebula is sure, is well aware of this, but is enjoying watching him struggle.

“Steven,” Romanoff announces. “What are you doing.” 

“Fixing the TV,” Rogers calls back up. Rocket gets him to hold another wire to plug a pair of them into the back of the television. Nebula can smell the burn of a soldering iron somewhere. 

“Really?” Romanoff asks. “Looks a lot like you’re destroying it.”

“No, we’re fixing it,” Rogers maintains. Rocket plugs in three more cables and the screen flickers on, showing a terran identifying automobiles. “See?” He frowns down at the pile of cables still in his arms. 

Rocket stands up and brushes his palms off on his pants. “We going?” 

He’s turned his back on Rogers and Rogers’ pile of wires. His tail is absently swishing from side to side.

“Do you want to go?” Nebula asks.

Rocket pauses.

They decide to stay a week. Just a week. If they stay any longer, Rocket claims, Kevin the Robot With a Knife will get lonely. 

Nebula knows it’s because he’s scared of what will happen if he stays any longer. 

“What was your sister’s name?” Nebula asks Romanoff one night. They’re up on the roof, watching what’s left of the stars, bottles of alcohol in hand. Romanoff takes a long swig of hers before she answers.

“Yelena,” she says. “She… She was my little sister. Liked to copy my handstands. Had a vest with more than a dozen pockets.”

“She sounds sweet.” 

Romanoff smiles. “Yeah, well, that’s how she got you.” 

Nebula takes a drink for a woman she’ll never get to meet.

Rogers and her don’t really talk. Rocket likes him, likes riling him up. Likes having someone else who’s in a world he doesn’t know with people he never particularly liked. They drink some, break some, mourn everything they never got to have. Rocket takes some of Rogers’ blood and tells Nebula he’s trying to reverse-engineer the serum that turned Rogers into what he is.

“He wants to get back to normal,” he’d explained to her. “And… Well, as he is now, there isn’t an end in sight.” 

Nebula knows Rocket doesn’t know how long his lifespan is. 

That’s probably part of it too.

Rhodey visits two days before they plan to leave. Raises his eyebrows and smiles when he sees them, Nebula and Rocket, dancing along to one of Peter’s songs that happened to come over the radio. 

“Come on, metal man!” Rocket calls over, “Join in!” 

“I can’t,” he says, smile dropping slightly, “my legs--”

“Oh, shut up,” Nebula protests. Rocket scampers up onto the table to grab Rhodey’s hands and drag him into the kitchen with them.

“We’re all made of metal here, buddy,” he promises. “Come on, dance!” 

Nebula meets Rhodey’s eyes. Rocket’s mainly bouncing along to the song, nodding his head and swishing his tail and occasionally pulling Nebula around to do a spin with her even though he can barely manage it on his own. Nebula can’t do much more, her legs were never made with dancing in mind, but she raises her arms and bounces her hands along. Rhodey kind of rolls his eyes and raises his own hands, moving them around in circles and swishes.

The kitchen’s cramped. None of them were made for dancing, and none of them are wont for joy, but there’s that warmth in her chest, that pushes her to spin around and sing along with the words. 

“How’s Stark?” Nebula asks in the living room the next morning.

Rhodey smiles. “He’s good. Morgan’s getting big. Obsessed with some cartoon or another.”

Nebula smiles too. “That’s-- good. It’s good.”

Rhodey tilts his head. “You could visit him, you know.”

Nebula clenches her metal fist. 

They leave when the week’s up. Pick up as many jobs as they can to get the hell away from the warm feeling settling around her chest. 

They get a call from New Asgard somewhere near Morag, Brunnhilde’s holographic figure standing cross-armed over the comm. Rocket’s busy fixing half the damn ship that’s falling apart in the turbulence of dodging a thousand blaster shots, so Nebula waits in front of her, trying to keep her balance.

“Your new friend Marvel is causing some hubbub over here,” she tells Nebula.

“Marvel?” Nebula echoes.

“Carol!” Rocket yells over from the cockpit, feet on the wheel as he stretches across the cockpit to flick on the different sets of guns, redirect the fuel half towards shields and half towards blaster fire, and keep the thrusters going at full speed. “She goes by Captain Marvel on Terra!” 

