cicatrix .⋆☁︎ :･꧂

by raccoonfallsharder

Summary:

a story about scars. two survivors learn about themselves, each other, hope, and the universe.
a freakish little monster visits the high evolutionary’s bride on her wedding night. an adventure of intergalactic proportions ensues. aka raccoons make plans; the universe laughs.

 

inspired by mary shelley’s frankenstein; or, the modern prometheus. enemies-to-lovers (as per frickin’ usual, only one of these idiots think they’re enemies.) while the beginning of this fic is dark and fast-burn, we move to like… slow-burn with intense growing intimacy & healing almost right away, and we always get happy endings here. please pay attention to all warnings for every chapter.

this fic is a longform expansion on wyndham; or, the galactic prometheus (day 31) of °˖✧♡kinktober 2023

Chapter 1: nemotia.

Summary:

wyndham’s bride lands on counterearth in time to prepare for her wedding. an unexpected guest arrives.

Notes:

warnings: discussion of non-sexual child abuse and grooming. brief mentions of suicidal ideations. animal/pet death. canon-typical violence.
coming soon:chapter two. ambedo.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

nemotia. the fear that you’re utterly powerless to change the world around you, looking on helplessly at so many intractable problems out there—slums that sprawl from horizon to horizon, daily headlines of an unstoppable civil war, a slick of air pollution blanketing the skyline—which makes the act of trying to live your own life feel grotesque and self-indulgent. Slovenian nemočen, powerless. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Something is terribly wrong.

It has been for years, if she’s being honest. She can’t even remember the way food tastes anymore – not without the sick slickness of dread filling her mouth.

The fact that this new planet reminds her of home makes her ribs tighten around her heart: a calcium jawtrap for her lungs. The teeth punch through, and it feels like she’s drowning in her own blood. The planet is so close to being Terra — but it’s not quite right, which just makes it all the more uncanny. Herbert had told her the sky would be as blue and clear as Terra’s, but it’s been storming ever since they’d broken through the atmosphere. The heavens are boiling with clouds the color of rot, and electricity scratches the bruised sky with grasping, broken fingers. The buildings all look like older, ghostlier versions of the ones she remembers leaving behind.

She’s been tucked in the little ship between Vim and Theel for hours since they’d left Wundagore II, and they’ve finally coasted past the drenched subdivisions that are identical to — if emptier than — the ones had always been outside of her mother’s price range. Now the small ship glides silkenly between lonesome dark skyscrapers. Finally, there in the marble courtyard off the harbor, rises the inhumanly-large and imposing statue of Herbert. She tilts her head and eyes the monument, but keeps her expression clear. It’s supposed to gleam in the sunlight, she imagines: a beacon of bright perfection. But it only looks oily in this light, and the swollen air smells all wrong — like bad days near the poultry-slaughtering factory she grew up next to, back when she was just Liz.

She slides her hands into the folds of her dress and clenches them. All day, they’ve been cold. She’s been cold. The fine crushed wool that Vim had given her — majestic purple, with compliments, from Sire — normally would have been just enough to keep her… well, not comfortable. But at a precisely-calibrated temperature of Wyndham’s choosing.

Unfortunately, she’s frozen: a cold that leaks out from the inside. Fingers like dripping icicles, clutching into panels of precisely-tailored fabric. She’s not sure she knows how to feel fear anymore — she hasn’t felt anything as warm as that in ages. But the space behind her ribs is full of glacial foreboding, ominously creeping between every organ like spreading frost. The small spacecraft drops gently to the marble outside the Arete, and there’s the deep hum of the door opening and the ramp lowering.

“Shall we disembark, M’dame Lavenza?”

It’s not a question — not really. It’s a cue.

She takes a moment to make sure everything is where it’s meant to be: no unsightly creases in her coat, no furrow between her brow. No quivers in the corners of her mouth. Her spine is straight and when she stands, she discreetly rolls her shoulders — and when they drop, everything else falls with them: every tiny scrape of humanity or softness in her eyes, not a single tightened muscle in her face.

Nothing can touch me, she thinks.

Vim and Theel step out onto the slanted bridge, unrolling a small portable canopy above them, and she glides out between them. They make their way down the ramp and take two small, precise strides into the courtyard, and then she feels it: a prickle of heated awareness.

She hasn’t felt anything like that in so long that it almost makes her stumble. She halts abruptly — freezing seems like an accurate term, in more than one sense — and Theel takes an extra half-step before realizing he’s ahead of her. He shifts back in a subtle moment of self-correction.

“M’dame Lavenza?” Vim inquires.

It feels like — being watched. Of course, she’s always watched — so much that she barely notices anymore — but this is different. She casts her eyes around the grim marble courtyard sprawling in front of the Arete, looking for the source.

“Is Herbert here?”

Usually, when she’s watched, it’s somehow both hawkish and glazed — like she’s a chess piece who remains unnoticed as long as she’s in her proper place. If she follows the map that Herbert has made for her, then everything proceeds smoothly.

But this gaze feels inherently changeful.

“Not yet, M’dame. I believe he is down in the labs. He will be back in an hour for dinner — and your nuptials, of course.”

The feeling shifts, misting into the rain, and she’s suddenly certain she’s made a mistake. Feverish, frightened fantasies, she supposes. The wish for something cataclysmic to happen before tonight.

“Thank you, Vim.”

“Is something wrong, M’dame?”

She doesn’t let anything flicker across her face. This little misstep will already be reported to Herbert. M’dame paused on the bridge. It was very odd of her to break her stride, and ungraceful.

“No, Vim. And please don’t call me that.”

That will get reported too, but at least it’s an expected behavior at this point.

She’s halfway across the courtyard before something flickers in the corner of her eye — perhaps just a particularly heavy pool of water sliding suddenly off the side of the canopy. She doesn’t pause this time, though. Instead, pace still fluid and unchanging, she asks flatly, “Are there other technicians and employees on HalfWorld yet, Vim?”

“No, M’dame. Sire will be bringing thirty additional Recorders next cycle, once they are fully processed — ten servants, ten guards, and ten technicians. In the meantime, you will have to make due with Theel and myself.”

“No other lifeforms?”

Theel coughs. “No, M’dame. None yet.”

She slides her eyes toward Theel coldly. “I wasn’t speaking to you.”

“Of course not, M’dame.”

She nods once, keeping every muscle of her face relaxed. Perhaps that hadn’t been fair. She’s been quick to anger with Theel since she was fifteen. Still, an apology for her brusque behavior would not be accepted, nor would it be found acceptable. She lets the Recorders flank her instead, easily herding her toward the glass pyramid, and she doesn’t allow herself to think about the desolation of being one of only four people on this whole broad planet — because it doesn’t really make a difference.

Nothing can touch me.

Vim and Theel guide her to the mouth of the Arete, then roll up their canopy. Soundlessly, they stalk beside her, as cold and cloying as the rain, touring her through the icy glass pyramid that will be her new home with mild, empty commentary. The inside of her ribs grows more and more frozen while they glance at her soullessly with their dead eyes — trading their observation of her in theory-second shifts — as they lead her through the corridors.

And then suddenly, something burns against the back of her neck: hot. Furious. Sneering. Every tiny hair on her body rises and without thinking, she touches her nape with her fingers.

“M’dame?”

They’re both looking at her like an insect to take apart, leg by leg. A set of butterfly wings, to be descaled. Her touch lingers on her neck even though she knows she should pull her hand away, but she wants that fire on her fingers. She forces herself not to blink, not to lick her lips, and to bring her hand back to its resting position in front of her abdomen.

“Show me to my room, please.”

“Of course.”

The heat is still there — the only warmth in this entire frigid building. Under the back of her collar, her skin burns. She revels in it. She tries to memorize the feel of it, before it goes.

“Sire has decided to grant you your own wing of the Arete,” Theel tells her, his voice an ingratiating simper that has her heart thudding resentfully in her chest. She schools her face: a careful void. “He has named it the Astraea. Isn’t that delightful?”

“Delightful,” she echoes coolly, and tries not to vomit on the floor. Her mouth is sour and her stomach twists.

Vim murmurs a comment that she misses, but it’s clearly meant to be the Recorder’s attempt at levity. Theel titters, and says something about how lovely M’dame Lavenza will doubtless look tonight, but she doesn’t respond. Doesn’t look at either of them. When they pass a corridor lined with slanted windows, she can see that the storm continues to infect the sky like black mold. There’s a distant roll of thunder and she remembers being a child running out into the rain, unafraid of lightning, hands cupped to the thunder and the sheets of pouring water — open and welcoming the weeping sky.

Vim and Theel bow and scrape in a way that forces her have to soften her shoulders with her next exhalation. She empties out all the broken, tangled-up emotions inside her, and doesn’t allow herself a scrap of self-pity. She’s knows that at best, she’s a willing, foolish offering — a little girl lured to a sacrificial altar by pretty words.

At worst — well. She knows what she is at her worst.

She has blood on her hands, after all.

Nothing can touch me.

They arrive at a door and Theel presses the sensor panel, and the door slides open. There’s that heat again, curling up the nape of her neck and along the base of her skull, and she tries not to feel it.

She steps inside.

“I’ll be back shortly with your attire for tonight, M’dame,” Vim says, and both Recorders nod before the door slides closed between her and them.

She breathes. She keeps her face placid. She looks up at the corners of the room, and then traces her fingers lingeringly along the carving in the dark wood headboard and the simple plasma orb lamp. She’s always been a tactile person, and it’s easy enough to disguise what she’s doing, even though she probably doesn’t need to bother.

Herbert doesn’t usually put holocams in her rooms. That kind of surveillance would imply that he doesn’t have complete control without them.

And after all, he’s no voyeur.

She traces her fingers over the slanted glass window, rippling with sheaves of pouring water. She tests the seams and finds the mechanism to open it — but no, it’s locked, with some hidden latch or bolt that she can’t find.

She should have guessed, of course. She hasn’t ever actually tried, but she supposes Herbert would have decided that tonight is not a night for taking chances.

She drifts toward the dresser. The mirror is plain and flat and also doesn’t appear to be hiding a holocam or a hidden window, and the drawers — of course — are empty. There’s an Acanti-ivory handmirror and a matching wide-toothed comb, and a little white porcelain bowl full of tiny nacre-and-pearl hairpins. Something that looks like an enormous conch shell, too — and draping from its mouth is a loop of pearls on a silk string so long that if she doesn’t coil it more than twice around her neck, it will probably drag on the floor. This is a message, she knows: what she’s expected to wear tonight. A few paces away is another sliding door. She taps the sensor and it slides open, revealing a walk-in closet. When she steps inside, she sees it’s bigger than her tiny Terran bedroom had ever been, even to her then-childish eyes. It’s empty too — as expected. She stands in the doorway and leans against the frame, and wonders if it might be worth it to pull the starched white quilt and the too-firm pillows off the bed, to build herself a little escape in the back corner of the closet.

It’s a stupid impulse, but it’s been there since shortly after she joined Herbert: the desire to tuck herself away anywhere small and hidden, some place she can pretend is cozy and soft, somewhere she can fold herself up as small as possible, somewhere with a hundred blankets so that she can finally get warm, so she can pretend—

So she can pretend.

There are no hanging mechanisms in the closet, but there is a shelf just at her eye-level. She slides out of her crushed velvet coat, and folds it, and tucks it there neatly. It’s a lovely color and she might have liked it if it hadn’t been styled to mimic Herbert’s armor. Then she slides out of her thin shoes as well, and tucks them into the dark corner of the closet, just next to the door. Her stockings are damp and she wiggles her toes, trying to decide whether or not it’s more unseemly to have them on or off when Vim returns.

Then she wiggles her toes again, because even that stupid, tiny act feels rebellious.

Fidgety, Herbert would have said disdainfully..

Her stockings slip on the slick wooden floor and she crawls onto the rigid bed, over the stiff, thin white quilt and onto the crisply-covered pillows, and she rolls up her long skirt carefully to avoid wrinkles, and she tucks her knees up to her chest. Then she leans forward and digs her upper teeth into her knee as hard as she can, biting, and she forces air out of her throat. It’s a stage-whisper of a sound, but it feels like a scream: tearing, exhausting, shredding. Her eyes well up, fat tears on her lashes — a weakness she’s been able to temper but never fully tame; she’s always cried like a baby — and her knee bruises from her teeth.

She screams like a ghost again.

There’s a knock on the door.

She unfolds her legs and rolls her skirt back down, spreading it around her and smoothing it out. Rolling her shoulders, she exhales, and this time she whispers it out loud — so quietly that she can barely hear it herself.

“Nothing can touch me.”

Her throat is still raw. She raises her voice. “Enter.”

“M’dame.”

Vim is alone this time. She has a sweeping armful of white fabric in her hands: a raw silk confection in cream, layers on layers of delicate fraying fabric, slightly coarse and shimmering distantly. No brassiere tonight, but there is a simple, tiny pair of dainty silk panties — equally coarse — and silk stockings with pearl-buttoned garters. Little silk slippers each set with a cluster of pearls on the toe and no soles to speak of, all in muted ivories.

Vim lays the clothing at the foot of the bed.

“Your coat and shoes, M’dame?”

M’dame Lavenza stares at the Recorder evenly, one brow delicately arched, her voice smooth and calm and strong. “I’m keeping them in my closet, where they belong.”

Vim doesn’t even sigh, doesn’t even sound like she needs to practice her patience. Her voice is as smooth and practical as it has always been, since the first time they’d had this discussion. “M’dame Lavenza.” The Recorder dips her head in solemn acquiescence, but the words are a denial. “You know that is not an option.”

The girl doesn’t rise, though Vim wouldn't expect her to. It’s the strange game she plays with the Recorders: all three of them have to pretend she’s in charge.

Vim collects the coat and shoes, and leaves her to her own devices, closing the door quietly.

The girl hesitates, then reaches out and touches the dress. It’s a frothy cloud of transparent silks and, in another life, she might have wanted to wear it. It’s true that she’s always liked pretty things, though her definition is a bit wider than Herbert’s. Then she sighs and unfastens the buttons at her collar, peeling herself out of her current stiff white dress, her seamless undergarments and thin stockings.

Then she slides into the new ones.

The dress is a draping, misty sheath of layers and layers of airy silk, so thin that even where the fabric overlaps four or more times, it’s still sheer. It wraps so tightly around her shoulders and bodice that the fabric strains, then flares at her waist, billowing into clouds of excess cloth at her feet. It’s unlikely that the tailor had forgotten her height, which means that Herbert chose this for The Look. She can imagine Herbert picturing her, still and unmoving as a statuette at his side. He won’t think of her as having difficulty walking in it, and if she does, it will only be another failing of her own.

Her body gets even colder in the frail gown — another shortcoming of hers, she supposes. Herbert says he keeps every building and ship calibrated to the optimal temperature, after all.

She stares into the mirror and lets her lips twist to the side in concern. There’s no reason to hide her expressions here, other than wanting to practice her good habits. So she indulges: sticking her tongue out at her own reflection, baring her teeth, furrowing her brow. Then she sighs and tugs upward on the low, off-the-shoulder neckline: so low she can see the edge of her areolas blushing over the hem of the bodice, and so translucent she can see the shadow of her nipples underneath.

Herbert doesn’t actually care about breasts in any sort of sexual sense, she’s certain. He’s never been attracted to her a day in his life, and she highly doubts that this wedding night of hers will involve any consummation whatsoever. But he is single-minded in his pursuit of what he thinks is aesthetic, of what he thinks is perfect, of what he’s made.

What he thinks is worth claiming.

Her face in the mirror is flat and unaffected. She studies it critically, then winds herself in the gossamer-strung pearls, letting them drip over her throat — collarbone — shoulders. She measures each loop carefully in the mirror. Herbert’s preferred proportions are etched on her memory more certainly than her own.

Once the strand is coiled around her neck like a collar and she can feel each smooth, silken droplet like a cold kiss on her skin, she slides the single silver hairpin from her hair. It is long and narrow and sharp, tipped with warm white pearls and two slender, blushing feathers. A punishment, and a penance. Balancing the pin reverently on her little dresser, she runs her fingers through the dark hair tumbling free of its loosened chignon. The rain has made her soft curls into something frizzed and fleecy, and Herbert Will Not Like It, especially when it’s their wedding celebration.

She snorts softly, and then flinches, eyes skittering to the still-shut door. Wedding celebration. Here she is in a fairy-tale princess-dress — scandalous neckline and transparency aside — about to marry her wealthy and powerful husband. And all she’s wondering is whether or not she can break the glass in the window.

Probably not.

Which means that Vim and Theel will come and collect her discarded clothing and escort her down to Herbert, and together they’ll sign the universal spousal electrocontract, and she’ll be… whatever is equivalent to married out here.

Forever.

It’s all very sentimental and romantic.

She uses the smaller pearl pins to wrestle her hair into something elegant. She doesn’t remember the name of the style, but her coiffeur had trained her in twenty Herbert-approved braids and knots for her dark, curly hair when she was… fourteen, maybe? He’d taught her each different look on a mannequin and had watched her plait and twist and pin until she could complete each one flawlessly on her own head by muscle memory alone.

Now she tucks a wayward curl back and stares at herself, then hesitates. The fact that a wealth of small pearl pins had been left on the dresser certainly meant she was supposed to wear them — but does Herbert still want the feathered pin in her hair? He hasn’t specified, and she grapples with the uncertainty before finally plucking up the slender, silvery stake and sliding it carefully into her new chignon, letting the cool metal glide against her scalp as it goes.

There.

Astraea.

Like every gift from Herbert, the name comes with expectations. She stares at her reflection, and she supposes she can see it: what he’s been trying to shape her into. She tilts her head: hollow under the skin. Then she leans forward abruptly, hinging at the waist so she can peer into the mirror, and lets her expression fall into something more natural than the icy stoicism she’s learned to pull on with a breath.

She imagines taking her twelve-year-old self’s face in her palms.

“Nothing can touch you.” She doesn’t know if it’s a warning or a consolation. And it’s not true, of course, but it’s safe. Safer. Nobody is supposed to touch her, after all — and while it’s not an immediate death sentence, it is a danger.

Physical touch can lead to affection, and it’s the affection that’s deadly.

So this one of Herbert’s rules has become a little bit of superstition for her — a little bit of magical thinking. A solace and a sorrow, an open wound and a scar. A talisman. If she can keep people away, then maybe—

She shuffles to the bed amidst her clouds of silk, and folds up the clothing that Vim will inevitably come to collect. Thunder rumbles in the distance again — and then the breath is sucked from her lungs as everything goes dark.

She blinks — frozen, again — and tries to wait for her eyes to adjust. The only light visible is from the lone slanted window, locked and unforgiving. It reflects in the mirror, at least: a deep gray wavering illumination, doubled in silver: just starless-sky darkness, muted further by the rain thumping and slicking itself over the glass, streaming like blood.

She hasn’t experienced a blackout since before Herbert had spirited her away from Terra at the tender age of twelve. Generally speaking, the technology he had created on Wundagore II had been nearly incapable of breaking down, of malfunctioning. The Homonoia — Herbert’s tiresome name for the lab and her tower on Wundagore II — had never suffered from any technological issues, though it had certainly seen its share of other kinds of suffering. She’s surprised that on this planet — in his uninhabited, paradisiacal city — a simple thunderstorm has proven enough to bring down any of the systems he’s put in place.

After all, it’s unthinkable that his creations might be flawed.

As if on cue, the thunder cracks so loudly that she feels it in her collarbones, and she jumps and whirls, legs catching and stumbling in the yards of fine silk swirled around her feet.

She wants to be outside. She wonders what it would be like to try and find her way out of this pyramid, to hike up all these too-much skirts around her knees and run, barefoot, to laugh just for a second, to get struck by lightning and levitate right up into the air on a string of electrons until every thought winks out and her bones turn to ash.

There’s a sharp knock at the door.

“It’s Vim, M’dame. May I enter?”

At least it isn’t Theel. The thought of him makes her throat clench. When she looks at him, all she can see is the little pink bird that Herbert had given her when she’d turned thirteen: as tiny as a hummingbird, all rose-quartz and blush and cotton-candy-colored, affectionate as a little kitten. She’d named the birdling Fairy, and it had slept on her pillow: the only little friend that the future M’dame Lavenza — then just Miss Lizette — had been allowed on Wundagore II.

The tiny bird had stayed by her side for two whole years of unfailing sweetness.

The girl still can’t look at Theel without making sure to empty her lungs and her face. Sometimes her eyes still sting at the memory, but she saves her tears for her bedroom.

“Come in,” she calls to Vim, her voice so faint it surprises her. It almost certainty can’t be heard over the drumming of rain on the windows. She clears her throat and tries again, more firmly this time. “Come in, Vim. And please don’t call me M’dame.”

There’s the creak of the door and her eyes have adjusted at this point to see the shadow of it open, and then Vim is entering with a gold-flamed candle. Its scintillatingly warm halo is a pocket of comfort and familiarity in the cold, wounded shadows of Herbert’s pyramid.

“Sire asked me to retrieve your discarded clothes, and to bring you a candle and this missive, M’dame. He requests you remain in your chambers while he sorts this unexpected… power issue.”

It brings her some relief, to be honest, despite the Recorder’s refusal to call her anything but the title Herbert has required — despite both of them knowing that Herbert’s requests are anything but. At least this means it will be a little longer till she has to see him. How has he gone from being such a comfort, to such a source of dread?

Had he always been a monster?

Probably, she thinks. He’s too smart to have not known what he was doing when he started manipulating a child. Visiting Terra regularly — being so kind to the lonely, unloved little girl with bruises on her arms, whose mother never asked where she was, who was allowed to run loose in electrical storms. He’d brought little soft animals out of his ship for her to pet and cuddle and feed: a baby fox, a little possum. A bunny, once. A turtle. Each one perfect, and sweet. That little girl had showered each one of them with love before he’d taken them back inside his ship and left — until next time, he’d say.

“Thank you, Vim. Of course I’ll stay here.” She accepts the candle without inflection, and the folded bit of parchment as well, sealed with a bit of laser-stamped wax. “Is there any way that I might help?”

Something flickers in Vim’s face: something between surprise, and disbelief, and maybe disdain. “Thank you, M’dame, but all will be well in short order. We’ll retrieve you for dinner and your nuptials then.”

That’s fine. She’d known it would be the answer anyway. She’s only Herbert’s useless little keepsake, after all.

But maybe — if the three of them are distracted, then maybe—

How likely is it, she wonders, that she might find her way out of the maze of the Arete? She can’t fly a ship, of course — by design — but she could get the rain on her face and under her feet. She could run.

She could decide whether or not to walk into the ocean and never look back.

She hasn’t felt that strange scorch on her neck since she’d gotten tucked away into this little vault — but maybe if she got outside, she’d feel it again. Frightening, but something. Something other than this dense constant aching weight.

Vim half-bows and retreats as the girl accepts Herbert’s missive and opens his seal. She begins to unfold the parchment — and then freezes at the soft swish and dull thunk of the lock sliding into place in the door.

Have they locked her in?

It’s the first time in ages that a flare of panic ignites, hot and bright behind her sternum. The layers and loops of pearls clatter softly together as she shoves the crumpled missive into her bodice and grabs an armful of creamy silk, winding it around her fist, trying to lift the layers enough to stumble toward the door without tripping. She slaps the sensor — stupid, she thinks; of course it doesn’t respond with the electrical systems down. But when she tries to slide the door sideways with the manual handle, it catches and holds. She heaves with all her weight, balancing her candle in her other hand, silk-stockinged feet nearly sliding out from under her as she pulls desperately — nearly going down, almost lighting her skirts ablaze with the candle.

Stop, stop, she tells herself, but that kernel of panic ignites everything she’s been keeping down, every little-girl fear and sting of despair, every loss and panic and sorrow. For a second, the fire burns up through her lungs and she can feel her breasts straining against the neckline of the dress. She almost calls out — cries, like a child, begs to be let out — but she slaps her hand over her mouth and manages to swallow it before more than a muffled moan can escape her fingers. She buckles down on the bite of the sob, forcing it out of her shoulders and into the cold pit of her belly.

Practice pays off, she supposes.

Besides, Vim is probably already gone, having fulfilled Herbert’s orders. And the girl has no desire for either of the Recorders to hear her beg — not that it would do her any good. They may let her do almost anything she likes as long as it doesn’t contradict Herbert’s rules — of which there are many — but once he’s made his wishes clear, they are merciless in their execution.

Of that, M’dame Lavenza is certain.

She forces her breathing into something resembling normalcy, and she bundles up the silk of her skirt again, and makes her way to the bed. The dress isn’t physically uncomfortable, other than being so long and flowing that she can’t possibly be graceful in it — a fact which Herbert is sure to hate. And at least no-one is here to see her breasts nearly escaping it. But she’s suddenly overwhelmed by the desire to pull all the almost-soft white things off the bed and make that little cocoon she’d imagined in the corner of the closet.

It’s probably something very messed up in her brain, she thinks: that being so deprived of freedom has made her cling to small spaces when she is at her most-anxious. When she was a child and things got too loud and sad and sharp in her mother’s little home, she’d take off and run into the fields and climb trees and lose herself in a sky as big and wide as the whole world. It’s not an option anymore, and so all she wants to do is tuck herself into a shadowed corner and burrow into blankets and sob herself quietly to sleep.

Of course, if she does that now, it seems likely that the lights will come on more quickly than not, and the Recorders will return, and she’ll be brought to Herbert in creased and tear-spotted silk with unsightly red-rimmed eyes. His lip will curl and she’ll get that coldness in her belly and she’ll have to wonder if he’s only going to make a cutting remark, or if his disappointment will lead to some kind of punishment. Unlikely — but always possible.

Always.

Nothing can touch me here.

It’s a protective charm and a curse.

She finally shuffles her way across the room to perch on the edge of the massive, rigid mattress, setting the candle on the table beside it. She plucks the crumpled parchment from her bodice with shaking fingers. It’s dark enough that she has to lean toward the glowing little flame to read the words.

My flawless pearl,

I regret that dinner and thus our marriage must be delayed. Having not seen you in many cycles, and having waited so long to make our union official, I had hoped to enjoy reports of your progress tonight. I trust you have learned much in our time apart, and have incorporated your learning into your conduct, presence, and bearing.

I admit that I also look forward to eventually sharing my current undertakings with you. While I don’t expect you to understand the science of my pursuit, I believe you are capable of appreciating the beauty of the goal itself, as well as the eventual outcome.

The Arete is too dangerous for you to wander around as a newcomer in the dark, and so I must require you to remain confined to your room in the meantime. Rest now, so that we may still dine and formalize our accord tonight.

I would hate to find you injured.

With Affection,

Your Bertie

Of course, he hasn’t been Bertie in ages — and she’s also fairly certain that “with affection,” for Herbert, means no more than one might feel for a well-trained pet.

At best.

The thunder curls ominously around her in the dark. There’s another claw of lightning, and everything goes skeletal-white for a moment, the room becoming its own stark negative.

She sighs, her heartbeat finally easing in her chest, even though her sternum still aches. She refolds the letter, and lays it next to the candle. And then she covers her face with her hands.

She’s tried so many times: to figure out how to flee. How to get away. She’d been so young when she’d met Herbert — alone in a field between the woods and the dam, staring up at a massive ship. A child, still in her single digits, sad and alone and hurting. And he had stepped out of the hatch and strolled down the ramp, and he had seemed so nice. Vim and Theel had been collecting up little animals with live-traps.

They are unwell, Herbert had told her patiently, letting her press her cheek into the fur of a baby bunny. It had been frightened in Theel’s grasp but she had cooed at it and stroked the space between its brows until its little heartbeat had eased. I take them to my home, and I make them better.

He’d let Vim take her to the rabbits’ den and she had worried that the mother would come back and be distraught that her babies were gone.

The doe will forget quickly, Herbert had told her calmly — coldly, she suspects, now that she’s wiser. She won’t be haunted by a broken heart. And then, carefully: Would your mother be haunted if you disappeared?

It had been a knife in her small little heart because even then, she’d known the answer was no — and Herbert had known it too; in fact, she’s certain now that it had been the only reason he’d asked — but she couldn’t bring herself to believe it of the rabbits.

What if you bring them back and the mama doesn’t remember them? she’d asked. And what if they can’t figure out how to live like rabbits in the wild?

He’d looked down at her with something like pity, but less forgiving.

Don’t worry. I won’t let them go without making sure they can live properly.

Still, she’d cried silently — already skilled in that particular art. She’d wept fat crystal tears while collecting handfuls of the soft fur and nesting materials that lined their little burrow, and she’d carefully made them a softer, more comforting place to sleep in their cage. Something that had smelled like home, and safety, and love for them.

Nearly a year later, he had brought her a small cake from the far reaches of the galaxy — some kind of honeyed bread, topped with a fruit she didn’t recognize, and sparkling with sugar. It had been her tenth birthday, and the only kindness she’d received in weeks, and she’d tearfully begged him to take her away with him. It had taken two more years of pleading, but he’d finally obliged.

Now, she’s wiser. She sees how it was done. He had probably expected her reaction to his small gift. He’d used it to his advantage. He’d let her beg him for two years so she would be so grateful when he said yes, so pliable, so eager to become whatever he wanted.

She hadn’t realized how much older he had been compared to her — how much older he had been compared to anyone she’d ever known.

How much more manipulative he’d been.

Of course, he’d taken great pains to ensure her safety. Her health. Her academics. She’d always enjoyed learning and it had been such an easy way to gain his approval. Languages, philosophy, etiquette — literature, scientific principles, theoretical maths, music — physics far more advanced than anything she could have possibly learned on Terra.

Nothing practical, though. Nothing immediately applicable. She had tried: to figure out how money works out here. To make friends with the Wundagorish locals and the servants. To learn how to fly a ship. And when her requests for knowledge and experience had gone unanswered, she’d managed to sneak out and learn on her own — or at least, to try. She hadn’t even realized, yet, that she might want to leave him some day. She’d only been a fifteen-year-old with the smallest, most fragile urge for rebellion. Not an ounce of vitriol in her body: just a young girl who was devoted to a man who happened to be a bit overprotective. She would learn to fly, she’d thought — just the basics. And he would be pleased by her learning, even if he was irritated by her going against his rules. After all, back home at this age, she’d be learning how to drive. Surely, she’d believed, this was a reasonable equivalent.

And then she’d been caught by a mechanic in the hangar, and Herbert had looked at her with such disappointment. It had made her feel sick inside and it probably would have been enough all on its own to make sure she never tried again.

It would have been enough on its own — but Herbert had wanted to make sure.

It’s funny. She’s certain now that Herbert barely remembers the bunnies, or the little opposums, or the chipmunks. But she’d never forgotten them — not at all. After her shock had worn off, her mind had returned to them with a vengeance. She’d started to wonder what he’d done with them after all. The thoughts plagued her every night. She’d stopped sleeping — mind scrambling, turning over the possibilities, balking with ever-growing horror as the quarters passed and she just kept making mistakes, she just kept not-learning.

Now she sits at the bottom of this relentless and endless well of cruelty and control and reminds herself of how stupid she is, how many wrong choices she’s made. How useless she is, sitting in the lap of luxury while Herbert does what Herbert does, to whomever he wants.

Things had only gotten worse over the next five or so years. At the end of it, she’d glazed out: body constantly cold, teeth aching, face blank and empty. Maybe another five years had come and gone like that, though she’d only noticed because for some reason, Herbert has always honored her Terran birthday with religious regularity.

She’d cried over that first cake he’d given her on Terra and while Herbert never does anything to be nice, she supposes he believes she appreciates this little tradition. He’s cruel, yes, but she suspects he doesn’t mean to be — at least not in this case. She suspects cruelty doesn’t even register in his mind. He probably thinks she’s sentimental about her birthday and his stupid cakes, and that honoring this tradition will keep her docile and content. And so every year, she eats two bites of the cake and sets it aside — which he approves of — and thanks him for whatever gift he has brought her, and then she goes to her room and stares at the wall and loses time until sunrise, face wet and body shuddering in silence.

Now she presses her elbows into her knees and her palms into her eyes, curving herself in the inky darkness. The thunder rattles the glass panes in the windows behind her and she stills her breathing and she closes her eyes, and she pictures the little cemetery she keeps in her mind: three little tombstones, pretty and white. Fairy’s name is carved on one under a cherry blossom tree. She’d always wondered if she had killed the pets that came after, and in some desperate superstitious hope, she has not made tombstones for them. If she doesn’t make them, she reasons, then maybe they’ll still be alive.

But she does keep two other blank stones — nestled in blue hydrangeas and white delphinium.

She sits with them and presses the heels of her hands deeper into her eyes, and she tries to imagine the scent of the flowers, the feel of the grass between her fingers and toes. She traces the letters and the tops of the stones, smooth and sharp-edged.

And then, on the back of one bare shoulder, she feels that burn again: hot, scalding. Before she can even look around, the escaped wisps of curls at the nape of her neck suddenly shift.

Her head snaps up and she whirls on one hip, nearly falling off the edge of the bed.

“Who’s there?”

Maybe no-one, she reasons — but if that’s the case, there’s also no-one to mock her for her fear. She knows she looks afraid: eyes big in her face, lips parted. She should hide it. She should. Instead, she holds her breath, and waits, but only the thunder answers in the dark.

Then the light shifts on the floor, and she realizes the rain sounds different. She tears her eyes from the dark corners.

The window is open.

How? She’d traced every edge, looking for a crack or crevice, a lock, a lever — but now it’s open, swinging lightly on its hinges. Fear unfurls in her chest, and it’s so warm that she presses her icy fingers under the ropes of pearls, locking them against her sternum automatically.

“Who’s there?” she repeats, and her voice trembles.

Thunder again, rumbling — but this time, when it fades, another sound remains behind: a chuckle, dark and low.

Dark and low, and very, very close.

Her head snaps toward the sound, and she catches the flash of something out of the corner of her eye.

“Were you watching me earlier?” she asks, and that fear licks out from her sternum to the edges of her ribs, down to her shoulders and hips. “You shouldn’t be here. It isn’t—”

It isn’t safe, she had been about to say — but then something grazes between her shoulderblades, like a paintbrush on her skin. Her head whips to follow it and she twists, eyes wide, lungs desperately trying to haul in air like stones up a mountainside.

“You can’t — don’t touch me. It’s—”

Dangerous.

Another flick of the terrifyingly-soft thing again, on the back of her hand this time.

Something is moving around her in the dark. Something is stalking her.

What to do? The door is locked. The closet is an open mouth of blackness in one wall, but she can’t barricade a sliding door. The open window had been a nice fantasy and she’s not ruling it out, but her curiosity is at war with her fear and she wants, more than anything, to make sure this creature or person gets out.

She knots her fist in the draping silk, gaze sifting through the shadows. Another flash of something her eyes can’t follow. She rises slowly to her feet, and reaches for the candle, and lifts it high.

For a moment, there’s nothing.

And then, in the dark shadows at the corner of the room, two perfect points of brilliant red gleam in the darkness: flat glowing coins, clouded with crimson. Twin blood-moons.

Eyes.

They gleam brighter, and blink, and then — they move slowly toward her.

Fading up out of the shadows like a body rising from the water or a creature coming out of the mist, he comes into view.

A raccoon, her childhood memory supplies — but not.

Everything in her aches.

He’s been mutilated: cut apart and reformed, limbs and trunk altered so that he can stand like a man. Scars and burns and metal struts stripe his chest, and vibranium bars and bolts form a makeshift collarbone to force his shoulders wide. The rain has matted his pelt, and she can see the ridge in the skin under the wet fur on his forehead: the cicatrix where his skull and skin have been cut open and healed closed. His teeth are almost as sharp as his eyes, and in the light of the candle, she can see that they’re stained with blood.

His claws drip something on the floor, and it looks too dark to be rain.

She pulls her breath in so hard that it shatters against the back of her throat and rattles down into her chest like chips of ice and crushed glass. She can feel her eyes open even wider, horror and tears welling in them at the same time. Her stomach twists up and nausea curls its fingers up into the back of her mouth and the sides of her cheeks: slick and sour. The sound of her pulse in her ears drowns out the rain and the thunder.

The raccoon-no-longer sneers.

“Hello, pearl.”

And then he leaps, claws reaching.

She whirls to bolt on instinct, but no matter how much silk she strangles into her hands, it’s not enough. Her feet and their soleless slippers catch in the waves of drapery and she hits her knees hard, right before the full weight of him — all muscle and metal, far heavier than he should be — slams into her back. The air she’d just sucked in is suddenly expelled with such force that a little cry comes out with it, tearing the edges of her throat. Her palms hit the glossy floor and skid forward, chin smacking the ground so hard that her teeth sink into her lower lip and blood spouts into and out of her mouth.

The candle falls and rolls, then sputters and dies with a hiss.

The raccoon-no-longer twists a fist in the chignon at the base of her skull and rears back, forcing her neck into an arch. There’s a spray of hairpins — and some worn-down survival instinct whispers at her to grab the sharp silver one, the one that is as long as a dagger, decked in pearls and feathers, to stab him —

But she can’t bring herself to do it. Because she knows.

And her scalp is on fire, but it’s fire, and it’s warm, and she isn’t sure she cares as long as she can get him out of the Arete.

She can’t think any further before a scalding lattice-work opens up at the base of her skull and the nape of her neck — the sharp points of his claws, she thinks — and she makes a choked, drowning gasp as the pearls against her throat throttle her and then give. Her neck is suddenly bare and cold, and she’s lost in the sound of loose marbles bouncing and rolling everywhere, echoing on the wooden floor.

And then — his breath is so hot on the soft skin under her earlobe that goosebumps rise everywhere else on her frozen skin, and the brush of his whiskers is so warm.

“Wyndham’s pretty bride,” he seethes, and then the fist slams her skull back into the ground: just once, sharply, hauling her back up so quickly that she’s suddenly seeing bright spots and stars, heat radiating from the spot where her forehead hit the floor. The shadows spin around her. “Not so flawless anymore, huh?”

She keeps her hands soft and tries to reach back to him, tries to unscramble her thoughts so she can say something. Because she knows what this is – she’d recognized it the minute she’d seen him, and even the blunt impact of the floor hasn’t dislodged the knowing from her brain.

It makes so much sense now. Herbert’s visits to Terra, the small mammals he’d let her cradle in tiny hands. She’d always just wanted something to love. And all her nighttime terrors, all the dark hours she’d spent rotating the memories in her mind and marinating them in fear — none of them had prepared her for this.

He’d hurt them. Of course he had. But this — the implications — the pain —

“Wait — wait—” she gasps, and there’s no word for the flavor of terror in her mouth. “He’ll kill you if you touch me—”

The survivor cackles, and then her head is ringing: a second smack against the floorboards, she thinks blearily. The room swims.

But does he know? Does he know if he doesn’t get out, right now, that he may as well have walked right into the incinerator and closed the door behind him?

“He’ll kill you—“ she begs, panic in every bone and nerve and blood cell. She’s burning up with it. “You can’t touch me—“

His mouth is against her ear and his teeth are against her throat and his breath is so warm that she thinks she could feel her body again if he’d just keep breathing on her. She doesn’t even care that it’s a sneer.

“Oh, I think I can, pearl.”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

hello my loves. ♡♡♡ thank you for those of you who have showed up for this new longform fic~ i hope you enjoy it! window was such a different experience because i initially started writing it without any intention of posting so it was very chill but now i am anxious lol. i really hope this lives up for those of you who are giving it a shot.

i know this chapter is a grim exposition dump (i apologize) so i hope you were able to get through it. i plan to have chapters two & three out in the next two weeks to get us past my always-awkward beginnings, and then we’ll probably move back to a more standard(ish) schedule of one new chapter every 1.5-2 weeks. as always, expected posting schedules and chapter-previews will be available on my tumblr, and i'll have a masterlist & moodboard added soon ♡♡♡ thank you again for giving this thing a shot, and for sticking with me.

coming soon: chapter two. ambedo.
summary: the monster makes his intentions known. wyndham’s bride proposes an addendum.
warnings: arguably one of the darkest chapters. things will get better before the chapter’s end. dubcon (wyndham’s bride is very into it but there’s definitely an argument for coercion here), lots of non-affectionate degradation and name-calling (slut, whore, etc), bad dom/sub dynamics, choking, hair pulling, pussy slapping, spanking, overstimulation. single, brief threat of mutilation/branding. use of claws. continued references to non-sexual child abuse and grooming. animal/pet death. canon-typical violence.
anticipated date: monday, march 4

Chapter 2: ambedo.

Summary:

the monster makes his intentions known. wyndham’s bride proposes an addendum.

Notes:

warnings: arguably one of the darkest chapters. things will get better before the chapter’s end. dubcon (wyndham’s bride is very into it but there’s definitely an argument for coercion here), lots of non-affectionate degradation and name-calling (slut, whore, etc), bad dom/sub dynamics, choking, hair pulling, pussy slapping, spanking, overstimulation. single, brief threat of mutilation. use of claws. continued references to non-sexual child abuse and grooming. animal/pet death. canon-typical violence.

coming soon: chapter three. rasque.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

ambedo. a kind of melancholic trance in which one becomes completely absorbed in vivid sensory details. briefly soaking in the experience of being alive; an act that is done purely for its own sake. From the Latin ambedo, “I sink my teeth into.” The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

No matter how she twists and stretches on the floor, she can’t get her hands on the once-raccoon digging his knee into her spine. Anything that might have reached him is batted away easily. Thunder groans, and her captor chuckles behind her. The sound is dark and broken like gravel, and far more dangerous than the storm outside. His claws let go of her ruined chignon for just a second and she scrambles to her knees, still twisted and trapped in silk like a net-tangled butterfly.

He snickers, and his fingers clamp like a vice on her ankle, bruising and prickling even through the diaphanous layers of fabric. He jerks her toward him with such force that she sprawls again, the air slamming out of her lungs as the momentum sends her skidding her back to him and beneath him, dress sliding on the polished wood floor as he hauls her under his wide-spread legs. There’s the renewed skitter of pearls across the floor, and before she can draw a breath, he flips her — easily — onto her back. Her lungs are slammed against the ground, airless all over again. Her ribs strain.

“Nuh-uh, pretty pearl.” He laughs down at her, teeth and eyes all bright and sharp in the darkness.

“W-wait,” she tries again, but he’s already dropping to his knees and straddling her torso, knees squeezing in on her ribs so hard that she can feel them creak. He’s so warm, though — a furnace — and heat radiates from his thighs and groin where they press snugly against the underside of her breasts. The part of her that aches for warmth and for touch batters against her weary survival instincts, willing to put up with the pain and the threat of imminent death if it means lying beneath him for the next few minutes.

Then she remembers that he needs to leave and she thrashes against him frantically, but it’s too late. His clawed fingers are circling her neck and they tighten, claws sinking in at her nape. His tail lashes behind him: a dark plume, painting the shadows. She flies her fingers to his wrists, trying to peel his grip away even as bright spots swim back into her eyes like little supernovas and moons. Her hips buck beneath him instinctively, wriggling, lips parted and bloody and begging for air. Tears burn in her eyes, streaming into now-loose curls at her temples, and she kicks and tugs helplessly at the hands that shouldn’t be this strong, but are.

There’s another skeletal flare of lightning, and she can see him again: narrow, scorching red eyes, teeth bared and gleaming, all scars and wet fur. Metal flashes in the electric light. Horrifying, yes. Not in and of himself, of course — but what it all means. All the pieces that had come together the moment he’d entered the little halo of golden candlelight.

Herbert had kept her in the dark, but now she knows.

Now she knows.

And her thudding, panicked heart is broken.

Maybe a quick death at the hands of this dangerous survivor is better than the alternative, after all. It’s not walking into the ocean, and it’s not a lightning strike — but it may as well be. And at least — at least —

Little pops of light flicker in the darkness all around her: hallucinations of a mind going dark. She wonders if this other person, this raccoon-no-longer, had been kept as alone as she had. Maybe, before she goes, she can give him some solace.

She lets go of his wrists, and reaches up. She can feel him flinch when her fingers slide carefully against the sides of his skull under his ears. He tries to twist out of reach, tilting his chin upward and squeezing his eyes shut, like he thinks she’s going to try and scratch or dig them out. But she only brushes her thumbs over his cheeks, stroking tenderly.

I’m sorry, she thinks hazily. I’m so sorry he hurt you too.

In the darkness, maybe his eyes widen. It’s impossible to tell. She feels her lashes flutter closed.

The hands at her throat flinch, and she drags in an instinctive gasp of air when they ease up — just a little. The blood pooling in her mouth from her bitten lip hits the back of her throat, and she tries desperately not to choke on it.

“Don’t. Move,” the survivor’s voice warns. It rumbles as low as the thunder. Maybe it’s the adrenaline and the dizziness, but she thinks she can feel it rasping up her legs, scraping over the exposed tops of her breasts. She keeps her eyes obediently closed, trying to focus on dragging in fresh air, on easing her shuddering heartbeat. “F’you move, I’ll crush your frickin’ windpipe. And I’ll enjoy doing it.”

She’s not sure how long this reprieve will last, so she just try to make herself soft and pliant. Tries to think.

He’s so warm.

“You’re tryin’ to trick me,” he growls suddenly, and her eyes open instinctively at that, baffled. “Don’t frickin’ play innocent.” His face peels into a sneer. “Sire’s precious pearl is too pampered to win in a fair fight, so she’s resorting to mindtricks. Pretending to be nice.”

He snickers, and the sound sends a shudder up her spine. His fingers flex against her throat, claws prickling.

But now that she can breathe, she catches the scent of him, and he’s the first thing that smells like home since her Terran clothes were deemed too deteriorated and thrown into the incinerator. He smells like campfires and blue spruce and clean fur. There are other scents she doesn’t recognize — something almondy, like marzipan, and something tangy and clear.

But mostly he just smells like Terra, and tears clutter up on her eyelashes again before she can stop them.

He sees them, and he sneers. “Poor pearl. You scared?” His hands squeeze — just a little. “Good.”

“You can’t be here,” she manages to utter, but it sounds like a squeak of terror. She hasn’t moved her hands though, and she lets her thumbs stroke his cheeks again. She tries not to lose herself in the softness and the warmth of his fur. This is urgent, after all. “He’ll kill you for being here. He’ll kill you if you do anything to me. But if you go now—”

“Let me guess — you won’t tell him?” His sneer splits into a wide, mocking grin. “Oh, I frickin’ doubt that. I bet you two tell each other everything, huh? I’m guessing he came back after I sent him that first transmission, and I bet he told you what I asked for. Bet you two frickin’ laughed at me together.” The grin, already hateful, curls into something furious and dark, and his claws dig in at her nape again. She can feel the blood, wet on her neck. “Maybe it was your idea to kill her, even.”

Oh.

Fairy, she thinks. And the other two, whose names she’d never been allowed to know.

This… this survivor had once had things he’d loved, too.

How much can he see in the dark? She’d only been a child when Herbert had spirited her away from Terra, but she thinks she remembers that raccoons had some kind of night-vision. And who knows what Herbert might have done to his eyes? So she just looks at him, meeting what she can see of the glint in his glare, and she wills him to read her face.

She’s not trying to convince him of anything. She knows she’s guilty. Maybe she hadn’t been an active part of whatever terrible thing Herbert had done to this survivor, or to whoever his person was — his friend, his beloved. But she has been tainted by it. She’d watched Herbert and Vim and Theel steal away countless small lifeforms, vulnerable babies taken from their mothers’ dens. She can feel it — the blood — slick as venom on her skin, as much on her hands as the other three deaths she’d watched happen.

Now she does move her hands: fingers sliding from the fur on his face to bracelet his wrists gently — pleadingly — as she tries to figure out what to say, how to reach him. You need to go. He’s going to kill you. Keep touching me, please. Don’t touch me at all.

It’s dangerous.

For you.

She can still make out enough in the darkness to see the stranger’s face twist into some kind of scowl, though she can’t see enough to read the emotions behind it. His hands, like sun-hot leather on her skin — so warm she only wants to lean into them — start to squeeze again and she manages to spill out, “what did he do to you?” before the once-raccoon can cut off her airflow all over again.

It’s not what she’d meant to say. She’s supposed to be telling him to go. But he’s warm and he’s hurt and he’s alone, and she knows how those last two feel at least, and she doesn’t want that for him.

Wrong words or not, the claws at her throat pause.

“Ohhh,” the raccoon-no-longer drawls. “I get it. She wants storytime.” His grin is violent. “Sure, pearl. Pretend like you don’t know. If you stall me long enough, maybe Wyndham’s goons’ll walk in and save you.” He cackles, and the sound is silhouetted against another crush of thunder so loud it splinters her clavicle. “They’re a little distracted right now, trying to put their precious Sire’s face back on. Besides, they think they locked you in, pearl, but I locked ‘em out.”

Trying to put Herbert’s face back on? Her mind stutters on that for a moment before pushing it away. It doesn’t matter. She can see what Herbert’s done to this survivor of his.

As far as she can imagine, any violence returned was a comparative mercy.

“What did he do to you?” she repeats — just as instinctively, but less urgently now. Tenderly, even. “If you’re going to kill me, don’t you want me to know why?” She thinks of her own loneliness, draped around her like transparent cream-colored silk. “Don’t you want someone to know your story, even if it’s only for the five minutes before they die?”

His mouth opens, then closes. He tilts his head — not softened in the slightest, eyes narrowing like he’s trying to see through her plan.

She has no plan — only selfishness, she thinks. She likes the warmth of him, and the weight of him. She likes the heat of it all, licking up her ribs. And she wants to be offered comfort for all her sadnesses — desperately — she wants someone to wrap her up and give her a balm for her grief, no matter that she’s not worthy of it.

She wants it, but failing that, she’s happy to give it.

“It’s five minutes of being less alone,” she tells the survivor softly.

Maybe, she thinks. Maybe he’ll tell her his name before she dies.

Lightning sizzles her vision, and when it fades, his hellfire-eyes are narrow in the blackness.

He sneers. “Your beloved betrothed wanted to play god. Wanted to create life.”

She can hear it in his voice: taunting. Mocking. Hating.

“Created me, instead.”

Her heart must’ve stopped beating at some point. It’s leaden: too heavy to move in her chest. A useless brick or boulder. It’s not fear, either. She’s felt that more days than not, and she knows the cold fingers of terror, crackling and slowly crawling over her ribs like her bones are just keys on an untuned piano. No — this is grief. She’s felt that often enough to recognize it too. Grief, and shock, and despair. The survivor is trying to sound dangerous and cruel and hateful — he’s succeeding, to be honest — but she can feel the pain underneath it. The ache.

Her eyes track the metal collarbones, glinting when he moves, and she knows he must hurt in his body as well as his heart.

“I’m the first, pearl.” The survivor is grinning. Even in this dim, rain-blurred darkness, she can see the flash of his sharp, sharp teeth. “The first of my kind, anyway. Fuck knows he’s prob'ly got a hundred other planets out there, with other fucked-up people he’s made. But there ain’t nothin' like me ‘cept for me.”

His fingers flex on her skin.

“I was the first one that worked — but I ain’t as pretty as he had in mind. A medley of mistakes, he said. Looks like he was cobbled together by fat-fingered children.”

The rumbling tone drips venom, but it’s a startlingly accurate mimicry. She can hear the disdain that she knows lives in Herbert’s voice. The condescension and contempt. The survivor curls his fingers again, tearing at the little cuts he’s already made on the back of her neck: just reminding her that his claws are there. Toying with her. The tiny slices should smart and sting, but she barely notices them.

“Guess he wanted me to look more like you, pearl. Perfect.”

She doesn’t think she believes in gods anymore — not the kind who listen to the prayers of mortals, anyway — but if she did, she’d be praying. Because her body is a foolish animal, and while she knows that the coldness of fear glazing ice inside all her organs should probably have only redoubled in the survivor’s presence — instead, she feels like she’s finally thawing. Melting. Her cold fingers prickle with feeling for the first time in years where they touch the skin and fur of his wrists. It feels like she’d let them fall asleep, and the bloodflow is finally coming back. Like she’s left them in the snow for hours, only to rush them too quickly into warm water.

They burn.

“Almost as soon as I woke up,” the survivor says — no, snickers, like it’s all so funny in the worst possible way — “he wanted to put me in the frickin’ fire.”

Her heart does beat then: leaps right into her throat. She aches for him still, yes — grieves for him — but there’s longing there, too. A whisper of hope.

Because somehow, the survivor is here.

“But you got away,” she breathes. “You got away. How? How did you do it?”

Maybe, she thinks — maybe she could’ve tried harder over the years. Maybe she’d missed something. There was a way. There’d always have been a way, then. Maybe she should’ve—

But no. There would’ve always been a price, even if she hadn’t been the one to pay it.

“Damn frickin’ right I did,” the survivor boasts, and she feels her eyes go soft with wistful admiration. “Dodged the guards, stole a ship, and got the fuck outta this hell. Twice.”

This hell. So it had happened here, on HalfWorld. Maybe in the Arete itself. And twice. He must be a genius. Her eyes search his in the dark, elated for him — and baffled.

“But why?” she whispers, her voice lost and small. “Why’d you come back?”

Because that’s one thing she can’t understand — not at all.

He bares his teeth at her, leaning forward so far and so quick that she crumples against the floor beneath him, startled.

“Look at me,” he hisses. “Look at what I am. You think anyone’s gonna—? Yeah, I got away. What do you think I found out there? Galaxy’s not nice to monsters like me.”

She sucks in a breath. He’d been so lonely. She can hear it.

“Ended up having to hide in the alleys on Conjunction. Stowed away on freighters and merchant-ships. Ended up on this Ravager tank that I—" His voice cracks. “I liked the captain. He was a good guy. I took care of that ship. Repaired shit before they even knew it was broken. Sometimes after. Kept ‘em afloat after some big fights with Nova Corps and other outfits they’d pissed off. Stayed in the crawlspaces. They knew I was there, though. Thought I was a rat at first.” His lip curls in something feral. "The name stuck."

He’s getting lost in his story, almost forgetting her here, pinned underneath him. And part of her is shrieking with the shrill reminder that she needs him to leave if he’s going to live, but part of her just wants so badly to listen, to comfort, to sit under his warmth and stroke the bones and pins she can feel in his wrists, to unwind the shreds and scraps of love that have been sitting dormant under her lungs and to gift them to him, free of charge.

“The captain used to talk to me at night. I’d answer him through the vents. Him and his first and second mates, they’d ask me for advice on things sometimes. And then—"

His mouth is a sneer full of teeth.

“Then I got caught. Found while I was sleeping — stupid. And they—"

His teeth clench and every word is scratched through with betrayal. Tears bubble up in her eyes again and slick into the cure at her temples because she’s always been such a crier. She just wants to hold him, bruises be damned, and the breath tumbles over her lips in a soft, mournful little hush.

“You loved them,” she murmurs achingly.

His mouth snaps shut so sharply she can hear his teeth clack together.

When he speaks again, the words are ragged. Enraged. “Captain and Tullk were distracted lookin’ for a kid who’d run off with one of their M-ships, and Kraglin was out with some crew. There was this big fuckin’ piece a’ shit who had it in for me an’ when he found me — Ravagers don’t take kindly to no stowaways —"

It’s another mockery of a voice, one she doesn’t recognize.

“—disgusting vermin. Coulda got diseases in the food. Coulda given the cap’n rabies.” His lip peels back from his teeth even further, and they gleam in the shadows. “Shitbag. I got my frickin’ shots,” the survivor snarls furiously.

“You loved them,” she repeats softly, heart-crushed and wrenching.

Glaring seems like such a mild word for the look that he’s giving her. It’s blistering with contempt, so scalding and hateful that she’s surprised she hasn’t scarred yet. He digs his claws into her neck — punishingly — and his knees squeeze tighter on her ribs until a little breathless noise of protest bubbles up, involuntary, on her lips. Maybe she should apologize but she isn’t sorry — not because she’d said it, anyway. She just wants to take some of that pain for him. She’s so empty most of the time she’s sure she could hold onto a little bit of it for him, if she could just figure out how.

“Doesn’t frickin’ matter,” he snarls — but she notices it isn’t a denial. “I got away from them too. Stole a runabout and took out the tracker and now it’s fuckin’ mine. Should’ve taken another M-ship instead.”

His teeth are sharp — so sharp.

“Here’s the truth, pearl. I didn’t ask to get made. I didn't ask to be torn apart and put back together over and over and turned into some kind of nightmarish little monster. But here I frickin' am.”

That word again. She shakes her head, throat tapping against his palms. “You’re not a—” she breaks off. His claws are tightening around her throat and he won’t believe her, anyway.

“You wanna know why I came back, pearl? I came back because I knew I was gonna be alone forever, and Wyndham frickin’ owes me.” He swallows: still gritting his teeth, still furious, but that pain is closer to the surface. “I asked him to — I was a selfish fuckin’ idiot, and I asked him to make—"

Oh. She can already see how this ends. Maybe it was your idea to kill her, he’d said. She thinks of Theel — sees again Fairy’s tiny pink feathers, the spatters of blood on the marble. She’d fluttered her wings — she’d looked up with big, trusting dark eyes — chirped—

The girl imagines a new white stone, smooth and clean, warm under the sun. She opens her mouth, and tries to make every word a little comfort, a little balm, a gentle kiss on the top of his head.

“What — what was her name?”

She can see his ears flatten in the darkness: agony, or maybe more rage.

“You know,” he hisses. “You know.”

She shakes her head, feeling his claws rip again at the back of her neck. The blood beads up on the delicate, tattered skin there. “I don’t,” she whispers. “I didn’t know about you, and I don’t know who he offered you.”

His knees abruptly crush in harder, punishing her, and he squeezes his hands — and keeps squeezing, till her vision swims again and no matter how she fights her instincts, she can’t help but reach for his wrists again, trying to wriggle away desperately.

“Liar,” he snarls. “If you didn’t know, then how did you guess he offered me anyone? Lylla was mine and I was hers and she loved me and he killed her, and I’m gonna return the fuckin’ favor.”

Her eyes are burning more than her throat, more than her lungs, more than the furrows scoring the back of her neck. Tears flock on her lashes, silvering her already-limited vision: tears for this hurt stranger, and for Fairy, and the bunnies and the fox kits and the broken-legged fawn, and the other two — and now for Lylla, too.

Lylla. Through the haze, she commits the name to memory — carves it on the new white stone while her rubs scream for air. It doesn’t matter that she’ll only have it for another minute — maybe two, if the survivor keeps toying with her. In the dazed mist of her mind she sees a little mental memorial, with a lilac bush beside it. She thinks she used to love the smell of them.

In the real world, the survivor digs his claws in, even harder than his fingers. He wants it to hurt.

She gasps against her will, back arching, fingers begging, and she can feel the neckline of her bodice pulling — dangerously low, riding the edge of her nipples, barely holding her in.

The survivor snickers suddenly. “I didn’t even notice till now how he had you all dolled up, pearl. Guess I should’ve. Guess it’s your wedding night, after all.” The words are jeering: sharp and gleeful. “Too bad I’m here to frickin’ kill you. Could’ve had fun instead.” He snorts. “Imagine that. Wyndham’s precious little pearl, fucked raw by the monster he made. There’s some poeticalistic justice to that, huh?”

His hands ease up just a little — feigning mercy when she knows it’s a joke, that he just wants to tease her with air — but she gulps in anyway, throat arching under his hands. She’s so dizzy, so spun around, and everything inside her feels bruised and shattered and aching.

“I did my research before I even asked him for her,” the survivor is saying, almost conversationally — mockingly. She tries to focus on his voice through the roaring in her ears. “Leverage, in case he screwed me over. I knew all about Sire’s bride, his flawless pearl, kept like a bratty, bitchy little princess in the Homonoia on Wundagore II.”

He grins sharply, all teeth.

“‘M a little surprised by how fuckin’ unimpressive you are, though,” he smirks. She winces, and he sees it — he must — because his grin widens. “For someone so caught up on perfection, I’m kinda surprised Wyndham settled for you.” The smirk turns into a sneer. “I guess you do got a sort of frigid, manufactured look he prob’ly likes. Too bad I got you all messed up.”

His fingers curl even tighter this time — she knows he’s just toying with her, but it doesn’t matter. She can hear the sound of his snickers under the thud of the rain and the thunder of her pulse and the sparks snapping in her vision. Some silly part of her brain doesn’t realize it’s dying, and wonders if there’s a pool of water under the window yet. Wonders what it would be like to be under all this warmth and not dying. His palms are like hot stones wrapped in leather and she’s never had anything but her own hands to keep her company — she wonders how his would feel elsewhere on her body, like little suns. Her fingers scrabble at his relentless grip on her throat and the dark spots blooming in her vision spread wider, like ink on wet paper. She bucks against him again.

The survivor holds her easily — but the dress doesn’t. One breast bursts free of the low neckline, gleaming in the low light. The girl feels her nipple bead up in the cool air and this time, when his fingers ease up on her throat, she can’t stop the raspy moan that drips its way over her lips. For all of the things she’s grown to hate about Herbert, his inattention has proven to be one of his best features — but suddenly she’s vulnerable under the stranger’s warm palms, and that glacier in her belly has turned into some kind of golden hot-spring, shimmering through all her nerves and veins. It feels so good that she could cry all over again.

And it’s humiliating.

Sure enough, the survivor snorts derisively, and his voice is a low, surprised drawl. “Are you getting off on this, pearl?”

The warmth in her abdomen tightens. She tries frantically to wriggle away, to leverage her grip on his wrists and pull herself up through his hands.

“What would Wyndham say?” he jeers contemplatively. “If he knew his frigid bitch of a wife was acting like a whore for me?”

She arches and strains against him, and he digs his knees into her ribs again.

“I ain’t in the business of raping women, so you’d have to ask real nice — but if you convince me that you really fuckin’ want it, maybe I’ll let you come before I kill you.”

It’s nothing but a taunt. She knows he doesn’t even mean it — he just wants to make fun of her, to make her feel stupid and small and ashamed.

But the joke’s on him, because she’s felt that way for her entire life, and now she can’t help but pause: bowed upward beneath him, nipple taut and begging in the watery darkness.

He’s going to kill her no matter what. She can fight him as much as she wants, but that’s inevitable. And anyway, that won’t even be the worst thing to have happened in her pathetic little life.

But even if he hates her — it might be nice to leave with something she’s taken for herself, something she’s asked for. One little choice she’d made in the shadows. The tiniest shred of autonomy.

What would Wyndham say, in fact?

The stranger feels it: the minute she goes still under his hands, soft and pliant and eager. Then he’s cackling all over again: tilting back his head in the loudest and most scornful laughter she’s ever heard. It comes from the roots of his lungs, the bottom of his diaphragm.

“Don’t tell me Sire’s precious pearl is secretly a cock-addicted slut?” he mocks. “I woulda come to kill you sooner if I’d known I could get laid doing it.”

Her eyes are wide-open on him now, luminous and clear and suddenly unafraid. His words have her abdomen twisting tighter, and it feels like something reaches down inside her and pinches in the channel between her thighs. She’s not sure exactly why: mortification, surely. Embarrassment, too. But also something liberating — because he’s right. No matter what Herbert has tried to shape her into over the years, she still has her little animal impulses. She’s still aching for this strange survivor, this fellow victim of Herbert’s cruelties.

She still has something that’s her own.

Her abdomen clenches involuntarily, and she feels a slight pressure, and then a sudden slipperiness sliding down the crease between her thighs.

She’s made herself come before, but she’s never made herself drip.

“Would you have sex with me, too?” she asks, curious and big-eyed. Why not, after all? Why not take something else back?

Because Herbert will definitely kill him then, some part of her remembers. If he doesn’t get away again, Herbert will definitely kill him.

But he has gotten away before. Maybe he could have sex with her, and kill her, and escape once more. Each and every part of that idea is a strange, warm comfort, and she knows it’s sick, but she can’t help it.

The survivor blinks — she can see the flicker of his glinting red eyes in the dark, and the gleam of his teeth as his sneer goes wider.

“If you beg me.” The words are so full of ridicule that they crackle in her ears.

She bites her lip. “He’ll kill you,” she tries to warn — but of course, the stranger thinks it’s a threat. His teeth look sharper, his eyes meaner. Still, she has to try. “He kills anyone who–”

“He’ll try.”

She breathes out, and this time it isn’t to make herself colder and more remote — it’s because she thinks it might be true, and that thought brings nothing but relief. This survivor has gotten away before, she reminds herself once again. Twice. Maybe she doesn’t have to be afraid for him. Maybe she can let him have sex with her, and let him make her come, and then she can be free of this hell, and no-one else will get hurt because of her.

It’s a nice thought, actually.

“Please,” she whispers, as politely as her etiquette instructor had trained her. She tilts her head, and decides to be extra-reckless. “Please f-fuck me.” She stumbles over the word — Herbert hates low language — and then she delights in the spiral of pleasure that gives her, too.

The survivor bursts out laughing. It’s raw and deep, and utterly derisive. “Oh, is that what you think begging is, pearl?”

No. She knows what begging is. She’d begged for Fairy, and for the others. But she doesn’t think he wants that.

“Make me believe you want it,” he tells her, jabbing each word into her skin with spikes of condescension. His fingers flex on her throat again. “Make me believe you need it.”

Her brow creases. “I—”

“You can start by getting your frickin’ hands off a’ me and taking your other tit out instead,” he taunts. There’s another cracked trident of lightning, blinding and burning, and his bright teeth and furious eyes are scorched into her retinas. She licks her lips, and loosens her hands on his wrists, and then carefully tugs the low neckline of her dress down further. It eases over the globe of her second breast, and she can see the glint of his widening eyes in the dark, the shadow of his nose as it flares.

And then another crackle of a laugh at her expense.

“Didn’t think you’d actually do it, pearl,” he jeers. “You know I’m still gonna kill you after this, right?”

She nods mutely. Counting on it, she thinks. This seems better than going out to get struck by lightning anyway, or walking into the ocean.

More of a sure thing.

“Then go on,” he dares her, grinning caustically. “Show me what you want me to do with your nipples. Get yourself nice and ready for me.”

She bites her lip, and flickers her fingers hesitantly over the tips of her breasts, feeling the buds there tighten further. She trembles — nervous while he watches critically — and then circles them, plucking at them under his scornful glare.

Her breath grows reedy and thin.

“That’s it?” he says condescendingly. “I’m gonna hate-fuck you on your own frickin’ request, and you’re just gonna touch yourself like you think you’re still some kind of princess?”

He snorts, and shifts his hands: one sliding just a bit over to circle her neck more evenly and squeezing — an unspoken threat — while the other slides down, hot over her icy clavicle, and palms her breast. He jiggles it roughly and she gasps at the sensation – then he closes his burning fingers on the blushing tip, pinching sharply and twisting.

A cry stutters out of her lungs and she arcs into his grip: snug on her throat, viciously tight on her nipple. Heat radiates from his clamped fingers.

“Yeah,” he hisses venomously. “F’you don’t wanna be treated like the filthy fuckin’ whore you are, you better say so now, pearl. That’s all you’ll fuckin’ get from me.”

“I do,” she pants, squirming under the warmth of him. “I do want—”

He chuckles darkly, and slaps her breast. Another stifled cry cramps over her lips, startled at the stinging warmth left behind. A little mew trembles in her throat, vibrating against his palm, at the flush suddenly rising from her chest into her throat, and then her cheeks.

Before she can register how suddenly-glowing she feels, his hand returns to her nipple: pinching, flicking, squeezing and tugging sharply before he darts his fingers onto the other breast to give that one a mean twist too. Back and forth — patternless, unpredictable — he switches his torture from breast to breast while keeping his other hand clasped on her neck. Her hands stumble to his thighs unthinkingly, fingers twisting into the fabric of his jumpsuit as she loses herself, arching into the abuse as his fingers sear her. Her belly goes molten and soft.

“Fuck,” he swears, and her eyes blur but she can still see the toothy cruelty of his grin. “I kinda wish Wyndham was here. Does he know he ain’t trained the slut outta you? I’d like him to see what a greedy, faithless bitch you are. I’d like him to see the ugly frickin’ monster he made turn his little wife’s perfect princess pussy into a sloppy, swollen hole.”

The softness in her abdomen suddenly clenches and dissolves into shame. She’s not sure why. She doesn’t owe Herbert any faithfulness outside of what she has to do to keep other things alive, but if the survivor is going to kill her anyway—

At some point, though, she’s started to care what the survivor thinks. Which is a fruitless endeavor because of course, of course he hates her — that’s obvious, he’s said it, there’s no way around it. She’d hate herself too, if she were him. She already does.

But he’s still going on, and every word sends a little mixed-up spiral of humiliation and warmth from her belly button to her clit.

“I’d like him to see you begging me to stuff you nice an’ full,” he tells her, every sharp canine flashing in a grin. “I want him to see my dick fucking into that worn-out little cunt of yours while you beg me to use you like a dumb fuckin’ toy.”

The ember inside her is a full flame now: flicking, licking up her insides, down her thighs. She’s familiar with feeling hollow, but not like this — thighs trembling, knees wanting to bend and stockinged feet wanting to scramble as she squeezes her legs together instinctively: trying to create some friction, trying to tighten every muscle in her lower half in the hope it will buy her some pressure, some relief, something.

“What a frickin’ treat for me,” he hisses. “Reach around me and pull up this stupid dress, pearl. I want it up to your waist, bare ass on the floor. Gonna leave you in a puddle of your come for Wyndham to find.”

She does as he says. She clenches her jaw for just a second, and she does as he says, because she wants to. A last-minute rebellion, she thinks — even if it’s bittersweet. She stretches to ruck up the clouds of silk, already damp with her sweat.

His tail sweeps across the tops of her thighs — so light and gentle it can only be accidental — and she shivers at the silkeness of it. He reaches back, twisting slightly on her ribs, and scrapes his claws over her abdomen, sharp enough to sting and probably drawing blood. She whispers out a wincing little gasp, and he snickers before gripping a handful of the thin, pale silk panties Vim had given her.

He wrenches upward. The cloth twists and slides between her folds. She squeals without meaning to, flinching away automatically when the panties pull viciously against her labia and abrade her clit, sharp and burning.

He releases the fabric, but before she can reorient herself, she sees his hand silhouetted against the stormy gray light. It flashes downward, almost whistling, and a bright lightning-hot flare of pain cracks against her clit and pussy-lips.

She tries to bow up under him, arcing off the floor, a muffled shriek spilling over her lips before she understands that it’s hers. He’s slapped her, she realizes — hard, right through the thin, twisted material of her panties.

Her stockinged legs scrabble against the wood floor instinctively, panickedly — but she doesn’t want to get away. Not exactly. The heat blooming from her pussy has her melting, dripping, burning up.

“That’s right,” he croons down at her. “Wyndham’s flawless pearl likes being used by monsters. Loves it, doesn’t she? Would do anything to get her cunt stuffed — doesn’t even care that she’s gonna die. That’s how desperate she is for dick.”

He slaps her between her thighs again, and her body arches into it, tears springing into her eyes. Her hands are still knotted in the silk of her skirts, clinging to the fabric now, holding onto it like it’s a lifeline while he rains a series of blows down onto her cunt, as rhythmic and forceful as the water pelting the window. She loses track of the number of times he strikes her: clit stinging and swollen, the wet sound of his palm against the silk and her pussy shocking her every time. The ache in her cunt and her clit just keeps growing and she writhes, flinching away and still trying to reach for the hot pressure building in her abdomen. She’s so close but it’s so much and once, without consciously willing it, she tries to close her legs, to shelter her delicate flesh from the relentless slaps. Tears are streaming out of her eyes and into her ears like silver rivers of salt.

“W-wait — please —” She’s begging for a break between blows, swollen and welting quickly.

The survivor laughs, of course. “Oh,” he taunts. “Sweet little pearl doesn’t like having her prissy little princess parts slapped? Guess she doesn’t wanna get railed after all—”

She tries to bite her lip — cuts it open again, blood spilling down the corner of her mouth. Flinching, cringing, she forces her legs to shudder open again — hesitant, or stubborn, or both. Her breath hitches into a sob, half-scared and half-needy: clit stinging and aching, pussy clenching on nothing.

“Please,” she implores. She doesn’t want him to stop — not completely — but she’s not sure how long she can survive this. “Please — please—”

She only see the flash of his sharp-toothed grin before the dark world spins around her. He’s flipped her again, another clatter of whatever spilled pearls were caught in the folds of her dress — then he’s hoisting her ass into the air before she even realizes he’s taken his hands off her neck and his weight off her ribs. She sways on her hands and knees, dizzy and disoriented, lungs not quite working right, flushed and panting. But then his grasp is back on the nape of her neck, steadied as much as trapped, like he still thinks she’s going to run.

Of course she won’t. Where would she go? And besides, as messed up as all this may be, it’s still a reclamation of some sort. She still wants this.

Him.

She can feel the survivor holding himself away from her, shifting — maybe unbuttoning his pants? — and she aches and hurts and can’t wait, so she drives her hips backward, trying to reach him, desperate for friction.

He laughs at her again, malicious and mean.

“I don’t even gotta tell you to show me what a wet fuckin’ slut you are and how much you wanna come on my dick, do I?” He’s got a handful of her panties again, twisting and pulling, dragging them over her clit and between her folds once more. The frail cloth twists and rubs raw against her, and she cries out again at the sting of it. Then he wrenches at the silk and she can hear the rip of the fragile fabric, feel it burn welts against her hips as he rips it away. The pearl buttons fastening her stockings to the panties snap free, thudding against the soft plush of her thighs like tiny bruising fists. She gasps — lurching, vision swimming.

The survivor doesn’t give her even a second. He lands another sharp smack against her cunt, then slides four fingers over her wet folds, smearing her slick fluids all over her. He tsks, and then flicks casually at her swollen, reddened clit. A squeal bursts out of her, and her body bucks at the renewed abuse. He chuckles darkly and then pinches the little bud so sharply that a high-pitched whine seeps out of her throat, floating back to his ears like it wants him as badly as she does.

“You ready to beg yet?” He’s leaning lengthwise across his back, and even so, his mouth only reaches her shoulder — but the hiss of his words is so bitter and scornful that it cuts through the haze clouding her mind. “Feels like you’re ready to beg.” He cradles her whole vulva in his palm, then squeezes derisively. His claws prickle into all that soft flesh and she freezes, suddenly terrified those sharp claws might slice her elsewhere — something she should have considered before, she supposes.

But then his grip eases — just enough to pinch her clit again, meanly, forcing another hitch out of her hips.

“R-ready,” she whimpers. “Please — please, please, please? F-fuck me? Please?”

“Please, please fuck me?” he mimics, his voice high and pitchy, and then snorts. “Try again, pearl. Tell me you just wanna be a good little slut for me. Tell me you want me to fill you with come. Tell me Wyndham never made you this wet—”

“N-never made me wet at all,” she swears feverishly.

There’s half a pulse of silence and then the survivor is roaring with laughter. “Oh, you’re a good little slut all right. Keep going, pearl.”

“I do wanna be a good slut for you,” she promises breathlessly. He draws a lazy, meandering, considering circle around her clit, slowly and repeatedly until she twitches — and then he attacks it with brutal, punishing strokes that nearly make her arms buckle. She lets out a shuddering whimper. “I do,” she swears again, tears patterning the floor beneath her. “I want to be a good slut for you and — and I want you to fill me up and—“ She doesn’t exactly have any experience with dirty talk beyond the few times when she’d tried to imagine the things someone might say while she was curled up in bed, and she feels herself trying to sift through the foggy reaches of her brain, trying to remember the things he has said and reflect them back to him. She refuses to call him a monster — he isn’t one, she knows monsters, she’s been a heartbeat and a thunderstorm away from marrying one all night — but the heat from her throbbing, abused clit is making it hard to think. “I want to be good for you — I want you to make m-me come however you want to – please. U-use me like —” What had he said? “Use me however you want, please. Like a — like a toy. Please. I want to be a good slut for you and I want him to know you fucked me and to know you made me come h-harder than I’ve ever before on my o–”

At first, her brain doesn’t register the intrusion — only the sudden burn between her legs. Then the pressure, and the stretch. She keens painfully, nails scrabbling against the smooth floor, mind stuttering on the conflicting urge to try to wriggle away, or push back and fill herself more with him. The urge to beg him to wait, to slow down rises on her lips, but she doesn’t want him to stop and she feels certain that he will if she keeps annoying him, keeps asking him. Tears spatter out of her eyes and moans splash out of her mouth as she tries to let herself stretch, to relax around him, try to breathe through it—

“Holy shit,” the survivor groans behind her. His hand tightens in the back of her throat, scruffing her like an animal. His other hand shoves down hard against the small of her back, forcing her into a deeper arch that tilts her hips and cunt up to him like an offering. She whines, because it hurts but it also feels — good, maybe? Almost? And she’s so warm; she keeps thinking she’s never been so warm before but then he makes her feel even warmer.

“Holy shit, pearl,” he repeats, a strange combination of wonder and wrath on his tongue. “Wyndham ain’t using you nearly enough —no wonder you’re so fuckin’ desperate—”

“N-nev–” she tries to tell him — not that it matters — but then he lands a stinging, brutal swat to her ass, sending her lurching forward. His grip slips from her neck and he grabs a fistful of her hair instead, forcing her head back. She cries out at the brutal haul on her scalp and he slaps her ass again — hard — and she squeals as the second bruising blow burns over the first one.

“Is the little slut enjoying herself?” he mocks, and then he’s pulling out of her, plowing back in, smacking her again. “Pearl’s not so flawless after all, is she? Just a greedy dripping cockdrunk whore who wants to get her ass slapped red and her unbelievably tight little cunt — seriously, pearl, how are you squeezing me like this? — just wants to get her sweet, tight princess pussy ruined by a hacked-up monster who’s gonna kill her as soon as she comes like the sloppy little bitch she is.”

She thinks he’s snickering again.

His hand continues to layer blow upon blow – just the one side, so painful and harsh that within seconds, she’s crying out: sobbing, instinctively trying to scramble away even as she wants to stay put, wants to let him fill her up again. She would be sore for days on that side — maybe even bruised — except she’s going to be dead anyway, probably in minutes.

So she just lets the heat radiate over her ass, up her flank and down her tightly-clenched thighs, into her chest and knees.

Warm. So warm she thinks she’s made of butter.

“Wetter and wetter,” he repeats — half-marveling, wholly-cruel. He cracks his palm against her ass again. “And frickin’ tighter and tighter. You really like getting fucked rough, huh? You’re gonna come on my cock like a good little slut, ‘cause apparently you just love get fucked by someone who hates you. An’ I do — fuckin’ — hate you.”

Each word is punctuated with a thrust, followed by a slap. Everything in her is spinning, tight and hot and high and bright. He yanks on her hair so hard that her head snaps back, little explosions of pain bursting across her scalp, and he drives into her again and again. She’s not sure what a normal-sized cock is but she suspects he’s more slender, a little smaller — and it still makes her ache and stretch and burn.

But she wants more. It doesn’t hurt anymore — not as badly, anyway. And everything inside her abdomen is coiled tight and bright and waiting, as if each time she had come on her own fingers quietly in her bedroom — biting her pillow and trying to force her breathing and body steady so no-one lingering outside her door would hear — had just been a pale, bland glimpse at what she could have had.

“Please,” she pleads again, not even sure what she’s asking for. He abandons the ongoing, merciless slaps to her ass suddenly, reaching around her instead, two fingers finding her clit and rubbing at it again ruthlessly.

“That’s right,” he hisses against the damp skin of her back. “Sire’s perfect pearl — Wundagore should be calling you Sire’s pitiful cockdrunk cumslut — who knew you could take dick so well—”

She whines desperately as the heat builds and builds, and the room blinks and flutters, the shadow of her eyelashes colliding with the shadows of the dark room. If there’s thunder, she can’t hear it anymore — all she can think about is the tightness in her belly and her pussy, the force of his fingers against her clit, the wetness dripping down her thighs and pooling under her knees. The vulnerability of having her head forced up and her throat bared. She whimpers, and he rolls his hips against her. When he drives into her again, she screams — something about where his cock hits this time is so intense, so sensitive, that the silvery tears already streaming down her face start coming faster, and the fire inside her turns starburst-bright.

“There she is,” he grunts, and his hand leaves her clit. She keens at the loss and she’s vaguely aware of that heartless chuckle before he thrusts back inside her, hitting that same spot again — then again. It cuts off her desperate, wordless plea with a sudden gasp and moan, and then she feels his hands wrap around her throat from behind. “C’mon, pearl,” he taunts. “I’m told it’ll feel even better if you come like this. Give you the best little o you’ve ever had right at the end of your pitiful, evil little life—”

His hands squeeze, fingers digging into the sides of her throat, cutting off her bloodflow.

Her vision immediately sparks and spots again, and he keeps pummeling his hips against her, the head of his dick crashing into the front wall of her cunt with bruising force. She reaches up desperately with one hand, trying to cling to his fingers even as the room tilts dizzily, and the coils of hot, bright lightning spiral and crackle tighter every time he slams into her—

And then everything explodes, bright fireworks like the ones she remembers from her Terran childhood: deep in her belly, in her throbbing cunt, in her vision. Blinding and burning and sweeping through her in a burning, thunderous quake so loud and painful that she shoots right out of time, right out of reality, better and brighter and more blinding than any orgasm she’d ever been able to give herself.

Her arms buckle at the same time that the stranger lets go of her neck, and suddenly, her jaw is slamming into the ground — hard. The inside of her cheek opens against her teeth, and she tastes blood for the third time that night. It fills her mouth. She can hear him snicker again “—fucked herself so stupid she can’t even hold herself up; pathetic—” and the skin at her hips burns in sharp points of fire as blood paints itself over her lips once more. Something drips down the outside of her thighs and she suddenly realizes he’s sunk his claws into her so he can haul her hips up to meet him. It’s just as well: she’s too dazed and weakened to pull herself back onto her hands, and her thighs are shaking and quivering. She can feel her cunt and clit, twitching and throbbing, pulsing with aftershocks. Her cheek presses into the cold floor and she closes her eyes, trying to breathe.

“I’m half-tempted to carve my signature in your pretty red ass. What d’you think?” The words don’t make sense at first in her blurred brain: swimming like shiverfish through layers of silver diaphanous water. Then something — the survivor’s clawed thumb, maybe — shifts and digs cruelly into the bruised, heated softness of her ass, right where he’d all but tattooed her with his palm earlier. His claw feels like a dull blade and a fiery brand all at once, like a butter-knife heated over an open flame, and surely she’s bleeding there now too as his claw digs deep and slides.

“Well? What d’you think, pearl? Should I sign my frickin’ work of art?” His voice, already unforgiving but somehow gleeful, suddenly turns cold and hard. “89P13?”

The nonsensical string of letters falls apart in her mind, but not the threat of pain. She whimpers and tries to wriggle away exhaustedly, maybe more afraid for herself than she’d been since she’d first seen him — but even that seems hazy and distant.

Just wait till I’m dead, she thinks vaguely — just wait for that, please—

But the threat is apparently empty, or maybe it just hadn’t elicited the reaction he’d wanted, because the sharp claw leaves its deep, burning furrow. Instead, the survivor’s hand snakes around and suddenly finds her clit again, and this time she shrieks, bucking up against him in surprise. His soft-leather touch — it hurts — maybe worse than the grounding burn that his claw had scorched onto her ass. It’s so startling, ethereal, ephemeral, stinging; it makes her whole body flinch and jump. She tries to wriggle away in earnest now; she doesn’t know why it’s so painful, like a million relentless static shocks — and now the survivor chuckles darkly against her.

“Yeah, pearl, you needy fuckin’ whore. I know, I know. You just needed to slum it with the vermin so you could get fucked right. Does it hurt, precious? Did Wyndham never play with you after you came?”

She can’t answer because oh, everything is recoiling, every nerve screeching and convulsing. She’s scrabbling and squirming desperately: trying to get away from his fingers, bucking her hips against him as she tries to escape, only to impale herself further onto his dick. The callused friction on her clit is relentless, though, and her pussy is clenching, sore and swollen — and then the rest of her is clenching too, bones scorching away into ash. Her body snaps and spasms, cunt clenching desperately, muscles seizing and then dissolving into anguished bliss, clit throbbing and painful with only white-gold cinders left inside her.

The survivor is snickering. And his fingers don’t let up.

“Please,” she sobs against the floor, “please — wait, just —“

“Oh,” he says, each word oozing with false pity, “is your puffy little clit too sensitive? S’it too much, pearl? D’you need a break?” He snorts, still driving his hips into her ceaselessly, still scraping the pads of his fingers over the sore, stinging bud between her thighs. “Please. You begged to come, didn’t you? Whiny, spoiled slut.”

She can hear the scorn in his voice and that spiral of shame she’d first felt when he’d called her a greedy faithless bitch — it suddenly returns to her belly, tight and miserable.

“M’sorry — didn’t mean to —” she muffles against the wooden floorboards, sniffling. If he hears her, he ignores it.

“M’sure you can come a third time,” he jeers. “Begged me to use you, didn’t you? Make you come however I wanted? Well, what I want is for you to come on my dick again.” Derision drops from his sharp teeth, floating teasingly over her back on his breath. “Don’t worry,” he hisses, “I’ll help.”

“C-can’t,” she sobs — more loudly this time — tears running over the bridge of her nose to puddle on the floor under her cheek. Her clit twitches and flinches against his merciless fingers.

“Quitter,” he sneers, and doesn’t stop the punishing pace he’s set, thrusting into her while he scrubs his fingertips ruthlessly against her little bundle of nerves. “So much for wanting to be good for me. Can’t even come without crying. Poor, sensitive little pearl.” He snickers. “Worthless, really.”

Her tears slip out faster, harder, as her heart sinks behind her breastbone, raw and empty. She’s shaky and helpless against him, aching, and this time when the heat builds, it’s low and melting, slow and relentless. She moans brokenly when it washes through her exhausted, liquified limbs, her little pussy fluttering and pulsing weakly around his cock. His hips push deep as she comes around him, twitching and dripping, and then he rips himself out of her and she feels the soft spatter of something sticky and thick and warm against her folds. He presses forward again, and some dazed, distant part of her realizes he’s fucking his come into her swollen, achy cunt, fingers leaving her clit to scoop it up and stuff it into her pussy alongside his dick. Everything that dares to drip out, he collects up and thrusts back into her — patient, remorseless. She whimpers at the additional girth of his fingers stretching her further around his cock, walls fluttering anxiously and exhaustedly, but she’s too shaky and spent to protest — not that she would, anyway.

His strokes grow slower, and finally, she feels him withdraw.

He releases the claws still anchored into her hip, stepping away. She wobbles before tumbling to her side, thighs slippery and body boneless — though to be honest, some distant dazed part of her is vaguely surprised he hadn’t shoved her away, thrown her down with that bruising strength of his.

Slowly, dizzily, the room resolves itself around her. She hears the pummeling rain, sees the wavering patterns of darkness. She starts to make sense of the shadows, and the warm moltenness of every muscle, and her impending death. Her whole body trembles: fingertips, toes. Every limb. Her ribs and her battered pussy and even her hair.

It was so much, so fast. She’s come before — but it hasn’t been anything like that. The room still spins around her — more slowly, but dizzy still. She thinks she can still feel the hot imprint of his fingers and palms: slapping, pinching, rubbing. Her skin echoes with the memory of all the ways and places he’d touched her.

Slowly, the room stills, but the ghost of sensation remains. She breathes something that might almost be a sigh. In front of her eyes, she sees her own gently curled fingers, knuckles gently kissing the wooden floor. Just beyond — easily within reach — the silver hairpin-dagger, feathers battered but not cracked apart. Something inside her stills, and then she turns her eyes away: watching the silhouette of the survivor as he tucks himself back into his pants and buttons them, metal glinting in the shadows as he moves. His tail flicks behind him, brisk and irritated.

And then — something strange and panicked bubbles up inside her. Endorphins, maybe. Adrenaline. Orgasms, and someone else’s hands, and rebellion. The promise of some kind of liberation on the horizon. Something is happening on her face — an alien feeling, uncontrollable.

M’dame Lavenza realizes, for the first time in years, that she’s smiling.

She tilts her head back against the dark floor in a cloud of half-loose, tangled curls, and she laughs. Silk still rucked up to her hips, tattered garters and stockings, breasts and swollen pussy still on display — but she couldn’t care less.

She feels good. She’d feel better, she thinks regretfully, if she’d managed to keep up with the survivor, if she hadn’t been such a disappointment for him, but still — still —

He tsks from the shadows and steps closer, staring down at her with his hands on his narrow hips. “Dick so good you cracked up, pearl?”

She shakes her head, grin faltering uncertainly. How to explain her frantic elation, and apologize at the same time?

“I–”

“Never mind,” he interrupts coldly. “I don’t frickin’ give a shit.”

The tattered remnants of her smile fade out, because of course he doesn’t. He hates her, after all.

And that’s okay. She knew that when she’d asked him to fuck her. He steps forward, planting a foot on her shoulder with a grimace, like he’s disgusted at the memory of having touched her moments earlier — and that stings, even though it shouldn’t. His foot shoves, and rolls her onto her back. She lets him: lets him straddle her, lets him drop back down onto her ribs, lets him tuck his knees back into her armpits. She tries to drag in a steadying, readying breath. His tail brushes carelessly across her bare pubic bone and an upper thigh, and lies there. Her breasts gleam in the darkness. He stares down at her, and she watches as he tilts his head.

Everything seems very far away.

His hands come back to her throat, and her still-trembling fingers rise to rest on his wrists again: delicately, this time.

“Not even gonna fight, huh, pearl? Fucked that stupid?”

She knows her eyes are big. So big that when the next lightning strike comes, it hurts her dilated pupils. But she doesn’t look away.

“I probably will, once you start,” she admits softly. She breathes in, filling her lungs, letting them expand under the restriction of his legs. Then she exhales, and she doesn’t bother to pick up the tatters of her M’dame Lavenza mask — she just lets herself deflate. Lets herself empty.

It feels like freedom.

She tilts her head back against the floor, leaning the base of her throat into his palms. They feel so good. All that sun-warmed leather. The faint purplish light cast on the ceiling from the window is dappled and shifting with rain.

Pretty, she thinks distantly. Everything seems blurred at the edges. Surreal.

“But I don’t know how else to get out,” she confesses, and the words are a crushed-up whisper, gravelly from the rawness of her bruised throat. “I’m okay with you killing me. I don’t want–” She swallows, and it hurts. “I don’t want to be left with him.” She tilts her head to one side, gesturing with the motion even while her eyes remain turned away. “You should move that. Just in case.”

She can feel the second his gaze leaves her, and then he curses, fingers flexing instinctively on her throat before one hand darts away. She hears the clatter of her sharp silver hairpin being shoved out of her reach, but she keeps her eyes on the rippling light splashed across the room. There’s a new and sudden quiet, softened only by the drumming rain. Both of his hands circle her neck again and she waits for the squeeze while lightning silvers the room.

The pattern of it through the rain-covered glass makes lace on the ceiling.

“Don’t try to trick me,” the survivor snarls after a moment, his voice tense and so furious she can taste it, sour and slick as venom dripped in her mouth. “You knew about Lylla—”

Lylla. The white headstone. The sweet-smelling lilacs. She can feel the misery paint its way over her face.

“No,” she says gently — tenderly. She reaches up one hesitant, careful hand again, and he flinches back when her fingers brush the fur of his face, like earlier. But she only smooths a thumb back over his cheek before dropping it lightly back to bracelet his wrist. “I guessed. Because I know he keeps us all alone on purpose. And he only gives us things to love so he can take them away when it suits him.”

The hands at her throat are so still she thinks she can feel the pulse in his fingertips, drumming softly against her skin. Something about it — the reminder of life when she’s only had imaginary tombstones for company, the relief of an escape laid out before her on these strong, warm hands, the hot overwhelm of them on her body — she feels a shudder run up her spine before she can stop it. Her hands, clinging like butterflies to his wrists, move to her face instead: palms pressed into her eyes, fighting down a sudden sob. It’s a practiced move, perfected over countless nights spent trying to keep everything still and quiet while she’d wept herself to sleep under her stiff white quilt, or whisper-screaming into her knees in the back corner of her closet.

This time, though, the tears are unexpected. She doesn’t even understand why they’re there — not really. Surely there’s nothing to cry about now. She grapples them back, sinking her teeth hard into the lip she’d bitten earlier, forgetting about the wound there.

Fresh blood spurts over her tongue and pours down the back of her throat, and she does choke on it this time — sputtering — and suddenly the stranger is leaning back, gripping her shoulders, twisting her onto her side underneath him. She braces herself on the floor with her forearm and opposite hand: coughing, spitting out blood.

He waits and says nothing until she’s able to gasp in a lungful of air, her throat hoarse and painful — and then she rolls back, pressing her shoulderblades into the floor, eyes fluttering closed. Exhausted. Depleted. His hands don’t return to her throat, and his knees rest easy next to her ribs.

It doesn’t matter though. It’s coming.

Though she does have one more thing she wants to say.

“You’re not a monster.”

His body twitches where it sits atop her ribs — a little jump. Whatever he’d expected her to say, apparently that hadn’t been it.

“You’re not, and you never have been.”

He shifts.

“It’s always, always been him.”

The rain thrums. A little swell of thunder rises threateningly, then falls again. The survivor says nothing, and she keeps her eyes closed. Maybe she could doze off here, and he could just strangle her in her sleep. She thinks again of the tombstones. She tries to imagine each flower petal, the feel of the engraved letters under her fingertips, the warm grass on the soles of her feet. Lylla and Fairy, and two more: forever-blank. There should be more, she thinks.

There should be countless more.

“Will you tell me your name?” she asks. She’s vaguely aware that her voice has gone dreamy. Exhaustion pulls at the ends of her hair, weighing down her eyelashes and the corners of her mouth.

“Stalling again, pearl? Trying to get outta me killin’ you?”

“Hm.” She can’t help the little puff of almost-laughter. “Not a chance.” She cracks one eye at him, almost — playfully. When was the last time she’d felt that? Maybe a couple of moments, years ago — gentle teasing comments to the maid. “You promised, you know.”

It strikes her that she’s laughed more in the last few moments with this stranger than she has since Fairy had disappeared into Theel’s fist and a palmful of blood.

His knees shift against her ribs again, and his crimson-glow gaze narrows, and she lowers her lashes again sleepily.

“It’s just been so long since I’ve gotten to learn anyone’s name.” Only Herbert and Vim and Theel. And now Lylla.

“No,” he spits, and she feels her heart squeezes in her chest, but she supposes he doesn’t owe her anything. And then he shifts his weight on her ribs and something in him must bend. “Don’t got one,” he rasps, and it’s stuck somewhere between bewildered and biting. “Lylla was gonna help pick—“ his voice cracks off, singed at the end like it’s been lightning-struck.

She can feel her brow crease. Tears try to squeeze out again from under her eyelids and the sweep of her lashes, but she ignores them. “Do you still want one?” she asks at last, achingly.

The silence grows long. His fingers return to her neck, and linger — but they don’t tighten. His voice, when it comes, sounds different.

“You should find something that makes you happy,” she whispers into the rain-purring quiet. “Take it for yourself, for your name. Let yourself be reminded of it whenever anyone calls you by it.” She hesitates, wondering if she’s going too far. “She’d probably want that for you.”

He doesn’t say anything for a long time. His fingers stroke against her neck — just a little — then fall away. But then he grips her chin with tight, bruising fingers, digging into her jaw and cheeks so suddenly that she flinches. But he only turns her face roughly to one side, then the other — and she lets him handle her: positioning her head however he wants. Pointing her eyes back toward him in the darkness.

“Look at me, pearl.”

She keeps her eyes closed, but she can feel her lower lip pursing softly: the reluctant ghost of a smile that can’t quite make it fully onto her lips. Everything still feels very far away and dense. “Do you know why he calls me that?” she asks, almost whimsically.

“‘Cause you’re perfect.”

The sneer is back at the edge of his voice, and her mouth curves even further — fondly, perhaps. She thinks she could almost laugh again — she can feel the shape of it haunt the edges of her lips.

And it’s good to not have to fight anymore.

“Because he made me from nothing more than a parasite.”

The silence swells: just rainfall, and low thunder. She feels her body sink sleepily into the floorboards, only pinned awake by his fingers gripping her chin. Then:

“Open your eyes.”

She opens them for him, wet lashes weighing her lids down. When did they become so heavy? His sharp-glinting eyes search hers in the darkness.

“What are you looking for?” she asks softly.

He doesn’t answer — at least not directly. “F’you wanted out so bad, why’re you still here?”

The question spears through her exhaustion, bringing all that urgency crushing back to the front of her mind. She jolts and her tired hands snap to his wrist again. He jumps — alarmed — fingers squeezing her jaw and knees clamping tight on her ribs once more, tail slapping softly against her thighs in startled tension. His ears flick back and his lips peel away from his teeth, but she ignores every warning sign to clutch at his forearm.

“You have to get away again,” she implores him. “Don’t — don’t get caught, okay? Please?” She repeats her earlier warning. “He kills anyone who touches me.”

She thinks his eyes widen in the dark. The fur, risen at his shoulders and neck, slowly lays itself flat. She can hear him swallow.

“I don’t get caught, sweetheart.” His voice is hoarse. “And when I do, I escape. Every time. Every prison.”

She tries to search his face — frantic — but it’s hard to make out much. Her human eyes strain in the darkness.

“Promise?” she begs.

There’s another moment of silence, and a low shiver of thunder, and then he responds.

“M’gonna be fine. Promise.”

Something in his tone puts her at ease. Slowly, she relaxes her hold on his wrist, thumbs stroking the warm fur longingly — wistfully. Then she lets her hands slide back down to the floor: palms up and open on either side of her head, fingers curved into tender little curls. She keeps her eyes soft.

“It’s okay then,” she tells him gently. And maybe he’ll be nice after all. Maybe it won’t hurt very much.

His fingers suddenly clench on her chin — so tight that her lashes go wide and she can’t help the startled whimper that trips up from the back of her throat — and his lip curls back in an abrupt snarl. She can feel the low rumble of his growl before the sound of it hits the air, rattling along her ribs.

Oh, she thinks, humiliated by her own foolishness. How silly. Of course he’s going to make it hurt—

But then he releases her face so abruptly it almost feels like he’s shoving her away, freeing a sudden hissing storm of expletives from wherever he’s been storing them behind his teeth. Brow furrowed and eyes flashing, tail lashing against her still-naked hips, he curses: shaking his head furiously and slamming his fists against his thighs, then digging his claws into his knees.

Her brow creases, and her eyes grow bigger. “H-hey,” she says gently, hesitantly, every word laced with concern. “Are you all right?”

He glares down at her, seething.

“I hate you.”

Her brow tilts, baffled. “Oh. I know. That’s okay too.”

His eyes screw shut and he grits his teeth so hard she can hear the canines grinding.

“You wanna come with me?”

She blinks. That doesn’t make sense. She can’t have heard correctly. A trick of the thunder, perhaps, still rolling ominously. Of her exhaustion-addled brain, and the bruise where he’d slammed her skull into the floor.

Maybe she’s concussed.

“I—what?”

He growls his frustration. “You wanna come with me, pearl?”

For a second, her heart trips over itself, hopeful — and foolish.

“I can’t,” she whispers through blood-slicked lips, the words barely audible over the low rumble. His ears flick. “I’ve tried. Every time, he — every time, there’s a cost.”

His eyes narrow on her. “You won’t be here to pay it.”

She can feel the corner of her mouth twist down and she hold his eyes solemnly. “I’m never the one who pays it.”

She supposed that will be it. Supposes he couldn’t possibly be inclined to take her now. She’s just told him that she’s let others foot the bill for her crimes.

But he’s quiet for a moment. She can feel the angry tension riddling his body — the way his tail flicks against her thighs, irritable and erratic. And then it drains away, and when she flutters her eyes open in concern, she can see he’s almost slumped over her.

Then he snorts. “Well then — seems like maybe you an’ me got something in common after all.”

She blinks, stunned, and then remembers: Lylla, of course. She wants to hold his hands in hers and tell him it’s not his fault — can’t possibly be. No-one makes Herbert do anything Herbert doesn’t want to do.

“I can’t take the chance that—"

“No-one else is here to pay it this time, either,” the survivor adds with an arched brow. “I know you ain’t got family here.” His voice gets a little meaner. “Didn’t sound like anyone on Wundagore II was gonna miss you either.”

She’s put so much effort into making sure that’s true that she doesn’t need to finch, but she’s sure a guilty flush rises in her cheeks.

He snorts derisively. “Unless you’re worried about Vim and Theel, which — fuck ‘em,” he adds placidly. "They're as guilty as he is."

She tries to crush down that stubborn thread of hopefulness.

“I’ll make him think you’re dead,” the survivor is already telling her — casually, like it’s nothing. Her brain tries to make sense of the sudden offer, because she can’t afford to make mistakes — not with his life on the line.

He doesn’t stop speaking, though.

“I’ll send him on a wild chase to the wrong systems. Tryls’art, maybe. Somewhere on the other ass-end of the universe.” The survivor tilts his head. “He got a tracker on you?”

She nods mutely, eyes wide in her head.

“Used to have one in me too. They’re easy enough to cut out — we can drop it in the ocean out there.” He gestures carelessly at the window. “I’ll take you to some fancy, nice little planet somewhere. Get you set up with some units and a place to stay. Fresh start, an’ all that shit.”

His teeth flash in a grin — the first of the night that doesn’t look like it’s carved into his teeth by hate. Its lopsided and tight — uncomfortable on his face, like he’s trying to put her at ease and doesn’t know how — but it warms her anyway.

God, it warms her.

When was the last time someone really smiled at her? The linguist, probably.

Still—

“It’s a big universe,” the survivor says.

She licks her lip — almost bites it again before catching herself. “What about your revenge?”

His voice is dry — sardonic. “M’flexible.” The wry smirk he offers now feels more natural — his wider grin fallen into halves, with an ironic edge. “I think fucking his little wife silly, making her come three times on his wedding night, an’ then helping her leave him at the frickin’ altar is maybe even better’n killing her.”

A desperate, frantic little laugh tries to flutter up from her ribs, chased fast by despair. She wants to believe he can get her out of the Arete and off HalfWorld, and that both of them can be okay. She wants to. She suspects he can even see it in her face. And maybe it would be the same mistake she’d made with Herbert, anyway — accepting a way out, only to find herself trapped all over again.

She doesn’t think so, though. She’s gotten much better at reading people over the years, as a matter of survival. When no-one will talk to a person, and no-one will touch them — when everything is a cold charade for years and years, and every mistake comes with a very high cost — well, a girl learns to read the nuances.

But still. She can’t get in his way.

“I shouldn’t,” she whispers, the sound like a wound in the darkness. “I’m not — I don’t know how to do anything. I can’t even fly. I’ll hold you back—”

“You sure are fighting hard to get killed.” His voice is dry.

She shakes her head. “I don’t want to be responsible for you getting killed,” she corrects him quietly. “I can barely walk in this stupid dress, much less run in it — and I definitely can’t climb out the window.” She shakes her head, trying to disguise the misery she knows show on her face.

His eyes rake over her again in the dark, and she can feel them — suddenly scraping over her still-bare breasts, the billowing clouds of diaphanous silk currently pinned between her belly and his thighs. Something fractures in his face and he lurches: peeling himself up and off her ribs so quickly that the absence of his weight and his warmth leaves her bereft. She’s at a loss when he turns away, massaging the back of his neck in the dark.

“Fuck,” he swears again. “Sorry. You can, uh, get yourself covered up.”

Her head is swimming with confusion.

“I — prob’ly shouldn’t have been so much of an ass,” he says, and she can hear the wince in his voice as she slowly sits — carefully, biting back a hiss when she leans briefly on the ass cheek he’d spanked. A few pearls, caught somewhere in the mess of her skirts and the tangle of her hair, hit the floor and tumble into the dark. Her legs are still shaky: thighs sticky, everything sore. She tries to tug her bodice up over herself, spreading the layers of skirt over her folded legs like a sheet, leaning sideways onto her less-tender hip. “I prob’ly shouldn’t’a fucked you at all,” he’s muttering. “I should’ve — I don’t frickin’ know. I’m a fuckin’ monster. Fuck.”

It doesn’t sound like an excuse — more like self-condemnation.

She’s baffled, and that urge to offer comfort — whether or not it’s wanted — rises again under her ribs.

“I didn’t mind,” she offers tentatively, even though she can feel the heat staining her cheeks. She looks down, still trying to pull up on the silk neckline. “I asked you to. It felt—” She stumbles over the words. “It felt good.” She hesitates. “Mostly. I think.” The neckline is finally somewhere close to covering her. “And I was glad that I wasn’t going to have to die without having sex.”

He whips around so fast that his claws skitter against the ground and more pearls roll against the wet wood flooring. She jumps back with a startled squeak, breasts nearly bouncing back out of the laughably-low neckline she’d finally gotten up over her nipples.

“What?”

She blushes hotter, mortified by his sudden scrutiny. “It felt good?” she repeats, her voice small and self-conscious. “Scary, but good–” She winces. “I know — you said I wasn’t good for you, and I’m sorry—“

“I said—? You’re saying Wyndham never fucked you? Nobody ever fucked you before?”

“Oh,” she says, startled. “No. Herbert — no. Thank god. He never even kissed me on the mouth.” She flushes. Given how disappointed the survivor had been, maybe there’d been a reason for Herbert’s reticence beyond what she had assumed was just an aversion to all things messy. “And nobody — I never—” She breaks off, flinching. “To be honest, I can’t remember the last time anyone touched me at all.”

God, that’s mortifying too. It had only been a year or so after she’d arrived, she thinks.

“It must’ve been — I was thirteen or fourteen, I think? An etiquette instructor, fixing my posture.”

Not that he cares about that, of course. Now she’s just saying things that don’t matter.

The thunder rumbles, low and mocking.

But the survivor is silent, eyes wide and searching, combing over her, staring, the muscles in his jaw flexing as he clenches his teeth and releases them again and again.

Maybe, she thinks, he’s second-guessing his offer to take her. She is a liability. She wouldn’t blame him. Or maybe it was all just a mean manipulation, like Herbert sometimes—

“I’m a fuckin’ monster,” the stranger rasps out suddenly.

His voice sounds strangled — genuinely horrified, she thinks, and it makes her brow tilt in concern. She rises up onto her reddened, raw knees, silk falling into twists and waves around her. She half-reaches for him before she can stop herself — then reels her hands back in between her breasts, nervous. She might crave contact, she reasons, but he seems unlikely to find her touch as comforting as she’d want it to be.

“No — that’s not—”

He’s watching her with wide eyes, skimming them up and down her body, from the messy tumble of her half-ripped chignon down to the puddle of silk around her knees on the floor. She can feel the scorch where his gaze lights on the bloody knot on her forehead and the red smear on her mouth, the place where her hands are clutched and fisted against her cleavage.

“Yeah,” he repeats abruptly, raspily, “I am. I’m a fuckin’ monster.” Then he’s striding toward her so quickly that she tries to shuffle back in surprise. But her knees get caught in the spiderweb of silk, and she tumbles back onto her welted asscheek, a tortured little cry peeling up out of her throat as she flinches and snaps her body onto her opposite hip.

Lightning flashes, and she sees something in him recoil.

“S-sorry,” she apologizes, reaching out one hand beseechingly, worried he might think she’s cringing away from him, like she believes he’s some sort of monster after all. “I’m sorry — it’s not — I was startled, and this stupid dress—”

His jaw works, and then his eyes skate over her again, and he eases the last few steps toward her. “I know what it is,” he says dryly. “We’ll take care of that once we get you off this frickin’ rock.” He drops into a crouch before she can fully interpret his words. “You gotta come with me now, doll.”

His words are firm, and it’s dizzying, how quickly he’s gone from one extreme to the other.

“I guess I can see why you wouldn’t trust me, but if I was still gonna kill you, you’d already be dead.” He clears his throat. “I got some contacts on a handful of planets — people I trust. Well. People who owe me. We’ll find someone who can take care of you till you get on your feet.” He picks up the layers of silk. “Hold still for me, pearl.”

She doesn’t balk, not even when he knots his fists in the fabric and rips it up to her knees.

“Lift up,” he says, tapping the outside of one foot gently. She leans back, stifling both a whimper and the surprising sting of tears when she has to lean on the bruised side of her ass to lift her legs and feet off the ground. Still, he notices, and she can see him grimace, ears flickering downward in the darkness.

He tears off a horizontal strip of fabric, all the way around, from each layer. The skirts are suddenly ragged and reasonable, fluttering more or less around her knees once she brings feet back down. He looks at her, and winces, then touches the fabric gently to the side of her forehead where he’d smashed her skull into the ground. She flinches, but she doesn’t pull away. When he retreats, there’s a dark stain blotting the pale silk. He considers her again, and then leans forward. “Bite your lip for me again, doll?”

She realizes immediately what he’s asking for — blood — and she nods at once, digging her teeth into the wound on her mouth with the same ferocity she’d normally reserved for her knees.

“Not that hard — fuck,” he spits, and he’s cupping the back of her head, tilting her face forward so the cut can bleed out onto the torn cloth. Messy dark curls tumble down either side of her head in tangled curtains.

“Do we have to hurry?” she asks after a long moment, worrying her lip with her teeth and trying to force out as much blood as she can. Her voice is muffled against the silk. For a moment, she thinks the survivor’s thumb is stroking the back of her head as he cradles it — but then his fingers go still and tense and she realizes she must have misinterpreted the motion. Still, his palm on her hair is so warm and so new that she just wants to curl up under it like a little cat.

“Nah, not that much,” he says quietly, every word rasping and measured. “Wyndham’s gonna be preoccupied fixing his fuckin’ face for a while. Vim and Theel, too. And there’s no-one else here yet. He ain’t finished—“ he trails off, shifting uncomfortably. “He ain’t finished the Humanimals yet.”

She doesn’t know what the Humanimals are, but she’s sure that they aren’t being finished with kindness and care. Her heart aches, and she swallows.

“Can we help them?” she asks into the silk.

He makes a little sound deep in his chest — startled, almost pained — and his thumb twitches against the crown of her head. There’s a long moment of silence, and then he mutters, “Not today.”

His voice sounds strained. But it’s also deep and smoky, and now that he’s not — not telling her how much he hates her, she’s surprised by how comforting it is. It rumbles low, like the thunder she’d wanted to lose herself in. Like a bonfire at night: warm and crackling.

“The Humanimals are still — violent. Violenter’n me, even. Wyndham can’t get the chemical filtration systems right.” There’s a pause. “They’d hurt you, pearl.”

The words flinch in the air, like he expects her to snap something cruel back at him.

“But still—"

“He’s already incinerated all the failures anyway,” he cuts in. “And there ain’t nothin’ else yet.”

She feels her shoulders sink and she tries not to let the ache of it overwhelm her. She shouldn’t be surprised anyway, she supposes.

Nevertheless, she’s blinking back tears again, hiding them behind the tilt of her head and the fabric in her hands. Leaving behind anything else that Herbert can hurt feels poisonous and vile—

It’s like the survivor can feel her misery rising up through the silk of her hair — or maybe he sees something in her bowed head and shoulders. There’s a pause, and then she feels him lean forward, tugging her in just a little — and the top of his head bumps lightly against the unbruised side of her forehead. She can feel his breath fluttering against the handfuls of silk.

It’s so — intimate. It could almost make her cry again. She’ll treasure this brief moment of contact and comfort forever, she thinks.

“It’ll —it’ll be okay, pearl.”

For the first time since she’s met him, he sounds unsure of himself. He clears his throat again and she feels him straighten: moving abruptly back, hand falling away. Her hair feels cold where his touch had suddenly disappeared.

She closes her eyes, and breathes in and out, washing away all the emotions just like she’s always done. Later, she thinks. She can cry about it later. For now, she prods at her lip with her tongue.

“I think I stopped bleeding,” she says, voice quiet. When she lifts her face, he’s eyeing the fabric consideringly. “I can bite myself again?” she offers.

“Nah,” he utters morosely. “This should be good.”

He drops the ragged, stained silk on the floor, letting it soak into the blood she’d spat out earlier, the gleaming smears of sweat and tears and other fluids.

“C’mon, sweetheart,” he stands. His tail twitches behind him in the dark. “Lemme get you out the window and down to the ground. Get you outta here and somewhere safe.”

His hand — the same one that had pinched her, struck her, toyed with her — is slender and dark when he offers it to her: the palm up, the claws sharp.

It’s so warm she can already feel it inside hers, long before she touches it.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

note: pearls are not made from grains of sand, but from a drill-worm or similar parasite getting inside a pearl oyster. the oyster’s mantle then secretes nacreous layers onto the parasite in an attempt to build a barrier, trapping the parasite inside. yikes

sorry babes, this chapter is mostly a direct pull from the og oneshot. it's also almost twice as long as a normal chapter because i couldn't find a good place to cut it. but here we are on our way now ♡♡ one more chapter this week and then we’ll probably move back to a more standard(ish) schedule of one new chapter every 1.5-2 weeks. realizing it's taking me like ten chapters to get through five days/rotations soooooo lol thank you again for giving this thing a shot ~ ♡

find expected posting schedules & chapter-previews on tumblr♡
here's the masterlist & moodboard♡

coming soon: chapter three. rasque.
summary: a daring escape.
warnings: references to chapter two’s violence. sexual fantasies. cutting (to remove a tracking device). some aftercare.
anticipated date: thursday, march seventh.

Chapter 3: rasque.

Summary:

a daring escape.

Notes:

warnings: references to the last chapter’s violence. big regrets. sexual fantasies. cutting (to remove a tracking device). some aftercare.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

rasque. a moment you instantly wish you could take back, feeling a pulse of dread right after crossing the point of no return—a blurted confession, a hurled insult, a final decision you’d been waffling over for months— wanting to take just one step backward in time, reverting to the way things used to be, in the halcyon days of just a minute ago. From rue, to regret + bourrasque, a tempest. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

There’ll be time for regret later, the Monster tells himself.

There always is, for him.

For now, he stands on the slippery glass of the pyramid, clawed toes clinging to the ridge of metal between panes. It’s thundering and raining and the lightning is dangerous and the glass is slick — but his throat is dry and he’s way more nervous than he’s allowing himself to think about. Because, well, he’d climbed up here with no concern for his own life, and now he’s got something that he’s gotta look out for.

Pearl.

He forces himself to focus on helping guide her bare, pretty legs out the window. He tries not to let his brain linger on how she’d looked, peeling down the tattered remains of her silk stockings. The only shoes Vim had given her, apparently, were stupid scraps of silk that would have probably been more of a hindrance than a help. When he’d asked if she’d had anything sturdier, she’d told him — as if it were no big deal — Herbert only lets me have the things I’m wearing.

It had been another bitter electric zap to the mouth.

She hadn’t asked to take anything else with her, either — lingering only over the long, sharp silver hairpin she’d warned him to move out of her reach when he’d still been planning to strangle her. Her eyes had looked tortured while she’d stood over it.

I’m not sure if Herbert will — think anything, about it being left here, she’d said. It seems stupid — it makes sense that it fell out of my hair while we were — before we — Her voice had crackled off like a little bit of crumpled honeycomb. But you know. He — he might think it means something. If I leave it. Or if it’s gone. I don’t know if I should take it or not.

He’d stared up at her, and tried not to think about the way her voice had dissolved like a sugar cube when she’d alluded to him fucking her. Instead, he’d focused his eyes on the feathered hairpin — willing her to take it, relieved to give her something, anything, to stamp out this guttering flare of guilt low in his belly.

The minute he’d asked her if she’d wanted to join him, he’d regretted it — expecting to have to fight with her to get her to leave things behind. His own idiot-brain had still been stubbornly stuck on the idea of a spoiled princess who would want to fill bags with expensive perfumes and embroidered shoes, or expect him to carry armfuls of her favorite satin gowns. In fact, it looks like he’d harvested more from this pretty cage of hers than she had: a pocketful of the most perfect of the loose pearls he’d been able to find.

He snorts. Maybe there’s a metaphor in that.

But it had appeared that this was the only thing she’d had to her name: a single pretty hairpin, elegant and narrow. He could’ve let her have that. He’d have been thankful if she’d taken it. Take a little of the taste of regret out of his mouth, and it wouldn’t hinder them at all.

D’you want it? Take it if you want it.

His question had only provoked more of a miserable little curl between her eyebrows.

I don’t know that, either, she’d admitted. Then she’d bitten her lip, and turned away. I’m leaving it, she’d said achingly, and he’d watched her bare toes curl nervously under the ragged ripped edge of her torn silk gown. They’d looked so fuckin’ vulnerable. I’m ready to go.

Now he tries not to flinch when she’s forced to lean her bruised ass cheek against the windowframe to slide out beside him. She makes a valiant effort to hide her little hiccuped gasp of pain — like she thinks there’s any galaxy in which he won’t notice. She’s so fuckin’ transparent that she might as well be glass herself, and he can’t believe he’d been such a stubborn fuckin’—

monster.

He should’ve figured it out long before he’d ever sunk his dick into her tight, tiny little pussy. He should’ve probably figured it out the minute she’d stroked her thumbs over his face like he was someone — a person — to be consoled, instead of jabbing his frickin’ eyes out of their sockets like he’d deserved.

He had known, in that moment, that something was off — but he hadn’t paused long enough to put the pieces together. He’d been too — fixated. Too obsessed.

Too busy hating that she’d existed.

“Put your feet like this, pearl,” he grunts at her, showing her how to notch the soft soles of her humie feet into the metal rails framing each pane in the pyramid. “Lean against the glass — it won’t break. This frickin’ stuff is made to hold up on re-entry.”

She blinks at him over her shoulder. “The Arete is a ship?”

Smart girl.

“Focus on your feet,” he orders instead, grimacing. He hovers his hand over the curve of her hip, and hopes that they both get lucky and neither of them get struck by lightning.

To her credit, the girl gets halfway to the vertical strut he’s gonna need her to climb down before she wobbles. His hand rises to her flank immediately, pressing her against the glass. Without thinking, he strokes his hand down over the curve of her hip in a way he means to be comforting — as if he could possibly be of any comfort to her at all — but she doesn’t seem perturbed by the gesture. There’s a slight uptick in her heartbeat — a soft little drumbeat beneath the rain — but it evens out quickly.

Unlike his, which is picking up speed with every new raindrop that lands on her stupid frickin’ dress.

The pale silk of it is already silvering into translucence under the onslaught of the storm, and he realizes — with a stifled groan buried under the low thunder and the sound of the rain hammering the glass — that by the time the two of them get to the stolen runabout he has stowed at the shoreline, she’ll be as good as naked. Worse, really — all wrapped up like the cutest little piece of candy, pink and peach peeking through the transparent layers and clinging wet veils. He can already see the delicate fabric clinging to her ass. His eyes pick out a bloom of washed-out red on one cheek and his whole body suddenly cringes, trying to fold in on itself. It’s blood, he thinks — he can smell it — blurred out in the wetness of the silk. He shudders on the memory of how close he’d been to fucking branding her.

89P13.

The only reason he hadn’t, really, was not out of some last-minute gesture of mercy — at least, not only that. The Monster is a bastard but he doesn’t believe in letting himself off the hook for his bad frickin’ decisions. No. A big part of the reason he’d stopped was only because he hates that designation, and he hadn’t wanted to claim it — not even in this fucked-up and vindictive way.

He’s going to need to bandage that for her. There’s no way she’ll be able to reach it by herself, and it’ll need a steri-strip at least. Maybe even a laser-stitch.

Poor fuckin’ girl.

No, there’s no time for this now — no time for the perpetual plummeting in his gut, the twist in his chest. He’s gotta focus on getting her off the fuckin’ Arete and away from this goddamn planet. He hasn’t got time to be letting his eyes sting and blur, getting further blinded in the rain.

He owes her that much.

…But also, what the fuck is he gonna put her in? The runabout seats and bunks two, but it’s tiny and full-up on all his stupid weapons and stolen shit — plus, he’s only got his own clothes. Maybe he can just bundle her up in as many layers of blanket as he can find and toss her in the bunk: Wyndham’s pretty little kidnapped bride, warm and soft and naked and wet, wrapped up like a present and tucked in his bed.

It’s a dangerous frickin’ thought.

He knows he’s got no-one to blame but himself. This whole damn thing is the result of his own impulsiveness at every frickin’ turn. When he’d first heard of her — Lizette Lavenza, Sire’s Flawless Pearl, mentioned only in hushed and frightened tones on Wundagore II — he’d assumed she was as heinous as Wyndham himself. She’d have to be, to attach her life to the High Evolutionary.

He’d thought.

The hushed tones of the Wundagorish locals had only supported that hypothesis. Madame Lavenza. Sire’s Pearl. Beautiful beyond compare. Kind. Untouchable. But the Monster had seen the tension in the lines of their faces and the hunch of their shoulders when they’d spoken of her. And under drunken breaths, deep in the shadowy recesses of nighttime taverns and bedrooms, far from Sire’s listening ears, there were other stories: the queenlike, cold-hearted witch who’d killed her little pets, who’d ordered the death of a young girl who’d displeased her, who’d tried to seduce one of her tutors and had him killed when he’d refused to fuck her. The tutor’s widow had taken their two children and had gone to Sire privately, the whispers said — to beg for justice, or at least support. It would’ve been a gamble that the Monster could have told them would never have worked out in their favor. But according to the stories, Wyndham’s betrothed had found out.

The tutor’s little family had been cut from the fabric of the universe.

The tales of Wyndham’s pearl hadn’t been told with vindictiveness or venom, either: only fear. A warning to children and adults alike. The solemnity had only made them easier to believe — but the local legends hadn’t mattered much when the Monster had first heard them. He hadn’t cared — not then. Not about her. His only goal had been to convince his creator to make him a companion. M’dame Lavenza — an icy, rigid-faced bitch, he’d have bet his last laser cannon — had only been a potential weapon, a bit of blackmail. A frigid piece of collateral to dangle in front of Wyndham.

Make me a companion. Make me someone like me, or I’ll destroy your precious pearl.

Then we’ll both be alone, won’t we?

He supposes, now, that Wyndham probably hadn’t actually cared very much about his pretty bride, or about being alone. That the High Evolutionary had been far more angry to find one of his own creations had the gall to make demands — even more outraged when the creation-in-question had proven to be his most hideous and degenerate first-draft, his most-hated and only escapee. Maybe the High Evolutionary had also been enraged at the idea that the one perfect thing he’d credited to himself — regardless of how much perfection his pearl had come by naturally, which the Monster now wagers is pretty much all of it — could be taken away. Ruined.

Destroyed.

Wyndham had agreed: mouth tense, rage shivering at the edge of his words, jaw perpetually clenched with fury. And then — a few quarters later — she had been there, hugging the Monster with her slender vibranium-alloy arms: Lylla. Lovely and kind, with nothing but compassion in her liquid-dark eyes.

Lylla. Alive just long enough for the Monster to love her, and then ended — shot neatly through the silky fur of her chest with a laser pistol.

The otter pelt, at least, is in fine condition.

That had been when the Monster had decided he’d gut Madame Lavenza — leave her as a present for Wyndham on his wedding night. A bride for a bride: one whom Wyndham might have considered ugly on the outside, and the other truly hideous within.

Except the Monster had been wrong, hadn’t he? This girl’s as soft as caramel, through and through.

Fuck.

She reaches the vertical strut and his hand returns to her hip — carefully avoiding the asscheek that he knows must be aching and stinging. Still, not a word of complaint has tripped over her pretty lips, even though he knows she must be exhausted and sore, and the metal ridge he has her balanced on is probably tearing up her feet. He presses one hand to her waist, delicately squeezing her against the slanted glass before swinging himself nimbly around her. She gasps as he hangs suspended — just for a millionth of a second — in the dark needles of rain, dozens of stories above the ground.

The Monster nearly jumps out of his skin when she reaches for him. He’s suddenly certain that he’s misjudged, that he’s made a terrible mistake, that she’s played him like the fool he fuckin’ is and now she’ll fling him off the precipice of the glass pyramid, down to the hard ostentatious marble below. He almost clamps his teeth into her forearm — I’ll at least take part a’ you with me — but her body scoops around him in the moment that he gets close enough. She’s soft and wet and half-sheltering him from the rain, pushing him firmly into the glass. She’s — anchoring him, steadily: even as her heart stumbles like a drunken frantic butterfly behind her ribs and her skin shivers, dripping with cold wet raindrops reflecting and refracting light.

He stares up at her, snug against the cold wet silk and the warm plush of her thigh, the side of his mouth pressed into the soft curve of her abdomen. She’s diamond-studded, star-sprinkled, and so close to frozen that her teeth are making little shuddery jumps against each other — but it’s almost like she’d wanted to catch him, to keep him safe. It’s an utterly alien thought, blooming in his brain, but it elicits the same sharp ache under his metal sternum that he’d felt when she’d begged him to make sure he could get away safely and he’d suddenly realized he’ll kill you had been a warning and a plea, but never a threat.

It stings and stumbles in his chest, and his mouth tastes so very bitter.

“S-sorry,” she stammers down breathily onto the drenched crown of his head, her words a little curl of warm breath between chattering teeth. “Sorry — I thought—”

He’d made her bleed, he reminds himself, and every image his mind calls up is a cringing horror. Her bitten mouth, her bruised head, her bloodied hips. Her soft little belly, right here under his nose. He’ll have to take a look at it — all of it — once he gets her off this rotten rock.

Fuck, he hopes she doesn’t scar. He’ll never fuckin’ get over it.

He peels himself from under the warmth of her, scowling. “Told you. M’fine in these kinds of situations.” His feet find the rungs in the vertical strut and he lowers himself two steps before opening an arm to her. “Get in here, pearl — uh, sweetheart,” he corrects himself immediately. She still seems like pearl to him: glossy, luminous, easily marked-up — too perfect for an ugly galaxy. But apparently Wyndham had meant it in a real fucked-up sense and now the Monster feels like calling her that is a weird kind of insult in a way he hadn’t actually intended. Maybe he should be calling her Lizette, or even Madame Lavenza — but he supposes those are details to focus on when he’s not trying to herd her down twenty-some stories in the middle of an electrical storm.

He shakes the thoughts from his head like so many raindrops and gestures her into the space between his arms. “Careful — metal’s slick. Your feet might slide.” He swallows. “Don’t look down, okay?” It’s probably too dark for her weak humie eyes to pick up on what a long drop it is, but he’s not gonna take the risk.

He’s surprised by how little he needs to worry, though. She listens to him so well and she’s so careful — each step placed carefully, tested before she leans her weight into it. His sharper eyes can pick up on how her fingers have gone bone-white from the chill and from gripping the handrails so hard, but she descends steadily above him, and she doesn’t flinch or quail at all.

He tries not to think about how his nose is so close to her thighs, to her cunt — the way the soft flesh is probably rubbing against her swollen, sore little pussy as she lowers herself on the ladder. It’s a distraction he really doesn’t have time for when — even though he knows Wyndham will be down for the count for a while, and Vim and Theel will be distracted trying to care for him — this is all still a pretty risky undertaking.

She’s got a sweet, clean scent that’s nearly hidden under the rain — something familiar that he can’t quite identify — and he’s suddenly trying to remember what she’d smelled like in her room, when he’d had her underneath him.

No. He’s an idiot. He hadn’t been in the right mindset to take in any of the details he should’ve. If he had been, he never would’ve—

Punished her like that. Tried to crush her up and make her feel as small and ashamed as he felt, tried to hurt her however he could.

“Almost there,” he murmurs up against her hip. He allows himself the indulgence of pressing the side of his nose consolingly against her thigh before pulling away, furious with himself all over again.

He can feel her relief when her feet finally touch the ground — or maybe it’s his own. It strikes him that just an hour or so ago, he’d started climbing that ladder to hand-deliver Sire’s perfect pearl a painful death, and now he’s just grateful she’s got land under her feet again.

“C’mon, pearl,” he says, and guides her through the dark and the rain and the wet and the cold, till he’s herding her onto the small stolen ship he’d stowed in the treeline on the shore. Her bare humie feet patter in puddles and on rain-glossed marble.

He’s already sliding into the pilot’s seat, firing up the little ship and leaning on the thrusters as he gestures to the other chair in the cockpit — then hesitates. “Actually, maybe the bunk in the back—“

He’d prefer her strapped safely into the seat, at least till the runabout breaks atmosphere and they’re careening safely into the mysteries of deep space, but the thought of her poor bullied pussy and welted ass bouncing and jostling on the cracked-vinyl seat next to him while she tries not to cry kind of knots up his shitty, withered little heart.

But she’s already shaking her head anyway.

“W-wait,” she stutters around clicking teeth, jaw shimmying with cold. “Tr-tracker.”

He feels the blood drain out of his face as the runabout shoots out over the ocean and honestly, could he be any more of a fuckin’ idiot? He hasn’t been thinking clearly since she’d moaned underneath him on her bedroom floor, a pretty doll in a pile of silk. There hadn’t been anything sexual about his initial attack — not even when she’d struggled against him and nearly spilled out of that stupid confection Wyndham had her dressed in. Not even when her gorgeous fuckin’ tit — pink-tipped and satiny — had jiggled its way free. Not until that goddamn moan. The sound had sunk into his undercoat in the shadowed light and even then he’d hated his own reaction to it, had wanted to make her pay for it.

He grits his teeth now and pulls the runabout into a tight circle, then a controlled float over the water. The docking ramp opens and he leads her back from the little flightdeck, between the two berth-style beds and through the hold to the open door. His first aid kit is rusty on the outside, but he keeps everything inside fresh, and well-stocked. The metal lid clanks when he tosses it open, and he pulls out a packaged scalpel, peeling off its sterile wrapper and grabbing the antibacc cream and steri-spray.

“Where is it, princess?”

She holds out her hand immediately, palm skyward and tilted, exposing the tissue-thin silken skin of her wrist and the delicate veins beneath. He blinks.

“He put it there?”

“S-somewhere Vim and Theel could easily ch-check,” she tells him, teeth still rattling in her pretty head, “to make sure I wasn’t trying to t-take it out. And somewhere I couldn’t get to it on my own, s-safely.”

He hesitates, brow dropping into a scowl, and then bracelets her narrow wrist with his delicate claws. They both stare down at her dainty pulse, and then she reaches forward with two fingers and prods deeply at the soft flesh. “Right there,” she tells him earnestly, rolling the delicate rod pinned under her skin, nestled dangerously snug between two veins.

“That fuckin’ bastard,” the Monster mutters under his breath. His ruby eyes flicker to hers. “You trust me with this, sweetheart?” Not that she’s got much choice at this point, he supposes.

Still, she nods immediately, not a trace of doubt in her pretty face. Just — something like hovering on the edge of hope.

“Get it out of me — w-whatever you have to do,” she says urgently, and then remembers those damn manners of hers. “Please.”

His mouth tastes like ash. He grabs a clean cloth from next to the first aid kit.

“Bite this,” he says, rolling it into a near little cylinder and holding it up to her. “Don’t need you opening that lip up again.”

She takes it and tucks it between her teeth without a scrap of hesitation, and that gets him too: Wyndham’s gorgeous frickin’ pearl, just prettily gagging herself with whatever scrap of fabric he tells her to. Fuck. He refuses to let his mind linger on that.

He’s been making bombs almost since his initial escape, and he’s grateful for the experience now. He tells himself that her little veins and tendons are finicky wires, and he channels every ounce of his precision and delicacy into the task at hand: plucking that little rod out like a malignant cancer, and then tossing it out over the edge of the docking ramp and into the water below.

And Wyndham’s pearl’s so good about it. He can hear her heart flutter when he slices in and her breathing goes shallow when he has to dig to pry the tiny tracker out, but she just bites on the cloth in her mouth and closes her eyes and breathes out slowly, and her wrist in his hand doesn’t flinch or flex at all.

He’s got a patch of sterile gauze pressed to the wound right away. “Hold this, pearl,” he grunts, catching her other wrist and pressing her fingers to it. She follows his instructions easily, and when he looks up at her face to see if she’s pale or anything, she’s still got that cylinder of fabric wedged so prettily in her mouth, eyes big and solemn and moon-silver above it.

Fuck. He just knows he’s going to be picturing her later, letting him stuff a pair of her own panties between her lips.

Told you not to make a sound, sweetheart. Let’s see if I can help you with that.

He scowls furiously. “Here,” he snaps uselessly, and plucks the cloth from between her teeth. “Now—” he gestures her back through the hold, toward the two berth-style bunks — wincing when he remembers that he’s been using the spare as a makeshift workbench. He’s gonna have to put her in his bed till he can clear it off, and the thought makes his abdominal muscles tighten with the threat of an erection.

Not frickin’ now.

He grabs a clean shower-towel and snaps it over his own bunk — blankets disheveled — and points to it with a clawed finger. “There,” he tells her briskly, already moving back to the cockpit. “On your stomach till I say otherwise.”

He doesn’t bother to make sure she’s listened to him, though he wants to — wants to turn around and watch her pretty self climb into his bed, prob’ly on her hands and knees on account of her poor, welted ass. The thought makes him wince, but then he’s thinking again of how she’ll be lowering herself and all her wet, diaphanous silk onto the towel, and how her tits will probably be spilling out of that too-tight, too-low neckline again, and—

Nope.

He doesn’t look back — just slides into his seat, pulling the ramp up and closed, sealing the airlock, and aiming the runabout at the stars.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Wyndham’s pearl hasn’t said a word from the hold, and he hasn’t said a word back: too focused on thinking about where to drop the first misdirection, where to drop her, and grimacing everytime his brain rebels and makes him relive some hellish part of the night.

C-can’t. He’d heard her press the word into the floor, shuddering like she’d been broken. The scent of her sea-salt tears had silvered the heavy, lightning-struck air, spraying like a shattered ocean wave over the sharp, thin smell of split molecules and fresh ozone. But she’d been so tight, and so warm, bucking up against him and fucking herself on his dick, and he hadn’t cared at the time but now it’s the worst sort of fantasy: how scared and hurting and sad she must’ve been, and how much he’d fucking enjoyed the feel of her anyway.

It twists up his belly and brings him low every time the image jumps into his mind.

When he manages to shake that thought from his brain, there’s another waiting to pull at his gut and wrench his heart: after — somehow — she’d looked so delighted. Rebellious. Glowing.

Hopeful.

He hadn’t understood it and it had pissed him off. All that work for her to act like she’d won? Like she’d wanted to share her strange exhilaration with him?

I don’t frickin’ care, he’d said — and he’d put his fuckin’ foot on her, treated her like she was less than nothing. And even then, he’d still been resentfully marvelling at how incredibly tight she’d been, how strange it was for her to be so cinched up, how much he’d loved the feel of her and how much he’d hated that he’d loved it.

Stop, he orders his mind — not that it’s ever listened to him before. Stop frickin’ thinking about it.

He flies onward.

Once the Monster is satisfied that the runabout is far enough away from HalfWorld, safely careening through an empty pocket of space in a lifeless star system, he flicks the ship into autopilot. His passenger still doesn’t say anything, and neither does he. He just sits for a moment longer, trying to pull the scraps of himself together, scrubbing his palms down his face.

He finally looks over his shoulder at the pearl — and immediately wishes he hadn’t. She’s been quiet this whole time, lying on her belly in his bunk as ordered — obedient little thing — but she’s propped up on her elbows, damp dark curls splaying in a tangled halo, eyes big and doe-like and taking everything in. She’s drinking it all up: him, the wide crushed-diamond sky, the notes he has pinned to the wall and the junk he’s got meticulously organized in half-open lockers and shabby boxes, on top of the other bed and in the corners.

It’s that wide-eyed gaze from when she’d looked up at him after he’d fucked her, exhilarated and confused and eager, and it makes his belly knot and his chest burn.

He slides to his feet out of the chair — cautiously, keeping his eyes watchful on her.

“How’re you feeling, p—sweetheart?”

She blinks at him, and then her lips curve and she gives him the most radiant fuckin’ smile he’s ever seen.

“Excited,” she says, with a breathy little stress on the word, and the soft edge of a laugh in her voice like a baby cloud. She raises onto her hands and then curls her body up carefully, perched on her knees like the prettiest little present. The satiny cushion of her tits are almost spilling over that stupid neckline and he can see the shadow of her nipples, peaked and straining against the confinement of layered wet silk.

He can also see how she’s listing to one side, trying to protect her bruised asscheek.

And he’s such a fuckin’ bastard, because all he can think of is keeping her on her knees like that. Strolling around her in a circle while she waits for him. Maybe with her hands loosely laced behind her back, just enough to keep her a little vulnerable, and her tits all pretty and pushed up for his mouth.

Let me keep you all excited, pearl.

He clears his throat. “Well, okay,” he hedges. “You — what d’you want me to call you, doll?”

She shrugs. “Pearl’s fine.”

He cocks his head and narrows his eyes. “Seems kinda fucked-up, using a name that Wyndham calls you when he’s being an extra kind of shitbag.”

She shrugs again. “I don’t mind it when you use it.”

He cants his head in the other direction, staring at her probingly. He can feel his ears flick. “Could call you Lizette.”

She purses her lips thoughtfully, and his eyes catch on them. He can’t let ‘em go.

“You can call me whatever you want to,” she says mildly, and he almost chokes on the suggestion. Oh, there are plenty of things he wouldn’t mind calling her, a dozen pornographic little pet-names he could wrap her up in.

“That’s a dangerous offer, princess,” he manages to drawl, and he hopes it sounds as lazy and laconic as he means it too.

But the corner of her mouth just twists up resignedly and she makes a little open-palmed gesture with the hand that isn’t carefully taking the weight off her bruised ass. “Herbert called me Lizette just as often as he called me pearl, and Vim and Theel called me M’dame Lavenza, or Miss Lizette before that. My mom called me Liz. But to be honest, none of them felt like me.” The little curl at the corner of her mouth goes even more bittersweet, so much that it sends that pang into his ribs again. “None of those people even liked me.”

It isn’t lost on him that he’d told her he’d hated her just a few hours prior and now she’s telling him to call her whatever he wants.

Rodent. Vermin. Monster. Creature.

89P13.

And then her little voice, a curl of light in the shadows: Find something that makes you happy. Take it for yourself. For your name.

Let yourself be reminded of it whenever anyone calls you by it.

He winces.

“Pearl for now,” he says. “You’ll have to pick something else when we get you — wherever you’re going. Something Herbert won’t attach to you — no Liz, no Lavenza. Nothin’ like that.”

“Okay,” she agrees easily. “Where are we going?”

“I ain’t decided yet,” he admits. “Trying to come up with some ideas. I’ll tell you when we got options.”

She nods, and shivers a little: so frickin’ pretty on her hands and knees like that, all quivering and damp. His eyes sharpen on her and he can see the little goosebumps pricked out on her skin.

He hasn’t had time to put it into words yet but he wishes — he wishes he’d done it all different.

Classic of him, honestly. Real on-brand shit.

He takes one step toward her — then two. Gestures her to the little shower room on the right side of the hold, next to the bunk-turned-workbench: tiny, but he’s fixed it up with the luxury of hot water.

“Warm up in there,” he tells her. “Wash all the — clean your cuts.” He winces, imagining her trying to be careful with all her tender bruises and wounds while also wanting to scrape all traces of him from her body. “I’ll — “

“But what about you?” she interrupts.

He blinks. “What?”

“You must be cold too,” she points out, and her voice is pragmatic but so soft he could wrap himself in it. “I don’t — if I could just have a blanket, I’ll be fine until you’re done. Your fur —“

His stomach pinches and twists and drops. Everything would be easier if she weren’t so damn nice.

“Get in the goddamn shower,” he snaps, ears dropping back in alarm, all of it masked by irritation.

“But—“

“Can’t you frickin’ listen?” he snarls, the corners of his mouth curling. “I already gotta regret bringing your useless ass with me?”

She flinches and he hates himself so much he can taste it.

He tries to lower his voice, to smooth it out. “Get in the frickin’ shower, princess,” he tells her, but it still sounds like he’s squeezing the words through clenched teeth. “I’ll bring you some salve and bandages, and — uh, figure out what you can wear.”

Fuck.

She only nods. “Okay,” she says, all frickin’ soft and worried. “Thank you.”

He nearly chokes on the bitterness in his mouth as she maneuvers herself off the bed and ducks away into the shower stall, wet silk clinging to her as she goes.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

She’d squeaked when she’d gotten in the shower. He’s not sure why — maybe the water had been too cold? — but it had sent all the little hairs on his body upright. And then, from under the tumble of water, he’d heard her moan.

What the fuck is she doing in there?

He’d cut that line of thinking off quickly. She’s sore. What she’s doing in there is probably just trying to figure out how to scrub every trace of him off her skin without hurting herself worse.

He cringes with his whole body, indulging the impulse to shake from shoulder to tail-tip, trying to rid himself of the unease that’s clinging to every thread of fur.

The towel on his bunk is half-drenched, but luckily, it’s only soaked through in a couple places, and he figures he deserves to sleep on a damp mattress anyway — before reminding himself that he needs to clear the second bed. He busies himself looking for something for Wyndham’s pearl to wear — the only sheets he’s got are the ones on his thin threadbare mattress, and he figures he doesn’t have time to wash ‘em and get ‘em dry for her, even though he’d love to see her wrapped up in them like a Sky Goddess of Indigarr.

It occurs to him that with one set of sheets he’s not gonna be able to make up the second bunk for her anyway, but he promptly shelves that thought. One frickin’ crisis at a time.

A blanket, maybe. Maybe a blanket would work.

So he goes digging through the narrow locker of towels and linens, then rifling through his bedcovers too. He’s got six blankets on the damn ship and none of them are soft enough, as far as he’s concerned. He’s basically gonna be wrapping Wyndham’s pearl in sandpaper. The thought makes him cringe, especially when he thinks about the fabric rubbing against her welted asscheek, or bullying her soft, swollen pussy when she sits. She doesn’t even have panties to protect her ‘cause he’d ripped ‘em right off her poor little cunt.

He finally settles on offering her the two nicest blankets, and then — and then what? Maybe knot one between her shoulderblades to cover her chest, and let her tie the other at her waist? There’s gotta be more options. Whatever planet he drops her on, he’ll help her get some real clothes and a place to stay before he leaves, but till then…

His hands claw through the contents of his clothes locker — desperate, knowing it’s unlikely anything in there will fit her. Still, he’s got a few old t-shirts and tank tops he’d bartered for or stolen over the years: worn and cottony, with a little stretch. Maybe she can do something with them.

He hears the water in the little shower-stall turn off, the pipes suddenly groaning into silence. The Monster looks down at his pitiful little offering of blankets and too-small shirts, then rifles through the still-open first aid kit to pull out some supplies. He can hear her in the little room: the soft tap tap of her wet bare feet on the puddled tile, the spatter of her ringing out those dark curls. A pause — suddenly realizing, he imagines, that she has no towel, no dry clothes. He tries not to let himself linger on the dreamed-up image of her: shining-wet and pink with warmth, dewy doe-eyes, naked thighs pressed together and palms clenched in sudden uncertainty.

For a second, the part of him that’s still a dick — that always will be, probably — imagines just waiting. Waiting for her to call him shyly from the little shower room, embarrassed, opening the door for him just a little with pleading eyes. Maybe asking him for help with all those pretty manners of hers.

Jackass, he berates himself, scornfully, and makes his way through the narrow hold toward the little stall.

He leans against the door. His heart’s suddenly up in his mouth and thudding against his sternum all at once, and he isn’t sure why. He shuffles the pile of fabric in his arms, then raps with his free set of knuckles.

“Pearl? I got a towel for you. And — something close to clothes.” He winces. “Some blankets and shirts to pick through. You can tie one of the blankets ‘round your waist. I can find some cord or something for a belt later, after I — we gotta get some ointment on you, sweetheart. I know you prob’ly don’t want me touching you —“

He nearly topples and barely catches himself when the door slides sideways, and she’s — fuckin’ gorgeous, peering around the corner, all big eyes and wet diamonds spangling her dark hair and slick skin, cheeks glowing and flushed with heat. The shower stall is a sauna and all the warm mist curls out around the door, around him, and he suddenly wants so badly to squeeze in there with her, feel how hot she’s gotten herself, how wet she is from the shower. How wet he can make her, all over again.

“Why wouldn’t I?” she asks, and she sounds so genuinely baffled that his fingers and toes curl up right then and there and he wants to die. He can see the slope of her shoulder, studded with water droplets, and the top half of one breast. His mouth waters.

He swallows. “Got a couple shirts,” he repeats instead, changing the subject. “They’re all gonna be too small but it’s better’n nothin’, I guess. Wear whichever you want and when you’re done, lemme know.” He passes in the blankets and the pitiful stack of soft shirts, with a little container of ointment and a box of steri-strips and bandages on top. “Here’s some — uh, cream. Antibacc, anti-inflamm. Pain-reliever, too. You can — it’s safe to use on anything that hurts, pearl. Anything you can reach. And then we’ll get you — I’ll take care of any — uh, injuries you can’t get to.”

He’s such an ass. He’s such a goddamn ass.

Her eyes flick to the soft mound of fabric in his hands and one of her own reaches out to take them — more carefully than he’d expected, almost cuddling them up into the crook of the one arm. When her eyes come back to him, they’re sparkling, though he has no idea why.

“Thank you,” she says, and it’s so earnest and sweet it makes his chest ache.

“Get dressed,” he grinds out, and turns on his heel to get as far away from her as possible.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

a shorter chapter (especially compared to chapter two's excessive length). we're entering a more regular schedule (i think) with chapters hopefully coming out every 1.5-2.5 weeks. i gotta be honest - it's gonna take like ten chapters to get through like five days of plot, so this may end up being more that twenty-five chapters. you still in? (,,>﹏<,,) ♡♡♡♡ for those of you who are hanging out and sticking with this shitshow i am eternally grateful, you are more precious than star sapphires and honeycombs

find expected posting schedules & chapter-previews on tumblr♡
here's the masterlist & moodboard♡

coming soon: chapter four. anthrodynia.
summary: the monster regrets.
warnings: aftercare. references to chapter two’s violence. regret. sexual fantasies and general horniness.
estimated date: thursday, march twenty-first.

Chapter 4: anthrodynia.

Summary:

the monster regrets.

Notes:

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

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

anthrodynia. a state of exhaustion with how cruel people can be, freely undercutting each other in ways that seem petty and gratuitous—which can sometimes trigger a countervailing sense of gratitude for things that are kind, sincere, forgiving, or unabashedly joyful. Ancient Greek ἄνθρωπος (ánthrōpos), humanity + ὀδύνη (odúnē), sorrow, anguish, pain. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

She’s too quick to get dressed.

The Monster is busy sorting through his foodlocker, looking for something she might be willing to eat. He hates that all he has are the synthetic scraps he hasn’t gotten around to yet: salty dehydrated lab-made meats and rolls of artificial pressed seaweed. He usually stocks up on synth foods because he can get more of a variety for the price. Natural foods cost a lot more, unless he wants to eat nothing but orloni and skag-eggs for weeks on end — which he doesn’t. Both are fine, but when he’s in the stars for cycles at a time and doesn’t know what the local proteins are on his next planet, sometimes he wants to mix it up. At least with the synth, he can add some with Aladnan snowfish and Indigarran auroch to the menu.

But Wyndham’s pearl? He knows what she’s used to. The Homonoia’s grounds have coops with five different breeds of chicken, some with eggs so dainty and sweet they could almost be a dessert all on their own. High Shitbag’s got a whole grove of trees, each one grafted together from branches of others: Indigarran pears and Xandaran honeystones, Honchi sunbread-berries and Centaurian red-pommes. The Monster has hacked the import logs more than once: he knows the pearl’s eating fresh greens from Foresteria every night of the week, studded with slices of real Idunn apples and all-natural silver pecans from Spartax. Probably served on crystal plates with golden forks, he’s sure.

And now he’s gonna feed her some fake dried auroch. And fake dried seaweed. The fanciest thing he’s got is some lyophilized fake-fruit and biscuits, but a few cycles ago he’d gotten an idea for enhancements on the Nova machine gun he’d stolen last quarter, and he’d ended up dismantling his rehydrator in a compulsive frenzy and had never bothered replacing the parts. So now the fuckin’ biscuits aren’t even edible.

He knows it’s stupid. Wyndham’s pearl had needed out of the Arete and he’d been willing to help out of — well, not so much the goodness of his shitty shriveled heart as much as guilt and a leftover need for revenge on Wyndham, but still. She’d needed out and he’d gotten her out, and now he’s gonna take her to a pretty planet somewhere that’ll treat her nice. Hell, with the loose pearls in his pocket, he bets he can get her some real clothes and temporary lodging, and someone to help her settle in. Then he’ll go — somewhere. Fron, maybe. No-one goes to Fron for fun.

Anyway, he’d done all this for her, and he’d done terrible things to her too — so many extremes that the sorry state of the clothing and the meals shouldn’t matter.

But for some stupid reason, he just can’t bear to feed Sire’s precious pearl his leftover scraps of lab-made freeze-dried fruit.

Then the door to the shower room slides open and he looks up — and goes as utterly still as a prey-animal in the woods.

He’d been worried. Worried that she’d be uncomfortable in his little shirts, that they wouldn’t work, that she’d be without anything to wear.

The reality is worse. The reality is so much worse.

He couldn’t have possibly prepared himself for the sight of her: the striped blanket cinched at her hip with a bobbing knot, fluttering open at the accidental, unavoidable slit to offer him teasing glimpses of a thigh he just wants to sink his teeth into. There’s her bare midriff, begging for tongue and teeth — her cute little navel.

And then there’s the shirt. His shirt. Stretched over the little nubs of her slightly-stiffened nipples, barely covering her tits. The ends of her thick, dark locks leave little palm-sized splotches of wetness on the fabric. It’s more indecent than if he’d just kept her naked: the way he can see her breasts jostle gently with every step she takes, bobbing like they need his mouth, pretty-please.

The Monster has a lot of feelings about his body. Most of them are clear-cut: he’s hideous, he’s revolting, he’s terrifying and unnatural. He’s found ways to use his sharp teeth and claws to his advantage, his sensitive eyes and ears — even his whiskers and tail. Most salient though — right now, anyway — is his size. The Monster is sometimes grateful for how easily his small, lithe form is overlooked in a crowd of average baldbodies. Other times, he is searingly resentful that he doesn’t take up more space.

But never before has he considered his size so much of a mixed curse-and-blessing as he does when he realizes that he can see right up under the damn shirt: shadowy half-glimpses of the curves on the underside of those pretty breasts, ripe and firm and so sweet his vision blurs. He bets if she had to stretch for something, his shirt would ride up and gape a little and he could see a palm’s worth of areola, maybe even the underside of one of those pretty nipples.

His fingers twitch with tactile memory: they call up the velvety-soft texture, burned into his skin from when he’d been pinching them and twisting them ruthlessly.

For a second, the Monster’s brain taunts him with a brief fantasy: that he’ll get to pinch them again — mean still, maybe, but interspersed with soft licks to soothe and light tickles to mock, to keep her guessing. If he could do it over again, he’d be so much less brutal — but he’d still play with them till he got her crying for him. Then he’d pull her on top of himself like a princess on her throne and fuck up into her relentlessly, till she was all drenched and dumb on his dick: lashes fluttering and wet, lungs hiccuping in happy, grateful, nonsensical little prayers. And once he had her all dizzy and drunk and misty-eyed — lashes sparkly with fucked-out tears of overstimulation — he’d doll her up just like this in one of his too-small shirts. And anytime the two of them stopped on a planet or a space center or came across another ship, anyone who saw her dilated pupils and swollen lips and soft, exposed belly would know she was fuckin’ his.

Then the blanket slips a little lower on her hips and he can suddenly see the stark white edge of the bandage on her lower abdomen. It’s exactly the punch in the solar plexus that he needs to bring him back to his senses. Everything in his stomach curls in on itself, pinching with the sharp stab of regret, and his eyes blur and sting. The Monster curls his lip in a self-deprecating grimace and shakes his head in disgust.

“C’mere, sweetheart.”

She approaches, the extra shirts and blanket snuggled up in her arms like she likes the softness of them, like she’s reluctant to let them go. She does, though: giving them over when he raises his hands for them.

For fuck’s sake, he hasn’t thought this through. Because now that she’s closer he realizes she smells like him, too. He can still pick out the scent of her — something clean and clear and sweet — but it’s half-buried under the scent of the Monster’s soap, his blanket, his too-tight t-shirt cradling her breasts and gently abrading her pebbled little nipples. He bets when she takes that shirt off, her tits will still smell like him. He could roll and pinch and twist the rosy tips of them and tell her they’re his now that they’ve been rubbed all over with his scent —

He shakes himself, jaw clenching furiously.

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. The sight sends yet another stinging twist through his belly and chest.

“On your stomach again,” he instructs, grappling down the ache of it. “Hand me your wrist — the one that had the tracker.”

She lowers herself on her side and offers him her wounded wrist without even the slightest hint of reluctance — stupid or heartwrenching, he can’t decide. Both, maybe. He can see she’s dabbed a careful amount of the cream onto the cut he’d made, and it’s already taking down some of the inflammation.

He adds a little steri-strip, pulling the small incision closed, frowning. It’ll heal up, he tells himself — but it’s gonna bruise, and probably leave a slender white thread of scar-tissue.

The thought reopens the pit in his stomach and he nearly falls into it, feeling himself begin to spin and stretch like matter at the edge of a singularity.

“Thank you.”

Her voice interrupts his twisting, sinking spiral, and he blinks at her — then tosses her hand back in her general direction with a grimace of self-disgust.

“You got your hips?” he forces the question out, in spite of the gut-churning wrench in his stomach at the memory. He’s pretty sure he’d left a handful of stinging, bitter slices across them, and a couple dozen vicious little punctures besides. “They need steri-strips? Bandages?”

He watches as she folds her forearms against his crumpled pillow and rests her chin on them, and for a minute he just… takes it in. Pretty pearl, Wyndham’s kidnapped or liberated bride — depending on who’s tellin’ the story, he supposes — lying on her tummy in his blankets, looking like everything he’d never imagined having.

She answers him so softly that he almost misses it. “I bandaged them. They’re fine.”

He swallows. “Are they — do they look like they’re gonna scar?”

She shrugs. “Probably. I don’t mind though.”

His eyes burn again and his stomach clenches and drops, and he’s so fuckin’ grateful her gaze is turned away from him. He blinks back the sudden wetness balanced on his lower lids and clears his throat, then drops his gaze to the small of her back. His eyes hesitate and he forces them lower, to the curve of her ass.

“Gotta move the blanket, sweetheart. D’you want me to, uh, roll it up or—“

Reach around me and pull up this stupid dress, pearl. I want it up to your waist, bare ass on the floor.

Gonna leave you in a puddle of your come for Wyndham to find.

He cringes, each muscle drawn reflexively tight, but she’s already unknotting the blanket at her hip, twisting herself in half to try to open it for him. He takes the loose end and pushes her gently back down to the thin, shitty little mattress. His fingers are frickin’ shaking — when did that start? — and he hesitates just for a second before peeling back the blanket like it’s goddamn giftwrap.

Except her pretty ass isn’t a gift for him, and one whole side of it is already purpling, the color mottled and forlorn. He can see the back of the bandages she’d taped carefully over the furrows in her hips, and bruising puncture marks a little further, where she hadn’t been able to see or reach. His thumbs, most likely, digging into her with the force of his grip. Yeah — she’s definitely gonna scar.

And over the fleshiest part of that soft discolored curve, there’s a furious inch-long swivel, cut deep into the tissue — the start of his so-called signature, the first twist of an 8. He sucks in a breath that hits the back of his throat and his stomach and shoulders both lurch — he barely swallows back a retching sound before it can force its way out of his mouth.

The Monster doesn’t believe in much but he’ll thank whatever gods might listen that something stopped him from carving that hateful string of letters and numbers into her poor, bruised ass. He swallows and stares, everything in him twisting up and clenching. He almost reaches out a hand like he — what? wants to soothe her?

He scoffs and twists open the jar of ointment, then hesitates. “I’m gonna — I’m gonna need to get on the bunk to get both sides of you. I’m gonna start with some spots on your left side that you missed. Then move to the right. And then, uh, lower.” The words creak out of his mouth, and he’s not sure why his mouth is so dry. Guilt, he guesses, and the corner of his mouth screws up in pure self-loathing.

“Okay,” she murmurs gently. And then, again: “Thank you.”

His teeth grit. The words are painful to hear, and his ears flatten against his skull to try to keep them out of his head. He leaps nimbly onto the bed and curses under his breath when she jumps a little, but she doesn’t panic or scream or thrash. She just grows very still, like a hunted little animal — and then, slowly, she relaxes. He straddles her thighs and looks down at her, and swallows before forcing the words out. “Uh — I’m gonna sit here, princess. Swear I’m not doin’ anything else.”

He sees the crown of her head bob in a nod and he lowers himself slowly, crouching carefully over the plush backs of her thighs. His tail rests in the back of one of her knees, but he feels her skin shiver under the brush of it and he immediately tears it away, trying to keep it flat between her calves, swept straight behind him. Then he reaches into the little jar and scoops out a few fingerfuls of ointment, carefully dabbing the medicated cream onto a sprinkling of swollen punctures. He’s not used to tending the wounds of anyone but himself, and his injuries have never required gentleness — so he tries to imagine she’s the most delicate little incendiary device, and hopes it makes his fingers turn into just a whisper against her wounds. His brow creases and his tongue curls over one pointed tooth in concentration.

She shivers under his hands, and her voice trembles breathily when it trips out over her lips.

“Thank you,” she says again. His lungs twist up in knots and his stomach drops again, like he’s just being perpetually tossed up and down in the blue-lit column of a gravity mine blast.

“Dunno why you keep saying that,” he manages to grit out, and he knows he sounds furious. But for fuck’s sake — she wouldn’t be in this state if he weren’t so impulsive, if he’d stopped to think for a single damn minute after climbing in her window.

His tone doesn’t stop her this time, though it does make her voice more — tentative. Measuring. “For helping me,” she offers up quietly, staring at the wall in front of her. “For being so careful with me right now.” He can feel her hesitation. “I know — obviously — that taking me along wasn’t part of your… plan.”

His jaw aches and he can feel his pulse pounding in both temples.

“I’m just trying to take some responsibility for my fuck-ups,” he half-growls. “Gonna touch your right side, now.” His fingers are cautious, meticulous. As careful as he knows how to be. With painstaking precision, he covers each small, purple wound with a patch of gauze and a little stripe of surgical tape.

She makes a little sound, like she — what? Wants to comfort him? He can see the migraine sweeping into the spot between his eyes, like a storm on the horizon. Before she can open her mouth and say something that drops his heart to his feet again, he speaks.

“Sorry,” he mutters. Fuck, why does he always sound so hostile? “About the — clothes.” He grimaces again, but he just can’t bring himself to say everything he knows he should. Sorry for fucking you like that. Sorry for being so damn mean and impulsive and vindictive. Sorry for not frickin’ thinking, and taking it out on your poor, sweet, snug little pussy.

Sorry for hurting you so bad, pearl.

She tilts her head so she can look over her shoulder at him.

“Why are you sorry about the clothes?” she asks, a little curl of bewilderment between her brows. “I like them.”

He snorts, then glances up at her again. Then he feels his ears drop and his eyes round out, because her gaze is all big and wide and truly baffled. “Why am I sorry about the clothes?” he echoes, incredulous. ‘Cause they’re too small, he thinks. ‘Cause they can’t be comfortable. ‘Cause I got you wrapped in a goddamn blanket.

Or unwrapped, as the case may be.

“They’re not…” he trails off. They might be the stuff of filthy fantasies for him, but no part of them can be something she wants to wear.

The otter pelt, at least, is in fine condition.

Her face relaxes, and she shrugs and turns her head away, resting her chin back on her folded forearms. He can see the curve of her cheek, and the soot-shadow of her lashes as she closes her eyes. A bemused little smile nestles in the corner of her mouth like a kiss. His heart wrenches again in his chest because it’s so small and so soft, like a tiny hidden kitten or a happy, whispered secret, something that could maybe curl up in his bed and keep him warm.

“You let me pick,” she tells him, the smile blurring into the edges of her voice like a watercolor wash or the edges of some kind of nice sleepy dream.

She’s not looking at him, so she can’t see his brow knit in confusion. “What?”

“You let me pick,” she repeats steadily. “Herbert — I haven’t picked my own clothes since a few years after I left Terra. Even then, my wardrobe was…carefully curated.” A little lopsided shrug of one shoulder. “By the time I was like, fifteen or sixteen, Vim would bring me what I was allowed to wear each day.”

