My heart! Oh, they look so beautiful and loving. Also wet grumpy Rocket is a vibe.
boring meeting scribble time
a couple lil pieces inspired by @hadesinsane
most raccoons have the instinct to swim and even enjoy it, but i suspect all of rocket's augmentations weigh him down in the water. to make a raccoon body stand and move like a human body requires so many pins and plates, new bones, osteotomies. but when we see lylla in vol 3, it really looks like only her arms have been altered (as far as her skeletal/muscular system goes), and otters don't appear to use their arms much for swimming. i like to believe she retains her aquatic abilities.
in another universe, a kinder timeline, i like to think lylla survives. maybe she and rocket escape at the same time, or they find each other later. she has a little den on a nicer part of morag, or aladna, or tarka. i like to think she convinces him to wade in the shallow water while she plays, and teases him for looking like a drowned f'saki when his fur gets all wet (because lets face it, otter-fur withstands the water a little better than raccoon-fur). but afterward, even though he’s so much bigger than her now, she curls him up in her arms like he's just a little baby otter pup, and floats him on her belly while they watch the clouds or doze under the stars, and the sky is beautiful and forever above them.
rocket fanart masterlist | art masterlist current art queue | navigation | fanfiction masterlist headcanons & imagines
raccoon dividers by @/thecutestgrotto fairylight dividers by @/saradika-graphics
This comic I’ve recently discovered is so, so Rocket and Jack coded.
Ya’ll… read this filthy perfect fucking fic. ⚡️⚡️⚡️🎆🎇🎆🎇 I give this a 5/5 ⭐️s and a spicy rating of 3.5/5 🌶️ s. Like if Masterpiece Theater did porn. 👏 👏 👏
᠊ᡃ࡚ࠢ࠘ ⸝່ࠡࠣ᠊߯᠆ࠣ࠘ᡁࠣ࠘᠊᠊°.⋆。✶˖ the bounty ⌖˖✶。⋆ part two of evasive maneuvers ✶ book two of kinktober 2024
evasive maneuvers | kinktober 2024 | navigation | fanfiction 18+ only | no use of y/n | f!reader | 2 parts | word count: pending. read part two ✶ the bounty now ⌖˖✶。⋆
a bird in the hand... WARNINGS: dom/sub vibes, restraints & bondage, continued dirty talk, use of a cloth gag, gunplay, electricity play, forced orgasms, overstim, fantasies of dubcon/noncon, dacryphilia, tech/sex toys, nipple & clit clamps, painplay, subspace, aftercare, biting/marking.
“Little birdie.” The words are soft — admiring. “Such a sweet thing for me.” The praise melts through you: a second wave of heat on the heels of the first one, though this is softer and more syrupy — silvery-sweet. When he coasts a light fingertip over the line of your cheek, you lean into his hand — nudging into the curve of his palm, grateful for the soothing warm balm of his approval. His hand lingers even as he lifts himself from your torso, fingers coasting along your jaw as he steps to one side and then moves down between your thighs. He holsters the modified electroshock baton into a loop at his hip, and gently pries your knees apart. The way you’re tied makes it impossible to resist him — not that you have much will to do so, anyway. “It’s one of the things I thought you’d promise me, when I was imagining catching you in Xandar — that you’d be so good for me. That you’d do whatever I frickin’ told you, with your big weepy doe-eyes.”
The baton crackles blue, casting him in a silvery halo — hovering just an inch over the soft curve of your belly. The metal wand doesn’t even touch your skin — just ghosts lightly through the air over your flesh — and the electricity still sings through you, contracting every muscle, sending your abdominals into wrenching, clenching spasms — sending your pussy into wet spasms, too. Your teeth grit into the fabric stuffed in your mouth, and when the baton lifts from your skin, you find yourself sucking on the cloth: whines crowding up your throat, tears cluttering up your lashes. Your hips roll toward him without your permission. Rocket just grins, of course. You can see the moon-white flash of his teeth through the blur of your lashes. He’s still got the baton grasped in one hand as he spreads your knees wider, skating the other palm through the slipperiness between your thighs. “Yeah, sweetheart, I knew you’d like a little shock or two. You’re such a sloppy mess down here. And look at that clit, all cute and twitchy.” His grip tilts, and the baton taps just below your belly button. Your body snaps into a bridge, every nerve careening wildly, pussy fluttering madly. Then the electricity leaves and you’re melting into the mattress, shuddering and shivering with waves of heat and cold. Your tits tremble with each breath, clamped nipples pulsing heat with every thud of your heartbeat. “Good girl,” he croons, and you watch with a wide wet stare as his baton dips lower, the rounded tip dropping just beyond your range of vision. “Eyes up here, buttercup,” he croons, and your gaze snaps to his burning stare.
read part two ✶ the bounty now ⌖˖✶。⋆ evasive maneuvers | kinktober 2024 | navigation | fanfiction masterlist
gray support/mdni banners by @/saradika-graphics | silver sparkle divider by @/strangergraphics
Fucking adorable.