“She also stole about a dozen records from the American Military’s database. Two of which are yours,” Brunnhilde adds. “And the rest of which are in reference to extra-terrestrial species, such as Asgardians.” 

Rocket sends the ship spinning and Nebula grabs the chairs to stay standing. “Why?!”

“When asked, her only explanation was, and I’m quoting here, ‘fuck the military, what did they do for me? They’re probably going to kill my friends.’ Caused a bit of an uproar.”

“Wasn’t she in the American military?” Rocket yells over, pulling the ship out of its spin and flipping another dozen switches. “Heading into atmosphere!”

Nebula clenches her fists against the sudden air pressure, repeats the question for Brunnhilde, who just shrugs and takes a drink of whatever she’s holding.

“I just need her to say that she didn’t do it under Asgardian orders, and that you aren’t accomplices. Technically Thor’s business, but…” She winces. “He’s not great right now.” 

Nebula nods. They finally get through the atmosphere and Rocket pulls them into the storm clouds, then shuts everything down as quickly as possible, the entire ship going dark other than the glow of the hologram.

“We haven’t seen her since we were last on Terra,” Nebula answers. “Last we talked about the files were… a Terran year and a half ago?” 

“Great, then I don’t care about this anymore,” Brunnhilde says, before pausing, contemplatively looking into the neck of her bottle. “When you see her next, give her my thanks. We’re meant to be free people.” 

Nebula nods. “Will do. We are.” 

Nebula catches a hint of a smile before the call ends.

“Well, look at this,” Rocket mutters a few days later, right off a job on Naro-Atzia. “Gift fairy dropped by with incriminating files on us.” 

Nebula raises her eyebrows and lets Rocket flick the dozen or so files over, two of which are labelled with UNKNOWN #2934 - “NEBULA” and UNKNOWN #2935 - “ROCKET” . When she opens them, there’s both too much and barely anything on there, but Nebula scrolls to the bottom and smiles at the note.

Hey. Couldn’t stop thinking about this and the easiest way to get rid of something digital is moving it somewhere else, so here you go! - Carol :P

“Guess it really is good to have friends,” Nebula mutters.

She just catches Rocket freeze in her peripheral, knuckles going white on the controls and ears pinned back against his head. 

She fishes him out from the corner of the engine room, bracketed between the rumbling wall and the rumbling engine. He’s got tears on his cheeks and fur pulled out in clumps and one of his claws has been sawn in half. 

Nebula grabs him by the scruff and places him in front of her. Stops him when he tries to run again and counts out loud like she did when Carol was spinning, when she was a child washing her hands. The rise and fall of Rocket’s chest matches the rhythm of the counting by three hundred, and is almost one breath every three numbers by a thousand. 

“I can’t do this, Nebs,” he breathes. His hands are shaking, trapped in Nebula’s so he scrapes away at the metal of her palms rather than the skin of his scalp.

“Can’t do what?” she whispers back.

“I can’t have friends. I can’t-- It’ll get them killed again. I can’t lose anyone else again. I can’t.”

Nebula blinks down at him. “They won’t die, Rocket,” she lies.

“You don’t know that,” Rocket hisses at her. “The Guardians of the frickin’ Galaxy died, these people will too. Everyone I love--” He cuts himself off.

“Is it better to be alone?” she asks, because she doesn’t know the answer.

He stills. 

“I don’t know,” he admits. “I don’t know.” 

“Everyone dies,” Nebula says. 

He looks up at her, big watery eyes. “I can’t do this,” he repeats.

“Then don’t.” Nebula carefully lets go of his hands to rest one on his shoulder. “I think… you can be close to people and not lose part of yourself to them. There has to be a way.”

Rocket stares at her. Cradles his hands in his lap. “I don’t know how.”

“Neither do I,” Nebula admits. “We’ll figure it out. We always do.”

“Let’s go back to Terra this year,” Rocket suggests a week before the anniversary. “We’ll invite Carol. Make it a big old thing.” 

Nebula nods. “Sounds like a plan.”