His lungs lurch up into his throat.

He’d hidden in that enormous closet in her room, just for a second — sticking to the shadows while he’d taunted her — and he’d noticed it was empty, but he hadn’t thought about it. It had seemed weird and he’d chalked it up to her just flying in from Wundagore II, but he knows Wyndham keeps his own rooms stocked with clothes even when he isn’t in residence. Even Vim and Theel have small wardrobes full of white lab-robes that await their return like guardian ghosts. The emptiness of pearl’s closet when he had expected it to be bursting with an obscene indulgence of stupid silk fripperies, fine Indigarran lace, gold-woven Xandaran cashmere — the dark void of it had itched at the back of his mind before he’d shuffled the thoughts off, intent only on her in that moment — on ending her.

Now she props herself up on her elbows — lower back curling into a cute little arch — and looks down at the logo branded across her gorgeous fuckin’ tits. “Bzermikitokolok and the Knowheremen. Is this a band shirt? I used to love band shirts when I was little. I was just a kid, but I thought they were so cool.”

She sounds so pleased, so delighted.

The Monster’s just glad she’s looking away so she can’t see what each word is doing to him. She’d said she’d only had the clothes she was wearing and he’d recognized that there was something really fucked there, but he hadn’t gotten the chance to consider what it had meant. Even if it’s unsurprising that Wyndham had been such a controlling bastard that he would — how did she put it? curate her wardrobe? — the Monster wouldn’t have thought that Sire would have wasted precious time choosing her clothing for every occasion, at least not her day-to-day wear. But he had, apparently — or had entrusted the task to Vim and Theel. And pearl had said she’d tried to run before — at least, she’d implied it — so maybe that had been another sneaky frickin’ reason that Wyndham had kept her so bereft.

Probably couldn’t get far in the useless crap he’d decided she would wear.

Maybe I’ll let you come before I kill you. If you beg me.

A chill races the Monster’s spine and he flattens a hand on her upper back, just between her shoulderblades, and gently pushes her down onto the mattress once more. She goes easily, letting him move her how he wants, and he swallows and looks down at her ass again.

Then he closes his eyes.

His stomach has been up in his mouth or down in his feet for hours now — anywhere but where it’s supposed to be. He feels like it shot up out of its place on HalfWorld and hasn’t been able to get back, like he’s stepped off a platform into the abyss and is still falling.

Please. Please fuck me, she’d said. So prim and proper and polite, so big-eyed and sweet. Had she stumbled over the word fuck? He thinks she had.

It has not left his frickin’ head, playing on quiet repeat in the back of his mind. What the fuck had she been thinking? How needy had she already been? At the time, he’d figured she’d just been trying to manipulate him, to barter for her freedom. You know I’m still going to kill you, he’d reminded her. But no — she’d just been kept so frickin’ deprived — so desperate and sad and lonely that being brutalized by a would-be murderer had sounded better than spending another day with Wyndham.

The Monster figures he should have seen that coming.

But this is another piece of the puzzle, isn’t it? Her choices had been so limited that the single option of whether or not to fuck her ugly executioner had been intoxicating in its novelty. Making any kind of decision for herself or acting in any way that wouldn’t be sanctioned by Wyndham had been as close to freedom as the poor girl had gotten in years.

And all she’d gotten for it were bruises and scars. The Monster doesn’t have much to be grateful for, but he’s so grateful that he didn’t split her skin beyond the rake of his claws and that terrible cut on her ass-cheek — so grateful he could almost cry about it.

How the hell had she still had the guts to come with him after all of this?

He forces himself to open his eyes. The soft flesh on the right side of her ass is a galaxy of broken capillaries, all red starbursts and constellations already deepening into indigo nebule — and that one inch-long slice, half a bloody lemniscate that will be marked on the pretty curve of her ass forever. Carefully, he gathers up another small dollop of ointment and then lowers the pads of his fingers to her flesh, to the curve of her bruised skin. He grits his teeth and slowly — cautiously — paints her with the medicine, watching each tremor and flinch that ripples over her and trying to adjust his touch accordingly.

He can tell how hard she’s trying to hold still — every muscle squeezes tight underneath him, the backs of her thighs trembling — and it tastes sour in his mouth. He carefully — so carefully — dabs some onto the inch-long cut he’d left, and uses the steri-strip to carefully tug it closed. He can hear the quiet hitch in her breath, the shudder of it in her lungs, and he hates himself so much.

“This is — worse than I thought, pearl,” he admits. The words are hoarse. “You — how d’you feel?”

You took care of your pretty cunt too? he wants to ask. Can I see?

Not even because he wants another look — that’s too manipulative, even for him — but he’s worried, really worried, that she might be as bruised and welted there as she is here.

Not that he would mind the chance to get another look, of course. To apologize properly to her sweet, tender pussy, to soothe any soreness with his careful tongue, to pet it like a scared soft little thing —

“I’m okay,” she says again, and tilts her head so her cheek is resting on her forearms and she can look at him over her shoulder from the corner of her silver-gray doe-eyes. “Thank—“

“Don’t,” he cuts her off. His voice is haggard and his lungs are aching. “Don’t thank me for anything, pearl.”

She shifts, like after all this, she’s suddenly nervous and uncomfortable. He swallows and braces his hands on the backs of her thighs.

“You. Uh. You got everything else?”

He shouldn’t. He shouldn’t run his fingers up between those pretty thighs of hers, test to see how swollen and hurt she is. Shouldn’t try to check and see if she flinches or whimpers when he touches her, make sure she’s properly tended to.

He really fuckin’ hates himself sometimes.

“Everything is good,” she says with that same kitten-soft smile. She says it in a tone that’s made to be believed, like a mother telling her child everything is going to turn out okay. Like a little housewife comforting her husband.

What is it about being on top of this girl that makes him forget where he is? The Monster scrambles back off of her suddenly, fur bristling, pulling the blanket with him and hiding her ass from his line of sight.

“Uh. You want—? I don’t got any real food, but there’s some synthetic shit — “

She twists to look at him and secure her blanket at the same time. Her eyes are doing that stupid sparkle thing again, like she’s all excited and he couldn’t possibly say about what.

“It’s all synthetic?”

He winces and tries to hide it, defensiveness suddenly sizzling in his gut and then trying to burn its way up his throat.

It’s infinitely more comfortable than the guilt.

“Yeah, princess,” he snarls. “Unlike Wyndham, I ain’t got fruit groves and chicken coops in my cargo hold—“

“Oh, no,” she says quickly, eyes losing their glitter in favor of alarm. “I’m so sorry — I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings — I like synthetic food.”

His mouth snaps shut and he stares at her, unblinking, for what must be a full minute before he barks out a harsh laugh.

“Pearl, you ain’t gonna hurt my feelings.” He snickers. “Can’t hurt what I don’t got.”

Her brow does that troubled little furrow again and she opens her mouth — then shuts it, tilts her head, and tries again. Fails again. His grin widens in spite of himself, even if it is a little mean.

“Also,” he purrs, “I’m betting you ain’t even tried synth. Not while you were with Wyndham anyway.”

She fucking blushes.

It wipes the smirk of his face quicker than he’d have thought possible. He’s gotta memorize that expression, he thinks.

“That’s true,” she admits, voice hushed. “But I always wanted to try it. Truly. I’d been asking Herbert for years.” She offers up that shy little kitten-smile that he’s already starting to hate. “Thank you.”

He can feel the corners of his mouth peel back in uncertainty as he approaches his food-locker again — cautiously — for what reason, he couldn’t say. “Why?” he manages at last. “Wyndham’s got the freshest stuff in the galaxy.”

If he’d been facing her still, he’d have seen her smile falter. As it is, he can still hear the difference in her voice when she speaks, and he hates that it makes his tail curl up against his inner calf and his ears flatten.

“Sure. He does.” Her voice is soft and quiet. “But for what? Everything I’ve read says that modern synthetics can taste just as good, are usually healthier for most bodies, and better for the environments of virtually every system they’re used in, even if it’s only a partial food replacement. And there’s so far no evidence of them triggering any allergies or sensitivities — not that we know of.”

When he turns back to her, she’s — scowling. It’s the first time he’s seen such a dark look on her face, and he’s once again reminded that he’d tried to murder her a few hours earlier. Somehow that hadn’t incurred any wrathful expressions, but here she is, looking angry over food.

“I think Herbert only wants to eat lifeforms because they’re more expensive, and he’s—” She pauses. Hesitates. Lowers her voice like she’s worried about being overheard. “—an elitest fuck.”

The Monster’s jaw falls open. It’s only the second time she’s sworn in any of this — and now he’d bet his last unit that she had stuttered on the word during her first time around, because she’d just dropped her voice into an adorable whispering hush to say it.

A full-on cackle pushes up his throat and he has to cough to cover it.

Great. She’s gotta be frickin’ cute on top of everything else.

“That, and—” Her voice is back to normal, but her moon-gray eyes only look stormier and sadder. “I think he eats them because he can. And it makes him feel—”

She flounders, but the Monster knows.

“It makes him feel like a god,” he finishes grimly, and strolls back toward her — more relaxed now — while she chews her fat pink lower lip and nods. He hands her a bowl of lyophilized fragaria and a few seaweed snacks and strips of dried auroch. “Well, I don’t got the real good synthetic stuff, and I fucked up my rehydrator, so this won’t be as good as it could be. But, uh, enjoy your first time trying synth.”

“Thank you,” she says — again — and her eyes are back to being all sparkly and grateful.

He leans against the drawers, tearing strips off his own auroch with his teeth. She watches him carefully, and he can almost see her registering that it’s a food meant to be eaten by hand. She tries to go in all delicate and mannerful, which he hates being charmed by, but eventually he’s trying to hide a grin or turn it into a smirk while he watches her wrestle with the dried meat. Once she finally gets her blunt humie teeth through it, she’s closing her eyes and tilting her head to the side, just a little, like she wants to moan but has been taught that good girls stay quiet and mind their table manners.

The whole thing has him shuffling back a step and propping one foot on an open drawer, trying to disguise the ridge in his jumpsuit.

“Oh, this is just as good as anything Herbert had,” she’s telling him eagerly once she opens her eyes again, all wide and earnest. “Seasoned better, too. And it’s kind of… smoky?”

He swallows. “Yeah — that’s how the meat’s prepared.” He sucks his tongue against the back of his teeth. “So, uh. You got somethin’ against people who do eat natural food?”

She flicks her gray eyes up to his, startled, and then everything melts into that kitten-soft smile again. She’s got eyelashes like a dream, thick and so heavy he’s surprised they don’t weigh her down.

“Oh, not really. People have their reasons for the most part. It’s just — I’ve always been silly about food. When I was little, we lived near a — a poultry-slaughtering factory. And sometimes—” She flinches, shrugs, and tugs on a handful of her loose wet curls. She’s done that a few times — a nervous habit, he’d guess. “I don’t know. We didn’t have a lot at home but whenever my mother got chicken, I’d usually have to prepare it and — especially when it was still on the bone — I just couldn’t stop thinking about it. About it being a happy chicken, eating seeds under sunshine. Then I’d start crying and make her angry.” Her mouth curves in a pensive, self-deprecating little smile. “I don’t even like chickens. They’re mean.”

Oh, fuck. He’s such a fuckin’ jackass.

Pearl’s so harmless that she borders on stupid.

He digs his knuckles into his sternum like he’s gonna pull the metal right out of himself. His chest hurts.

“Anyway. At some point I just couldn’t stop looking at my plate and seeing whatever animal it had been.” She half-shrugs, eyes sliding to the side like she’s embarrassed. “Where I lived, being a vegetarian was expensive, and it wasn’t really an option for me — not with my family, or our situation. My situation. And then later on there was a—” She stumbles, something catching her throat, and she tries again. “I guess I just figured — why eat anything that used to be alive if I don’t have to?”

Something twists up the corner of her mouth: not her hidden-secret-smile, this time, but something a little hunted.

“Herbert didn’t want me to eat synth because he said it was low, but he liked that I wanted to be vegetarian, and he mostly let me. He thought it would be healthier overall, and he thought it would be easier to keep my body—” She flushes suddenly, so bright scarlet he can’t tear his eyes away. Fuck, she’s pretty like that. “To, uhm, keep my body the way he wanted it.”

The Monster’s stomach suddenly revolts and he has to fight to keep down his own auroch meat.

Wyndham may have avoided scarring up his pearl, but the narcissistic fuck had still found a way to try and sculpt her into what he wanted after all.

The Monster propels himself off the wall of drawers and stalks toward her, one claw brandished before he thinks better of it. She nearly drops the food and pops up on her knees, eyes flickering and swiveling around the little ship like she’s trying to figure out if she needs to try and make a break for it. To where? She’s in deep space with him, and basically at his frickin’ mercy, which is a line of thinking he needs to avoid.

He forces himself to drop his hand.

“When we get you planetside, you’re gonna eat whatever you want,” he mutters at her, but he can’t stop the ferocity seizing up between his teeth. “You hear me? Try everything.”

Something shifts in her expression. It moves from a cautious sort of near-panic to something softer and open and sweet again, and he flinches back from it, then spins on his heel.

How to tell her that he knows what a Wyndham diet is like? That he might have thought he’d be jealous that she’d at least gotten meals rather than kibble and pellets, but he suspects that if it had suited Wyndham’s purposes to have her eating gravel, the High Shitbag would’ve found a way to make her do it. Moreover, the Monster at least has had the chance to try all sorts of things since his initial escape — including foods both fresh and synth — and he feels certain that almost all of it is better than whatever bland, metabolistically-balanced, health-optimalistic bullshit Wyndham’s been rationing to her calorie-by-calorie.

He tries to imagine her with a bowl of Aladnan iced-blooms — drizzled with sweet syrups and spices — and the face she’d make trying it for the first time.

It’s a shame he won’t get to see it.

He strolls broodingly up to the pilot’s chair, where he hits the dial that dims the plasma orbs in the hold. He glowers out the starshield and tries to remember if he still has booze hidden away under the console.

Then he tries to make his voice into something less angry.

“Go to sleep, pearl. You gotta be — tired.” He winces yet again, and he’s glad his back is to her.

“Here?” she says softly. “In your bed?”

He scowls out over the galaxy before him. “Other bunk’s full, ain’t it?”

There’s a long silence, and then he can hear her settling: pulling up the blankets, rustling between the sheets. He slides into his chair and keeps his eyes pointed away from her, trying not to imagine the length of her legs between the layers of fabric, or her breasts pressed into his thin mattress. Some part of him wishes he’d pulled her blankets up for her — tucked her in, almost.

Her voice breaks his thoughts: a little tap tap on glass.

“Have you decided where we’re going?”

He clears his throat. “I wanna look into some things first,” he says flatly. “We’ll figure out tomorrow tomorrow.”

There’s a pause, and then she offers up quietly, “I could just go wherever you’re going. I could stay with you.”

Wouldn’t that be something.

He pushes the thought away. “No,” he says shortly — sharply. “You ain’t cut out for this shit. You need something more than just — trailing around with me through the galaxy, running from Wyndham for the rest of your life. Nuh-uh.” He tries to soften his voice, but he’s sure it just comes out like broken stones and smoking jet fuel. “I promise we’ll find you someplace nice.”

For a moment, they sit in silence — as much silence as there can be over the steady thrum of the runabout’s engines — but the Monster can feel her there, and her big, quiet, moon-bright eyes on him.

And then — quietly — she asks:

“Won’t you sleep too?”

He leans forward and pinches the bridge of his nose. She’s too frickin’ much. Unbelievable.

He grimaces. “Maybe later. Gonna keep us bouncing around for a little bit.”

There’s another long silence and he can tell she wants to say something, to ask something — but he pretends not to notice.

Unfortunately for him, twenty minutes later, he still feels her stare. He sighs, and slowly half-spins his chair. His low-light vision picks her out easily in the dim hold, his gleaming red gaze snatching onto the shimmer of her wide moonlight-eyes, chin still propped on his pillow and her arms crossed underneath it. She looks like some cute little prey-animal, curious and inquisitive. Watchful.

“You gotta problem, pearl?”

Her head shifts: side-to-side, a silent little negation.

“Then stop staring,” he gripes. “You’re givin’ me frickin’ hives.”

She twists under the blankets, trying to get comfortable, and he tries not to wince: imagining the prickle of the fibers against her soft, bruised body. The way the scratchy threads might catch on her little bandages.

“Sorry,” she murmurs, and closes her eyes — obediently, almost. He swallows, and the image of her tucking his little rolled towel between her teeth surges into his mind so abruptly that his eyes almost roll back in his head. He grapples his thoughts into submission and tries to breathe through the sudden change in bloodflow, but even after he gets himself under control, he doesn’t turn back to the stars: he just waits and watches the shifting light coast over the girl’s dark curls and the slopes of her limbs, piled carefully under the covers. Her lungs, floating and falling softly under the planes of her back.

Sure enough, his patience pays out, because her lashes flutter open again.

He raises a brow and wonders if she can see it in the shadows.

“Gonna start staring again, pearl?”

Her brow knits and her eyes slide away. She bites that lip again and he’s pretty sure her cheeks are getting warm under his gaze. He can’t help but feel a little curl of heat in his own abdomen at that expression on her face — and the fact that he put it there — and he files it away for later. He’s half-tempted to see if maybe there’s some way he can bring it to the surface again.

“Sorry,” she apologizes again. “I just… this ship is so small. It’s the size of my closet. And I haven’t slept in the same room with anyone since I was on Terra.” The admission is hushed and whispery, floating through the blue shadows.

He snorts, thoughts of her pretty expression dissolving under the sneer growing on his mouth. “Well, this ain’t the Homonoia or the Arete or a six-pulsar bed-an’-breakfast on Spartax, princess,” he snipes. “We got limited space, and you’re lucky I even—“

“Oh,” she interrupts softly. “I wasn’t complaining. It’s nice.”

His words stumble and crumble to a halt while his brain tries to process those words. Then he snorts. “Yeah. Okay, pearl.”

“I mean it,” she says quickly, her voice like hushed rushed little raindrops on a forest floor. “I like — small spaces. I used to sleep in—”

The words crackle off and red filters up into her cheeks, and she winces while he stares at her.

“Anyway,” she resumes, quietly, “I do like it. And I like having you here. Or — “ Her words falter. “I like being here. With you. Thank you — for letting me be.”

He does turn his chair then — away from her, back to the open starshield and the sky, beautiful and forever. Swallows down the sudden rock in his throat, as big as a fist and so sharp he’s sure he’s got blood in his lungs.

“It’s nice to be close to someone,” she continues softly, each word a feather. Somehow, his throat gets even tighter, eyes stinging and stomach twisting again. How the fuck does this keep happening? Shouldn’t he be over his stupid guilt by now?

Nope. Not even close.

“You could — come to bed?” she ventures, and his hands go still on the yoke, an infinite number of x-rated fantasies zipping through his head like a string of seven-hundred jump points — as if she isn’t exhausted, and swollen, and too sore to be touched.

And fast on the heels of those dirty thoughts come other, more dangerous ones. Sweeter ones. Are you coming to bed? That little housewife-voice again. He could almost pretend — that she’s become someone who’s so used to having him curled up next to her that she won’t be able to sleep without him, or that maybe she cares so much about his rest that she always has to remind him. Come to bed.

“You don’t need to — to stay up all night because of me.” In the real world, her voice tilts uncertainly. He doesn’t speak. “I can make myself small. You’ll have lots of room.”

He winces at that. “Don’t need to do that, pearl,” he says quickly, because it seems like she’s been keeping herself small since the second Wyndham picked her up. “Just — get yourself comfortable.”

He sits, and he waits, nudging the yoke now and then to keep them on a general route through the systems, a few jumps, and further. And when he hears the soft steady drumbeat of her heart slow, and her breathing goes gentle as a lullaby and she murmurs a tender little wordless noise into the air, he climbs out of his chair and digs quietly under the console.

Contraxian moonshine comes in a number of… flavors, the Monster supposes, if a person is being generous with their vocabulistics. Mostly, it’s a medley of fermented stonefruit mash. Sometimes — if he’s got the expensive shit — he might even be able to taste what kind of fruit was used, but mostly it’s just a variation on paint thinner and starblaster fuel.

But the Monster doesn’t drink for his palate. He drinks for pain reduction. Or for penance. Take your pick. Maybe there’s even some secret third factor, something like a slow suicide-by-proxy.

Now he stares at the girl, just the sweetest bundle of bruised limbs, pillowy and soft and fragile under his mound of blankets, tucked safe and warm — relatively safe, anyway — in his bed.

Wyndham’s bride.

Did he save her? He doesn’t think he’s saved anything before, even though he’s tried.

He has tried.

Or maybe this is all some elaborate trick. Maybe she’s as manipulative and scheming as Wyndham, and this has just been another way to get under his skin. She probably doesn’t even realize it, but he’d seen her other face — the cold one — so he knows she’s capable of changing up her body language, the expressions she’s wearing. She’s still an actress. She’s still a liar. She’s still, ultimately, Madame Lavenza, and that means she could still be fucking him over.

Maybe she has another tracker hidden in her somewhere. Maybe she’s just waiting for Wyndham to follow them out into the forever sky.

It’s a conundrum, isn’t it? Either he’s betrayed Lylla’s memory by keeping her alive, or he’s betrayed Lylla’s memory by hurting her in the first place.

Or he’s betrayed Lylla’s memory by wanting her.

The otter pelt, at least, is in fine condition.

The Monster peels the wax seal off the bottle of Contraxian moonshine, and begins his long vigil.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

thank you for sticking around, little spring bluebirds. i know this isn't for everyone but i do hope you enjoy it and there will be actual plot, complete with old friends returning and a full-on happy ending ♡♡ i have abouttttt ten chapters drafted so far and the full arc planned so like...we're goin' places, i promise! ♡ anyway i love you, thank you, i hope your days are full of fresh-baked bread and cute animals and your favorite kinds of weather.

find expected posting schedules & chapter-previews on tumblr♡
here's the masterlist & moodboard♡

coming soon: chapter five. o'erpine.
summary: a conflict arises. a series of truths come out.
warnings: a few descriptions of physical nausea/pre-vomiting. it’s been less than a day since chapter two so we’ve still got a lot of regret to process. descriptions of leftover physical pain and references to some of the rough/hate-sex from chapter two. discussion of non-sexual child abuse and controlling behaviors/manipulation. discussion of pet death and intentionally self-inflicted allergic reactions. brief flashbacks to lylla’s execution.
estimated date: thursday, april fourth.

Chapter 5: o'erpine.

Summary:

a conflict arises. a series of truths come out.

Notes:

warnings: a few descriptions of physical nausea/pre-vomiting. it’s been less than a day since chapter two so we’ve still got a lot of regret to process. descriptions of leftover physical pain and references to some of the rough/hate-sex from chapter two. discussion of non-sexual child abuse and controlling behaviors/manipulation. discussion of pet death and intentionally self-inflicted allergic reactions. brief flashbacks to lylla’s execution.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

o’erpine. to wander through the grounds of a cemetery, glancing over the gravestones as if you were people-watching the dead, imagining all the things they must have seen and the lives they might have led, trying to conjure up an entire biography from a handful of words and dates etched in granite, with barely more than a single dash to cover the unimaginable vastness of their experience. From over, finished and done with + pine, to yearn or grieve for something. Compare the flowering perennial orpine, also called autumn joy or live-forevers, which is often found in open sunny areas of cemeteries. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Pearl jolts awake, the tatters of nightmares still clinging to her temples. She doesn’t recall last night’s dreams precisely, but she’s had similar-enough slumbers to suppose she knows the themes. Like cobwebs, they cling to her curls, to her soot-heavy eyelashes.

Everything — everything — aches.

Her throat is hoarse and parched and raw, and when she touches her neck with light fingers, she’s sure a ring of bruises must be darkening the skin. Her wrists twinge so badly she barely even notices the stinging tug of the incision where the survivor had removed her tracker. She’s not sure why — maybe from the punishment of being on her hands and knees while he’d been fucking her, or maybe from where she’d pitched forward after tripping in her skirts and being shoved down. That would also explain the tenderness in her shoulders from when she’d fallen on her face — twice — and the rawness of her knees and the strain in her thighs. The knot on her forehead throbs and shifting her body at all has her hitching a slow breath between her teeth, trying not to make noise.

And — the space between her thighs feels bruised. Aching. Most saliently, it feels empty, in a way she’s never felt before.

Her brow pulses and her eyes hurt, and her jaw aches. She nearly bites her lip on instinct, and then immediately regrets it when she remembers how swollen her lip is. She barely swallows down a hiss, striving for silence.

And still.

Still, that glitter of excitement bursts sweet and warm inside her, like a mouthful of pink fairyfloss. Like — like pop rocks, she thinks, even though she hasn’t had them since Terra. Like pixie sticks. She’s lying stiff and sore on her belly, but she’s tempted to drum her toes against the thin mattress in pure elation because she’s out, she’s free, she maybe even has a friend who Herbert can’t touch, and not only has she had sex — which neither her biology lessons nor her own explorations could have possibly prepared her for; all that hot stinging sensation, all that sweaty melty warmth — but the survivor had touched her, even afterward. She thinks she can still feel the linger of his hands on her curves from when he’d helped her with the salve, and when he’d pinned her wrist in his fingers to cut free the tracker and bandage her back up. His t-shirt and his pillow both smell like him: resin and blue spruce and burnt wood, something like sugared almonds — and even though the mattress is thin, everything around her feels cuddly and warm and soft, so far from Herbert’s starchy stiff sheets and hard bed and thin prickly quilts.

Maybe the survivor will touch her again. Yes, okay, she’d been bad at sex — pathetic, probably, really. She’d known that her ideas of intimacy were half-formed and nebulous at best. She’s enough of an adult to realize that porn and romance novels are largely their creators’ fantasies, though even those had been far beyond her reach since Herbert would never allow such lowbrow material anywhere near his homes. And the biology lessons Herbert had made sure she’d had were — clinical. So, even though she’d very much like to try it again — ideally, with the survivor — she’d be so very happy if he even just continued to touch her casually. She’d climb down a thousand Aretes in dark rain and lightning if it would mean more light brushes of his hand on her hip.

So much for wanting to be good for me. Can’t even come without crying.

Worthless, really.

She indulges in a wince at the intrusive memory — then shakes it off. Stowing away all the things that make her heart heavy is actually a very typical morning ritual, honestly, but if that bit of critical feedback is the worst thing weighing on her this rotation, then it’s the best day she’s had in a decade or longer.

She hides her smile in the soft crush of the woodfire-scented blanket and tries to calm herself, to not be annoying, to hold it together. And then she crawls up on her elbows to dare a glance up toward the flight deck.

She jolts when she realizes the survivor is already staring at her broodingly from the pilot’s chair, and he looks so haggard and furious, so hollow-eyed and bare-fanged, that her heart trips right up to her mouth and all that giddiness feels like the height of indulgence. She lets it slowly leak out from her ribs and trickle down into the grated floor, stomach now hollow.

You got ahead of yourself, she thinks. Remember? He hates you.

“Did you sleep all right?” she asks worriedly, before she can think better of it. Of course he didn’t, and his glower only grows stormier at the question. Did you sleep at all? she wants to amend, but she suspects she knows the answer to that too. Her tongue suddenly feels like ice in her mouth.

There’s a soft clink as the runabout jostles, punching neatly through a little cloud of stardust, and she glances down to his feet. There lie two bottles of — she’s not sure, but when she delicately tries to scent the air, she realizes that — apart from the warm woodsy smell of him in the blankets — there’s an oppressive tang to it: something like Herbert’s stronger wines, but magnified a thousandfold. Her eyes dart back to the survivor and yes, he looks surly and somehow not quite as sharp as last night, the fury of his glare muted by just a hint of the hazy muddled quality she’d witnessed from a distance when drunk Wundagorish locals had meandered the streets below her tower window. The scent calls forth a half-lost memory of her mother’s television-lit living room. The only thing missing is the scorch of cigarette smoke.

The Monster has another open bottle in his lap, three-quarters gone. Her eyes are huge in her head.

Broad shoulders aside — how can such a small body hold so much?

“I was thinkin’ all night,” the survivor says slowly — and yes, now she’s certain there’s a low slur under his words. “‘Bout your Herbert.”

She flinches. The giddiness is already gone but now she can feel a little coil of dread slowly starting to wind up in her abdomen. She’s missed something important here. Something happened while she was sleeping. Something is wrong.

“He isn’t my Herbert,” she says softly: as strong of a protest as she dares.

The corner of the survivor’s mouth curls dangerously, cynically. “No?”

She hesitates where she lays on the bunk, half-shifted onto her side, hoisted onto aching hands and her least-bruised hip. He’s second-guessing everything, she realizes.

And maybe she should be, too.

But somehow, she can’t bring herself to feel anything but trepidation and concern. Dread and fear, and worry for him — but no regret. There’s no room for it: every breath since the power had gone out in the Arete has been drawn by her own choice, and each one has made her feel more alive than she’d felt since Fairy had been crumpled into feather and bone.

No, the survivor had done what she’d asked last night and had even gotten her away from HalfWorld and Wundagore II and if she’s going to die today, at least it will be well outside of the High Evolutionary’s reach, and that’s a mercy in its own right. Plus, if she’s being honest, she’s accustomed to a man with a temper far more evil and calculating than the survivor’s. She suspects she can manage this just fine if she can keep her head clear.

So she swallows the feeling of ice in her mouth. It coats her throat — drips down the inside of her ribs and forms little shimmering icicles, she imagines.

She tries to conjure up some warmth, just for him.

“No,” she says quietly. Gently. “He isn’t.”

His crimson-glow gaze narrows. “Uh-huh,” he says skeptically. He gestures with his chin to the food storage locker. “Grab some breakfast, f’you want it. There’s water in there. Coffee’s next to the shower stall.”

Her eyes flick up and take in the lopsided coffeemaker, crouched next to what looks like a dismantled rehydrator. Half a pot of hot caffeine remains — probably from yesterday, from the look of it — tarry and bitter and black.

She hesitates, then eases herself carefully over the edge of the berth-style bunk. It swings slightly beneath her and she tries to maneuver herself over the edge without putting too much weight on her bruised side. She’s on her feet more quickly than she’d feared, and she allows herself a little, half-pleased smile. The survivor makes a throttled noise in his throat, and when she looks up at him, he’s already turning back to the starshield.

She picks her way through the small cabin and finds a plasma orb to tap. It brings up the lights enough for her to see more easily as she pries open the foodlocker. The track sticks till she jiggles the drawer a little, and she hesitates over the neat stacks of seaweed and dried auroch, the little boxes of dehydrated egg and biscuit and lyophilized fruits. The foodstores aren’t expansive, and it’s clear he’d only been planning on feeding himself.

She’s been greedy. She hasn’t thought about the longterm costs of him taking her with him.

She takes just a couple slices of freeze-dried stonefruit to nibble on, and a fresh bag of water she can nurse throughout the day. She’s pretty sure at least part of her headache is sheer dehydration, and if she can get rid of that, maybe she can sit down and try to think of some way to be useful to him — some way to thank him for his generosity. Some way to ease whatever’s got his heart in his teeth like this, all bloodied and mauled.

“Thank you,” she murmurs, advancing slowly toward the flight deck. He’d wanted her to sit here yesterday, hadn’t he? She studies the copilot’s seat, trying to figure out how she can tuck herself into it with minimal flinching.

“For what?” he snaps, half-slurring his words.

She wonders if he should even be flying like this — but, well, the sky is big and empty, and maybe it’s safe enough. She doesn’t know the first thing about flying, after all.

She dips herself into the seat, unbruised hip first, and curls herself onto the outside of her thigh, the rest of her weight distributed on the elbow she’s anchored into the armrest.

“For sharing your food with me,” she tells him steadily. He’s not looking at her, so she just takes in his profile in the blue-purple starlight and the glow of the flight deck. There’s a perfect, lovely slope from the top of his head to the tip of his nose, and his gaze is reflecting the stars: a dozen red embers in each gleaming eye.

His ears flicker toward her, and she looks away immediately — impulsively, cheeks burning, because of course he noticed her looking and she should’ve just been more normal about it.

Whatever normal is.

“Yeah, well,” he growls, “don’t frickin’ mention it.” He takes a swig from his bottle before settling it back into the cradle of his thighs, his other hand resting lightly on the yoke. His claws are dark and sharp, and his fingers look slender and agile where they bracelet the flight controls and the neck of his bottle. And they’re warm, she remembers from last night. Strong. Thinly-calloused, like heated leather — and unforgiving.

She shivers a little and looks out into deep space, too. It’s been a while since she’s been starside. Herbert would call her to some new planet, once or twice every quarter: to check up on her progress, to see how she would handle herself amidst his… subjects. Creations. People.

Victims, she thinks.

The Sovereign. The Ruul. The Pegasusians. The Xeronians. The Nuwali.

It’s beautiful, though. She marvels at how safe and snug she feels in this cozy little runabout: all this cluttered, organized chaos. Meticulously clean, like a dust mote or a feather of lint could disrupt the entire electronic ecosystem. Tiny buttons and lights everywhere — controls and panels and boards glittering like fields of fireflies. Half the electrical and mechanical systems in the little ship are clearly homegrown or works-in-progress.

And the berth-style beds: perfectly-sized, swinging slightly with every small bounce and jump-point turbulence. Hanging curtain rods circle each bunk. The curtains themselves looks like they’ve never been pulled, but she appreciates the possibility of making a tiny space even tinier.

She wishes he would have joined her, though. The few moments when he’d touched her after — after he’d fucked her — had been the most comforting moments of her life. His hot hands cupping her calves as he’d guided her legs out of her bedroom window — pressing her safely against the cold glass of the Arete — braceleting her wrist while he’d carefully peeled the tracker from her arm. She’s memorized each and every touch he’s given her and she thinks she can still almost feel them like warm ghosts on her skin. And sure, no-one has touched her in over a decade, and maybe she’s just primed and desperate to see any ambiguous physical contact as a blessing, but even though he may have hurt her a little — frightened her a little — all she wants is to snuggle her face into the fur of his neck, and warm her cold body against the furnace of his.

She needs to stop that line of thinking. She needs to focus on trying to figure out how she can earn her keep with zero practical skills. She can’t fight. She can’t fly. She can’t shoot. Back on Terra, she’d been responsible for keeping her mother’s home clean and keeping food on the table, and she’d been good at it — but the survivor’s ship is clearly in exactly the order he wants it, and almost painfully spotless in terms of dust and grime.

She feels her brow crease, and it startles her so much that she jolts a little, eyes flicking around the ship like maybe one of the Recorders will catch her.

But no — if she thinks back, she realizes she hasn’t put her mask on since yesterday, with Vim and Theel. She hasn’t once worried about keeping her face expressionless — not since Vim had locked her into her room.

She darts a glance at the survivor. It’s the first time in ages that she hasn’t tried to hide what she’s feeling in front of another person — and it had happened so naturally that she hadn’t even noticed. The survivor’s eyes slide sideways to her like he can feel her gaze, and she jerks her stare back to the starshield.

Be normal, she reminds herself furiously.

He takes another drink. One-handed, he swirls the booze in the bottle in his lap.

“You ever think,” he asks suddenly, his voice as hot and hard and heartless as his hands had been the night before, “that evil fuckin’ people get what they deserve? That maybe you can tell how much a person sucks by how much bad shit the universe gives ‘em?”

“No,” she says. The word is immediate and unflinching. There isn’t much pearl knows, but she certainly doesn’t believe the cosmos operate as a meritocracy.

“No?” It’s almost a leer. He’s still so angry, and she still hasn’t figured out why. She tilts her head, and tries to peel back the layers of his question.

“Sometimes,” she says slowly, “maybe bad people get what they deserve. But more often—“ She thinks of Fairy. She thinks of him — her survivor — and the brief lightning-struck glimpse she’d caught of his gleaming metal brackets and bolts. “More often, someone else pays.”

He’s not looking at her. Instead, he sneers out into the sky. “So you don’t think what I did to Wyndham was justice?”

Wyndham’s gonna be preoccupied fixing his fuckin’ face.

She doesn’t know exactly what he did, but—

“No,” she says again, quietly, and his eyes flare to hers — heated and close to hateful once more. She twists her hands nervously in her bag of water, and forces herself to go on: honest. “Whatever you did to him, I’m sure it didn’t even come close.”

The hostility clenched in his teeth gutters for a minute, and she can see it almost die. But then he’s fisting it in both drunk hands and pulling it back to the surface, like he can’t bear to let her be his friend right now.

I just want to be your friend right now.

Though maybe that’s selfish of her, too. Every friend she’s had since coming to space has ended up dead, after all.

She shifts anxiously. The air feels tense and dense, so heavy she could drown in it.

“Wyndham deserves every bad thing that he’s got coming,” the survivor mutters. “And I do, too.”

Her heart stutters and twists at that. The no tumbles up to her lips before she can think about it, but it doesn’t get the chance to escape because he’s already slicing her open, cauterizing her with those burning eyes.

“What about you, pearl? Do you deserve all the bad shit that happened to you?”

The words freeze on her tongue: little flat glassy disks of ice. “Wh-what?”

He doesn’t respond, though — taking another mouthful of booze and swallowing so hard she can hear it.

“He shot her, you know.”

Her eyes ricochet back to his, and now he’s got his head tilted so he can stare at her directly, narrowly. She knows immediately — instinctively — that he’s referring to Herbert.

And to Lylla.

Her chest suddenly aches, like it’s on the verge of caving in. The feeling is as familiar to her as her own body. She thinks it might just be part of her at this point. Her fingers uncurl from the water bag, each one with a mind of its own and each one wanting to reach for him. How many times has she sat in the corner of her Terran bedroom, or deep in her empty closet on whichever planet Herbert had her planted on, and just wanted someone to hold her?

Especially after an execution?

She wonders if the survivor feels that constant ache too, if it’s the most familiar thing in the galaxy to him, like it is to her.

Her fingers curl back into the plastic and she imagines them curling into his undercoat, stroking over the back of his head. Cradling him against her, holding all the broken pieces together, giving him the kindness she would’ve begged for — that she had begged for, before realizing that no person who heard her would ever be willing to help.

She tests her voice slowly, trying to smooth out the tremors. “I’m sorry,” she says softly. “I — I know it hurts.”

It’s stupid, of course. And he clearly doesn’t want whatever comfort she could offer, because his smirk grows and she suddenly realizes that the half-blurred spark in his red stare is predatory. Waiting. Ready to make her run — just so he can corner her. She tries to ease herself further upright, forcing herself not to wince when her right side comes into contact with the seat.

What, she thinks, is the natural prey of raccoons? Because right now it feels like the answer might be stupid, spoiled Terran girls.

The smirk gets wider, like he can taste her apprehension: sharp-toothed and sneering. “Sure, pearl,” the survivor drawls. “‘Course you’re very frickin’ sorry for me. ‘Course you know it hurts.”

He takes another indolent swallow of his alcohol.

“On the other hand,” he purrs lazily, “Wyndham did say he was gonna give her to you as mittens.”

He watches her go ash-gray — he must see it. Because she can feel it: the abrupt dwindling of the blood in her cheeks, like someone has pulled a blade across her throat so sharply and smoothly that she doesn’t feel the cut — only the loss from the veins in her throat.

She thinks she might be light-headed. Her fingers clench in her bag of water and she feels untethered from her body — floating, linked only to reality by a coldness so sharp and sudden that her teeth hurt.

Wait, she thinks. Wait. Stop. Slow down.

Did she have fur? she wants to ask — but she suspects it’s a desperate question that she already knows the answer to. What color? might be the better option. Or—

It doesn’t matter, though: the survivor has already seen the paleness of her face, big gray eyes suddenly a dark, stark contrast to her skin. Who knows?— his sharp ears may have even picked up the sudden, horrified trip and thud of her heart.

His gleaming eyes narrow and drop to her fingers, suddenly shaking, suddenly curled into her water bag like it’s a plastic security blanket. His shoulders straighten and his gaze snaps up to hers again.

“Did he?” The survivor rumbles. “Did you?”

She forces the words out over her tongue, over her frozen teeth. She’s suddenly so shivering that she can’t think.

“I don’t — I don’t know,” she tells him shakily. “There was one time —“

“Get out,” he rumbles, his eyes red and glowing — and so abruptly full of hate it sucks the breath right out of her icy lungs. Even more hateful, she thinks, than how they’d looked shining down at her while he’d squeezed her throat. Last night, he’d only seen her as an enemy — but now she’s a traitor, too. “Get the fuck out.”

“I’m sorr—“

“Who the fuck do you think you are?” His words are so sharp in his mouth that she’s surprised he’s not bleeding, and her whole body jumps. His dagger-bright teeth bite into a snarl, and he leans forward like they’re pulling him toward her throat. “Get the fuck outta my sight.”

She propels herself out of the copilot’s seat — as if she’d ever belonged there in the first place — clutching at her bag of water with both hands, edging past him and backing away into the hold. There’s no real threshold, though — nowhere to go to get out of his sight — and she turns to stare helplessly around the tiny space, full of weaponry and machines she can’t identify. The shower stall? The tiny toilet room? Can she shuffle herself into a clothes locker somewhere?

What about you, pearl?

She pushes past the shower, past the food locker and between the bunks, looking for anywhere to go so she can respect his privacy. Past the toilet room and the linen locker and another series of shelves and drawers, past another tiny space she assumes is for his clothes — there’s the docking ramp and airlock toward the back, and a hatch leading down to the cargo bay and the engine room below.

Do you deserve all the bad shit that happened to you?

She hazards a glance over her shoulder, but he seems to be staring out the starshield. Her vision blurs. Stop it, she thinks, blinking quickly, trying to soak the tears up with her lashes. She wrestles as quietly as she can with the hatch and then down she goes, into the dark.

It might be a mistake. She’d left the hatch open, not wanting to risk locking herself down here and not willing to interrupt him by asking him if she’d be able to open it from below. The minute her bare feet meet the cold grating, she steps away from the circle of light — and realizes just how shadowy it is down here after all. Tiny pale security orbs pin the shadows to the edges of the floor like little moons. She wonders if they create enough light for the survivor’s sharp eyes — but either way, they certainly don’t for her. Guiding herself with her hands, she finds the door for the engine room — marked in Kree letters she can trace with her fingers — and the cargo bay, full of too many unknown things for her to safely navigate in the dark. But as her eyes adjust in the main chamber, she can see faint blue light emanating from behind two bulwarks — one on each side. She reaches out toward the one on the right, her fingers showing up as a black silhouette against the midnight-blue, and finds a tiny groove behind the bulwark — and a narrow panel of re-entry grade glass, shot through with the tiny glistening gossamer lines that she knows denote armor weaving.

A window.

Beyond the shining spidersilk lines in the glass, she sees a hundred million stars, and pink dust clouds, and emerald asterisms. All left in the past.

There’s a little ledge that she tucks herself into, not bothering to hide her winces as she settles herself, tight and hidden. Out of the way. She pulls her knees into her chest and rests her weight evenly on her ass for the first time since last night — which calls up a wave of pain so overwhelming that her vision swims. She gapes into the darkness, breath suddenly shallow — but it fades when she doesn’t move, dulling down to a steady, vision-blurring ache that she can’t quite bring herself to care about.

The blanket, still tied to her waist, shifts to one side and she digs her teeth in viciously to the bruise on her knee. It almost hisses with pain — the sharp outburst of an angry animal. Even the bone aches, and the old wound hurts in a new way — a result of yesterday’s time on the floor, most likely. She digs her teeth in harder, till she can taste blood. Her ghost-scream builds in her lungs like a decimated beast, but she refuses to let it out.

She doesn’t know how good his ears are, and she doesn’t want him to hear.

Do you deserve all the bad shit that happened to you?

No, she’d said just a few minutes earlier. The question had been different, but the answer is the same. No.

I’m sure it doesn’t even come close.

She tries to sort her thoughts. Tries to think. There had been fur mittens, once. And a hat. Fairy had died, and she’d just been given the little flerken. The sight of the silvery-white fur mittens, shimmering with gold spots like a leopard’s, had made her excuse herself to the bathroom where she’d vomited and cried until Vim had found her. It had somehow felt like the feathered hairpin all over again.

Do I have to wear them?

Vim had gazed down at her, lips pinched in disapproval.

Do you know what he’ll do if you don’t?

The girl — the future M’dame Lavenza — had thought of her tiny silver-white fluffball of a flerken, who yawned like a kitten with tiny pink tentacles instead of a tongue, and who liked to curl up against her collarbone while she slept at night. Add gold spots, and it could almost be the same fur.

No, pearl had said softly, and the whisper had echoed in the marble-tiled bathroom. What — what will he do?

Vim’s eyes had flattened. I don’t know either.

The words had not been an admission of ignorance, but something far more ominous. The girl had thought again of the fragile flerken — fixed, not even able to defend itself with portals and pocket dimensions, just a little thing — and she’d nodded and risen shakily to her feet.

Wash your face, Miss Lizette, Vim had instructed coolly. Sire will expect us in two hours.

About a decade ago, then. Is that when the survivor had lost his Lylla? She thinks again of the white gravestone in her mind, and the lilac bush. She’d never made a stone for her flerken or her mouse — wishful thinking, she supposes, that she hadn’t sent them to their deaths. She hadn’t made a tombstone for the gold-spotted creature who’d been killed to make her mittens and hat at the time, and she supposes she should’ve. Then she supposes, if she were able to make a tombstone for every life Herbert has taken — directly or indirectly — she’d have a forest of stone ghosts, enough to get lost in.

She looks out at the stars. Interplanetary travel makes it hard to find constants — a thing she hadn’t known she would miss when she left Terra — so she outlines the vague shapes that she associates with constellations now: made up from her studies, so simple that she can superimpose them on any vantage point with a view of the open sky. She folds one arm up and hovers a finger over the glass, tracing them on the cool recycled air: diamond, oval, circle, spiral. “Arete,” she whispers. “Astraea. Homonoia. Adrestia.”

She winces into the shadows. Her breath puffs a soft cloud onto the starpane. Her eyes blur with tears and she sneers at the faint ghost of her reflection. It’s cold here — pressed between metal and armored glass, with the wide frigid expanse of space just beyond — but that’s okay.

She’s always cold.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

The Monster empties his last bottle of moonshine and glowers out at the stars.

There are no words for what he wants to do to Wyndham’s Flawless Pearl right now — fury he’d normally let run free and destructive now that he has a little alcohol in his system. He’d like to melt her too-gorgeous face off with a laser cannon. He’d like to make good on yesterday’s promises and dig his fingers back into her soft, fragile little neck. But something — maybe just the phantom of her face the night before, yesterday’s guilt, the ghosts of her little cries — something snakes up between the cartilage of his joints and anchors him to the chair.

He’d sneered through the starshield as he’d heard her slink away into the back of the runabout — like a fuckin’ scumbag — then grapple with the hatch. She’d shuffled down the ladder and bumped around clumsily in the darkness — and even drunk and furious, he’d been ashamed to say he’d been listening: half-worried she’d smash her stupidly-pretty face into a door or a fuel tank or worse. But she’d eventually gone quiet and still, and he’d scowled down into the rest of his booze, and lost himself in as much bitterness and grief as he could strangle up.

She’d worn Lylla. He’s certain of it. His other hand grips the empty bottle so hard that his claws screech on the glass. He’s pretty sure he’s only one hateful thought away from shattering it, so he lowers it almost to the ground before dropping it against the other two bottles at his feet.

The stars slide by. He keeps the runabout on autopilot and dozes on the flightdeck. For the first time in over five circumrotations, he doesn’t dream only of Lylla, or of his old cagemates, or of the silver sheen of scalpels. The straining sting of shrinking pupils in bright white lights, and the melting pain of the knife, the rattling shrieking feel of the circular saw grinding through his bones. Instead, eyelids flickering, he fumbles through half-sleeping thoughts of Wyndham’s evil bride-to-be, the ice-faced bitch who always got everything she ever asked for, including Lylla’s beautiful fur. He’d seen M’dame Lavenza only once before HalfWorld — had caught a glimpse of her strolling beside Wyndham at some stupid gala on Wundagore II. His sleep recalls — with perfect clarity — the frigidity of her face.

She’d been the coldest frickin’ thing he’d ever seen.

The Monster hadn’t wanted her — not then — but he’d been able to see why Wyndham had taken her as his consort and accomplice. She’d been such a lovely little package for such a callous, shriveled soul. And not just vapid and spoiled, he’d realized when he’d gotten the minute to observe her. Not a petty and ignorant evil. No, her face had been careful. Watchful. She’d been bright.

Frozen frickin’ witch, he’d thought when he’d seen her again, taking in her rigid shoulders and expressionless features as she’d stepped out of Wyndham’s little travel-pod on HalfWorld. He’d sneered at the glacial tone of voice she’d used with Theel, putting the Recorder in his frickin’ place. If the Monster hadn’t hated Madame Lavenza so much, he’d have enjoyed witnessing that little exchange.

I wasn’t speaking to you.

A new voice rises in his drowsing, half-drunk mind. An old voice.

Incinerate them.

Wyndham had said it so casually to Vim and Theel, while the Monster had howled and wept over the remains of his intended companion. His hands had cradled her body — hands that remembered every single thing to pass over palm and fingertip. Now, drunk and dozing, those same hands recall the feel of the heat leaving Lylla’s body: wisping away between the silken threads of fur, all her muscles growing loose and flimsy in his arms. He’ll never be able to forget the feel of it, inked into his sensory memory like the serial numbers tattooed on his bones. Even now, in his sleep, he rubs his fingers over his palms and nearly wakes himself on a heartbroken whine.

Incinerate them.

And then — pragmatically, almost dismissively, with an airy wave of one hand as Wyndham had turned to leave—

No. The otter pelt, at least, is in fine condition.

And my pearl needs new mittens.

The Monster had assumed that the so-called High Evolutionary had been taking advantage of the sharp mind behind Madame Lavenza’s big, observant, ice-gray eyes. That narcissistic shitbag had always been preoccupied with cleverness, after all. Wyndham had probably confided in the bitch while the two of them had lain together between silk sheets. It’s all part of the nightmare that the Monster has had a million times since Lylla’s murder.

Pearl, what do you think of my attempts to create life?

Darling, Madame Lavenza had probably said, propped on her side, surrounded by satin pillows. In his nightmares, there’d been a vampiric chill to her face and she’d had ice-chips for teeth. Darling, they’re hideous.

…But I do need new mittens.

Except the Monster can’t really dream it quite the same way anymore. He sees pearl’s mouth move as he sleeps, but the words don’t fit together in it anymore. Instead, her eyes melt into urgent starlight, and the words tumbling off her tongue are desperate.

Don’t get caught, okay?

Can we help the Humanimals?

I don’t even like chickens. They’re mean.

None of that sounds like the voice of a girl who demands furs for her empty closet.

He shifts a little more fully into wakefulness, and the idea falls apart further into tatters and ghosts when the headache moves in and — suddenly, with the surge of wakeful restlessness — he remembers how criminally tight her soft little cunt had been when he’d fucked into it.

He groans and smashes a hand over his eyes, then squeezes the space between them.

He knows thinking about it is going to skew his anger, shift him back into the wrenching discomfort of guilt, but he can’t stop. Every time the Monster thinks about how he’d treated that welcoming, soft little thing between her thighs, a new wave of pain smashes into his hangover-brain, and his gut twists up into some pinching, icy knot.

It’s hard to imagine villainous sweet-nothings whispered back and forth between downy duvets when Wyndham had left that syrupy, snug little pussy all unfucked and lonely—

Do you deserve all the bad shit that happened to you?

He finally drags his sandpaper-eyes open, wincing at the stabbing sharpness of the starlight, and groans. It is easier, the Monster realizes, to picture things exactly as pearl had described — that she had been a prisoner too. That Wyndham had maybe held lives hostage in exchange for her obedience. That Sire had eyed his pearl with clinical condescension and tried to figure out how to make her perfect — as if she wasn’t already halfway there, all on her own. That he’d reduced her to a drill-worm in a clamshell and then had spread that name to all the far reaches of the galaxy, and had made sure she’d known it.

89P13.

The Monster grunts, sure his head is splitting open right along the scar where Wyndham had cut in to access his brain, again and again.

The fact is, the Monster should’ve reevaluated everything the moment he’d gotten Wyndham’s pearl underneath him. He should’ve stopped as soon as she’d tried to get away from him — tried to get away, but hadn’t tried to hurt him.

Not one single frickin’ time.

Not when he’d had his palms squeezing into her pretty throat, and not when he’d been brutalizing her poor, sweet little clit, flinching and swollen under his fingers. She’d clung to his fingers so desperately when he’d made her come that first time — her first time with someone. He’d cut off her bloodflow and then, when she’d stuttered out into the stars and sparks of a brutal, choked-out orgasm, he’d fuckin’ dropped her, like she was less than nothing, worse than trash. He could’ve — he could’ve at least held onto her. Steadied her.

Instead, he’d taunted her the whole time.

And still, she hadn’t tried to hurt him.

So much for being good for me, he’d sneered, and of all the shitty, stupid things he’d said to try and fuck with her head and get under her skin and make her feel as small and worthless and ugly as he’d always been — somehow, it seems like that’s the one that had made her sad.

His stomach suddenly revolts and he lurches for something — anything — to be sick in. There’s nothing, but he thankfully manages to hold it down. He hasn’t puked from booze in ages, but he suddenly has to wonder if he’s more hungover than he’d thought.

What was her name?

She’d asked the question like it had mattered to her. Like she’d really wanted to know. Like she would have mourned Lylla too, or wrapped him up in the rosy crescent of her arms and cradled him against her if he’d let her.

And he’d repaid her with knees dug so sharp into her ribs that he could’ve made ‘em snap with just a little more pressure. She probably has bruises there too, he thinks morosely.

And now this: sending her away, on a shitty tiny ship with nowhere to go. Because now that it’s been too many hours and he’s sobering up, he realizes he’s only continued to be an impulsive ass. Whatever had happened with Wyndham and Lylla and the — the mittens—

You’re not a monster, pearl had said from beneath him, eyes closed and waiting for death. Or cruelty.

Or both.

And still, she’d said it like she’d believed it.

You’re not a monster, and you never have been.

He pinches the bridge of his nose again, between his eyes, and shakes his head — cringing. For a moment he wonders if his body is going to try to be sick again.

“Unbelievable,” he mumbles. He’s such a frickin’ moron. She’d basically said she didn’t even wanna eat anything natural if it required something to be killed, and then he’d decided — what? That she might’ve wanted to wear fur?

He’s such an ass.

He’d scarred her up and made her cry and fucked her hard when she had probably only had the most timid of orgasms before, and then he’d accused her of ordering the murder and mutilation of his—

of Lylla.

He stumbles over the clinking empty bottles — a miracle he hadn’t tripped on them when he’d lunged out of his seat — then collects them up in his arms and throws them in the glass compactor.

Water, he thinks. Food.

Then go find her.

The High Shitbag had said My pearl needs new mittens. He hadn’t said she’d asked for them. The thought of her wearing Lylla makes the Monster want to vomit all over again — guts spiraling tight, and mouth slick with saliva and acid — but maybe she hadn’t known. Maybe she’d thought it was just another lower lifeform, like the natural food she’d had to eat under Wyndham’s watchful eyes.

How many times though? How many times had she pulled Lylla’s silk-soft fur over her hands?

His fists clench so tightly that blood wells under his claws.

Food, he reminds himself. Water.

Lylla wouldn’t hold it against her.

On the other hand, he ain’t Lylla. He could hold it against her, if he wanted to.

The Monster scowls at nothing, and opens the food locker, and then frowns. It’s more full than he’d expected — but then, the girl had only had breakfast, hadn’t she? He’d sent her away and she hadn’t come back, even though she must have been hungry again by now.

Even with breakfast, though…

She must be pissed. To have stayed down in the hold this long — sulking. No, he admits — she’s justifiably furious. He grimaces against the knowledge anyway, resentful.

One thing at a time.

He scowls and pulls out a bag of water and some dried synthetic auroch. Hesitates. Maybe he should take her some. A peace-offering. Or call her up for dinner.

Fuck, he’s bad at this. Lylla — he’d only gotten to share a few hours with her altogether, something close to the length of a rotation altogether. But it had already been obvious that Lylla had enough emotionalistic intelligence for both of them combined. She would’ve known what to do.

She would’ve wanted him to be nice to Wyndham’s bride. Look out for her.

Well, he thinks, gnawing on his auroch dismally. He’s already fucked that up. Twice over. He’d been the worst kind of — well, monster — the night before, and the pearl still hadn’t turned on him — and now he’d yelled at her and sent her away and she’s gotta be angry.

No, not yelled at her — he’d been heartless.

Do you deserve all the bad shit that happened to you?

His stomach lurches and he damn near hurls up his auroch. What the fuck is wrong with him?

“She’ll come up when she’s ready,” he mutters to himself under his breath. He should just — let her burn off her annoyance first.

He cringes and wishes he had another bottle of moonshine.

Another hour or two passes. He dicks around with some kind of homebrewed blaster made from parts of a Chitauri directed-energy particle rifle, an old ion cannon, and one of the Nova machine guns he’d lifted the last time he’d tangled with the Corps. He tries to hum and mumble out an old Sneepers song while he works, and he takes breaks to lament that he’d burned through all his booze in one night. In between, he’s furiously punching down random spurts of shame and irritation when they erupt like ignored, infected wounds.

Justifiably angry or not, the girl’s a stubborn little brat. She still hasn’t come up from sulking down in the cargo hold. At least, he assumes she’s sulking in the cargo hold. She might’ve gone into the engine room, and his head snaps up at that, ears flicking, trying to ascertain whether the runabout sounds different.

She better not have fucked anything up.

But no, everything seems to be running smoothly. Any sound she might be making down there is quiet enough to be covered by the hum of the little ship. She’s probably waiting on an apology. He snorts. Well, she’ll be waiting a long frickin’ time. He’s never apologized for anything — not to anyone but his first two cagemates, and then Lylla.

At least, not until last night, when he’d apologized to pearl about the fuckin’ clothes. Even if he had meant — something else.

Everything else.

One damn apology is enough, he thinks. She doesn’t need another. It’s already more than he’s given anyone who’s still breathing.

But another half-hour passes and she still doesn’t come through the hatch. He sighs so noisily that it’s half-a-snarl, and squeezes the bridge of his nose again, and finishes off his water. Nibbles on some dried seaweed. When he can’t hardly stand the tension in his shoulders anymore, he clears his throat, and strolls to the hatch.

“Pearl?”

The call is quiet — he’s trying to chew back his annoyance, to make his voice reasonable and maybe even something like penitent, since he knows he probably should be. The lonesome word echoes down into the hold.

There’s no response, and he glares into the dark shadows. Did she lock herself in the engine room or something? Or is she just stubbornly refusing to answer? When he sniffs, he’s pretty sure he can pick up on the fragrance of her — soft and clear under the scent of his soap and his shirt. She smells like clean riverways, and — he figures it out then, the memory calling to him out of nowhere — like this kind of cool, honey-sweet waterlily he’d noticed carpeting some of the freshwater canals when he was hunting down a bounty on Morag. Noticed is maybe an understatement, because he’d liked them — took big deep breaths of them every time their fragrance hit the air. Wouldn’t have minded swimming in ‘em, if there had been time for luxury.

He sighs, and groans, and eases his way down the ladder. “Pearl?” Apologize, he orders himself, and he rolls his eyes as his lip curls in irritation. He’s not sure he can scrape out another m’sorry, but he can at least admit he’s a dickhead. “Look. I know I been a jackass—“

Still nothing, but he can pick up the sound of her breathing and the beat of her heart, slow and steady — slower than it should be, he thinks — and he can follow the clean waterlily scent of her. He knows his stolen runabout like the back of his hand but he’d almost forgotten these weird little corners, wasted space between the hull and the cargo bay — but there she is.

She’s wedged herself up behind the frickin’ bulwark.

Her thighs are pressed into her breasts, with the undersides of those flawless curves peeking out from under his shirt. She’s tucked in tight between glass and metal, folded in thirds, blanket-skirt tucked carefully over her knees. Dark curls everywhere, lashes like black crescent moons against her cheeks — and a necklace of purple and green blooming on her bared throat.

The sight of the bruising makes his body snap backward. Every cell in his skin is suddenly tight and squeezing, his flesh crawling to get away from his own fingerprints. His eyes try to scramble away — to jump to the hatch, the security lights, anything to pretend that blossoming proof of violence isn’t there.

He doesn’t let himself, though. He drags his eyes back and makes himself stare. He counts the bruises, and all the thin weals left by his claws, and the constellations of needle-fine punctures. He stands and he looks till he’s seen everything he can see from this angle — and only then does he let himself stop.

She’s sleeping, he realizes abruptly, a self-deprecating snarl curling his lip. He’d stubbornly been trying to out-wait her and she’s sleeping down here ‘cause he’d told her to go away.

And he’s such an ass.

Should he wake her up? He can see the goosebumps on her skin. Maybe he should bring her a blanket — but between the aches he knows he’s already put into her body and the way she’s sandwiched herself between the hard layers of the ship, he’ll be lucky if she doesn’t wake up so sore she can’t even stand.

He reaches out before he can think — because his hands sometimes have a mind of their own and right now they’re longing for her skin — and he skates the leathery pad of one finger lightly down the velvet-soft inside of her forearm.

She leans into his touch like one of those damn waterlilies in the sun, so languid and soft and pliant that he almost chokes. But then her eyes flutter open and she hiccups on a soft little breath in her throat, turning her head to meet his gaze with sleepy, dreamy big bedroom-eyes that make his abdominal muscles clench.

Then he notices the redness around them, and he wonders if she’d been crying down here in the dark, too.

He’s fuckin’ gutted all over again. At this rate, he’s not going to stop feeling sick till he gets her off the damn runabout and out of his frickin’ sight. Maybe not even then. His ears flicker, trying to force themselves flat to his skull in chagrin, and he grimaces.

“Hey,” he says quietly, trying to bite any lingering hostility out of his voice. “You should — you should come eat something.”

She turns toward him without thinking and he watches her lips whiten before she sucks in a sharp breath of hurt, hiccuping on a hiss. Her head ducks and her eyes dart to his.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. Her eyes well up and her bottom lip quivers and he doesn’t think it’s from pain. His mouth goes dry, and his throat tightens right up. All his inner bickering about apologies and how he wouldn’t give her another one, no matter how much she might deserve it — and it’s the first thing out of her damn mouth.

He sighs, and tries not to let his shoulders and ears drop further.

“Doubt you got anything to be sorry about, pearl,” he says tiredly. He wants to pinch the space between his eyes again but he settles for rubbing the end of his nose with his forearm, then scratching behind one ear.

She gives him that watery little smile. Her hands come up to toy with the curling ends of her hair, tugging nervously. “I think I probably have a lot to be sorry about.”

Before he can scoff and tug her to her feet, though, something happens. He wouldn’t be able to describe it if he tried. She closes her eyes and she licks her bruised and swollen lip, and she breathes in — and then she’s exhaling the slowest, most shuddering breath he’s ever heard, right between her pretty pursed lips.

And it’s like everything goes with it.

Every soft, living thing in her face falls away and her chin drops and her shoulders square up, and the moonlight in her eyes goes out like an eclipse. Her hands rest gracefully in her lap. She’s Madame Lavenza on the ramp all over again, untouchable and remote.

“I had a bird,” she tells him quietly, and her voice is flat and even — but still somehow so thin and fragile and small that he just knows he could snap it between his fingers.

Breakable.

“It’s not an excuse, but I had a bird,” she repeats in that steady, thready voice. “And I did something I wasn’t supposed to, and Herbert made Theel execute it.” There’s no inflection when she delivers the words — all fragile and brittle-thin — and he feels his ears flatten against his skull even further. His tail tucks tight to his inner ankle.

“Then he gave me a flerken kit, and two days later, the mittens and the hat. I didn’t want to wear them, but Vim reminded me that — Herbert is unpredictable when displeased.” She blinks once. “I didn’t know what to do. And that’s not an excuse either. I’m so sorry.”

His brain’s still trying to grapple with the frickin’ transformation he’d just witnessed happen in front of his face — and then he catches up to what she’s saying.

“So you wore ‘em.”

It’s almost as flat and emotionless as her own tone — almost, but not quite, because he’s always burned hot and Madame Lavenza is the most frozen corpse he’s ever come across.

“Only once,” she says quietly— solemnly. There’s a flicker of something desperate and pleading in her eyes: there and gone, and if he weren’t so frickin’ shrewd at reading expressions for tells — when he thinks to, anyway, which is pretty much only when he’s grifting or gambling — he would’ve missed it. “Only for a little while. There were berries.”

He stares at her blankly. “There were what?”

“Wundagorish winterberries. I’m allergic to them.” Her voice is still struggling for flatness, but it comes out soft and strangled. “There were some in the garden. I snuck out and crushed some up, and put the juice on my wrists and my—“ She touches her forehead, just below her dark curls. Something on her face wobbles and then she flutters her eyelashes and exhales again, and her voice is back to being strictly factual.

“I got welts. They almost scarred. He didn’t make me wear fur again.”

He stares at her. Her eyes don’t have any reflective shine, like his, but still — they’re all dark polished gunmetal in the shadows. Solemn and serious and heavy. They flick down, as if they’re full of too much weight for her to carry — and then she drags them back up to his, like it’s some kind of penance. Like she’d let him slap the shit out of her again if he felt like it.

His mouth suddenly feels slick and sour. “You don’t gotta do that.”

“Do what?” she asks, her voice like glass.

All of it. Apologize. Martyr herself for him.

“Think it’s your fault,” he manages to squeeze out between his clenched teeth. “It’s not.”

You’re not a monster, and you never have been.

It’s always, always been him.

“But—”

“It’s not,” he repeats. Enamel grits off his teeth and it’s a bitter dust on his tongue. Her words have recalled all the forest-fire of his fury at remembering Lylla, and imagining her velvet-silk soft fur wrapped around human hands — but there’s something else there now, muted and split to one side, like a run-off of his biting, gnawing outrage. Something isn’t settling right. He tries to reconcile all this with the stories he’d heard from the locals on Wundagore II. “Was the bird your first pet?”

She nods, just once. “She was my friend,” she whispers. “Her name was Fairy.”

And he thinks, of course it was.

This sweet fuckin’ moron.

“And the flerken?”

She swallows. “The second of three,” she acknowledges quietly.

That lines up.

“What happened to it? The flerken?”

Her face crumples — just for a second — and then she does the whole thing all over again. Breathes in, breathes out, and loses everything that makes her pearl in the process. It’s frickin’ fascinating to watch, and it makes him nauseous at the same time, like he’s being dangled over the edge of a damn cliff. Pure fuckin’ vertigo. His ears slant flat and he tilts his head to study her through squinting eyes.

He wonders what it feels like for her.

“I snuck him out of the garden and let him go,” she says in that brittle-thin voice. “I don’t know what happened to him after that.”

He opens his mouth to say, The locals said you killed it, but he snatches back the words before he can hurt her worse. His eyes narrow again as he reconsiders her words, and he tilts his head the other way.

“You thought he’d have better chances outside the Homonoia.”

She doesn’t so much as blink or flinch or shrug — just meets his eyes with a quiet flat desolation, like she thinks he’s criticizing her for something, and like she thinks she deserves it.

He grinds his teeth together, and squeezes his eyes shut. She’s gonna be the death of him. He’s had her on his shoddy little ship for maybe one full rotation at this point, and he can already tell she’s gonna be the death of him. He glowers at the ceiling, then offers a sharp nod. “Smart girl.”

Whatever shield she makes for herself must crack right up the middle because when he brings his gaze down, her eyes are waiting for his, stunned and wide open and all disbelief.

“A flerken kit wouldn’t’ve survived Wyndham,” he mutters by way of awkward explanation. “No way. Nothin’ that small would.” I didn’t, he thinks. He hesitates, then reaches deep and forces the words out from between his teeth. “You prob’ly gave him the best shot he coulda had in those circumstances.”

Her eyes flicker back and forth between his, and without all her emotions pushed down wherever she hides ‘em, she looks — distraught. Desperate to believe him and so frickin’ afraid he’s lying.

He can’t fuckin’ bear it, so he just clears his throat again. “And number three?”

“A… I don’t know what she was.” Her voice is no longer flat: wavering and delicate, patterned all over with spiderweb-cracks. “A little mouse. I let her out, too.”

She hasn’t taken her eyes off his and she sounds dazed now, like he’s slapped her out of a panic and the only thing she can focus on is his face and the sound of his voice.

He clenches his jaw, and then nods again. “Good girl.”

She makes a little, unidentifiable sound in her throat, eyes so big and begging that he mutters a curse under his breath and adds that expression to his frickin’ spank bank too. Why not, at this point? Unfortunately for both of them, every entry in there is starting to look a lot like her.

He swallows and tries to shake her stare, turning to stride a couple paces away in the shadows, then back.

“Now based on my intel—“ Stories from the Wundagorish gossips who were fuckin’ afraid of you, he doesn’t say “—your first pet disappeared little bit more than seven circumrotations ago. And the other two weren’t long after. So you’re saying Wyndham tried to put you in fur somewhere between all that.”

She nods, but she’s still tracking him like he’s a frickin’ beacon on a star-map. Like everything he’d just said had flipped her whole fuckin’ universe on its head. Like she wants to cling to him. “I was about fifteen, almost sixteen? — So, yes, that sounds right. About ten Terran years ago.”

The air in his lungs crackles with relief. He tries to soften his voice, though he’s not sure it works.

“It wasn’t Lylla, pearl. Lylla only died ‘bout five and a half circs ago.”

Whatever’s left of her mask crumples. He watches it happen, like an iceberg cracking apart in warm ocean currents. Her already-silver eyes go luminous and wet. Tears are suddenly standing bright on her lashes, fat and clustered, spilling over. He doesn’t even know where they came from — just that they are abruptly here, big and overflowing.

His tail’s fully wrapped around his shin at this point, and every strand of fur is vibrating with anxiety.

“Oh,” she breathes out, and those elegant shoulders slope downward and her spine curves and her head dips on her neck like it’s the heaviest thing she’s ever carried. “I was so afraid—” Her voice is unsteady, and the tears drip out over her lashes, and he wonders how many she’s got inside her and how they all rise to the surface so easily. “It would have been bad enough already,” she wobbles, “to wear something he’d had killed just for its pretty coat. But if she’d been your friend, I don’t think I—”

He wants to scoop up every one of those damn silver tears and tuck them right back under her eyelashes. “It wasn’t,” he tells her quickly, turning his back to her. His shoulders are trying to crawl up all the way under his ears, and his voice is rasping and raw. “It wasn’t Lylla.”

“I’m still so sorry,” she manages to strangle out. “That any of this — that he—”

“Hey,” he says sharply. His back is still to her but he wants to turn around, to put his hands on her again. To pinch her chin like he had last night, twist her face to meet him. Pull those heavy silver eyes toward his own and hold them. Press his forehead to hers again. Wrap his other hand around her throat — not to strangle this time, but just to hang onto her, to ground her with the heat of his palm and to know for himself that she’s just under his fingers.

Instead, he ducks his head, glaring at the floor — shoulders hunched despite his best efforts, wondering if her gaze is locked on his too-sharp spine. He flexes his fingers, curls them back into fists — flexes them again. “You don’t get to apologize for him,” he snarls at last, and then hates himself and hopes she knows the anger isn’t for her. “You don’t get to feel bad because of what he did.”

“I—”

“Pearl,” he snaps, his head slashing toward his shoulder so quickly that his neck makes an audible crack. He glares at her with one brilliant, burning eye. “Stop it.”

She chews her lip, and opens her mouth to say something, and he cuts her off with a quick jerk of his chin — giving her his back again, which makes him feel hollow and twisted-up all over again. He forces one foot forward — then the other.

“Come on,” he says abruptly, not waiting for her, and strides haltingly toward the ladder. He braces his hands on the rungs and something — something pulls him back to the floor. He darts a look over his shoulder at her, right as she’s rising up, glancing down at the ledge behind her — the little blue sliver of armored glass and the cold stars beyond — and something lurches behind his sternum. “Come on,” he bites out, stepping back, one hand still anchored to the ladder while the other gestures for her to hurry up.

She blinks at him, lips parted, cheeks still reflective with tears that roll down and collect in her collarbone. Then she nods, and scurries over into the space he’d vacated — heading upward to the hatch in front of him. For a second, he’s reminded of the night before: caging her in between his arms while she’d carefully climbed down the side of the Arete, all wet silk and skin. He shoves the thought aside, but it’s only replaced by the ghost of her folded up in that tiny crevice against the armored glass: cold. Bruised. Exhausted. Asleep. Dark doe eyes red-rimmed with spent, dried-up tears. All alone down here.

I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I think I probably have a lot to be sorry about.

I had a bird. I did something I wasn’t supposed to, and Herbert made Theel execute it.

His own voice echoes in his head: hollow, and fuckin’ mean.

Do you deserve all the bad shit that happened to you?

He grits his teeth and climbs up behind her, but all he wants to do is run the furred side of his mouth against the plushness of her thigh.

He’s gotta stop being a bad thing that happened to her.

In a better universe, he’d spend the next few hours being a good thing. Pulling back the edge of her blanket where it opens, and licking a careful, repentant stripe over the curve of her hip. Burying his nose between her legs and nuzzling apologetically into her soft little cunt.

He wonders if she smells like waterlilies there too.

He’d had her in a perfect position to find out yesterday, near-naked and begging beneath him. If only he hadn’t been so violent, so cruel, so utterly himself, he probably would know the answer to that question.

Instead, he surrenders to just the faintest, uppermost layer of indulgence, letting the very tips of his whiskers twitch and tap against her outer thigh.

“Hey, sweetheart?” he asks, tilting his head up and immediately regretting it because — fuck — he’d forgotten about her tits, the undersides of them fully visible from this angle, ripe as plums and perfect for his mouth.

He really is a fuckin’ cretin.

She shifts to look down at him.

“Hm?”

He swallows. “Just one more question, f’that’s okay.”

Her brow creases and she pauses, half-turning on the ladder to look down at him more directly and yeah, her tits are even more tempting now that she’s turned more toward him. He can see the little tents of her nipples on the outside of the cloth, and all that pretty velvety firmness, naked underneath the edge of his shirt.

He has to fight not to salivate.

“What is it?” she asks softly, worried but willing to answer whatever he asks, he just knows it.

“Why did Wyndham decide to have your bird — to, uh—”

Her brow softens and she lets go of the rungs with one hand, stretching down to him. He almost manages not to flinch away. A joke, really, since out of the two of them, he’s the only one who’s been violent. But her fingers hover over him, not touching — like she’d seen the jump in his pulse and clutched tight on whatever instinct had her reaching for him.

“I snuck out,” she says quietly.

His own brow knits. “To run away?”

She shakes her head, and there’s a curl in the corner of her mouth. It’s not her kitten-smile, though — no, this smile is all self-loathing. He may not show it the same way she does, but he knows shame when he sees it. His ears flick back, trying to flatten, and he feels his whiskers drop and his eyes widen just a little.

“No,” she says quietly. “Not yet. I didn’t know how bad it would be yet.” She shrugs her shoulder, but the Monster doesn’t think it’s indifference. It feels, to him, like such an unbearably cold gesture that it cuts under his skin just exactly like the Recorders’ scalpels — the cruel dismissal of pain. His hackles raise and his lip peels back from his teeth and a growl starts rattling around in his ribs before he abruptly realizes what his instincts are telling him: the pain she’s dismissing is only her own.

She doesn’t seem to notice, though — just turns back to the ladder, and steps up the next rung.

“I wasn’t running away. I just wanted to learn how to fly.”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

hiiiii this is a long chapter but i could not find a good place to split it soooooo ♡♡ i do think we're going to take longer than 25 chapters so i hope you're in it for the long haul. i just drafted half of chapter thirteen today and i gotta say, it might become one of my faves? ♡ i hope you enjoyed this one ("enjoyed" might be the wrong word, but if you have any room in your heart to hate wyndham more, hopefully we just filled that little spot to the brim). anyway you all all delights. thank you for reading my fucked-up little story ♡♡♡

find expected posting schedules & chapter-previews on tumblr♡
here's the masterlist & moodboard♡ (which includes forecasted schedules and summaries for quite a few chapters in advance)

coming soon: chapter six. lockheartedness.
summary: pearl and the monster get to know one another — a little bit.
warnings: leftover regret. descriptions of child abuse/grooming (specifically gaslighting, blaming, and pet/animal death).
estimated date: thursday, april eleventh.

Chapter 6: lockheartedness.

Summary:

pearl and the monster get to know one another. a little bit.

Notes:

warnings: leftover regret. descriptions of child abuse/grooming (specifically gaslighting, blaming, and pet/animal death).

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

lockheartedness. the atmosphere of camaraderie when people are stuck together in a certain place—a stalled elevator, a shelter during a storm, the sleeper car of a train—which leaves them no other option but to be present with each other, with nowhere else to go, and nobody else to be. From locked up + fullheartedness. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

The Monster studies Wyndham’s pearl as she takes little nibbles of fruit, leaned up on her left hip against the clothing locker. He’s pretty sure she should be eating more, but Madame Lizette Lavenza refuses anything he offers her beyond an extra half-scrap of auroch.

I just wanted to learn how to fly.

He shakes the words out of his fur, brushing down the strands on his forearms till they lay flat, then flicking his stare up at her. She tries to dig her square little teeth into the dried meat and rip — tries and fails, resorting to a series of grimacing little tugs. Maybe he should turn his back — hide his snicker — but he doesn’t. And she doesn’t seem pissed or defensive about his raised brows and taunting smirk, either. She just looks up at him, with her big moon-gray eyes and the corner of her mouth curving into her own hesitant kitten-smile.

His stomach tightens up at the softness of it, and his smirk etches into nothing — stars fading in the light of a triple-sunrise on Indigarr.

She’s watching him intently enough that she flushes — clearly thinking that the darkening of his expression is because of something she’s done. And it’s not like she’s wrong — not completely. Her stupid little smiles are cluttering up on his nerves like a buzzing static charge.

But of course she has no way of knowing that, so she turns her nervous attention back to her fruit and auroch, like she thinks he’s mad at her again. He supposes he can’t really blame her for that — he’s been a mercurial dickhead since the moment he’d climbed through her window. Hell, he’s been a mercurial dickhead since the second his cagemates had been slaughtered and thrown in the incinerator, and he’d clawed his way across the sky in a stolen transporter pod.

Prior to that, he’d been — hopeful, maybe. Imaginative. Innocent. In pain, sure, all the time — but he’d believed it was for some grander purpose, that things would turn out, that someday his Sire would love him and the others and they’d all go live in that gleaming city on the shore.

Afterward — well.

Afterward, he’d never been able to shake the relentlessly restless, urgent, frenetic fury behind his sternum. It had only gotten worse after the Eclector, and then twice as bad after Lylla. And he still can’t shake it — so he beats it down, imagining his sharp hard knuckles pummeling it into submission, forcing it back into the cage of his ribs.

Once all that panicked angry energy is locked away — bruised and bleeding but silent, at least; crumpled weakly on the floor of his chest cavity — he focuses his attention back on watching the pearl. He hoods eyes and stares through ember slits while she leans against his clothing locker and works away at her little meal. She’s still covered in goosebumps, and still too frickin’ tantalizing in his shirt. Her nipples are gonna be a problem. He tries to distract himself with a quick stroll to the tiny flight deck, where he can turn up the temperature in the runabout. Then he steels himself, and smooths down the raised, bristling fur on his forearms and around his neck before he dares to stroll back and grab a piece of auroch for himself. He stares down at it consideringly, and then — because he’s still half-sorry for being such a monstrous jackass over the course of the last rotation — he decides to try his hand at small talk.

“So. Uh. How’d you get away with the berry trick?”

He winces. He’s so fuckin’ bad at it. Still — she deserves a little effort at this point, doesn’t she?

She looks up at his words and her eyes soak up everything from where she’s leaning uncertainly against the locker. That dove-gray gaze of hers lingers on the wide open starscape out over the flight deck, the purple privacy-curtains around the two bunks, the grating underfoot — then shifts to his. She swallows her little bit of freeze-dried stonefruit: so polite.

There’s a tug in his abdomen. Please, he remembers her saying, big-eyed and just starting to get all needy. Please f-fuck me?

Goddammit.

“Herbert wasn’t there,” she tells him quietly. “We were supposed to travel to him on Tomriv after I was dressed and ready.” She pauses, measuring her words. “It was a gamble. I’d only eaten winterberries before; I didn’t know if I’d have a reaction if they were — applied to my skin. But they did. Vim and Theel — panicked a little. They didn’t test the allergy to see if it was the fur. They were too worried about me being marked. They only had me undress, wash myself, and treat the wounds while they explained to Herbert.”

Some part of him, still rageful, notices the choice of language. “They had you treat the wounds? They didn’t treat ‘em themselves?” He doesn’t know why he’s surprised — fuck knows they’d never treated anything they’d done to him or his brother or sister, at least not beyond a sloppy laser stitch or solder.

But the pearl raises one shoulder in a shrug: not lopsided or brutal this time, but an elegant movement. Measured. Trained.

Madame Lavenza, he thinks, and tries not to sneer. He’s been doing too much of that with her and somehow he ends up regretting it every fuckin’ time.

“Nobody’s touched me in a long time,” she answers. She’d said that, hadn’t she? Not since — someone, years ago, fixing her posture, or something stupid like that.

“Until last night,” he says sharply. He doesn’t understand why he says it, but he does. And he doesn’t understand why it works, but it does — that last bit of Madame Lavenza falling away so she can gift him that shy little half-crescent of a smile.

He tells himself that he isn’t going soft. The beaten-up muscle of his heart should prove that. It’s just that — he likes pretty things. Always has. The shiny bits he’d stolen from Wyndham and pieced together into a key. The bright blue of the sky and the silver of the stars, like her eyes. Gleaming-fast rocketships, slicing furrows through space and time.

And now — her. Sire’s flawless pearl.

“Until last night,” she agrees, and her eyes get that very pleased look in them that he also doesn’t understand but — he’s starting to realize — he really wants more of. She’d offered it to him yesterday, hadn’t she? After he’d fucked her — a little virgin princess, sprawled on her bedroom floor in the Arete, nervous and bruised and half-elated, heart in her eyes.

Never mind, he’d said, and put his foot on her. I don’t frickin’ care.

He swallows down the regret curling up in his throat, quick as he can.

I don’t care, he tells himself now, a silent snarl half-curling his lip. He ducks his head so she doesn’t see, doesn’t think that bitter expression is for her too. I got her outta there. An’ beyond that, I don’t frickin’ care.

Except she’s still got goosebumps from being squeezed up against that armored glass, just an inch or two away from the void of space. As soon as she’s done nibbling her fruit, he orders her into the shower to warm up and clean her injuries — out of sight, out of mind, he tells himself.

Of course, it doesn’t work. She makes that little squeak when she gets in the shower again — his ears are too damn sharp and apparently he needs to muffle them when she showers, because she’s humming long pleased moans in there and all he can think about is whether or not she’s got her pretty fingers stuffed in her pretty cunt or tickling her little clit — no, no, she’s probably being cautious because of all the bruising; maybe she’s just giving herself careful, soothing strokes —

She comes out too soon, curls shiny and wet, skin glowing nearly scarlet with heat. She’s changed into one of his sleeveless shirts, and it allows him to see not only the curves underneath her breasts, but also along her sides. A new band-name stretches itself from stiff little nipple to stiff little nipple: The Sneepers.

The Monster decides suddenly that he hates the fuckin’ Sneepers.

Fuck them. And fuck their music.

And fuck their stupid merch most of all.

He directs her to the bed with a glower, and tries not to look at her ass when he smoothes the salve over her and replaces the steristrips on the curving incision from his claw. Keeping his eyes on the upper edge of the curtain railing isn’t helpful though; he can still feel her little jumps and shivers underneath him. His mouth is dry and he has to swallow like twenty times, and obviously he does have to look down occasionally to make sure he’s bandaging her properly, protecting all her little cuts.

And each unfortunate time he drops his gaze, he notices something new.

Her bruising is still dark but the salve is already helping, he thinks. Beyond that, there’s the dip in her spine, the dimples above her ass. Mouthwatering, moon-pale stretch-marks he’s amazed Wyndham hadn’t made sure were scrubbed or burned off her pretty hips and thighs. How had he not seen those before? He wants to drag his tongue over them, taste them, map them like distant rivers reflecting starlight. For one blistering moment, he’s not sure he’s ever wanted anything more. And once he shakes himself free of that blinding thought, he realizes she’s already got goosebumps again, pebbling all her softness. He tries to believe they’re just the result of her being perpetually cold, and not wonder if his touch has brought them to the surface of her skin like flowers.

When the Monster is done — finally — he tries to cover her back up without looking. He half-stumbles from the bunk, intent on turning down the plasma orbs and tinkering with his weapons till he’s ready to go back to sleep himself. As he rises — clumsily, jumpsuit a little more snug than it should be — her fingers tumble against the bones of his wrist like she’d catch him if she could.

But gently.

Of course, his skin still tries to peel off his bones — he still jumps three feet in the air, tail puffing, ears flat to his skull. He whirls on her, teeth bared.

“What?” he hisses.

She doesn’t flinch though — not this time. Like she’d been expecting him to lash out, claws hooked and threatening. No — her eyes are big and quiet and silvery, and there’s something so damn solemn in them. While she lays on her belly and he stands on the floor, her face is right at his level, and he suddenly wants to grip her cheeks with his fingers and squeeze till she opens her pretty lips so he can lick his tongue inside. Keep the taste of her in his mouth forever — an antidote to ghosts.

“Don’t sleep in the chair,” she whispers, and something twists inside him. He tears his eyes from her mouth to her serious, almost sorrowful gaze. “It can’t be comfortable,” she says softly, and shifts to one side. “Sleep here. Please.”

He stares at her, and something underneath the ball of anger and guilt that has been winding tighter and tighter since the Arete — like twisted steel wool or his own manufactured tendons, spun out of muscle — something beneath it suddenly feels hollow.

“No,” he rasps. “I’m good.” He steps out of her reach and heads to the flight deck. He can feel her moon-gray eyes on him the whole time: trailing after him in the starlight, in the shadows. He doesn’t snap at her this time, though. He just tries to just ignore her stare, or ease into it. He can feel it clinging softly to his fur, mapping its way through the strands to linger on his scars and skin underneath.

He’s pretty sure he knows the moment her eyes slip closed, lashes finally feathering shut.

The Monster tinkers with the particle rifle while she sleeps, then dozes on and off for a little while. His sleep cycle has never been regular, and he’d slept a whole shift later than her anyway.

So he spends the time thinking.

He’d told her he’d get her somewhere nice and pretty and safe, and he hasn’t changed his mind — not even, he admits reluctantly, when he’d been pissed — but he hasn’t been doing a good job. Hasn’t been doing his research. She deserves better than to just get dropped on the first halfway-inhabitable planet they come across. She deserves better than everything he’s given her so far.

Do you deserve all the bad shit that happened to you?

He pauses in his work, eyes squeezing shut and lip curling in a grimace. He’d been drunk, but apparently not drunk enough to bleach the memory of those words from his brain, or to erase the memory of the way her eyes had widened and her face had gone pale, how she’d stumbled over her one-word response — w-what? — a confused, wounded whimper.

With hindsight as his guide, he suddenly feels certain she’d been about to try to comfort him — before he’d blown it all up.

You’re not a monster. You never have been.

He gets up and squeezes the space between his brows, trying to shake it away. The memory of the heartache in her voice, the soft gaze — no longer on him, but still lingering in his fur like honey.

He stretches and paces, and then turns back to the flightdeck to skim through the starmaps.

He tries to focus on refamiliarizing himself with the information on Xandar first. He’s been a few times — ended up in the Kyln twice — but it’s clean and fancy and the Nova Corps aren’t likely to put up with any of Wyndham’s shit. She could probably even apply for asylum and they’d protect her — more or less. Unfortunately, Xandarans are also frickin’ snotty imperialist douchebags — condescending and sneering — and he’s a little afraid that the pearl will get chewed up by the dickheads who live there.

Xandar would be great if not for the Xandarans, he thinks.

He’d like to put her up on Trellerri. Other than the times when the Shi’ar royals retreat there every sixth quarter, it’s probably one of the nicest places in the universe, and it’s almost as far as she could get from HalfWorld. Unfortunately, it’s also expensive as shit, and he’d want to teach her some self-defense and evasion techniques for the times the royals are around. He doesn’t trust those bastards. They’re even more contemptuous of the rabble than the Xandarans, and they’re entitled. Handsy bastards.

Spartax is nice too, but the dictatorship is a problem.

He likes Inix for the music and the liveliness and the volume of people from all over the universe who come through, but he doesn’t want her there on her own. Too chaotic for a lost little pearl. And Indigarr has good people, but they’re real traditionalistic. Nice enough to outsiders, but cautious nonetheless. She won’t fit in, and then she’ll probably end up all lonely and shit.

Seems like she’s been lonely a long, long time.

Of course, she might not fit in anywhere. He’s sure as hell never met anyone like her, not on any of the planets or space stations he’s been to. She’s like an abandoned kitten with the manners of a queen; she thinks chickens are mean and wants to eat only-synth because she doesn’t think there’s a reason for her to kill anything; Wyndham can’t have possibly taught her to shoot if he never even let her learn to fly —

I just wanted to learn how to fly.

The words lurch in his memory; in his heart and his stomach. If she were gonna be around longer — if he had more time with her—

He’s never tried to teach anyone anything and he can’t imagine he’s good at it. Or maybe that’s not quite true; he’d tried to teach A95 and L06 some stuff when they’d been in the cages together, back when he’d been as hopeful and stupid as pearl herself. They hadn’t had an easy time grasping what he was trying to teach them, though, and ever since — since them — he’s never really tried. Not beyond explaining to Tullk and the Ravager captain about some of the repairs and modifications he’d made to the Eclector.

But Tullk and the Captain had gotten it, hadn’t they? Maybe he could teach her to fly, after all, if they had a little more time—

Because if there’s one thing he can understand, it’s wanting to get off the ground and into the beautiful and forever. Wanting to feel untethered from gravity, unstitched from the soil. Loose and free of pain, able to go anywhere a person had the money and heart to go. The first time he’d felt the yoke cradled in his palms, he’d known what it was to finally have his life in his own hands—

No, he reminds himself firmly. For her own sake and safety — and for his sanity — she has to go. As soon as possible.

And then he sees it: Cyxlore, a mountainous little moon in the Telladore system. He’d forgotten it existed, but it’s probably the best answer to all his current questions.

Altitudes that allow for snow flurries in almost any season, but warm enough for wildflowers almost as often. And people he knows — including the perfect fence for the pouch full of pearls he’d swiped off the floor of the Arete.

Cyxlore’s got an artistical culture, kinda like Inix, but the people are a little more laidback. They’re big into trade and commerce — kinda like Xandar but with fewer douchebags. The Monster has been there a few times. Along with the merchant he’ll contact about the pearls, he knows a number of his… ah, acquaintances from the Ore Gardens had relocated to Cyxlore after they’d left the pleasure industry. If he gives ‘em some extra units and asks ‘em nice, they’ll help find the pearl a place to stay and get her settled in the community.

And she’ll probably love it. He can imagine her in the busy open-air markets and the sellers’ streets, leaning over every stall and kiosk like she leans over the second bunk to look at his weapons and inventions. She’d be all big-eyed and fascinated by everything on Cyxlore.

He can’t help but think, too, that the Cyxlorades are a tactile people. They love their soft stuff. Textiles like clouds. Sweeping robes in locally-woven cashmere, blankets sewn from fleecy fibers they don’t make anywhere else in the universe. Cotton clothing crafted with silky grasses that only grow in the light of the Telladore star system.

This is the place he wants for her. Mild weather, soft clothes, semi-decent people, pretty things.

He wants that for her.

Then the Monster grits his teeth because he’s not trying to be fuckin’ Wyndham. He’s gotta give her choices. Options.

Some sort of control.

He spends another hour trying to figure out if there’s anywhere else he can find that might measure up. He wants to give her a list of the best possible options. In the end, he can’t find anywhere else quite as good as the planets and moons he’s already pulled up. He collapses the screens but keeps them tagged so he can show ‘em to her later, and he dares to keep his hopes just a little high off the ground that maybe he’s picked right, that maybe he can give her some place nice and pretty and safe to call home.

Then he flicks the screens to dark — the safety of shadows, so different from the sharp stinging white of the lab and the glowing furnace of the incinerator — and dozes for an hour or two.

He dreams about her again — pearl — though this time, it’s nothing as ugly as before.

Instead, it’s something too sweet for his tongue, syrupy as waterlily-honey: a sugary haze of dream, where he’s got pearl perched in the pilot’s chair and he gets to play with her soft, sopping pussy while she tries to learn to fly. He gives her light little teasing caresses and the praise that makes her eyes go all big and pleading whenever she gets something right — or a delicate pinch or stinging little slap when she makes a mistake. Nothing so mean as before, just enough of a swat to make her jump and squeak for him, and get even wetter and needier.

He’s so nice to her, this time, in his dreams. At least, he’s nice for being him.

He’s careful.

And she’s so fuckin’ grateful. All the little thank yous that haunt his ears during the wake-shift only serve to make his dozing fantasies richer. When he wakes this time, he tilts back in his chair and groans his misery into his hands, trying to muffle it, whispering jump-point coordinates into the darkness like prayers until his dick calms down.

Once he thinks he can make his way across the flightdeck and the hold without his jumpsuit rubbing him raw, he decides another distraction is in order. He’s already bored by the rifle — for now — but he’s suddenly got an idea for an enhanced gravity mine, and he’s pretty sure he has all the parts he’d need to make it. So he gets up and picks his way delicately down the narrow aisle between the bunks and digs around under his makeshift workbench — trying to be quiet, but looking for something so unimportant that he forgets what it is two seconds later when he stands up and catches sight of the pearl.

She’s still asleep: face turned away from him, arms and the slopes of her lower back all painted with dark shadows and starlight, like little blue lakes along her spine. He freezes for a moment, staring at her. She’s laying on her tummy as usual — still too bruised for anything else, he imagines with a mental wince — and her dark hair is twisted and tangled around one hand, like she’d pulled it off her neck in her sleep. The raised arm has him staring at the outer curve of one perfect tit, squeezed between her body and the mattress, almost fully visible right now thanks to The Sneepers’ stupid useless sleeveless shirt.

His fingers twitch and he can hear his pulse in his ears, but the urge to reach for her fades, or rather, it changes. Because for the first time, the Monster sees the nape of her neck: scratched and scored, peppered with little starburst-scabs and raked with deep furrows. He barely remembers doing that but it must’ve been him — he’d had her delicate throat fisted in his hands multiple times the other night, enough that she’s got that necklace of bruises he’d cringed to see earlier. It makes his insides cuddle low in his belly. His teeth suddenly carry the heavy metallic taste of dread, and he abruptly realizes that he’s probably going to keep finding new ways he’d hurt her without even realizing.

Now his hand crawls out through the shadowed air between them, and hovers over the slices and punctures on the back of her neck, the soft little wisps of floating curls. The short, fibrous hairs on his paws brush against the tendrils at her nape — a touch so light she won’t even feel it in her sleep. But he can feel it; he can count each one of those little silken wisps. He could map her whole body like this — and it sends a ripple down his spine, from the crown of his head to the tip of his tail.

Or maybe she can feel it. She murmurs in her sleep: a flutter of sound tumbling over her lips like dense little roses and loose flower petals. He bets her poor little clit is still puffy and swollen and sore from how mean he’d been. Suddenly, all he can think about is kissing her better. Carefully rolling her onto her back, shifting her to protect her bruises. Crawling onto the bunk between her thighs and peeling back the layers of blankets, licking carefully in all the places the silk panties had abraded her. He just wants to curl his tongue gently into the unbelievably narrow channel of her soft, vulnerable pussy — lap lovingly at her sore little clit in apology until she forgives him, and then longer, until her fingers curl into the fur behind his ears in benediction and she clings to his head and rides his mouth like the sweetest little —

I do want to be a good slut for you, she’d begged. I do — I want to be good for you —

He hesitates, and brings his fingers carefully closer. Lets them just barely whisper over her skin and her wounds. Snatches his hand back — like he can’t trust himself not to hurt her again.

He can’t. He doesn’t.

Which is why he’s gotta get her off his damn ship.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Fairy had looked at her with such big, trusting black eyes from Theel’s palm. The little bird had chirped.

And then: splintered bone. Blood. Broken pink feathers.

The girl had screamed. Her voice had been a living creature made of shock and grief, ripping its way out of her lungs like fire from the throat of a dragon, back when she’d still been warm. Nothing had made sense: the dark eyes, the split and shattered hollow-bones, the blood and fractured feathers. It had all seemed so unfathomable. Fairy had been so small. So fragile. She’d never hurt a thing, only eating seeds and fruit. What could possibly make Theel’s fist close on her like that? And why?

The girl lurches awake, peeling herself up from the mattress and onto her side so quickly that the pain of her bruises doesn’t register at first: only the sucking sound of her gasp, hauling air into empty lungs, hitting the back of her throat so hard she gags. Then the pain shows itself, wrenching and spearing through the cold of her body: contracted muscles suddenly stretched, bruises suddenly squeezed and crushed beneath her. She strangles back a wide-eyed whimper of shock: baffled and stunned; disoriented. Afraid.

“Pearl?”

She doesn’t even know where the voice comes from — doesn’t know why she recognizes it, not at first. But the warmth and the raspiness wrap around her and her shoulders ease, and she’s able to turn toward the sound of it.

The survivor, she thinks. The survivor. He’s staring at her from his chair on the flightdeck, his own eyes wide and stunned, claws piercing the vinyl of his armrests while he holds himself half-hoisted from the seat, like he’s ready to launch himself out of it.

“You okay?” he asks, the words suddenly measured and careful.

“We need names,” she whispers inanely. It’s the only thought she can wrap her fingers around right now. “I need something to call you.”

Something flickers across his face but she eases herself back onto her side, wincing as she deals with the distraction of her body. She normally sleeps curled into a ball on her right flank— the side that’s currently sore, of course. Being trapped in more-or-less one position all night is not doing her existing aches and bruises any favors. Her lower back burns and her thighs are tight and contracted, but — her body feels better than yesterday, she thinks.

If she could only finish shaking herself out of that dream.

It’s a natural consequence of your behavior, Bertie had told her calmly, staring down at her implacably as she’d wept at Theel’s feet, cradling the shattered little pieces against her chest. Children who willfully refuse to follow simple instructions cannot be trusted to care for the lives of lesser creatures. We’ll try again next quarter, and see if you’ve learned more consideration for lower lifeforms.

And then, as Fairy’s blood had soaked into her white sleeves and bodice, he had curled his lip distastefully and rolled his eyes before turning away.

You’re ruining your dress.

Of course, some part of her had known it was unfair. Unjust. A monstrous, cataclysmic overreaction — to hurt a little bird because of its human’s selfishness and incompetence. The consequences of disobedience — never previously outlined, because they had never before needed to be — were suddenly clear.

And therefore, any future deaths — any future executions — could only be her fault. Because now, Bertie had shown her what he was capable of.

Now she knew who he was.

Or at least, she knew some small part of him. She’d still been a child, after all — fifteen, and isolated. Overnight, she’d gone from a lonely teenager who had always been overjoyed to earn even the faintest glimmer of Bertie’s approval and affection — to a frightened, sleepless girl who suddenly knew the costs of failure. Every cycle had found her suddenly jumpier, clumsier, with dark circles bruising her eyes and a flagging appetite.

So when the next quarter had rolled around and Vim had placed the flerken in her arms, Miss Lizette Lavenza had stayed awake the next handful of nights, cradling the soft thing against her, sobbing silently into the feathery silver-white fur of his neck and the dappled pattern of his belly. She’d stroked his pink toes and counted his whiskers and fallen in love with every twitch of his ears — the first warm thing to touch her since Fairy. He had groomed himself with rosy little tentacles and then licked her tears with them, too.

She’d wanted so badly to keep him.

But some small part of her had spoken up in the middle of the night, right after the incident with the hat and mittens and winterberries. It had jolted her out of a restless, nightmarish doze, and it had told her how easy it might be to mess up again, to make another lethal mistake, especially since she had never really meant to fail Fairy — or Bertie — before.

And it had told her that if she couldn’t leave the Homonoia on her own, she at least needed to get the flerken kit out.

The next morning, she’d tucked the warm, tiny body into the pocket of her coat, and she had gone to the garden and climbed up into a tree — and had carefully dropped the kit on the other side of the low stone wall encircling the courtyard. It had mewed for an hour at least — pitiful little cries. She’d imagined that it had felt abandoned, that it had wondered why she was rejecting it. She’d climbed down and sat with her back to the wall and had sobbed into her knees until the kit had eventually left, and she’d prayed someone kind would find it.

She’d wept again afterward, and Vim had found her with her dress rumpled and tears on her cheeks. The Recorder had assumed she’d tripped and fallen.

Young Miss Lizette had been required to take extra deportment lessons every night for the next quarter.

The same thing had happened with the mouse a few cycles later. Cupping its sweet pale blue body in her hands, folding gentle kisses between its round blushing ears, letting it squeak and press tiny clawed hands to her lips and explore her face. Stroking its long naked pink tail and the rift of silky blue fur at the end. Marveling at its perfection. Mourning it already, and letting it go through a hole in the garden wall. It had been easier to free — neither trying to return nor crying outside the wall — but Miss Lizette had wept then too.

At least no-one had caught her that time.

The girl had still believed in something back then. She’d looked up at her fake constellations every night, and she’d wished that someone would find both creatures, and would give them warm beds to sleep in and food in their bellies, and that their lives would never ever hang in the balance just because a dumb kid like her was too stupid and selfish to follow rules.

A cycle later, when one of the Recorders had noticed that she’d lost her third pet, Bertie had paced back and forth while she’d stood on the edge of his dais. He’d castigated her with words that had cut through her skin and into her bones, and frozen there.

Selfish, spiteful, and spoiled. If this is how carelessly and cruelly you treat the vulnerable creatures I entrust to you, then we will make sure to do them the favor of keeping them far. Away. From you.

She’d wept again. She’d always been a crybaby. She still is, of course — but she’s gotten better at waiting. Till she’s alone in bed, or curled up in the corner of a closet.

Stop your self-indulgent whining. If those animals are hungry — if they are cold or dying or dead —then you have done that. You have sentenced them to illness and loss of life, to mutilation in the streets. Every unkindness and misery they suffer is a direct result of your casual disregard.

Take responsibility for the lives you’ve ruined.

Sometime between the next two Terran birthdays, Bertie had become Herbert, and while she hadn’t been able to put it into words yet, she’d started to understand that at least part of the problem was him.

And that she’d needed to get out.

It has always felt like her fault, though. Like deep in the cold pit of her belly, some part of her had always believed him. Like it had recognized how ultimately self-centered and self-serving her choices had been — how if she could have just committed to being Bertie’s Perfect Pearl, then Fairy would have been fine, and the flerken and the little mouse, too.

Like they could have been happy, if she had just been better.

But the survivor seems to have disagreed.

Smart girl, he’d told her when he’d woken her in the little nook against the starpane. You gave him the best shot he could’ve had.

She’ll never forget that kindness. She’ll never forget it. It’s burned into her bones, delicately carved right over top of Wyndham’s bitterly-cold condemnations. It’s tattooed on the valves of her heart like a sigil, activated every time the muscle pumps: magic carried on her blood throughout her entire body, from her toes to her skull. Maybe she’s an idiot after all. Maybe she’s still a little fool desperate for approval because here she is, thinking she knows the survivor wouldn’t lie to her, thinking she might be half in-love with him already for getting her out and for touching her and — maybe more than anything — for giving her that small scrap of absolution, however undeserved.

Even though — she’d seen it; she’d been able to tell — he’d still been wrestling with whatever memories the Arete and HalfWorld and his own drunkenness had brought up to him. Lylla, and her death, and the mittens, yes. But other torments, too. She’s sure of it. Even though he’d been grappling with all that under his fur, he’d been kind to her. He’d offered her something immeasurable, something invaluable.

Just a little bit of forgiveness.

She sinks into the thin mattress, into the blankets and pillows. That scrap of grace makes her feel more alive than the anti-inflamm salve and the long nights of rest.

Which is saying something, because she’s slept more in this runabout than she thinks she ever has in her life. Things had been too chaotic when she was a child — there’d never been a night undisturbed — and since she’d left Terra, her sleep has always been rationed for efficacy, as Herbert had put it. Not too much, and not too little.

Except it had always felt like too little, even before her nights had become haunted. She can’t remember having had a leisurely wake-up before yesterday — even if yesterday had quickly become fraught.

For now, she lowers herself back onto her tummy and buries her face in the survivor’s pillow again, looking up at him with eyes she just knows are huge in her head.

“Sorry,” she breathes into the fluff, but she knows he hears her based on the way he eases back into his seat. “It was just a nightmare,” she adds. His ears flick, and the tension in his face loosens just a little.

“Yeah, I figured, pearl.” Something in his voice is so tired — beyond just a lack of sleep — and she winces.

He surely has his own nightmares to contend with.

“Sorry,” she repeats, and means it, but he only waves a clawed hand dismissively and slowly spins his chair back away from her, toward the starshield.

Her heart twists up in her chest but she takes the gesture as permission to sink deeper into the blankets, breathing in the lingering burnt-wood, blue spruce, and marzipan scent of him. She lets it wash away the remnants of her dream, and it works better than anything else she’s ever had before: the ribs around her lungs suddenly ease, and her breathing grows easier in her chest.

She breathes in again, and tries to identify the softness behind her sternum, the sudden ability to melt. The warmth.

It might be comfort, she thinks suddenly. It might be something like feeling safe. She feels that new, unfamiliar sensation in the corner of her mouth and realizes it must be another little smile — bemused, and guilty. She buries her face in the pillow fully, breathing in, and tries to just sink into the peace of the moment.

How can she possibly give this up? She may not deserve it — the comfort, the kindness, the absolution; the scent of his blankets and the warmth of his touch — but how can she possibly give it up?

She knows he’d said he’d leave her somewhere nice, but maybe she can convince him that she’ll be helpful. She can’t be sure, of course, but she thinks maybe he doesn’t hate her anymore, since last night. Still, she’ll have to prove her worth if she has any hope of getting him to let her stay. Not that she has any usable skills whatsoever. Somehow, she doesn’t think the survivor will want deportment lessons any time soon, or that her ability to debate the positions of various Scadamite philosophers throughout the eons will provide him with anything of practical value.

I already gotta regret bringing your useless ass with me?

She does have some understanding of certain sciences, even if it’s mostly theoretical. She’s sure she could figure out how to apply that knowledge, if he’s willing to let her try. Or — he did imply that he might continue to run, to keep trying to stay out of Herbert’s grasp. That could take him anywhere. And she’s fairly sure he’d been muttering about Fron recently, which she’s pretty sure is on the furthest edge of the Thneed system, well beyond the reaches of most of the major empires. His universal translator may not be as effective out there.

Maybe that’s her way in.

Her belly flutters at the prospect and for a moment she wonders if she’s ill. But the sensation is light and her mouth is curving again, so maybe it’s hope after all.

An impulse steals over her body before she recognizes it. Her toes flex against the sheets, then point — and she feels her legs stretch as far as they can toward the foot of the bed, one hip dipping and then the other. For what might be the first time in years, pearl lets her body do what it wants. Her back arches, pressing her belly and breasts into the thin mattress — wincing when it only makes her lower back ache more. The inverse, then: she wriggles till her knees are tucked up under her abdomen and her back is curved over them, opening up the space at the base of her spine.

It feels good — to just listen to her body. To stretch without any precautions or self-consciousness. To take up space. Still curled over herself like a crescent moon or a rainbow, she reaches her arms out under the pillow till she’s touching the little drawers and lockers at the head of the bed, hollowing her back like a cat. The tightness in her muscles slowly eases, and everything feels springier — lighter. She suddenly clutches two armfuls of pillow and bedding into her face and chest, muffling a happy little mew into the warm softness. Yes — happy. That’s what she’s—

The survivor clears his throat.

Her head pops up, tangled cloud of curls tumbling into her eyes and around her shoulders.

“Hi,” she says, flushing. “Sorry. I just—”

He looks — not exhausted, exactly. Beleaguered, maybe. Long-suffering.

“Why’re you doing that?” he asks raspily, ignoring her question. She shifts upright, bringing the armful of rumpled blankets and pillow with her, tucked loosely in against her ribs and belly.

“Doing what?” she asks, wincing and resettling when she leans against her bruised side.

He flinches at her movement and she flushes guiltily, but he ignores that too.

“Rolling around like that.”

He sounds so pained that she doesn’t bother to point out that it’s a mischaracterization. Besides, she knows what he means. The redness in her cheeks shifts from guilt to embarrassment. She shuffles the blankets a little higher into her chest, and the Monster’s eyes suddenly flick away, nose twitching.

“Your bed is comfortable,” she admits, almost nervously.

His burning gaze darts back to her, mouth dropping just a half-inch before he snorts. “Yeah, okay, pearl.”

“It is,” she insists, snuggling up to the fabric a little more without thinking. “The blankets are so much softer than the ones in the Homonoia. And probably in the Arete, too.”

And everything there smelled like death, she doesn’t say. Not like rot — no, more clinical than that. The only scents in Herbert’s homes had been cold, chemical, and devoid of life — even her bed had smelled like it had been made with linens from a mortuary unit.

But the survivor doesn’t believe her — or maybe he’s just baffled. He blinks at her, brow creasing and the corners of his mouth curving downward. So she tries something she hasn’t tried in years — a dubious skill she’d learned on Terra as a child trying to make her mother laugh, trying to diffuse the roiling anger. She’d used it once or twice — toned down — on the Wundagorish maid, hoping to coax a stifled giggle out of the younger girl.

She reaches down deep under her heart and tugs at the little bit of drama she’d used to carry with her as a kid: exaggerating everything that it suits her to.

“Herbert had the scratchiest, starchiest sheets I’ve ever felt in my life,” she confides to the survivor, dropping her voice into a theatrical whisper. “The quilts felt like they were made of fiberglass.”

The survivor’s eyes widen marginally.

“Sandpaper,” she offers firmly, and lets her mouth curve just a little — an invitation. “Steel wool.”

Something in his garnet gaze sparks like a flame.

“That jackass never misses a trick when it comes to torture,” he smirks, and she can feel her smile widening.

“He’d hate to hear it, but it’s basically the only thing he’s good at,” she concedes, and he barks out a startled laugh.

“All right, pearl,” he snickers, and his voice has a tilt to it that she hasn’t heard before — it sounds a little lighter. More mocking than playful — but halfway there. “Speaking of torture — you should prob’ly grab some food. Then come up here an’ take a seat. Think I found some places we can drop you off.”

She ducks her head in a nod, trying to hide the little twist in her heart while she rises and smooths out the blankets and pillow. She’d wasted yesterday trying to ransack her memories, and then feeling guilty and sorry for herself. Sleeping off exhaustion she hadn’t even known she’d been carrying.

She needs to refocus today — needs to figure out how to be helpful to him, how not to be useless. How to be more than a trophy for five seconds. The survivor may or may not hate her still — even if she hadn’t worn Lylla, she’ll always just be an extension of Herbert, a thing he’s made in his image.

But maybe, if she can prove herself, she can convince him not to leave her behind.

She takes a single dried seaweed snack from the food locker, and shies away again from the survivor’s sludgy coffee, taking a quick count of the remaining water bags before she grabs one.

“You can eat more than that, pearl,” the survivor says drily, and she looks up to see that he’s spun his chair so he can keep watching her. His eyes are gleaming, but they don’t look as garnet-hard as they had even a few moments ago — certainly less so than yesterday, when she’d woken up and found them more knife-edge hateful than ever before. Now they look so warm she thinks she could heat her whole body from his stare alone.

“I’m fine with this,” she says lightly, closing the food locker and sweeping through the narrow aisle and onto the tiny flight deck. There’s just a moment of hesitation before she glances at him uncertainly. He winces, and nods a sort of vague acknowledgement, and she cautiously folds herself into the copilot’s seat.

She nibbles at the seaweed, and he narrows his eyes at it, but doesn’t say anything about the meager rations she’s allotted for herself. Instead, he pulls up a projection, casting it onto the starshield. She can see the sky behind them, ink-dark washed with teal blossoms of moondust, rosy spirals of stars, violet and blue clouds and asterisms skating by.

“You said you don’t have anywhere you wanna go, right?”

She shakes her head, staring at the starmap he’s pulled up. It glows goldenly where it’s superimposed on the dark sky. “I really — don’t want to go anywhere, actually,” she says softly, but he either ignores or misunderstands her.

“Then I got six places I’m thinking’ of. You got anything you know you want? Certain kinda weather? Geographicalistic features? You like places with more people or less?”

Her ribs suddenly feel too tight on her lungs again. She tries to suck in a breath; she rubs her icy fingers against each other. “Uhm,” she says softly. “That’s a lot of — that’s a lot to decide. I don’t think — I don’t know if I know—“

“Hey,” he interrupts, and he cocks his head at her, eyes narrowed and ears flickering. “That’s all right. Let me show you what I got and we can just think about it.”

It’s embarrassing — to not even know what she likes. She supposes she could give him a list: she knows likes small spaces, forests, thunderstorms. A wide open sky and a small room, with an even tinier closet. She likes animals of all kinds and sizes. Sunrises. Synthetic food — maybe? Good smells. His bed and his blankets and his soft, snug band shirts.

And she likes him, and the heat of his hands and his stare. The rasp of his voice and the ways he’d put his hands on her in the Arete: throwing her around, pinching and twisting, stinging. His hundred strange inventions, sprawled on the extra bunk, and the whole little runabout: a tight, tiny nest in a vast sea of stars.

But beyond that — where does she want to live? She doesn’t know. She’s been places, but they’ve almost exclusively been the ones that have been painstakingly crafted by Herbert. She’s been isolated for so long that she craves people, and she’s simultaneously terrified of them. Even just the other day, she’d told the survivor that she liked synthetic food, and he’d correctly called her out on that unintentional lie. She’d never even had a chance to try things — how could she know if she liked them?

“Maybe I could go a little further with you?” she offers up tentatively. “I could see some places on the way before I pick, and maybe I could find ways to help you—”

He snorts and turns back to the screens. “I don’t think so, pearl. That sounds like a frickin’ recipe for misery.”

Oh. Her heart stutters hard against her breastbone, aching a little, and she rubs her fingertips against it absently.

“Here—” He reaches up and taps a series of glowing dots, pulling up information panels on each planet. “I got Xandar, Trellerri, Spartax, Inix and Indigarr. They’re all nice enough, but they got their pros and cons.”

He rattles off a list — of cultural attitudes, planetary traditions, political and environmental concerns, financial situations, and more. She keeps track of most of it — she’s always had a quick mind for information, honed sharp under Herbert’s less-than-tender ministrations — but none of them sound like places she’d want to stay. She chews her lip and her mind scrambles. She’s trying to find a place to interrupt, to get him to let her make her proposition. But her brain is also trying to sift through all the information he gives her, trying to decide what the best choice is if he won’t keep her.

And underpinning it all is the bittersweet knowledge that he’s trying so hard to take care of her. She can feel her eyes getting wider and wider, fingers growing colder and colder as they twist together in her lap.

It’s all so overwhelming. She’s drowning in it.

The survivor scrutinizes her, then nods to himself. “Got one more.” He cracks a grin at her and it almost stops her heart in her chest because it’s teasing, and she hasn't seen that from him before — not like this. Everything inside her thuds against her ribs.

“Thought I’d save the best for last.” He taps on another dot. “Cyxlore. Nice people, mostly. I know some folks there. Lots of — it’s a good place to try new things. New foods, clothes, whatever you want. Lots of merchants and trade come through Cyxlore so you’re not really stuck with just one kind of food or clothing or whatever, the way you would be on Xandar or Spartax, or even Indigarr. But it’s a little — calmer than Inix, and friendlier than Trellerri.”

She chews her lips and her hands come up to scoop up palmfuls of her dangling curls again, finger-combing them nervously, tugging. Both are anxious habits that Herbert had initially coaxed out of her before she’d even left Terra. Of course, the unsightly behaviors had returned when Fairy had died, only to be trained away again — with harsher methods, this time.

Later, after the Wundagorish maid, she’d learned to keep her bad habits private. To stage-whisper her screams into her knees and her closet, and bruise herself with her teeth where no-one was likely to look. But now here she is, for the first time in seven Terran birthdays, falling prey to these old childhood rituals.

And then she decides she doesn’t care, and continues to untangle the cloud of spirals.

“It sounds nice?” she offers tentatively. I would still rather stay with you, she thinks. “But, uhm—”

He nods. “It is nice, pearl. You can hang out on the runabout when we get moonside, till we get you a place to stay. We’ll hook up with Sanna Orix and they’ll get you some clothes. They can prob’ly help us figure out where you can lodge, too. And—”

She takes a shuddering breath. “How long will it take us to get there?”

He shrugs. “Maybe two more rotations? Now that we know where we’re going?”

That’s only two days to prove that she can be useful, and — just in case she’s wrong and he hasn’t come around yet — to convince him not to hate her.

I don’t think so, pearl. That sounds like a frickin’ recipe for misery.

“You’ve got a lot to figure out,” he muses, like he’d been reading her mind just a few moments before. “What’re you gonna do with your time, now that you’re out from under Wyndham’s creepy-ass stare?”

She licks her lips nervously. “What do you do?” she asks, and watches when he startles. She reaches down into that place deep within herself, pulling up the little shreds of herself that still remember how to play, how to tease. Fiberglass, she thinks. Sandpaper. Steel wool. She had made the survivor laugh, after all. She offers him her tentative smile. “What do you do when you’re not saving brides, I mean?”

He blinks at her — and then snickers. She warms herself in the sound of it, like a crackling campfire. Wishes she could hold her cold fingers out, and just let his dry humor chase the chill out of her bones.

“Stealing brides, you mean,” he corrects her, and her smile grows.

“Stealing brides,” she agrees, and scoots forward as much as she can in the chair without leaning on her bruises.

“Lotsa shit,” he tells her, waving a clawed hand as he closes out the information panels and begins typing in the coordinates for Cyxlore. “Fly wherever I can. Gamble. Get drunk. Invent murder-weapons.” He tilts her a sideways grin. It’s too sharp to be friendly, but it’s not hostile, and she likes the way it licks over her insides. “Why?”

Because I want to know more about you, she thinks. Because I want to learn how to help you. Because I want you to keep me.

“Just wondering,” she hedges, and tilts her head. “How do you invent murder-weapons?”

He blinks, and then cackles. “Oh, pearl.” His voice is taunting and pitying all at once, but she doesn’t mind. She watches as he checks the nav systems before deciding he can turn the controls to autopilot for now, and then he spins in his chair to look at her directly. He holds out both claws, palms up, like he’s holding the air up in his hands. “Can’t explain it. I just get an idea and I know how it’ll work, so then I take the parts and put it together.” He shrugs. “‘Cept for when I don’t get an idea and I just dick around with the hardware and something magic happens.” His brows wing upward mockingly and she stifles a laugh, surprised when it bubbles its way out of her mouth.

“So you’re a genius then,” she says. She doesn’t have much warmth of her own to spare, but she makes sure it wreathes every syllable for him. Something surprised flicked in his red-lightning stare — but then he just shrugs again, and smirks, and leans back lazily in his chair.

Something about it — about him, his cocky half-grin and his hooded eyes, the way he’s sitting with his legs spread wide and his tail flicking beneath the base of the chair — something about all of it pinches in her abdomen. She flushes suddenly, jolting with the urge to sit upright — followed sharply by the pain that has her immediately retreating again. The survivor notices both the movement and the flinch, and he grimaces.

She’s ruined the moment again.

She tries not to lose herself in the disappointment of that and instead tries a different route. “Is making weapons how you — make money?” She cringes. It’s a rude question, her etiquette instructor would have told her, aghast. Herbert would have called it low. After all, he had always had whatever resources he’d needed seemingly right on hand. Too rich to concern himself with the cost of things, her mother would have said snidely.

But then, Herbert had never let her learn anything useful and she’ll need to understand how money works out here, and how to make it, and — if all goes well — how to help the survivor make it.

And he doesn’t seem bothered at all by the question. Instead, he grins, teeth sharp and flashing. “The murder-weapons are mostly for my own frickin’ entertainment,” he drawls. “I’m a bounty hunter.” Another sharp, taunting grin. “When m’not stealing brides, anyway.”

His tail flicks again, and a little spiral of heat curls up in her abdomen, into the space right under her ribs.

Be normal, she orders herself again, sternly. She’s suddenly reliving the feel of his hands on her last night, veiled by the cool slipperiness of the save, skimming lightly over her curves — fingertips kissing each little wound.

She swallows back a little sound and tries to twist her attention toward him. “How does a person become a — a bounty hunter?”

His eyes slide to hers, wide and curious — and then he throws back his head and laughs, loud and long, as derisively as he had that first night on the Arete. The laughter rips out of his lungs and roars through the little runabout.

Something shivers through her at the sound, and she’s not sure if it’s apprehension or want.

“What, doll?” he gasps around a new peal of laughter. He’s got tears silvering his carnelian eyes, tracking down into his fur, and he gives her all his sharp teeth in a taunting grin. “You want in? Pearl’s ready to try huntin’ bounties?”

She offers up a one-shoulder shrug, watching him with big eyes, her own lips curving, albeit with more than a little confusion. She’s hungry for his amusement. The mockery doesn’t bother her, not even a little bit: Vim and Theel would never have dared, but Herbert’s condescension and cold sarcasm had pulled her apart with surgical precision countless times over the years.

Comparatively, the survivor’s derision feels mild. And warm. Almost companionable — strangely comforting.

“Maybe I could be helpful,” she offers up. Her voice is a little puff of self-conscious laughter of her own. “Even if it’s just—“

“Nah,” he cuts her off, still snickering, still scrubbing the tears out of his eyes. “You already told me you can’t shoot or fly or anything, pearl. And I know now — you ain’t got the heart for it.”

“I could, maybe,” she insists, still half-smiling, watching him. “I could have the heart for it.” But he’s already cackling again, nearly doubled in half in his seat, and she’s — fascinated. Entranced.

She’s never seen anyone feel things like he does — or at least, she’s never seen anyone show it like he does. Grief, rage, hate. Laughter. It’s all right there on the outermost tips of his fur, wide open. Oh, she knows he has his secrets — maybe even from himself — but what he’s feeling? It’s right there for the whole universe to see. She thinks of her own carefully-carved masks and she just wants to sit here and wrap herself up in his laughter, and not be alone.

“You,” he chokes out, his voice jeering and a little mean, his lungs and shoulders still rattling. “You don’t even wanna eat plants. How’re you gonna shoot a guy?” A new wave of cackling, and now he’s coughing on it, one fist smashing against his knee. “How’re you gonna turn someone in? Without crying?”

She leans back, still careful of her bruises, and rests her cheek on her fist and just soaks him in.

“I could,” she repeats, still smiling. His laughter fills her up inside. “The right person. The right reason. I could do it.”

“Yeah, okay,” he drawls sarcastically, his guffaws finally dwindling. He’s still grinning, though — pure, vicious glee tucked in the corners of his mouth, between his sharp teeth. “Okay, pearl—“

Then the runabout jumps, and she stifles a squeal of pain when her body bounces on the seat — clinging as the runabout suddenly tumbles over itself, cartwheeling wildly through the void of space. Only the runabout’s own artificial gravity keeps them both from smashing against the ceiling. Pearl’s teeth clack painfully and she squeezes her eyes shut tight as she wraps her arms around the armrest she’d been leaning on, blanket and bare legs flying, ass crashing painfully against the vinyl. She forces her eyes open in time to see the survivor hanging on just as hard, fists clenched on the thrusters, pulling back as his chair tries to spin out from under him. The cartwheels stop — no way of knowing at a glance if they’re rightside up — but the survivor’s already tapping screens, spinning dials as the little ship bounces along like an expertly-skipped stone.

“Well, fuck,” he deadpans, his eyes slashing briefly over to hers as he wrangles the runabout back under control. It lurches to a stuttering halt in the dead space between stars, then floats gently like nothing could possibly have gone wrong. “This ain’t good.”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

i love you all so much and i am so grateful for you joining me on this journey and i might see if i can squeeze out an extra chapter this month? (though i think starting this weekend, i'm trying to transfer a few short drabbles from rocket raccoon prompt week over here from tumblr, so that might take up a good portion of my time). ANYWAY part of this chapter was veryhard to write and part of it was really easy and i don't know if i like the outcome but i do hope you enjoy it, you magical little stacks of pancakes ♡ i have realized that while i have this fic labeled as fast burn, it’s really fast burn once and then slowwww simmer with a LOT of filthy daydreams & intense emotional intimacy developing along the way. i'm sorry if you expected something else and i appreciate you a lot, a lot, a lot.

extra kisses to those of you who have left comments. they truly mean the world to me ♡♡♡ like i cannot describe how much i appreciate you taking the time to leave a lil note of encouragement. i'm so grateful and may you have extra blessings on your day, your week, your month, your life. may your beverages always be the exact right temperature.

find expected posting schedules & chapter-previews on tumblr♡
here's the masterlist & moodboard♡ (which includes forecasted schedules and summaries for quite a few chapters in advance)

coming soon: chapter seven. starlorn.
summary: pearl pleads her case.
warnings: sadness, self-injury (biting), continued references to grooming and confinement. rocket’s explicit running commentary and the faintest whisper of d/s vibes. brief mention of bondage.
estimated date: monday, april twenty-second.

Chapter 7: starlorn.

Summary:

pearl pleads her case.

Notes:

warnings: self-injury (biting), continued references to grooming and confinement. rocket’s explicit running commentary and the faintest whisper of d/s vibes. brief mention of bondage.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

starlorn. a sense of loneliness looking up at the night sky, feeling like a castaway marooned in the middle of the ocean, whose currents are steadily carrying off all other castaways—entire worlds and stars whose only remnant is a scrap of light they flung overboard centuries ago, a message in a bottle that’s only just now washing up on our shores. From star, a luminous dot in the cloudless sky + -lorn, sorely missing. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

“Well, shit.”

The runabout is drifting in a deadfloat, and the survivor is flipping switches and tapping buttons, sliding through screens and spinning dials. He’s reading things she doesn’t understand — but maybe she would’ve, if she’d ever learned to fly — and checking fuels, temperature, all sorts of gauges she can’t comprehend.

She tries not to say anything — not to get in the way — but she can’t help but think that maybe this will at least buy her some extra time. Some extra days — to try and convince him. He mutters to himself, then climbs out of his chair and snags a pair of goggles from the console before crawling under the flight control panel. Before she can blink, he’s pried off a panel below and crawled into the space he’s just created.

“We should be good on oxygen levels,” he tells her off-handedly. “Life support systems are solid — least for a while. Whatever the fuck is going on, m’sure I can fix it before we got real problems.”

She nods before realizing he can’t see her from this angle. “Of course,” she says quietly. “I wouldn’t believe anything else.”

He rolls onto his back.

“There’s a canvas wrap of tools in the console, pearl,” he mutters out to her. “Grab it and unroll it here, would you?” He taps his claws on the grated floor beside him.

An opportunity to help? She’ll take it, however small. She rifles through the drawer until she finds what he’s asking for, and then folds herself onto her knees beside him and unrolls the canvas. As soon as it’s open, his clawed fingers are slipping down to grab two little pieces of metal, and he begins clinking away under the flight control panel.

She stares at the roll of tools. She doesn’t recognize a single one.

The awareness of her ignorance has her belly rolling inside her. She tugs at the ends of her curls, hard enough to hurt.

One dark palm descends and reaches, fingers flexing.

“Hand me that laser driver, pearl.”

She stares blankly at the pile of tools. Herbert had never seen fit to have her learn these basics — but surely, surely, she can figure out which one is the laser driver. She picks up a broad handle and flips a switch and — nope, that can’t be right.

He wriggles down, shoving back his goggles and blinking at her once she’s in eye-range. His stare — red as velvet roses and a hundred times harder — narrows on her consideringly.

“S’that one, pearl.” He points to the handle closest to her and she flushes, flicking the tool in her hands off and trading it out for the other cylinder. When she twists the base, something like the head of a screw driver flickers out, shifting shapes and sizes as she scrolls through the settings. It’s — fascinating, really, but the survivor’s still scrutinizing her with a calculating expression, so she clicks it off quickly and stretches it toward his hand. Her face is burning with self-consciousness, and the heat of it is still a relatively new feeling when normally her cheeks feel so cold and still, like a layer of ice on a lake. Thankfully, his hand is a distraction in itself: the creased leather of his palm, and the memory of it on her skin in the Arete. It had burned unforgivingly that night, and for a moment, she’s nearly overcome by the urge to slide her fingertips from the well of his palm up over the heel of his hand, letting them kiss his pulse point lingeringly.

“Pearl?”

That is not the way to convince him that she can be useful, though. Especially if he does still hate her.

She tucks the handle into his hand and watches his fingers curl around it before he immediately turns his attention back to whatever he’s working on, tucked outside the line of her vision — and then he mumbles a thoughtless good girl that makes her breath catch on a sharp corner and stick in her throat.

Smart girl. Good girl. Is there no end to the nice things he’ll say? Maybe it’s pathetic, but it’s been something like six or seven Terran birthdays since she’s received even the thinnest ghost of a compliment — at least, outside of Herbert’s rare nods of approval, Vim’s critical murmurs of Sire will find this acceptable, and Theel’s disingenuous simpering.

No. The last time someone had just said something kind to her would have been the linguist, of course. Sunshine-smiling and telling her, Very well done. You’re a natural at recognizing sister-languages. Both Taluhnisan and Cotati are daughters of the proto-language Ex Nihilii, and you’ve already identified that they possess a high degree of mutual intelligibility. You’re well on your way to understanding the entire language family.

I’m not sure I’ve ever had such a clever and dedicated pupil. Truly impressive, Miss Lizette.

“Do you—” she starts uncertainly, still on her knees beside the survivor. “Are you good with — with languages?”

He snorts from his place under the flight controls. “That’s a random frickin’ question.”

She shifts where she sits, wincing at the pain in her thighs and ass. “Well — I just had a thought. I was just — wondering.”

He grunts. “Short answer’s no. M’not good at anything ‘cept flying, shooting, and inventing weapons of mass destruction.” There’s a moment of silence as he keeps working, and she has to fight not to protest.

Because he is good at other things. More than she is, certainly. He’s clearly good at fixing things. And — escaping things. Surviving.

Healing — or at least, healing her.

But then his voice emerges from the shadows — almost reluctant, like the words don’t want to leave his mouth. “Truth is, languages always give me a little bit of trouble, even when my translator’s workin’ right.”

He snickers to cover up the vulnerability and she hears it just in time: her hand had been gliding through the air without her permission, reaching for his knee as if she could smooth away his discomfort. She freezes, and curls her arm back in.

“Wyndham frickin’ hated it,” he says into the darkness of the underside of the flight controls. “I didn’t realize it when I was a kid, but looking back, he’d always make this face whenever I’d fuck up a word.”

She can imagine it. If Herbert had been in a good mood, it would’ve been a flicker of disdain. But if his patience had already been stretched thin? He would’ve stared at the ceiling and clenched his jaw, every tendon in his throat communicating that he was being dragged so slowly into hell that the journey itself had actually, at some point, become boring.

Of course, Herbert had not believed in hell. Once, casual and brusque, he’d told her that if hell had existed, it would be a relief. A change of pace, from her dull inadequacy and the tiresome ineptitude of everyone else.

She hates that her question has brought this thread of vulnerability in the survivor’s voice, though. It doesn’t matter that he’d sneered to try and hide it — she recognizes it for what it is, and it makes her stomach twist. Still — this may be an opportunity. One she has to take.

“If you’re going out to Fron, you’ll be on the rim of the Thneed system,” she says softly. “That’s — far. Outside of all the major empires.”

“Yeah, pearl.” A clatter from within, and a muffled curse. “But there’ll still be people speakin’ Kree and Shi’ar and Skrull. Centaurian, probably. Rigellian. Spartoi. Plenty of stuff I got in my chip.”

“But — more people than you’re used to who don’t speak those languages. And who have different languages in their own translators — more regional dialects. You’ll have — more difficulty than usual, on your own.”

He reaches out and waves the handle of the laser driver at her like it’s a scolding finger. “What, you think you got a solution?” He snickers again. “You gonna program me a new translator chip?”

She winces and combs through the ends of her hair, then gnaws at her lip. “I could — I could be your translator, maybe.” She can see his strong thighs and calves, roped with muscle under the fur and the jumpsuit — legs that had launched his body like a stone from a catapult into her back, and had carried him nimbly over the rain slick glass of the Arete. Clawed toes — strangely enticing. The sweep of his striped tail, like a paintbrush. Her fingers tremor with the want to stroke it. She wonders if that would feel nice to him — then decides with a little uncertain half-smile that he’d be too furious to properly notice how it felt anyway.

But she wants to. Wants to touch him.

She pinches the hem of his t-shirt loosely instead, running her fingers over the little threads against her ribs. “I thought — I know I’m not very useful yet, but I could learn. Instead of going to Cyxlore — maybe I could stay. Help you out, here.”

The clinking drops abruptly. When he appears from beneath the flight controls, half his fur is smushed flat and he’s pulling his googles up on top of his head again.

Cute, she thinks, without meaning to. Handsome.

Sexy.

“Not a fuckin’ chance, pearl,” he says dryly.

“But the languages—”

He doesn’t dignify her with a glance — just slides himself out from under the flight controls and closes up the panel while she scoots back carefully, moving out of his way.

“Gotta go down to the engine room to finish this,” he mutters. “Might have to dismantle a couple of the things I was working on — just to get this patched up till we reach Cyxlore. Then I can get new parts, at least to last till our next stop.” He hauls himself to his feet, striding past her, off the flight deck, between the two bunks. Pauses, and grabs one of the massive firearms that’s nearly as big as she is before he heads back to the hatch. He examines it, the corner of his mouth tight, like he’s trying to decide if he can take it apart and use bits of it on whatever repairs he’s imagining.

Wait, she thinks, and scrambles to her feet.

“Uhm, Herbert brought a — uhm, a linguist. To the Homonoia. He wanted me to learn as many obscure languages as I could.” The grating bites into the soles of her bare feet as she half-stumbles after him, but the survivor isn’t even glancing at her now. He puts the massive cannon back down and picks up another — something. She can’t even begin to imagine what it’s supposed to be, but she is certain that it kills things. He snaps it against the metallic circle strapped to his back — some kind of magnetic holster, she suddenly realizes — and turns and begins moving toward the hatch, grabbing a massive and half-rusted toolbox as he goes. She follows, of course. She’s scurrying to keep up with him, even though her legs are so much longer. How does he move so quickly?

“I’m fluent in a number dialects from the rim,” she manages to breathe out as they go, “including a few that are popular in and around the Thneed system. Uhm — A-Chiltarian, Xem, Elans, Glacian. Xem and Glacian are sister-languages with Fronnish, I’m pretty sure, so I could probably pick it up pretty quickly, which might — might be helpful. I know a variety of the arboreal languages out there, like Cotati, Taluhnisan, R’malk’i, and other Ex Nihilii daughter-languages. And I know a dozen other language-families from the rim with enough competence to at least—”

But his attention snags and he stops abruptly, spinning on his heel to face her. She freezes. Deer in headlights, her mother would have said derisively.

“Arboreal languages?”

His glowing eyes narrow up at her, silently scrutinizing, and she falters, suddenly lost and off-kilter. She wrings her wrists in front of her belly, trying to figure out why he’s staring at her so intently, like she’s just given him some kind of clue.

“Uhm—?”

His eyes are so sharp they could cut her, taking in every hesitation — and then he suddenly barks a short, hard laugh.

“That’s why you wanna eat synth,” he snickers. “‘Cause someone told you plants can talk.” He turns and strides again toward the back of the runabout, shaking his head. “Unbelievable.”

It’s said with so much derision she flinches. “Taluhnisans have a beautiful history,” she says weakly. “Literature. Songs. Stories passed down through photonic tradition. The language sounds like — old-tree branches creaking in the deep forest. Leaves—”

“What it sounds like is that your little linguistical skills ain’t gonna be very useful to me, pearl,” he scoffs, peeling open the hatch with infinitely more ease than she’d had the rotation before, and slinging himself easily over the edge and down the ladder. She debates asking if she can hold the toolbox for him until he gets down, but he manages so well with one hand, and something tells her he might find the offer insulting. “Not planning on running into many talking trees.”

She swings over the edge of the hatch and climbs down after him, then hears him muttering a curse as her feet hit the floor. When she glances up, she’s just in time to see him jerking his eyes away from her, wearing an expression she can’t fathom. But then he’s stalking toward the engine room door, pulling it open and steering himself through the dark, and she’s coming behind: fingers outstretched, steps suddenly slow in the shadows, bumping into massive metal shapes she can’t quite see. She tries to find a railing, but there’s nothing to guide her.

“But — uhm, you might?” she offers. She can hear her voice growing more and more fragile in the dark. “Better to have me there, than to not — right?” Even to herself, it doesn’t sound very convincing, especially not as she fumbles behind him in the dark.

She squeaks when something warm and leathery suddenly wraps around her wrist, prickling sharply over her pulse, before she realizes it’s the survivor. He makes a strangled sound she can’t interpret in the darkness.

“Fuckin’ helpless,” he mutters — but he tugs her along behind him instead of telling her to leave, and maybe that’s promising?

“I’m just—” Pointless to defend herself against the darkness, she supposes. He can obviously tell that she can’t see anything down here, though now that her eyes are adjusting, she’s starting to make out the blurry edges of darker phantoms around them. She lets him pull her along, following him with a faith so implicit that it doesn’t even occur to her to plant her feet or stumble. She doesn’t realize she’s even doing it till she feels him turn and catches the brief ruby flare of some bit of unseen light glancing off his eyeshine.

“Trusting little thing, aren’t you?” he says drily, and she can only repeat what she’d said earlier when he was making fun of her interest in bounty hunting.

“With the right person,” she says immediately, unthinkingly. “For the right reasons.”

He’s so silent for a moment that she’s not even sure he’s breathing. Then he scoffs again, and pulls her along another few feet before he stops her and she hears the clunk and clatter of him dropping the tool chest.

“Get comfortable, pearl. Gonna be here for a minute.”

She hesitates, because she still can’t see much of anything, but then lowers herself to her knees carefully. The grate is unforgiving, but the blanket she’s wearing is cushiony enough to protect her a little bit.

“An interpreter — it could be useful, though,” she says, softly urgent in the shadows. “I could be useful. To you. And I’m — Herbert said I was a relatively quick learner, so I’m sure I could find other things to — I could figure out how to help with ship repair, or—”

His laugh is quick and sharp and loud, and utterly scornful.

“D’you think I’m a frickin’ moron?” he asks derisively. “I saw you earlier. You don’t even know what half these tools are. I wouldn’t let you touch my ship for a billion units.”

“A billion—?” She feels him jolt, sees again the sunset-bright flash of his eyes, and realizes she’s shown her hand for a second time. Her stomach sinks into her abdomen like a stone. “Okay,” she says softly — quickly. A sad attempt at a distraction. “That’s — reasonable. Not to want me to touch your ship yet. But I — I could learn. I’m quick at—”

“You,” he says quietly, and she can feel his stare, even if she can’t see it. It’s that same scorching heat she’d felt on her when she’d been walking into the Arete. “You don’t even frickin’ know what units are, do you?”

She can feel herself go pale and she wonders if he can see it. “I do,” she says, and she knows her tone is more defensive than believable. “I — they’re money.” She hesitates and tries to bite the question back, but she can’t. “R-right?”

“Fuck. Me.” The survivor’s voice is so flat that she flinches. “You’re really so spoiled you don’t even fuckin’ know what units are.” The second sentence is almost wondering, like he’s awestruck by how she’s been able to live, so indulgently — and her throat is suddenly tight and her eyes are stinging. “You really just had every frickin’ thing handed to you, didn’t you?” he asks, marveling.

Yes, she thinks. No. Her vagus nerve goes cold: heart dropping, stomach twisting.

She chews her lip, and then makes the decision without realizing it: breathes in, breathes out, and shivers her shoulders just a little so she can shake off all the old layers of uncertainty. Her teeth release her lip and the crease between her brow relaxes, and her hands fall from their nervous, curl-tangling pattern to rest elegantly in her lap.

A little chill races over her arms and her flanks, bared between the hem of his t-shirt and the edge of the blanket-skirt.

“I never had to worry about missing a meal,” she agrees quietly, and her voice is paced and even. Some small part of her wonders why she didn’t channel this competent, cold part of herself when she’d initially launched her proposal. Maybe the survivor would have listened to her if she had been — calmer. More refined, and dignified. More like — whatever Herbert had wanted. She tries to level her eyes where she thinks his own gaze might be. “At least, I’ve never had to miss a meal since Herbert took me. And after that, I have certainly always had a roof over my head, and I was always—” She pauses, trying to choose a word; every word means something precise, Herbert had told her coldly, so use the correct ones — “safe,” she says at last. It’s true — even if only comparatively so. “So, yes. Your assessment is fair. I am spoiled. But I’m trying not to be.”

There’s a long moment of silence — so long that she’s able to pull herself in further, letting her skin go to ice while she surveys the situation from a deep, dark distance. She still can’t see much of anything, and the survivor isn’t moving — she can’t hear the clink of him working, or the clatter of his tools. She thinks she can still feel his eyes on her, like a patch of heat she can’t shake off — and for the first time, she wishes he’d look away, because she doesn’t think she can afford to melt right now.

I don’t want to go, she thinks, even though it’s stupid, even though she doesn’t know why. Don’t make me go.

Then there’s a faint shuffling sound, and the survivor clears his throat like he’s uncomfortable. “Look. It’s — you can’t be here. I don’t need you hanging around, and you do need a nice place to stay. Cyxlore — just trust me. Cyxlore’s good. Too nice for me to stay long — little outside my comfort zone. I don’t usually go there unless I got a reason, but I got contacts there who’ll be able to look out for you. Teach you all the shit you need to know to survive there — like about units. Somebody could teach you to fly, if you still want it. And these folks are trustworthy — as much as anyone is, anyway. They’re real nice. Plus, they got lots of anti-trafficking laws. Real humanitarian-types. Not particular fans of the High Evolutionary — you should be safe. It’s a good place for refugees, and lots of people come through to sell shit. You’ll get to see a lot of different things even if you never leave. Folks there are real kinestheticalistic, so there’s a whole lotta nice, soft, pretty things there.” She can hear him swallow, and the sound is harsh in the darkness. He picks up something from inside the toolbox, and she hears metal scrape on metal. “You’re gonna — you’ll fit right in, pearl.”

Something about his voice and his words melt her anyway, and she blinks quickly, trying to shuffle back the silvering of tears. Hopefully he’s looking at what he’s doing and not at her, so he can’t see her trying to trap them behind her lashes.

“Do I… have to?” She whispers slowly, her words are soft little dove-sounds in the darkness.

He snorts, and she hears him shake himself. It sounds like his back is to her now, which is a sad relief. “What other option you got?” His tone is sharper now. “M’goin’ outta my way to drop you off somewhere nice an’ safe, and you’d prefer… what? Contraxia?” He snorts. “Knowhere? Conjunction? The Hub?”

No wonder he thinks she’s spoiled. She is, she supposes.

“I — no,” she says softly, trying to cover up her misery. “I’m — grateful. I’m sorry.” She falls quiet, wishing that her ass didn’t hurt so much so she could pull her knees in toward her chest. She wonders if she can find her way out of the engine room by herself — fold herself into the little tucked-away deadspace behind the bulwark so she can squeeze herself up against the starpane and stare out at the endless sky, squished and small. If it weren’t for how hollow and cold she was, it could be nice here — listening to him work, soft shuffles and quiet clinks, the sound of his breathing. It would be nice. But right now, she just feels tangled up and sickish inside.

Maybe she’s just been awfully unfair. She would guess she doesn’t have the clearest moral compass anymore. Maybe she’s being selfish, by trying to impose. She already knows he has limited food stores. And maybe, if she did stay — maybe it wouldn’t be good for either of them. Not healthy. Codependent, she thinks, except there’s really only one of them that’s dependent right now, and it certainly isn’t the survivor. He’s been doing just fine on his own, after all. And then he had the — well, the gall or the kindness, she supposes — to touch her, to sweep her out of the Arete and off Halfworld, out into space, to take her somewhere he’s made sure will be safe and good. Saved her or stolen her, depending on which one of them is telling the story.

She wishes it didn’t have to be like that though. She wishes — well, maybe he does still hate her after all, and he’s just been extremely nice about it since — what? realizing she was a virgin? a terrible lay? god, pathetic — but she wishes they could be friends. She’d thought, for a moment, that they might be able to get there. He’d chuckled at some of her careful jokes this morning.

Because yes, she wants him — wants him to let her laugh with him and travel with him and maybe, if she’s lucky, let her touch him. Or he can touch her, if that’s what he’s more comfortable with. Just a scrap of that scalding, stinging heat. Some part of her is certain that if she walks off this runabout on Cyxlore and he catapults back into the sky like a meteor in reverse, she’ll never, ever, ever get warm again.

And along with all of that — along with her own greediness and selfishness, side-by-side with it, part of it — is just the want to be able to give something back to him. To do even a tiny bit as much for him as he’s done for her. All she can think of is that he’d liberated her, and given her that little bit of absolution after she’d told him about the flerken kit and the blue mouse. That he’d looked out for her and taken care of her, and soothed her wounds, and what she wants — what she really wants is to give him something back—

“There we go,” he rasps out suddenly, and she jolts from where she’s sitting, wincing when she leans back too hard on her sore side. The gratings have bitten through the blanket and she suddenly realizes that her knees and the arches of her ankles are probably gridded with red pressure-marks. She peels herself slowly off the grating, trying not to flinch, and then strangles back a gasp when she realizes her legs are asleep.

The full heat of him is suddenly pressed against the outside of her thigh as she wobbles: strong arm winding around her hips, holding her steady. His fingers slip between the makeshift slit in the blanket and he jolts — fumbling his hand out from under the bobbing knot, trying to hang onto the fringed hem of fabric instead. Still, the little fireprints of his fingers on her bare skin—

“Easy, pearl.”

There’s something rough and gravelly in his voice: hoarse, uneven. She wiggles her toes against the grated floor, trying to stimulate the bloodflow into her legs. She’d like to stay right where she is, lean against him all day, but she can already feel that he’s getting restless: clawed fingers flexing his discomfort against the blanket-skirt, shoulders twisting so he can turn his face as far away from her as he can get.

She braces herself, and he pulls away. She hears the tool-chest scrape on the grating, and then — a tug on the knot that suddenly, for some reason, makes her abdomen spiral tight up inside her. She chokes back a gasp because he’d made her drip the other day and she cannot, cannot, be dripping down her thighs without any underwear right now when she’s already miserable —

“You okay, princess?”

She nods, assuming he can see her in the dark, and follows obediently where he pulls her along by the knot at her hip.

She’s just trying to control herself.

Then they’re back to the glowing spotlight of the hatch, and she’s climbing up quickly, tucking herself away on the little mattress while he sets aside the toolbox and then carefully lays the remnants of his dismantled whatever-kind-of-weapon-it-was on the extra bunk. He must have used parts of it to repair the issue, or circumvent it, or done some other genius thing that she doesn’t have the slightest hope of understanding.

She shivers. Her fingers are icicles and she’s got goosebumps everywhere. The survivor casts a sideways glance at her, eyes snagging on his band-shirt — probably because she’s stretching it all out, some mean little internal voice hisses — and he curses under his breath.

“Gimme a second and I’ll turn up the heat,” he mutters. “Or just — wrap a blanket around yourself or something.”

She bites back a wince and pulls the blanket from the bunk over her shoulders, burying herself in it.

“D’you want — something to eat, pearl? Shouldn’t’ve kept you down there for so long—”

“I’m fine,” she drags up, voice smoky with disuse. She tries to clear it delicately — an act Herbert would have observed with contempt. “Thank you.”

He stares at her, red eyes so hot and glowing she could almost warm herself in the glare of them, before he gives one short, sharp nod.

“All right, then. I’m, uh, gonna shower, and then I think — I’ll just turn in for the night. Ship should be all set to start running tomorrow morning.”

He won’t be flying tonight, then? She snags her lower lip with her teeth. “Maybe — if you’re not flying — I still really don’t mind sharing the bed,” she offers. “I hate to think of you sleeping so uncomfortably —”

He recoils. “No — uh. No. I’m good. Swear it. M’used to sleeping rough.” He rifles through the linen locker and pulls out a towel, and before she can say another word, he’s already locked himself in the little shower stall.

The water comes on, and she doesn’t move: leaning on one hip, staring vacantly across the little hold. Her fingers comb through the ends of her curls mindlessly — trying to separate and smooth them. Vim and Theel had supervised her morning and evening rituals for years before Herbert had trusted her enough to let her do them unobserved. She’d thought it was strange, when she was younger, but she hadn’t had context for what a caring adult could look like, so she’d just assumed it was a gesture of affection and attentiveness. Then, at some point after Fairy, it had become apparent that they were there to make sure she didn’t deviate from expectations.

But now here she is, nearly two full rotations with no hair-comb, using only her anxious fingers to untangle her curls after one rainstorm, two showers, and two sleep-shifts. At least she hasn’t been tossing and turning much, since her sore body won’t let her.

What would Wyndham say? she thinks, echoing the survivor’s words in the Arete, and a dismal little half-smile curls the corner of her mouth. She’ll need a wide-toothed comb once she gets to Cyxlore, or she’ll have nothing but mats left.

It does make a little half-breath of a laugh scrape up her throat — almost a snort, and wouldn’t Herbert be appalled at that. What’s the worst that can come of mats? She cuts all her hair off and gets to defy the High Evolutionary just a little bit more?

The water turns off. She can hear the sound of spattering splashes, like the survivor has just shaken himself off, and she hesitates before lowering herself onto her belly, taking the blanket with her.

When he exits the stall, his fur is damp, and it looks like he’s wrangled himself back into his jumpsuit too soon. It can’t possibly be comfortable on all his wet fur, and she wonders if — when he’s alone — he normally just comes out naked and lets himself air dry.

She flushes and turns her face into the pillow while he taps the plasma orbs to the dimmest glow.

He probably hates you, she reminds herself. He almost certainly hates you.

You really just had every frickin’ thing handed to you, didn’t you?

Do you deserve every bad thing that happened to you?

Yes.

She doesn’t hear him move for a moment, and when she looks up, he’s staring at her with those garnet-glow eyes, and his brow’s furrowed and creased. She tilts herself up on her elbows immediately, because he looks troubled. Her fingers long to reach for him. Are you okay?

But he only rubs at the back of his neck, and grimaces. “Get some sleep, pearl. No dreams tonight.”

It sends an arrow through her heart.

“Okay,” she whispers. “You — sleep well, okay? If you change your mind, the bed—”

“M’not gonna,” he says shortly. Then he snaps his mouth shut, and sighs, and turns back to the flight deck.

One more time. Try one more time, and then leave him alone and stop being annoying.

“I’m sorry for bothering you,” she whispers as he hoists himself into the pilot’s chair. He visibly startles, and then turns in his seat to look back at her. “But I just — I’d rather stay with you than go to Cyxlore. I still think I could — I could help you. You’re so all alone out here, but you — you looked out for me.” She shrinks into the thin mattress and the soft blankets, and they all still smell of him: sweet almonds, burnt wood and fire, blue spruce in the rain. Her voice is a soft little whisper. “I’d like to have the chance to look out for you, too.”

He snorts. He doesn’t even have to think about it: just scoffs, right then and there.

“And how are you gonna do that, pearl?” The corner of his mouth curls and a fang flashes in something doubtful and dry. He holds out one flat, upturned palm, and begins counting out each finger with his other hand. “You can’t shoot a gun.” His index finger. “You can’t fly a ship.” The middle one. “You don’t know your way around a simple toolkit — and I bet you never built or repaired a single machine in your life.” Those are the final two fingers. He holds up the whole hand, palm facing her, waving it in a taunt. “Sweetheart, you probably can’t even eat a real vegetable without wanting to cry your little heart out.”

Her heart is in her mouth, and it tastes like ashes and ice.

“And you think you’re gonna — what? Protect me?” He snickers and shakes his head. “You’re fuckin’ useless out here, pearl. Better for both of us if we just get you someplace safe so you don’t gotta be my problem anymore.”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

The Monster dozes in the star-blue shadows. He keeps waking up to a mouthful of guilt and bitterness. He’d gotten out of the shower and he’d realized he hadn’t taken care of Wyndham’s pearl’s wounds, and he’d already been feeling like shit because of — everything, really. He doesn’t know why he’s gotta frickin’ feel like this when he’s doing the noble fucking thing, getting her somewhere nice and safe. Hell, he could take her up on her offer. Keep her out here with him like his own soft, pretty pet — a needy little housewife, all warm and wet and willing. Fuck, the way she’d sat on her knees next to him while he’d worked? Head tilted, the side of her throat bared while she’d fingercombed that mane of glossy curls over one shoulder, then rested her hands in her lap like the most submissive little sweetheart—

Tender little thing. Can’t bear to eat anything that might’ve ever told a story or had a dream. Probably can’t hurt a Sakaraan stingfly, even if it’s biting her. How’d the two of them both get put through so much at Wyndham’s hands, but the Monster had turned mean and she’d only gotten sweeter? At least he assumes she’s gotten sweeter; if this is pearl at her worst, he never would’ve survived her when she was less-cynical.

She’d been so blind in the dark, and for a second — in the shadows, realizing she couldn’t see him — he’d thought about teasing her. Flicking his tail around her ankles, pricking his claws over the soft hollow behind her knee through the gap in the blanket. Taunting her the way he’d taunted her on the Arete, but this time, he’d treat her so much nicer once he finally let himself get his hands on her. She’d looked so pretty, just letting him lead her deeper into the darkness, vulnerable and trusting.

Then, of course, he’d been a jackass.

You don’t even frickin’ know what units are, do you?

He hadn’t meant to be a dick, but she’d gone so pale and she’d looked so hunted, so humiliated.

I do. It’s money. The tortured little stammer of uncertainty, heartbreaking in its distress. R–right?

He’d seen it — even in the moment — but he hadn’t understood what it had meant, not when his own defensiveness had been surging. But almost as soon as it had come out of his mouth, he’d known what a Class-A shitbag he was being.

You’re so spoiled you don’t even fuckin’ know what units are. You really just had every frickin’ thing handed to you, didn’t you?

What a stupid fuckin’ thing to say, he thinks now, viciously, awake enough to pull up an file on Cyxlore and place some orders for new parts for the runabout. Because of course she hadn’t known what units were. Of course Wyndham had denied her any scrap of information that might have been useful if she’d managed to get away from him. Five minutes of her — of actually genuinely paying attention to her — would have taught anyone that.

She hadn’t been spoiled. She’d been trapped, in every possible way that heartless bastard could trap her, and any little thing she’d been given had come at a cost.

And then she’d done that thing. It makes his skin crawl, just to think of it: the way, even in the shadows, she’d dropped everything about herself away. Her tense shoulders had suddenly given the illusion of relaxation, and her face had smoothed out so completely that she might as well have been dead.

Your assessment is fair. I am spoiled.

But I’m trying not to be.

For fuck’s sake, he’d wanted to wring his own neck. She’d described her personal hell with Wyndham as safe, and he’d felt like the biggest, shittiest frickin’ hypocrite in the galaxy. Maybe further.

And what is up with that chilling, fucked-up transformation, anyway? He knows in his serial-numbered bones that it has to be something she learned to protect herself during her time in the Homonoia, but it’s…it’s a fuckin’ agony to watch.

It’s like watching the light go out of Lylla’s eyes.

Every. Single. Time.

Does she feel like she’s dying when she does it, he wonders? Because it definitely feels like he’s frickin’ dying, every time he has to witness it.

He dozes off again, fitfully. He keeps picturing her big, moonsilver-eyes over the edge of his pillow, the way she’d looked on her knees, the feel of her thigh when he’d accidentally slipped his fingers into her blanket.

You’re so all alone out here.

I’d like to have the chance to look out for you.

It’s maybe the nicest little thing anyone had ever tried to give him. It’s maybe the thing he’s been looking for ever since he first left HalfWorld. He’d lived on the streets in the Hub, then stowed away to Conjunction, then Contraxia — looking for some little community he could belong to, some small family he could be a part of. Someone who could look past his freakishness and his scars and his nightmares, his sharp teeth and claws. Someone who — unlike his so-called Sire — would want him alive and at their side.

Instead — a scared, already-bitter child on the streets — he’d been spit on. Grabbed and scruffed, stepped on, mocked. Thrown in a sewer, twice. Shot at, taunted, stabbed. Once — still just a kid — some drunk assholes had found him sleeping in the crook of two tree branches and had knocked him down by throwing a dense glass bottle at his head. It had still been half-full of Centaurian ginsky, and heavy — he’d been dizzy for days afterward, but that wasn’t even the worst of it. When they’d caught him, they’d tried to cut off his frickin’ tail before he’d ripped one’s ears off and bitten clean through another’s nose, and had given the rest of them the slip in an alley while they’d screamed.

At some point, the Monster had bypassed bitterness and gone straight to mean.

He’d stumbled on the Ore Gardens by accident a few circumrotations later. Well, he’d been solicited, but he had no complaints or regrets about it. A Centaurian who’d escaped Hala, probably only a few circs older than himself, had blown blue smoke in his direction one night at The Mobius Strip and asked if the Monster was an adult member of his species.

The Monster hadn’t known — not really, not for sure — but he’d felt frickin’ ancient, so he’d said yes.

That had been his introduction to the Ore Gardens and specifically, the Aluminum Rose on Orex II. Like its better-known sisters on Contraxia — the Iron Lotus, Copper Lily, and Golden Peony — the Aluminum Rose had been part of a particular collective of unionized brothels spread out over a number of systems in a number of galaxies. The courtesans with the Ore Gardens were known to be committed to discretion, and they’d never seemed to flinch at the sight of him. Of course, the Monster has his preferences: he’d rather pay for a real escort’s time than purchase extra hours with the bots, and there are a couple people he visits whenever he can afford ‘em because he trusts them — and they almost seem to enjoy his company, like maybe they’re able to ignore metal and burns and stitches riddling his hideous little body.

‘Course, he does pride himself on tipping really frickin’ well, so maybe that’s what they’re really enjoying. But he’s not gonna complain either way.

At any rate, he’d been at one of the bars outside the Iron Lotus with a Krylorian courtesan named Astrala when the Eclector had docked, and he’d decided on a whim — okay, maybe less of a whim and more of being severely intoxicated on Angargal’s — to climb aboard and see what he could steal while the pirates had been getting their rocks off.

Then he’d passed out in one of the ventilation shafts.

When he’d finally woken up — dry-mouthed and with a pulsing crush between his eyes, and the ship moving underneath him — he’d told himself it was fine. He’d needed to hitch a ride somewhere new anyway. Unfortunately, it had taken only a handful of cycles before he’d realized how much he’d liked the Captain and Tullk. The idiot second-mate too — Kraglin. They’d been a little family of their own — them, and the Captain’s kid. The kid hadn’t been around often, but the Monster had watched their weird, fucked-up little family — he’d watched, and he’d wanted.

They’d all been rough around the edges and then some — straight through to the core, really — but with an easy camaraderie. Lots of backslaps a little too enthusiastic, and punches a little too hard; warm sarcasm, playful insults. Fights, too — raised voices and clenched hands, cannibalistic half-threats, the occasional fist in the belly — but nothing meant to wound.

Lurking in the vent-system and the crawlspaces, the Monster had realized more than anything how much he’d craved it. To be part of it. Part of the family; part of the crew. Part of something. He’d figured — he could be a Ravager. He practically was one, already. Stealing shit, hunting bounties, blowing things up. He’d have to figure out his angle, though — couldn’t just stick his head outta the vent and ask for a bunk. A stowaway, and a monster besides? One who’d been eating their food for cycles now, and without an unpaid friend in the world? Nah.

Then the fuel injection system had gone down and the Eclector had been dead in the water. Three rotations had gone by before the Monster had made his move. He’d wanted them to know they were fucked without him.

Then, when the Ravagers were getting desperate, he’d crept out in the middle of a sleep shift and fixed it.