New silly Rocket comic!!! :)
Set before Vol 3– it continues my headcannon of Nebula and Rocket attending the reputation tour in 2017 :P
This one was actually written by my twin brother, and illustrated by me!!
Enjoy heheeee!😄🫶
This is frightening and perfect. I love their expressions. Glorious! I am so blessed with your art.
“How? How do you know that? There was no time to read it-”
“Listen to me, none of that matters anymore. All that matters is you getting out of here.” Petra told Rocket, putting her hand on his shoulders. There was a loud thump on the cargo bay door, and both of them turned to check the monitoring cameras. Frack pounded at the door while Knot’s mouth opened in a wordless hiss.
Rocket drew in a breath of pain as Petra gripped his shoulders with punishing strength. “You have two choices. One, finish prepping the ship, and get out of here as soon as the locking mechanism is off, or, two, I knock you the fuck out. What’s it going to be?”
One of Petra’s hands was burning him with cold, and she shook him roughly. “Which is it Rocket? You don’t tell me right away, then I’ll choose for you.” There were strange harmonics snarling in Petra’s voice, her eyes were glowing uranium lanterns. He wanted to scream in terror at her expression, but he knew that if he started he’d never stop.
——Chapter 10 by @hibatasblog
not gonna lie, this reminds of some a story I once read about Peter. When his mind extended the span of galaxies under Ego’s influences. Pushing him mentally beyond the factors of human perspectives til the case of the root of his humanity is called back. His mother. But the side effects linger on as the scope of his consciousness is suddenly reduced back to the size of glass where it once had been an ocean.
For Petra it’s similar in my eyes. The celestial traits giving her mind’s eye a perspective beyond the ‘smaller frames’, this being Rocket. As long as he’s okay, the means are justified. soooooo….amazing chapter!!!! the picture scared the crap out of my friend so I’m calling it a win.
*screams in 60 languages at once about how fucking cute this is.
it’s my favorite flarkin’ color— whaddaya mean it doesn’t go any faster? (don’t worry, he’ll make it better)
rocket fanart masterlist let me love your OCs masterlist | current queue | main masterlist
raccoon dividers by @/thecutestgrotto fairylight dividers by @saradika-graphics
I might be in love with Wanda now too.
the raccoon, the witch, & the roadtrip. part four. south dakota.
the raccoon, the witch, & the roadtrip masterlist prev | next [est june 11] | main masterlist
angst, comfort, friendship, & fluff for @hibatasblog rocket & wanda | part 4/7 | word count: 1864.
During a watch party for Avengers: Endgame on Twitter, Markus revealed the idea to team Wanda with the Guardian of the Galaxy captain actually made it into several versions of the film's script. "We had whole drafts with Wanda on a road trip with Rocket," Markus wrote, "but after the Vision plot in Infinity War, nothing we came up with was anything but wheel spinning for her character." CBR
They don’t stop until Rapid City. Wanda looks like she might actually be ready for a nap — her firestorm-eyes somehow blunted by exhaustion — and Rocket himself could go for a few drinks, which is apparently not a thing you’re allowed to do if you’re in a moving vehicle in this corner of Terra.
Stupid, he’d scoffed at the witch. M’not even the one working the frickin’ pod.
Car, she’d corrected mildly, and she still hadn’t let him have a drink. He’d thought about swiping some booze at one of the so-called rest-stops, but then he’d felt all twisted-up inside about sneaking a drink when it was clearly something she didn’t want him to do. In some ways, she reminds him of Gamora — too serious, carrying way too much for her skinny baldbody shoulders — and the thought of fucking around with her rules when she’s got so few of ‘em just makes him feel small and low.
Sometimes he misses the days when screwing with someone brought him twisted shreds of meanspirited joy.
Time to be the captain, he thinks bitterly.
