[During A Mission]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pretends.

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

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

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

“F’you’re not gonna sleep…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, you can’t.

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

But she can’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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by solitudee

*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

This needs to be tucked in every Rocket fans bedside table as a naughty guilty pleasure. It’s also so beautifully written.

꧁･:☁︎⋆. cicatrix .⋆☁︎:･꧂

chapter four. anthrodynia. [new 3/19] ❤︎

18+ only | rocket x f!oc | 4/25 | wip | word count: pending.

the monster regrets. see below for warnings & notes.

There are two berth-style bunks but he’s always been on his own, and so one has been covered in tools and machines and mines, all in various stages of being constructed or dismantled. She clutches her hands in at her collarbone — just as well, the Monster thinks, because she probably shouldn’t touch any of this shit unless she wants to possibly lose her cute little fingers at best, or blow a hole in the side of the runabout at worst — but he’s startled when she sways over his makeshift workbench, peering down with something like fascination painted on her pretty face. “You made all these?” she asks. Fuck — she sounds so nice like that, voice all drenched with awe and admiration.  He abruptly realizes that he’s still gonna have to figure out the bunk situation. “Shit,” he hisses, and she jumps.  “S-sorry—“ “What—? Not you, pearl.” He sighs. He’s not gonna get any sleep tonight anyway — too focused on getting as far away from HalfWorld as possible, on figuring out where to drop the first careful misdirection, figuring out where to drop her — and would it be so wrong to just have her sleep in his bunk tonight? His dick twitches in response and he seethes. “Lay down,” he orders in a growl.  She hesitates only for a second, then skirts him and lowers herself carefully to the berth, leaning awkwardly as she balances on her unbruised side.

read chapter four on ao3 :･꧂

WARNINGS: aftercare. references to chapter two’s violence. regret. sexual fantasies and general horniness. references to food restriction/dieting.

i appreciate every one of you who has stuck around for this. i'm working hard on this (i have about ten chapters drafted and i'm watching this fic become longer and longer because we will eventually get to "real" plot with like. reuniting with old friends and shit.) there's a little bit of a fix-it fantasy in here for me beyond just comforting & fucking the raccoon. anyway if you stick around i hope you won't be disappointed.

꧁･:☁︎⋆. masterlist, notes, & moodboard .⋆☁︎ :･꧂

some explicit statements or references ✩ abbreviated explicit sequences ❤︎ detailed/prolonged explicit sequences ❤︎❤︎

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

It was fucking great. A+++

just for the record ･:*𑁍✧˚₊ overheard on the bowie is possibly the filthiest, smuttiest, most plotless thing i've ever written. far too many orgasms to be bodily possible. no storyline whatsoever. the emotional depth of a tabletop fountain. please don't expect anything but gratuitous ridiculousness omg sorry

also trying to capture reader's vibe in this oneshot has been absolute hellllll

Good bless you crazy raccoon.

39. Roach

Everything is fine until the roach is airborne.

What I love about Rocket is the 100% sass on the boy. This line is perfection.

Even in alternate universes, like my Entanglement, he would still say this about Quill. Even and maybe especially, if he was in a romantic relationship with Quill. Just because the lil guy loves someone, doesn’t mean that the constant burns, insults, and grumpiness ever stop.

Never go full Quill

A lovelier and more poignant beginning and ending I haven’t read. I cried and smiled at the same time.

the raccoon, the witch, & the roadtrip.✮ part seven. you've arrived at your destination.

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angst, comfort, friendship, & fluff for @hibatasblog rocket & wanda | part 7/7 | word count: 3006.

rocket and wanda complete the most important mission in the galaxy.

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

Needless to say, Rocket hadn’t slept that night. He thinks he might never sleep again. The witch had said what she’d said and he’d promptly spun on his heel and said Welp, time for me to get to bed, and parked himself on the sofa at the foot of the mattress. He’d stayed there all night, staring up wide-eyed at the ceiling, each hand clutched into a pocket: the key-plate in his right palm, and the zune tucked into his left. Both memorized so well by his fingertips that he could take them apart and put them back together, blindfolded in the dark — both grafted onto the skin of his hands so lovingly that the ghosts of their shapes stay with him always, whether he’s awake or sleeping.