It had been obvious, even to those morons — someone had made massive changes to the system. Had improved it — made it better than ever. A couple idiots tried to claim credit but Tullk and the Captain had looked at them with dubious sneers on their faces, eyes half-squinted in disbelief. A few hours later, when the Captain had been alone in his quarters — that’s when the Monster had taken the risk.

Had talked to him.

Now the monster sighs and scrubs his hands over his face. No use lamenting that particular tragedy. The summary of it is that he’d been searching for the same thing with Lylla, he knows. He’d escaped the Eclector and spent circs in and out of prisons, making and losing money, hating the universe more and more. Until, blinded by his own greed — wanting someone, anyone to accept him, someone to be his, someone he could belong to — he’d had the idea to stalk Wyndham. To extort him. To demand a companion of his very own. The Monster had been reckless in his want for a friend, a partner, an ally — thinking he needed it, thinking he could have it — as if everything he was didn’t fly in the face of the natural order of things. As if there could be anything in this universe suited for him, when he himself had never been suited for anything but an incinerator.

And his selfishness had resulted in another innocent lifeform being tortured and murdered.

He can’t keep the pearl.

He can’t take care of her out here, not the way she needs. Not the way she deserves. How could he be trusted to? He’d brutalized her when she was vulnerable, trapped in her gilded cage — gotten her all tied up in her pretty skirts and smashed her lovely face into the ground, like some kind of moon-damned villain. He’s a selfish bastard but there’s a reason he stays solo these days.

Tying someone to himself is a guarantee that, at best, they’ll be miserable. Or worse: they’ll be dead.

No, he tells himself sleepily, leaning back in his chair. The best thing he can do is drop her somewhere safe. Somewhere nice, and comfortable, and welcoming. Somewhere that’s suited to her, far better than he is.

But — he should’ve cleaned her injuries tonight, he thinks hazily as his eyelids weigh themselves down over his blurring stare. The tangle of cables and buttons and switches on the ceiling slowly shadow away with every blink. He should’ve rebandaged her. He should’ve made sure she’d eaten; he should’ve—

He jolts awake. It’s still the middle of the sleep shift, but he’s awake now, and he’s hungry. Maybe a snack, and he can dick around with the leftovers of the dismantled Hadron Enforcer, see if he can fashion anything smaller but equally devastating and destructive from the remnants—

Except Wyndham’s pearl is gone.

He lurches out of his pilot’s chair — tail puffing, eyes hunting — before he reminds himself that this is a frickin’ spaceship, and a tiny one at that. No-one’s come in and stolen her, and she wouldn’t have been able to leave.

But she ain’t in the bunk. And the shower stall’s open. Toilet room, too.

He looks at the bunk again. One of the blankets is missing.

Then — like something’s hooked a sickle right into the manufactured red muscle of his heart — he feels the tug toward the hatch. It’s open again, and he has a fleeting moment to marvel that she’d managed to get up and move around the little runabout without waking him.

He’s always been a fitful sleeper, particularly prone to bolting alert whenever other people are around.

He eases himself down the ladder. Sure enough, as soon as he gets down to the lower level, he can breathe in the freshwater scent of her — clean and sweet and clear. And when he ducks his head behind the bulwark, into that useless little panel of space, there she is: folded up against the cold metal wall with the extra blanket wrapped around her shoulders, thighs pressed to breasts and shins to the cold, armored glass. The makeshift-skirt has fallen open at the slit and he can see her bare knees gleaming like moons in the starlight. Both are faintly criss-crossed with red lines that take him a minute to place — the gratings, he realizes abruptly, and suddenly feels so fuckin’ ashamed he hadn’t sent her up the hatch to be more comfortable while he’d been working. One of her knees looks different, though — eclipsed by dark bruising.

At first he assumes that it’s leftover from where he’d thrown her to her knees on the Arete, and his guilt folds in on itself and doubles. But then he glances again because it doesn’t look right — it’s at the top of her knee, not where she would’ve hit the ground, and it’s so dark and layered, and there are repeating crescents of—

Teeth.

Teeth. And they’re sure as hell not his.

His eyes flare up to her face. She’d been so still, he’d assumed she’d fallen asleep here again — but no, her wide gaze is solemn on him, silvered in the translucent light from the window.

“Hello,” she whispers, as if there was anyone else on the runabout, as if she’s surprised to see him.

He can’t look away; can’t blink his eyes. “Pearl.” He manages to push the words over his lips like stones. “What’re you doing down here, sweetheart? More nightmares?”

I know about those, he almost tells her. I got ‘em too. We can—

“No,” she says, and her voice is steady and hushed — as much of a quiet comfort as she’d offered to him on HalfWorld, after he’d stolen through the window of the Arete to torture a soft-hearted bride. The generosity of her whisper makes his heart sink and turn over. “I just couldn’t sleep,” she tells him gently.

She turns her eyes slowly from him, out to the quiet asterisms that surround them. Their light makes the armored fibers of the glass look like spidersilk. He realizes suddenly that she’s got one finger hovering over the glass, like she’s been drawing on it.

“What — uh, what are you doing?”

“Looking for constellations.” There’s no inflection in her voice: just this quiet matter-of-factness, and an even tone that wrenches at his ribs. She traces a spiral on the cold glass.

He’s got no idea why he does it, or where the words come from, but they’re out in the recycled air before he even realizes he’s thought them up.

“Can I look too?”

Her eyes flick to his — startled — and then, almost imperceptibly, she nods and shifts. She only betrays the tiniest wince at the movement, even though he knows her ass and all her muscles must be protesting, but she’s made room for him before he even realizes what she’s doing.

He’s not sure why that rips at his insides too, but it does. He hesitates, then pulls himself into the little nook beside her.

“How’d you even frickin’ fit in here?” he mutters. He’s so much smaller than her but the fact that his knees hit the glass at all has his hackles raising. He knows she’s confined between him and the wall, boxed in tight while he’s safe on the outside — free to leave, to run — but it still feels too much like a trap, too much like a cage.

But she only offers up a little lopsided shrug and that quiet, hesitant curve of a kitten-smile, and he sighs.

“Okay, pearl. Constellations.” He tilts his head. “You know these aren’t the same stars you saw over Wundagore II or HalfWorld, right?”

She looks down at him and there’s just the slightest arch of a brow, but she doesn’t say a word. It’s probably the most sass he’s seen from her, and he huffs a half-laugh.

“Okay, okay. How was I supposed to figure you knew? You’re the broad who doesn’t even know what units—“

He snaps the words off, because he’s already ruining it, already being an asshole, and he just frickin’ got here.

But then she softens, and if the Monster believed any gods were listening, he’d have thanked them for the look on her face right then.

“When I was younger and new on Wundagore II, I made up constellations,” she tells him softly, leaning down and toward him like she’d tuck the words carefully into the soft shell of his ear if she could. He shivers, and the velvet of his ear flicks against the ghost of her breath. “Simple ones that I could find anywhere, with any stretch of stars.” She nods to the window. “Diamond-shapes, ovals and circles. A leaf, a teardrop, an inverted triangle.”

She traces the triangle just a breath above the glass: three lines pinned by three bright stars.

“Do they got names?” he asks. He’s not sure where that question came from either, but there it is.

“Mmhmm,” she hums. “Herbert was always — so obsessed with Terran culture, at least for the time I knew him. I’m not sure why. He built HalfWorld to look — to look exactly like it.” She offered that squeezed-tight half-shrug again. “Anyway, he made me study classical Terran mythology and literature, among other things. The Greek classics were his favorite.” She nods at the space where she’s just sketched the shape. “That one is Eleos — the personification of mercy.”

He tilts his head, studying it as if it was more than a triangle. He doesn’t know why he bothers — it isn’t even real, some of those stars lightyears behind or before the others. But still, it feels like it means something.

“Why an upside-down triangle?” he asks at last, and she shrugs.

“I don’t know. It felt like it should just be something that could be filled up.”

Why does he feel like he’s falling apart? Losing little crumbles of himself in the quiet erosion of her presence. The Monster clears his throat.

“You, uh. Got any more?”

Her eyes flick again to his, all moon-gray surprise, and then she’s puffing a breath of fog onto the glass and tracing something shaped like a tear onto the glass. “Penthus,” she tells him softly. “God of grief.” And then — unbelievable, and adorable — she gifts him a careful wink and adds a stem, turning it into a leaf. “Auxesia,” she tells him softly. “Growth.”

He huffs a breath. “You tryin’ to make a point, sweetheart?”

She blinks at him innocently, but he’s pretty sure there’s a muted sparkle in her eye — something almost playful under whatever’s got her so sad.

She sketches out a handful of other shapes: spiral, crescent, star, heart.

“Adrestia,” she tells him. “Balance, inevitability — inescapable punishment. Eucleia: glory and good repute. Pepromene: destiny. Elpis: hope.” She pauses, and looks down at him consideringly, before drawing a diamond against the glass. “Arete. Lab 89. The personification of excellence.”

His ears flick back and it’s all he can do not to hiss a breath in through his teeth. Excellence? Of course, there’s no way the pearl could know he was made there, but now it feels like the worst kind of joke, and he wants to scrape Wyndham’s face off all over again.

But the pearl is already tracing a thoughtful circle above the glass. “Her sister, Homonoia. Lab 88. Uniformity and order. Like-mindedness.”

Now his ears and eyes both flicker to her.

“Is that what he was tryin’ to make out of you? Something like him?”

She shrugs. “Maybe. I mean, yes, always; he wants everything he makes to be a reflection of himself. But I think the Homonoia lab was more about his experiments with the Wundagorish people. He was trying to make himself a — a fleet of warriors. The Knights of Wundagore. Almost a — a hive-mind, beholden to him.” That perfect mouth of hers purses. “I don’t think I was part of the Homonoia projects. Or the Arete. I think I was… something else.”

Something about her voice is so dead inside that he shivers.

“What d’you think you were?” His voice scrapes up his throat, but it’s almost soft. Funny — he hadn’t thought he was capable of that.

“When we landed on HalfWorld, the Recorders told me that Herbert had built a whole new wing to the pyramid for me. Astraea.” She traces out an oval in the stars. “Purity and precision.”

The words drip like a curse.

“Astraea was a celestial virgin,” she says quietly, and the Monster feels himself damn-near recoil at the words. But the pearl doesn’t stop, doesn’t finch. “She was the last immortal to live among people. And when the world became too — violent, too distrustful and wicked — she ascended into the stars. Untouchable.”

She makes a strange, soft sound in her throat: not derisive, but close. And sad, too. The Monster can feel his skin tighten under his fur with something like tension, like misery.

“Someday, she’s supposed to return — the ambassador of a new, utopian golden age. She also presented as Dicé — the bringer of justice. On Terra, her constellation is positioned next to Libra.” She draws a sideways oval, perfectly balanced, and then tilts her head. Her sweet, faint kitten-smile flattens into something a little harder — almost bitter. It’s an expression he hasn’t seen on her before, despite — despite all this.

“Of course, Herbert could never understand something like justice,” she confides quietly. “To him, I’m sure ambassador meant something else entirely. Figurehead, maybe. Symbol.” The corner of her mouth twitches. “Showpiece.”

She locks her eyes straight ahead, and puffs a breath on the glass, and draws an X across five stars: one for each point, and one in the center.

“He should have called my project Peitharchia.”

He waits, but she doesn’t elaborate: just sits in the darkness, and then leans forward in the tight space to rest her mouth against her bruised knee. The way she does it — yeah, he’s sure the crescent ring of bite marks are from her own teeth. Something behind his sternum aches.

“What — uh. What’s Petharth — what’s that?”

She lets out a quiet breath, and he watches again as pieces of her drop away. He immediately wants to call back the words, shut himself up, wall off whatever it is that makes her like this: empty. Hollowed-out.

Hopeless.

Her skin shivers.

“Obedience.”

He reacts more violently than he ever would have expected. “No. No frickin’ way, pearl. Not a chance. You? Obedient?” He cackles, but the sound is broken off at the edges — almost frantic. “You smuggled two frickin’ animals outta the Homonoia right out under his nose. Gave yourself an allergical reaction to get outta wearing whatever gross furs he wanted to dress you up in, and none of ‘em ever figured it out. You made sure I escaped after I clawed his frickin’ face off.” He hesitates, then tries to cast a taunting grin up at her. “For fuck’s sake, princess. You fucked a violent stranger on your wedding night and then you ran off with him. You ain’t obedient.”

He expects a soft little laugh. He thinks, even a few hours ago, he would’ve gotten one. Instead, she leans forward, her fingers curling over her bare toes, her knees pinned between her chest and the starpane. And her eyes — her eyes are suddenly big and glossy and wet, gemstone-tears suddenly balanced on her lower lashes.

It feels like someone’s broken through all his ribs, gripping his heart in a vibranium fist.

“Don’t make me stay on Cyxlore,” she says softly. “I won’t try to make you take me if you — if you really don’t want to. But I’d rather be here. With you.” A soft inhale. “Please.”

His stomach drops out.

You ready to beg yet? he suddenly remembers asking her on the rain-slick floor of her Arete cage. Well. Here she is, begging, and he’ll be an ass if he ignores it.

And an ass if he accepts it.

The line of her nose and cheeks gleam with starlight. The blanket around her shoulders shifts down, pinned between her back and the cold metal wall, and the soft curves of her breasts press against her thighs. The Monster can see the shape of them, rounded and squished at her sides through the sleeveless armholes and under the edge of his too-small Sneepers shirt.

She’s so far away, and he can see her dying all over again. Lylla on the floor of the Arete; Madame Lavenza in the rainy courtyard of HalfWorld. Haunting and haunted, cold as ghosts and skeleton-bones and lifeless stars, as distant and unreachable as the edge of the universe.

Come back to me, pretty pearl.

He swallows.

“Sweetheart,” he tries. “You know you — you gotta go. It’s for the best. I didn’t mind getting you outta there, but you can’t stay with me. You remember what I told you?”

She blinks and the precarious tears spill over onto her cheeks. It feels like a sucker punch right to his solar plexus. He’s pretty sure his abdomen curves inward with the force of the blow.

“Yes,” she whispers, and her voice sounds all crushed up and soft, like broken hearts and torn velvet, like tiny little wildflowers that’ve been stepped on and pressed into the mud. “I remember. And I’m sorry.”

He’s still reeling from the sight of those jewel-bright tears. They haven’t stopped, though: now that the first two have escaped her eyes, the rest are running free, painting her cheeks with wet silver. He tries to make sense of her words, but he’s baffled. “I — what?”

Her eyelashes flutter, all damp and star-clustered now. “I’m sorry,” she repeats, and even though she won’t look at him, her voice is painfully earnest. “I am. And I understand why you don’t want me here. But if you — if you’d let me stay, I’d try so hard. I pr-promise.”

There’s a shivering crack in her voice and it damn near breaks something inside him that he didn’t even know was there. Everything around him lurches. “P—kitten. What do you think — what do you think I’m talking about when I ask if you remember what I said?”

Her eyes shut tight and she flinches. Her mouth trembles and aches at the corners like he’s just dug his claws into an open wound. She whispers something, so soft and quiet and then disrupted by a little hiccup that even his sensitive ears can’t make sense of the hushed, broken sounds.

“What was that, sweetheart?” His mouth hurts. His throat — it’s too tight, like he’s got a rock lodged in there.

“That you regret bringing me,” she utters softly. “That I’m useless.” Whatever shades of kitten-smile might have once existed at the corner of her lips are gone now. “That you hate me.”

His stomach lurches again and he thinks he might actually vomit. He rips his eyes away from the wetness of her face and her big wide-open, wounded eyes, and he stares out into the sea of stars ahead of them.

“I’ll do better,” she whispers. “You won’t have to — to regret it. And I’ll find ways to—”

“That’s not what I meant,” he cuts her off. “I meant — I mean, I can see why you’d think that. I did prob’ly say all that shit. But I don’t — I don’t hate you. And I don’t think you’re useless — not really.” He swallows. “An’ I don’t regret bringing you. I don’t even remember saying that one, but it was a stupid thing to say.” His voice splits up the middle, brittle and splintered, and he has to take a steadying breath before he can repeat himself. “I don’t regret bringing you, pearl.”

She goes still beside him — not that she’d have much room to move, folded up like she is, squished and stuffed neatly into this tiny, cold little crevice in the ship, but he thinks she’s even stopped breathing. “Then — why can’t I stay with—”

He clears his throat. “I told you. You need something more than — than just following me around through the galaxy, runnin’ from Wyndham for the rest of your life.” He shifts uncomfortably, and when the words come out, they’re a fractured, defective mutter. “You deserve more.” He’s staring into the starpane, gazing at their ghosts. Her: solemn-faced, soft-mouthed, with a riot of dark curls and big, luminous eyes — and him: point-nosed and triangle-faced, with his spoon-shaped ears and warning-red glare. A glowing celestial virgin or whatever — and a fuckin’ monster.

“You deserve to be safe, and you ain’t gonna be safe with me,” he says, and his mouth is so dry that his words hit the air and crack: parched and shriveled. She doesn’t flinch, her expression matching his as she stares out the universe, tears like wet diamonds still rolling down her cheeks.

“Look, sweetheart—princess—pearl,” he settles at last, grimacing anyway at the taste of Wyndham’s vicious little nickname in his mouth. “I know you think — well, no, I don’t know what you think. You’re a fuckin’ anomaly. But I know you don’t really want to be here. With me.” She opens her mouth and he shakes his head, rushing in. “I get why you think you do. ‘Cause — you’re all alone an’ I’m the only person you know. But you’ll make friends real quick — I know you will, ‘cause you’re all nice and sweet and shit. And I—” he trails off. I ain’t nice, he thinks. And, I’m gonna spend all my time trying to think up ways to get my hands up under those damn shirts. “And I ain’t good at any of that stuff,” he settles on at last, weakly. “Hell, the number of prisons that got bounties out on me alone…”

He trails off. The stars — all her fake constellations — hover silently outside the thick armored glass, studding their reflections. For a long moment, everything is quiet, and he holds his breath while he waits.

“I wish,” she says quietly, each word clinging to her mouth like a slow-moving syrup, “that people would stop telling me that they know my needs better than I do.”

He jolts so hard he nearly tumbles off their shared ledge, right back onto the floor next to the bulwark. Because he knows who she’s talking about, and it’s not just him, and somehow that makes it way worse. Because that means it’s gotta be fuckin’ Wyndham who she’s talking about — Wyndham, and probably the damn Recorders. Rationing her food, rationing her clothes. Not teaching her anything about tools or weapons or units. Not letting her fly.

“That wasn’t — I wasn’t tryin’—”

“I know,” she interrupts softly — but at least she isn’t crying anymore; or if she is, the tears have slowed down. “Can we — can we just try something?”

He’d probably give her just about anything right now. Anything to make sure those tears stopped. He wants her crying, yeah, but not like this. He keeps fucking everything up. And for fuck’s sake, even just staring at the ghost of her reflection, she’s got to be the prettiest, softest thing he’s ever seen.

And she wants to stay. She really wants to stay. Or she thinks she does.

He hasn’t got any real reason to say no — other than the threat to her safety, which he can be selfish enough to ignore, even if it makes him feel like the worst fuckin’ lowlife to do so. More salient, though, is his own sense of self-preservation: how could he possibly believe she would really want to stay, could really be satisfied sticking around with a vicious, freakish, violent scumbag and his tiny, shitty little ship with his synthetic food and his microscopic shower stall?

But yeah. If he could have it his way? Oh, yeah. He’d keep her, all right. Nice and bundled up in his bunk, or perched on the copilot’s chair next to him. Fuck that — he’d keep her on his lap if she’d let him. On top of him or underneath him at all frickin’ times. He bet she’d be so nice to keep cuddled up against him while he piloted them through the beautiful and forever sky, her soft breasts squished up against the side of his face while she kept his dick warm in that silky, squeezing little pussy of hers.

“What do you wanna try, pearl?” he rasps out, his own breath clouding the glass. He already knows there’s a good chance he’s gonna agree. He owes her, he figures.

You’re so all alone out here, she’d said, big eyes all urgent and moonsilver-sweet. You looked out for me.

I’d like to have the chance to look out for you.

“Give me until you’re ready to leave Cyxlore,” she offers up. “Let me try to prove I can be useful—”

He’s already shaking his head. “You don’t gotta prove that, pearl, honest—”

“Then let me prove that I want to stay,” she says immediately, even though she doesn’t sound like he’s convinced her. Her voice is a little plea. “You can show me every reason you think I should stay there. And if you’re right — if I think I’d be happier there than out here with you — I’ll stay on the moon. I promise. But if I still — if I can show you I’m not useless, and if I still want to come—”

For fuck’s sake. She’s gonna shred him apart from the inside out.

“Then I’ll let you come,” he interrupts, his voice hoarse and rasping.

You begged to come, didn’t you?

He’s such an ass. He’s such an ass. But she only sinks somehow lower into the nook, tailbone curved, knees tucked up almost as high as her cheekbones. He suddenly wants to keep her like this: folded in thirds, squeezed tight and immobile, frog-tied in his bunk. Calves to thighs, wrists to ankles. Pretty little cunt all vulnerable and dripping for him.

“Thank you,” she whispers, and her voice is a soft stormcloud full of gratitude, ready to rain.

He pinches the bridge of his nose and groans, because he already knows this deal he’s agreed to is a mistake. Maybe one of the worst in either of their lives.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

my little babies. reaching an agreement of sorts. they make me so proud. we'll be spending some bonding time together over the next few chapters. we'll be making some new (old) friends as we move forward and starting our plot-plot arc around chapter eleven or so, so please bear with me. thank you so much for your ongoing support and your kind and encouraging words. they truly mean the world to me. you are tiny, perfect moonstones and opals and i appreciate you so much. i hope every meal you eat tastes exactly how you want it to, and brings you exactly the nourishment you need.

find expected posting schedules & chapter-previews on tumblr♡
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coming soon: chapter eight. keep.
summary: the monster dreams. pearl makes a den.
warnings: references to canonical medical trauma. as usual, rocket’s a degenerate.
estimated date: thursday, may second.

Chapter 8: keep.

Summary:

the monster dreams. pearl makes a den.

Notes:

warnings: references to canonical medical trauma. as usual, rocket’s a degenerate.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

keep. an important part of your personality that others seldom see—a secret flaw, a hidden talent, trauma that never comes up, dreams you never mention—that remains a vital part of who you are even if nobody knows it’s there, like the sprawling archives in the attics of museums, packed with works far too priceless to risk being displayed for the public. from a keep, the innermost tower of a castle. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

They sit for hours, peering out the starpane. The Monster is surprised when the feeling of being caged slowly drains away.

I’d like a chance to look out for you too.

She’s been trying to look out for him since he’d first broken into her little cage, hadn’t she? She might be as fragile as a promise — softhearted and too damn eager-to-please — but he’s gonna hang onto that whispered little silliness. Plant it in his heart like a stupid frickin’ flower.

He’d never asked that of L06 and A95 — protection. Shelter. They’d all three been too innocent — until they suddenly weren’t, until two of their little family had already been gunned down and the Monster had been on his own. He’d learned too quickly — on the streets of the Hub and Conjunction, on the Ravager ship — that no-one was looking out for him.

Maybe Lylla would have, even though he’d been responsible for — for all her misfortunes. Lylla had been good, and she’d loved the Monster in a way he’d never deserved. She probably would’ve tried to take care of him if he’d been able to get her out of the lab and off HalfWorld.

But he hadn’t.

And now, here’s Wyndham’s pearl, the only person in the whole damn universe who’s ever wanted to protect him. To look out for him and keep him safe.

She’d be shit at it, he’s sure, and he doesn’t want her to have to. But still. The thought is warm and flickering and unfurling behind his metal sternum: a little everbloom blossom, or a curl of flame on an ember he’d thought long-dead. Part of him rears back with the urge to crush it, to stomp it out, to whuff a mean laugh so hard and uproarious that the tiny flicker of life stutters into darkness.

But the other part of him — greedy, grasping, needy, pitiful — wants to collect that little coal under his warm palms, shelter it, feed it kindling and breath. Water the sprout, give it sunshine.

Whatever it takes to make it grow.

He battles with himself beside her, twitching tail and clenching fists the only sign of his conflict — but it must be enough, because after the first few handfuls of desperate minutes, her hand creeps tentatively over his. Her light, careful fingers walk across his knuckles in the starlight. He surges at first: fur rippling, nostrils flaring, ears flattening. But it’s just a touch: careful, hesitant.

Generous.

He’s suddenly reminded of her hands on his face in the Arete, trying to console him when she should’ve been going for his eyes.

So he forces himself to go still. Forces himself to let her fingertips stroke the scars and tendons on the backs of his hand, to not shudder when she treats him like his bones are glass and his skin is silk. He can hide the tremble in his mouth, except for how it dances out to the tips of his whiskers and makes them shiver.

The tightness curling his claws starts to ease.

And eventually, at some point, his quietness stops feeling like an act, like a shield. Instead, his heartbeat slows and his breathing goes easy, and he sits and waits in the blue-purple darkness till she starts dozing. Then he coaxes her back up the hatch, just the same as he had a rotation-and-a-half before: beckoning, folding her between his arms on the ladder, catching sight of the scratched soles of her feet and lamenting that he doesn’t have any shoes for her — just a tiny ship full of metal-grated floors and too-sharp edges.

He doesn’t think of it as tucking her into bed, but he knows he’s closer than ever to caving in when she reaches for him with a beseeching palm and asks him to join her. Instead he scoffs, and makes his way back to his pilot’s chair — a chair which, for the first time in his life, he’s starting to resent. He’d slept in it a hundred times before he brought her on board — but never so begrudgingly.

He should hope she decides to stay on Cyxlore. He should hope she realizes how much better life there could be for her. Then she could let him go — a little sad, maybe, but with a whole moonful of possibility laid out at her feet. If worse comes to worse, he could trick her — leave her behind anyway. Show his hand as a complete jackass. Then she could just be safe and happy and he could be—

Well, miserable and alone, he supposes. But that’s nothing new, and it’s safer — for both of them. And at least he won’t have another fresh sin on his conscience.

But if he holds onto his end of the bargain, and if she wants to stay after all — well. He’s got some thoughts about that. The first of which is obvious and degenerate, and the second or third of which is that he should teach her some basic life-skills shit.

So the next day, he has her sit next to him on the flightdeck while he flies. He does his best to explain how units and credits work, how they can be banked or transferred. Physical and digital formats. He hates to say it but Wyndham was right — she is a quick study. She watches him with big eyes like she can pick up any scraps of information he drops, just from the solemnity of her stare. Her lips form silent words: repeating things, he thinks. And she’s not just memorizing, either. The questions she asks and the comments she makes are all cross-contextual: she’s asking about macroeconomics in one breath and the cost of bread for a family on Sakaar in the next, muttering about the impacts of Kree and Shi’ar imperialism. It’s like she’s pinning every little note he gives her to some existing piece of knowledge — to more than one, actually. Wyndham’s apparently kept her up-to-date on intergalactic politics. The Monster supposes it was to make sure she’d never embarrass the revered High Shitbag at diplomatic dinner parties or some shit. Philosophy, ethics, art, literature — she’s tying down everything, tangling the new information with what she already knows until the Monster would guess it’s not only embedded in her quicksilver mind but also an easy-recall, which is — well, it’s fuckin’ clever, if he’s being honest.

They move on from money — for today, anyway — and he starts giving her basics on other things. It doesn’t take long for him to understand that Wyndham had kept her more frickin’ isolated than the Monster could’ve ever imagined. He runs her through a basic primer on space travel and ship fundamentals, how to access most planetary public transit systems as well as intergalactic transport till she can learn how to actually fly. He talks her through something she quietly dubs Safety 101, though he doesn’t understand the reference. And he tries to tell her about all the ways people will try to con her, try to take advantage of her.

Which invariably brings him to basic self-defense. He doesn’t have the space on the tiny runabout to run her through any real sort of sparring here — though his fucked-up brain automatically reroutes him to the swaying berth-style bunk where he’d be more than happy to grapple her into submission and let her try to squirm away. No — there’s no room for actual, legitimate practice here. But he can talk her through some basic guidelines: how to hold her fists, where to strike on most body types. How to aim a gun and squeeze a trigger; how to protect herself from the recoil.

“There ain’t any ethics when it comes to self-defense,” he tells her, his voice harsher than he means it to be. She’s not disagreeing: just listening to him with wide eyes, curling and uncurling her hands as she listens to him describe how to use her blunt humie fingers to gouge out a set of eyes, or ball them into fists for a good throat-punch. “If you can find their eyes, go for their eyes. Externalistic genitalia’s another good spot to aim. When you throw a punch, don’t aim for the body — aim through it, like you want your fist to come out the other side of ‘em. And look for anything that looks small enough that you might be able to rip it off — ears, tails.” He swallows. The more he talks, the less he wants to leave her to her own devices. She won’t have the heart for any of it, he thinks. “F’you gotta fight dirty to survive, do it,” he says, slashing his eyes off the starpane to hold her moonsilver gaze fiercely. “You only get to have your moralistic meltdown tomorrow f’you live through today.”

She doesn’t bat an eyelash and she’s staring at him too intensely for him to figure out what she’s thinking — if she agrees, if she’s willing to do what it takes to protect herself.

I could do it, she’d promised him yesterday, looking vaguely half-amused while he’d mocked the idea of her taking down a bounty, or shooting someone. The right person. The right reason. I could do it.

Well, she’d better be able to, he thinks. Whether she decides she wants to leave with him or stay on Cyxlore, she’d better be able to. He wants her shooting a quadblaster before he leaves her anywhere. Preferably something bigger, with more firepower. If she — supposing she wants to stay moonside — he could always leave her with his laser cannon, and pick up something better for himself later on down the line.

The truth is, it might be harder to leave her if she doesn’t convince him that she can take care of herself. He’s already got a migraine just thinking about it — this adorable little idiot who’s so afraid of hurting anything that she wants to go on a full-synth diet. Of course she’s not gonna be able to pull a trigger when she really needs to.

Maybe he should keep her with him regardless. Just so he can — just so he can keep an eye on her.

No, he reminds himself sharply. Everytime he gets that flicker of life in his chest, of hopefulness, he tries to smother it. Once she sees what Cyxlore’s like, gets a taste for the food and the clothes and the people and the freedom — no way she’s gonna want to stick around with him on his dim, rusty little runabout. He’s gotta remember that. He’s gotta keep the truth of it under his tongue and between his teeth.

He can’t afford to get attached.

That night, when she comes out of the shower — skin pink and damp — she’s fretting over fistfuls of dark curls.

“Do you have any scissors?” she asks him, so hopefully he’d think the galaxy hung in the balance. It puts a handful of gravel in his throat when he has to disappoint her.

“Nah, pearl.” He shrugs. “Got some blades for shrapnel-bombs. A few lasers for cutting metal and wire. What d’you need ‘em for?”

She tries to run her fingers through the wet wealth of hair. “I don’t have a comb,” she admits. “It’s starting to be a problem. I think I’m going to have to cut it.”

He swallows. He’d had a few spare, clean dental picks on hand, and polishing paste and rinse to spare for her teeth — but he hadn’t considered her hair.

“D’you wanna cut it?” he asks cautiously, ears tilting downward. She’d probably look like the prettiest little everbloom if she did — petals of curls falling riotously around her head — but he kind of hates the idea of her feeling like she’s got no choice. Again.

One corner of her mouth pinches together thoughtfully and she looks upward, like she’s trying to find the answers in her own eyelashes. “I don’t think so,” she admits, “but it wouldn’t bother me if I had to. It’s just hair.” Then — like a suckerpunch to the belly — she adds, “Doing anything with it at all, outside of Herbert’s rules, is nice.”

He swallows. “Don’t cut it, then,” he manages to utter casually, pretending to care about the plasma blaster barrel in his hands. He studies it, then tosses the whole thing on the workbench-bunk. “‘Least, not yet. Not if you don’t want to. Bet we can get you something on Cyxlore to keep it nice. Cyxlorades ain’t got hair, but they still got some of the best salonists in the quadrant. Maybe further. They like the texture of it.” He shrugs again. “Just sayin’. F’you wanna keep it long, just hang on a little while.”

She looks at him with something so grateful on her face that his throat gets even tighter than when he’d admitted to a lack of scissors. He clears it, and rolls his eyes.

“Now get over here.”

He gestures her to the bunk and — like a fool — tries to treat her wounds without his fingers shaking, without his lungs collapsing behind his ribs.

The frickin’ hubris, he thinks to himself, scowling. His mind reaches for something to latch onto — something to distract him—

“What — uh, what’re you doin’ in there, anyway?” he asks after a minute, trying to break the silence while he smoothes the cooling salve over her flesh.

She lifts her torso a little and cranes her neck to look back at him over one shoulder. “What?”

He winces. He sounds like an idiot, and it’s not a question he should be asking anyway. But as much as he’d like to imagine it, he doesn’t think she’s getting herself off in his little shower cubicle, and he’s never been able to back down after he’s already committing to asking or doing something fuckin’ embarrassing. So he clicks his tongue with feigned nonchalance and offers her an eyeroll. “You yelp everytime you get into the frickin’ shower. And then you’re — groaning the whole time you’re in there.”

A blush rises into the cheek he can see over her shoulder, and she shifts uncomfortably underneath where he’s kneeling on the backs of her thighs — wiggles under him, really. He bites back a hiss.

“The hot water’s nice,” she says at last. “I didn’t — I couldn’t—”

He feels his eyes widen. A growl rolls up his ribs before he can stop it. “You’re frickin’ kidding me.”

“I — what?”

“You’re telling me he didn’t let you take a hot goddamn shower either?”

She hesitates, then shifts back onto her belly and dips her head into the pillow, all soft and mounded up in her folded forearms. “It was — he said hot showers were unhealthy. For my hair and skin. He kept the water in my quarters regulated to within one-and-a-half degrees of my body temperature.”

The Monster doesn’t know why he’s surprised. He grunts, and refocuses on his fingers, trying not to think about how pretty she’d look under the hot spray and steam, and how much of a crime it is that she’d been deprived of that comfort for so long. Tries not to dwell on the growing realization that there probably isn’t a single thing Wyndham had let her just enjoy. So if the Monster takes a little longer than he absolutely has to — to soothe in the cream, to make sure every square-inch of bruising is slicked with it — he’s too distracted by a low-smouldering fury to feel guilty about it.

“I frickin’ hate that guy,” he mutters suddenly.

Her skin jolts under his fingertips and he pulls back, startled. She makes a little noise in the back of her throat and then buries her face into her pillow, shoulders shaking.

“Uh—” He reaches out uncertainly, not sure what to do from where he’s resting against her thighs. Is she crying again? “Pearl?”

Then she tilts her head, cheek pressed to the pillow, one moonsilver eye peering over her shoulder from under a riot of damp curls. She’s laughing. The relief punches him in the belly and he lets out a ragged huff of air.

“Me too,” she agrees breathily. He manages a snort, and hopes she can’t tell how close he’d been to panicking.

“Your — injuries — they’re lookin’ a lot better.”

It’s an awkward pivot in the conversation, but he wants her to know.

“Probably only need this salve for another three or four rotations,” he manages, glancing up to see she’s still watching him, one-eyed and bemused, her faint little kitten-smile in the corner of her mouth. “‘Cept for maybe on this one.” He hovers one finger carefully over the steri-strip he’s re-applied to the inch-long half-eight. It’s healing up quickly, but he wants that scar to be as faint as possible. He needs it to be as faint as possible. He imagines, again, the scoring across her lower belly, the peppering of punctures that are mostly out of his eyeline, on the front of her hips. He wants to ask to see them, to make sure they’re healing up — but it makes him feel like the worst kind of fuckin’ degenerate. He can barely take care of her ass without needing to go jerk himself off in the bathroom — there’s no way he’ll be able to survive anything else. He swallows.

“The — uh. The others lookin’ good?”

She nods, and it’s a little hard to discern from this angle, but then she says, “Oh yes, they’re fine.”

He tears his eyes from hers and sweeps the blanket back over her hip, knotting it carefully. “Not gonna scar?”

He’s only just leaning back when she shifts to look at him — rolling underneath him onto her side, so her thighs are twisted up under him and he’s looking right up under the damn t-shirt, watching the naked undersides of her breasts shift sideways obligingly. He recoils, tumbling right off her legs and onto the thin mattress next to them.

“Oh,” she says, startled, and reaches for him. “Sorry—”

“It’s fine,” he snaps. “I’m fine.”

He dusts himself up and flips the first-aid kit closed, and then he’s throwing himself from the berth-style bunk so hard that it sways behind him.

“You don’t have to leave,” she says, and her voice curls after him as he shoves the kit away — little beckoning fingers of sound, brushing the ends of his fur. “You should sleep in the bed tonight.”

For just a moment — for just the hundredth of a second — he almost forgets why he keeps saying no. Some part of him, tucked between his heart and his lungs, tries to pull his body toward her, like he’s a little scrap of cosmic garbage being tugged toward a star-spun singularity.

He hesitates. He’s already fucked her, after all — at his worst — and it hasn’t scared her off. He’s put his fingers on her almost every night. If he just curled up with her — just stole a little bit of that softness she seems to want to give him so bad — what could be wrong with that?

He swallows again, and this time he chokes — coughing, thumping himself square on the vibranium breastbone as she reaches for him.

He dances out of reach.

“Nah, pearl,” he rasps hoarsely, once the coughing has subsided. “When we get to Cyxlore, I’ll clear out the other bunk and get some extra linens and we can both be comfortable. If you decide to stick around, I mean. But for now, you just—”

“If — if it’s me,” she says softly, “I can sleep up there. Or something. I just hate—”

“It’s not you,” he cuts in sharply. It’s me. It’s me having already frickin’ hurt you so bad, and wanting to still crawl between those pretty thighs of yours. It’s me wanting to lick you all over to show you how sorry I am. “It’s not you,” he repeats, trying to soften the edges of his voice. “It’s just two more sleep-shifts, sweetheart.” He snorts. “I slept in Wyndham’s cages for the whole first part of my life,” he reminds her, and when she flinches, he tries to redirect. “Prisons, too. I broke outta like, twenty-some prisons at this point. And I slept in vent-shafts on the Ravager ship. This is nothing.”

“Twenty prisons?” she repeats with a squeak, and he pauses, a surprised grin curling the corner of his mouth. He hadn’t thought of sharing the lowlights of his life-story with her, but it might be worth trying to entertain her with them if he can hear more of those little squeaks of hers.

“Yeah. And then some.”

She hums, still looking displeased when he settles into the pilot’s chair, but he keeps it spun so he can look at her.

“You want a bedtime story, princess?” He tries to shuffle his smile into something closer to a smirk, watching her through slitted eyes. His lowlight-vision can lick her up while she only gets to stare at his shadowy silhouette, unable to pick out more than the fireside-glow of his gaze — and he’s more than happy to take advantage of it. He thinks again of her in the darkness yesterday, letting him lead her into the black shadows of the engine room. “Pick a number.”

She hesitates, eyes wide on him. “Uhm. Sixteen?”

His grin grows. Then he launches into the tale of his sixteenth prison breakout — he’d been trying to steal a planet, and had ended up dumped in the SecuriMax UltraPen 8000.

Also, he tells Wyndham’s pearl gleefully, known as The Colon.

“Walls were forty feet thick,” he tells her, gesturing with his hands as if he could possibly encompass forty feet. “Solid duranium.” He taps the side of his head. “Temp implants so they could fuck with the inmates — ‘specially programmed for each an’ every prisoner, with whatever would hurt ‘em most. ‘Lectrical shock, molecularistic acid, electromagnetical pulses — the works.”

She tilts her head at him, eyes wide. “Your bedtime stories are something,” she says mildly, and it’s so close to sass that he barks a laugh. He wants more of that, too.

“You got better?” he challenges, and she shrugs, her guilty little kitten-smile curving the corner of her mouth. He wants to lick her till she mews.

“No,” she admits readily, and sinks down into his blankets and his pillows again. So he tells her about his gaseous Unoxxian cellmate Qgaxbq-4, their time in the Hole, and his daring escape involving squid ink, a stolen electro-stylus, a couple repurposed temp implants, and Qgax’s containment suit. The last time he’d told anyone a story had been circs ago — Lylla, through the comms and then through the bars of her cage. He’d kept his voice gentle and tender, and the stories themselves had been carefully-chosen and re-crafted until they’d resembled something hopeful. But this time — halfway through, this time, he realizes he’s standing on his pilot’s chair, arms gesturing wildly: reaching across the sky like he could steal fistfuls of stars, mimicking explosions with all his clawed fingers stretched wide. For a moment, he feels the sudden buzz of self-consciousness under his fur, hot and flushed — but pearl is watching his silhouette against the starpane and flight-control-lights with big, shining eyes. She’s breathing out soft laughter at all the times he would’ve wanted her to, and looking nervous at all the right times too. And he can’t bring himself to stop, to reign it in. He’d never thought of himself as a performer, but here he is, getting too caught up in his own story to stop.

And by the time he’s able to bring his voice down and the tale ends with him back in a bar on Digriz, he can tell pearl’s eyelashes are heavy, and she’s struggling to keep them open.

And he wishes again that he could crawl into the bunk with her.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

His sleep is scythed away. The adrenaline’s already in his mouth before he even knows he was sleeping: slick and sour on his tongue, claws slashing, legs scrabbling. Up over the arm of the chair he goes, crashing onto his back as he scrapes himself hurriedly over the grated floor — lungs shuddering, heart heaving like a stone battered against his metal breastbone.

“Sh, shh — wait —”

He slashes the air — eyes swiveling, so panicked they’re painful in his skull. He can’t breathe, and he can’t swallow — and there’s blood in the air, iron-bright—

“Please — you’re going to hurt yourself—”

He crawls backward so fast that his heel comes down hard on his own tail, damn near pulling it right off his body before his spine slams against the metal wall under the flight controls. Cornered. He bares his teeth: fur bristling, ears flat.

He pants, trying to focus his attention, trying to find the threat. The lights brighten and he’s back in the lab: scalpels above — flashing silver — and the clicking of machines, of blades-on-blades. The hiss of lasers through metal and the grind of diamond-toothed saws through bone. And the lightning-ghost of pain through his wrists and his hips and his sternum and his ribs: all the places that have been broken and bent, reformed and replaced — all the bones split by screws — he recoils—

Then the lights dim again, and there’s a soft whisper, and careful footsteps that make him hiss. His eyes focus: a blanket fluttering, a few feet out of reach. Legs bending — a human woman on her knees, arms full. The metal wall behind him bites against the bolts and ports in his back. He snarls: an animal sound. His eyes are ready to kill, teeth sharp and bared.

She sits, head bowed and tilted, eyes averted and throat open.

And she waits.

He doesn’t know how long it takes before he realizes the breaths he’s hauling in aren’t only full of the bright sharp sting of his fear. Of course, underneath the smell of terror is his normal scent, everywhere: something evergreen, something smoky. The nuttiness of half-broken-down plastic explosives. There’s the earthy comfort of engine grease and the sparking scent of electricity, the tang of vibranium — all the familiar fragrances. He’s in his runabout. His home. His.

And then, layered delicately alongside it, too faint to have been here long: something soft and clear and sweet. Scent-memory triggers and for a second the only thing in his mind is the ripple of light on quiet canals, sunshine filling the delicate bowls of water lilies, droplets like wet jewels shimmering on floating leaves. His eyes lock onto the woman’s lapful of blankets, the bag of water and the metal straw tucked into one elbow. The lowered lashes, the tumble of dark curls.

“You’re safe,” she murmurs now, her eyes flicking to his and then carefully away. “You’re safe, and nothing can touch you here.”

His sternum hurts, and his ribs are tight — lungs both starved and swollen — but he knows where he is now, and he can drag the breath in over his teeth, force it down through the brachioles and into his alveoli. His chest starts to ease open and he relaxes his snarl — whiskers still twitching, ears still flat and defensive. Pearl. He keeps his teeth bared, one canine denting his lower lip: a warning.

She doesn’t stir or shift — not till his inhalations become more smooth, and his heartrate starts to slow. Even then, he leaves his teeth out. When she finally moves — just a little — it’s to shuffle on her knees and dart a careful glance at his chest, his mouth, then back down again.

“Hello,” she says softly. “Can I come under there with you?”

He stares at her. “What?” His voice rasps, almost as broken as he is.

She hesitates, and then leans forward to lay her bundle of blankets next to him, and the little bag of water and the metal straw. And then, right on her frickin’ hands and knees, she crawls underneath the flight controls with him.

She’s taller than him — too tall, like most baldbodies — and she has to curve and lean onto her side, listing toward him slightly to make sure she fits under the console. She’s not moving quickly — every motion is cautious and tentative — but it still takes too long for his brain to process. Before he can comprehend it, she’s tucked in beside him, soft and warm and smelling like those stupid waterlilies.

And blood.

His eyes find the four deep slices through her upper arm and he fuckin’ reels away at that.

“Pearl—”

“Shh,” she hushes, and somehow it’s not condescending at all. The sound is so soft he could hide in it. Then she’s piercing the water bag with the straw and handing it to him.

He can feel his eyes, still wide and wavering, roving over her face and the water bag and the view of the flight deck, the edges of the two bunks.

“Please?” she murmurs, big silver doe-eyes catching his. The water moves just an inch closer. “You should drink something. When you wake up like this. It’ll — ground you.”

She says it like she knows.

And maybe she does. He’d heard the half-drowned choking gasp that had startled her into consciousness the other day — seen the lunge that had sent the berth-style bed swinging.

He reaches for the water bag, and grimaces when his fingers tremble.

But she doesn’t seem to notice — as soon as he has the bag in his hands, she’s opening the bundle of blankets, tucking them around the two of them. He stares, brain fully short-circuiting, while she crafts what he can only assume is some kind of nest.

“I know it seems silly,” she huffs softly, furiously patting the wealth of blanket around him like she’s trying to make sure it’s soft enough, “but I swear it helps.”

He hesitates — adrenaline draining away in favor of absolute, undiluted confusion — and then hesitantly grips the straw with his teeth and takes a long draw of the water.

It is grounding. And he hadn’t realized how dry and cracked his throat is, how his tongue has stuck to the roof of his mouth in terror. But the water washes some of that away, along with the foul, sour taste of adrenaline and fear. He focuses on the feel of the cool slick plastic in his hand, the shape of the water clenched in his fist, and watches with blank baffled eyes as the pearl fusses and he finds himself surrounded by softness like clouds.

“I used to do this all the time in the Homonoia,” she tells him distractedly, and he’s slowly realizing she’s been whispering little inanities the entire time — just muttered comforts and quiet, consoling nothings. “I’d drag all those awful quilts and hard pillows off the bed and into the closet and sleep in the corner there. Being someplace small just sometimes feels safer. Your blankets are much better than the ones there, though—” and on she quietly chatters, giving him the soft nonsensical companionship of meaningless noise. His brain’s too thick and fuzzy to make sense of most of it — but he remembers her empty closet, and he thinks about her folding herself tightly into the deadspace behind the bulwark below the hatch.

And then when she’s done, she settles in next to him — close, but not touching — and curls onto her hip under the blankets, in the tiny den she’s made for them.

“What—” His voice splinters. “What is all this?”

She blinks at him, and then peers out onto the dim blue flightdeck like she’s trying to figure it out too. “A — cave?” she says doubtfully. But then she looks back at him, and something flickers in her eyes, then softens. He’s not sure how they get softer. “A little comfort while we’re down here.”

A noise curls out of his throat before he can stop it, before he even realizes it’s happening: too raspy to be a whine, too anxious to be a growl.

“Do you—“ She hesitates. “Do you want to talk about — whatever it was you were dreaming about?”

He scrapes the sound back into his lungs, and tries not to tense again. Never. Instead, he rasps out, “I made you bleed.”

Her face does something — lips twisting sideways, brows bowing uncertainly, and he feels like the biggest dick because yeah, he’d made her bleed, but it’s sure as hell not the first time. He tries to shift forward.

“We gotta get you patched up—”

Her fingers reach out and hook carefully on the fabric of his jumpsuit strap —just the most delicate little pinch of her thumb and forefinger, tugging carefully. He lurches to a halt, looking at her, whiskers twitching. Something inside him still feels desperate and frantic.

“We will,” she says softly. “But not right now. Stay with me.”

“I don’t — you don’t gotta—“

“We don’t have to do anything,” she intervenes gently. “We can just sit here for a minute and catch our breath. Nothing’s coming for us. Nothing’s watching us, or waiting for us.” She breathes out a little sigh. “Which is nice.”

His brain trips on that, and he lets out a shuddering breath — leaning back into the shadows and blankets, flexing his fisted fingers in the water bag. He eyes her wounded arm and is just… so fuckin glad he didn’t get her somewhere else. Her face, or her chest, or her soft bare belly. He presses his spine and all his metal buttons and bolts hard into the metal wall behind him, till the paneling bites him through the armored fabric of his jumpsuit and he can feel the cold seeping through to his twisted-up scars.

He takes another mouthful of water, and it does ground him. So then he takes another. Pearl’s still next to him, all warm satin and softness, and the blankets feel like safety even though he knows that’s stupid; knows they couldn’t protect him from anything. Still, the shudders of his nightmares fall off of him like dead leaves under their coolness and weight. He wants to lean into her, melt against her so badly he can taste it: bury himself in the quiet comfort of her body, like a home he could curl up in.

What would it be like to be held? he wonders, and then smashes that thought under a fist like glass. He tries to distract himself — latches his teeth onto a fragment of whispered ramblings from earlier. The words stumble out of him, drunk and half-broken.

“You said you — slept in the frickin’ closet? In the Homonoia?”

It doesn’t work. As soon as the hoarse words leave his throat, the bruised muscle in his chest thuds once against his metal sternum, aching. He can practically see it: her, all alone, quietly wrapped in the quilts and the darkness. What would he have done, he wonders, if he’d found her like that when he’d broken into her room?

Probably not stuck his dick in her tight little pussy, he thinks morosely. At least he hopes not, hopes he wasn’t that far gone on bitterness and rage.

But the pearl blanches at his question. “Did I?” She bites her lip — then shakes her head. “No. I wouldn’t sleep in the — that would be stupid.”

He stares at her, lungs aching and haunted, and then sighs and thumps his head back against the metal panel behind him. “You’re in luck. I’m not callin’ anyone stupid for their fucked-up sleeping habits tonight.”

She doesn’t say anything to that — just sits with him in the quiet. Everything feels sharp right now — everything except her and her damn blankets. But the water’s still grounding him — he swears he can feel it cooling every vein and cell in his body — and the shadows start to soften. The little plasma orb security lights stop stabbing his eyes, instead turning into blurred little haloes at the edge of the floor. He shifts — just a little — and watches in silent consternation as she tries to tuck the mounds of blankets closer to him, silently urging him to layer them between his body and the grated floor.

Long minutes creak by, broken only by the quiet hum of the ship. The vent system cycles on, and the security lights buzz softly, and the climate control purrs. When he finally speaks again, his voice is as quiet as he can make it, and he still makes himself jump.

“Saw — when I came down the other night. Down the hatch. Your knee was all bruised up.” He swallows, then takes another mouthful of water. Swallows again. The nerve behind his breastbone is still quaking and flushed: a twisted column of trapped moths and fire. “Saw bite-marks, too.”

She makes a small noise in her throat, and he holds still for another moment, waiting. But she only confirms it quietly. “Yeah.” Her voice is a little bird in the darkness.

He wonders why he’d even frickin’ brought it up. He doesn’t have anything to say — anything to offer her. He pictures her again, like the whisper of a ghost — cursed to the corner of the closet, sinking her teeth into her knee and trying to imagine she was anywhere else.

And now here she is, next to him, in a frickin’ den she’s built for him. He scrubs his long, narrow face into one dark hand, then muffles a bitter laugh: at himself, at the universe.

“You said that Arete meant excellence.”

She makes another small noise, shifting in her half of the blankets. He hesitates, then tugs at the soft quilts around himself. He should probably throw them off. Act like nothing’s wrong — tell her to get her ass into bed. He could keep himself busy — distract himself with tinkering. His brain is still skittering in his head like a little animal in an electrified cage, but he thinks maybe he can rig up a nonfiring practice-cannon for her, get her set up for some target practice as soon as they get moonside.

“Arete is the personification of excellence, yes. She’s the idea of someone… fully realizing the height of their potential. Or — uhm. A thing that perfectly fulfills its intended function.”

He doesn’t know why that hurts. His thoughts are still rattling in his skull: ricocheting, rippling with echoes of his memories. Maybe it’s the part where he knows that people and objects are interchangeable for Wyndham. Maybe it’s the ghost of everyone who’s ever called him a thing. Maybe it’s just that he knows he’s infinite lightyears away from any definition of excellence — scrabbly and horrifying and sewn-together and scarred, hiding under his own goddamn flight control console next to a gorgeous fuckin’ girl he’d just mauled a few rotations ago.

The Monster manages a pathetic little attempt at a snort. “Well, guess he fucked that up with me.”

He feels her turn her head a little toward him, but he still can’t look at her. He focuses instead on the curve of the flightdeck, the edge of the two bunks beyond. He narrows his eyes — hardens his gaze. Lets a sneer creep into the corners of his mouth and the spaces between his teeth.

“He wanted something beautiful and—” His sneer grows sharper. “—gentle, I think. Made me instead.”

“Oh,” she murmurs, and her voice flutters softly — startled, but quiet. “But you are.”

He flushes hot. He wouldn’t’ve thought she’d be so — fuckin’ mean, so cruel. He wouldn’t’ve thought she’d had it in her, but—

“I am what?”

She must notice that his voice has dropped into a growl — that every strand of fur is bristling with danger right now. He turns his head slowly to face her.

“I am what, exactly?” he repeats, the words a low threat.

She doesn’t back down though — nope. Not Sire’s Flawless Pearl — not this time. Instead, she hesitates, and then leans in a little closer.

“Beautiful,” she breathes out, like — like it’s something obvious. “And gentle — when you want to be.”

He knows his eyes are warning-red in this light, gleaming and glinting, sharp and slicing. He lets his eyes snick over every inch of her face: big, quiet-silver stare — soft, quiet-cornered mouth. The little purse of her lower lip, like she’s distressed. The curl between her brows.

Then he pulls back and thunks his head on the wall again. He’s too tired for this shit.

“Times like these, I can tell you ain’t got out much, pearl.”

“That’s not true,” she says suddenly — more sharply than anything that he’s heard out of her mouth before. He blinks, and casts his tired eyes at her sideways. She’s got a scowl on her face and if he wasn’t so drained and ashamed and worn-out, he might’ve found it amusing.

“I got out,” she tells him, frowning. “Quite a bit.”

He snorts. What a weird thing to get all offended about — right now, huddled up in the dark. “Uh-huh, sure—”

“Hey,” she says, brow creasing further. “Will you look at me, please? It’s important.”

He rolls his eyes as dramatically as he can when he’s hiding under a frickin’ flight control panel, and he slants another glance at her. “What?”

“I wasn’t allowed to do much. Or say much. Or,” she admits with a little twist at the corner of her mouth, like she’s embarrassed about it, “or be much. But I’ve seen all the races that Herbert thinks are his most beautiful, and his most gentle. He couldn’t bear not to show them off.”

She leans forward, and her fingers comb through the fur of his cheek before he’s even realized she’s brought her hand up. He jolts a little, eyes dropping from their sardonic sideways glance to widen in a way that he’s sure is almost comical. But then she’s turning his head toward hers so she can meet his stare — no longer avoiding eye-contact, not now that he’s out of his nightmares. Her silver-star gaze takes up his entire field of vision, and her mouth is suddenly just a soft breath away from his.

“And what I found out there, on Herbert’s favorite planets, was — limited,” she breathes. “Uniform.” Her fingers stroke over his cheek. “Millions of people who looked exactly the same, or who had been bludgeoned into subservience, or both.”

Her hand hasn’t moved from his face. The way each strand of fur shifts under her light touch sends a frisson along his skin — and it’s not pain. He suddenly wonders if anyone had ever touched him before. Certainly, he realizes abruptly — certainly not like this. He’d frequented the Ore Gardens, of course, but that had been — different. Paid-for, and never — never this impossibly tender. He almost closes his eyes in the shiver of it, wanting to pull it into his bones — but he can’t, can’t take his stare off her for even a second. If anything, he thinks his eyes get wider, desperate to drink in the feel of it. He wants to lean in so badly it hurts.

“You, though,” she whispers. “You are beautiful.” Those big gorgeous eyes of hers, framed in sooty lashes, are earnest and urgent. “And I’ve felt the way you’ve looked after my injuries. You are gentle.” Her brow creases. “And you’re so much more than both those things. You’re kind, and creative, and so smart I can’t even dream of keeping up with you. You’re — you’re your own person.” Her voice twists wistfully. “You’re the most your-own-person I’ve ever met, and I think it’s the worst thing in the galaxy that you don’t even like those parts of you.”

He swallows, and it burns. His throat is a vice. It must be the nightmares, he thinks. The nightmares sometimes close off his lungs and his throat and the valves of his heart. He tries to ignore the fact that he’d been calming down, that he’s been able to breathe for the better part of an hour at this point. He tries not to purr into her palm, snatch her hand in his and rub his face against it. His eyes, already bruised in their sockets, silver over again.

“Herbert thinking you were… less than… it doesn’t mean you were actually less than,” she murmurs, and the words stir the soft, short fur of his face, and the long whiskers at his cheeks. She’s so much closer than he’d realized. “It only means he was too much of a — of a coward and a dogmatist to see it.”

“You’re — lying,” he says, but his voice is crackling like twigs in a little hearth, and even he can hear how desperate he is to believe her.

Her other hand crawls carefully over the billows of blankets: fingers reaching, pulling, tugging. She wreathes her fingers into his, cautiously, and for a moment he’s too stunned to move, too stunned to tear himself away from her.

Stunned that she’d touch him like this — so willingly.

Stunned how badly he wants her to.

Yeah, she’d stroked the back of his hand behind the bulwark last night, but somehow he hadn’t let himself feel it quite the same way—

“Herbert wanted to keep you feeling small and unworthy because he thought it would keep you docile,” she whispers. “I know, because I know.” She bites her lip, and squeezes his hand — so carefully, like she’s afraid of hurting the small bones inside. He remembers she’d said, I had a bird, and he wonders if she’d held it cradled carefully in her palms and stroked each tiny feather with the same careful delicacy she’s using to touch him now — like she’s made a home for him in her hands.

“He can’t have something under his foot without wanting to grind his heel in,” she says softly. “Don’t — don’t do his work for him.” Her words become a wobbly murmur. “You are good. You’re so good.”

“You don’t know,” he manages to spill out, sentences suddenly tripping over themselves, flooding up and ripping out of his mouth like a levee has broken, deep at the base of his throat. “You don’t know everything I done. You don’t know I’m worth—”

Worth all this. Worth this kindness — this soft-edged, half-dreamed watercolor-comfort.

Worth anything at all.

“I do,” she whispers into the quiet flicker of the flight control lights, and all the dark blue-velvet shadows. “I know it.”

Her fingers stroke over the back of his hand — the whiskers above his claws. He quivers under them. Her hands stay on his wrist and his face, but it feels like she’s using the softest fingertips to write the words gently against the inside of his heart:

You’re so good. I know it.

“You’re lying,” he says again, but the words limp over his teeth, fractured and more uncertain than anything he’s ever let leave his mouth before.

She says nothing out loud. She only shakes her head, very slowly and deliberately, and never takes her moon-gray eyes off his.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

He loses track of time. At some point, he supposes, she must let him go. They sit in the quiet den she’s made to share with him — made to take care of him, some part of him thinks. He’s not ready to face the fact that he’s never come down so quickly from the nightmares before — that he hasn’t pulled out any of his fur this time, or made himself bleed. He’d cut her, of course — and isn’t that just like him, to make someone else hurt when it should be him? — but it could’ve been worse. It could’ve been so much worse.

Instead, he distracts himself by listening to her tell him about a time the Recorders had carted her off to Xeron — another one of the High Evolutionary’s little projects. Lab 34, Eirene, the pearl says. Xeron’s got a major orloni problem, and one of the little lizards had somehow gotten up in Theel’s robes. She gestures wildly, then tries to mimic Theel’s face — and then Vim’s, and then Wyndham’s. The Monster is snickering before he realizes it, something breaking open in his chest and scattering across the floor like a shower of unstrung pearls.

“What’s next?” she asks him softly, trying to make herself comfortable, huddled up on the floor with him. He knows he should tell her to go to bed, should get them both out of this absolutely stupid little nest, but if he’s being honest — well, he hates being honest, but right now she’s so close that whenever either of them move, he can feel the slightest brush on his fur and he has to stop himself from shivering. And she’s right — it feels safe down here — which is stupid, of course. But he doesn’t want to leave, even though having her so close—

Well. Without her fingers lacing lightly through his fur, the spaces between each strand feel empty.

“What do you mean?” he rasps, calling up the image of Theel making an ass of himself in front of his beloved Sire. He smirks again and bites off the end of a mean chuckle. He’ll be imagining that for a while, whenever he needs a laugh.

“After Cyxlore. On — Fron. Or wherever.”

He tilts his head and lets his eyelids drop to half-mast. “S’pose it depends on whether or not you end up comin’ with me after all.”

Her face whips toward his, curls flying, and her eyes are huge on him. “I’m coming with you,” she says, already half-desperate, like she thinks he’s about to skip out on their deal. Which isn’t unheard of — the Monster has fucked over plenty of people he’s had deals with before — but if he’s being honest, he thinks the only way he wins in this situation is if she sticks around. He shuffles himself under the blankets, looking around this stupid frickin’ den she’s built, and yeah. He’s certain of it.

“Okay, okay,” he says mildly, and lets himself lean into her — just a little. “So after this — I don’t know. Collect some bounties on the way to Fron. Can’t really plan that sort of thing ahead of time — have to figure out what jobs are up for grabs as we go. I want us to be able to pick up everything we’ll need before we even get out to the Thneed system. And then we still gotta decide whether we wanna live on the outskirts of a Fronnish settlement, or try to survive on our own, out on one of the ice fields or in the mountains. There’s risks to both — you know, being with people or not.” He shifts uncomfortably. “People don’t — tend to like me much.” He clears his throat and looks away when she makes a hurt little noise. “Anyway, uh. Then we’ll hang out there till Wyndham forgets about us. After that —” He shrugs.

Her eyes search his, and then something in her face eases. She settles in next to him — her face a little closer, braced on her side and elbow next to him, trying to cushion the hard point of her arm on a triple-layer of blankets to protect it from the grating. He should get mats on the floors, he thinks. Even if she doesn’t stick around — for nights like this, when the nightmares are bad, mats on the floor would be good.

He could maybe — he could maybe keep a stack of blankets down here. He doesn’t deserve the comfort, perhaps, but he wants it, especially when he’s two hours into a panic attack and on the verge of passing out.

“After that?” she prods, and he just shrugs again.

“I dunno, pearl. I never got that far.”

“Mmm,” she acknowledges softly, resettling again. “So… if the universe were perfect… and if Herbert were gone…”

He turns his eyes to her and she’s already waiting to catch him, silver eyes deep as starry lakes.

“...and if you had everything you needed, what would you do?”

He always keeps the memories behind his makeshift metal collarbones, but when they suddenly rise up inside him, there’s no room for breath. The desire to tell her everything bubbles up in his chest: about his first, loneliest days, crying and in pain. About the arrival of A95 in the neighboring cage, and L06 in his own. His brother and sister, and the way the three of them used to dream.

He can feel his eyes silver over again, and he looks away and clears his throat. “I don’t think it’s worth spending too much time thinking about — if the universe was perfect, pearl.”

She tilts her head, eyeing him. “Maybe not,” she concedes. “But—?”

He swallows around the ghosts in his throat. “Wish I had a drink,” he finally rasps out. “Trade me. You go first.”

A wistful half-smile curves in the corner of her mouth. “I’ve always wanted to see an Acanti migration. Have you ever seen one?”

Something unexpected nudges its way across his face — a real grin, not a sneer or a smirk or a snarl — and it loosens some of the tightness in his chest. Of course that’s the kind of shit she’s thinking about. “Once or twice.”

She hums a satisfied little note. “That’s what I would do.” She slants a gray glance at him, and it’s got that tentatively-playful sparkle he’s starting to become addicted to, the little kitten-smile hiding in the corner of her mouth. “I’d make you take me to see an Acanti migration.”

He barks out a laugh before he can stop himself. “You’d have to make it worth my time, sweetheart,” he drawls before he thinks better of it — and before he even realizes what he’s said, her playful look drops away and she’s staring at him with big luminous eyes, mouth parted and cheeks bright pink. And fuck, before he can sweep his mind in the other direction, he’s imagining it now: her warm, blushing cheek pressed into the fur against his thigh, lips glossy and open for him.

“I would try,” she offers uncertainly, her face just glowing brighter and brighter, pupils blooming wide right as he watches.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, he thinks. Fuck.

I know you said I wasn’t good for you, he suddenly remembers her saying, big-eyed and bruised on the floor of her pretty cage — and I’m sorry.

He hates to think he’s given her some sort of complex because she sure as hell doesn’t deserve that, but at the same time, imagining her just — trying so hard to please him? Him?

He’s twice as grateful for the blankets in his lap now.

“Uh, my turn,” he says hoarsely, and he isn’t sure if it’s an escape or not — not when the only thing he has to share is a dream from when he’d been a child in a cage of his own. “I guess — if everything was good — I’d just focus on building shit. Inventing things. Making ships — bigger than this one. I’ve got ideas, actually — for ships that can navigate the jumps better—“ Her eyes are so big and shiny and watchful, that same look she gets when she’s peering over the makeshift workbench on the other bunk. He gets lost in it: the silvery glow of her admiration. He can feel his chest puffing a little bit. The skin around his metal collarbone tugs a little when his shoulders broaden. Without thinking, he starts describing the design, etching imaginary blueprints onto the air in front of them.

“Have you always wanted to do this?” she asks softly, and he nods without thinking.

“Doubt I’ll ever have the units for it,” he admits. “Not to do it the way I want, anyway. But yeah. I always wanted —“ He chokes abruptly, suddenly back there: perched on Sire’s knee, staring out at the beautiful blue. Trying to describe it to A95 and L06 later. And later — so many circs later — describing it to Lylla, over comms. Trying to tell her all the places he’d take her. “I used to look out of the Arete,” he says — without even meaning to. The words just come up and spill out, wild little animals he can’t get control of. “I’d watch the rockets he was sending out. I’d daydream about ‘em. How they’d work. How the parts fit together. Ignition. Take-off. How they’d handle. Sometimes, during the surgeries — that’s where I’d go. Lose myself in how I thought a frickin’ fusion-engine should work.”

He hears the tremor in her breath. “You were awake for the surgeries.”

It’s a statement, not a question, and he winces. He’d gotten too comfortable, too loose with his words. “Yeah.”

She leans in closer to him and he goes still, because now the curve of her breast is pressed against his upper arm.

“I’m glad you had them to help you,” she says quietly, and he jolts for a minute, thinking he’d mentioned L06 and A95. But no, he’s sure he hasn’t —

“The rockets,” she clarifies, reading something in his face that has her brow creasing. “It sounds like they were — lodestars for you.”

He blinks, and stares at her, mouth dry. “Yeah — yeah, I guess—“

You should find something that makes you happy. Take it for yourself, for your name.

Let yourself be reminded of it whenever anyone calls you by it.

He sucks in a breath and stares at her as the words click into place like little pieces of metal, snapping together to form a key. He’s suddenly drowning in the urge to roll into her, grab a fistful of her curls and pull her head back so he can nuzzle into the sides of her throat, licking and nipping and losing himself in the scent of her, the softness of her. Pin her underneath him on all the blankets she’s wrapped around them and worship her.

She gives him her shy little kitten-smile.

“After all this is over, we’ll find a place where you can build ships,” she tells him softly. “And then—” her voice tilts with just that little, hesitant touch of mischief, “—you can take me in one of them to see that Acanti migration.”

Another sharp, startled laugh bursts out of him before he can contain it, and he just barely manages to bite back a second suggestive comment. She’s smiling beatifically, curls faintly haloed in the multicolored glow of the control-panel lights, and she’s looking so damn pleased that she’s made him laugh that he still can’t find it in himself to tell her to get back into bed.

The result is that she doesn’t, and time drifts in and out like an Aladnan tide: lapping slow and content at his senses, with little rockpools full of alien starfish and gold-minnows when she shares a quiet question or soft comment.

They both end up dozing under the flight controls. Once, he wakes up to find her listing toward him. Without thinking, he pulls her in — more for his own sake than hers, because when she mumbles out a half-nibbled word of protest, he tugs her head into his lap and slides both of his hands into her hair, stroking and petting. His sleepy fingers find the tangles she’d been lamenting earlier and, like they’re silken snarls of wiring inside a delicate little bomb, he instinctively unlaces them while he drifts in and out.

He can’t get over how silly it is, but yeah, he still feels safe — here and now, with the pressure of pearl’s body leaned up against his, anchoring his thighs to the ground. She tethers him to the soft, shadowy den in this place and time, far away from the harsh lights of the lab and the growl of the incinerator — just by the waterlily scent of her body, and the warm, quiet weight of her hair in his lap.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

sorry i am delayed by a day! i had to work a super-long day yesterday and wasn't able to get home at a reasonable hour. on the plus side, i'm trying to update every week this month, i think, so... yay? as always, thank you for your kind words, your support, and your encouragement. i am so grateful for the time you've spent with me on this wild little journey so far.

oh, i almost forgot to mention that rocket’s bedtime story is his prison break in The Blue River Score (2017) comic arc.

find expected posting schedules & chapter-previews on tumblr♡
here's the masterlist & moodboard♡ (which includes forecasted schedules and summaries for quite a few chapters in advance)

coming soon: chapter nine. mal de coucou.
summary: pearl and the monster make landing-plans. pearl gets a massage from her survivor.
warnings: description of hand surgery/butchery. massages and the resulting fantasies.
estimated date: thursday, may ninth.

Chapter 9: mal de coucou.

Summary:

pearl and the monster make landing-plans. pearl gets a massage from her survivor.

Notes:

warnings: description of hand surgery/butchery. massages and the resulting filthy fantasies.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

mal de coucou. a condition in which you have an active social life but very few close friends—people who you can trust, who you can be yourself with, who can help flush out the weird psychological toxins that tend to accumulate over time—which can eventually progress into a state of acute social malnutrition, where even if you devour an entire buffet of chitchat, you’ll still feel pangs of hunger. French mal, ache + de coucou. Coucou is a French colloquialism for “Hey there!” Mal de coucou is a riff on the term mal de caribou, also known as rabbit starvation, in which you can starve to death even with unlimited access to lean meats like rabbit and caribou, after eating an excess of protein and not enough fat. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Neither pearl nor the Monster stir until halfway through the first wake shift — and luckily for himself, the Monster rouses first, which means he has time to wrestle his stupid fuckin’ body under control. Making pearl sleep with her head in his lap had seemed like a good idea when he’d been half-unconscious last night, but waking up with his hands tangled in a sea of curls and her pretty mouth an inch from his dick is most certainly not.

Still, he doesn’t move — not other than to slide palmfuls of her silk hair away from her face. Not even when his left foot starts to fall asleep. Not till she starts stirring on her own, and then he makes a show of stretching and yawning right along with her, grumbling complaints the whole time. She spills big-eyed apologies and scrambles to fold up the blankets, and he immediately wishes he knew when to shut the fuck up.

It’s after he gets the coffee-maker running and they’ve both quietly swallowed some handfuls of auroch and leftover lyophilized berries that the pearl starts finger-combing her curls. He can tell the second she realizes how his restless hands have spent the night. Her gaze flies to his and he glares as meanly as he can.

Don’t say a frickin’ word, he thinks at her. It must work, because she doesn’t. Her moonsilver eyes get all wide and trembly, and she offers up that kitten-smile like a willing sacrifice.

Mentally, he takes it, and puts it in his pocket, and runs. But on the outside, he only rolls his eyes and gives her his back, scoffing.

Sentimentalistic moron, he thinks, though he’s not sure if he means pearl or himself.

They’re still on track to get to Cyxlore early in the next rotation, even if it’ll be a few hours later than he’d originally planned. He spends the morning taking apart an old quad blaster and repurposing it while he keeps an eye on the autopilot, talking pearl through more firearm knowledge while he creates a harmless training cannon. It should still handle like a regular blaster — he’s rigged it to approximate a real recoil, too — and he programs a training holoprojection that he can sync it to. By dinner, he’s got it finished, and he’s walking her through how to use it so he can have her try it out once they get moonside.

“You’re going to have to eat more if you’re sticking around,” he tells her in between the talk of firearms. “You can’t just not-eat forever, and I know you humies need more than what you’re taking.”

She chews her lip. “I just — don’t want to be an inconvenience,” she says nervously.

He glares at her. “It’s gonna be way more of an inconvenience when you pass out somewhere,” he grunts — but he’s gratified when she takes an extra two strips of auroch and more seaweed than usual.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

The rest of the wake-shift goes smoothly. No more surprise mechanical issues, no more misunderstandings — at least as far as pearl can tell. The survivor quizzes her about some of the things they’d talked about in the earlier part of the day and the rotation before: units and firearms, spaceships and self-defense. He seems surprised by how much she’s able to recall, which gives her a warm little buzz of endorphins that she tries to squash down. She doesn’t want to fall back into the same habits she’d had those first few years with Herbert: desperate for praise, and blind to everything but his approval.

Instead, she asks about the ships that the survivor is going to build — someday, when all this is over.

He seems startled by the questions, and she can read his hesitation the first few times he answers — like he doesn’t trust that day will ever come, and like he can’t quite figure out why she’s asking. Eventually, though — when she figures out how to take the stubbornness that she has dedicated so long to survival, and channel it into asking about him instead — he gets lost in sharing the sparkling sprawl of his ideas with her. It’s an hour or two of just listening to him sketch out his thoughts like a story, painting invisible imaginary ships on the sky in front of them. He takes a page from her own book, making blueprint-constellations in the stars.

“Wanna see if I can find an abandoned Dreadnought somewhere, harvest it for parts,” he tells her when he’s finally winding down. He pauses then, squinting one eye at her. “You don’t got a clue what a Sovereign Dreadnought is, do you, sweetheart?”

There’s a pause while she orders her thoughts. She’d gone adrift in the almost-narrative quality of his dreams, in the way she’s been able to see them unfold like a story, like little premonitions. She drags herself back, pulling together the pieces she’d lost to his intensity and excitement. Sovereign, she thinks. She remembers the holodocuments she’d read as part of her official training to become Herbert’s wife and ambassador — and the eons-old lab notes she’d stolen access to. She feels her smile quirk the corner of her mouth. “I do, actually,” she confesses. “They were mentioned in my approved studies. A later invention — after the Light Brigade, but before the Omnicraft. The Sovereign call them Gold Captains, I think, but they don’t tend to fly the ships themselves. They have quite a long history of outsourcing any risk of death.” That last bit had not been from the approved studies — a bit of knowledge she’d picked up after Herbert had executed the maid, when pearl had been frantic with confusion and fear. She’d broken into the databank of Herbert’s old lab records and found — everything. All of his abandoned, decimated worlds, all of his flawed experiments.

Had found, and had learned exactly how high the price of disobedience could be.

But her survivor doesn’t have all that context, and pearl keeps the faint and uncertain smile in the corner of her mouth. His jaw drops — just a little, for just a second — and then he rolls his eyes theatrically. “Figures Wyndham would have his little fiancée studying intergalactic military history and not knowing what units are,” he mutters. “Gotta know how to talk during all those fancy diplomatic dinners, huh, princess?”

She lets a soft chuckle roll out of her lungs. “Well, yes, I suppose that’s part of it.” Being a refined sort of artistic entertainment for people Herbert wanted to impress or overwhelm — or being furniture, silent and unmoving. Those were the things Herbert had wanted of her. The figurehead, the statuette, the obedient ambassador-bride: clever enough to converse with him, but not so clever as to have a thought of her own.

The survivor only scoffs, and carries on: describing a hundred minor alterations he’d make to a Sovereign Dreadnought. He’s fascinated by the Gold Captains, she realizes — infatuated. It charms her: the way his eyes gleam appreciatively, and he looks like he’d kiss a ship like that, if he could. He describes the way he imagines they handle, as if it were a living thing he could seduce. She gets lost in his words all over again.

Eventually, the conversation slides into other inventions the survivor has dreamed up. Every mental draft and diagram seems to have been born, fully-formed, in his mind’s eye — like Athena springing from Zeus’s forehead. He’s talking about physics in what Herbert would have described as gutter slang, and then waxing poetic about developing a new protective plating to better resist jump-point wear-and-tear. He’s almost singing songs about advancing UNTN-compatible powertrains through unconventional methods, and then trying to describe mental schematics for ship-components that spin to cultivate and harness artificial gravity, allowing for travel through regions that are normally avoided due to time-dilation complications. Forget the classic yoke and throttle: the survivor’s ships will respond almost presciently to the nuanced guidance provided by more intuitive, full-body steering mechanisms. He imagines ships with six separate fuel tanks, and injectors that can calculate proportions to burn more efficiently when traveling through various types of matter and antimatter, and he talks about them as lovingly as if he’s describing a mountain sunrise or a sea of stars.

Pearl rests her chin on her fist and watches him with a curve in her mouth and — she’s sure of it — her heart in her eyes. How can she help it? He’s fascinating to listen to: his fingers splayed and then curling to grasp fistfuls of sky, hands sweeping over the entire range of the starshield, plucking concepts out of the air with dark-clawed fingers. She’d gotten a taste of his storytelling the night before, describing his escape from the UltraPen 8000, and she’ll never let it go again if she can help it. She’d called him beautiful when they’d been under the flight controls, but she’s starting to suspect he becomes lovelier every rotation. Right now, his eyes are as red as live coals, and so bright that she’s surprised sparks don’t snap and flare every time he blinks. He’s got a voice like a handful of paper-wrapped silver-fulminate pebbles: whispery and rasping in her palm; biting and cracking under pressure. His ears flick and swivel and his whiskers twitch with every sentence, and his tail lashes and ripples along with his words. He laughs — truly laughs — on three separate occasions: once as a derisive cackle, and the other two times in a startled burst of mirth at something she’d said but can no longer remember. All three times, the sound has been bonfire-bright, and she’d reveled in the crackle of it — reveled even more in how he’d looked startled by the laughter himself.

When she gets out of the shower before bed, squeezing the water from her curls into the shower — mostly tangle-free, now, thanks to his clever hands — she finds him pensive again. He’s perched on his seat in the flightdeck, looking out at the expanse of stars slowly sweeping past them. He doesn’t look away from them, but she can see his ears following her as she moves through the little hold. Something about the moment tugs at her: tapping on her heart, gently plucking at the ends of her hair. Telling her to be still, just for a second.

She pauses. She takes him in: gilded with the rainbow and platinum lights of the flight controls — the rose and blue light of the stars. The snugness and coziness of the cluttered little runabout: the swinging berth-style beds, and the crushed-purple curtains that have never been pulled. The softness of the blankets and the shadows and the little plasma orbs, the thin scent of the recycled air and the survivor’s sludgy coffee still in the coffee maker.

She wishes she could live in this moment forever.

He speaks, and his voice slides raspily into the strange, shimmery liminal space she’d let herself linger in.

“You figure out a name yet? For when we’re on Cyxlore?”

She shakes her head before reminding herself that he can’t see her from this angle, then hurriedly goes back to blotting the water from the ends of her hair. “No. I haven’t really thought about it,” she admits, and she’s not sure why it makes her so apprehensive. Maybe because it’s another choice, one that seems even more fraught than trying to pick a planet to live on.

He clears his throat and twists a little in his seat, gazing at her over his shoulder with one perfect, red-amber eye.

“You told me to pick something I liked, and name myself after it. Maybe you should take your own frickin’ advice.”

His voice is striving for lightness, and she smiles and ducks her head before carefully tucking her damp towel into the laundry-wash locker. “Well,” she reasons, straightening and starting to drift toward him. It’s almost unconscious, like he’s got his own field of gravity and she’s caught up in it, just a little moon or a flaring meteorite. “I don’t know exactly what I like yet. Which makes it difficult.”

He grunts, eyes latched onto her as she floats forward. “Still feels kinda shitty, calling you pearl,” he says. She can see his lips curling a little in a fleeting little flinch that she doesn’t quite understand. “Knowing Wyndham said it like a fuckin’ insult.”

She shrugs, watching him curiously as she weaves closer. “I’m starting to like it, I think.” She pauses consideringly. “When you call me it, anyway.” For a half-second, it looks like a shiver ripples his fur, and her brow creases in concern. “What—”

“Well,” he interrupts briskly — and something about it sounds rushed, like he’s trying to slide his words into her question, to prevent it from escaping her mouth. “Can’t call you pearl out there.” He gestures vaguely toward the starshield and quirks a brow. “Wyndham’ll pick up on it too quick.”

She hesitates. “What do you want to call me?”

Those incandescent eyes of his widen, then narrow and flicker like firelight in a hearth. His brow creases, then twitches, and his nose flares — he licks his tongue over his teeth and she can see him test the point of one sharp canine with the end of it, like that bright spot of pressure is some kind of anchor she doesn’t understand.

“It’s gotta be somethin’ you like,” he says abruptly, sharply.

She shrugs and feels herself being reeled further through the hold, onto the flight deck, barely an arm’s length away from him — then, close enough to touch. “It also has to be something that feels natural to you,” she points out. “Maybe a — maybe just call me those other nicknames, like you usually do.”

Sweetheart. A litany of others she can’t really recall. Even though he’s just mocking her with them, she thinks she’d like to layer them into the blankets and pillows of the bunk: bury herself in the warmth of them, wrap them around her.

She can feel the blush rising in her cheeks so she looks down instead, avoiding his eyes and plucking on the hem of this new t-shirt instead. Lux-Crystal Fantasy Music Festival. Below, in smaller letters: Inix 18153K520+1651R12. By the time she dares to look up, his stare is on the shirt too, eyes hooded and dense with embers. He drags his gaze reluctantly from the Kree letters emblazoned across her chest, up to her own wide eyes — then offers a lazy roll of his shoulders.

“You want me calling you little pet names in public?” he drawls. His voice is almost casual — almost lazy — and it curls a little gold spiral in her belly, like a heating coil made of bright nickel. She gives him a helpless half-shrug of her own.

“Could try to stick to one of ‘em,” he muses. There’s something syrupy in the way he says it, his voice thick and heavy and low. “Doll, maybe.” His eyes slant down to the shirt, then up again to her. “It’d be easy to remember that.”

Then something shutters in his face and he swallows, twitching his eyes away from her. “Can switch it up, f’you don’t like it.” His lip curls abruptly and he grimaces. She can see the furrow in his brow, and she wants to soothe it with a careful thumb when he mutters, “Don’t want you to feel like — I know Wyndham treated you like some kinda fucked-up trophy and I don’t wanna act the same way—”

She’s close enough to touch him now, so she takes the risk and does it, because she can’t bear that thought taking up any space in his brilliant mind. Her fingers flutter over the crown of his head, and she feels him jump — and then go still, utterly unmoving under the light brush of her hand. She wills her touch to be as soft as snowflakes, and then she draws a careful curve under his chin. She’s startled when he lets her — and maybe he is too, because his stare is suddenly wide and simmering when he looks up at her, all that hooded languorous laziness evaporated into something heated, but almost vulnerable.

“You’re not him,” she tells him softly. “Nothing you do or say feels like him.”

His eyes flare wide — and then his lids lower again, halfmast over two setting-suns: molten and scarlet and languidly burning. Her own body suddenly heats from the inside-out in what feels like a pure call-and-response: her heart a flickering gold-haloed flame to match his eyes, and every part of her softening like candle-wax for him. She’s sure that she’s translucent and luminous and warm to the touch — probably for the first time in her life.

She tilts her head. Opens her mouth to say something — she’s not sure what — and then closes it again.

“What, pearl?” His voice is as unhurried and enveloping as his stare: midnight bonfires and woodsmoke. A little shiver runs the ribbon of her spine, from the delicate wings of her shoulderblades right down to the hollow of her back.

Then he corrects himself, the curve of his mouth tilting upward.

“I mean – doll.”

She jerks her eyes away from his, the heat suddenly tightening in her stomach, blinding-white and scintillating.

“Uhm, I don’t—”

She steps backward, toward the bunks. Her thoughts rattle in her head: scattered glass beads, luminous and iridescent, rolling and colliding against each other. She tries to swallow.

“I’m not sure — I don’t know what I was going to say,” she whispers. “Did you — uhm. Do you have something you want me to call you?”

The predatory look in his eye softens, and he leans back in his chair. “I guess I do,” he says quietly, flicking his gaze back to the flight controls and then up out the starshield. He pauses, then clears his throat. “We’ll meet up with Sanna Orix while we’re there. Think I mentioned ‘em before. They’re a Cyxlorade merchant — clothing and luxury shit — could offload a pearl or two.”

Her eyes widen and she startles a step backward, the chill already settling into her skin; his eyes catch hers and he suddenly flips up his palms like he’s trying to calm a skittish animal. “Not you, pearl, for fuck’s sake.” He reaches into the pouch at his pocket and pulls out a few of nacreous little jewels — from her necklace, she realizes abruptly. She’d been so shaken, that night on the Arete — she’d never even thought to take the jewelry. Foolish, really. Instead, she’d been fixated on that stupid, evil hairpin—

“Think even just one of these should get us both set up in enough gear to keep us warm on Fron,” the survivor is saying. “Get you some new—” He breaks off with a choking sound, then resumes. “Some new everything, I guess.” He rolls the little round gems back into his pocket and fusses with the closure, and she can’t help but feel like he’s suddenly avoiding her eyes. “Restock our food supplies, get some other — things. Fix up the runabout a little. I wanna trade her in for something more reliable before we get out to Thneed, but Cyxlore ain’t generally the best place to look for a new ship.”

She tries to create the half-curve of her smile, but it feels faltering: uncertain, and wobbling on her mouth. Her heart is still racing. Could offload a pearl or two. She doesn’t know what she’d been thinking, why she’d been so stunned and — and scared, for just a second. She swallows down hard on the beat of her heart, the tightness of her ribs around her lungs.

Be normal.

Focus, she tells herself. She tries to peel apart the words. She tries to pick up the pieces of her voice, strained and limping, but he intervenes before she can say a word.

“Pearl,” he says, and his voice is low and slow — far more patient than she might have imagined from him. “M’not gonna try to leave you somewhere.” He swallows. “Not unless you tell me you want it. We made a frickin’ deal.”

She feels her shoulders collapse, imploding like one of Herbert’s unloved planets. It’s less like relief — though that’s there too, in small and thread-fine amounts — and more like simply being too overwhelmed to hang onto the sudden anxiety.

“Okay,” she whispers.

The corner of his mouth tugs downward and he squints one eye at her — the face he makes when he’s trying to tell if she’s lying — but she just repeats the word.

“Okay.”

He stares, scrutinizing, and then whuffs out a lungful of air. When he speaks again, it’s quiet. “The point is, Sanna Orix has kinda named me already. They call me Stranger.” He licks his tongue over his teeth and pulls another face. “Rather you didn’t frickin’ call me that, though.”

“I’d also rather not call you that,” she manages to confess, though the words still hurt in her throat. He’s not a stranger, after all, she reminds herself — one more reason she should have known better than to be so alarmed. He’d agreed. He’d said he’d let her decide. He won’t take that from her. She tries to funnel her attention into his words. Her brows tilts. “So what should I call—?”

He catches her eyes with his and holds them: so focused and intent that her breath catches in her throat — a little hiccup of air. Her lungs ease up in her chest, suddenly just a handful of flower petals behind her ribs — panic streaming away like snowmelt during a thaw. He suddenly seems like the one fixed point in the universe, and she feels herself sink into him.

“What should I call you?” she asks again, and her voice is easier now. It fits in her mouth, comfortable and soft.

His eyes are quietly-burning embers.

“Rocket,” he says, and his voice the warmest, smokiest breath on her senses.

I used to look out of the Arete, he’d said. I’d watch the rockets he was sending out.

I’d daydream about ‘em.

“Rocket,” she repeats, and all her apprehension is forgotten. She lets herself feel the way her mouth shapes the word: the soft rumble in the roof of her mouth, the breathy o, the click in the middle. The clip of the t on the end, holding the whole word together like a snap. It’s a pleasure on her tongue, and as soon as she says it out loud, something shifts in the survivor. She can see it. His spine straightens and his shoulders square up, his eyes gleam and a taunting, smug smirk curls the corner of his mouth. It’s like everything inside him just lights right up: a hundred beads of illumination on a flight control panel, a hundred stars studded against the endless night.

And yes. He’s beautiful.

“Yeah,” he rasps out, and his voice is surprisingly nonchalant — but his fingers tap restlessly against the armrest. “You got it. That’s it.”

“It’s so good,” she tells him, and she knows her eyes are curved and happy and eager. “It’s so good.”

“Say it again,” he orders, eyes still flared bright as burnt copper, and caught tight on her face.

“Rocket,” she repeats without thinking. Her mouth lingers over the R, and clips the ck and the t together neatly at the end: a love-song on her lips.

The simmering look in his eyes only gets more warmer, more full of sparks. Then he blinks once, and he lets out a shaky, shuddering breath — shoulders easing into something confident and comfortable. His smirk widens in a brief, pleased flash of teeth before he brushes it all aside with a casual wave of one clawed hand. “Yeah, yeah. Okay, kitten. You goin’ to bed?”

She blinks. Kitten. She hasn’t heard that one before, but she likes it. Her eyes drop back down to Lux-Crystal Fantasy, and her belly’s suddenly so warm and peaceful and content. It feels as buzzy and pleased as it has when she’d first woken up for most of these past few rotations: happy, she thinks. She toys distractedly with the knot at her hip, and when she glances up, the survivor’s fire-bright eyes are snapped on the coil of interlocking fabric. It bobbles under her nervous fingers.

“You could come with me,” she suggests.

Whatever satisfaction had been painted across the survivor’s face fades abruptly, and he grimaces. “You gotta stop worrying about that, pearl. The chair’s fine.” He pauses, then adds — almost annoyed — “It’s my own damn fault I don’t got my own bed. I shoulda cleared the other bunk.”

No. She’s glad he hasn’t cleared the other bunk.

“You could come to bed anyway,” she says, and bites her lip. And then — nervous and stupid, she knows – she adds, “Rocket,” like she thinks using his new name might be the magic word, the thing that tips the scales and convinces him to come rest with her, to be close to her. It’s foolish and selfish and greedy, and she knows her voice is caught somewhere between hopeful and mortified.

He glances up at her, one gleaming ruby eye half-squinting, like he sees right through her but can’t quite decide what it all means.

“Pearl, I don’t think—“

“Of course, not if you don’t want to,” she rushes out, voice spilling over itself in her embarrassment. “But — I really want you to know. That I wouldn’t mind sharing the — the bed.” She winces, and fumbles for that incandescent thread of courage winding tight and nervous in the pit of her belly: a bright little pilot-light of warmth and life. She touches the edge of the bandages peeking over the hem of her makeshift skirt, tracing the line they lay out over her lower abdomen, then chews her lip and tries again.

“I wouldn’t mind being close to you again,” she confesses. “It was — we don’t have to do anything else,” she adds quickly. “I know it wasn’t — but I liked when you — touched me.”

She coils the white-hot thread of bravery in her hands and tries to hold onto it, even though her vagus nerve is twisting with the vulnerability and humiliation of it all.

This is the last time, she promises herself. This is the last time I make a nuisance of myself by asking.

But the survivor’s face has gone suddenly blank and distant and calculating. His eyes burn into hers broodingly, and then he tilts his head.

“You just liked bein’ touched, pearl,” he says, and he sounds — almost dismissive. Cynical. Her belly drops. “It’s only ‘cause Wyndham kept you frickin’ deprived of it for so long.”

She gnaws at her lip and stares at him. All that courage is wilting in her hands; all that luminosity fading out. She tries to hang on. “You’re — you’re doing it again,” she whispers hesitantly. “Trying to tell me what I want—”

Something tangled and regretful sweeps in behind those blood-moon eyes of his — the corners of his mouth tugging downward — and a ripple coasts over the ends of his fur, but he only leans back in his chair and raises one brow.

“But it’s true anyway,” he says evenly. “You do. And he did.”

She knows she gives him a pained little look. She can feel it. For a second she thinks he might falter, but he just readjusts himself and offers her a dismissive, smug little half-shrug.

It’s so — infuriating, really. She knows there’s some truth to what he’s saying but she’s also not stupid — not anymore. She feels her eyes narrow and her mouth purse mutinously — knows because it was a look she’d given the Recorders quite often, years ago, and that’s how they’d described it: mutinous — and it must startle him because he straightens abruptly, his own eyes blinking rapidly at her.

“Okay then,” she concedes suddenly, dipping her chin in a sharp nod. “Okay. Fine. I like being touched. And Herbert did keep me deprived. Because he’s—” Her voice cracks, and then she decides to say it anyway, because Herbert isn’t here, and neither are Vim or Theel to tattle on her. “Because he’s an asshole.” The word is hushed but it straightens up her spine, tilts up her shoulders. She can see something glint in the survivor’s eyes, amusement twitching up the corner of his mouth. She tries to glare. “I like being touched and I wasn’t touched for a very long time and so I’d very much like to share your bed with you.”

His smirk collapses and the survivor — Rocket — stares at her, those red eyes searing right into her, igniting the little embers deep in her abdomen.

The old etiquette training kicks in and she feels shame staining her cheeks. Insolent, she thinks. Demanding.

“Please.”

She swallows, and suddenly realizes she’s burnt right through all that platinum-bright courage and whatever’s left is only ash in her hands. Her voice drops into a creaking whisper and her hands fly up to sweep her curls over one shoulder, twisting and tangling in them desperately.

“I promise I — I wouldn’t try to touch you in any way that would make you uncomfortable or anything. I wouldn’t.”

His eyes stay locked on her, suddenly far more impassive than usual. She holds her breath, because this seems to be one of his favorite expressions right before he sneers at her. In fact, only his ears and whiskers and the very tip of his tail are flickering, but it’s not enough to tell her what he’s thinking, and his claws tap a staccato rhythm on the arm of the chair — impatient or pensive, she couldn’t say. She feels her shoulders slope downward and she just knows she looks crestfallen. She wonders if she should try to tap into the coldness of M’dame Lavenza, just to get this stupid look of crushed disappointment off her face.

But then the survivor — Rocket, she thinks again; a name like stars and adventure and freedom, a name she could follow like a trail of fire through the dark sky — Rocket huffs out an incredulous, scoffing little sound.

“Gave you an inch — letting you pick whether or not you wanna stick around after Cyxlore,” he mutters, but — she doesn’t think his annoyance sounds quite real. If anything, he sounds almost nervous.

Still, he’s rolling his eyes.

“And now, sure enough, you’re tryin’ to take a whole frickin’ lightyear.”

Her face grows even hotter, and the warmth floats down into her throat and chest. Should she apologize? He had agreed to let her stay if she’d wanted to, after Cyxlore — even if it was because she’d cried like a child. She can feel her heart getting all chewed up by the teeth of her ribs. “I—“

“I’ll come to bed in a little bit,” he says casually — like it’s not a big deal after all. Like all that stress and tension she’d had tangled up in her belly, all the anxiety and nerves, had been silly after all. He raises an eyebrow challengingly. “But I ain’t fuckin’ you, pearl. So don’t ask.” There’s a sardonic twist to the corner of his mouth.

“O-okay,” she breathes out, so relieved, honestly. Not that he’s not fucking her, but just that he’s willing to join her. It layers in quickly on top of the relief: the new ripple of jittery, apprehensive pleasure at the idea of just having him with her. “Okay. I—” I know I wasn’t very good at that. I wouldn’t expect you to — I’m sorry. She swallows. “Thank you. I’ll — wait.”

He keeps his eyes fastened on her steadily as she steps back, then steps back again. His eyelids drop and his stare turns languid and lazy from beneath them. He tilts his head consideringly. “How’re your bruises, sweetheart? Your cuts?”

“Oh.” She traces the little line of tape on her abdomen again. It’s on the verge of becoming another nervous habit, like chewing her lip and tugging on her hair. “Fine, I think. They don’t hurt hardly at all.”

Something flickers in those crimson eyes.

“Tch,” he utters abruptly, and leans back, flipping a few switches and tapping out something on the screens without even looking. “Let’s get those looked at an’ get you into bed, pearl.”

The runabout’s lights go dim and blue, pinned by the little gold fireflies of security lights, and the beaded flight control panel just a few feet away. He’s sliding off the low chair, striding toward her — casually, hips jutted and tail swooping behind him indolently — eyes still as bright and glowing as if the ship were cast in full sunlight. He swipes the little container of anti-inflammatory cream from on top of the shelf, along with the first-aid kit and the roll of tape and gauze, but his eyes never leave her. Something about the hooded flicker of his eyes has her belly fluttering, and then — lower.

Don’t ask, she reminds herself — not that she thinks she’d have the nerve to do so. She shivers a little, and sidesteps to the bunk before lowering herself to sit on the thin mattress, leaning her weight onto her unbruised side in a way that’s almost become habit.

“Tsk,” the survivor murmurs, a twist of regret weaving into his low voice. “Can tell it still hurts you, sweetheart. Lay down.”

She leans further and lowers herself onto her forearms, tucking them under the pillows.

“Can I untie this, pearl?” He tugs on the blanket slightly, and that quiver in her belly grows brighter. It’s been nearly a handful of times that he’s done this, and every time, it makes her burn.

“Yes,” she breathes, twisting to reach for the tied corners. “I can—“

But his fingers make quicker work of the knot than hers ever could. She gasps when the cool recycled air of the runabout curls over her suddenly-bare ass, and he follows the tickling sweep of the blanket over her thighs, straddling them like he has every night. He makes another little grumbled noise — regret again, she thinks; and discontent, and something else.

And then his fingers — cool and callused and leathery — lightly kiss the muscles to the sides of her spine. She holds her breath, going utterly still as she feels them stroking downward to the dimples at the small of her back.

She knows she doesn’t have bruises there.

The lightness of his touch, the careful sweep of it, startles a shiver right out of her, and she can feel the goosebumps flicker up over her flesh in a little lazy path: every tiny little patch of her skin suddenly springing to life for him. Thawing. She feels like little crocuses and tiny spring wildflowers growing right up out of the snow, reaching for his warmth.

He makes another little rumbling noise, and then she hears him flip open the first-aid kit, and then the soft whoosh and cool misting of anti-bac fluid, sprayed gently over each little puncture mark. She shivers again, feeling the weight of him pinning her thighs. He’s always heavier than she’d think, his mass doubled by whatever metal augmentations Herbert had added to his lithe three-foot frame. She tucks her chin into the pillow and squishes the soft cushion up around her mouth, trying to be patient while the spray dries. The survivor’s hands must be resting on his own knees while he waits — because she feels them shift sideways and float on to the backs of her thighs. They’re tentative at first, and she goes still and silent, holding her breath in her lungs like little flowers waiting to bloom. Then his thumbs slowly smooth up and down: careful little three-inch rivers of sensation, of contact. It feels affectionate. It feels loving.

It feels good.

She crowds the pillow in closer to her mouth, tears springing to her eyes.

“This okay, pearl?” he husks, and she nods, not trusting the sound of her voice. His thumbs falter, like he’s uncertain whether or not he read her bobbing head correctly, but he continues to carefully stroke over her soft thighs while he waits.

Then — too soon, she thinks — he’s dabbing cream onto each little cut, loosely bandaging them.

“Can prob’ly take the gauze off most of ‘em in the morning,” he rasps out, his voice low. “Let ‘em get some air.”

His touch, when it comes again, is gently soothing the cool lotion over her still-sore cheek: cautiously layering the medication, then lingering. His fingertips trace the curve of her ass, so lightly that she shivers again. She can feel him snatch his hand back, like he thinks he’s done something he shouldn’t, and a little mew of protest tumbles up over her lips before she can stop it. There’s a moment of silence, and then he clears his throat.

“You sore anywhere else, pearl?” he asks cautiously. “Shoulda asked before, but I was just focused on the — the injuries I could see.”

His thumbs trace the backs of her thighs again.

“You sore here?”

She almost tells him only a little, because it’s true and because she’s learned not to want things over the years. Her muscles still ache from the abuse of a few rotations ago, and maybe from whatever subconscious stress she’s been carrying — on and off since the Arete, and for her entire life.

Maybe it could be an excuse — to keep some of that precious warmth on her body a little longer.

“Yes?” It comes out sounding like a little question, buried into his pillow, and he huffs an unidentifiable noise, like he’s halfway-amused.

“You tell me if this is okay,” he says, and his palms cup the backs of her legs while he shifts back on his heels, his weight hovering at the top of her calves now. His hands press deep, and she knows he’s barely started but a moan wells up under her ribs and spills over her lips, into the pillow. He chuckles at that, but the sound of his laughter hovers on the edge of disbelief. Her face grows warm again, but it seems to have encouraged him: he’s kneading into the muscle and fat of her thighs, fingers squeezing and stroking. She’s never felt anything like it before: the deep, almost loving pry of his thumbs in her dimpled, doughy thighs, the strength of his scarred palms melting into her and turning her into warm caramel and soft butter. Another moan tugs its way over her throat and buries itself in the pillow.

His thumbs coast lightly up the soft insides of her thighs and she jolts, her whole body buckling in — something. Surprise, yes, but something else too: something electric and expectant, hopeful. Needful. That bright-nickel coil from earlier suddenly flares to life, hotter and more blinding than before, than anything since the Arete. She could float right up on the heat of it, like the blaze in a fire-balloon. The weight of him — her survivor, her Rocket — anchored onto her calves… it’s the only thing holding her in place.

“Shh,” he murmurs. “I know, pearl. Made you go through all that just to get me to sleep in the damn bunk, and here I am, bein’ frickin’ greedy. Again. But it feels good this time, right?”

Greedy doesn’t make sense to her, but she can admit her brain doesn’t seem to be fully functioning right now: drunk on the feel of his hands, warm and hazy. Her vision glazes over. His fingers flutter up like butterfly wings, palms coasting back down like warm stones. His thumbs, too: brushing up between her thighs, so close to where she wants them to be — then back down to the insides of her knees.

She opens her mouth — then closes it. Sinks her teeth into his pillow.

“How’s your—” His voice splinters halfway through his question, and he doesn’t pick it up again. But she can suddenly feel his eyes on her, on the shadowed spot between her thighs, the place his thumbs press just shy of. If he pulled the fat of her thighs outward with his thumbs, he could probably see her there. Of course he already had, just the other night on the floor of her room in the Arete, but maybe he’d already seen her again during this molten massage — caught a glimpse of her folds while he grasped and squeezed handfuls of her flesh.

She can feel the slight pressure of wetness gathering between her thighs and she clenches instinctively before realizing he can feel the tightness in her thighs, see the way she twitches. And he must notice, because he sucks in a sharp breath and his thumbs surge deep into her inner thighs, kneading and gently pulling. It tugs a whimper from her, and she can feel her heartbeat suddenly: in her throat, her wrists; throbbing in her pussy. If he wasn’t right there, she’d be rubbing her thighs together nervously. As it is, he can probably feel her trying not to squirm underneath him. Maybe he can even smell her, she realizes suddenly — anxiously.

She hopes she smells good.

He drops his voice and leans forward, almost whispering. His voice is a rasp, so low she’d almost think it was strained if she didn’t know better.

“How’s your little pussy, sweetheart? She okay?”

Something about the question — the deep heat of it, the intimacy of his voice, maybe the way he refers to this part of her body as she — has her trying not to twitch and roll her hips beneath him. Her cheeks burn, and yes, she can feel herself dripping again — wetness rolling down to her clit, slicking between her thighs. She tries to breathe and manages to muffle an answer into his pillow. “It’s fine.” Cheeks still burning — even her eyelids burning now. It’s like an incoming tide.

She hears him clear his throat. “Still hurt at all?”

His thumbs are so close, so warm. His claws prickle lightly on the tender flesh just shy of her. She shivers again.

“A little,” she whispers, and wonders if his sensitive ears can even pick up the sound she’s pressed into the pillow. “It’s mostly better now.”

He makes another unidentifiable little rumble in the back of his throat. “Poor girl,” he mutters, and she suddenly wants so badly to ask if he’d be willing to rub that too. He’d said he wouldn’t fuck her, but maybe —

“You should put some salve there, sweetheart.” His voice is a sandpaper-scrape, light and rasping.

Her stomach knots: nervous, yes — and. She chews her lip and stares at the wall in front of her.

“Right now?”

His hands go still on the back of her thighs and he doesn’t say anything for a very long time. Her face is so scalding-hot — and her body is so scalding-hot — that she suddenly thinks she might never be cold again.

When he finally speaks, the words crackle softly at the edges, like a low campfire. “In the morning. Take the kit to the bathroom.”

She’s glad her face is turned away from him because she can’t control the little pout blooming on her lower lip, or the blush that continues to burn through her cheeks.

Almost like he can read her mind, he slides his thumbs up, so close to her core that she can’t help the needy whimper bubbling up from her throat — then smoothes his hands down her thighs once more before coughing and lifting his fingers away. She hears the first aid kit close, and then he’s lifting himself off her and tucking the metal box into the shelf over the bunk, tapping the last plasma orb as he goes. All the buttons and dials and gauges embedded in the walls and ceiling cast a halo of soft colors that remind her of the neighbors’ holiday lights when she was a child, and if she twists she can see the scintilla of the cosmos swirling past the two starpane portholes on the sides of the runabout, or the starshield up on the flightdeck. It’s lovely and moody and deep, but it’s not enough light to make out much more of him than his silhouette, and the red-cinder eyes suddenly lambent in the dark.

“You gonna scoot over an’ make room for me?” he asks, sweeping her blanket-skirt back over her and cinching the knot into the fringed corners — dressing her, practically. Something about the gesture has her heart going soft, even while everything inside her flutters and burns, like bits of embery ash scooped up from a forest-fire and caught on a breeze.

“Oh,” she says, immediately shifting and rolling onto her side so she can look at him in the dim shimmer emanating from the nearby flight deck. “Aren’t you going to get changed?”

He looks down at his armored jumpsuit, then up at her. The red glow of his gaze skims her bare belly, the shape of his t-shirt and the way it stretches and cups her breasts while she’s on her side. She tries not to shiver. His eyes settle on hers in the dark, and the shadowy shape of his shoulders shrug.

“Used to staying armored up when I’m on the run,” he admits. “S’it gonna bother you?”

She frowns and shakes her head. “Only in that I wish you had a chance to be more comfortable,” she confesses. His eyes burn into hers, and then he offers up another tch of mild scorn.

“F’it means that much to you, pearl, I’ll pick up something while we’re on Cyxlore,” he tells her mildly, before lowering himself beside her. The movements are cautious, though, like he’s ready to bolt if she changes her mind.

She gives him a half-smile. “I’d like that,” she murmurs. “You deserve to feel good, too.”

He snorts, and reaches for the other blankets on the bed, peeling them up and over her limbs and piling them onto her shoulders before he lowers himself to his own side, facing her. “M’just fine,” he informs her. “You—“

“My legs feel so much better,” she interrupts suddenly, before she can lose her courage. “Maybe tomorrow, I can return the favor.” She hesitates when he goes silent and those ember-eyes get a little larger in the dark, languid blue of the ship. “I know you must hurt,” she whispers after a moment of silence, her voice almost shaky with uncertainty.

The red glints of his gaze widen, then blink — slowly.

“I don’t think that’s the best idea,” he rasps at last. “I’m — M’not used to other folks putting their hands on me. Not like that; not unless—“ His voice cracks off and his mouth snaps shut, but his crimson-fire eyes burn steady as banked fires.

She wants to protest — but maybe this is an example of him offering her an inch, and her trying to take a lightyear. She doesn’t want to press him too much, or too far.

More than anything, she wants to comfort him, and she’s not sure she can do that while she’s also making him more uncomfortable.

“Okay,” she says softly in the dark. He’s just two blinking, blood-moons and a soft pile of moving, melting shadows. She hesitates, holding his flat stare with her own. “Can I — keep touching you, though? For now?”

Again, the flat red moons blink — implacable, indecipherable.

“Sure, pearl.” His voice deepens again, scraping delicately across her skin — like a knife-edge, or teeth, or claws. She thinks he swallows. “You can touch me.”

She reaches out slowly under the covers, trying to decide if she should rest her fingertips against his hip, or his arm, or the strap of his jumpsuit. Just for some contact, just to find the warmth and company of another body—

He must be able to see her hand faltering with indecision because he reaches out so suddenly she jumps, and grasps her wrist with his narrow fingers. He tugs her hand till her palm rests flat on the mattress between the two of them, then rests his own carefully on top of hers — almost reluctant.

Reluctant — but willing, and warm, and real.

She holds her breath for a long moment, and when she lets it out, she shudders. The exhalation becomes a tremulous little breeze. His hand — heavy and heated — suddenly feels like an anchor, like a weighted blanket. It pins her like a butterfly to this reality, and she knows she won’t have any bad dreams tonight.

“Thank you,” she murmurs.

Normally, when she’s trying to sleep, she tries to think of her pretty graveyard, or her fake constellations. Tonight, though — feeling the way of the survivor’s hand on hers, the sun-warmed leather of his palm and his fingers delicately pinning hers — tonight, she tries to imagine the Lux-Crystal Fantasy Music Festival. He — Rocket — has enough band shirts that he must attend concerts frequently, but she hasn’t heard any music at all since coming onto the runabout. She’d only had the vaguest idea of how music festivals had been depicted in a Terran entertainment — imagining one on another planet is significantly harder. Plus, she’s never been to Inix — Herbert had scorned any art he hadn’t considered sophisticated, and Inix had been home to exactly the kind of creatives he’d disdained. She only knows what little she’s read: that the planet’s surface had been sculpted by artists eons ago. Still, she doesn’t know what it looks like — if it’s mountainous or quilted in flowers or carved through by rivers and waterfalls. She certainly doesn’t know what the Lux-Crystal Fantasy Festival is like—

—but she likes to imagine there are trees.

She dreams up the taste of fireworks and beer in the air. Burnt everbloom, like the Wundagorish locals would smoke outside the bar just beyond the Homonoia’s garden. Laughter somewhere, and stages between the thick, leafy trunks.

And weaving through every branch and around every body, she imagines a hundred kinds of music, cacophonous and crooning — all curling welcomingly around her survivor. She hopes the sound of it allows him to become pleasantly untethered — unpinned from the bolts and bars she’s seen splayed across his chest and collar, the brackets that hold his heart wide open to every cruelty and injustice in the universe. She can’t blame him for the ragged sarcasm and bitterness that stripes his words like scar tissue, and makes him reel away snarling. How else could anyone with a heart that vulnerable survive?

She feels his hand shift on top of hers in the bunk: uncertain, even now.

She closes her eyes before tears can well on them, but he must see them or smell them or otherwise notice, because she feels his claws tighten almost imperceptibly on her hand — nervously.

So she gives into the impulse, the need to respond. She rolls her hand beneath his on the mattress: lacing her fingers with his fingers, lying palm-to-palm in the tiny bunk.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

The Monster — Rocket now, he reminds himself — sleeps better than he can remember ever sleeping before. Even so, not even the warm closeness of pearl’s body — her soft little breaths and dreamy mumbles — can completely heal dozens of circs’ worth of bad habits. He drifts in and out every few hours, only to find his hand still tangled with the pearl’s. Every time, it jolts him, and he finds himself studying the pale pink ovals of her fingernails, and the tiny white moonrises at the base of each one. He marvels at how delicate they look. His own hands are smaller, but whiskered and coarse, with deadly-dark claws and calluses. He’s got a network of scars on the backs of his hands and his palms, radiating like spiderwebs from where they had cut him apart and snapped bones and spliced sinews, disconnected his forefingers to fashion them into thumbs. Wyndham and the Recorders had strung him with new tissue, and threaded tendons from wristbone to fingertip: some synthetic, and some twisted from his own flesh — muscles that had been carded and roved and spun like wool. His dissected hands had been sewn through with axons and stitched up haphazardly, then anchored and braced with metal frames and screws to keep the contractures at bay. He remembers the long rotations of his childhood after the surgeries: hands cramping around the duranium brackets, seeking desperately to return to their natural shape — nerve spasms waking him in the night, making it impossible to sleep. How many times had he woken with his hands curled compulsively into broken crescents around their trellises, feeling like his bones had been replaced with hollow metal tubes, electricity running up and down the insides?

His hands remember everything they’ve ever touched, and everything they’ve ever felt. They never, ever forget.

He stares at pearl’s pretty, delicate fingers. His lowlight vision paints them with the champagne light of the security orbs, and he can see them so clearly that he can count the faint freckles on the second knuckle of her first and third digits, and a beauty mark on the web of her thumb. He compares the satin skin and spindle-thin bones to the mass of gnarled leather and claw that make up his own hands. Then he rolls her fine knuckles under his rasping thumb, and finally — carefully, stomach tight with tension at the thought of waking her up, of getting caught — he brings them to his face and coasts his mouth over them lightly.

He wants to lick them. Take the flavor of them into his mouth, press them against his teeth. Maybe between his teeth — nibbling just enough to leave little divots that would fade in less than an hour. Get the taste and texture of her silken skin on his tongue.

An antidote to ghosts.

If he could get the flavor of her in his mouth, weave the feel of her into his hands forever, he could call up the sensation of all these little gifts she’s given him so willingly — whenever he’s haunted, whenever he’s hunted, whenever he can’t sleep and wants to rip his own skin off in the dead-quiet of a sleep-shift.

He could hold onto her even after she’s gone, even after she leaves him for the pretty moon he’s picked out for her.

It’s a good thing she doubles as a cure, because he knows he’s just branding more of her onto himself, and that he’ll never get free of her, not even if he leaves her moonside and gouges his way back into the sky. He tries not to think about it — tries not to think about the slope of her naked belly, just inches away from his other hand, and how good that might feel under his fingers and between his teeth too. He tries not to think about nipping the soft flesh there, about the mouthwatering curve of her tits under his shirt, under his scent — rubbing all over her jutting little nipples. Lux-Crystal Fantasy — that’s for frickin’ sure.

What do you want to call me? she’d asked, like she’d had no idea what a dangerous question it was.

Sweetheart, he’d thought. Kitten. Princess.

Pretty little slut.

Sugar, after that tasty little cunt I just know you’ve got there.

And then, despite his best intentions — which are admittedly pitiful at the best of times — he’d eyed her up and down and had imagined — again — getting her all wet and happy and drunk on his dick, and then tugging her around dreamy-eyed by her wrist once they land on Cyxlore. Let everyone see who’s got her, who she lets play with her.

Little pet names.

Doll, maybe.

It’d be easy to remember that.

And then she’d said his new name. Rocket. No, she hadn’t said it — she’d practically kissed it into existence, breathy and lingering, practically rolling herself in it the same way she rolls around in the bunk some mornings, like she wants it all over her skin. She’d been taking pleasure in every consonant and syllable. It’s his name, one he’d chosen on his own — but when she’d said it, he’d felt like she was giving him part of herself along with it. It had felt so personal, so intimate, that it had made his teeth hurt and his claws itch.

Maybe it would have been the same with anyone, saying his name for the first time. Reminding him in the same murmured little notes: of the wide open blue sky — Beautiful and Forever — and all the possibility that he had gathered up for himself, that he had taken when no-one had wanted to give him even a scrap of it. Maybe anyone could’ve said it for the first time and he would’ve wanted to keep it constantly on their tongue.

But he doesn’t think so. He doesn’t think anyone is capable of saying his name the same way pearl had.

Anyway, after that little conversation, it had been too easy to give in to his worst instincts, to let her convince him to climb into the bunk with her and stay. He’d made two seconds of a terse, valiant effort, and then said screw it. Especially after she’d tilted her chin up at him and basically commanded him into the bed. Generally speaking, he’s not one for taking orders — more likely to do the exact opposite of whatever’s asked — but the defiant, demanding moue of her lips had looked so good on her, and for whatever reason, he’d let himself be swayed by the idea of protecting that brief flicker of confidence.

Of course, protecting her confidence had ended up being the perfect excuse for getting his hands all over her. For fuck’s sake, he’d been gluttonous for her skin, for the doughy softness of her thighs. Still, at first, he’d managed to hang onto some pretense of being a reasonable frickin’ person.

Then she’d started making those needy little moans, and all he’d been able to think about had been rolling her over and pushing her knees right up to her tits — folding her in thirds like she gets when she’s tucked against the starpane behind the bulwark — and turning her into a broken little squeaky toy, squealing and hiccuping with every thrust. He’d been able to tell when she’d dampened; he’d known he could have slid his hand up just a half-inch higher and felt all that gossamer wetness slicking over his skin. Could’ve popped the pad of his thumb into his mouth and tasted her. He’d been right, he thinks — he’s almost certain she’d smelled like waterlillies and the rich, heavy redolence of arousal. He’d pressed his palms into the back of her thighs and imagined having them tucked tight against his cheeks, or hitching them against his hips. Pretty girl.

His hands had been hungry for the springiness of her skin, grabbing and stroking and squeezing.

Is your pretty pussy okay? he’d wanted to ask — had hardly been able to stop himself once the question finally rolled over his lips. Does she need anything — anything at all? I can pet her like a little kitten if she wants it, princess. I can kiss her all better, I promise.

It’s mostly better, she’d said, and he’d just wanted to love on her little cunt in response, soothe her, give her the softest and sweetest orgasm she’s ever had — get her coming in slow and overwhelming waves till her dazed silvery eyes had rolled back in her pretty head.

He wishes he would have told her to say his name again, when he’d had his fingers prying into the sleek, bouncy satin of her thighs. He could’ve made her moan it. He isn’t sure how he would have made that request sound reasonable — say my name, kitten, with his thumbs digging sweet, achy circles just an inch shy of her dripping cunt. He opens his mouth, and mouths the word silently toward the dark ceiling of the bunk, trying to make the hideous shape of his mouth replicate the way he remembers her saying it.

Rocket.

Instead of making her mew out his name, though, he’d been stupid enough to tell her to put some salve on her pretty cunt — and for a second, he’d thought she was gonna roll over and open those mouthwatering thighs of hers, let him watch her part those pretty folds and trace her fingers over them, dip inside. He could’ve helped her — watched her and guided her to make sure every inch of her poor battered pussy was cared for and slicked up with cream, make sure she got her cute little fingers deep enough inside her to make sure she was healing up nicely everywhere.

He remembers again how cautiously she’d plucked at her nipples on the floor of her room in the Arete. How timid and gentle she’d been with them. Not a complete novice — she’d touched herself before, he’s certain, but he bets she’d only tentatively explored. Maybe brought herself to quiet, stifled orgasm a few times, trying to muffle her little gasps so Vim and Theel didn’t hear her and report back to their voyeuristic god. He wonders what it would be like to watch her dip those fingers into her tender, pretty-pink cunt. She’d be shy about it, he bets. Blushing. Circling her pearly little clit with hesitant fingers while he urged her to make sure she got that salve everywhere, sweetheart, rub it in.

Sleepy — half-tortured; dick throbbing — he studies her fingernails again, then runs his thumb over the glossy pebbles of her knuckles — again. Presses them to his mouth — again — and doesn’t lick, still — no matter how much he wants to. It’s a dangerous game he’s playing — taunting himself like this.

Can I keep touching you? she’d asked. For now?

He wants the whole picture of her — the ability to call her up beyond just the phantom of her velvety, soft nipples cruelly pinched between his fingers, or the shape of her swollen, wet vulva pressed onto his palm. So he’d said yes, and now — now, every time her palm brushes against his in the dark, it lights up new parts of his brain like a flight control panel on the fritz. He figures, by the time the wake-shift rolls around, he’ll have every little crease and silken cushion of her hands memorized. This whole time, he’s been collecting little pieces of her in the memory banks of his palms: the satin threads of her curls and the way the knots had loosened under his sleepy, intuitive fingers the rotation before. Now: the delicate curved edge of her nails and the pulse in her wrist.

He can’t stop. Doesn’t want to. Doesn’t know how. She’s sweeter than any Contraxian moonshine, and twice as intoxicating.

Exponentially more addictive.

He traces the base of her nailbeds, and measures the length of her fingers with his. He lets his touch linger in the silky valleys between her knuckles. He bracelets her wrist, so narrow that his fingers and thumb can almost touch, even though his hands are so much smaller than hers. He traces the veins there, careful of the little steri-strip that marks the spot where he’d removed her tracker. He wants to lick that spot, too, once it’s healed — a starlike scar, he thinks, trying to imagine how it would feel under his fingertips: glossy and smooth and a little raised from the rest of her tissue-thin skin. Proof of how much she’d trusted him before he’d even done a damn thing to deserve it.

You’re not a monster. You never have been.

You are beautiful — and you are gentle. And you’re so much more.

Rocket.

He sighs and scowls, then stares at the ceiling again. He pictures a laser cannon in his mind. It’s a gorgeous frickin’ machine, and he knows it well. In his imagination, he takes it apart, piece by piece: reducing it to bolts and panels, to four barrels and a dozen tiny mirrors. Puts it back together, and takes it apart again. And again. He tries to recite jump-point coordinates and major star systems — anything to get himself to ease back into sleep.

The truth is that he could probably get up. The pearl’s deep-asleep now, eyelashes fluttering like the wings of dreaming butterflies, and he could unlace his fingers from hers and go screw around with her training blaster, or the set of linked laser-mines he’s been messing with. He could see if he can figure out a way to make the rough draft of his rotary plasma-autocannon usable, despite the pieces he’d taken out to fix the runabout’s engines.

But no. He’d said he’d stay, right? Implied it, anyway. She’d stayed with him last night — built him a cozy den under the flight controls and stayed till she’d fallen asleep with him on the unforgiving grates. She’d stayed, so he should too. It’s not that he wants to continue laying like this, bored out of his mind — listening to the pearl’s soft breaths and quiet, inviting murmurs.

You’re the most your-own-person I’ve ever met, and I think it’s the worst thing in the galaxy that you don’t like those parts of you.

It’s not that he wants to continue committing this moment to memory: palm pressed to palm in the melting shadows, and the feel of her pulse under his callused fingertips. It’s not that he wants to keep hearing her words in his head: each syllable shaped into a little heartbeat of trust, cushioned only by the quiet tide of her breathing, and the lullaby-hum of the tiny ship.

Rocket.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

once again, i am late. two weeks in a row. it's unconscionable really. i'm giving myself the excuse of having had to suddenly drive 600 miles in one night earlier this week because one of my parents needed surprise brain-surgery, and i am updating this from an uncomfortable chair in the hospital room. and yes, i am so tired i might as well be drunk, so please forgive any messiness of this chapter. in my head i had imagined it very slow-burn and delicious, but now i suspect it is clunky and clumsy. so thank you for bearing with me! i'm hoping to be on time next week but tbh the parental unit is still in recovery and may need another surgery, so we're just gonna play the next update by ear, okay?

i was really gonna get a chapter out every week this month. the best of intentions, blah blah. ANYWAY next chapter (ten) is gonna be a "beach episode" (without a beach. you know, like a filler, slice-of-life episode). and then once we hit chapter eleven, i think we'll start moving into more plotty-stuff. (but it'll still be slow because fundamentally these stories are more about the character arcs than the events.) if you're looking for the smut, we'll have some (ish) in chapter twelve and again in fourteen, i think. i hope you enjoy, my spring violets, and i'll love you forever.

special love and sweet treats to those of you who comment, too. your comments get me through long days haha

 

find expected posting schedules & chapter-previews on tumblr♡
here's the masterlist & moodboard♡ (which includes forecasted schedules and summaries for quite a few chapters in advance)

coming soon: chapter ten. querinous.
summary: rocket and pearl go shopping on cyxlore.
warnings: just rocket's anxiety.
estimated date: thursday, may sixteen. (TENTATIVE)

Chapter 10: querinous.

Summary:

rocket and pearl go shopping on cyxlore.

Notes:

warnings: just rocket’s anxiety.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

querinous. longing for a sense of certainty in a relationship; wishing there were some way to know ahead of time whether this is the person you’re going to wake up next to for twenty thousand mornings in a row, instead of having to count them out one by one, quietly hoping your streak continues. Mandarin 确 认 (quèrèn), confirmation. Twenty thousand days is roughly fifty-five years. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

“These pearls are flawless,” Sanna Orix murmurs. “I’ve never seen anything like them.”

“Yup,” the Monster agrees distractedly. Sanna Orix is holding each round little jewel up to the light, marveling, murmuring words like translucence and luster and luminosity. Normally, the Monster — Rocket, he tells himself furiously, as if having chosen a name less than two rotations ago could undo a lifetime of thinking of himself as some kind of freakish little beast — normally, Rocket would be marveling right alongside them, but right now he’s only got eyes for the other pearl.

Ever since they’d landed, she’d been distracted. Worse, she’d been distracting. Hands fetched up between her pretty tits, belly bared for everyone to see the little white hem of the few bandages he’s decided to keep her in, and the faint peppering of half-healed scratches and punctures that had been left unwrapped. That stupid blanket — the flash of her thigh, creamy and soft beneath his hands the night before — and her bare feet. He’d been infuriated by her shoelessness earlier, snarling at her for it when he’d known it wasn’t her frickin’ fault — and then mentally thanking whatever gods there are in this shit-hole universe that the streets in this part of the Cyclorade capitol are so frickin’ clean.

At least she’d been wearing his shirt. Already having his scent draped across her chest like a shield might have been the only thing keeping him from rubbing his face all over her belly and throat before they’d disembarked. But he’d hated that the two of them were here, suddenly moonside, and that she was so close to being—

Out of his grasp.

Last night had been the height of frickin’ indulgence, and he feels stupid for getting caught up in it. He should’ve kept his distance. Now, instead, when pearl inevitably decides she wants to stay here with all the soft pretty things and the soft pretty people — now, he’s going to spend every waking moment longing for the silken hollows between her knuckles. He’s not gonna be able to fall asleep without her soft breaths and stupid mumbles. When he claws himself awake after a nightmare and crouches like a hunted thing under the flight controls, he’s gonna ache for the smell of her and the quietude of her little handmade dens — her careful gifts of water, her comforting whispered nothings, and the weight of her head in his lap.

He might’ve been fine before last night. A few cycles of regret — nothing new — and then he’d forget her, except for maybe when he’d had too much to drink. But now she’s been woven like satin threads into his palms and fingertips and — like A95 and L06 and Lylla — he’s never gonna be rid of her ghost.

He’d thought she was a cure but too late, he’d realized — no. Not if she doesn’t stick around.

If she doesn’t stick around, then she’s just another person he has to lose.

“I think they might be from Aladnan sun-oysters, but I can’t be sure,” Sanna Orix says now. They pull out a box that sounds like it’s rattling and jingling with coins, opening it to reveal probably over thirty gem loupes with increasing levels of magnification. Any other rotation, the Monster — Rocket — would have already pocketed a handful of the convenient little jeweler’s tools. Today, though, he just bats Orix’s words away like Sakaaran stingflies.

There’s no way the pearl’s gonna wanna stick around.

He’d been riddled with the certainty of it since he’d woken up. His fingers had still somehow been laced through hers, and she’d been waking up at the same time: silver-gray eyes, luminous and sleepy, dreams still clinging to heavy lashes. His senses had narrowed to three specific, needle-fine points — her pretty mouth and eyes, the feel of her hands knotted in his, and all her softness just a breath away.

Then his awareness had blown wide. He’d felt like he was everywhere at once: breathing in the scent of her, sinking into the dip in the thin scrappy little mattress, feeling their shared body heat under the blankets he’d shuffled up around her the night before. Coasting his eyes over the line of her shoulder, and the fading wreathe of bruises on her throat that still makes his sternum twinge.

He’d rolled away so fast that he’d dragged her hand with him off the bunk, and she’d startled, suddenly coming full-awake. He’d ignored her alarmed stare, the stumbled start of Are you okay—? and had flung her hand from him like it was a gravity-grenade with the pin already pulled.

He grits his teeth, thinking of nothing but his pearl, while Sanna Orix studies some lesser jewel through the loupe.

“What can we get for the lot of ‘em?” he asks instead, barely paying attention. His eyes follow Wyndham’s bride with a sort of sticky neediness that makes his lip curl in self-contempt and his teeth hurt. Sanna Orix’s place is full of textile goods and gemstone luxuries, and he’d told the pearl to start looking at some staples — practical, he’d urged, even though he’d doubted the reminder had been necessary.

For more than one reason.

After all, practical only matters if the pearl’s staying with him. And the way she’s looking around right now? Staring at all the pretty trinkets and fabrics and clothes? Lingering over them with her fingertips?

Yeah. There’s no way in hell he gets her back up in the sky.

He curls his hand — the one that had held hers all night — and tries to saw through his own palm with his claws. Tries to crush out the tactile memory of her satiny knuckles, and the soft spaces between her fingers.

Rotations earlier — when all this had started — he’d thought that he was giving her the bunk to herself out of some kind of penance, and because he’d figured she must’ve been scared of him. But now he realizes that some part of him had maybe always known that if he’d let her knit her way into the fibers of his life—

“A lot,” Orix says mildly. “You could buy everything in my shop today, and I’d still have to pay you out. A lot.” They squint through the loupe. “I’d have to take out a loan.”

The words shift over his head, barely ruffling his fur. They don’t even register. Pearl’s tugging on a handful of rich brown curls in that way that he’s realized means that she’s nervous.

“She needs clothes,” he mutters with a distracted jut of his chin. “Anything she wants. Plus—”

He hesitates. Well, why the fuck not? Wyndham’s apparently made him fuckin’ rich — for a little while, anyway — thanks to the frickin’ present that had been wrapped like a noose around his pretty bride’s neck. It’s not like the Monster will be spending the units the way he normally would — gambling, booze, escorts from the Platinum Dahlia — at least, not as long as the pearl’s with him.

She’s not sticking around.

Still. He should get her some clothes for Fron.

Just in case.

“We might hit some of the more — uh, scenic mountains while we’re here,” he lies easily. “You got some good insulated gear? Maybe with heat tech?”

Sanna Orix hums thoughtfully. “It’ll take a couple rotations, but I can get some good boot-and-glove sets in both your sizes. I’ve also got some temp-controlled coats and thermal gear in the back—“

“Armored?” he cuts in, and they raise a brow.

“Now, Stranger,” they say mildly, in a tone that makes it clear she doesn’t really expect an answer, “what would you need armor for while sight-seeing in the Cyxlorade mountains?”

He grunts, and they quirk a knowing brow.

“But yes, the leather is already armored. Luckily, I’ve got two that should fit you both already, and if you need any alterations, I can have those done by the time your boots are ready. You’ll also need warm socks and scarves, hats—“

“Yeah, whatever,” the Monster says with a dismissive wave of one hand. “Sounds great. As long as they’re the best of their kind.” His eyes slide back to the pearl, then jump away. She’s migrated to an overflowing wardrobe, where she’s now sifting cautiously through underthings.

He tries not to think about that — not to wonder what pretty scraps she’ll decide to cover her pussy in. Something cloud-soft, he hopes. Thin and frail enough for him to cut through it with his teeth. Maybe some skinny little straps on the hips, or held together by ribbons. There’s a kind of Cyxlorade lace, he knows, made from that soft grass they grow in the Telladore system — he wants something like that rubbing against her little clit all day, just a little wisp of delicate, gentle texture—

“Your girl is very pretty.”

He drags his glare up from where he’s latched it to the floor, slowly scraping it upward to meet Orix’s open gaze.

Your girl.

Rocket feels his mouth twist up a dry, bitter grin. “Ah, she ain’t mine.”

“No?” they ask mildly, seemingly preoccupied with examining another of the little gemstones from pearl’s necklace.

He scoffs and lets his eyes flicker back to the dark-haired Terran. “She’s her own.”

Orix looks away from the smooth, satiny gems in their hands and stares down at him with big, soft, liquid-dark eyes. “You know, I wasn’t sure about you at first, Stranger. But I suspect you’re a good person.”

He snorts and is about to reply with something snide and shitty when a slow gleam of color catches his eye on the far wall of the tiny shop. Cloth drapes from the tapestry bars there, slowly catching the shifting sunlight — curtains and sheaves of glossy woven fabric.

“Are those blankets?” he asks without thinking. Orix’s eyes flick to them.

“Silk chenille,” they clarify. “Spun right here on Cyxlore. Would you like to look at them?”

He hesitates, eyes drifting over to Pearl. She’s frowning while she holds up a leather thong doubtfully, brow creased like it’s got her concerned, and he feels the corner of his mouth twitch in a grin despite himself. He forces his gaze back to the folds of fabric on the other side of the shop. They somehow manage to look fluffy and shimmery, all at once.

“Yeah.”

They make their way to the wall, where the textiles layer over each other in gleaming waves of color. Rocket hesitates, then runs the pads of his fingers lightly down the cloth — surprised by the softness and plushness of the pile. The thick threads are soft and smooth and woolly, and each sheet of fabric and tasseled border feels like woven clouds and water, dense and satiny under his hands. Plus, they’ve got such a pretty sheen. There’s a deep teal, and a red so rich and dark that it might be made of the inside of a heart. Moondust-blue and gold champagne and faded rose. They all remind him of her, and he suddenly wants all of them, wants to pile them in his bunk so when she goes to bed at night she can sink down into shiny soft pools of cloth, letting them lap at her skin like an incoming tide. She’d probably cuddle them up in her arms and peer at him over the waves of blanket with big star-gray eyes and fuck, he suddenly thinks he only ever wants her to feel good for the rest of her silly little life.

Silk chenille blankets, he thinks. Cushiony pillows. Downy duvets. Pearl might’ve grown up with starchy sheets and fiberglass quilts but there’s no reason he shouldn’t cocoon her in whatever soft things he can get his grubby little claws on right now.

No reason except it’s not like him.

“I didn’t take you for a man who was interested in this type of luxury,” Sanna says, and he frowns.

“You’re right,” he agrees coldly, and backs up a step. He feels his lip curl in a subtle, instinctive baring of teeth, and his ears lay flat. “M’not.”

They study him with dark eyes. “There’s nothing wrong with a little indulgence now and then — a little comfort.” Her nacreous hand glides down the folds of one blanket. “If not for you, maybe for the girl. Something to make your ship a little — more cozy for her.”

He clears his throat. “Speaking of — the girl. And the ship.” He hesitates, and sucks his tongue against his teeth. “If she wanted to stay moonside, where would you recommend?”

Orix’s hairless brows arch. “You don’t want her around?”

He flinches, startled at the question. “I want — it don’t frickin’ matter what I want,” he says instead. “I’m just thinkin’—“

“That girl’s not leaving your side unless you make her,” they interrupt quietly.

He tries to dredge up a glare, and when he can’t manage it, he rolls his eyes instead and strides past Sanna Orix, headed back over to where the girl in question is chewing her lip and studying the drawers overflowing with undergarments. She looks… nervous: hands clenching fistfuls of the blanket at her waist, toes curling anxiously against the glossy mosaic-tiled floor. He needs to get her in boots as quick as possible — he can’t stand how frickin’ vulnerable her humie feet are. He’ll have to get her a second pair for now, while they wait for the heated ones to come in.

If she doesn’t come with him — well, then she’ll have two sets of boots. And if she does wanna go visit the higher altitudes on Cyxlore, she’ll be ready for them.

Bare toes aside, right now, she seems torn. Or maybe overwhelmed. Her shoulders are high up under her jaw, and her fingers leave the blanket to twist in front of her belly, then rake anxiously through the dark ends of her curls. Her eyes flit from one drawer to another in the wardrobe — leather, latex, satin, lace — and her stare gets bigger and bigger as they go. He can hear her heartbeat trip over itself: frantic little footfalls running downhill so fast that he knows they’re about to send her sprawling.

He swallows, and clears his throat.

“For whatever it’s worth,” he says with a jerk of his chin, “my vote is for those ones.”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Pearl jumps at the sound of her survivor’s voice. He’s barely spoken to her all day — but now, when she’s submerged in uncertainty, his voice calls her out of it.

The words sound almost hoarse.

He gestures to a little pile of frilly underthings draping out of one open drawer. Her vision, which had been blurring with panic, suddenly has something to focus on. She blocks out everything else and just tries to take in the delicate mound of gauzy cloth. All the pieces in that drawer are made of a silky sort of diaphanous, cotton-like material she’s not familiar with, woven into different textures and patterns. They look dainty and thin, and cloud-soft. There are a few dozen pairs, each different: bows and ruffles and pillowy lace, some shot through with iridescent threads or painted with little watercolor hearts. They range from cute to pretty to sexy, a myriad of pastels and rainbows that promise infinitely more choice and fun than the serviceable, elegant, coarse raw silk Herbert had chosen to dress her in.

So many options.

And she’d be lying if she said she wasn’t intrigued by the fact that the survivor — that Rocket seems to like them. She wonders if he’d want to see them on her — if he’d tear them off her again, or maybe let her slip them down her thighs for him.

I ain’t gonna fuck you, pearl. So don’t ask.

“You do?” she asks, trying not to sound hopeful. She draws her eyes over the pile of shimmery fabric. “They are pretty.”

Her gaze shifts to his, curious, just in time to see a flurry of expressions chase each other over his face, too fleeting for her to identify a single one. He gestures helplessly, ears flattened against his head — almost anxiously, she’d think.

“They look soft,” he stresses, and something underneath her heart flutters, like the little bird at the base of her sternum has just woken up and feathered its small wings. He mutters something just under the range of her hearing, but she thinks his lips frame the words — poor pussy. He clears his throat again. “F’you’re gonna be on the ship with me, you should at least be in somethin’ frickin’ comfortable.”

It melts her heart a little. She drifts closer to them and pluck up a pair and it’s true that they are soft: almost misty, and feather-frail. They’re all slightly different cuts — some high at the hip, and others that ride low. A few that probably would cover everything but the soft undercurve of her asscheeks, and one that doesn’t really cover anything at all. There’s a pair with shimmery multicolored stars printed on them, and another that’s a pure confection of pillowy, frothy lace and strappiness.

In short, she’s spoiled for choice.

Another little knot of tension rises up inside her, and she’s not sure if it’s good or bad. The wealth of pretty options before her is daunting. She drops the undergarment back in the drawer, fast as she can, in case her fingers start shaking.

It’s just underwear, she reminds herself. As much as she’d like to imagine otherwise, the survivor probably doesn’t care much other than that she have some. There’s no-one to please but herself. She’d have thought that would be reassuring.

And still.

“You like ‘em?” Rocket asks. His voice is rasping. “Or you want to look at something else?”

“I like them,” she says quickly, immediately. “I’m just… trying to pick.”

He shuffles his weight to the other foot. “How many are in your size? Ten? Twelve?”

She sifts through the whispery little pile. “Twelve,” she confirms, and he hitches a shoulder.

“Get ‘em all,” he says easily.

She blinks, guilt already chewing its way through her belly. “But—“

He cuts her off with a grimace and a wave of a clawed hand. “Rather spend the extra units than the extra time,” he tells her roughly. “Better to get ‘em all so you can you figure out what the fuck you like than to hafta stand around here for another two hours while you make up your frickin’ mind.”

“Altogether, they’re a fraction of what even one of these little jewels you brought me is worth,” Sanna Orix intervenes delicately, as if they’ve already assessed the pearl’s concerns about a pricetag. “Your Stranger here can definitely afford them today — but I might even end up throwing them in for free, simply based on the magnitude of how much I’m going to make off these.” They roll a little sphere between their fingers, and their skin glows with almost the same iridescent luminosity.

Pearl chews her lip, and then offers a hesitant half-smile and nods. She likes Sanna Orix — could probably love them, if she were going to stay on this moon for any length of time. There’s a kindness to the Cyxlorade that pearl would have loved to have in her life — and a deep wisdom that she’d like to be able to emulate someday.

Of course, Herbert would have hated Sanna Orix — would have hated all the luxe inelegance of this little shop, and the clutter of treasures that seem to serve very little purpose beyond making life a little sweeter. He’d hate the quiet sagacity of Orix’s presence and bearing, unpinned to pursuits of whatever the High Evolutionary considers glory. Instead, the Cyxlorade merchant’s only goal seems to be creating and sharing comfort, and pleasure.

And to pearl, that seems deeply honorable — and deeply necessary — in a universe that hosts monsters like Herbert.

“Thank you, then,” pearl says — first to the Cyxlorade, and then again to Rocket, with perhaps some extra warmth. Delicately, she plucks up the panties in her size, beginning to bundle them up in her arms until Sanna reaches out with slender, shining hands and takes them from her, stowing them away on the little counter where purchases are finalized.

“Stranger here says you need a full wardrobe, sweetberry,” Sanna Orix says, and takes pearl’s fingers in their own, leading her to a tiered table of pants and skirts and various other assorted bottoms, depending on the patron’s anatomy. “What colors do you like, dewdrop? Do you prefer pants or skirts or wraps? Dresses? Robes, like mine?”

“Yours are lovely,” pearl says quickly, barely restraining her fingers from reaching out and coasting the hem of the shiver-thin satin that cascades off Orix’s frame: a watercolor wash of gold and champagne and ice-blue, as iridescent as his skin. “But I think—“ her eyes dart to Rocket’s red-gold stare “—something, uhm, less flowy?” What does practical mean? She imagines, if Rocket is going to let her stay on the ship with him, that it means clothing less likely to get caught up in machinery — something more suited to the bitter climes of Fron. “Pants, I think?”

Orix tilts his head. “Pants it is, then.”

But Rocket makes a little sound in his throat. “You can get whatever you want, p— doll. You want skirts or whatever? Get a couple skirts.” He coughs a little. “We won’t be in the mountains all the time.”

Sanna Orix raises a brow at pearl, and the Terran girl flushes.

“Okay,” she agrees, a little breathless with the freedom of it. “Maybe — one skirt? And uhm — however many pairs of pants.” She flicks her eyes to Rocket again and he shrugs.

“I got three armored jumpsuits,” he tells Sanna Orix. “Get her at least as many pairs of pants. Whatever style she wants, but they gotta be armor-weave.” Something flickers in his face and he grimaces. “Soft, preferably. Somethin’ comfortable.”

Soon enough, Sanna Orix has ushered her back into a little curtained area. Pearl hasn’t worn pants in years, and she’d missed them at first — before she’d learned that all of the things she might want to do in them, like climbing trees or spinning cartwheels, were unseemly anyway.

She’d forgotten how nice they are.

“I like these,” she admits from behind the curtain, smoothing the buttery, snug black leggings over her hips and tummy. They wrap her up like a hug, and it’s so nice to be so free, to be able to stretch and move and run without a million layers of fibrous silk getting in her way, or rigid folds of thick violet-dyed wool.

“Come on out, sunberry,” Sanna Orix calls. “Let me make sure they don’t need any alterations.”

Pearl ducks back out from behind the sweeping curtain, and Orix clucks and tugs at the waistband and thighs.

“Are they comfortable, berry? Have you tried sitting in them, kneeling in them? On Cyxlore we make sure clothes fit the body, not the other way around, so you just tell me if anything needs to be adjusted.”

“They’re perfect,” pearl says instantly, turning and looking over her shoulder at herself, then crouching low. She shoots back upright when her survivor makes a throttled, sputtering noise in his throat. “Are you—“

“Those got fiber-armor woven in?” he interrupts her, crimson-fire eyes looking anywhere but at her, his voice rasping around whatever has suddenly gotten stuck in it. Sanna Orix lifts a hairless brow and nods, and her dark eyes glint, as if she’s entertained by the whole scenario.

Rocket is still coughing.

“Do you need some water?” pearl asks her survivor worriedly.

“Three pairs of those?” Rocket inquires instead, voice hoarse and crackling. He ignores her question. “Or you want something else? We can—“

“Three is fine,” pearl says quickly, flushing. “Thank you, but do you—”

“Gotta get you some shirts too—“

“Oh,” she says, trying to keep track of her concern for him while also balancing his questions — and hang onto the little things she wants. Heat rises in her throat, shimmering into her cheeks. “I—“ She falters. “Okay,” she agrees softly, but apparently the survivor can hear the disappointment on her voice, and apparently it bothers him.

“What?”

She looks down and fingers the soft, worn hem of Bzermikitokolok and the Knowheremen, where it floats somewhere just around the edge of her ribs. “I was kind of hoping I could keep wearing yours,” she confesses, cheeks burning. “I’m sorry — I know that’s selfish; they’re your clothes—“

“You wanna keep wearing my shirts.”

The sentence is delivered flatly — still hoarse, but with no inflection — and when she looks up, Rocket is staring at her with hard, hot eyes — bright red embers, as glowing as the night they’d shone at her from the shadows of her HalfWorld cage. She winces, the crushed debris of mortification starting to fill up her ribs like rubble.

Sanna’s eyes dart back and forth between the two of them, rapt.

“I—yes? I’m sorry; it’s okay, I can—“

“That’s fine, doll.” The words are clipped and short, but quick. “Gotta get you a — somethin’ to make sure you stay warm, but — that’s just fine.”

“I have something perfect in mind,” Sanna Orix says, and they disappear around a corner of the little shop before returning with an armful of something that pearl assumes must be the galaxy’s softest sweater: big and blanket-like with massive pockets, to be buttoned over the survivor’s cottony little t-shirts if pearl gets cold. It’s thick and heavy, and the weave feels like cream against her skin. Rocket crosses his arms — eyes dark and intent on her when she snuggles into the shawl-lapel collar — before he strides across the little space and pinches his fingers in the loose elbow of her sleeve. She startles, then watches with big eyes as he massages the fabric together between his thumb and forefinger like he’s testing its texture.

“This’ll fit under the jacket?” he demands, and Sanna Orix disappears again briefly to bring out an armored-leather coat with an internal heating system woven into the lining. The soft, silken fluff of the cardigan collapses easily inside the jacket sleeves.

“It should actually work together better than the coat on its own,” Sanna admits. “It crushes down quite easily, and will add an additional layer of insulation while wicking away any moisture.” Their narrow hands pinch a fold in the fabric, as if the gesture could illustrate its wicking properties.

“You want one or two?” Rocket asks pearl abruptly, running his eyes from her ankles and up the velvety, painted-on leggings to the place where the cardigan puddles over her hips, a little rectangle of her midriff peeking through.

“Oh,” she stammers, “I only need one—“

“Two,” he decides. “You got a favorite color, doll?”

She blinks. “Uhm — I haven’t thought about it in a long time,” she admits. “I haven’t really had a— uhm—“

I haven’t had a reason to have one, she thinks. Herbert had dressed her in whites and purples, and all the cages where he’d kept her had been in shades of neutrals.

“Not — I think, not purple?” she says, and she can hear the question in her voice. The uncertain lilt of it makes her flinch, but her survivor is watching her with burning red eyes that suddenly fracture, and somehow they feel unbearably patient.

He knows, she realizes in that moment. He knows.

“I have a soft silver-gray that would match your eyes,” Sanna Orix says. “But—“ She tilts her head. “I think you might like at least one in color, sweetberry. You’d look pretty in yellow, or perhaps teal.”

“I like gray and teal, I think,” pearl says, and she can hear the reediness in her own voice. She knows her own eyes are fastened to Rocket’s crimson-fire stare like silver buttons, nervous and wide. “Or r-red, maybe? Instead of the teal?”

“Fuck it,” Rocket says abruptly. “The girl’s got no frickin’ clothes—“

Pearl flushes, and Sanna Orix’s brows arch in surprise.

“—and apparently we ain’t buying shirts today, so just get her all four, Orix. Teal, red, yellow, gray — whatever.”

“That’s so much—“

He ignores pearl’s protests. “You wanted a couple skirts too, didn’t you?”

“Just one!” she squeaks, but Sanna’s already disappearing around the corner again.

Rocket rolls his eyes. “We ain’t gonna get a chance to get you anything else for a while, doll. And m’not generally the generous type. So just enjoy this while it lasts.”

“What about you?” she asks, and he raises a brow.

“What about me?”

“I thought these might be to your taste,” Sanna Orix interrupts delicately, coming back into view, gently herding pearl back toward the dressing area before she can respond. There’s a stack of sleek fabrics in his arms: soft and cool and smooth, too matte to be satin or silk but with a strange luminosity nonetheless. They’re long on pearl, fluttering around her ankles, with a lower waist band that rests softly against her hips — even lower than the blanket had — and slits that rise to mid-thigh on both sides. The survivor is watching her with half-hooded eyes when she leaves the curtained dressing-area, and it feels like his gaze licks over her knees when she rustles the panels of fabric and the slits flare open at the sides.

“Berry,” Sanna Orix says softly, “are you all right?”

Pearl startles at the sudden, dense worry in their voice, then sees Rocket wince: ears flattening, shoulders hunching, head ducking. Her heart suddenly twists behind her ribs and climbs right up to her mouth, beating against the back of her tongue — because her survivor looks like he’s waiting to be hit. It takes a moment for pearl to process, but then she follows both sets of their eyes to her belly.

The white bandage, almost fully visible. The faint remnants of scratches and spark-shaped splotches, nearly healed.

“Oh,” she says quickly, and she tries to usher up her very softest smile, keeping her eyes on Rocket. Her fingers linger over the edge of white. “In all honesty, I’m certain I’ve never been better.”

Something in Sanna Orix’s face softens, but it’s the survivor that pearl is watching. His ears ease, hesitantly half-risen, and he flicks an ember-eyed glance up at her face. She’s only seen that hunted look on his face once before — pressed into the shadows under the flight control panel, eyes wide and wounded. But there’s something else in them now, something uncertain and raw.

Orix smiles. “Try this one on,” she says, and they hold out a skirt in the same style in muted, silvery pale rose. They flick their eyes toward Rocket and drop their voice into a stage whisper. “I happen to know your friend here is partial to pink.”

Rocket’s lower jaw drops a little and he flashes betrayed, accusing eyes toward the merchant, who only chuckles softly.

But pearl doesn’t need to try it on. She already loves the color and the sheen of it, all on her own. With her survivor’s worn gray and black band shirts and any one of her new sweaters, it’ll be a dream of candy-sunrise-colors.

And knowing Rocket might like it? That just sends an extra golden trill up through her belly: something hopeful and warm, and as springlike as her new clothes. The joy of it all — soft comfy clothes in a watercolor wash of colors she likes, pretty and warm and gifted to her for no reason other than she needed them — it flushes high in her cheeks and down through her throat, warming her belly and tensing in her calves. Without thinking, she bounces on her toes.

“I love it,” she says without thinking, and she’s sure the proof of it must be all over her face. Wyndham would hate her showing so much juvenile excitement, but she doesn’t care. She thinks she can feel her eyes sparkling. “Thank you—” she adds, turning to Rocket, just missing the fact that his eyes have been bouncing with her: following her bare toes to her ankles and the flounce of her hips, the jostle of her breasts beneath his shirt, the rumples of soft new sweater.

“He needs something too,” she says eagerly to Sanna Orix — missing Rocket’s strained swallow entirely. “Something more comfortable than a — than an armored jumpsuit.”

Sanna’s brows raise and they cast a mildly challenging look toward the survivor, who grimaces.

“Yeah, yeah,” he concedes grumpily, looking deeply unsettled by the shift. “Just some pants to sleep in.” He brandished a claw and a raised eyebrow in Pearl’s direction. “Just ‘cause I’m lettin’ you wear my shirts doesn’t mean I’m giving ‘em up.”

Pearl has no complaints. If he’s wearing them to bed, that means they’ll be dosed again with his resinous, warm, almond-cake-and-campfire smell between washes. She’s more than happy to rotate through their little shared wardrobe.

They leave an hour later, with pearl happily swirling her petal-pink skirt around her ankles and the tops of her short new boots, which are a dusty lilac-blue. Her blanket-skirt has been tucked into a bag along with their other new belongings: her sweaters, along with scarves and hats and a plethora of wool-warm socks for both of them. They’ll need to come back in a couple rotations, Sanna Orix explains, for their altered leather coats, heated boots, and thermal pants, and for Rocket’s pair of soft trousers to be modified to accommodate his tail. In fact, the only items that Rocket had really dictated are the armored, heated jackets and thermal gear, and sets of paired boots and mittens that are able to store up to fifty hours of heat provisions, all recharged and powered by the kinetic energy of their own footsteps. Everything else has been her choice. Pearl’s head is whirling with the freedom of the whole experience — the liberation of it — and she can barely focus on anything else.

The two of them drop their bundle of new belongings at the runabout, and then Rocket is weaving her through the streets of Cyxlore. There’s so much to look at: cupboard-shrines set into the glittering stone walls of the city, carts where merchants sell foods from all over the universe, kiosks full of textured pottery, and scrolls embossed with tactile Cyxlorade lettering. At some point, a wave of something warm and sweet washes through the air. It reminds pearl of the marzipan-scent clinging to her survivor’s fur — nutty and buttery and rich as brown sugar — and maybe something like cinnamon, and something like chocolate. She hasn’t thought of hot chocolate in years — since she’d left Terra, actually — but the memory of it steams to life prettily in her mind. The woman next door had made her some — twice. Creamy and dense, with nutmeg and and cloves and allspice. The sudden recollection startles a breath out of her throat, and when Rocket darts an angle-eyed, red-glimmer glance up at her — one brow raised in dry inquiry — she lets out a little laugh.

“Something smells good,” she says only, but his ears flick and he scowls before striding up to a stall and saying something to the Krylorian working there. The pink-skinned man laughs and Rocket rolls his eyes and scans a thin piece of glass — a datacard, he’d told her the rotation before — and the Krylorian hands him an insulated bottle full of something cream-colored and steaming.

Rocket pushes the warm bottle into her hands. “Cyxlorade morningtea,” he grunts. “S’good. Not synth, but it didn’t kill anything to make it. Nuts from a kinda proteaceae tree here that overproduces, mostly. It’s more like — fleecing a woolly f’saki than anything else.” He shrugs. “Know you didn’t ask, but everything we ordered today ‘cept the leather coats were made like that. Most of the textiles here are — the grasses in the Telladore system make good cloth, and they’re part of a connected root-system. Didn’t have to kill nothin’.”

He’s edging around the words, tight and tense, but she feels herself soften, the breath seeing right out of her lungs and lighting up like slow-glowing summer fireflies. “You did that for me?”

He flinches and shoots her an appalled glower. “No — I told you. It’s just the way most shit is made here. You got lucky.”

If anything, his defensive glare just softens her more. What he’s saying is probably true, she supposes — that most of the fabrics here have been created from materials that required no loss of life. But that he’d wanted her to know, while claiming no credit for thinking of it — that makes her heart shift and float high in her chest, bumping gently against her collarbone like an iridescent bubble. Or a peony, unfurling. Herbert would have used that truth to manipulate her, to claim space in her head and heart, to tie her knots over his meticulous thoughtfulness, his detailed and attentive care.

Herbert is a monster who’d wanted to make her believe he cared, and her survivor is a caretaker who’d rather her believe he wasn’t.

“I did get lucky,” she only agrees, her voice melting all over him. She thinks all her old ice must be as warm as the morningtea in her hands by now. When his ears flatten and he hazards another uncertain glance up at her — vulnerability quickly covered by a scoff — she tries for an impudent wink, unable to help but bounce on her toes again.

Rocket’s scoff immediately turns into a sputter.

She takes a sip of a morningtea and almost moans. It does remind her of her neighbor’s hot chocolate, and something richer and nuttier and spicier besides. Once, the same neighbor had given her a slice of chocolate-pecan pie, and she thinks that’s what this drink tastes like.

And though the memory and the drink don’t warm her up the way Rocket does, it’s a close, close second.

“Don’t you want some?” she offers, reaching out to him with the glass bottle. He blinks down at it, then up at her as pedestrians trickle around them: rivulets of water in a spring thaw.

He hesitates, tilting his head, then plucks the bottle from her hand. His eyes stay on her, ember-bright, as he puts his mouth over the same spot hers had been and takes a drink. Something golden spirals up inside her and she lets out a shuddery little breath.

Cautiously, he hands it back to her — fur bristling just a little, and tail tucked as he waits to see if she takes it.

Of course she does — why wouldn’t she? she wonders fleetingly — and she takes another sip. Some small part of her tries to decipher where the lip of the bottle is warm from the drink inside, and where the smooth glass has been heated by his mouth.

It still tastes like a hug.

She asks a million questions as they go, and he rolls his eyes every time — but he answers, and more than once she thinks she sees amusement twitching the corner of his mouth. His spine pulls up as they walk, and his shoulders look like they become even broader — his tail sways indolently behind him and at some point, he starts to sound… smug. Prideful.

That makes the gold coil in her belly glow brighter, too. Her heart bumps merrily against her ribs and everything is full of sunlight and starlight, and she thinks maybe this is the happiest she’s ever been: band-shirted, pink-skirted, and lilac-booted — sipping her morningtea, tagging along behind her beautiful survivor through the mosaic-paved streets.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Pearl pauses at almost every stall, exactly as he’d expected: hands caught up between her breasts in little fists around the warm glass bottle. It’s just like when she stares at his weapons and tech: like she’s fascinated, but she knows that touching could be dangerous. The Monster had originally thought she’d just had a healthy fear of explosives when they’d been on the runabout — but now, he’s wondering if Wyndham had done something to train the pearl to keep her pretty fingers to herself at all times. Somehow, it makes him hate the bastard even more.

Which honestly shouldn’t be possible.

She looks so much better already. He’d thought she’d been gorgeous in an evil, ice-queen sort of way when he’d first seen her, but the difference now is almost painful. He knows she still hasn’t been eating right, but she looks so much healthier: moon-gray eyes constantly aglow, cheeks all rosy and kitten-smile perpetually just a dimple away. Curls bouncing recklessly and freckles suddenly copper-bright on the tawny rose of her skin, instead of fading monochromatically into pale marble-cold flesh.

And every once in a while she does that little dance: bouncing on her toes, breasts bobbing all sweet and tauntingly, face lit up like a rosy lantern at the Indigarran sky festivals.

Rocket’s never been interested in spending his hard-earned units on almost anything before. Music, maybe. An escort if he’s near an Ore Garden brothel — maybe even two, if he’s feeling rich. Otherwise, he only begrudgingly parts with money: usually just enough for a leaky roof over his head and booze in his belly, and fuel for his damn runabout. A spicy meat-stuffed pastry if he can’t knick one. Maybe extra tech that he could turn into something new, though he’s more likely to swipe what he wants if he can. Gambling, maybe, if the other players look drunk or stupid or easily-duped. Everything else, he steals: not because he’s always broke — though he often is — but because it’s fuckin’ fun.

Hell, even the Bzermikitokolok and the Knowheremen shirt had been snatched from a merch stall at a Lux-Crystal Fantasy festival in Inix a couple years ago. His general policy is to avoid stealing from musicians and sex workers, but he’d been in dire straits at the time, and the jackass working the kiosk had stepped on his tail and then called him a plague-ridden goblin when he’d gotten mad about it. As far as Rocket had been concerned, that dickhead had owed him more than a new shirt, and he’d just shrugged and hoped that the band had taken the cost outta that shitbag’s wages.

But here? With pearl? Rocket sort of figures gambling ain’t that fun anyway — just a thing to do when he’s bored and lonely or wanting to fuck up someone else’s day. And he can’t really imagine a universe in which he hires a courtesan while he’s still got such a pretty thing already sleeping in his bunk, even if he’s gotta stop himself from putting his hands on her the way he wants to.

Better to put a half-unit toward getting her a taste of her very first morningtea. It’s a well-known, widespread beverage for frickin’ commoners, especially in the Telladore system, so he’s sure she’d never had it before. Wyndham woulda never allowed it.

At first, the Monster thought — she should get a chance to try it. She’ll like it. Then he’d thought, let me show her all the things she can have if she sticks with me. M’not like Wyndham. I’m not. Then he’d figured it had been a mistake to introduce it to her at all — Cyxlore’s the only place she can get it fresh every morning, so he’s giving her even more reasons to stay behind.

But…

…the look on her face when she’d tried it?

He’d buy her a hundred frickin’ more if she asked for ‘em.

He knows some of the shops out here sell a powdered blend that can be mixed with hot water — not as good as having it fresh, but if she ends up coming with him — if she does — it could help keep her warm on Fron. It’s just — pragmatical, really.