By the time they find a hotel with a vacancy that doesn’t look like a shithole — not that he minds shitholes, of course, they kinda feel like home to him; but Wanda’s muttering something about bedbugs and reminding him that Natasha’s paying — well, by then, he’s a little worried he’s not gonna get a drink after all. There doesn’t seem to be a bar within reasonable walking distance — not that he can see. But when they check in, he can see from the corner of his eye that there’s a bar attached right to the frickin’ lobby, and he thinks maybe Terra doesn’t completely suck after all.
The witch is so exhausted that it actually doesn’t take long for her to drift off this time — at least, not by his standards. He can hear her heartbeat suddenly thumping her awake every few minutes for the first half-hour or so — but eventually, her stifled breaths of wakefulness spread out and smooth over.
It’s not that he’s trying to sneak out. He hasn’t done that since — well, since Pete was around, and that was mostly just to fuck with an easily-annoyed Star-Lord. Really — and Rocket would never admit it if asked — he’s pretty sure that, like himself, the witch finds it easier to sleep when she’s not alone.
So he putters around, quietly working on a series of tiny linked infrasonic mines made from some scraps he’d squirreled out of Nat’s sound system and a pocketful of things called earbuds he’d swiped at one of the fancier rest-stops. Once he’s sure Wanda’s asleep, he scrawls a note for her — hoping he’s remembering the written Terran language Pete had insisted on trying to teach the Guardians before everything went to hell. Rocket had picked up a fair amount of it, even if he’d pretended disinterest.
He wishes he hadn’t been such a frickin’ dickhead about it.
witch - goin to lobby bar. see you in mornin. r
He snags one of the access cards out of the flimsy paper envelope that the front desk had issued them, and carefully eases the door shut behind him. Currently, the plan is to let the poor witch sleep, and to get so wasted while she does it. He’s been sober for cycles now, and he frickin’ deserves it.
Down the hall he goes, whistling a jaunty tune, tail swinging casually behind him. On the way past the ice machine, the door of another room opens. Some baldbody woman looks out, then drops her eyes to his. She blinks, goes white, and closes the door right back up again. He shrugs — weird — and hops in the elevator. He ain’t a fan of the little crack between the floor of the hotel and the little metal box, dropping down countless stories to the basement below. Don’t Terrans know how to make any safe tech? He tries not to think about being in a deathtrap while he hits the button labeled G, which Wanda had explained was for ground floor.
On four, the elevator pauses and a man nearly steps in before noticing Rocket. The interim captain of the Guardians of the Galaxy offers a friendly, nonthreatening mock salute.
“Hey, guy.”
The man goes white, and steps back out of the elevator, suddenly gripping his messenger bag in front of his belly. Rocket frowns as the doors slide shut.
Terrans are so frickin’ weird, he thinks again.
The elevator dings and the doors slide open, and Rocket grins at the sight of the bar, with all its glass bottles reflecting molasses-brown shadows and amber light.
“Hello, gorgeous,” he murmurs, and strolls across the tiled floor and through the little entryway. The bar is nearly empty — perfect for penance-drinking. He leaps delicately onto a stool at the bar. “I’ll take the hardest thing you’ve got,” he tells the bartender — a slender humie with thick, darksilver hair. The man blinks at him, eyes growing wide and face turning to ash. “The whole bottle,” the captain clarifies, suddenly recalling that Terran humies tend to distill some of the weakest liquors in the galaxy.
“I — I don’t think I can do that,” the Terran says thinly. His eyes flicker over Rocket, ears to tailtip.
Rocket’s brow pleats. “Huh? Why not?”
“Uh,” the bartender says, eyes siding nervously to one side, “we don’t serve… pets at the bar…”
It takes a minute for Rocket to be sure he’s understood correctly. His lip peels back from his teeth and he catches himself at the start of a seething hiss when the man shrinks back.
Terrans are just morons, Rocket reminds himself. You’re s’posed to be the captain now. Of the Guardians of the frickin’ Galaxy. A good guy.
Hang onto your frickin’ temper.
“Dude,” he manages to grind out between sharp teeth. “I ain’t a frickin’ pet.”
“Wild animal, then,” the bartender mumbles, eyes nearly as big as Mantis’ had been, but much less kind. It sends a spear of leaden regret slides right through the fucked-up, half-shredded muscle of Rocket’s heart.
That chick with the antennae, he’d called her. Why’s he always gotta be such a dickhead?