It hadn’t been his finest captain-moment. He can admit that to himself. Wanda had just told him something all…vulnerable an’ shit, and he’d been a jackass. 

He’s been trying to get better about stuff like that. Not that Rocket would recommend himself as an ideal person to talk about feelings with, but he’s been trying. Kraglin’s surprisingly softhearted and Rocket’s had to get used to offering some awkward emotional first-aid every once in a while, even if he is frickin’ useless at it. And both himself and Nebula get drunk enough that sometimes they end up saying things they’d never say sober. 

But the witch had said what she’d said, and every strand of Rocket’s fur had stood up in its follicle, prickling with awareness and an instinctive fear. He’d kept track of his sire’s whereabouts, more or less, since his own escape from HalfWorld. At least, he’d listened for the gossip. But he hadn’t considered where else the bastard might’ve had labs back when Rocket himself was still just a kid, still just a scrawny degenerate escapee on the run, living on the streets of Contraxia and Conjunction and anywhere else he could lay low.

He hadn’t considered the High Evolutionary might’ve ever come to Terra. That even this backwater mudball might not be safe. 

So Rocket had tossed and turned all night and stared sullenly out at the landscape all morning, drinking the rest-stop coffee Wanda had silently brought him in some kind of terrible cup she called styrofoam. Now he watches her sideways through slanted crimson eyes, calculating. The lab she’d walked into willingly, with the infinity stone — that had been some bad decision-making on her part. But the other — the place in the mountains, when she’d just been a little humie gargoyle? The one where Herbert E Wyndham had probably gripped her jaw with his palm and wrapped his spindly fingers around the back of her skull like he was measuring it, ready to crack it open and feast on what was inside? Unlikely she’d ever had any sort of choice in that.

And besides. Who’s Rocket to judge, really? It’s not like he hasn’t made a bad decision or two since being raised in the High Shitbag’s lab.

“Sorry,” he grunts at last, into the weird plastic lid on the styrofoam cup. The coffee smells bitter and acrid, and it tastes worse. Not like the stuff that comes outta Nat’s Nespresso, or even the shit they’d had at the little diners sprinkled throughout their route across this stupid continent. 

Her eyelids flicker. “I’m not sure what you’re apologizing for,” she says at last, dryly, gaze still locked on the mountains and trees ahead of them. 

Some kind of weird sound shuffles up from under his ribs: something between a scoff and a reluctant groan. He pinches the bridge of his nose, right between his eyes, and scrunches his body down into the stack of books and the chair cushion under his ass. His tailtip flicks out his discomfort in dots and dashes. He’d always been on the outside — since Halfworld. He’d had his little family — his precious family — in the cages. And then he’d been alone, apart, and separate. No thing like me ‘cept me.

What did the galaxy ever do for you? he’d asked Pete, shrill on the side of a blown-apart skull, still reeling from the tidal wave of purple death. The High Evolutionary’s afterimage had seemed burned into his retinas, glowing the same color as the power stone’s blast. Why would you want to save it? 

Because I'm one of the idiots who lives in it! 

No thing like me ‘cept me, he thinks again. But he’d found his second family, his second precious family — of morons. And he’d found Nebs, almost as singular as himself in the ways she’d been remade. 

And now there’s Wanda. Maybe something like a sister, if he dares to think that way again. 

“Don’t give yourself a migraine,” the witch says sardonically with a sideways flick of her own dark-star, volcanic gaze. He cuts a glare at her from behind the squeeze of his fingers, and makes sure she sees it. 

“Can’t give myself what I already frickin’ got,” he mutters, and there’s a soft breath of a chuckle from her corner of the Terran vehicle. He sighs again. “I dunno. Shoulda said somethin’ last night. Not good at that shit. But what you said…” He hesitates. Clears his throat. Swallows. “Reminded me of some things I’d rather not think about.”