And if she had wanted that cheap, delicate little gold necklace with the fake Spartaxian crystal in it? If she’d asked, he’d have gotten it. Stolen, maybe, but secured around her pretty throat nonetheless. The watercolor Indigarran silk scarf at Linna Fennex’s stall? It would look pretty as hell on pearl’s dainty neck, maybe even make him feel a little better by covering up the sunflower-shadows of bruising still left by his hands.

The uncharacteristic urge to snatch up every pretty and tasty and soft thing he can for her — it’s just because she clearly hasn’t had anything of her own before, he reasons. Not even her own choice of jewelry, or food, or clothes. Hell, she’d had to give herself an allergic reaction just to get out of wearing — to get out of wearing—

Lylla.

Not Lylla, he reminds himself. Some other poor, fur-covered bastard.

But if she’d told him she’d always wanted pink-floral-printed rainboots, or had suddenly expressed a desire for a set of the fake Shi’ar costume-wings that the kids sometimes like to wear on their backpacks, or asked for one of the stupid flower-crowns woven from Telladorean indigo-and-sunshine irises, he thinks he’d have found a way to make it happen.

And he’d probably still wanna fuck her in all of ‘em.

At some point, she finishes her drink, and the Monster gestures her roughly toward one of the little recycling compactors built into the building walls every few blocks. He stops at Nola Doren’s shop and picks through a clutter of old parts and repurposed tech, eyeballing a few pieces he might come back for tomorrow. Normally he’d just swipe ‘em, but he can’t be sure pearl won’t have an adverse reaction to his less-than-exemplary shopping habits.

Eventually, they make it to the food and provisions market, and pearl’s leaning over his shoulder at every stall. The softness and the waterlily scent of her — combined with the resinous, woodsy scent of him on her tits — makes his chest puff up like an idiot. He stops caring when people glance dubiously at the strip of white bandage peeking over the waistband of her pretty pink skirt — he just grins sharply at them, daring them to even try to put hands on her.

It’s unnecessary, of course. And he’s got no right to her anyway.

But still.

She’s fascinated by the food market, too — like she is with damn near everything. There’s some Cyxlorade natural food he convinces her to try — mostly vegetables and fruits from trees and other plants that don’t suffer from the harvest. She predictably shies away from yaro and other root-vegetables, since the whole plant dies in the reaping. The synth market is rich here, though, and he’s able to stock up on all sorts of proteins and snacks for the two of them — a synthetic smoked Moraggian moonfish that he likes, and three different kinds of artificial auroch; lab-made woolly-boar bacon and more fake Aladnan snowfish. A meat that mimics purple chicken from Indigarr. Imitation eggs and wedges of lyophilized stonefruit and melon, berries and pomes.

Every other stall, his brain turns over. At one, he’ll forget that she’s not his — take for granted the eagerness with which she follows him and stands at his side, silver eyes sparkling. He takes for granted the togetherness of the moment, and the idea they’ll be sharing these rations out in the Beautiful Forever. But by the time he pays and they move on to the next provisions merchant, he’s regretting every single minute of the day — showing her what an indulgent moon Cyxlore is, treating her to their pretty clothes and their tasty foods.

He figures he’s practically pushing her out of the hatch, when all he really wants to do is keep her in his bunk.

Inevitably, the regret grows more bitter and he starts hating that he’d let her become such a need in such a short time. He’d called her spoiled, but it’s him who got ruined fast. ‘Cause… who’s gonna make little moans from the shower when she’s gone? Who’s gonna kneel so prettily next to him when he’s fixing something? Who’s gonna beg him to unfold his dreams about a future where he does nothing but build ships, and air them out like soft clean bedsheets on the quiet flightdeck?

Who’s he gonna imagine chasing Acanti migrations with?

And why does he suddenly feel the want for any of it?

…But speaking of her kneeling on the grates — he does need to find some mats for the floor, to protect her knees. And before he knows it, he’s right back to the beginning of this whole cycle: forgetting she’ll be leaving him, forgetting he doesn’t get to keep her. By the time he’s ready for them to head back to the runabout — arms piled high with crates of goods — his head feels lightning-struck: pulsing and throbbing, thoughts all twisted up together and biting. That old frenetic pulse behind his heart is throbbing, tangling everything with the jagged buzz of electricity, just waiting to be discharged.

He’s not so distracted that he doesn’t notice when Pearl’s soft-soled boots falter behind him, though. He stops so quickly his fur keeps going, ends of each strand swaying with momentum while he casts a sideways glance behind himself. Pearl’s staring at an arched doorway — Wona Beax’s salon. Rocket hasn’t been there before, but he’s heard of it, and he raises a brow before following the Terran girl’s silver stare. She’s watching, entranced, as a Luphomoid exits — they spin their long, luxurious mane of midnight-dark hair over one shoulder, and the underside is a rainbow-aurora. It practically glows.

The pearl’s eyes are drawn to it, and there’s something faint and yearning in the set of her mouth — regret clinging to the corners of her lips, tugging at them.

“You like that?” Rocket asks before he can stop the words. His voice gets stuck in his throat, splitting up the middle, fractured by how wistful she looks — almost affectionate, almost sad.

But she doesn’t seem to hear the cracked edges of his words. She only nods mutely, eyes wide. He shifts the crates in his arms and reaches up — all impulse — to pinch her hip. The silky weave of the new pink skirt is smooth and cool under his fingers, but he can feel the warm give of her flesh underneath. He makes sure it’s not a bruised spot — he’s memorized all her little wounds — but she jolts anyway, and that’s when he realizes, too late, how intimate the gesture is.

He snaps his arm back so hard that his knuckles smack against the crate, stinging, but before he can spit out any panicked and furious excuses, she’s already answering.

“When I was a kid, I used to want turquoise hair,” she tells him softly, her voice caught up in an expression that he’s starting to recognize as the indulgence of one singular memory that doesn’t hurt. He goes still as she speaks, and his eyes catch on the kitten-smile half-curving her mouth. “Like a mermaid’s.”

He feels the sides of his nose crinkle, and her eyes flicker down to him — then focus, and grow warm. The moonsilver of her irises goes molten, like she’s seen something in his face that she’s found endearing.

He whuffs against his will and tries to distract her. “What the fuck’s a mermaid?”

The sound of her little chuckle ripples over his fur. She turns her gaze back to the salon and lifts one shoulder dismissively. “Terran myth. It doesn’t matter.”

He studies her, head tilting and ears twitching toward her. He remembers the conversation about cutting her hair — about all of Wyndham’s rigid rules. He snorts. “You wanna get your hair colored turquoise, doll?”

Her brow crimps in the middle and he winces. The statement has clearly tweaked something for her, though he’s not sure what; she tucks the crate of groceries more firmly against her belly and her shoulders curve a little, like she suddenly wants to make herself small. But then she offers him a fleeting, self-conscious smile and a half-shrug before watching as another person steps out of the arched doorway. The stranger waves at someone down the street and then hurries away, hair burning like a banner behind them: sunset ombré, all oranges and scarlets and plums.

“I — I haven’t thought about it in a long time.”

The Monster muffles a noise. Fuckin’ Wyndham. “Well, think about it now. And quick.”

She blinks, eyes swiveling toward him, and it’s his turn to offer up a half-shrug. “Should be getting you a disguise anyway.”

Another blink, and her lashes are starry, silver eyes wide. “What?”

He juts his chin toward the salon. “You want red hair? Blue skin? Wona Beax can get you dyed whatever colors you want, doll. Give you supplements to keep the new layers growing in the right colors. Might make the High Evolutionary less likely to spot you.”

She stares at him, and he watches as her expression melts: apprehension sparking and softening into fascination. “How do you know all this?” she asks, those pretty eyes starting to brighten with intrigue. “Have you —?”

He feels his own eyes go wide, and then — unexpectedly — a cackle rises in his throat and bursts from his mouth. At least three passers-by shoot him startled glances. “What? No,” he snickers, imagining himself with pink fur. Or maybe she’d pictured him in blue and orange, to match his jumpsuits. “But I do know a few escorts — from Contraxia, mainly — who come out to Cyxlore for dye-jobs if they got the units. They got nothin’ but praise for a Cyxlorade dye-job. Wona Beax in particular.”

The pearl tilts her head, watching a cluster of three Krylorians enter.

“What color do you think would look good on me?” she asks cautiously.

You heard Sanna, he thinks — I always been partial to pink. For a second, he imagines some of those silky curls of hers: tumbling past her shoulders, glossy and almost-matching her rosy nipples. He closes his eyes for a second, then wrestles them open. “You should pick,” he says flatly.

“Oh.” She readjusts the crate in her arms. “I wouldn’t know what would look right —“

He snorts. If his hands had been free, he’d have waved her worries away with clawed fingers. You’ll look pretty no matter what, pearl. “All you baldbodies look the same anyway. Just pick something.” He gestures with his chin and rolls his eyes. “Get in there.”

She only hesitates for a moment more — searching his eyes like she’s looking for something, though he has no idea what. Then she gnaws her lip, and jostles the crates in her arms, and steps up to the doorway — so resolutely, he’d almost think he’d asked her to face down a Kree Accuser all by her lonesome.

“Hey,” he snaps out sharply, and she pauses on the threshold and looks down at him. And yeah, she’s nervous — eyes all big and alarmed, heart tripping softly against her ribs. Reckless impulse tightens his throat and forces a rush of air through his surgically-augmented vocal cords.

“M’right behind you, doll.”

Everything in her face goes so soft and grateful that he feels it like a fist in the belly and oh shit, he’s frickin’ ruined; he might as well be leashed. He’s tethered to her by the heartstrings; he’s a meteor, bonded and bridled to her happiness.

Oh, he fuckin’ hates it.

But he stays true to his word and follows her in anyway.

The salon artists here are all trained by Wona herself. Colloquialisms aside, the practice isn’t really a dye job so much as careful augmentation of the pigment in the hair follicles and the skin cells — changing the receptivity to light on a structural level, altering the way the visible spectrum is reflected back to viewing eyes. Rocket tries to ignore the leftover thud in his chest so he can focus on figuring out how to pocket some of the tools floating around the shop — he’d love to dig into the tech. Refractor guns and melanocyte adaptors, particulate ‘fusers. It all might be used for aestheticalistic purposes here, but he’s sure he can redevelop it into something far more cool and devastating. Still, he keeps half an eye on pearl, where she stands and stares at a series of small screens mounted on the wall. They scroll through different hair styles, and scale colors, and a rainbow of patterns printed like tattoos onto flesh.

He’s distracted from his mission when it isn’t a random artist who approaches the little Terran, though. Instead, it’s Wona Beax themself.

“Hello, dewdrop,” Wona Beax says gently, approaching pearl from behind. The dark-haired girl startles, then shuffles the crate of rations in her arms. “Why don’t you put your supplies down over there—” They gesture to a nearby chair “—by your friend, and tell me what you’re looking for today?”

Rocket nods once, sharply, when pearl’s eyes meet his, and she carefully settles her crate down on the chair next to him.

“Are you wanting your hair or skin done? Or both?” Beax asks pearl quietly, tapping lightly at her shoulders and guiding her into a circle. Rocket’s surprised by the Cyxlorade’s gentleness — like they’d read pearl from a distance and had known she was gonna be skittish. “You have gorgeous curls. What’s your name, dewdrop?”

Pearl looks at the Monster, eyes wide. He blinks at her and shrugs. They’d focused on what he should call her but not on an actual name, and Rocket feels like an idiot for it.

“Uhm,” she murmurs, her hands fluttering to trace the white bandage over her lower abdomen. She twists her fingers together anxiously. “Doll.”

Rocket’s stupid, manufactured heart nearly detaches itself from its synthetic valves and arteries and ligaments, and practically falls right out of his chest and onto the tiled floor.

Beax chuckles, hefting pearl’s hair in her hands. “Just Doll?”

“Just Doll.” The words are a softly-crackled whisper, like dead leaves underfoot, shy and nervous. The Monster’s tongue feels thick and swollen, throat tight and strangled, chest aching. He can see the second that Beax reads the trepidation and vulnerability in his pearl’s voice, because their dark eyes soften and they just say, “Well, Doll is a cute name, sunberry.”

The Monster winces and scrawls a mental note to tell her pick out another name — her own name — for the next place they go, so she doesn’t have to use some pet-name he’s painted on her.

But he does like it.

He watches as pearl murmurs a few responses, and Wona Beax glides their fingers over the screens. They switch back and forth between lilac and a pale, icy blue for a few breaths, and then pearl nods and smiles, stars bright in her eyes and her teeth, and Wona Beax is guiding her to a chair.

Rocket sets down his own crates and meanders around — sleight-of-hands a refractor-gun into one of his pouches and smuggles a light-scatter ‘fuser and a melanocyte adapter into one of the boxes of rations. Beax is murmuring to pearl as she smooths a ‘fuser through the curls.

“I haven’t had a comb for a few days,” pearl says back, all hushed and apologetic, and he feels one eyelid flicker in a quickly-hidden grimace. He’d been too slow — a dozen steps behind, ever since he’d opened her window. Since before — hadn’t seen how miserable she was out in that rainy marble courtyard, hadn’t paid any attention to the details, small or large, ever since. Otherwise he’d have had a pair of boots ordered and ready for her before they’d ever stepped off of the docking ramp, and a comb waiting for her.

“We’ll get one on the way out,” he rumbles casually, nodding at Beax. “Along with some supplements to keep her hair growing in the way she wants. If she wants.”

Wona looks down at pearl, a handful of silky curls gripped loosely in their palm. “You okay with that, Doll?”

Pearl looks at him with her little, uncertain smile, and nods. “I’d like that very much, actually.”

He nods to Wona Beax. “Three circs’ worth.”

Wona stills. “Three—?”

He tilts his head. “Will they go bad?”

“No,” they say slowly. “We just don’t usually get such large orders.”

He considers that. “Can you fill it?”

Pearl’s already cutting in — not wanting to be a bother, he’s sure. “It’s okay if—“

“We can,” Wona Beax says quietly. “She shouldn’t be forced, though—“

He waves a clawed hand and turns his eyes to pearl. “You can stop taking ‘em any time you want, doll. You know that, right?”

She’s looking at him like he’s offering her the entire Bank of Xandar and the Spartoi royal jewels, combined. “Yes,” she says softly, and he tries to keep his grunt from sounding too pleased. She turns her eyes to Beax. “Three circumrotations’ worth would be wonderful.”

Wona Beax tilts her head consideringly, then nods once, firmly. They start rattling off how the supplements work — suppressing or stimulating melanin production in targeted organic systems, altering structure and particulate concentrations in the translucency of skin and hair cells. “If you take the supplements, your hair will start growing in altered,” they caution, and tug a wayward curl. “The supplements will target your scalp, but the rest will eventually grow in a little different too. Dark still, most likely — the melanin shift tends to stay localized — but your eyelashes and brows will probably end up a dark blue, after some time.” They cough delicately. “Lashes and brows and — elsewhere, perhaps.”

Rocket tries not to linger on that comment, and Wona Beax goes on like they haven’t just set a gravity-mine off in his brain. If he stumbles a little, he doesn’t think anyone notices.

“When you stop, any new hair will start to grow back in its natural color—“

The Monster tries not to listen anymore.

They’re done before he realizes it, and more quickly than he’d have imagined. His head snaps up when he hears pearl’s footsteps approaching, and smells her waterlily scent as it softens the bright ozone-sting of the salon.

“What do you think?”

Her hair’s a color he can’t possibly describe: something between smoke-blue and pale lavender, too silvery to be a true pastel. Her skin looks even more golden under the halo of curls, gleaming like a starlit Spartoi peach, and her gray eyes somehow look darker and more luminous at the same time: satin chrome, like the bolts and caps on a clean starship before its engines ever ignite — just waiting to reach up into the sky.

He swallows.

“‘Least I’ll be able to tell you apart from the other humies around here,” he mutters, as if he couldn’t have picked her out by the sound of her heartbeat, or the clean sweet fragrance of her breathed into his lungs. As if he couldn’t find her just by letting the whiskers above his claws sketch over the bones in her wrists, kissing the silk between her knuckles like they’re little valleys for his touch to come home to.

She takes his dryness in a stride though — seemingly unperturbed, just looking pleased by the whole thing. He pays for everything — well, everything but the small arsenal of tech he’d lifted when no-one was looking. And then — just because it’s Wona Beax and the Ore Garden escorts love them, and because he figures maybe pearl will want to come back and he doesn’t want to fuck that up for her — he tips an absurd amount that he figures should be more than enough to cover the cost of the shit he’s stolen. Beax schedules someone from the salon to deliver Pearl’s supplements to the runabout tomorrow, and then Rocket gruffs a hoarse order to pearl, gesturing to a spinning rack of hair accessories.

“Pick out a comb,” he tells her, trying to sound casual about it.

Predictably, she spends too long pouring over the damn things, but even though he’s rolling his eyes and tapping his clawed foot on the tile, he can’t bring himself to rush her. She fusses over the price like she’s afraid to spend even a quarter-unit. Still — when she finally chooses, she clutches the wide-toothed comb to her heart and then slides it lovingly into the pocket of her skirt like it’s the universe’s most tenderly-kept secret, even though it’s only made of cheap pink opalite swirled with veins of fake gold—

so pretty and silly and ultimately worthless that it makes something inside him twinge.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

heyyyy friday again. sorry, my friends. firstly thanks to all those of you who sent good wishes for me and my family since last week. i just drove home today but we still don't really have any answers, so my future currently remains uncertain, which means all these estimated posting-dates truly are just wishful thinking/hopes/dreams. but you have all been truly so kind, so supportive, and i appreciate you so much. thank you from the bottom of my weepy lil heart.

i know this was a little bit of a nothing, filler-episode chapter but i still enjoyed writing it and i hope you enjoyed reading it. next week we get to make a new friend ad start moving into more plottish elements. and i'll have some character art of my girl pearl up on tumblr probably next week or the week after, too.

also, this was my first time writing long scenes with characters who use all pronouns. i stuck with they, she, and he for this purpose — i hope i was able to maintain clarity for readers and that it wasn’t confusing at all. cyxlorades are a highly-tactile people and are what would probably translate best as “genderfluxe”. most have at least two names and shift between genders as pleases them from moment to moment, leaning into their names as feels right. sanna orix is one of my fave OCs and i often tend to include them as a peripheral character in a bunch of my shit lol. like they’re a merchant in windfall/giftwrap (always selling panties geezus lol) and take what you need (odds & ends, rarities & luxuries). but this is my first time writing such a long scene with them, + introducing bestie wona beax. i'd love to someday do some art of them as well (i think their skin would be SO fun) but we shall see when i get time for that!

thank you again, for everything. you are beautiful little sunwarmed raspberries and perfect little iridescent dove-feathers. i appreciate you and this fandom from the bottom of my heart. ♡♡♡

find expected posting schedules & chapter-previews on tumblr♡
here's the masterlist & moodboard♡ (which includes forecasted schedules and summaries for quite a few chapters in advance)

coming soon: chapter eleven. hailbound.
summary: pearl adopts a stray. rocket falls for a sovereign.
warnings: still just rocket's anxiety.
estimated date: friday, may twenty-four. (TENTATIVE)

Chapter 11: hailbound.

Summary:

pearl adopts a stray. rocket falls for a sovereign.

Notes:

warnings: still just rocket’s anxiety.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

hailbound. mysteriously compelled to wave to passing strangers on a country road, a mountain path, or a remote stretch of water. From hail, to greet + bound, being obliged. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Pearl picks her way through the streets of Cyxlore’s capitol city, trying not to get distracted by the mosaic of blue and green and golden glass glinting beneath her lilac-blue boots. She cradles the smooth bottle of morningtea between her hands, warming her palms and fingers on the sweet, rich liquid inside, and pauses at one of the painted cupboards set into the walls.

She’d been too overwhelmed to really look when they’d been trundling through the city two rotations earlier, but most of the shops and kiosks seem to be carved right into the sparkling granite mountainsides, with rough-hewn stairs spiraling up into the upper levels of apartments and slanted, meadowed patios. Tall trees, sleek-barked and thin as spindles, rise up from careful patches of soil to stretch leaves out above the rim of the high mountain walls. Their shallow roots occasionally break through the glimmering tile of the street. Vines and mosses sprawl and drape lazily over the stonework, and barely any of the merchants are out at this hour — just a few, opening up their morning-food stalls here and there.

She’s on her own today. After Wona Beax had remade her hair — as pale lavender-blue as the hydrangeas pearl had imagined planting around the linguist’s white headstone — she and Rocket had returned to the runabout, where he’d muttered under his breath to himself as he’d emptied out part of the clothing locker of random odds-and-ends. Her eyes had widened at the displaced treasure-trove of scrap-metal and half-constructed tech.

“S’yours, now,” he’d grimaced, gesturing at the narrow space while shoving the brilliant, deadly devices into whatever open spots he could find under the bunks. Then he’d watched — shifting his weight from foot to foot, ears and tail flicking erratically — while she’d carefully folded away her sweaters and pants. The intensity of his gaze had confused her, but she’d swallowed down the bubble of anxiety rising in her throat, suddenly certain that he wouldn’t want her bringing attention to his heated stare.

Then he’d shown her how to work the laundry locker to wash her flimsy pile of new underthings. While she’d been sorting through them, he’d quietly crept away, only to call her from outside when she was done. He’d set up some sort of firearm-practice rig — a roving holotarget he’d projected onto one of the nearby cliff walls, paired to the training-blaster he’d made her.

“Like this,” he’d ordered, mimicking the stance he’d wanted her to take. When the recoil had sent her stumbling, she’d expected him to cackle — but his brow had furrowed and he’d only muttered something that had sounded like, tch, moron; kitten ain’t got a tail, and had circled her studiously before kicking one of her heels wider apart, and tugging at her hip to pull her more into a crouch.

“Center of gravity here,” he’d muttered, and then his hand had reached out to pluck at one of her new lilac-blue curls, tugging. The frisson on her scalp had made her wide-eyed, stifling a gasp. “Lean forward,” he’d drawled, like he hadn’t noticed the tremor fluttering on her skin and lashes — but his ears had flickered forward and his own gaze had turned hooded.

“Good girl,” he’d purred, giving the curl one more tug for good measure, and she’d had to shuffle back a mew.

Still, she’d gotten closer to the target each time, and had learned how to anticipate the kickback. After the first round, he’d grudgingly told her she’d done pretty good for a frickin’ amateur. She’d redoubled her efforts, running the randomized target through session after session until he’d eventually snarled at her to get into the runabout and shower while he rehydrated some of the new synth provisions.

“You’re gonna be sore again tomorrow,” he’d told her broodingly, like he’d regretted letting her practice so long.

“I don’t mind,” she’d responded breathlessly, and it had been true. She might still be trying to temper her bone-deep ache for approval, but she doubts she’ll ever stop wanting to improve, to do better, to chase the ephemeral moving goalposts of achievement like a mirage in the desert — as if there’s some finite point she can reach that will make her feel like she’s earned her place in the universe and is worthy of the stardust it has taken to make her.

In her head, she knows it’s faulty logic. If it were Rocket, saying such things about himself, she’d tell him that he doesn’t ever need to justify his existence like that. But her heart and her gut are fickle, hypocritical little gremlins, gnawing at her heels and driving her into an ourboros, devouring herself in her pursuit of perfection.

The best she can hope for, she supposes — for now, anyway — is to remake the idea of perfect on her own terms.

Not Herbert’s. And not, she supposes, Rocket’s.

At any rate, the new synth provisions had been delicious, in her opinion, and then Rocket had lingered over her wounds: dressing them, fingers coasting over the slopes of the backs of her thighs, leaving goosebumps and shivers behind. And not the kind of shivers she’s used to — rising up from the ice in her belly like a last-ditch effort to keep her from freezing to death. These had been all warm, golden shudders, rippling out from the base of her spine.

“Two more nights,” he’d told her, tracing the steri-stripped sliver he’d sliced into her skin. His touch had been so tender that she’d felt tears well up on her lashes.

Crybaby, she’d thought, and she’d tried to warble out some words of gratitude for him, for their shared day, for her new clothes and her hair and her boots and the food and the morningtea and the comb and the freedom. But he’d cut her off with another quiet, half-scornful tch and told her to put some damn underwear on.

He’d stayed in his jumpsuit — not willing to sleep in just one of his t-shirts, apparently — and so she’d kept on her skirt as well, though she’d have been happy to have stayed in just his shirt and her new underthings. He hadn’t given her another massage, though he’d seemed reluctant to let his fingers part with her skin. She’d been afraid he wouldn’t sleep with her, but he’d stayed in bed — though she’d been able to see his hesitation. Still, when she’d reached for his hand carefully, he’d let her lace their fingers again. He’d swallowed when she’d pressed their palms together, and something had flickered behind those burnt-ruby eyes before he’d swallowed a second time.

“Am I hurting you?” she’d asked, brow creased, moving to pull her hand back. But his fingers had suddenly latched tight, claws pricking into the backs of her hands.

“No,” he’d scoffed. “For fuck’s sake. Shut up and go to sleep.”

They’d started the next day with more firearms-practice. He’d lingered in the shadow of the runabout, trying to correct her posture and stance and aim at a distance until he’d gotten fed-up enough to stride up to her and kick her feet further apart again, pressing a leather-warm palm to her abdomen and snapping at her to tighten her core.

Still, he’d seemed impressed by the progress she’d made, and he’d set the target to roam slowly over mountainside while he’d dragged out a toolbox and peeled open part of the runabout, tackling the engine from the outside of the ship this time. They’d spent the day companionably, focused on their own tasks side-by-side. The camaraderie had kept a quiet buzz under her sternum, like bumblebees bumping around inside her ribs.

Sunlight and daisies, she’d thought. Wildflowers.

There had been a field behind her mother’s home that stretched against the neighbors’ yards — and beyond that, the poultry-slaughtering factory. But in the right months — with the light slanting through the grasses and fey specks of pollen glittering in the sunbeams — the meadows had been full of spiderwort and Queen Anne’s Lace, purple and yellow coneflowers, harebell and Black-Eyed Susans. Blue asters and forget-me-nots and purple vetch, and bright orange butterfly-milkweed. Back when she was just Liz, she’d laid in the tall grasses and let them close around her like a tight tiny closet with a view of the sky, hiding her small body while she’d watched caterpillars spin their cocoons, and honeybees sway drunkenly from blossom to blossom.

Lightyears away and circumrotations later, her fingers had squeezed the trigger of the modified quad-blaster and somewhere behind her, Rocket had cursed into the belly of the runabout’s engine. Deep inside her lungs, pearl had thought she could feel all that sweetness filling her up like the gold-dust pollen, clinging to her ribs and her knuckles and her eyelashes.

That night, Rocket had handed her a second square glass datacard — linked to his account, he’d told her.

She’d stared at him, horror crawling up her belly with ice-cold fingers. She’d literally just learned about units — and he expected her to spend them responsibly?

He’d brushed off the expression she’s sure she’d been wearing. “Don’t worry,” he’d grumbled. “There’s a limit.” His dark-fire eyes had been narrowed on her, and she hadn’t been able to figure out whether it had been a glance of distrust or something else. Still, his words had eased her nerves, softening the sharp and crackling edges of them. His eyes had been as scrutinizing as ever, but something in his tone had melted into velvet against her skin. “F’you wanna understand money, you gotta get practice using it,” he’d told her. “Go — get yourself some breakfast tomorrow morning. Get — get something comfortable to wear to bed. Find something else you wanna buy. I dunno.”

“You won’t be with me?” she’d asked, brow furrowing, and he’d shrugged, ears half-flattening and tail tucking against his inner calf.

“I got shit to do,” he’d muttered testily, eyes sliding away. “Things I don’t want you to — well, I just don’t want you gettin’ in the frickin’ way.”

She’d winced, and he’d spun away, muttering under his breath — but she hadn’t pushed any further. Gave you an inch, and sure enough, you’re trying to take a lightyear.

Maybe, she’d told herself — maybe if she gets better at shooting, convinces him she can do more, be more helpful, maybe he’ll let her come with him next time.

Later that night, she’d been fairly certain she hadn’t needed the salve anymore — but he’d ordered her onto her belly again, and she hadn’t wanted to dissuade him. She hadn’t wanted to give up the heated pressure of him any sooner than she’d had to. She’d asked him questions while he’d lingered over the panes of her lower back, fingers dipping into the dimples at the base of her spine, tracing lines over her hips that she thinks might have been her stretch-marks. She doesn’t believe that Herbert had ever known the pale stripes were there — Vim had provided full physicals every twelve cycles, and pearl’s not sure the Recorder had ever considered the blemishes as anything other than normal human coloration, much less relayed them to the High Evolutionary. Surely, if Herbert had found out, he would’ve tried to rid her of them.

Before Rocket, pearl had taken a perverse pleasure in her stretchmarks, knowing that Herbert would have hated them if he’d seen them. But with the survivor’s fingers trailing over her skin, she’d found herself suddenly self-conscious: aware of every flaw the High Evolutionary had ever tried to erase in her, as well as the ones he hadn’t known about — many of which have already been on display for her companion.

She’d felt herself growing cold and distant, miserable and alone — even with Rocket’s fingers branding her, kneading and melting all her muscles. She’d tried to tear herself out of it, to focus only on her survivor, to anchor herself to his warmth — but the fear had filtered into her next question without her permission.

“Do you think we’re more than the people who made us?”

Her heart had thudded, echoing in her chest, pulsing in her ears.

His hands had stilled, thumbs prying deeply into the softness of her thighs, right under the curve of her ass. When he’d spoken, his voice had been slow and rasping.

“Do you?”

She’d known he’d meant the question as a challenge — it seems like he’s always ready to be hurt by her, and she supposes she can understand that because she at least has an idea of the ghosts he carries with him. But his question had grounded her — anchored her better than any hoarse whisper-scream into the darkness, or the bruise of her teeth in her knee, or even the cool splash of water in her dry mouth after the terrorscape of her nightmares. She’d twisted her neck to watch him from the corner of one big eye, and her voice had been earnest.

“I know, in my heart of hearts, that you are nothing like him. You’re better than anyone or anything he would ever have been capable of dreaming up.”

She’d felt the hitch in his chest as if it had been her own — and when he’d breathed out a lungful of air, he’d looked startled by it, as if he’d held his breath without realizing it. Distractedly, with his ember-red gaze locked on her singular eye, he’d lifted one hand from her thigh and scrubbed his knuckles — hard — against his metal sternum.

“I dunno,” he’d husked — voice irritated, eyes glaring anywhere but near her. “Seems like him an’ me got similar destructive tendencies.”

Oh, some part of her had realized suddenly — a sunrise through fog, muted and strangely sorrowful. He’s afraid of it, too.

“You’re nothing like him,” she’d repeated, watching him as carefully as she could from her strained vantage point. He’d cleared his throat suddenly, and shifted backward onto her calves, unrolling her new skirt from where it had been pooled at her hips. She feels like he’s carefully tucking her away, and she hazards another statement — truth, and hope. “And that makes me think maybe I don’t have to be like him either.”

He’d made a grunting sound. “Kitten, you couldn’t be less like him.”

“Well, if that’s true of me, surely it can be true of you?”

He’d scoffed, and pressed a fist into the mattress next to her hip and leaned forward — warm weight pressing suddenly against the curve of her ass through the petal-pink dress, and she’d squeaked in surprise and sudden want — but he’d only moved to flip a handful of her new stardust-blue hair over her face, burying her in her own curls. She’d sputtered and squirmed as he’d leapt away, startled when she’d heard him laugh — mocking still, but surprisingly light.

They’d gone to sleep and he’d let her hold his hand again, scoffing the whole time — but then she’d woken up with his back shuffled tight against her chest, both of her arms wrapped snug around his waist and her lips pressed into the soft shell of his ear, her whole body curved around his. The coarse, armored weave of his jumpsuit had left an imprint on her belly and upper arms and she’d been too dozy and content to think about stammering an apology or loosening her hold — but he hadn’t seemed perturbed at all. The tip of his tail had been flicking her knees through the thin pink material of her skirt, and he’d only let her babble on stupidly and sleepily in his ear till she’d talked herself into a corner and had no choice but to convince herself to shut up.

When they’d parted ways, he’d tucked a comm in the pocket of her leggings — warm fingers tugging at her pants in a way that had made her skin sing — and had told her to use it if she ran into any trouble, and not to talk to strangers.

She’d glowered at that — glowered, an expression she’s sure hasn’t made in years — and it had startled her to feel it. But Rocket had only grinned tauntingly, then followed the smirk with a solemn stare. “I’m frickin’ serious, doll,” he’d warned, then loped away in the other direction.

And now here she is, with two soft stretchy pairs of shorts rolled up and gripped in one fist and a bottle of morningtea palmed in the other, pausing at every painted cupboard door inlaid in the quartz-streaked rockface walling the city streets. She’d noticed the cupboards the other day, and she had been curious, but all that curiosity had been forgotten in the blissful chaos of the clothes and the food and the hair.

Now that she has a chance to study them, she marvels.

The few cupboards that are open this early in the morning reveal small stadiums of fifty or sixty clear-glass and tin-smithed cups, each cradling a votive as blue as a pale spring sky on Terra. Anywhere between five and ten candles are lit in any given cupboard, and little tin plaques are anchored into the rock walls beneath the cupboards, etched with the tactile written language of Cyxlore as well as Kree, Shi’ar, and Skrull translations.

SHRINE OF THE SYBILA NIX ORA

Pearl tilts her head, shuffling through the glossary in her head, trying to find the name — but she comes up empty. Herbert hadn’t cared much for planets like this one: no significant political or cultural merit, he’d usually sniff dismissively. She tries to interpret the little shrine, and a shadow moves across the space, making the delicate flames seem brighter.

“I am Groot.”

She blinks, but doesn’t take her eyes from the glowing votives.

“They’re all memorial candles?” she asks.

She feels the lifeform, tall and imposing behind her, jolt at her words. The twitch is accompanied by a low crack: a twig unexpectedly snapping somewhere in a quiet forest.

“I am Groot. I am Groot. I am Groot?”

“Oh,” she breathes. “That’s lovely. And — yes. I do speak Taluhnisan. Or — I suppose I should say I understand it.”

Another startled creak. “I am Groot.”

She turns her eyes down the streets. As shopkeepers and pedestrians filter past, more and more of the cupboards are opened reverently — heads bowed, words murmured under breaths, a candle or two lit — and then the people go about their day. Pearl turns her eyes toward the voice speaking over her shoulder — then up, up, up.

He’s beautiful: skin dark and crackling, form tall and stately — and the softest eyes she’s ever seen in her life. She feels her own heart go just as soft in response.

“I didn’t realize it was quite that unknown.” She tucks her extra shorts into the crook of her left arm and extends her right hand. She’s woefully ignorant of common greetings out here, but the Taluhnisan doesn’t seem to mind — instead of shaking her hand, he cradles it with infinite delicacy, turning her palm upward and placing a frail blue blossom in the bowl of it. She stares at it, and lifts it to her lips — it smells something like vanilla, and something like peppermint. Her eyes turn up to him.

“My name is — well. My friends call me doll.”

Not that she really has any friends — other than Rocket, if he’d even let himself be counted in that meager number — but she has friendly acquaintances now, for the first time in her life, and it’s true that all two of them had known her as doll.

“I am Groot,” the figure says simply.

She falters. She knows a little of Taluhnisan naming customs, and Groot can’t possibly be all of it. But then, she hasn’t been completely forthcoming about her name either, so how can she possibly demand more from him? She supposes, like herself, there must be some reason he’s hiding it.

So she only nods, and then threads the little flower into the lavender-blue curls over her ear. “What brings you to Cyxlore, Groot?”

He smiles at her — lopsided, and sweet — and gestures to a bench carved into the wall. She drops her empty bottle into a recycling compactor and takes a seat, and he creaks along next to her.

His storytelling is simple and straightforward, and it leaves her heart in splinters and bruises. He’s all alone in the universe, and the thought has her as brittle and breakable as the thinnest shell on the shore.

She thinks of Rocket.

The small Terran girl she’d been — one with bruises on her arms and in her heart — had still chosen. Too young to have been forced to make that decision, perhaps, and too manipulated by someone far older — but she had left her home-planet with some pretense of autonomy, some shadow of foreknowledge that she was going to be more-or-less on her own.

But Rocket had been made singularly. And Groot had been made singular.

“I am Groot,” he finishes at last, splaying his thick, branchlike fingers and holding them up to the pale mint sky. He squints at the silhouette of them. “I am Groot.”

She hesitates, unsure if she’s overstepping the boundaries of strangers. Surely Herbert, at least, would have been appalled. “I can do that, though,” she tells Groot softly. “We can do that together, if you want. I’d — I think I’d like to light a few, too.”

He gazes at her, his already-soft eyes only softening further. Then he smiles again, and nods, and she rises and tugs him to his feet — as if she could possibly move him if he didn’t want to be moved. Her hand laces in against his forearm as easily as if he had grown a place just to welcome it, and she guides him back over to the shrine.

“How do we do this?” she asks softly.

“I am Groot,” he explains. “I am Groot.”

She reaches into the tall, narrow tin box set into the casement and pulls out a long match — flexible and thin, so delicate that she suddenly understands why Groot had been having difficulty with his broad, barked fingers.

She strikes the match. The slender copper core burns blue-green.

“I am Groot,” he whispers, and the sound is the susuration of leaves against leaves in high summer winds, and a prayer of green lace against the sky.

She lowers the blue-green ember to a wick. It pops softly, and then ignites.

“I am Groot,” he murmurs again, and she lowers the match to another votive.

She lights each candle with every stitch of reverence in her bones, and she only slows when Groot has to pause and grope for his thoughts. His eyes, dark as wells, grow luminous and wet, and tears river their silver way between the patches of bark lining his face. She only shifts a half-inch closer to him in these moments — a quiet brush of presence, of comfort in his spiritual solitude.

They continue this pattern until thirty-three of the fifty candles in the shrine are lit — one for every Lost House of Taluhnia.

Pearl goes on.

“Fairy,” she whispers. “For you, I hope the Sybila Nix Ora sees high and leafy branches. Clear skies, and warm nests. Idunn apple slices.”

She lights a thirty-fourth candle.

“The Maid.” She swallows. The awareness of how little she knows leaves her bereft. “Soft kindnesses, gentle laughter, and ribbon-bracelets. Warm and loving arms.”

Thirty-five.

“The Linguist.” A shaky breath. “Delicate porcelain cups of spiced Indigarran tea, and a low fire in the hearth. A window to see your wife and children: happy, whole, and safe.” Thirty-six.

“And… Lylla.”

She falters. She knows so little of what to wish for, what to pray the oracle might see for the lifeform with the white headstone and the lilac bush — Rocket’s beloved.

“Peace,” she whispers at last. “Comfort, and ease in your body. Companionship.” She bites her lip. “The — the knowledge that I’ll do my best to keep him safe.”

Thirty-seven.

She hesitates. The long match is only half-burnt.

“I am Groot?” her new companion asks gently.

“It’s so many,” she tells him. “It’s — a number I’ll never know.” They both fall silent for one long breath — then another. The match sparks softly.

“I am Groot,” he says at last, and she pulls in a shuddering breath.

“All the ones he can never hurt again,” she utters, hushed and hollowed. “Healing for every injury and insult — every injustice. Freedom.” Her throat squeezes. “The homes they wanted. Their families returned to them — if not already, then in the future. Acceptance, abundance, and joy. The soul-deep understanding that they’re — safe from him, now.”

The match trembles. The blue-green ember at the end shivers like a dying firefly, then flares with a soft whisper as it touches the candle wick.

Thirty-eight.

She sighs, and blows out the match before sliding it back into the tin, to be re-used and burnt down.

“I am Groot,” Groot rumbles softly.

She takes a shuddering breath, and her hand tucks back in the crook of his arm.

“I know Taluhnisans mostly eat light,” she says with a soft, watery smile, “but would you like to try a Cyxlorade breakfast with me?”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Maybe the panties were a mistake.

No, Rocket thinks. It’s good that she has them — the softest little scraps of cloth in Sanna Orix’s whole shop, to cup her pretty pussy gently and maybe rub tenderly against her little clit whenever she moves. Protection from the seams of her leggings and the roughness of his coarse blankets, and the scratched-up and split vinyl of the runabout’s seats.

That’s the problem, though. Now that pearl’s got the panties, Rocket can’t stop thinking about them. He’s been fixating all day — wondering which ones she’s wearing, if they’re as comfortable as he wants them to be, how they’d feel against his fingers if he stroked between her thighs — how they’d feel against her if he pet her clit through them. How she’d look in each pair: just a little shred of frothy soft lace or glassy satin, and one of his faded cotton t-shirts stretched tight over those pretty tits of hers.

Of course she’d be pretty in whatever she’d decided she’d wanted from that place, even though none of it had been the cloud-lined armor he would’ve wanted for her. Still, it’s a frickin’ relief, just knowing she’s got something that might be comfortable on all her soft, vulnerable parts, and that pretty little gem tucked between her folds.

The unfortunate thing is that he’s trying to haggle for — and occasionally swipe — a wide variety of hardware, and instead, he keeps getting distracted by the idea of silky ruffles stuffed prettily in her mouth. Ever since he’d cut out her tracker and she’d had that little towel between her teeth, some variation on the image has been his constant companion.

“New ion blaster model,” he overhears one of the seedier merchants hiss to some A’askvariian scumbags. Not every neighborhood in Cyxlore is as pristine as the spot where he’s holed up with pearl. “Just brought in a bunch of ‘em from the Hub.”

Rocket smooths his thumb over the circle of metal in his pocket, checking to make sure it’s on. It’s just a tiny piece of tech he’d invented ages ago, with scrap he’d stolen off the streets and a few of the remaining pieces he’d pocketed in his collarbone when he’d first run from HalfWorld: an energy-and-data-disorganizer. He’d crafted it to interfere with just about any program that tries to scan him and cross-reference him with the lengthy list of bounties and records he’s got trailing after him like little comets.

Energy-and-data-disorganizer is a mouthful, though, so he mostly just calls it his Fuck-You-Disk. It’s worked for him so far: most hunters — even the Nova Corps and assorted localized police systems — are too lazy and untrained to manually match him with his records, so the disorganizer has effectively hidden him in every situation where he hasn’t already been stripped bare and incarcerated.

Still, it makes him nervous to be out here, so exposed, after such a recent and direct attack on Wyndham. The High Shitbag has almost certainly had 89P13’s HalfWorld bounty doubled by now. Again, the Monster makes sure the Fuck-You-Disk is toggled on before he meanders casually toward the dealer’s stall.

From here, the blaster does look nice. It would probably look even better in pieces and divided between the three other firearms and two mines he’s working on right now. Maybe the ion generator from the blaster combined with the ‘fuser he’d stolen from Wona Beax’s shop yesterday. It could replace some of the shit he’d had in the first draft of the enforcer. Generate a big enough stream of ionized subatomic particulate, and he bets he could blow up a moon.

That’s why he’s scoping out the weapons-dealer’s stall from a rocky outcropping on the second level of the tiered mountainside — trying to figure out where they keep their stockpile and how to access it — when he sees her.

She’s a fuckin’ dream.

All sloping curves and neat lines, gleaming in the sunlight. Bigger than he’s used to — which is fuckin’ exciting if he’s being honest— and draped in gold, with four elegant, petal-like arms. She’s almost as pretty as pearl.

Almost.

She’s just as cold as Madame Lavenza, though — all Sovereign, through and through. Aloof — arrogant. At first glance, her artillery looks impressive — a medley of enormous carronades and narrow-barreled rotating autocannons — though he bets he can bring all of her firepower up a notch or two.

Combined with her five engines, rotating gravity wheel, and the sunken cockpit that doubles as a detachable emergency pod?

Oh, yeah.

Rocket’s always wanted a Sovereign Dreadnought — never thought he’d have a chance to get his hands on a working version, though. The best he’d hoped for was finding a burnt-out abandoned one on a scrapper-planet somewhere. But here she sits: prettily wedged between three shifty little shops set into the mountain wall, taking up valuable real estate and probably annoying every thief, smuggler, and lowlife trying to sell their shit today.

Rocket stares and salivates.

His eyes roam the streets, trying to find the pilot. Sovereign don’t fly their Dreadnoughts themselves, of course. Unlike the omnicraft, Dreadnoughts can’t be used via frickin’ arcade-game, and the snobs can’t bear to put their pretty gold necks on the line — which means they generally contract out for captains, mechanics, and gunners.

It takes less than thirty seconds for Rocket to identify the moron flying the thing: chest all puffed up, smug shit-eating grin on his stupid face. He’s got a look that says I been handed everything my entire frickin’ life. Prob’ly went to the Xandaran flight academy and everything. Hell, maybe he’s even ex-Nova Corps. And, sure, Rocket’s instinctive ability to assess a person’s character may have served him bitterly in the last handful of rotations, but he’s sure he ain’t wrong about this dickhead.

He twitches his ears, funneling the delicate shells toward the baldbody in question.

“— a Gold Captain. I earned it through a contract with the High Priestess — for handling an abilisk migration a few circumrotations back.”

Even from here, Rocket can read the jealousy on the faces of everyone listening. He tsks under his breath. He could slip past the moron and hack the biolock on the cargo-hold hatch in probably under twenty seconds. Once inside, recalibrating the controls and IDs would take three minutes max — less, most likely. He’d get the gold warship up in the air and break exosphere before the cocky jackass on the ground could get out more than a mournful, sputtering wail. And the best part is, this guy’s making such a target of himself that the Monster would probably get cheered on as he went—

‘Course, he can’t. At least, he can’t for now — not till he knows what’s going on with pearl. If she tells him today that she wants to stay on Cyxlore — well, then he’ll steal the Dreadnought tomorrow. He can’t leave her behind for a golden ship though, no matter how pretty it is. It might have guns he could cry over, but he’s already memorized pearl’s hands and the curves of her ass and thighs, the valley at the base of her spine. A Dreadnought won’t make him a stupid den out of blankets when he has nightmares. It won’t tuck itself up behind a bulwark and show him made-up constellations, or squeak when it gets in the shower, or thank him for everything he does — no matter how stupid or self-serving. It won’t say his name — the new name he’d chosen, probably only because of her — like it’s the world’s most perfect secret on her lips. And it won’t whisper a hundred comforting little idiocies at him — small kindnesses that he steals away and holds onto like stray units, like shiny little vials of universal antivenom.

You’re not a monster. You never have been.

You’re the most your-own-person I’ve ever met, and I think it’s the worst thing in the galaxy that you don’t even like those parts of you.

You’re nothing like him.

She’d sprinkled those little sentiments over the last handful of rotations like stardust and snowflakes and glitter-confetti, and each time, he’d focused all his attention on cracking his knuckles, intent on pretending like it hadn’t mattered. Like her words hadn’t broken the ancient leaden stalactites off of his ribs.

It had hurt to hear them, but he’d still felt lighter.

Seems like Wyndham and I got similar destructive tendencies, he’d protested flatly.

But she hadn’t believed him, had she? It’s such a strange, fragile gift and he’d be lying if he said his first impulse isn’t to immediately smash it on the floor. Too many people have trusted him and paid the price.Too many people have hurt him, too — rotten to the core, teaching him how to be vile and violent by their own frickin’ example. Better for everyone if he ends her image of him quickly.

But some perverse part of him wants to see how long he can fake it —how long he can pretend to be worthy of this fragile, vulnerable glass bubble she’s handed him.

Then, late in last rotation’s sleep cycle, she’d twisted in her sleep onto her bruised side, and had let out a low, muffled mew of discomfort. He’d carefully tugged her back without thinking — only to find her turning his way instead, arms winding around his waist and twisting him as she’d pulled him in. His eyes had gone circular with the shock of it as she’d tugged his scarred spine against her soft belly and breasts, nuzzling in at his ear. It had flicked with every soft exhalation she’d purred into it, and every fiber of his fur had stood on end. He’d attempted to disentangle himself — only once, with petrifying results: she’d reacted by cuddling him in, wedging the back of his head into her soft cleavage, separated only by the thin layer of his stupid tiny t-shirt.

What he wouldn’t have given to roll over and taste her instead.

He hadn’t been able to sleep at first — hesitantly tracing the backs of her hands and forearms where they’d curled protectively around his belly, the little butterfly-bones in her wrists.

At some point, though, the maps he’d made of her skin had become some sort of labyrinthine meditation, and the flex-vibranium ribs that always seem too tight on his lungs had slowly opened like cage doors. He’d breathed deep without realizing it, till he’d been slipping in and out of slumber as easily as he maneuvers the runabout.

When pearl had finally woken up, she hadn’t moved — just stayed there, cradling him, lips buried in the plush fur behind his ear. She’d murmured stupid, silly, sleepy questions — a hundred quiet, domestic-daydream comforts like the ones she’d given him after his nightmare — and any lingering tension in the set of his shoulders had slowly melted into the purple shadows of the bunk.

“Why do you always smell like marzipan?” she’d murmured at one point, voice drowsy — as thick and soft as those silk chenille blankets in Sanna Orix’s shop. “Everything else — the forest, the campfire — that all makes sense. But the marzipan—"

“What the fuck is marzipan?” he’d scoffed, and if his voice had been more hushed than usual, he wasn’t gonna dwell on it.

She’d laughed — something too deep and melting in her throat to be a giggle, but too sleepy and light to be a chuckle. “A little…cake? Kind of? Made from sugar and honey and almonds. It’s like — you have this sweet, nutty smell—"

She’d buried her nose into the thick velvet fur where his throat had met his shoulder, and he’d had to bite back a groan. It was like she’d been trying to scent-mark him, her cheeks and jaw and neck all scrubbed up against his fur. He’d wanted to return the favor — stroke his nose along her throat, between her thighs. Make sure she’d smelled like him everywhere—

“Uh.” He’d been able to feel the heat under his fur, and he’d closed his eyes, swallowing. His throat had been squeezed so tight that it had hurt. “Some kinds of the explosives I use, prob’ly. When the chemical compounds start breaking down, they uh — they smell like that.”

“Your shirts do, too,” she’d added. “Sometimes I just want to—"

Her voice had cracked off into something suddenly awake and self-conscious and shy, and some part of him had mourned the loss of whatever she’d been going to say.

What, kitten? You wanna rub me all over yourself? That’s just fine, sweetheart. You go right ahead.

No. No. There’s no way he’s leaving her behind.

Not if there’s any chance she’ll leave with him.

“I’ll be going back to negotiate a contract for this migration, too,” the owner of the Dreadnought boasts, grinning. “Maybe for a few million units. The abilisks should be coming through in a cycle or two—"

And there it is. There’s the magic he’s been waiting for.

The Monster — he still hasn’t been able to completely stop thinking of himself this way — the Monster strolls lazily down the stone steps and cuts across the chipped mosaic street. He meanders between degenerates and reprobates, lightfooted and innocuous as a flerken. When he reaches the far side of the Dreadnought, he strokes a palm lovingly over the gold-plated hull — too gaudy for his tastes, but he knows there’s a perfect dura-vibranium alloy underneath — and then sidles up under the external hatch leading to the engine access.

It takes a whole fifteen seconds to hack the biometrics, and forty-five to unscrew the remaining protective panels and hardware. Three more excruciatingly-long minutes to identify and remove a small handful of vital components. The only reason it’s so time-consuming is because he’s being careful — if pearl tells him she’s going to stay moonside, he’ll just come back and replace the parts and take off into the sky. Probably immediately. A stolen Dreadnought ain’t worth leaving her for, but it’ll be an adequate place to lick his wounds.

Meanwhile, it sure as hell won’t fly for its current owner — not any time soon. Rocket bets no-one on this damn moon will even be able to identify what’s wrong with the thing. Not many ace mechanics on Cyxlore, and fewer still who’ve ever seen the insides of a Dreadnought.

He tucks the parts into the pouches and pockets on his jumpsuit, seals up the belly of the ship, and strolls away — whistling a jaunty tune.

He steals a few more things — the ion blaster’s his — but he’s distracted by his new goal. Tomorrow, he promises himself. Tomorrow it’s up and away toward a new job, and a new ship, and a new planet. Toward Fron, for now.

And then — he doesn’t want to think too hard on it, doesn’t want to betray himself with anything resembling hope or want or need — then maybe it’s an Acanti migration or two. Once the High Evolutionary forgets about him.

Fat chance, he thinks suddenly, morosely. He’d broken into the HalfWorld atmosphere with the intention of ripping off Sire’s face and killing his new little ice-bitch wife and then running off, with only marginal concern for whether or not he lived through it all. Now that he’s got pearl — maybe — it occurs to him that perhaps he should’ve tried to be more sneaky in this whole stupid revenge-plot, should have stolen her away without letting his face be seen, without making a spectacle of his revenge, without making sure that Wyndham would be after him forever.

He sighs exhaustedly when he reaches Sanna Orix’s shop, squeezing the space between his eyes. He’s just stopping in to pick up their boots, his new sleep pants — who’d’ve thought he’d ever waste units on sleep pants? — and a few other odds and ends. But he pauses on his way in, eyes drawn to the soft chenille blankets on the far wall again. He hasn’t been able to get them out of his head. Next to them is a drawer full of body soaps and shampoos, and lotions and oils, too. For a second, he toys with the idea of getting pearl some — then decides no, he likes that she uses his shampoo and soap — he likes that she smells like him. But —

“Is there anything — uh, anything baldbodies need? ‘Sides food an’ water?”

The words funnel up out of his mouth without his conscious permission, and Sanna quirks a hairless brow at him. He knows he’s talking about pearl like she’s a pet — a bedraggled little kitten who’s decided to stay on his ship — but he decides he doesn’t care.

If anything, he just hates how much he likes the idea of it.

Sanna Orix drifts toward him, surveying all the little bottles of cleansers and ointments that Rocket’s been staring at distractedly. They tilt their head.

“If she’s using your toiletries, they might start to take a toll on her skin and hair,” they muse, shifting through the bottles and jars. “Do you know what she likes?”

I don’t even know what I like, she’d said. He sighs.

“Nope.” He lingers on the n and pops the p. He hesitates and picks up a glass bottle etched with leaves and flowers. It looks… luxurious. “She had real fancy stuff back — back at her last place.” That seems like a safe bet.

“Hmmm.” Orix lifts a little basket from the drawer and sets it in a lower shelf. “These are the supplies we have that are generally suited to mammalian humanoids. Can I assume you’re scent-marking her?”

Rocket nearly fumbles the glass bottle in his hands. “What?”

They just stare down at him patiently. “If you’re scent-marking her, I recommend these — or these.” They pluck a few vials from the basket and lift their left hand. “This set — hair cleansing conditioner, soap, moisturizer — has a neutral smell. This set—“ They indicate the other handful. “—enhances the scent-marking. Generally imperceptible to anyone whose species doesn’t rely on olfactory input, but very salient to the rest of us.”

To the rest of us. Fuck. Orix had picked up on the smell of him all over the pearl, then — and maybe a hundred other little cues besides. Rocket scrubs one palm over the back of his neck, squeezing the base of his skull and pinching his eyes closed. He can already feel a migraine coming on. “The — uh — the neutral’s fine.” He regrets it as soon as he says it, but he knows it’s the responsible choice. He clears his throat. “Can I get some extra? Not sure when we’ll be able to stock up.”

Sanna tilts their head, then nods. “Moisturizing oil may be good for her as well. Friction increases the fluidity, so even a small bottle should last a few circumrotations. Most of them don’t come in neutral scents, exactly, but this one enhances the natural scent of the wearer — along with any other fragrances their bodies might be carrying.”

He hesitates. Maybe this whole thing is a bad idea. Buying lotions and soaps and shit for her seems — intimate. Seems like he’s planning on more than he should. And that makes it seem like he’s putting an expiration date on this whole stupid thing they have going on — whatever it is — just by thinking about it too much.

“That’s fine,” he manages to spit out, the fur on his shoulders slowly raising into bristles. “I should — probably go, though—”

“Of course,” Sanna Orix says smoothly. “I did notice you’ve been drawn to the blankets today and during your last visit, though. Are you sure you don’t want to take a look?”

You’re good — you’re so good, he remembers her murmuring under the control-panel lights, and how the gratings must’ve bit into her skin. I know it.

“Maybe — yeah, okay. Whatever. Just a quick look.”

The silken-soft weave of them is as woolly and gleaming as he’d remembered. Pearl had mentioned some blue-green colors a bunch — her sweater, her childhood dreams of murmay-hair — so maybe he should grab the teal one. But there’s also one that’s the same stardust-blue as her shiny new curls, and another that’s the perfect fuckin’ shade of pink, like the heart of a waterlily. Imagining her all wrapped up in it, naked underneath, just as pink in some places—

Okay, maybe not the pink—

“You can get more than one,” Sanna Orix says, sounding amused.

Rocket rolls his eyes. “You’re just trying to sell me more shit,” he grumbles, but he runs his fingers through the loose tassels. They feel like cool water, flowing smooth and clear from a spout.

But Orix laughs. “Stranger, you could take every blanket on this wall and still end up with almost three-and-a-half million units back from the pearls you brought me.”

He blinks, and stares up at them. “Three million?”

“I told you,” Sanna Orix says with a dismissive gesture. “I haven’t seen anything like them. The closest, in my experience, are from Aladnan sun-oysters — but even those don’t have the same depth of luster. The nacre is astonishing — I think the crystal structure is unique, probably made of something other than arogonite. And the surface quality and symmetry are — flawless, honestly. I know at least three jewelers who will offer over three-hundred thousand for each of the large ones. I’ll make three times what I’m paying you.”

“Well, that hardly seems frickin’ fair,” he grunts, but he’s not surprised. Sanna Orix is the best at what they do.

“Four blankets,” Sanna suggests. “Since you said you wouldn’t be back for a while. I’ll throw in a few pillows, too.”

He tilts his head. “Make ‘em big enough to sit on, and you got a deal.” He hadn’t been able to find any floor mats. Orix would probably lose his mind if they knew Rocket was planning on eventually using their fancy pillows in a make-shift den on the grating of the flightdeck, but they don’t need to know.

“I know you said the other day that she’s not your girl,” Sanna Orix says as they tally up the purchases, then start the transfer to Rocket’s account. There’s a hefty three-point-seven million fresh units making their way onto his data-card, and he tries to keep his face nonchalant even as his tail whisks behind him nervously. He’s never had this much money before and the apprehension is rippling through his fur — doubled by the way Orix is talking about pearl.

“She ain’t,” he bites out warningly. “She’s—”

“Her own,” Sanna says. “I know, I know. But I’ve decided I do like you, Stranger, so I’ll share a little Cyxlorade wisdom with you.” They lean forward just a bit as the last unit pings over, dropping her voice into a theatrical whisper. “A person can be both.”

He swallows, whiskers twitching, and then rolls his eyes and tsks. “That’s nice and all, but it’s a little sentimentalistic for me.”

He might claim it’s too sappy, but by the time the Monster leaves, he’s disgruntled by how many pretty little luxuries he’s juggling: pockets stuffed full of body products and Dreadnought parts; two pairs of boots pinched in his fist and a veritable mountain of blankets, linens, and pillows stuffed into a sack that Sanna Orix had graciously suctioned all the air out of with a vacuum-sealer, shrinking the bundle down to a cylinder the size and density of a Kylosian fighting-club. He’d never thought of bedding as a weapon before, but here he is.

Pearl’s waiting for him when he gets back to the runabout, and the sight of her nearly knocks the lungs right out of his manufactured ribs. How could he have thought the Dreadnought even came close? She’s bouncing on her toes in her stupid dusk-blue boots, curls and tits all bouncing too. The stardust-shimmer of her hair looks glossy in this light, and her eyes are as wide as the whole frickin’ moon. Her cheeks are pink and her lips are pink and she looks just as excited as she had that first night he’d gotten her on the runabout, but less scared, and she’s got her fingers all twisted up against her cleavage and collarbone.

Those leggings are probably gonna kill him, too. Maybe they were as bad of an idea as the panties.

Maybe he just needs to keep her naked.

“I have something to tell you!” she bursts out eagerly.

“Me too,” he grunts, slinging down the cylinder of bedding and the four boots by the hatch, and then strolling toward the locker next to the shower. He starts emptying his pockets of bottles and vials.

“You first,” she urges, and when he casts a sideways glance over his shoulder, she’s got both palms extended to him like it’s an entreaty. He swings his head back toward the locker, ducking instinctively, grateful for the fur hiding his flush. Dammit.

“Heading out tomorrow,” he tells her evenly. “Think I can get a job that can get me a bigger, better ship.” He swivels his ears toward her, trying to see if he can catch a hitch in her heartbeat or her lungs.

But she just bounces higher — smiling harder when he turns around to face her. He bends one knee and braces it against the locker, leaning his shoulders against it, and lets his eyelids drop to half-mast. His gaze skims over her — the toes of her boots to the ends of her hair and back again — while he tries not to let anything show on his face. His tail flicks back and forth. Is she still in? Does she still want—

“That’s perfect!” she says, eyes curving into crescents. She leans in, and she’s so damn pretty his heart climbs right up in his chest, into the back of his throat. She drops her voice into a conspiratorial whisper. “I think I made a friend.”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

thank you for sticking around, my friends! and extra hugs and love to those of you who leave comments. they fuel me. you are magical glittery fireworks and cozy little campfires and i am so happy & lucky to be vibing with all of you. ♡♡♡ and extra-extra special thankyous to those of you who have sent good thoughts to me and my family right now.

a few exciting things coming up:

♡ i've been working on a portrait of pearl, which will be posted to tumblrthis wednesday (5/29).
♡ i'll link to it with the next chapter update if you've been curious about how i picture her.
♡ next chapter is also uhhhhhh a little smutty. Ish. The warnings below will give you a good idea if you want it.
♡ i've also been working on an illustrated scene from chapter thirteen i'm really excited about!

i plan to update this work next saturday (june first) and then most updates will be on fridays for the rest of the summer, every week (though i may skip a week every once in a while to catch up). on off-weeks, i'll try to post something else (i know i still have to finish posting my rocket raccoon prompt week oneshots!). my family's medical situation is still uncertain so that could obviously impact my plans at the last minute, but this is the current outlook. again, i want to thank you for all the support. i'm always everso grateful for this fandom but the kind thoughts and support and words of encouragement these last few weeks have just reaffirmed to me that this is the best, sweetest fandom on the internet. thank you for being amazing, always. you are perfect orange blossoms and sweet sunwarmed pears.

posting schedules & chapter-previews on tumblr♡
masterlist & moodboard♡

coming soon: chapter twelve. ochisia.
summary: rocket decides to make sure pearl doesn't think she can replace him.
warnings: guided masturbation. mild exhibitionism/voyeurism. praise. light d/s vibes.
estimated date: saturday, june one.

Chapter 12: ochisia.

Summary:

rocket decides to make sure pearl doesn't think she can replace him.

Notes:

warnings: guided masturbation. mild exhibitionism/voyeurism. praise. light d/s vibes.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

ochisia. the fear that the role you once occupied in someone’s life could be refilled without a second thought, which makes you wish that every breakup would include a severance package, a non-compete clause, and some sort of romantic placement program. Greek όχι πια (óchi pia), not anymore. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

The Monster recoils — flinches so hard he’s pretty sure some of his joints crack. For a split-second, he forgets about being Rocket — forgets about being anything but 89P13, being vermin, being some cobbled-together thing. His claws clench and his teeth ache and everything inside his ribs condenses into a pinpoint-singularity, hollow and sucking, and his skin scrabbles over his bones with tiny nails. He presses his tail in against his inner calf and his ears lay flat.

He tries to smooth out the crease in his brow and the fur that has risen on-end, to will himself to be disinterested.

“So,” he says, and he tries to make his voice sound casual. But he knows he’s biting out each word letter-by-letter, snapping off the ends with his teeth. “You change your mind about hangin’ out with a monster?”

Pearl falters and straightens, a little curl forming between her brows. “I — what?”

He grimaces. No need to make her feel bad — if only ‘cause he doesn’t wanna deal with her crying. Hell, he’d been half-counting on this, right? Pearl’s got a history of bad fuckin’ taste in friends, himself included, but he’s sure he can convince Orix to keep an eye on her, and he can touch base with some of the trustworthy ex-escorts he knows who have retired to the Cyxlorade capitol before he leaves. They’ll make sure she’s safe. Then he can skip the trip to Sovereign — get pearl set up somewhere nice tomorrow morning, and take the Dreadnought he’d just dismantled and crawl up into the stars like some kind of beaten dog.

He tries not to think about the fresh bottles of baldbody-friendly cleansers, and the cylinder of blankets and pillows by the airlock. Instead, he swallows, and he works hard to wrestle back any shred of accusation or abandonment clawing its way up his ribs. “You found someone better to hang out with here,” he says, and his ears flick. He’s proud, he tells himself, of how mild he sounds this time. “That’s good, pearl. Fron’s frickin’ cold. You’ll be better off here.” He even manages a shrug. Yeah, he’s doin’ a good job.

But then she makes a little sound in the back of her throat and when he startles and looks up at her, those moonsilver eyes are all big and stricken, hands anchored to her sternum, wedged between those beautiful tits of hers again — pulling his t-shirt taut and flattening the soft curve of her breasts in a way that would make him salivate if he’d been capable of feeling anything other than despondent at the moment. He’d been so brutal to those pretty things and never even got his mouth on him, and now the opportunity’s lost, he thinks morosely. They might haunt him forever — though he supposes it’s still less of a punishment than he deserves.

“Are you trying to get rid of me again?”

The tremor on her lips snaps him back to the here-and-now.

“What? No. You said — pearl, you—”

“I thought you said I could decide,” she says, and she sounds so fuckin’ lost that it rakes the air right out of his lungs. Her fists shift from her cleavage to knot in the ends of her lavender-blue curls, tugging, and now her big eyes look half-panicked. “You’re taking it back? You’re not letting—”

He propels himself off the locker and lurches forward, reaching. His fingers catch in the snug armor-weave of her leggings and he sinks his nails into the cloth — careful not to snag skin — and twists a handful of the fabric up in his hand, pulling her toward him. She stumbles, mouth snapping shut, and stares down at him.

“M’not taking that from you.”

Her lips part but she doesn’t say anything, just staring down at him, big tears already cluttering up her eyelashes like little sequins and stars.

“You can—” His voice splits up the middle, and he tries to wrestle it back, to smooth out the crumpled edges. “You can stay, if you want. It’s still your choice. I just thought — you said you’d made a friend—”

“He needs a ride,” she whispers.

He stares at her. “What?”

“I thought — maybe we could take him with us? It’s only — I know the answer might be no but I thought I should ask—”

He lets go of the leggings and takes an abrupt step back, and the elasticized armor snaps softly against her thigh. She falls silent when he pinches the space between his eyes, then stares up at the ceiling of the runabout. Unbelievable.

“You still want to come with me?” he demands. He can feel his eyes burning into hers, and she doesn’t look away — doesn’t even blink. The tears are still silvering her lashes. “You’re sure you still want to come?”

“Please,” she whispers softly. “Please let me—”

Maybe I’ll let you come if you beg me.

He cringes back, and then digs his thumbs into his orbital sockets. “What the fuck is my life?” he mutters disconsolately.

The truth is, he can’t help but feel the fur on his shoulders smooth down, and the muscles in his back relax. His prosthetic collarbone and ribs had been tearing at his scars with every tense, jaw-grinding breath, but now they ease into a more normal, manageable tug. What was it Sanna Orix had said?

That girls not leaving your side unless you make her.

To her credit, she’s waiting — eyes still big and nervous, hands twisting in front of her belly.

“This ain’t a frickin’ intergalactic taxi service,” he says at last, but he can tell as soon as his voice hits the air that if it’s the difference between her joining him and not, he’s gonna give in. He sighs. “I told you, there’s public transport through most of this part of the universe—”

“But he needs to go in our direction, anyway. Almost all the way to the Thneed system. You said most transports don’t go that far—”

He scowls, but his heart’s not in it. The relief is still high in his throat, leaving him feeling shaky and overheated with the sudden loss of adrenaline. “I can’t be takin’ on every stray you wanna save—“

“But — I have a plan. A little one. I think he can help us — sort of. Inadvertently.”

He sighs, and pinches the space between his eyes again. “Who is he?”

Her urgent, strained expression melts and she looks at him with something almost worshipful.

“I ain’t sayin’ yes,” he snaps, alarmed, fur already rising to stand on end again. “I just wanna think.”

“His name is Groot,” she says. “He’s so kind, Rocket. He’s Taluhnisan—”

He stares at her. “The frickin’ arboreal — whatever.”

Her moon-bright eyes are full of delighted silver sparkles and he’s so fucked. He might as well save himself the migraine and just admit that he’s going to do whatever the fuck she wants.

“Yup,” she says, smiling so big it hurts his stupid, withered heart.

“You are not adopting a frickin’ flowerpot.”

Her face falls immediately. “He’s not a flowerpot,” she interrupts softly, and the words are a whisper. “And he’s — like us.”

He falters. Her damn pouting is gonna be the death of him. “What d’you mean, like us?” he demands.

“He’s — he’s all alone, Rocket.”

He scoffs. “Lots of lonely people in the universe, pearl.”

“No,” she says softly. “I mean — he’s all alone. He thinks — he thinks he might be the last one left from his home planet. He’s trying to get back to see if anyone at all is left.” She twists her hands in front of her again, and bites her lip. “He’s the last one, Rocket. The last survivor.”

Her words are a loop of gossamer-thin rope tossed out into the endless sky — just an etching of a distant, made-up constellation — but they loop around his sternum and tug. He knows what it’s like to be the last one left — even more than she’s realized.

But she has some idea. She knows he lost Lylla — and almost every time he looks at her these days, he can taste his own guilt.

Penthus, pearl had said, tracing a teardrop on the hidden-away window behind the bulwark. God of grief.

Yeah, he knows what it’s like to be the last one left.

Her chin tilts up and her brow flattens in sudden determination. “Besides,” she says quietly. “I told you — he can be helpful to us. He can be part of your — your disguise.”

He blinks at her. “My what?”

Her lips tighten, and she looks like she already hates whatever’s going to come out of them. “Herbert will be looking for you,” she says firmly. “You know that. It’s part of why you encouraged me to change my hair.”

Well, mostly it had been to see her look all happy and soft and excited, but yeah, there are other benefits too.

“But he’s going to be looking for you all by yourself.”

Rocket pauses.

“He might not rule out that you’ve kept me alive,” she reasons, and all her earlier urgency has fled in the face of sudden pragmatism. She’s talking about all this like it’s so practical — taking on a new crewmember he’s never met, from a planet he doesn’t even know. But pearl keeps going.

“—so maybe Herbert will be looking for you and a girl.”

She tilts her head, and for all that she seems like such a sweet moron most of the time, he suddenly feels completely pulled apart under her silver gaze: like she’s already seen the worst of him — which he supposes is true, after all — and has figured out how all his pieces fit together. He can break a Dreadnought in under a minute, and fix it in probably less… but even he doesn’t know all the garbage-scraps and broken bits that make up his twisted, fucked-up self.

The crescent-shaped implants in the corners of his mouth tug at him as his lips purse and pull downward.

“But a party of three?” pearl asks him, so gently that his fingers and eyes ache. “How likely is Herbert to assume you’re a part of it?”

He doesn’t want this. Not another person to get in his way, to hold him back, to hurt him or be hurt by him. Not someone pearl’s said is kind. The two of them — Rocket’s pet Terran and her pet tree — will probably talk in that frickin’ arboreal language all the time and he’ll be left out and eventually she’ll realize just what a miserable excuse for a companion the Monster is, after all. His brow deepens and his jaw flexes.

A party of three? How likely is he to assume you’re a part of it?

But she isn’t wrong.

“Not very,” he concedes in a growl. Wyndham knows the Monster is a frickin’.... isolationist loner, at best. Knows the most that 89P13 had ever hoped for was the companionship of just one single other creature like himself.

A timid little smile curves the corner of pearl’s mouth — that tip of a kitten’s tail. Rocket’s eyes narrow. If he didn’t know better, he’d think she was trying to be sly.

“Even less likely,” she says sweetly, “if he realizes there’s a massive bounty on the third crewmember, but he’s not getting turned in.”

Rocket’s eyes flare wide. “What?”

“Herbert wouldn’t believe it could possibly be you,” she reasons hopefully.

“How massive a bounty?”

She winces. “Three hundred thousand units.”

“What?”

“He’s sweet though,” she protests.

Rocket stares at her, furious. And then — hopeless.

Pearl and her big pretty eyes, not asking for a Spartaxian crystal necklace or an Indigarran silk scarf after all, but a fucking friend. His fingers twitch with the tactile memory of that night on the Arete: her hair under his fingertips and palm — soft and glimmery — the strands springing and shifting under his thumb. How much he'd fought the urge to pet her pretty head while she’d bowed it in front of him and bled into her skirt and asked him, can we help the Humanimals?

“Kitten,” he tries to reason, swallowing on the memory of her big eyes looking up at him, the feel of her hair under his palm, lip swollen and glossy and bleeding — swallowing on the what if forming in his brain. “Kitten, sweet people don’t got bounties on their heads.”

“You do,” she says, like she’s making some kind of point. He sneers before he realizes she thinks that’s an actual argument. “You said—”

“M’not sweet, princess,” he tells her sharply, but the words taste sour in his mouth. A cycle ago, he’d never even thought about being sweet — it’s one of the few crimes he’d never been accused of, before pearl — but he figures maybe he could try to be, under certain circumstances. He could prob’ly be sweet to her, to make up for all the meanness he’d heaped on her when he’d first crawled in through her window.

“You’re sweet,” she repeats firmly, like there’s no room for him to fight it, nothing he could say to change her mind. “Sweet, and kind, and brilliant.”

He hesitates, the praise scything right through the flexivibranium in his ribs.

After all, what’s three hundred thousand units when he’s already got nearly four million in his account? He’s used to grabbing up whatever he can, whenever he can, but he probably doesn’t need to pick up the bounty on her so-called friend’s head, does he?

He can feel himself turning into a fuckin’ moron.

His ears lay flat against his skull, tailtip tucking against his inner ankle. His eyes slide upward in a derisive roll and he slaps a hand to his forehead, drawing it down his face with a noisy groan of frustration, trying to peel what he’s starting to suspect is a lovesick look off his face. He scowls at himself — dramatically. “You’re a fuckin’ moron,” he repeats aloud now, flatly, and hopes she thinks he’s talking to her.

For once, his wishes come true.

“Compared to you? Sure,” she says with an elegant shrug, and that makes his gut twist a little with regret. “But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong,” she adds, sounding like an echo of his own hopeless brain.

He doesn’t want to adopt a Taluhnisan — whatever they are. He doesn’t want to let himself get attached to some fuckin’ shrubbery or swamp-monster who happens to be the last shrubbery or swamp-monster of its kind.

But pearl does.

Penthus, he thinks again. God of grief.

“You’re the worst frickin’ thing that ever happened to me,” he mutters, digging his fingers and thumb into his orbital sockets.

There’s a silence and he winces into his hand, wondering if he’d hurt her fuckin’ feelings, and why he always has to keep saying the worst shit to her—

But then she speaks up, her voice uncertain but — he can tell — trying to tease him. “Probably not the very worst?”

He snorts, because he just knows she’s referring to Wyndham — and he’ll give her credit for trying to turn the High Shitbag into a fuckin’ joke. “Fine,” he agrees. “Second-worst thing to happen to me.” He sighs and drops his hand, rolling his eyes to the ceiling of the runabout, the loose panels and wires and countless gauges and buttons. “I’ll think about it,” he concedes. “Sleep on it.” He brandishes a dark claw and glowers. “I’m not makin’ a decision till I meet the guy, and can figure out who’s holding the bounty and why.” He scowls. “Go wash up, pearl. Then I’ll bandage you up. Should be the last time you need it.”

He regrets the words as soon as he says them. He could take them back if he wanted to, though: clawed fingers hooked in the soil of their conversation. He could tell her that the cuts and bruising haven’t healed up quite as much as he’d thought, and that she’ll need him to keep caring for her.

He could keep her dependent on him just a little bit longer.

It’s degenerate thought, even for him, and he grimaces — wiping his palms on his jumpsuit like he can feel the sticky venom clinging to the pads of his fingers. That kind of manipulation is worthy of Wyndham — and yeah, hate to disappoint you, pearl, but I guess I’m more like him than you thought.

She hesitates, then murmurs a thank you before turning and grabbing a pair of her new sleep shorts to take with her to the shower stall. He turns, pretending to busy himself with the locker as she hesitates. He knows he should give her the pretty lotions and cleansers, but the thought of giving her something sinks talons into his throat and won’t let go. His tongue feels like a river stone in his mouth: heavy and smooth, and utterly unable to move. Too close, he thinks again, regretfully.

Then he feels her step quickly behind him. He stiffens, and the only other warning he has is the sudden, overwhelmingly clean scent of waterlilies and clear sunlit canals. Then a curtain of glossy, starlight-colored curls cascades all around him — like a frickin’ Aladnan waterfall range. Something warm and plush presses against the crown of his head — reverently.

“Thank you,” she repeats, her whisper tickling the sensitive back of his ear, and her hair brushing all around him.

The curls sweep away from his body like rivers of silk, and then she’s gone.

He closes his eyes as the shower stall gently clicks shut, and he shudders. The warm softness spreads across the top of his head, the ghost of it sinking under his fur and misting outward to curl around his ears. Most of his sensory memory is catalogued through his hands but — this? This will be a constant bit of warmth he carries with him forever: a coin-sized wish tucked under his fur, a little flower floating right out of the crown of his head. He can still feel it.

He doesn’t think — he’s pretty sure nobody’s ever kissed him before.

He can’t lose pearl to a fuckin’ tree. Rocket knows he’s a vile little monster but he can’t frickin’ lose her to a goddamn houseplant.

He’s not good at being a friend. He’d proven that with L06 and A95. He’d tried, but he’d failed them. And Lylla — he’d failed Lylla a hundred times over. Even Tullk and the Captain — it had been different, that time, but he’d still abandoned the Eclector. He isn’t good at being anything good, and now some frickin’ forest-monster is gonna come in and be so much better at it than he is—

Or he’ll be worse. Pearl thinks Rocket is sweet and kind — who knows if this Taluhnisan is actually any better. Maybe he’s a real fuckin’ lowlife too — in which case, pearl will need someone to watch out for her.

Rocket can do that. He can.

And in the meantime—

He hears her squeak when she steps in the shower. And sure enough, like clockwork, she moans.

In the meantime, he could pretend to be nice. He could try. He could fake it, for as long as he’s able to. He won’t lie to her about her injuries — injuries he’s caused — but he could convince her he’s indispensable in — other ways. He could be just as kind and sweet as she wants to that cute little cunt of hers, rub his rough fingers over it so lightly, just the most careful kiss of his calluses on her trembly, eager little pussy, sliding up slowly to her quivering clit. He could tease tiny circles against her like a whisper, till her head is tossed back and her lips are parted, small puffs of breath gasping out of her mouth while her back arches and her nipples jut skyward.

Maybe it would be unfair. Maybe it would be taking advantage, since she’d never been fucked before he’d — done what he’d done. Hadn’t been touched in ages. But he can be clear with both himself and her: that he’ll only touch her as long as she wants him to; that it will only be to build up her, uh, library of experience before she finds someone else she wants to ride.

It wouldn’t be the tree, he thinks. There’s no way, right?

He hesitates, glaring at the cylinder of blankets. He’ll have to open it to get his sleep pants, and once the seal is gone, all the rest of the linens will expand — all the blankets and pillows he'd purchased for her on a tortured whim. She’ll see ‘em and have questions and he doesn’t want to deal with them right now.

But if he doesn’t wear the damn pants, she’ll furrow her brow and ask why he didn’t pick ‘em up.

He sighs, beleaguered, and hauls the plastic-cased cylinder to the linen locker, where he makes quick work of the casing and haphazardly shoves everything else inside under an older set of towels — clean, but stained by grease and really only used for engine-work anymore. He only snatches the stupid pants out. The pile of goods looks weird and obvious to his critical eyes, barely hidden under the towels, but he doesn’t plan on letting pearl back here tonight — doesn’t plan on her being anywhere but the bed.

He can start slow, he thinks as he slides into a band shirt she hasn’t worn yet and the soft pants she’d demanded he sleep in. He considers his options while he buttons the pants in the back, right above the opening for his tail. He can start slow, and start tonight. Show her that even though he’s been mean, he can make her feel good, too.

He’s lost in thought — more daydream than plan, really — when she exits the shower stall, squeezing her hair into a towel. The waterlogged curls look as blue as tempered steel, and twice as shiny — and she offers him her kitten-smile before perching on the edge of the bed. She’s taken to tucking her new pink comb carefully under the edge of the thin mattress — neatly out of his way, he suspects. Now she pulls it out and slides it through the silvery locks, then scrunches handfuls of the damp hair in her fists. To bring out the curl, he assumes.

He suddenly hopes the hair-stuff that Orix suggested is good for curly humie hair. He thinks it probably is. Cyxlorades may be smooth-scalped and mostly-hairless, but Sanna Orix is too invested in providing satisfaction to their customers to have overlooked a detail like that. Still, maybe he should have picked up something from Beax instead—

Rocket swallows.

“Got you some stuff while I was out today — just in case you wanted ‘em,” he adds. “No pressure. I’ll show ‘em to you tomorrow. Did you already eat?”

She opens her mouth — rethinks whatever she’d been about to say and closes it. Nods instead. He can already imagine what she’d been about to say, though. I ate with Grut. Or whatever-the-fuck his name is.

The knowledge fuels him.

“All right,” he mutters. “On your belly, sweetheart.” He grabs the salve from the shelf where the first-aid kit has migrated, and then stares at the picture she makes on his bunk: lavender-stardust hair, crumpled and silvery-gleaming with the heaviness of the water. He pauses once he’s over her thighs. The shorts are so tiny and somehow, pulling ‘em down seems more sexual than unwrapping the blanket or lifting her skirt has felt so far. He wonders if she’s wearing any of her new panties underneath. He hopes not. For a second, he just imagines sliding his hands up under the hem of the shorts — tugging them up so he can see the bruises and cuts. The soft terrycloth would rub snug against her pussy—

Pearl wriggles underneath him, tugging the shorts down in back, the waistband pressing against the underside of her gorgeous cheeks. He holds onto his groan with both fists and tries to assess her little wounds with honesty.

The interrupted half-eight is sealing up nicely, and all her bruises are fading out into a watercolor-wash of pale yellow suns and delicate brushes of greenery. The punctures and scrapes are now only a smattering of pale pink and rosy lavender. Most of the smaller, shallower ones will be gone in the next few cycles, he thinks — even without the salve.

Still. He brushes the pads of his fingers delicately over the raised edge of the elongated s-shaped slice — lip curling in a grimace — and commits it to his sensory-memory like a curse. Strokes the salve on it carefully, and then moves his hands to her lower back to glide his thumbs smoothly into the valleys, easing out any leftover tension.

“Can I give you a massage tonight?” she asks — almost wistfully. She’s asked every rotation since the first time he’d touched her beyond simple bandaging, which probably accounts for the ruefulness laced into every word.

“Don’t need one, pearl,” he manages to grit out. It’s basically a ritual at this point. He can’t imagine saying sorry again — it’s a useless word, anyway — but he can try to make amends this way: easing any lingering or new discomforts, making every little squeeze into an apology.

She hums a little disappointed note into the quiet air of the runabout, and he sweeps his hands down to the back of her thighs, fingers kneading under the hem of her thin shorts — thumbs carefully parting her. He hears the little trip her heart always does when he gets this close and he thinks again —

He could show her. That he can make her feel good.

He could.

He shakes his head and clicks his tongue, and feels her take the breath to ask the question she always asks when she catches him about to engage in self-flagellation — are you all right? — but he opens his mouth instead, asking a question that isn’t part of their weird, fucked-up little tradition.

“How’s your pussy, sweetheart?”

He hasn’t asked since that first time, a few rotations ago — and the words are so low and cracked that it almost sounds like he hasn’t spoken at all ever since. She freezes underneath him, and he winces, wondering if he should float his hands right off her and go back to sleeping in the pilot’s chair tonight.

But then she softens, muscles turning buttery under his palms.

“It’s a lot better,” she murmurs.

He tilts his head, eyes on the shadowed crux of her thighs, where her legs are pressed together, trapped by the waistband of her shorts. “She still hurt at all?”

She shakes her head — no. He slides his thumbs between her thighs again.

“Should still put some salve on her,” he rasps. “At least one more time.”

He sees the shiver start in her shoulders before he feels it under his palms.

“Could you — help me?”

The circles he’s been pressing into her thighs die slowly over the next ten seconds, and it takes him just as long to realize he’s not breathing. The ventilation system cycles on and that’s when he remembers to exhale. He floats his hands up off of her, and he sees her shoulders curve upward with embarrassment. She’s burying her chin into the pillow and hunching her spine miserably.

He wonders if she’s remembering his words the other day — I ain’t gonna fuck you, pearl — and he wishes he’d never said it.

He huffs out a breath.

“You sure, pearl? Can let you do it yourself.”

His voice is so low it burns his throat — and maybe it burns her too, because she shifts her trapped thighs against each other, underneath him. He imagines the words, licking and rasping between her legs. He remembers her little offer that first time — right now? — like she’d have parted her thighs and stroked herself if he’d said to.

“You could show me how you been applying it,” he rasps. “Lemme make sure you’ve been doing it right.”

He immediately wonders if that’s a step too far, if he’d misinterpreted her little offer.

But she shivers and yeah, he can hear her heartbeat quiver and shudder, then pulse suddenly between her thighs — adorable. “Okay,” she agrees softly, and she can probably feel him pull back on his heels in a little jolt of shock. He can’t dredge up any words, and the silence — surprisingly — must comfort her a little bit, because her shoulders soften and she sinks deeper into the thin mattress, almost melting underneath him all over again.

He wonders if she’d expected him to mean about it — about her asking. He supposes he could’ve mocked her, after all. Sire’s cock-addicted cumslut, he’d called her before, and she must’ve known he’d meant it to hurt. Something in his chest twists.

“Should I — roll over?” she asks, muffled into her pillow.

He grapples with himself — then, on impulse, he flickers his fingers up from the backs of her thighs, over the thin, bunched up folds of her shorts and the curve of her ass. She jolts with a muffled squeak, and his brows wing up, eyes widening. A smirk curls the corner of his mouth and just like that, he suddenly feels back in control.

“Pearl,” he taunts, grinning. “Are you frickin’ ticklish?”

She falters. “I don’t — think so?”

He teases a light sprinkling of touch over her flanks and her muscles clench and she yelps, wriggling.

He almost cackles. He hasn’t had a reason to think about anything like this since L06 — his sister had begged for tickles the same way she’d begged for him to play games or tell stories or sing songs — but the discovery that pearl is ticklish suddenly seems like a treasure. He tucks it away to keep for later.

“Don’t gotta roll over, kitten,” he tells her, still grinning. “Don’t want you on your back for a couple more rotations, if you can help it.” He lets his voice drop an octave. “Just come up on your knees a little bit and reach under yourself.”

She goes still beneath him and for a moment he thinks — no, he should’ve kept things light, he shouldn’t have said anything at all. He can feel himself reel backward onto his haunches, ready to throw himself off her and the bunk.

But then she draws in a little breath that he’s pretty sure is anticipation — not that he’s heard it before out of anyone but Ore Garden courtesans, and he suspects that might just be a pretty bit of theatre — and wriggles her hands down to push her shorts a little lower.

It’s all the encouragement he needs. He reaches out and plucks at the scrap of fabric questioningly, and when she makes a little noise and shoves at them, he grips them by the waistband and tugs them down — raising up on his knees and pulling them underneath himself and off her ankles. Then he’s tugging gently at her hips in encouragement, careful of the remaining knicks and bruises. She’s up on her knees in an instant, shoulders and face pressed into the pillow, a tumult of silvery lilac-blue curls splayed everywhere — and he’s suddenly wondering how the fuck he got here.

He doesn’t want to think too long, though — doesn’t want to lose it.

“Gimme your hand, pearl,” he utters, voice hoarse and throat raw. “Right between your pretty thighs.”

When she wiggles one beneath her, he reaches down and gently hooks his fingers in hers, carefully drawing her hand down further between her thighs before tucking a little scoop of salve onto her fingertips.

But he doesn’t let her fingers go. Not yet. First, he takes in a slow, measured breath, nostrils flaring.

“F-fuck,” he mutters, and if he’d been paying attention to himself he might’ve been surprised to hear himself stammer. Knew that pussy would smell like waterlilies.

Waterlilies and clear, bright water, now all blended with something a little bit heavier underneath — dusky and earthy and resinous, like fossilized amber.

And what a sight she is, too. He can’t help but lean back where he rests on her calves and take her in. She’s still a little swollen and too-pink — sensitive, he imagines — from his fuckin’ evil, vindictive spanks a cycle earlier. But she’s also all glossy, almost dripping, just from his little massage. Fuck. Again and again, he’d forced his eyes away from her little pussy that night on HalfWorld, too furious at her, at how gorgeous she’d looked with her raw silk panties twisted up between her folds, at how delicious she’d felt on his dick. But now — now he looks his fill. Drinks her in. She’s all splayed open for him, empty and needy, and his heart starts drumming a sharp staccato rhythm against his metal breastbone. Slowly — slowly — he lets go of her hand.

“Go on, kitten.”

Her fingers curve into the pretty flowerlike situation she’s got going on and when she does — finally — touch herself, the action’s so tentative that it makes his heart swivel up tight in his chest, throat squeezing. She’s just offering the tenderest, lightest little touch of her fingers on her folds, searching and hesitant. Her chin is dipped toward one shoulder, one moonsilver eye lingering at the corner to try to see him, and he knows it’s gotta be a stretch just to get a glimpse of him in her periphery. She’s artless, though: clearly never put on a show for anyone else, or she’d have her other hand down there too, maybe holding herself wide for him so he could see every little bit of her.

Not that he’s complaining — there’s something that feels extra-special about seeing her like this, still a novice really, showing him what little she’s learned about how to make herself feel good. His night of cruelty aside, she’s still so obviously an innocent.

“Look at you,” he mutters, watching her shy fingers curl between her legs, stroking the salve over her folds, and then her tender little clit. He can see her biting her lip over her shoulder — fuckin’ cute as hell. That amber-scent grows under the waterlilies, like his voice alone has brought it back to the surface. “Is this how you used to play with yourself, all alone and lonely in your tower, princess?” he murmurs. “Trying to figure out how to make yourself come?”

Fuck. She whimpers.

“For fuck’s sake,” he rasps, and he hopes he doesn’t sound angry — he’s admiring her, really. “You make the prettiest frickin’ noises, don’t you?” The Monster can feel his eyes glaze and fasten on her fingers, and the pretty bud that flickers into view as she shifts her hand. His ribs feel tight and his chest feels full and he’s pretty sure — all fucked-up miseries aside — he’s the damned luckiest bastard in the whole frickin’ galaxy right now. His good fortune sucks the air right out of his lungs, and his voice crackles.

“Poor thing. Nobody but you to play with your juicy little cunt. Bet that tiny clit of yours was so lonesome.” He swallows hard, and runs his tongue over his sharp teeth. “Was your little pussy lonesome, pearl? Aching for some cock?”

He’s not sure if it’s the low register of his voice or his words, but her thighs tense and try to squeeze together on her hand. “Didn’t even really know what she was missing, did she?” he asks, all fake-sympathy, eyes never flickering from where she’s pressing ovals against her clit. “Make sure you’re getting that salve everywhere, sweetheart. Outside and inside.”

She shifts her hips, and her ass wiggles a little as she tries to squirm her hand down further underneath her, reaching. Rocket has to force his eyes not to cross at the sight, at the quick interlude of her pretty pink cunt fluttering, trying to squeeze on nothing.

“Uhm, I —“

“You need more, pearl?” He scoops a couple fingerfuls of cream out of the little jar and — careful not to touch her directly, skin-to-skin — smears it right onto her vulva. It must be still cold because she jolts with a little hiss through her teeth, and he can’t help but grin, sharp and hard. “Go on, princess. Nice and deep.”

She mews, fingers slicking up the salve before one slowly slides inside, and she’s shuddering at the chill.

“In and out, sweetheart. You still got some cream on that other finger, so make sure to get that one in there too.”

She slips her second finger in to join the first, whimpering a little at the stretch, and he’s gotta adjust the front of his suddenly-tight jumpsuit. He presses his tongue against one canine, hard enough to taste the bright tang of blood, and lets his grin get a little harder, his eyes more intent.

“Twirl those fingers around, kitten. Get every frickin’ inch.”

The twisting flutter of her fingers inside has her gasping, and then a shivery moan jerks its way over her lips before she can bite it back.

“Good fuckin’ girl,” he rumbles. “Take care of that sweet, pretty pussy for me.”

Another little groan shuffles itself out from behind her bitten lip, and she turns her head to bury her face in the pillow, ass lifting just a couple more inches while her shoulders press into the bunk and his shirt rides up under her scapulae.

“Keep going, pearl. Rub it in.”

He can hear her heartbeat picking up, drumming against her breastbone, and her little stifled pants.

“Faster, sweetheart. Think you deserve to give yourself a little reward, for bein’ so frickin’ good.”

A muted little whine steals its way up the back of her throat and he clenches his jaw, remembering how forlorn she’d seemed that night.

I know you said I wasn’t good for you, and I’m sorry.

Well, he’ll be happy to correct that misunderstanding in the future.

For now, he hesitates, then reaches out. He wishes he were bigger — big enough to rest his palm on the back of her neck and still keep an eye on her fingers fucking nervously into her little cunt, palm swiveling. He’d have to stretch like he had the other night in her room on the Arete, pelvis crushed against her pretty ass, to get that grip on her throat, and then he’d lose this gorgeous fuckin’ view — and it might scare her, anyway, ‘cause he’d been such a frickin’ monster that last time. Instead — cautiously — he rests his palm on the small of her back, claws prickling and hand pressing gently, deepening the dip in her spine and tilting her pussy upward toward him, just a little.

But she jolts under his palm, so sharp he almost whips his hand away — and then, like his touch is frickin’ magic or something, she falls apart. Her breath trips right out of her lungs on a half-strangled cry as her thighs clamp tight on her own fingers, slippery wetness dripping out of her cunt and sliding down her thigh as she keens, long and sweet. So fuckin’ pretty: all those starlight-blue curls spilled out on the pillow, gorgeous ass and little pussy high in the air, achy and swollen and silky. His pearl shudders, some kind of panting moan still stuttering into the pillow. He wants to lick up that trail of liquid gossamer on her inner thigh so bad, follow it with his tongue right up to that spot where her fingers are still buried so sweetly in her little pussy, like she’s afraid to move them. He remembers her surprise a cycle ago, when he’d kept abusing her clit and forced a second and third orgasm out of her, and he’s torn between a retching grimace at his own cruelty and a snicker at how fuckin’ sweet she’d been, how sweet she’s being right now. She’s just instinctively holding still, waiting till all those little tremors subside, unwilling to move her fingers without knowing why.

If he’s lucky, maybe he’ll get a chance to play with her again. Show her that a little overstimulation can be nice.

For now, he just strokes his claws lightly over the base of her spine. And then — overcome by impulse like the capricious frickin’ gremlin he is — he lets himself feather his whiskers over her unbruised asscheek like a light little kiss.

She jumps, and a split second of panic and defensiveness rushes over him — but then she pulls her hand from between her legs and collapses onto her side, half-rolling so her eyes can search for him while she smiles her tentative little kitten-smile. She looks just as bright and happy and excited as she had right after he’d fucked her in the Arete.

Right before he’d put his fuckin’ foot on her.

He feels himself shutter closed, stomach dropping and pinching, even while she keeps beaming that sugar-sweet smile at him, like he’s her fuckin’ savior.

“Thank you,” she whispers like a secret, still smiling, eyes all curved into happy dark-lashed crescents, and he forces himself to take a long breath.

For what? he thinks ironically — she’d done all the work, and given him such a pretty show in the process. But then he reminds himself that he’s supposed to be convincing her that he can make her feel good, so he offers an attempt at a nonchalant shrug. Exhales, drawing his breath out as long as he can. Inhales, twice as slow.

We can do this every night, he thinks about saying. Any time you want, pearl. Any time at all. We’ll go at whatever pace you want and when I put my hands on you, it’ll only be to make you feel good, I promise. And I’ll do it better than anyone else’ll ever be able to.

“Let’s get you cleaned up, pearl,” he mutters instead, and he’s amazed that his voice comes out without breaking: lower than usual, and raspier — but unshattered.

She looks startled and half-lifts her head, hazy-eyed, curls tumbling. “But what about—?”

He stills, watching her with carefully-blank eyes as her words stumble and trip. “What about what, pearl?” he asks when she doesn’t pick them right back up again.

“What about — y-you?” she asks, tentative.

What about me? he thinks. Sweetheart, I’m taking my time with you.

“M’fine,” he tells her: voice so firm it’s almost harsh. He winces, and tries to make it a little softer. “M’fine, pearl.”

“But—”

“Lay down,” he interrupts, leaving no room for argument — but he’s proud of how mild the words are. And she listens — of course she does — even though he can see the crease in her brow that indicates she doesn’t like it. He doesn’t want to leave her, and he’s willing to waste a clean hydrocloth— intended for woundcare, but a cheap and plentiful ingredient in the first-aid kit — to clean up the silky wetness spilling down her thigh. He dabs carefully at the soft, puffy skin sheltering her pussy — careful not to remove all the salve he’s just had her slick herself up with — and massages the moisturizing cloth against the soft curls just above her clit. He’s meticulous in not touching her skin-to-skin, though — as much as he might want to.

Not yet.

Once the kit is closed and shoved back in its place, and she’s got all her pretty parts hidden behind her shorts again, he lowers himself cautiously to the bunk beside her. Some part of him’s still waiting, he supposes, for her to suddenly recoil and scream, to scramble back on the bunk, to shove him off the mattress with her feet while she clutches the blankets to her chest in panic and disgust and regret.

But it never happens.

Instead, she curves herself toward him on her unbruised side, looking as careful and hesitant as he feels, like she’s just as afraid he’s going to kick her right out of the runabout and onto the streets of Cyxlore. Her eyes are big and starsilver in the darkness, practically glowing with something too soft for him to name. He’d wanted to help her come, help make her all buttery and needy for him so she could see how good he’d make her feel, so she wouldn’t want to replace him or leave him or let him go — but now, he thinks maybe he’s played himself.

Maybe he’s trapped himself.

“You know,” she says, and it’s been quiet for so long that even though it’s just a whisper, her voice still makes him jolt. “You know, I used to be so afraid?”

He stares at her, eyes just a few inches away, so close that every word makes his whiskers twitch with the soft little puffs of air from her lungs. “Of what?” he rasps. Of me?

“Of him,” she says quietly, and of course that’s who she’s talking about. Wyndham. He should’ve guessed. “I mean, not him exactly, though — yes, him too. But — he would tell me he’d made me? A pearl from a parasite. And I — I’d believe him.”

His mouth twists at the corners. No, sweetheart, he thinks, and he’s surprised by how much the unspoken protest aches in his lungs.

“But you,” she breathes, and the second word is so reverent that he doesn’t recognize it at first. She reaches for him slowly, giving him time to pull away — and he doesn’t. Her fingers bury themselves into the fur on his jaw — such a tender little curl into the soft velvet that he could almost think her hands love him — and then she’s tipping her face up to hers. “You are so much more than anything he could have ever dreamed up. So much better.” She has the little kitten-tail-curl in the corner of her mouth, shy and gentle, eyes like moons.

He can feel his brow crease with a want to cry.

“You give me hope. Maybe I’m not just his — his stupid pearl after all.”

Nah, he thinks, so suddenly and sharply that he can almost forget the sting in his chest and the water trying to silver the lower edge of his eyelids. Nah, pearl, you ain’t his — you’re mine.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

hello, shiny sunbeams and sparkly meteorites. ♡♡♡ i hope you enjoyed this chapter??? as always, i appreciate you reading and joining me on this weird-ass journey. i just finished a (very) rough draft of chapter eighteen and i gotta say, i am very happy with where this is going! although i do think it's gonna end up being quite a bit longer than twenty-five chapters, so uhm, buckle in. i really hope you don't mind sticking around???♡

extra cinnamon-oatmeal-butterscotch cookies & blessings to those of you sweethearts who leave comments. i want you to know that i screenshot and save a lot of them on my phone because they really do mean so much to me. ♡(╥ ᴗ ╥)♡

some exciting things:

♡ the ♡portrait of pearl♡ is done!
♡ i mentioned i've been working on an illustrated scene from the next chapter. i was hoping it would be done before thirteen. heartspur. is posted but there's no way that's gonna happen. BUT the lineart of the environment (rocket & pearl's bunk in the runabout) and the layout of the lil ship will be posted and shared this week on my tumblr if you want a peek. i will link them with the next update here as well.

again, thank you for sharing this with me. i truly hope you enjoyed this chapter and am so grateful for the encouragement and support and kind comments. they mean so, so much to me.

 

posting schedules & chapter-previews on tumblr♡
masterlist & moodboard♡
portrait of pearl♡

 

coming soon: chapter thirteen. heartspur.
summary: rocket and pearl get in a fight. rocket shares a secret.
warnings: canon-typical violence against animals.
estimated date: friday, june seven.

Chapter 13: heartspur.

Summary:

rocket and pearl get in a fight. rocket shares a secret.

Notes:

warnings: canon-typical violence against animals. brief description of surgical violence. rocket’s a real piece of work.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

heartspur. an unexpected surge of emotion in response to a seemingly innocuous trigger—the distinctive squeal of a rusty fence, a key change in an old pop song, the hint of a certain perfume—which feels all the more intense because you can’t quite pin it down. From heart + spur, a spike on a heel that urges a horse to move forward. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Pearl falls asleep thinking she could die happy, and she wakes up thinking she could die happy.

It’s true that Rocket hadn’t touched her the night before — not beyond the light pressure of his hand at the small of her back, and the feathering of his whiskers over her hip. But it feels almost like he did: eyes flickering over her as tangibly as a candle-flame, so blistering that she thinks she might have shiny pink burns everywhere he’d looked. And his voice, talking her through it till she’d felt like a marshmallow over a campfire: golden-hot, barely holding together all the molten-sugar insides.

Poor thing.

Nobody but you to play with your juicy little cunt.

Was your little pussy lonesome, pearl?

Aching for some cock?

He hadn’t sounded mocking, exactly — but dangerous and low and predatory, like he’d liked imagining her like that, like he’d enjoyed the idea of her huddled up under her covers, trying to be quiet, trying to make herself come. She’d listened to him while she’d touched herself, and she’d thought she could hear every sharp tooth in his mouth, biting out the words in gritty, pleased little snips, satisfied at whatever mental images he’d conjured for himself.

Rocket must not have woken up happy, though. Pearl winces as he kicks around in the engine room below, and then curses his way up the hatch and digs noisily through the clothes lockers — muttering under his breath, grunting sharp words she can’t quite make out. It’s enough to make a girl self-conscious. She supposes she’d been selfish, by not touching him. He hadn’t seemed to want her to, but maybe that was just because she’d been so useless the first time—

She flinches away from the thought, shaking her head. She’d woken up fluttery with something just shy of hopefulness, but now it’s leaden and sinking. She tugs an anxious handful of curls and shakes her head like she can rattle the thoughts right out of herself.

Be normal, she thinks. Either she’s overreacting to Rocket being Rocket, or she’s gotten too far ahead of herself and has overestimated whatever last night had meant. It’s only to be expected. She’s not exactly well-versed in what healthy relationships look like—

The little voice of soothing reason splits apart at the sound of a bang and clatter. Rocket yells another curse from behind the lockers. The word isn’t in her translator, and Herbert had never wanted her to learn low habits like swearing. Her curiosity swims to the surface and she finds herself wondering if she can turn her not-insignificant linguistic talents toward learning to swear up a storm. Still, it’s a poor distraction, and she chews on her worry until Rocket ducks back around the corner, rubbing the crown of his skull. Had he hit his head?

He brushes her off as she reaches for him. She knows concern is knitted into the crease of her brow and the press of her lips, but he clearly doesn’t want any of it.

The disdainful curl of his lip stings, and yes, she’d probably gotten ahead of herself. Overestimated everything. She thinks again of lifting herself onto her knees in the bunk, letting him see her touch herself, and her spine suddenly goes cold with humiliation, rippling her skin with something between a cringe and a shiver.

Stupid, she thinks, and then tries to shake that thought from her head too. The chill recedes.

Be normal.

“Let’s go,” he mutters, stalking past her to the external hatch. “Grab some breakfast, meet your fuckin’ flowerpot-friend, and then get the hell out of here. We’re on a timetable.”

She ducks into the tiny toilet-stall to change her clothes. It feels silly to hide away while she pulls on a pair of panties and her buttery new leggings — especially after last night when he’d really seen every part of her in a way she’s sure he hadn’t before, even on the Arete. She’d barely been able to see him, crouched behind her, but she’s certain she could almost feel his breath against her, so warm that she’s still melting from it.

She tries to be quick about her clothes, but by the time she’s scurrying out of the little stall and slipping into her boots, he’s tapping one foot impatiently.

“C’mon!” he barks.

Still, his apparent impatience doesn’t stop him from making it a point to pause at a food stall serving synthetic soft-boiled Gangalorian squirrel-bird eggs.

“How d’you feel about real eggs?” he asks off-handedly, irritation still buzzing under the begrudging curiosity in his voice as she bites into the almost-creamy pink ovals. “They never been alive.”

She shrugs, wondering if she should ask him what’s got him so tense and tied in knots. No — he always cuts her off when she asks, impatient with the question itself. Better not to annoy him more.“I guess so. But I think unless they’re bred to do otherwise, most things don’t usually lay unfertilized eggs. Which feels like a whole new box of — of ethical concerns. And these synthetic ones are — yummy.” She smiles a little, bemused. Words like yummy hadn’t been allowed after she’d come to space. Juvenile, Herbert would have sneered, distaste curled into every feature. Say what you mean. Flavorful. Palatable. Savory.

She licks a sunshine-drop of yolk off her fingers. Herbert would hate that too.

Rocket’s eyes track her fingers, and then he jerks his face in the other direction, staring down the mosaic-glass road as he grunts something and hands her a warm bottle of morningtea.

“What did you say?” she asks, leaning closer and wrapping her fingers around the glass.

He waves a hand in her direction. “Bought some morningtea-mix yesterday,” he mutters, which she’s fairly certain is not what he had said. “Should save it till we get to Fron — warm drinks’ll be good there.”

Frissons of gold spiral up inside her. He’s so thoughtful, even when he tries to hide it. It soothes some of the leftover ache of his sudden withdrawal from her.

“I’m excited,” she tells him with a lopsided, hopeful half-smile. He only spins sharply on his heel, giving his back to her, muttering something bitter under his breath. Her smile falters.

“Where the hell’s your frickin’ shrub?”

“I am Groot.”

Rocket turns toward the sound instinctively and she watches his neck crane back, ember-eyes flying wide.

Groot smiles down at him softly from behind her. “I am Groot.”

“Got it,” her survivor says shortly. “I’m Rocket. Now. I hear you got a frickin’ bounty on your head—”

“I am Groot,” the Taluhnisan says.

“Yeah,” Rocket snaps. “I got that—”

“Sorry,” pearl intervenes, flushing. “I should have explained. He’s — it’s Taluhnisan. The language. You just don’t understand it — yet. But you will,” she adds hurriedly, and she can feel a hopeful, rueful little smile blooming in the corner of her mouth. “You will,” she repeats. “I think you’ll pick it up so quickly—”

“So he can only say one frickin’ thing?!”

“No — sorry,” she apologizes again, “I’m not explaining well. He’s saying a lot right now, and he understands everything, but Taluhnisans have very inflexible larynxes. So his apparent vocabulary is, uhm — limited? To, well, I and am and Groot. In exactly that order.”

“I am Groot,” the Taluhnisan says unhelpfully.

Rocket sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Unbelievable,” he mutters. “Okay, morons. Who’s holding the bounty?”

“I am Groot.”

“Uhm—”

A noisy groan bubbles up in his lungs. “I’ll just look it up, I guess,” he snarls, and lifts his datapad to scan the Taluhnisan.

Whatever he sees on the screen is apparently less-than-ideal, because he spits out a curse that only reads in her translator as some kind of facial parasite — then repeats it a number of times.

“Not only am I supposed to kiss three-hundred-thousand frickin’ units good-bye, but you got the fuckin’ Collector after you? What the fuck did you do?”

The enormous Taluhnisan shrugs haphazardly, and pearl ducks to avoid getting clipped by an errant branch. “I am Groot.”

“He might be the last of his kind,” she reminds Rocket gently, translating. “I don’t know much about the Collector, but doesn’t he — traffick in rarities?” She winces. “Groot was surprised, yesterday, that I knew what Taluhnia was called. His home-planet isn’t even marked by name on most imperial star-maps — he says it’s only been designated a letter.”

Rocket squints down at his data pad. “Yeah, I guess I can believe that.” He flicks a calculating glance up at Groot. “The info the Collector’s got on your bounty just lists your species as flora colossus.”

Pearl can feel her brow furrowing. Groot is possibly the most pure-hearted person she’s ever met, and the title they’ve given him is so reductive, so…demeaning and disrespectful. Something trips, hot and frenetic, up her jaw and into her cheeks. “Big flower?” she says sharply, and her voice surprises her: the words are all wound tight, and they sting. “They said he was just a big flower?”

Rocket blinks up at her, startled — then a shit-eating smirk starts to form. “I been callin’ him the same thing, basically.”

She feels her eyes narrow — a strange sensation — but Groot interrupts right as she opens her mouth.

“I am Groot.”

“Doesn’t say anything about Taluhnia,” Rocket reports, ignoring both of them and scanning the datapad once more. He snickers. “Just says he speaks groot, actually.”

She opens her mouth again, but nothing comes out — the words stuck, hot and boiling, in her throat. The sting of how strained this morning had been, with Rocket’s even-shorter-than-usual temper, is buried under the bright flash in her veins and behind her eyes. She fumbles for her voice, distracted by the narrow heat behind her eyes and the slash of fire along her cheeks, the tightness in her ribs. It doesn’t feel like the other lung-strangling emotions she’s familiar with — not vulnerable, certainly not cautious. No. This feels like something that could burn her — or someone else — if she doesn’t keep it leashed. She reels herself in, trying to stay balanced.

“He speaks Taluhnisan,” she says shortly, almost not recognizing her own voice for the clipped edges of the words. “He speaks Taluhnisan, and soon you will, too.”

Rocket studies her, one eye half-narrowed as she feels him reading whatever’s painted on her face. His smirk grows fractionally wider — just for a second — and then he scoffs, and slides the datapad shut with a sigh so heavy she’s not sure how he carries it. Beleaguered — dramatic. If she weren’t still so outraged, she might have commented on it, and tried to offer him a teasing smile.

“Where the fuck are you gonna sleep?” he asks Groot, sliding the collapsed datapad into a pocket and then crossing his arms to glower up at Taluhnisan. He casts a taunting, sideways glance toward pearl, quirking one brow. “Too big for one of the bunks — might not even be able to stand up on the runabout—”

“I am Groot,” Groot says, sounding almost insulted, spreading his open palms and fingers. The words dampen her fury, tempering it with concern.

“Oh,” she responds, startled. “You don’t have to—”

“I am Groot,” he says reasonably.

She hesitates, then shifts her shoulders uncomfortably.

“Well? What’s he sayin’?”

She feels her lips press together hesitantly. “He says he usually just sleeps on the floor — curled up. A bit of clear space in the cargo hold or somewhere similar would be enough.”

“Huh.” Rocket squints up at Groot, shielding his eyes from the morning sun, just glancing off the edge of the mountain wall. Whatever he sees in the Taluhnisan, it makes him deflate with a sigh. “Good thing we’re getting a bigger ship.” He rolls his eyes and then turns back toward the way they’d come. “All right, pearl.” He shrugs his irritation, tossing an annoyed look over his shoulder at the two of them. “It’s a bad frickin’ precedent to set, but you can keep ‘im, I guess.”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Pearl gives Groot a quick tour of the little runabout — so small that Groot has to tilt his head a little when he stands — while Rocket gets the ship ready for take-off.

“I don’t know how clearly Taluhnisans can see in the dark,” she says apologetically as she guides him down to the lower level, “and I haven’t figured out where the plasma orbs are—”

But Groot opens his fingers like a flower, and a small spray of glowing golden embers float outward like fireflies. Pearl gasps, feeling her eyes go wide in the luminosity.

“Taluhnisan spores,” she whispers. “I’ve never — they’re lovely,” she tells Groot, the warm glow blurring.

“I am Groot?”

“Sorry,” she says, ducking her head and scrubbing at her misty eyes. “I’ve always — I cry too much. They’re just — they’re very beautiful.”

“I am Groot,” he offers gently. She feels the corner of her mouth curve in a hesitant, half-shy smile, then reaches for his hand.

“Let me show you the cargo hold,” she tells him, tugging him toward the door.

He ducks under low pipes and protruding shelves, and eventually finds a space that he decides will serve as his nest. Before she can show him much more, Rocket’s yelling from the hatch that it’s time for her to get in her moon-damned seat and put on a frickin’ seatbelt.

He doesn’t seem to have any similar suggestions or concerns for Groot.

But up she climbs — and Groot follows, finding a place to wedge himself on the flightdeck floor between their seats and a little behind them. Rocket’s got the runabout ascending as soon she buckles herself in, and then they’re punching through the Cyxlore’s atmosphere, and out into the stars.

She waits until they’re fully on their way, and some of the tension has left Rocket’s shoulders.

“So…you’re getting a new ship?” She’s been wondering since he’d mentioned it the night before, but there hadn’t seemed to be a good time to ask — not between the orgasm she’s now trying not to think about, and the sparks Rocket’s been spraying off since she woke up.

He grunts. “Yeah. Thanks for reminding me. Gotta put in a bid for the job.” He swipes up a screen in front of the starshield, and taps a few buttons. “There it is. Just gonna get rid of a pest problem for these snobs, and then we’re gonna have our very own ship — an upgrade from this rinkadink runabout.”

Our? she thinks. She feels like she’s being whipped around by her heartstrings in the last rotation: hopeful, eager, happy, worried, mortified — only to cycle back through the feelings all over again. She’s getting motion-sick from the lurching spin of it.

“I wanna try to get there a few rotations early — figure out what we’re working with. Terrain, weaponry, that sort of thing.” He slants those fire-red eyes at her. “Give you some time to practice shooting and maybe explore a little.”

She breathes slowly, trying to calm the whirling chaos behind her ribs, and tilts her head. “How can I help?” she asks, trying to sound easy and mild. “With the, uhm, pest problem?”

He snorts and turns his eyes back to the stars. The air in the ship is dark and blue, with the lights from the hold just haloing the back of his head. The flight controls blink mauve and scarlet, blue and gold and green up at him — beautiful on his fur, but somehow she only feels tight and tense and off-balance.

“You’re just gonna get in the way.” His eyes flick to her, and she feels the protest curl up immediately into the back of her throat, like an animal hiding under a porch to die there. “Oh, sure, your shooting’s not bad for a first-timer,” he admits with a doubtful sneer and a wave of one clawed hand, “but how do I know you ain’t freeze up when something with a whole lotta teeth looks at you with big sad eyes, huh?”

She feels the frown creasing her forehead. “I told you. I could. I could shoot something if I needed to. For the right reason. To protect you. Or — or to protect myself, if I had to.”

He snorts. “That ain’t as reassuring as you think it is. Don’t trust you with an active firearm yet. How do I know you ain’t gonna accidentally shoot me?”

Okay, she supposes she can understand that. Still—

“I could look out for you,” she says. “I could be an extra set of eyes. Help you stay safe—“

“M’gonna be killing abilisks, kitten. Not shopping for trinkets. So no, you can’t be an extra set of eyes.”

Not shopping for trinkets. The words score across her skin: a surging reminder of how little value she brings — just Herbert’s mindless, useless trophy. Before she can even fully register the wound, a new shiver of cold is licking icily up her spine. Her voice sounds distant and tinny in her ears. “Wait — abilisks? What — what are those? And why are we killing them?”

“I don’t — I don’t frickin’ know what they are,” Rocket snarls defensively, “ and we aren’t doing anything. I’m killin’ ‘em. Because they’re a nuisance. Or something. What, I gotta have the answers to everything?”

“I am Groot,” Groot offers up, and pearl would probably feel vindicated if she weren’t so torn. Her heart twists, and her vagus nerve suddenly feels peeled raw from her body: hurt, and filled with a vague, stomach-shifting terror. Something about the word — abilisks — makes her fingers and toes go numb. The coldness comes with it, as ancient as polar ice caps: clawing up into her bones out of some primordial crevasse. She huddles up her shoulders and tries to curve herself around that pilot-light of hot emotion from earlier.

“Groot says they’re interdimensional lifeforms that eat energy,” she translates, her voice going reedy and thin with the effort of holding all her pieces together. “No-one knows where they came from. They have a minimum of four tentacles, but they usually grow more over the course of their lives. They can sense spectral and other kinds of energy, and they have seven rows of teeth on the top and bottom — each — of their mouths.” Rocket rolls his eyes, and that ache inside her grows right next to the fear. She tries to feed the flickering little flame instead. Her jaw tightens — a strange sensation — and she attempts to loosen it. “He says they’re significantly larger than you, and they’ll be dangerous for you to fight on your own. He says they could swallow you in a single bite and not even stop to chew.”

And why does this feel so familiar? There are lots of big, space-faring creatures out there — the Acanti are only one evolution of star-whale — but for some reason, Groot’s description of the abilisks feels like a half-remembered dream to her. Something about sensing energy—

Before she can focus on sorting through the puzzle-pieces, though, Rocket scoffs and rolls his eyes again — in the other direction, this time.

“Now you’re just making stuff up. I am Groot,” he repeats mockingly. “No way he said all that.”

The spark at the root of her heart flares, and she feels her fingers curl into fists. She immediately forces them loose. Her ribs feel tight and thin on her lungs, like she’s wound herself up in kitestring and pulled it so tense that it cuts into all her soft tissue. “I am not. He’s worried about you. And I am too.”

“He just met me,” Rocket says flatly, disbelief carved into every syllable. Her hands tighten again.

“That doesn’t mean he doesn’t care. I told you, he’s kind—”

“I am Groot.”

“Too bad,” Rocket mutters. “I want this ship. Oh look,” he taunts, “the bid’s been accepted.”

His voice is smug.

“I am Groot,” Groot says reasonably.

Her emotions are in the back of her mouth and behind her eyes now, sparking tears and a bitter taste. It’s too much. She twists her hands together nervously, flexing and unflexing her fingers. “Groot’s been on the ship for barely half a rotation and he’s already been helpful,” she points out.

“Has he?” Rocket muses mockingly, sounding entertained by it all. She can feel a bubble of panic rising in her belly and she shatters it as hard and fast as she can: first with a wave of ice, and then with fire.

“He has,” she snaps, and she can hear her voice pitching higher. Her eyes feel hot and the shuffled-down panic begins to coil like a spring, like a snake. “He told us what the abilisks are, so you won’t be getting into anything without knowing. And I can be helpful, too—“

“Can you?” Rocket asks, and she knows it’s just a thoughtless repetition but it makes her want to cry now, too: fat, confused tears welling up on her lower lashes. She slashes a frantic hand at them.

“Pretty sure the most helpful thing you could do would be to stay outta my frickin’ way,” he adds scathingly.

“Don’t fight the — the abilisks,” she says sharply, even as he catches sight of her tears and clicks his tongue knowingly, a smirk curling the corner of his mouth. God, she hates crying. She tries to narrow her eyes, tighten her jaw. Her fingers curl again. “Especially not alone. We can think of something better—”

“Just ‘cause you’re along for the ride and I let you bring your little friend, princess, doesn’t mean you get to tell me what to do. You’re getting awfully cocky—“

She makes a strangled noise in her throat. She doesn’t even know what that noise is. A growl, maybe?

Rocket’s ears flatten with annoyance and he sneers sideways up at her. “What the fuck is wrong with you, anyway? You’re acting so frickin’ weird.”

“Don’t tell you what to do,” she repeats, trying to keep her voice even. It still comes out strained and fraying at the hems. “You get to tell me what to do, though.”

Her vision is shimmery and she feels herself float right up out of her body, pinned to her bones in only a handful of places: icy nails and fiery lances. Her jaw’s clenched again and her twisting hands have knotted themselves back into fists, and it’s only now that she realizes it.

Rocket snorts. “Just telling you not to get in my way while I shoot things,” he mutters under his breath — then dares to slice a mocking leer in her direction. He’s all sharp teeth and bitter eyes, sneering so angrily that her breath shudders in her lungs, haggard and suddenly afraid. Not for her physical safety, but he looks like he hates her again. “‘Sides, princess, if last night was any frickin’ indicator, I think you like me telling you what to do.”

Her jaw loosens and her eyes widen and all the humiliating second-guessing from this morning doubles up to slam right into her belly. One of her mother’s boyfriends had punched her once when she was still a little girl — so hard she’d vomited. But that had only been with his fist, and she’d never liked him.

Somehow, this is worse.

She stares at Rocket. He glances at her again — grinning meanly — and something in his expression suddenly stumbles, ears shifting from flattened irritation to something like apprehension. His smirk slants into a grimace.

“Pearl—”

It’s too late. She can barely hear him. Her vision goes white and staticky. She fumbles for her seatbelt. It clatters open and clangs against the seat when she rises to her feet, trying to stumble her way off the flightdeck without crashing into Groot.

“Hey!” Rocket squawks, once he realizes what she’s doing. “Get over here and buckle up. We’re goin’ too fast for you to—“

“I am Groot?”

“Don’t you get up too,” Rocket snaps. “Bad enough I got one of you morons running around while I’m trying to push our jump-points—“

She ignores them both, lurching between the bunks and back to the hatch, just needing to be as far away as possible before — before something happens. Before she says something she regrets.

She doesn’t bother to sit, to tuck herself away, to be quiet and small. Instead, she paces, stumbling everytime they pass a jump-point. Her steps are frenetic, erratic, and she presses a fist against her sternum where her heartbeat is thudding painfully. For too many trips across the narrow space, her belly spins tighter: spiraling upward like a firestorm. She pants.

What is wrong with her?

Rocket had muttered it and in the moment, the words had seemed only flippant and derisive — but it’s a valid question, and the memory of it brings her to a pause, breath stuttering in and out of her lungs in sharp little gasps.

The next jump-point makes her stagger, and she tucks herself behind the bulwark — folded, squeezed right, teeth already digging into her knee. She thinks about hazarding a whisper-scream and forces herself to hold it in, digging her top teeth in harder. It’s much less satisfying through the armored fabric of her leggings.

But she’s not even sure the scream would satisfy right now. This overflow of — well, what she’s now pretty sure is anger — is so different from the vacancy of hope, hollowing out her ribs like an ice-cavern. Instead, it’s a volcano — one that has been kept dangerously dormant for far too long.

She only wishes she knew how to get it out from under her skin.

She stays there for — far longer than she can estimate. Eventually, her jaw loosens, and she eases her teeth from where they’ve made a valiant effort to punch through the armored cloth. Her thoughts slow from a fiery cyclone of chaos to a desperate rainstorm, and then eventually to an embarrassed rumble.

The space behind her sternum still aches.

Poor Groot, she thinks, as her insides slow and grow still. He must be wondering what he’s gotten himself into — stuck on a tiny ship with the two of them. She winces. Herbert would be furious if she’d acted this way — she can’t even imagine what he’d—

She cringes, shoulders collapsing inward.

Rocket had let her bring Groot — even though he didn’t know the Taluhnisan, or like him, or trust him. Even though he’d barely wanted to bring her. He’d taken her all over the Cyxlorade capitol city and spoiled her with clothing and choices, and then he’d bought morningtea mix and even though he seems to like it, she’s not so much of an idiot that she can’t tell it was for her.

Smart girl, he’d told her, when she spilled her heart out onto the grated floor. He’d mopped up her guilt and shame with the words. You prob’ly gave him the best shot he could’ve had.

A sunbright gift of absolution, more valuable than anything she could have found on the streets of Cyxlore.

She twists her hands in her moondust-curls, melting into anxiety. Why had she done that? Why had she gotten so mad? She can’t remember the last time she’d been angry at all — probably at Theel, sometime in the early days. He’d always been a meanspirited bully, though he’d been too afraid to turn that tendency in her direction. Is all of — this — just some built-up, baseless outrage, compiled over decades and spilling out now, at the worst possible time, toward the least-deserving person?

Well. Maybe not the least-deserving. No-one else had encouraged her to — to fuck herself in front of him, then barely said a word to her all morning, only to taunt her with it in the middle of a — of a fight.

I think you like me telling you what to do.

She muffles a moan into her hands. How did everything get messed up so quickly? Is it her fault — for insisting on joining him? For — what, guilting him into bringing Groot? She hadn’t meant to be manipulative, but maybe she’d picked up more from Herbert than she ever realized or wanted.

Her tears had flagged somewhere in the middle of her fury — later, she’ll be disgruntled by the knowledge that even being angry will make her cry — but now they come back full-force. She doesn’t care about Rocket’s stupid snide comments — not really. They only sting a little. But she’d been anxious all morning, and then — spiraled tight from the overwhelming, ultimately unattainable urge to protect him — anxious and afraid—

And the mention of the abilisks—

She knows that word. She’s sure she knows it. Maybe—

She falters. She can deal with that later.

No, she realizes slowly. She knows why she was angry — why she’d lingered in her fury for so long, and let it brew. Ultimately, she knows. It was something she’d always instinctively recognized in her mother, born out of a child’s survival instincts and a misshapen need to caretake. In some ways, it’s something she’d recognized in Theel, too, though he’d hidden it under a petty and powerless tendency to pick on small things. And it’s something that she’s always recognized in Rocket, something which had made understanding his relentless anger so easy.

But she thinks this is the first time she’s felt it herself. The desire to be angry, to stay angry. To hide in it. Complicated by years spent being molded by Herbert, perhaps, but there nonetheless.

She takes a breath as she weighs her options. Herbert had always kept her struggling to balance on a tightrope of conflicting expectations. He’d wanted her groveling when she’d made a mistake, while at the same time, he’d loathed what he’d referred to as emotional, erratic behavior. She’d learned to humiliate herself before him without batting an eyelash — to beg and plead without a tear in her eye or a hitch in her breath. On particularly bad occasions, to get on her knees while keeping her spine and shoulders straight. She supposes it had been layers of power for him: to control her down to her expression of emotion, even when she was at her most panicked. Or maybe it had been about controlling someone so in control of themselves. She really can’t say. But it is an option. She could go to Rocket, M’dame-Lavenza-cold, and politely beg him for forgiveness.

She doesn’t want to do that, though. The cold is useful to her, but she hates it so much.

The panic in her belly, on the other hand — the guilt, half-instinct and half-conditioned — wants her to throw herself in front of Rocket’s ankles, plead for him not to leave her behind. Apologize for getting so angry about something so stupid, for taking circumrotations’-worth of pressurized powerlessness out on him.

Of course, there are other options, and other truths to consider. There’s a part of her — newly-awakened — that insists she’s not entirely wrong, and yet another part that reminds her again of just how long it’s been since she was angry last.

And the part of her that’s so soft for him, always — that just wants to give him any scrap of tenderness and comfort she has inside her.

Still, it takes her a while to wind up her courage: a luminous thread of sunlight she clutches with both hands. She breathes into her palms, even as the runabout slows and eases into a float. By the time she’s decided what she wants to say, and then gets her nerves under control, Groot’s voice is already rustling down the hatch like a soft pile of autumn leaves.

“I am Groot?”

“I’m coming,” she calls back quietly. She stands, and she inhales and exhales and shakes out her fingers and wrists — but she doesn’t call up the cold.

I don’t need it, she tells herself. I don’t.

She falters when she rises up through the hatch. Rocket’s not looking at her, though his ears are swiveled in her direction. Instead, he’s focused on his makeshift bunk-become-workbench: clearing it out. Cleaning it up.

Making it sleepable.

Her stomach drops to her knees and she has to will everything in herself to not retreat.

“Dinner’s in the rehydrator,” Rocket grunts, still not looking at her.

She blinks at him. “You fixed it?” she says numbly, but the thoughts cartwheeling through her mind — like seagulls skimming their wings into blue ocean — are very different.

He’s clearing out the bed, but he’s also made her dinner. She swallows.

“Bought a new one,” he says only, and his eyes flick to hers — cautiously. Like he doesn’t know what to expect. Well, fair enough. She’d just thrown her first temper tantrum since — well, she’s not sure she’s ever thrown one before.

“Your houseplant didn’t seem to want any,” he adds — and then she sees his shoulders flinch. “Uh, Groot, I mean.”

She’s already so soft for him, but that softens her too.

“Taluhnisans mostly eat light,” she says quietly, fingercombing the ends of her curls. She focuses on the texture of them, the way they slide between her fingers, how the tangles catch. It helps her keep her heartbeat steady. “Some water or vegetation, sometimes. Minerals. But that’s really it.”

“I am Groot,” Groot agrees. “I am—“ He makes a show of stretching: a purely mammalian gesture, and one which only succeeds in him knocking his head and knuckles against the ceiling. He winces, and rubs at the back of his head. Pearl feels the corner of her mouth curve.

“Thank you,” she tells her big friend. “Sleep well. And — I’m sorry, Groot. If my behavior made you — uncomfortable, or anything.” She offers a halfhearted shrug and a nervous half-smile. “It’s not an excuse, but — I’m still learning how to be a person, I think.”

There’s a quiet sound behind her — a noise Rocket has swallowed, and she can’t tell what it means. Still—

“I am Groot,” Groot says only, and offers her survivor a little wave before clumsily lowering himself through the hatch.

Pearl collects her plateful of food, and sits primly on the edge of the bunk while Rocket continues to pack up the odds-and-ends on the opposite one.

“What are you doing?” she asks. Her voice is soft — and apprehensive. She doesn’t try to hide it, just nibbling on some kind of little sandwich he’s made her: rehydrated coarse bread — almost like a whole-grain bagel or soft pretzel — and some kind of fake smoked fish. A little pile of jewel-bright berries and something that reminds her of sugar-snap peas.

He sighs. “What’s it frickin’ look like?” She thinks he’s trying to be snappish and snarly, but he only sounds tired. “Makin’ a place to sleep.” She can see the fleeting grimace at the corner of his mouth — there and gone.

She swallows. Her mouth is dry and her throat feels swollen. “Will you stop, please? And sit with me for a minute?”

He goes still — slowly, but completely. It’s like freezing, she decides — but not a flash-freeze. It’s the kind of freezing where it steals over a person so quietly, nobody even realizes it till it’s already happened. She knows what that’s like, and she doesn’t want it for him.

Then he sighs again, and hoists himself up on the cleared part of the bunk, staring at her legging-clad knees. “What?” he utters, low and tense. His ears flicker, and some of that mocking meanness comes back into his voice. “You gonna apologize to me, too?”

She wants to say yes, immediately. To drop herself to her knees on the grating and apologize for being awful, and beg him not to be mad at her, not to be withholding. Instead, she drops her own eyes to the plate of food he’s made for her, and she lets herself settle into the hundred quiet truths tucked into the shadowy corners of the runabout: hurts and promises, lessons and tears. Nightmares and small comforts. Massages and healing salves and regret, and hot showers and held hands, and foreheads pressed to foreheads.

Little sandwiches, and what they mean.

Instead of begging — of pleading — she takes another bite. It's just a way to take a pause, to give herself time to think — because though the sandwich is good, she’s too nervous to taste it.

She swallows, then raises one eyebrow delicately.

“Did I say something I should apologize for?”

It’s an honest question — but she doesn’t try to hide her doubt. She expects to look up and find surprise on his face — but it doesn’t come. Instead, his ears slant sideways and downward, and his shoulders fall a little further. He stares into his lap. He only looks — beaten. Bereft.

“I stand by every word,” she tells him, and she knows her voice is soft — uncertain, despite how firm the sentiment had sounded in her head. She chews her lip. “But I am sorry for getting so frustrated. For raising my voice.”

His head tilts up — cautiously — and his ears flick. Those ember-eyes study her carefully, assessing.

Then he scoffs — all bravado again. “You call that a raised voice?” he asks. “Please, princess—“

She takes another bite of her sandwich and waits as he falters. The silence grows, and she finishes her food, and dabs at the corners of her mouth with her best manners. Carefully and precisely, with both hands, she places her plate aside on the mattress.

He’s waiting for her to say something, but she’s had her whole life to learn how to stay quiet. She remains still, willing her restless hands to lie motionless in her lap.

“M’not good at apologies,” he says at last. His voice wavers. “I think—“ He swallows, and his eyes dart to hers and then away, anywhere else. “Think maybe we’re both learning how to be people.” He scrubs both dark palms over his face, pulling down on the fur of his cheeks as they go, and he stares at her knees again. “M’not sayin’ it as an excuse, either.”

The echo of her own words, carefully offered back — the honesty of his voice and the exhausted expression on his face — it means more than any apology, she wants to tell him. It means he understands.

She gives into the urge to drop herself to the ground, and he startles when she lowers herself from the bunk to the metal grating. Now she can look up into his face.

“That’s better,” she breathes, and gives him her softest eyes. He blinks down at her, his red-ember stare wider than she’s ever seen it. The width of the aisle between bunks is barely enough for her to kneel there, but kneel she does. Before, it had seemed like Rocket had been incapable of looking at her — but now, she doesn’t think he could tear his eyes away if he tried. She lays her palms flat on her thighs to keep them from twisting together nervously, but she manages to meet his gaze steadily — solemnly.

“More than apologizing, I wanted to thank you,” she says. Even so, her voice is a tremor.

His nose scrunches — adorable, she thinks; handsome — and he squints at her with dubious eyes. “For the sandwich?”

A shy little puff of laughter surprises its way over her lips, and something inside her loosens. “Yes,” she agrees. “That too. But mostly for everything else.”

How does he look so confused?

“Pearl, I—“

“For the sandwich,” she says softly. “The morningtea. The clothes. The freedom to pick my hair color and the courage to get it done. Everything. For letting me come with you. For letting me bring Groot, even though you didn’t want to. I know I’ve already thanked you for getting me out of the Arete and off HalfWorld, but for that too. I’ll never be done thanking you for that.” She steels herself, but somehow it’s easier to be brave on her knees and looking up at him, with him staring down at her like she’s some strange, far-off thing. Still, her voice goes shy as summer violets in her mother’s overgrown lawn. “For touching me,” she breathes. “For last night. Even if you don’t want to again. All of it.”

He swallows, and the sound is so loud it might echo through the hold.

“Kitten—”

“And one more thing,” she says quietly, trying not to let him interrupt before she loses her courage. “One more thing, for now.” It’s her turn to take a shuddering breath. She feels the corner of her mouth twist in something self-deprecating, and her brow crimps uncertainly. “Do you know how long it’s been since I felt angry?”

She doesn’t expect an answer, but he gives her one anyway: blinking wide molten-red eyes, mouth slowly closing, and shakes his head — just a fraction of an inch. No.

“Me either,” she admits, with a little smile she’s sure looks half-broken. “It took a lot to get me angry when I was a child, and after — with Herbert, I just — I couldn’t. Getting angry at him was—” She shrugs her shoulders helplessly, but something flickers in his eyes.

“A death sentence,” he says only, his voice hoarse and rasping.

“For someone,” she agrees, and tries not to shiver in the momentary wave of iciness inching its way up her spine. She keeps herself curved protectively around that tiny flame of inner warmth. “I—“ She tilts her head up at him. “It feels good, doesn’t it? Being angry. Not — well, not really good. But better than the alternative. You get to hide from… being sad. Being scared. All that—“ She stumbles, then plunges on. “All that bullshit.”

Rocket makes a sound in his throat — a quickly-swallowed laugh, maybe, at her childish curse word. Or maybe something more wounded than that. The quiet is long and syrupy, clinging to everything.

But then he speaks.

“Yeah, pearl.” His voice is low, and surprisingly less tense — soft, like velvet and smoke-billowing silk, like he wants to wrap her up in it. “Never thought of it like that, but — yeah. Speaking as someone who’s basically perpetuallistically angry, that’s pretty much all of it.” He winces. Opens his mouth — closes it. Tries again. “I been a jackass all day.” She can tell he’s trying to make it sound flippant, but the last word pitches high and he has to clear his throat. “I was — trying to be angry, I guess.” He pauses, then makes a face and shakes his head. “Fuckin’ stupid.”

But she’s already shaking her head. “Some things aren’t meant to be figured out alone, I don’t think.” She hesitates, and then reaches up carefully to collect his hands in hers: like seashells, like wildflowers, like fallen fruits. She’s held them in bed every night for rotations now, but this feels different — and she thinks he feels it too, judging by the way his fingers curl nervously closed. For a moment, she almost lets them go — but then she shakes her head at herself, and tugs his closed fists forward. She dips her face and places a kiss on the inside of each of his wrists, right over their respective pulsepoints.

His hands twitch in hers like startled birds.

“Thank you,” she says, holding his gaze solemnly, “for making me so safe that I could be angry.”

His firebright-eyes, already wider than she’s ever seen them, somehow grow just a little bit bigger in his face. They silver over, and then he sighs.

“Are all Terrans such saps?” he asks, but the question cracks on the last word.

She manages her tentative half-smile. “Only the best ones,” she tries to tease, and he snorts, tugging his hands out of her grasp.

“Get off the frickin’ floor,” he says, scoffing and looking away. “It’s gotta be filthy down there.”

She lets her smile widen and eyes the grates with an expression she hopes looks considering. “It’s not that bad—“

“Up,” he orders, and she rises to her feet.

“See?” she says, trying to sound light — because it doesn’t bother her. Not usually. Not really. “You’re still telling me what to do.”

His ears flick and he looks away. “Uh. ‘Bout what I said.” He clears his throat. “Shouldn’t’ve.”

She tilts her head. Hesitates. “You were…kind of a jerk,” she admits softly, and a ripple travels his face: surprise, she thinks, and then amusement. And then guilt. “I didn’t like that you said it to make me feel bad.”

“I didn’t mean — that’s not exactly — look,” he huffs, “I’m just a fuckin’ idiot. I open my mouth without thinking—”

“I’m not mad anymore,” she tells him quietly. “We’re both learning how to be people, remember? So I think we’re both going to make some mistakes.” She can see his fists opening and closing, clenching and twisting: agonizing. She tilts her tentative half-smile at him again, trying to tease him into something lighter. “Besides,” she reasons, blood already rising to her cheeks, flickering like butterfly wings. “You weren’t wrong.”

His eyes snap to her like live coals: glowing, and even warmer than her wrath had been. She sighs, already half-melted against her will.

“Can we just go to bed now?” she asks softly. She eyes the second bunk with disdain. “Together?”

His shoulders sag — with something like relief, she thinks.

“Yeah, pearl,” he utters, and his voice is gruff against her skin. “Let’s get to bed.”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Rocket would be lying if he’d said he wasn’t still rattled.

He’s not sure what the fuck had happened. Scratch that — he knows exactly what had happened. He’d gotten something nice between his teeth, and had nearly frickin’ destroyed it.

When he’d finally drifted off during the sleep-shift before, he’d gone dreaming of soft, wet sunlight reflecting on the clear canals of Morag. Rocket doesn’t swim in water over his head — he thinks he’d be good at it, he thinks he’d have an instinct for it, but he’s worried about the weight of his manufactured insides. Still, in his dream, he’d been as light as a feather in low-gravity, slipping through a world of clear, jeweled sunshine that had shifted and moved and streamed all around him. The tremulous beams of light had wavered between the shadowy leaves above, and they’d blurred around him. When he’d floated to the crystalline surface — whiskers dripping with wet diamonds — he’d seen that the canal had been afloat with a lush blanket of waterlilies: as shimmering and cool as the silk-chenille he’d bought on Cyxlore, still hidden in the bottom of his linen locker. Each perfect bloom had been moon-pale and pink-hearted and dew-jeweled, and each bowl of petals had cradled a mouthful of sweetness.

In his dream, he’d dived back beneath them, and marveled, and risen again. Everything had tasted like their perfume — the shivering Moraggian air, the lungfuls of opalescent sunshine, the moonstone-glimmering blossoms. He could’ve lived off the scent of it, off the taste of it, off the comfort of weightlessness and being submerged and surrounded and all wrapped up in the clean clarity of this strange waterway in his dreams.

Now — from the safety of almost a full rotation’s worth of perspective and a mournful mouthful of gratitude for pearl’s absolutely frickin’ moronic willingness to forgive him when he doesn’t deserve it — he realizes that he’s not sure he’s ever had a good dream before. Not like that. Not so promising and clear that he’d woken up with his chest so full of sweetness that it was already aching. Not like a whole canal-full of waterlilies had bloomed behind his ribs while he’d been sleeping.

Maybe that’s why it had terrified him.

He’d surged to the water’s surface again in his dream and this time he’d woken up. Pearl’s blue curls had been tumbled all around him: riversoft as satin, cool and weightless and streaming like a lilac-colored sky layered with clouds. Everything had smelled unbearably of her. Her breath had been a warm little puff of air in his ear and she’d murmured something sleepy and stupid, and then she’d tightened her arms around him — and his manufactured lungs had wrenched sideways in his chest. He’d had to fight himself not to scramble, not to risk waking her by ripping himself out of her arms. The only thing he could hear outside of his own heartbeat and ragged breath had been the echo of reverence in her mouth when she’d curled up with him the night before.

You are so much more than anything he could have ever dreamed up.

Every instinct had shrieked along his veins to back up, to get away, to recognize that she was more dangerous to him than Recorders or Ravagers or hell, even Wyndham himself.

She’d break whatever was left of his wretched, ragged little heart.

Pulse pounding, chest burning, he’d wriggled himself out of her arms and away from her and all her threatening softness, and nearly fallen out of the bunk before he’d scuttled through the hatch to try and distract himself with final touches on the engine before they took off. He’d talked himself into a snarling, seething corner inside his own body, wrestling the sick twist of regret and anxiety and fear into a familiar jaw-trap cage of hissing anger and petty meanness.

It feels good, doesn’t it? Being angry.

You get to hide from being sad, or scared.

All that bullshit.

Now, he watches pearl slide back into his bunk, and he half-draws the purple curtains around the two of them, and he tries not to remember the sight of her on her knees: fingers folded into the jumpsuit material covering his thighs, eyes all big and wide, lips parted and glossy-wet.

It’s the first time he’s bothered with the privacy drapes — like the deadspace behind the bulwarks in the lower level, he’d essentially forgotten they’d existed before pearl. But there’s a stranger on his ship tonight and while the Taluhnisan seems — surprisingly tolerable, actually — Rocket wants the illusion of privacy and protection in case Groot ends up being a problem.

He’s pretty sure pearl hasn’t noticed, but Rocket has always kept an extra laser cannon tucked under the edge of the hanging bedframe, and a modded Nova machine gun stashed on the shelf at the top of the bunk, and an ion pistol overhead. And of course, over on the second bunk, there’s still a dozen functional laser cannons of various sizes and, uh, special features that he never actually got around to moving — all within easy reach.

Pearl doesn’t comment on the curtains, surprisingly. She just climbs under the covers, sending the berth-style bed into a gentle sway as she goes. He circles nimbly behind her as she lowers herself to the mattress. Normally, he’d wait till she was settled and then cautiously lay himself behind her, letting her hang onto his hand — but not tonight. His eyes flick to the gap in the curtains and the hatch, and he decides the best vantage point will be higher on the bed than usual. He drops himself neatly onto the pillow beside her head.

Pearl squeaks in surprise and of course he tenses, waiting for her to pull away — but she doesn’t. He should’ve known she wouldn’t. With nonchalance so gauzy and thin he’s sure she can see right through it, he settles in around her, tucking her head in next to his belly.

From here he can see the hatch. Just in case the big guy’s some kind of creep.

Rocket can admit that the Taluhnisan seems like an okay sort, but there’s really no telling. Hell, Rocket doesn’t really think about it anymore — even though he probably should — but he still hasn’t forgotten that pearl can pull on a cold face quicker than he can squeeze a trigger. She could still be more M’dame Lavenza than his —

His whatever. His… crewmate. His Terran. His pretty, stolen, forgiving pearl.

His mind calls up the look on her face when he’d made his shitty little remark about shopping for trinkets — how wounded and crushed-up she’d looked for a second before all the wide-eyed hurt had collapsed under splinters of concern and fear, then shuttered in the chill of an unseasonable blizzard. For a second, he’d thought she might go all M’dame Lavenza again, and for the first time since he’d cornered her in her Arete bedroom, he’d wanted it — wanted to prove himself right, wanted to remind himself of how frigid and empty she could be.

It hadn’t been till later, after she’d fumbled herself from the flightdeck and down the hatch, that he’d thought about what he’d said. What it might’ve meant for her to hear it, like a confirmation of everything Wyndham had demanded from her, had tried to shape her into: something vapid and hollow and meaningless.

But Rocket had kept going anyway, hadn’t he? The truth is bitter and sharp in his mouth, a jawful of broken Centaurian saltrock cutting apart his tongue and the insides of his cheeks. Yeah, he’d run her right into the ground, as if now that she’d agreed to stay with him, he should give her every reason to wish she hadn’t. Between the mean little bite about trinkets and his clawed dig at how earnest and obedient she’d been the rotation before — as if all that sweetness and eagerness to please didn’t make her into the most adorable, fuckable little thing he’d ever seen — he’d sunken himself into the pilot’s seat, a snarl stuck to his teeth and sour regret ricocheting off every bone in his body like a misshapen, sharp-edged bullet. Groot had wisely stayed silent, perched on the floor behind him, shifting and resettling only a few times with a murmured I am Groot?

The regret had eventually battered itself into a shape more like self-loathing. And loss. He’d stared out moodily at the stars, broodingly aware of how much better she’d deserved — at every frickin’ turn. But now she’s stuck with him — at least until she asks him to drop her somewhere else — and he’d probably never get to bury himself in the warmth of her arms or her tits or her tight, wet pussy ever again.

Maybe she’d be so mad she’d want to stay on Sovereign, he’d thought, not knowing if it would be a blessing or a curse. Maybe he only had a few more rotations to torture himself with the scent of her. Amazing, really — how he’d ruined it all because of the nicest little dream he’d ever had. And fuckin’ pathetic, that something so sweet had made him so frickin’ scared.

But then she’d risen up out of the hatch like a waterlily-goddess, heartbeat tripping nervously, all pink and moondust-blue and solemnly silver-eyed. And he’d seen it painted on her face — how frickin’ hard she’d worked just to not back down when he’d snapped his stupid little you gonna apologize to me? challenge. She’d set her limits — and once she’d been sure he’d understood them, she’d knelt on the dirty grates and leafed through all his meanness and misery, and had somehow used it to understand him better than he’d ever even wanted to understand himself.

And as if all of that weren’t enough, she’d then found some sort of gold thread underneath it all — something that reimagined him as good — and she’d tugged on it with the softest little thank you he’d ever heard in his entire, fucked-up life.

She’s so frickin’ generous in her ability to believe the best of him.

Now — as if she can read his frickin’ mind — she relaxes in the bunk and tentatively winds one arm around his waist, curling herself against Rocket’s lower half and nestling her face into his flank. It’s his turn to startle. Fuck — she feels good, warm and soft and trusting, pulling him in even more tightly. He exhales slowly through his nose, and then breathes her in again: waterlilies, clean rain, and the smell of his shirt.

Pictures her — again — on her knees in front of him, hands in her lap. Imagines her resting her cheek against his inner thigh and looking up at him with those earnest moonsilver eyes.

He shuffles back a growl — fully directed at himself — and then sweeps a hand over the gleam of her hair. The silvery lavender-blue catches every bit of light his eyes can snatch up, each curl painted and glossy with illumination. It feels like light under his fingers: feathersoft and silken, weightless as air. He loops a curl around one knuckle and tries to commit the texture to memory, closing his eyes and letting it slip over his claw and float away.

Pearl makes a muffled, sleepy little sound, and he tries not to think about her pretty, plump lips, pressed like a kiss against his side. If he hadn’t been such a jackass earlier, he could’ve asked if she’d wanted to touch herself again. He could’ve offered to help her out a little, this time — guiding her hand until his fingers slipped between hers, helping stroke over her soft, slick pussy. He would’ve painted his voiceless apologies over her clit till he sent her off to sleep with stars in her eyes, muscles all molten and buttery from a handful of worshipful orgasms.

But he had been a jackass earlier, and — forgiven or not — he can’t imagine she’d be happy to part her pretty thighs for him right now. And there is the new shipmate to consider. Rocket can hear Groot shuffling around on the level below, bumping into things in the cargohold. The Monster rolls his eyes, then narrows them on the hatch, just in case.

Just in case.

But he lets his hand stroke over pearl’s hair while he does it. His fingers lace through it, testing its softness and springiness, measuring it with his knuckles — letting it pour over his palms like water in a clean, sunlit canal.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

He wakes up with claws already hooked, ready to rend — ribs tight, lungs heaving — teeth bared and eyes wide, darting, scraping over every shadow and bright hot light — he looks for cinders, for sparks, nostrils flared and searching for any shred of smoke — for fur, for blood, for the burnt smell of the laser pistol—

“—only you and me. I’m here — it’s just me.” The voice is a caress. “Herb— Sire is far away, and so are the Recorders. It’s only you and me.”

He rakes in another scorched lungful of air, and the burnt scent in his nose suddenly seems dampened, softened by clear water and dewdrops and lilies.

Pearl.

“Did I scratch you?” he pants. “Did I hurt you?”

Her eyes are big and careful on him, shifting from his own stare toward something just a little below his left ear. Unassuming, nonthreatening. “Not at all,” she soothes, and her voice is the softest little brush along his senses. “I’m fine.”

“I can’t—” he seethes, peering around the bunk. It’s still swaying recklessly on the straps that suspend it from the ceiling, and the pillow is hemorrhaging feathers: a soft spill of downy guts, scattered across the mattress between them like a silk sacrifice. He reaches out — the fabric that had been underneath her head is in slivers. “I shouldn’t frickin’—“

—be here.

“Stay,” she says — not that he could move yet if he wanted. His legs are shuddering: adrenaline suddenly leeched from his body, sunk into the mattress and the grates beneath. She slides herself to the edge of the bunk, perched prettily between the gap in the curtains, reaching for something he can’t see.

“Shouldn’t be in here with you,” he manages to rasp. His fingers strangle the shreds of pillow. They could’ve been her skin, her face, her throat — the feathers could’ve—

He’d sliced open her arm during that sleep-cycle on the flightdeck and sure, they’d bandaged her as soon as they’d woken the next shift, but has he checked on it since? Is it another clawful of scars he can add to the list of ways he’d hurt her? Pearl slips through the curtain-gap and whatever little lights had been hidden by her silhouette suddenly flare into his eyeline, bright as burning ash.

His nostrils flare again, trying to make sure the air is clear.

Then she’s back, thighs gleaming under the hem of her little shorts as she edges toward him. She sets a waterbag down on the mattress, settling herself next to him with her back against the wall.

He flinches back. “Did you frickin’ hear me? I shouldn’t — you shouldn’t—”

“Can I touch you?” she murmurs, like she hasn’t been listening at all. Her hands are already reaching for him, palms up and open.

His lip peels back in a silent snarl before he can stop himself. He doesn’t want to scare her — he wants her to stay — but—

She’s already there, though, her hands curling up into the Knowheremen shirt he’d decided to wear to bed — anxious to get his scent back into the fibers of her favorite tee since he’d been so rotten to her earlier. She tugs him toward her body by fistfuls of the soft fabric. He’s still so shaky — heart in his mouth, thudding against the base of his brainstem. His hands are trembling — he can feel his pulse in the pads of his fingers — and when she pulls gently on his shirt, he tumbles into her, breath still stabbing his lungs.

“Don’t—”

The protest is more for her sake than his, but the little idiot doesn’t seem to have any sense of self-preservation anyway. She can only pull him so far — he’s heavy, he knows; riddled with duranium-plated bones and vibranium prosthetics; probably ten extra pounds of screws and solder alone — and then she’s easing herself around him, her right leg sliding behind him and helping drag him toward her. He’s suddenly — inexplicably — nestled between her thighs, his spine anchored against her soft belly, her breasts brushing the back of his head. He tries to pull away, heart hammering with the fear of hurting her again—

“Rocket.” She whispers his name like a talisman into the shadows, like some kind of spell or prayer. And it works. He can’t help but go still at the sound of his name in her mouth. The way she says it doesn’t sound like some random ship slicing its way across the vacuum of space. Instead, it sounds like something burning a warm path home.

“Look,” she urges, gesturing with soft fingers to the gap in the curtains. “We can see from here.” Her breasts bump against him gently as she stretches for the waterbag, and she reaches both arms around him so she can puncture it with the metal straw. She holds it carefully in his lap until he takes it with both hands. Her knees are bent, pointed to the sky: thighs bracketing either side of his body, cushioning him.

Protecting him.

“Drink,” she urges. “It’s grounding. Remember?”

She smells like waterlilies.

Her fingers thread into the fur on his neck and he shudders at the lightness of the touch, ribs still heaving. He sounds like a dying Acanti, run aground planetside: lungs straining in hollow, choking, mutilated gasps. He shifts his grip on the waterbag, then looks down at his own hand, the hand that had apparently murdered a frickin’ pillow tonight.

Be grateful it was just the fuckin’ pillow, he thinks, heart still battering itself against his metal sternum. It’s gotta be nothing but a bruised, bleeding mass of tissue by now.

Her thumbs dip below his collar and he freezes — suddenly terrified of her feeling his scars and metal bits, even though he knows she’d caught glances of them on the Arete; suddenly terrified she’ll dig her digits into his swollen, sore tissue and hurt him. But she pauses when she feels him stiffen — so quickly that it almost feels like she noticed his fear before it even rose to the surface. Then the delicate touch shifts safely back outside his shirt, coasting tenderly over his clothed shoulders and then back to his neck. His muscles stay strung-tight — cinched up under the memory of what he’d done the last time he’d had his hands on her throat — but her thumbs just stroke lingeringly along either side of his spine, then up to the base of his skull. She dips them into the fur there, below the surface layers and into his plush undercoat, rolling the pads of her thumbs carefully over the bone.

It’s like she’s found a dial he hadn’t known was there. His heart and lungs are still pummeling his bones, too much momentum to slow them down — but his shoulders go molten, becoming flux under her ministrations, and his head tilts forward, suddenly too heavy to hold up. Her fingertips float to the sides of his face — light as Foresterian moonmoths brushing against his whiskers and fur — while her thumbs continue to stroke up from the nape of his neck to the crown of his skull. They rove against his head in petal-like ovals, and then slide back down again.

Circs and circs before, trapped on HalfWorld, the muscles in Rocket’s neck and shoulders had been manipulated into new shapes: shortened, lengthened, split; twisted into tendons. They force himself to hold his shoulders broad and his head upright. He’s pretty sure there’s no name for any of the stuff he’s got going on in his body. But it’s here — in these strange manmade muscles between his neck and his shoulders — that pearl carefully kneads her thumbs. Her fingertips are still stretched upward, cradling his jaw like he’s—

Like he’s something precious.

Fragile.

His breath hitches on a strangled sound. His ribs spasm upward, eyes suddenly wet and burning.

“Drink,” she murmurs, gliding her thumbs deep into whatever agonized mess has been made of his trapezii.

He grips the straw with his teeth, and takes a long pull of the water. It floods his mouth, cool and sweet and clear, and his eyes flicker closed — just for a second.

The tears on his lower lids spill over and river into his fur.

Pearl shifts behind him, and he feels her mouth again, pressed carefully between his ears like a gift.

“The incinerator,” he mumbles. His voice is a scraped-raw wound in the air that he hadn’t meant to let escape. “It was — the incinerator.”

He takes one hand from the waterbag — folds his fingers in and rubs the pads over the creases in his palm. Calls up the ghost of L06 in his sensory memory: silken fur, sleek metal, warmth. Then, the loss of her: muscles suddenly loose and heavy and tugging to the filthy Arete floor, and then snatched from his childish grasp—

His hands had been smaller then, but time and growth haven’t changed how the memory feels in his fingers. It’s always just as big, taking up the full surface-area of his hands.

Pearl’s thumbs sink sweetly into his fur, then glide over top of the collar of his shirt, out to the edges of his shoulders: careful, delicate. She doesn’t say anything, but her mouth continues to brush against the top of his head in a way he’s certain he doesn’t deserve. It’s a knowledge etched along his bones as certainly as the scars burned and stitched into his flesh, engraved so deep into the undersides of his skin that his shoulders suddenly seize up — in spite of pearl’s careful lullaby of touch.

“You can tell me,” she murmurs against the curve of his ear. It flickers instinctively, and he feels the brush of it against her lips. “Only if you want.”

He closes his eyes.

She leans, tugging the pile of discarded blankets toward them — wrapping him up in her arms, and then them both in the blankets. She doesn’t seem to give a fuck about the pillow or the white-and-silver-speckled feathers that puff between them as she weaves a home for him. He thinks about fighting her but the truth is, tucked between her soft thighs, with her hands patiently working away around them, he feels—

—safe.

As safe as he had in her den, dozing under the flight controls a rotation or two before they’d landed on Cyxlore. His lungs shudder painfully and he lets her pull his tense shoulders in against her body.

“I had a brother and sister,” he manages to utter hoarsely. The words hit the air and shatter. “Sometimes I — I see them burning.”

Her fingers don’t even pause, which he thinks might be a miracle. He means for that to be it — the extent of what he tells her, the end of the story. But before he can stop them, the next words bubble up like blood: an old internal injury suddenly bludgeoning its way to the surface. The insides of his throat and mouth shred themselves on the sharp, gritty edges of his teeth and splintered bones.

“I don’t deserve this,” he rasps out into the shadows. He lurches forward suddenly — half heartedly trying to get out of her grasp — and every muscle in his face pinches at the wave of scalding shame that burns through each hair-follicle, down to the cell. “I don’t frickin’—“

But her hands keep moving against him: soothing and cool, smoothing and patient. Loving. His shoulders shudder under her palms, waiting — for the condemnation, for the rejection he knows he deserves. Instead, her voice is a soft breeze against the velveteen back of his ear.

“Do you remember what I told you,” she murmurs, every word a little cloud wrapped in shadows, “when we were under the flight controls?” Her fingers slide deep under his fur at the base of his skull, her blunt humie nails scraping comfortingly against his scalp.

He shakes his head — just slightly. Because he doesn’t want to disrupt the pressure of her patient hands on him, and also because he’s not sure he can manage to move much more than that. But she’s already giving him the answer, generous and quiet.

“He wants you to feel small, and ruined, but you’re not,” she whispers. Her oval nails scratch and stroke. “You’re good.”

“You don’t know what I did,” he says, and he wants the words to be a snarl but they only shiver weakly into the shadows. “It was my f-fault. And it’s not even the worst frickin’ thing I—“

His voice crackles into static but she’s already pressing a thousand soft whispering kisses into the crown of his head. He fists his claws into his hands. He’s not ashamed of crying, but he knows if he lets go of any more tension he’ll end up weeping under her hands and her lips and that is a thing he doesn’t want to do. He doesn’t think he could survive it.

“It’s not your fault.” The words are a trickle of light, a luminous little stream of water dripped onto the grated floors. “I know it feels that way — maybe more than anyone else in the universe, Rocket, I know.” Soft, glowing little exhalations, brushing the strands of fur between his ears. “But that’s also how I know it couldn’t have been. Nobody makes Herbert do anything he doesn’t want to do.” He can feel her behind him, silent, nibbling at the words in her mouth uncertainly before she pours them out like the rest: little moons and opals, quiet stars and silver coins spilled onto the thin mattress and shabby blankets, between the puffs of murdered pillow. “He’d have always intended to kill them. To kill you too. He may have pretended otherwise but in the end, that’s all he ever intends to do.”

He shudders under her words.

“But you — you loved them, didn’t you? I can tell.”

He hesitates, crushing the side of his face against the inner curve of her thigh, rubbing his cheek against her, trying to get just as close to inside her as he can. Her fingers flutter carefully — from the tip of his shoulder, across his chest and metal collarbone, to wrap carefully around his front in an embrace that’s lighter than the silver-specked feathers eddying and pooling in the blanket-creases. Any other night like this, he would’ve been afraid of an arm across his chest — like it could turn into a cage or a noose — but pearl’s so soft about it that he just knows he’d only have to hitch a breath for her to let him go.