The compound is full. There are people Nebula doesn't recognise, a big green man with glasses and a sweatshirt, a group of people Brunnhilde brings with her that might be Asgardians, a dark woman dressed in green who accompanies the Queen. 

Up in the sky, a Ravager ship passes on its way to Knowhere. Shoots some fireworks that make the non-Terrans raise their glasses and cheer. 

“Why is it,” Nebula asks the Queen just after midnight, “that Rocket and I remind you of your children?”

The Queen raises an eyebrow. “Because you love each other very dearly, even if it doesn’t seem like it,” she answers. “And because Rocket constantly needs to build, like my daughter. And because you are a warrior like my son, filled with rage but knowing how to be restrained.”

“I’m sorry that you lost your children,” Nebula says. “I’m sorry we aren’t them.”

“No,” the Queen agrees. “You aren’t. But that’s not a bad thing.”

Nebula smiles.

Morgan gets very tired around three in the morning. She’s bigger than when Nebula last saw her, enough that she can climb up on Nebula’s shoulders herself. Stark smiles up at her. 

“She’s missed you,” he tells Nebula. 

“I’m never going to be around much,” Nebula warns him.

“I know,” Stark says. “That’s not in your nature. Just stop stealing my roombas when you go.”

Nebula shrugs. Grabs Morgan’s feet to keep her steady.

She barely sees Natasha Romanoff. She’s talking with the big green man, wearing a vest with more than a dozen pockets.

“You and Rocket doing okay?” Stark asks at some point, right before the sun rises. 

“We are,” Nebula confirms. “Why do you ask?”

“Just… he’s hanging out with Stars and Stripes over there.”

Nebula nods. Passes Morgan over with a kiss to his forehead. “He’s himself, outside of Rogers. I’m myself, outside of you. We…”

She doesn’t have the words, but Stark doesn’t look like he needs them, looking contemplatively out at Rogers.

“When are you going to come down?” the ship’s singing when Nebula gets back. Rocket’s sitting on the ramp, nodding along to the song. He raises his glass to her. “When are you going to land?” 

She sits next to him. Grabs the bottle and pours herself a drink into the spare glass. 

“Look at us,” he says with something like a smile, “two losers that have got themselves some loser friends.”

Nebula snorts. Takes a swig. Watches the sun rise over the horizon in a symphony of gold and orange.

“You know you can’t hold me forever,” the song continues. Rocket hums along to the words, familiar enough to copy them.

There’s warmth in Nebula’s chest, right around her mechanical heart.

She lets it stay.

Chapter Text

It’s never a good gig when it involves children. It’s a bit easier for Rocket, maybe, since he doesn’t see humanoids quite like he sees himself, but Nebula looks across the dozen children in the bay and spots one with blue skin, one with a hairless scalp, one with metal fingers, and feels a part of herself tear more apart than it already has.

It’s one of the gigs they take so they can make sure it doesn’t work. On paper, they’re taking these kids to a secondary location on Knowhere.

“Do any of you remember where home is?” Nebula calls, then again in about another twelve languages.

About half their hands go up. Nebula beckons them forward and they whisper what they know to her.

Some of it’s useful. Planet and city names. Some of it will take some deciphering - the girl with Proxima’s eyes whose home is a wooden house with farmland stretching out behind it and a dark skinned sister sharing her bed, the boy with Gamora’s nose whose home is a red haired man with a scar raked through his eye and a voice that enchants monsters, the child with Ebony’s hands whose home is the cabin at the end of an orchard.

Rocket will be able to track most of it down. He’s been to more living places than Nebula has.

“‘S cold,” one of the children whispers.

Nebula glances over her shoulder. She and Rocket never leave children they’re transporting alone. Not when they had to escape with no one by their side.

“Rocket,” she tells her comm, “keep the heaters up. I think these are from warmer systems.”

“Got some names?” he calls back, but she can hear him flicking up the temperature from the cockpit.

She tells them. He maps out a route, sets the ship on autopilot, and walks out to join her and the kids.

They’re restless. Always are, after a bit. When they aren’t is when to be concerned.

“All from neighbouring systems,” Rocket tells her. “Pretty easy to give ‘em back, and the ones we don’t have planets for can be found easier.”