For once, he tries not to turn that pain outward, even though it’s always so much easier. Still, he can’t help but feel his fists curl and his ears flick back, flattening against his skull. “How many wild animals do you know that talk?” he asks the humie behind the bar, trying to be reasonable. “I’m a frickin’ Guardian of the Galaxy. An honorary Avenger or whatever. I fought Thanos for you assholes.”
I lost my whole family for you.
The bartender begins backing away, palms raised in surrender. “Look, I don’t know anything about you being an Avenger, but if you’re not a service animal, I don’t think you can even be in the bar—“
Rocket feels his eyes go round and his spit go sour. The fur on his back and neck and arms splays wide, and his tail puffs to twice its normal size. “A. What?”
The bartender looks like he’s going to cry. “I don’t know, man! For all I know, you could be rabid—“
“I ain’t rabid,” Rocket snarls, rising to his feet on his barstool. “I get my frickin’ shots—“
“—and we don’t serve raccoons!”
His jaw clicks shut. The sharp electric-shock of the word burns every nerve and short-circuits his brain, and all he can think is how much he’d give up for Pete to call him that shit-name again.
“What’d you call me?”
He launches himself over the bar and lands on the mirrored shelf behind it, spraying bottles across the narrow space while the Terran shrieks and cowers. Glass and booze explode against the tile while Rocket spins and hooks his hands into claws, ready to rend.
“I’m gonna frickin’—“
He’s springing through the amber and blue shadows when strands of light, as glowing-crimson as his own warning-beacon eyes, loop around his waist and tug him back, suspending him in midair. He tears at the gossamer-fine threads, but they slip through his fingers like mist.
“Rocket.”
He bares his teeth and glares upward.
The witch.
She strides across the lobby, smudged and tired, her red-star eyes spiraling and spilling molten fire. Her hair’s all tangled from whatever brief sleep she’d gotten, and her face looks white and pinched and pained. She must’ve woken, some part of him notices — smothered under the heat of his fury, his lashing tail and kicking legs. She must’ve woken, and noticed he was gone, and seen his note.
She looks concerned.
The front desk staff flinches away from where they’d been watching the scene unfold in the bar.
“Rocket,” she says gently. “Stop.”
“I will, sweetheart,” Rocket promises earnestly, still twisting and tearing at her threads of power. “Swear I will. Just lemme take care of this one jackass first—“
“No,” she says, stepping up next to wear he’s suspended, her face just a few inches from his. Her magic pulls him gently over the bar, closer to herself. “He’s not worth it.” She looks around the lobby, and some distant part of Rocket wonders how such a volcanic stare can suddenly look so utterly cold and remote. Is his own eyeshine is picking up the reflection of her light and throwing it back at her? He can picture it: four firestorm-eyes lighting up the entire hotel lobby.
“Nothing in this place is,” she adds icily, and the ends of her hair begin to flicker and float in a wind he can’t feel. His instincts suddenly shudder and go still: the freeze element of a classic flight-or-fight reaction. Something deep under his fur acknowledges the pure threat of her. The witch’s voice is dark, and crackling with raw red lightning. Something at the base of his spine recognizes it as the most dangerous sound he’s ever heard, and his ears flatten in alarm, puffed tail suddenly tucking in against his inner calf. The silk strands of magic lower Rocket gently until his feet rest on the surface of the bar, but they don’t release him — not yet. Never mind that he’s not fighting anymore.
“You are a fool,” she tells the bartender, turning her molten eyes toward the baldbody still cowering behind the bar. She lifts a hand to point at Rocket. “This person is more than just an Avenger. He has saved the entire galaxy — a number of times. In all likelihood, he has saved you. Personally.” Her eyes skim the weeping bartender dismissively, then flick dismissively over the front desk staff and the two other patrons Rocket hadn’t even noticed, hiding near a potted tree that reminds him too much of a young Groot.
“He’s no animal,” she tells them in that terrifying, midnight-voice. Honestly, Rocket wouldn’t blame any of them if they’d wet themselves. His own bladder suddenly wants to let go and it’s only his superior frickin’ aversion to embarrassment that keeps his body under control.
“He deserves your deepest respect, and your deepest gratitude,” she tells them. Her eyes, still haloed in red radiance, hold onto the bartender.
“Now pour him a drink.”
the raccoon, the witch, & the roadtrip masterlist prev | next [est june 11] | main masterlist
[During a mission]
Nebula: Quill, what are you wearing?