He doesn’t, though, and her arm squeezes him in just a little closer, so protective and tender that his tears double-up, spilling over twice as fast.

“So what if I loved them?” he rasps out, before he even knows he’s thinking it. “So what? It didn’t — open up the lab doors. It didn’t get them out. Not in any way that mattered. It didn’t make their shitty little lives any bigger.” The words bleed out on the grated floors.

But he can feel her torso shift as she shakes her head, the cascade of lilac-blue curls sweeping gently against his arms. She hums a little note of soft distress. “Oh, Rocket.” Her lips are a prayer on the crown of his head. “I think it was probably the best gift they ever could have had. Knowing what I know of you? I think every joy and dream they had was thanks to you. I think your love for them would have been the biggest thing they’d ever have known, even if they had gotten out and been free. I think your love for them was bigger than the entire sky.”

Something about her words, the way they form a sort of stained-glass symmetry with the old promises murmured between his siblings and himself in the dark — the stories they’d imagined for their futures — makes something inside him crack open. He tries to grasp onto the pieces of himself, his claws flexing before he realizes he’s palming her calf, leaning into the shelter of her body and her thighs.

He’d been such a dick to her, all day. And now — this.

He exhales a shaky breath, and sinks deeper into her softness.

“M’no good,” he tries to tell her, and the words are splintered and desperate. He has to tell her. She has to know. She deserves the warning.

“You’re so good,” she denies him in the darkness. “I hate so much that he had them, that he had all of you — but I’m so thankful that you had each other.”

Fuck, he hurts, everywhere. Muscles and tendons and screws set deep into bones, metal plates biting at tissue, implants and wires and scars and solder. Burns. And worse than that: a hollowness under his breastbone, a twisting wrench in his broken heart, and a stone perpetually lodged in his stomach — forever. And the sting of constant hypervigilance, the way it makes his eyes and skin hurt: hackles always raised, fur always just a breath off his skin, waiting to spike out in defense. Gaze always narrowed, twitching, surveying. Fingers cramped with the need to keep his claws ready, all the time.

Of course he’d cut her. If not with his teeth and his nails, then with his words. He doesn’t know how to do anything else.

“You don’t have to believe it right now,” she tells him softly. “I’m not asking you to know what I know or feel what I feel. But I know how good you are, and I know how much better you made their time here. And I can believe it enough for the both of us.”

He steels himself and casts a backward glance up at her, not sure what he expects to see, but only knowing he’s afraid of it. But pearl’s just soft and quiet and haloed in all the dim lights of the runabout. Red and blue, green and gold. The prettiest pink he could’ve dreamed up, splashed like a blessing over her hair. It’s all waves and curls of steel-blue stardust in this light, and her eyes reflect back at him: dark, metallic silver. A starlit, gunmetal goddess. Astraea, she’d said Wyndham had named her project — after a celestial virgin ascended from the mud when her world had grown too cruel, which Rocket hates to say seems to fit.

But also, she’d whispered against the bulwark just a few rotations ago, a bringer of justice.

He’s so exhausted — not just bodily, but in his frickin’ heart, in his thoughts. Every part of him feels too heavy and haunted to move.

“You go to sleep,” pearl murmurs against his scalp, like she already knows how dense it all is. Every word she utters is a breath that stirs the threads of his fur and he knows he shouldn’t — he knows he shouldn’t — but he lets himself drift sideways in the cradle of her thighs, the corner of his mouth pillowed against the soft inside of her knee. The bunk sways on its straps like a little rowboat in a calm sea, where everything is so glassy and still that it’s hard to figure out where the stars end and their reflection begins. His vision blurs with thick lashes as his eyelids grow heavier, hazier.

“I’m going to keep watch,” pearl whispers. Her lips brush the crown of his head again and he feels himself melt under them. “I’m going to take care of you and keep you safe, Rocket. Always.”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

LONG chapter, my friends. sometimes you write a chapter and you think it's a solid draft and then you revise and edit it thirteen million times and you think oh, that's solid and then you go to post it and you feel like you have to rewrite it again. eugh. i thought about splitting this bad boy up, but i had such a hard time writing this whole chapter (still not sure how i feel about it) and i decided i was just going to keep it all together because hopefully there's something in there that appealed to you lol ♡

anyway thank you. for being amazing. next chapter's got a lil more smuttiness to complement last chapter, but it probably won't be out for around two weeks. i am back with my family trying to help out as we figure out the medical situation there and right now there isn't a whole lot of time for writing (or anything, really), so next week, i'll post one of the rocket-prompt-week one shots i've been sitting on for a while. but i'm COMMITTED to chapter fourteen being posted in two weeks unless something absolutely bonkers happens. ♡♡

anyway i am SO grateful for how lovely and kind you all are (and extra-special ice cream sundaes with sprinkles and cherries for you absolute sweethearts who filled my inbox with kind words that week. i have saved so many of these comments and honestly i do reread them when i need motivation or just a general boost. you are SO kind and i am so grateful)

exciting things:
♡ i mentioned i've been working on an illustrated scene from this chapter (it's the post-nightmare comfort scene). i was hoping it would be done before today but it's probably too detailed and the trip to take care of the fam has definitely slowed down some of that work. BUT... you can see the lineart of rocket & pearl's bunk if you want! (there's a rough lil scribble of a map of the runabout too, from someone who does not know jackshit about physics and space travel. but hey, this story stars a sentient talking raccoon so like, whatever. as an fyi, i do picture the runabout to be much taller than it is wide. it's got the proportions of an angelfish.)

again, thank you for EVERYTHING. you all make the writing experience truly magical, honestly. and thank you again for the sweet comments; they actually make my day/week/month/everything so much better! ♡♡♡

 

posting schedules & chapter-previews on tumblr♡
masterlist & moodboard♡
portrait of pearl♡
rocket & pearl's bunk on the runabout (lineart)

 

coming soon: chapter fourteen. ghough.
summary: pearl teaches rocket and groot about abilisks. rocket helps her relieve some stress.
warnings: talk of genocide and wyndham’s other experiments. grinding, dirty talk, praise. mentions of gagging (with panties). slight degradation/use of the terms “slut”/“whore” (affectionate).
estimated date: friday, june twenty-one.

Chapter 14: ghough.

Summary:

pearl teaches rocket and groot about abilisks. rocket helps her relieve some stress.

Notes:

warnings: talk of genocide and wyndham’s other experiments. grinding, dirty talk, praise. mentions of gagging (with panties). slight degradation/use of the terms “slut”/“whore” (affectionate).

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

ghough. a hollow place in your psyche that can never be filled; a bottomless hunger for more food, more praise, more attention, more affection, more joy, more sex, more money, more hours of sunshine, more years of your life; a state of panic that everything good will be taken from you too early, which makes you want to swallow the world before it ends up swallowing you. Onomatopoeic to the sound of a devouring maw. Pronounced “hawkh,” with air drawn sharply inward through the mouth. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

I’m going to take care of you and keep you safe.

The words are still humming softly through his head by the time Rocket stretches groggily in the morning. Pearl’s already awake — or maybe she hasn’t slept at all. He’s curled up in a crescent between her legs, nose pressed too close to the open crux of her thighs. He jolts back, but she barely seems to notice how close his mouth had been to the hem of her tiny shorts. Instead, her kitten-smile is just a little tired and tattered at the edges, and the skin under her eyes is a faint bruise-blue.

Nothing else indicates how tired she probably is, or how close he’d been pressed against her all night. She only takes his sudden movement as an excuse to stretch her arms up over her head and arch her back, legs flattening and flexing in the most seductive yawn he’s ever seen in his miserable frickin’ life. The Intergalactic Omniphonics t-shirt she’d worn to bed rises up so high that he can see the lower crescents of her areola like two perfect pink quarter-moons. They look so soft that every part of him twitches — nose, eyelids, dick — and he takes advantage of her squeezed-shut eyelashes to sit upright and make sure he’s got an armful of blanket wedged over his lap.

“Groot’s still down below,” she tells him once she’s eased back into something less pornographic. “Do you want some breakfast?” She folds her legs across each other and hinges in half at the hips so she can rest her forearms against the mattress. He stares at her as she lowers her face to his, feeling his own eyes widen in his skull. “It’s been a long time, but I used to make really good scrambles for my mom,” she says with her little smile. “I think I could make some here, on the hot plate—”

“Scrambles?” he repeats. He’s baffled, sure, but more importantly — he doesn’t think he can move, just staring at her as she folds herself in half for him.

I’m going to take care of you, she’d promised, and she’d fuckin’ done it.

Never mind the fact that he’d been a dick to her most of the wake-shift yesterday.

“That’s what we called them,” she says mildly, and then she’s unlacing herself from the blankets and sliding off the swaying bunk. “I’m sure you have a different name for them out here.”

And before he can grapple with the reality of his situation, she’s up and has her back to him, pretty ass shifting under her tiny sleep-shorts, the edge of those stretch-marks he loves peeking out from under the hem on the outsides of her thighs. He stares at them, and at the dimples in her lower back — just above her waistband — and the silvery lilac-blue curl of her hair cascading down past the t-shirt to brush against her spine.

Dazed, he casts his eyes around the bunk, taking in the snowdrift of feathers and the ruined pillow, the soft warm dents in the blankets all around him where she’d guarded him all night. He feels his lips press tight together, holding back the strangled little sound trying to whine its way up his throat, and he watches as she studies the rehydrator. When he finally trusts himself to speak again, he opens his mouth to explain the tech to her, but she only hushes him with a gentle palm.

“Let me figure it out,” she says softly, and then gives him her kitten-smile and shy wink. “I promise I won’t break it again.”

His mouth snaps shut. “I didn’t break it the first time,” he mutters at last, sulkily. “I repurposed it.”

Her smile widens sweetly and she winks at him again before turning back to the little machine. She figures it out more quickly than he might’ve expected, and then she’s whipping up some synth-eggs with little scraps of fake boar-bacon and some slivers of lab-made cheese. She smells the handful of spices he’s got stocked up and throws in some combination he hasn’t tried before, and he just — sits there, too stunned to move, when she brings two bowls over to the bed.

She’s wrong. He hasn’t had anything like a scramble before. The eggs are fluffy and light, and the cheese and bacon suffuse the delicate dish with salt and savoriness.

I’d like a chance to look out for you, too.

He can hear the Taluhnisan shifting in the lower level, then clumsily making his way up the ladder.

“I am Groot,” their guest says, emerging from the hatch.

Rocket grimaces. The damn tree takes up a whole lotta space in a real little runabout. Thank fuck he’s got a Dreadnought coming their way.

He clears his throat while pearl perches next to him on the bunk. “So, uh. Guess we should talk about the next stop.”

“I am Groot,” Groot offers, a little bundle of flowers spiraling out of his forearm. The Taluhnisan lifts it up to his face and then chomps a mouthful of the plant.

“Damn,” Rocket mutters, his ears flicking back. “That doesn’t exactly seem healthy.”

“I am Groot,” the Taluhnisan says reassuringly.

“Groot says it’s normal for Taluhnisans to recycle nutrients,” pearl translates. “And he also thinks you should reconsider fighting the abilisks.”

The urge to scoff and brush her off ripples under Rocket’s skin, but he bites it back with sharp teeth, wincing instead. He focuses on his bowl of scramble, scraping it clean and making sure he’s got every salty-savory bite, and then sliding off the bunk and tossing it in the sanitizing locker.

“I got my eye on a ship, and the only way to get it is by getting rid of the abilisks,” he says slowly, trying to wrestle back the hostility that wants to rise up in his ribcage right alongside his breath. Trying to explain, and to — maybe try to listen. It buzzes uncomfortably along his skin like one of the electrical zaps Theel had liked to give him. He clears his throat. “Gimme a second to get changed, and then we’ll head out.” He swallows, then adds reluctantly, “We can talk more on the way.” He stares at the crush of feathers and shredded pillow, grimacing, and adds, “I’ll — clean that up later. Got an extra few pillows — somewhere.” In the linen locker with her blankets, he thinks, but doesn’t say.

Instead, he showers quickly and tugs on his jumpsuit, wincing as it pulls against his damp fur. When he refolds his soft sleep-clothes, his hands linger on the fabric. He’d worn the Knowheremen t-shirt in the hopes of making sure she still smelled like him, despite their little fight — then she’d wrapped her fist in it to pull him into her arms and guard him all night. Something about it makes his throat tighten up, and he forces himself to swallow again before striding out into the little runabout.

She must’ve used the toilet room to change, or pulled the curtains on the bunk, because she’s in leggings and a different one of his shirts — String Theory, with the Kree words superimposed over a lacey resophonic plate — and yeah, it still smells like him, thank the stars. She’s bundled up in the red cardigan, with her chaotic curls pulled up into a high ponytail by a red scrap of cloth mimicking a stupidly-adorable bow. The lavender-blue curls spill down her back, nearly a match for her short leather boots. She looks so pink-cheeked despite the sleepy shadows under her eyes, so frickin’ cozy and domestic that he suddenly wants to say fuck Sovereign, fuck the abilisks, fuck the Dreadnought — let’s lock Groot in the hold so I can make everything up to you, pearl.

“Seatbelt,” he grumbles instead.

To her credit, pearl waits till they’re cruising through the stardust clouds and asterisms — then waits longer. She’s a cloud of patience in the seat next to him: soft and airy, but not so aimless that he doesn’t know she’s waiting on him. Groot sits between them and a few feet back, quietly cross-legged on the floor, fumbling with the assorted plantgrowth clinging to his arms like mosses and vines. Rocket rolls his eyes, and grits his teeth, and forces the words up out of his throat from where they want to lie, silent and brooding, at the base of his lungs.

“I got a shot at a ship that I prob’ly won’t ever get my hands on otherwise,” he admits to the starshield, more for pearl’s sake than Groot’s. He honestly couldn’t care less about explaining himself to the frickin’ freeloader. “Wanted one forever. All I gotta do is get rid of these abilisks.”

“I am Groot,” Groot says anyway.

“Groot says their hides are too thick to be injured by normal weapons,” she says quietly.

Rocket grits his teeth, but he can’t keep back the sneer in at the edges of his mouth. Fuckin’ Groot. “Lucky for us, I don’t make normal weapons.”

He casts a sideways glance at her. She’s pulled her ponytail over her shoulder so she can tug on the ends, fingercombing them nervously.

He tries to soften for her, to make his voice reasonable and less biting at the edges. “Pearl, they’re just a nuisance that needs getting rid of.”

She does that new little thing with her jaw, where it juts out, all bratty and stubborn. He grimaces. He doesn’t need to start liking this little attitude of hers.

“I’m a nuisance,” she points out, but her voice is gentle despite the expression on her face, and that makes him feel like a piece of shit.

“S’not the same and you know it,” he snaps.

“Besides, that’s not really the point.” Her voice falters, melting into something muffled and uncertain and concerned. “I’m worried as much about you as I am about them.” Another wince, like she’s hesitating on the words. “Moreso.” He can see her frown in his periphery, and then she’s pulling on her curls again, pensive and quiet.

“I am Groot,” Groot offers inanely, and Rocket rolls his eyes.

“Okay,” she manages to say after a moment, her voice still hushed and quiet. “Can you just… explain to me exactly what the issue with the abilisks is? And… maybe humor me for a little bit, while I try to think of some way I can — I can help you that won’t annoy you?”

He sighs tiredly, guiding the runabout through the first jump-point of the day. Trying to communicate takes a lot more fuckin’ energy than he’s used to sacrificing. He slants his eyes sideways at pearl, though, and thinks maybe it might be worth it.

I’d like a chance to look out for you too.

Humor her. He’s not sure it’s really humoring her — not given how she’d held onto him last night. Looked out for him. He can’t even believe he’d managed to go back to sleep at all, but he feels far more well-rested than he normally would after — after a night like that. Even better than after that night under the flight controls. Still — being the softest, sweetest little reassurance in his bunk isn’t the same as helping him murder a bunch of spacefaring monsters.

“According to the contract, it looks like every circ-and-a-half, there’s an abilisk migration that makes its way past the Sovereign collective. There’s some—”

His voice breaks off as pearl sucks in a breath so hard that it catches on her collarbone and cracks. His eyes flash over to her, concern already rising in his throat like a fountain of gravel. Her delicate fingers are curled: one set of oval nails digging into the cracked vinyl of her armrest, and the other gripping at her clavicle like she might try to pull the bone out.

She’s so frickin’ pale — so ash-gray that for a second he wonders if she’s put on her M’dame Lavenza face again. But then he sees the shiver in her lips, and the way her eyes strain at the edges, already silvering over in panic.

M’dame Lavenza would never.

“I am Groot?” Groot asks, and he sounds worried, too.

“Pearl?” he utters, before remembering that he hadn’t decided whether or not to spill her identity in front of the Taluhnisan yet. “Doll?” he tries again, anyway.

“Sovereign?” she says softly. Her voice quivers in the air, reed-thin. “Is that where you—? We can’t go to Sovereign—”

He checks the coordinates, and flicks the runabout over to autopilot so he can turn his chair and look at her.

“Doll,” he repeats, and reaches for her with careful fingers. Thinks better of himself at the last second and flicks her knee sharply instead. She jumps.

“R-Rocket?”

Yeah. He’s never gonna want to stop hearing his name in her mouth, not even when she’s half-panicked and barely hanging on. “What’s wrong with Sovereign?” he asks, trying to keep his voice low, as close to soft as possible.

She blinks and refocuses her moonsilver eyes on him.

“It’s his,” she whispers. He blinks. The words don’t make sense — not at first. “You didn’t know?” she asks, her words thin as a silver thread, twisting in the currents of the air-vents.

“It’s — Wyndham’s?” he asks. He thinks all the blood has drained out of him and right between the grates in the floor.

She yanks on a fistful of her hair, and he wishes he was close enough to snatch at her hand. “Lab 67,” she murmurs. “Adrestia.” She swallows. “I remember why the abilisks sounded so familiar. I’d — I’m an idiot, and I’d forgotten. He’d mentioned them a — a few times. In the old records I wasn’t supposed to read. A failure of his. And the — the High Priestess. Ayesha. She mentioned them when we traveled there, too.”

“I am Groot,” Groot says quietly, and her eyes flick to him, then out to the stars. Rocket can practically see the panic rising up in them again, muting the moonsilver-glow.

“Hey,” he says sharply, snapping his fingers as close to her face as he can reach. She jumps a little, and he feels like the worst little gremlin all over again. She’d given him a den after he’d murdered her pillow, and a safe little nest between her thighs, and all he can give her is a bitter snap of his fingers. “Eyes on me, kitten.”

She lets out a shuddering breath. Then she inhales and he can see her start to do that ice-cold, M’dame Lavenza-thing, each gorgeous little fleck of light in her face starting to bleed out, slipping away—

“Stop it,” he snarls, and this time he clamps his hand on her knee and squeezes hard enough to dig his claws in between the armored fibers. The bright sting of blood hits the air — just a drop or two — but he can’t bring himself to regret it when she focuses her moonsilver eyes back on him and they’re still alive. “Don’t — don’t frickin’ go anywhere.”

“I wasn’t—”

“You were,” he interrupts, eyes narrowing, teeth bared. “Stay with me, sweetheart.”

She breathes out, but she doesn’t go all icy: just keeps her big, dove-gray eyes locked on him like he’s a grounding force for her.

“You tell me what you know about Sovereign,” he says slowly, “and I’ll tell you what I know about the contract. And we’ll figure something out.”

“I am Groot,” Groot encourages softly, and Rocket doesn’t know what he’s saying but for the first time, he’s glad to have the Taluhnisan there. Something the Big Guy has said brings her down a little further, some of the panic leeching out of her eyes.

She breathes again, shuddering, fingers still locked on her collarbone.

“I’ve only been there once,” she says quietly. “Years — I mean, two circumrotations ago.Three, maybe. I think. But I’d studied it. Before. I had to study all the — all the old experiments. The successful ones. He tried to keep the — the failures away from me, but after the maid, I — I figured out how to access those too.” Her fingers tighten again, her oval nails digging red crescents into her skin, and Rocket’s too distracted by the iron taste of fear in his mouth and the sight of pearl sinking her own pitifully-blunt talons into her flesh to think about what after the maid means. “It was — Sovereign is so much older than Halfworld, or even Wundagore II, but it was always intended to be — beautiful, and lovely, and luxurious. Every person there was meant to have an — an easy life.”

He tries to swallow around the worry still blocking his throat and airways, like he’s been stuffed full of stones. “Well, that makes sense,” he manages to say drily. “Based on what I know of the place. And the snobs who live there.”

But she’s already shaking her head. “Adrestia — the experiment, the… the premise, or the… the value, he’d call it sometimes — it wasn’t about ease, though. It was about — equilibrium. Cosmic fate. A balancing of the scales.” She swallows. “Inevitable, inescapable punishment.”

He can feel his eyes go narrower. “What does that mean?”

“I am Groot,” Groot murmurs, and pearl’s nodding.

“Everything has a cost,” she says softly. “The — the luxury. The ease. It was meant to be destroyed. By the abilisks. Every time he talks about Sovereign, about the Adrestia experiments, he’d get so angry, and then when I found the records, I realized it was because it — it didn’t happen the way he’d wanted it to.”

He stares. “You’re saying — look, the Sovereign contract says the abilisk migrations happen every other circ. He planned that?”

She shrugs helplessly, eyes brimming with dread as they slide to the stars again. He squeezes her knee, claws digging in just a little, till she drags her gaze back to him. Her brow bows upward, shivering.

“I told you,” she whispers. “He can’t have something under his foot without — without wanting to dig his heel in.”

He feels his eyes grow impossibly wider, and he tries to narrow them. “Tell me,” he says flatly, and she licks her lips and swallows.

“He — he built the whole Collective — but not on cores of dense minerals like most other planets,” she whispers. Rocket can feel the dread slink up through all of his nerves, cold and slithering, right through the sensitive pads of his fingertips. “He crafted them out of a rare energy that he harvested and refined and — essentially trapped inside the mantles and crusts of each planet. The Sovereign mine the energy to support their infrastructure — export it in the form of batteries. It’s what their whole civilization is built on — economically, yes, but physically too. It’s literally the foundation of their existence.”

He’s heard about Sovereign batteries the same way he’s heard about Sovereign Dreadnoughts: expensive daydreams he’d love to get his hands on. He knows the planets are built on some kind of energy cores — but he’d always assumed they were just a natural anomaly. Most people seem to believe the same. It had never occurred to him that the design was calculated — not like this.

But he can see, before she even says it, the symmetry of Sovereign’s destruction.

“He built their planets so that every part of their life was woven into the use of this energy — and then, he let loose the abilisks.”

Rocket’s ears try to flatten further against his head, but they can’t go any lower.

“I am Groot,” Groot says in hushed, crackling tones.

“I don’t know if Herbert — if he lured the abilisks in from their home dimension, or made them for this — but he used to keep a few locked up in the lab on Xeron. He’d bred a — a whole herd of them, ages ago — before he even started terraforming HalfWorld. He meant for them to — to wipe out the Sovereign. To destabilize the Collective — to devastate the physical planets, to crack them open like eggs.”

Every word pulls his whiskers down further, makes his teeth grit harder until enamel flakes off in his mouth. He can feel the chill under his fur, and realizes Pearl’s knotted her fingers into her fluffy red cardigan, pulling it tight around her. Her lips are so pale that they’re tinged with blue.

“I don’t give unearned favors, he used to say,” she whispers, and her teeth chatter a little at the end before she swallows. “The Adrestia lab had always been about — the bill coming due. Accept the gifts, and reap the retribution.”

“But it didn’t work,” he says raspily — a half-hearted protest at best. “Sovereign’s still around.”

She nods. “He didn’t count on the people being so… resourceful, I don’t think. He always underestimates — everyone. As soon as their astrobiologists predicted the migration — well, they were rich, and they were smart enough to outsource the — the warfare. They hired poachers. Big-game hunters. The abilisk herd was — decimated. There had never been all that many — not more than Herbert thought he’d need to demolish the Collective and leave the Sovereign dead or dying or — whatever. His notes had the herd counted down to the last hatchling, but I can’t remember their exact numbers. I want to say there were somewhere around five-hundred-fifty. But by the time the first migration actually happened, their numbers had been… whittled down to around twenty. The Sovereign had their Light Brigade — the prototypes for the modern omnicraft. They attacked what was left of the herd, and it was enough to kill and wound a few of the abilisks, and — scare off the rest.” She swallows. “There was no — no loss of Sovereign life. Herbert’s notes — he was furious.” She swallows again, fingers white-knuckled in her sweater. “And now the — the remnants of that abilisk herd — they come through every few circumrotations because it’s just what they were meant to do. Conditioned to do, their instincts — m-made or manipulated into it. Into being Sovereign’s enemy, without even knowing it.”

She breathes out, and Rocket’s breath follows her, emptying his lungs until there’s nothing left.

“I am Groot?” Groot asks. “I am Groot?”

She looks at the Taluhnisan. “I don’t know why. That’s not in his notes. I don’t know what he hoped would happen, or if he was just — trying to play out the idea of it. Trying to be a god. Trying to — to see if he could design justice, as if he ever understood the concept in the first place.” She tries to scoff but it comes out broken. “It was a vanity project. They’re all vanity projects. These lives, to him, are just…” She trails off, and looks down at her palms: open and helpless, then clutching closed. When she speaks again, her voice is quiet and small. “I think in most cases, Herbert would say he doesn’t want to destroy things. They just — fail to live up to his expectations. I think he might even believe that. But I don’t think it’s true.” She looks back to the starshield, like she thinks if she stares enough she can see Sovereign, even though they’re still almost a cycle’s worth of jump-points away. “He tries to throw everything into an incinerator eventually.”

Rocket recoils, almost snatching his hand from her knee. His claws dig in instead — an accidental wrenching, and he loosens them quickly — but he can smell that he’s drawn more blood. Cut her worse, this time. But pearl doesn’t even flinch. Her eyes only swivel back to him: suddenly molten-soft silver, miserable and tender for him. She swallows again.

“Have you heard of — of the Godpack?”

Groot shakes his head slowly, and Rocket does the same.

“The — uhm, the Nukree?”

“No,” he rasps. She twists her hands in the cardigan. Her calves are so tense that her knees are bouncing — jostling his hand where it grips her, almost shuddering under his touch.

“What about the Neous Athanatous?”

He shakes his head, and she nods again, mouth twisting.

“I found out about them in Herbert’s hidden files, after the — uhm — after. They were some of his first experiments in sentience. The Nukree were his first — well. His first people. On the original Wundagore. Lab 5 — Pepromene. After them, he wanted to make something — better. More powerful. He —“ She breaks off and scowls, dropping her voice the way she does when she’s about to curse. “He’s such an asshole. He thought of them as — as his rough draft. So then he built Lab 7: Eucleia. It was — he thought it would be his crowning glory, at the time. The most perfect race. Those were the ones he named the Neous Athanatous. But he wanted to clean his slate of the Nukree, and before he could, the Athanatous — they rebelled. Herbert was never sure what caused it, but they tried to get free of him. They almost did it, too — he’d made them so strong. So he backed off, and they thought — I think they thought they’d won. But he was just working on Lab 12 — Heimarme — as an answer. The Godpack, he called them. More powerful than the Athanatous, but sterile and limited in number, and particularly partial to being… controlled.”

Rocket feels his belly somehow sink even lower.

“Then he had the Godpack wipe out the Nukree and the Athanatous. Everyone.” Pearl uncurls a hand from the hem of her cardigan and makes a little twisting motion in the air: a nothing-gesture, like she’s plucking dust motes and pollen from the stars. “Every — single — one.” Her hand falls back to her lap: lifeless. “Complete interplanetary genocide.”

He feels his eyes growing bigger in his face, his lower jaw dropping open just a little. He tells himself he shouldn’t be surprised, but pearl’s already going on, her voice hushed in the runabout.

“I — I need you to understand. These were — planets. Like Wundagore II and Sovereign. Like Xandar or Contraxia or Conjunction. Full of people. Of life. Not — not thousands. Not millions. Billions of people, at least. Trillions.” The tears that have somehow, miraculously, kept clinging to her lashes now spill over. “Trillions, but each one, singular. Someones who had…. brothers and sisters and lovers and friends. Children who they read stories to and kissed goodnight. Hobbies and gifts and favorite foods, silly little holiday rituals. And more than just people, too — little animals keeping warm in their dens with their kits. Plants and trees. Hundreds of species that swam and flew and ran through the fields, playing — dying in agony because — going extinct because he — he—”

Her voice cracks off, splintered up the middle. Her teeth clack together in a shiver and she clenches them while Rocket’s hand grows tighter on her knee and somehow, all he can think of again is the incinerator.

“He didn’t just end them. He wiped them out of history. Out of consciousness. Eons ago. No-one knows about them, because they don’t exist outside — outside Herbert’s records. No-one remembers them, Rocket. Trillions of someones, and nobody — nobody mourns them.”

Except you, he thinks, with such clarity that it almost doesn’t even seem like his own thought. But he can see it in her weeping moonsilver eyes, feel it in the memory of her thumbs stroking his cheeks that night in the Arete, when she’d first asked about Lylla.

What was her name?

“Afterward — eventually, when he decided he didn’t need them anymore — he destroyed the Godpack too. And — no-one seems to remember them, either.”

He doesn’t know why it makes him squeeze her harder, but it does. He thinks he can smell the ghost of ash, of the hot-burning fire that haunts his dreams.

“I am Groot,” whispers Groot.

“It’s only a matter of time,” she tells them both, her voice pale and thin as glass. “Sovereign and the abilisks will go the same way. And Wundagore II. And eventually, HalfWorld as well. When he decides they’ve outlived whatever usefulness he had for them, he’ll end them all. He can’t just — he can’t just let them go. He can’t just let them be their own things.” She breathes out a shiver. “He’ll cut every atom of them out of the fabric of the universe.”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Rocket can’t release his grip on the dream of the Dreadnought.

Again, he thinks maybe there’s more of his maker in him than he’d like, because he can’t just let it fuckin’ go. He’s wanted that ship for too long, and it had seemed so close to being in his grasp. He can almost feel the yoke in his palms, and the weightlessness of its glide into atmosphere. The way it handles through jump-points with barely a reconfiguration-bounce. He can see it, stripped bare of its gold plating, and gleaming like pearl’s gunmetal-eyes in the darkness of space.

He knows he should give it up. Pearl makes it sound like Wyndham could demolish Sovereign any rotation now. Plus, maybe the bastard has sent transmissions to all his countless little experiments in the stars and they’re all on the lookout now for a cobbled-together thing like 89P13.

And pearl said she’d been there before. She’d implied that she’d met the High Priestess.

But the High Evolutionary has had bounties out on the Monster before. The Fuck-You-Disk works for Rocket — or at least, it has up till now. No-one knows about it or how it functions, so it’s unlikely Wyndham’s devoted any of his considerable brainpower to developing tech that would override the data-disorganization. And there’s no reason to think Sovereign tech would somehow outsmart it, or that they would otherwise link him to Wyndham and HalfWorld. If nothing else, he’s too imperfect, right? It should be enough to keep him off their radar.

And he could make another Fuck-You-Disk for pearl, too. Should’ve already thought to do it, to be honest.

He cants his eyes sideways at her.

She looks different now, too, he reasons. Surely there’s no way that some snooty Sovereign High Priestess is going to see Rocket’s vibrant golden girl with the killer kitten-smile and hair like a rare blue Aladnan cloudblossom, all snugged up in a cardigan with her bare belly and skin-tight leggings, and think, ah yes, that’s M’dame Lavenza, the High Evolutionary’s Frigid Flawless Pearl.

Not that pearl’s looking particularly golden right now. Her lips are still pale and she’s knitting her hands in her cardigan, combing out the curls in her ponytail till they’re frayed. Gnawing at her newly-healed lip, and staring pensively at their path through the stars.

It’s a sliver of a blessing, but at least it seems like she’s forgotten to fight him about the abilisks.

She didn’t have to come, he thinks belligerently, and the thought puts a twist in his belly. I told her coming with me was dangerous. She should’ve stayed on Cyxlore if she was frickin’ scared.

He tries to ignore the sardonic inner voice that reminds him he’d told her they were trying to get away from Wyndham, not running toward him. It’s the same voice that reminds Rocket that if he weren’t so fixated on the Dreadnought, he would’ve never considered going to a planet he now knows is owned by Wyndham.

“We’ll come up with a plan,” he says, the words spilling and tumbling onto the flightdeck — pathetic, selfish little halfhearted offerings. “She won’t recognize you.”

I’m going to take care of you, she’d told him last night.

“‘Sides,” he reasons aloud. His voice feels thin and ashamed and he knows he’s just trying to manipulate her soft little heart. “Won’t it feel fuckin’ good to help some of Wyndham’s people, right under his frickin’ nose?”

But pearl only looks at him desolately, and he flinches.

“I am Groot,” Groot says grimly, and Rocket cuts a glare at him.

“Didn’t ask for your input, Barky,” he mutters. To pearl: “You look a lot different than you did a cycle ago, kitten. Keep that ice-queen look off your face and I bet the High Priestess won’t even recognize ya.”

“I’m worried about you,” she says, with just a trace of yesterday’s angry sharpness. It’s a relief to hear, to be honest. “I said I was going to try and look out for you, and now—“

That sucks the relief right out of him. His eyes narrow. “Told you. You don’t gotta worry about that,” he says for what must be the hundredth time. He tries not to think about the last sleep-shift, and how soft her thighs had been around him, how carefully she’d kneaded his nightmares out of his bones and prosthetics.

“Ayesha’s not stupid,” she says. All the sharpness is gone — her words are soft, and smudged at the edges. “No matter what Herbert thinks. She’ll put it together.”

“I am Groot,” Groot adds knowingly, and pearl nods.

“I got tech,” Rocket says. “I’ll make you — both of you — a Fuck-You-Disk, and then we’ll—“

“A what?” pearl asks, eyes wide, and he feels himself flush under his fur. No reason to be embarrassed, he tells himself; pearl knows you got a mouth worse than a landlocked Ravager.

“It’s an energy-and-data-disorganizer,” he mutters.

Something filters into her eyes, uncertain and shivery. The corner of her mouth quivers. He flounders — almost panics. He doesn’t need her frickin’ crying again—

“It’s — it keeps me off the radar. I — look, it’s just—“

Whatever had been welling in her abruptly breaks through, and it’s like the snap of a kite-string. Suddenly, she’s laughing — hands slapped over her mouth, a half-panicked lilt to the edge of the sound. He blinks sideways at her, alarmed, and Groot seems to echo his concern with a rumbled, “I am Groot?”

She can’t stop though: giggling till tears are back in her eyes, then overflowing.

“I’m sorry,” she breathes out at last, practically panting. “A Fuck-You-Disk?” Her voice drops into a near-whisper on the curseword, then stumbles into a new cluster of laughter. “Sorry — I think I’m just — I don’t know why that was so funny?”

His heart twists in his lungs. He knows. He’s frickin’ been there.

“‘Cause you’re too stressed,” he mutters broodingly. “All emotionalistically-fucked right now. Overtired from stayin’ up all night. Your body’s trying to balance itself out or somethin’.”

She hums a note, and the chuckles purr back into existence, then double up again. Those silver eyes of hers are glinting with all sorts of conflicting emotions, and the sum of them makes his stomach wind up tight under his ribs.

“Okay,” she says agreeably, still giggling. “But also. It is funny.”

Then she takes a breath, and suddenly she just looks so damn tired that he can feel the exhaustion pulling in his own twisted-up muscles. The thought slithers up his spine shamefully: the last cycle-and-a-half of pearl’s life might have been her first taste of freedom in more circs than he cares to think about, but it’s also been a shipwreck.

He thinks of his own first few rotations on the run. He’d cried to the point of vomiting, tried to claw out the metal ports in his back, screamed his throat raw, and nearly passed out from dehydration before he’d crashlanded on Conjunction — then glutted himself on discarded food till he’d puked again, picked up an intestinal parasite, and lost his little escape pod to thieving scrappers. When he hadn’t been trying to bare his teeth and bite at everyone around him, he’d been weeping himself sick or screaming till he coughed up blood. In all honesty, it’s a miracle pearl’s holding up so well. Sure, she’s got him, but also — she’s got him. Given how they met and the entire first cycle they’ve shared together — not to mention everything that had happened yesterday — he’s pretty sure he can’t be any more of a blessing than he is a curse.

And still, she’d tucked herself up under the flight-controls with him a few rotations ago, and made him another den — this time with her body — last night.

He clears his throat.

“Take a nap, sweetheart,” he says quietly. “We got almost a full cycle till we get to Sovereign.” He grips the insides of his lungs with both fists and tries to drag up the smuggest, most shit-eating grin he can clench between his sharp teeth. “‘M a frickin’ genius, remember? We’ll figure something out before then.”

She’s resistant at first, but Groot apparently persuades her — which Rocket tries to convince himself doesn’t bother him. She crawls back into the bunk as he eases up on the thrusters just a little, trying to keep the ride as smooth as possible while she shifts from her seat beside him into the belly of the little runabout.

“I am Groot?” the Taluhnisan asks softly, gesturing to the plasma orbs when Rocket slants a sideways glance at him.

He clears his throat and hazards a guess at what the question might mean. “Uh, sure. Turn ‘em off for her.”

The two sit silently on the shadowed flight deck for the next few hours, and Rocket hates to admit it but — it’s kind of nice. He’s still letting guilt chew away at his brainstem, but it would be way worse if he was all alone up here. He takes breaks when he can drop the runabout into autopilot — grabs a snack for himself and tries not to stare at pearl’s back where she lays on her side in their bunk.

“I am Groot,” Groot offers on occasion, but the words mean nothing to Rocket.

“Never been good at languages,” he mumbles, hating the self-consciousness that raises the fur on the backs of his arms. “You understand me though, right? Pearl said—“

“I am Groot,” Groot says, and Rocket grits his teeth and flexes his hands on the yoke. He’s so frickin’ out of his depth.

“Is it — is it a tonalistic thing?” he hazards. “Your language? Taluhnisan or whatever? I — I dunno; you’d think with there only being three frickin’ words that I could fuckin’ figure it out.” The bitterness burns on his tongue: defeated already.

There’s a long, star-spattered silence, and then Groot speaks in a voice almost as soft as pearl’s. “I am Groot.”

Rocket clenches his jaw.

“I am Groot.”

“I know the only reason you got on this damn ship was because of her.” Rocket’s voice is low, and layered: half-resentful and as close to apologetic as he could possibly ever be with a stranger. “Sucks for you that you’ve mostly had to deal with just me for the last two rotations.”

Another pause, luminous in the moving shadows. “I am Groot.”

“I don’t like my company much either,” Rocket replies bitterly, even though he’s got no idea what the Taluhnisan is saying. “So I guess we got one thing in common.”

“I am Groot,” Groot says, and there’s a dismayed quality to it that reminds Rocket of pearl’s voice when she’s hurt because of something mean he’s said about himself.

Rocket rolls his eyes.

“Don’t think I don’t get it,” he mutters under his breath. “You were all-the-fuck alone in the universe, with nobody who could understand you.” He scowls. “An’ then she showed up — all nice and sweet and shit. Willing to break her neck for you.” His mouth is dry and he has to lick his lips. “Yeah. Believe me — I frickin’ get it, Big Guy.”

The silence becomes weighted.

“I am Groot,” the Taluhnisan says at last, heavily.

“Yeah,” Rocket mutters — though if someone had asked him, he couldn’t have said exactly what he was responding to. “All-the-fuck alone, buddy. And then — her.” He glances over at his giant new crewmate, sitting cross-legged on the floor. “Guess we got two more things in common, after all.”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Sitting in the quiet with Groot is — surprisingly companionable. He doesn’t trust the Taluhnisan yet but… it had been nice. Better than the previous rotation, when Rocket had been sunk deep in bitter misery over his stupid, thoughtless mouth. He’d spent most of yesterday glowering sideways at Groot, as if it was the Taluhnisan’s fault that Rocket had taken the gift of pearl’s pretty orgasm and weaponized it against her. The silence then had been tense and rigid, ready to snap like kindling.

But this had felt — better. He’s still annoyed that the Taluhnisan had decided to gang up on him with pearl in regards to the abilisks, but he supposes he can’t blame the guy. Given half the chance, Rocket would’ve done whatever it took to ingratiate himself with her too — provided he could keep his own frickin’ foot out of his mouth for five seconds.

About a dozen hours and the same number of jump-points later, the Big Guy makes a show of stretching and yawning — a habit that Rocket suspects is entirely staged for the benefit of the mammals in the room — and mumbles a soft I am Groot before rising to his feet and lumbering quietly toward the hatch.

Rocket flies for another few hours before pulling the runabout into a soft float, hidden away behind a quiet moon in an empty star system. He stands and stretches, shoulders and spine popping, then makes his way back into the hold.

Pearl hasn’t pulled the curtains. When he steps from the flightdeck, his eyes can follow the tousle of her lavender-stardust ponytail, an Aladnan river of blue curls. One pink cheek, and the rumple of her red cardigan, hinting at softness underneath. She must’ve quietly cleaned up his mess of feathers before her nap — he grimaces when he realizes he’d forgotten about them — but she’d apparently missed a couple. They curve into her curls lingeringly, and he plucks one from her hair, rubbing it between thumb and forefinger pensively before setting it aside on the other bunk.

Then he ducks around the clothing locker, just out of sight if she should happen to blink herself blearily awake, and pulls on a t-shirt and his sleep-clothes. He hesitates once he’s done, standing beside the bunk. He’s been sleeping with her a handful of rotations now, but sliding into bed with her when she’s already dreaming still feels… frickin’ presumptuous. Like he’s taking for granted that she wants him there.

He flicks his eyes over to his abandoned chair on the flight deck. Maybe—

“Rocket?” she murmurs drowsily, propping herself onto one forearm. She’s still in her leggings and sweater, the String Theory shirt shuffled up dangerously high on one breast, and he suddenly wonders why he didn’t get her a frickin’ bra. Or something. Anything to protect those curves from his mouth. The ponytail situated high on top of her head has gone lopsided in her dreams, and he suddenly thinks that this is how she should look all the time: rumpled and sleepy, like she’s been bounced on his dick till she’s damn near passed out.

She reaches for him, and he sucks in a breath. He opens his mouth to tell her go back to bed, sweetheart, but what comes out instead is,

“You still stressed, kitten?”

Her brow furrows as her eyes try to focus, and the muscles in his abdomen tense. He fights the urge to reach out and trace the exposed curve on the underside of her breast with his sharp claws.

“Mm,” she muffles out in sleepy agreement. “Think I will be till we’re done, till we’re off Sovereign.” Her fingers stretch and flutter through his fur, pinching his sleeve delicately and tugging him toward the berth-style bunk.

He clears his throat. “Could find some place to drop you off on the way,” he admits. “Prob’ly not as nice as Cyxlore, but—“

Her eyes flare wide, drowsiness forgotten, and she pulls herself onto her knees so quickly he lurches backward with his eyes round and alarmed, ears flattened and tail tucking reflexively against his inner calf. “What? No — Rocket, please—“

He surrenders immediately — and exactly when did he become such a pushover? — with his palms out and his ears flat and his eyes wide. “Okay, okay, pearl. Yeesh.” He shrugs uncomfortably, his sleeve still gripped in the curl of her fingers. “Just—” He can’t take his eyes off that soft curve of exposed pink flesh. Is her areola peeking out? Fuck. “Just don’t like to see you all twisted up because of a bad choice I’m making.” He clicks his tongue against his teeth: a mouthful of regret he doesn’t mean to convey. “You deserve better, but I’m a dickhead.” And then, because he’s apparently tired enough that he can’t make good decisions, his fingers reach out anyway and he grasps the bottom hem of the String Theory shirt, tugging it down to cover her — but letting the inside of his index finger flutter delicately over the soft underside of her breast.

She feels like satin.

Her breath catches in her throat and he winces, hand snapping back into his own chest, eyes diving upward to hers. But her silver stare is suddenly wide-awake and glossy — and molten.

Oh.

He thinks of her in that moment under the flight controls, when she’d looked at him with the pinkest frickin’ cheeks he’d ever seen. You’d have to make it worth my time, sweetheart, he’d leered at her, and she’d looked up at him with those big earnest eyes.

I would try.

He hoods his gaze immediately. His mind is moving lightyears at a time, skipping through jump-points faster than a Nova starblaster, and his half-lowered lids hide as many of his thoughts as he can catch. He’d meant to tell her, hadn’t he? That he could be nice to her, help her — uh, broaden her horizons or whatever. Keep her warm on Fron, so to speak, just as long as she was interested. He’d damn-near ruined it yesterday — cutting her up with his words after she’d given him such a pretty show — but she’d taken him back into their little curtained bunk and then carved her tenderness into his muscles with her hands, keeping guard over him while he’d slept. And she looks — willing, now, anyway. Wanting. Despite the jackass he is.

It won’t last — it can’t — but it’s all the more reason to not waste time, to taste as much of her as he can while she’s still interested.

I ain’t gonna fuck you, pearl.

He tsks without meaning to, more at himself than anything else, but she responds by curling in on herself — shoulders suddenly hunching, fingers releasing his sleeve.

“S-sorry,” she starts. “I—“

“I could help you,” he interrupts, taking a step back so he can lean against the workbench-bunk behind him. It sways on its straps but he just pushes it against the wall of the hold, crossing his arms over his chest and eyeing her lazily. “All that stress.” He clicks his tongue against his teeth with mock regret. “It’s my fault anyway, isn’t it? Should probably take responsibility for being such a dickhead.”

Her moonsilver eyes are big and baffled. “I — what?”

He tests his canine with his tongue, then manages a grin that he’s sure looks more casual than he’s feeling. Inside, his heart turns over and then sprints, thumping and pulsing against his metal sternum like it’s trying to climb right out of his chest and reach for her.

“Orgasms, sweetheart. They’re good for you when you’re all tense like this.” He lets his grin grow a little sharper. “Could help you relax and get back to sleep.”

Her cheeks are suddenly so pink he thinks she might be burning up, and a snicker crackles out of him before he can stop it. But she doesn’t look put off by the mean little laugh. No — her pupils bloom wide and he suddenly has to fight not to surge across the narrow aisle and pin her to the thin mattress. His abdomen tightens and his dick twitches, and for a second his brain completely short-circuits: white sparks sizzling, sharp and stinging. He drops his eyelids, trying to hide the chaos of a hundred colliding fantasies, and he manages an insolent smirk.

“I can help you if you want, pearl,” he offers again. “You just gotta ask me with your prettiest manners.”

He watches her face flicker through a dozen emotions, all of them pretty as hell. Then she chews on her lip, and looks down at her fingers, clenched back in the soft weave of her sweater. He thinks they might be trembling if she loosens them, and he tilts his head, eyes sharpening as he studies her.

“Hey,” he says, raising his palms carefully. “No pressure. If you don’t want it, we can pretend none a’ this ever—”

“You want me to beg again?” she asks uncertainly.

His ears — he hasn’t even realized how attentively upright and alert they’ve been — suddenly drop in pure dismay. He can hear the way her question plucks chords on her anxiety. His stomach plummets, lungs caving in.

He’s such a frickin’ monster.

“Pearl—“

“I don’t mind begging for you,” she rushes out, hands suddenly pressed to the mattress in front of her so she can lean forward toward him, like she’s afraid he’s gonna take it back — as if he possibly could. As if he were capable. “But I know you didn’t like — I didn’t do it right—“

He’d gone a few hours without that bitter, biting flavor in his mouth, but it’s back. Her voice is a little wound, deep and red — an inch-long half-lemniscate, held together by a single frail steri-strip.

“—if you — if you tell me how you want me to—“

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” he breathes out, lungs aching. “You were just fine, princess.”

“But—“

“Okay,” he cuts her off, heart twisted up into the back of his throat. “Okay, kitten. Next time I want you to beg for me, I’ll teach you how, okay? I’ll tell you exactly what to say, sweetheart.”

Her thighs squeeze together in her leggings.

“For now, you just tell me if you want me to help you come, and I will.” He licks the front of his teeth, belly curled tight. “I’ll be so nice to you, sweetheart. Won’t be mean at all.”

“Y-you can be mean,” she whispers, and he stutters out a choked, startled little chuckle. The tension in his abdomen twinges.

“Is that what you want, princess? You want me to be mean to you again?”

She’s got her lip pinned between her teeth, gray eyes wide as she nods cautiously, and he tries not to groan.

“It’s prob’ly not fair if I do that,” he rasps out, trying to hang on to a thread of rationality. “You haven’t been touched in so long, kitten. Haven’t been pet at all like you shoulda been. How are you gonna figure out what you like if I just keep being mean to you?” But oh, do I frickin’ want to, he thinks. I wanna bully your friendly little pussy for hours. He feels his eyes narrow, latching onto her lips, and forces the words out of his mouth. “Should probably make sure you get a taste of all the different ways this soft little body of yours can feel good.”

A strangled little mew curls up over her lips and he tries not to let his eyes roll back in his head at the sound of it.

“Let me come up there, doll? Take your leggings off?”

She scoots to one side, and the bed sways as she fights to peel off her leggings, so rushed he thinks she might be afraid he’ll change his mind.

I’m going to take care of you, she’d told him last night.

He doesn’t deserve any of this — but when has he ever let that stop him?

He leaps nimbly onto the bed, tugging the curtains closed around her. It’s reckless, maybe — Groot’s still a stranger; Rocket hasn’t even been able to really talk to him and the Big Guy could come up the hatch at any time — but he’s not passing this up. By the time he’s turned around, she’s kneeling the same as before, big moon-gray eyes locked on him.

He gives in to the urge to just look at her.

“Stay there, kitten, just like that,” he says, and circles her carefully on the swaying bed, his tail twitching from side to side: keeping him balanced as he strolls the swinging bunk, but also flicking with eagerness. Pearl doesn’t move, sitting just as she had that day he’d had her down in the engine room. Her thighs are naked and fucking luscious, pillowed against her calves, striped faintly with those stretch marks he just wants to lick. Her knee is still flowered with bruises from her mouth — and maybe some new ones, and that makes his belly twist in something less-pleasant. He’ll make her put salve on it tomorrow.

Tomorrow.

For now, she’s kept on the cardigan — kitten does exactly what she’s told, he thinks with another little curl of hot anticipation — but it’s a little askew and he can see the pretty nubs of her nipples denting the tiny String Theory shirt, all puckered up and waiting for his teeth.

He wants to push her onto her knees — gently, this time — and wrap his fists in her ponytail of blue curls instead of around her throat. Pull her into an arch while he fucks her till the little t-shirt is all rucked up over her tits and she’s mewing, nipples rubbing against the soft woolen texture of the cardigan.

He lowers himself slowly beside her, bracing his back against the wall, testing the sway of the bed.

“C’mere if you still want to, pearl,” he murmurs, tapping his thighs. He’s watching her so hard that his eyes feel like they’re burning in their sockets.

She hesitates.

“Don’t have to,” he forces himself to say, even though the words taste like ash and lost hope. “Can just go to sleep like normal. But if you want my help—“

“I just — don’t want to hurt you,” she breathes, hands rising to tug on the ends of her ponytail.

He stares at her blankly. It takes a full twenty-slow seconds for him to piece it together, and when he does, his heart knots in his chest and his pulse pounds in his throat. He drops his eyes from her face, past her gorgeous tits, down to the bare skin of her belly. Free of the high-waisted leggings, he can see the constellations of pale pink scars sprinkled over her hips — the flower-petal-spray of ivory and rose over her lower abdomen. One day, he swears, he’s going to worship each mark.

“You’re not gonna hurt me, pearl,” he utters hoarsely. “Almost all my parts are reinforced. Metal platings. Prosthetics.” He huffs a breath and hopes she can’t taste the guilt in it. “Even if they weren’t, I don’t think you could make yourself hurt me, not even if you wanted to.”

Her eyes are wide gunmetal moons, searching for his and holding. “I’d never want to,” she whispers fervently, and it churns up something in his ribs, something so sweet and achy that the space behind his eyes tightens.

He taps his thighs again. “Sit here, sweetness. Let me help you get all that stress out.”

She hesitates just a second longer — self-conscious, he’s realizing, as if she had any reason to be shy of her pretty self — and then crawls over in a way that makes his mouth water before she climbs delicately atop him, straddling him carefully on her knees and hovering just an inch or so over his lap. It’s his turn to hesitate this time, before he carefully reaches for the fingers he’s had laced in his nearly every night for the past half-cycle. The feel of her, palm-to-palm, is already enough to have him stifling a groan, dick twitching underneath her. He slides his hand down so the little thud of her pulse is dancing in his hand, then presses the flat of his tongue reverently to the inside of her palm without thinking. She makes a muted little whimper in her throat and he twists her wrist in his grasp, tucking her hand onto his shoulder before giving the same treatment to the other one.

His fingers come down to paint warm paths over her hips — flickering over the tiny rose-pink marks left by his claws, then tracing the edge of her panties.

“You like these ones, sweetheart?”

When he looks up at her, though, she’s doe-eyed and hazy already, lips parted just a little, heartbeat thrumming like a dozen drunk butterflies in the wildflower-cage of her ribs. His fingertips had been heavy with the need to treat her like a glass goddess, worthy of every devotion — but seeing her already dazed and molten sends a savage little curl of satisfaction through him, hot and coiling just below his lungs. Yeah, it might just be that she’s gone so long without anyone touching her, but his vagus nerve is vibrating with glee.

“Kitten,” he croons tauntingly, and hooks his fingers carefully under the ruffle, snapping the delicate waistband against her hip. She jumps, eyes flying wide and focusing on his. “You like these panties?”

She glances down, biting her lips, hands still obediently resting atop his shoulders. This pair just happens to be a deep blush pink, dotted with iridescent hearts and a little ruffle at the waist and thighs. Delicate and flimsy and flouncy and yeah, his favorite fuckin’ color. He wants to shred them with his teeth.

“I — yes?” she falters uncertainly, and he grins.

“I think they’re just about the same color as the inside of that pretty little cunt I saw the other night,” he muses, and her thighs twitch around his, knees clamping briefly against his hips while her eyes snap back up to his. He runs his fingers back over her hips, letting his sharp claws prickle along her skin before toying with the silky ruffles along her inner thigh. She shivers. “Pussy looked even softer, though,” he murmurs with feigned thoughtfulness. He can hear her heart trip over itself, and then the pulse between her thighs: hot and humming. His grin grows wider.

Kitten’s needy little cunt is purring.

His hands tug at her hips, guiding her down until the warm valley between her thighs is snuggled right up against his dick. A breath hisses out between his teeth.

“Good fuckin’ girl,” he grits out, and he doesn’t miss how her eyes fill up with moonlight and something like hope at that. For fuck’s sake, he’s such an ass. He guides her hips into a gentle rock, and she gasps when the shape of his cock notches against her clit. “There we go,” he mutters. “Keep moving, sweetheart. Just like that. Use me however you need to — nice and easy.” He slides his palms from her hips to her knees, then walks his claws teasingly up her inner thighs. Her breath and her body both hitch uncertainly as he dances the dagger-sharp weapons tauntingly up her bare belly.

“Can I see your tits, kitten?”

Her eyes are wide on his and she nods, but he shakes his head.

“Gonna have to use your words for now, sweetheart, at least till we figure out what you like. Can I see your pretty tits bounce?”

She makes a breathy little sound at that, hips stuttering, and he grins again.

“Y—yes,” she stammers, and he drags the worn t-shirt slowly up against her sensitive nipples. Another stifled moan spills over her lips and he leans back, lacing his fingers together and tucking them behind his head lazily, letting his hot eyes scrawl all over her.

“This is a good frickin’ view,” he tells her conversationally. “I’ve been thinking about getting these stupid t-shirts up over your tits since you first started wearing ‘em,” he adds, watching her pupils somehow bloom larger. “The way you jiggle, sweetheart.” He whistles low between his teeth, then grins up at her. “Did you know your nipples are hard all the frickin’ time? They’re constantly pouting for attention, pearl. Brattiest little things I ever saw.” He presses his tongue to the tip of one canine. “Can I touch?”

She nods, and then stumbles out another shaky yes, still grinding her clothed cunt against his dick. He unlaces his hands and, quicker than he thinks she can register, he flicks both of her nipples sharply.

She muffles back a startled cry, hips locking against him as her back arches.

His mouth waters, and a rumble starts at the base of his chest cavity.

“Quiet, pearl,” he growls under his breath. “Remember, you gotta be polite for your frickin’ guest. Don’t wanna disturb him.”

She flushes, and nods, and presses her lips together like she’s trying to listen to him.

I do wanna be a good slut for you. The words ring in his ears and he leans forward, rubbing his cheeks into her jostling breasts. Poor, good-girl pearl. Never getting told all the things she deserves to hear.

“Your pussy is nestled so nice against my dick, kitten. Think you might’ve been made to come on it. And you’d look so pretty taking it, wouldn’t you? Bouncing up and down — such an eager little slut, all for me.”

Her breath hiccups in her lungs and she tries to stifle a whimper, biting down hard on her lip. He winces. Maybe that’s too close to the things he’d said to her that night on the Arete, trying to make her feel worthless and hated. Cumslut. Needy whore. For a moment, he thinks maybe he should just forgo any dirty talk whatsoever — but he remembers again the threadiness of her little plea that night.

I do wanna be a good slut for you.

He tilts his head, hiding a grimace. Better just to check in. What if she likes it, and he’s just needlessly depriving them both? He feathers his fingers over her flanks longingly.

“You okay with me calling you that, pearl? Got plenty of nicer names for you, f’you don’t like it.”

“N-no,” she stammers out, breathless and wide-eyed, hips canting against his. “I don’t mind. I like it — please—“

For a moment, he’s deafened by the sound of his own blood, rushing past his ears. His cock jumps beneath her. “Yeah?”

Her fat, rosy-golden lower lip is pinched by blunt teeth, glossy and swollen, while she nods. That blue hair bounces, and the soft pink tips of her breasts bobble as she grinds against him. There’s gotta be a damp patch on the front of his pants now, and it fills him with a vicious sort of pleasure.

“Mmm-hm,” she whimpers, hushed and secretive in the shadows. “It makes me—“ A ragged intake of breath. “—feel like I’m not what h-he wanted me to be—“

Fuck.

Well. If she needs a little degradation to go with her praise, he’s just as happy to fill that void for her as he is to fill the soft, sweet little hole between her legs.

“You ain’t what he wanted you to be,” he hisses through his teeth, trying to keep his claws careful on her skin while he drags her cloth-covered cunt over his dick, grinding up against her. Her head tilts back and she chews back a pitiful little moan, and it’s like that little sound unleashed a flood of filthy words he hadn’t even realized were waiting at the edge of his teeth. “Wyndham tried to keep you like some kind of untouched little thing on a shelf but here you are, moaning like the sweetest little whore in the whole fuckin’ galaxy, all pathetic and helpless and needy without a cock to ride. You weren’t ever meant to be what Wyndham wanted. You were meant for me, to take my dick like a good little slut, to beg me to fill you up whenever I want, to cry and bounce on my lap like you’re doing right now. Bet you’re a fuckin’ natural when it comes to stuffing yourself with my cock.” He grins up at her, sharp and hard and feral. “Bet we’re gonna find out.”

She nearly whines, and he can’t help but grind up against her again before releasing her hips to let her stroke against him at her leisure. Instead, he focuses on plucking another stray feather from her hair — this one a little longer, a little larger — and considers it for a long, bemused moment before brushing it testingly over the rosy tip of one breast. She strangles back an incoherent, half-bitten warble, arching again, and he smirks at her with one raised brow before carefully setting it aside.

“Wonder how that’ll feel on your little clit later,” he muses with another sharp, shit-eating smirk. She stutters out some whispery nonsense and he chuckles, letting the pads of his fingers flutter over her perfect pink nipples, as lightly as she had on that first night — but with far more intention. He plucks at them teasingly, quick deft little squeezes and pulses that have her bucking and gasping and writhing on his lap. Every wriggle against him has sparks flying into his eyes, dick aching to be clamped inside her tight pussy again, this time while her hips dance and wriggle in time to his hands on her breasts. Her lilac-blue curls are bouncing everywhere and he forces one of his hands away from its greedy, taunting grip on her nipple to catch what he can of her ponytail. He tugs — hard enough that she tilts her head back, nipples to the sky while she rubs herself against him and tries not to whine. The choked-back sound makes his blood pulse in his cock.

“Wanna make you walk around all the time like this,” he croons up at her. “Hair perfect for my fists, and this big stupid sweater. Your pretty tits all bare with my shirt up around your collarbone, nipples just — constantly hard.”

He lets his other hand drop, claws prickling dangerously across the damp pink satin just above her pussy.

“Panties just constantly drenched.”

She does whine then, and the sound has him salivating around sharp teeth. He presses the flat of his thumb down, burrowing it into satin and skin till he finds that perfect little bead between her thighs.

“There she is,” he croons. “Sweet little fuckbutton, just made to reward sweet little whores.”

Pearl lets out a broken, wounded little sob, and he can’t help the smugness curling inside him. His dick aches, but this — this is worth it.

“Told you to quiet down, pearl,” he croons mockingly, and adds more pressure. He can tell the second her vision starts blurring, the moonsilver eyes losing their focus entirely. The urge to cackle rises hot and ragged in his lungs, fiery his throat. His grin goes wider, and he shifts his hand and plucks at her through the satin. Pearl gasps out loud, the hands that had been light as feathers on his shoulders suddenly spasming and clamping down as she drives her hips forward into his waiting fingers. He doesn’t let go, rolling and kneading the little nub through the soaked satin, tugging gently when her hips pull back. She stifles a broken moan, and she’s so frickin’ gorgeous like this that it makes his throat close up.

“Last chance,” he manages to rasp threateningly. “You’re being too frickin’ loud. Gonna bother the houseplant.” He wedges his face between her jostling tits and licks a stripe up her sternum. “Next time you make a noise, m’gonna stuff your silly little panties in your mouth.”

She swallows a gasp, hips and breath and heart all stumbling, and his face hurts from the smug grin that’s suddenly stretching his mouth.

“D’you like that idea, princess? Did your little cunt just clench up and gush, all needy and begging for my cock?” His voice is all faux-sympathy. “‘Cause I’ll tell you a secret. I like that idea. Been thinking about it a long frickin’ time. Love the thought of keeping you nice and gagged and helpless, my very own little housewife, riding my dick just like this and coming over and over and over again, all pathetic and needy and drooling around her own panties.” He grins, all teeth. “Bet I could make you move any way I wanted, just by how hard I pinched your pretty nipples.”

“R-Rocket—” she whispers, trying so hard to be quiet for him that she’s practically just mouthing the word, a breath that even his ears can barely pick up. He’d been thinking since the first time she’d said it that he’s never heard anything as nice as his name —the name he chose — in her mouth, but now it sounds even better: just a puff of air, shaky and sweet and prayerful. He can feel and see the hot flush sweeping over her skin, glistening at her temples and her upper lip, thighs starting to tremble. She’s practically feverish under his eyes and his claws. He pinches and plucks at her clit, just a little more firmly, snickering at how wet and glossy the satin has become. She shakes her head suddenly, eyes unfocused, lips swollen, skin hot. “Rocket—”

“That’s all right, princess, keep going; I’m right here,” he coos to her. “You’re all right, sweetheart. Use me to fuck all that stress right out of yourself, kitten, you adorable little fuckdoll. Rub yourself silly on my dick.” He tilts his head and watches, abdomen spiraled tight and dick throbbing beneath her as her lashes flutter closed and her head tips back, hips suddenly canting downward and frantic.

“Kept thinking you’d hate me,” he admits to her, the hoarse words layered and reverent, safe in the certainty that she’s incapable of listening to him at this point — couldn’t catch his words if she tried, too desperately chasing the orgasm he’s got waiting for her at the end of this ride. “Guess I didn’t have to worry too much, huh? Gave you a hundred reasons to, but here you are.”

He shifts his touch on her clit, hooking his fingers sideways so she’s protected from his claws, driving the pressure deeper into her core. She smashes one hand against her mouth, barely managing to stifle a keening wail as she rubs herself against his cock and his hand.

“Poor, sweet pearl,” he rumbles, drinking her in. “All that heart, and no room in it to hate me.”

He presses harder. She gasps, every muscle from shoulder to toe suddenly stretching and arching as if she really were a little cat. He grips her hip with his other hand, holding her steady, rocking her against him, pushing her through the orgasm so she doesn’t lose it even as she tries to bow right out of his grasp.

“Good girl,” he says again, like it’s a vow, like it’s something he’s sworn to. “Good fuckin’ girl.”

She buckles in his grasp, bones all clicking back together, folding in on herself like an autumn-blown flower. She’s a bundle of glass stems and spindles in his arms, collapsing, and he grasps her around the ribs and pulls her against him. He hauls her in because he’s stronger, because he’s the one more in control right now, ready to be a support for her frail fucked-out body — but somehow she turns the tables and he feels more sheltered by her softness than he thinks he’s ever felt in his life. Her hands slip up from his shoulders to sink into the fur at the back of his skull and for a moment, he freezes at the feel of it — the sense-memory of other hands, encircling his head like a bridle or a jaw-trap or a vice, marveling at his brain. But pearl’s touch is so delicate, even in her dazedness; she cradles his head in her weakened arms and leans into him like she’s marveling at his soul.

He’s always wondered if he has one — a soul. Do cobbled-together things even get to have souls?

But right now — face pressed against her bare breasts with String Theory rumpled up against his ears, breathing almost as hard as she is and protected only by her flimsy frickin’ arms and the crushed purple curtains of the bunk — right now, he’s certain that he does.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

i want to thank you all for the super-sweet comments and for just sticking with me for this super-long story. it has honestly meant the world to me, especially when i've been really tired over the last few weeks. i really wanted to post a chapter every friday this summer, but that seems unlikely to be in the cards with all of the time i've needed to spend travelling and supporting the fam. plus, i am trying to really focus in on ⭑˚.⚘𖡼𖥧𖤣 windfall and ･:*𑁍✧˚₊ overheard on the bowie to get them done this summer (i really want to get florescence ❀ done by my next birthday oh my god), SO i may have to move to an every-other-week posting-schedule for this fic in july/august. for those of you sticking with me, know i'm eternally grateful. like, REALLY grateful. your support and your enjoyment truly means so much to me.

exciting things:
♡ i'm hoping to get some more done on my chapter thirteen drawing this weekend (maybe i'll share some in-progress pieces but i doubt it'll get done). i wanted it done by now but again, taking care of the fam has impacted the time i get to spend on my silly stories lol.

again, thank you for EVERYTHING. i try to write "for myself" but i'd be absolutely lying if i didn't tell you that the fandom and each and every one of you, your kudos and your comments, make it a far more rewarding experience. like, writing for myself - living in my fantasyworld lol - is fun and i love it. but getting to share it with you all and bond with you all too, knowing that maybe it means something to you, makes it into a community experience, and makes a writer feel much less alone. thank you for that gift. you are treasures and i am grateful for you.

oh! and: Intergalactic Omniphonics is a collection of musical instruments crafted by Jonathon Keats and Amelia Pate with the intention of communicating via music to alien entities. and I thought it was a cool name for an outer-space-band lol.

posting schedules & chapter-previews on tumblr♡
masterlist & moodboard♡
portrait of pearl♡
rocket & pearl's bunk on the runabout (lineart)

coming soon: chapter fifteen. soufrise.
summary: pearl teaches rocket to speak groot.
warnings: would it even be a rocket fanfic without a lil post-orgasm angst?
estimated date: friday, june twenty-eight.

Chapter 15: soufrise.

Summary:

pearl teaches rocket to speak groot.

Notes:

warnings: would it even be a rocket fanfic without a lil post-orgasm angst?

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

soufrise. the maddening thrill of an ambiguous flirtation, which quivers in tension halfway between platonic and romantic—maybe, but no, but maybe—leaving you guessing what’s going on inside their chest, forced to assume that at any given moment their attraction is both alive and dead at the same time. French sourire, smile + frisson, a shiver of chill or excitement. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Pearl stays poured over Rocket’s lap for longer than she realizes. Her fingers curl against his shoulders, weak and needy, as she breathes in his scent and tries to hold it forever in her lungs: burnt wood, blue spruce, buttery brown-sugar marzipan. Petrichor, and the faint ghost of engine fuel. She’s vaguely aware of his hands, coasting up and down the planes of her lower back, his breath curling against her sternum, whiskers dancing on her damp flesh. When she finally pulls back, she knows she must look dreamy-eyed and blissed-out, because she is. And not just because of her body’s reaction to friction, no matter how his words had scraped and rasped all over her. No. The closeness to him, though — that’s what has her too buttery and syrupy and molten to move.

As soon as she shifts, he does too: looking up at her with wary eyes. She ignores the grim fatalism in them, tilting her head downward to brush her mouth against the side of his. He jolts, startled, and she uses the opportunity to curl at the waist and touch her lips to his narrow jawline, and then the fur at the side of his throat.

He rears back against the wall, his face trying to follow hers, hands suddenly bracing at her waist to pull her away.

“What’re you doing?”

His voice is sharp and stinging, and she falters. “I just — I wanted—"

“You don’t gotta do that,” he tells her, each word clipped and bitten.

She flounders, cold waves of self-consciousness and mortification skittering across her skin. She reaches up to tug the String Theory t-shirt back down over her breasts, trying to scramble backward off his lap. His hands don’t release her, though, and she’s abruptly reminded of how strong he is — far stronger than his small body should be; far stronger than she is. He anchors her to his thighs. Something flickers in his eyes, and he drops them to the soaked panel of Cyxlorade satin pressed between their bodies — then burns a track up from her belly to her face. Something in the corner of his mouth softens. “Pearl—"

“I just wanted to make you feel good too,” she whispers, but he’s already shaking his head. She can feel her heart — so full just a moment ago — hollow out in her chest. She plants her fingertips against her collarbone, nails digging pink crescents into her skin. She must be a mess — blue curls falling out of their ponytail, underwear drenched — and humiliation flickers cold up her spine. Her teeth rattle when she shivers.

“Hey,” he says when she tries to wriggle away again. “Pearl, stop. Look at me.”

She stares down at him, cheeks and eyes stinging. He suddenly looks uncertain — flustered.

“You’re not — you don’t gotta do anything to make me feel good,” he mumbles. “I’m the one who owes you.”

She recoils so sharply that he almost loses his grip on her, his hands squeezing instinctively on her hips to hold her in place.

“You don’t — Don’t do this because you think you owe me,” she spills out, and it sounds like a terrified bleat in her ears. “You don’t owe me — I don’t want—"

“Okay — pearl, okay, hold on a minute—"

It’s the lostness in his voice pulls her up short, and when she looks down at him, there’s so much resignation and regret all etched into his ember-red eyes — more than she thinks she’s ever seen before. It’s enough to make her go still, her own eyes desperate for every detail of him that she can see in the shadowy dark. His claws tighten on her again, almost imperceptibly.

“M’not doing this ‘cause I owe you,” he admits into the haze of multicolored light and shadow. His voice is hoarse and smoky. “Even though I frickin’ do.” He tilts his head back and thuds it softly against the wall — once, twice — and closes his eyes like he’s exhausted. “M’just doing it ‘cause I frickin’ want to, and I’m a greedy little lowlife.” His thumbs ease up, and sweep back forth across the crease where her thighs meet her hips. She shudders under the callused brush against her skin. “And you’re making me feel plenty good, sitting just right there.”

He shifts beneath her, and the movement rocks her just slightly over the narrow, hard ridge pressed up against her core. She licks her lower lip, then bites it, trying to force herself not to shiver — but the vents cycle on and suddenly her sweat-shimmered skin pricks out in goosebumps. Rocket thumps his head against the wall a third time. To pearl’s eyes — weak in the darkness — it looks like he’s been fistfighting something inside himself, and now he’s too tired to keep it up. All her cells vibrate with anxiety and she tries to hold her jittering pieces together, tries to wait patiently for him to be able to form whatever words are crowded in his throat, even though her body wants to rattle apart.

“Fron’s cold, sweetheart,” he tells her finally, opening his eyes and dropping his gaze from the ceiling to meet hers. The fingers on her hips loosen and shift, thumbs pressing in, and he carefully massages the fat and flesh there. His voice rasps, the edges of his words crumpling like ruins. “I could keep you warm out there. Just if you want.” He shrugs against her. “Just for a little while. Till we get tired of each other.”

She stares at him, every rapid fire movement of her little atoms suddenly going still and quiet, echoing under her skin.

I won’t ever get tired of you, she thinks, so certain it leaves her breathless and empty. It’s his turn to wait, swallowing thickly in the shadows while she tries to order her thoughts and his blood-moon gaze flickers over her face.

“I still want—" she starts, and stumbles. I still want to make you feel good. “Won’t you let me try again? I’ll do better this time.”

A small sound groans up out of his throat: a mournful, aching scrap of breath. She shifts uncertainly, and then — a fractured second of boldness — grinds herself delicately against him.

He hisses, claws curling back into her hips — not enough to puncture, but hard enough that she barely throttles back a hitching gasp. She doesn’t move again, half-hopeful and waiting for something — anything — that encourages her to go on, anything that might tell her he’d welcome her advances. He leans forward slowly, tilting his face downward and letting the crown of his head bump tentatively against the String Theory t-shirt and her breasts underneath.

“Next time, maybe,” he mumbles against the worn, stretched cotton. “Or the time after that. Rushed you before. Just wanna make sure you — wanna make sure you feel good.” A sound that she recognizes as a half-ruined attempt at chuckle. “Gotta make sure you know what you’re getting into.”

Maybe he doesn’t want her — though his comments seem to indicate otherwise. Maybe he does want her, but for whatever reason, he’s — she doesn’t know. Resistant. Afraid, maybe. She digs her blunt front teeth into her tongue, and hesitates. “Rocket.” She murmurs his name like it’s a talisman. “Rocket.”

She wants to say more. Promises and prayers and love-confessions. Every rotation, his shape becomes clearer to her. She can see and feel all his sharp edges, and she suspects that she knows where every scar is — that she could find them blindfolded through his fur, her fingers unerringly drawn to the places where pain haunts him most. His nightmares call her out of her own sleep; she can feel them filling her lungs with the hot sparks of his terror and the drowning smoke of his grief long before he ever wakes. Her hands reach through the hazy veil and collect all those broken, sleeping parts of him like bruised blossoms, and all she wants — all she wants in the whole wide sparkling sprawl of the universe, and beyond — is to make sure he can breathe again.

Her hands float up, threading through the fur of his cheeks, fingertips kissing the sides of his jaw delicately. She’s sure her whole heart is in her eyes. “Rocket,” she repeats achingly. “I just want—"

He shifts abruptly, spilling her onto her side, tumbling her onto the remaining pillows and blankets. For the barest, flutteriest fraction of a second, she thinks he’s pinned her to the bed — but then he curls to one side, lacing his fingers into the lilac-blue waves that have loosened at the crown of her head and gently pressing the side of her face into the coziness of the remaining pillows. He plucks the scrap of red fabric from her ponytail, and claws carefully through her curls. His ember-red eyes search her face, and then his forehead presses against hers in the hallowed dark.

“Shut the fuck up, pearl,” he says, and his voice is the warmest, tenderest thing to ever scrape over her skin.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

“I am Groot,” Groot says to her as he sits on the flightdeck floor, just a few feet from where she’s perched in her chair. He’s enchanted by Rocket’s sludgy coffee, stirring his mugful with one thick barkish finger, and then popping the digit in his mouth.

“He’s usually awake first,” she admits, eyes sliding over to the bunk she’d crawled out of a half-hour ago. It’s the first time she’s woken before Rocket — not counting the times he’s been trapped in nightmares, or the night she’d sneaked down to the nook behind the bulwark. He’s usually so attuned to his surroundings that he jolts awake as soon as she stirs.

“I am Groot?”

She flashes a glance over at her Taluhnisan friend just in time to see the faint mischief in his otherwise-soulful eyes. Her cheeks flush hot.

“I didn’t know Taluhnisans had such good hearing,” she says, trying to sound as peevish as Rocket does — but she’s sure the words just come out vaguely wilted instead.

“I am Groot,” he tells her, stirring his coffee again and taking a sip. He smacks his nonexistent lips — another behavior that she mentally adds to the list she’s titled mammalian theatre. When she looks up at him, his eyes are considering. “I am Groot,” he admits. An inquisitive glow lights his nightsky-eyes. “I am Groot.”

The flush is back in her cheeks and she darts a glance to the crushed-purple curtains around the bunk. She’d pulled them closed after she’d slipped out of bed, hoping to let Rocket have some privacy and to muffle any sounds she or Groot might make — but now she wishes she’d left it open a little so she could see if he was stirring.

“Well, yes,” she concedes softly, hushed and under her breath. “He’s very — quick. And he does have very nice hands.”

“I am Groot,” he adds.

“Yes,” pearl says softly, taking a sip of the red-pome juice Rocket had apparently picked up on Cyxlore. “He’s the smartest person I’ve ever met.”

“I am Groot.” His dark eyes sparkle, starry in the shadows of his face.

She snorts softly. “No?”

“I am Groot,” he tells her with a shrug, and she stifles a laugh, casting her eyes at the curtained bunk.

“Okay, okay,” she chastises playfully. “You say that now, but I guarantee you he’s going to pick up Taluhnisan quickly. And when he does, you might want to be careful about making fun of him.”

Groot blinks. “I am Groot?” He always looks innocent — but now he widens his eyes comically, and points to his chest in an unmistakable who, me? gesture.

She hides her smile behind the rim of the small plastic cup she’s using. The juice is sweet and tart all at once, reminding her of cherries back home. Thought you’d like it, Rocket had grumped at her yesterday — before she’d put all the pieces together and panicked over going to Sovereign. Her heart had opened right up when he’d said it, and wildflowers had spilled out: leaves and blossoms unfurling, each one with a heart of sunlight and warmth.

We’ll stop at a space station or trade center before we get out to Thneed, he’d said. We’ll stock up on milky-fizzes. Keep ‘em frozen till we use them. You’ll like ‘em even better.

His ears had perked forward when he’d mentioned milky-fizzes, tail swinging behind him with a little extra vigor. She’d hidden her smile then, too.

She’s never had smiles to hide before, and it feels good — a happy secret for herself.

Now she shares her smile with Groot. “Oh, you’re very funny,” she says, trying to sound as dry as Rocket — though she is amused.

“I am Groot,” the Taluhnisan says with characteristic mildness.

She rolls her eyes and then casts them to the crushed-purple curtains and drops her voice again.

“He’s sweet,” she says quietly. “And I’m glad he thinks he’s smart. I wish he knew how many other good things he is, too.” She hesitates. “I’ve known people who thought they were smart before. But they — weaponized their intelligence to try to make everything else fit into what they wanted it to be. They’d cut off anything that didn’t fit.” Her eyes slide to the shadowy curtain, and she drops her voice again. “Rocket takes things that already exist and he sees how they can work together. He takes parts and — and makes them whole. It’s — creation, instead of destruction.” She feels a little smile curl the corner of her mouth again. “Even if a lot of his creations are a little destructive themselves.”

Groot chortles, and it sounds like a wide, mossy tree trunk crackling cheerfully into mulch. “I am Groot.”

Her eyes widen. “I don’t need to defend myself,” she shoots back, trying to keep her laughter quiet. “He’s—”

“I am Groot.”

Now the blush scalds her cheeks. “Groot,” she admonishes, her voice faint and thin, eyes darting over to the curtain again. “You can’t just —“

“I am Groot,” he points out.

“Well of course I do,” she almost hisses, trying to keep her words low. She presses the cool side of the cup against one warm cheek. “But I don’t feel great about it.”

“I am Groot?”

“Because—“ She falters. “I don’t—“ she tumbles over the words, wildflowers wilting into a thousand dried petals and autumn leaves. Her big friend waits patiently while she grapples to put her thoughts in order. “We all have our… our hang-ups,” she says at last, softly. “I’m not… confident that I…”

I’d like the chance to look out for you too.

She’d meant the words when she’d said them, and they haven’t been more than a half-thought from her mind ever since. She’s folded them and tucked them into each breath that comes into her lungs, laced them within her ribs and wristbones like silk scarves or ribbons, and kept them as sparks between each of her synapses. With every breath, they become more a part of her, sending tenderly-curling root-tendrils to spiral delicately around the valves and ventricles of her heart.

I’m going to take care of you and keep you safe.

They’re constantly in the back of her mind: a promise she’d burned right next to the words of absolution he’d given her that night he’d first found her behind the bulwark.

But how does a person say, I fell in love with a real monster, once, when I was just a little kid, and now I’m not sure I know how to tell the difference? Or, I trust Rocket without a single shred of doubt in my heart, and that makes me wonder if I’ve learned nothing? Or, I’ve spent the last near-dozen circumrotations with so much love to offer, and any time I couldn’t stop myself from giving the smallest scrap of it, that person was executed?

And still, Groot sits with all the patience of an ancient forest — waiting on her words.

“We all have our hang-ups,” she repeats instead.

The Taluhnisan is quiet for a long time. Somehow, the hard crags and crevices of his face seem to soften, the shadows of his face growing hollow with misery. “I am Groot.”

She reaches for him, and he takes her hand in his. It feels like sunwarmed, satin-smooth driftwood. They sit in solemn silence together, drifting in the stars until he rumbles a distant, quiet thunder.

Then his eyes slant up at hers. “I am Groot,” he tells her solemnly.

She almost spits out her juice at that, nearly choking as she fumbles to set it aside. “Absolutely not.”

“I am Groot?”

“Because — well, speaking of hang-ups,” she murmurs, one side of her mouth curved in bemusement, her eyes on the crushed-violet curtain. “Can you imagine how he’d react if I told him I loved him?” She startles herself with a soft little snort on the end of her chuckle. A snort. Herbert may have been alive for eons but surely, if he’d heard that, it would have sent him to his grave. The thought makes her snort again, and then her mirthful whisper crackles out of her: soft as featherdown crushed into a duvet, and fractured with fault-lines of laughter. “No. I’ve — thought about it. But no.”

“I am Groot?” Groot asks, quietly. His dark eyes are soulful.

“I just—“ She drops her voice again. “I just want to look out for him.”

Groot tilts his heavy head. “I am Groot?” He asks gently. She winces, then offers him something caught halfway between a headshake and a shrug.

“I don’t know,” she admits hollowly. She’s never had a chance to learn to fly, and she’s never shot a gun — Rocket’s training-blaster notwithstanding. She’s not as creative as her survivor, or as naturally talented. She’ll never be a mechanical or technical genius, though she does still believe she can help with some of the more mundane tasks and repairs. But no. There’s nothing immediately apparent about her that she can use to help keep him safe and happy.

But she’s sure she must have some hidden skill somewhere, something they’ve both overlooked. There has to be.

She has to believe that.

She leans over her lap, eyes falling somewhere past Groot, and fingercombs through a handful of curls. The only thing she trusts that she’s good at is learning languages. Maybe that’s not exactly true — she suspects the reason she’s good at languages is because she’s also good at connecting bits of knowledge — snapping information together like jump-points, anchoring every fact and nuance to five others and seeing how they all fit together. The inside of her brain looks like a corkboard belonging to a conspiracy theorist in one of her mother’s old crime dramas: a hundred intersecting red threads, tied neatly to unexpected pushpins.

There’s that, she thinks. She has that. She has a hundred puzzle pieces, and the ability to make a picture of them.

So for now, she sets her not-informidable brainpower toward solving the Problem of Sovereign. With every spare second, she sinks into memories of what she’d read in Herbert’s files: the diagrams of the abilisks, the records of the energy cores, anything she can remember from the Collective’s history as well as the herd’s. She half-starts drafting a dozen stilted solutions, only to discard them.

“I am Groot,” Groot says softly, and his voice is a quiet embrace, gently interrupting and enveloping the tumult of her thoughts.

It’s only a few more murmured moments between the two of them before they hear Rocket shift in the bunk — then the bed sways on its straps to the sounds of him lurching upright.

“Pearl?”

She sucks in a startled breath, rosiness already glowing in her belly like the sound of her almost-name in his mouth is enough to ignite her: happiness, arousal, belonging. “I’m right here,” she calls softly, and he’s peeling the curtains up from the edge of the bunk rather than opening them from the side, blinking out at her with a wide ember-red gaze that warms her skin as soon as it lands on her. The fur on one side of his face is crushed flat and splayed, warm eyes still blurry with sleep, and she melts — fingers floating upward and toward him before she can quite reel them back in. He’s got a gravity all of his own.

Be normal, she reminds herself fiercely. Pretend to be normal.

Though, to be fair, reaching for him is probably the most-normal part of her new life. Her fingers have longed for his fur since the moment he’d pinned her to the floor of her room on the Arete. If anything, it might be more strange to suddenly pretend they don’t. She watches the tension in his face settle, then dip into the familiar irritation he wears with more regularity than his armored jumpsuit.

“How long’ve you two been up talkin’ shit?” he grouses. “Shoulda woke me. Could’ve already been on our way.”

“I am Groot,” Groot offers.

Her survivor shakes the sleep from his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose with a dark-clawed hand. “Unbelievable,” he mutters.

For the first time, it occurs to pearl to worry. Rocket had been so strained and distant the morning after she’d made herself come in front of him. Be normal, she’s been telling herself — though now she wonders if perhaps he’s the one who is going to act differently.

He said, next time, she reminds herself before she can go cold with panic. He said, on Fron. She holds onto the promise of that with twisting fingers, and tries to ignore the icy voice in the back of her mind that pipes up with, He also said, just till he gets tired of you.

Somehow, though — thankfully, miraculously — Rocket continues to act exactly as lovably irritable as he always has. Perhaps it’s not accurate to say that nothing has changed: it certainly has, at least since the Arete, or since that first rotation when he’d drunkenly told her about Herbert and the mittens, or the time when she’d curled herself behind the bulwark and begged him to let her stay out in the stars with him. But nothing seems to have changed since yesterday, or since he’d bought her a morningtea for the first time on Cyxlore, or since he’d let her build a den under the flightdeck or curl around him after his nightmares.

And for that, pearl is so grateful that tears start to sequin her vision. She moves quickly to the little foodlocker and hot plate, turning her back so she can hide them before they fall. She’ll make omelettes for herself and Rocket, she decides. That will distract her.

When she’d been a child, she’d once heard a commercial that had described some sort of pre-made dough as made with love. Carefully cooking her mother’s hangover-breakfasts and late-night dinners, pearl had tried to imagine what that had meant — as if love were a seasoning she could sprinkle in like red pepper, or sauté in butter like garlic. With all the hopefulness of childhood, she’d thought that if she could make her mother a cinnamon-sugar oatmeal with extra leftover cranberries from the woman next door, or a macaroni-and-cheese with just the right amount of dried mustard — maybe there’d be enough love for her and her mother to share.

Years later — circs later — some part of pearl had sat beside Herbert on the dias and thought that if she couldn’t be loved, she’d give whatever she had left in her, just to be sure that some of it existed in the bleak universe the High Evolutionary had painted.

Then that had been weaponized too.

Now, though — when she rehydrates the lab-made eggs, the synthetic auroch, and the pressed greens she doesn’t recognize, then sprinkles in a sharp, tangy-flavored lilac cheese — now she thinks she knows what it means to cook with love. This is less desperate, less anxiety-riddled and painful and raw. When she whisks the squirrel-bird eggs and adds a different blend of spiced crushed herbs that smell like smoked paprika, the twist of her wrist feels almost healing. When she pours the mix onto the hotplate and the sizzle fills the air of the runabout with something so savory and spicy that she can see Rocket’s nose twitch, she feels hopeful: not for anything in particular, but just — in general.

Elpis, she thinks, as Groot leans against the starshields and drinks up moonlight and chews on a mouthful of Rocket’s tar-like coffee. She’s become a little heart-shaped constellation, sketched out onto any stretch of infinite stars. The personification and embodiment of hope, just for hope’s sake. She thinks it must pour out of her, suffusing the air, the scent, the flavor of the food. She daydreams about it filling Rocket up inside, right alongside the eggs and the auroch and the herbs.

Her survivor practically inhales the eggs and slivers of various rehydrated, lab-made meats with a muddled, shuffled groan, as if he’s never tasted anything so good, and it gives pearl a golden trill of sunlit warmth.

After breakfast, Rocket flies. He tells her he has a box of Krylorian cards in the console, and Groot tries to teach her games for the entire first wake-shift before they realize they can’t win because at least a dozen of the deck of ninety-nine are missing. Rocket cackles. Though she can’t be sure whether he’d known the whole time or had been just as surprised as they were, he’s certainly entertained, and that warms her too. Before she can ask, though, he orders her into the seat beside him.

“Welcome to Rocket’s Flight Academy,” he tells her, still snickering. “Three times better’n Xandar’s. You don’t get to touch the controls till you got all the basic parts an’ jargon memorized, and know how they all work.” He cants his sunset-gaze sideways to her in the dark, as molten-hot and crimson as a late-summer evening. “Knowing you, that prob’ly means we’ll get you flyin’ in no time, kitten.”

Her breath catches in her throat at that and she trips over the sudden fullness of her heart.

“R-really?” she stumbles, starbright eyes wide as they flick over the glowing beads of light lining the console, the dials on the walls, the levers and buttons and gauges pinned to the ceiling like stars and fireflies. Her fingers twist in her lap.

He lifts his shoulder in a lopsided shrug, grimacing. “Get you through the basics here. Dreadnought’ll be more complicated, but you’re a smart girl—“ Something inside her preens golden feathers at the praise. “—and I figure we’ll probably have you take your first test-flight in three, maybe four cycles. F’you still want to, anyway.” He shifts uncomfortably in his seat. His eyes flick over to her own, and she’s sure they’re big and starry with excitement. He huffs out an annoyed breath. “It’d be good to have someone else be able to fly sometimes too, ‘specially if we gotta move quick.” His cherry-bomb eyes shadow over with sullenness, and she knows he’s thinking, in case we gotta run from Wyndham.

“I still want to,” she breathes out quickly, shoving thoughts of Herbert aside for now. She casts her own stare out to the stars, hunting and hungry, trying to trace all the dark paths she could take between them like a labyrinth. He must hear something in her voice, or see it in the gleaming line of her profile, because she watches his hands tighten on the yoke in her periphery.

“Well, then,” he says with a rumble. “Let’s get started.”

He spends hours pointing out every shimmering button and panel, then quizzing her on them. Occasionally, Groot tries to guess as well, but he’s never right and Rocket just rolls his eyes when the Taluhnisan speaks anyway. By the time Rocket orders her to take a break — she’s decided to see if she can make a good stew on the runabout’s little hotplate — she thinks she might have a third of the dials and and gauges mostly-memorized, though Rocket’s told her they may be positioned slightly differently on other ships. The important thing, he’d said, is to remember their color and shape in connection with their function, and which side of the panel they’re located on.

The stew — rehydrated lab-made landfowl, synthetic root-vegetables, some celery-like stalks and a series of smoky seasonings — ends up being hearty and filling, and Rocket breathes in the fragrance like it could nourish him all on its own. She feels herself blush when he does it. Meanwhile, Groot nibbles on a few of the umbellifers, more for the novelty of eating mammalian food than anything else.

Watching them eat, though — grateful for the opportunity to feed them — pearl wonders. Even though Rocket had made it such a point to tell her that she needed to try new foods, even though he’d gotten her the morningtea and delicious meals on Cyxlore, she wonders how often he had gone without. She remembers the dismantled rehydrator, and tries to guess how long he’d been eating only dried and lyophilized foods. Some of them had been pre-seasoned, but otherwise, she doubts they’d tasted like much of anything at all. She hates the thought that he’d gone hungry — grown taut with emptiness over the years.

She’s no chef — no culinary genius. Even now, she’s muddling her way through by taste-test, working with foods she’s never handled before. After all, Herbert had never let her cook — and even if he would've, she’s sure nothing dried or preserved would ever have touched his table. But maybe this is one more way — however small — that she can look out for Rocket.

“It’s time for your lesson, now,” she reminds him, after his bowl has been scraped clean and they’ve returned to the flightdeck.

He snorts as he steers them through the stars. “My lesson?” He tosses a look at her over his shoulder, red coals half-hidden behind hooded lids. There’s something in the glance that has heat pooling in her belly, and suddenly remembering the feel of his warm-leather fingers drawing circles around her nipples the night before. Her throat feels abruptly hot, and she swallows audibly, then nods with eyes she just knows are too big for her face.

“I said I’d help you learn Taluhnisan,” she says softly, and if her words are a little wobbly, she suspects it only serves to win him over. A smirk curls the corner of his mouth and he makes a sideways gesture with one open palm.

“Teach away then, pearl,” he taunts.

“I am Groot,” Groot offers.

She bites her lip and tugs on the ends of her hair, combing it with her fingers and weighing it in her hands while she studies him carefully, tilting her head to try and read his expression in profile. Every little thread of fur glistens, distinct and separate and silver-bronze, glinting with the rainbow glow of the control panel lights.

“Well?” Rocket prompts, slanting another glance her way. She stifles another wave of heat and nods once to herself, firmly.

“I’m going to teach you the way I learned,” she decides. Well, nearly the way she’d learned. As cold and unkind as she’d been to the linguist, she’d always wanted to learn. She’d always believed she could. Rocket, on the other hand…

She watches him carefully, taking in every movement and flicker with loving consideration: the tilt of his ears and brows, the angle and flicker of his whiskers. His tail is hard to read while he’s sitting, but she can see the tip of it where it’s been swept to the other side of his body, and it looks like it’s waving lazily back and forth.

Good signs.

“And how was that?” he asks, bemused. "How'd you learn, kitten?"

She uses her tiptoes to swivel her seat slightly, so she can face Groot. “Groot, could you tell us a story? Maybe, First House Orchidacea?” she asks, reaching into her memories from seven years ago and pulling the name of one of the Taluhnisan folktales she’d first heard, recorded onto a holodisk.

“I am Groot!” Groot startles. “I am Groot?”

She nods. “It’s okay if you don’t remember it exactly,” she says apologetically. “I know you probably haven’t heard it since you were a sapling. We’ll need to take a break every few sentences, anyway.”

“I am Groot,” Groot responds, his soft-smiling mouth curved into something wistful and pleased.

“Storytime?” Rocket says doubtfully. “I’m not gonna understand—“

“It’s okay,” she says quickly. “We’re just practicing listening.”

Rocket’s lip curls uncomfortably — almost a snarl.

“For now, I want you to just take a few breaths with me,” pearl says quietly.

“I am Groot,” offers Groot.

“Breaths?” her survivor repeats doubtfully, and she nods.

“Just to try to relax and — center yourself,” she explains.

Rocket snorts. “Behind the flight controls are about as relaxed as I get, pearl,” he says drily, but then casts her another half-hooded look that tells her he’s thinking of something else entirely.

She wriggles in her seat. Stop it, she thinks at him, flushing, before directing an admonishing be normal toward herself.

“Breathe with me,” she repeats, and he rolls his eyes — dramatically, she notes with affection — but follows her in three grounding breaths. He’d deny it if she pointed it out, she’s sure, but she can see how his shoulders ease a little with each one.

“I want you to hear Groot tell this story,” she says quietly. “You don’t need to try to make out any special sounds or tones. Don’t try to project any meaning on them at all. Just let his words wash over you.”

“All three of ‘em?” Rocket snickers, but she doesn’t take the bait. She’d certainly been a worse student to the linguist — talented, perhaps, but biting and cold. At least Rocket’s dry sarcasm is half-playful.

“All three of them,” she confirms. “All I want you to do is hear his voice. That’s it. There’s nothing easier than that.”

“I am Groot,” Groot adds, and she nods.

“Ready, Rocket?” she breathes, and sees his ears flutter toward her.

“Ready as I’ll ever be, I guess,” he gripes, and Groot begins.

The story, like many Taluhnisan myths, is lazy and branching, and they take breaks to recenter. Partway through the tale, pearl watches her survivor’s ears start to flatten. One set of dark claws begin tapping a staccato rhythm on the yoke.

“That’s enough for tonight,” she says the next time Groot pauses, and her giant companion nods, and then does his adorably, transparently fake stretch-and-yawn before lumbering to his feet.

“I am Groot,” he wishes them both.

“Good night,” pearl replies, and settles back into her chair beside Rocket, leaning on one armrest to study him again.

The silence crawls between them, seeping and sullen. She feels the corner of her mouth turn down, and her eyebrows crimp. Maybe she should have tried this differently — but she’s never been a teacher before. She opens her mouth to explain, but he gets there first.

“Told you,” he mutters darkly. “I never been good with languages. Don’t even know what I was supposed to get outta that. Mind kept wandering.”

Her brow tilts more deeply, rippling with pensiveness. Uncertainty twists up her belly —but then she looks at him again and his furrowed brows, the self-consciousness threading his fur, and everything in her softens.

“The part of the story we heard today was about the first Walking Taluhnisan. This was back when all the people of Taluhnia were still rooted, and so her feet were sunk deep into the soil. At first, she was happy in her home forest, with her fellow rooted Taluhnisans surrounding her, and the stars above, and the woodland creatures who would come and go.

“But as time passed, she began to understand the little birds and the animals. She heard them talking about all the places they’d been, the things they’d seen. Sometimes, a ship would land on Taluhnia, and the inhabitants would get out and stretch their legs and marvel at the deep forests. They’d sometimes sit outside, maybe by a fire they’d built, or the stream that ran past her, and they’d tell stories to each other — about their own adventures, or the adventures they’d heard from other travelers. Shining, distant cities. Light-spangled planets. She was so eager to hear more, and she’d ask to hear more — but nobody understood her. And so, after countless circumrotations of this, the soil around her feet began to feel like shackles, and her home forest began to feel like a cage. She found that all she wanted to do was escape the place where she’d been planted, and explore her world — and beyond it, the stars. To see for herself. To leave the spot where she’d been tethered.”

She trails off, and tilts her head again, studying her survivor. Rocket’s eyes are fastened to the starshield, but she can see how wide-open his gaze is.

“That’s—“ He stops, and swallows. When he speaks again, his voice is a shriveled-up husk of a whisper. “That’s — I’d been thinking of something kinda like that,” he admits, his voice low. “While I was — uh, listening to Groot.”

“Yeah?” she asks softly. Herbert had hated that — yeah and nope and hey. She’d purged them from her lexicon, before — but now they rest between her lips as naturally as a sip of morningtea.

Rocket’s words, when they come, are more reluctant: lingering at the corners of his mouth, clinging to his teeth. “I was thinking about — being a kid. Stuck in the cage. At first, I’d thought—“ His voice crackles off, dry and aching, before he furrows his brow and narrows his eyes and bares his teeth at the stars. “Everything hurt, but the Arete was all I’d ever known, so I thought it was fine. Normal. Good. Then I started to — to learn how to talk. Don’t think you got a chance to see it while you were there, but there’s this big room with huge windows where Wyndham used to — frickin’ hold court, I guess. Anyway, uh. He’d sit me there and try to teach me words.” He loosens the tight air in his lungs. “It’s where I saw the rockets.”

He has to pause to lick his lips nervously, and pearl’s heart twists in her chest. There’d been a similar room in the Homonoia. And in the Adrestia. In every stronghold and fortress and lab that Herbert had ever built, she expects.

She still has nightmares about the ones she’s seen, sometimes.

“He, uh. He’d tell me stories about what it would be like — the place we’d all get to live. Paradise. Utopia. Whatever. A shining city.” He snorts. “I was remembering… how much I wanted to go. To be part of it. My — my brother an’ my sister an’ me. I told you — before the incinerator. We had each other. An’ we’d tell each other stories of what it would be like — when he was done with us, when we could be let free and be part of the — the city. Go on adventures of our own. See other places, other planets.” He swallows. “I was — I was remembering all a’ that.” He hesitates, then drums his claws sharply on the front of his jumpsuit, right over his sternum. They make a muffled, metallic sound, and she remembers all the struts that had lined his chest, the bars and buttons she’d seen flashing in the lightning that night in the Arete. “Maybe not remembering, exactly. But I could feel it. Here.” He pauses, eyes troubled. “Haven’t felt it in a long time.”

He casts uncertain eyes toward her — fire-moons, red and warm. She meets his gaze openly. There are at least a dozen things she thinks she could say, and none of them feel quite right. She wants to slide her hand up his chest, to feel the warm drum of his heart under her palm.

Instead, she decides to offer him an escape-hatch: the slightest shift in topic, away from his most painful memories. For now. She gives him a soft, gently-teasing smile. “I thought you told me you were bad at languages.”

She can see the relief on his face at what he rightly assumes is a change of subject: a windsail-sigh and the easing of tension around his eyes and whiskers. His tailtip flicks.

“I am,” he retorts, and she manages a delicate snort. It’s such a new behavior for his polite little Terran that Rocket blinks and then stares at her, but pearl doesn’t notice.

“Not this one,” she says, trying to sound soft and light all at once. “You’re a natural.” She lifts one shoulder, then the subsequent, open palm. “It’s not surprising to me that you’re picking it up so quickly,” she says, and she keeps her smile soft: just a gentle half-curl in one corner of her mouth. “Taluhnisan — and Cotati and a bunch of other Ex Nihilii sister-tongues— they’re all empathetic languages. Which I — I just knew you’d be good at.”

He flinches, then scowls. “What does that — I don’t even know what that frickin’ means.”

She pauses, and casts a careful eye over to him. “It’s not an interpretation of sounds — nothing so sequential as that, which is one of the reasons I thought you’d be better at it than most. You just have to be able to — to tune in to what’s being shared with you, as a whole. Comprehensively.” She hesitates. “You don’t need any practice with the comprehensive part. I’ve seen how you look at — a firearm, or a ship. You see the whole thing in its entirety, rather than linearly. So… what we’re practicing, right now? It’s just opening a space for another person to experience their own thoughts and emotions. Listening to them, and being able to say — with absolute honesty — I understand why you feel this way.”

“Joke’s on you,” he snips, but his eyes flicker side to a side, a little hunted. “I don’t frickin’ understand people at all.”

She tilts her head, and then leans across the space between them: skittish still, but determined. “I think you do.” Her hand finds purchase in the crook of his elbow, and he jolts, then goes still. Carefully — cautiously — she lets her fingers scroll over his fur. She slides out of her seat and into a one-kneed crouch so she can dance her hand up over the strap of his back-holster and the armored cloth of his jumpsuit. Her fingertips find the space over his heart — where he’d just clicked his claws — and she echoes the motion: tapping delicately on his metal breastbone, buried beneath fabric and fur, and half-grown over with scarred flesh. “I think you understand them so much it hurts.” Her voice is nervous, but she only swallows and makes herself go on: soft and gentle. “Easier, maybe, to try to convince yourself of the opposite.”

His jaw drops open an inch and his eyes round out, big and ember-bright and stunned. He stares at her, silently, mouth snapping shut, brow crimping: a dozen emotions she can’t place, all chasing each other over his face and ears and eyes and whiskers. Nerves skitter up her spine, cold little hailstones and beads of ice. Maybe she shouldn’t have said so much, shouldn’t have invaded his space outside of the confines of their purple-curtained bunk. She gently rocks back onto her heels, pulling her hand away from him.

“Anyway,” she whispers, anxiety threaded through the hush of her words. “That’s how the Taluhnisan language operates. I open space for you to share your experience, and I understand it.” She tugs at a handful of curls and leverages herself back into her seat. When she speaks again, the words are earnest: curling out of her and reaching for him, vibrating with honesty.

“You’re doing so well,” she tells him. “I bet it’ll be no time before you can understand exactly what Groot’s saying, all the time. You won’t even have to try.”

He’s still staring at her, eyes suddenly big and more uncertain than she’s ever seen them. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he utters, and he sounds baffled. “That I’d — that I’d be able to understand it like that? Or, uh — start to?”

She tilts her head and twists her fingers nervously in her lap. “Would you have believed me?”

He opens his mouth — then closes it, brow furrowing. The silence deepens, wavering and filmy. She lets it linger for a moment — lets him think — and then reaches across the space, this time with an offering of words.

“I told you that you’d be good at it,” she reminds him, keeping her tone as tender as she can make it. “You needed something to prove it to you, without me telling you where to go looking.”

His eyes slide away, then back. They light on hers, then flick to the starshield, the controls, the hatch all the way at the other end of the runabout. He brushes the back of his hand over quivering whiskers.

“I don’t — I never been good at languages.” His voice is uncharacteristically thin, and there’s a small splinter somewhere in the middle: a hollow narrow wound that fills with water, and wobbles. It’s an almost vulnerable sound, and it splits her heart right up the middle. She swallows, tears suddenly stinging in her eyes.

“I don’t think that’s true at all,” she confides gently. When those live-coal-eyes burn back to hers, she keeps her face solemn and soft and open, so he can read every truth in it. “I think you were just expected to learn the wrong ones.”

He swallows again, eyes trailing away from hers like red meteors, back out to the stars. “You—” he starts, and his voice frays before he tries again. “You’re the second-worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”

It’s a reminder from a couple rotations earlier, but it has so much less dryness in it, so much less annoyance. Instead, he just looks so lost, and she wants to give him something — anything to help him understand the truth in what she’s saying. The memory rises in her suddenly — an unexpected supernova in a dark patch of space. She can feel a little, half-devious glow start to crinkle in the outer corners of her eyes: a normally-shy half-smile suddenly turned into mischief.

“Do you want to know what used to make Herbert absolutely livid?”

His ears flicker — intrigued. He looks at her again, crimson-warm eyes suddenly calculating, and she feels her smile turn smug.

“The whole reason Herbert wanted me to study these languages, specifically, was because he couldn’t learn them himself. God, he tried so hard. Cotati, Taluhnisan, all the Ex Nihilii languages — he’d listen to recordings of them constantly. He’d rant about it under his breath, trying to convince himself that the fault was with the root-language, not himself — but he'd still get so tangled up in knots about it. He’d have them playing over the speakers through the entire Homonoia all day, for cycles. He’d try to find native speakers he might be able to talk with. He’d hire linguists to explain them to him. He'd pour over manuscripts and codices. He’d try to create new translation programs. Everything.”

She raises one brow — an expression she'd almost forgotten, but it feels at home on her face. Rocket’s eyes are still wide, but that familiar smirk is starting to tug the corner of his mouth. Satisfaction. She lets some twinge of her own gratification — even a little mockery — enter her tone.

“All his big, evil brains — and Herbert could never pick up on the empathetic dialects.”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

these little idiots, trying to muddle through their trauma and bad communication, and what they think they do and don't deserve. i love them so much. admittedly this is not my favorite chapter, but i hope it held your interest and did something for you. i think it had some okay moments?? i'm really happy with how the next three chapters are turning out though, so hopefully they make up for this one. you deserve the best. ps the next chapter is real smutty

as ALWAYS, i have so much gratitude for you all, especially the repeat-commenters, you precious bits of golden honeycomb and peach. you are what makes this fandom great, and what makes writing fanfic a community experience rather than a solitary one. i appreciate you all so much and cherish your little (and lengthy!) support and encouragement. it means the absolute world to me ♡♡♡ thank you from the bottom of my heart, you perfect jeweltoned hummingbirds

exciting things:
♡ still working on the chapter thirteen drawing (ㅠ﹏ㅠ)
♡ in lieu of a cicatrix chapter next friday, we have a new addition to the take what you need collection! i'm excited!
♡ cicatrix is currently scheduled to be updated on the 12th and 26th
posting schedules, chapter-previews, & more on tumblr♡
masterlist & moodboard♡
portrait of pearl♡
rocket & pearl's bunk on the runabout (lineart)

coming soon: chapter sixteen. craxis.
summary: pearl considers the problem of sovereign.
warnings: smutty-smut while rocket wears his cute lil goggles. cockwarming. dirty-talk. praise. mentions of gagging and one light spank. use of “slut”/”whore” (affectionate). aftercare.
estimated date: friday, july 12.

oh, and! the story groot tells is based loosely on (a translation of) the first part of hans christian andersen’s dryaden, or, the dryad.

Chapter 16: craxis.

Summary:

pearl considers the problem of sovereign.

Notes:

warnings: smutty-smut while rocket wears his cute lil goggles. cockwarming. a light foray into subspace. dirty-talk. praise. mentions of gagging and one light spank. dirty-talk. use of “slut”/”whore” (affectionate). aftercare. so much dirty-talk.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

craxis. the unease of knowing how quickly your circumstances could change on you—that no matter how carefully you shape your life into what you want it to be, the whole thing could be overturned in an instant, with little more than a single word, a single step, a phone call out of the blue, and by the end of next week you might already be looking back on this morning as if it were a million years ago, a poignant last hurrah of normal life. Latin crāstinō diē, tomorrow + praxis, the process of turning theory into reality. Pronounced “krak-sis.” The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

The rotations spin past, almost as quickly as the stars. The three of them wake and pearl makes breakfast. Rocket settles himself into the pilot’s seat and tells her about flying and ships and space, testing her as they go — not just about the gauges and buttons she’s memorizing, but about what to do in unexpected flight situations: if something breaks, or a Kree army appears out of nowhere, or they have to speed through an asteroid field. In theory, at least, she’s figuring it out, and Rocket always seems impressed, though she tells herself not to get distracted by his grudging praise.

Then they eat dinner and Groot tells more of his Taluhnisan folktale, and Rocket practices listening. The survivor pretends like he hates it — grumpy and dramatic, rolling his eyes — but his ears don’t lie. They stay swiveled toward their third crewmate, alert and attentive.

Afterward, once Groot disappears down the hatch for the night, pearl curls into bed. Rocket offers up the excuse that he wants to get in another hour or two of flying to make sure they get to Sovereign on time, but pearl can tell he’s just stalling — waiting till she slips into sleep before joining her in the bunk. For better or worse, the rattle of the curtains being drawn around the bed always has her drifting in and out of wakefulness. While she dozes, she dreams of the coast of his knuckles, like a blessing against the curve of her cheek, and the slide of his claws through her silky, silvery-lilac curls. She mumbles something drowsy and winds her arms around him, and the sound of his grunt rumbles into her unconsciousness, as comforting as the velvet lure of thunder in a storm. In her sleep, his grumble becomes the sound of the sky outside the Arete: all rainfall and tumbling dark clouds. Pearl nuzzles into his heat and the thick softness of his pelt. Under his shirt, his chilled metal buttons grow warm against her belly as she curls around him.

“For fuck’s sake, kitten,” she hears muttered from somewhere near her breasts, but she just sinks down into his fur and soaks up the scent of him: rainfall and camphor, blue spruce, and woodsmoke. Rich, buttery almond-cakes. She squeezes him sleepily and muffles some dreamy nonsense against the crown of his head.

Then they wake up, and do it all over again.

One rotation, when she’s about to get into the shower, Rocket clears his throat and mumbles something about having gotten her some shit for her hair an’ stuff. He gestures vaguely to the locker of extra toiletries that she hasn’t had much of a reason to peer into since her arrival, and when she opens it, there are a dozen bottles of human-friendly hair products, soaps, and skin oil. She turns to stare at him over her shoulder, eyes wide and shimmering.

“Didn’t know what you liked, so I got ‘em scent-free,” he mutters.

“Rocket,” she murmurs, every word wreathed and woven with gratitude. “Thank you. This — it’s so —”

“Shut up and go shower,” he growls, but his eyes flick away and he palms the back of his neck, and she’s starting to think that means he’s blushing underneath all that fur of his.

She plucks up the bottles and clutches them against her sternum. For countless circumrotations, Herbert had kept her in perfumes and silk-lotions made with bouquets of sweet-smelling Atraxian nectar-roses and Spartoi duskberries. It had taken her years to get used to the sugary, almost medicinal smell: overdrenched with fragrances that had reminded her of dense, late-summer honeysuckle and cherry-flavored cough syrup from back home. She’s never even thought about choosing a scent for herself. When she’d been a kid, she’d sometimes borrowed a friend’s Unicorn Ballet Body Mist, which came in a filigreed clear plastic bottle. The liquid inside had been dyed pink, and the label had claimed it smelled like moonlight and strawberries.

Beyond that, pearl’s never had options to choose from.

The fact that Rocket had considered what she might want has her heart flurrying, featherlight behind her collarbone. Her hair had already felt glossy and healthy thanks to Wona Beax’s treatment, but after she uses the cleansers and conditioners he bought her, it dries into perfect waves and ringlets — silky and reflective and smooth. She hadn’t realized how dry her skin had been becoming under the indulgence of hot water and Rocket’s soap, but the oil on her damp skin has her feeling more soft and velvety than she remembers, even under Herbert’s rigid beauty regimens.

Through it all — between the breakfasts and the dinners and the blissful hot showers, Groot’s and Rocket’s endless supply of sludgy coffee, the pre-flying classes mixed with Rocket’s sarcastic remarks and wild stories, the Taluhnisan lessons, and the marzipan-scented dreams — through it all, pearl laces her thoughts with plans for Sovereign. She winds gossamer threads around every little piece of information she knows — about abilisks, about Sovereign, about Rocket — creating a web to connect every half-formed idea. It’s a nebulous constellation of starlight and gravity, orbits and jump-points; around energy-cores and her perfect survivor. He hasn’t touched her since the night he’d made her come on his lap — at least not beyond letting her scrunch him up against her belly and chest while she sleeps. Or maybe he has — maybe those careful light touches to her face, almost cherishing, aren’t dreams after all — but she has no way of knowing.

When she thinks about it — about the lack of his touch — it puts an ache behind her sternum, as well as in her lower belly and between her thighs. The long-gone bruises on her ass had spoiled her, she thinks. Without him applying the salve every day, she’s bereft.

Ask me with your prettiest manners, he’d said, and she’s thought about it every rotation since. He’d said he would teach her how to beg the way he liked, but she wonders if she should try sooner.

If she waits too long, maybe he’ll change his mind. Get annoyed at the idea of having to teach her how to be good in bed, or talk himself out of whether or not he wants her. She’s considered it every rotation: trying anyway. Begging anyway. But — too soon — it’s the sleep-shift before they’re supposed to arrive on Sovereign, and she needs to lay those thoughts aside for a while. She needs to get her priorities straight. Right now, her biggest, most important, most precious priority is looking out for Rocket.

And she still hasn’t figured out quite how to do that.

Groot’s gone to bed already. Her survivor has showered and changed into the soft pants that remind her of joggers, buttoned at the base of his spine to allow an opening for his tail. He leaves the stall, still tugging the hem of a Music of the Spheres t-shirt over his waistband, and she’s delighted to see him dressed in his sleep-clothes. Maybe, she thinks — maybe tonight he’ll join her.

But Rocket doesn’t leap into the bunk. Instead, he sets the thrusters and restarts their journey on autopilot: sitting in his pilot’s seat with his feet propped up on the console. There’s a box he keeps to his left, full of small, half-constructed devices and scraps of tech he tinkers with when he’s bored. Now he puts on his goggles, unsheathes a laser-multitool from one of the countless pouches on the side of the seat, and grabs a handful of loose tech to mess around with.

Pearl feels her lip purse — self-consciousness flinching in the corners of her mouth and putting a crinkle between her brows — and watches him from the seat beside him. Chin cupped in hand, she tries to stay awake and focus on her tattered half-plans for Sovereign. She traces red-thread paths through what she knows of the Collective, and tries her best to lean back and see the whole picture. To find the solution to the abilisks, and the solution to getting Rocket back in the bunk with her.

A second later, she realizes he’s muttered something, and she’d been too lost in her drowsiness and her half-formed strategies to catch it.

“I’m sorry?” she says, a curl forming between her brows.

“You can stay on the runabout,” he repeats, eyes still latched on the pieces of tech pinned between his claws. “F’you don’t want to get off on Sovereign. I’ll sneak you onto the Dreadnought as soon as we got it.” He hesitates. “Pearl, I don’t think you’re — you’re not hardly recognizable anymore, but if it makes you feel safer, just stay onboard. They don’t even gotta know you’re there.”

She’s already shaking her head. “I’m not leaving you to deal with Ayesha alone.”

The goggles flash as he glances up at her, a little smirk in the corner of his mouth. “You make it sound like she’s worse than the frickin’ abilisks.”

She tries to pinch her brows into a scowl. The expression is still unfamiliar on her face, despite her recent brief foray into anger. “I can help you with both,” she reminds him, and sighs when he just snorts derisively and turns his magnified gaze back to his work.

She pulls the tangle of curls over her shoulder and runs her fingers through the ends. “I’ve been working on it,” she informs him, trying to sound firm. Trying to sound like herself — whatever that means. Confident, without channeling the false austerity and iciness of M’dame Lavenza. She thinks, if she can do that, she might escape Ayesha unnoticed. Ayesha wouldn’t expect her to be there. She wouldn’t be looking for M’dame Lavenza, probably. And pearl knows people don’t tend to notice things they aren’t looking for. “I’ve been working on how to — how to act, so the High Priestess doesn’t recognize me. And how we can get the Dreadnought without you having to fight the abilisks.”

He snorts. “M’not gonna be fighting the abilisks,” he sneers. “M’gonna be killing ‘em.”

She can feel her scowl, already flimsy, melt into something sadder. “I’d rather you not have to do that either.”

Another flash of the flight control lights on his goggles. “This is what I’m talking about, pearl. This is why you can’t be with me when it’s time for frickin’ pest control. ‘Cause you can’t do what’s gotta be done.” He snickers, but it sounds a little softer than usual. “Couldn’t kill a stingfly.”

She shakes her head again — adamant, this time. Her moondust-blue curls tumble and fly, reflective in the shadows. “I could,” she repeats. “I told you. I could kill something if I had to. For the right reason.”

He raises an eyebrow behind his goggles. “Yeah, okay. If you were worried about the right reasons, maybe you’d be more worried about the Sovereign. If the abilisks are meant to destabilize them—”

“There’s so few of them left; they couldn’t possibly—”

“—then aren’t we doing a good deed by lookin’ out for the Golden Snobs?”

She stares down at her twisted hands. “Nobody’s winning in this situation,” she murmurs under her breath. “Nobody but Herbert.”

Rocket’s silent for a moment, but then he snorts. “I dunno. I think I’ll feel like I’m winning when I’m sitting in the cockpit of a frickin’ Dreadnought.”

She chews her lip, and frowns. “I’ll figure something out,” she promises, and she knows there’s something fervent in her voice. “We’ll get your ship. But I’m not letting you fight them all alone. Not the abilisks, and not the Sovereign.”

He leans back and pushes the goggles up onto his forehead. Fur splays beneath them. “F’I do my job right, I won’t have to fight the Sovereign.”

Her mouth tilts in one corner. “The fact that you think that is why I can’t leave you to Ayesha,” she says, and she’s proud of the dryness in her own voice.

He grimaces. “Why would you think she’s gonna want to fight?”

Pearl hesitates. “I just know how she is. Or at least, how she was, a few circumrotations ago. If she’s still the same High Priestess, then she’ll say something, and it’ll make you want to fight her.”

He chuckles — and the sound is so warm on her insides that it distracts her for a moment. He turns his eyes back to the handful of circuitry and metal. “Go to bed, pearl.”

She gives her hair one last nervous tug before slowly leaning forward, until she’s bent double in her seat, as close to him as she can get while still in the navigator’s chair. Her hand drifts through the shadows and the rainbow glow of the lights, and she sees the moment he notices her intentions. His clever fingers go quiet and still on his little machines. She hooks her own fingers, tenderly, into the soft fur along the inside of his elbow.

“Won’t you come too?”

His red-glow gaze shifts from his half-constructed device to her fingers in his fur, and she feels it suddenly like a burn: as scorching-scalding as his eyes had been back on HalfWorld. She shivers, and his stare crawls up her wrist and along her arm, finding her breasts pillowed against her knees, and her upturned face. She tries to school her face into something confident and sultry, but she can tell by the tension in her brow that she just looks pleading.

“Please?”

His eyes, hot as live coals, are implacable as they peer at her. His lids lower slowly — lazily — and he tests one sharp tooth with the tip of his tongue, then offers her a slow, languid blink.

“You need something, pearl?”

The heat of his stare is calling forth an answering flush in her cheeks, and she hesitates, fingers curling into his fur. His eyelids flicker down to her hand, then back to her face — pausing at a few places along the way.

“Well, sweetheart?” It’s an almost-insolent drawl.

Her heart thumps once against her sternum, then rolls in her chest. “I — I just wanted you to come to bed,” she whispers.

He raises one brow, and it scrunches the fur pressed flat under the goggles on his forehead. “That’s all, huh?” He flicks a clawed hand dismissively and gestures with the little machine tucked into his grasp. “M’working on something. Gotta get it done before we land.”

She winces, and rubs her forefinger and thumb together through the silky fibers of his fur before drawing away reluctantly. He twists his arm under her retreating hand, dark fingers snagging and circling her wrist, trapping it.

“Guess you could stay up with me for a little bit, after all,” he concedes. His voice is wry, but the look on his face is intent — predatory. A sudden flare of gold bursts in her belly, hot as a chrysanthemum firework, every ember sizzling. “Keep me company while I work.” There’s something lava-like in his voice, turning it from smoky maple syrup into hot, burnt sugar. “You wanna keep me company, princess?”

It feels like a trick question — like there’s far more to this offer than just keeping him company — but it’s absolutely a trap she wants to fall into. She nods — so emphatic she just hopes she doesn’t look pitiful — before remembering what he’d said about needing words a few rotations earlier.

“Yes, please,” she whispers. “I’d like to — to keep you company.”

His hand stays clasped around her wrist, and he cocks his head. “You’re tired, though,” he says — but it doesn’t sound like a protest or a refusal. He cocks his head: a mockery of consideration. “Could let you curl up on my lap again, like a sleepy little kitten.”

She blinks, but he releases her wrist before she can say anything, tucking his gadget into the crook of one arm while he flips up the armrests on his pilot’s seat.

“I’m too — how—?”

“Lots of possibilities,” he drawls. “You could just sit sideways right here so I can lean my head against those pretty tits of yours while I work and you take a nap.” He tilts his head in the other direction, measuring her blush with a curl in the corner of his mouth. There’s a weighted pause, and then she sees the flash of one canine as his smirk sharpens into a grin. “And if you can’t sleep, we can tire you out. Get a repeat of the other night — let you rub your friendly little cunt on me till you come.”

She stares at him, and she knows her eyes are too wide in her face, her cheeks too warm. She chews her lip and tilts her head: cautious.

“I — you said you wouldn’t — I know you said not to ask,” she says softly, “But I—“ She falters, voice crumbling into nothing.

I ain’t gonna fuck you, pearl.

“Forget what I said.” He leans forward: eyes suddenly intent, voice rasping. “You want me to take care of you? You can ask for whatever you want, kitten.”

Her abdomen tightens: nervousness and fear, but also the still-burning embers of the golden firework, searing everything it touches. She can feel the hesitation in her eyes, searching his from under the dark smudge of her lashes.

His voice drops impossibly lower, somehow. “D’you wanna rub yourself on me again, sweetheart?” His tongue sweeps out and one canine flashes. “Or d’you want something else?”

“Some—something else,” she says uncertainly, her voice all reedy and thin. She clenches her fingers in the pink of her skirt to keep them from trembling. His eyes follow them, though.

“What something else?” he presses, one brow raising. “My fingers?”

She shakes her head mutely, and he leans back.

“I did want a chance to lick your pretty cunt before I put my dick in it again — if that’s what you want. ‘Course, we don’t gotta do either of those things. Up to you.”

The gold firework has faded in her belly, into a field of simmering embers — but she feels like they could reignite at any moment. There’s a tension in her abdomen, and a buzzing between her thighs.

“I want to,” she breathes out, the blush so high in her cheeks that it hurts. She twists her hands in her lap. “I — please — I want to.” Her eyes tilt down into her lap, to her knotted fingers, before she quickly drags them back up to his face. “I missed you,” she confesses, cheeks burning still.

His eyes are half-lidded, but she swears the glow of them intensifies.

“Don’t gotta fuck just because you missed me,” he reminds her, though he sounds almost reluctant to admit it. “Shouldn’ta made you sleep alone these past few rotations, but I — uh—“ his voice breaks off and he looks away, using his empty hand to rub the back of his neck. “Just wanted to get to Sovereign quick,” he decides to say at last, though his eyes flicker like he’s hiding a different thought, and again, she could almost think he’s blushing.

It doesn’t look like a happy or excited blush, though. Embarrassed, pearl would guess. Or sad.

“No,” she protests quickly, her hand darting back out to his fur. “I missed you, and I want to. Please, Rocket?”

He turns his eyes back to her, and they’re suddenly liquid-dark, pupils blown out into the sunset-red. “You want my dick or my tongue, sweetheart?” It’s a lazy drawl. “M’not gonna make you beg again right now, but you’re gonna have to at least say it.”

She bites back a mew of need and embarrassment. “I w-want your dick, Rocket.” Her face feels so warm that she instinctively presses cool fingers to her cheeks, and his grin widens before she can snatch them away.

Be normal.

“Good girl,” he offers lazily, and everything inside her flares at that. He must notice, because his smirk gets sharper and he eyes her consideringly. “I still got work to do, but I can give you something while you wait, f’you can be patient for me.”

She nods slowly, eyes wide and clinging to him. His grin is so dangerous it makes her dizzy. He holds out one clawed hand. “C’mere, then. F’you think you want me inside you, hand me your panties.” His brows wing up tauntingly. “I’ll keep ‘em safe.”

She rises, and she can feel that they’re already damp. Her teeth dig into her lip, worrying it. She twists her fingers in the panels of her skirt, slipping it upward — high enough to slide her hands between the slits on both sides and tug the hidden scrap of soft, frothy white lace down her legs. She steps out of the panties, then bends down to pluck them off the floor, stepping forward and bringing them to him like a little handful of cloud. He takes them, and ruffles them between his fingers, clicking his tongue regretfully.

“Stupid of me to tell you to do that,” he says conversationally — casually. “Think I would’ve liked to see ‘em on you after all.” Somehow, his eyes look even darker, the sunset color turning closer to burnt-out red stars. “Good girl,” he adds again mildly, and her thighs clench under her skirt — the most unnoticeable twitch, except she’s sure he notices. He tucks the panties into the pocket on his hip and then drums his claws against his thigh. “Just like the other day, sweetheart. Pull your skirt up and come straddle me. You’re gonna have to lean to your right and get real frickin’ close so I can still work.”

She crosses the tiny space between them — no more than a human’s arm span — delicately crumpling the folds of skirt into her curling fists, raising the hem up over her shins and knees. She only hesitates as she starts to move toward him.

He looks up at her — a question flickering in his eyes. She just knows he’s going to start doubting everything, might take back his offer — so she just squeaks out the first truth that rises to her tongue.

“I’m going to get your pants wet—“

The uncertainty leaves his eyes, and now she thinks they’re even darker, as dark as the sky beyond the starshield. There’s only the thinnest ring of fiery crimson gleaming around his pupil.

“So how’re we gonna solve that problem?”

She flinches, casting around for an answer. “T-take them off? Please?”

His eyes lock onto hers, considering and calculating. “Yeah, pearl? Told you. I got work to do.” His tongue tests the point of one canine as he gazes up at her through slitted eyes. “You gonna let me keep my cock squeezed nice and tight in your little pussy while I get this done?”

Her breath catches in the back of her throat. She’s not entirely sure what he’s describing, but the sound of it has the heat inside her coiling and sparking like an electrical fire. “Y-yes?”

“Y-yes?” he mocks, high-pitched and breathy, mimicking her questioning tone.

“Yes,” she repeats, trying to put every certainty into the little syllable, firm and short and sure.

He tilts his head, studying her for a long, quiet moment.

Pearl holds her breath.

Then he shifts, shoving his soft pants under his hips, dragging them halfway down the fur of his thighs. His dick is already ready: gleaming and flushed — slender — and curved unforgivingly. She hadn’t seen it before, though she’d felt how rigid and narrow it had seemed the other night, trapped between her thighs. How brutally it had fucked into her on the Arete.

She swallows and shifts forward, closer to him, before she can second-guess herself. He muffles a growl at her sudden closeness — his nose nearly buried into her soft belly — and she begins to lower herself carefully. He goes still beneath her, and she slows her descent, trying to read his face and then gasping when the head of his cock suddenly kisses her slit.

He slides a hand between them, eyes locked on hers. He must be gripping himself, because the slick, smooth feel of him shifts, gliding along her folds and up to the soft little bud at their apex, then back again.

“You sure, pearl?” His voice is low and smug, but she hears the hitch in its undercurrent: uncertainty. Doubt. A need for reassurance, as strong as her own.

“Oh yes,” she spills out quickly, the words soft and warbling in the dark. “If — if you are.” Then the tip of his dick taps gently against her clit again, and she can’t bite back a whimper.

A rumble rises up from his chest, abruptly impatient. “Get on my frickin’ cock then,” he orders fiercely, and she sucks in a breath at the flood of wetness the words provoke, sinking slowly down onto him.

She’s seen a number of diagrams of differently-shaped phalluses and other genitals in her biology lessons, and she suspects he’s a bit smaller than most of them — but he still fills her up, thicker than her own fingers, and curved in such a way that he rubs along the front wall of her pussy, squeezed against places she hasn’t thought to try and reach on her own. The stretch still stings — somehow she’d thought it wouldn’t after that first time — but he’s already crooning reassuring little praises up at her.

“Breathe, kitten. I got you. Promise.” His nose presses briefly into her belly, nuzzling in. “Knew you’d look frickin’ gorgeous taking me like this. You feel so frickin’ — fuck, tight, still.”

The feel of him, hot and hooked inside her, turns her whimper into a little moan as she seats herself fully on him. Tears have already shivered into her eyes, emotions and senses all overwhelmed, and they spill over as she lets out a ragged, achy sigh against the crown of his head.

“That’s right. You’re okay. I got you. You’re doing so well, sweetheart.”

She melts against him at the words — still stretched and strained between her thighs, but her ribs are already brimming with a golden haze.

“Th—thank you,” she stumbles out, because even though the feel of him still stings, it also feels so good that she’s still tearing up, breathless and full everywhere. He goes still beneath her — then uses his free hand to abruptly palm a handful of her ass, tugging her closer. The sudden shift has her clenching on him even as her clit rubs against his fur in a way that shoots glimmering little sparks and stardust over her skin. She hiccups in surprise, dropping her handfuls of skirt and twisting her fists in his shirt even as her breasts press against his face, nearly smothering him. She jumps and squeaks when he levies a light slap to her ass — just enough to sting — but he’s immediately soothing the spot with featherlight-fingers.

“Sorry, pearl,” he mumbles against the Omniphonics t-shirt she’s wearing again tonight, a bitter sort of regret etched along his voice. “Shouldn’ta done that. Not after last time—“

“You can,” she interrupts quickly. “I don’t — I liked it.” She flushes. Can she get any warmer? Everything — how wet she is and how overheated she is, the little admission that she likes when he spanks her — it’s all embarrassing. Self-consciousness ripples along her arms and up her spine, right next to all that hearthfire-warmth. At the same time, it feels good: low in her belly, and deeper — pinching somewhere inside her cunt, making her thighs ache to squeeze together on him. Rocket rumbles something under his breath, and when he shifts beneath her, her hips hitch against him. The curved shape of him is rubbing against a spot she’s never noticed before, something that has her abdomen tightening and coiling already.

“Stop that,” he mutters, but there’s a smirk at the edge of his voice. “Not gonna get anything done if you keep squirming.”

She blinks down at him. “I—“

“Lean right, like I told you,” he interrupts, and she shifts her body so that her torso is lined up against his left shoulder and bicep, her breasts pressed to the side of his face and the back of his chair. She loops her right arm around the chair, leaning into it.

Rocket tilts his head and casts a sideways, critical glance up at her.

“Pull that t-shirt up for me, princess.” His free hand squeezes her ass, pulling her closer again.

“But—”

Like he can read her mind, he’s already answering. “Groot ain’t gonna come up the hatch, and even if he does, you’re covered up by the seat-back, and by me.”

“He heard us,” she whispers, blush flaring again. “The other night. Heard me, I think.”

Rocket just snorts. “Lucky guy,” he says dryly, raising one brow. “As much as I’d love to gag you, sweetheart, I need you to be able to use your words the first time I f—”

His words crack and stagger. He flinches, and it takes her a moment to grasp why. Her hands come up to cradle his face but he’s already pulling together the broken bits of his smirk, patching them together haphazardly.

“The first few times we fuck.”

She chews her lip. She hasn’t tried to kiss him since he’d let her grind on him a few rotations earlier. He’d never reacted so strongly to her stolen kisses before, but that night, he’d seemed to hate the feel of her mouth on him. Carefully — ready to freeze the moment he reels away or cringes — she curls forward, and rests her lips reverently against the crown of his head, just north of his pushed-up goggles.

His hand tenses on her and she darts back, terrified that she’s messed it all up — but then his thumb strokes tenderly against the curve of her ass. He clears his throat. “Told you. I wanna see those pretty tits again, pearl. You gonna be a good girl and show me?”

She lets out a little half-caught breath of relief. His thumb, sweeping back and forth, is still soothing her. Maybe it’s soothing for him, too, she realizes distantly. And maybe none of it should be so reassuring — but it is, and she shivers before leaning back to tug the Omniphonics shirt upward. The cold vinyl on the back of the chair has her gasping when it brushes against her right nipple, and he chuckles when she jolts at the contact. More insidious, though, is the feeling of his soft cheek-fur on her other breast — a fluttering tickle over her areola that has her caught between melting, and wriggling desperately against him. He sets the handful of little machine-parts he’s been crafting down onto her left thigh, and they feel cool and metallic against her overheated skin.

“Good girl,” he repeats, and she feels herself flutter, more dampness slicking between them. “For fuck’s sake, pearl,” he snickers at her, but the words are edged with a groan. “Get your needy cunt under control, would you? I only got one hand to work on this now, so you gotta hold real still for me, otherwise I’m gonna fuck it up.”

She freezes immediately, body clenched, and he makes a little sound in the back of his throat.

“Not like that.” His claws trail gently over the curve of her ass. “Relax. Just sit with me.” His voice is an easy croon. “Let yourself get used to having that soft little pussy stuffed full of me.”

She feels herself shiver at his words, but she tries: to ease the fingers clenched in his shirt, to lean against the back of the chair. His thumb skates against her skin.

“Breathe, sweetheart.”

She listens — taking the campfire-and-sweet-almond smell of him into her lungs. Slowly, she feels herself melt around him, into the featherlight scrape of his claws against her ass-cheek and the brush of his fur against her breast. She breathes him in again and lets herself soften further on the exhale.

“There you go,” he drawls against her. “Good fuckin’ girl.”

The words set off another series of flutters, silver butterflies dancing through her whole body, tightening her pussy around him — but he doesn’t acknowledge it this time. Instead, he resettles beneath her, and she stifles another moan when the movement has him shifting inside her, his dick bucking just a little more deeply into her.

Then he turns his attention to the little pieces of tech resting on her thigh, pushing the folds of her skirt out of his way so he can use her naked limb as a table.

At first, she’s not sure what to make of it. She would almost think she was nothing — a piece of furniture — with the way he’s so diligently focused on the bits of tech resting on her thigh. Except… his other hand continues to trace mindless paths over the bare curve of her ass, smoothing her skin and all her tensions. The minutes pass and she tries to distract herself from feeling so full of him — from feeling herself dripping into his fur — by memorizing the crown of his head and the glinting strands there, all gunmetal and copper. Her eyes trace the red lenses of his goggles and the way they crush the silken, metallic fibers beneath them — the shape of his ears, and the velvet thickness of them, carefully curved and so sensitive that they twitch every time she breathes.

He’s beautiful. Whatever Herbert had said to make him feel ugly and small, the High Evolutionary had been wrong.

Rocket is possibly the loveliest person she’s ever seen.

The space behind her sternum opens up like a flower: full-blown, and still hungry. She wants him, and more importantly, she wants him happy and safe. She’d give him up if it meant he could just be happy and safe. And she’s desperate for more of him, and still so worried on his behalf. The stupid Dreadnought, and Ayesha, and the abilisks, and Herbert — she pushes the strained tension of them aside, trying to clear space in her mind to just be here, with him, wrapped all around him, stretched full with him. She focuses again on the bronze and burnt-iron threads of fur, the whiskers glowing against the starlight. The longer she stares, the softer her body grows, and the more her heart hurts — overflowing, and so brimful that for a moment she wonders if she’s having an anxiety attack. But no: this is slower — a feeling she can swallow around, like a whole garden slowly unfurling into life on the first warm day of the season. And the more that the garden in her ribcage grows, the stronger it makes the quiet tug in her belly. The achy fullness between her thighs begins to shift into something more needful.

Rocket hasn’t looked up — which is good, she supposes, since she’s done a poor job of holding back her tears, and she’s sure he’d see her whole heart glimmering on the edges of her eyelashes and spilling down her cheeks. Instead, he starts teasing the small of her back in a way that has her struggling not to hitch her hips, every muscle in her abdomen squeezing. The flush in her cheeks and belly slowly spreads, warmth running everywhere through the tracery of her veins. He skitters his claws over the soft skin at the hollow of her spine and she has to twist delicately inward, burying her face in the arm she has looped over the back of his chair, trying to stifle a whine.

Rocket’s ears flicker, but he says nothing, still working away.

She lets out a shaky breath, biting her lip, and his free hand slips out from under her skirt to tangle in her hair, then flattens between her shoulderblades to press her in closer to himself. Casually, he rubs his furred cheek against the nipple closest to him. The texture sends prickles of tension all over her skin, and the flush throughout her body burns brighter. She tries not to shift, but she can feel herself twitching against his lap, her thighs starting to tremble with the effort of staying still for him. Time drifts in and out of her awareness, measured only in her breath, and the throb of her heartbeat between her thighs, and the way his fur keeps teasing the tip of her breast and her soft, aching clit.

“Do me a favor, princess,” he utters at last: nonchalant, and not sparing her a glance.

She has to wrangle her voice together, like it’s been scattered and tattered into gauzy little pieces across the runabout. “Y-yes?”

“Want you to keep your fingers on this greedy little nipple over here,” he says mildly, brushing against it again with his whiskers. “Give it a good tug for me every few seconds.”

She can’t stifle the whine this time, and she can see his brow furrow under the goggles still perched on top of his head. He still doesn’t look up, grimacing at whatever he’s working on, but she can hear the smug satisfaction in his voice when he speaks again.

“I’d do it myself, but…” He gestures with the tiny laser-multitool in his other hand before going back to his work. For a second, she doesn’t move — then, nervously, her hand floats upward to her breast and pinches lightly.

“Little harder, pearl.” His voice tilts wickedly. “I should be able to feel it all the way down in this cozy little cunt of yours.”

His words alone have her clamping down on him, and when she tugs more firmly, a gasp hiccups right out of her lungs. He resettles himself beneath her, the curve in his cock kissing that spot again, and she just knows his fur must be sopping wet from how much she’s dripping.

“Keep goin’,” he mumbles, focusing again on the clutter of tech resting on her thigh. Through blurred eyes, she can see that it’s become two semi-circles of metal and a handful of tiny, broken-up plates of circuitry.

She pulls on her nipple again, and a little mewl wobbles over her lips even as she tries to keep herself still.

“Good girl,” he mutters, his free hand slipping under the back of her tiny t-shirt, soothing up and down her spine. She can feel her heart thudding between her thighs, pulsing against his dick, and some vague part of her wonders if he can feel it too. She’s so feverish— a sensation she doesn’t think she’s ever had before in her life — that the flightdeck suddenly seems misty and surreal: distant, and a little dizzy. Her thighs are shivering in earnest now.

“Just a little bit longer, pearl.”

“Please,” she pants, not even sure exactly what she’s asking for. His ears flick again.

“Steady,” he warns, and the word is a low threat that has her channel fluttering and more slippery wetness spilling between them. “Don’t you dare frickin’ move yet.” He hunches against her, getting his nose down almost to her thigh, magnifying goggles long forgotten. “Almost done.” He pulls back without looking up, scowling at the machines on her thigh, and then deftly taps the cold, blunt end of the multitool directly on the nipple still clamped between her fingers. “Didn’t say to stop, though. Keep giving me those pretty little moans.”

She chews back something close to a sob, squeezing every unforgiving, curved inch he’s got inside her, then squeezing her nipple too. Each muscle and tendon in her body is so tense that she’s quivering. Everything around her seems haloed and hazy.

“R-Rocket—“

“There,” he mutters, and clicks off the multitool, collecting up the small devices and nudging her thigh backward so he can tuck the tech into his pocket. The movement has him rubbing along the front wall of her cunt and something desperate and needy trips out over her lips.

“P-please—“

Both hands free, he grips her hips, pulling her back to the middle of his lap. She whimpers at the shift inside her, trying to move — but his grasp doesn’t allow her to.

“Rocket—“

“For fuck’s sake, princess, you’ve got us both drenched. What a messy frickin’ pussy you got.” He clicks his tongue against his teeth, smirking at the place where her skirt covers them both. “Literally didn’t even do anything to you, and you’re already all desperate and pitiful.”

She bites her lip, brows cinched together. “Rocket, I — I need—“ She falters. How had he wanted her to beg, last time? The words are gone from her mind. “Won’t you please fuck me?” She thinks her whole body is flushed. She knows that’s not the right way to ask him, not what he wants, but everything else is lost in a golden static. “Please?”

He makes that regretful tsk again. “Feel like you should do the fucking this time, sweetheart.” Her mind trips over that, uncertain, wondering if it’s a strange sort of rejection. But his thumbs stroke back and forth over the low waistband of her skirt, sliding silkenly along her flesh. “Set your own pace. Part of figuring out what feels good.” His eyes slant up to her: serious and solemn under the goggles still propped on the top of his head.

She licks her lips, bracing her hands on the headrest above him. “It all — it all feels good,” she spills out. “Y-you feel good—“

He dips his hips and then thrusts up, just a little. Her vision blurs, all the glowing little lights turning into shimmery starflakes and haloes, hexagonal chips of illumination shattered and splashed all around her. He chuckles at whatever he sees in her face. “Go slow and easy,” he drawls up at her. “Take your time. Told you — I got you.”

She’s shivering, even though she doesn’t think she’s ever been warmer. She pins her lip between her teeth so hard she thinks she might draw blood again, and rocks experimentally against him. The curve of his cock rubs against that spot inside her, and a moan flutters up out of her lungs, molten and feverish.

“There we go, sweetheart.” His fingers hover over her thighs, brushing against her shuddering skin, and he grins, sharp and gleaming. “Can’t believe you’re this worked up just from sitting with me.” He plucks at her hips under her skirt, tugging her upward, guiding her into a soft, gentle bounce. Her walls clench on him needily, and a little keening noise filters from her throat before she even recognizes it’s there. God, he feels so good. She takes over, bracing her feet against the floor and her knees against the edge of his seat, lifting and lowering herself carefully, a little clumsily.

He doesn’t seem to mind, though.

“Greedy little pussy. So frickin’ snug — huggin’ me so tight. Next time I’ll get you outta the damn skirt so I can watch this gorgeous little cunt suck me in.”

Without thinking, she reaches down with one hand — the other braced against the back of his seat — tugging up the edge of her skirt, and she sees the fire-bright flash of his eyes before he groans.

“Fuck, princess. It’s like she doesn’t want me to leave.” His eyes linger on whatever he can see of her below her bunched-up skirt, then rise to her breasts. They jostle slightly as she lifts herself up and down. The Intergalactic Omniphonics logo is rumpled up over them, nipples strutting forward in the dim light. His eyes are hungry, burning-hot as he watches them, and she can’t help but arch a little further.

“Are you bouncing those gorgeous tits for me, sweetheart?” he snickers, and she falters, flushing. “Don’t get all shy. Love to watch my good little slut give me a pretty show—“

He lunges forward abruptly, tumbling her out of her rhythm, so he can scrape his tongue over the nipple that had been neglected earlier. She muffles a little squeak of surprise as his hands brace her hips so he can lean in and clamp his teeth onto the skin there, so fast and firm that for a second her heart scrambles in fear. But his bite is as delicate as his fingers when he’s weaving together the wires in his gravity mines: the perfect amount of pressure, dangerous but not breaking skin. Her squeak turns into a startled moan, body arching toward him even further, fists clinging to his t-shirt. He chuckles around a mouthful of her and she has to force back the keening wail riding in her throat. Then he draws away, just enough to pin her nipple daintily between his sharp teeth and flick his rasping tongue against it. His hands shift upward to cup the silk of her curved spine, claws prickling, and his mouth widens to take in as much of her breast as he can. She stifles a shriek, arching again, and he bites with just enough pressure to leave an oval of red indents when he finally takes his mouth off her.

“Too scary, sweetheart? Or did it feel good?”

She shudders and hums a note, but he locks his hands into her waist, not letting her move, keeping her trapped on his dick while she squirms desperately. “Rocket — wh-what — please—“

“Fuckin’ — keep wiggling like that and you’re gonna ruin all my noble frickin’ intentions,” he growls. Her hands drop from where they’d knitted in the folds of his shirt, lacing through the thick fur of his abdomen instead. It fluffs between her curled fingers in feathery, ticklish tufts, teasing against her knuckles. She’s desperate for the feel of him under the fabric. She wishes he’d taken the shirt off — she wants him pressed up against her everywhere—

“Told you,” he gripes, tightening his hands at her waist and not letting her move. “Gotta use your words for now. You like that? Or was it too much?”

She looks down, hazy-eyed, taking in the red marks forming an ellipse around her areola.

“Liked it,” she says breathlessly, almost panting. “Scary, but in a good way. I like your marks — please—“ she wriggles against him, grinding herself against his fur, gasping when he taps against that spot inside her again. “Please,” she repeats, wide-eyed and tearful when she looks up from where her fingertips have made their way under his shirt, burying themselves needily in the soft fur over his belly. When her eyes catch his, she realizes he’s been watching her with a narrow, scrutinizing stare.

“Yeah, okay,” he says at last, releasing her hips. She muffles a moan and resumes rocking against him, trying to find the pace and motion that had felt so good a few heartbeats before. His fingers slip between their bodies and before she can register the action, he’s pinching her bare, slippery clit with light fingers.

She bites back a wail.

“What about that, pearl? You like that?”

“Uh-huh — yes,” she gasps out breathlessly when he raises a brow threateningly. “Yes, yes, I do, I like it — like it so much, promise, I love it— “

She’s not even sure what she’s babbling anymore: just broken whispers and nibbled, watery half-words. Through tear-blurred vision, she gets the impression of a smirk curling his mouth.

“Yeah you do. Pathetic, needy little thing, an’ all mine,” he bites out, and the words drip like crystallized honey on her skin: rasping and warm, and golden-sticky. She’s so hot she thinks she might go up in flames.

“Yes, thank you, Rocket, thank you—“

He hisses between his clenched teeth. “Polite, too. Using all your pretty good-girl manners while you bounce up and down on my dick — what a well-behaved little slut you are—“

“I — I can’t,” she pants, not sure what she’s referring to — only knowing that everything is overwhelming and incandescent. Her hips quicken as she bucks against him, shaky and needy and shimmering with sweat. Her pace is jagged, full of breathless pauses as she tries to figure out how to maintain all the strokes that feel good, startling everytime he rubs against her insides in a way she hadn’t anticipated.

“Yeah you can, kitten. I promise.” He grins sharply, not easing up on the little bundle of nerves between his fingers: rolling it instead, toying with her lazily.

“Wait,” she gasps out breathlessly. The flush swells along her skin, an omen of her impending orgasm. Tears spill down her face in earnest now, and she sees his eyes lingering on them: tongue flicking over his teeth like he wants to lap them up. “Wait—wait, please — I want you to c-come too—“

“Don’t you worry about me, princess.” He grins sharply. “You’re the star of this dirty little show.” Something about the way he says it and the gleaming, almost mocking bite of his smile makes her belly clench tight, and she can feel herself squeezing him. A wounded little noise tries to stammer out of her mouth and sure enough, his grin only grows sharper. “Listen, kitten — you keep using those pretty manners of yours while you cry on my cock, and I’ll be just frickin’ fine.”

She thinks she might cry — for real, though; these tears are just overwhelm, but she’s hovering on the edge of something grieved and wounded. “P-please? I want you to, please, I want you to c-come inside me again—“

She’s vaguely aware of the smug look on his face — and how it falls apart, piece by piece. He grits his teeth, head tilted, one ear flattening uncertainly. “You sure, sweetheart? It ain’t supposed to be about me this time—“

He says it like she hasn’t been the one to come every time they’ve been together — and more than once, that first time.

“Mmhmm — yes—“ The words are tattered and ragged. “T-tell me how to get you there, please—“

His tongue licks over his teeth again — hesitant, she recognizes through the growing haze of need. His claws prickle up and down her back again. “Go just a little faster for me, sweetness,” he says only, and she tries desperately to speed up, whimpering as he continues to stroke and play with her clit. “I know, princess is getting all tired and fucked-out,” he purrs silkily, and that makes her abdomen tighten up too. His grin is taunting. “Wish you could see yourself — what a pretty whore you make for me, trying so frickin’ hard to make me come. Love watching how hard you try for me.”

She whines, thighs clenching as she tries to push herself faster still. Her breasts squeeze between her upper arms, plumped up and bouncing; her hands brace in the soft fur of his abdomen. He groans and hisses between his teeth, his breaths starting to turn sharp and short, ragged in the middle.

“I can tell how much you like it when I call you names, too, you wet little slut,” he growls. “Somehow this sweet, tight pussy of yours gets even sweeter and tighter for me — fuck—“

His brow furrows, both ears flattening as the hand at her waist grips tight enough that she can feel his claws sink into her skin and the fat beneath. The sting of it makes her arc against him, staggering out a hiccuping sob before she sinks back into her rhythm. His touch against her clit suddenly shifts, and the leathery, callused pads of his fingertips scrub roughly against the soft, swollen bundle of nerves. Some distant part of her feels his hips drive up against her, sees his lip peel back from his teeth in something close to a snarl — but then the wave of building heat snaps inside her. It spreads like a firestorm: swirling and tumultuous and scorching under her skin. Every bone in her body feels like it’s been cracked in two, sending sprays of sparks and molten gold through her veins, blinding in its fire-brightness. He thrusts up into her, dragging the curved ridge of his cock along that sensitive spot on the front wall of her pussy. The glittering burn of her orgasm is still pulsing through her, so overwhelming she doesn’t even need to worry about screaming — she can’t get enough air out of her lungs to make a single sound.

His hips stutter beneath her — “you’re fuckin’ strangling me — perfect frickin’ pussy; perfect fuckin’ pearl” — and then he drags her torso against him, hips driving upward into hers as he muffles a choked, growling half-shout into her breasts, shuddering against and inside her.

She crumples against him — or maybe they collapse together — breathless and quaking, shuddering in aftershocks.

She’s not sure if she blacks out. She doesn’t think so. But time loses all its meaning, much as it had when she’d first climbed into Rocket’s lap and lowered herself onto him. She comes back into awareness while the breath is still rasping in both of their lungs: slower now, but still heavy and deep. Mumbled gratitudes are already wobbling over her lips, born in the watercolor-aftermath of her orgasm, half-conscious and blurred at the edges. His face is pressed between her breasts, the edge of his goggles biting into her soft skin. She tries to lift herself up and away — to let him breathe — but he grunts something irritable and winds his arms more tightly around her ribs, forcing her to stay right where she is.

She forgets how strong he is sometimes.

“Most perfect tits,” he rumbles from between them. Her body is too tired to blush properly, but it gives a valiant effort: blood rushing weakly into her cheeks, faint and warm. “Most perfect — don’t know how I frickin’—“

Whatever he says next is growled lower than she can hear, stifled under exhaustion and her own body. She brings her hands from where they’re pinned between their two bodies: fingers releasing their curl in his fur, floating upward to stroke lingeringly over what she can reach of his head. When he finally eases his grip on her and allows her to lean back, she has to strangle back the tatters of an exhausted, half-panicked giggle at the sight of him: goggles askew, fur mussed beneath them, brow already ominously creased.

“You okay, pearl?” His eyes, still cinnamon-hot, rove over her. “You’re bleeding somewhere. Can smell it.” He mutters a curse under his breath, fingers skating — cool and delicate — over the oval of pretty pink indents on her breast.

“I think it’s my side,” she tells him quickly. “It’s fine,” she adds when his brow darkens.

“Turn,” he orders flatly, and she does, trying not to flinch at the feel of him — still buried deep within her, still bone-hard. The way he shifts inside her is suddenly torture. She abruptly realizes that she’s so sensitive she could scream.

But his fingers are already dusting against her side, nervously light.

“Thought I filed these down enough,” she hears him mutter under his breath — and somehow she just knows he’s talking about his claws. She hadn’t noticed, and it makes everything left inside her suddenly soften like warm candlewax. When had he done that? After she’d rubbed herself to orgasm in his lap a few rotations before? Or earlier, when he’d urged her to touch herself in front of him? “Gotta get you cleaned and patched,” he says more firmly. “Get up, sweetheart, and go sit on the edge of the bunk.”

She hesitates, suddenly uncertain how to maneuver herself over him without dripping everywhere — but he just slants her a wicked grin when she finally starts to rise and slips his hand between them, cupping her pussy and making her jolt against his fingers.

He snickers.

“Keep that inside as much as you can, princess. Think I’ll enjoy watching you try not to spill a drop.”

Her eyes flare wide and she clenches up automatically at his words — couldn’t stop herself if she tried — and floats carefully and slowly toward the bunk, knees still wobbly but somehow feeling like her feet barely brush the ground. She can feel his eyes on her, like little patches of sunburn on her skin, before he rises and moves past her to the linen locker, dampening a couple of fresh cloths. He cleans himself first — for someone so certain of his supposed imperfections, he seems to have no embarrassment in openly washing their shared fluids off his body. Then he’s tucking himself back into his pants and making his way slowly to her, eyes already hot and dark again.

“Lose the skirt and sit down, kitten. Then open wide for me. Wanna see how good of a girl you’ve been.”

A whimper crawls out of her mouth before she can stop herself. She tugs the skirt past her hips, and it looks in a river of silvery-pink at her feet. Lowering herself carefully to the edge of the bunk, she opens her thighs for him: shivering and wide, face flushed with heat.

“There’s that creamy little cunt.” He leans back and whistles low. “Wish you could see how swollen and sloppy she is, pearl.” He tsks regretfully, and wedges himself between her thighs. “Such a sweet, desperate little pussy. Coming all over me. Prettiest cunt I’ve ever seen.” He makes a show of licking his lips and slants her a devious grin. “Can’t wait to get her riding my tongue.”

She shivers, eyes wide and abdomen aching again from emptiness.

The second cloth — damp and warm — caresses her folds so softly and tenderly that she could almost cry. All the tension his words had brought back to the surface suddenly melts in the instinct to be soft and pliable for him. Then the soft fabric brushes her still-tender clit and she jumps, hot electricity ricocheting through her all over again, and her fingers sweep up instinctively to knot in the sleeves at his shoulders. His crimson eyes flash to hers mockingly — then he grimaces and looks back down, tongue clicking contritely against his teeth.

“Probably shouldn’t tonight,” he rumbles, mostly to himself. “Trying to take it easy on you.”

She’s not sure exactly what he’s talking about but any questions drift out of her grasp as he carefully cleans her, leaning in just a bit to lick a lingering, almost loving stripe up the inside of her thigh when he’s done. She shudders and melts, fingers aching to crawl across the shadows between them and pull him up against her.

“Yeah,” he mutters under his breath. “Waterlilies.”

Before she can ask what he means, he’s pulling back and retreating across the shadowy aisle, rustling for a bag of water, and pulling her sleep shorts out of the little clothes locker for her. He hands her the water along with a metal straw, tosses her discarded skirt into the laundry sanitizing-locker, and then — before she can blink — he’s crouched at her feet: dark claws delicately circling her ankles and lacing them through the fabric of her shorts. Her heart suddenly floats right up into the back of her throat as he dresses her.

“Rocket—“

He’s already got them lifted up to her knees, stepping back so she can stand and tug them over her hips.

“Drink,” he grumbles at her. “And turn so I can patch up those cuts.”

“I’m fine—“ she protests, but he’s already pulling the first aid kit off the shelf and nudging her to one side. The cool antiseptic spray mists against her flank and she jumps.

“Fragile,” he berates himself, voice low and muffled. “Gotta be more frickin’ careful—“

She twists back to face him, leaning the water bag against her hip so she can gather his face in her hands. The goggles are still crooked on top of his head and she thinks again how lovely he is. Her thumbs coast against the corners of his mouth gently.

“I’m fine,” she repeats. “Don’t — you don’t have to be careful of me.” She feels a sad little twist form between her brows, and another at the corner of her mouth. “I’m not — I’m not made of glass. I’m not fragile. I want you to touch me however — however you want to.” The flush is back, stronger than ever: bright and high in her cheeks while he stares up at her with wide fire-flecked eyes. “I told you,” she adds, dropping her voice to a low whisper. “I liked the way you felt. I loved it.”

I love you, she thinks, and doesn’t say. Anxiety suddenly wisps up inside her like a winterchill: pulling a sudden shiver from her spine, trailing goosebumps over her arms and spine like she’s been marked by frost. Her head tilts, brow crimping with worry.

“It was — I was okay, right?” she asks, her voice suddenly small and thin, breaking off uncertainly. “I can learn how to do better—”

“Fuck me,” Rocket spits, so venomously she flinches and drops her cupped palms quickly from his face. But his clawed hands snatch at her fingertips before she can fully snatch them back: his thumbs pressing into the wells of her palms before he flicks his tongue against the insides of her wrists. “You were so frickin’ good for me, sweetheart. Perfect girl. I never—” his voice cracks off and she holds her breath when he hesitates. “I don’t think it’s ever been that fuckin’ sweet before,” he admits at last, voice hoarse, and her heart trips in her chest. He clears his throat and loosens his grip on her hands before tossing her a shit-eating smirk. “Might have a hard time letting you go after all, once we’re done with all this.”

The delicate gold float she’d felt in the wake of his praise is suddenly hollowed by the reminder that he’s not intending this to be forever. Gutted.

Silly, she thinks. Stupid. He’d told her last time — till we get tired of each other. Her belly twists and pinches, more ashamed that she’d let herself forget about the impermanence of this part of their relationship than anything else. Now all she wants is to find the smallest space she can on the runabout so she can hole up and lick her wounds, then count her constellations and walk her imagined cemetery like it’s some kind of penance.

But Rocket must read something of her ache in her expression, because he’s sliding the first aid kit under the bed with the side of his foot, then leaping onto the bunk beside her. It sways beneath them and his hand sinks into her lilac-blue curls. He tugs her head back so he can peer down at her, into her eyes. The fire-ruby irises flicker between her own, dark and intent.

“M’not exactly known for saying nice things to people when I don’t mean ‘em, pearl,” he mutters dryly, and then something around his mouth and eyes soften. “That was — you were perfect. Promise.”

Her eyes suddenly burn with tears and he releases her abruptly, eyes alarmed, stepping back with his palms raised in surrender. She slashes at the wetness on her lashes, furious. “Sorry,” she says. “I’m always — I cry too much.” She offers him a wobbly smile. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

His stare narrows like he can tell she’s lying, but he lowers his hands slowly.

“I’m glad,” she insists instead, despite the fact that she knows her cheeks are slick. “I just wanted — I just wanted to make you feel good.” Because she knows there’s been precious little of that in his life.

Rocket swallows, head tilted to one side, studying her with a furrow in his brow.

“You’re still wearing your goggles,” she tells him — mostly to change the subject. To distract them both. A little trick she’d learned from life with her mother, exercised occasionally with the Recorders.

And it does bring the ghost of a smile to her lips, after all.

Sure enough, he fumbles one hand up to the crown of his head, surprised, before making a face and sliding them off, dropping them on one of the little shelves over the head of the bed.

“Get in here,” he orders, grabbing the curtains to pull them closed, and she pulls her legs up into the bunk obligingly.

“And the tech is still in your pocket,” she points out, smile blooming a little further as she leans back, propped on her elbows against the pillows. Yes. Later, she can mourn the fact that he doesn’t want to keep her. For now, she just gives him the plush whisper of her half-smile, welcoming and teasing, and gestures to the side pocket on his sleep-pants. He blinks at her, then clears his throat and slides the two small, flat machines out.

“One’s for you, anyway,” he says, voice creaking with forced casualness as he flips it toward her like an oversized coin. She catches it in her palms while he sets the other one next to his goggles.