“Good,” Nebula mutters. “Good. How long are we thinking?”

“At least a week, at most a month,” Rocket answers. “Will need to set up semi-comfortable bedding that ain’t just mattresses on the floor of the bridge.”

“Pete and Gamora’s rooms should hold all of them,” Nebula decides.

“Are these ones old enough that we have to split ‘em up by genitals?” Rocket asks, scratching at his neck. Nebula shrugs. “Well, I guess they choose themselves, then. Any arguments, and we can combine Drax and Mantis’ stuff into one room and split the kids across all three.”

It’s pretty standard routine. Living cargo is always a pain and a half to deal with, especially when they’re younger. At least these ones are old enough to not need Nebula to wipe their asses.

Rocket whistles sharp. “Alright, snot gremlins!” he yells over them, and Nebula resists the urge to put her face in her hands. “How many ’f you speak Common?”

About two thirds raise their hands. They ferry language questions until the kids can all translate for each other and Rocket only needs to tell his speech in Common.

“We’ve got two rooms for you all to sleep in,” he tells them. “You can choose which one you wanna go with, and we’ll organise mattresses once you’ve all chosen. Six of you to a room, or more if you’re fine with it being cramped, but if you do you’ll have to share mattresses. We don’t have spare clothes for all of you, so you’ll have to wash your clothes at the end of each cycle, which Nebs here will show you how to do. We’ll be at the first planet in about six hours, which none of you will complain about because if we go any faster we’ll turn your bodies to sludge. Any questions?”

More hands. Rocket selects the child with Ebony’s fingers and they ask where the bathroom is.

Nebula sighs.

Eight of the kids use the bathroom, and Nebula manages to get them to wait orderly and clean themselves off afterwards. When she gets back with the last one, everyone’s huddled together, muttering quietly but generally not disturbing where Rocket is tracking down species and planets.

“Do you have a hypnosis device you haven’t informed me of?” Nebula jokes as she slides into her seat next to him.

“Oh, hah, hah,” Rocket deapans. “Nah, I just gave ‘em Groot’s console and told ‘em to beat his high score.”

Nebula pauses. Blinks. Tries to track what would have made Rocket decide that this was more important than endangering Groot’s legacy.

Rocket sighs. Stares out over these children that are far too familiar and far too alien. “He’s… He’s gone. Fully gone. I’m not going to prioritise a ghost of a memory over these real kids, who need real help.” He taps his claw against the back of his tablet. “Don’t let yourself get lost with the ones you lose, right?”

“You’ve been thinking about this,” Nebula notes, because she can’t think of anything else.

“Yeah,” Rocket mutters. He coughs. “I didn’t… I don’t want to be defined by my ghosts, you know? Not like--”

He cuts himself off, but Nebula hears the end anyway.

Not like you are.

The girl with Proxima’s eyes beats Groot’s high score. She presents it proudly to Nebula and Rocket and something in her tears further apart.

The kids get to sleep in decent time. Nebula washes up while Rocket’s changing in his room, scratching the pus out from where the metal in her forearm meets flesh as he grumbles about the annoyance of getting into his pants.

“Shifts tonight?” he calls over to her.

Not uncommon, especially not when kids are involved.

“I’ll take first,” Nebula offers. “Wake you up in an hour?”

“Nah, we’ll be through the first jump soon enough, just get me up then.” Rocket pulls the elastic on his pants tight. “You gonna be alright?”

She doesn’t answer. He knows what that means, if the head bump he gives her shoulder says anything.

The girl with Proxima’s eyes approaches Nebula only a few clicks away from the jump point. Nebula glances down and tightens her hold on the wheel a little.

“Who got the high score before me?”

Nebula almost snaps. Almost, almost, because she’s always been defined by her ghosts. Because she’s always torn pieces off of herself so the people she loves can fit. Because she doesn’t want to forget her bodies by burying them.

But.

This girl has Proxima’s eyes, and she’s going to die without knowing that.

“His name was Groot,” Nebula says. “He was about your age, younger. Spent every moment of his life on that thing.”

The girl smiles.