Quill: Gardening gloves for the heist.
Rocket: You couldn't wear any other pair or gloves?
Quill: Real men wear floral while trespassing
A secret or a heartbreaking revelation? Wanda and Rocket have more in common than one would think.
the raccoon, the witch, & the roadtrip.✮ part six. idaho. washington.
the raccoon, the witch, & the roadtrip masterlist prev | next [est june 25] | main masterlist
angst, comfort, friendship, & fluff for @hibatasblog rocket & wanda | part 6/7 | word count: 2210.
During a watch party for Avengers: Endgame on Twitter, Markus revealed the idea to team Wanda with the Guardian of the Galaxy captain actually made it into several versions of the film's script. "We had whole drafts with Wanda on a road trip with Rocket," Markus wrote, "but after the Vision plot in Infinity War, nothing we came up with was anything but wheel spinning for her character." CBR
The city of Missoula spreads out underneath them like a lakeful of stars or a well of distant coins, glimmering in the night-velvet hug of the mountains. When the sun crests the horizon, they'll make their way through Idaho and onto the last little part of their journey — but for now, Wanda leans against the open window of the bed-and-breakfast where they’ve holed up for the night and lets the Montana breeze kiss the ends of her hair. She closes her lashes, and for a moment, she can almost imagine it’s Vis, leafing through her crimson locks with gentle, marveling hands.
You’re only gonna become someone’s nightmare.
Well, she thinks savagely — she’s always been someone’s nightmare. They hadn’t decided to call her a witch for no reason. Made by circumstance and bastardized science — layers of folded power. Sure, people fear Danvers for her strength, too — but Danvers has blond hair and an impulsive, crooked smile. For some reason, blond hair and an easy smile always seem to set the rest of the Avengers at ease, as if it’s skin and hair color that make a person good.
Wanda — with her dark eyes lit from within and her hellish tendrils of magic — stands no chance when compared to a woman who radiates iridescent power like something avenging and divine. No — the Scarlet Witch is made of nightmares, and she has been since long before Hydra. The only ones who have looked at her with anything other than trepidation or terror or disdain were her adopted parents, and Pietro, and Vis.
And now, perhaps Rocket.
Yes, she’d made the captain of the Guardians of the Galaxy nervous — she can tell. But that was a fear she’d earned — a result of her less-than-noble confession. If Rocket had been anxious in that last hour on the road, it hadn’t been because of who she is.
Or what she is.
She sighs, and leans out into the breeze.
“Don’t go making any magic cities out there, now.”
She half-turns, casting a look over her shoulder. He’s sauntering up beside her, scrabbling up onto the desk chair next to the window to peer out over the sweep of the midnight city, studding the valley like a jewelry-box full of diamond strands. From this angle, she can see the lights catching and flickering in his eyeshine, turning them into flat red coins and then back again. She feels one brow arch.
“We’re making jokes about it now?”
He shrugs, peering down into the spangled mountainside. “What’s the alternative?” A sideways smirk. “I blow you up?”
She snorts. “You could try.”
His grin widens.
Well, his fear has apparently been short-lived. Something about that feels like a quiet reassurance — a flicker of candleflame in the winter solstice of her life.
“You’re not worried about me turning myself into a monster?” she asks anyway. She’s trying to make it sound light, but the words are laced with bitterness and salt.
He shrugs. “Not yet.” He raises his own brow and slants her a calculated glance. “Hopefully not ever.”
She keeps her eyes on the city, unwilling to spare him her own stare.
“Where’d you, uh, get your powers anyway?” he asks after a moment. The words ripple in the cool night air. “Lab or infinity stone?”
She huffs a soft, almost-laugh. “How do you know I wasn’t born with them?”
“What, like Dazzler?” he asks doubtfully.
She tears her eyes from the valley now, brow creased. “You know Dazzler?”
He shrugs. “Sure. She sings, doesn’t she? Wouldn’t mind getting some of her stuff on the zune, actually.”
An incredulous chuckle bursts in the back of her throat like a ripe cherry. “Not like Dazzler,” she concedes. “Dazzler has a genetic condition—”
“That makes her cool as hell,” Rocket supplements, and Wanda offers an acquiescing half-shrug laced up with a half-smile.
“That makes her cool as hell,” she concedes. “I was born with — something else. And then, I think—” she pauses, feeling the crease form between her brow. “Well. Whatever it was, it was enhanced, I guess.”