She turns it in her hands. There’s a tiny touchpad, clearly made of two others pressed together, and three little beads that she suspects are lights. A ring of vibranium at the edge, patched into shape from scraps that look like they’ve been cut off larger devices and soldered into place. It feels cool and glossy under her fingers, and every smooth little bump and ridge somehow makes it feel more organic than mechanical.

“What is it?” she asks curiously, warming the metal between her palms.

He settles down beside her. “Get under the blankets first,” he orders, rolling his eyes. “No fur on your body, and just those stupid frickin’ shorts. You’re gonna freeze.” His eyes drop to her chest as she shifts and slides under the covers. “It’s a Fuck-You-Disk,” he says at last, once he’s satisfied. “The, uh, energy-and-data-disorganizer I was telling you about—“

But her eyes are already wide. “I remember,” she breathes, and she flips the disk in her hand again, studying it now. “You made them both so quickly—”

He snorts. “They’re easy,” he says, leaning against her arm. He taps the touchpad with his claw, and one of the little beads lights up in a cool moon-blue glow that almost matches her hair. “Simple, but fuckin’ effective.”

“How?” she asks, the words low and slow. “How do they work?”

He snorts. “You tryin’ to get me to put you to sleep?” A smirk curls the corner of his mouth. “The orgasm wasn’t enough?”

She arches a brow down at him, and she can feel the challenge in it. It surprises her — the flash of sass creeping up her spine — but he looks delighted by it, grinning. He taps the ring of patched-together vibranium and doesn’t wait for her answer.

“When the disk’s on, this creates a sort of shield around it. A bubble. It reads incoming signals — specific’ly, the kinds used by most scanners — and resonates at the same frequency. Kinda scrambling it, a little. Not enough to fry out the scanners — that’d be a dead-giveaway — but just enough to disrupt the scanner’s ability to identify what it’s looking at. So when someone’s scanning you, they’re not gonna get anything useful off you. Like, their device’ll see you, but not recognize you as anything different from any other carbon-based lifeform. Just a mammal with a heartbeat. Nothing special. Not what it’s looking for. Or maybe it’s set to scramble a particular sound, right? Like your voice or somethin’. The receiving scanner will think it’s a different wavelength — not a match. Maybe it’s looking for a DNA chain — it’ll still read all the chemicals you got there, but not in the right order.”

Pearl forgets her sass in the wake of all this wealth of genius and creativity, sitting smooth and cool in her palm. She stares at the little circle, like a miniature flying saucer in her hand. “It doesn’t disrupt your own tech?”

He grins sharply. “My tech operates six levels higher’n anyone else’s. But no — it only targets incoming signals.” He frames up his words with his hands, drawing a diagram on the shadows as if there’s a holoscreen above their bed. “The scanning signal hits the shield as it comes in, here.” He indicates a source point and the disruption. “By the time it reads the subject, here—“ He points to a third spot in the darkness, on the other side of the disruption point. “—the signal will be distorting information all on its own. Then it bounces back—“ He draws an imaginary line back to the source “— uninnerupted. Already fucked.” His voice is gleeful. “That means any signal I’m sending out — or inside the shield, like from me to you — is just fine.”

Genius, she thinks again — awestruck by her survivor once more. “And the lights?” she asks, caressing her fingers over them like braille.

He shrugs. “The range. Keeping it on the first level’s enough to hide yourself, probably a couple people right next to you. Second light should be enough to cloak a pretty decent ship, maybe even a Ravager freighter — not that I’ve had to test it, yet. Pretty sure the runabout’s not on anyone’s radar.”

She stares down at the rings of metal, pressed and soldered together in her hand. “This little thing can hide a freighter?” She has no real context for the size of a Ravager ship, but she knows what a Terran freighter is — had sometimes seen them passing by the wide river a couple miles from her mother’s little house, when she’d spent days out on her bike, as far from home as she could get.

Rocket snorts. “Should be able to. Like I said, haven’t had to try. Third level’s even better,” he adds. “Could prob’ly hide a fleet. A moon.”

She breathes out. “What’s the catch?”

He shrugs. “No catch. Not really. ‘Cept you gotta know what the incoming scanner’s looking for. DNA, sound, facial recog, energy signature. That sorta thing. Especially if you don’t wanna jumble up all incoming signals, just particular ones. Like if I wanted to make sure I got a transmission from you from the other side of a planet, but didn’t want the jackass next to me to see I got a bounty on my head.”

She flips it again in her fingers. “How does it run? Do you have to — to charge it?”

He starts to shake his head, pauses, then nods. “Sort of. It recycles whatever signal and data it’s reading. Which is basically everything, all the frickin’ time. It’s scanning constantly, so it can make sure to interrupt the right ones. So as long as it’s on and there’s something to be read, it’s got a charge.”

She runs her fingers across the edges of it. “And what do you need to make it?”

He shrugs. “Nothing special. Some vibranium, couple a’ resonator-chips. Micro-transmitters, which I can make if I gotta.”

“And you can program it for anything?”

“Yeah. As long as I know what it needs to be lookin’ for.”

She breathes out shakily and says what she’s been thinking. “You’re — you’re a genius.”

His sideways-smirk is all teeth. “Coulda told you that an hour ago when I was making you sit in my lap and drip all over me, kitten.”

Her body hitches next to him, snapping to attention.

“Definitely one of my better ideas,” he muses with a taunting leer. “But don’t worry, pearl, I got plenty more.”

She tries not to rub her thighs together, but he notices the twitch in them anyway and snickers before settling into the thin mattress beside her.

“Sleep now, sweetheart. You gotta get some rest ‘cause I’m gonna keep you up a whole lotta nights.” His brows wing up mockingly. “How’s that for bein’ mean?”

Oh god. She wishes she knew how to flirt. Instead, her voice comes out in a crushed whisper. “That’s — that’s good.”

His grin is so wide and his teeth are so sharp, and he tugs her down into the pillows beside him. “Sleep,” he repeats. “Don’t tell me I didn’t tire you out enough?”

He tangles a claw in her curls, deftly unlacing a knot she hasn’t combed out since she’d climbed atop him on the flight deck, and she bites her lip and lets her eyes flutter closed. Tentatively, she coils an arm around his waist, and he lets her: tucking the lilac-blue shine of her hair against his shoulder and neck so that every breath she takes sifts through the silk-soft fur at his throat and puffs against the metal collarbone glinting just at the edge of his shirt-collar. He untangles her curls with his fingers, unweaving every little snarl, so tender her eyes well up again. But his heartbeat keeps a steady timpani under her ear and eventually, her lungs ease, and her own heart slows, languid and mild.

But she doesn’t sleep. Can’t, really. Her mind is still going a hundred lightyears every minute; no, faster — even when his fists loosen into the starlit-lavender pillow of her curls, and his chest goes steady and slow against her cheek.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

frienddddsss thank you for your comments, for hanging on through some delays this summer, for being magical little dewdrops and summer flowers and tiny lil ice-cream-cones. and special gratitude to you darlings who leave me such lovely comments. you are what makes this fandom such a joy to be a part of and i am so grateful for you. may life give you extra-tasty waffles, peaceful mornings with perfectly-temped beverages, comfortable beds and restful sleep, and the high regard of friends, coworkers, and animals. you deserve lovely things.

exciting things:
♡ OH MY GOD a tumblr friend created art of chapter one. nemotia of cicatrix and it is SO good (ㅠ﹏ㅠ)
♡ slowly making progress with coloring ♡ in lieu of a cicatrix chapter next friday, we are FINALLY wrapping up ⋆˚.⚘𖡼𖥧𖤣 windfall 𖤣𖥧𖡼⚘.˚⋆ omg
♡ cicatrix is currently scheduled to be updated on the 26th and will be much plot.

coming soon: chapter seventeen. keyframe.
summary: a raccoon, a girl, and a kylosian walk into a throneroom.
warnings: none really. brief glimpses into rocket’s typically-filthy thoughts, pearl’s anxiety, and wyndham’s dickishness.
estimated date:

･:꧂posting schedules, chapter-previews, & more on tumblr♡
･:꧂masterlist & moodboard♡
･:꧂chapter one. nemotia of cicatrix scene by @frostedwitch
･:꧂portrait of pearl♡
･:꧂rocket & pearl's bunk on the runabout (lineart)
･:꧂rocket & pearl's bunk on the runabout (color)

Chapter 17: keyframe.

Summary:

a raccoon, a girl, and a kylosian walk into a throneroom.

Notes:

warnings: brief glimpses into rocket’s typically-filthy thoughts, pearl’s anxiety, and wyndham’s dickishness.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

keyframe. a moment that felt innocuous at the time but ended up marking a diversion into a strange new era of your life—a chance meeting you’d think back on for years, a harmless comment that sparked an ongoing feud, an idle musing that would come to define your entire career—a monumental shift secretly buried among the tiny imperceptible differences between one ordinary day and the next. In video compression, a key frame defines major changes in a scene. Most frames in compressed video are in-betweens, marking subtle incremental changes, but key frames depict a whole new scene. This technique allows you to move forward without stopping to buffer, even if it makes it harder to rewind. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Cure for ghosts, my furry ass, Rocket thinks, scowling into the starshield as they knife through the sky toward Sovereign. It’s been hours since he’d slid into pearl’s sweet little cunt, and he’s still haunted by the prettiest mewls he’s ever heard in his frickin’ life. The sensory memory of her tiny, silky clit, soft and vulnerable and trapped between his fingers, has his claws tapping convulsively against the yoke.

She’d been so sweet and slow and uncertain, riding him for the first time. Fumbly and cute. Pussy all clenched up and fluttering while she’d sat still in his lap, tugging on her nipple for him, trying not to grind her clit against him, trying so hard to be a good little thing for him — trying so hard to please him.

Someday they’ll get to Thneed and drop off Groot, and then they can spend every rotation like that, for just as long as she’ll tolerate it. For a minute he lets himself picture it: perched in the captain’s seat on the Dreadnought, the starshield patterned with lacy snow and frost, rimmed in icicles. He’d keep her cozy and warm, wrapped in blankets on his lap with a mug of morningtea in her hands, making her share it with him while she kept his dick deep in her desperate, dripping cunt.

Finish your tea first, kitten.

He could get her all needy and then grip her hips and lift her off him, make her hover over his cock while she’d beg and plead to ride him—

But you told me I could be mean, pearl.

He wonders how quick he could make her cry to be filled up. It would probably be painfully, beautifully easy. She’d gotten so wet while waiting for him last night — it had damn near blown out every neuron in his brain. He’d never expected her to get that worked up, or that she would make it so damn hard for him to concentrate.

He’d needed a couple rotations to sort himself after the first night, when he’d convinced her to grind against him in her pink satin panties. He’d done his damnedest to not be a jackass again, and he’d thought he’d been more or less successful — but he’d still been disconcerted by how sweetly she’d looked down at him that night, and how adoringly she’d tried to press kisses into the corners of his mouth and the underside of his jaw.

It had made him ashamed, all over again, of how brutal he’d been with her on the Arete. And afraid now, too. Because she’s gonna be so fuckin’ addictive.

He’s never gonna get over her.

He’d eventually decided — for now, at least — that he doesn’t care. He’d woken to her sleepy, dark-lashed gaze this morning, and he’d wanted to stay in the damn bunk forever. Hesitation had cut into his fur and lingered there, till he’d let himself lick a quick kiss into the corner of her mouth. Her silver eyes had shot wide. She’d made a little plea of a sound in the back of her perfect throat, but he’d forced himself to get moving, rolling out of the bunk to start the final few hours of their flight to Sovereign.

He knows that ultimately, this’ll end — she’ll come to her senses or meet some handsomer, nicer jackass than himself. A Fronnish prince or something — someone who won’t deserve her, but who will at least come closer than Rocket himself. Alternatively, the Monster will rear his head and do something too dangerous or stupid or mean and run her off.

But for now? He’s just going to gulp down mouthfuls of her — as much as he can. That sweet, doe-eyed look of reverence, the thankful little prayers, the needy grip of her fingers curled into the fur over his belly. For fuck’s sake, he’s never felt anything like that before. The Ore Garden courtesans are at turns playful and generous and friendly, but they don’t clutch at his fur like they’d give just about anything to be a little closer to him. The feel of pearl’s fingers, knotting and tugging there, had made his abdomen cramp with the need to come. If she wants to sit in his lap or ride his dick or come on his fingers or — anything, really — then he’s here to frickin’ serve. He’s gonna convince her that he can take such good care of her for as long as she’s willing. In fact, he decides, it’s gonna be his first order of business when all this Sovereign shit is done. He’s gonna land the runabout and meet the High Priestess and scope the terrain, and then he’s gonna kill some abilisks and get his new ship—

And then he’s gonna fuck his pearl.

Really, properly fuck her this time — take over and do all the work for her, worship her, get her absolutely drunk on his dick. He’d tried to be careful with her the night before: to go slow, to let her get used to him, to give her all the control — or as much as he’d been capable of relinquishing, anyway.

I like your marks, she’d said so frickin’ prettily, caressing the indents on her breast as carefully as if he’d given her a loop of pink diamonds instead of a bite.

He shifts in the pilot’s seat, trying to surreptitiously readjust himself in his jumpsuit.

After they leave, he tells himself. After they leave Sovereign, he’s gonna fold her in half underneath him and play with her helpless little pussy until she comes so many times that she forgets every bad thing that’s ever happened to her — including every bad thing he’s done to her. He’s gonna fuck all the sadness right out of his pearl until she’s nothing but tearful moonsilver eyes, blissed-out smiles, and those sweet little gratitudes.

But first, before he leaves this stupid batch of planets, he’s gonna find a Sovereign lingerie shop. ‘Cause the frothy white lace she’d been wearing yesterday is still in his pocket, transferred over from his sleeping-pants — and he’s not sure he wants to give ‘em up.

Better to just replace them. ‘Sides, pearl needs more panties anyway, more opportunities to figure out what she likes under her clothes. And Rocket just bets Sovereign undergarments are made of gold lace and filigree, and wouldn’t that look precious, cradling pearl’s sopping cunt? Especially once the thatch of dark curls down there starts to grow in midnight-blue. He can already see the color-shift Wona Beax had mentioned, starting to collect in the delicate hairs of pearl’s eyebrows and her thick, sooty lashes.

For fuck’s sake. He hopes she lets him play with her long enough to see that. Glossy pink folds and damp, dark blue curls, and dripping gold lace. Saliva pools in his mouth and he has to swallow, claws tapping a staccato rhythm on the yoke. He can almost taste her—

“Do I look like M’dame Lavenza?”

Her voice breaks into his thoughts, nervous and tense, as she steps onto the flightdeck and nests in the seat beside him, tugging on a handful of starlight-blue curls. He takes her in: chaotic hair, wide moon-gray eyes, bitten lips. The soft curve of her belly with all his scars hidden safely under the panel of her leggings. Those anxious fingers, twisting the hem of her wooly, petal-pink cardigan. His abdomen tightens and his eyes flick around the hold, where Groot is climbing up the hatch. He lets his eyes skate over her again as she shifts in the seat.

Nah, princess, he thinks. You look like a pretty girl who just needs another good dicking down to settle her nerves.

“What d’you mean, kitten?”

“I need—” She licks her lips nervously and he tries not to let his eyes roll back in his head. “I need to look like someone Ayesha will take seriously, without reminding her of — of me from before.”

She’s so serious, so worried, and he forces himself to settle. She thinks she was sneaky, but he knows she was up all night, eyelashes flitting, thoughts spinning anxiously through her pretty head.

He’d been trying to take it easy on her, but maybe he should’ve fucked her again after all — made her come till she was dizzy and dazed and finally able to drift off, unworried, dreaming only of his tongue and his hands and how good he could make her feel. He tries to peel his attention away from where it’s clinging to his own filthy daydreams, and focus on what she’s saying.

“What d’you think might remind her of you from before?” Pretty girl.

She chews her lip, staring out to the starshield. Groot trundles behind them, pouring himself a mug of tarry coffee. “I mean — I know you said I look different,” she says slowly, like she’s got a knot of tangled thoughts behind her eyes and she’s trying to unwind them all. “Obviously I didn’t have — my hair was brown then, I mean. Of course. I looked — probably however you saw me on HalfWorld, before I knew you were there.”

You knew I was there from the frickin’ beginning, he thinks. He can remember how she’d gone still in the marble courtyard, her big, silver-ice eyes tracking the places he’d just run past. How something had pricked her awareness whenever he’d stared too long. But he also remembers how she’d looked in the purple wool coat and pleated white skirt, her shoulders stiff and uncreased, every line of her body as rigid as the sheared edge of broken-apart glaciers. The paleness and the sharp bones of her face, somehow now softened and turned pink and gold. And later that night: the bridal silk, so fine it had been translucent, bound tight around her body.

What she doesn’t know yet is that there was the time before, when he’d seen her on Wundagore II, still gathering intel about Sire and his bride-to-be so he could make his pitch and blackmail a companion for himself into existence. The High Evolutionary’s Flawless Pearl had been trapped in yards of pale-on-pale damask, gliding across the floors beside Wyndham despite the stiffness of the fabric. Every time he’d seen her, Rocket realizes, she’d been tied up in nooses of pearls, or collared and cuffed in massive silver torqs studded by moonstones and white opals. She’d been wearing that signature hairpin, slender and sharp, like a lance of starlight stabbed through her tidy chignon. Each wayward ringlet had been confined in a perfectly-glossed wave. The daggerlike hairpin had been iced with another cluster of white pearls, and a spray of pink feathers: the only color other than purple that he’d ever seen her in. The feathers had been so blushing-bright that they’d made her skin look ash-blue in the shadows.

You should move that. Just in case.

His hands suddenly call up the ghost of her throat in the Arete. The fluttering pulse in the hollow beneath his palms — the tremble in her gray eyes as she’d gestured with her chin to the place where the hairpin had lain on the floor like a knife. Rocket’s mouth goes sour, smothering all the plush, slippery warmth of last night’s memories. She’d been soft as hell then on the Arete — still pale, but warm and rumpled and lovely — her hands gently cradling his face and then his wrists, squeezing his thighs in nervous, harmless panic and desire. But before that — before he’d broken in through her window and sent her sprawling on the sleek hardwood floors, burnt up her knees and bruised her neck and cut his claws into her and hurt her — before that, he’d only seen her as cold and stiff and distant. Glacial. Austere and arrogant in her formality. If someone had found him drunk in a Wundagorish bar after that first time he’d seen her, and if they’d asked him what he’d thought of Sire’s Flawless Pearl, he’s sure he would’ve sneered.

Frigid, he would’ve said. Hard as flint. Steel-sharp, though. Mind like a godsword, probably.

Mean.

And sure, later, maybe some of his perception — well, maybe a lot of his perception — had been colored by the belief that she’d wanted to wear Lylla as mittens, but even in the beginning, the locals had been scared of her too.

So what might a Sovereign have seen, when they’d looked at her then?

As far as Rocket’s aware, the Sovereign seem just about as arrogant as he’d always imagined pearl to be. Maybe she’d fooled them too — maybe she’d had them thinking she was one of ‘em. Superior and haughty.

“How’d you an’ the priestess get along?” he asks consideringly, and pearl gnaws her lips and then shrugs, digging her fingers into the soft weave of her petal-pink cardigan. She looks like a flower, or a piece of candy he just wants to unwrap and suck on.

“We didn’t, really,” she admits. “Not that we had any, uhm, overtly negative interactions. But Herbert was there to take care of business, and I was there to learn — not to impress. It was only with diplomatic connections that I was supposed to… entertain and sort of….ingratiate myself. With his own — with the people he’d made, he wanted me to keep my distance. He’d — test me afterward, and the Recorders would keep watch.”

He blinks. “Watch for what?”

She shuffles up one shoulder, wincing. “Interactions that were appropriate for building relationships with… outsiders were different from interactions with Herbert’s… subjects. With outsiders, I was meant to ask questions to connect with them — though only in certain ways.” The corner of her mouth that he loves to see curled up in a kitten-smile now purses, twisting uncertainly. “Herbert wasn’t always — he didn’t always know how to talk to people,” she says, and he snorts at the wasted kindness of her description.

“I am Groot,” Groot interjects mildly, and Rocket reads a soft sense of skepticism. He still can’t understand the Taluhnisan exactly — not the way pearl does — but if he were gonna paraphrase the feeling, he’d think it would be something like, That’s a frickin’ understatement.

“Yes,” pearl admits, hitching both shoulders upward now, lips pinched in embarrassment and eyelashes heavy. “He was too — people could tell he didn’t like them. So when he wanted smooth dealings with someone, I was there to… soften his image. To be charming, in a… lofty sort of way. I’d talk to them about culture and politics and art, and I would find ways to validate them. But Herbert didn’t feel the need to w-waste—” She stumbles. “To waste effort on the people he’d, uhm. Made.” Her fingers are so deep in the soft knit of pink that Rocket wonders if they’ve punched through the threads and come out the other side. “So with them, I was only meant to be…pragmatic. Not to engage in any personal exchanges.” She sucks in a breath. “Their opinions didn’t matter. Their thoughts didn’t — matter, not beyond making sure that they were thinking the way Herbert wanted them to think. I think he wanted me to learn his — his metrics of value, and be able to apply them as a sort of — force of maintenance when he was distracted by other projects. New experiments, new expansions, new sciences.”

“So Vim and Theel were watching to — what, report back if you asked a real question or somethin’? Showed too much interest in the little peoples’ lives?” Rocket snickers at the ridiculousness of it, but he feels the smirk falter on his face when she looks at him with big eyes.

“I am Groot,” Groot says solemnly.

Rocket swears under his breath. “Okay,” he reasons, trying to sort out his thoughts. “Okay, so you didn’t really have any interactions with the priestess, then.”

She shakes her head. “Not beyond initial introductions. But I was with Herbert the whole time — listening to their discussions, being watched. Making people nervous without meaning to. Trying to — well, behave.”

The word makes him want to cringe. “Behave like what?” he asks flatly, and she shrugs again.

“Like a wife befitting the High Evolutionary?” she offers, sounding a little lost. The corner of her mouth does that little twist again, like it wants to cry even though the rest of her is still holding steady. He watches the tightening of that little muscle and tries not to think about licking it.

“Okay,” he says slowly, maneuvering them through one of their last jump-points of the trip. “So you just stayed at Wyndham’s side, mostly quiet? Doing that ice-queen thing?”

Her brow creases, then smooths out. “Oh. I never thought of it like that, but — yes. I was — cold. I don’t really know when that started but it was… easier to do what Herbert said when I was like that, and it didn’t — he preferred me that way, anyway.”

Cold. It seems like a mild word for what it looks like from the outside: like she’s a fuckin’ vampire, a gorgeous corpse — dead inside, heart completely iced-over. The Sovereign would have seen that coldness, Rocket figures. They may or may not have been impressed by her, but they’d’ve seen that rigidity. That iciness. The perfect posture, the dead eyes. Implacable and unmoving. They’d’ve drawn conclusions about her from that. Probably wrong ones, like his. She’d implied she’d made them nervous, after all, and he suspects he can imagine it: seeing her as the High Evolutionary’s silent, judgesome right hand, who might whisper critical contemptuous observations to him in private — who might sway him to violence.

Rocket had believed so once too, after all.

But she’s nothing like that now — not when she’s not trying to hide, anyway. Her shoulders slope, delicate as bird-wings, and her eyes shimmer like handwarmed gunmetal or quicksilver stars. Everything down to the ends of her hair, shivering and bouncing when the rest of her isn’t even moving, looks alive.

“You don’t look anything like you used to,” he tells her firmly. “Just keep the ice outta your veins and you’ll be—“

“It’s the only way I know how to — to be, though,” she interrupts — quiet, but he can see the nervousness hovering at the edge of those eyes of hers, panicked darksilver bleeding into the platinum inner-rings of her irises. “Cold, I mean. In front of other people. It’s the only way I know how to try to be — to pretend to be someone who’s—”

“I am Groot,” Groot breaks in gently. Rocket doesn’t catch that one — he’s looking too hard at pearl, watching the way she buries her hands in the plush pockets of the petal-pink sweater, swiping them down her legging-clad thighs, twisting them back into the wooly weave of fabric. Knotting her fingers together.

“It’s the only way I can pretend to be someone worth listening to,” she says at last, her voice reedy and whisper-thin. She looks down, then up at Rocket, eyes wide. “Maybe I shouldn’t wear the pink?” she says, and he blinks at the whiplash-shift in the conversation. It sounds like she thinks she’s asking a perfectly-reasonable question, but his brain can’t quite grasp the cognitive leap she’s just made.

“Pearl, what—”

“Pink’s not a very serious color,” she says, almost to herself, and then she’s up and moving back to the hold before he can blink a second time.

“What the hell’s that mean?” he asks Groot.

The Taluhnisan shrugs, palms up. “I am Groot?”

“Pearl—”

She’s already back, bundled up in her teal cardigan now, soft and fleecy. She leans over as she tucks herself back into the chair, tying her hair back into a high ponytail with a bit of frayed cord he’d pulled out of the neck of a drawstring bag for her a couple rotations earlier — like she thinks a hairstyle is gonna make a difference.

“This is better, I think,” she says, running her hands down her thighs again, like she can soothe away the anxiety dampening her palms.

“What the fuck’s wrong with pink?” Rocket asks, insulted in spite of himself.

She wilts. “I don’t — nothing, I guess? On Terra, some people had… there was a lot of weird gendered nonsense.” She wrinkles her nose. “I don’t know why I was thinking about that now, but…” She gestures nervously, then looks down at the soft pile of woven threads in her lap. “I thought the teal was maybe more… calming.” Her lips face swivels upward and to the right, and her eyes squint, like she’s thinking hard. “I guess maybe the gray would be better? More serious? But the yellow is closer to Sovereign gold—”

Something about it wrenches at him. “Pearl, I don’t think they’re gonna recognize you or not based on the color sweater you’re wearing.”

“I am Groot,” Groot agrees.

“No, of course not,” she admits softly, fingering the hem of the cardigan, and then scattering her stare out to the stars again.

Rocket watches her from the corner of his eye, navigating them through another jump-point. The pressure in his ears pops as they exit. He clicks his regret between his tongue and his teeth, and hesitates. It’s feeling like more and more of a risk: reminding her of how they’d met, how he’d threatened her and hurt her on HalfWorld. So much more to lose, now, when she eventually wises up.

But she deserves the reassurance, he figures grudgingly.

“Remember how you talked to me when I — in the Arete?”

She grapples her gaze away from the starshield and back to him, moonsilver and already so soft for him. It makes his heart twist again with the memory of her hands cradling his face, resting like butterflies on his wrists.

You’re not a monster. You’re not, and you never have been.

She nods.

“You were perfect,” he manages to rasp out, looking away. He’s saying that a lot to her lately, and maybe he should feel some way about it — but that doesn’t make it any less true. “You were frickin’ perfect, and I took you serious. I listened to you, even though listening was the last fuckin’ thing I wanted to do. You were perfect then, and you weren’t even trying. So stop trying, pearl.” He swallows. “You’re gonna be fine.”

Her eyes are enormous and silvery and sheened up with tears again, blinking them out into her eyelashes like wet little sequins and glitter, and then she swallows and faces the void of space once more.

“We should be careful about what we say when we meet them. They’re…. easily offended.”

It takes him a second to realize she’s talking about the Sovereign again. Okay, we’re ignoring my frickin’ advice, I guess, he thinks — and he supposes he’s all right with that, if it means he can forget how many times in the last rotation he’s had to think about just how flawless pearl is. Instead, he leans into the distraction with a derisive snort.

“What, like the cost of transgression is death or somethin’?”

She blinks over at him, nonplussed. “What? No. That’s… a wild exaggeration.” She looks away again. “But they can make our lives difficult in plenty of other ways, even without knowing who we are.”

Her hands twist in the cardigan fibers again, and she looks back at him, eyes narrow and considering. Then she snaps up out of the seat.

“The red will be better, I think,” she mumbles, already halfway back to the hold before he can even think to stop her. “It’s closer to your orange. We’ll look more like a team—”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

“Who the fuck is this?” Rocket demands.

The throneroom of the Amber Palazzo is different from how pearl remembers it. It had always been a brilliant amber-gold, everything glossy and poured over with a honey-like glow. The space had originally been modeled after Herbert’s central chambers, where he’d liked to hold court, as it were — subjecting his people to assessments and evaluations, drafting and brainstorming with his Recorders, impressing diplomatic guests. Though the High Priestess’ palazzo has always been lacquered in gold — garish, Herbert had said, but he’d seemed contemptuously entertained by the gaudiness — it is as sleek as the estate rooms in any of the High Evolutionary’s laboratories, and it had been fitted with radiant cut-crystal windows from floor to ceiling, just like Herbert’s. The Sovereign sunlight through the glass had made the whole palazzo glow, exactly like the fossilized resin it had been named for.

Now, though, the windowed wall behind Ayesha’s dais has been covered up by rays of cobalt-blue enamel, fanning out from behind the throne: radiant and regal. Still cold, and pompous in its way — but something about the new design makes pearl feel a little easier in her lungs. Maybe she’s reading too much into it, but it feels like the Sovereign are testing the limits of their freedom.

Perhaps that shouldn’t make her happy — it’ll probably only speed up their demise — but she feels herself flutter with the recognition of it anyway. Just the tiniest bit of liberation and rebellion, for the Sovereign people.

“This,” Ayesha tells Rocket coolly, “is your competition.”

She’s beautiful, pearl thinks. She hasn’t aged at all in the last handful of circs, of course. Her skin glitters with gold-dust, and she sits with her shoulders back and her spine unbending. Facing off against the three of them — if pearl counts herself among them, and maybe she shouldn’t, because she admits she’s trying to stay unnoticed in Groot’s shadow — Ayesha looks far more controlled than pearl has ever seen her.

It’s Herbert, the Terran girl realizes. Ayesha had always seemed dignified, but of course — of course she’d been anxious when dealing with Herbert. Now, without the High Evolutionary or his silent bride present — without the Recorders watching everything like hateful, pecking birds — Ayesha is not only collected, but confident.

Pearl might envy her, if she didn’t know how callous the Priestess could be. And if she didn’t know how heavy it must be — to have the safety of a whole people on her shoulders. Ayesha may or may not have realized the kind of destruction that Herbert is capable of, but the High Priestess had clearly understood him to be a powerful and menacing creator.

“It is not a competition if I have already won,” the other man rumbles from the sidelines. He’s massive: broader than Groot, with steel-blue skin rippling with scars. She thinks she recognizes the patterning from some of her studies. Herbert had expressed an academic interest in Kylosian epics and eddur — especially after the Mad Titan had ordered the destruction of the planet Kylos. the High Evolutionary had ensured that pearl had learned enough of the language and culture to recite nearly any piece of Kylosian storytelling at his request. This massive man — wider than Groot, standing just a few strides away — reminds her of the tales of the old Destroyers, and she wonders how much of his own saga is carved into his skin.

“You ain’t won anything,” Rocket snarls back at the Kylosian. “What do you mean, won? What are we trying to win? I just wanna kill some frickin’ abilisks and get my ship.”

“I am Groot,” Groot adds, and pearl watches as Rocket sniffs an acknowledgement in the Taluhnisan’s general direction.

“I am Drax,” the Kylosian replies, and pearl’s survivor rolls his eyes.

“You accepted my bid,” Rocket hisses at Ayesha through clenched teeth. “You said the job was ours—”

“The job is yours,” the High Priestess says, and her cool voice turns scathing. “But it generally requires a team of more than one person.”

“I am Groot,” Groot protests, and pearl feels a similar indignation rise up in her lungs — but she smothers it.

“I am Drax,” the Kylosian repeats.

“At the end,” Ayesha says coolly, “the reward will go to whichever of you is most successful.”

“Which will be me,” Drax asserts.

Rocket bares his teeth and reaches back to grip the laser cannon latched into his magnetic holster, and pearl finds herself stepping forward and leaning down before she can think twice.

“What defines success in this scenario?” she whispers into his ear.

Ayesha’s eyes slant to her, but Rocket speaks up before the Sovereign can focus on her for too long. “Yeah, okay, I’ll bite. What defines success in this scenario, or whatever?”

Nobody’s looking at her anymore, but pearl can’t help but curl her fingers into the hem of her red cardigan, trying to hide the nervousness she’s suddenly stuffed down deep under her sternum, where her lungs are rooted to the rest of her body. Little tremors try to shiver up her bones, but she locks them away, keeps them caged.

“Killing the most abilisks,” Drax inserts reasonably.

The Priestess’s golden lip curls in a faint sneer. “Keeping the Collective safe,” she corrects coldly. “Preferably, with the minimal loss of our batteries, which generally serve as bait.”

“Sounds a lot like killing the most abilisks,” Rocket says dryly.

“I am Groot,” Groot admonishes.

“I am Drax,” Drax says again, his brow furrowing.

“What if both of us — us, and Drax — what if we both manage to protect the Collective?” pearl murmurs, trying to keep her voice low so only Rocket and Groot can hear her. “No loss of life, and no loss of batteries? How will we be…compensated?”

Rocket’s ears flick, and his eyes shoot to Ayesha, mouth opening — but the High Priestess is already eyeing pearl distastefully, and the girl feels her skin tighten on her back.

“Are you trying to bargain, Terran?”

Pearl bites her lip. She hopes that Ayesha has seen more than one Terran in her time, otherwise that might make recognizing Herbert’s bride a lot easier.

“I’m just trying to understand the — the limits of the contract,” she says softly.

The Sovereign’s mouth pinches. “I somehow doubt that you’ll be on equal footing,” the High Priestess says with a dismissive flick of her eyes over the three of them. Pearl can feel Rocket bristling, like static electricity is jumping off his fur and snapping against her skin.

“My feet are superior,” Drax agrees, and for a moment, the High Priestess’ eyes flutter closed in exhaustion. “But I will not use my feet to defeat the abilisks. I will use my blades.” He gestures to two curved daggers from his hips, each as long as pearl’s forearm, and she wonders if they’re true Kylosian bloodsteel knives. Unlikely, given how the Black Order had melted down most of the traditional blades of Kylos, but possible, she supposes.

And if they are, they might almost be enough to harm an abilisk.

“You think this moron is gonna do a better job than me?” Rocket growls at the Priestess.

“I am Groot,” Groot adds.

“And I am Drax.”

“But if we are?” pearl presses, and tries to ease her grip on her sweater. She’s going to stretch the hem out, and she doesn’t want it ruined. It might be her favorite of the cardigans. It reminds her of Rocket’s eyes. “If we are on equal footing? If it’s impossible to tell who… who contributed the most?”

“We will consider that if the need arises,” Ayesha says, and her voice is edging into sharpness. Impatience. “Luckily, you are not competing for the same remuneration. Your bid is for payment in the form of a Gold Captain. While he—” She gestures with a willowy golden hand toward the Destroyer. “—has negotiated for one of our captives.”

“He’s capable of negotiating?” Rocket snickers.

Pearl knows she shouldn’t ask. It doesn’t matter. It’s not any of her business. But now that she’s opened her mouth, she can’t stop.

“What captive? Why?”

Ayesha’s mouth twists into something sour. She gestures to a member of her black-robed cortège, who sweeps to the side to whisper to a Sovereign admiral. The latter frowns, then turns and glides through an archway to one side.

“I hadn’t intended to bring in the rabble,” she says grimly, “but I suppose you’re already here.”

Rocket’s ears flick and he glances up irritably at pearl, tail puffing slightly. “Did she just—“

“Maybe it will serve to motivate you — to know what you are each fighting for.” Ayesha lifts her chin, eyes narrow and sharp. Somewhere, someone must have pulled a lever or pressed a button, because the rays of blue enamel behind the throne suddenly whirr to life and begin to collapse into each other like the folds of a paper fan. Behind the blue, pearl realizes, the massive glass windows remain: a callback to the days when the throneroom was more obviously modeled after the Adrestia’s public chambers. And beyond the glass: a Sovereign Dreadnought, sleek and golden, artillery gleaming in the misty Sovereign daylight.

Pearl can hear Rocket’s breath catch in his lungs and it makes her heart spring to life, all warm and flowering again. Her survivor, so in love with flying machines that he named himself after one. It almost hurts, how hard her heart thuds against her ribs, just for him.

Her fingers ease open in her sweater, melting into something more relaxed.

As the last blue enamel panel clicks into place, the admiral re-enters the room, dragging a hobbled, black-robed figure behind him. He throws the prisoner down onto the gold-tiled floor, and pearl feels herself sway with the urge to move forward and make sure the person is all right.

The captive looks up, teeth bared, and her hood falls back.

A Luphomoid, pearl thinks — though it’s a little difficult to tell for certain. For one thing, Herbert hadn’t cared much for Luphom — he hadn’t really considered it worth learning about in its own right. But he had wanted pearl to have a general understanding of current events, and she’d been aware of the Black Order’s massacres on other, “more valuable” planets — planets like Kylos, for instance. She’s fairly certain that Luphom had been one of the earlier worlds mentioned on that list.

Still, it’s hard to be certain of the captive’s origins. Parts of her have been broken up and re-patterned with metal implants. It seems likely that her entire scalp has been replaced with synthetic skin, since the characteristic Luphom-black hair is absent and her head doesn’t look shaved. Her eyes, too, are as fully-dark as a nightsky, including her sclera — pearl’s seen Herbert use similar implants in one iteration of his Recorders.

Another survivor.

“Who’s she?” Rocket asks, and Ayesha inclines her head.

“A beast,” the Priestess says, lips pressed thin. “She tried to kill my son. She nearly broke into his cocoon—“

“Cocoon?” Rocket asks flatly. “I thought you people were mammals.”

Pearl winces, and Ayesha glowers.

“—with the intention of pulling the gem from his head.” The High Priestess sniffs. “According to our contracted interrogators, she had expected it to be a fictional artifact called the soul stone.”

“This is getting too complicated,” Rocket mutters under his breath.

“I am Groot,” Groot agrees.

“And I am Drax,” Drax says. Ayesha closes her eyes and breathes like she’s trying to maintain some sense of civility.

“My son has a piece of our energy core, cooled and solidified, implanted in his head. It will magnify his strength and abilities once he is born. Whether due to misinformation or foolishness, this… Luphomoid vermin attempted to seize it.”

Pearl’s heart twists. Vermin.

Ayesha sniffs disdainfully. “Given that her entire plan hinged on stealing a magic jewel from a myth, I suspect foolishness.”

“The infinity stones are not a myth,” the cyborg seethes from her place on the ground. Her voice is hoarse and broken, and pearl winces. “My father—”

The admiral rears back and kicks her, putting his whole body into the blow. Pearl feels the sharp stab of his boot in her own gut, so hard that sourness floods her mouth. She can feel her mother’s boyfriend’s fist in her belly all over again, and she wonders if Rocket had been abused like this — kicked when he was already down.

No, she’s certain he has been.

That pilot light of anger in her belly suddenly flares to life. Thoughts slip through her mind, quick as fast little silver fish.

“You didn’t understand me right,” Rocket says flatly. “When I said this is too complicated, what I meant was I don’t frickin’ care.”

“Her father is the Mad Titan,” Drax says from a few steps away, and now Rocket’s mouth snaps shut. He stares at the Kylosian with wide eyes that quickly turn shrewd. “He made her from spare parts and ill intent, and he sent her to do evil deeds under Ronan the Accuser. He murdered my wife Ovette, and our daughter Kamaria — and I will have my vengeance on her.” His teeth grit so hard that pearl can hear them crackling against each other. “She is a monster.”

And that is the word that seals pearl in. All she can think of is her survivor in the gleaming, lightning-struck dark of the room in the Arete. The metal implants, the ridged scars.

I didn’t ask to get made, he’d growled. I didn't ask to be torn apart and put back together over and over and turned into some kind of nightmarish little monster.

But here I frickin' am.

“Sucks that this lady tried to kidnap your kid—” Rocket starts.

“She would have killed him,” Ayesha interrupts sharply. “She would have torn the energy core from his skull—”

“—but you caught her. You got her. And this contract should be mine.” His live-coal glare narrows on the High Priestess. “Mine. Not this blockhead’s.”

Drax blinks. “My head is a perfectly round shape.”

“Look at this guy,” Rocket sneers, jabbing a thumb at the Destroyer. “He’s gonna try to stab abilisks with frickin’ daggers.” He turns to the enormous Kylosian, and pearl can see that her survivor’s claws are clenched so tightly that they dig into his palm. For a moment, she worries he’s going to draw his own lood. “You’re not gonna be able to get through an abilisk’s hide with frickin’ daggers.”

“Then I shall dive into the abilisk’s mouth,” Drax says gravely, “and gut it from the inside out.”

Rocket’s eyes nearly cross with a frustration so palpable it borders on fury. “It ain’t gonna be any easier from the inside, moron—”

“I am not a moron, rodent!”

“And I am not a rodent, moron!”

“I want the Luphomoid.”

Every head in the room snaps around to face her, almost before she even realizes she’s spoken the words out loud: Rocket’s and Ayesha’s and Groot’s and even Drax’s, yes. But also, the statuesque members of the cortège have swiveled their faces to stare — some with lips parted in an expression pearl assumes would be considered unseemly. Even the guards are blinking at her curiously. The admiral is gaping too, and when pearl ducks her head nervously, her eyes snag on the Luphomoid’s midnight glare.

“What?” snaps Rocket. “The Dreadnought—”

“The Daughter of Thanos is mine,” the Destroyer growls. “No little girl will stand in the way of my vengeance.”

“I am Groot?” asks Groot, bewildered.

“Now this,” Ayesha says, her lips stretching into something a little too cold and elegant to be a smirk, “is interesting.” For the first time, she moves more than her eyes and mouth, leaning forward to set her elbow against her knee, and resting her chin in her palm. “The Daughter of Thanos does have a handsome bounty on her name with the Nova Corps, you know.”

Pearl licks her lips, not letting her eyes fall on either Rocket or the Kylosian, even though her skin is crawling under everyone’s sudden scrutiny. It’s so tempting, for a moment, to call up the cold, which has suddenly woven tentacles into the base of her spine and is trying to claw its way up her ribs.

“If the abilisks arrive, let my partner and the Destroyer work together to battle them, and pay them each their due,” she says slowly, interlacing her voice with the thinnest threads of the icy calm she’d once had to weave her whole being out of — refusing to let it take her over. Tempering it with the heat of her anger, the fireburst of outrage at seeing the Luphomoid cyborg kicked on her knees. “As you’ve said, it’s a job that will require more than one person, and right now, you only have these two.”

“I am Groot,” grumbles Groot.

“Three, then.” She takes a steadying breath, and she can feel her self threading back into her words, as solid and certain as she’d been on the Arete, pinned beneath her beloved survivor’s body, telling him how much he wasn’t a monster. “But,” she says, and now her tone is quiet and firm, “if we can do more, if we can do better — then we get the ship and the cyborg.”

Rocket gapes at her, then snaps his mouth shut.

“Yeah,” he says, arrogant again, but she can hear the thread of uncertainty weaving between his words. “What she said.”

“No,” the Destroyer interrupts, and his face is set with outrage. “The Daughter of Thanos is mine,” he repeats.

Pearl hesitates, and chews her lip, and flattens her fingers — smoothing the rippled edge of her red cardigan. She turns to the Kylosian and shrugs, trying for nonchalance. “If our plan works, then I guess you negotiate with us.”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

“What the fuck were you thinking?” Rocket hisses at her as they leave Ayesha’s throne room, heading toward the highest of the four landing decks and landing fields built on the Amber Palazzo. Pearl pleats her fingers back into her wooly red hem.

“Not here?” she begs, eyes flickering to Drax and the Sovereign admiral nervously. “Later, please. I promise. Back on the runabout. I have — I have an idea but I just didn’t get a chance to — to tell you before. And it won’t — we won’t lose anything, if it doesn’t work.”

He scowls and picks up his pace, the laser cannon still slung over one shoulder, nearly as large as he is. Balancing the added weight puts a hitch in his step and a flick in his tail, and she dips her head to hide the heat in her cheeks — not that anyone is looking at her now. She studies him from her lowered lashes. He has to take two strides for every one of Drax’s and the admiral’s in order to catch up with them, but of course he manages it easily.

Pearl lingers behind with Groot, hands twisting.

Maybe she shouldn’t have said anything. She’d drawn too much attention. Ayesha’s eyes had weighed her. Pearl knows she should have spoken to Rocket first. She’d intended to tell him this morning, but she’d been too nervous to latch onto more than a few words at a time — fixated on her wardrobe and her hair and her facial expressions. Then she’d intended to wait until they’d gotten back to the little ship.

But there had been no way she could have remained unmoved at the sight of the woman — nameless for now, in some ways like pearl herself, like Rocket had been: referred to only as the Daughter of the Mad Titan Thanos, at least by Drax and the Sovereign. There’s no way pearl could have looked at that woman and counted the metal implants in her face, seen the gleam of the prosthetic arm and eyes, witnessed her take a boot to the belly and be called vermin and monster and not felt that tug under her ribs.

There’s no galaxy in which pearl could have heard Drax say she was made, and not thought of her beautiful survivor.

No galaxy in which she could not think of herself, too.

Do you think we’re more than the people who made us? she’d asked Rocket a cycle earlier, and he’d forced her to answer her own question. Now, she supposes, it’s time to test the theory.

“I am Groot,” Groot murmurs from beside her.

“This is where we bank the batteries,” the admiral declares, gesturing to a wide outdoor landing deck, ringed by raised platforms, each one capped by glowing storage towers that hum and buzz with energy. “The abilisks that break off from the migratory herd will head here first, as this is where we generate the highest concentration of external energy — the equivalent to a stellar flare, if you will. Therefore, this space will essentially serve as an arena for your battle with the creatures.” He casts a sneering look down his nose at pearl and sniffs. “We assume you will be battling them, after all.”

Pearl says nothing and just focuses on not shrinking back.

This will work. She knows it will.

“We maintain a team of Sovereign astrobiologists who specialize in abilisk behaviors and migratory patterns, and they are currently tracking the herd’s movements around the clock. If all continues as expected, the migration is expected to arrive in approximately nine Sovereign days, or seven-point-eight rotations.”

“Less’n a cycle to prepare,” Rocket mutters, circling one of the structures that houses the batteries. His fur rises when he nears it and if pearl didn’t know how strong a Sovereign battery was, she might think he was anxious. Well, perhaps he still is — but she’s handled one before and knows how a single glass battery can make a person’s hand numb, sending little vibrations of energy-current up and down an entire body like everything is balanced on the edge of a static shock.

If the Sovereign had harvested some of the supercritical fluid that makes up the planetary cores and the insides of the batteries — then condensed it into a solid to implant in Ayesha’s son’s head like a magnetite chip in the beak of a bird — well, it’s no wonder the cyborg thought it was some other powerful, mythical stone.

“How big’s the herd?” Rocket asks the admiral.

“Larger than the previous incursion,” the Sovereign admits. “There are five new hatchlings this time, bringing the numbers up to twenty-two. We suspect the calves will not approach the Collective, but three of last migration’s young have now reached maturity. Our scientists are expecting six or seven bulls to make landfall. Perhaps a dam or two, looking for food for their young.”

Pearl’s heart twists. That’s at least a quarter of the herd — up to almost half — that might be gone by the end of this. Not to mention the danger that trying to fight off six-to-nine full-sized abilisks would bring to Rocket and Groot.

“And you geniuses never built anything here to hide behind,” Rocket deadpans, moving back out the perimeter. “No blockades or barricades to make shooting the moon-damned things easier.”

“Hiding,” Drax scoffs. “You are no true warrior—“

“Nope,” Rocket agrees darkly. “M’not here to test my strength against a bunch of testosterone-fueled cephalopods and angry mommies. M’here to get the job done, get my ship, and get out.”

“We have no need to build such barricades,” the admiral intervenes with a superior sneer, “because we are not the ones fighting. If you would like protection, you must provide it yourself.”

Pearl closes her eyes. This has always been the most exhausting part of the Sovereign, in her experience. They try so hard to emulate Herbert, undervaluing everyone and everything outside of themselves.

Not that pearl can fully blame them. She’d spent far too long seeking his approval too, for various reasons. She just hasn’t tried to do it in quite the same ways they have.

“I will attack them face-to-face,” Drax boasts. “So that they know who has brought them death.”

“I am Groot,” Groot says mildly, and Rocket scoffs.

“You’re not even gonna get to enjoy your cyborg’s bounty if you’re already dead,” her survivor jeers.

The Destroyer growls. “I do not want the Daughter of Thanos for her bounty. I want her to end her. I will gut her on my daggers while they still drip with the blood of the abilisks.”

Rocket looks up at him with a creased brow and a worried snarl. “You’re a real chill guy, aren’t you, buddy?”

Drax glowers. “I am not cold, and I am not your buddy.” He pauses, then tilts his head. “Yet,” he adds considerately.

Rocket clicks his tongue against his teeth. “Oh. Yeah. Kylosian. I forgot.” He adopts his most patronizing tone. “Chill is an expression,”he drawls condescendingly, “and I was being sarcastic.”

The Destroyer’s brow clears. “Ah, yes. Saying the opposite of what you mean. Such a foolish way of communicating.” He turns to the admiral abruptly. “I am hungry. Where may I find sustenance?”

The admiral’s lip is a perpetual curl of derision. “You are welcome to feed and entertain yourself in the city below.” He gestures to the system of rotating platforms that rise and fall like the cars on a ferris wheel, circling from the elevated Amber Palazzo and down to the city streets. “We only ask that you don’t… disrupt the locals. No disturbances, no problems.”

Pearl snorts in spite of herself, and tries to turn it into a cough when the admiral flashes angry topaz eyes toward her. The Sovereign might act superior, but she’s witnessed them when they didn’t know anyone… important was watching. Indulgent, excessive — hedonistic.

Messy.

The admiral’s glowering at her, and pearl tries not to imagine a Sovereign version of one of her mother’s old reality shows. Do they even still air on Terra? Real Housewives of the Golden Piazza. She covers her mouth with both hands, trying to swallow a panicked giggle.

Luckily — or because he can see she’s about to ruin everything — Rocket distracts the admiral’s attention by clearing his own throat. “You. Uh. You got places where I can pick up supplies if I need it? Tech, or weapons, or spare parts?”

The admiral lifts his chin, just so he can look further down his nose at her companion. Pearl feels her strained smile fade, and her jaw clenches. Anger sparks and flares in her belly again.

“The Collective doesn’t keep… spare parts,” he says haughtily. “There are many nearby shops that cater to luxury weapons and technology, however.”

Rocket clears his throat again and flicks a burnt-ember glance at pearl, so unexpected and heated that her breath catches in her throat.

“Any, uh, clothing shops? Or shit like that? In case the girl gets bored?”

She winces. Shopping for trinkets.

The admiral rolls his eyes. “One might think you were here on a holiday instead of a job,” he says scornfully, but Rocket only rolls his eyes.

“Never frickin’ coming back,” he snipes. “Might as well enjoy it while we’re here.”

The admiral curls his lip. “There are multiple luxury boutiques in the central boulevard,” he admits. “Now, if that is all, I shall take my leave.”

He doesn’t wait for a response, sweeping away with exaggerated grandeur.

“Do they sell zargnuts down there?” Drax calls out to the Sovereign’s retreating back, but the golden man doesn’t answer.

Rocket’s already back to studying the perimeter of the landing deck, framing up each battery-tower between his thumbs and forefingers with his cannon wedged against his elbow, studying the access angles.

“Could build a barricade here,” he mutters. “Land the runabout here; use that too.” His voice drops lower, as if he’s talking to himself. “Won’t matter if it gets fucked up once we got the Dreadnought—”

“I don’t think we’ll have to kill them,” pearl ventures now, her voice hesitant. “I told you, I — I have an idea.”

“Not kill them?” Drax asks dubiously, his eyes moving to Rocket. “Is this also sarcasm?”

Her survivor rolls his fire-red eyes, not looking away from whatever he’s trying to measure between his fingers. “Nope. She’s frickin’ serious.”

“Of course you should still — we should still build whatever you need, just in case,” she rushes to say. If she’s wrong, she doesn’t want him hurt. “I just don’t think it will be necessary. But, uhm — better safe than sorry, I suppose? And,” she adds quickly. “I can help with the — with building, if you tell me what you want done.”

“There must be a fight,” Drax says stubbornly. “And I must kill the most abilisks. Otherwise I will lose my reward. And I will have my revenge on the Daughter of Thanos.”

“I am Groot,” Groot pipes up.

“Yes,” Drax says, suddenly impatient, “and I—“

“It’s just the way Groot speaks,” she interrupts. “I’m sorry for not explaining before. He’s Taluhnisan, and his vocal cords are very rigid, so it sounds like he’s only saying those three words. But he’s actually saying other things. I’m happy to translate.”

“I am Groot,” Groot says agreeably, and Drax looks intrigued.

“What did he say?”

“He’s sorry for your loss,” she admits quietly. “As am I.”

The Kylosian looks startled — then suddenly deflates.

“Oh,” he says at last. Then he perks up. “Are you also in need of sustenance? Perhaps the four of us should dine together—“

She feels a smile twitch at the corner of her mouth. “You won’t like Sovereign food much, I think,” she confides. He blinks dark — surprisingly soulful — eyes at her.

“No?”

“It’s extraordinarily bland,” she confides, and he frowns almost immediately. “Especially compared to Kylosian cuisine,” she adds frankly. “Pretty, but nearly flavorless.”

“Probably no zargnuts then,” he mutters, and she has to stifle a soft laugh. She hesitates, then reaches out to rest a light hand on his forearm.

“They only want to eat,” she says quietly. “The abilisks. It seems unfair to kill something that only wants to eat, and has no intention of hurting anything.”

The Destroyer shifts uneasily on his feet, and looks back at Rocket again. She smiles in spite of herself. Her survivor has something about him that makes following him feel natural — even this Kylosian stranger notices.

“Is this a dishonorable battle?” he asks Rocket, suddenly sounding skeptical.

“It’s frickin’ ridiculous, is what it is,” her survivor snaps. “I came here to use guns to kill things. Which, I might add—“ He throws a wide-open palm in Pearl’s direction without even looking. “—you knew. I’m a bounty hunter, remember?”

She chews her lip and watches him: his annoyed blood-moon eyes, gleaming like overheated carnelian. She can feel the hesitation tearing tiny claws at her lungs: little scratches and shreds.

“I think they’re like us,” she says at last, her voice even more of a whisper than she’d meant it to be.

“They appear to be very different, according to the holovids of their last attack,” Drax interjects. His eyes narrow. “Unless you are hiding your tentacles.”

“I am Groot,” Groot says, and extends his fingers into vines. Drax purses his lips, impressed despite himself.

“Perhaps you are an abilisk,” he acknowledges to Groot.

“No,” pearl says, and she catches Rocket’s eyes. Holds them— urgent. “I think they’re like us.”

His eyes are wide and disbelieving. “The abilisks?”

She offers him a helpless little shrug.

“Pearl, first you’re telling me the Taluhnisan is like us. Then the Sovereign. Now the abilisks. What’s next?”

She winces — hesitates. Now doesn’t seem like the right time to say the Daughter of Thanos. Luckily, he continues without waiting for her response — brandishing a threatening claw.

“You wanted the houseplant—“

“I am Groot?”

“—and I said okay. You want the bounty on that cyborg? Fine, we’ll frickin’ keep her and drop her off on Xandar, I guess—”

She cringes. She isn’t looking forward to clearing up that misconception.

“The Daughter of Thanos is mine,” Drax repeats sulkily.

“—but I draw the frickin’ line at adopting a fuckin’ abilisk.”

“I do not think one would fit comfortably, even on a Gold Captain,” the Kylosian adds.

Rocket blinks, then nods approvingly. “Yeah,” he agrees. “What he said.”

“I don’t want to adopt an abilisk,” she reasons quietly. “I just don’t want them to die out.” She chews her lip and eyes the Kylosian nervously. She’s not sure how much he’s inferring from any of these conversations, or how careful she needs to be — but then, she’s always tried so hard not to underestimate people the way the High Evolutionary does. So instead, she just offers Rocket a pleading little half-shrug, and she looks out at the stars, wondering how far the herd still is. Seven-point-eight rotations. How many lightyears is that? The distant celestial bodies glow and shimmer, studding the expanse of space with patterns that are simultaneously familiar and new.

Eucleia. Penthus. Elpis.

Adrestia.

Dicé.

The words unfurl on her tongue like a blossom, petal-sweet, before she’d even known they were growing there.

“I hate to think of us all here, just playing out the roles we were assigned.” She slants her eyes downward to her beloved survivor. “Don’t you?”

His eyes widen, molten sunsets and bonfires. She sees his chest hitch on an uncertain, startled breath — and then those same eyes narrow.

“You’re the second-worst frickin’ thing that’s ever happened to me.”

She feels her smile wobble. “I know.”

“Who assigns these roles?” Drax asks.

“The first-worst that’s ever happened to me,” Rocket answers dryly. He rolls his eyes and leans on the cascabel. “Okay, kitten. I hope this idea of yours is a frickin’ good one.”

She feels a half-shy smile curve the corner of her mouth. “Maybe it is?” she says hopefully. “It all hinges on you.”

He blinks. Frowns. “If it ain’t shooting shit—“

She cuts him off with a nervous half-smile better. “Better.”

He raises an eyebrow.

“It’s inventing.”

His eyes flicker — intrigued, she thinks. The pause between them is long and gold-dusted. “I’m listening,” he drawls.

Her eyes flick to Drax. “Later,” she urges. “Maybe we should eat dinner first. I’ll tell you — later. In private. I promise.”

Rocket’s gaze narrows, and somehow grows even more scalding-hot. She shivers as he licks his lips, swinging the cannon off his shoulder and collapsing it, snapping the hull against the magnetic holster on his back. She startled when his claws snag her wrist as he passes, tugging her along as he lopes toward the vertical carousel of golden platforms. “Let’s go eat then. C’mon, Groot.”

“I am Groot,” Groot replies with a chuckle, following behind.

“Wait,” Drax says, and she can hear his voice quake with each step as the big Kylosian trots the few paces to catch up. “Should I also be assigned a role?”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

deepest love to all those of you who are sticking around as this story continue to unfold (and extra-gooey homemade chocolate-chip cookies, warm from the oven, for those of you who leave comments. i appreciate you SO much and i truly do treasure, save, and reread so many of these remarks). i really enjoyed this chapter as i was drafting it and again on my second, third, and fourth revisions - but while i was editing it today i realized it's a lot choppier than i thought. i hope you're able to follow it without too much difficulty and i apologize if reading it is a chore. anyway this is a great example of why i'm thankful lol. for your patience, generosity, and diligence in staying by my side through the rougher chapters lol. thank you a million times over from the bottom of my heart ♡♡♡♡

exciting things:
♡ art of chapter one. nemotia of cicatrix by a sweet tumblr friend (ㅠ﹏ㅠ)
♡ my art from chapter thirteen. heartspur. should be posted this weekend
♡ cicatrix is currently scheduled to be updated three times in august! i've already got another (very smutty) oneshot to be posted on 8/2, so expect cicatrix chapters on 8/9, 8/16/ and 8/23.
♡ major themes of every future chapter mapped out.

coming soon: chapter eighteen. attriage.
summary: pearl is a brat.
warnings: so much smut. cunnilingus, d/s vibes, praise, slight degradation, use of “slut”/“whore”/”brat” (affectionate). edging, mentions of pussy-slapping. playful bites. overstim. aftercare. maybe a lil bit of top-drop.
estimated date: friday, august nine.

･:꧂posting schedules, chapter-previews, & more on tumblr♡
･:꧂masterlist & moodboard♡
･:꧂chapter one. nemotia of cicatrix scene by @frostedwitch
･:꧂portrait of pearl♡
･:꧂rocket & pearl's bunk on the runabout (lineart)
･:꧂rocket & pearl's bunk on the runabout (color)

Chapter 18: attriage.

Summary:

pearl is a brat.

Notes:

warnings: so much smut. cunnilingus, d/s vibes, praise, slight degradation, use of “slut”/“whore”/”brat” (affectionate). edging, mentions of pussy-slapping. playful bites. overstim. aftercare. maybe a lil bit of top-drop.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

attriage. the state of having lost all control over how you feel about someone— not even trying to quench the flames anymore, but lighting other fires around your head just hoping to contain the damage. From atria, the chambers of the heart + triage, the sorting of patients in hospital admissions, factoring in the urgency of their illness or injury. Pronounced “at-ree-ahzh.” The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

The High Priestess is a condescending fuck, Rocket thinks.

Modeled herself after M’dame Lavenza, he figures: cold, regal, formal. M’dame Lavenza never let that kind of disdain show on her face though — pearl had always been more implacable, though Rocket figures now that it had been more out of necessity than anything else. He’d guess there’s a solid chance that pearl has never had the heart to really look down on anyone — except maybe Theel — while Ayesha seems like she looks down on just about everyone. Of course, he’d also be willing to bet every last one of the units he’d gotten from Sanna Orix that the Sovereign ruler is brittle underneath all her arrogance. Not a drop of sweetness in her. Designed that way by Wyndham from birth, maybe — or she’d had it all squeezed out of her by his later machinations. None of pearl’s deep-down charm. He finds himself wondering, again, how his little Terran got through so many circs as the High Evolutionary’s betrothed and still kept such a soft frickin’ heart.

He should be pissed about all the holowrenches pearl has thrown in his plans today — but somehow, he just can’t find it in himself.

Dinner is as bland as pearl had predicted — no good spicy street foods or soups to be found anywhere on the Collective, as far as he can tell. The Kylosian wanders off somewhere — thank fuck, one less moron to deal with — but pearl picks up a few carry-out dishes from a small, fancy restaurant where Rocket doesn’t recognize anything on the gold-calligraphed menu. She urges him and Groot back to the runabout, where she opens each silver-papered carton and re-seasons the dishes inside, turning them into something new.

She hums while she works. He’s never heard her do that before.

“I am Groot,” Groot says later, after pearl’s climbed into the shower with her characteristic squeak-and-moan. No matter how many times she does it, it still makes Rocket’s tail twitch furiously, whiskers twinging. “I am Groot,” the Taluhnisan adds.

Rocket tries to lean into Groot’s words and what’s behind them. It’s a little harder without pearl’s presence. She’d probably say she doesn’t do much by way of guidance, but there’s a quietness that floods out of her — soft and slow as a rising tide — that makes it easier to relax into this different way of paying attention. To be honest, Rocket likes listening to Groot better than he likes listening to almost anyone or anything else. There’s no tense, frantic sense of his brain trying to sort through the order of different sounds and the way they line up — something that’s only ever come easy to him when it’s been strung together in a tune. No. With Taluhnisan, all the meaning is laid out at once, like the parts of a gun, and it’s getting easier and easier for Rocket to see how they fit together all at once.

In this case, Groot is saying something about the stars, and about the radiant energy of the cores, and about sleep. Something about soaking it all up and finding nourishment in it. Something about the too-snug quarters of the runabout.

“You’re sleeping outside tonight?” Rocket asks, the corners of his mouth tugging downward. He’s not concerned about the Big Guy, exactly, but—

“I am Groot,” the Taluhnisan replies mildly. There’s a sense of — something close to hunger, and a longing for starlight.

“You got your Fuck-You-Disk?” Rocket demands. Groot straightens, and a series of branches and bark split open in his chest — right over where a heart would be — and there’s the little circle of silvery tech, cradled inside a nest of twigs and leaves. Something about it pinches Rocket’s own heart, like his vagus nerve has been plucked — just once — by deft fingers.

He scowls. “Okay, show-off,” he grunts. “You got a gun?”

“I am Groot,” Groot gestures with open palms, closing the little cabinet of his chest.

“D’you even know how to use one?” Rocket asks doubtfully.

Groot pouts — there’s no other word for it. “I am Groot,” he utters, clearly insulted.

“Well, how the fuck am I supposed to know that?” Rocket demands, and hoists himself onto the edge of the workbench bunk, rooting around by touch alone on the shelf above. The rotary autocannon’s probably too big for the Taluhnisan to just carry around casually. There’s the single-barrel BN1 blaster or the triple-barreled BA17 ion pistol — but Rocket had swiped them both from the Eclector before he’d been run off the ship, and he’s still got a kinda bittersweet, emotionalistic attachment to Katie and Vicki. There’s the training quadblaster and the one he’s modding to shoot more rapidly and accurately — but those are pearl’s.

“Twin-barrel plasma blaster all right? It’s a little big for you to just carry without a holster,” Rocket adds doubtfully. “Where you gonna—“

“I am Groot,” Groot admonishes gently, and Rocket gets the impression that the Taluhnisan is pointing out their size difference. The ligneous shell of skin on the Taluhnisan’s thigh creaks open like the lid of a locked trunk, and Groot begins to stow the blaster inside. Rocket tilts his head. Useful, he acknowledges.

Creepy, but useful.

“I am Groot,” the Taluhnisan sasses gently.

“Fuck yourself,” Rocket replies pleasantly. “Take the frickin’ blaster or don’t — I don’t frickin’ care. Here—” He trots up to the flight deck and digs around in the console till he finds an extra comm and tosses it at Groot, who catches it with surprising nimbleness. “Take that too. Just in case. And don’t—“ He hesitates. “Don’t get into any trouble. Stay safe. Get back here in time for breakfast.” He scowls and rolls his eyes. “Pearl’ll be all whiny and annoying if you get hurt or something.”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

I want the Luphomoid.

Rocket can’t bring himself to be mad at his stolen bride, no matter how much he’d like to be. No matter how much he knows he should be. Mostly because he also knows that she’s been tying herself in knots, trying to figure out how to get them through this next cycle without having to shoot a single cannon. It’s a dilemma she’s entirely made up in her own head, thanks to her unwillingness to see even a stray orloni or a frickin’ yaro root get hurt. But still — he scowls — he can’t bring himself to be pissed about it.

I have an idea.

He tells himself that hearing her out is just… pragmatical. If pearl has an idea that might save him some ammo, he should at least give himself the chance to listen. It’s not because he’s becoming even more of a pushover for her. He’s not. It’s just because it’ll be interesting to see what kind of idea her weird little Terran brain has dreamed up. The last so-called plan she had involved using the Last Living Taluhnisan as a disguise from Wyndham, so who frickin’ knows what this one will look like?

Besides. The way she’d suddenly sort of… stepped forward without moving a muscle — like all three Sovereign suns had suddenly realigned themselves just to spotlight her in that stupid, pretentious throneroom — it’s burnt into his brain now: the image of her. Shoulders back. Blue curls rioting out of that wayward waterfall-ponytail. Those solemn moonsilver eyes. Pink-cheeked, gold-freckled, and hands clenching into fistfuls of red Cyxlorade cashmere. Chin at that defiant little tilt. Everything sparking, and not a shred of M’dame Lavenza in her.

I want the Luphomoid.

It makes his belly tighten up.

He’s just finishing getting into his sleep-clothes when she steps out of the shower stall, tucking her little bottles of cleansers and oils — things he got to give her; things she puts on her naked, pretty body all the time now — into her side of the tiny toiletry-locker. Maybe that shouldn’t make his chest puff up with a bizarre sort of pride and possessiveness, but it does, and he’s not gonna try to quell it — not right now.

Groot’s gone, he thinks — and the thought snaps and blossoms in his brain like a crossette explosion.

He clears his throat. “Groot’s gone. I mean, just for tonight,” he clarifies quickly, as soon as her alarmed moonsilver eyes whip to his. “He just wanted to — I dunno, eat some light or something. He’s comin’ back in the morning. I gave him a gun and a comm, just in case.”

She hesitates, then bends at the waist to continue blotting out her hair while she looks at him sideways. Her skin glows, reddened and rosy from the shower. It suddenly strikes him — sharp as bladed lightning and twice as scorching — that he’s gonna have to make sure the Dreadnought has a good water heater. Something that runs just as hot as she likes. Sure, it can’t be good for her to burn herself like this — but Rocket figures that after so many circumrotations of Wyndham’s room-temperature bullshit, pearl deserves the indulgence of scalding her own skin off.

Besides, he loves seeing her all pink and flushed, with the steam licking right up off her skin.

“Thank you for looking out for him,” she says with that tender little half-smile, soft gray eyes melting into something sweet and grateful. She drops her day-clothes into the laundry-sanitizer, and he leans against the berth-style bed, watching as she squeezes out the ends of her hair. It’s left wet splotches on the clean shirt she’s put on — back to the sleeveless Sneepers tanktop, apparently, with entirely too much and absolutely not-enough of her tits on display.

He feels his already-burning blood heat up further in his veins.

“Yeah, well,” he grunts dismissively — but his eyes are seared onto the moon-pale stretchmarks etched over the tops of her thighs, just peeking out under her shorts. Is she wearing panties under them tonight, or not? Even his eyeballs feel warm right now. “That was hot,” he adds. His tail’s already swaying languidly behind him.

“The shower?” Her nose wrinkles quizzically as she adds her towel to the sanitizing-locker and sets the dials.

He snorts, watching. Her nipples are predictably stiff and sweet under the damn Sneepers shirt, peeking out between soaked silvery curls. He tests one canine with the tip of his tongue, letting his eyelids drop to half-mast.

“Nah. You.” He lifts his voice in a breathy, mocking mimicry. “I want the Luphomoid.” He chuckles. “Brat.”

She flinches. “I wasn’t trying to be—”

“Like seeing you say what you want,” he interrupts, before she can get all self-conscious and uncertain, second-guessing herself. Before he can second-guess himself, too. He flicks his tongue over his teeth, remembering the brief taste of her he’d gathered up on his tongue the night before. He can feel his voice go low and smoky. “C’mere, princess. Gonna give you a little reward, if you can do what I say.”

He sees the second her pupils bloom, wide and dark. The runabout’s tiny, but she takes the two steps toward him immediately, eyes big and lip pinned between her teeth. Her hands flutter and twist in front of her waistband, then rise to tangle in her wet, steel-blue curls. The speed with which she responds to him has his dick twitching already, abdomen coiling tight. He tries to quiet the strangled sound in his throat.

“You know you can say no, sweetheart,” he utters. “You know you don’t gotta listen to me. You can say no to anything you don’t like, or don’t want. Parts of it, or all of it.”

The memory rises up in him as quick and hard as a fist to the throat, dizzying and bone-breaking.

F’you don’t wanna be treated like the filthy fuckin’ whore you are, you better say so now, pearl.

That’s all you’ll fuckin’ get from me.

His whole body flinches.

“Anytime, pearl,” he says out loud, and swallows as his eyes burn red tracks away from her skin and out into the dark. “Won’t bother me at all.”

It’s a lie. At best, he’ll be riddled with guilt and self-doubt forever. But still — it’s a lie he needs her to believe.

She flushes, and the corner of her mouth shivers. He can just tell she’s trying to give him a teasing little kitten-smile, but her eyes are all big and needy and her breath is already quaking. “Don’t you remember?” She’s trying to make her words all light and playful. “I like when you tell me what to do.”

He hisses in through his teeth: hard, heated want, and the undertow of regret. “Pearl—”

“Please, Rocket?” she whispers, achingly. “I want you.”

His ribs collapse into his lungs, bones all clacking together. I want the Luphomoid.

“Shorts off, then,” he orders impulsively, but the words are charred and desperate, flaking at the edges, leaving smudges in his palms. “Shirt, too.”

She’s so frickin’ quick to do what he says, like she’d never even considered the escape hatch he’d given her. The shorts are already puddled around her ankles so she can toe out of them — bare feet still suffering on the grates, he’s sorry to say; he’s gotta take better care of her — and then she crosses her arms to grip the hem of the Sneepers shirt and peel it up over her head, and he suddenly can’t breathe. All he can do is stare: at her soft belly, still spangled with the evil scars he’d left on her — at the undersides of those perfect tits, rising up as she stretches and bouncing when they escape the confines of the shirt. Her gorgeous nipples — so pink they make his mouth water — pebbling up even further when her hair curls around them, cool and dripping-wet. She drops her hands to her sides, flexing and clenching — nervous. Or excited.

Or both.

She shivers in front of him, waiting, gnawing on her lips. The panties are floating loosely around her hips — just a whispery flutter of pale-blue gauze, so shimmery-sheer that they barely matter.

“Good girl,” he rasps out. “Get on the bunk for me?”

She hesitates for just a second, but he notices. He thinks he’d notice damn near anything involving her. The tension in his mouth has mostly been of the sexual variety, but now he eyes her warily.

“What is it, kitten?”

“Aren’t you…” she trails off uncertainly, fingers twisting together in front of her panties.

“Aren’t I what?”

She gnaws at her lip. “Don’t you want to take your clothes off, too?”

He grimaces. He should’ve seen that coming. He knows she’s seen some of him — in the dark and lightning, that night on the Arete. He’d wanted to disgust her that night — to scare her. Now, the idea of her seeing everything — all the proof that he’d been stitched and soldered together, the incontrovertible evidence of his monstrosity — makes his stomach lurch in sudden queasiness. He shifts on his feet uneasily, and wrangles his voice into something dry and sardonic.

“M’not trying to ruin the mood, doll.”

A little curl forms between her furrowed brows. “But—“

Something bitter and mean and defensive rises in the back of his throat like bile. Somehow he bites it back, teeth clicking closed before he can say something venomous that he just knows he’ll feel like shit about later.

“You gonna listen so I can reward you?” he interrupts instead — forcing his voice to stay calm and easy, hoping she doesn’t notice the crack in the middle. He raises one brow and crosses his arms. The corner of her mouth purses worriedly and her eyes are big and anxious — and yeah, she’s all concerned for him. This is exactly the moment when he would’ve loathed himself if he’d said something vile. He sort of loathes himself for impulse anyway, even though he’d somehow managed to cage it.

It’s only a matter of time before he blows this up — unless she gets sick of him first.

Eat it all up while it lasts.

But for now, pearl slowly lowers herself to the thin mattress beside him anyway, and he lets his lungs loosen the tiniest breath of relief. The bed sways just a little as she climbs in, and he steps back so she can swing her legs up.

“Good girl,” he repeats, and then leaps nimbly onto the mattress. She jolts, but doesn’t move or make a sound — just watches him from where she’s curled up on one hip, hair dripping damply over the perfect curves of her jiggling tits. She’s raincloud-soft and made of moonlight, woven around a pink-hearted Moraggian waterlily, and he just wants to lap her up. He reaches out slowly — carefully — and presses the leathery pad of one fingertip to the spot just an inch below the dip in her collarbone.

She shudders, eyes wide, and shifts a little: shoulders tilting back, spine arching her skin into his touch just a little bit more. Some of the wet hair slicked to her shoulders and clinging to the sides of her breasts now surrenders to gravity, revealing more of her damp areolas. He swallows a groan and pushes, forcing her down onto her back with just the slow, inexorable pressure of his fingertip against her sternum. Pearl’s eyes hold his as she goes down easily: dropping to her back, propped up by her elbows. Her bent legs uncurl for him — slowly, but without hesitation. He delicately slides one foot between her knees, nudging them apart questioningly — but she’s already shyly spreading her thighs for him. A triangle of space opens between her legs, and he steps in and sinks to his haunches.

“Is it okay if I lay down here, sweetheart? Play with you for a little while?”

She hasn’t looked away from him yet. Her moonsilver eyes are nearly eclipsed by her pupils, but there’s something apprehensive lingering in the tilt of her brow. “I thought you’d want to hear about — I thought you’d want to talk about what I said earlier first,” she admits. There’s a nervous little tremor in her voice. “The — uhm, the plan. My idea. The Luphomoid.”

He tilts his head consideringly. “None of it’s gonna change the fact that I’m gonna fuck you tonight,” he says bluntly, and her irises are just the thinnest rings of starlight around her pupils now. “You wanna talk about it now, or later?”

Please say later.

Her breath catches softly. “Later’s fine,” she murmurs, licking her lips, and he drops from his haunches to his knees immediately. He wants to dive face-first into that gorgeous little cunt of hers — but he forces himself to pause, to roll down onto his forearms, to settle himself on his belly between her thighs.

“Can I get my tongue in you, princess?”

He can feel her pause, her brow hunching in uncertainty.

“I’m not… what?”

He gazes up at her with heavy-lidded eyes. “Said the other day I was gonna lick you up, sweetheart.” He taps his finger unerringly on her clothed clit — once; twice — and grins when she jolts both times. “Right. Here.”

Her pupils blow wide and she licks her lower lip. His eyes follow the tip of her tongue. “Like…” she hesitates. “Kissing?”

For fuck’s sake. His abdomen tightens.

“Yeah, kitten,” he breathes out against her. “Wanna kiss your pretty cunt. Show her how sorry I am for being mean. That okay?”

She nods — no hesitation now, though she still looks a little baffled. He noses against the inside of her thigh carefully.

“You tell me if you don’t like it,” he purrs against her. “I’ll stop, sweetheart.”

Her breath trips up her ribs and breaks haltingly on her lips. “I’ll like it,” she whispers, and he thinks somehow her eyes have gotten even darker at the pressure of his nose against her. “I’m sure. I think I already do.”

He chuckles and cants his eyes up at her wickedly. “No harm in changing your mind,” he tells her with a smirk, lowering his face again, “but I think you’re gonna like it too.” He grins into her thighs. “Think I’m gonna make my kitten mew.”

An inhalation catches softly on her clavicle, tattered and breathless as he skates his fingers over her inner thighs. The thin ruffle of ice-blue gauze makes his mouth water. Up close, he can see that it’s shot through with the faintest suggestion of silvery threads. He’s sure he could shred it with one good bite. It drapes against her so fuckin’ adorably, translucent enough that he can see the pillowy shape of her pussy and the blush of its color, the tiny little nub of her clit, and the dark shadow of her curls.

He flattens his tongue against one canine, so hard that he can taste the bright-iron of his blood. Saliva pools under his tongue and he swallows. She smells like the clean water of the shower, and under that, the ghost of waterlilies. He wonders how long it’ll take before the scent of her is drenching the entire runabout again: clear and sweet, underlined with the earthy amberlike fragrance of her arousal.

He presses his cheek into her thigh.

“Want you to promise you’re gonna do it again,” he rasps against her.

“Do — do what again?” she asks breathily, voice faint and confused.

“Say what you want,” he utters hoarsely. “No second-guessing, no doubting yourself.”

“I want you,” she repeats immediately, like she thinks that’s what he’s asking for, like she doesn’t have to think about it at all. His heart stutters in his chest: electrified, convulsing. Unthinkingly, he darts forward, pinching a mouthful of the plush fat of her inner thigh between his teeth. He loosens his jaw immediately — just in time to avoid puncturing her skin when she gasps and her thighs spasm around him.

“Good little thing,” he mumbles against her. “You can say that as much as you want, sweetness.” He laps at the crescent rosy-pink dents left behind by his teeth. “It’s not what I meant though.” He ghosts the pad of one finger and the blunted tip of his claw down the panel of gauzy fabric over her pussy. She leaps beneath him, gasping, hips buckling upward. He can smell the arousal pooling on the other side of the cloth, right as a little damp spot darkens the frail material, turning it transparent.

Carefully, he slides his finger past the delicate gauze, scooping the scrap of cloth to the side. She shivers again and he groans deep, breathing in that waterlily-and-amber scent. For fuck’s sake, she’s all glossy and trembling for him already. She looks even more delicious than she had that night in the Arete, dripping and flushed.

“W-what did you mean?” she asks, and he shifts, bringing up his other hand to stroke her folds carefully. She gasps and arches again, and he uses two fingers to part her slowly. She’s so frickin’ soft; he can’t believe he was so mean to this sweet, wet little pussy that’s already crying to welcome him home. He swallows to purge the hoarseness from his throat, to sound strong and careless and confident.

“Trying to get you to be a brat more often,” he manages to say conversationally, and if the edges of the words are fraying a little, he doesn’t think she notices. “Just tell people what the fuck you want, when you want it.” He tilts his head curiously, then blows a cool stream of air across her glistening clit. She bucks under him again, a little hiccup in her lungs, and he chuckles from his place between her thighs. “Promise me you’ll be a little selfish every now an’ then.”

He can hear her heart roll over and thump in her chest: a timpani drum, half-pleased and half-panicked. “I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to—“

He dares himself to flick his tongue, quick and greedy, against the pretty pink bundle of nerves, then tsks regretfully against his teeth when she jumps with a warbled, confused little noise. “Clearly I gotta frickin’ convince you, then, pearl.” He tugs her panties further to the side. He needs to get more pairs for her — snippets of lace and misty-thin scraps that he can rip through whenever he feels like it. He remembers once, on Inix, he’d seen a pair that had tied on the sides with little bows — they’d be so easy to unlace from her body without giving up his spot between her thighs.

It’s just that she’s all warm and wet in front of his mouth, and he doesn’t want to move far enough back to get this stupid wisp of cloth down her legs.

“I didn’t—”

He sinks his tongue into her and she arcs against his mouth, a keening noise breaking through her nervous half-babble. Any other time the sound might make him chuckle and taunt her, but it’s his first real taste of her, and he’s nearly lost in the feast of it. She smells like waterlilies and tastes like something resinous and salty — earthy. And clean water, clear and sweet. He’s starving, he realizes suddenly, and he works his tongue against her furiously: curling it inside her, stroking, lapping, trying to get every bit of her flavor into his mouth. Her hands flutter against his ears, the heels of her palms pressing panickedly against the back of his head, her fingers curling into the fur there and tugging as her hips start to curl and tense and rock against him. This — this is what he’s been wanting ever since those first few rotations: worshiping her with greedy licks, apologizing to her sweet, generous, forgiving little pussy with his mouth.

Too bad he can’t let her come yet.

As soon as he feels the change — the intensifying flutter against his tongue, the grip of her fingers growing increasingly-frantic, the broken wobble of pleas becoming more and more nonsensical — he forces himself to stop. He draws back abruptly, licking his teeth and lips and whiskers.

“Promise me, sweetheart.”

“B-but—“

He tsks again. “Still thinkin’ too much?” He anchors her hips with his hands, forcing them still against the thin mattress, and sinks his tongue into her again, dragging it out to flick meanly against her precious little clit. She squeals, hips trying to hitch against the grip of his hands, fingers plunging back into the fur at the crown of his head and tugging pleadingly. The muscles in her abdomen and thighs cinch tight and he pauses. “Be a good girl for me,” he mutters against her. The irony isn’t lost on him. “Be a good girl for me and promise you’ll be more of a frickin’ brat.”

“I don’t wanna be—“ she mews out. “I didn’t mean to be—“

He does chuckle, then, nosing into her folds and breathing her in again. He wants to keep the scent of her in his lungs forever. “You want me to call you a needy little whore ‘cause it makes you feel free from Wyndham — but you’re drawing the line at being a brat?”

She twists underneath him and he slants a glance up at her face for the first time. She’s got big tears standing out in her lashes like jewels and it takes him a smug second to realize they’re not from frustrated desire — at least, not completely. He feels his smirk fade. “Pearl, what—?”

“I don’t want you to think I’m a brat,” she whimpers. “I don’t want to be a brat to you—”

He can’t stop the growl growing under his ribs, and she whines when his mouth rumbles against her.

“I don’t want to — to give you a reason to dislike me,” she pleads. “I don’t want—“

He’s incredulous. A snicker rises to the corner of his mouth and he smirks against her pretty cunt. “Tch. You think I’d fuck you like this f’I didn’t like you?”

Her voice drops, achy and breathy and low. “You hated me — the first time—“

Nose deep between her thighs, he freezes: stomach dropping out from him, pulled right into Sovereign’s core. Pearl, he wants to protest, but what can he possibly say after that? Yeah, but I was a fuckin’ moron—

“M’not gonna hurt you like that again—” he swears, but she’s already cutting him off, shaking her head, trying to stretch and bend so she can hold his red-ember gaze with her wet, silvery stare while she clutches at him with pleading hands.

“I don’t care about that,” she says vehemently. “I told you I — I think I liked — but I don’t want you to think—“

She tilts her head back on a sob, half-needy and half-forlorn, and she sniffles. The sound has his heart damn near falling apart all of a sudden, like burnt-up bits of wood crumbling to ash in a cold hearth.

Greedy, faithless bitch, he’d called her on the Arete. Whiny, spoiled slut. So much for wanting to be good for me.

Worthless.

And what had she said, weeping against the wet floorboards while he’d pried a third orgasm from her?

M’sorry, she’d sobbed. Didn’t mean to—

He laps at her once and lingers — mournfully — tongue rasping and broad against her clit. Pearl gasps, then mewls when he comes back again to continue his apology.

“There ain’t nothing wrong with saying what you want, pearl. ‘Specially not to me.” He licks her again: the pretty pink petals, that sweet little button he just wants to flick and tease and play with. Then deep inside, tickling her deep in her cunt till she arches and whines. “F’you wanna be a good girl for me, this is how you do it. You tell me exactly what you want. Don’t just ask for it. Demand it. Promise me.” She news again. He drags the sound out of her with another demanding, torturous swipe of his tongue. “‘Sides. I told you. It was frickin’ hot.”

She whimpers, and he can hear how nervous she still is. The apology of his tongue turns into a mean, punishing stroke.

“You want a nice new skirt or some pretty new panties? You say it.”

Another lick.

“You want your hair colored? You say it.”

Another. She pants and tries to writhe against him, but he holds her hips steady.

“You want me to fly your tree-friend to Taluhnia? I’ll be a cranky jackass about it, but you better say it.”

A taunting stripe from slit to clit, and then he locks down her hips more tightly than before and pins her soft bundle of nerves between his teeth. She strangles out a scream and strains against him, pulsing against his mouth. He closes his lips and sucks just once, hard, releasing her with a pop when she sobs, flailing her lower legs and thrashing her head from side to side on the pillows. Gorgeous.

“You wanna turn in a murderous cyborg for your first bounty? We’re gonna have words, but I still want you to say it. Promise me.”

“Please,” she pleads. “Rocket — please—“

He snickers. “If I wasn’t trying so hard to be nice to you, I’d spank your fuckin’ cunt right now, pearl.” He winces as soon as he says it, and glances up at her. But if anything, she looks even more desperate. He vows he’ll check in with her before next time, make sure they get on the same page — safe words and shit. For now, though, he loosens one hand on her hip so he can spread her wide again, and she wriggles desperately the moment that she’s a little more free — but he only blows another soft jet of cool air against her. He’d meant to keep that feather from the pillow he’d murdered a cycle ago, but he supposes he can make due without. Instead, he brushes the soft fur of his cheek against her, teasing her with his whiskers till she’s whining and begging, then breaking. Next time, he thinks — next time he’ll see how easily he can reduce her to begging with just his tail. “Promise me, kitten.”

She’s got tears swimming down her cheeks when he looks up again, all her words shattered when they hiccup out over her lips. “Please — promise, Rocket — I promise—“

He gives her a mocking sweep of his tongue. She squirms desperately, but he only follows it with another soft, denying brush of his fur, light and tickling, over her slick pussy — paying special attention to her clit as she gasps and shudders and tries to wriggle closer. “Promise what, princess? C’mon. Tell me.”

“P-promise I — I’ll say what I want, I will, I promise—“

“No second-guessing,” he purrs against her. “No doubt. Just bratty demands.”

“Okay,” she weeps. “Rocket—“ She’s shuddering under him, bouncing, twitching and shivering and desperate. “Rocket, I promise, I’ll try so hard—“

He debates teasing her for that — for the promise to try instead of to do — but he figures he can only expect so much and she’s already crying, feverish and trembling so hard that her body jolts with shock and neediness every time he shifts his touch the slightest bit.

And besides, he’s got no qualms being selfish and greedy himself, and right now he just really wants to make her come.

“That’s a good little slut,” he rumbles, and latches his mouth onto her clit, worrying it with delicate teeth and then sucking hard. One hand — which had been holding her wide and vulnerable to his mocking licks and light brushes — moves from her inner thigh to plunge two fingers into her pussy, twisting and fluttering against her spasming walls. His fingertips map her insides — committing every inch to sensory memory — and then he finds the little spot that had made her wail that night on the Arete.

And wail she does.

“Right there, kitten?” he mocks, fingers beckoning against her. His voice is dripping with condescension, even if the feeling in the back of his throat is something closer to reverence. “Is that your little sweet spot?” He snickers when she arches and gasps for breath — massaging the little patch of spongy tissue unforgivingly, petting and rubbing and tapping. His mouth sinks in to suck hard on her clit again as he pushes upward with stroking fingers. And pearl doesn’t disappoint: torn between a scream and a sob, her body ripples up from the mattress so fast and hard that he suddenly has to slam his other hand down across her lower abdomen to keep her from hurting herself on his teeth. It’s an instinctive, panicked reaction to the unexpected strength of her arch, but she squeals again at the new sensation: the sting and slap of his hand against her lower belly, the pressure on her abdomen as his fingers press relentlessly against her from the inside. She clamps down on his digits — so tight he might’ve been worried about her breaking his fingers if he could’ve brought himself to care — and bows against the hand he’s got on her abdomen like she’s trying to push herself right into his palm.

Then his mouth is flooded with a gush from her slick cunt, his chin and the collar of his t-shirt suddenly soaked and dripping. He goes still for a moment — sopping wet, stunned and silent — then slowly leans back and stares at her.

Holy shit.

She’s already crumpled beneath him, eyes blurred and wet, lashes all starred-out with tears as she stares blankly at the ceiling. Her hands are curled into sweet little crescents, palms up on the pillow, and her shoulders are heaving — breasts bobbing, splayed thighs quaking — while she hauls in rasping, broken breaths. A wounded little sobbing sound escapes her throat.

“Pearl,” he says slowly from between her shuddering thighs. “I think you just changed my fuckin’ life.”

He watches as she tries to lift her head, then gives up, fresh tears pouring down her cheeks. “W-what—?”

“That mighta been the hottest thing I’ve ever frickin’ seen,” he adds, and drops his eyes back to where she’s soaked through the sheets. The gauze panties, still askew, are glassy and transparent, and her folds are all slick and swollen. “Think you can do that again, sweetheart?”

She mews something incoherent and pitiful.

Slow down, he orders himself — but he’s staring at her glistening folds, licking his lips before he can stop himself. Maybe one more—

He leans in, rasping his tongue carefully over her puffy folds, but she jumps anyway. He’d promised himself he wouldn’t overstimulate her again for a while, not after he’d been so mean the first time — but surely just one more would be fine. There’s a tension in the base of his throat, under his tongue — like a hard knot of breath that wants to push up into his mouth. It doesn’t feel bad — just strange — and when he gives in to the pressure there, a strange little sound ripples into his mouth and chest — a low clicking rattle, like a deep and endless chirp. It startles him and he stomps it down, but he can’t prevent himself from practically cuddling against her drenched, generous pussy in spite of himself. He nuzzles in, rubbing his scent all over her inner thighs.

All his edges suddenly feel entirely too tender, and he tries to balance it by teasing her with a sharp, mean little flick of his tongue against her puffy clit. She gasps and bucks beneath him with a little broken whine.

“M’not fuckin’ done with you yet,” he growls against her as aftershocks ripple along her body. He feels her shiver at the threat. “Go on, pearl. Tell me about your little plan, huh?”

“R-right now?” she squeaks weakly, and he huffs a warm breath of laughter against her. She whimpers and moans, knees bending like she wants to curl her legs right up around him to protect her poor little cunt from his mouth. Unfortunately for her, trying to close them up right now would only mean locking his head right where he wants it. He wishes she’d try — the thought of those pillowy thighs pressed snug against his cheeks when he fucks her with his mouth anyway, making her flail and cry? He’s hungry for her, all over again.

“Right now,” he croons, lapping his tongue once against her. She spasms against him, and exhales a shaky, wounded little noise. The soft, leathery pads of his fingertips trace her slit, then slide up to her clit. He paints the little nub in gossamer wetness till it shines. She shudders when he does, and he grins at the sight of her pussy, fluttering weakly. “Is my slutty little housewife too distracted to share all her big-brain ideas?” he gloats, all false sympathy.

She makes a little noise in the back of her throat, shaking her head like she’s trying to focus— more for her own sake than his, he suspects. He’s happy to play along, surging upward so he’s on his knees between her thighs, hands anchored to the mattress on either side of her hips. He suddenly hates his own self-consciousness. If he’d listened to her and taken his frickin’ clothes off, he could already have the tip of his dick kissing the glistening curls just above her pretty cunt. Instead, he has to shove his pants down his hips in order to free his cock and slide it along the slippery seam of her thighs. Pearl whines, the sound high in her throat as her hips roll, trying to get more of him.

“So what’s your plan for getting rid of the abilisks?” he prompts, half-mocking. He taps her tiny clit with his dick, and she jumps and whimpers. “What smart-ass scheme are you cooking up, sweetheart?”

“I think,” she says, the words hesitant and nibbled apart, fractured by distraction and heat and the delicate slap of his cock against her pussy, “that you’re a genius.”

He chuckles, and notches himself at her opening only to hold completely still — gratified when he feels her tremble. She’s exhausted, but still somehow wanting him. He glances up at her: the soft curve of her belly and ribs, her gorgeous tits with the pink nipples still all firm and achy, like they feel left out from all the fun.

Poor, neglected things. He’ll make it up to ‘em later.

“Well, yeah,” he snarks, grinning up at her, shifting his hand to grip her clit in a delicate pinch. “Lemme prove it to you again—”

“W-wait—” she gasps out when he gently pulses his fingers on her. “Wait — let me explain—”

“Go on,” he mutters with a sharp grin, squeezing gently as he slides himself into her — just a half-inch, and no more. She chokes on another little cry, hips struggling to push against him — nearly bucking him right off the bed. He hangs on, snickering, but then she winds one leg around him, her heel pressing right in at the base of his spine, and tugs.

The blunt pressure against the top of his tail already has him hissing on a startled breath, belly cramping — who could’ve known that spot would feel so good? — but the movement simultaneously pulls her body down onto his. She impales herself on his dick, and his eyes nearly roll back in his head at the competing sensations. It’s like she’s made of sopping-wet velvet and sunwarmed silk, and the spot where her heel massages the hollow of his back has his abdomen spiraling tight and his hips bucking forward in spite of himself.

And she swallows him up so lovingly.

“Brat,” he hisses again — admiring. “That’s my good fuckin’ girl — take what you want; fill yourself up—”

Her cunt squeezes him desperately and he tries his best not to move. He doesn’t think she’s hurting from the sudden intrusion — not with the way she’d sunk down onto him, so quick and greedy. He suspects that gushing orgasm of hers eased the way. Still, he doesn’t want to push too fast. For his own sanity, he needs to make sure she has time to adjust, even though she feels like everything warm and sweet and holy on his dick.

Get frickin’ control of yourself, he admonishes. Play with pearl till she passes out. Not a single worry in that pretty little skull of hers.

His breathing evens out.

“C’mon, kitten,” he mocks, rocking against her slightly — making sure she can feel his fur rubbing against her sweet clit while he offers up only the shallowest, most teasing of thrusts. “M’listening. I can do two things at once. I’m a frickin’ genius, remember?”

Her leg is still wound around him, satin and softness, a little claim in its own right.

“I just thought — you’re so smart—”

He responds to that by withdrawing almost completely, then plunging back into her — letting her loving little pussy welcome him back. Her moan is almost as giddying as the way she tightens on him.

“That’s right,” he agrees, letting his voice rumble and vibrate against her as he speeds up, setting a slow, punishing pace. “Sure am. Keep goin’—” She lets out a breathy, high-pitched gasp each time he surges back into her — tits bouncing with every thrust — and he can’t get enough of the sight and sound and feel of her. His fingers trail over her upper thighs, and the texture of her skin ripples where the stretchmarks stripe her. He traces them reverently, committing each of them and the satin spaces between to memory. His fingers knead into the fat over her hips as he rocks back onto his knees, hauling her with him, her ass cradled between his thighs. From here, he can stare at the spot where her gorgeous, slippery little pussy hugs him, her pretty clit begging for his attention, her breasts shivering with each demanding stroke of his dick inside her. He uses his grip on her hips to slam himself into her cunt again — then again.

“The — the abilisks are looking f-for — There’s a gland near their — olfactory bulb in their brain—” Her eyes clench tight and her fingers fist in the blankets of the bunk, tears squeezing out onto her lashes as she gasps in time with his movements. Breathy half-moans ripple between her fractured words. “It d-doesn’t matter; they’re just scanning for energy s-signatures — drawn to, uhn, the strongest ones—”

He pauses, and loosens one hand so he can stroke her where she’s split and stretched around him, coating his fingers in her wetness. “You smell like waterlilies down here, kitten.” He chuckles. “Knew you would. Tell me more.” He lifts his hand, admiring how his blunted claws and the leathery pads of his fingertips shine in the dim lights of the runabout — making sure she can see it.

“I — uhm — oh, f-fuck, Rocket—” She stammers over the curseword like she’s surprised to hear it from her own mouth. He licks his lips, then brings his fingers to his mouth and winds his tongue around them. He has to close his eyes at the flavor of her, groaning low in his chest. He’d just had his mouth on her, but he can’t get enough.

“Taste like some kind of honey, too.” He pushes her legs wider so he can see her better. All he wants right now is to levy a soft little slap to her clit — careful, so careful, just enough to have her bowing against him, fucking herself further onto his dick with a little cry — but he immediately shutters the impulse, lightly ghosting his fingertips over her instead. She bucks under the whisper of sensation. “Think they got bees on Morag?” he asks distractedly. “Probably make all their best honey from waterlilies. I didn’t tell you to stop talking, sweetheart.”

He pinches her lightly and then drives into her again, a brutal plunge that forces the air right out of her lungs with a hiccup. She’s gripping fistfulls of the soft bedding on either side of her, and he regrets again that he still hasn’t given her those Cyxlorade chenille blankets. The whole pile of them, to fuck her on, to drag the silky tassels over her pretty nipples.

“Mmm — I thought you could m-make—” she gasps out, breathless and uncertain. “To hide the — the energy signatures that the abilisks — a, uhm — I can’t think when you—”

He shifts the angle of her hips and his own before slamming back into her. She gasps and chokes this time, hands reaching for him — finding the strip of fur between his shirt and his waistband immediately. Her fingers knot in, like she’s holding on for her life, and he has to stifle a groan. He fuckin’ loves when she does that. It makes him want to rut into her like a feral frickin’ animal. He forces the instinct down — folding over her with a snarl instead, snapping a warning bite at one gorgeous bouncing tit. It’s just a scrape of the sides of his teeth — not even enough of a mouthful to leave any marks — but she squeals.

“A Fuck-You-Disk!”

He’s already withdrawn once more and the head of his dick is just kissing her folds, and he can feel her quivering — but his body freezes in spite of himself. His head jerks up and he goes still, staring up at her as she pants and wiggles. She stares back: eyes wide and blurred, pupils fully-bloomed, fresh tears cluttering up her lashes like wet diamonds and gemstones.

“A what?” he asks, trying to wrap his head around it. Some distant part of him thinks that he sounds exactly like she had, the first time he’d mentioned one of his little inventions by name.

“Y-you said they could hide a moon, maybe,” she whispers. He stares, silent — stunned. He can still taste her on his tongue and he knows if he licked his lips and whiskers, he’d get a new sweet mouthful of her — but he can’t do anything but look at her, transfixed.

It’s so frickin’ simple that it’s stupid, and he can’t believe he didn’t think of it sooner.

Her tits are heaving between every handful of words, but for once, his eyes aren’t drawn to them. He can only stare at those tearful moonsilver eyes of hers, his fur rippling.

He’s fuckin’ underestimated her. Again.

She doesn’t seem to know what to make of his silence, his motionlessness. He watches as she swallows and tries to explain. “If you — if you can make one to mask the energy signatures of the cores, the abilisks won’t have any reason to b-break off from the migra—“

He slides into her, as deep as he can get. He knows a lot of humie-types with bodies like hers crave more fullness than he can provide, but he swears to himself he’ll make up for it with finesse. She whimpers, and he braces himself on one clenched fist so he can grab the thigh she’s still got curled around him: hitching it up high on his flank, holding her wide, grinding his fur against her — and making sure to get that perfect, bruising angle. He goes slow — for now — and deliberate. Precise and measured and relentless. The tears spill over and into her temples, leaving gleaming streaks behind like meteor-tails as they hide in the blue-silver tangle of her hair.

“—from the m-migratory path—” She’s sobbing out each word, trying so hard to keep them from fraying, her voice spilling out into broken neediness through the recycled air of the runabout.

He nips at her breast again — sharply this time — and she arches up with a whine like she’s offering him her tits. “Pearl, enough.” His own voice is harsh — smoky and hoarse. He nuzzles against the underside of her breasts and between them, trying to give her something tender even while he fucks her till she’s raw and swollen. She chokes on another moan and rolls her hips desperately toward him, but he just grips his fingers into the doughiness of her thigh, keeping her spread wide and at the mercy of his leisurely, unforgiving pace. “You’re too frickin’ smart. How come you get to be this pretty and this nice and this smart and—” He releases her thigh to slide his hand between them, flicking brutally at her clit. “—feel this fuckin’ good on me?”

She keens out a wordless little cry and spasms around him, back arching and hips dipping upward toward him pleadingly.

“Knew you wanted to save the abilisks. Didn’t know you wanted it so bad you were gonna come up with a genius little plan all on your own—”

“You — you can do it?” she asks, breathless and broken and weeping. At some point, the tears have multiplied, and her face is shining in the spangled glow of the runabout lights. Something about the sight of her, all vulnerable and open, all her faith laid out for him — it makes his throat close up.

“‘Course I can,” he rasps out, and tries to smirk. Get a grip, he orders himself. She lets out a soft breath of relief and he latches onto the distraction — can’t have her getting comfortable. His tongue rasps against her nipple, rolling the tiny pink bead with his lips, and he flicks her little clit again. She shrieks and wriggles, and he snickers. “Gotta save the abilisks.”

“Not just the — the abilisks,” she chokes out, and her voice is thready and needy and he wants to roll in it.

He twists his hand and scrubs a calloused thumb over the glossy little gem between her legs. She whimpers and tries to grind herself against him, and it’s so precious that he just wants to ruin her.

“Not just the abilisks,” he corrects himself, mocking her. “The Sovereign too.”

She whines. She sounds so frickin’ pretty when she whines for him like that. The leg she’s still got looped around him tries to tug, to pull herself more fully onto him — but he’s wise to her fuckin’ tricks now, and he snickers, holding her still and speeding up the harsh strokes against her clit only to stop entirely when her sweet cunt cinches tight and her hips tilt upward. She sobs when he stops — betrayed. He’d be lying if he said he didn’t love the sound of it.

“N-no,” she stammers. “Y-you.”

He pauses then, throat suddenly tight, and pulls back to stare at her: the soft expanse of her belly, the underside of those pretty breasts he’s basically memorized at this point, the column of her arched throat. He can’t bring himself to tear his eyes away, to keep moving, to keep playing with her. Something suddenly feels so high and tight and bruising in his mouth that he has to choke it down.

“Sweetheart—”

She tries to wrestle herself onto her elbows so she can look at him directly, sparkly little tears on her lashes, silvering her pretty eyes. “I c-can’t — I can’t protect you any other way,” she whimpers. “Not yet. B-but–”

He growls. He doesn’t mean to this time, but there it is, crumbling along his ribs and against her soft flesh before he curls his hands into the fat of her thighs and hauls her onto her back again, then snaps his teeth against her breast with another almost-bite that has her jumping and jolting and trying to squirm out from under his grasp. It’s a distraction, of course — buying himself time to wrestle down the sudden twist in his own belly, the way his heart stutters behind his vibranium breastbone.

He slams his hips against hers, driving his dick into her — just as ruthless as before, but fast, now. Relentless. She stretches for him, trying to latch her fingers back into his fur, suddenly frantic at the vicious pace he’s set.

“And then what?” he asks once he’s got his voice grappled into something reasonable and taunting again. His hips snap punishingly against hers. She’s so slick he can hear it — the sounds of their bodies fill the air, just under her little pleading moans. “You gonna turn in the Luphomoid for her bounty? Use the funds to buy yourself something soft and pretty?”

He can already tell she’s shaking her head, even as her hands find a spot to curl into his fur and tug desperately. “Rocket—please—”

“Nuh-uh,” he scolds, and pinches at the pretty little jewel between her folds, tugging gently. He revels in the way her fingers slide deep into his fur and pull: little electric shocks zinging over his nerve endings, radiating from the places where she’s got her grip knotted and tugging on him. Beg me, you sweet, needy little slut. “You tell me the whole plan, kitten.”

“Dunno,” she hiccups. “Just wanted time to think — but — she’s like us—”

He snorts. “You think everyone’s like us, pearl.” His pinch gets meaner, his thrusts harsher. “You think the abilisks are like us and the Sovereign are like us — but she wasn’t one of Wyndham’s. She was—”

“She was made,” she gasps. “But she’s — we’re more than that — we can be — y-you taught me that—”

He can feel the words under his palms, in his mouth — he suddenly knows the shape and taste of them, unforgettable in his mind, and he’s so voracious it hurts. He growls, hips pistoning against her with so much force that he’s got the small of her back rolling up off the mattress with every thrust. Her fingers tug in the fur at his flanks like she wants to yank him against her but is scared of hurting him.

“Fuck,” he hisses, and licks a delicate kiss onto one sweet, neglected nipple. She’s weeping, trying to grind herself onto him. “Give me too much credit, pearl. Can’t—” He snaps off the words, plunging back into that precious cunt of hers, so soft and wet. “Sweet girl,” he mumbles against her, teeth flashing and nibbling. Her thighs are quaking again and he flattens his palm over her lower abdomen, pinning her, pushing down while he drags his dick against that spot on the front wall of her snatch. His callused thumb roves over her clit: round and round, ruthless and relentless. “Adorable little kitten — with her tiny waterlily cunt winding up so tight on my dick — all fuckin’ mine—”

She clenches on him like a vice, sobbing as his hand presses against her abdomen and his thumb abuses her clit, all while he drives into her mercilessly.

“C–can’t—”

“You say that pretty much every time, sweetness,” he grunts, “and you’re always fuckin’ wrong. Think I know better than you by now.” His lower abdomen cramps and he drops his head, lungs heaving. “You give me just one more now, and I won’t make you give me another till tomorrow — but I need to feel you come again, sweetheart—”

I need to make sure you feel good.

Her thighs are pressed into his hips, shuddering with tension, and slippery. “Someday,” he pants against her, hips slamming bruisingly against them, “someday I’ll tie you up and gag you and see just how many fuckin’ orgasms I can wring outta my slutty housewife’s defenseless little cunt, but for now, just—“

Just gimme one more, he’d meant to say, but pearl makes a warbled little cry as she surges against him. Her heel presses into that spot above his tail again as her pussy squeezes so tight around him that he can barely move. She yanks on his fur — accidental, he’ll think later, trying to scheme up how to get her to do it again — and it shoots sparks along his skin and right up into his eyes: fiery and white-hot, static-bright and loud. Every cell in his body flares into incandescence as his hips slam into hers and grind. His jaws snap shut — only the many circs’-worth of time he’s spent with Ore Garden courtesans save him from instinctively sinking his sharp teeth into her breast — and he strangles back a guttural bellow from between them as he pushes into her, letting her unbelievably tight little pussy pull every drop of come out of his body.

For a second, he’s pretty sure he transcends the fuckin’ cosmos. Blinks right out of the limitations of three dimensions, and into twelve.

Then he’s back in his body: panting, lungs heaving, skin prickling under his fur with hot sparks and shattered starlight. Pearl’s a pile of softness and sweetness underneath him, her pussy fluttering tenderly around him, every part of her trembling and damp and exhausted.

He doesn’t want to let go. Something rises high in the back of his throat: a fist-sized sphere of polished marble, heavy and hard and smooth. He doesn’t want to let go.

So he doesn’t. He pushes himself down into her — baculum bone keeping him lodged deep and hard inside her — and she whimpers and flinches when he does, still sensitive.

“Sh, sh, sorry,” he muffles against her, sinking in deeper as her achy little sound shifts into a moan and her flinch turns into a seeking, instinctive roll of her hips, “won’t hurt you—“

He doesn’t relax his arms from where his hands are clenched against the mattress at her side; no, he scoops them around her, pressing his damp shirt and chin into her belly, nose resting between her delectable fuckin’ tits as he squeezes his arms around her waist, snuggling in. His hands lock in at the small of her back, gripping the sleek curves on either side of her spine. He can feel the flutter of her pussy, trying to clutch weakly at him. A huff of incredulous breath of laughter escapes him. She mews and her cunt hugs him tighter.

“Good girl,” he rumbles. “Sweet, good-girl pearl—“

He lays with her till her breathing slows, and his does too. Till their heartbeats steady, strangely keeping time with each other.

He should get up. The sheets beneath them are drenched, and so are her frail, sheer blue panties, still twisted askew between them. Her thighs are sticky and his own clothes and fur are smeared with fluids — mainly hers. He should’ve put down a towel, but he hadn’t thought she’d — well. A little dampness is the last thing he’s interested in complaining about. It’s like some shitty god out there had finally noticed what a terrible frickin’ life he’d had, and they’d finally decided to start trying to make it up to him. And not that he deserves any of it, but he’s sure that — just for a moment in time — he’d been fuckin’ blessed.

But for her sake, he should get her up. Get ‘em both up, and showered, and hydrated.

Take care of her better than he did that night on the Arete.

“Okay,” he mutters reluctantly, more to himself than to her, as he unlaces his arms from around her waist and starts to withdraw. She makes a tiny, broken sound as his dick leaves her body with a wet, sordid pop that might’ve had him grinning if he wasn’t feeling—

Well. Feeling whatever this is.

“Okay, kitten,” he repeats, raggedly. The words are hoarse. “I’m gonna get you some water—”

“W-wait,” she begs, reaching for him, fingers curling weakly. She’s got fresh tears on her lashes, and she’s trying to twist toward him. He pauses, suddenly uncertain, and catches her grasping hand with one of his — still damp with her wetness. Without thinking, he curls her knuckles toward himself and licks them fleetingly.

And even though he’d been thinking of her as the vulnerable one, he suddenly feels a pang of something knifing into his heart — something defenseless and fragile and thin, soft as a new sprout and twice as tender. His breath catches in his lungs and his mouth and eyes and metal collarbones all ache.

“What is it?” she asks. She wriggles up onto her elbows, voice laced with concern, suddenly alert and wide-eyed.

“What?” He tries to sound lazy and careless, but the words choke.

“Your ears went back—” She leans upright, perching her hands on either side of the crown of her head and flattening them — so frickin’ stupid-cute that it makes that split-apart heart of his squeeze.

“Nothin’,” he says, a hitch in his lungs. “M’fine.” He attempts a scowl, but the message gets lost somewhere between the crease in his brow and the downward tug at the corner of his mouth. He’s hollowed out; he’s full. He’s empty again. He’s so unbearably hungry that it guts him, puts an echoing ache just under his lungs, a sucking void. Eat it up while it lasts, he tells himself again. His tongue feels thick and swollen in his mouth. His eyes sting. He turns away. “Just — shut up and lemme take care of you, pearl.”

“But what about—“

“Kitten, stop it,” he says sharply, and she goes quiet. “It’s—” The words die in his throat.

It’s important to me, he thinks, and he crushes a mental heel into the words. It is important. Because, well, she’s a likable little thing. And he’d hurt her and he owes her and he wants to keep her happy and he wants to keep her fucking him and being all sweet as long as he can, and yeah, maybe he’d even consider her some sort of — a sort of a friend, he guesses. But saying it — putting it out into the darkness of the galaxy: you’re important to me — it feels dangerous. Taunting the fates or the gods or the watchers or whatever.

“Stop it,” he repeats only, quietly, as the marble sphere in his throat grows heavier. “Let me get you cleaned up. Let me get you somethin’ to drink.”

He ends up saying fuck the shower, and fuck changing the sheets. He pulls a giant, baldbody-sized towel out from the linen closet — eyeing the old grease-stained ones still covering the chenille blankets with growing resentment — and a washcloth. He orders pearl to curl up and drink from her waterbag while he spreads the towel over the bunk. They’ll need to do another locker-full of laundry in the morning, but he’s gonna do his damnedest to keep her naked tonight.

He runs warm water through the washcloth, then hesitates before reaching into the toiletry locker and adding a tiny dollop of the baldbody-cleanser from the bottles Sanna Orix had sold him. Pearl watches him with widening starsilver eyes, and he takes great pains not to meet them — not even after he leaps back onto the swaying berth-style bed and kneels in front of her, circling one delicate ankle with his small dark hand and tugging her legs apart. The soaked scrap of her panties cling to her wetly when he tugs them down over her hips, tapping her hip till she lifts her ass off the mattress for him. He dips the warm washcloth between her thighs, cleaning the dark thatch of soft curls over her cunt, then gently gliding the rough wet fabric over and between her swollen folds.

He tries not to swallow too hard when she gasps and shivers and jolts for him.

Her thighs are next. He moves the washcloth down the insides of her legs, carefully wiping the stickiness from her skin. She lets him, silent and still except for a quiet breath and shudder when his touch is light enough to tickle, or when he happens across a particularly sensitive spot. The insides of her soft thighs, of course — but also the hollow behind her knees, especially the left. A place on the inner curve of one calf that he bets he could suck on till it bruises, and it might be enough to make her come. There’s no need to go further — other than that he wants to, so he does: using the washcloth as an excuse to map every fine bone in her ankles, the tops of her feet, her delicate toes.

“I’m sorry,” she murmurs. He startles, looking up at her from where he’s crouched at her feet. She’s staring at him, big-eyed and quiet, nervously gripping the waterbag tight against her gorgeous, biteable breasts. She hesitates, then offers it to him. He blinks and stares at her before accepting it.

“What the fuck are you apologizing for, pearl?” he asks, baffled, before taking a sip of the water and handing it back. She bites on the metal straw anxiously, and it clinks between her pretty teeth.

“I don’t think — I’ve never been that messy,” she falters, and suddenly her cheeks are flooded with red, so scorching hot he can feel it. He stares at her and her miserable little expression. The knot in his throat twists painfully — stoppering the sudden cackle that builds in his lungs. Torn between laughing and groaning, he instead makes a dying sound in his throat.

She flinches, but he leans forward — washcloth forgotten in hand — and grabs himself a wealth of her hair. It’s still shower-damp, and now snarled, too — and he winds his fist in it. She yelps when he tugs her, bending her in half at the waist, bringing her face to his.

“I told you,” he says, and he can feel his eyes searing little burnmarks into her skin. “That was the hottest frickin’ thing I’ve seen in my life, and it’s gonna be my personalistic goal to make sure you get that messy just as often as possible, pearl.” Her wide eyes blink at him, hesitant and worried, and he flicks his tongue into the corner of her mouth. “If you ‘pologize for something like that again, I’ll edge you till you pass out, sweetheart,” he swears vehemently. “Keep you on the verge of coming for days.”

The shameful red in her cheeks melts into something pink and needy, pupils trembling on the verge of dilation again, and he forces himself to grin around the expanding stone in his throat.

“Good girl,” he says when he’s sure she understands, and he lets her go.

The panties and the washcloth end up tossed in the laundry sanitizing locker and he pulls the covers up around her before she can protest, cocooning her safely — tucking her away the way he’d wanted to since that first night he’d pulled her off HalfWorld and daydreamed about keeping a stolen rainslick virgin-bride all wet and naked and bundled in his bunk. Then he reaches under the edge of the mattress where she’s been stashing the pink comb from Cyxlore, and he begins to work his way through the tangle of her damp curls while she worries her lip with her teeth, shifting back and forth with increasing distress.

He knows what she wants. She wants to — probably show him some kind of tenderness. Cuddle him, or help him clean his fur. But he can’t — he can’t sink his teeth into that, can’t quite let it happen. It’s too raw. And what he wants, more than anything, is just to make her feel good.

To convince himself that maybe he can take care of something.

“Shut up,” he says mildly when she tries to speak, and he puts the comb aside on a particularly stubborn snarl so he can work it out with deft fingers.

“You won’t let me do anything for you?” she begs anyway, into the floral spray of shadows and lights. The words are the most tender little plea and he feels his tail and whiskers twitch, his ears flicker.

“Told you. You can shut up for me, sweetheart,” he purrs in lieu of answering, keeping his fingers greedy against her skin and hair, trying to ignore the fistful of gravel still weighing down his throat.

She says nothing, but he can feel her hesitation in the way she shifts against the towel and the sheets and him, in the soft little breaths she takes like she’s about to speak, before she abandons the words. He allows himself a grunt, trying to sound more annoyed than he is.

“What.”

“I — I really wasn’t trying to be a brat,” she whispers. She shifts again: restless and worried. “I’m sor—”

He whistles, low and mocking, against the crown of her head, stirring the lilac-blooms of her drying curls. “You’re trying to get yourself edged for a whole cycle, then? That’s a choice.”

She falls silent, and he can see from this angle that she’s staring wide-eyed into the dark. He’s not sure if she knows exactly what edging is. Her adorable little question earlier — like kissing? — still has him tied up in knots when he thinks of it. He guesses whatever limited information she’d gotten from her tower-view of Wundagore bars and Wyndham’s biology holotexts hadn’t prepared her for what someone like Rocket could give her.

And oh, he’s definitely planning on giving it.

He strokes through her curls again, counting each forming ringlet. Yeah, he needs this: the weight of her in his arms, soft and safe and so close to being his that he can fool himself just a little, just for now.

Eat it up while it lasts.

He buries his mouth in the halo of her hair and strangles back the strange, alien rumble that wants to rise in his throat again, pushing against the marble rock already lodged there. “Kitten just needs to be reminded what a good girl she is while she gets fucked, huh? Cute,” he taunts lightly, ignoring the squeeze in his heart. There’s a pause, and then she wiggles a little, like his words have maybe brought that flutter back into her belly already and she doesn’t know what to do with it. He grins into her hair. “Good little kitten,” he teases. “Such a frickin’ sweetheart. Says what she wants in front of a roomful of snooty gold shitbags just like she should, then begs for my dick afterward like such a good girl.”

Treats me like a king instead of a creature, he thinks but doesn’t say. Treats me like a frickin’ blessing.

She shifts again and he feels her thighs squeeze together, a rumpled moan moving over her lips. He chuckles — a little darkly — and soothes her with another quick pass through her hair, checking for any remaining snarls.

“Best little fuckin’ thing I’ve found under the stars,” he muffles into her hair, and his throat immediately clenches ‘cause he hadn’t meant to say that part out loud. But she mews softly, her whole body suddenly going lax and soft against him, and he can’t bring himself to scrape it back or tear it up. Instead, he lets his hands sink into the lilac-blue of her still-damp mane, scrunching the curls in a mimicry of her own hands, beckoning the waves and ringlets out of hiding.

And he doesn’t stop — lacing his fingers into the wet threads of her hair, delicately scraping his claws over her scalp. Sinking clever thumbs into the muscles at the base of her skull, the way she’d done for him. Keeping her all tucked tight and snug, warm and wrapped up.

She muffles a sleepy protest at some point, a half-plea for him to nest under the blankets with her, to let her hold him. But he’s relentless, and greedy, too. When she finally drifts off — which shouldn’t be long, according to his calculations — he’ll make himself get up and shower, and throw his wet clothes in the laundry sanitizing locker. He’ll hide away like a broken, ugly thing — which, he reasons, he is — while he washes himself up and changes into something clean and dry. Once he’s covered up again — only then — he’ll come back out and creep under the covers with his perfect fuckin’ pearl, his pretty stolen bride, and he’ll pet her while she sleeps or let her wrap her arms around him tightly, and then, then, he’ll rest.

For now, though, he’s content to watch pearl’s hair dry. To count her eyelashes and her freckles while he feels her hair transform from strands of clinging wet silver to something lighter and fluffier and more alive under his fingers, blooming into curls the color of an Inixian sky just an hour after sunset. He breathes in — the light from the buttons and gauges all around them on the runabout, multicolored and spangled and glowing like wildflowers in a Centaurian meadow. He breathes in — the scene from outside the starpanes: the golden cityscape turned into a champagne-colored shimmer in the wake of two silver Sovereign moons. He breathes in — the scent of her and of him, thick and heady all around them: campfire and clean rivers, blue spruce and waterlily, the nuttiness of his old explosives and the amber scent of her arousal. He breathes it all in, and he holds it in his lungs like the pin in a gravity-grenade, like the last good memory he’ll ever have.

Eat it up while it lasts, he thinks again, mouthing the words silently into the champagne stardust and the midnight-blue.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

ever write a chapter and think this chapter's great! and continue to think that through every one of your twenty revisions and then you come back to it for final edits and you're like oh wait, this sucks??? (me, every third or fourth chapter at least.) writing is hard friends but i hope you were able to enjoy this tidbit of an offering (ㅠ﹏ㅠ) as always i am grateful for you, and i treasure you and your kindness & kudos & encouragement so much i can hardly stand it. you are the little jeweled scales in butterfly wings

exciting things:
♡ FINALLY! my fave rocket & pearl scene from chapter thirteen! (scroll down for the whole piece)
♡ cicatrix is currently scheduled to be updated three times in august. today, then next friday 8/16 and the following friday 8/23. technically i am traveling on the 23rd so it's possible i may get the chapter out a day early or a day late, deepending.
♡ major themes of every future chapter mapped out.

coming soon: chapter nineteen. tiris.
summary: rocket and pearl develop something of a tradition. the trio argues, and the kylosian has a request.
warnings: rocket’s a degenerate. dirty-talk and teasing while panty-shopping, with the threat of being overheard. brief description of fantasies. angst.
estimated date: friday, august sixteen.

･:꧂posting schedules, chapter-previews, & more on tumblr♡
･:꧂masterlist & moodboard♡
･:꧂chapter one. nemotia of cicatrix scene by @frostedwitch
･:꧂portrait of pearl♡
･:꧂rocket & pearl's bunk on the runabout (lineart)
･:꧂my fave rocket & pearl scene from chapter thirteen. ♡♡ (scroll down for the whole piece)

Chapter 19: tiris.

Summary:

rocket and pearl develop something of a tradition. the trio argues, and the kylosian has a request.

Notes:

warnings: rocket’s a degenerate. dirty-talk and teasing while panty-shopping, with the threat of being overheard. brief description of fantasies. angst.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

tiris. The bittersweet awareness that all things must end. The way you’re still only settling into vacation while mentally preboarding your flight home, or how soon after starting a new relationship you start to wonder exactly how this one ends. Even before you’ve purchased the carton of milk in your hands, you’re already turning it over, looking for the expiration date. In the end, all goods are perishable. Everything is transient. From Tír na nÓg, the land of everlasting youth in Irish folklore + hubris, excessive pride or arrogance, especially toward a god. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Mornings and wake-shifts don’t always line up when a person is planetside. The sky brightens when it brightens, with little care for when landlocked space pilots might be trying to catch a few precious minutes of frickin’ sleep. To be honest, morning always seems less like a time of day to Rocket, and more like a thing that happens to him. Experimentation, loss, starvation, injury.

And mornings.

Luckily, mornings on Sovereign aren’t as bright as they could be. Dawn crawls in like a bright moon, thanks to the furthest of the three suns rising first and the mistiness of the Sovereign atmosphere. The first time he wakes — an hour before he normally would, with his arms full of pearl — the words are already ringing in his head.

Eat it up while it lasts.

He thinks of it every hour afterward, and each time, it widens the pit in his belly.

He starts hanging onto every moment in the meantime, hoarding them like spare units: waking up with his nose in pearl’s hair, or with his body tucked against her belly and squeezed tight against her tits. She cuddles into him like he’s some sort of soft toy, something she loves, and it makes his heart rise up into the back of his mouth every time. Sometimes he can feel his eyes get glossy and wet when she curls around him and nuzzles into the fur at the back of his neck, murmuring sleepy nothings.

Eat it up while it lasts.

He’d never really bothered with breakfast until he’d been trying to get pearl to eat more those first few rotations together, but now she feeds him every time they wake up. He’s always loved eggs, even more than auroch and boar — but he’s never known they could taste like this. He’s only got a handful of seasonings and spices that he’s never really experimented with, but she mixes them with the dried synth-vegetables he’d purchased for her, or rehydrates them into different kinds of scrambles and things she calls frittatas and skillets and omelettes, or fried with noodles, or hard-boiled and added to a porridge she’s made from Indigarran mixed-grain.

In the past, his menu’s always only consisted of whatever was easiest to store, supplemented by the most delicious shit he could steal or afford from street-stalls. But here’s pearl, reinventing bland-as-paste Sovereign meals for dinner every single evening. She pours over them, somehow spinning flavor out of thin air and whatever few ingredients she’s decided to add from their food locker. Rocket hasn’t thought about being hungry in ages — nothing compares to the first five or six circs he’d spent on his own after his initial escape from HalfWorld — but his stomach and his muscles are all cramping less, and he hasn’t had the sickly burn of acid in his throat for a couple rotations now. He leans back on the workbench-bunk or spins his chair on the flight deck, and he watches his girl lingering over the hotplate with loving hands, tasting everything before she gives it to him like he’s some kind of Spartoi royalty and she’s checking for poisons.

She’s continued this new habit of humming while she works. He finds his ears are always swiveling toward her, trying to funnel the strange melodies home into his head where he can remember them forever. Maybe shuffle them into his fur. Sometimes she catches him looking and gives him that shy little kitten-smile, and his heart kicks in his chest like a broken Nova machine gun.

He tries to scowl at her, and finds it increasingly difficult.

It’s usually around this time that Groot trundles in — consistently thudding his massive head on the top of the airlock doorway — smiling his big-oaf smile and murmuring I am Groots that make Rocket think of skies far more scintillating than any he’s ever actually seen. When Groot speaks, Rocket sees a heaven full of stars and planets that radiate faint golden rings like ripples in a pond, shimmering and lapping against each other. He starts to wonder what the visible range of light is for pearl’s houseplant — if the Taluhnisan is capable of seeing the energy emanating from the Sovereign Collective in the same way that the abilisks seem able to almost smell it.

He thinks about Groot more than he’d like to admit, to be honest. Rocket had assumed that he’d be annoyed anytime they crossed paths but maybe you can’t spend hours trying to understand another person without coming to like ‘em a little bit. He’ll never come out and say it, but he’s started making extra coffee for Groot. Pearl had noticed the very first rotation he’d done it, and he’d glared at her before she could get a word out — but she’d just looked at him with her starsilver eyes so soft and happy, big stupid tears already sequining her lower lashes. Rocket had rolled his own eyes and told her to shut it. Every morning afterward, while he and pearl had eaten their delicious little handmade meals and Groot had stirred a mug of bitter black tar with one barkish finger, the three of them had picked through her memories to find anything she could recall from Wyndham’s notes.

Actually talking about the abilisks and the Sovereign-related lab-notes has opened a frickin’ treasure trove of information in pearl’s mind. She uses a datapad to sketch vague ideas of what she remembers: biological diagrams, half-certain maps of abilisk brains and the gland next to their olfactory bulb. Next to it, she’s scribbled the Kree words for dyneal gland, and a bulleted list of the notes she remembers and hypotheses of her own about how the damn thing works. Something about magnetite crystals rooted at the base of the gland, and secretions of somatosensory and mechanoreceptors. Biological engineering doesn’t come quite as naturally to Rocket as every other kind of engineering, but he thinks he’s got the basic idea — enough to fill in most of the blanks, if pearl’s notes are right.

His concept of the abilisks and their dyneal glands and the Fuck-You-Disk distills: as crystalline as the special high-grade armored glass in his future Dreadnought — while pearl unravels everything she knows, showing him each thread and fiber as she goes. She explains whatever she remembers: bits of how Wyndham had harnessed the energy that infuses the cores of the Collective, shreds and scraps of the processes he used to refine it. His notes had described it as a sovereign energyform — a sort of purified, comprehensive condensation of potential power of various kinds: gravitational, electric, elastic, magnetic, chemical, nuclear.

“Huh. So that’s why it’s so adaptablistic,” Rocket muses as the pieces click into place for him. “Frickin’ Collective can use it for anything — sell it to anyone — ‘cause it’s fuckin’ compatible with just about any power grid or energy system.”

Pearl hums her agreement. “Herbert figured out ways to filter the energyform. To remove the, uhm — harmful levels of radiation, I guess? He sort of — distilled and purified it, condensing it down. And then — I don’t understand the mechanics of it, exactly, but it seemed like he sort of infused it into the molecules of a supercritical fluid. In that form, it’s — well, it’s mostly harmless. I mean, I wouldn’t suggest ingesting it if you’re not an abilisk. It’s still battery fluid.”

Rocket snorts.

The energyform, pearl tells him, is supposedly so potent that a spoonful keeps the Amber Palazzo powered for a full circumrotation. Renewable, too. If the Collective had seemed like an unnatural planetary formation, the Monster of the past had dismissed it as just another cosmic anomaly. Weirder structures have taken shape in the universe over the eons, after all. But pearl tells Rocket that the planets are generators and refineries themselves — that the Collective isn’t just built on sovereign energyform; it produces it.

Rocket sort of wishes pearl could remember more of the schematics, ‘cause he wouldn’t mind building himself a little sovereign energyform generator and selling a few batteries of his own.

Once Pearl’s sketched out what she can remember on the datapad for the day — and scribbled down notes she’ll doubtless come back to and pour over later — they finish eating breakfast. Invariably, at this point, the three of them head out to the observation deck so Rocket can study the batteries. Pearl had been nervous the first time he’d hacked all the Sovereign biolocks and security, murmuring something about how testy the Gold Snobs get about their damn batteries.

“Can’t make a Fuck-You-Disk without knowing exactly what I’m fucking up, pearl,” he’d reasoned with a sharp little grin. “Don’t you worry — I’ll make sure they’re all right here when the abilisk migration comes through, just in case this little plan of yours doesn’t work. Gotta make sure there’s still bait.”

There’ll be plenty of time after the migration to snatch some of the little glass vials, after all.

Pearl had still looked nervous every time he’d done it, and Groot had watched him with dark eyes that had seemed entirely too observant — but nobody had protested when he’d poked through the glass vials of sunlight.

He’d used every tool in his arsenal to identify all the ways the energyform seemed to show up. The batteries are all off the charts on most of his scanners, and by the time he leaves the observation deck most mornings, his fur is standing on end with something like static, and pearl’s lilac-blue curls look even more alive than usual — floating around her like she’s swimming through those sunlit canals he keeps getting glimpses of in his dreams.

Drax, who spends all his mornings on that same deck — flexing and sparring with himself like some kinda frickin’ moron, or sitting and staring up at the thin dusk-blue Sovereign sky — invariably points and roars with laughter.

Frankly, it’s fuckin’ obnoxious.

The three of them spend the middle part of their days hunting for supplies. It’s rough in a city that only sells luxury f’saki-shit. Everything is expensive, and only half of it is worth half of what it costs. And of course — like the truly-moneyed shitbags they are — the citizens of Sovereign send their trash off-world, so Rocket can’t even scavenge for cool parts in a moon-damned junkyard. He wishes — not for the first time — that he could go back in time and kick his own ass for his scathing comment about pearl shopping for trinkets, because sure enough, she proves to be the best one of their hodgepodge trio when it comes to finding what he needs for an almost-reasonable price in these stupid boutiques. Usually, she’s dragging him to places he would never have even thought to consider. Thrice, she finds his required items that he’s apparently incapable of tracking down on his own. The first time, after he’d skulked around the Golden Piazza for too many hours, he’d finally surrendered to the idea of purchasing a mediocre blaster with vibranium detailing at the fancy-pants armory, just so he could melt down the metal. Pearl had prodded him to figure out why he’d intended to buy it for and when he’d told her, she’d tilted her head and squished her brow into a little furrow, thinking all hard and cute — then made him follow her to a bespoke jeweler where she’d only paid near-cost for a Kree pound of pure vibranium. The shop’s been using it for the cores of gold-plated torqs and arm-bands. Apparently, the Sovereign pay way more attention to the quality of their jewelry than their guns.

Pearl’s insight had led to a double-win anyway, as far as Rocket had been concerned. He’d been half-afraid that she would’ve noticed that the shitty blaster had a hull made of imported, hand-carved Acanti ivory, and he’d just known it would’ve made her cry.

Now, Rocket lets her drag them all into little jewelry stores and home goods boutiques and art houses, pinging back and forth between fancy Sovereign shops like ricocheted bullets. With silvery-sweet doe-eyes, she asks the local artisans and hobbyists and jewelers if they can tell her where to find each of his supplies in bulk. Every single one of ‘em start by sneering down their nose at her, but she works whatever ambassadorial magic she’s woven into the fiber of her being, and half the bastards end up selling her whatever shit they’ve got in their own storage rooms at cost.

Of course, even after he’d decided to just sit back and let her take the lead — telling his pearl what he needs and letting her decide where to hunt for it — she remains hesitant. She’s always reminding Rocket in hushed undertones that she’s new to units, and that he should stop her if she’s doing something stupid. But here, he supposes, is one of the big differences between the two of them: he’s used to scavenging half-melted scraps from old busted-up ships, to snatching anything he can with quick clever hands. Meanwhile, pearl’s sitting quietly in the background, sifting through her pretty thoughts for a place that might have what he needs in abundance. And if Rocket happens to snatch an item or two — for free — while they’re talking? Well, nobody needs to know. Groot only catches him once — with a predictable three-word admonishment — but Rocket just grins at him, hard-edged and cynical.

Unlike at Wona Beax’s, Rocket has no urge to leave a little extra cash behind in his wake, either. These pretentious fuckers can get wrecked, as far as he’s concerned.

Groot’s terrible at all of it, incidentally. Doesn’t seem capable of keeping track of different purchases and vendors. The Taluhnisan is deeply uninterested in their shopping list, and clearly prefers people-watching to any of the more tangible tasks at hand. He’d gaped at the snooty Sovereign who’d strolled by with their condescending stares and pinched mouths. He’d peered through restaurant windows with his face pressed to the glass. He’d gawked, awe-struck, at the fountain-displays in the piazza — each programmed to spray in a dizzying array of fanciful hydroworks.

Then he’d climbed right into one and tried to drink from it.

Rocket had snapped at him to get the fuck out of the pool, till pearl had tried her hand at coaxing the Taluhnisan. Water had glanced off the Big Guy’s ligneous skin and ended up dousing her in a cold splash. Rocket’s teeth had clacked shut immediately, and he’d opted to lean against the gold-plated retaining wall instead: hips jutting, tail swinging, hooded eyes sticking to pearl’s wet hair and tits the same way his tiny soaked t-shirt had. He’d pressed the tip of his tongue to one canine so hard that blood had filled his mouth, and he’d bitten out a grin when he’d realized that the only thing offering her nipples any sort of protection at all were the words Orbital Resonance: Shi’ar Tour 57, plastered across the clear shape of her bouncing breasts.

She hadn’t noticed. She’d been too focused on luring Groot from the water. Thankfully, it had been a quiet time of day — but even so, a handful of Sovereign had watched with slick sneers. Rocket had only bothered casting a few murderous glares back at the clusters of pretentious bastards. Once they’d flinched back from his glower and dropped their stares, he’d turned his own eyes back to his two bumbling morons.

Eat it up while it lasts, he’d reminded himself again as Groot had reluctantly clambered over the retaining wall. Apprehension had wrapped around him just as pearl had tugged her half-soaked cardigan back over her drenched tits.

The cords in his throat had knotted in tension and uncertainty.

Fountain-fiascos aside, Rocket will admit — just to himself — to feeling a sullen, clawing sort of relief when Groot is with them. It’s just natural, he decides — wanting to keep an eye on these two idiots, both of ‘em too nice for their own good. Somebody’s gotta make sure they don’t do something stupid.

More stupid.

The knot in his throat tightens. If there’s some kind of bitterness burning, sharp and hot and brittle as a fulgurite swelling under the sand, then he manages to keep it buried for now.

Once pearl secures their materials for the day, the three of them head back to the runabout. If there’s still light, they stay outside on the landing deck. Pearl practices her shooting — she’s doing well, though her aim’s still off, especially when she tries to squeeze the quadblaster’s second trigger — while Rocket starts melting down whatever toxic-smelling metals he needs for his next few prototypes. Then pearl makes some sort of delicious dinner out of bastardized Sovereign takeout, and they eat together while the Big Guy tells the next segment of his story in a series of quiet I am Groots. The old Taluhnisan folktale winds through a hundred other stories, breaking apart like branches and coming back together like root systems. Sometimes, Rocket has no fuckin’ idea what he’s listening to, but whenever pearl retells the story in a language his translator can understand, he’s startled by the way her words run parallel to the paths of his own thoughts. Both she and Groot always seem so fuckin’ thrilled by Rocket’s responses, like he’s doing so well, and it twists him up on the inside. Some part of him aches to — what, make them proud? To feel good at something he’d always been worthless at? To understand his strange new crewmate — as if it mattered?

Rocket doesn’t know. He’d long ago given up on feeling anything but low and bitter, pleased by his own genius in a vindictive sort of way that had hinged entirely too much on Wyndham’s outrage and shortcomings and jealousy. Whatever this is, it’s an alien feeling, and Rocket doesn’t think he likes it. Doesn’t like the way it makes him want to cling his fists into pearl’s and Groot’s moronic smiles, their sappy-soft glances. In some moments, its makes him clench his claws into his fists — furious, and unable to explain exactly why.

But he keeps listening to the stories. Greedily, almost.

And resentfully.

Eat it up while it lasts.

What’ll be the turning point? he wonders moodily sometimes, twisting thread-fine copper wires into tiny circuit boards, goggles hiding whatever expression has squinted into his narrowed, focused eyes. What’ll be the thing that breaks this fragile, weird little thing into pieces, each one falling between his claws and shattering on the runabout’s grates?

After their weird little evening ritual, Groot leaves, and Rocket stays awake, working on Fuck-You prototypes to take back to the battery tower in the following morning. He doesn’t fuck pearl again — though he wants to. For fuck’s sake, he fuckin’ wants to. Even if part of him is annoyed — even, occasionally, irate — at her for all the weird tremors she’s put into his whiskers, and the heavy marble stone in his throat that hasn’t gonna away since he’d licked an apology into her pretty cunt.

And the longing that lives in the palms of his hands these days.

But it’ll have to wait till he figures out this tech. Sure, he’d been able to throw together a couple regular disks while pearl had kept his cock squeezed tight in her pretty pink cunt. Those had basically just been crafted from muscle-memory. Unfortunately — for him, at least — there’s no way that he’ll be able to figure out something to scramble the signature of the sovereign energyform if pearl were wrapped around him again.

He stays with her, though. “Get into bed, pearl” — grunted at her every night with the full intention of keeping to himself on the workbench-bunk, or even up on the flightdeck. But somehow, Rocket always ends up trailing after her like an asteroid caught up in the gravity of a star — nervous system all sparking and sparkling, burning up, trapped in the way time and space seem to pool around his pearl. No matter how far away he gets, he always comes back: climbing up after her into the bunk with an armful of metal and circuitry, resonator chips and tools. She curls up on her side, and he sits with his back leaned up against her belly. He works quietly — cutting and clicking together little pieces, temp-fusing them with a quick skim of a laser, pulling together ratty mock-ups that will be tested on the batteries in the morning.

The hardest part of this whole endeavor is going to be making sure that the Collective will still be readable by other scanners — the kind used by travelers and merchants and intergalactic emergency systems — as just another planet with lifeforms. But it feels like the hardest parts are these moments, right now: sitting beside pearl in the shadows, feeling her soft body behind his without turning to give her his hand on the mattress. For fuck’s sake, it’s only been around two cycles that he’s actually been in this bed with her, but he thinks the only way he knows how to sleep anymore is with his forehead pressed against hers, or her head tucked against his flank, or his back smushed against her tits and her arms wrapped around him like he’s some kind of little humie gargoyle’s soft toy.

He doesn’t let himself think too long about that last part, about letting himself pretend he’s really a thing made just to be cuddled. His mind swerves off the idea like it’s dangerous. Toxic.

Let himself think too long about being loved on like that, and it can only end in trouble.

Still, he can’t help but glance over his shoulder at pearl as he works, watching her gunmetal eyes follow his hands. He knows she can’t see very well in the dim dark of the runabout, even with the glow of the gauges and control panels on the walls, the faint radiance of the security lights. But she sleepily follows the patterns of his fingers like they’re little beacons. The flare of his multitool reflects and dances on the thin ring of her moonsilver-irises, pupils blown wide in the dark. He keeps his eyes half-trained on her until her lashes start sinking over her gaze, and even after — when they’ve long ago made feathery crescents on her cheeks.

Then he looks to the circular starpane at the foot of the bunk, and to the starshield out over the flightdeck to his right, and he tells himself he’s probably the only one on this whole batch of planets that’s still awake. He stares at the Sovereign starscape between glances at the series of coils and circuits in his hands, and he maps pearl’s constellations in his mind.

Arete. Astraea.

Adrestia — inescapable punishment.

For some reason — Sovereign aside — that last one sits like a stone in his gut. He thinks again of the fragile spun-glass web of this weird thing he has going on with pearl and Groot, and how easily it’ll shatter. How it must, sooner or later. Inevitably, he sighs and tries to refocus on the thing he’s making. He pulls out scanners. He tries to test the little prototypes as well as he can, without access to an actual battery. He thinks he’s close. He thinks he’s almost got it. He does everything he The Monster reaches out absently with one dark claw and winds a star-blue ringlet between his fingers like a curling ribbon of silk.

Eat it up while it lasts.

He stays up late, and keeps working.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

By the sixth rotation, Rocket’s eyes are blurry and burning from lack of sleep, but he wakes up giddy nonetheless. He can barely eat pearl’s tasty little breakfast, though he’s certainly already salivating.

They get to the observation deck, where the Kylosian is stretching as he warms up. Rocket has no idea what the idiot is doing out here all day, every day: sparring with ghosts and staring into the dusk-blue overhead, like he’s gonna spot a wayward abilisk before it gets picked up on any of the scientific instruments and alarms that are currently trained toward the sky. Rocket ignores him: striding up to the battery tower as usual, dismantling its series of biolocks and securities, and pulling out a single battery. The supercritical fluid inside, glowing like sunlight, floats and shimmers and drips along the inside of the delicate glass vial. He can feel every strand of fur on his body quiver and start to rise up off his skin, prickling in reaction to the energyform.

He sets the prototype — just the size of his palm — down on the open case of batteries and gestures at pearl impatiently. She hands him the double-cylinder of a datapad, which he unscrolls so he can view the battery through the faint blue glow of the screen. Ages ago, he’d dreamed up some code to turn the datapad into a multiscanner, but he’s had to make some adaptations in order to try and mimic the particular idiosyncrasies of an organic computer rather than an inorganic one.

Rocket flicks through the settings. A standard energy-signature scan reads the battery at a negligible output — not even enough to power a plasma orb. He dials through a range of hypotheticals based on Pearl’s notes. He scans for magnetism, ionized particles, temperature, vibrations, and more. He uses the programs he’s developed to try to mimic biological scanners: Gangalorian squirrelbirds following underground duranium veins to develop migratory paths; the echolocating microbats who hunt prey via vibration on Canticle 6. The spawning meadowsharks that flood against the Aladnan river currents in mating season, following lures of temperature and chemical magnetoreception and smell. Foresterian moonmoths who know to only hatch from their chrysalises when their planets’ second moon re-enters their sky, ionizing enough atmospheric particles to wake them up.

All these ways of reading energy, and the little prototype fucks ‘em all up.

There’s no way of knowing for sure if it’ll work on the abilisks — not till they cross paths. But still, the bubble of excitement in Rocket’s chest expands even while his ribs tighten. He licks his lips and lets his eyes narrow. He tucks the battery case back inside the tower and locks it up, and he pockets the prototype. Pearl and Groot are both looking down at him with big, worried eyes. Pearl’s got her fists knotted between those gorgeous tits of hers again, pressed against her sternum as she chews her lip anxiously. She’s wearing the pink cardigan and he wants more than anything to see her naked underneath it. He wants to squeeze and massage her pink nipples through the wooly texture — see how whiny and wet it would make her—

He clicks his tongue in disappointment. Not tonight.

Of course, there’s no reason why he can’t still have some fun. For a moment, he swallows back the knot of tension in the base of his throat, stuffing it down, ignoring it. Trampling it under clawed feet and sealing it up, nice and quiet.

“I am Groot?” Groot asks.

Rocket hazards a guess at what the Big Guy’s saying — You look disappointed. But he only bites the inside of his cheek and says, “C’mon. We gotta pick up some more supplies.”

Both of his companions deflate.

“I am Groot,” Groot laments, and Rocket rolls his eyes.

“You ain’t even the one staying up all night trying to figure this out,” he chastises the Taluhnisan, trying to bite back his grin. He cants a sideways glance up at pearl and she falters, brow creasing, like she sees something in his face that confuses her. He scowls, trying to lock down his twisted-up inner elation. “And you,” he adds, brandishing a clawed finger in her direction, “you’re gonna find me about twelve Kree pounds of duranium ore, three pounds of vibranium, twenty-five standard Kree segments of copper wiring, and a whole bunch of other shit I’m still working out.”

“Twenty-five segments?” she squeaks. “Twelve pounds?”

He gives himself enough leeway to let his lip curl back into something closer to a sneer. “Can’t do it, sweetheart?”

“I can,” she says, frowning with so much concentration it almost looks like a pout. “It’s just a lot. How are you going to use—”

But he cuts her off, spinning on his heel and stalking across the deck toward the moving platform. The perch lowers them resolutely down the outside of the Amber Palazzo, feeding them into the city below. The streets aren’t exactly bustling, but there are a number of Sovereign out today: strolling from store to museum, eating in outdoor restaurant courtyards, or sipping imported Asgardian wine at one of the capitol’s central fountains. More than one levels a condescending glower on Rocket’s little group, but he only grins back dangerously, putting an extra swagger in his stride.

Every now and then, though, he sees some of that disdain melt into heated intrigue as some Sovereign jackass realizes just how fuckable his pearl is. They’re hungry, he thinks, for the exotic moon-blue of her wild curls and the pink of her skin, the plushness of her soft body. Some of them look as predatory as Indigarran panthers, slinking and prowling across the piazza. Rocket bares his teeth in a series of biting smiles and dares them to come within reach, his own gaze feral and taunting.

They don’t.

When the shopping is done — arms heavy with wrapped packages of vibranium shavings and duranium ball bearings, sheets of aluminum sheeting so fine they have to be rolled into a protective tube so they don’t crumple; pourable fiberglass fluid and resin, a thousand copper wires fine enough that they’d almost felt like wool when he’d touched them — Rocket turns to Groot and pearl in the tawny light of the piazza. There’s the soft crush and burble of a giant gold-and-cobalt fountain a few feet away, and the Sovereign sunlight — dim and almost opalescent — casts everything with a dreamlike glow.

Ostentatious the Sovereign may be, but they definitely know how to cultivate an aesthetic. Plus, Groot doesn’t even try to drink from this one this time.

Eat it up while it lasts, Rocket thinks, and imagines his pearl splayed out in the bunk of his brand-new Dreadnought: a celebratory feast for him to relish. That sour, sharp sense that he’s on a timeline — that everything is going to crumple — stays folded neatly beneath his lungs, and he decides to pretend it doesn’t exist for now. His smile hardens.

“Groot, can you take this shit to the runabout?” he asks Groot, gesturing with his chin to the bundles in his own and Pearl’s arms. “Dump it on the other bunk — the one that’s got all my guns and tools and shit on it?”

“I am Groot?” the Taluhnisan asks, though he’s already plucking the packages from pearl’s arms while she protests. The Big Guy is somehow always more massive than Rocket remembers, and he’s able to wrangle the ramshackle mountain of supplies with surprising ease. Rocket’s eyes narrow. More than once, he’s considered that Groot might be decent muscle to keep on hand — providing the Taluhnisan wants to stick around. The two of ‘em could probably tackle even bigger bounties than Rocket can take on alone. Not that the self-professed Monster needs any help taking anyone out if he needs to — but bringing ‘em back in? He’s limited by his size and whatever tech he happens to have on hand.

But if Groot were to stay, the Taluhnisan could easily carry in some of the heavier bounties—

Rocket punches the thought down, hard-knuckled, as soon as it starts to rise. He’s already too tangled in pearl — no need to shackle himself to another idiot, too. Not when there’s already that low sense of dread and buzzing tension trying to climb out from under his ribs.

“I am Groot?” Groot repeats. Concern threads its way through the words like new tendrils on an old vine, and Rocket bares his teeth in a sharp little grin at the question. Pearl’s there, pretty lips parting to translate, but he’s pretty sure he’s already got most of the message.

“Just wanted to pick up a few more things, as a special treat for me,” he explains with a smirk he just knows looks smug as hell. “Thought I deserved to celebrate.”

There’s a beat, and then Groot’s eyes widen. “I am Groot?” he asks, but Rocket’s stare is already sewn onto pearl. Her starsilver eyes are big and wide, ringed in thick lashes, and she’s got her hands clasped against the tiny String Theory t-shirt, belly bared in a thin strip above the high waist of her leggings. That high ponytail of blue curls is already swinging as she rocks onto her toes and does that fuckin’ delicious little bounce of a dance — like she’s so thrilled by him, by Rocket; so impressed and happy ‘cause of him that she can’t even keep it all inside her skin. It’s gotta come out: through her eyes and the edges of her smile, channeled into this little vibration of movement — bright and shimmering, warm as sunlight.

“You figured it out,” she squeals, soft but pitchy and eager, and his damn heart turns over in his chest and that stone in his throat gets bigger and heavier. But he just gives her his best shit-eating smirk and slants a crimson wink in her direction.

“You doubted me, kitten?” He tsks with a raised eyebrow, stifling the thread of uncertainty and the growing knot of tangled static. If he’s sardonic enough, he reasons — if he’s enough of a smug, cocky bastard — maybe he can forget that sense of impending ruin. “Definitely shouldn’t have gambled on me if you weren’t sure.”

“I was sure,” she says fervently, still bouncing on her toes. Something about it has the flexi-vibranium in his ribs going all soft and molten. She makes it easy to ignore the dull warning bell blaring along his synthetic bones. “I knew; I knew.”

“I am Groot,” the Big Guy agrees warmly.

“I’ll work on the final model over the next rotation or two. Got an idea for a back-up shield too, for myself, just in case it doesn’t end up working right. But I don’t think that’s gonna be a problem.” He licks his teeth and scratches out another sharp grin, denting his lower lip with one canine. “I think we’re gonna be just fine.” He raises one brow. “So, princess — you better figure out just what the fuck you’re doing with that Luphomoid. ‘Cause I ain’t gonna ferry her around forever. Sure as hell not taking her all the way to Fron. You wanna trade her in for her bounty or get her into murderer-rehab or whatever, you better figure it out quick. Till then, she’s gonna be locked up in the cargo hold.” His grin gets wider, smugness whitening his teeth. “In my new ship.”

If he’d expected any pushback from pearl, it doesn’t come — not yet. She’s still looking at him with moons and meteorites in her gunmetal-gray eyes, like he’s the most amazing thing she’s ever frickin’ seen, and he grinds his heel into the warning voice lurking in the back of his mind and under his lungs. Instead, he lets himself preen under his pretty pearl’s admiring gaze, feeling like a billion fuckin’ units.

“I am Groot,” Groot says, and the words resonate with the vague impression of movement and weight, of bundles and packages and the open airlock of the runabout, beckoning like home. “I am Groot?” A request for clarification, or maybe confirmation: pearl with her lilac-blue hair, her wrist gripped in Rocket’s dark-clawed hand.

“Yes,” pearl says, not waiting for Rocket to answer. “I’m staying with him, if you don’t mind?” Her smile — a shade past the shy kitten-curl Rocket’s become too damn enamored with — is too bright to stay trapped in one uncertain corner of her mouth. “I want to help him celebrate. I want to make sure he—”

“Yeah, I need her,” Rocket interrupts, and he can’t help the half-sinister leer pulling at the corner of his own mouth as he echoes her words. “She’s gotta help me.”

“I am Groot,” Groot says, and it feels like, Of course; like I wouldn’t expect anything else; like, It makes me happy to see you two like this, little mammals.

He’s got no frickin’ idea.

Rocket has already scoped out where he wants to take his pearl. A little boutique called Anaya’s Armoire. Pearl’s oblivious, almost skipping sideways beside him, chattering. When did he figure it out? Why didn’t he say anything? Did he need so many more materials because the final version has to be larger? Will he have any extra supplies left over? She has another idea that could be useful, for diplomaticalistic purposes—

She stutters to a halt, feet nearly tripping over themselves in surprise once she realizes what they’ve walked into. Sparkling lingerie drips glitter from every wall and glass dais: shades of gleaming yellow and bronze, rose-gold, silver and champagne. Frothy ivory scraps of lace, sparkling with platinum threads and studded with iridescent Spartoi crystals — so tiny that the fabric twinkles. Gleaming, rippling silk panties layered thickly with ruffles, tied low on the hip by wide shining bows: flouncy and frilly, made from sleek fabric the color of iolites and dark honey. Rocket almost salivates on sight, imagining the silk under the ruffles becoming dark and slippery from pearl’s soft, dripping cunt.

There are garters and bustiers and camisoles studded with fine sprays of sapphires and citrines, quarter-cup brassieres and ouvert knickers that damn near short-circuit his brain, and a whole line of lingerie made from filigreed gold metal-work that he immediately dismisses as too rigid and unforgiving to be allowed to come close to pearl’s flesh.

“What—“

“Special treat for me,” he repeats with a toothy grin. Her lips part, moonsilver eyes rounding out, a perplexed little noise curling in the back of her throat.

“I thought you meant a new firearm,” she utters, her voice breathy and uncertain. “Or something for the Dreadnought—“

“Nope.” He lingers on the n and pops the p, smug and drawling. “I’ve been thinking about seeing you in some of this fancy shit for a while.” He grins up at her. “I’ll be workin’ nonstop on the final model till it’s done, but I wanna know what you’re gonna wear for me on our first night in our new ship.”

The color blossoms high in her cheekbones, pink as the fifth sun on Olark. She opens her mouth to speak, closes it, and tries again — just as a predictably-statuesque Sovereign sweeps toward them, looming over them both with the faintest, most tasteful sneer pulling back the corner of her mouth.

“Can I help you?” the woman asks haughtily. Rocket’s pretty sure that each and every Sovereign instinctively knows how to tilt their head at the perfect angle to really look down their noses at a person. And yet somehow, it still feels personal. He’s suddenly certain that they can all see right through him — past the vibranium gunmetal veneer into that hollow pit he’s trying to keep quiet, the one that’s always saying You ain’t enough and you’re a frickin’ monster and you’re no good for them and eat it up while it lasts.

His lip curls in response to the interloper, canines bared in a toothy sneer of his own as his ears flatten backward. “Who’s askin’?” he says, half a snarl graveling out his voice. Pearl tenses beside him.

“The owner,” the woman shoots back icily, and Rocket lifts a brow and gives her a doubtful once-over. She’s in an elegant, clinging black onepiece that covers her from collarbone to ankle, with sleeves that reach over the backs of her hands, down to her knuckles. Amethysts drip from her tawny ears, and her hair’s pulled back in a severe golden knot at the base of her neck. If Rocket had been gambling, he’d have bet this woman was more likely to wear gold-studded black leather under her clothes than any of the sweet, frilly nothings on the walls.

“You’re Anaya?” he asks skeptically, and she arches a golden brow.

“The boutique is named after my wife,” the woman says sternly — and that makes Rocket crack a grin, suddenly more at ease.

“It’s a lovely shop,” pearl interjects before he can say something likely to get them kicked out. “We were just looking. We’ll—“

He reaches up under pearl’s cardigan to pinch the bared skin between her waistband and the String Theory shirt. She yelps, and he turns his eyes back to Anaya’s wife.

“We got units,” he tells the Sovereign evenly, “and I wanna spend a few of ‘em.”

“Rocket,” pearl whispers, discomfort written in the crinkle of her brow, “I’m sure these things are expens—“

“As a treat for me,” he interrupts her, and pearl falls quiet, her fingers knotting in front of her abdomen.

Anaya’s wife studies him through narrow gilded irises, lips pursed — then grants him a single, abrupt nod. “Exactly what are you hoping to purchase?” she asks, and Rocket casts his eyes up at pearl again, at her moon-blue hair and starry eyes.

“A little souvenir,” he drawls. “Whatever she wants.”

Pearl’s immediately protesting. Of course.

“You said—“

He cuts her off with a raised brow. For fuck’s sake, she’s blushing so hard he can feel the heat radiating down to where he stands. Her fingers reach for the ends of her ponytail, combing and tugging. He wonders if he can get her blushing this hot when he’s got her alone next time, pussy all wet and cradled in whatever pretty thing he buys today.

And later, the handful of other pretty things he’s planning to steal on their way out.

“You said, a treat for you,” pearl says, her voice all worried and tense. “It should be something you like—”

“I just want it to be soft,” he says, turning his eyes back to Anaya’s wife. “None of that scratchy kinda lace, none of that metal. She’s gotta be comfortable in it. It’s gotta feel good on her skin.” It’s gotta feel good when I drag it off her. “Otherwise, it’s her pick.”

“But—“ pearl starts.

“Sweetheart,” he snaps. “You’ll look good in any of this shi — this stuff,” he amends, casting a sideways glance up at the Sovereign shop-owner.

Her gold eyes flicker.

“I have some suggestions to help you begin,” Anaya’s wife says at last, head still held at that arrogant angle. “Please, sit.” Her slender golden hand waves dismissively to an alcove in one corner, with plush royal-blue drapes and a matching bench in indigo velvet. Then she steps away, gliding over the polished floors to pick through piles of silk and sequin while Rocket strolls across the room, trying to act like he feels at home. He leaps onto the bench and sees pearl still hasn’t moved from her spot by the door, so he raises one brow tauntingly and taps the bench next to himself. He can read her uncertainty, but still, she listens, and he can’t help how it makes his abdomen tighten every frickin’ time. It’s so good, it makes his skin sing under his fur. It’s so good, it can almost drown out that seething self-loathing.

“Relax, kitten,” he says mildly when pearl finally lowers herself onto the bench beside him. “What’s the point of havin’ units if we don’t spend ‘em?” He slants a curious, assessing gaze up at her. “An’ what’s the point of shopping on Sovereign if I can’t pick up something that gets your little pussy wet whenever you think about wearing it for me?”

She sucks in a breath, eyes scattering around the room to pin down the shop owner, and Rocket grins and scoots closer to her on the bench.

“What?” he asks in a stage-whisper, all mock concern. “You don’t want Anaya’s wife to know that you’re here in her fancy-pants shop, getting all drippy and desperate at the thought of showing off your pretty body to the degenerate vermin?”

Her eyes fly to his, wide open and wounded. “I’d never think of you like that—“ she starts fiercely, but he cuts her off with a snicker.

“Don’t worry, kitten, I know. And I bet Anaya’s wife does too. She seems like the type who prob’ly took one look at you and knew what a good girl you are.” He chuckles when the pink in her cheeks gets even brighter and more flowerlike, and he pitches his voice low. “Think she could probably guess how you like me to tell you what to do.” Pearl makes a muffled sound on her throat, something akin to a whimper, but her pupils are dilating rapidly. He lets his voice turn into smoke. “And how you wanna please me so frickin’ bad that your pussy’s constantly crying for it.”

Her thighs twitch and he pats the knee closest to him — a mocking reassurance.

“Your nipples are hard again,” he teases in a low voice, right as the Sovereign sweeps back into their range. Poor pearl’s so pink that it puts the inner hearts of the Moraggian waterlilies to shame, and Rocket bites back a snicker, transforming it into a shit-eating grin instead.

Anaya’s wife must see this kind of shit all the time, though, because she doesn’t bat an eye at how obviously flustered his pearl’s gotten. Instead, she carefully sets out piece after piece on the bench beside him, as if she’s laying out artwork. He supposes she is, in a way.

“Do you see anything from this batch that you like?” the Sovereign asks pearl, with only the faintest trace of disapproval etched into her tone.

“Uhm, thank you,” the Terran girl murmurs softly, her eyes nervously flickering over the panties and brassieres and camisoles fanned out before them. “But I’m not sure—“

Her fingers knit in her cardigan and Rocket slips his own into her grip easily, stilling her. He knows her hands so well — he’s memorized them for so long that he can feel the anxious energy coursing through them now. Unthinking, he smooths his thumb over the inside of her palm soothingly.

“It’s just panties, kitten. You’ve picked out panties before.”

“You helped before,” she protests softly, and he rolls his eyes in her direction.

“And m’helping now. I said I wanted ‘em to be soft. I narrowed ‘em down. Now it’s your turn.”