When Rocket shows up to take the next shift, she’s asleep on Nebula’s lap, Nebula’s hand on her scalp.

They don’t manage to get all the kids off the ship before the Sovereign find them again, and usually the Sovereign are nothing, barely a scratch, but it’s always harder when kids are involved.

“No, no, no, no, no, no,” Rocket hisses from Nebula’s bracelet, and she can see him desperately trying to keep the ship out of range of the Sovereign’s guns. “Nebs, we can’t--”

“Shut up,” she snaps. “Shut up, right now. GET TO THE DAMN PODS!”

The kids are scared of her, but that’s good. That will get them to move quicker. That will get them to push the fear back next time.

(Somewhere in her, she registers how much she sounds like Thanos.)

“Nebs, one of us is going to need to go with them and protect them, you know that.”

“Shut up, you damn fox.”

She doesn’t need to look at his hologram to catch him clenching his jaw against the insults he almost lets out. “Nebs, they don’t have anyone else. We don’t have anyone else.”

“Well, that’s stupid,” a voice says in Nebula’s ear, and the sky glows rainbow in front of them.

“Brunnhilde,” Nebula breathes.

“Hi, Nebula. Spider-Monkey. Need a lift?”

Rocket lets out a burst of relieved laughter. Nebula starts ushering the kids towards the loading bay where the sensors in her eye pick up thermal activity. Proxima’s eyes, and Ebony’s hands, and Gamora’s nose, and Cull’s walk, and Corvus’ smile, and Nebula’s fear.

Brunnhilde’s wearing silver armour, a heavy fur cape on her shoulders and her hair braided up over her head. Her pegasus’ saddle is lined with goat fur as well. It must be cold back on Terra. The hands that grab the children are covered in woollen gloves.

“If you can’t walk, you’re on the horse,” she tells them, before looking up at Nebula. “I’ll take them to New Asgard. The vísendakona that got me here isn’t powerful enough to do more than two trips.”

Nebula nods. Brunnhilde smiles. “Don’t keep me waiting.”

“Kids are safe?” Rocket asks when Nebula buckles into her seat and takes control of the mobile turrets.

“Brunnhilde’s taken them back to New Asgard,” she agrees.

“Good,” Rocket says. They’ll get a better life than us, she hears. Better than what we can give them, better than what we have.

A shot grazes the engines, and Rocket’s teeth show.

“Guess it really is good to have friends,” he tells her, before spinning the ship around to rain hell on their enemies.

Nebula wakes up with tears in her eyes and Gamora’s name in her throat. She rips herself out of the sheets and stumbles out of Rocket’s ear range, until she’s in her own room and curled up in a corner, rocking herself back and forth.

She doesn’t know how Gamora died. It could have been painless. If Thanos could have loved anyone, it would have been her, he might have tried to make it painless.

Nebula laughs at the impossibility of it.

She doesn’t believe in ghosts, but it’s hard to deny the weight on her shoulders, like Gamora’s corpse is dragging behind her, like Thanos is clutching at her neck, Cull, Ebony, Corvus, Proxima all trying to pull her into the ground with them.

She looks over her room with blurry vision. There isn’t much. Prosthetics. Notepads.

Her eye, resting on the shelf, projecting that image of all of them. Cull had just had a growth spurt before that projection. He’s still awkward on his feet, and hasn’t realised that he’s swamping Gamora by leaning on her. Proxima had shaved half her head off and convinced Corvus to do the same. It shows off how Corvus’ ears twitch with his nose when he laughs, how Proxima’s earrings always get tangled. Ebony’s almost floating, his grip on his powers weak at best. Gamora doesn’t even have her facial implants yet.

Didn’t.

Nebula rests her head on the wall behind her. Their bodies are so heavy.

The emergency lights make Nebula’s metal glow. Rocket’s too, as they both cradle their mugs and lean on the cabinets across from each other.

“Why did you save me, that night on Berhert?” Rocket asks. His eyes reflect red.

“What?” Nebula asks.

“The Ravagers had me,” Rocket elaborates. “I left you back on the ship with-- with Groot. You broke out and saved me from them. Why?”