She arches a dark-cherry brow skeptically. “You met an evil, purple-clad mad scientist with no face, too?” 

He cringes, and does what he does best: evades. “More or less.” 

I'm one of the idiots who lives in it! 

Rocket had been lucky to find his idiots. A little pocket of belonging in the glittering junkyard of the galaxy. He drops the hand that’s been pinching his brow and tilts a curious look at Wanda now: open. Thoughtful.

Ain’t no thing like me ‘cept me — except the witch reminds him of himself: his whole first family lost, and then with nothing and no-one to his name. Not till he’d found himself in a pit-prison with a robot and a flora colossus, promising to take care of Groot. Rocket himself doesn’t need any taking-care-of, of course.

…but Wanda seems like she maybe needs a Groot.

And then her own pack of idiots, ‘cause the frickin’ Avengers sure ain’t it.

He clears his throat again, and flips the zune in his hand nervously. His eyes dampen and he looks out the window at the flashing scenery. Terran vehicles are so slow, but sometimes — like this — there’s so much to see that they still feel fast. “I think we got more stuff in common than I realized, is all,” he admits at last, and turns back to narrow his eyes on the witch until she finally glances over, her eyes shifting from the road to his face.

“What?” Wanda asks.

“Meant what I said the other day,” he says at last. The words are slow and measured. Deliberate. For once, he doesn’t leave space to hide behind any sarcasm or jokes. “You should think about comin’ and hanging out with the cool kids in space.”

“Turn here,” Rocket says, consulting the map he’s made on his datapad and pointing at a sidestreet. His clawed hands grip the cylinders that hold the screen open, and the zune is tucked safely between his knees. Then he points. “Now here.” It’s been a maze of streets for the last hour or so, and he wishes Terran travel weren’t so damn two-dimensional. If he’d had the Benatar, he could’ve just dropped down right on top of the place.

“Can you tell me what we’re doing yet?” the witch asks dryly. “How am I supposed to help you if I don’t know—”

“Here, turn here,” he interrupts urgently, and Wanda taps the brakes and lurches to an undignified stop. Her red-dark eyes slash to him, confused, and then furious. Somebody honks, and she mutters something under her breath in a language that his translator identifies as Terran-Sokovian but can’t interpret. She drifts the car across the bikelane and against the curb. 

“I said turn,” Rocket mumbles sulkily. 

“Microsoft?” she growls. The sound is incredulous, but not condemning. Not yet. “Danvers has you completing a mission at the Microsoft campus?”

Rocket grimaces, then offers up what he hopes is a charming smile, even though he knows he’s a toothy little goblin without an ounce of charisma in his scarred-up, metal-riddled body. He can feel his ears trying to flatten plaintively, against his will. It’s not like he’s suddenly developed a conscience or anything, but… 

“Uh. Hm. About that—“

Wanda throws the car into park. A biker swerves around her and gives her the finger, a gesture Rocket recognizes from having seen it delivered almost-daily by Pete. The witch ignores it though, crossing her arms over her chest and turning in her seat to glower at Rocket.

“What kind of evil lurks at the heart of the Microsoft campus?” she drawls sarcastically, but he sees an escape hatch and his ears prick forward.

“Actually—”

“If this is another one of your rants about how fucked-up Terran capitalism is, save it,” she cuts in flatly, and he blinks and tries to remember if he’s heard her swear before. “We all know.”

He gives her a look he just knows can only be interpreted as a pout, and tries to cover it up with a scowl. “Not well enough to change anything, though. F’you people would just adopt the Intergalactic Accords—”

“Enough,” she says sharply, and for a second she’s so like Gamora that it brings a sheen of tears into his eyes and a lump like an infinity stone into his throat. “Rocket. Were you serious about me coming to space?”

He blinks again at the shift in subject. Verbal whiplash. He hadn’t thought she’d even been considering it — not really. Someone should let her know that come hang out with the cool kids really means come hang out with the losers — the people who lose things. But all that comes out of his mouth is, 

“I was.”