She hesitates again, and looks up at Anaya’s wife nervously before reaching out with tentative fingers to stroke over the pair made of ruffles and bows. He grins. He’d thought she might be partial to those. He bets the bottom of her ass-cheeks will peek out from under ‘em, just waiting for the nip of his teeth or — someday, maybe, a good swat, if he could ever earn her trust for that kind of play. He’d love to see her ass pink up under those sapphire ruffles.

But then she drifts her fingers over to a barely-there pair made entirely of pale gold lace, glittering with warm, rosy-iridescent threads. He can imagine her trembly little cunt cupped inside like a jewel in a filigreed setting, lace soaked and dripping. He could tease her through the texture of it, lick her through it and taste her again.

Not that he’s completely unempathetic to her plight. He can understand why she’s overwhelmed. There’s so much to choose from: a glossy, pleated bralette in an iridescent moonstone-blue that almost seems to glow, and a matching pair of satin panties that sit low on the hips. Another matched set in sheer champagne with delicate floral embroidery in shades of midnight. There’s a lone pair of slippery silk panties that lace up the middle, from cunt to waistband, so a person could unwrap their partner like a present if they wanted. He sees a deep-purple romper made of soft, sheer, delicate lace with a neckline that would plunge past pearl’s navel, and a library of mesh camisoles and flowing satin shorts. Frilly little off-the-shoulder bras that probably wouldn’t accomplish anything but making him drool, though they might rub against pearl’s nipples in a way that would get her needier and needier throughout the day. His eyes take in glossy bows and ribbons, misty little shreds of material, and a hundred other soft-edged details he’s too hypnotized to focus on.

It doesn’t matter what pearl picks, he decides. He’s stealing anything she shows even the slightest inclination toward.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

After way more anxiety than a panty-purchase should inspire, pearl had ended up not picking the pair made of sapphire silk ruffles that tied in big bows over her hips. He’d seen her eyes lingering on them even while her hands had kept drifting elsewhere, and finally he’d asked, Why not those?

She’d flushed. I don’t think they’re — practical, she’d admitted. How would they fit under my leggings?

He’d cackled. Not even Anaya’s wife had been able to avoid a twitch at the corner of her solemn mouth.

Kitten, you put these on, and I won’t let you get into leggings.

Instead, still nervous, she’d chosen a delicate pair in flimsy, scalloped lace, so soft it had looked like a rumpled sunlit cloud in her hand. The tiny threads of warm, glittering opalescence had been woven into patterns of pale pointed arches, framed by delicate fans and flourishes, and every edge had crimped into a corolla that he just knows will flare away from her skin like petals, mimicking that gorgeous flowerlike cunt of hers underneath.

It had been more difficult than he’d expected to pocket the ruffled panties — and a few others besides. Anaya’s wife had been telling pearl how to handwash the delicate cloth and he’d kept his ears on her, logging the information away while snatching up quick handful after handful of satin and lace. Anything pearl had seemed to like, Rocket had shamelessly stuffed into the pouches of his jumpsuit. By the time they’d left, she’d had seven new sets of underwear — one paid for, and the other six nicked with both women none-the-wiser. He’d also managed to smuggle out the transparent lace romper with the plunging neckline, and a flimsy longline bralette with ruffled straps that he’s hoping he can convince pearl to wear sometimes under his shirts, just to try to keep the temptation of her curves a little more under control when he needs to concentrate.

Who’s he fooling, though? There’s no way this scrap of frail fabric will make him want to do anything but shred it off of her.

Pearl flushes and blushes the whole way back to the runabout, clutching the little satin bag that Anaya’s wife had folded her purchased panties into. When they get there, Groot is waiting patiently, so she just tucks the bag away in her locker. Rocket, for his own peace of mind, waits till she’s back on the flightdeck and chatting with Groot before he unloads his pockets into the bottom of the linen locker, shuffling the lacy scraps of cloth into the folds of the still-hidden chenille blankets.

He’ll sneak ‘em into her locker, one by one, he decides.

“Gonna spend most of tonight out by the battery tower,” he tells them once he’s hidden away his treasures and strolled to the flightdeck, fists shuffled nonchalantly into pockets. “Groot, you willing to stay in tonight? Keep pearl company? I don’t want—“

“Can’t I come with you?” she asks, eyes all big and silverstruck.

“I am Groot,” Groot agrees.

“We both want to,” pearl translates before Rocket has the chance to parse through the response. “Maybe we can help you put it together — or at least, keep you company.” Her kitten-smile peeks out at the corner of her mouth. “I want to see the final product.”

“I am Groot,” Groot agrees.

“I want, I want,” he mimicks, pitchy and mocking. Before she can flinch, he gives her a wink that has his whole head tilting into the gesture. “That’s exactly what I wanna hear, princess.” A leer. “Good girl.”

She’d slapped a hand over her mouth to stifle a laugh at his over-the-top humie-wink but now her eyes round out and she blushes as pink as he likes. He smirks up at her.

“I’ll be busy all night though,” he adds with a shrug. “No reason for you to stay up too—“

“I want to,” she repeats, a little more firmly, even though her cheeks are still hot and her eyes flicker nervously, uncertain. Rocket stares up at her, considering.

“You tryin’ to negotiate, sweetheart?”

The pink grows rosier. “What do you want?” Her voice is breathy.

He tests one canine with his tongue, hooding his eyes and making sure she feels it when he they scrape up and down her pretty body. Finally, he offers an indolent shrug. “I’ll think of somethin’, and you can pay me back once we get off this stupid set of rocks.” He raises a challenging brow, and grins when he sees the shiver she tries to hide in her shoulders. Turning on his heel, he jerks his chin toward the workbench-bunk. “F’you’re comin’, you can carry my shit,” he adds, half-jesting — but Groot is already bundling up all the raw materials they’d just purchased, and pearl is standing almost at-attention, arms open for whatever Rocket wants to pile into them.

Something about it makes the air falter in his lungs, heart right up in the back of his mouth.

He swallows it down.

“I am Groot,” Groot says, nudging him with the back of one careful hand. “I am Groot?”

“Okay,” Rocket concedes to the air, trying to wrestle his breathing back into something less shallow. He squeezes past the Taluhnisan and pulls out two canvas rolls of tools, only to push past again and hand them to pearl. “You two head out. M’gonna get some other stuff and follow you.”

He meets them on the landing platform as dusk falls, carrying not only his typical arsenal but also hefting a weighty armful of gear. He’s got a series of casting molds he’d made himself — complete with tech that allows him to quench, harden, anneal, or temper molten metal at various speeds and rates — all stacked into his arms. They’re piled into the small melting furnace he’s lugged in his arms, tucked alongside tongs and a series of crucibles that he’d stolen from a vibranium smuggling ring the last time he’d been on Torfa. He pauses as he strolls up to the landing deck, peering around the toppling tower in his arms, and takes in the way Groot and pearl both scurry toward him: hands outstretched, rushing to carry his burdens.

There’s no explanation for why it makes Rocket’s throat suddenly wrench tightly shut. None.

He lets them take his shit — watches them with big eyes while they neatly lay out his tools at the foot of one of the battery-towers. Groot and his pearl. They look… frickin’ domestic together. And yeah, Rocket’s still on the outside — but it’s like he’s peering into the window of his own ship. And it is his frickin’ ship, right? Metaphoricalistically-speaking. It’s a home he could belong to — he could just step inside, any time he wants.

It’s a dangerous fuckin’ feeling, and for a second, his lungs seize up again. He wrestles down the urge to turn on his heel and walk away now, to forget the Dreadnought for the first time since he’d seen its cousin on Cyxlore, to climb into his runabout and leave ‘em all behind in the gold-dust of Sovereign.

Eat it up while it lasts.

Jackass.

Even during the daytime, the Sovereign sky is a shade bluer and darker than pearl’s glowing lilac curls — but now it’s deepened into a dusty-dark lavender, with the edges of stars picked out against it like little pins. Drax is still out here on the landing deck, sitting with his back to an enormous gold-veined marble retaining wall, arms crossed and eyes closed. They slit open when Rocket finally steps up, and the Kylosian studies his little wayward trio as they continue to set up camp next to the batteries.

“You appear able to carry many times your body weight, small rodent,” the Destroyer rumbles.

For a second, Rocket falters. It’s like something’s been scraped away — the dark scab he’s been nursing over that smoking, smoldering uncertainty in his chest. The skin of his nose wrinkles; his lip peels back and the fur on his tail stands on end, prickling and stinging in each follicle.

A seething breath practically whistles out between his teeth. The quiet white-noise that he’s been trying to stifle now surges into his ears: an ocean of roaring static. The Kylosian has released a pressure-valve, and Rocket rushes toward the familiarity of fury. His eyes narrow on the enormous warrior and everything else shadows away. With a heavy, metallic thud, Rocket drops the melting furnace, tongs, and crucibles, letting them ring dull and hollow on the observation deck.

“Okay, asshole, I told you—“

There’s a butterfly-light tug on the strap of his jumpsuit and he freezes, so stupidly-attuned to pearl that he knows it’s her soft fingers calling him back before he ever registers her words.

Or maybe he’s not attuned to her at all, because when he does hear them, his lungs and heart suddenly shrink and shrivel, ribs buckling inward in the sudden crushing vacuum left by a collapsing star.

“Please don’t call him that,” pearl protests, all breathless and nervous.

In an instant, the bitter hiss of dread he’s kept tightly sealed for these past rotations suddenly twists around: doubling back on itself, curling and melting and burning every inch of him. He’d been relieved to release some of this steam in the Kylosian’s general direction, but now — now betrayal streaks up the rail of his spine instead. It scalds every wet, half-melted nerve under his fur before flaring in a little burst of glowing-white heat at the base of his skull.

The big idiot looks baffled. “But he is a rodent—”

Pearl seems to think she can hold Rocket back — little humie fingers still curled into his jumpsuit. She’s wrong, of course. He bares his teeth, waiting for the impulse to snap them into her flimsy fingerbones, but it doesn’t come. Instead, there’s just a pit in his belly, twisted with misery and self-loathing and a vicious, smug sort of vindication.

Told you.

Maybe — horrifyingly — the old monster-part of him has been too tamed to want to sink the sharp bite of his anger into her, on account of their history together. On account of how sweet her cunt is, or how bad he’d hurt her before. But it doesn’t matter, he decides, jaw cracking as he clenches his molars. He’ll worry about it later. For now, she’s forgotten that he’s carrying three different firearms. He twists, unsnapping his laser cannon from his holster in one smooth motion.

“There is nothing wrong with being a rodent,” the Kylosian is saying, perplexed. “I have known many rodents who were very wise, or who were strong warriors and leaders. And others who were very delicious.”

The growl between Rocket’s teeth is a cross between a bellow and a shriek. With a flick of his wrist, the cannon extends and he takes aim, knocking pearl’s hand off his shoulder as the Kylosian cautiously rises to his feet. She tries to clutch at his jumpsuit anyway, and he ignores her, striding out of her reach and toward the Destroyer.

“I’m gonna fuckin’—”

“No disturbances!” pearl strangles out in a panicked, choking sort of gasp. He feels her fingertips brush the magnetic holster on his back as she stumbles behind him, grasping. “No problems—”

His fingers clench suddenly on air — the laser cannon plucked from his grasp right as he’s about to squeeze the trigger. His brain somersaults, unable to register what’s happening as he grapples compulsively for the firearm. It’s only then that realizes his feet have been snatched right off the ground, courtesy of the thick vine lifting him upward. Fuckin’—

“Groot!” the Monster roars, tearing at the treelike limb twined around his waist. “Don’t you frickin’ dare—”

He’s so spitting-mad he doesn’t even notice the Kylosian standing there: hands at his side, round dark eyes flicking between the three of them uncertainly. It isn’t until the moron speaks — “What is happening?” — that Rocket remembers him.

“M’not a rodent,” Rocket snarls, trying to twist in Groot’s branches so he can unsnap the ion blaster he keeps on his holster. “I’m just — me. Fuck you, Groot. Tell him to put me down!” he thunders at pearl, before turning half his attention back to the Kylosian dickhead. “I’m the only thing like me,” he hisses.

“The thing you are seems to be very rodentlike to me,” Drax mutters under his breath, and Rocket can feel his ears grow even flatter, tail thick and all his fur standing on end. He writhes in Groot’s grasp, twisting to glare up at the Taluhnisan. Every thread of his fur is screaming and electric with betrayal.

“M’gonna bite you,” he growls, and sinks his claws warningly into the crackling top layer of the Taluhnisan’s arm.

“I am Groot,” Groot says, sounding wounded.

“Rocket, please,” pearl begs. Even through the gaze of his fury, he can see the way her moon-gray eyes silver with tears, sparkling and wet on her lashes and cheeks. He rips his gaze from hers — livid — and back to Drax.

“Look, asshole—”

“You’re saying you are a solitary thing, instead,” the Kylosian interjects thoughtfully, and then shrugs. “I can call you thing, if that’s what you want.”

Rocket can feel his eyes widen: too burnt-up with incandescent, combustible fury to keep them narrow. “I’m gonna fuckin’ kill you—”

“He’s just Rocket,” pearl interrupts, pitchy and frantic. Somehow, she’s crossed the space — just fuckin’ abandoned her spot next to Rocket and Groot — and is tugging on the Kylosian’s arm. Her tiny hands on the Destroyer’s humie frame — it’s too frickin’ much. It makes the Monster see white — staticky, brain-numbing, lightning-bright white. He’s actually blind with rage. His claws sink into Groot’s bark and he manages to wiggle partway out of the distracted Taluhnisan’s grasp, free almost to his hips. “He’s not a rodent,” pearl’s saying, though Rocket can barely hear her over the roar of his blood in his ears. “He’s not a thing. He’s a person.”

The Kylosian tilts his big, stupid head. The Monster stretches and reaches backward, and his fingers brush the cold grip of his ion blaster.

“Rocket,” she turns back to him and Groot, “please—”

“Fuck you,” he lashes out, and it’s almost a bark of fury. Traitor, he hisses mentally. He strains — gets the blaster in his grasp, and rips it off the magnetic holster.

“Rocket, I’m sorry,” she pleads. “Please — you can’t—”

He levels the blaster at Drax, but his words and his eyes cut to pearl. “Fuck you for siding with—”

“You can’t draw attention on Sovereign!” she cries out shrilly, and she plants herself squarely in front of the cannon.

Her voice is a splintered, ragged wail.

Rocket’s mouth snaps shut so hard that his teeth click together and for a moment, everything is so silent that Sovereign itself seems to resonate like a struck bell. His lungs heave as Groot readjusts his grip, chest straining against the powerful vines.

“Move,” he spits at last, flatly, gesturing to one side with the tiniest flick of the barrel.

Pearl doesn’t move.

“Please,” she repeats brokenly. Her cheeks are gleaming wetly. Her chest is heaving too, and the Monster can’t even enjoy the frickin’ view because his moon-damned brain is short-circuiting with fury. “I can’t — I need you to be safe. And you can’t be safe if you’re in trouble with the Sovereign. Please.”

He wouldn’t have thought there was anything left in his charred husk of a body to pluck at, but pearl’s words pinch and twist something beneath his prosthetic collarbone. For a meager starved second, he lets himself wonder if maybe she hadn’t been trying to defend the Kylosian. He hesitates before that voice at the root of his brain speaks up, sly and scabbed and swollen:

You shoulda known that if it came down to you and some humie-type, she’d pick the humie every time.

“Rocket,” she whispers — his name again, so perfect on her lips: a silver spaceship with a glittering tail of fire, sliding seamlessly through the endless blue. The tip of the blaster falters where it’s pointed at her belly. His eyes suddenly sting. He hates everything — the Sovereign, the High Evolutionary, the Kylosians. The forever and beautiful and unfeeling sky. Groot and pearl and his own body, and the way none of the pieces ever fit together right — not inside his stupid skin, and not outside it either.

Except he doesn’t hate pearl. Or Groot. Even if — for right now — he wants to.

Drax clears his throat. “I see that I’ve offended you,” the Kylosian says. “That was not my intention.”

The firearm sags in Rocket’s hands. The blaster’s nowhere near as weighty as the laser cannon, but for some reason it feels so frickin’ heavy right now. His shoulders ache. His red eyes dart around and everything suddenly feels very hollow and thin: carved out, empty.

“I don’t give a Falligarian-fried fuck about your intentions,” Rocket rasps, the words crackle hoarsely when they fall out of his mouth, breaking into pieces on the gold-plated landing deck. He swallows, and collapses the damn laser cannon before snapping it back onto his holster. He cuts a glare up Groot — wishes it felt stronger. Meaner, instead of just wrung-out. “You gonna put me down, Barky?”

“I am Groot,” Groot says gently, and lets a delicate tendril curl tenderly out to brush Rocket’s cheek. The Monster startles and slaps it away with both hands, swatting at it like a bug.

“Well?”

Reluctantly, Groot eases his small companion’s feet back to the ground, then loosens his vines. Rocket sighs again, and the air tastes acrid in his lungs and the back of his mouth. He dusts himself off, trying to discreetly scrape the taste of salt and resentment off his tongue.

“It’s only fair for you to let me explain,” Drax pipes up again — sullenly, almost childishly. Rocket knows he himself has a tendency toward emotionalistic immaturity but it’s surprising to hear such a plaintive tone from the enormous Destroyer — though perhaps it shouldn’t be, given he’d already clocked the Kylosian as a frickin’ moron. Rocket presses both sets of fingers into the bridge of his nose, then runs them upward to yank anxiously on his own ears, trying to drag himself back into some sense of normalcy. His chest manages to feel both tight and empty.

Everytime he loses his shit, he loses everything. He knows this. He’d begged and pleaded and finally snapped at his brother and sister to get them to leave HalfWorld — and he’d gotten them slaughtered. Wyndham had mocked him with their deaths and distracted him from Lylla — only so she could be executed too. He’d fallen prey to Taserface’s clumsy antagonism, and ended up having to flee the Eclector with his tail quite literally fuckin’ tucked between his moon-damned legs.

Of course pearl was gonna pick a humie over him. And of course Groot was gonna pick her. Doesn’t mean Rocket has to practically shove ‘em out the airlock. He was supposed to ride this out — keep the two of ‘em as long as he could.

He shovels his hands over his face and tries to breath through his teeth.

If he could just stop being a monster for five frickin’ seconds—

He drops his hands, shoulders slumped, and glowers up at the Kylosian. “So explain.”

Drax shrugs like it should be obvious. Of course he does. “I was attempting to compliment your strength. It is quite impressive for such a small body.”

Rocket stares. He stares until his eyes itch with dryness and he has to draw back, blinking rapidly to try to regain some moisture.

What the fuck.

He pinches the bridge of his nose again — one-handed, this time — and then rolls his shoulders and palms the back of his neck. His skin feels damp under his fur: muscles knotted around bone and metal.

“Uh, yeah, well.” His brow furrows and he takes a threatening half-step forward, brandishing a warning claw up at the Destroyer’s face. He’s stupidly proud that it doesn’t shake with the loss of his adrenaline, and self-disgust peels his lip back from his teeth anyway. He probably looks even more feral for it, and he supposes he should be grateful for that mercy. “Don’t call me a frickin’ rodent again. M’not a rodent. Or a — a vermin. Or probably anything else you wanna call me, either.”

Drax tilts his head, then nods. “Understood, small—” He pauses, and his dark eyes flick just behind Rocket’s shoulder. Rocket feels his fur bristle again as soon as he realizes the Kylosian’s looking at pearl again.

He might claw the Destroyer’s frickin’ eyes out after all.

Don’t fuckin’ look at her.

“—Rocket,” Drax concludes, instead of whatever he’d been about to say.

This idiot. His fury falters again — in spite of himself. He reaches for the comfort of it, but it wisps away — out of his reach. Rocket huffs, then clears his throat and turns his back to the Destroyer. Calm down, he orders himself. Just — calm down. His palms ache and when he looks down at them, he realizes he’s cut them open with his own claws, even though they’d been filed down. He scrubs his hands ruthlessly against his jumpsuit, trying to scrape off the blood, then makes a halfhearted attempt to brush down the fur that’s still standing on-end over his arms and shoulders.

“Well, uh. Thanks,” Rocket manages to wrangle out around the resentment that’s still got his tongue curling at the back of his throat, stomach twisting and churning emptily. He turns his back on the Kylosian, hoping the hulking Destroyer will take it as the dismissal it’s meant to be, and brushes past pearl without daring to look up. He can’t fuckin’ deal with whatever’s painted on her face. Anger? Disappointment? Fear? Disgust? He scowls, and forces his clawed hands to begin setting up the furnace and crucibles.

“I will sit with your party,” Drax says decisively, and before Rocket’s even able to whirl around with an incredulous glare, the Kylosian is settling himself in, cross-legged with his back against the nearby battery tower. Without thinking, Rocket slashes a glance at pearl, a what the fuck? scrawled across his face. He startles when he realizes she’s already looking back at him: her brow all crimped forlornly, and the line of her lips all soft and sad.

Nope, Rocket tells himself firmly, his gaze skittering away from her as fast as it can. Don’t think about even lookin’ at her right now.

“Why?” he asks the Destroyer flatly.

“It is possible that I had another reason for complimenting you as well,” Drax concedes, his big shoulders suddenly shifting uncomfortably.

Rocket snorts. “Everybody’s got ulterior motives,” he sneers — but he keeps his eyes carefully trained away from pearl and Groot while he says it. “Didn’t expect you to be any different, Destroyer.”

“I am Groot,” Groot protests with a grumble, but Rocket’s in no mood to hear the Taluhnisan language. Can’t bear to, right now. Something stings just from knowing that he could understand it if he tried.

Drax huffs. “For now, I will sit with you and let your strange friends become accustomed to me.”

Rocket turns back to the furnace, forcing a strangled, salt-crackled, snarling-snicker out of his throat. He keeps his ears flicked toward the Kylosian, alert for any sudden movement. “Yeah? You gonna try to kill the competition once we get used to you?” He snaps his goggles down over his eyes and starts up the flame.

There’s a soft shift behind him, and when Drax speaks again, he sounds offended. “There’s no honor in that.”

Rocket snorts — attempting to sound dismissive, though for some reason it only comes out resentful — and for a long moment, there’s no sound but the sullen clank of the crucibles and furnace and supplies as he fusses with them. He focuses on the coarse mineral texture beneath his palms; the way his hands know and remember the shape and weight of each crucible as he lines them up — but it isn’t enough to keep him distracted from the empty vault of his stomach.

“Can I help?” pearl asks softly, and it takes Rocket a second to realize she’s talking to him.

“I am Groot,” Groot observes — huffily — and lowers his creaking branches into a sitting position beside the Kylosian.

“No,” Rocket clips out at her, even while it twists everything up inside him. He mutters a curse under his breath and adds a handful of duranium ball-bearings to the first crucible. The darksilver metal immediately begins to soften at the edges. “Sit over there with the two morons and stay outta my way.”

“But—”

The twist turns into a hissing hot knife, cutting between his ribs like the laser–scalpel that Theel had so enjoyed using on him.

“Go,” Rocket snaps, “or get back to the runabout.”

He shifts, watching from the corner of his eye as she hesitates, hands wringing in front of her abdomen. The air suddenly catches on the edge of his lungs, tumbling in the back of his throat — tripped and brought down by the realization that it’s been less than half-a-rotation since he’d had her melting on the indigo-velvet bench in Anaya’s Armoire. Even less since he’d nearly gotten caught stuffing his pockets with pretty Sovereign-style panties.

His tail spasms and the tip slaps tightly against his inner calf — the little muscles at the base of his ears twisting and flexing to flatten against his will. He ducks his head and wipes the back of one dark hand across the end of his suddenly-shivering whiskers.

Huh. His claws are shaking.

It doesn’t have to be over yet, the softer voice behind his sternum tries to protest — weakly. Just because she picked a humie over you in a fight doesn’t mean she won’t still come to you for other things. Doesn’t mean she won’t still go to Fron with you, make you breakfast, teach you Taluhnisan, open up her pretty thighs. Doesn’t mean she won’t still let you teach her to fly, or take her to see her first frickin’ Acanti migration.

He settles back on his haunches, forcing at least one ear upright, keeping it swiveled toward the Kylosian. The heat-resistant leather mitts he slides onto his sensitive hands suddenly feel much heavier than he’d remembered. He tries to blank his mind, and maneuvers the tongs around the crucible. The molten duranium is as liquid-silver as pearl’s eyes, but somehow it still can’t compare. He pours it into the mold.

Please don’t call him that, pearl had said. He can’t get it out of his head. How she’d begged him not to call Drax out for being a typical, condescending, tough-guy baldbody-jackass — begged. She’d been protecting that fuckin’ nobody, this stranger — from him. Rocket stares blankly into the duranium as it slowly dulls, and he tries to pick up scraps of his anger where he can find them.

But there’s none left right now, he realizes. He’s listless. Lost.

He shakes out his fur, and scowls, and turns to the next crucible. Although—

A shred of a thought lingers at the edge of his memory. Rocket had been too pissed to process anything but — he’s pretty sure the Kylosian had responded to pearl. And not with gratitude, or even a brush-off.

He is a rodent, the big idiot had replied plaintively — like he’d thought maybe pearl was talking to him.

A furrow puckers the fur and skin between Rocket’s brows. It hadn’t really made sense. Not that Rocket supposes that Drax makes much sense on his best days, of course. He grits his teeth — something like regret pinched between them — and starts melting the vibranium in the next crucible. There’s a mold here somewhere that should work for the resonator ring inside the disk. It’s a little bigger than he needs, but he can grind down the excess.

Behind him, Groot asks pearl something, and she answers in a low murmur. The Kylosian speaks, and the three of them talk quietly for a few moments before lapsing into silence again.

Rocket could’ve probably eavesdropped if he wanted — collected their quiet words like units dropped and lost in the cobblestone gutter of Old Conjunction — but that sense of being just outside their little domestic daydream of a family suddenly seems achingly, viciously out of reach.

Maybe he doesn’t deserve to listen in, anyway. He bares his teeth in a silent snarl at the melting vibranium.

Now that he frickin’ thinks about it, she’d said something else in the middle of that fight, hadn’t she? Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s wishful thinking. But — he’s pretty sure maybe she’d said something like, he’s not a rodent. Like, he’s not a thing.

He’s pretty sure she’d said something like, he’s a person.

That emptiness inside his gut somehow knots, twisting into a tangled stony pit of nothing and thorns. Apprehension swells behind his sternum like something infected. His lungs labor under the sudden pressure — ribs too tight, too much like a cage. He tilts his head back and stares up, trying to grapple down the tension rising in his breath. His palms and fingers and claws itch. The hot scent of melting metal sears the inside of his nose, and the sky grows darker and more violet-blue.

Against the plush vibrant velvet — through the lens of the Sovereign atmosphere — the stars look like spikes driven into the sky.

“I am Groot,” Groot says quietly.

“It’s okay,” pearl responds. Her voice is — it’s fuckin’ stupid, but it feels like her voice is petals and spring breezes and similar sentimentalistic nonsense. Fresh cool air, and clean canal-water, and lilies — all gently bumping up against that scorched-metal burn in his mouth and lungs. “I think it’s actually going pretty well, all things considered.”

“I am Groot.” A tender admonishment, and pearl makes a reluctant noise in her throat.

“Okay,” she agrees, and Rocket can hear her shift behind him. You can’t draw attention on Sovereign! she’d cried out, when he’d been ready to blast the frickin’ Destroyer into melted skin and cinder. She’d sounded panicked — and already heartbroken.

I need you to be safe, and you can’t be safe if you’re in trouble with the Sovereign.

What would it mean if he’d been wrong — if he’d misunderstood? What would it mean if she had been fighting for him, and not for that idiot fellow baldbody of hers?

It wouldn’t be the first time he’d been so recklessly wrong about her intentions.

His breath gravels to a halt in his throat and he tries not to choke — has to swallow, noisily. He loses the battle with the single ear he still had swiveled toward the Kylosian — it flattens instinctively.

It would mean she put herself in front of the damn blaster for you, you fuckin’ moron, he thinks, and something inside him aches. It would mean she either trusted you enough to know you wouldn’t melt a hole in her guts, or she thought you were worth the risk.

You. Not the Destroyer.

And of course, it would mean he’d been a shitbag about everything. Again.

He broods over his work, pouring the ring, turning his attention to the copper wiring, weaving patterns as intricate as metallic Sovereign lace. He mixes the resin, and pours it into another mold. The fiberglass fluid follows suit. He imagines pearl in the soft shadows of the runabout, reaching for him.

I’d like a chance to look out for you, too.

I’m going to take care of you.

And then, the sensation of her fragile fingers curling into his jumpsuit. The soft bareness of her belly — vulnerable in front of his blaster—

I need you to be safe, and you can’t be safe if you’re in trouble with the Sovereign.

He’s such a dickhead. Regret pinches his gut and twinges behind his sternum, stings behind his eyes. He bows his head over the melting metals, the curing liquids, the blinding-white glare of the small furnace. He kicks halfheartedly at the handles of the tongs, not even caring if he stubs a clawed toe.

He’s such a dickhead.

When the last mold is poured and the copper wires are set, he grimaces. There’s nothing else to do tonight — the molds need to rest before the pieces can be removed and screwed or soldered together. He’ll need to laser-file everything smooth first, though, and then airblast it all to get rid of the dust and debris. He scrubs the back of his hand over his nose, and sighs. There are no excuses or distractions left to hide behind. No barricades to protect him from abilisks or from his own frickin’ jackassery. He leans back: stretching his arms, rolling his shoulders. He stands and presses his knuckles into the small of his back, arching to try to ease the muscles that have contracted around all his bones and joints and prosthetics. He turns.

There they are. His two favorite morons, slumped against each other, leaning on the battery tower. And a new frickin’ addition, apparently — temporarily, Rocket reminds himself, before he can get annoyed about the Kylosian’s presence all over again. Just for the next few rotations, till they get the hell off this deathtrap. Why Drax has decided to try and ingratiate himself with their little group of rejects and loners, Rocket hopes he never has to figure out.

Instead, he takes a slow, ragged breath. He tries to find whatever slivers of integrity and dignity he’s got left under all the bad temper and the scars and stitches, and scrape them up together into a pathetic little pile of scraps — just so he can offer ‘em to pearl like some kind of pitiful, shitty, unworthy little prayer.

Even slumped over on the flightdeck, rumpled and creased, she’s pretty as hell. Her lips are parted as she dozes, and Groot lets out rumbly, almost infrasonic snores, like footsteps in the forest and heavy winds high in the trees. Drax simply sits with his arms folded and his eyes screwed shut, occasionally letting out a startling, broken snort. Rocket palms the back of his neck again, and kicks uselessly at the gold-lacquered floor of the observation deck. The sky is so clear that he can see the stars reflected in the glossy metal. He traces a tear-shaped constellation with one clawed toe.

Penthus. God of grief.

He sighs, and approaches the battery tower hesitantly, then lowers himself to a crouch in front of pearl. She’s got her head resting against Groot’s enormous arm, and her hair is a gleaming lilac-blue that looks only a few shades paler than the sky in this light. He thinks maybe he should let her sleep, but for some reason, watching her doze in uncomfortable-looking places always seems to get him all nervy and annoyed. So of course he can’t stop himself from reaching out with curled fingers, and coasting hesitant knuckles down the curve of her cheek. They barely kiss her skin, but she shifts in her sleep immediately, and leans into him.

“Rocket?”

He swallows. His name in her mouth — still the best thing he’s ever heard. A blessing from a starry-eyed goddess. Astraea.

“Hey, kitten.”

She lifts her head, lashes heavy with sleep — voice earnest. “M’sorry.”

He closes his eyes, fighting back the flinch in the corner of his mouth. “For what, sweetheart?”

She blinks blearily, lifting herself from Groot’s shoulder with infinite gentleness so as not to wake the Big Guy, and scrubs her fingers against one eye. Rocket reaches out deftly and snags her wrist, pulling it away from her face before she can bruise herself. He wants to tuck those knuckles against his teeth, keep her hand safe and memorized in his palm.

“I didn’t mean to make you think I wasn’t on your side,” she whispers, leaning toward him in the dust-purple darkness. It seems like she’s got her own constellations swimming in her eyes, lashes thick with stardust and glitter. “I’m always on your side, Rocket. No matter what.”

The words ring truer than he’d like, resonating along his bones and implants, humming in the metal plating and prosthetics. His stomach clenches. Hell, even on the floor of the Arete, she’d been trying to look out for him.

You have to get away again.

You’re not a monster. You never have been.

He sways toward her, a meteor caught in the gravity of a haloed, prism-spangled star. He wants to lick into her perfect lips. He wants to press his mouth against those stardust-eyelashes. He wants his fists knotted in her hair, pulling her head back till she can’t see anything but the velvet sky over Sovereign, spilt with crushed diamond and radiant sparks. If Drax and Groot weren’t right there, he’d do it — slip his hand down into her leggings and pinch and tug and play with her till she couldn’t tell which stars were real, and which he’d put there. Apologize the best way he knows how.

But he can’t. So he tries to twist up the dregs of a smirk.

“Where’s the girl I met on the trip from Cyxlore? The one who said I was a dickhead, and then told me she stood by every word she’d said when she was yellin’ at me?”

Her moonsilver eyes squint at him. “I didn’t say it like that.”

His grin relaxes a little. His shoulders shudder, and then he feels them ease. “You’re right,” he admits with a raised brow. “You said I was bein’ kind of a jerk.”

She leans further forward, and toward him. Into him. His lips part and even with the burn of molten metal still singeing his nose, he breathes her in: waterlilies and clean canals. Raindrops or dewdrops, lit by misty morning sunlight. His tongue flicks over his teeth, yearning for a taste of her.

“Okay,” she murmurs, and the words are so tender that they ache against the silvery Sovereign night air. “You were being kind of a jerk.”

His vagus nerve trembles and twists, but there’s a bittersweetness underneath it. His mouth floods, like he’s just bitten into a candied-citron straight out of an Aladnan lollyshop: sour, but so sugar-sweet he could almost frickin’ cry. He huffs out a half-uttered laugh — admiring her, and crumbling at the edges. No frickin’ infrastructure except for the driving need to keep her in his hands and on his tongue, as long as he can.

“By the way,” she whispers confidingly. Her breath fans gently over his jaw, and his whiskers tremble in its softness. “I have another idea.”

He can’t help the way the laugh doubles over itself and comes back: sharper, surprised. “For fuck’s sake, doll, lemme see if this one even frickin’ works first—”

“It’ll work,” she says fervently, and his rusty half-mechanical heart stumbles in his chest. “It’ll work ‘cause it’s you.”

He’s already given up, he realizes. He sighs — aggrieved. Whatever she wants, he’s gonna do anyway. “What is it? This new big idea of yours? You need my inventing-skills for something new?”

The corner of her mouth tilts up in that kitten-smile, and everything in him feels heavy as an overripe fruit, dripping with sweetness. She dips her head — almost mischievous. “I need your diplomatic skills.”

His eyes widen and he sinks back on his heels, already tangled up in the bitterness of loss again — of disappointing her again, of not being able to give her this one thing in apology. “Sweetheart, I ain’t got—”

“The prototype,” she tells him softly. “Give it to Ayesha.”

He blinks. “What?”

“Ayesha is smart,” she breathes into the darkness. She tilts her face to the sky. “Not — nice. But smart. She’ll keep all of it hidden from Herbert. She’ll know he won’t want her to have it. It makes the Sovereign harder to hurt, so he’ll hate it. Even if she figures out who we are, she might not turn us in — because then we might tell him about the disks, and then he’d know. But if you give her the prototype—”

“For what?” he asks. He doesn’t care, exactly — he can’t imagine there’ll be a whole lot of use for it out in Thneed. He just can’t quite grasp where she’s going with this—

“Her son,” she whispers between the stars. “Her son has a piece of the energy core in his head. It’ll be easy for anyone to see him coming, with the sovereign energyform just… emanating from him. But with the prototype, he can be almost undetectable off-planet — at least as much as any other person.” Her hand, slender and delicate, flutters out into the darkness like a Foresterian moonmoth, lighting gently on his wrist. “You can protect the High Priestess’s only child from the High Evolutionary. At least — you can protect him a little bit.” She leans back. “Ayesha won’t be able to give you up — not when you know the secrets protecting her son. And more than that,” she adds gently, “she won’t want to.”

Rocket’s chest aches, and he suddenly realizes he’s been holding his breath. When he exhales, it’s shaky, and his lungs and ribs hurt. “You’re not doing this to frickin’ — manipulate the Priestess.”

Pearl blinks those gorgeous gunmetal eyes of hers.

“I know you,” he reminds her. “You’re doing it because you think it’s — the right thing to do or some shit. ‘Cause you think the Sovereign are like us, or something.”

“They are,” she says simply, and then tilts her head. “And — I am. Manipulating them. Or — gambling, in a way. For good will.” That kitten-smile curves the corner of her mouth: half-timid, half-tender. Wholly-playful. “Or I would be, if I were the one giving it to them. But I won’t be.” Her smile sweetens. “You will.”

He hadn’t thought his eyes could get wider, but he feels them. He doesn’t have the sort of personality for diplomatical discourse or whatever. “Doll, I can’t—”

A throat-tearing snort splits the air — pearl damn near jumps out of her skin and Rocket’s head snaps toward the sound. Drax is wide-eyed, snuffling out an alarmed choking stutter, while Groot jerks upright with the sound of snapping twigs. There’s a moment of startled silence — and then pearl stifles a flutter of laughter behind her hands, and Rocket can already feel the loss of her fingertips on his pulsepoint.

“Ah,” the Kylosian says, still blinking as he gazes around and tries to get his bearings. “The three of you are accustomed to me enough to sleep in my presence, I see.”

“I am Groot,” Groot mumbles politely in Drax’s direction. Rocket gets the impression that it means something like I am concerned about your mammalian respiratory system and also waking someone up like this should be illegal in every system.

“I think it is time to express my extillier motive,” the Destroyer adds solemnly.

Rocket feels his eyes roll. “This should be good.”

“I think you mean ulterior,” pearl offers gently.

Drax blinks. “That’s what I said. Extillier.”

Rocket blinks. “Even I can tell that ain’t right.”

“I am Groot,” Groot adds mildly.

“It doesn’t matter,” pearl hastens to assure the Kylosian. “We know what you mean. What’s your, uhm, other motive?”

“I was going to ask,” the Kylosian admits awkwardly, “if you would give me a ride.”

Rocket jaw drops open, and he stares at the warrior. He can see pearl’s eyes widen in his periphery and she makes a little noise, and Groot blinks.

“I am Groot?”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

love love love to all of you for sticking with me through this and extra-love + gooey warm s'mores for those of you who leave comments. every one is precious to me. may you always get a full night's sleep and wake up well-energized, refreshed, happy ♡♡

also these chapters are starting to get really really long because i'm trying (???) to stick to 40 chapters? I'm sorry for that! please let me know if i need to shorten the chapters/lengthen the story instead. psa, if anyone had any doubts, i am not a physicist lol. and while my favorite of my secondary OCs is for sure sanna orix, anaya’s wife can step on me whenever she likes. also-also, i did a scrabbly lil pearl x rocket doodle! enjoy!

exciting things:
♡ still gonna mention my fave rocket & pearl scene from chapter thirteen 'cause i love it so much (the damn bunk is so detailed) (scroll down for the whole piece)
♡ bumping up the next update to thursday 8/22 because i'll be traveling next weekend. my schedule may change in september once work gets busy again. i hope you enjoy it! AND that update will hypothetically be the halfway mark!

coming soon: chapter twenty. foilsick.
summary: rocket is outnumbered. the abilisks arrive.
warnings: bits of a panic attack, complete with a lot of angst and self-loathing.
estimated date: thursday, august twenty-two.

･:꧂posting schedules, chapter-previews, & more on tumblr♡
･:꧂masterlist & moodboard♡
･:꧂chapter one. nemotia of cicatrix scene by @frostedwitch
･:꧂portrait of pearl♡
･:꧂rocket & pearl's bunk on the runabout (lineart)
･:꧂my fave rocket & pearl scene from chapter thirteen. ♡♡ (scroll down for the whole piece)
･:꧂scrabbly lil pearl x rocket doodle!

Chapter 20: foilsick.

Summary:

rocket is outnumbered. the abilisks arrive.

Notes:

warnings: bits of a panic attack, complete with a lot of angst and self-loathing. mention of past self-harm.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

foilsick. feeling ashamed after revealing a little too much of yourself to someone—allowing them too clear a view of your pettiness, your anger, your cowardice, your childlike vulnerability—wishing you could somehow take back the moment, discreetly bolting the door after a storm had already blown it off its hinges. Scottish Gaelic foillsich, to expose. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Rocket stares. He can taste his tooth enamel, flaking as his molars grind together. “What,” he asks slowly, “do you mean by give you a ride?”

Drax shrugs. “After I win our competition,” he says reasonably, “I—“

“You ain’t winning anything,” Rocket snaps. The Destroyer looks at him with something like pity.

“I will kill the most abilisks,” Drax explains patiently. “Then I will gut the Daughter of Thanos like the enormous moon-scaled fish that used to roam the Forgotten Lakes of Kylos. But then,” he gestures with something like helplessness, “I will need transportation.”

“You… don’t have a ship?” pearl asks carefully.

“I am Groot?” Groot chimes in.

“Yeah,” Rocket chimes in. The Taluhnisan has a point. “How’d you even get here?”

“I coerced the captain of a merchant vessel,” the Kylosian says simply.

Rocket throws up his hands. “Then what makes you think I’d frickin’ want you on my ship?”

Drax blinks. “We’re friends now,” he points out. “We almost shared a meal together. Your Terran pet—“ He points at pearl and Rocket’s brain is back to short-circuiting. “—warned me about the miserable tastelessness of Sovereign food. I complimented your impressive strength, and have spent casual time in your party’s company.” His brow furrows, like he’s surprised he’s gotta explain all this.

“We ain’t friends,” Rocket says darkly, and the words are almost shrill. “I’m barely friends with them,” he adds, jabbing a thumb at pearl and a forefinger in Groot’s direction.

Drax’s eyes widen, and he looks wounded.

“We slept together,” the Destroyer whispers.

Rocket sputters.

“I am Groot,” Groot concedes, and Rocket turns on the Taluhnisan.

“We did not sleep together,” he snaps at the Big Guy. “For fuck’s sake — you three slept together.”

“I am Groot,” Groot reasons, and pearl chokes. The statement’s too complex for Rocket to catch, though, and he turns to pearl, who looks half-panicked herself.

“What’d he say?” Rocket asks dangerously.

“He said, uhm.” Her moonsilver eyes flick to Groot, and Drax, and then back to him, wide and alarmed. She’s pale except for two high spots of color in her cheeks. “He asked if the transitive property applies to mammal sleeping habits.”

“I am Groot,” Groot adds.

“He says, if I slept with them, and you slept with me—“

“I am Groot—“

“Enough!” Rocket bellows. “What is wrong with you people?”

For a moment, silence flattens between the landing deck and the stars. Then—

“I am Groot,” Groot pouts.

Rocket pinches the space between his eyebrows. “Unbelievable,” he growls, then shoots a glare at all three of them, his eyes stalling on Pearl’s tilted head. “Stop thinking,” he orders her, half-frantic. “I told you. This ain’t an intergalactic taxi service.”

“Five is even better than three or four,” she offers timidly. “He would never think you were traveling in a group of five—“

“The Luphomoid don’t count,” he snaps. “She’ll be locked in the cargo hold—“

“The Luphomoid will be dead,” Drax corrects, and Rocket can only roll his eyes.

“That’s another reason not to take him,” he snaps at pearl. “He’s gonna try to kill your frickin’ bounty.”

She’s already shaking her head. “He’s too honorable for that—“

Rocket stares at her, then slaps both hands against his forehead in an effort to protect himself from any moron-contagions. He can feel himself becoming more of an idiot just by being in the presence of these three. His palms slide down the sides of his face, fisting his fingers into his whiskers and pulling, just to make sure this is reality after all.

Nope, not a dream.

“He forced a merchant ship to bring him here!” Rocket yells, knuckles still pressed into his cheeks. “D’you think he did that by baking cookies and writing ‘em love letters?!”

Pearl turns her gunmetal gaze to Drax and holds his eyes solemnly — measuringly. “He won’t do that to us,” she says carefully, studying the Destroyer’s face as she speaks. “Because we’re friends.”

The Kylosian nods earnestly.

“We are not friends!” Rocket explodes. He’s losing his mind. He’s actually losing his moon-damned mind.

“Why did you end up here, Drax?” pearl interjects softly. “Shipless, trying to get the Sovereign to give you their captive?”

The Destroyer shrugs. “I was in the Kyln for some time and overheard Nova Corps gossip that one of the Daughters of Thanos had been captured.”

“And you knew it was the Luphomoid?” pearl asks, her brow creased.

Drax shrugs. “Any Daughter of Thanos is my enemy,” he reasons.

“But you said she killed your family,” Rocket clarifies. He thinks his eyelid is twitching.

“Oh,” the Destroyer utters, nonplussed. “No. Ronan the Accuser killed them.” His chest puffs out and his shoulders straighten. “But the Daughters of Thanos are connected to Ronan, and my vengeance is broad. One of his family-members for each one of mine might be good enough.”

Rocket stares at him, and everything inside himself sinks. He just knows he’s about to be surrounded by morons for the foreseeable future. “So you escaped the Kyln,” he says slowly, each word measured, “and then highjacked a merchant ship to take you to the place where a genocidal maniac who did not kill your family was being held prisoner.”

Drax rears back, appalled. “Of course not,” he says, clearly offended. “I didn’t escape the Kyln. It’s inescapable—“

“Shows what you know,” Rocket mutters.

“— and I was let out early on good behavior.”

Rocket can feel his ears flatten. What the fuck. “I been in the Kyln twice, and nobody ever frickin’ let me out on good behavior,” he sulks under his breath before thinking better of it.

Groot chortles, and even the corner of pearl’s mouth twitches.

“Perhaps,” she says, and her tone is soft and teasing, “your behavior was never quite that good?”

“I am Groot,” Groot adds mirthfully.

Rocket glowers. “Didn’t stick around long enough for them to know anything about my frickin’ behavior,” he growls. “And anyway, it don’t matter.” This whole conversation’s a frickin’ mess. “I said this ain’t a taxi service.”

Drax’s brow furrows. “What if I pay for passage?”

Rocket feels his eyes roll so hard he’s surprised they stay in his head. “What part of this ain’t a taxi service don’t you understand—“ He breaks off, tilting his head consideringly. “How many units you got, anyway?”

“None.”

Rocket drops his head into his hands, massaging his temples. M’gonna pull out all my fur, he laments. M’gonna look like I got mange.

“I do have these, though,” the Destroyer says. There’s the soft scrape of metal on leather, and when Rocket glances up, he sees Drax pulling two curved blades from his boots. Pearl sucks in a gasp and Rocket feels his eyes narrow.

“So this is where the threats start, huh?”

Drax blinks up at him, then turns his eyes wistfully to the blades in his hands. “Take me to Knowhere,” he says, and there’s something resigned in the giant Kylosian’s voice. “I will be able to pawn these—“

“You can’t sell those,” pearl interrupts, eyes wide. She’s staring at the knives like they’re holy relics. “Those are… priceless.”

The Destroyer nods at her. “They are, little Terran girl,” he admits, “but only to me.”

Her eyes find Rocket’s, full of protest. “No — they’re really priceless. They’re star-tempered Kylosian bloodsteel — the alloy’s harvested naturally from iron-vibranium meteorites. It’s hard to come by — almost sacred, according to the eddur.”

The Kylosian leans back, surprised scrawled across his blunt features. “You know Kylosian eddur?”

Rocket’s eyes narrow as pearl fumbles. “Uhm, some of them?” she stammers. “I had — there was—“

Her brow creases and she looks a second away from crumbling, hands suddenly knotting in her cardigan again. Rocket opens his mouth to intervene, but Drax is already leaning toward her.

“The Song of Saint Urd?” he asks eagerly. “The Saga of Midnight Death on Mount Kylos?”

“I — yes,” she answers, growing flustered. “But—”

“I have not heard these recitations since my people fell,” the Destroyer says, something like yearning lighting up in his eyes.

“Kylosians ain’t extinct,” Rocket says sharply, his eyes slipping to Groot. “You ain’t the last frickin’ one left.”

“I am Groot,” the Taluhnisan murmurs quietly.

Drax shifts uncomfortably. “There are still Kylosians,” he concedes. “But our population has been decimated. Our beautiful planet is barely habitable, the atmosphere and soil corrupted by the Accuser’s weapons.” His eyes grow hard. “Ronan executed half our numbers, but the damage he did to our planet and people claimed many more lives over the following circumrotations. Who was there to till the barren fields? To provide medical healing to the wounded and ill? To care for the orphans? To pass along our traditions? We are a quarter — less — than we once were, scattered to the stars as sojourners and refugees.”

Pearl’s eyes flicker to Rocket’s. He can already hear her voice in his head. Like the abilisks, she’s saying. Like Groot.

Like us.

“No,” Rocket snarls at her. “No. No. No.”

Drax frowns. “I am sure the bloodsteel will fetch a reasonable price,” he offers.

“No.” That’s pearl this time — of course. “You can’t pawn those. They’re etched with your whole lineage, the histories of all the significant battles they’ve seen.” She looks again at Rocket, her eyes desperate. “He can’t pawn those. They’re so rare. The Kree incursion melted down all the bloodsteel they found. These daggers — they’re worth too much. He’ll only get a fraction of the units he should — and I bet they mean even more to him—“

Rocket’s eyes narrow. “You want him?”

Her eyes flutter, confused — and then panicked. “What? No—“

He waves a hand dismissively. “Not like that,” he drawls, conveniently ignoring the fact that he’d just spent the last half-rotation furious with her for his own insecure belief that she’d chosen the Kylosian over himself. “D’you want him like you wanted Groot?”

“I am Groot,” Groot notes mildly.

“I—“ she stumbles. “I—“

“‘Cause you ain’t the only one who can have ideas, sweetheart,” he says smugly. “I can be a nice guy. We can compromise.”

The Destroyer tilts his head. “What is your idea, Rocket?”

“After the Dreadnought and the Luphomoid are ours—“

Drax frowns. “The Luphomoid will be mine—“

Rocket brandishes a claw. “After they’re ours, fair and square, you’ll honor that—“

Drax’s frown deepens, and he nods once. “If you win, I will honor it.” A pause. “But you will not win.”

Rocket lets his mouth sharpen into a smirk. “After they’re ours and you honor it, then I’ll take you to Knowhere,” he says mildly. “It ain’t too far outta our frickin’ way, I guess. But you won’t be pawning those knives of yours.” His grin widens, teeth bared and flashing. “You’ll be selling ‘em directly to the Collector.”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Rocket had expected pearl to be pissed, but while she’d been quiet all the way back to the runabout — thoughtful and pensive in the blooming dawn and softening stars — she’d still blessed him with a wistful, kittenish half-smile when he’d caught her eye. Groot had mumbled a sleepy-sounding I am Groot before heading immediately down to his place in the cargo hold, and Rocket had wavered at the edge of the bunk while pearl had started to straighten the blankets.

“I should probably shower.” He’d grimaced, palming the back of his neck. “Don’t want you breathing in metal and resin and liquid-fiberglass fumes all night.”

The corner of her mouth had twisted, rueful and grim. “I wish you would’ve let me help, earlier.”

He’d hesitated. “I was being a dick about it,” he’d admitted, “but I wouldn’ta let you help tonight anyway. It’s a lotta bad shit you’d be breathing, if you’d been standing right there—“

She’d been frowning already though, that little curl pinched between her brow — so concerned. “But you were breathing it in,” she’d said softly, and he should’ve known that’s exactly where her mind would go. “Don’t you have any protective gear?”

He’d shrugged — lopsided and reluctant. “Just for my hands, mostly,” he’d admitted. “Breathing apparatus didn’t seem particularly important to steal, at the time.” He’d winced. “I’ll—“

“We’ll get you some,” she’d sworn vehemently. “I bet we can find someone on Knowhere who can make something for you — with it being a mining community, and so many different kinds of people living and working there—“

She’d pinned herself to him, he’d realized slowly. Something in his ribs had clattered with the revelation, like the blown-open shutter-doors of an old Cyxlorean shrine to Sybilla Nyx Ora, Goddex of Death. She’d pinned herself to him. Not for forever, of course — but for now. He’d been an idiot to think she’d picked the Kylosian over him.

He’d inhaled slowly, and let his lungs fill.

“You get some rest,” he’d instructed her quietly. “I’ll shower and—“

“W-wait,” she’d stammered, and her cheeks had been suddenly burning and brilliant, that perfect color of pink. He’d halted, half-turned. He’s incapable of frickin’ stopping himself when her cheeks are like that because he just knows she’s thinking something he’s going to like. He’d tested one canine with his tongue.

“Yeah, sweetheart?” he’d drawled.

“I could — I could maybe use a shower too?”

He’d flinched — recoiled. Shoulda seen that coming. “You got a lotta good ideas, princess,” he’d said lightly, “but that ain’t one of ‘em.”

He’d been able to see the moonlight leak out of her eyes. “Oh,” she’d uttered softly, and stepped back. Her head had tilted and her brow had creased. “Are you still mad at me?”

“No.”

The word had come out like broken glass — sharp-edged and spiderweb-cracked — and he’d grimaced. It’s not that I don’t want you all wet and soapy under my hands, kitten, he’d thought about telling her. He’d flexed his fingers and curled his claws into his palms. It’s not that I don’t want to feel you like that, under the water — get every part of you memorized so deep in my hands that I can never shake you off.

She’d knotted her fingers in front of her belly, all anxious and concerned. “Then why—“

He’d had to clear his throat. “Kinda love it when you’re naked and wet — not a real big fan of it for myself,” he’d managed to offer thinly. It had been a pitiful half-explanation, but it had also been all he was capable of forcing out of his throat.

But — his scars and stitches, his misshapen body, contorted over prosthetics and broken bones — they’re all more prominent when his fur is drenched and sticking to his body. And yeah, she might’ve seen him that way before — but those had been different circumstances. Then — that night in the storm on HalfWorld — then he’d not only been a Monster, but he’d wanted her to know it. To see it. To feel the terror of him creeping along her skeleton, sticky and clinging while she fought for her life.

Now, though—

He’d closed his eyes and pinched the space between his brows. He’d been up too many hours, he’d reasoned — he’d been breathing in molten metal and glass; he’d had that fucked-up fight with pearl and Groot, then had to deal with the idiot-Kylosian—

And now, this guilt. The shame of it. What had he been thinking, trying to frickin’ terrorize this poor fuckin’ girl on what was probably already one of the worst nights of her frickin’ life?

I’m always on your side. No matter what.

What kind of monster—

“Rocket?”

The word had been a warm little lantern, floated across a dark sea. He’d gaped for breath and suddenly wondered if he was drowning.

“Oh,” pearl had murmured, and her arms had already wrapped around him. She’d sunk to her knees in the narrow aisle of the runabout, hauling him toward her. Before he’d even registered what was happening, she’d tumbled the heavy weight of him into her lap, squeezing him against her belly and tits just like he’d secretly wanted, just like he was a child’s toy she could snuggle into. He’d eased into her softness — so wretchedly, achingly grateful for the pressure of her arms wrapped around his ribs that his eyes had stung and burned.

He hadn’t deserved it.

“What’s happening?” she’d whispered into the shell of his ear.

He’d almost fucked it up. He’d almost fucked it all up. Already. Eat it up while it lasts, he’d told himself, but at the first fuckin’ chance he’d nearly blown the whole thing up — thinking of her as a traitor, getting so frickin’ lost in his own shit that he’d fought with her over nothing. Again. There’d been no way he’d ever have pulled the fuckin’ trigger on that blaster — not with her right in front of the barrel like that — but still, the memory of her planting herself there—

“Nothing,” he’d rasped, but he hadn’t tried to pull out of her arms. He’d let himself melt into her further. “Just tired.”

Even without looking at her, he’d been able to tell she hadn’t believed him. He’d felt her lips against the crown of his head, the base of his ear — trembling with worry. “Are you sure I can’t shower with you?” she’d asked softly. Her voice had tilted — uncertain, but trying to play. Trying to comfort him with lightness. “I won’t even try to seduce you,” she’d teased shyly. Her palm had swept over his forehead, and he’d probably have made some filthy fuckin’ comment if he wasn’t feeling so sick and miserable. “I’d just take care of you,” she’d added tenderly, and everything inside him had ached.

“Nah.” He’d forced the word into a drawl. That would be all he’d needed, he thought grimly — for her to see him again. For her to see his water-slicked fur clinging to every ridge and twist on his body, and the scar around his head where they’d cut apart his skull. The half-exposed flexi-vibranium bars that attach his prosthetic sternum to his natural ribs. Disgusting. Horrifying. Repulsive. His stomach had rolled and he’d launched himself out of pearl’s lap, mouth suddenly sour and slick.

Every muscle inside him had immediately wept and rebelled, and begged to be back in her arms.

“Nah, pearl,” he’d managed to squeeze out of his suddenly-tight throat. “I just gotta clean myself up and get some rest. Go to bed.”

He hadn’t waited for her response — just left her folded up like a tossed-aside flower on the grated floor.

What a jackass.

Now he stands in the shower with his head and fists pressed against the smooth wall of the stall. The water forms mournful, lonely rivers under his fur. It runs down his cheeks and rolls off his nose. He can’t tell if he’s crying or not, but he keeps his eyes closed, letting his chest heave and strain against the achy implants. He runs his fingers over them: the edges of metal — warmed by his body and the heat of the water — and the sinewy, ropy scars, patched over with haphazard fur. When he reaches back over his shoulders, he can feel the uglier side of himself: bald and undisguised between his scapulae, twisted up and mangled. The first five circs he’d been off HalfWorld, he’d gone through his more obvious self-destructive cycles. Every quarter or so — more often in the beginning — he’d lost his mind a little: clawed at the metal and skin, the underskin-itch of his old wounds. He’d made himself bleed, trying to tear them out. At some point — over time — he’d realized that trying to remove his own skeleton was a pointless endeavor.

But now he finds himself reconsidering. Surely there might be benefits to tearing each and every forcibly-altered piece out of his body, no matter how deep he has to go.

Get them out, he thinks fervently. Get them out of me.

The irony isn’t lost on him. He’d just dragged pearl to a lingerie boutique less than a rotation ago with the intention of dressing her sleek, soft body in the silliest and most useless decorations he could find, all for the pleasure of his eyes and his teeth. And now here he is, cowering in a shower stall, trying not to let his heart beat out of his chest with the panic of his own immense ugliness, inside and out.

He drops his hands back to the smooth wall, letting the water drum down on him — and he shudders, fingers curling back into too-familiar fists. He thuds them gently against the wall: first one, then the other, quietly enough that he doesn’t think pearl will hear. The corners of his mouth quiver and peel back, eyes and brows pinching tight while he cages the sounds he might make behind his teeth. If any of them escape, they’re hidden under the isolation of the water.

He takes longer than he should, finally soaping the scent of melted vibranium out of his fur and trying not to look in the mirror as he towels off. If not for pearl and Groot, he’d stay naked till his fur dried. But the thought of pearl seeing him like this — again — almost makes him want to stay in the stall forever.

Once he’s finally wriggled back into his clothes, he opens the door of the stall, hoping pearl’s asleep and he can just crawl into the bunk with her — hoping she’ll squeeze him again like she does sometimes, like she thinks he’s just a soft thing meant to be cuddled.

Like she thinks she loves him.

“Hello.”

He blinks. She’s still awake — of course she is — perched on the edge of the bunk, a little plate of berries and smoked fish at her side.

“It’s just a snack,” she says softly. “But you have to eat something.”

He approaches slowly, the grates biting into his shower-softened feet.

“You’re s’posed to be sleeping,” he says inanely, like a frickin’ moron.

She shrugs, and gives him her kitten-smile. “I got a nap while you were working,” she reminds him. “Besides, if I were asleep now, would you eat?”

He studies her solemnly. He’ll dress her up in Sovereign satin and sparkling lace but at the end of the day, he’d been honest with what he’d told her at Anaya’s — it’s more of a gift for himself than for her. To have something like her, all pretty and soft, and to pretend she belongs to him.

Cautiously, he plucks a berry from the plate and studies it, too. He should tell her that no, he wouldn’t be eating if she was already asleep. He should tell her that he’d never imagined being — taken care of like this; that she’s more than surpassed her promises to look out for him; that he doesn’t deserve this kind of—

Of attentiveness. And softness.

But he can’t. Or he won’t. And when he puts the berry in his mouth and lets himself bite down delicately, it’s as sweet as waterlily-honey.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Everything looks better after some sleep.

He wakes up curled in a circle on the thin mattress, and pearl is a crescent around him. He can feel her tummy, breasts, and thighs surrounding him on three sides, with one arm draped over him — tethering him to the bunk, keeping him steady. His nose is tucked right into the seam of her thighs and he allows himself the indulgence of licking his lips and nuzzling in deeper. It’s hard to care about the worn mattress and soft, threadbare blankets and even the generally-shoddy quality of the runabout when he’s living the height of frickin’ luxury, waking up to his nose pressed into such a pretty waterlily-cunt.

Yesterday had been frickin’ great till that fuckery with Drax and his own — breakdown in the shower. But today — today’s already looking better. He nestles into her, bumping his nose longingly against her clit. Would she like to be woken up like this? Licked sweetly, with every ounce of gratitude making up his marrow? He should probably ask her. Next time, if she says it’s okay. Next time he’ll wake her with his tongue curled deep into her pussy, or lap at her soft little clit till she starts shifting sleepily, moaning in her dreams. Will she murmur his name, dreaming and needy? Will she wake up trembling, pretty pleases already on her tongue?

“I am Groot?”

Dammit.

Thank fuck pearl had closed the curtains.

He reluctantly withdraws, sweeping a handful of rumpled lilac curls out of her sleeping eyes before he slides out between the gap in the cheap purple fabric.

“She’s still sleeping,” he tells Groot in a hushed voice.

The Taluhnisan’s eyes widen and he hunches, as if making himself smaller will somehow also make him quieter. “I am Groot,” he whispers — something like apologies and chagrin. Rocket shrugs.

“Want some coffee?” he asks, though he doesn’t wait for the answer. He knows it’ll be an enthusiastic yes.

Sure enough, Groot doesn’t disappoint. “I am Groot!” he accepts eagerly, rumbling with muted excitement. Rocket flicks him a glance as he dumps some extra grounds into the coffee maker, some of the smaller particles already falling through into the coffee pot below.

They take their coffee outside on the landing deck, staring up at the dust-lavender afternoon sky. It’s a companionable sort of silence, and leaves pearl safely to her sleep, which Rocket’s grateful for. Plus, it gives him a chance to check in with the third crewmember he’s reluctantly adopted. For now.

“So,” he says slowly, measuring his words carefully. “‘Bout yesterday.”

There’s a lingering pause.

“I am Groot,” Groot says gently. Rocket cants his eyes sideways up at the Taluhnisan, but Groot’s just stirring his coffee with one wood-crusted finger, studying the way the dark sludge clings to it and then drips back into the cup. He puts the digit in his mouth, apparently sucking the coffee right out of the ridges in his barkish skin. “I am Groot,” he adds, and Rocket sighs. He’s not entirely sure what the Taluhnisan said, but it feels like something mild, and gentle, and understanding. How the hell has Rocket — a cranky selfish jackass at best, and a brutal violent monster at his worst — ended up with these two for crewmates? It’s unfortunate as fuck for them, he laments silently — but lucky as hell for him.

“Your arm alright?” It’s not an apology — that’s what the coffee was for. But he does feel bad about it.

“I am Groot,” Groot assures him, then adds, “I am Groot.”

The three words are almost an apology themselves — which makes Rocket feel more like a dickhead. At the same time, they ring with a gentle protest. A quiet appeal.

“I know you were… trying to help,” Rocket hazards.

“I am Groot.” The Big Guy sounds relieved.

“Better if you just let me get myself in trouble next time,” he admits after a moment, and takes a mouthful of his coffee to wash down the bitterness of that particular truth. Groot says nothing this time — just rumbles inquisitively. Rocket clears his throat — regretful. “I don’t frickin’… respond well. To bein’ touched.”

There’s a long silence, and he can feel his shoulders start to crawl toward his ears, fur beginning to bristle. His ears tilt and flatten, tense in spite of himself. He flexes one hand nervously, then shifts his mug to one palm so he can shake out the other.

“I am Groot,” the Taluhnisan says at last: a note of acceptance, and a delicate vow at the same time. For a moment, Rocket feels the quietness of being understood, and the relief of knowing Groot will try to avoid invading his space again — along with the annoying knowledge that the Big Guy still intends to intervene if he thinks Rocket’s in danger.

“I am Groot,” he adds with infinite gentleness. It means something like, Or if he thinks pearl is in danger.

For the flicker of a second, Rocket’s stomach knots and his ears shift from nervousness to something possessive and wrathful. His fingers turn into claws on his mug and he can feel defiance and defensiveness stinging on the end of every nerve, a hiss rising in his throat like a living, raging, burning thing.

And then — small and cool and clear — he feels a soft little sigh of relief feather over his sternum. Pearl’s rarely reckless — with the exception of the night she’d followed him off the Arete, she thinks more than any person he’s maybe ever met, and even that had probably been a smart move when all things are considered. No, she isn’t reckless — but he is. He could’ve gotten her hurt the night before: stirring up trouble, spoiling for a fight. Pulling out his cannon and blaster even though she’d been right there, in the way.

Plus, like he’d thought before — Groot’s good muscle to have around. He might be able to protect her when Rocket can’t.

“Yeah,” he breathes out, and the words are a shudder: wounded and consoled, all at once. “Okay. Yeah. That’s good.”

“I am Groot,” Groot says, and Rocket can’t quite catch the meaning of it, but it sounds incredibly soft. He lets out a shaky exhale, and rubs the back of his hand over the end of his nose, and straightens his shoulders.

“So, uh — what d’you think about the Kylosian?”

Groot’s eyes round in surprise and he taps his fingers to his chest. “I am Groot?”

Rocket rolls his eyes. “D’you see anyone else here, Big Guy?” He shifts on his feet. “I know you’re about as soft as pearl, but she’s a sap for a fuckin’ sob story and I need to make sure I’m not doing somethin’ stupid by taking him to Knowhere.” He can feel the skin along his nose wrinkle as he bares his teeth in a relatively good-natured sneer. “You’re definitely not the best person to double-check me, but you’re all I frickin’ got.”

Groot chuckles softly, like leaves underfoot. He pauses thoughtfully, then takes a swallow of his own coffee, and gestures to the lavender sky with his mug. “I am Groot.” It’s a surprisingly melancholic sound — lonely, and craving company. The sound of a person lost and solitary, wreathed in grief. Something twists in Rocket’s chest.

“You might be the only Taluhnisan, but he ain’t the only Kylosian,” Rocket reminds his giant companion, and he’s surprised by the softness of his own voice. He clears his throat and forces himself to roll his eyes. “And you ain’t alone anymore, ya big idiot. You got pearl.”

“I am Groot.”

Rocket grimaces. “And me, I guess. Sure. If you count that as an asset an’ not a frickin’ liability.”

The pause lies like a downy quilt between them.

“I am Groot.”

There’s something so tender about the statement that Rocket winces. His eyes sting and his view of the sky takes on a peculiar glaze. He’d only ever been used to tenderness from L06 and A95, before Wyndham and the incinerator took them. Even on the Eclector, “softness” had only looked like a gruff set of knuckles to the chin, or ground into the top of the skull — and Rocket, hiding in the vents, had never been the recipient of such affection. By the time he’d bargained with Wyndham for Lylla to be made, he’d forgotten what it had felt like: the featheriest flutter of surprised wings inside his ribcage whenever she’d gifted him with her endless kindnesses, no matter how short their time together was.

Now here he is, trying to navigate pearl’s sacrificial offerings of kisses and massages and delicate, generous touch. Her sweetness and determination in the wake of his clawing nightmares, her forgiveness when he’s an ass. Her patience with the brevity of his tortured, crawling, limping stories when the dreams take him. He’s not even used to her yet — so how the fuck is he supposed to deal with the Last Living Taluhnisan offering him consolation at the same time?

He blinks, and the tears slide from his lower lids and into his fur.

It’s good to have friends, Lylla had told him once, even though all she’d had in the whole frickin’ galaxy was him, and he’d done her every kind of injustice.

Fuck this, he thinks — but he can’t quite make himself believe it. Not right now.

“Yeah,” he grunts at last, and clears his throat of the obvious crackle. “I’m less lonely with you, too.” He lets his eyes fall shut for a moment, and swallows, and then rolls them in a glare up toward Groot. “How could I be lonely when I’ve got you two morons constantly on my tail?”

Groot huffs a chuckle — autumn breezes, dried leaves stirring on the woodland paths. “I am Groot.”

Rocket sighs and shakes his head, trying to get back on track. “You don’t think—“ He hesitates, and then grits his teeth. “You don’t think it’s a mistake?” he repeats. “Bringin’ the Destroyer?”

The Taluhnisan tilts his head. His kind, dark eyes flicker with soft amusement and he shrugs. “I am Groot.”

Rocket blinks, then grins. “Okay. Yeah, okay — that’s what I’m saying. At least we can make some frickin’ units off him, right?”

“I am Groot,” Groot agrees happily, and then shrugs. His smile softens, gentle and wide. “I am Groot.”

Rocket hesitates, then tips back his head and downs the rest of his caffeine, thick as grease. “All right,” he agrees slowly, lowering his mug and staring into it for a moment. “You watch mine, I’ll watch yours.” Then he cuts his eyes up toward Groot. “We both watch pearl’s.”

Groot raises one brow skeptically. “I am Groot.”

Rocket blinks, and stares, narrowing his eyes up at his big companion. “Did you just make a dirty fuckin’ joke?”

Groot’s midnight-eyes round out, and he taps his chest again — the picture of frickin’ innocence. “I am Groot?” he protests, but for once, Rocket doesn’t think the Big Guy’s tone is remotely genuine, and it startles a brief bark of laughter out of him.

“Yeah, okay,” Rocket snickers. “Anyway — ya frickin’ deviant — if we keep him on, we need a plan for Knowhere.” He grimaces. “Your Fuck-You-Disk should help but you prob’ly can’t just be runnin’ around Exitar, looking like a giant tree. Word’ll get back to the Collector.”

Groot frowns and tilts his head. There’s a pensive pause, and then a reluctant, “I am Groot.”

It’s a tangled net of twigs and leaves in Rocket’s ears — frustration, regret, and other emotions too fleeting and flickering and conflicted to catch.

And something like trust.

Rocket clears his throat. “Didn’t catch all that,” he admits roughly. “But—” He drags in his breath and slants his eyes up to Groot. “My professionalistic recommendation is that you stay on the frickin’ Dreadnought while we’re there.”

There’s a soft rumble of distress — crackling footfalls on a forest path. Rocket shrugs. “It’s up to you.” He grimaces. “Pearl’ll look out for you either way,” he admits, and then rolls his eyes. “Guess I will too.”

“I am Groot?” Groot asks softly.

Rocket sighs heavily — beleaguered, as per fuckin’ usual. “Guess we’re a frickin’ team now, after all.”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Rocket ends up back on the other landing deck — the one with the battery towers — within the hour, laying out his selection of laser-tools and soldering guns as he prepares to finish the Fuck-You-Disk. The entirety of the time, Drax sits curiously by, watching him work. Groot keeps Rocket company for a long time before he wanders off, and then pearl shows up — bringing him some meal she’s reimagined from the shitty local Sovereign food.

She sits beside Rocket, on her knees again, just like she had in the engine room — all sweet and soft, hands in her lap while she studies his movements.

There are few moments in which Rocket feels as comfortable as he does when he’s putting something like this together. He pulls metal shapes from their molds. His hands find every rough edge and sharp bit of flash. Carefully and softly, he smooths them with a laser-file till every surface is glassy and smooth; the only sharp edges are the ones he intentionally files sharper. He blasts dust out of the delicate geometric web of copper wire; he layers each piece he’s made together. They fit together easily, snapping into place with satisfying metallic clicks, and his fingers find the perfect spots for drill-holes and screws and bolts. The machine feels like it’s about to come alive under his hands: to thrum and hum and whirr and chirp.

He loses track of time while pretty pearl sits next to him admiringly, and he can’t help but preen under her attentive eyes. He should thank her, some part of him registers distantly. Making things — getting to actually challenge himself with something new — makes him feel like his whole body’s singing. Makes him feel like he’s flying. Makes him feel like himself. In this moment, doing this? Crafting a glittering, starstruck mosaic of delicate, tissue-thin metal sheets and copper wire and magnetite, fiberglass and resonators and resin? It feels more natural and instinctive than almost anything else he’s ever known, except soaring a ship through an endless sky. And maybe — maybe getting to bury himself in pearl’s sweet little cunt, figuring out how to make her thrum and hum and whirr and chirp for him, too.

Sometime in the evening, the black-clad admiral from Ayesha’s throne room — at least Rocket assumes it’s the same guy; he can’t be bothered to glance up for long — comes to announce that the abilisk herd has been spotted through Sovereign cosmoscopes and should be entering Sovereign space within a half-rotation or less. Once they’re in range and likely to make landfall, the capitol alarms will sound, indicating that the civilians should take cover while their contracted defenders handle the threat.

The timetable will make it impossible for Rocket to finish the bubble-shield he’s been imagining making for himself — as back-up — but he’s increasingly sure he won’t need it. If all works well — and he’s increasingly sure it will — the shield this thing generates will hide not only a moon, but a whole Collective of planets.

It’s dusk again by the time he’s finished, settling back on his heels with a Fuck-You-Disk the size of a Kylosian dinner-platter. He can’t keep the shit-eating grin off his face.

“I am Groot?” Groot asks.

“He’s done,” pearl breathes, before he’s even gotta say it. She scoots forward on her knees to stare down at the disk, one delicate hand reaching, pausing, hovering. “Right? You’re done?”

He looks at her — cardigan open, the plump curves of her tits pressed against his t-shirt. Gonna bite ‘em later. He licks his lips, and grins, and nods.

Groot positions the Fuck-You-Disk by the battery tower — not that the placement will matter. In fact, once they prove it works, Rocket will probably recommend the Sovereign move it somewhere that it can be protected from the elements and vandalism and all that shit. And pearl will probably want Ayesha to hide it from prying eyes.

Rocket doesn’t wait to turn it on — there’s no telling when and where the abilisks will start to sense the Sovereign, like a little beacon calling them goldenly out of space. So he flips the switch, watching as the first light flickers, then holds steady. That should cover this planet. When the second light does the same, he breathes out a quiet huff of relief through his teeth. That’s the whole Collective.

The third light could probably mask this entire section of the star-system, but that seems unnecessary.

“M’gonna stay out here with it tonight,” he tells pearl and Groot. “Can’t risk anything happening to it before tomorrow.”

“Then I’ll stay too,” pearl says resolutely, and Rocket rolls his eyes.

“You an’ Groot should go back to the runabout,” he says. “Get some real rest—“

But she’s already shaking her head, and Groot’s obviously in agreement. “I am Groot,” he says — something about his last opportunity to drink up Sovereign light.

The fact that they want to stay with him — even after last night — has him tangled up inside for a second, tripping over himself. He swallows.

“I know you haven’t seen me,” the Kylosian speaks up from where he’s been seated, still and silent all afternoon. Rocket’s ears half-flatten in confusion. “But I am here, and I could guard your strange toy.”

Rocket snorts, allowing himself the distraction. “Yeah, unlikely, buddy. Don’t want you getting any ideas.”

Drax’s brow furrows. “That is rude.”

Rocket only snorts again. “I’m a rude guy,” he admits, seating himself next to the disk and propping his back on the tower. He snickers. “Better get used to it if you’re gonna travel with us. We’ll take off tomorrow after the abilisks clear the Collective. You an’ Groot can start moving our shit from the runabout to the Dreadnought while I wrap things up with the priestess.”

The Kylosian’s brow furrows more deeply and he frowns. “You are still assuming you will win this fight,” he points out. “I—“

“You better hope I win this,” Rocket interrupts dryly. “Can’t fit you comfortably on the runabout, genius, and I don’t like you enough to put up with you in such close quarters.”

Drax makes a disappointed, conflicted little sound in his throat, but before he can say anything further, pearl pipes up.

“Maybe Groot could tell more of his story tonight?”

Rocket laces his fingers together behind his skull and looks up at the deepening dusk, the stars starting to prickle their way out in the lavender-blue that almost matches pearl’s hair. He takes a slow breath, and his lungs fill — quiet and steady and easy. His shoulders feel surprisingly loose as he tilts himself up to meet the sky.

It might not last, he admits to himself, but it’s good while it does.

“Sure,” he says into the dusky shadows, letting them wrap around him. “Let’s hear it, Groot.”

He falls asleep to the Taluhnisan’s hushed and gentle voice.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Sirens.

Rocket jolts awake with the amplified warning alarm, low and resonating over the landing deck, the piazza below, and the entire Sovereign Collective. His heart is high in the back of his mouth, swollen and bruised, and his hand lashes out before he thinks twice. It anchors itself to pearl’s wrist, seeking out the butterfly-flutter of her pulse.

The abilisks are here.

Drax is already on his feet, half-crouched with his knives drawn. Rocket rolls his eyes, releasing his girl.

“You gotta get back to the runabout,” he tells her firmly. His eyes flick to Groot. “Take her. Grab yourself a cannon f’you wanna come back—”

But she’s ignoring them both, leaning into Rocket’s ear to gesture open-palmed toward a patch of fading stars.

“Admiral Amyri said they should be entering our range of vision here,” she’s telling him, and he swats her away.

“Back to the runabout,” he growls. “If you can have Groot pick me up—”

She looks scandalized. “I did not have him pick you up; he did that on his own—”

“—then I can have him return the frickin’ favor,” he warns. “Get back—”

A little curl forms between her brows. “I want to see it work—”

“I am Groot,” Groot adds.

“See what work?” Drax asks, and Rocket winces. Is he really prepared to deal with this idiot’s cluelessness all the way from here to Knowhere?

“You don’t even got a gun on you, sweetheart,” he snarls instead, keeping his attention on his Terran.

Pearl tilts her chin in the stubborn, bratty little moue that he really doesn’t have time to frickin’ appreciate right now. He unsnaps his laser cannon. Maybe it had been a mistake to convince her to ask for what she wanted, but she’d looked so good doing it.

And while her uncertainty might make her easier to manipulate, the flashes of confidence that keep showing up for him are frickin’ hot, and — he admits grudgingly — probably a lot healthier for her.

Except for right now, when her safety’s on the line.

“You could give me one,” she proposes. “A gun.”

“You’re not exactly a reliable shot yet anyway,” he reminds her. “What’re you gonna do to protect yourself if they make landfall?”

But she’s already shaking her head. “I trust what you’ve made—”

He makes an exasperated sound in his throat. “Go back—“

“I want to stay—“

His eyes narrow. “Oh, you’re gonna be in so much trouble later,” he promises darkly. “You got exactly ten seconds to—”

“Look!” she urges, eyes on the sky.

He swears and plants himself in front of her, turning his eyes up into the lavender pre-dawn.

There’s a flicker in the sky — almost like a series of satellites reflecting starlight. Rocket tenses, readying his cannon, gritting his teeth. The shimmer of the distant herd moves ponderously across the smoky violet-blue, growing closer. And then — there’s a faint, tiny burst of glitter, like a far-off firework: tiny emeralds and peridots sparkling in a brief cloud of crystal that hovers and then quickly fades.

Beside him, pearl breathes in a startled oh, and Groot murmurs, “I am Groot.”

“They draw closer,” Drax observes, deepening his crouch.

A soft spray of something like pink stardust, and then gold and orange and blue. They’re faraway, microscopic sequins of light — even as the glimmers of the herd grow closer, the tiny flowering explosions of color grow more frequent. They mesmerize: little fountains of sparks, confetti made of light. Rocket can’t help but stare — not just to follow them with his eyes, not just to figure out if they’re getting closer — but because it’s a musical sort of movement, a display more lovely and natural than any of the fancy waterworks down in the Sovereign capitol below. Pearl’s all soft and lovely behind him and yeah, he’s gonna make her sorry later — but for right now he’s just relieved she’s here, relieved that he can see this and know she’s seeing it too. She’s probably already half-in-love with the abilisks: the glitter of their passing, the way they put something pretty into the stars in their wake.

“Is this what it’s like to see an Acanti migration?” she murmurs behind him, and he swallows.

“It’s different,” he tells her, and it is. Not better or worse — just a moment of awe at the weirdness of the universe and all the creatures in it.

“I don’t know,” she says softly to him. “I don’t know if he made them, or if he stole them from wherever dimension they come from. It wasn’t in the labnotes — at least not the ones I found. But look how beautiful they are.” He can almost hear the tremulous smile and sigh in her words. “I bet he never planned that,” she whispers. “I bet he never expected them to make something so lovely.”

He feels his whiskers droop and quiver, his tail — already tucked close to protect it from danger — tugs even tighter to his body.

Do you think we’re more than the people who made us? she’d asked him, and it feels like yesterday and a million circs ago, all at once. And less than a cycle earlier, when he’d had his mouth between her pretty thighs:

We’re more. You taught me that.

The abilisks grow larger — still indiscernable from any other kind of cosmic flotsam floating past, except for the occasional burst of twinkling color and light. They center in the sky, and even if they can’t sense the Sovereign energyform, they must be able to see the planets. They must know that the Collective is here. Everyone on the landing deck grows slowly still and silent, but Rocket can hear each one of his companions anyway: the slow, shallow breaths, half-anxious and half-awed; the thudding of Drax’s heart, and pearl’s, and his own. The sift and crackle of the air in whatever passes for Groot’s lungs.

The glisten of the herd sweeps — slowly — past the middle of the sky. Even more slowly, Rocket thinks — they start to grow smaller.

He doesn’t relax his death-grip on the cannon, though, and neither pearl nor Groot move behind him — not even as Drax straightens and lowers his knives, asking, “What just happened?”

Not until the tiny splinters of light wink out of their range of vision does Rocket let his grip on the cannon ease.

And then pearl’s pushing past him, dancing past him, twirling to show him her kitten-smile turned into something glowing and wide and bright.

“It works!” she squeals, eyes wide and moonsilver against the stars. She turns again, staring out at the space where the herd disappeared, and she does that mouthwatering little dance: bouncing up on her toes, all those blue-lavender curls bouncing with her, cardigan flaring open and pretty tits bobbing under the gray edge of his shirt. He can see the curved undersides of them — shadowed and jostling, making his mouth water.

Gonna bite ‘em later, he thinks again.

Yeah, he’s gotta find out about getting her into that Sovereign bralette as soon as they get starside. She’s gotta wear something — anything, at least sometimes — to protect him from staring at the naked undersides of her breasts all day.

He’s gotta yell at her, too — for not heading for cover when he’d told her to.

But all that’s for later. For now, he just collapses his cannon and snaps it into its holster, leaning back and lowering his lids to half-mast. For now, he’s just gonna enjoy the show: starlit eyes and the shimmy of her hips, dust-blue ringlets that look nearly purple in this light. The curve of her ass in those clinging charcoal leggings; the wedge of soft belly he can see above the high waistband and the bright turquoise cardigan dripping off her shoulders. Happiness infuses her and it’s almost like he could take some of it for himself — lick it off her lips and her breasts and drink it from her cunt; swallow it down like sunlight and let it glow inside him. He presses his tongue against the tip of one canine, testing it: imagining how he’ll nip at her pretty pebbled nipples later, all pink and jewel-hard under his t-shirt — how he’ll celebrate by cupping her warm little cunt through the Sovereign lace she’d pick out, rubbing her through it till he makes the pretty lace drip—

“Your Terran pet,” Drax interrupts, his brow creased in concern. “Is she… dancing?”

Rocket blinks, and his eyes narrow up at the Destroyer at his side. Fuckin’ Kylosian, interrupting his good time. “You wanna keep your eyes to yourself, you big frickin’ jackass?”

Drax scowls. “Dancing is for morons,” he says without taking his eyes off pearl. Rocket feels his eyes widen at the sound of disappointment ringing through the warrior’s tone, like he’s taking it personally.

Every threaded nerve and twisted tendon inside Rocket goes taut and for a moment, he sets aside his best self — already of questionable quality — and fully embraces the Monster. He’s sure his eyes are glowing when he looks up at the Kylosian.

“I want you to listen to me very carefully, Destroyer.” The words are low and dangerous. “F’you say a single fuckin’ word to her — now, or ever — that makes her stop doing that—“ And he gestures with his chin to the place where pearl’s bouncing from foot to foot, staring with moon-big eyes and moon-blue curls at the space between the stars where the herd has disappeared. “—I’ll peel your frickin’ face off and throw you out the airlock, and even she won’t be able to save you.”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

THIS IS THE HALFWAY MARK! thank you for sticking with me - i hope this chapter was okay! i always appreciate your willingness to stick around SO much. ♡♡ your comments literally mean the world to me and have kept me going during a really rough summer. thank you so much for your kindness and support.

it'll be two weeks till the next chapter update. i'm debating what september will look like as the new academic year starts and my job picks up again. i am not sure if i should stick to (mostly) posting on fridays or if i should move to a week-and-a-half schedule. i had hoped to get a new chapter of florescence ❀ up next week but i have a hard time seeing that happening thanks to life-stuff & a chronic illness flare-up (YAY)

exciting things:
♡ i am hoping to post the next oneshot for Rocket Raccoon Prompt Week on tuesday, if all goes well! (it is already on tumblr for those of you who hang out over there)
♡ i am also thinking about kinktober. i don't think i'm gonna do a full 31 prompts (frankly there's no way) but uhhhh i would 100% take some kinky prompts for the line-up from you all so send 'em my way.

coming soon: chapter twenty-one. puntkick.
summary: diplomacy is attempted.
warnings: heightened trauma-related anxiety. general insecurity.
estimated date: friday, september six. [TENTATIVE]

･:꧂posting schedules, chapter-previews, & more on tumblr♡
･:꧂masterlist & moodboard♡
･:꧂chapter one. nemotia of cicatrix scene by @frostedwitch
･:꧂portrait of pearl♡
･:꧂rocket & pearl's bunk on the runabout (lineart)
･:꧂my fave rocket & pearl scene from chapter thirteen. ♡♡ (scroll down for the whole piece)
･:꧂scrabbly lil pearl x rocket doodle!

Chapter 21: puntkick.

Summary:

diplomacy is attempted.

Notes:

warnings: heightened trauma-related anxiety. general insecurity.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

puntkick. a quiet jolt of recognition that it’s time to become a better version of yourself, sensing that all the strategies that brought you this far are no longer working—that it’s not enough anymore to be cute or nice or righteous or tough—as if you’ve now entered a new phase in the game of life, moving forward with a completely different token. Dutch puntstuk, railway frog, which is the part of a railway switch where two rails intersect. Sometimes you can feel a little kick when your train passes over it, as if the world is trying to signal you’re missing a turn, having traveled too far on the same old track. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

“What,” the High Priestess asks quietly, “happened?”

Her voice is surprisingly dangerous, and if pearl hadn’t whispered her expectations in his ear on the way to the throneroom, he might have been surprised.

What you’ve done is unprecedented, she’d told him softly. I don’t think they’ve ever thought of it before — they’ve been so focused on eliminating the abilisks. She’ll be confused, and maybe afraid, and those two things will make her angry.

“What d’you mean, what happened?” Rocket says flatly. “We fixed your fuckin’ problem, is what happened. No loss of Sovereign lives, or whatever you said. No damage to the Collective at all.”

“Witchcraft,” the Kylosian says solemnly — but almost admiringly. Rocket rolls his eyes, and notices that the Luphomoid captive — chained and crouched on the floor, with fury etched into every line and prosthetic of her face — rolls her eyes too.

“Less witchcraft,” he corrects drily, “more engineering.”

Groot holds up the massive Fuck-You-Disk.

“It’s a Fuc— it’s an energy-and-data disorganizer,” Rocket tells the Priestess. “It’s, uh, made to scramble the abilisks’ ability to see energy comin’ from Sovereign, but to be honest, it’ll probably scramble any incoming scanners looking for the exact same thing. You’ll still be visible to other kinds of scanning, though. People just looking for the physical location of the planet, receiving transmissions, that sort of thing.”

The High Priestess gestures to one of the black-clad guards and admirals hemming the room, and the Sovereign approaches to take the disk from Groot — grunting when it weighs down his humie arms.

“Keep it running,” Rocket advises. “Just in case there’s any wayward abilisks or — anything else,” he adds uncertainly, flicking his eyes to pearl. “Keep it somewhere inside, protected from wear-an’-tear and frickin’ vandals—”

“We don’t have vandals among the Sovereign citizenry,” Ayesha says flatly.

“—and it should last you another five circs, at least, without trouble.” He swallows, and flicks his eyes again to pearl. “Should be long enough for all your fancy-pants scientists to figure out how to reverse-engineer it, make repairs as needed, whatever.”

The Priestess’ eyes narrow and she opens her mouth, but pearl steps forward smoothly — hands knotted in her sweater, moonsilver eyes focused on the seam where the gold-lacquered floor meets the hems of Ayesha’s armored gown.

“Of course, Hiereiai, we don’t need to tell you that the Collective will benefit the most from this technology by keeping the knowledge of its existence… exclusively retained.”

Ayesha pauses, and tilts her head.

“Hiereiai?” the priestess repeats musingly. “I don’t believe an offworlder has ever called me by my proper title.”

For a moment, Rocket freezes, but pearl only bobs a smooth little curtsy-like thing, a dip of her shining lilac-blue crown gleaming against all the gold light of the Amber Palazzo. “Anyone who is interested can learn about the illustrious history of the Sovereign race,” she says demurely. “Since we decided to come here, I’ve read a number of the public records in the Intergalactic Archive.”

That’s a frickin’ lie, of course. He’s surprised by how good pearl is at it — at lying. But the High Priestess hums, looking… pleased. Satisfied. Smug, even. “Then tell me, Terran — since you’ve done your research — how would exclusivity preserve our advantage in possessing this technology? Why should we not deconstruct this… disorganizer… and sell the science of it?”

Somehow, Rocket grows even more tense — a thing that shouldn’t even be frickin’ possible at this point. Every fiber of fur slowly rises in its follicle, staticky and buzzing with alarm. And annoyance. Sell his frickin’ inventions without his permission? He’d better be getting a frickin’ kickback or royalties or something—

But pearl only lifts her gaze slowly — almost hesitantly — and Rocket holds his breath for as long as she holds the Priestess’ eyes.

“Like all great empires, I assume the Collective has enemies,” pearl says lightly, and Rocket tilts his head. He’s pretty sure the Sovereign don’t have enemies — not beyond petty thieves like himself who’d love a chance to snatch some batteries. Well, petty thieves and then Wyndham, the worst fuckin’ enemy of all. The golden snobs are too exclusionary and remote to tangle in the politics of other planets. Still — judging from the pleased glow of Ayesha’s golden eyes, the priestess takes the comment as some sort of fucked-up flattery.

And then pearl’s words slow — grow more deliberate and cautionary.

“The longer Sovereign’s new data-disorganizer goes unnoticed, the longer you will enjoy a relatively tranquil existence. The moment your enemy discovers it, they will look for ways to destroy or circumvent it.”

It doesn’t escape his notice that she’s dropped the plurality of the word enemies, and Rocket can see it — see the moment Ayesha snaps the pieces together like the components of a brand-new Fuck-You-Disk. Her golden eyes narrow. “An interesting proposal,” she says coolly. “One I will take under consideration.” She gestures to the guard, who takes the Fuck-You-Disk toward a door discreetly hidden behind panels of cobalt blue. As the Guard heads steps over the threshold, they’re flanked by another four — apparently guarding the disk on its way to wherever the Sovereign priestess plans to keep and study it.

Ayesha makes a beckoning motion with one languid hand.

“Tell me, Terran. What is your name?”

Rocket flinches. He’s kept the name pearl off his lips for the last few rotations, reserving it only for time they’ve shared in the runabout, alone and isolated from the rest of the Collective and any chance of being overheard. But he’s been trying to keep his stolen bride more-or-less under the radar, and now—

Her eyes go all big and round as she stares at Ayesha, not looking away, and her fingers knot in the jewel-toned cardigan.

“Kitten,” she says, so softly that he’s sure her voice barely floats across the throneroom floor. “My friends call me kitten, Hiereiai.”

Rocket blinks. It’s a switch-up from doll, and just the fact that she’s chosen it — for here, for now; for the foreseeable future, since they’ll have Drax and the Luphomoid aboard till Knowhere — makes something in him shiver, from the nape of his neck to the tip of his tail. Pretty kitten, he thinks, My kitten.

Gonna lick your little clit later.

Something twitches at the corner of Ayesha’s mouth: irony or amusement, it’s impossible to tell.

Rocket’s eyes narrow — sizing the Priestess up — and he tilts his head. “Guess this means we get the Dreadnought and the Luphomoid,” he remarks with studied, insolent nonchalance, drawing her attention back his way. The Sovereign inclines her head haughtily.

“Indeed. I will have my Guard open Gold Captain 232 — new, and freshly stocked with standard-issue supplies and munitions — so that you can move your belongings into your new ship.” She curls her lip. “You will need to tow your… dinghy off-planet with you. We don’t have… junkyards here on Sovereign.”

He rolls his eyes. Good thing Dreadnoughts have towing capabilities. He can trade the runabout in at a scrap-planet somewhere for a few units, anyway.

“The Guard will register a blank bio-key for you to reprogram once you take possession of it. As for the Luphomoid, they will take her aboard your ship and secure her wherever you like.”

Rocket gestures over his shoulder. “She can go in the cargo hold for now,” he mutters, and pearl makes a tiny little mew of protest in her throat. He rolls his eyes. “Fine,” he snaps. “Put her in the jackroom.” Pearl had mentioned being vaguely familiar with Sovereign Dreadnoughts, so she probably knows it’s the least-appealing of the bunks — intended for the dozens of lowest crew on the ship — but it’s better than the cargo hold. Frankly, Rocket’snot willing to have a murderous frickin’ prisoner-cyborg living in the lap of luxury — especially not before he’s even gotten a chance to get inside the Dreadnought and look around himself.

Ayesha’s eyes grow cold: gold lined with frost. “What do you plan to do with her?”

The Luphomoid in question growls as a member of the Guard hoists her to her feet, half-dragging her out of the throneroom. Pearl’s eyes follow her out, pretty mouth twisted to one side in concern.

Yeah, Rocket’s got the perpetualistically-sinking feeling that he’s not gonna be able to offload the cyborg as easily as he wants.

“Prob’ly take her to Xandar—”

But when he turns back to Ayesha, the priestess’ lips are pinched.

“I wasn’t asking you.” The sentence is drenched in mockery, so slippery and taunting that Rocket feels his claws bite into the meat of his fists. “The Daughter of Thanos belongs to your Terran, does she not?”

“We’re a team,” he says tightly, and doesn’t risk a glance at pearl even when he hears her softly-indrawn breath.

Ayesha ignores him, of course — simply turning her gilded glare toward his silver-eyed girl. “Well, Terran? What will you do with the Luphomoid now?”

Drax’s gaze is fastened on them now too, dark and curious.

“I’m not sure,” pearl says slowly, and swallows. Her fingers twist in front of her belly, then flutter upward to tug on the ends of her hair.

Rocket crushes a palm against his forehead, groaning. He can feel pearl’s eyes dart to him — can feel the apology in her hesitant gaze.

“I just think—” She hesitates, and when he squints open one eye to watch her, she’s squaring up her shoulders. Huh. It’s I want the Luphomoid all over again: pearl’s somehow effortless ability to capture the attention of a whole room, usually when she doesn’t really want to. “I think I have to learn more about who she is before I decide.”

Rocket scrubs at the spot between his brows. He can already feel the migraine. It redoubles when he hears Ayesha’s voice, tense and annoyed.

“What more is there to learn?” The High Priestess says, and there’s a bit of a hiss behind the words. He drops his hand — ears alert, tail tucking, eyes flicking between the two women. “She tried to take the stone from—”

“Because of her father,” pearl says softly. Her eyes coast sideways to Rocket’s, and he suddenly feels something swell in his throat, his eyes growing large against his will. He tries to swallow. “But I’ve learned, Hiereiai, that we can be more than the people who made us.”

The High Priestess’ mouth snaps shut.

“I’d like to see who the Luphomoid is, on her own.”

Rocket clicks his tongue mournfully against his teeth. Yeah, no way this shit with the cyborg is gonna go the way he’d hoped.

So many units, he thinks miserably. Lost before I even got ‘em. Again.

Ayesha’s voice is tight and controlled — and angry. “Do with her as you please then, Terran.”

Pearl dips her head in that little bobbing bow, and Rocket shakes his head as the High Priestess opens her mouth to address their little group again.

“We thank you, of course,” Ayesha says coolly, “for putting your lives on the line, and for developing this… interesting new technology. We could not risk the lives of our own Sovereign citizens, and perhaps now we may not have to.” She sniffs delicately. “Every citizen is born exactly as designed by the community. Impeccable, both physically and mentally. Whereas, yourselves…” She trails off, one golden brow raised skeptically, and Rocket feels his teeth grit.

He knows he’s a fuckin’ creature. He doesn’t need to be reminded by some pompous golden snot who, all things considered, ain’t any better than him. She was made, same as him, and—

Pearl’s hand fingertips fall on his shoulders, light as little glass raindrops. He grapples with the hiss that’s already gathering at the tense little knot in the hinge of his jaw, and manages to breathe it out.

“Yeahhh,” he drawls. “Cool. You know, I heard you people were conceited douchebags, but that isn’t true at all, is it?” Pearl sucks in a fluttering, nervous breath, and Ayesha’s eyes narrow, but he just grins and shrugs his shoulders. “Well, time to fly. See y’around.” He shifts on his heel, already herding against pearl’s thighs to sweep them both out of the throneroom. Groot will be on their heels, he tells himself, and if Drax still wants that ride, he’ll follow suit.

The Priestess’ voice rings out across the gold-plated corridor, suddenly chilling. “Actually, I would like another word with our savior,” she says, and her voice is almost M’dame-Lavenza-cold. “Alone.”

He feels his eyes narrow and his ears flick back, but before he can turn himself back around, his pearl’s stepping past him. Just one little step — small, with a soft brush of her hip against the whiskers of his cheek. Still, his hands reach for her before he even gives them permission to do so: fingers snarling — too late — in the teal hem of her fluttering cardigan. He moves to yank on it anyway — trying to tug her back behind him, not caring if he knocks her on her adorable, plush ass.

“Not a chance,” pearl’s already saying, so firmly that her voice is nearly unrecognizable. His heart stutters in his chest, eyes suddenly wide and snapped onto her, fist locked motionless in her sweater.

The corner of Ayesha’s mouth curves: almost cynical, absolutely entertained. She flicks her golden eyes to Rocket, and arches an eyebrow. “No?”

He swallows. Normally, he’d laugh — loudly and nastily — in a person’s face if they thought they could control him like that. But something about that smirk of Ayesha’s gives him pause. The High Priestess has been condescending, snide, dismissive, cutting, and contemptuous. But this is the first time she’s sounded knowing.

Get pearl out, he thinks immediately.

“I’ll be fine,” he mutters under his breath, trying to hide the sudden hoarse throttling in his throat. He coughs and says to pearl, a little more loudly, “Go — get Drax and Groot to help you move stuff to the new ship.”

“W-wait,” pearl stammers. “You can’t—”

He does yank on the cardigan now — a warning he hopes she fuckin’ takes, this time. “Need you to do this for me,” he tells her, eyes locked on hers. He grimaces — dramatic and manufactured. “Can’t trust those two idiots with anything.”

“I am Groot,” Groot protests.

Her brow creases. “But—”

“I have a solution to your problem, Friend Rocket,” Drax volunteers, like he’s trying to ingratiate himself — and then pearl is whisked out of Rocket’s grasp, a thread of soft turquoise snagging on his claws like a little blue wisp of river.

“H-hey!” she yelps, but Drax already has her thrown over his shoulder like a sack of yaro root. The Kylosian turns and walks backward down the corridor as Groot startles, the Taluhnisan’s dark gaze darting between pearl and Rocket.

“We will have all your belongings moved shortly,” Drax informs Rocket easily, though it takes the latter a few seconds to register the words. He’s too distracted by the sight of pearl’s perfect ass lodged cutely over the Destroyer’s shoulder. Not for the first time, he regrets the fact that he isn’t taller himself. “As your new friend, I vow to keep an eye on your kitten.”

Your kitten. Rocket sucks on his teeth as the Kylosian turns. He has to take a moment to shuffle down his disappointment as pearl’s gorgeous ass disappears from view. She tries to peer up at him through the tumult of lilac-blue curls draped over her head, still squeaking out protests from where she’s sprawled down the Destroyer’s back, but all Rocket can think about is how he’s gotta get her folded in half like that as soon as he can. Maybe tonight, with the celebratory Sovereign lace cupping her asscheeks and that dripping pink pussy—

“Groot,” he mutters as Taluhnisan continues to look torn between the throneroom and the outdoors. The Big Guy turns. “You,” Rocket says firmly. “You keep an eye on him. I don’t frickin’ trust ‘im yet.”

“I am Groot,” Groot assures him, relieved, and then trundles after the two humies.

Rocket sighs, and pinches the space between his brows. “Unbelievable,” he laments, and then turns back around to face Ayesha. “What d’you want?”

“Your Terran is strange,” the Priestess muses.

Rocket will admit — to himself, and himself alone — that Ayesha is far more intimidating when he’s facing her by himself. Her headdress glints as dangerously as a circular saw-blade, studded with chips of sharp diamond. As if her Royal Golden Bitchiness didn’t set his teeth on edge enough, she’s still flanked by her cortège, all clad in funereal black, with the Guard lingering at the hems of the room. As far as Rocket’s concerned, it feels like being in front of a firing squad — which he had been, once, on Sibilax-4.

Still, he drags up a smirk from the bottom of his twisting belly. “Yeah, well. You won’t hear me say otherwise.”

The Priestess tilts her head musingly, a knifelike glint in her eye. “I almost thought I recognized her.”

The galaxy tilts and Rocket has to struggle to keep his feet under him, blood roaring in his ears.

“But no,” she hums laconically, eyes flicking away in dismissal. “She looks — far healthier than that girl ever did.” Her eyes slide back and she raises one golden brow before Rocket can be sure he’s got his balance back. Does that mean Ayesha didn’t recognize pearl? Or that she did and she’s acknowledging — what, exactly?

“She thinks she can protect you.”

He bares his teeth distractedly, mind bouncing between jump-points, trying to keep up. “Yeah. She’s a frickin’ idiot.”

Ayesha snorts — the first sign of inelegance he’s seen from the Sovereign priestess. She leans forward intently: elbow to knee and chin to fist, the same way she’d swayed toward them a cycle earlier when pearl had declared she’d wanted the Luphomoid. In this moment, the Priestess reminds Rocket of one of the auric snakes from Indigarr: gleaming, and cold-blooded, and always ready to strike. Predatory intrigue, Rocket recognizes — because he’s felt it in himself, on more than one occasion.

Especially when it comes to pearl.

“And who will protect the little Terran from you?” the High Priestess murmurs, her smirk widening.

His stomach clenches. Fuck this broad. “There’re worse monsters than me out there,” he hisses.

The High Priestess straightens, pursing her lips as her eyes shutter. She inclines her head. “I suppose that’s true.” Then: “After all, we can be more than the people who made us, yes?” It’s a mocking taunt — but it vibrates with curiosity, too. He flinches, ears flattening and tail tucking, shoulders hunching with the distinctive desire to make himself small. Pearl had played well, he supposes, but her own desire to do right by all Wyndham’s countless victims has fucked them over. She’d known Ayesha wasn’t stupid, but she’d risked a lot with her little comments anyway, and now the priestess has them figured out.

“Or don’t you believe that?” the Sovereign monarch asks now, eyes intent and focused. A number of the cortège members shift uncomfortably. Rocket skims his eyes over them, then the admirals and the Guard. He hitches an awkward shoulder, eyes narrowing.

“She thinks we can be.”

The High Priestess grins, and Rocket’s fur almost crawls off his skin. It’s a smile sharp enough to rival his own. “I’m interested in what you think,” she drawls, the words slow and languid and deliberate. “Inventor.”

She flicks the last word out like it’s a title, and he pauses. Rodent, he’s used to. Vermin. Monster. Freak.

Inventor? That’s new. He hesitates. The flippant response that has surged to the tip of his tongue seems to fade like spun sugar. Something about the whole situation — about Ayesha looking like she knows, about pearl’s moon-damned earnestness — something holds him back.

“I don’t know,” he admits. “I used to think —” He wrestles with the words. He lacks pearl’s finesse with communication, her delicate and precise diplomacy. He grimaces. “I used to think we — uh, everyone, you know — was… limited. By whoever created us.” He wants to scrape back the words but he can’t, so he tries for a dismissive gesture he’s sure the priestess can see right through. “You know. Parents or… whoever.” Stupid. He doesn’t even know how normal people grow up. He clears his throat. “Nowadays—” His eyes flick toward the doorway his pearl had disappeared through, and he winces. “Nowadays I’m not so sure.” Another pause, and his ears flatten back again. He licks his lips, and then — because he’s a reckless shitbag — he bares his teeth in a biting, bitter sneer, and spits out, “I’d frickin’ like to be more. Wouldn’t you?”

The silence clings to the gold-plated interiors like a sheen of iridescent oil. It drips into his fur. His ribs grow tight with the tension, pulling taut between the two of them — ready to snap as Ayesha studies him, still and thoughtful. Almost pensive.

Then she shakes herself, and her eyes narrow on him again.

“You’ll leave the batteries, Inventor.”

He grimaces. Well. Could be worse, he supposes. Rocket reaches into the pouch at his side and pulls out five sunlit glass vials, and hands them to the stoic black-clad Guard who approaches with an open palm.

The Priestess glares. “All of them.”

He rolls his eyes and pulls the last two from another pouch. Okay, you pompous, stuck-up jackass, he thinks resentfully.

“Ungrateful,” the High Priestess murmurs, golden eyes slitting. “I’m letting you keep everything else you stole, aren’t I?” Something twitches at the corner of her pressed-tight lips. “Including the small fortune’s worth of lingerie you took from Anaya’s Armoire.”

The flinch pulls at the muscles of his cheeks before he can stop it. Oops. He bares his teeth, trying for nonchalance. “Yeah, yeah,” he says, forcing the words into a casual, careless drawl. “Okay, Your Royal Highness or whatever. Can I go now?”

Her lip curls in a grimace of her own, but she inclines her head regally. Rocket spins on his heel, ready to stalk down the corridor — and hesitates. He pictures pearl, blue-haired and peach-skinned and vibrant, spilled across his bunk in the opalescent lace. He pictures her, dancing on the observation deck while her moon-wide, moon-bright eyes follow abilisks into infinity. He pictures her planting herself in front of his blaster — and he hears her voice, sweet and curling all around him:

I have another idea.

He groans, long-suffering, and lets his body continue its full rotation until he’s facing the High Priestess again. Impulsive — and stupid — he takes a step toward the throne. Every black-clad moron in the room immediately steps forward: the cortège closes ranks around their priestess, and the crescent of Guard and Admirals pinch in on him warningly.

Rocket rolls his eyes again and scowls at the High Priestess.

“For your kid,” he says, and flips the palm-sized coin at her: rings of vibranium and duranium and copper circuitry and homebrewed nanotech. “Just in case he leaves the planet for anything.”

She catches it — surprisingly agile — and peers down at it curiously before recognizing the design. Her cold metallic eyes flash to his — shocked copper clashing into golden light — and draws herself up abruptly. He can see her scrabbling to calculate the cost of it, her eyes hardening and turning shrewd once more.

“What do you want in exchange?” she asks coldly, and her voice is bitter as salt.

He snorts, and shakes his head: not at her; not even at pearl — but wholly at himself. “Good will. Or somethin’.” He offers a sarcastic two-fingered salute, wedges his hands into his pockets, and gives her his back. His tail’s still puffed with annoyance in spite of himself, but he strolls toward the vaulted doors with insolence to spare. He’s halfway out of the frickin’ throneroom when he hears her voice ring out again. It sounds different this time, though he couldn’t say how.

“Inventor?”

He sighs, beleaguered, and tilts his head up to stare at the gold ceiling. For fuck’s sake.

“What?”

She eyes him when he turns back to her grudgingly — and she looks so different, this time, that he falters. None of that condescension is gilding her face anymore, and her head is tilted to one side like she’s trying to parse out a tune she doesn’t recognize but which feels familiar.

“If someone sends word, looking for you,” she says slowly, each word heavy and dense and pensive, “where shall I tell them you’ve gone?”

His mind trips over itself, then races. Wyndham, he thinks. There’s a surge of something in his chest: his heart, so loud and painful he can taste the deep kettle-drum of it — something sour on his tongue, like gasoline and adrenaline. His thoughts immediately crash on pearl, and then himself, and then Lylla and his former cagemates. And then he wonders — why is Ayesha asking him this? She’s arrogant as hell, but she isn’t stupid. She has to know it’s a head’s up.

A warning.

His mouth is dry when he speaks, the word cracking and splitting like old sticks of dynamite. “Conjunction.”

She tilts her head, then raises her chin. “A wise and… believable choice. I suggest you get there quickly, Inventor.” The silence shudders and then lies between them like a deadweight.

Rocket nods once, sharply, and turns on his heel once again. Hesitates, and turns back. “Uh. Thanks.”

But her face is already shuttered again — a face to rival Madame Lavenza’s, though the pearl had never had this much arrogance. The priestess flicks one hand at him dismissively, bored. “Please. Remove yourselves from the Collective.”

He bristles again, but manages a stiff nod. She’s still a cocky stuck-up jerk, but the fact that she’d been willing to warn him means something, and he isn’t about to waste it.

Then the fur down his spine ripples. “Oh shit, the fuckin’ blankets,” he mutters, and takes off down the corridor to the runabout.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Rocket had burst into the runabout right as pearl had been beginning to transfer out the towels in the linen locker.

“I got that,” he’d panted, planting himself in front of her.

Her brow had creased in confusion. “But—“

“Linen locker’s mine,” he’d interrupted sharply. She’d backed off reluctantly — baffled by his apparent possessiveness of grease-stained towels — and then dropped down the hatch to help Groot and Drax with the last few items from the cargo hold instead.

Of course, by now, she’s realized the Dreadnought is so much more massive than she’d realized just from looking at old history-holotext images and blueprints. She’d taken a quick look around when she and Drax and Groot had been moving things in, but there’s no time for grand tours now — not with Rocket suddenly rushing to guide the runabout into the towing dock.

“Gotta hit the sky,” is all that he mutters under his breath when she asks about the abrupt sense of urgency. He does a cursory check of the engine — though how he does so when the new ship’s so huge is beyond her — and digs around inside a panel under the flight controls until he rips something out. A copper-plated cartridge the size of a datapad skitters across the floor,a nd she realizes it’s a standard-issue Sovereign tracking chip.

“Groot,” Rocket says, and gestures with two fingers to the cartridge without even looking. Pearl’s heart flutters when her tall friend nods, and she realizes — even though Rocket probably hasn’t — that her survivor is already fluent enough in Taluhnisan that he doesn’t need to give any wordy commands to make himself understood.

Groot plants one trunklike foot on the cartridge and leans over to grip the exposed edge. There’s a crunch as the enormous tracker snaps in half.

When she turns back to Rocket, her survivor is already settling into the pilot’s seat and tapping in coordinates — presumably for Knowhere. He dials his own Fuck-You-Disk up a by an extra light. Could cloak a Ravager freighter, he’d said, and she assumes that means it’ll hide his Dreadnought now.

“Your seat,” he mutters, gesturing her to the copilot’s seat next to him. There are enough supposed to be enough extra chairs in the sphere for a full core-crew, leaving plenty of spots for Drax to ease into the seat behind her while Groot lingers next to the Kylosian. Before she can even fully take in the details of the cockpit, though, Rocket is already lifting the enormous warship into the lavender-blue sky.

Then they break through the atmosphere and into the coldness of space with only a puff of cloud and light.

Unfortunately, Rocket’s tension keeps pearl tightly coiled for at least a half-hour. She doesn’t even realize it till he finally lets out a shoulder-soothing sigh and she finds herself following suit. Once she’s able to relax enough to look around, she finds herself enthralled. The cockpit is a beautiful bubble of glass, bisected by the flight controls. A closer count tells her that there are enough seats for the full retinue of leadership on a classic Gold Captain — pilot and copilot, navigator, chief mechanic, arms master, and surgeon — and a bridge above them for a captain and first and second mates. A wide hatch leads below to the gunmaster’s deck, which has a three-hundred-sixty-degree view of the space around them and the ability to comm to — and override — every gunner tower and pit on the Dreadnought.

“Can probably get cannon-control relayed to the pilot’s seat before we get to Knowhere,” pearl hears Rocket mutter under his breath, and she’s pretty sure he doesn’t even realize he’s thinking out loud. “Then work on getting flight controls down to the three-sixty, too.”

He’s flipping switches, running his eyes and his hands lovingly over the console, caressing every button and dial. He looks like he’s in love, and pearl’s ribs tighten around her lungs and heart: wildflower-stem-cages for all the bumblebees and butterflies in the galaxy. His hands cradle the yoke, and at one point, she watches his surprisingly-broad shoulders sway toward the flight-controls, like he’d kiss them if no-one else was around.

He looks feverish. And enraptured.

“You can go take a look around if you want, sweetheart,” he tells her distractedly. “Just stay outta the jackroom, till I can come with you.”

She should explore, she knows. She’s seen blueprints of the Dreadnoughts before and she knows approximately what to expect — the bubble of armored glass at the top of the ship where the captain resides with his private toilet and shower-bath, and the first and second mates in a similar room right below that. The officers’ bunks and commons, the galley, and the commons proper. Lower still: jackroom, the general-use toilets and showers, and the linens and storage. And finally, the rations, cargo, main engine, and ammo.

The lowest levels are consumed by the forward-thrust three-floor cockpit and its own engines, rations, and ammunition storage, pearl remembers — this bubble of glass effectively serving as its own large emergency pod. And behind the cockpit, there are two levels of smaller evac-pods for the jacks, if she’s remembering right.

Pearl knows all this. And she’s gotten cursory glimpses of most of it: moving their dishware and rations to the galley, their personals to the officer’s quarters. She supposed maybe it’s too — too presumptuous, to move her clothes and her little gifted lotions and pink comb into the captain’s room, where she assumes Rocket will sleep. After all, he’s repeatedly reminded her that their sexual relationship is temporary.

But she doesn’t want to sleep alone. Isn’t sure she can, on such a big ship.

Yeah, pearl knows she should explore the Dreadnought in more detail — find all the spaces she hadn’t noticed the first few times she’d wandered through with her arms full of their belongings. Find all the tiny little corners that might be… smaller.

But she can’t. She’s rooted to her seat beside Rocket.

“I am Groot?” Groot asks the three of them, and pearl winces at his offer.

“That sounds just fine,” Rocket says distractedly, before she can protest. And even though it’s a bad idea to accept, she can’t help but be softened by Rocket’s increasingly easy, casual grasp of Taluhnisan. She reaches across to skim her fingers over Rocket’s fur.

“You understood him so clearly.”

For the first time since they’d left Sovereign, Rocket tears his eyes from the flight controls and the wide bubble of the starshield — made with the highest quality of crystalline-armor, far stronger and clearer than the protective weave in the runabout glass — and looks up at her. His mouth quirks to one side, baffled and bemused. “Huh. Well. I guess that one was pretty clear—“

“But you don’t want him to do that,” she clarifies, gently interrupting.

Rocket blinks again.

“I am Groot,” Groot protests, pouting.

“I know, and it’s very kind of you, Groot,” pearl consoles, her voice as tender as she can make it, “but you’re extremely bad at it.”

“Bad at what?” Drax asks curiously. “What did he say?”

“Cooking,” pearl elaborates. “He offered to make us mammal-food.”

“I am Groot.” The Taluhnisan’s dark eyes roll mournfully toward the stars around them, and Rocket snorts.

“I’ll — go help him,” pearl offers, though she’s loath to leave her spot at Rocket’s side.

“I could do it,” Drax volunteers. “I am an excellent cook.”

“No,” Rocket replies immediately, raising one eyebrow at the Kylosian. “Don’t trust you not to poison it yet.” He nods at pearl — casual, brisk. “Go on, then.”

The kitchen is much bigger and fancier than the one in the runabout, meant to cook food for a crew of forty or more. Instead of a hot plate, there’s a full stovetop-grill, two ovens, an enormous coldbox, a two-tier rehydrator, and more flatware and utensils than pearl thinks she’s ever seen, including soft silicone versions that fold up into small compartments. There are two compactors — one for recycling and one for compost — and two dish-sanitizers, plus three sinks. She only takes up a small corner of space in the galley, and it’s still more than enough room to make a spicy grain-and-protein dish for the mammals on board. She tries to explain how she decides on cook-times and spices and ingredients to Groot, but he continues to look mystified as she works. The pots and pans clatter hauntingly in the emptiness of the galley, and she winces every time the dishware echoes.

“How is the Luphomoid?” she asks Groot, trying to distract herself from how very expansive the Dreadnought is. She hadn’t thought about it before she’d first set foot on it — hadn’t realized it might be a problem for her. But it’s so big. A shiver starts at the root of her spine. “Did she — did she tell you her name?”

“I am Groot,” the Taluhnisan answers solemnly. “I am Groot. I am Groot.”

Pearl frowns at the thought of chaining the Luphomoid in the jackroom without enough slack to sit on a bed or access the nearest toilet stall. “Well, thank you for making sure we didn’t deprive her of basic rights,” she says dryly, “and for giving her a snack and some linens.” She stares down at the food in the pot. “I should bring her a bowl,” she murmurs. “And a bag of water.”

“I am Groot,” he admonishes, sounding almost stern. Pearl sighs.

“I know he doesn’t want me to go in there alone, but she needs to eat,” she points out.

“I am Groot.”

She furrows her brow. “I’m already supposedly in trouble anyway,” she protests halfheartedly, but Groot’s already shaking his head and opening his palms to her, as if to ask what she thinks she’s doing.

“I am Groot,” he offers, and she hesitates. “I am Groot,” he adds.

She sighs, reluctance weighing down the corners of her mouth. “Fine,” she concedes, spooning a serving of the food — mouthwatering, she’s pretty sure — into one of the flexible silicone bowls in the cabinet, then pulling out a similarly-harmless spoon.

“He can’t complain about that, can he?” she asks dryly. “We can even forgo the straw for the waterbag.”

“I am Groot,” the Taluhnisan says approvingly, gathering up the bowl in his arms and pulling a waterbag out of the locker where she’d stored them earlier. “I am Groot.”

“Hey,” she says softly as he turns his back, and he pauses before twisting to face her again. She tilts her head. Everything in her feels suddenly glasslike. “Thank you,” she says, and the words are thin and small.

His brow furrows with a soft crackle of bark. “I am Groot?”

She smiles weakly. “I’m fine,” she urges. “Go.”

But when he’s gone, the galley seems more empty. Ghostly. The tables and chairs in the general commons look like blank gravestones — clean and white, with gold-plated hardware. She closes her eyes and leans over the counter and breathes, imagining her own cemetery — Fairy, and the maid, and the linguist, and Lylla. Delphinium and lilacs and cherry blossoms.

She shivers. The Dreadnought, she thinks, is cold.

She scoops the rest of dinner into three thermal-retention bowls and puts lids on them, sanitizing the counters and dishes before juggling the meals down to the cockpit.

“—strip off the gold plating as soon as I can and sell it,” Rocket is telling Drax. “Maybe on Knowhere. We’ll have to lay low there — too many degenerates would want a piece of this ship.” He turns to her, already grinning as she passes them their bowls and tucks herself back in the seat beside him.

“You didn’t even feel it, did you?” her survivor asks gleefully, canting those ember-red eyes at her. She’s struck again by how much they look like warm coals, and how much she just wants to swim in them, let them burn her. She shivers again.

“Feel what?” she asks honestly, and he cackles. The sound is so warm, licking over her skin like little tongues of fire, and she gratefully sinks into it like a bath of lava.

“We went through like six jump-points while you were in the galley,” he tells her. “This ship reconstitutes like a fuckin’ dream.”

“The food is very good, kitten!” Drax interrupts, scooping another enthusiastic mouthful onto his spoon. “A far cry from the weak Sovereign mash.”

Rocket’s ears flick back and the wicked glee in his face flattens. His eyes dart from Drax to her. “Don’t like that,” he says darkly, and for a moment, she thinks he’s talking about the meal. A flush of embarrassment curls up in her cheeks. “Call her something else,” he adds, waving his spoon at Drax, and it takes a second for pearl’s brain to catch up.

“Sorry,” she squeaks. It had been her fault, she realizes — introducing herself that way to Ayesha. What had she been thinking? “I don’t know why I—“

“Don’t gotta apologize, sweetheart,” he says, eyes back on the starshield before he raises a brow and offers her a scowl. “Least not for that.”

She winces.

“What else should I call you?” Drax asks, dark eyes fastened on her curiously. “Do you have a name?”

She opens her mouth, then closes it. “Not really,” she says faintly, and she can feel Rocket studying her consideringly from his periphery. “Doll, I guess?” she looks askance at Rocket, and he shrugs.

“Whatever you want,” he says dryly, and he sounds a little hoarse. She twists regretful hands in her lap — she should have brought him water. “Just not — kitten is mine,” he says, and something in his voice sounds tight and strangled.

Drax’s eyes widen comically. “Ah, of course,” he says agreeably. “It’s a love-name.”

Pearl can feel herself blanch, the blood running from her face so quickly she goes lightheaded, while Rocket’s ears lay back more flatly than she’s ever seen them.

“Absolutely not,” he snarls at Drax, half-turning in his chair for what pearl suspects is the first time he’s shifted from the flight controls. “Love ain’t got anything to do with this little arrangement.”

Something cramps behind her sternum, and the icy flutter at the base of her spine climbs higher. Her ribs feel brittle and fragile.

Drax frowns. “There is no shame in having love-names for each other,” he says sternly. “My wife, Ovette, called me—“

“Well, we ain’t married, are we, Destroyer?” Rocket snaps.

Drax blinks. “I do not know,” he confesses. “Are you?”

“No,” Rocket snarls. “Thank fuck.”

Absently, pearl anchors her nails to her clavicle, pressing deep red crescents into her skin. It’s not as good as a bite to the knee, perhaps, but it’ll do for now.

“We’re not married,” she repeats to Drax. She’s distantly aware of something soft and bruised, shivering under her tendons and bones. “But I’d love to hear more about your wife and daughter.”

The distraction works, and Drax begins to describe them: dark-eyed and brave, both of them, with silver-blue skin and solemn features. Kamariah, innocent and curious and honest; Ovette, stoic and loyal and loving. Pearl tries to wrap the stories around herself, and stares into the stars while he speaks.

Elpis, Auxesia, Arete, Penthus, she thinks to herself, lacing their path with stars as they go. Eleos, Eros, Pepromene. By the time she’s sought out every shape on her list of simple constellations, the skies are new again, and she starts over.

Groot rejoins them with a quiet I am Groot to her, and Rocket shoots them both a sardonic glance. She dredges up a weak little smile.

“Thank you for taking it to her,” she offers quietly.

Rocket clears his throat. “We’ll stop for tonight in the Raptor-17 system — ‘bout an hour out,” he tells them. “It’s basically dead space there, so we shouldn’t have to worry about running into any trouble.” He tilts his head toward pearl. “Where’d you put our stuff?” he asks curiously, and she feels her shoulders curve upward nervously.

“We put yours in the Captain’s quarters,” she says cautiously. His eyes narrow. “And I put mine in the officer’s commons. For now. I wasn’t sure which room you’d want — which room you’d want me in,” she admits, and she feels the flush stain her cheeks again, miserably. It had only been a little self-conscious flicker of uncertainty before, but now — cold and embarrassed, once more reminded of the lopsided skew of her feelings compared to his — self-doubt sinks talons in her mind.

The Dreadnought’s so big, she thinks again. Such a far cry from the snug, cluttered runabout and their tiny swinging bunk, made smaller and more cozy by the curtains that cut them off from the rest of the galaxy. If he tells her he doesn’t want to share a bunk with her, she’ll have to find some place—

Some place else.

His eyes narrow on her. “You want your own room, princess?” he asks coolly. Coldly. She winces, and then looks at him honestly: wide-eyed and solemn.

“No,” she says immediately. “I’d rather stay with you.” It’s an abbreviated echo of what she’d told him that night behind the bulwark, painting out her constellations for him through the starpane, tucked safe and tight against the glass. She tries not to sound panicked. “Please,” she adds softly.

He must hear the panic anyway — or must remember — because his brow tilts up and the corners of his mouth turn down, ears and whiskers wilting in something startled and flinching.

He swallows.

“Take our stuff up to the captain’s quarters, then,” he tells her gruffly. “F’you want a shower, have at it before I get up there.” Then he grins, teeth sharp. “Wear that thing I bought at Anaya’s.”

Relief blossoms inside her, so warm and sudden that her breath catches, driving away the chill. She clutches into the petals of it with both hands.

“Groot,” Rocket adds, “you got the first mate’s room.”

“I am Groot,” Groot reminds him mildly, and Rocket rolls his eyes.

“I think you just said you could still sleep in the cargo hold,” Rocket says dryly, “which is frickin’ stupid. Sleep in the damn first mate’s bunk. And Drax,” he adds, “you got your pick of the officer’s rooms. For now. Just leave the frickin’ jackroom alone.”

“You mean the prisoner,” Drax says knowingly.

“I mean both,” Rocket snaps. Then his eyes swivel back to pearl, burnt-bright and daunting. “Go on, kitten,” he says, and his voice drops to a purr. It rumbles up her bones: ankles, knees, pelvis, collarbone. She can feel it sending frissons of electricity through her tendons and muscles, stinging-warm. Something in her lower abdomen grows tight and heat washes over her, starting somewhere just below her cervix and spreading out to her thighs and breasts and face.

“And don’t forget what I said earlier,” he adds with a sharp, punishing smirk. “You’re in trouble.”

She fumbles for their dishes, but Drax takes them kindly from her hands before she can drop them on the cockpit floor.

“Go,” he tells her benevolently. “I can tell you are eager to fornicate.”

Her mouth drops and her eyes dart to Rocket’s who looks torn between fury and riotous laughter.

“I am Groot?” Groot interjects, sounding far too curious for her comfort.

But pearl doesn’t answer: face burning, she goes — up the hatch to the officers’ commons, collecting their little bundles of belongings, and then up again to the captain’s quarters.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

♡♡♡ i hope more than anything that you enjoyed this chapter! it's a lil bit of a bridge-chapter as we move from sovereign to the next stage of the plot. i just finished drafting chapter twenty-eight and i gotta tell you i like where it's all going so i really hope you continue to stick with me and enjoy this little thing. thank you so much for your patience, for staying with me, for being committed to the longhaul lol. i appreciate you all so very very very much, with extra love and affection and sweets for those of you who leave comments and let me know you're still around lol. i feel like once you get to chapter twenty-one and you're only cresting the halfway point it's nice to know you're not just screeching into the voic as an author, so please. know that i appreciate you so so so much.

two weeks again till the next chapter update (a steamy one btw). that new chapter of florescence ❀ is gonna hopefully be out on my birthday (september 24th) - i'm trying to focus largely on that this month.

exciting things:
♡ new take what you need next week!
♡ i am going to start posting parts of an already-complete six-part story regarding wanda's & rocket's massive roadtrip next week.
♡ still thinking about kinktober. reminder: i would 100% take some kinky prompts for the line-up from you all so send 'em my way.

coming soon: chapter twenty-two. falesia.
summary: pearl is punished.
warnings: continued trauma-related anxiety & general insecurity. smutty-smut with a safeword discussion, d/s vibes, “punishment” (affectionate), nipple play (discussion of clamps), and orgasm control/delay. tiny bit of overstim, tons of dirty talk as per frickin’ usual.
estimated date: friday, september twentieth.

･:꧂posting schedules, chapter-previews, & more on tumblr♡
･:꧂masterlist & moodboard♡
･:꧂chapter one. nemotia of cicatrix scene by @frostedwitch
･:꧂portrait of pearl♡
･:꧂my fave rocket & pearl scene from chapter thirteen. ♡♡ (scroll down for the whole piece)
･:꧂scrabbly lil pearl x rocket doodle!

Chapter 22: falesia.

Summary:

pearl is punished.

Notes:

warnings: continued trauma-related anxiety & general insecurity. smutty-smut with a safeword discussion, d/s vibes, “punishment” (affectionate), nipple play (discussion of clamps), and orgasm control/delay. followed by soft romantic sex with a tiny bit of overstim, && tons of dirty talk as per frickin’ usual.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

falesia. the disquieting awareness that someone’s importance to you and your importance to them may not necessarily match—that your best friend might only think of you as a buddy, that someone you barely know might consider you a mentor, that someone you love unconditionally might have one or two conditions. Portuguese falésia, cliff. A cliff is a dizzying meeting point between high ground and low ground. Pronounced “fuh-lee-zhuh.” The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

They’re beautiful, pearl admits.

The captain’s quarters.

They’re a series of Sovereign-worthy luxuries, housed under a glass dome at the top of the Dreadnought, mirroring the sunken cockpit beneath the ship. When pearl had first peered inside — while she and Groot and Drax had been moving things over from the runabout — she’d been cautious in sliding open the door and crossing the threshold, uncertain of whether or not Rocket would want her there, at least before he got a chance to explore it himself. But then she’d found herself lured into the narrow, curved hallway: floor-to-ceiling crystalline-armor glass on her left, and two mysterious doors on her right. The glass wall — glittering with its view of stardust and distant asterisms — had been so clear and clean that she’d leaned over to breathe on it, just to make sure it had been there.

The doors, she’d discovered, had led to a massive bathing room — studded with an enormous glass-walled shower and a too-opulent bath — and a toilet-room, respectively. The floors in the corridor had been sheet-metal like the rest of the ship, but plated with some kind of shining white-silver that had reflected the galaxies beyond the glass like a flooded salt-flat. The edges of the ground had been pinned to the walls by tiny glowing plasma orbs that had lit up a glowing trail into the room.

A few more steps inside had shown the hallway flaring into a chamber shaped like a gibbous moon, with the exterior wall made entirely of crystalline-armor glass. The head of the bed had nestled into the solid interior wall, hiding the two rooms she’d just passed, and it had been lined with empty shelves — a perfect home for Rocket’s weapons and inventions, pearl had thought. She’d looked at the bed, and at the dome of the ceiling, and the crystalline glass all around and above. A person could lay there in that bed and lose themselves, she’d thought: staring straight up at the endless expanse of stars, or into the infinite sky at their side and feet.

The room had seemed limitless.

And cold.

She’d eventually made her way around the massive bed and peered past the opposite side of the shelves, only to find another narrow curving hallway mirroring the one she’d entered through. This one had offered an alcove full of built-in drawers, and a walk-in closet that had reminded her too much of the ones in her bedrooms on HalfWorld and Wundagore II. Luckily, neither she nor Rocket have enough clothing to require the use of closets, so she and Groot and Drax had decided to use it to store all the items from Rocket’s workbench-bunk — at least until he gets the chance to decide where to move them.

Now, she turns from the drawers where she’s just tucked the last of her cardigans and leggings, and pauses with her back toward the alcove: staring out into an endless glittering web of constellations and dewdrops, jewels and snowflakes. She stalls there in the alcove, with the shadows and drawers behind her and the crystalline glass in front of her. This alcove, with its built-in chest-of-drawers, is so much more open than her nook behind the bulwark, and so much shallower than a closet. For a moment, she winces and shakes her head at the stars, biting back the regret of not taking the time to explore earlier — to look for more tiny and tucked-away spaces.

For a moment, pearl sways against the edge of the wall, feeling so small and so cold that she wishes she could fold herself up and tuck herself into one of the small drawers, stay somewhere dark and warm. She chews her lip and tugs the ends of her curls — then presses down on her nerves, packing them into a small dense ball of matter that she can tuck into the pocket of her cardigan.

Finally — swallowing the tight collar of her throat and pretending as if it hadn’t taken her twenty minutes to talk herself out of the shallow recess in the wall — she showers and focuses on slicking herself over with the moisturizing body oil Rocket had given her. It glosses her legs and belly, the soft undersides of her breasts, the columns of her arms. It’s scentless, she thinks, but she always feels like she smells better after she uses it. And it makes her skin feel soft and velvety, and sometimes — when she thinks of him while she puts it on — she could almost swear it leaves her skin tingling.

Sometimes, like now, she can feel herself getting wet.

Wear that thing I bought at Anaya’s.

You’re in trouble.

She presses her thighs together nervously and pauses before slipping into the new panties Rocket had bought for her, hoping she doesn’t make a mess of them before he even comes up the hatch. They’re incredibly lovely — more whimsical and frivolous than anything she’d ever had in her time with Herbert, but somehow just as luxurious. The lace is so soft and light that it feels like a palmful of feathers — like shimmery warm sunshine splayed with a kaleidoscope of iridescent light, or like glittery pale-gold fairyfloss: sugary-sweet, and ready to melt or float away. She shimmies the scrap of fabric up over her hips. It feels almost nonexistent on her body — ethereal and misty. For a moment, she’s disappointed that there’s no mirror big enough for her to view her whole self.

But perhaps it’s just as well. While every flaw on her body had felt like a tiny rebellion under Herbert’s watchful eyes, she now finds herself needled and pricked by each one. Better for her confidence, maybe, if she isn’t tempted to peel herself apart in front of a full-body reflection. Still, from this angle, she can see some of the details she hadn’t noticed back when the panties had only been a promise in her hand at Anaya’s. The fanned filigree is delicate enough that she can glance down and easily see the color of her curls beneath, starting to blush midnight-blue at the base of each strand. The lace-pattern, too, is placed in such a way that it would draw a lover’s eye right to her clit, and a quick brush of her fingers between her thighs has her jolting, informing her that the weave of the lace there is much finer than she’d realized. The scalloped edges of the waistband and legs are far more dramatic than she’d originally believed — each petal of lace curling gently up from her skin, exposing more vulnerable flesh at the crease of her thighs and her abdomen. Her touch skims lightly over the soft flower-petal spray of scars on her lower belly — blossoms of pink, and tiny pollen-flecks and crescents of moonlight-white. Maybe she should feel some kind of way about them, but she likes them, in a bittersweet sort of fashion. Rocket hasn’t broken her skin since that night on the Arete — other than his accidental scratches during his dreams, or the time he’d mistakenly held onto her too tightly in his pilot’s chair — but she wonders if she could convince him to leave some new marks, now that he doesn’t hate her. She likes the way they look and the way they feel under her fingers — likes the way they commemorate the first choice she’d made solely for herself — but it would be nice if she had just one that she didn’t have to associate with his bitter contempt and hostility.

Love ain’t got anything to do with this little arrangement.

She winces, fingers lingering on the marks. Unlikely, she supposes.

Oddly, while she enjoys the little marks on her belly — proof of her rebellion, and of Rocket’s presence on her body — her stretchmarks still make her anxious these days. Now, in the pretty Sovereign panties, they suddenly seem far too obvious. She scrubs a self-conscious finger over one satiny, rippled stripe, visible under the flowerlike hem of the panties.

Surely, pearl thinks with a resigned sigh — surely the Sovereign don’t have to contend with stretchmarks.

She muffles an embarrassed little groan, and debates putting a t-shirt and cardigan back on. It’s cold — so cold in the captain’s quarters, all alone with just the frigid expanse of stars overhead and all around — but she’s fairly certain that she isn’t supposed to pair her new, pretty shred of sunlit Sovereign lace with Rocket’s too-small, nearly-worn-through band-shirt and her own rumpled, messy cardigan. For the first time, she wishes she had something else — something gauzy and glamorous to go with the pretty panties she’d picked out to wear for Rocket. Something small opens in her heart, and a little bit of that warmth and light she tries to keep on reserve leaks out, fading into nothing when it hits the cold Dreadnought air.

Everything is wrong, she thinks desolately, and immediately stamps on the thought. It’s foolish and unfounded and greedy and catastrophic, and there’s no reason for it. They have this massive ship that Rocket has been dreaming of and they escaped Sovereign; they’d saved the abilisks and protected the Collective and maybe even bought a little bit of grace for the Luphomoid — a fellow made-thing. Rocket is learning Taluhnisan and Drax could maybe become a friend and everything, honestly, is perhaps the best it has ever been—

But she still feels this knot of dread in her stomach, woven into the lace of the stars and everywhere she looks. She still feels the slow fingers of frost, tracing patient deadly paths along each rib.

She shivers, and tries to ignore the sense of being haunted — peeling back the bedding on the captain’s sprawling bed, and crawling in. The mattress itself is fluffy and firm: nicer than the bunk on the runabout, though far too wide. She and Rocket could sleep on opposite sides of this bed for a full cycle and never even touch — which is a cold and miserable thought. The sheets are a satiny kind of fiber, soft enough that she wonders if they’d been imported from Cyxlore, and the pillows are full of downy fluff.

Unfortunately, the comforters and blankets are another story. Like the quilts on the Homonoia and Arete, they’re woven with something that is probably meant to be elegant and expensive, but which only serves to add a scratchy element to the weft of the fabric. When pearl burrows into the damask, hoping for warmth and comfort, it only feels like she’s wrapped herself in flimsy layers of cardboard.

She sinks back on her haunches, nose crinkled and brow creased, wondering if these quilts are even worth tolerating — then bundles her shivers into them anyway, pining for the threadbare old blankets from the runabout. They’d made the move over from the smaller ship — she’d wistfully tucked them into the enormous new linen locker herself. Maybe Rocket won’t mind if she trades them—

There’s a soft susurration as the door slides open down the narrow curved corridor where she’d entered, and pearl rises to her knees with the sheets half-wrapped around her, peering out from under a draping veil of itchy-edged damask. Her lips part, skin already aching for his warmth.

Rocket.

His eyes burn across the rounded room and the loose scrawl of stars beyond the glass, then light on her: bundled in linens, wide-eyed, and very-obviously nearly-naked underneath. She stares back, unmoving, as he abruptly goes still. For a long moment, they only look at each other.

Pearl is always awestruck by him but for a moment, she thinks maybe he feels it too.

Then her silly heart jumps and trips into a gallop, and Rocket’s quiet stillness shifts into something more predatory — like a tiger crouched in the tall grasses, motionless but for the calibrating twitch of his tail.

He tilts his chin.

“Well, well,” he drawls. “If it isn’t the girl who didn’t wanna listen earlier.” The curl of his mouth is sardonic — voice dry and derisive. “Looks like you’re listening now, though.”

She licks her lips, and then — hesitantly, in what feels like a gamble — she loosens her grip on the sheets. They shuffle slowly downward, pausing in creased rumples over the jutting tips of her breasts. His eyes follow the dipping folds of fabric, lids dropping lazily as he takes in the shadows feathered between her breasts, the suggestion of curves under the coils of cloth. She watches as his lip peels back so he can trace the point of one canine with the tip of his tongue — and she can see where his tooth dimples the muscle, so sharp that the sight of it alone teases her skin like a knife.

She shivers again — and this time, it has nothing to do with the coldness of the Dreadnought.

“Well?” He raises his brows. “You gonna let me see that treat I bought myself, to celebrate what a frickin’ genius I am?”

Slowly, she unfolds herself from the blankets. It’s not reluctance that has her moving so tentatively — not exactly. It’s just that she’s still very aware that he’s looking at her with all the leisurely intensity of a predator who knows he’s stronger, faster, and more ruthless than his prey. Her nipples, already stiff from the chill, tighten painfully as she slides her legs out of the bed and stands before him in the vulnerability of the cool, recycled air.

The stars prickle and sharpen around them, and Rocket lets out his low and mocking whistle while his eyes narrow in on her jewel-hard nipples.

“Look at how needy you are already,” he purrs. “Cute.”

She flushes, color high in her cheeks, and sways toward him without meaning too. The embarrassment is hot and heady — such a contrast to the cold of this ship — and she needs him right now. And if he won’t give her the warmth of his hands and his body, then she’ll accept the burn of humiliation in its stead — even accept it gratefully.

“Funny how bad you want me — and I just got here. Tits already begging to be tugged on.” His tongue curls against the back of his teeth, like he’s imagining tasting her. “Little slut.”

Her thighs clamp together as she stands there in the cold, her skin shivering. She’s prickling with goosebumps, even as the flush spreads through her limbs. He strolls up to her casually: hands piled lazily in his pockets, tail swinging behind him as indolently as a hypnotist’s watch. Her breath stammers.

When he speaks, his voice is a low, patient drawl.

“You ever hear of a safeword, princess?”

She tilts her head. There’s a needful sort of haze already curling into her vision, like vapor rising off a warm river in the chill of dawn. She folds the shape of his question into her fingers as it drifts past and then shakes her head. No.

One corner of his mouth tilts: pleased, perhaps. Or troubled. She can’t tell.

“It’s a word you say when you want me to stop,” he says quietly, his voice suddenly serious and low. “F’you’re feeling uneasy or scared, or don’t like something — if you’re just not sure — you say your safeword, and I stop.” He clicks his tongue on his teeth. “Like magic.”

She nods silently, wide-eyed and lips parted. She can’t imagine wanting him to stop, not right now, not when he hasn’t even begun. Whatever he wants to do — especially right now, tonight — she needs it. Not just for the heat he calls out of her muscles and bones, either — not just for the grounding weight of him. But every time he’s made her come, she’s been so sleepy-eyed after, too warm and dozy and drowsy to think.

She needs that. She needs that so badly it already hurts. She’s suddenly sure it’ll be the only way she’s able to close her eyes at all tonight. Not to mention the closeness he can give her, like gentle fingers and salve on a bruise.

Love ain’t got anything to do with this little arrangement.

“What’s your word gonna be, sweetheart?” He considers her for a long moment. “Should be something you’re not gonna say in bed otherwise.”

A hundred possibilities spiral through her mind, bitter-tasting and immediately discarded: Fairy, recorder, flerken, Wundagore.

Astraea.

“Cyxlore,” she says, and he tilts his head at her before nodding once, firmly.

“Okay, kitten. You remember that word, and you say it if you need to. Anytime. There’s never, ever a reason you can’t say it if you want me to stop. You understand?”

She nods, fingers twisting and twining in front of her belly.

“Words, sweetheart.” The smoke of his voice, wrapped all around her, is surprisingly gentle, and almost enough to warm her skin. She wants to wrap herself in it.

“I understand,” she says softly. “If I want you to stop, I say Cyxlore. I can say it any time, no matter what.”

He hums an approving note, and her knees wobble beneath her, warmth curling up from the base of her belly. “Good.” He prowls closer, and his voice lowers. “‘Cause I’m still mad at you, sweetheart. So m’not gonna be nice to you tonight.” A single claw prickles over the soft curve of her belly. “And I plan on having you so sorry before morning.”

“W-wait,” she stammers, and he cants a sideways glance up at her, one brow quirked. “What about you? Don’t you have a — a word?”

He snorts — then snickers. Then cackles, the laughter as loud and derisive as she remembers from those first few days when he’d mocked her after the Arete. For some reason, though — instead of making her stomach twist in nervousness — it has heat radiating from her panties. Her thighs twitch and she tries not to rub them together.

“Kitten,” Rocket taunts, “the idea that you could do anything to me if I didn’t want you to—“

“I’d feel better,” she offers up breathlessly. “Just — just in case. I don’t ever want to hurt you.”

His mouth snaps shut, and he surveys her solemnly. “Eclector,” he says at last. It’s a word she doesn’t recognize, but his mouth is tight at the corners and his ears are flicking, so she doesn’t ask — just commits it to memory. His eyes narrow on her though — the smoky promise in them abruptly fading away as he tilts his head, one ear flicking thoughtfully. “You okay, sweetheart?”

She nods emphatically. “I — yes, I am. I’m okay.” It’s not a lie, she thinks. Or maybe it is — she doesn’t know. But there’s nothing he can do to help her — not beyond this, anyway — and she can’t risk him stopping.

It’s an echo of her thoughts that night on the Arete — that she just can’t bear it if he stops — and she can’t let herself consider what that might mean.

But Rocket squints, and pearl can tell she hasn’t sold him. “You scared?” His voice sounds strange — hollow, almost, like it hurts to carve the words out of his ribs, and her brow dips in confusion.

“No-o,” she says slowly. “I trust you.” She clears her throat and drops her hands from where they’ve tangled and twined at her waist, squaring her shoulders in spite of how the cool air curls over her nipples, in spite of how vulnerable she feels. “I’m really okay, Rocket,” she says gently, and she hopes it’s true.

He keeps his eyes on her for another long, slow breath, then another — till her hands start floating upward again, no matter how hard she fights them, and knot uselessly at her abdomen.

“You’re sure?” he asks slowly, and she nods again.

Words, sweetheart.

“Yes,” she says. “I’m sure. And I’ll use my — my word. If I need to.”

“Your safeword,” he reminds her, and she nods.

“My safeword.”

He still doesn’t move for another moment: black nose flaring, trying to make sure she doesn’t — what? smell like terror or outrage? She tries to soften, to focus on the anticipation of his touch, on how happy she is to still be with him. And it seems to work — or maybe he decides that whatever feels different to him is just his own imagination. He huffs a breath of air out of his lungs and rolls his shoulders, tucking his hands into his pockets. His eyes narrow on her again — playful this time, though. Predatory once more.

“Now where the fuck were we?” he muses. “Oh. Yeah. I was telling you how frickin’ funny it is that your cute little body’s already begging for attention when you couldn’t listen to me earlier.”

She winces, twining her fingers together. “You told me to tell you what I want,” she offers thinly, but the excuse sounds flimsy, even to her ears.

Sure enough, he scowls. “What you want when it comes to a Taluhnisan or a Luphomoid or learning to fly or where you wanna go or a scrap of underwear or — whatever — is a lot different than not listening to me when your frickin’ safety’s on the line.” His eyes narrow up at her. “You can’t fight yet. You can’t shoot yet. And if you can’t fight or you shoot — then you run.” He shrugs. “There’s no shame in it. Running’s the smart thing to do sometimes.” He grimaces. “I’ve done it more than once myself.”

“I would have,” she protests, “but I knew your disk would work—“

His eyes narrow. “Not a fuckin’ excuse,” he says, voice dangerous and low. She swallows.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, and a grin crackles briefly at the corner of his mouth.

“You will be,” he promises, eyes intent on hers.

She chews her lip. “Are you — are you going to slap me again?” she asks uncertainly, and he blinks, face shuttering so suddenly that she feels the loss of him as certainly as if he’d left the ship.

But when he traces a claw over her belly again, it feels strangely consoling.

“Not this time,” he murmurs.

“I don’t — I don’t mind,” she whispers, and it’s true. “I think — I told you I think I liked it.”

And the heat of it, now — the heat of it would be welcome.

But he’s already shaking his head. “Plenty of other ways to punish that pretty pussy of yours—“ He peers up at her, brow quirking. “But I’ll give you a chance to escape punishment, f’you want it,” he offers slyly. She tilts her head. The grin he’s wearing is so sharp that she’s fairly certain it can only be a trap. The answer is yes, probably — I probably want whatever you’re offering, no matter what — but she asks anyway.

“What — what is it?”

“Just show me you can listen, sweetheart,” he purrs. “Show me you can be a good little thing when I tell you to be, and—“ he shrugs and spreads his dark palms wide, mocking smile bitten and pinned between his teeth. “And we can be on friendly terms again.”

She shivers again. It’s an easy ask, she thinks. In most cases, anyway — certainly in this one.

“I want to be good for you,” she breathes out shakily, and the grin somehow gets brighter and meaner.

“Sure you do,” he croons, and hoists himself onto the bed. He runs a palm briefly over the rumpled sheets, head tilted like he’s trying to decide if he likes them, then rubs a handful of the damask cover between his fingers and makes a face. “You’d think there’d be more comfortable shit on a Sovereign vessel,” he mutters, glancing up at her with his brow furrowed in frustration. Before she can comment, though, he’s nestling himself against the headboard, surrounded by the plush, downy pillows. He laces his fingers together and cradles the back of his head with them, and grins up at her. “You did a real good job of listening that night I had you sitting pretty on my lap, stuffing your tight little cunt with my cock and not moving for an hour,” he reminds her casually, and she feels the blood rush back into her cheeks. Her breath shudders on her exhalation, and he smirks lazily, eyes hooded. “I’m gonna have you come sit over here like a snuggly little kitten on my lap again, and play with your tits like before. Both of ‘em, this time. And you’re gonna do exactly what I say with ‘em, right?”

She shivers. “R-right.”

His lids lower halfway, and he tests the tip of one sharp canine with his tongue. “C’mere, then.” he drums his clawed fingers on the armored weave of his jumpsuit. She hesitates, then crawls carefully back onto the bed. Cautiously, she loops one leg over him, resting on her knees in a straddle across his lap. “Good girl,” he coos. “Now, I want you to notch your sweet, needy little clit against my dick — but don’t you dare rub yourself on me.”

She hesitates, then carefully slides herself against him until she feels the ridge beneath his clothes slide between her lace-covered folds. She freezes when it bumps against the little bundle of nerves hidden there, a sizzle of heat singing along her insides and a whimper poised on the edge of her lip. Even though she hasn’t given the soft little cry any breath, she thinks he hears it anyway — he must — because his ears flick forward and he tosses a taunting smirk up at her. His fingers flick at the scalloped petals of lace at her waist and hip, toying with them.

“Good girl,” he purrs. “Now. I want you to use your fingers to draw some cute little circles around both your nipples — just like that. Good.”

The stiffened peaks of her breasts — already hard and oversensitive from the cold — ache under his direction. She bites her lip and tries not to shift on him, not to roll her hips.

“Good,” he repeats lazily. “Now — pinch. Nice an’ hard. And don’t let go.”

She can’t hold back the wounded little sound tripping out of her mouth as the tender beads between her fingers begin to ache and radiate heat. The warmth swirls down to her core and tightens like a spring, hot and coiling. Her thighs tighten against his hips.

“Now give ‘em both a little tug, kitten.”

She swallows, and listens. It sends a frisson down that ever-tightening spiral through her core. He watches as she tries not to squirm, then lets out another slow, low, mocking whistle.

“Always thought those tits of yours were so pretty, pearl. Now that you’ve got your nipples turning red like little rubies, I think I might have a new favorite color.” His lip curls back to bare his teeth while he licks his tongue over the front of them, like he’s imagining tasting her. “Might need to keep them like this all the time. You ever hear of nipple clamps?”

She swallows another whimper. She hasn’t heard of nipple clamps — she’s pretty sure that he knows she hasn’t — but the name seems pretty self-explanatory.

He smirks when she shakes her head. “They’d do just what you’re doing now — pinch your nipples nice and hard and tight. Harder and tighter, even. Could clamp ‘em both and tie a pretty ribbon between ‘em — give it a good tug while I make you ride me. Could make you wear ‘em all day with a cute little chain peeking out from under whatever stupid t-shirt of mine you’re wearing — and I could play with it whenever I wanted to make you bounce your tits.”

She shudders, eyes wide. Perhaps she’d understood the basic mechanics of clamps, but she hadn’t had time to think of all the ways he might imagine taking advantage of them. The tender nubs between her fingers are so hot that they’ve almost become numb, and she can’t focus on anything but the white-gold sensation spiking through her, from both nipples and right down into her clit. Her pussy clenches and her eyes blur.

“Let ‘em go.”

She can’t hold back the whimper this time — not when she releases her grip, hands floating uncertainly as sensation floods back into the tips of her breasts, stinging and burning and molten. Tears immediately stud her lashes like drops of crystalline-armor glass. Rocket eases more comfortably against the headboard and his hands, knocking his hips against hers in a way she’s sure is intentional — looking, for all the world, like he’s waiting for her body to reset before he orders her to do whatever is next in his mind. She tries not to wriggle against him, though her hips twitch with the overwhelming urge to grind down.

“Pinch for me again, sweetheart. A bunch of times — quick and sharp.”

She does, lips parting on a shattered moan as her knees squeeze against him.

“Don’t,” he reminds her so sharply that she freezes, eyes wide. “Don’t you move that pretty pussy of yours, kitten.”

She gasps, realizing the shape of this particular plan of torture. Her brows twist and tilt — pleading — but he just grins indolently at her.

“Keep going with the fingers.”

The fear of the cold is long gone, now — faded into a gauzy, ghostly, barely-remembered dream of winter. Her limbs feel soft and molten and buttery, and she has to tense every muscle to keep from rocking against him. Stardust gathers on her lashes, silvery and shivering.

“Do your pretty tits like being pinched, sugar?”

She blinks down at him through tear-blurred eyes, and he clicks his tongue against his teeth in mock sympathy without waiting for a response.

“Bet they do,” he drawls. “Bet they love being squeezed and tugged on.” He scoffs. “Your nipples are so frickin’ hard all the time, sweetheart. Begging me to touch ‘em every time I walk by.” He bares his teeth in another callous grin. “Begging me to bite ‘em.” The canines sharpen and flash. He chuckles. “You know, I can feel you leaking out of your lace panties all over me. And you’re panting like you’re already halfway to coming.”

It’s true — she can feel how soaked she is, how raspy her breath feels behind her too-tight ribs. Her whole body is sheened in sweat now too, feverish and needy.

“You can ease up on those cute tits of yours,” he purrs up at her. “Why don’t you just stroke those poor red nipples for me now, huh? Pet ‘em nicely.”

She falters, and then tries to follow his instructions. For some reason, the light, feathery touches on her breasts seem a million times worse than the sharp, punishing pressure had. She feels the space between her legs, empty and aching, clenching, begging to be filled. “R-Rocket,” she breathes shakily. “I—“

“I been thinking about getting you on your hands and knees since that moron Drax threw you over his shoulder earlier,” he interrupts her, taking his hands from behind his head and prickling his claws up the insides of her thighs. She struggles to focus on him, and when she does, she can see something wary and shuttered in his scorching, ember-red gaze. “Hey — no frickin’ wiggling allowed.” She tries to still herself — tries not to whine as the tears continue to bubble up on her lashes and threaten to spill over. “You think you’d be okay with that, kitten? Letting me play with you on your hands and knees?”

It takes a moment for her mind to make sense of his words. “Like in the Arete?” she asks, the words fuzzy and glazed at the edges. She doesn’t catch his wince.

“Different,” he promises vehemently. “Won’t hurt you.”

Her brow furrows. “I—I told you, I liked—“

“I’m not asking if you liked what happened in the Arete,” he says, sharply enough that she jumps — skittish before his palms smooth apologetically over her thighs — and then his voice softens. “Just asking if you’d be okay with me fucking you from behind.”

She nods — earnest, hopeful. “Y-yes.” Anything would be better than trying not to move while she plays with her breasts on his lap, she thinks.

“You remember your safeword, doll?”

She nods helplessly, trying to keep her hips still. There’s a prickle at the base of her spine, urging her to buck against him desperately.

“What is it?”

“C-Cyxlore,” she stammers, “but please don’t stop—“

He chuckles. “M’not even doing anything yet,” he reminds her, but his claws skate teasingly down her inner thighs again, and a ripple races the entire length of her body. “You sure you’re okay with it?”

“I’d — yes,” she repeats. “Please fuck — please fuck me l-like that.”

“All right, princess,” he murmurs — and then lunges toward her, one arm wrapping halfway around her waist as he tumbles her off him, using her body’s momentum to twist her in mid-air. She squeaks with surprise at the whirl of the room, the twist of her body and its impact against the mattress, the suddenly-new position. The tears clinging to her lashes spill over with the force of the motion, streaking her cheeks as she tries to orient herself. Instead of facing him — the headboard and the shelf-lined wall — now she’s staring out through the crystalline-armored dome. All she can see are a million unnamed asterisms and sprawling, glittering galaxies, softened and obscured through her tears. He’s already unlacing the tangle of her legs, even before her head stops spinning. The prickle of his claws urges her up onto her knees. She fumbles herself onto her hands before she feels his palm sweep up her spine to the back of her neck. She freezes — a momentary flicker of fear spiking through her arousal — but then he stretches across her back, sifting his fingers into the spiraling silk of her lilac curls as his palm cradles the back of her head and presses her cheek gently down into the spilled, splayed sheets. She melts under his hand, shoulders softening against the mattress as his breath fans across the space between her shoulderblades.

“Stay just like this, kitten. Keep those knees wide open for me, and your head down.”

He withdraws slowly and she can feel him settle back on his heels, no longer touching her. Still, her already flushed and overheated flesh warms wherever she feels his eyes grazing her. She could swear they almost sear her, leaving shiny pink burns in their wake.

She curls her fingers into the sheets on either side of her bed and revels in the feeling.

“What a frickin’ day,” he muses behind her, his voice rasping and low. “Damn near feel like a Ravager king. Captain of my own brand-new Dreadnought, and a pretty slut in my bed.” He traces a claw along the edge of the panties where they cradle her ass, and she shudders, thighs twitching. “I got you these panties so I could see your pussy dripping through ‘em, and now I get to punish you in ‘em too.” He chuckles, and it sounds sinister. “There are a whole lotta rotations when it sucks to be me, kitten, but this ain’t one of ‘em.” His fingers sweep lightly over the soft, tissue-thin lace cupping her cunt — fluttering the scalloped edges of the fabric. Her hips tilt deeply — instinctively — back arching for him even further, and she hears him suck in a breath.

“Please,” she pants. “Please—“

“Please what?” he asks, all false innocence. “Please remind you how to listen better?” His claws tease against her. “Please teach you a frickin’ lesson?”

She tries not to squirm, but she can tell by his snicker that she’s unsuccessful.

“Gonna have to wring these panties out later. You’re dripping off the edges. Little kitten’s got a needy cunt.”

She twists her face into the scratchy damask and satin-soft sheets, mewling into the puddles of cloth.

“Okay, little kitten,” he croons — something that sounds like a mockery of comfort, too smug and condescending to be soothing. Her skin prickles and tingles and buzzes under a fine layer of sweat. “One last thing. This is the last thing you gotta do to show me you can listen. You ready?”

She nods desperately against the sheets, whimpering and dampening them with her tears. The pads of his fingers ghost over the thin panel of lace covering her folds, pressing teasingly against her empty, crying slit and then circling lightly against the filigree of threads over her clit. She gasps, hips hitching, when his fingers circle her again — then again. He leans against the soft curve of her thigh and one asscheek, his palm coasting against her pussy as his fingers continue to trace her clit with increasing speed. The coil in her belly burns brighter and hotter and tighter, and she twists the sheets in her fists, pulling them against her body.

“P-please,” she pants again: nipples rubbing against the rough weft of the damask, cheek scrubbing against the blankets. If he would only press a little more firmly against her, instead of haunting her with this taunting wisp of pleasure—

His whiskers tickle against her hip as his other hand toys with the fluttery, delicate lace hem of her panties. He leans in close.

“D’you want to come, kitten? Wet, pretty slut?”

There’s something dangerous in his voice, but she can’t quite grasp it. The stars swim and blur in her tear-filled eyes. “Yes, please, Rocket,” she mews, and feels the breath of his chuckle as his fingers speed up — quickening, but not giving her any more pressure. Her pussy squeezes achingly — pleadingly — on nothing, and her abdomen cinches tight.

“So polite, doll. Such pretty manners.” A sharp pain clamps into the fat of her ass and she yelps — another bite, she thinks fleetingly, and a moan spills over her lips — but his tongue is already laving the spot, then tracing long lines over the plump, plush curve. “So you’re gonna be a good girl and listen to me?”

A soft sob shakes her shoulders against the mattress. “Yes — yes, please. I w-want to be a good girl for you, Rocket, I promise—“

His mouth brushes against her skin and she can feel his grin. He snickers as his fingers quicken even more, and then his breath puffs against her with two growling, distinct words.

“Don’t. Come.”

She bucks against his hand instinctively, gasping and jolting in alarm at the sudden command. She twists her shoulders against the sheet, trying to see him from her position against the mattress, and she just knows she’s wearing a wounded expression.

“W-what—”

“You heard me,” he purrs, and his touch is relentless now, winding her tighter and tighter like a coil of copper-wire or string-lights or detonating cord. “Don’t you dare frickin’ come, kitten. Not till I tell you.”