Nebula picks at her pants. “I didn’t save you. I needed transport and units. The Ravagers could give me both.”

“My carcass could give you more,” he points out.

“Corpse,” she corrects.

He tilts his head like that’s the only answer he needed.

They deliver the rest of the children. Get hugs and money and food despite the blood dripping from their hands. Hunt down their employers and use them as an example of what happens to the people who take kids’ lives away. Go home and water the flowers in their fire escapes’s flower box. They bloom with teardrop white petals, little bioluminescent spores hovering around them. When insects get too close, they snap shut until the insect is entirely consumed. Two years have taught Nebula and Rocket how to take care of them.

“I think I’m gonna get a cactus,” Rocket tells Nebula as he mops around her feet from where she’s pruning the flowers. “Somethin’ prickly and pretty, like you.”

“You flatter me,” she deadpans. Then, “Why?”

“I dunno. Cacti age slower, right? It’ll last longer than me.” Rocket shrugs, but she can see the tension in his shoulders as he turns away.

Most mammals don’t make it much longer than thirty years, she knows.

Romanoff had said that Steve Rogers lives his life like it’s an epilogue. Nebula wonders why it took so long for her to notice Rocket does the same.

Nebula and Rocket’s next few jobs are on Knowhere. They keep returning to their apartment, keep watering their flowers and mopping the fire escape.

This isn’t the life weapons get to live, Nebula knows. This isn’t the life of soldiers, of monsters, of the next step of evolution or something horrifying.

Her and Rocket are living the life of people.

Something warm settles in her chest at that thought. She realises, for the first time, that it's happiness.

The battery powering her eye dies.

The Nebula of the past is missing some of her scars. Her skin is softer, brighter, and the metal laced through it isn’t as aged as Nebula’s familiar with. She’s still got her arm, the original replacement, not the one that the Ravagers gave her or Rocket or Stark.

Nine years ago, Nebula still had that tragic fervour in her eyes. Was still so desperate to be told she was the best.

“Did we ever beat her?” she asks, something like terror wavering in her voice.

Nebula tilts her head against the wall. “We realised we never had to.”

“You’re an idiot.”

Nebula shrugs, because if she has to be one to live the life that people do, then so be it.

“Peter,” Pepper mutters around her own tears. “Peter, you have to let go.”

He’s still clutching onto Tony’s body, sobbing into his shoulder. Nebula closes and opens her metal fist.

“Peter,” she starts. Rocket’s off somewhere on the battlefield, trying to piece together the rest of the crew.

“I can’t-- I-I-- I can’t be alone, I can’t!” he cries. Pepper’s hands shake.

Nebula crouches down, muddying the knees of her pants. “We’re never alone,” she tells him. “Just… closer or further than others. There’s never a distance you can’t breach.” She reaches out, cupping Peter’s face (Proxima’s tears, Gamora’s muscle, Ebony’s shake). “Tony’s just… further than usual.”

Peter looks up at her. His eyes are brown, big and round and wet with tears. They’re Nebula’s, from before Thanos tore them out and replaced them.

“C’mon, honey,” Pepper whispers, and this time Peter lets her tug him away.

Nebula folds Tony’s arms over his chest so it’s easier to pick him up.

Her heart clenches, like it always does when she sees people die. Some piece of her is tearing apart, looking at him, at the stones that Thanos had done so much to gather.

She’s always been defined by her ghosts. She’s always torn pieces of herself off so the people she loves can fit.

But, she decides as she watches Rhodey and Pepper and Peter desperately try to hold their shattered pieces together, as she can’t find red-blonde hair and sharp eyes in the crowd, she is still someone without the people she used to have.

Rocket finds Quill, and Quill finds Drax, who finds Mantis, who finds Groot. They’re standing in a tense circle when Nebula gets to them all.

Rocket’s hands are clenched. His tail is swishing back and forth and she doesn’t have to be an empath to see how many emotions are bubbling under the surface.

“Rocket,” she calls, holding out the blaster he’d lost at some point during the fight.

It’s enough for those emotions to boil over.

“How stupid do you have to be,” he starts in a growl, “to go straight for the big purple fuckass in the middle of his territory over your dead family instead of taking one second to strategise?”