“Lab then,” Rocket says, and sighs. “How come so many of you Terran-types can walk into labs and say, hey, fuck me up, with no frickin’ regard to your own lives and bodies? And then you come out with cool powers and super-strength and shit?” He scowls down at the city and his next words are so low under his breath that she almost doesn’t hear them. “Need a t-shirt that says, all I got was chronic pain and indigestion.”
She could leave it. Pretend she hadn’t heard him, which is probably what he’d intended. But for whatever reason, his sarcasm always seems to pull out these bite-sized heart-to-hearts from her. “Anxiety and depression.”
He blinks up at her, nonplussed. “What?”
“My t-shirt. I got experimented on! And all I got was anxiety and depression.”
He holds her eyes, his own rounding out, then flicking away. “Yeah, well. You say yaro root, I say yaro fruit.”
She lets the moment slide through her fingers, lingering and bittersweet over the star-spattered valley. “Besides,” she says, and she’s surprised to hear a thread of humor weaving together her own words, “I’m special. I was made by an infinity stone and in a lab.” She feels the corner of her mouth twist. She hadn’t been going to admit it, but why not? Who else would she ever tell, now that Vis is gone? “Labs, actually. I think.”
His ears flicker. “Plural? Wait, how’d that happen?”
The twist turns into a quiet smirk. When was the last time she’d smirked? “Which one?”
He furrows his brow. “The first. No, the most recent. Both.”
She braces her forearms on the window sill and leans out further, letting the wind whisk her words away: keeping them as short-lived as a luna moth. Maybe shorter. There’s safety in the brevity of the words, in how transparent and transitory they seem when they’re caught up and spiraled in the shadowed mountain-breeze.
“I remember the second one best. I was older, and — foolish. And fixated on revenge for the loss of my parents.” She gives him a sideways look. “The horrors of the universe, you know. Pietro and I had been orphaned and adopted, only to be orphaned again. I joined a — well, I joined the bad guys, I guess, and I let them experiment on me with the mind stone. It was before anyone really knew what the mind stone was. At the time, I thought it gave me my powers, but now…” She hesitates.
Rocket stares at her, then scowls. “I meant what I said earlier. What is with you morons walkin’ into labs like that? Sure, I don’t know what this glowing rock is. Hit me with it,” he mimicks — but there’s something half-shrill underneath his voice, clenched into the back of his teeth. She wonders if it’s concern, just a decade or two too late. “You know, I kinda liked Banner at first. He seemed like a genius-idiot, and — you know—” He holds up two fingers, a scant half-inch apart. “—tiny little temper problem. Kinda like me. But he did that to himself?” Rocket clicks his tongue against his teeth. “Thought I liked Steve too, but he just walked into a situation with strangers and said, yeah, gimme this highly-experimental drug and let’s see what frickin’ happens.” He shakes his head. “You morons are reckless. And ungrateful.”
She hums. And she doesn’t deny it.
“But now, what?”
She blinks and casts him a questioning glance.
“You said, you thought the stone gave you your powers. But now. But now what?”
She grimaces, dark-cherry brows furrowed. Not a thing slips past him, apparently. “I don’t know,” she admits. “Maybe it was just a dream. But—”
She hesitates, and he waits — surprisingly patient.
She takes a breath. She can already tell the words are going to hollow her out. She tries to say his name so little, because it guts her every time, and because so few of the Avengers seem to want to hear it.
And she has no-one else to listen.
“Vis never had a childhood,” she says at last. “Not a bad one or a good one — just none at all. The idea of it — all the complexities of physical development combined with cognition and learning and vulnerability — it meant so much to him. He thought it was beautiful, and strange. One of the great mysteries of the universe, he said.” The last few words are strangled. She’d opened her mouth and said his name, and it had floated up out of her like a butterfly tethered to ghostly memories she’d tried to keep down. Ribbons and bows in the tail of a haunted kite. Each word starts to drift up and out of her and she just knows, if she doesn’t choke them back, they’ll keep rising. And while she’s happy to sacrifice the words of her own past to the nightsky, every bit of Vis is too precious and rare to let them slip away into midnight mountain breezes.
“He’d always ask about mine,” she finishes abruptly, shrugging. The words quietly click the whole story closed. “The more he asked, the more I think I remembered.”
Of course, Rocket doesn’t let anything rest, she’s learning. Not unless it suits him. He squints one gleaming red eye up at her.
“What’d you remember?”