He cringes. There’d been more sincerity in those two words than he’s entirely comfortable with.

“Then start telling me the truth,” she grows, her voice low and ominous. Each word is clipped and demanding — unyielding. Unwilling to be dissuaded. Rocket grimaces, lips curling back from his teeth, and coughs a little, trying to scratch out some words.

“Okay,” he mutters at last. “Okay. So, maybe Danvers didn’t send me on a mission.”

Wanda groans and rolls her face into her palms. “You lied to Natasha?”

Not, you lied to me, which Rocket decides is a good sign. Or maybe he’s just fundamentally optimistical after all. The captain of the Guardians of the Galaxy lifts one shoulder in a cautious shrug. “I lie to most everybody at some point.”

Wanda makes a sound that might have been a laugh, if it hadn’t been so choked in frustration.

“In my frickin’ defense, I did need to come out here an’ see this place,” he adds quickly. “And Nebs really is busy workin’ on making Knowhere into a place for refugees with Kraglin and Cosmo. Just got in a transport of displaced Xandarans and everything.” He winces. “Not that those three morons are very good at refugee-work. But like Pete used to say, it’s the thought that costs—”

“—that counts,” Wanda snaps. She lifts her head from her palms and glowers. “And you needed to see this place for what.” It’s delivered so tonelessly that his translator almost doesn’t pick up on it being a question. “So help me, if you tell me this is some…. bizarre space-alien tourist-type shit while everyone else is back in New York doing very important things—”

He grapples. He’s such an impulsive frickin’ creature and he never thinks things through. He’s had days to scheme up what to tell her and now here they are, and he’s been caught empty-handed. “Look, I was just hoping for some ideas to improve my tech—”

“Your tech is better than anything on this planet,” she almost-snarls. “And you know it—”

“What not to do, then—”

“Stop lying.”

He hates the way the words claw and crawl up his ribs, scrabbling scabbed little gremlins with gawky unhinged limbs, like bony monsters climbing in his throat. He tries to cage them with his teeth, but they pry open his jaws and tumble out anyway, sticky and keening and malformed.

“I read they made the zune here.”

The words hit the console between the two of them and lay there, pathetic and dripping over the armrests, into the cupholders. Another biker swerves past the car and somewhere, someone honks. Rocket clenches his jaw and looks away, glaring at the decimated dashboard and the upgraded sound system that looks like a wreck. The datapad snaps shut and he grips the two cylinders in one fist, crossing his arms and trying to pull up every defense he’s still got in his arsenal—

Wanda breathes out, and he can feel it when she deflates against the car door. 

“You could’ve told me that,” she says quietly.

He snickers darkly. “Would you have come? Drove me out here from New York, and left all the other Avengers doing their very important things?” The words are a sneer.

The witch sighs, and he winces in spite of his commitment to pretending to be unbothered. “I don’t know,” she admits. “Maybe not at first, but honestly, there wasn’t much keeping me in New York anyway. And — look at me, Rocket.” 

He doesn’t want to. Sure, maybe he’s acting too sullen to be considered much of a captain right now, but there’s comfort in sullenness and he’s decided he kinda hates being the captain if it means he has to give up Pete and the others to do it. But Wanda waits, and eventually, he deflates too, and turns his firestorm eyes to hers.

But hers aren’t glowing right now — not like when she’s mad, anyway. 

Huh. 

He’d always thought her irises were dark around the fire, but he suddenly realizes they’re actually a kind of tawny hazel: clear, and soft, and sad. 

And honest.

“You could’ve told me back in Chicago,” she says, so gently it hurts. “In Pennsylvania, even. I would’ve said we should keep going. I would’ve wanted you to be here.”