Drax shifts on his feet.

“And how shitty an empath do you have to be,” he demands of Mantis, “to not realise that this asshole is too emotionally constipated to be able to deal with Thanos?

“And you!” he continues to Peter, “You are the cherry on top of the shithead cake, ‘cuz you’re the idiot that ruined everything and made it so I had to live the last five years without you!”

He pauses, panting, tears cutting trenches in his fur.

Peter reaches down and wraps him up in a hug. “We missed you too.”

Rocket melts. His claws scrape along the back of Peter’s jacket, Peter’s scarf he’s wrapped around his head fluttering behind him in the wind.

Gamora’s sitting on a rock on the edge of the battlefield, fiddling with her comm.

Nebula sits beside her with a grunt. Gamora grunts back.

“How much older are you?” Gamora asks.

“Nine years,” Nebula answers.

Gamora nods. Rests her comm to the side. “Our family?”

“Dead.”

“Good.”

Nebula shrugs.

“You got any advice for me?” Gamora asks. Her accent is heavier, not masking it like she did with the Guardians, not yet so used to masking it that it becomes second nature. “Since you’ve apparently been dealing with this for so long?”

Nebula considers the ashy sky.

“There’s more than just you and your grief,” she decides on. “Don’t let it become everything you are.”

Gamora shrugs and nods. “I’m not joining your crew,” she tells Nebula.

“I know,” Nebula responds.

Gamora sighs. Leans back on her palms and looks up at the sky. “Nine years. How much has it all changed?”

“Not enough,” Nebula answers. “Too much.”

“You ever beat me?”

Nebula smiles. That liquid ache is back, seeping through her chest.

“Take this,” Nebula says, holding out a bag of liquid chocolate. “You’ll like it.”

Gamora does. She flips the bag, checks the instructions. “If you were me, what would you do?”

Nebula knows the answer. “I’d start a farm on a planet with enough for everyone but too far away to check.”

“Sounds boring,” Gamora scoffs.

Nebula grins. “Doesn’t it?”

They stay on Terra for a while. Until the clean up is done, until their rooms are re-sorted, until the funerals.

Nebula moves out of Mantis’ room into what used to be Gamora’s so the rest can move back into where they were. Mantis, Groot, Drax all accept it easy enough, even though Groot spends the first night in Rocket’s room because Rocket’s so scared to lose him again.

Peter finds her, that night, when everyone’s asleep or doing their best to get there.

“So,” he says. “Five years.”

“Almost,” Nebula agrees.

“And you’ve spent all of it here? With Rocket?”

“Yes.”

Peter clenches his jaw.

“What?” Nebula demands.

“Why did you stay?” Peter asks. “Would’ve guessed you’d fuck off into the great unknown and make yourself an empire off of your dad’s back.”

Nebula tilts her head. She’s taken off her hand and arm, preparing to clean them before bed. Rocket is making her a new prosthetic out of Tony’s nanotech, she knows, but for now she just puts some of her arm in her pocket.

“He was alone,” Nebula answers. “I was alone.”

And they’d just barely managed to get a taste of love, and it’s the most addicting drug life could peddle out.

“Back to the howling old owl in the woods…” the singer croons as Nebula takes a seat next to Rocket.

He’s flicking his bracelet between his fingers, clack, clack, clack. There’s no memorial this year, not legitimately, since everyone’s back. Nebula had almost been afraid they wouldn’t have this.

“Hunting the horny back toad…”

“It hurts that they’re back,” Rocket says. “I mean, don’t tell them, but I’m glad they are, so I don’t know why it still…”

“Me neither,” Nebula mutters. “It hurts for me too.”

Rocket leans his head on Nebula’s shoulder. It’s a different kind of silence than she’s used to, but it doesn’t hurt more than the normal ache.

“Oh, I’ve finally decided my future lies…”

It’s a soft kind of pain. She knows that it won’t get better, because she remembers the first implant, low in her back. Because it still hurts.

But she hadn’t thought about that implant in years. Life keeps moving.

“...beyond the yellow brick road!”

Nebula leans her head on Rocket's. To the next chapter of this life, then.