She looks out on the sea of tiny lights, like fireflies and gemstones and stars. Over seventy-three thousand little lives, all cradled in the palms of a single mountain range on an unremarkable little planet the midst of a galaxy and universe far wider than she can ever really know.
“I think it was another lab,” she says quietly. “One in the mountains. Not like these mountains — more severe. Cliffs and crags. It felt….haunted.” She takes a steadying breath. “I think there was a man — cold. Casually cruel. He would be silhouetted against these vaulted glass windows overlooking a sheer drop, staring down at me and Pietro. I could feel his disdain — even as a child.” She hesitates. “Sometimes he would hold my head in his hands and stare into my eyes like he was trying to see into my brain. I remember having nightmares after we were adopted. I would dream that he carved into my skull while I was sleeping, to try to find where I kept it.” She shivers. “The magic.”
She can feel Rocket shuttering closed next to her, and she supposes she’s already said too much. Made things uncomfortable between them — been too vulnerable. These intimate little exchanges are never supposed to last more than a handful of sentences, but here she is: spilling them out onto Missoula, as personal and quiet as if she were on a midnight walk with Vis, or curled up beside Pietro in their dark orphanage bed.
But then Rocket sighs beside her, and even in her periphery, she can see his stiff shoulders loosen. He wedges his own forearms against the sill, mimicking her posture as he leans out over Missoula too. She turns her head slowly to look at him, and the breeze that has been playing with her hair now ruffles his fur, too.
“I knew a guy like that once,” he says roughly. “I knew a guy — too much like that.”
She inhales, more slowly than she has since long before she’d ever heard of Thanos. She thinks she can remember the last time she took in air like this: the morning before the Black Order had found them in the streets. She’d stretched against the faded sheets of the bed she’d shared with Vis, and everything had come easy — even her breath.
She exhales — just as slow.
“I don’t trust my memory,” she admits. “I was a child. Maybe I made it all up.”
Rocket grunts. “Don’t sound like something little humie gargoyles just make up.”
She huffs a laugh. “Maybe not, but my adult-mind says he can’t possibly be real,” she tells him quietly. “My memories make him into too much of a… a ghost story. Too much of a legend, or a monster under the bed. A caricature of what he probably really was.”
Rocket doesn’t look at her, but she can see him raise his eyebrow doubtfully. “Prob’ly we all do that with the things that fucked us up when we were kids,” he concedes grudgingly, and she shifts uncomfortably. How to make Rocket understand? The imposing figure, so severe — the words, so cultured and sophisticated — the surrealism of the mountain, snowy and mist-shrouded, stabbing the sky? It’s too fantastical to be real. She’d told Rocket her secret, perhaps ill-advised dream of a town based on the old TV shows she’d seen her childhood; how can she explain how these shadows of her childhood seem like the other side of the coin? She thinks of the man again, and all she can picture is a caricature of a cartoon villain.
“In my memory, I think he always wore all purple,” she explains. Like a uniform. Wanda shakes her head, frustrated. It’s not clear enough. She inhales again, slow and steady. She exhales again — just as measured. When she speaks, her voice is hushed, and she can’t keep that old childhood terror from seeping in at the edges. “In my memory, I think he came back one day without a face.”
scarlet witch was one of the high evolutionary’s subjects in the citadel of science at mount wundagore pass it on. look this is a fluffpiece so will anything come of this? not beyond a lil bit of emotional bonding. maybe volume three would play out a bit differently but we're not going that far. still, i couldn't bear to leave this bit in the comics ♡♡
the raccoon, the witch, & the roadtrip masterlist prev | next [est june 25] | main masterlist
Stop discriminating on skin color/race/gender/religion/sexuality/gender identification/anything people. We are all just human beings. Our differences only make us more interesting!
He’s Sikh, not a terrorist. Poor Sikh comunity always bears the brunt of ISIS terrorist because they wear a simple turban.. Wake up and accept cultural differences, not every foreigner is out to hurt you.
reminder to:
straighten your back
go pee goddAMN IT STOP HOLDING IT
go take your meds if you need to
drink some water
go get a snack if you havent eaten in a while
maybe wander around the house/stretch a little if you’ve been sat at the computer a while (artists especially: sTRETCH THOSE WRISTS)
reply to that text/message from earlier you’d forgotten about
maybe send a nice lil message to someone having a bad day?
Fan art for the amazing fan fic Window Across the Galaxy by raccoonfallsharder
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