His mouth feels suddenly dry, and every nerve is scraped raw and wounded. He tosses the closed datapad into the backseat and palms the zune from where it’s still gripped between his knees. “It’s stupid,” he admits. “Sen’imentalistic—”

“I think it’s a really good idea,” she interrupts, and her voice is a quiet hum. “I at least—” She hesitates, and he hears her throat working. “Thanos took the part of Vis that made him Vis, and someone—” She stumbles. “I never saw his body after Wakanda. I don’t know who did it, but someone took that away from me, too. And I think not having any little part of him made losing it all so much harder.” She closes her eyes, and Rocket feels his ears flatten further when the corner of her mouth trembles. “I know — with the Snap, I know it was like that for you too. If there’s something you can do that makes you feel closer to — to Pete, then you should do it.” Her eyes open and meet his again, and hold them. “We should do it. Together.”

Rocket feels himself swallow. The witch doesn't remind him of Gamora right now. Instead, her voice and all the words in it sound like they're coming from Lylla. He looks away — out the front, and then out the copilot-side window. Passenger-side, he corrects himself mentally. Tears clutter up on his lower lashes, silvering everything in his line of sight. “What about your very-important Avengers things?”

There’s a sound in the back of her throat that he can’t identify: something cynical, and amused, and sad.

“I’ve never really been much of an Avenger,” she admits softly. “Besides. At this point, I’m beginning to feel like this is the most-important thing we could be doing right now.”

The silver runs over his lower lids and into his fur. He sighs, and scrubs the back of his paw over the end of his nose, and slants his head toward her. When he speaks, he can’t keep the words from sounding strangled.  “There’s, like, tours or some shit here. At this Microsoft-place.” He tries to wrangle out a cocky smirk, but he knows it falls lopsided on his mouth. “Real tourist-type shit.”

Wanda huffs out a low, forlorn little laugh. “I have a feeling you’re going to be disappointed,” she tells him. “This company has nothing on your inventions, so don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

He shrugs, and something in him eases. He allows himself a single sniffle while the tight knot of ice in the back of his throat starts to melt at the edges. “If it’s all crap, I can still enjoy myself by makin’ fun of it,” he reasons, and she snorts softly. Those eyes of hers are warm with affection.

“Even though they made the zune?" she teases gently.

He opens his palms in mock-helplessness. “Even a broke multicalendar is right once a circumrotation.”

She smiles and shakes her head, and turns in her seat to wrap her palms around the steering wheel. “You’re going to have to teach me what all these phrases mean, if I’m coming out to space with you,” she tells him lightly, and shifts into drive.

His ears tilt forward, and he grins — small, but real, this time. There’s a little flare of gleeful triumph at the base of his skull. His legs swing in front of his seat without his conscious permission, and he turns the zune over in his palm, fingers tracing the well-known ridges and rounded corners without taking his eyes off Wanda’s profile, and the sun glancing all gold-and-green off her hazel irises. 

Yeah. Maybe she could be something like a sister, after all. 

“We can start on the way back to New York,” he promises.”You’ll have the best guide in the galaxy, sweetheart.”

“Okay, okay,” the witch utters sardonically, one eyebrow raised. She glides the Terran vehicle carefully back out into the street. “Guide me to a parking spot first, Captain.”

that's it. that's the fanfic. clearly i’ve never been to the microsoft campus before so i was relying a hundred percent on maps and streetview and reddit and the campus website lol. thank you thank you for suspending your disbelief, and for all your kindness ♡ i hope you enjoyed this LENGTHY fuckin headcanon of mine, all inspired by the magical @hibatasblog, the gorgeous rocket raccoon, and the incompetence of the endgame creators lol. my gratitude to them forever. ˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗

the raccoon, the witch, & the roadtrip masterlist prev | main masterlist this will eventually be posted on ao3, probably as a one-shot.

Everybody grab your animal!

Some of you may remember my popular bi, pan, and asexuwhale trio from last year. Well, I’ve decided to redo the set and add EVEN MORE SEXUWHALES (and an aromanatee!)

Featuring: Bisexuwhale - humpback whale Homosexuwhale - sperm whale Pansexuwhale - narwhal/narwhale Polysexuwhale - beluga whale Asexuwhale - killer whale/orca Aromanatee - manatee

All are available in my Redbubble shop as stickers, shirts, mugs, and more; text-less versions will be added to my shop soon, too.