She panics, adrenaline spinning her higher and muscles shaking and melting inside her. She’ll come like this, certainly, she thinks. If he doesn’t stop — if he keeps up with that friction— she won’t be able to help herself.

“Wait,” she gasps, trying to lift herself onto her hands, to scramble out of his reach. “Wait — I can’t—“

His hand delicately cuffs her ankle as she tries to wriggle away, dragging her back toward him just like he had on the Arete — but there’s no terror, this time; just a hot spike of desire suddenly spearing through her core. She chokes on a half-strangled moan. Her skin is drenched with sweat now, tingling, and she tries to lock down every muscle in her body.

“Wait, wait, please, I can’t,” she tries to pant out against his clever, insistent fingers, “please, I need—”

“Huh,” he muses. “Thought you wanted to listen to me.” His fingers grow more insistent, pushing more firmly against her — dragging the soft weave of the lace against her clit in those fast, buzzing circles now. Pearl’s eyes twirl around the room — the glass walls, the spinning stars — and she sobs again, tears pouring down her face and into the sheets as her arms buckle and her shoulders collapse back down to the mattress. Every inch of her skin feels overheated and slick, flushed, sunburnt. Every inch of her is melting: desperate, painfully needy.

“Don’t do it, sweetheart,” he threatens darkly against her skin, his breath a shadow that drifts over her swear-sleek body. “Don’t you fuckin’ come till I tell you. I know your cute little clit is begging; I know that cunt of yours is all sloppy and squeezing and empty, but you gotta listen—“

“Please,” she sobs out. Every muscle wants to push herself back in his hands, but she knows if she does, she’ll be lost. “Please don’t make — please let me—“

“Why should I let you, princess?” He scoffs. “You gotta prove to me—“

“I’m sorry,” she mews. “I’m sorry for not listening—“

“Oh,” he says, and she can hear the mockery in his voice. The galaxy swims and vibrates in her vision, glazed with glistening splinters of light, refracted and reflected in her own kaleidoscope-tears. The air shreds out of her lungs in short, shallow, desperate breaths. “Well, then. Since you’re sorry—“

There’s a shift behind her and the rattle and soft clank of metal — a number of buckles, softly thudding open.

“You know your safeword, kitten? You still okay?”

Her mind scrambles. “Y-yes, I know it, please, please, don’t stop — please let me c-come—“

“No.”

She’s barely aware of him peeling the panties to one side — “So wet it’s a frickin’ miracle I didn’t accidentally tear right through ‘em,” he jeers — but she squeals when the warm, leathery pads of his fingers suddenly touch her bare clit. Her whole body hitches, hips rippling upward. She can feel the glossy head of his cock suddenly dip between her drenched folds.

“Tell me, princess,” he purrs, tapping against her clit with the hard curved tip of his dick. “Is your hungry little pussy greedy to get filled up?”

“Yes, yes,” she sobs. The light, rhythmic thumping of his slick head against her soaked clit is sending shimmers of gold and silver confetti over her nerves. He slides between her wet folds, teasing her, taunting her with promises that leave her empty and aching. “Yes, please—“

And then he’s inside of her, stretching her, the shape of him gliding against all her vulnerable spots. She keens against the sheets, hips hitching in spite of herself, trying to fuck herself back on him as he toys ruthlessly with her clit.

“Don’t come,” he warns her again, dragging himself back out of her, slowly, as she whines — then punching back in with a wet, sucking sound. “Fuck, you sound like music, pretty pearl. Keep bouncing your desperate, fucked-out self back on my dick, silly slut, but don’t you dare fuckin’ come.”

Her teeth grit so hard that something in her jaw makes a strange, popping sound, but she barely notices — just buries her face in the tumult of twisted-up blankets and tangled bedsheets. He presses his other hand into the small of her back and adjusts the angle of his thrusts. The curve of his cock now scrapes against that spot inside her that has stars blossoming and exploding in her vision. She shrieks — trying to hold strong against the wave of feral, drowning pleasure rising dangerously inside her. The spiral of white-gold scintillating heat has never felt brighter or tighter, has never burned like this, and she’s suddenly afraid that when it snaps, it will sweep her right off the ship and into the stars. She’s begging, weeping — warbling out nonsensical apologies and promises, eyelashes and heartbeat and pussy all fluttering frantically.

“How d’you get even tighter?” she thinks she hears him groan from behind her. “How tight can I make you?”

“Please, I’m sorry,” she weeps, and she hears him laugh, though she’s too tense and panicked to recognize the breathlessness and incredulity of the sound.

“Maybe I won’t let you come at all tonight,” he taunts, his fingers scrubbing harder at her clit. Her hips roll against her will, thighs straining, and if he hadn’t had one arm anchored around her waist and the other looped around one thigh to play with the bundle of nerves there, she might have propelled herself right out of his grasp. But he hangs onto her, hauling her back to meet a particularly punishing stroke, and she squeals again. “S’too good, having you all pitiful and needy and helpless like this, begging so hard to come. Maybe I’ll just keep playing with you — keep you forever, my wet little wife—“

She can’t hold on anymore. Her sweat-slicked body snaps into an arch, sore sensitive nipples dragging against the sheets — pussy clenching and squeezing as she grinds herself back into him. White-gold stars and endless blue sparks flare in her eyes as her body snaps and clutches. She wails — a split-second of panic before his voice runs soft fingers up her back.

“Okay, kitten; there’s my fucked-out little doll, my good fuckin’ girl. You can come your pretty brains out now, sweetheart.”

Something about the words has another orgasm rattling along her body before the first one has even eased from its peak. She screams, stretching her arms out into the sheets while she knots her fists in them, keening into the mattress as she grinds her hips back against him with so much anguished, agonized, mindless need that her vision goes white.

“F-fuck,” she hears Rocket utter from behind her, and his claws catch her hips as she begins to melt bonelessly against the beds. “Holy shit, sweetheart—“

His hips piston against her and she hums out a fragile, breathless little note of adoration, whimpering when her belly cramps gently and another series of desperate flutters ripple down her body and along her pussy. Rocket must feel it too because he groans, and the rhythmic slap of his fur against her ass quickens and becomes erratic — soaked, she realizes vaguely; she’s drenched him.

His arms wrap around her fiercely when he comes, circling her waist and hugging her hips and ass and thighs against himself. She’s vaguely aware of the rolled down folds of his jumpsuit divoting the backs of her thighs, and the sharp edges of buckles biting into her vulnerable flesh, and the crumple of delicate lace between them. Then his body sags against her, the heavy mass of his chest — with all the weight of his metal and implants — pressing her down into the firmness of the mattress. She sinks beneath him gratefully: safe and grounded and warm under the pressure of his body-heat and fur. The shape of his baculum bone presses into her as she melts beneath him and she whimpers as another ripple of shock runs the length of her body, concentrated deep in her pussy. He groans, and twitches inside her. Pearl can feel the rhythmic thud of his heart against the small of her back and she murmurs out a misty, grateful little moan. The stars spin and swim around her. She shivers feverishly, lost somewhere between overheated and chilled. Strangely, it doesn’t bother her, and she’s too star-dazed to notice that he must be naked from the hips up — not until she weakly tries to wriggle and roll herself to face him. His clawed fingers abruptly bite into her soft waist, holding her motionless beneath the crush of his body.

“Don’t move,” he rasps hoarsely. “Just — don’t move, for now.”

The sharpness of his prickling claws — not puncturing skin, but startling her — and the similar sharpness of his voice has her trying to swim her way back to clarity. She attempts to sort through the last few moments, to make sense of the starbursts of sensation. A forlorn little mew shivers from between her lips.

“M’sorry,” she muffles mournfully into the sheets, her voice crimping with misery. Rocket shifts against her and his breath puffs incredulously against the damp, shivering skin of her flank.

“For what, princess?”

“I couldn’t — I didn’t—” Her voice snags on a sad little hiccup.

“Oh, fuck,” he curses, “no. Pearl, no.” He doesn’t let her move: just squeezes a consoling handful of the softness at her waist, then strokes his palm against her soothingly, nuzzling into the small of her back and the tidal wave of damp lilac-blue curls. “It’s frickin’ — it’s just playing. That’s half the fun.”

She blinks wet lashes against the stars. “What do — what do you mean?”

“I meant for you to come, kitten. Was trying to push you too far.” His fingers trace rivers down the curve of her side, over her rounded hip. They stroke reverent lines over the tops of her thighs, and some fuzzy part of her wonders again if he’s caressing her stretchmarks. “S’fun — making you squirm, watching you trying to fight yourself. Seeing how long you can hold out.” He hovers the leather pads of his fingers over her, letting them brush her skin as she continues to shiver. “Supposed to make your orgasm better. More intense or whatever.” His tongue rasps lingeringly along her sweat-slickened skin. “You were good for me, sweetness. Always so frickin’ good.”

She melts beneath him, shaky and relieved. “Really?”

“Mm-hmm,” he mumbles agreeably against her. Now that she’s more alert, more collected, she registers the velvet of his fur on her damp back — crushed and feathersoft against her — and the dampness of his jutting hipbones against the curve of her ass. The firm shape of his cock, still lodged inside her thanks to his baculum bone. The smooth, glassy ridges of vibranium alloy nestled against her skin, warmed between their bodies like bars of gloss-smooth silver left shining in the sun.

“Next time, I’m not gonna tell you can come, and when you do anyway, I’m not gonna stop.” His voice tilts dreamily, like he’s imagining it — imagining her, desperate and sprawled and begging mindlessly while he teases her. “I’ll punish you for it. Make you come for hours. Just wring orgasm after orgasm outta your cute little cunt till you’re stupid and babbling and crying. My brainless little kitten, begging just for my cock.”

She shudders underneath and around him, wiggling at the renewed ache between her thighs, and he groans, twitching inside her. Her fingers skim down her side: searching for him, grazing the fur of his forearm. He palms and kneads her hip, and knots his other fist in her hair, tugging gently.

“You like that, sweetheart?” His voice is sleepy and musing, and almost whimsical — unlike anything she’s heard from him before. He rolls his hips into her gently, the shallow depth of his dick massaging the first few inches of her pussy sweetly. She whimpers. When he speaks again, he sounds almost as starry-eyed as she feels. “You like the idea of me making you sob and whine for it, and then forcing you to come till you pass out on my cock?” His chest rumbles against her, pleased and drowsy. “Maybe that’ll be when I finally stuff your mouth with your soaked panties — make sure you can’t scream too loud.” He clicks his tongue softly against his teeth. “Don’t you think I’ve forgotten.”

She sifts her fingers lovingly against the fur of his forearm again, curling her grip into the velvet pile when his other hand slips from her hair, squeezing between the mattress and her plush belly, then lower. His deft fingers make their way between her thighs and slide into the skewed lace of her Sovereign panties. He pets gently over her folds and her soft, slick clit. The bright sting of overstimulation jolts up along her nerves, but his touch is so light and careful that she’s melting against his hand before she’s even registered the sharp electric pain of it. And still, he continues to quietly stroke his dick just slightly in and out of her exhausted, fluttering cunt.

“That’s right,” he whispers, feeding her his fantasies in a half-dreaming tone, sharing them with her until she’s sure they’re her own fantasies, too. “You’ll be my sweet little cock-hungry housewife. Just a silly slut who wants to bounce on my dick till she can’t anymore. I’d keep you so happy, sweetheart. Make you stay curled up in my lap so you can keep my dick warm, cuddled up tight in that greedy pussy.” His breath shivers as his fingers softly drift over her bundle of aching nerves, sending a happy buzz to float through her veins. “Or that sweet, needy little mouth.”

Her thoughts, already pleasantly buttery and molten, snag on the word mouth. She remembers, with a shuddering sigh, the way he’d licked her on Sovereign.

“I want that,” she breathes shakily, the words blurred and slurred at the edges. “I want to kiss you like that,” she repeats, in case he didn’t hear her. “Like you did for me.”

He squeezes her hip again, his other hand continuing its tender strokes to her puffy, stinging clit. He nuzzles into her back and hair again.

“Yeah, kitten? You want my cock in your mouth, instead of your panties?” The words are almost a groan. “Fuck, sweetness, you’d look so pretty like that. Big gray eyes, with your lips wrapped around my dick, trying so hard to make me feel good. Your little clit all swollen and lonely and begging for friction while you suck my cock.”

She tries to hold onto his words, to log them away so she can mentally rehearse later — but it’s difficult with the way his quiet fingers and thrusts are slowly building her again toward another crest. She wouldn’t have thought it was possible.

“Yes,” she manages to gasp out hazily, imagining the shape of him in her mouth. What would he taste like? Under the marzipan-scent of dying explosives, he smells smoky and woodsy — would he taste that way, too? She’d never thought of using her mouth like that — not before he had — but now the idea of trying to please him like that, of learning the flavor of him and holding it on her tongue, puts little salt-sugar shivers all over her skin. She wiggles underneath him, trying to rock back on him, to let him fill her up more. Her words come out in damp, eager little whimpers, nibbled and chewed at the edges, shuffled into the mussed folds and creases of the blankets still twisted in her limp fingers. “Rocket, yes, I want it, I want it. Please?”

“Oh, princess, I’ll give it to you,” he promises, his tone dark and hoarse and almost threatening in its hushed, shadowy softness. Her skin tingles where his warm breath fans over her flank. “I’ll stuff all your pretty holes if you let me, s’long as you remember these sweet fuckin’ manners of yours—“

She can feel herself rising on the tide of his words and his touch, as if she’s in the basket of a hot-air balloon as it slowly inflates and bumps against the sky. The soft gold sheen of static and the low hum of fire and warmth expands along all her limbs, then condenses in a flare, deep in her belly, radiating outward. She feels her body bow and her toes point, ankles arching against the bed.

“Thank you, Rocket,” she gasps softly as the waves overtake her. They’re deceptively slow and quiet, but so deep — so immense and overwhelming — that she knows she’s being swept away. “Oh—oh. Thank you, Rocket—“

She’s not sure if he comes again. Her mind and body are too blissed-out, dissolved amongst the stars. Love you, she thinks reverently — but even exhausted and falling apart like a full-blown flower in late autumn, she knows not to speak the words. Love you. She’s vaguely aware of him shuddering against her and then growing still. She melts in and out of consciousness for longer than she can keep track of.

“Rocket?” she whispers at some point, when she opens bleary eyes and realizes the plasma orbs have dimmed of their own accord, no longer sensing movement in the room. Rocket’s still petting her flank, though, and he squeezes her again gently. When pearl speaks, her voice is lullaby-thin. “Can I roll over?”

He snorts softly against her skin. “Only if you—” His words falter, and he falls suddenly, broodingly quiet.

“Only if I what?” she wonders gently into the spaces between shadows and stars. Love you, she thinks again, slow and hazy.

He squeezes the fat at her hip again, then strokes her once more — long and lingering, like she really is a little cat. She can feel him swallow. “Just — stay like this just a little longer.”

There’s something vulnerable in his voice — something parched and broken. It’s that thread of fragility that has her settling back into the mattress without any resistance, sprawled safely beneath him while his cheek rests against the small of her back and he pets her till her lashes slowly feather closed, blotting out the span of stars all around them. Contentment weighs down her muscles, and she sinks into velvet and shadow.

Love ain’t got anything to do with this little arrangement.

The words still resonate along her bones, disorienting and achy. But for right now, they don’t bother her. For right now, she doesn’t care.

And when pearl drifts off with Rocket’s weight still pinning her gently to the bed and the sheets and covers tangled underneath them, she isn’t cold at all.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

thanks for waiting around, friends. i know it's been a slow month for those of you who are still following & reading and i appreciate it SO so so much. thank you to folks who have kept up with the commenting, too. even the smallest little heart emoji honestly is like fuel, especially on a heinously-long journey like this one. the next few chapters will be pretty light on the smut but we do have kinktober to make up for it! you can find me on tumblr if you're looking for posting schedules and previews.

this is also the last call to name that f'saki, who will make an appearance circa chapter twenty-six of this fic.

coming soon: chapter twenty-three. xeno.
summary: the crew gets used to the layout of the dreadnought, and the high evolutionary’s flawless pearl chats with the daughter of thanos.
warnings: pearl’s still dealing with the triggering environment of the dreadnought. mentions of torture.
estimated date: thursday, october 3.

other exciting things:
♡ Tuesday 9/24: new chapter of florescence ❀ out in time for my birthday lol. very smutty.
♡ Friday 9/27: part three of the raccoon, the witch, & the roadtrip. friendship fic.
♡ Thursday, 10/3. cicatrix .⋆☁︎ :꧂ chapter twenty-three. xeno.
♡ Tuesday, 10/8. kinktober 2024. book one. part one.

･:꧂posting schedules, chapter-previews, & more on tumblr♡
･:꧂masterlist & moodboard♡
･:꧂chapter one. nemotia of cicatrix scene by @frostedwitch
･:꧂portrait of pearl♡
･:꧂my fave rocket & pearl scene from chapter thirteen. ♡♡ (scroll down for the whole piece)
･:꧂scrabbly lil pearl x rocket doodle!

Chapter 23: xeno.

Summary:

the high evolutionary’s flawless pearl chats with the daughter of thanos.

Notes:

warnings: pearl’s still dealing with the triggering environment of the dreadnought. mentions of torture.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

xeno. the smallest measurable unit of human connection, typically exchanged between passing strangers—a warm smile, a sympathetic nod, a shared laugh about some odd coincidence—moments that are fleeting and random but still contain powerful emotional nutrients that can alleviate the symptoms of feeling alone. Ancient Greek ξένος (xénos), alien, stranger. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

When pearl wakes, Rocket is gone.

At some point, he must have shuffled her under the covers. She’s not entirely sure how, but he’s proven himself more than capable of moving her body according to his whims. She’s cocooned in the softness of the sheets and the bitter creases of damask, with remnants of last night’s activities still syrupy between her thighs.

Love ain’t got anything to do with this little arrangement.

She doesn’t care, she decides. Last night had been special. The so-called punishment had been… fun, she realizes — once she’d gotten over the cold, shivery flare of misery at her perceived failure, and Rocket had cocooned her instead in the warmth of his reassurance.

His approval.

She winces into the pillows and reminds herself not to lose herself in the desire for the buzzing gold warmth that comes with his validation.

Still, last night had been special. Thinking about the punishment now makes her still-sticky thighs squeeze together and her pussy quiver hopefully, sure. But what had happened afterward — lazy and languid, a shared fantasy passed back and forth between soft fricatives and crushed-velvet exhalations, a filthy-sweet daydream licked reverently against her spine — that had felt like a fire she could warm her palms over for the rest of her life. Beyond the memory of words that still make her abdomen cramp longingly, there’d been something reverent in his tone — in the slow stroke of his shallow, unhurried thrusts. In the way he’d whispered his palms along her flanks, like she’d been a shape made of silk and shadows — easily torn apart, worth cradling carefully.

It might not be love — not for him — but she’ll accept it into her cupped palms and shelter it, grateful and protective.

She stays in bed, tracking out the sparkling spikes of the stars, trying to keep the enormous mattress warm with memories and the ghost of his body-heat. Eventually — despite her best efforts — it fades. The satiny sheets grow cool against her fingers and toes, and soon every shift of her body brings the brush of icy sleekness against her skin.

She wriggles out of bed before the shivers can set in, and surveys the rumples of damask and satin. She supposes she should have asked Rocket if he’d mind her changing out the blankets. He’d looked unimpressed by the Sovereign quilts, but finery is important to him, she thinks — not because he particularly cares for it on its own, but because of what it means to have it in his hands. Herbert had needed the best of the best because he’d hated everything else, while Rocket… well, she suspects in some cases Rocket’s more comfortable with the lesser, but something about owning luxuries makes him feel like he’s stealing something back from a universe that’s taken too much, or from all the people who’d told him he didn’t deserve it.

He won’t want the prickly damask quilts, but he won’t want them taken from him, either. So she’ll bring up the old blankets from the runabout today and leave them at the foot of the bed, and let him make the decision about what stays and what goes in this sprawling, luxurious room.

For now, she washes herself up carefully, grimacing at the chill. After less than a rotation, the Gold Captain still feels impersonal and haunted, and pearl decides to wear the Knowheremen t-shirt as if it were a shield. The worn, stretched fabric cradles together the bruised muscle of her heart, jewel-red and battered. She hugs it against her breasts, pressing the collar up to her nose — breathing in the buttery marzipan-and-smoke smell of Rocket — then dives into her gray cardigan. Wooliness winds around her body, staving off the frost that’s already creeping up her calves under the petal-pink panels of her skirt.

The journey to the cockpit is almost an odyssey in its own right, thanks to the size of the Dreadnought. The three of her companions are already there when she enters, and she can tell Rocket is aware of her presence before she even sees him. His ears are already swiveled toward her as soon as she passes through the hatch, and he shoots her a pained, long-suffering look when she comes into view. Groot and Drax are wading through a very loud, long-winded, and ultimately nonsensical conversation. The Kylosian responds to Groot every time the latter speaks, but the comments never make sense together. It’s perpetual, ongoing chaos, and she can immediately tell that it’s also why Rocket is gritting his teeth and flattening his ears while he steers the Dreadnought through a jump-point.

“Should be about two-and-a-half, maybe three cycles before we get to Knowhere,” he mutters at her. “That includes the time we gotta be grounded, so I can take care of some maintenance-stuff. While we’re starside, I’ll be pushing the jump-points, f’course. ‘Cause three cycles is about as long as I can handle this shit.” He jabs his thumb at the two larger lifeforms, both of whom pause in their chaotic conversation. Pearl drops her hand, but her smile lingers, and she can tell he sees it when he rolls his eyes at her.

“Have you eaten yet?” she asks.

“I made yaro-root pastries with Kylosian spiced-gravy,” Drax volunteers proudly. “There are two left in a heat-retention plate in the galley for you.”

“I am Groot,” Groot agrees, and mimes dipping something in his mug of coffee. Pearl glances over and winces. Somehow — despite the fancy coffee grinders in the galley — the coffee looks just as thick and sticky as ever. Rocket catches her eye and grimaces.

“The food was decent, and I ain’t sick or dead yet,” he admits grudgingly. “It ain’t synth, though. Sorry.” He keeps his eyes on her, one brow raising, then flicks his glance casually from her toes to her lashes and back again — making sure she’s still in one piece after the previous sleep cycle, she suspects.

Or, she revises as he grins and tests the tip of one canine with his tongue, gearing up for the next.

Her lips twitch in spite of herself. Priorities, she tells herself sternly. Be normal. “That’s okay,” she says aloud, moving toward the seat next to Rocket. “I might prefer synth, but I’d never turn down a homemade Kylosian breakfast.” She smiles warmly at Drax. “Did the Luphomoid get to eat?”

She pauses when all three fall silent.

“I am Groot,” Groot volunteers at last, sheepishly. Pearl slants a tender smile at her friend.

“Will you go with me to feed her now?”

“No,” Rocket interrupts. “I’ll go with you later. At lunch.”

“I am Groot,” Groot admonishes, and Rocket’s ears flatten. She can see him parsing through the images and emotions sent through to him in Groot’s rumbling tongue.

“I do trust you,” he mutters testily. “Just don’t trust the murderous cyborg locked in the jackroom.”

“She needs to eat more than once a day,” pearl says gently.

Rocket snorts. “I went circs without eating more’n once a day,” he points out dryly, and her heart squeezes in her chest. “Sometimes went more than a cycle without any food at all.”

She can feel the corners of her mouth soften and tug downward. “That’s not how it should have been.”

Rocket only rolls his eyes and turns back to the starshield, muttering something about soft-hearted idiots.

“I support the limited distribution of rations,” Drax agrees with Rocket, which only succeeds in making her survivor roll his eyes in the other direction. The Kylosian’s brow darkens. “You have already provided the Daughter of Thanos with more luxuries than most prisoners enjoy.”

Pearl turns to Rocket, waiting till he takes his eyes off the crystalline-armor starshield and looks at her again.

“Please, Rocket,” she says softly. “She needs to eat. Or at least,” she hesitates, “I need to make sure she has the opportunity.”

His eyes hold hers — red as magma and equally warm, melting against her as he scrutinizes her. Then he sighs dramatically. “Nothing sharp,” he tells her. “Flex-dishware and utensils only.” He scowls. “Can’t even have you take a weapon ‘cause she’d probably get it outta your hands in two seconds flat.”

Pearl offers a tentative smile. “I don’t need a weapon when I have Groot.”

Rocket looks at Groot pointedly, right as the Taluhnisan chomps on a mouthful of leaves growing off his own arm. Her survivor’s brow creases painfully and he casts her a withering glare.

“Take the Destroyer, too,” he decides, his voice grim as he turns cabin to the starshield and glides them smoothly through another jump.

“Me?” Drax says, sounding startled and pleased.

Pearl winces. She likes the Kylosian, but his plans for the Luphomoid make her nervous. “I thought you didn’t trust him.”

“I don’t,” Rocket says flatly, and Drax lets out a wounded gasp.

“But we are friends—“

“But I do believe he’ll kill her if she acts up.”

Drax pauses in his protests, then squares his shoulders proudly. “That is true.”

“It’ll be hard to have a real conversation with her if she’s feeling threatened.” She tries to sound coaxing.

Rocket only snorts. “Making sure she don’t feel threatened is not a frickin’ priority for me,” he says drily.

“I will be so still and silent that she will not even see me,” Drax promises.

Pearl feels her head tilt and a crease curl between her brows.

The Kylosian stills. “Look,” he murmurs. “I have already disappeared.”

“Fuck me,” Rocket mutters flatly, squeezing the space between his eyes.

“See?!” Drax belts out. His grin is wide and triumphant, both fists seizing the sky in victory. “You are both so prudish that my best friend Rocket would never have suggested engaging in intercourse if he had known I was still present!”

“I hate everything,” Rocket mumbles, and for a second, pearl feels a curl of warmth on her lips — a tentative smile, quickly quieted.

“I suppose that’s true,” she tells Drax agreeably, and reaches out to gently squeeze the Kylosian’s forearm. Rocket shakes his head, looking exhausted.

“I am Groot,” Groot adds.

She turns her eyes back to Rocket. “While Drax is clearly an excellent warrior, protector, and… capable of great subtlety,” she adds, with a flick of her eyes toward the Kylosian, “I don’t think he’ll be needed for this.” She chews on her lip and tugs at the tangle of her curls. “I just want to talk with her.”

“Kitten, you’d be better off spending your time figuring out if you’re gonna sell her for her bounty on Knowhere, collect it on Xandar, or find some nice rehabilitation program somewhere that would actually be willing to take her.” He slants his eyes up at her. “Take Groot and the Destroyer, or wait for me. Those are your choices.”

She can feel her chin beginning to jut mutinously — brattily — and he raises an eyebrow at her. She loosens her jaw and sighs.

He’s just worried, she tells herself. Which is nice, all things considered. He may not love her — may not see her as even remotely lovable, based on the vehemence of his protests — but he does care.

I could keep you warm on Fron.

Yes, she tells herself, crushing down the whisper of uncertainty. He clearly does care. She chews her lip, feeling her reluctance soften.

“Okay,” she agrees, and tries to offer him a slanted, grateful smile before she turns to head to the cold and empty galley.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Drax won’t let her open the jackroom for herself. He insists on being her protector, and pearl can’t tell if it’s because he really thinks she needs it or because he hates the Luphomoid.

Or because he wants to impress Rocket.

Still, she shoots Groot a disgruntled look when the Kylosian shuffles her back before tapping the sensor, and Groot shrugs his own bafflement back at her. The door sweeps open and there’s a moment of silence, and then the Luphomoid’s voice rings out: hoarse, and emotionless, and crunching at the edges.

“Are you here to kill me?”

Pearl can’t see around Drax’s broad shoulders, and she assumes the Luphomoid has a similarly-limited range of perspective and has directed the question to him.

So she skirts him quickly, food in hand.

Drax is already reaching for her, but pearl is quick prepared. She side-steps, then takes in the rows upon rows of bunked single mattresses, the portside wall of toilet-stalls and the starboard wall of showers. She sees them all, catalogues them, and then zeroes in.

On her captive.

Something squeezes again, dangerous in her chest.

The room is dim — Groot must have set the plasma orbs to half-light the night before — and the Luphomoid woman sits on the floor, leaning back against the only bed with sheets and blankets.

It’s been made with military precision.

“Nobody’s here to kill you,” pearl replies gently, letting a self-deprecating half-smile curve the corner of her mouth. “I’m just here to bring you breakfast.”

The Luphomoid’s black gaze flicks to her — almost dismissive — then to Groot as he ducks through the doorway as well. Her eyes are dark galaxies of suspicion, shuttered and wary. Narrowed, alert, watchful.

How exhausting, pearl thinks, and wonders if her own eyes have looked like that. Her shoulders round out, softening as she feels herself unfold in that familiar ache. The Luphomoid is trapped — far beyond the meager Sovereign manacles — and pearl knows the feeling all too well. She steps forward, and Drax lifts a guarding hand.

“Stay out of range,” he reminds her, and she slants a tilted eyebrow at him. He huffs and crosses his arms, and steps back. “Fine,” he grumbles, and sinks into the stillness that she assumes is supposed to make him disappear.

“Do you have a name?” pearl asks the Luphomoid, crouching on the ground across from her. The glossy fabric of her pink skirt pools around her. “Is there something you’d like me to call you?”

“Do you have a name?” the cyborg rasps. The rawness of her voice makes pearl’s belly twist in recognition — and a futile sort of hollowness. She sets down the flex-bowl and utensils just within the Luphomoid’s reach, and Groot passes her a bag of water, which she lays down as well.

The Luphomoid glares at the food mistrustfully. The dark eyes may not be the ones she’d been born with, but they’re expressive nonetheless. Pearl chews her lip and studies the captive.

“I, uhm — I don’t, really,” she offers quietly across the dimly-lit space between them. “Just — nicknames, more or less.”

“Of course,” the Luphomoid sneers. “The kitten.”

The woman says it like it’s an insult, but the word only calls a further curve into the corner of pearl’s lip. “Doll might be better,” she confides, remembering Rocket’s response to Drax calling her kitten the rotation before. “Or — whatever you want, at this point. I haven’t settled on something new.”

“Rocket said she’s a princess,” Drax shares.

The Luphomoid’s eyes widen and flick to pearl, suddenly calculating, and pearl huffs a soft laugh, palms out.

“No,” she utters, a quiet, self-conscious heat rising in her cheeks. “That’s not — he doesn’t mean that.”

“Then what does he mean?” Drax asks, baffled.

“It’s an—” A what? An endearment? A — what had the Kylosian called it? A love-name? She hesitates. “It’s not like that. He’s being sarcastic.” Her eyes shift back to the Luphomoid and hold. “We don’t have to be identified by what others have chosen to call us.”

“If you’re royalty fleeing your throne, it makes sense that you might hide your name,” Drax mutters thoughtfully under his breath.

“I am Groot,” Groot agrees, tilting his head at her curiously. “I am Groot.”

She frowns at that. “I’m not— It’s not like that,” she says weakly. “I just—”

The cyborg’s lip twitches in something close to a grimace. “I don’t mind being referred to as the Daughter of Thanos,” she says coldly. Something in her jaw clenches. “Better for everyone if we all remember it. Princess.”

Pearl leans back. “I’m not a princess,” she utters, and there’s a thread of sharpness to her voice. “I’m not anyone.”

“Everyone is someone,” Drax points out. “Even this Black Order murderess is someone.”

“I am Groot,” Groot adds. “I am Groot.”

Pearl tries to ignore them both, twisting her hands in her lap. The Luphomoid still hasn’t reached for the food. The hinge of her cybernetic jaw is stiff and jutting; her lip is curled and the eye that still has skin around it looks tight and tensed. She’s taking everything in, prosthetic eyes galaxy-dark and wide.

They’re prey-eyes in a predator’s face, pearl thinks. A trickle of cold pools in the base of her spine. She swallows, and looks to the food again, her stomach and fingers knotting.

The Daughter of Thanos is a fawn that has had to become a falcon.

“Would you be more comfortable eating if I left?” pearl asks the cyborg. Her words wobble and she tries to lace them together more tightly. “Groot can stay with you, like yesterday.”

The Luphomoid snorts and leans back against the bed. “Your presence means nothing to me, princess.”

A sigh huffs its way out of pearl’s lungs before she can stop it. Yes, the title is disdainful and dripping with sarcasm when it leaves the Luphomoid’s lips, but it’s clear now that that cyborg thinks there’s some truth to the title. And while princess is far enough from the truth to be laughable, it’s also too close for comfort.

In many circles, living as the High Evolutionary’s bride may as well have been a royal role.

“Then eat,” she urges gently. She lets her own gaze flutter from the food back up to the cyborg’s dark, unblinking eyes. What do the implants see? pearl wonders. Does the Luphomoid have night-vision now? Heat-vision? Do her eyes serve as scanners? Holocams? Can she see color? Are they simply a sharper version of what she would have been given biologically by her Luphomoid heritage? Certainly, her black eyes are no less expressive that what she would have come by naturally. And while the Luphomoid’s face may be relatively stoic — likely a result of the mass of prosthetics and her training, the latter of which pearl can relate to — her eyes are clear.

Wary. Scrutinizing. Searching for a threat.

Pearl shivers again. “Is there something that would make you more comfortable?” she asks quietly. “Another blanket, maybe? It seems cold in here.”

Cautiously, holding pearl’s gaze with her own, the Luphomoid’s fingers creep across the floor. Pearl doesn’t acknowledge the outstretched hand in her periphery.

“I can regulate my body temperature and metabolism as needed,” the Luphomoid says tersely. “I need nothing. Especially not from the likes of you.”

Pearl tilts her head, and wonders what the likes of her entails. Terrans? Fully-biological lifeforms, maybe? Someone too soft to be seen as a threat? A princess? Pearl snorts softly, and the Luphomoid glowers — but at least the other woman snatches up the bowl and the spoon, and at least she takes a bite.

The cyborg sucks in a startled breath at the taste, then cautiously takes another bite.

“It’s good, isn’t it?” pearl says softly, leaning forward. “It’s the inside of a Kylosian breakfast-pastry.”

Drax grumbles from behind. “I was willing to share parts of the meal I made since the Terran princess requested it, Daughter of Thanos,” he scowls irritably. “But I draw the line at baking for you.”

The Luphomoid blinks and pearl holds her eyes, offering the faintest curve of a half-smile. “A person has to stand by their convictions,” she says mildly, looking for a glint of humor in the cyborg’s wide, dark gaze. Of course, none comes, and pearl admits to herself that it had been a foolish hope.

“Do you like coffee?” she asks instead, changing the subject. She purses one corner of her mouth. “Rocket’s looks awful—”

“I am Groot,” Groot protests with a gasp.

“—and I never learned how to make it from beans, but I could bring you some, if you like. We have juice and—” She hesitates. Would Rocket be okay with her offering it? “And morningtea, if you like.” Her mouth twists to one side. “I can see if the medbay has moonmint in stock—“

The Luphomoid flinches — then face shutters, stoic once more. Even so, her dark eyes stay sealed on pearl as she eats.

“There are other drinks, as well,” Drax speaks up from behind her. “Asgardian and Sovereign liquors and wines in the officers’ commons, and barrels of ale in one of the cargo holds with other food stores.” He pauses, and even though pearl isn’t looking at him, she can hear the hiccup of his sudden backtracking. “Not that you deserve any of it, Daughter of Thanos.”

The Luphomoid finally breaks from her temporary stoicism, rolling her eyes. “Water is fine,” she rasps, and tilts her head. “Didn’t you plan to kill me, anyway?” she demands of Drax. Pearl twists to slants her own eyes sideways up at him.

“I still do,” Drax says fervently — then shrugs. “I will use this time on the Dreadnought to convince Rocket and the Terran princess that I deserve the right to claim your life in retribution for the murders of my wife and my daughter. Ronan should suffer as I have done.”

The Luphomoid stares at him, then barks a strange, hoarse sound. “Your plan for revenge on Ronan is to kill me?”

Drax inclines his chin. “A family-member for a family-member.”

The Luphomoid’s sneer is ugly. “Ronan doesn’t see me as family, you idiot. Ronan doesn’t see anyone as family.”

Pearl can see Drax’s stumble, the sudden confusion in his dark eyes. “When you battle with someone at your side, you’re family.” The cyborg scoffs and turns back to her food, and Drax’s brow clears. “I suppose… Ronan is only a puppet after all. The true person I must avenge Ovette and Kamariah against is Thanos.” His eyes narrow. “And you are a Daughter of Thanos.”

The Luphomoid rolls her eyes again. “A least-favorite daughter for an only-daughter?” she rasps. Cynicism crackles on the gravelled edge of her voice. “Seems like a bad trade.”

Again, Drax falters, and the cyborg takes the last bite of the yaro-root filling, mopping up what remains of Kylosian-spiced gravy. Then she shoves the flex-bowl back across the floor toward pearl and leans upward, peering at the Kylosian.

“Get me out of these chains and off this ship,” she hisses through her teeth, “and I’ll take you to Thanos’ most-favorite daughter.”

Drax’s jaw drops.

“Enough,” pearl says softly, collecting the bowl in her hands. She looks up at Groot. “Take him out. He can’t be in here anymore.”

“I am Groot,” Groot protests, his eyes flicking between pearl and the captive.

“I’m supposed to guard you,” Drax says stubbornly, his eyes flittering to pearl. She smiles wanly.

“You need to tell Rocket what she said to you,” pearl tells him. “If you don’t, Groot and I will, and he’ll think you’re not trustworthy — that you’re tempted to plot with her and mutiny against him.” Her eyes weigh him heavily. “And you are trustworthy, aren’t you? Because we’re supposed to be friends now.”

That strange, sharp barking sound snaps out of the Luphomoid again, cracked and split. A laugh, pearl suspects, and it pierces something behind her sternum.

“Ye-es,” the Kylosian falters, hesitating. His dark eyes scramble from side to side, gaze twisting up to the ceiling — like he’s suddenly realized his oath of friendship is a trap, with no way out.

“Go,” pearl says gently. “You can leave the door open. I’ll be out shortly.”

Groot hesitates, then reaches out to touch Drax’s arm. “I am Groot,” he urges the Kylosian.

When they’ve disappeared just beyond the doorframe — still within hearing distance, pearl assumes, at least for Groot — she turns back to her captive and looks her up and down.

“Does anything help the pain?” she asks quietly.

The Luphomoid stares at her. Something in the fawn-dark eyes flickers. The silence heaves suddenly between them, sticky and nauseating and cold. Pearl tries to warm her words in her hands before she lets them go, floating them across the air to the Luphomoid like paper lanterns lit with candles.

“I know you must hurt,” she says quietly, clenching her knuckles into the soft silicone of the bowl. She forces them to relax: first her fingers, then her voice. “Does anything help?”

“I don’t kn—” The cyborg sputters, sounding — not offended. Not exactly.

Horrified, perhaps.

“I don’t need anything.”

The cyborg’s voice creaks on the last two words, and pearl lets herself go soft: eyes, voice, corners of her mouth. Hands, still crushing the bowl. “You don’t need anything?” she repeats gently. “Or you don’t know?”

The Luphomoid swallows, and then her jaw tightens and her eyes narrow. “I don’t need anything.” The words, when they come, are a vindictive, hydraulic hiss — the scrape of a blade on brick. “Pain is a whetstone.”

Pearl looks down at the bowl in her hands, empty of all but the faintest traces of gravy and the flex-spoon. She eases one hand from it, and cards her fingers through the lilac-blue ends of her curls as if — in lieu of comforting this fawn-eyed murderer — she could comfort herself.

But she can’t. The ice at the base of her spine trails cold fingers up her xylophone-ribs.

“I suppose your father said that,” she offers at last, timidly. The Luphomoid doesn’t blink again, but a muscle in her jaw twitches. Pearl chews her lip, then tips the words out like they’ve been gently tumbled from a rocking cradle. “We have painkillers,” she says, voice hushed and tender. “The kind that won’t make you… fuzzy. Or sleepy.” She hesitates again. She doesn’t know exactly where the med-bay is yet, but she knows it’ll be stocked with the basics. “Warm compresses to ease cramps,” she promises. “Cold compresses for inflammation.” She can’t volunteer Rocket’s genius with all things mechanical — no matter how much she’d like to. Still, she shivers: frost in her lungs.

“I told you,” the cyborg snarls. “I need nothing from you.”

The tremor runs the length of Pearl’s spine. Her fingers crimp on the soft-sided bowl and she ducks her head, then rocks back onto her heels and rises.

“Of course you don’t need anything,” she agrees — flushing, feeling silly. Still — she can’t help but tilt her head. “But if you want something — to make yourself more comfortable, or to keep yourself entertained — let me know, and I’ll see what can be done.”

The Luphomoid snorts, and pearl finds herself lingering in the doorway, not wanting to go. She looks back at the cyborg: chained to the post of the bunk, sitting there on the floor. The big, dark eyes — wary and shuttered — and the knowledge that the cyborg is hurting. Pearl swallows and winces, and turns away — then shakes her head at herself, and turns back. The compulsion tugging under her sternum right now is the only thing keeping her warm in this cold community-bunk in the Dreadnought.

“You know,” she says gently, and she knows her voice is everything timid and soft and uncertain in the galaxy — no bite, no bone, nothing but feathers; probably laughable to this woman who has clearly been through so much pain and who has created it for others, too — “You know, I used to study a lot of different things. I was recently remembering what I had read about Kylosian culture, and their traditional star-tempered bloodsteel daggers.” She hesitates, feeling silly. The Luphomoid must think she’s ridiculous too, because the corners of her blue mouth pinch into something contemptuous and annoyed.

“What do Kylosian daggers have to do with me?” The Luphomoid sneers and leans back against the bunk, closing her eyes and resting her manacled hands in her lap — pretending not to care, the way Rocket does when he’s waiting to be hurt.

Pearl shakes her head, and backs up a step, closer to the threshold. “Nothing,” she admits. Her fingers clutch coldly at the silicone bowl. “But if they did, I might tell you what I learned about knives when I was studying them. I might tell you—” She breaks off, and chews at her lips, and tries again. Squares her shoulders. Looks down at the Luphomoid’s stoic face, and the crescents of her dark lashes, closed dismissively over a bottomless black gaze. But the cyborg’s shoulders are tense — and they look like her own, rigid under Herbert’s omnipresent stare.

Always waiting for the next cruelty.

“I might tell you that whetstones only work to a certain point,” pearl says gently. “I might tell you that oversharpening a blade only damages it — knicks it, makes it duller.” The Luphomoid’s eyes flick open and up, wide and dark and hunted in a face that thinks it belongs to a predator. The rest of her features might be implacable — but not those eyes, searching pearl’s, looking for the manipulation, the scheme, the hurt. Pearl manages a tentative offering: a half-smile, rueful and full of recognition.

“I might tell you that,” pearl says softly, “if I believed you were only a knife.”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Pearl spends a few hours with Rocket on the flight deck. He quizzes her on the controls, trying to see if she can match what he’d taught her on the runabout with the splay of rainbow-lit buttons and gauges and dials that parade the panel around them. There are countless more gears and switches on the Gold Captain than there had been on the tiny runabout they’re towing — but she’s able to translate nearly everything she’d already learned onto the new control panel, and it makes something unfurl petal-soft behind her still-chilled ribs. Rocket, for his part, continues to question her on the controls again and again — at random — until he’s satisfied that she can identify any of the elements he’s already taught her, and recall them at a moment’s notice.

“You got an instinct for it,” he admits, and flashes a smirk up at her. “Not as quick at it or as good at it as me, of course — but I was cybernetically engineered to do this.” The smirk turns bitter and biting. “It’s what I was frickin’ made for.”

The words send small, thin needles of cold outward from her sternum and ribs. You’re more than what he made you, she thinks, but she can’t drag up the words. Her ankles and wrist bones are beginning to ache with the creeping ice, and she stiffens her shoulders — wiggles her toes in her boots. Afterward, she decides. After this lesson with Rocket is done, she’ll go back to the captain’s quarters and change out of her skirt. The leggings are warmer. Then she’ll take one of the standard-issue datapads and go down to the storage floor and start familiarizing herself with the inventory.

Hopefully she can find the medbay as she goes, and catalogue everything there too.

She hesitates once she makes it back to the captain’s quarters. It’s easy to get lost staring into the endless stars, spiraling forever. Shivers ripple up and down the ridges of her ribs, shimmering over her skin, pricking goosebumps out on her flesh. She remembers the Luphomoid’s eyes, dark as the expanse of glittering sky, and far more untrusting. Lonely, pearl thinks — though she has a feeling the Luphomoid would deny it. And maybe it’s a silly assumption after all — a wild projection of her own memories and instincts, and the way she’s learned to walk through her life.

Still, she shivers.

She hesitates when she pulls out the leggings, then digs a little deeper into her drawer to find the warmer, fleece-lined ones meant for Fron. She doubles up on her cardigans, too: keeping the gray, and adding the red as well — wrapping herself in the soft crush of wooly warmth, and shuddering as she waits for her shivers to ease up.

She finds the excess rations-storage below the galley, next to the linens and the hold of various toiletries and cleaning supplies. Cursory glances tell her that even if Rocket wants to keep the Gold Captain stocked and set up exactly as it is — which she doubts — the existing supplies can be condensed to take up half their current space. She flicks through the datapad while she explores the floor, searching for the medbay, and tries to imagine how he’ll remake the Dreadnought into the ship of his dreams. It’s already got an almost-horrifying amount of artillery, but she suspects he’ll add to it. The Sovereign ships are fully-stocked with munitions and weaponry for their contracted crews, but Rocket won’t be satisfied with the standard firepower. And he’ll need a space like the runabout’s workbench-bunk, she thinks — but bigger, bigger even than the walk-in closet in their quarters where his things are currently stored. He needs some room where he can sprawl his barrels and grips and springs and firing pins, bullets and mirrors and magazines and microchips, shells and circuitboards and pipes and batteries and plates. Maybe Groot will stay in the first mate’s quarters indefinitely, she muses, and Rocket will turn one of the officer’s floors into a full workshop for himself. Or maybe he’ll have stations on every floor — rooms and common spaces and cargo-holds and storage units, all transformed into a mosaic of mechanical dreams: missiles, mines, and Fuck-You-Disks the size of Asgardian battleshields.

Maybe, once he’s made the Dreadnought his own, all these corridors won’t feel so empty and sterile and cold.

When she eventually stumbles into the medbay, she’s pleased by what she finds: lockers stuffed with medpacks of various sizes, sterile laser-scalpels, treasure-troves of pain relievers in varying strengths. Racks of saline bags and nutrient IVs, drawers full of syringes, sutures, and steri-strips. There should be at least one first-aid kit and two medpacks already stocked on every floor near the fire-suppression devices — in addition to the kit from the runabout, which she’d left in the cockpit. She’s fairly confident that she could restock them all twenty times and still not make a dent in the supplies here.

There are three cots and two surgical tables, an array of supplies that she has to look up on the datapad because she doesn’t recognize them; mesh and slings and braces, plaster and canvas wraps. And in this corner — in this cabinet — a precisely-organized series of shelves stacked with antibiotics, immunoboosters, antivirals, cough syrups, lozenges, sleep aids, fever reducers, and anti-inflammatories. There are all the warm and cold compresses pearl had promised the Luphomoid, complemented by countless rolls of soft Indigarran med-grade gauze and elastic bandages, adhesives and butterfly-bandages and metal clips.

She pockets a handful of the lozenges and makes the appropriate adjustments to the inventory records, then stops in the linen room to pick up the blankets from the runabout as she leaves.

“I am Groot?” Groot asks her later, while she’s bowed over the counter in the galley, making dinner. She looks up and smiles wanly.

“I am,” she says. The words strain in the air. “I think… I think I just got used to never-ever being alone on the runabout, you know?”

Even when she’d been tucked behind the bulwark, Rocket had always been one too-loud breath away, so close she hadn’t dared whisper-scream into her knees. But the Dreadnought is just as empty — and almost as open — as the Homonoia or the Arete. She could sit in the medbay and screamed for real, and probably no-one would have heard her, even with the door open.

I think I hate Rocket’s ship.

The thought unfurls in her mind like a foxglove, and a curl of shame winds up her spine at the same time. Toxic tendrils knit with the ice tangled into her nerves. She feels guilty; she feels like a traitor— Rocket has always wanted this ship; he’d dreamed of it like an impossibility at the edge of the universe when she’d kept him huddled up in blankets under the flight-control panel. He’d schemed and crafted and created and invented to get it.

And she thinks she might hate it.

“I am Groot?” Groot asks, his barkish brow creaking in concern and his big dark eyes following her worriedly.

“I’m sure,” she lies brightly. What would she say, anyway? I’m not okay. The Dreadnought is cold and it’s lifeless and there’s a wounded fawn locked in the jackroom and love hasn’t got anything to do with this arrangement and for some reason, I haven’t been able to get Herbert out of my head since we came on board.

Except for when I was naked with Rocket.

“I am Groot,” the Taluhnisan says disapprovingly. She chews her lip and focuses on slicing the synthetic egg and adding it to the rice-porridge. Idly, she wonders if the standard-issue bread flour stocked in the storage pantry will make a decent pasta-dough. Drax would love Terran-style ravioli, she thinks. “I am Groot.”

“I’m okay,” she repeats, and tries to squeeze up a smile for him. A blue curl tumbles out of her haphazard ponytail and into her eyes; she pouts her lower lip and blows, floating it up off her brow. Groot leans over with his surprisingly delicate fingers and tucks it back for her. “Just… I’m still learning how to be a person, remember?”

“I am Groot,” he grumbles. “I am Groot?”

She hesitates. “I—“

“There you fuckin’ are.”

She blinks and straightens abruptly as Rocket strides into the galley, scowling. “You were looking for me?” she asks, absurdly warmed by the idea.

If anything, his scowl grows darker. He fumes, leaning against the enormous coldbox and crossing his arms over his chest and his legs at the ankle. His tail flicks irritably behind him. “Can’t usually get away from you,” he mutters.

She ducks her head back to the egg and porridge, blinking rapidly. She’s always cried too easily but this is ridiculous. Still, she can’t stop the tears — hemmed in by a need to grasp at his words and decipher whether he’s more annoyed by her presence or her absence. Be normal. She swallows them down.

“I am Groot,” Groot admonishes, and she’s aware of Rocket’s tail abruptly going still in her periphery.

“What’s wrong with her?” he demands of Groot. Then: “What’s wrong with you?”

She blinks up at him with glassy eyes. “Nothing.” I don’t know. “I think — maybe I’m feeling badly about the Luphomoid.”

Rocket swears and rolls his eyes, peeling himself off the edge of the coldbox and strolling toward her. “Knew this was gonna happen,” he grouses. “First it’s not eating the frickin’ vegetables, then it’s saving the abilisks; now it’s the moon-damned murder-cyborg in the cargo hold.”

“I am Groot,” Groot points out.

Rocket slashes a careless claw at him. “Yeah, yeah. The jackroom. Whatever.”

“Drax told you what she said to him?” pearl asks. Rocket won’t forget her weakness for living things, of course — but maybe she can distract him for a little while.

“About taking him to find his vengeance against some other daughter of Thanos or whatever? Yeah.” He shrugs. “S’why I’m coming with you for the frickin’ dinner-delivery instead of him.”

“Oh.” She wrangles up a half-smile for him. “Then you’re not here because you missed me?” It’s meant to sound playful, but even she can hear the wistfulness in her voice.

Rocket’s ember-eyes narrow. “Look, kitten—“

“Dinner smells good,” Drax says cheerfully from the hatch. “Warm and comforting. It reminds me of the meals my father used to make for me when I was ill as a child, and which I made for my Kamariah.”

“Then let’s eat,” pearl offers, “before it gets cold.”

Drax shovels down his food quickly, and even Groot decides to try some, and dinner is over before pearl can even register the passage of time. The Destroyer is already collecting dishes and loading them into the sanitizer while she makes a bowl for the Luphomoid captive and brews a pot of tea.

“What’s that?” Rocket asks, jutting his chin to the soft silicone cup as pearl lets a mesh bag of Aladnan moonmint leaves brew.

“Tea,” she says simply. “For the Luphomoid.”

Drax looks up, aghast, from his place beside the sanitizer. “None for us?”

A half-smile gentles the corner of her mouth. “I’m happy to make you some, Drax. Do you like tea?”

He shakes his head solemnly. “Leaf-water? It is disgusting.”

“You can’t give it to her hot,” her survivor cuts in sharply, and pearl frowns, looking down at the cup cradled in her hands. The warmth seeps through the silicone and into her palms, bringing her chilled fingers back to life.

“Why not?” she asks softly. There’s a wounded note in her voice that she tries to stomp down, but Rocket’s already heard it. His glare is sharp — maybe as sharp as it had been before Cyxlore.

“Don’t pout,” he snaps, and she tries not to let her shoulders buckle. “M’looking out for you. Hot water is a frickin’ weapon, brat.”

The name doesn’t sound playful or affectionate this time. She carefully sets the tea on the counter by the Luphomoid’s bowl, measuring every movement.

“We can wait till it cools a little?” she offers carefully. If she moves too quickly, she thinks she might do something stupid, like burst into tears.

Her survivor rolls his eyes, but doesn’t protest — leaning against the edge of the island in the center of the galley while Drax finishes the dishes and she stirs the tea, willing it to cool more quickly.

“I am Groot,” Groot observes.

The tea takes longer to reach what Rocket considers an acceptable temperature than pearl would have expected — to the point where she decides to reheat the Luphomoid’s food and add a heat-retaining lid. By the time she’s carrying the tray to the jackroom, Rocket looks ready to throttle someone.

“Sorry,” she murmurs to him as they reach the jackroom doors.

His stride falters, and he peers up at her with bright bonfire-eyes. “For what?”

Being a nuisance.

“Taking so long?” she offers nervously. “Taking so much of your time? I know you’d rather be… working on something for the Dreadnought. Or… flying it.”

Something flickers across his face — there and then gone. He snorts. “Got plenty of time for that later tonight,” he mutters. “Prob’ly—“ He hesitates, then narrows his eyes, studying her face. “Prob’ly won’t be up to bed till late,” he says slowly — precisely — while watching her. She blinks, not sure what he’s looking for — only knowing that her stomach is sinking into her abdomen and she should probably hide it.

“Okay,” she says blankly.

“You should go to bed without me.”

She flounders. Her eyes skitter from his to the wall, to the plasma orbs lining the ceiling, to the door of the jackroom and the tray in her hands. She thinks of how expansive the captain’s bed is — how like the beds in the Arete and the Homonoia it is, all cold and quilted in bristling textiles. She thinks of the crystalline walls and the stars beyond them, and the spaciousness of the room, vast and hollow. Rocket’s presence last night — his touch, his smoky whispers — had melted through it all like a plasma ray tunneling through a glacier. His weight had held her down and heated her, kept her warm and tied-together. She’d talked herself into believing that last night had been a special few shared breaths, in spite of the fact that Rocket doesn’t have any feelings for her — not beyond a sort of weird sense of responsibility, just bordering on friendship.

Maybe it was special, she thinks stubbornly. Maybe it was special, and that’s why he’s trying to stay away.

Or maybe she thinks too highly of herself, and he just wants to work on his new ship.

“Okay,” she repeats, dizzy. She feels like she’s swaying on her feet.

Whatever he’d been looking for in her face, he must not have found it. His brow darkens and the corner of his mouth curls derisively. “Well, go on, princess,” he says, and it sounds more like a sneer than anything she’s heard from him in a while. He reaches back even as he nods to the jackroom door. With a clacking sound, his ion blaster is unholstered and extended, resting easily in one warm leather palm. “Can’t keep the prisoner waiting.”

She swallows and rests the tray on her hip while she keys in the code for the door.

“Terran,” the Luphomoid says tonelessly. Her dark eyes flick to Rocket. “Fox.”

Rocket blinks, ion blaster still dangling comfortably from one dark hand. “M’not a fox.”

The cyborg doesn’t respond, staring as pearl lowers herself to the floor just out of reach. She sets the tray on the ground and slides it across the space between them.

“Egg and grain porridge with Aladnan darkpepper,” pearl explains. “Rehydrated fragaria and stonefruit.”

The corner of the Luphomoid’s mouth twists downward. “No yaro root?”

Pearl opens her mouth, but Rocket beats her to it.

“This ain’t a resort-planet or a spa-station, lady,” he snarls. “You get what you get.”

The Luphomoid’s jaw snaps shut and her eyes shutter, and pearl shoots a sharp, warning glance in Rocket’s direction.

His jaw snaps shut too, and he scowls.

“You like yaro root?” pearl says quietly. “I’ll make something with it tomorrow—“

“I know what this is,” the Luphomoid interrupts. Her lip peels back in a snarl. “Do you think I haven’t seen this before? Do you think that it will be a kindness—“ The word drips with mockery, with contempt. “—that will break me?” She scoffs and plucks up the bowl — with practiced carelessness, this time. A studied show of how little she fears her two captors.

That’s what we are, pearl thinks.

Captors.

“My father trained me for this,” the Luphomoid says from behind a spoonful of porridge. Every word is acidic and scraped raw: lemon juice and salt on a skinned knee. “It was one of his favorite methods. I know how it works.”

The jackroom rings with silence.

“How does it work?” pearl asks softly.

Behind her, Rocket snorts. “She thinks we’re playing good-cop, bad-cop,” he scoffs. “Little does she know—“

“Please,” the Luphomoid snaps, her voice hoarse as she swallows another mouthful of porridge. She gestures with the flex-spoon. “That’s an amateur’s version of the plan you seek to enact.” She leans forward and pearl can hear her survivor tensing behind her, the soft clink of metal as he raises the blaster warningly.

“A world of pain followed by a series of kindnesses,” the cyborg confides, as if she’s reciting a page from a holomanual that she thinks pearl has already memorized. “A series of softnesses. Enough to make a person think, for just a moment, that maybe they can still be a person.” She bares her teeth. Her wide dark eyes are narrowed, and baleful, and hateful, and hunted. “And then the unexpected slap. So casual and small that you’d think it wouldn’t matter — not after everything you’ve been through before. But it does.” Her breath seethes through her teeth. “It breaks you.”

The Luphomoid leans back, gaze shuttering, and takes another bite of her porridge. If it weren’t for how heavily the cyborg’s lungs were heaving, pearl might’ve thought she’d imagined the grating intensity of the words.

“Well, it won’t break me,” the Luphomoid says once she’s swallowed her mouthful. “I’ve been trained in this type of torture. I’ve endured it a thousand times.” Her voice is smug and certain when she repeats the words under her breath. “It won’t break me again.”

Pearl’s ribs sink into her lungs like the teeth of a steel jaw-trap. She tries to pull in air — gasping for breath — and fails. Tries again.

“Look,” Rocket drawls to the cyborg, stepping beside pearl, “you got issues. I can appreciate that. I got issues too. Ain’t a mass murderer, but hey. Who in this room ain’t been brainwashed by a sadist with delusions a’ grandeur at some point?”

A strangled, splintered sound claws up Pearl’s throat. A laugh, perhaps.

“But I’m here to tell you this.” He knocks the muzzle of the blaster under the Luphomoid’s chin and the cyborg startles, blinking those big eyes up at pearl’s survivor like she hadn’t expected him to get so close. The barrel presses against the cyborg’s throat.

Prey-eyes, pearl thinks again.

“F’you try to turn anyone on this ship against me,” he purrs, his voice low and grating, “f’you try to stage a little coup or start some sad, pathetical little mutiny with our resident Destroyer, I’ll shoot you through your moon-damned throat and pitch you out the airlock before you’re even done bleeding out.” He smirks. “One look and I can tell that neck of yours ain’t as well-armored as the rest of you. I got all your weaknesses already catalogued—“ He taps the side of his head with one black claw. “—so don’t frickin’ test me.”

Pearl looks down at the tray, at the lukewarm tea and the empty bowl. She twists her fingers in the first layer of the two cardigans she’s still wearing, then digs into her pocket.

“Sorry,” she says to the Luphomoid, her voice soft and crushed-up against the cold floor and the ion blaster and the heavy emptiness of the Dreadnought. She grasps for words in the thin, frigid air. “Sorry the tea isn’t warm. It’s… it’s moonmint.” Pearl looks at Rocket. “Can we leave it?” she asks. “It’s just a flex-cup. She can’t do anything dangerous with a flex-cup.”

Slowly, he lowers the barrel of the blaster. Pearl doesn’t miss the way the Luphomoid’s shoulders ease — just a little.

“Yeah,” he says, and his voice sounds suddenly strained. Distracted. “Yeah, that’s fine. Whatever.”

Pearl picks the cup up off the tray and sets it down, still in the Luphomoid’s reach. She pulls the four wax-wrapped hard-sugar sweets from her pocket, shows them to Rocket, then sets them beside the tea too.

“Lozenges,” she says only. Miserably. “Indigarran honey. Mentholated.”

The Luphomoid’s eyes flare to her, startled.

Then shutter again, wary.

Pearl doesn’t explain further — it would be pointless anyway. She just collects the tray, and rises. “Okay,” she says to Rocket. It’s nowhere near bedtime but she’s so tired, and so cold. The thought of trying to sleep alone in that giant empty bed surrounded by the void of space has something deep inside her curling up and dying, like a cherry blossom that bloomed too early in the spring. She furls tight around herself. “Okay. Let’s go.”

They make it to the door before the Luphomoid drags in a choppy breath. “Wait,” she snarls in the same broken, busted-up rasp.

Pearl stills, and turns.

The cyborg’s face twists: furious, frightened, reluctant.

Yearning, maybe. But she says nothing: mouth opening, then snapping shut again.

Rocket snorts. “Let’s go, kitten,” he mutters, and turns back to the door, tapping Pearl’s hip with the tips of his fingers like he’d herd her out of the jackroom if she’d let him. Pearl hesitates, then turns to follow.

“Nebula,” the Luphomoid hisses, and pearl pauses with a glance back over her shoulder, gray eyes wide and locked on the Luphomoid’s fawnlike prosthetics.

The cyborg grimaces.

“My name is Nebula.”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

first of all. i cannot thank you all enough. the comments on the previous chapter were SO sweet, and i'm so grateful to all of you for sticking around on this very very long ride and letting me know you're still here. i hope that this story continues to pay off. this chapter and the next few are angsty and then pretty plot-heavy, but if you're here for the smut, we do have a bunch of stuff coming out for kinktober. your notes and comments mean so much to me and i am truly so grateful for you and for being part of this community.

secondly: some dear lovely little lightning bugs made us some
CICATRIX ART!!
for my birthday!!! these pieces are everything. please please check them out and follow the creators and give them love.
♡ absolutely adorable little pearl x rocket selfie by starriidreams. so cute i could actually die.
♡ steamy incredible pearl x rocket painting on "water lily" (lotus) fabric by hibatasblog/hibata. absolutely jaw-dropping (and like. really emotionally evocative? or maybe that's just me?)

coming soon: chapter twenty-four. nighthawk.
summary: pearl gets lost. rocket finds her.
warnings: allusions to abuse against animals, mentions of torture and surgery. angst.
estimated date: monday, october fourteenth.

other exciting things:
♡ saturday 10/5. all my kinktober plans get posted to tumblr.
♡ tuesday, october 8. kinktober book one. part one.
♡ thursday, october 10. kinktober book one. part two.
♡ monday, october 14. cicatrix .⋆☁︎ :꧂ chapter twenty-four. nighthawk.

･:꧂posting schedules, chapter-previews, & more on tumblr♡
･:꧂masterlist & moodboard♡
･:꧂chapter one. nemotia of cicatrix scene by @frostedwitch
･:꧂portrait of pearl♡ by me!
･:꧂my fave rocket & pearl scene from chapter thirteen by me! ♡♡ (scroll down for the whole piece)
･:꧂scrabbly lil pearl x rocket doodle by me!
･:꧂ adorable pearl x rocket selfie by starriidreams!
･:꧂ steamy/emotional pearl x rocket painting on "water lily" (lotus) fabric by hibatasblog/hibata♡♡♡

Chapter 24: nighthawk.

Summary:

pearl gets lost. rocket finds her.

Notes:

warnings: abuse against animals, discussion of torture and surgery. angst & trauma. tiny bit of rocket being a degenerate.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

nighthawk. a recurring thought that only seems to strike you late at night—an overdue task, a nagging guilt, a looming future—which you sometimes manage to forget for weeks, only to feel it land on your shoulder once again, quietly building a nest. Nighthawks is a famous painting by Edward Hopper, depicting a lonely corner diner late at night. In logging, a nighthawk is a metal ball that slid up and down a riverboat’s flagpole, to aid pilots in navigation. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Rocket can’t wait to go to bed.

He’s lost time more than once today: reveling in the feel of the Dreadnought’s powerful yoke beneath his palms, taking a break to begin rerouting extraneous controls so he can start patching artillery into part of the main control panel. Meditating on wires and a flower-field of buttons and dials. Grinning everytime they’d slicked through a jump-point without even the slightest wobble of reconstitution.

But none of that compares to the start of the wake-shift: coming into consciousness on a massive, sprawling, captain’s mattress, with pearl all soft in his arms and the forever and beautiful sky stretched out beyond. Nothing between him and the stars; nothing between his body and hers. He’d woken up already petting her — palms coasting her flanks in his sleep as if, even unconscious, his hands had known who they’d belonged to.

Kitten.

He’d eased in and out of sleep in a luxurious, indulgent sort of way he’s not sure he’s ever done before: drifting like a flowerfish in an Aladnan tidepool. Like a lily, he supposes, in a Moraggian canal. He’d buried his nose in the nape of her neck. That strange, instinctive rumbling sound had forced its way up out of his shoulders and throat as he’d squeezed all her pillowy softness in his arms and under his palms, and snuffed his nose against her soft throat.

I want it. I want it.

I want to kiss you like that.

He’d groaned at the memory and weighed one breast in his palm while she’d slept, sliding his thumb back and forth over her soft, stiffening nipple, so sweet he could already feel it against his tongue. His eyes had opened and closed lazily, gaze blurring between the shock of stars on the other side of the glass and the new freckles spangling up her cheeks and shoulders and throat. She’d murmured something sleepy and shifted in his arms, warm as silk, and he’d slid his hand down again, over the delicate scrap of Sovereign lace and the faint stickiness there, finding the satin ripple of stretchmarks over her hips and upper thighs, measuring them with the leathery pads of his fingers. Sweet girl. His palm had curved around, cupping the curve of her belly.

Then he’d felt the scars.

He’d seen them last night, of course — with a twisting sting under his sternum at the sight of the silky pink splotches blossoming up just over the waistband of her flowerlike Sovereign panties. Seen, and forced himself to ignore — for his own sanity, more than anything else. But as soon as his fingertips had found them that morning, it had jolted him awake with a gutting precision. He’d wrenched his eyes open wide, the foreign rumbling sound snapping off in his throat.

He’d still been shirtless, he’d realized.

He’d peeled himself off her with a frantic, scrambling sort of grace, careful not to wake her before he could cover up his own scars. He’d showered, resting his head against the porcelain wall, letting the water trickle down through his fur. There’d been no need to dial the temperature to cold — he’d been fairly sure nothing could kill his hard-on faster than the idea of her seeing his body right now. Remembering what a monster he was — remembering what he’d done.

So, as per frickin’ usual, he’d run. Buried himself in the Dreadnought — in the inner works of the weaponry and the engine and the flight controls. Listened to Drax and Groot ramble, waited with his breath curled into a knot on the back of his tongue while pearl had finally climbed down to him and strolled through the hatch, her pretty body swaying toward him like a Foresterian moonmoth drawn to a lunar glow. His fingers had spasmed on the controls.

Pretty pearl.

And then she’d disappeared. To feed the Luphomoid. To inventory the storage rooms. To change her clothes. She’d appeared briefly in the cockpit once or twice — to test her ability to translate what he’d taught her of the runabout’s control panel, and again to bring up the old blankets from their previous bunk and ask if he’d be willing to let her trade them for the scratchy damask.

Sometime in the second part of the wake-shift he’d started missing her. Well, no, he decides. Not missing her. It had just been — well, he just hadn’t been able to shake the lack of her. The feel of her absence, like a bruise on the air. He’d kept expecting her shadow on his shoulder, soft as velvet, and had been surprised to find it gone.

He’d gotten too used to living half on-top of her, he’d decided: hearing her soft little exhalations only a few strides away, or her increasingly-sensical murmurs with Groot. Her quiet, thoughtful little questions about the runabout or whatever machine he’d been working on in the moment, and the quick snap of her mind: latching onto new thoughts and ideas and knowledge even faster than a plasma-blast. The sizzle of whatever good-smelling thing she’d been cooking on the hot plate, and the timpani of her heart as she’d sat just an armspan away from him in the pilot’s seat, safely within reach.

Close enough to touch. Close enough to breathe in.

It had made him more irritable than he’d like. He’d gone looking for her, seething more with every new place he couldn’t find her. True, he’d left her in bed that morning — but it wasn’t fair that she could so easily wander away herself, unperturbed by the distance between them. It wasn’t fair that it should bother him so much while she’d just… floated out of grasp.

It had seemed like a harbinger of things to come.

One day in the future — probably sooner rather than later, if he keeps taking his damn clothes off in front of her — one day she’ll dance right out of Dreadnought and over some other undeserving bastard’s threshold, moonsilver eyes sparkling and hands clenched between her pretty tits, bouncing on her toes like she does when she’s happy.

And Rocket will be left in her wake, reaching for something he doesn’t have any right to hang onto.

Eventually, he’d found her — making some cozy-warm egg-and-grain dish in the galley. Groot had seemed concerned about her and she had looked… pale. The corners of her mouth had pinched and the soft skin beneath her eyes had seemed shadowed and bruised and sadder by far than they had at the start of the first wake-shift. He’d thought again of how tight and tense she’d looked the night before, nervous before he’d gotten her warm and wet in his lap again. The memory had made his eyes narrow and study her further. After that, it had taken him only a second to clock that she’d changed out of her skirt — a loss or a reprieve, because every time she wears it all he can think about is sliding up underneath it — and another second to realize she’d slipped into the fleecy leggings intended for Fron, and had doubled-up on her cardigans. Odd, considering the climate-control on the Dreadnought is set at the same level as it had been on the runabout — but at least the double-cardigan had covered most of her chest and the panel of skin between her leggings and his t-shirt, hiding her probably-hard nipples from his view.

Then he’d mentally kicked himself and shelved those thoughts: focusing instead on the Luphomoid, and pearl’s sudden obsession with giving her tea, and the candies his sweet little idiot-Terran had slipped out of her cardigan and passed to their captive.

She’d stayed with him on the flightdeck afterward — for a while. Groot had told more of his Taluhnisan folktale, while Drax had inspected his daggers solemnly and with no small amount of grief. It might’ve almost made Rocket feel guilty, except then the Kylosian’s brow had hardened and he’d asked,

“Do you think that this Collector will pay enough for these that I can buy the Luphomoid from you?”

“She’s not for sale,” pearl had said immediately, in the same tone she’d once used to tell them, I want the Luphomoid.

Rocket had felt his teeth grit. He’d already admitted to himself that it was unlikely she’d claim the cyborg’s bounty, but — still.

“You said I could negotiate with you,” Drax had protested. “I no longer want to kill her. She can take me to Thanos’ other daughter—“

“I know I said that,” pearl had admitted. Her eyes had flicked to the crystalline starshield, troubled and teary. “But I don’t think — I don’t think I—“

“That was before you asked for a ride,” Rocket had snapped at the Destroyer, slashing a glance toward pearl. “We can talk about it again once we find out how much you can get for those butter-knives.”

Pearl had shot him a wounded look and Rocket had rolled his eyes. Just wanna get to Knowhere without a frickin’ mutiny, he’d thought at her, but he’d said nothing.

“I am Groot,” Groot had offered.

Eventually, the second wake-shift had eased into the sleeping hours and pearl had started to nod off beside Rocket on the flightdeck. He’d hesitated, watching her through slanted eyes. He could’ve slipped over into the Mercurix system twenty minutes away — sunk the Dreadnought into a float for the night, unlikely to be bothered by anyone in that dead star system. He could’ve docked the ship and tugged pearl up to his captain’s quarters, fucked her in that beautiful giant bed that now belongs to him. Maybe he could’ve made her sit on his cock for an hour or two again till she was whining and whimpering, or—

I want to kiss you like that.

He’d glanced at her again and felt his fur prickle on his skin. When he’d woken that morning — to her sleeping so trustingly in his arms — he’d thought that there had been no barriers between himself and the stars, and no barriers between himself and her.

It had been a stupid thought, of course.

He’d realized it as soon as his fingers had found her scars. The captain’s quarters are walled in by the most expensive, impenetrable armored glass: crystalline-clear between himself and the sky. The idea that he could reach out and touch the heavens had never been anything but an illusion.

And in the end, the barrier’s for the best, after all.

“I will retire for the sleep shift,” Drax had announced at some point, and pearl had muffled out a sleepy good night as the Kylosian had left. Groot had murmured his I am Groot and the hatch door had slid shut and the stars and hours had spiraled past. Rocket had watched as pearl’s eyelashes had fluttered against her cheeks. She’d propped her chin in her hand, then nearly toppled over when sleep had swept in a little too close.

“Go to bed,” Rocket had muttered in her direction. Then, to Groot: “Take her up. Don’t want her breaking her neck on one of those ladders, or getting lost.”

“I am Groot,” Groot had said agreeably.

“I’m not that tired,” she’d protested softly. Rocket had snorted. “I’m not,” she’d repeated, her brow pinching. “I’m not even sure I can go to sleep up there—“

“You’re already halfway to snoring,” he’d scoffed. “Go on.”

The silence had grown so long that he’d dragged his eyes from the starpane. Pearl had been twisting her hands in her cardigan and chewing her lip, and something about it had wrenched at his vagus nerve. He’d opened his mouth, about to tell her never mind, that she could stay — but she’d spoken first.

“Okay,” she’d said quietly, and had risen. His jaw had snapped shut and he’d swallowed, watching her reflection in the glass.

“I’ll be up in a few hours,” he’d said, and the words had felt stilted and awkward in his mouth. He’d been able to see the kitten-smile curve her lips, but it had looked tentative and uncertain.

“Okay,” she’d said again. Her smile had wobbled and he’d opened his mouth again, trying to take it back — not knowing why, and not knowing how. She’d turned, and floated through the hatch.

Out of reach again.

“I am Groot,” Groot had said softly, and Rocket had felt his manufactured heart lurch.

“What’s wrong with her?” he’d demanded again.

Groot had shrugged, and turned to follow her. “I am Groot.”

Then Rocket had been alone.

Just himself and the sky all around, opposite another crystal-clear barrier. He’d tried not to think about the strain that had kept shimmering up through pearl’s voice and her moonsilver eyes — the dark shadows there, the hard candies she’d left for the Luphomoid. The two cardigans, and the extra-warm leggings. The way her face had fallen when he’d called her a brat.

The way the cockpit had felt without her next to him.

A person might think it would be easy to remedy. If a monster was bothered by the absence of his pearl, maybe he should just frickin’ go to her. Leave through the hatch and make his way up a dozen levels through the ladders and stairs, or the cargo elevator.

But going to pearl never feels simple. It feels like admitting a weakness. It feels like getting his hopes too high. It feels like lying to himself. It feels like a gift he doesn’t deserve. It feels like waiting to be wounded.

It feels like staring down into the glowing quad-barrel of someone else’s laser cannon, and not even having the heart to draw his own.

Now he sucks in a shuddering, jagged breath, and drops the Gold Captain into an abandoned mining system. No-one comes through ASR-31776 these days, so they should have a quiet night. Maybe tomorrow they can land on Alon-Gim, which is similarly abandoned but has a breathable atmosphere. He can start stripping the gold off the Dreadnought — make the ship blend in better on Knowhere, and sell off most of the expensive metal plating.

For tonight, though, he has other tasks in mind.

He grabs his multitool out of the canvas roll he’s already stuffed under the console, and spins it in his hand before holstering it neatly in a pocket on his hip. Then he fishes around in the box of odds-and-ends he’d already stowed under the flight controls, till he finds a suitable handful of loose cables and an old datapad with a lock-picking program he’d written circs ago.

Humming a low, half-forgotten melody, he slips from the cockpit. The wake-shift lights have cycled off in the corridors, and the Dreadnought is lit only by the tiny security orbs pinned to the floorboards, and the rainbow-glow of various buttons and knobs that light up new control panels after twenty strides or so. Still, his eyes lick up every soft-subtle glow, and he can pick out damn near everything in the shadows. He may not be familiar with the Dreadnought yet, but it will only be a matter of time, especially if he keeps up these midnight strolls.

Still. The midnight strolls do feel like a little bit of a waste when he could probably be sunk to the hilt in pearl right now, if he’d just followed her up to the captain’s quarters.

Nevertheless, he doesn’t stop till he gets all the way back to the jackroom, where he pauses and listens. The Luphomoid’s heart and breathing remain steady on the other side of the door. If she’s asleep, he’s sure she’ll wake up while he’s working — though he tries to be quiet anyway. Sure enough, he hears her heartrate pick up as soon as the first screw pops out of the plate on the keypad. Still, he doesn’t change his approach: quietly removing the protective cover, rewiring the cables so they can snap into the layer of tech embedded in the wall. A few quick taps on the datapad has him inside the security programming. Previously it hadn’t been locked — a simple tap to the sensor had been enough to open the jackroom. Now, though, there’ll be a code — one that Drax won’t have.

Sure, the big Kylosian doesn’t seem like the treacherous type, but there’s no accounting for stupid. Hell, Rocket wouldn’t put it past the Destroyer to call Ronan directly to the Dreadnought, if he thought it might serve his pursuit for vengeance or whatever.

Better to make sure the Luphomoid has as few opportunities as possible to get inside the moron’s big head.

As if she’d read his thoughts, the cyborg — Nebula, he remembers — speaks up darkly from behind the door.

“What are you doing, Fox?”

Her voice is harsh and rasping, and there’s a certain tightness to it — something he can’t place. He’s surprised by how good her aural implants are — that she can hear him well enough to know it’s him. Or maybe she can smell him. There hadn’t been any obvious signs of olfactory implants and Luphomoids don’t generally have an impressive sense of smell, but who knows what the Mad Titan did to her. She looks nearly as fucked up as the Monster himself, after all.

“What are you doing?” she repeats, and her voice is tighter. Higher. Scared, he realizes.

He considers not answering at all. A few cycles ago, he wouldn’t have bothered — but then, he wouldn’t have been in this situation at all. He looks down at the datapad in his hands and he pictures pearl: two-cardigans-deep, haloed in blue curls and fishing candies out of her pocket for their captive killler. He thinks of the Luphomoid’s words, smug and so damn sure of themselves as they’d spattered on the jackroom floor.

It won’t break me again.

“Just changing the lock on your door,” he grunts. He wishes he could recode the Sovereign manacles on her wrists, too — but he’d have to take ‘em off to do that, and he’s not a frickin’ idiot.

There’s a long moment of silence.

“Is the princess not coming back?”

The princess? He barks out a sharp, startled laugh. “Prob’ly couldn’t keep her away if her life depended on it,” he admits. “She’s in bed now, but she’ll be whining to come bring you breakfast as soon as she wakes up.” He snorts, and taps in the new passphrase, re-enters it, and locks it in. Grapples with an impulse, then shrugs as he untwists the wires. “She doesn’t want to turn you in for your bounty,” he confides in a grumble. “Won’t fuckin’ listen to me about it.”

“Then what is she planning to do with me?” Nebula’s voice creaks with suspicion.

Rocket snorts. “Who knows? Somethin’ better than you deserve, I bet.” Another silence as he fits the plate back over the keys. His brow furrows. “M’only saying that as someone who’s also been given better than he deserves,” he concedes grudgingly, and begins to replace the screws.

The Luphomoid doesn’t speak, and he closes the datapad and winds up the cables, then drops the multitool back in his pocket.

“Hey,” he says suddenly, and leans his shoulder into the doorframe. Tilts his head against the closed door and crosses his arms and his ankles. “Why’d she give you those candies?”

The silence goes on for so long that he doesn’t think she’ll answer. Then:

“She didn’t tell you?”

He shakes his head against the sleek, curved metal of the wall. “Nope.” He lingers on the n, then pops the p. “What’s that about?”

There’s another crawling quiet. When the Luphomoid speaks, the words are equal parts secretive and baffled.

“I truly don’t know, Fox.”

He flicks his tail and tilts his ears.

“Yeah you do.”

He can almost hear the cyborg shaking her head. “I know what she gave them to me for,” she says. “But I don’t know why.”

He rolls his eyes. “That’s the same frickin’ th—“

“It isn’t,” Nebula interrupts. He hears a sudden shuffle and the clink of a chain — and then the sound of a body sinking into a flimsy low-grade jackroom-mattress, and the shift of blankets. “It’s not the same at all.” There’s a tight, tense exhale. “Go sleep with your kitten, Fox,” the Luphomoid rasps irritably. “Let me rest.”

His ears twitch. Your kitten. The two words, together, feel different than when Drax had called pearl kitten alone — as if his girl could belong to just anybody. But like this? Rocket might be able to get used to it if people start referring to her as his.

He waits there, tilted against the door — but he knows the cyborg isn’t gonna say anything else. He sighs, and rolls his shoulders, and lifts himself from the wall.

The trudge up to the captain’s quarters is grueling. Not because it’s terribly long — Rocket supposes that’s an easy cost to pay for having a frickin’ Dreadnought — but because every moment feels like a test. Despite Nebula calling pearl his, every step still feels like a risk. He scowls. He’s not even sure why. Pearl hasn’t rejected him yet. If he can just remember to keep his moon-damned shirt on and stop being a jackass, he can probably make this last for a while.

Except, when he gets to the captain’s quarters, pearl isn’t there.

She’s been there — recently. She must have just left. He can smell the waterlily-scent of her, still filling up the glass bubble like a drug. The captain’s bed has been remade with the blankets from the runabout, layered sideways over each other because they’re too small to comfortably drape across the whole mattress. It’s haphazard and soft, and rumpled like she’d laid down in them.

But it’s empty.

Rocket wheels around, stunned. Baffled.

He strides back out of his rooms. The galley, maybe? She’s never been one for midnight snacks, but it’s possible that with the influx of food items available—

But she’s not in the galley, or the canteen.

One of the common rooms, maybe, he thinks. Rocket’s still not always clear in his understanding of Taluhnisan, but he’s pretty sure Groot had suggested they look for an actually-complete deck of cards in the coming rotations. I’m not that tired, pearl had said. Maybe she’s in one of the commons, sorting through shelves of games and holovids. There are three possibilities — the two officers’ commons and the general commons — but pearl is nowhere to be found.

Something rises in Rocket’s throat like a fist, pushing its way through his vocal cords and his fucked-up tendons. It suddenly seems as if he’s on the runabout again: waking up from a dream of the pretty bride in his bunk, remembering how he’d called her spoiled and mocked her ignorance at Wyndham’s hands. She’d disappeared and he’d panicked, blood thundering in his ears as he’d hunted for her, till he’d found her stuffed behind the bulwark.

But the runabout had been so much smaller. If he’d been a jackass again — if she’d felt like she’d had to go into hiding again—

His heart thuds painfully against his manufactured ribs. He crushes it down.

The storage holds, he thinks then. Down he pads, startled when he finds his feet trying to run. He can catch her scent faintly by the linens, and in the medbay, and a couple other places besides — ghosts from hours ago, but nothing current, nothing new. He hesitates before dropping lower, into the near-empty cargo hold, and then the artillery bays. He can’t smell her at all here — can’t smell anything but gunpowder and plasma and explosives and metal — but he checks behind every door anyway. Considers the mechanical rooms, snaking up and between everything else in the ship, before rejecting them. Maybe, if he can’t find her anywhere else — maybe he’ll come back to it. But right now, checking the hidden serpentine corridors with all their nooks and crannies feels like a waste of time.

He hesitates, and then heads back to the jackroom. She can’t have gone inside, he knows — he’d just programmed the code and he hasn’t had the chance to pass it along to her — but paranoia has him pressed against the door anyway, trying to see if he can hear or smell her inside. Just the cyborg, he thinks, and he doesn’t know if it’s with a renewed sense of relief or worry.

Had she gone back down to the cockpit? No. Or maybe—

His stomach sinks, clenches, revolts. He feels his lip peel back from his teeth in a snarl he quickly attempts to swallow. Still a monster, he berates himself, and pushes himself back up to the officers’ quarters. Maybe she had rejected him, and he’d been too stupid and cuntstruck to notice. Maybe she’d been acting so weird today because she’d decided she needed her own bunk afterall. There are two floors of eight rooms each for the officers to choose from, and Rocket would guess Drax is in one of ‘em based on the snoring he can hear emanating from the second tier. He still checks each one, even though he doesn’t catch more than a passing whiff of waterlilies — even checks the one Drax is in, taking a gamble that works out for the best when the Kylosian sleeps through the soft swish of the door sliding open and closed again.

Nothing.

There’s a relief to that, too. That she hasn’t — what, abandoned him? Except she’s still lost, and—

Groot. Of course. Maybe — troubled — she’d decided to visit her Taluhnisan friend. Back up to the first mate’s cabin, then. Rocket listens at flora colossus’s door, but all he can hear is the soft susurrations of wind-in-leaves: Groot’s quiet breathing. He hesitates, wondering if he should sneak in — just to check, like he had with Drax. Just in case—

He squeezes both fists into the fur at his cheeks, then wraps his fingers around his ears and pulls. A strangled sound scrawls up from his belly and hits the back of his tongue, high and pitchy, before he realizes it’s there. A whine. He can’t remember the last time he’d whined.

Inside the first mate’s cabin, he hears Groot stir. Rocket paces, his leathery hands sliding off his ears and clinging to his whiskers instead, crushing the stiff bristles between his fingers. He should leave. He should look. He should stay and ask—

The door slides open. “I am Groot?”

The Taluhnisan’s voice is a kaleidoscope of soft concern, gently pummeling against the tidal wave of whatever-the-fuck is happening in Rocket’s panicked brain. The words twist and translate behind the Monster’s sternum: his own concern for pearl earlier in the day, washing back over him. He pants.

“I can’t find her,” he manages to rasp out.

I lost her.

Already.

Groot pauses. “I am Groot?” he asks gently.

Rocket breathes in, and tries to listen. He pictures pearl, and her soft kitten-smiles. Her anxious hands, woven into the fabric of her doubled-up cardigans. The vast hollowness of the Dreadnought.

“I know,” Rocket snaps, even though there’d been no censure in Groot’s three soft words. “I know. She was actin’ weird. And the damn ship is too fuckin’ big. I didn’t think — I never should’ve—”

“I am Groot,” Groot interrupts, and it’s a memory of pearl hunched over datapads with her stylus, taking down the notes of everything she remembers from Wyndham’s records. Her casual comments about Gold Captains, like she’d been familiar with the idea of them. The reminder of how easily she’d seemed to navigate the galley and the upper floors. Her ability to apply her learning from the runabout’s flight controls.

The image of her, sleepy and quiet, climbing back up to the captain’s quarters.

She’ll find her way back, Groot might as well have been telling him. You should be there when she does.

Rocket swallows. “But—”

“I am Groot,” the Taluhnisan tells him kindly. His voice brims with all pearl’s soft gestures, the strain at the corner of her eyes, the pinch at the corner of her mouth. The way she’d looked down into the moonmint tea, so forlorn, and the candies she’d offered the Luphomoid. The damn doubled-up cardigan. Everything inside Rocket twists like a still-alive insect pinned to a holoboard — like an orloni caught in a Sakaaran glue-trap.

“Okay,” he manages to choke out. The word is strangled; his eyes are wide and panicked and resentful. “Okay. Okay. I’ll go up and I’ll — I’ll wait for her.” He works his jaw, and his eyes grow narrow and slitted. He brandishes a claw at the Taluhnisan. “But if she’s not back by the wake-shift—”

“I am Groot,” Groot agrees solemnly. He doesn’t close the door, though — not until Rocket’s scrambled-stumbled-trudged to the hatch leading back up toward his own quarters. Faintly, the Monster’s ears pick up the hiss of the first mate’s cabin door sliding shut.

Rocket is panting by the time he reaches his own door again. His breath hisses painfully in his chest, all his screws and solder pulling tight on his skin and bone and muscle. But when he opens the door to his room, he can taste her on the air — just as sweet as before, just as cool and clear. The tight pockets of breath he’d crammed into his lungs suddenly ease like a tide coming in, and he shudders with the loosening of all his joints, with the sharp sting of a relief so profound it brings a burning prickle to the backs of his eyes. The scent of pearl is so honeyed and clean that he’s suddenly certain she must’ve already returned, that she must be waiting for him, and he’s not so overwhelmed by relief that he can’t recognize the brief pang of guilt. He strides down the little hallway — past the shower-bath and toilet rooms, turning the corner into the crystalline-armored pyramid.

But the bed looks just the same — soft, cozy, and utterly empty without her keeping it warm — and his lungs stutter behind his ribs.

He takes in a ragged, shattered breath, and then deflates again: shoulders sagging, tail slinking to the floor. Ears droop against his skull like they’re too heavy to pick up.

And in that moment of quiet, miserable resignation, he hears it.

It takes a second, but of course. He’s a frickin’ moron and he hadn’t thought to listen until he’d gotten all the way back down to the jackroom before. She’s not in bed, but he can hear her — a quiet and slow heartbeat, occasionally fluttering with a sort of residual panic, like something’s startled her in her sleep. Her breath, steady and deep, except for when she hits a sudden hiccup on the inhale. His ears prick up and his eyes widen, and he takes a steadying breath that slows his own lungs. Exhales, calming his heart. Forces himself to relax his fingers, his ears, and the tense puff of his half-tucked tail.

Shut the fuck up, he orders himself. Listen.

He follows the hushed sounds of her, creeping himself slowly as a shadow around the foot of the bed, toward the second hallway — the one that hides the closet and the built-in drawers. The narrow corridor is dark: lit only by the tiny plasma orbs at the edge of the floor, and sprinkled by the tangle of stars on the other side of the glass. For a moment, he hesitates — ears twitching, nose flaring — and then he sees the edge of the damask bedcovers, rumpled against the floor and trailing from the alcove of shelves.

Pearl.

He edges toward her, careful and slow.

She’s damn-near buried in the scratchy, creased quilts: a cloud of starchy folded fabric wound around her like some kind of seashell, and a splash of stardust-blue hair spilling from the opening like a little ocean wave. He can’t see anything of her but the top half of her face and that lilac halo of curls: the dark blue lashes like crescents, fanning damply against her cheeks. She’s been crying, he realizes abruptly. He sidles closer, cautious — remembering, again, the sight of her wedged up behind the bulwark that first time he’d had to come find her on the runabout. How she’d been folded in thirds, having wept herself to sleep.

Alone.

She’s been with him every — single — time he’s woken like some kind of screaming beast in the dark — but somehow, he always has to come find her after she’s crawled off somewhere, haunted and lonely. He tilts his head and drinks her in with greedy eyes, unwilling to give up the sight of her now, starved for every wayward curl and crease and freckle and teardrop. His fucked-up brain conjures the contrasting image of her as she’d stepped into the courtyard on HalfWorld: stiff, formal, cold.

Brittle, he knows now. Infinitely breakable.

I’d drag all those awful quilts and hard pillows off the bed and into the closet and sleep in the corner there, she’d told him in hushed, comforting, confiding tones while she’d built him a den under the flight controls.

And then, later — denying it all—

No. I wouldn’t sleep in the closet.

That would be stupid.

His mind flicks back again and he sees her as she’d been that night on the Arete — but this time, he doesn’t think of her panties wrenched between the soft, wet folds of her swollen cunt, so lush that he’d wanted to hurt her. He doesn’t think of the satin curve of her escaped breast and the sweetness of her nipple, pinched unforgivingly between his fingers.

No. Instead, he thinks of the shattered sound of her necklace snapping and the little round jewels hitting the ground; the feel of his knuckles knotted in her hair and the crack of her forehead punching the floor under the grip of his fist. The well of blood in that evil fucking divot he’d split into her flesh — the raw wound of his carved half-eight.

The wet fan of her lashes when that sob had rippled its way up her body and she’d forced it back down.

He stands there with his hands knit into his pockets, leaning against the wall beside her — and his shoulders hunch and his ribs buckle and for a second, his whiskers quiver.

I’d like a chance to look out for you too.

Can it even be said he’d looked out for her at all, though? He’d always known he hadn’t deserved the stroke of her hands on his shoulders, her lovingly-built shelter of blankets, the press of her mouth on his fur and the squeeze of her pussy around his dick — but for the first time, he lets himself sink deep in how lonely she must’ve been, too. How wounded, to hold onto him with delicate soothing hands and not let go, no matter how hard and mean he’d tried to shake her off that first night and so many nights after.

How desperate she must’ve been — not just to escape, not even just to be touched — but only to not be alone. He’d known he was taking advantage of her kindness, her softness, her sweetness. Her eagerness. But now he thinks he’s been taking advantage of that isolation, too.

His throat tightens and twists, and his heart jerks and wrenches like a dying thing behind the trap of his ribs. In the darkness, he suddenly swears to himself that if pearl wants a fuckin’ Taluhnisan, she gets a fuckin’ Taluhnisan. A Luphomoid, a Kylosian — whatever and whoever she wants. There’s no reason for her to have to be as alone and isolated as Rocket himself, and if he only gets to keep her as long as she’s frickin’ lonely, then that’s too fuckin’ high a price to pay. His teeth grit and his jaw works and without thinking, he leans harder against the edge of the wall and reaches out, delicately thumbing away the wet diamonds sparkling on the edge of her lashes.

She stirs, and her tear-blurred moonsilver eyes blink up at him hazily.

“Hello,” she greets, in that soft way of hers.

The singular word chokes up his throat for some stupid, unknowable reason, and he tries to shake it clear.

“What’s all this?” he manages to rasp out. The words are cracked in the middle, and chipped at the edges. “You havin’ nightmares again, kitten?”

Her eyes clear and her brow furrows as she looks around. The damask ripples when she sinks further into the scratchy material, and he realizes it’s evidence of a shiver.

“Not — exactly,” she hedges.

He pauses, trying to order his thoughts. His eyes scatter to the space around her. There’s nothing to squeeze her in tight like he knows she likes — nothing pinning her together like the bulwark and the glass in the runabout. Nothing above her like the control panel when he’d had his own nightmare that first time, and she’d made a nest for him out of the softest blankets in the bunk. Nothing to hold in everything around her like the curtains of their little bed, creating a purple velvet cave for them while she’d guarded him.

No; instead, she’s wedged up against a sad little three-inch-deep corner in an alcove that barely tucks her out of sight, and she’s probably got a drawer-handle or two digging into her back, and starchiest shittiest most-expensive quilts in the known universe. It makes his mouth all dry and his throat tight.

“This is a pitiful excuse for a den,” he mutters.

She utters a soft, choked-sounding little laugh. “I didn’t know where else to go,” she confesses. “The Dreadnought is too—” He can hear her snatch the words back. “It’s nice. It’s good. It’s just… big,” she admits after a beat.

Oh.

He’d said the same thing to Groot — frantic, panicked — but now he can see it the way she must: the emptiness of the corridors, too similar to the Homonoia and her sister ship. The cold sterility of it all. He remembers how surprised he’d been by the way she’d seemed to blossom in the tight quarters of the runabout — by the way she’d rambled on about how much she’d liked the small space.

No. I wouldn’t sleep in the closet.

That would be stupid.

He swallows, crouching in front of her, dipping his fingers carefully into the quilt-creases that he assumes lead to a buried opening.

“You gonna let me inside, pearl?”

She opens her arms so easily for him — readily, almost hopefully. It’s probably unfair of him — how willing he is to ask it of her. But he burrows in anyway, climbing up onto her thighs and pressing his back into the cradle of her belly and breasts. Using himself as a way to squeeze her tight against the wall and the drawers, to push her together into something approximating that pinned position that he thinks probably makes her feel safe, somehow. When she sighs into the velvet shell of his ear, he feels every part of her go soft and pliant beneath him. He hadn’t realized she’d been so rigid, like she’d been halfway to freezing solid before he’d given her this pressure and heat. He can feel her hesitate while he folds the layers of stiff blanket closed around them again — and then her arms wind around his belly and she snuggles her face cautiously into the crook of his neck.

He lets her. Of course he does. It’s not like he ever stood a fuckin’ chance against her.

He can feel her breathing him in, then softening further. He peers out at the stars across from them, through the barrier of the crystalline-armored dome, and he tilts his head. Wondering, maybe. Marveling. He’d never thought of himself as being capable of offering comfort, but — he thinks that’s what might be happening right now. Yeah, he’s been a true dickhead — taking advantage of this girl’s aching loneliness — but he can try to give her something too.

He hesitates, then decides to make an attempt at lightheartedness.

“Spent the last hour lookin’ for you. Should put a fuckin’ tracker on you, kitten.”

She huffs against his fur — a soft, halfhearted laugh. “On Terra, kittens get bells. Or at least they used to, when I lived there.”

He blinks. “Bells?”

Her hand flutters up through the narrow opening in the blanket, finger and thumb just a hair’s-breadth apart in front of his face.

“Tiny ones.”

For a second, his brain redirects all its electrical currents toward this novel idea. Bells? How? He imagines little ankle bracelets, or a collar, or a delicate chain around her waist — each with a handful of tiny, jingling bells. Or maybe, just two — one on each of the damn nipple clamps he’s been thinking about since the previous sleep shift—

“That what you want?” he asks hoarsely. “Little bells on you so I can find you when you go missing?” He imagines the soft chiming as he thrusts into her. He’ll probably never be able to hear a bell again without getting hard.

She shrugs against him, utterly unaware of the filthy imaginings she’s just incited. “I like bells.”

For fuck’s sake. He tries to wrangle his thoughts, to not be a complete degenerate. He forces his mind away from thoughts of her jingling while she rides him — closes his eyes, and swallows.

“I think I’m s’posed to ask you if you wanna talk about it,” he says, trying to sound casual. Reluctantly, he opens his eyes to stare out at the ink-dark sky and diamond-dust stars. “Whatever’s got you hiding back here, I mean.”

He feels her heart trip over itself in her chest.

“That’s — that’s okay,” she says reluctantly — like she’s nervous.

Rocket scowls.

“I showed you mine,” he reminds her, still staring out at the dark. They’d been sitting very similarly to this, that night in their little runabout-bunk: feathers floating all around them, each one glowing in the light of the stars and the control panels. She’d been his shelter and his lookout that night — and this time, he figures he can be hers. “Now you’re s’posed to show me yours.”

She hesitates. “I don’t know where to start.”

He frowns. “Maybe start with why you gave the Luphomoid those candies,” he suggests, settling back more deeply into her softness. Squishing her. She doesn’t protest, though — her arms just tighten around him more snugly.

He can feel the flutter of her eyelashes on the fur of his cheek as she pauses. Chews her lip. Her hands trace the seams on his jumpsuit, the lines of his pockets and pouches and holsters. The shape of his knees, folded loosely against his own chest. It’s a mindless sort of habit — as close as she can get to tying her fingers in knots when he’s parked in her lap like this, anchoring her to the floor and wall.

“She has — all those prosthetics,” pearl says at last, haltingly. “But you know — you noticed. Her father’s never touched her neck.” He can feel her throat work against the back of his shoulder as she curves herself, tucking her chin between his jaw and his shoulder. “All those fancy new parts — but he never replaced her vocal cords.”

He turns that bit of insight over in his head. Interesting, he thinks — but ultimately, just useless information. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

She shivers behind him, and when he reaches down to stop her roving hands, he realizes that she is cold — bone-cold, void-of-space-cold. Almost M’dame-Lavenza-cold. He startles, and flattens her palms against his abdomen. He can feel the coolness of her skin seeping through the armored fabric of his jumpsuit, and even his fur underneath.

“They’re damaged,” she whispers, and it takes him a second to replay the thread of conversation. “Her vocal cords.” Her fingers twitch against him, and he holds them steady, trying to warm them with his own. “From screaming.”

He stills against her. “What?”

She tilts her head, her forehead coming to rest on his shoulder. When she speaks, her words are a puff of air against fur and fabric. “Her voice is like that because of the damage to her vocal cords, and her vocal cords are damaged from screaming,” she repeats softly. “From the torture. I think — probably from the surgeries.” Her voice wobbles. “And he never replaced her vocal cords, so they hurt her all the time.”

He sucks in a breath. Tries to force down the sickening recognition he suddenly feels in his own belly, the miserable feeling of the worst kind of fellowship.

I didn't ask to be torn apart and put back together over and over—

He swallows. “How do you—”

“I’ve seen it before,” she rushes in, cutting him off before he can ask. “I’ve — I’ve seen it before. With others.” He feels his eyes round out and he stares straight ahead, looking at the glass wall, at the stars beyond.

Fuck, he thinks flatly. “Wyndham?”

She says nothing, but he feels her nod. For a long moment, they sit silently, her hands tense and cool between his dark palms and his belly, and the heavy weight of him crushing her against the drawers and the floor. The stars lay motionless in the well of the sky, glittering and distant. He wonders if she’s been trying to find her constellations here, alone and weeping silently in the dark.

Penthus, he thinks. God of grief. It’s one of the ones he remembers best, and it’s maybe a miracle that she hadn’t started up her own little shrine of sorrow while she was with Wyndham. Or maybe she had, after all, and just hadn’t realized it.

Maybe Rocket had, too.

“There was—” she starts, and stops. “There’s this moment I keep thinking of. When I was still little, and Herbert had — I believed he was good.” Her voice is a crushed, small whisper. “He told me he took care of people. Of animals. I used to believe him.”

Me too, Rocket thinks, but doesn’t say. It’s true, though. There had been a time when he’d thought his so-called Sire had others’ best interests at heart.

“I found a fawn, once,” pearl tells him now. “I was riding my bike to the field where Herbert’s ship had landed, and I found it by the side of the road. It must have been hit by a car. Its back legs were broken.”

He doesn’t recognize bike or car — some kinds of vehicles, his translator tells him. And when he hears the word fawn, he knows that the animal he’s picturing isn’t quite whatever pearl’s seeing in her memory. But he can understand what she’s really saying — where he suspects the story is going.

His stomach pitches and rolls.

“It was so small — the fawn. I left my bike and carried it the rest of the way. I thought — he said he’d make them better. I thought that meant he’d make them well.”

He tries to imagine her: a little humie gargoyle, spindly-legged with big moon-gray eyes, trying to cradle a frightened animal nearly as big as she’d been, with equally spindly-legs and equally-big eyes. She’d probably tried to shush it gently and soothe it while she’d wobbled her way over hillsides and through forests till she’d gotten to whatever hidden corner Wyndham had landed in. Crying, probably — so worried, and feeling too much for the wounded thing in her arms.

“It was so scared, Rocket,” she says, and he feels her lungs hitch against his back on a broken, hiccuping breath. “It was so scared. And I brought it right to him.”

His mouth tastes sour.

“I dream about it, sometimes,” she confesses into his fur. “I never saw it again — not in real life. I’d ask about it and he’d tell me it was fine, that I shouldn’t worry, and didn’t I trust him to do what was best for any living thing he could possibly help? But after he — after Fairy—”

The little bird, Rocket remembers.

“After Fairy, I started to dream about it. Them. All of them. Fairy, and the rabbits, and the fox kits. And the fawn. I’d dream I was walking into that room in the Homonoia — you know the rooms he has, with the big windows. And the fawn would just be lying in a patch of sunlight — horribly broken. Like Theel had — crushed it in his fist, even though it was too big for that. But then I’d look at it and I could see it was — it’s still breathing.”

He doubts she notices when she slips from past tense to present, but he notices. He knows how nightmares can warp time, can make a person think they’re in them, even when they’re awake.

“Herbert and the Recorders are in the room too, but they don’t see me, or they don’t notice me — or maybe they’re ignoring me,” she whispers. “They’re just standing, talking — sometimes complaining — about the latest… experiments. Or trials. So I run to the fawn and I try to scoop it up. I keep thinking it’s going to fight, like it did when I first tried to hold it. But it just — flops.” The word splits open, empty and bloodied and aching. “All its — all its little bones are broken. It can’t even make those awful crying noises — it just closes its eyes tight and tries to breathe.” Her voice splinters. “It hurts so much.”

He swallows.

“There were others,” she admits against the tendons of his throat. Her voice is thread-thin and frail as spun-sugar, easily tattered and easily washed away. He can’t see her eyes, but he figures he knows her well enough to picture them: silvery and swimming with tears, wet sequins on the starlike splay of her lashes. “Other little animals. And there was the… there was the m-maid—”

The word hollows out on another hiccup and his hands tighten on her wrists. Every bone feels fragile and cold beneath the hot leather of his palms. The tears are probably dripping down her cheeks.

“You don’t have to keep going,” he strangles out.

The words stagger to a halt in her throat — he can feel them, crammed behind her own vocal cords, swallowed back. “S-sorry,” she whispers, and before his mind can wrap itself around that shameful little word — before he can tell her no, pearl; I didn’t mean it like that — she says, “It’s just that the Luphomoid — Nebula — she reminds me of them. The fawn. Her eyes.” Her heartbeat stutters against his back. There’s the harsh, hacked-apart sound of a sob she’s trying to strangle. “I feel like I’m carrying her to a butcher.”

His lungs cave in and the space behind his sternum feels scraped empty. Gutted. He wants to pick up her cold hands from where he’s got them cradled against his belly, and gently bite each finger. Lick between each knuckle; crush them against his teeth. Pray to her through her folded fingers, dig his canines delicately in the meat of her palms. Dent and mark her flesh with the understanding that none of it — not one fuckin’ bit of Wyndham’s cruelty — is her fault. He wants to press the way he sees her right into her skin.

Instead, he swallows.

“The Nova Corps ain’t butchers, sweetheart,” he tells her hoarsely. “As far as fuckin’ cops go, they’re practic’ly goodie-goodies. But if you don’t wanna turn her in for her bounty, we don’t have to.” He sucks in a breath. “We just gotta be smart about what we decide.”

She’s silent behind him, beneath him. Then she shivers, and her breath hiccups again, and he feels something soft against his shoulder before it rolls between the strands of fur: salty-wet tears, and not the kind he likes seeing on her face at all. She makes a heartbroken little sound against his shoulderblade.

“You don’t h-hate me?”

He can’t help but suck in a startled breath — something to fill the sudden, stinging vacuum in his chest. He thinks of her, suddenly, on Sovereign —

I’m always on your side. No matter what.

He pushes back into her, not caring if his bolts dig into her. The urge to nip at her fingertips and palms surges in him again, so strong that his muscles lock up for a second. But instead, he forces himself to lift his own hand — coasting it gently against the side of her skull, tugging her face more tightly into the side of his throat. He tucks his chin and presses his cheek and the side of his nose to her temple — engraving his scent into her skin — and he shudders. And he aches. And for once, it has nothing to do with his prosthetics or his split-apart bones and muscles.

“No, pearl. I don’t hate you, kitten.”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

look at these babies, just starting to learn to communicate. they're still gonna be bad at it for a little while, but they're learning. god i love them. and i hope you do too. thank you, as always, for the lovely comments and kindnesses. i appreciate them so so so much, and i want to give each one of you a cozy hug and a mug of spiced cider. kinktober has put a hold on my drafting future chapters of this, so we could come to a bit of a temporary hiatus in november/december (especially if I do end up trying to write any northen-hemisphere seasonal oneshots), but i know some of you are trying to catch up anyway, so maybe that will ultimately be a good thing! either way, thank you for sticking with me. i appreciate you so very, very much.

coming soon: chapter twenty-five. kairosclerosis.
summary: he crew finds peace on alon-gim, but all things are temporary.
warnings: cunnilingus, begging, rocket’s fantasies, fellatio. a fight + angst. rocket can’t let himself be happy for long.
estimated date: thursday, october twenty-four.

other exciting things:
♡ kinktober 2024 masterlist and posting schedule.
♡ wednesday, october 16. kinktober 2024. book one: sunshine. part three.
♡ saturday, october 19. kinktober 2024. book one: sunshine. part four. [TENTATIVE]
♡ tuesday, october 22. kinktober 2024. book two: evasive maneuvers. part one. [TENTATIVE]
♡ thursday, october 24. cicatrix .⋆☁︎ :꧂ chapter twenty-five. kairosclerosis.

･:꧂posting schedules, chapter-previews, & more on tumblr♡
･:꧂masterlist & moodboard♡
･:꧂chapter one. nemotia of cicatrix scene by @frostedwitch
･:꧂portrait of pearl♡ by me!
･:꧂my fave rocket & pearl scene from chapter thirteen by me! ♡♡ (scroll down for the whole piece)
･:꧂ scrabbly lil pearl x rocket doodle by me!
･:꧂ adorable pearl x rocket selfie by starriidreams!
･:꧂ steamy/emotional pearl x rocket painting on "water lily" (lotus) fabric by hibatasblog/hibata♡♡♡

Chapter 25: kairosclerosis.

Summary:

the crew finds peace on alon-gim, but all things are temporary.

Notes:

warnings: cunnilingus, begging, rocket’s fantasies, fellatio. a fight + angst. rocket can’t let himself be happy for long.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

kairosclerosis. the moment you look around and realize that you’re currently happy—consciously trying to savor the feeling—which prompts your intellect to identify it, pick it apart, and put it in context, where it will slowly dissolve until it’s little more than an aftertaste. Ancient Greek καιρός (kairos), a sublime or opportune moment + σκλήρωσις (sklḗrōsis), hardening. Pronounced “kahy-roh-skluh-roh-sis.” The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Rocket’s never considered himself one for coaxing. He doesn’t coax — he persuades. Usually with the help of a plasma blaster or a gravity bomb. But there’s no other word to describe how he eventually convinces his half-sleeping pearl to abandon the dismal little corner of the alcove and scratchy damask, luring her exhausted form into bed where he piles her high with the runabout’s blankets and then sprawls against her, crushing her into the pillows. He lingers on wakefulness, chewing her words over and over in his head, sometimes blinking rapidly as water blurs the stars around him.

Shit’s way more complicated with pearl in his life. It would have been easier if he’d left her on Cyxlore, after all. He wouldn’t’ve spent nearly a whole cycle building a giant Fuck-You-Disk — wouldn’t be saddled with a Taluhnisan and an idiot Kylosian and a cranky captive cyborg. Wouldn’t have nearly had a heart attack when he’d been unable to find her in his bed.

But he can’t bring himself to regret it — not when she snuffles softly and burrows deeper into the mattress and blankets, trying to pull him with her.

He falls in and out of slumber, restless for the entire sleep-shift. He claws through the tumble of her waterlily-scented curls, licks over her pulse, rubs his cheeks against her throat and jaw again and again, till his own smoky, buttery-sweet smell is painted over her skin. He returns every sleepy squeeze she gives him with a fierce tightening of his own arms — hauling her against him even when it makes her brow furrow in confusion and she muffles drowsy nonsense into his fur.

When the wake-shift starts, he crawls out of bed and stares at the alcove again, where he’d made her leave the piles of creased damask. Between himself and pearl, all their clothes fit in the little drawers that had been pressed against her back. He strolls a few steps to the left and peers in the closet, wondering why she hadn’t chosen to hole up there, but realizes after a quick glance that it’s full of all his frickin’ junk from the runabout: gun parts and explosives, things that probably shouldn’t be stored next to each other — not that there had been many options when they’d been on the tiny runabout. Ion generators and old plasma blasters, loose parts of the refractor gun and melanocyte adapter and ‘fuser he’d stolen from Cyxlore. Stuff he’s been using to remake and improve the Hadron Enforcer, and something he hasn’t decided on a name for yet. Chitauri necroblasters and gravity mines and laser grenades.

He scowls.

“Rocket?”

His name is sleepy and uncertain on her lips. He crams his hands into his pocket and strides back toward the bed.

“Oh,” pearl breathes when he comes around the corner. He stares at her with eyes he knows are unreadable. Sure, she might be bigger than him, but the size of the mattress still makes her look small: buried under the runabout’s blankets and surrounded by pillows. “I thought you’d probably already left for the morning.” Her voice is a little swallowed apology.

“No,” he says shortly. Her skin is the color of Indigarran peaches, pink and gold under the starlight and the plasma orbs. He looks around at the empty shelves above the headboard, the cold glass walls, and another grimace pushes its way into the corner of his mouth. “You wanna do me a favor, pearl?”

The request wakes her up fully. She straightens, suddenly alert — blankets tumbling around her waist, the Omniphonics t-shirt stretched over her soft little nipples. He feels his eyelids flicker, and a muscle in his jaw jumps.

“Yes,” she says, all eager and shit, leaning forward with her tits plumped up between her upper arms.

It takes an effort to tear his gaze off ‘em, which he masks with a masterful eyeroll. “I just need you to figure out what needs to happen in this room—” He gestures broadly to the glass dome. “—to make it livable or whatever.”

She looks around, a little curl forming in the space between her brows. “It isn’t livable?”

Not for you, he thinks.

“Too empty,” he grunts. Tilts his head and squints at her, trying to figure out the right gamble to make. “I like seeing the sky,” he admits. “But otherwise—” He cocks his head in the other direction, measuring her. “It’s kinda big. Cold.”

She chews her lip, her starsilver eyes big and wide. He wonders if she can see right through him. But no — she just shifts on the bed, kneeling in that way she does, pensive gaze flitting from the glass curvature to the shelves behind the bed, then the slick floor.

“I can do that,” she says slowly, already contemplating. The grin that springs to the corner of his mouth surprises him, and he ducks his head and swipes the back of his wrist over his whiskers to hide it.

“Good,” he says briskly. “Now, let’s get something to eat.”

He sits in the galley with her and makes coffee for himself and Groot while she cooks up some kind of savory egg-thing she’d previously called a frittata. She pours moonmint tea for the Luphomoid and lets it cool while the four of them eat together, and they leave Drax scowling in the kitchen afterward when they sojourn to the jackroom.

Rocket makes sure that pearl and Groot know not to give the new code to Drax, though to be honest, he’s not sure Groot will remember it anyway. The Luphomoid is quiet this morning, her black eyes suspicious — and for a moment, Rocket thinks he can almost see what pearl’s talking about. Predators tend to be less wary, he thinks: more certain of having the upper hand. The dark, distrustful gleam of Nebula’s galaxy-gaze — alert, watchful — is a survivor’s stare. It’s the look of someone who’s been hunted: someone who has had to learn how to hide amongst the members of the Black Order, amongst the Accusers and the Mad Titans of the universe.

Rocket should know.

Pearl brings out four of the candies — lozenges, he realizes now — and sets them next to the Luphomoid. Nebula says nothing, of course — eyes flicking away from the little offering. But he notices that her hand creeps toward them a moment later.

Rocket himself spends the rest of the day in something close to leisure: asking pearl what she’s learned of the ship, letting her eyes get big and sparkly while she leads him from hold to hold with practically a skip in her step, like she’s just fuckin’ happy to be with him. She’s in regular leggings today, and only one cardigan, her lilac curls bobbing and spiraling from a high ponytail she’s tied with one of those stupid, scrappy bows. She bounces beside him, feet dancing and tits jiggling, asking about his plans for the Dreadnought: where he’ll set up shop, what would make the best location for all of his creations. She talks about condensing supplies and what they currently have in stock, and how long it will probably take the five of them to work through everything the Sovereign consider standard issue for an intended crew of over forty. Drax and Groot do find a damn pack of cards and Drax attempts to teach the Taluhnisan some sort of bastardization of a Kylosian tile-game while Rocket quizzes pearl again on the flight controls, then teaches her some of the new dials and gauges. He shows her where and how he’ll be redirecting the artillery — up through the floor with a series of levers and switches, handles and triggers, pulleys and datapad programs. He’ll need some supplies for that, most of which he expects to be able to salvage from the runabout itself. Anything else, he’ll be able to get for cheap on Knowhere. It shouldn’t be hard to find a junker planet between there and the Thneed system, too. He doesn’t like flying without access to the cannonry, though — even though the Fuck-You-Disk is on its second setting, and more than capable of hiding the Gold Captain — which is why they’ll stop for a handful of rotations on Alon-Gim, he tells her.

It’s not that Rocket wants to delay their arrival on Knowhere. He’s got absolutely no desire to hang onto Drax for longer than he has to — not when he could be enjoying this trip to Fron almost-alone with his pretty pearl. Plus, he’s hoping he can convince her to just drop Nebula off on Knowhere too — let the Luphomoid find her own way into or out of trouble. The problem is just that he doesn’t wanna float anywhere near the skull when his moon-damned ship is still covered in gold and he doesn’t even have an accessible artillery.

At least, that’s what Rocket tells himself.

Which is why he decides to set them down on Alon-Gim after all. The planet is empty and crumbling, but pretty — in a haunted, ruined sort of way. The sky is the color of Aladnan limes and Inixian stonefruits — golden-pink and blue-green — and the rolling hills are splayed with spindly trees lurching up out of the thin soil and tall grasses. Distant towers mark the entrances of abandoned mines, and there’s the quiet whirr of native instincts and the occasional chirrup of local rodents and stray orloni. Drax builds a fire outside — which pearl seems far too excited about — and she bakes some kind of sweet pastry in a covered iron pot that she finds in the galley, burying it deep under the coals. The sky darkens into shades of teal and rose before the stars splash against it. Groot tells his story silhouetted against the golden flames and Drax examines his knives. The whole thing feels weirdly warm, soft enough to make Rocket almost doze off — like he’s pleasantly buzzed on ginsky and buttercream shots. Twice, he starts to feel that clicking rumbling purr under his ribs again, and twice he swallows it down.

When the sky’s gently collapsed into a velvety dark-turquoise, Rocket tugs pearl up into the captain’s quarters — still feeling all buttery-warm and pleased for no real reason. It’s almost a high, and he’s never been one to pass up a single moment of reprieve from the misery of the universe — so he barely waits till the door slides closed before he nuzzles right into pearl’s cunt. She gasps and stumbles and lets him push her down the hall to the bed, spilling onto her back while he wrenches off her leggings. He noses and licks at her pretty garnet panties — clamping his hands into her doughy thighs and spreading them wide so he can get a tongueful of waterlilies and amber through the Cyxlorade silk. Pearl hiccups and scrambles backward, silver eyes wide and playful, and Rocket follows: stalking her, snagging her panties with a deft claw and yanking them down her legs — shoving against her with his shoulders wedged between her knees and his hands full of her ass. He drives her backward across the bed till her elbows hit the edge of the mattress and she nearly somersaults over it. She shrieks with the sudden, half-laughing fear of falling, collapsing onto her spine with her neck arched backward over the side — and Rocket’s so fuckin’ taken by the bright open sound of her laughter that he can only bring himself to anchor her by her hips and bury his mouth in her soft, slick pussy. He holds her there long enough that her laugh turns into moans, then hitching little gasps. He lets the blood rush to her head while she clutches at his fur, helpless against gravity and the strength of his grip.

It’s frickin’ beautiful — how all she can do is whine, teary-eyed, and watch the constellations in the velvet-teal sky while he fucks her with his tongue. She comes against his mouth, body bowing into the air like a crescent moon. Her shoulders slide dangerously far off the bed with the force of her orgasm — but he just locks his hands onto her hips and rears back, rising on his knees and rearranging himself, nearly ripping open the jumpsuit-closure over his groin so he can sink his cock inside her. Pearl’s pretty cunt is still squeezing when he plunges into her, and she cries out and arches again, fingers knotting in his fur frantically as she nearly tumbles off the mattress with the force of his dick driving into her.

He lets her nearly plummet off the bed again — and then again — half-terrorizing her with each vicious, deliberate thrust; catching her and yanking her back to meet him at the last second before doing it all over again. She yelps with a dizzy sort of panic that breaks into a whimper every time he slams inside her, and her cunt tightens up on him with each renewed threat of falling: hot and sleek and so clenched-up that his eyes nearly cross. He tilts her up to meet him, keeping her spine curved backward — watching as her torso tips over the edge of the mattress, t-shirt rumpled up over her tits. Her rosy nipples bounce wildly thanks to the upside-down angle and some vague part of him thinks he needs to fuck her all overturned like this every time.

At some point, she gets her legs wrapped tight around his waist: cunt open for him like a precious little offering, wet and clenching and needy. Her heels notch into that spot at the base of his tail, sending silver starbursts up his spine with every bruising, blissful thrust. Half-feral, teeth bared, he watches the ghost of her reflection in the crystalline-armored glass across the room. He tries to drink in the sight of her without looking at himself: the panting parting of her mouth, the swing of her ponytail sweeping back and forth across the floor, the wild jostle of her gorgeous upside-down tits as she reaches up to clutch at him and squeezes on him when she comes again.

He can feel his own grin when she does, teeth grinding sharply against each other: smug, and mean, and dangerously happy.

But he doesn’t care. He fucks all his happiness right into his pearl, hauling her back onto the mattress to meet his hips when he finally comes inside her. Release ripples over him, bringing soothing sort of relief fast on its heels, and he tilts his head down into her belly and licks exhaustedly — just once, far too devotedly — at the spray of pink scars on her lower abdomen. When his body sinks quietly against hers, he tries to wrangle in all the words that want to escape into her soft skin and hushed, heaving breaths.

At some point, they rouse. They get cleaned up and he bundles pearl under the covers, pinning her with his weight to the bed: doing his damnedest to make sure she feels safe and warm, trying to ignore the way her silvery eyes soften when she realizes what he’s doing. Instead, he scoffs and smirks and snarls, bullying her into a position where he can sprawl on top of her belly with his head between her breasts and his fingers skating up and down her flanks, palming handfuls of her soft sides and squeezing whenever he wants.

He’s not sure which of them tilts into unconsciousness first. The last thing he remembers is the sleepy stroke of her hands on the back of his head, over his neck, across his shoulders — lulling and comforting him, at least as much as he’s comforting her.

Mornings on Alon-Gim mostly seem to align with the wake-shift. It’s a relief. Rocket spends the next rotation working on the Dreadnought, and with the help of pearl and Groot and even Drax, he strips a fifth of the gold plating off the ship before lunch. Together, he shows pearl how to check for the structural integrity of the exposed duranium, and explains how they’ll add reentry-grade reconstitution plating before they take off.

Over the next rotation, he considers the runabout: peeling it apart, stripping it of anything useful. There are pieces he can use for scrap, or manipulate into back-up parts in a pinch — not to mention the stuff he can use for redirecting the Dreadnought’s flight and cannon controls. He’d considered keeping it as a smaller, more-discrete back-up ship — but there’s no reason for it when he has so many escape pods at his disposal. Drax and Groot help with some of the heavy lifting, following his instructions as they take apart the Dreadnought’s gold paneling and the runabout’s interior.

Between it all, Rocket watches pearl practice with her modified quadblaster, watches her cook over the fire, watches her spread out some scratchy quilt she’d gotten from the linen closet and wistfully describe a Terran tradition called a pick-nick. Drax and Groot play along immediately: lounging with apparent happiness on the massive square of fabric, unperturbed by the casual intimacy that sharing food on a moon-damned blanket seems to somehow inspire.

Rocket hangs back for a while, himself — eats his dinner standing in the shadow of the Dreadnought, propped against one of the landing supports. Watches — again. Feels — again — that tug toward domesticity.

Or would, he reasons, if the Kylosian weren’t in the picture now, screwing everything up.

Still. Rocket continues to watch anyway: stories, food, laughter. It all feels like glass — not the armored kind, either, but that dainty breakable shit they export from Indigarr. Groot with his soft eyes and their shared morning coffee. Drax, constantly bellowing out my best friend Rocket like it’s his new name. Pearl, bringing Nebula meals and tea and lozenges. The Luphomoid herself, her dark eyes narrowing and widening with suspicion and surprise every time pearl does the unpredictably soft shit that she does. For fuck’s sake, one rotation pearl brings down the damn deck of cards and asks Nebula if she wants to play — a concept which seems to entirely elude the cyborg.

“Stay?” pearl asks him, pretty and soft, and he rolls his eyes before dropping to sit cross-legged beside her. She deals the three of them into Drax’s loose approximation of sickles-and-hearts, teaching the Luphomoid how the game works according to the Kylosian’s often-vague instructions. Nebula listens to the rules with the skeptical, wide-eyed stare of someone who believes they’ll be tested later, and that the cost of failure will be worse than death — but pearl keeps showing her hand, explaining all her plays to the Luphomoid, walking her through the win. Whenever the cyborg puts down a good card, pearl gets more excited than when she’s got a decent hand herself.

“What are we gonna do with her?” Rocket asks when they leave later, and the corner of pearl’s mouth pinches worriedly, brow creasing.

“I don’t know,” she admits. “I’m sorry for — I know this wasn’t what you planned—”

He snorts and makes a slashing noise with his hand, then slants his eyes up at her. “Could let her go on Knowhere,” he says carefully. “Give her some units. Let her figure her own shit out.”

Her lips twist to one side and if she hadn’t been holding the tray with the Luphomoid’s food, he’s sure she would have been knotting her fingers in her cardigan. “She needs more than units,” pearl says reluctantly — almost regretfully.

He feels his whiskers twitch and tilts his head. “Like what?”

But she just shrugs helplessly. “A home, maybe? A purpose?” Her voice is tangled and soft. “Someone who looks out for her?”

The sigh ripples out over his fur, rasping in the tops of his lungs and scraping his collarbone. Pearl startles and blinks down at him. “What?” she asks, her eyes big and bewildered, and he rolls his shoulders and his eyes.

“Nothin’,” he tells her resignedly. “Saw it coming, anyway.”

Her brow furrows and she pauses, looking down at him. “Saw what?”

“Forget it,” he says mildly, continuing their trek back to the galley. She has to rush a little to catch up with him.

“Rocket? Saw what?”

He knows he’s a moron — turning way too soft — but it only takes another rotation before pearl convinces him that if they can keep Nebula properly restrained, the cyborg should join them for meals.

“Then you and Groot won’t have to stay with me in the jackroom everytime,” pearl cajoles. “She can sit outside with me, get some fresh air while you and Drax and Groot are all there.”

“Fuck no, pearl. What if she escapes?”

“She’s not — I don’t think she’s going to kill us,” pearl says timidly, and he snorts.

“You don’t think so?” he drawls sarcastically. He’d never admit it aloud but pearl might be right. Sure, the Luphomoid would probably sell them out in a second — to get away or to get what she wants — but he doesn’t suspect she’d kill them now, either. At the very least, he thinks Groot and pearl would probably be safe from her violence. “What if she runs off and we can’t find her?” he argues instead.

Pearl looks around with exaggerated curiosity — a little of that frickin’ sass he likes so much, shimmering through. He lets his own eyes follow hers: the scraggly trees and broken landscape, the distant towers that mark now-abandoned mine entrances. The rolling hills, the distant sun, the gold plating Drax is meticulously laser-cutting into squares that can be more-easily stored and more-easily sold. The roving holotarget projector — now turned off and resting in the grass — and the practice-blaster that pearl had been using earlier, which Groot is now studying with far too much curiosity for someone who had recently convinced Rocket that he knew how to use a firearm.

Their little camp around the Dreadnought is the only current sign of life on the planet.

“So what if she does?” pearl echoes, somewhere between curious and teasing. “Where would she go?”

He grunts at the gentle mockery in her tone. “Brat,” he warns, but he can’t keep the slight lick of affection out of his tone. He doesn’t agree right away — it’s too enjoyable to taunt her, to see if he can convince her to try to convince him. But eventually, he gives in — of course he does — rolling his eyes and scowling, making his own demands about how they’ll restrain their cyborg captive. Pearl agrees to keep the Luphomoid in her Sovereign manacles, and he orders their prisoner to cuff her own ankles as well, with a pair of Nova Corps shackles he’d stolen on his way out of his last vacation in the Kyln.

The Luphomoid’s dark eyes flick, wide and wary and baffled, as pearl guides her out into the fresh Alon-Gim air.

Drax — apparently practicing some Kylosian battle-stances in the soft meadow grasses — pauses when he sees Rocket following the two women off the Dreadnought.

“What is the Daughter of Thanos doing out here?” The Kylosian sounds like he isn’t sure whether to be furious or curious.

“Nebula,” pearl corrects, granting the Kylosian a kitten-smile for a peace-offering. “And she’s going to eat with us.”

The cyborg looks like a hunted thing when she sits on the edge of what pearl has now dubbed the pick-nick blanket. She studies pearl as the Terran cooks over the fire. Groot offers their captive his own mug of sludgy coffee and the cyborg looks faintly repulsed, which Rocket frankly finds frickin’ insulting. But they eat — Nebula silent while Drax regales them with some stupid war-story, studded by Groot’s three-word commentary — and it’s weird and awkward and it makes Rocket’s skin itch. He rolls his shoulders and sits back against the hull of the Dreadnought, watching while the dim Alon-Gim sun sets and pearl somehow tempts both Drax and Nebula into a round of the adapted card-game.

The next day, Rocket allows himself to be persuaded into bringing the damn captive out again. The Luphomoid sprawls across the blanket now — still shackled, but looking for all the universe like a very self-satisfied flerken soaking up the sun — and observes them all through narrowed eyes. Rocket ignores her, focusing instead on breaking down the insides of the runabout and figuring out which parts which best serve in redirecting the dreadnought’s artillery. A few strides away, pearl’s practicing with her modified quadblaster and the roving holotargets. She’s getting better at it, but as soon as Rocket hears Groot trying to give her advice, he shuts that shit down and takes a break from the manual labor to train her properly: making delicate adjustments to her arms, widening her stance, adjusting her aim. Her plasma-shots are decent — maybe not perfect, but close enough to be lethal — and her stun-blasts keep going wide, but he’s got no complaints. She’s better than he might’ve expected at this point. Plus, he’s rapidly coming to the conclusion that the more training she needs, the more opportunities he has to tease her. If he lets his fingertips linger along the inseam of her leggings or his claws prickle across her spine under her cardigan, then nobody comments on it — and he gets the pleasure of hearing his pearl’s heart turn over, smell the pulse in her pretty cunt, feel the little somersault in her breathing. He can purr little praises into the softness of her hip, or nip punishingly at her thighs.

Other than wanting to pull his own fur out whenever he thinks of her being unable to defend herself, it feels like a win-win for him.

That night, pearl makes some kind of stew — she seems strangely fixated on cooking over the fire while they have it, and he admits that it does make the food taste a little richer than it normally does in the quick-ovens or on the hot plate. Smokier, and more layered. He sits afterward in the shadows, considering what it means to be fed like this, to have someone who makes him food — who makes him eat. He’s sure his fur’s looking better now. Glossy and thick and full. When no-one’s looking, he strokes his own arms. It’s not that he’s preening — he’s just startled by how it shines in the afternoon sunlight, and how much softer it feels. Less brittle and coarse; less prone to breaking. When he studies his tail, it’s a million times more luxurious than he’s used to. He’d learned long ago that his tail could do more than just help him balance — one of the courtesans from the Iridium Hyacinth had suggested its use during some bedplay and he’s been considering weaponizing it against pearl for a while — but he’s surprised at how silky and lush it’s become. Certainly soft enough, now, to be worthy of teasing against pearl’s tawny skin. He could dance the feathersoft fibers over her rosy nipples and the shadowy hollows behind her knees, ghost it over that frickin’ delicious cunt of hers —

It feels way too fast, but suddenly three more rotations have passed, and he’s just finished scraping off the last of the gold with Groot’s rather hamhanded help when he comes around the curve of the Dreadnought and hears Nebula mutter something gruff to pearl.

“—always have better aim than you because he can hear where his target is even when he’s not looking at them. Plus, he has faster reflexes than you ever will,” the Luphomoid rasps. “I’d guess the Fox could shoot through a solid duranium wall and still hit whatever he aimed at. He probably doesn’t even know that he’s doing it — or that it’s not a skill you‘re capable of learning.”

His ears flick down and a defensive snarl curls in the corner of his mouth. Okay, pearl might not be cybernetically engineered to be within twenty-four thousandths of optimum intuitive grasp, but that doesn’t mean she can’t learn to shoot a frickin’ quadblaster.

“He’s not a fox,” he hears pearl correct mildly, easing back into her stance as the holotarget shifts lazily over the field of high grasses. He’s startled when he realizes that her form looks even better now — more balanced. She’s sinking into her center of gravity with much more ease, as if it’s started to become second-nature go her. Maybe the Luphomoid’s been giving her humie-sized tips. Rocket’s not completely sure how he feels about that. Shouldn’t teaching pearl be his thing?

“So how do I get better?” she distracts him by asking.

“Aural implants,” the cyborg says flatly, and pearl makes a soft little noise somewhere between a laugh and a gentle scoff, like she thinks the Luphomoid’s made a joke. “And get him to give you something other than a quadblaster,” Nebula adds. “You’re bad at keeping your sights in line when you’re trying to manipulate the lower trigger. Your hand is too small for the grip.”

He startles at that, eyes automatically narrowing as the target flashes white and pearl squeezes the second trigger. She’s doing well, but the cyborg’s right. While his little housewife looks like she should have excellent aim — thanks in no small part to the million times he’s made her practice — her wrist tilts everytime she tries to squeeze the secondary. Her smaller fingers lack the span or the strength to pull it properly without taking the whole damn firearm down with ‘em.

The whole thing scratches a scowl onto his face. He’d decided on the quadblaster in the first place because he’d figured pearl would be more likely to defend herself if she had the option to use the nonlethal electric stun function — and because it had given him some begrudging, beleaguered, too-rare peace to know that her primary trigger would activate a deadly plasma blast if she could just bring herself to use it. He hadn’t noticed she’d been having difficulty because she’d made such surprising progress in the last few cycles. And — while her aim might not be perfect — it’ll probably get the job done.

If she can ever bring herself to aim at an actual living thing, that is.

Pearl’s frowning down at the training blaster in her hand as the holotarget moves on, though. “Rocket has smaller hands than me, and he can—“

Nebula grunts, as if she’d like to deny it but can’t. “I assume the Fox has been made to be preternaturally skilled in weapons combat.”

Rocket’s tail bristles.

The Luphomoid pauses, then adds thoughtfully, “And — I doubt he’s ever even considered using the stun feature on a quadblaster. Not when the plasma trigger is so readily available.”

Well. That’s true, he supposes.

“Tell him to train you on something else,” Nebula repeats, voice scraping the afternoon air. “One trigger, or—“

He rolls his shoulders and strolls into view, then. “Or maybe I just make the quadblaster fit her hand,” he sneers at the Luphomoid, dropping the armful of goldscrap to one side and swiping the blaster from pearl’s grip. She yelps when he does it, and he flashes a quick leer in her direction as he turns the blaster over in his grasp. Then he’s tangling his fingers with hers, twisting them so he can look at her palm. Of course, he realizes moodily. Quadblasters are made for bigger hands than hers and while he’s figured out how to manipulate his own fingers enough to use the deadlier functions — more easily and naturally than breathing — the Luphomoid is correct in assuming he hasn’t had many reasons to stretch for the second trigger. He has an armory’s worth of completely-different weapons he uses when a bounty needs to be brought in alive.

Rocket sighs, studying the creases in pearl’s palm, even though he’s got them carved on his heart by now. It’s gonna be back to the drawing board for this one — he can already tell. He holds up three fingers.

“Squeeze,” he orders, and she hesitates before loosely wrapping her fist around them. “Harder,” he half-snarls, and she winces, but listens.

It’s still a pitiful amount of pressure. Probably another reason why she’s having a hard time with the second trigger. These are the fingers of a girl who’s learned to hold everything in her life as if it were butterfly-fragile: little birds and flerkens and mice, all getting ready to die — and herself being the only one who could give them any comfort. Maybe, when she’d been younger and still fresh from Terra — when she’d been determined to wrangle a crying fawn across who-knew-how-many hills and meadows — maybe back then, she'd also known how to grasp tools and tree branches. But for too many circs, he thinks, she’s been given nothing to hold onto.

If anything, the High Shitbag had probably forbid her from ever making a fist.

“BN1?” he wonders out loud, shooting a glance over his shoulder to the shackled Luphomoid.

Nebula’s chin lifts warily. “Or an ion pistol.” She cocks her head, considering. “Single-barrel. She might be able handle a double.”

He clamps his palm back against pearl’s wrist and tilts her hand, splaying her fingers wide. “Could go in the other direction,” he muses. “Bigger gun. Something she can brace on her shoulder.”

“Does she have the core strength to handle the recoil on a laser cannon?” Nebula asks doubtfully.

“I’m right here,” pearl squeaks.

“Not yet,” Rocket admits, releasing the slender Terran fingers to prickle his claws teasingly up the inside of pearl’s wrist. “Getting close, though. Sides, I’m more worried about the trigger resistance on a laser cannon. Her grip strength’s not worth shit.”

“Surely you can help her practice her grip strength,” the cyborg says dryly, and there’s an undercurrent of something sardonic that makes Rocket’s eyes snap to her, incredulous. First Groot, now this broad.

“Was that a dirty joke, Nebs?”

Nebula stares back at him implacably. Pearl’s eyes are big as moons and she’s blushing so hard the pink’s verging into red. Rocket huffs, not sure whether to be impressed or offended or smug. He settles for a snort, trying to hide his own confusion, and turns to pearl.

“I’ll make you something custom,” he tell her, and he tries to make it sound like an inconvenience instead of a promise — even though, if he’s honest, the idea of making a firearm just for her, one that will sing in her hands, has a little spiral of something hot and bright coiling around the base of his backbone, just above his tail. It simmers, sending little sparks skittering up his spinal column. “For now, just use the primary trigger — but I want you practicing one-handed. Right grip, then left.” He scowls. He’s got a BN1 he could let her use eventually — Katie, one of the two loves of his life — but he isn’t about to fuck Katie up by making her into a training blaster. No, he’ll let pearl practice with the BN1 once he trusts her with live ammo.

“She’s going to have an even harder time one-handed,” the Luphomoid observes, her dark eyes flat and following Rocket. He rolls his eyes and opens his mouth to growl an I know at the cyborg, but does a double-take instead. He’d almost swear he’d seen a brief flicker in the corner of the cyborg’s mouth.

“You’ll need to get her wrist-strength up too,” Nebula drawls.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

As the rotations shift again, Rocket finds himself almost hating the idea of leaving Alon-Gim. It’s been a nice little side-stop. Sunlight-hours under a mint-pastel sky spent breaking down the runabout, rewiring the artillery — teaching pearl more about flight controls and how best to handle them, watching her practice with the training blaster. He and Nebula call out absent-minded corrections when necessary, even though the Luphomoid’s still chained.

Their sunset-routine has settled into hearthside dinners, and something else that Rocket can’t quite put his finger on. He’s almost given up resisting the weird lure of the picknick blanket, standing next to it while he grudgingly takes his meals with everyone else, staring at his clawed toes while the shadows lengthen and pool around them. Groot tells his folktale in the gathering dusk, and both Drax and Nebula seem nonplussed by the hour or more of I am Groots rumbling out of the Taluhnisan’s mouth. The first time Drax convinces pearl to recite a Kylosian eddur, Rocket isn’t sure what to expect — but it’s not the torrent of words that spill out from between her pretty lips. The first few shimmering rounds of syllables are self-conscious, but then they sweep into something too big for her Terran body. Her voice plummets and soars, and the Kylosian reacts with more emotion than Rocket’s seen on his face so far: rapture, anguish, and delight.

Pride, too. And sorrow.

Sometimes, Rocket finds himself sprawled on his back on one of the wings, searching lazily for pearl’s constellations between the clouds, listening to them all chatter. Once, Nebula had muttered something dry and sardonic under her breath in rasping, broken tones, and Drax had burst out with such a sudden, thunderous roar of laughter that it had nearly startled Rocket right off his perch. The sound had boomed right up from the floorboards of the Destroyer’s presumably-cavernous lungs, and Rocket had lurched from his peace with such a panic he’d practically rolled right off the wing, catching himself on the edge before dropping to the grass below. Of course, his near-tumble had triggered a new round of uproarious Kylosian laughter, even twisting a bitter smirk from the Luphomoid.

Rocket had reached for the old defensiveness that has lain, prickling and tense, under his hide for circs — only to find it sleeping like some contented beast in a warm den. When he’d tried to force a snarl anyway, his ears had picked up the soft whisper of Groot’s chuckle instead; and when he’d tried to scowl, his eyes had only found the warmth of pearl’s kitten smile.

So he’d huffed a muttered insult under his breath, directed at absolutely no-one, and climbed back up on his wing.

The laughter begins to come more frequently over the next rotations: deep and dappled with the whispery, crackling hush of Groot’s woodland chuckles, or the shifting light of pearl’s soft mirth. Nebula doesn’t laugh, of course; she scoffs. Her eyes flicker between them all like she doesn’t quite trust or believe what she’s seeing. She continues to eye pearl with vague distrust despite the brief sharing of shooting techniques. When she does speak, it’s usually to scoff at Drax, who continues to alternate between expressions of wide-eyed curiosity and disgust for the Daughter of Thanos.

They stay awake later every night — dinners turning into stories, turning into card-games played by firelight. Rocket doesn’t join at first. It’s hard to get up the motivation when there’s no-one else with units to gamble, and when he could be working on improving the Dreadnought, and when all of this seems so weirdly—

nice.

Rocket hates the realization that pearl was probably right, that he has far too much in common with this blue-skinned cyborg than he would’ve liked to admit. He watches as the Luphomoid wrestles with the idea of winning something that doesn’t require pain, and losing something that doesn’t mean worse. It makes his ears flicker and his whiskers twitch, tail trying to tuck itself against his ankle every time he thinks of it. Like it’s something he can almost feel in himself.

“Come play with us,” pearl beckons one night, kitten-smile perched like a kiss in the corner of her mouth, there for the licking. He scowls, but she must be learning to tell which of his grimaces are just a front, because her smile doesn’t falter. If anything, her starry eyes just sparkle more. “We can gamble this time, if you want.”

“Finally!” Drax bellows, slamming both fists into the picknick blanket.

“I am Groot!” Groot agrees.

“You got no units to wager,” Rocket sneers at the two of them. “You both owe me.” His eyes twirl to pearl. Even though she hadn’t thought to grab her jewelry that night on the Arete, he figures half the funds he got from Sanna Orix probably belong to her. He opens his mouth to say something about it but Drax is already pouting.

“I am Groot,” the Taluhnisan protests.

“Not units, then,” pearl agrees, still smiling. “Something else—”

“The Black Order doesn’t play games, but we do gamble,” Nebula offers. “Especially among the rank-and-file. Not for units, either.”

Pearl turns her silver gaze to her captive before Rocket can interrupt. “Then for what?” she asks, and Rocket slaps a hand to his forehead, already grimacing.

“Pearl, I’m fairly frickin’ certain you don’t wanna know—”

“For ammunition and weapons,” Nebula replies, too quickly — and now her rasping voice pauses doubtfully, like maybe she’s realized this hasn’t been her brightest offering. “Or an opportunity to—”

She falters, but Rocket’s been in enough prisons to know. He’d make a bet right now — bet that the members of the Black Order had gambled on sparring matches and brawls, and had wagered more often than not for the right to cut off a finger, a tail, an ear, a nose. Anything to bring a competitor or future enemy down a notch.

“I am Groot,” Groot suggests, weaving a flower out of his own body and offering it to the group.

“You’re the only one who can do that,” Rocket interjects with an eyeroll. Pearl’s gaze flies to his like some kind of small silver bird looking for a place to land, and she gifts him with one of those soft looks — admiring, he could almost think; maybe even close to adoring, and just for him. It makes something under his collarbone quiver, and his throat suddenly cinches closed. He flexes his fingers and shakes out his fists, trying to loosen the tightness under his fur. “F’you’re gonna gamble for something that’s not money, gamble for favors.”

Pearl’s eyes widen and then that kitten-smile of hers breaks open like the prettiest frickin’ dawn he’s ever seen. “Favors? What made you think of that?”

He swallows and lets himself drift closer to the semicircle of idiots. “I. Uh. I stowed away on a Ravager ship for a while.” He wedges himself between Nebula and pearl — the cyborg’s far too close to her to be safe, for fuck’s sake. “That’s what they did. Losers would end up cleaning out the sewage line at the next compost stop, or giving up a shoreleave so someone else could visit an Ore Garden brothel. Sometimes you’d take sleep-shift guard duty for a cycle. Or sometimes you’d win against a guy who did a real good job sewing, and he’d patch up your uniform and ten pairs of underwear. Or — there was some chick who could re-sole boots. Everyone wanted to get favors from her, but she was a sharp player. Only saw her lose twice, and they were low bets.”

“So I can gamble to have my manacles unlocked?” Nebula questions, one brow raised.

“Not a frickin’ chance,” he responds easily, not even sparing her a glance. He feels his stare turn syrupy now, suddenly clinging to pearl. Fuck. Why hadn’t he thought of this before? He’s gonna win so many favors from her. He’s not sure what he’ll do with ‘em once he has them — he’s pretty sure pearl’s already willing to do just about anything he asks — but still.

Suddenly, the risk of sitting with them feels worth it. He lowers himself — cautiously — to the blanket. He can feel the soft prickle of meadow grass beneath the fabric, giving way under the pressure of his palms.

He wins round after round that night. He’s got no qualms against cheating, even when the Luphomoid begins to watch him with narrow and suspicious eyes. By the time they’re done, he’s got Groot promising to help bring in the next oversized bounty Rocket wants to pick up, and Drax pouting while he agrees to empty out the kitchen compost and recycling compactors when they get to Knowhere, and Nebula conceding to some favor as yet undetermined — not that he’d trust her enough to ask her for one. And pearl — pretty pearl has also promised him something he’ll call in at a later date.

I want to kiss you like that.

For a second he imagines her with swollen, glossy-slick lips, bleary-eyed and dreamy, swaying on her knees while she waits for him to fuck her gorgeous mouth. Pulling her head into his lap by a fistful of silky lilac curls and telling her, convince me you want it, sweetheart. Be a good girl and fucking beg.

And pearl — being pearl, and owing him a favor — she’d nuzzle right into the fur of his thighs and his abdomen with her lips parted. Maybe she’d look at him with that admiring, almost-adoring stare he’s starting to get addicted to — all big-eyed and full of awe and sweetness, melting into need — and she’d say, I want it so bad, Rocket — I want it. I want it.

I want to kiss you like that.

Of course, it would be one thing if he could convince himself that he was only doing this for the chance to snatch up pearl’s sexual favors. Unfortunately, sitting with this weird little circle of morons — first for one game, and then for dinner the next day, and then for meals and stories and more gambling, more gifts — it all calls something both familiar and strange into his lungs. Like a wisp of clean smoke, it curls gently through his ribcage, winding in-between all his bones. Sometimes he startles to realize that his shoulders are loose — that his teeth and fingers aren’t clenched. Rocket always runs hot — like a frickin’ volcano, like a firestorm or a forge—

But this just feels warm, as if all his ridges and scars and sharp edges are turning into something malleable, as soft as the rime of molten wax left in a tin votive to the Sybila Nix Ora.

He tries to sneer when he notices it. As if this were… what? Some kind of domestic scene? More like a joke: what do you get when you cross a monster, a stolen bride, the last talking tree in the universe, a vengeful Kylosian, and a shackled war criminal? The answer is not a family, he reminds himself with sudden disgust. He’s tried that before — with L06 and A95, with Lylla, with the Captain and Kraglin and Tullk.

It’s not a family. But it’s starting to feel like one. And as much as he tries, his annoyance at the fact doesn’t have enough bite to make it stop. So when it’s time to leave Alon-Gim, he can’t help but feel a little twist of regret. But there’s no excuse to stay, he growls at himself: he’s already stripped all the gold plating and reconfigured the cannon-controls as planned, then procrastinated by rerouting the flight controls too. He’d always intended to make that happen — smugly pleased for no reason at the idea of the Dreadnought being capable of flight and combat from both the main flightdeck and the gunmaster’s three-sixty — but he’d meant to wait till they were safely on Fron to manage that last project.

Now he’s done, and pretty much anything else he wants to do will require more supplies. And while Alon-Gim is nice — empty and peaceful, if a person happened to like overgrown ghost-towns and sparsely-forested hills — it’s still too close to the High Evolutionary for the Monster’s tastes.

Plus, it doesn’t make sense to keep hauling Drax and Nebula around.

They hit the stars when he can’t justify lingering any longer. He’s more leery about letting Nebula out and about inside the Dreadnought, but pearl is a convincing little negotiator when she wants to be. While he keeps the cyborg in her shackles and chains, he lets himself be persuaded to lock her to a table in the canteen or commons for a few hours each shift, and their weirdly-domestic evening rituals continue from inside the ship.

“You’re sure we can’t just drop her off on Knowhere with Drax?” he asks pearl one night, when they’re just a single rotation away from Knowhere — practically close enough to smell the stink of the mines and the drunks, Rocket thinks. Luckily, he’s got pearl here huddled under the threadbare covers, cocooned as cute as one of those Foresterian moonmoths with the fluffy antennae — and she only smells like waterlilies and clean water and amber. Maybe when they land on Knowhere, he’ll borrow another pair of her panties so he can keep smelling her instead of rotting celestial brain matter. He thumbs at one of her nipples, considering. “Those two got that whole go-after-the-other-daughter thing. Maybe they’ll be fine together.”

Pearl scrunches her nose at him in a sassy little expression that makes him want to pinch her nipple in retribution.

“Unleashing Drax and Nebula — together, on the galaxy — seems like its own kind of war crime,” she muses, startling a snicker out of him. He does pinch then, forcing a little yelp out of her, and grinning at the instinctive hitch of hips.

“You’re really pushing this whole brat thing,” he drawls, though it’s a lie. Everytime she shows that thread of a backbone, he just wants to reward her. Twice as much when her pupils bloom in her moonsilver irises: little lovely eclipses, like they are right now. She licks her lower lip, and it glistens like it’s waiting to be bitten.

“You could… punish me again?” she suggests breathily, her lashes suddenly heavy on her eyes.

For fuck’s sake, he thinks. The only reason he doesn’t think he must’ve died and gone to some kind of heaven is because he knows he’d never deserve one of the better afterlifes.

“I could,” he agrees, all mock-consideration. “Maybe tie you up, nice and tight. Gag you with those panties, finally.”

She shifts under the covers — rubbing her thighs together, he thinks. He tries not to groan.

“Or,” she offers cautiously, like she thinks he’s going to say no to whatever’s about to come out of her gorgeous mouth, “you could teach me to kiss you.” Her cheeks are scintillating-bright and his own eyes flare down to hers, locking on to those blown-out, starless pupils. “To, uhm—” Her face screws up, like she’s trying to remember something she’d heard, once. “—to suck your dick.”

For fuck’s sake.

He manages to arch a brow, even if his next words come out throaty and strangled. “You think that’s a punishment, kitten?” It could be, he supposes — but in his fantasies, she wants his cock in her mouth so bad she’s crying for it, kneeling with her pretty lips parted and needy, hands fisted in the fabric of his pants or clenched pleadingly on his thighs, the same way she’d gripped him that night he’d been seated on her ribs in the Arete—

No, he thinks sharply, hitching a breath that immediately has pearl’s brow crimping with concern. Not like the Arete, not at all—

He knows he doesn’t deserve that fantasy. He’s already had his chance at more sweetness than some lifeforms ever get a glimpse at. But—

I want to kiss you like that.

“No,” she says, the word soft and quick. “I want to.”

I want to. I want to.

Her lashes flutter lazily. “Please.” She licks her lips again, and his eyes track the pink tip of her tongue like a lodestar. He can feel her fingers, shyly tracing the waistband of his sleep-pants. His breath hitches and he casts his eyes up and around the glass room. The idea of her on her knees at the edge of the bed makes his fists want to curl, and he channels the urge into another rough tug on her nipple. She gasps, then wriggles against him.

The only problem is that the floor’s all platinum-plated sheet metal. Better than the grates of the runabout: smooth on her bare humie feet while she pads softly around the captain’s quarters in her stupid shorts and a t-shirt, or — better — her panties and one of those fluffy cardigans. Still, he doesn’t want her kneeling on metal while she’s got her head between his thighs.

“When we’re in Knowhere,” he says, “we need to find some shit for this room. Rugs, cushions, whatever.”

She blinks at the change in subject, and he fumbles.

“Something for your knees,” he mutters under his breath, eyes siding away. There’s a hush under the glass dome, echoing like the whispered crush of soft waves against the walls. Like all the stars are holding their breath, waiting. He shifts uncomfortably, and the inside of her wrist brushes his hipbone. “So when you — if you’re on your knees—“

Her eyes — dark hematite in the shadows — suddenly flare like molten silver as she puts the pieces together, and a soft gasp tumbles up her throat.

“Oh,” she says.

“You don’t gotta kneel,” he says quickly. “Floor’s too hard. Can do it up here, f’you still want. Lay down on your belly between my—“

But she’s shaking her head, pupils sweetening even further. “I don’t need — I want to be on my knees for you, Rocket.”

The rush of blood and the press of his baculum bone has his dick jutting against the soft curve of her tit, eyes blurring. Shit, he thinks flatly. She’s already drawing away, though: gaze sweeping the cold room, lighting on the little sitting area in the far edge of the glass dome. There are two overstuffed chairs — the coziest things in this barren room besides the bed, Rocket notes grimly. They’re tilted toward each other, with a plasma-orb lamp between them, and a small little throw-rug that looks more voluminous than it is.

Pearl’s fingers lace through his and tug, her eyes wide and shimmery. She’d had the same look on her face that night on Arete, right after he’d fucked her — before he’d put his foot on her, he remembers with a sharp sting to his metal breastbone. And again, that first night in the runabout, when she’d been perched all damp and sweet in his bunk.

How’re you feeling, sweetheart?

Excited.

Baffled, still distracted by the hardness in his pants, he lets her pull him to the edge of the mattress and off the massive bed. He trails after her, fingers twined together gently, as she guides him to one of the chairs and then sinks to her knees on the rug. His gaze is trapped by hers when she meets him at eye-level, her cheeks growing warm and rosy as she tilts her head toward one of the chairs. “Show me how, Rocket? Please?”

His ears flick and his tail twitches side-to-side.

Yeah.

Yeah, okay, kitten.

Whatever you fuckin’ want.

He’s in the chair before he tells himself to move, not sure whether he’s staggered or stumbled or leapt. And for fuck’s sake, if she doesn’t look somehow even prettier from this angle. She’d knelt beside him while he’d worked in the runabout’s engine room, and on the landing deck on Sovereign — but looking down at her like this? Watching her lick her lips nervously, shoulders trembling as she tries to smooth down her breathing?

Fuck. Fuck. He’s gonna come as soon as she wraps that pretty mouth around him. Maybe sooner.

She turns toward him and tentatively touches her fingertips to the slopes of his kneecaps, delicately stroking the soft fabric of his pants. Her eyes dip to follow her own fingertips, plucking nervously at the cloth.

“Can you—? Please?”

For just a moment, there’s a thread of misgiving, sewing its way up his spine. He remembers how quiet and alone she’d looked, wrapped in scratchy Sovereign quilts in the alcove a few rotations earlier. He remembers the realization of how lonely she must’ve been. He’s known for cycles now that pearl deserves better than anything he’s got to offer.

But for now, isn’t this okay? She wants it, right? Wants him? Maybe she’d choose someone else if she had more options, but for now — for now—

But then she turns her eyes up to him, big and needy, and he finds himself stomping any remaining reluctance to the ground. He doesn’t deserve this, and she deserves better, but he’s gonna fuckin’ take it anyway.

“Shirt off,” he rasps. “Panties too.”

She blinks, then rushes to shimmy his too-small t-shirt up over her head, arms briefly trapped in the tight, tiny sleeves. Her tits jiggle softly as she wiggles free, pink nipples bouncing. He flicks his tongue against the tip of one canine, already imagining the dove-softness of her areola between his teeth. He’ll suck on her tits as hard as she sucks on his dick, he promises himself fervently. The thoughts shatter as she tips onto one hip, untangling her panties from her legs and off her ankles, and then pulls herself back up to sit nakedly between his knees.

She shivers. Her nipples had already been firm and pebbled up — so sweetly — but they harden further in the chill.

This isn’t fair either, of course. He knows that. He’s still taking advantage of her loneliness, her need to be touched, and constantly making her get naked for him while he’s—

Frickin’ hideous, he thinks, biting back a snarl.

Eat it up while it lasts.

“Rocket?” she says, and it’s almost a little mew: uncertain and eager, all at once.

He shuffles back on his hips, unsnapping the button over his tail and tugging his waistband down around his hips, gripping his cock at the base and guiding it out of his pants. He shoves his shirt back and out of the way. “Gimme that mouth, sweetheart.”

She edges forward on her knees and if that’s not the hottest thing he’s ever seen—

“Can I—“ Her words trail off apprehensively. “Can I lick you?”

He swallows. “Yeah, doll. Do whatever you fuckin’ want—“

The tip of her pink tongue parts her pretty lips and as soon as she touches it to him, all his nerves jump and snap and shatter. She jumps too — startled by the jolt of his body and the savage ripple across his fur. Panicked silver eyes bolt to his.

“Did I hurt you?” she demands, stricken, and he tries to snicker but it cracks apart in his throat.

“Fuck no, pearl.” He swallows again. “Keep — keep fuckin’ doin’ that.”

She chews her lip, then dips her head toward him again. Her eyes are still on his, big and luminous and moon-gray, and he clenches his fists into the waistband still bunched in his claws. The sight of her there — hands lightly resting on his knees, glossy lips parted, pupils blown wide and locked on him — is enough to have his thigh muscles straining already. Pearl keeps her tongue soft and pliant, letting it pillow the narrow length of his cock as she draws it upward from root to head. She almost curls it around the blunt tip, soft as wet flower petals, and he hisses a breath in through his teeth.

“Fuck—“ He pants, eyes wide at how quickly he already feels the telltale cramp in his abdomen, the involuntary hitch in his hips. “Kitten — fuck—“

She adjusts, scooting forward and leaning into him. Her nipples rub against his shins as she sinks a little closer to his lap, letting her lips wrap around him from the side, clinging to the curved shape of him. The sleek, flat front of her humie teeth bump gently against him: too glossy-smooth to be remotely dangerous, and so artless that the action drags a rumbling, growling groan up over his ribs. Her eyelids flutter like butterfly wings before she closes them — like she enjoys the flavor of him, like she’s savoring having him in her mouth.

Rocket shudders. “Good,” he gasps. “Good fuckin’ girl—“

Pearl pulls back, resting on her haunches, and he holds his breath and forces himself to stay still while she — studies his dick, like she’s trying to figure out the best way to approach it. Hesitantly, she rises up on her knees, hands braced against his thighs, and carefully lowers her mouth over the tip. His eyes roll back in his head as she swirls her tongue around him. When she tries an experimental suck, his hips buck right off the chair and it’s all he can do to not scramble.

“Fuck, kitten, you—“

“Was that wrong?” Her voice is so raw and worried and small.

I know you said I wasn’t good for you.

And I’m sorry.

He slams the hatch on that memory. “Princess, no. Fuck. You’re perfect, remember? Just—“

“Can you show me?” she asks softly. “The best way? What you like?”

He stares at her through dazed eyes and hesitates, then lifts one hand slowly. He cups the palm up toward her — almost a gesture of submission, if it weren’t for the way he then cradles the top of her head, lacing his dark claws into her glossy blue curls as he tugs her forward. With his other hand, he taps his cock gently against her plush lips.

“Slow for now, sweetheart,” he mutters, his voice like a shadow. “Take your time. Watch the teeth.”

When her mouth sinks over him — all pillowy wet silk — he tilts his head back and knocks the top of his skull against the chair, a litany of curses skittering up his spine. She hesitates partway in and he doesn’t rush her — just rests his hand on the crown of her head and manages to utter hoarsely,

“Breathe through your nose, sweetness. Your mouth feels so — f-fuck — you don’t gotta go all the way down; you can use your hand on the base—“

He feels the warm insides of her cheeks shift as she swallows, but before he can tell her it’s okay, baby, you can drip; extra’s always good; lemme see you drool on my cock, princess — she sinks down suddenly. Her nose brushes the soft fur of his abdomen, and his voice cracks off while his eyes rove the glass and the stars dizzily. He’s just long enough to hit the back of her tongue and there’s a brief second where he feels her fluttering panic around the tip of his dick — all sleek and wet and warm.

“Easy, sweetheart,” he chokes out. For the first time since he’s met her, Rocket’s grateful that he’s smaller than the average humie. “Relax. You don’t gotta—”

But she adjusts quickly, the panicked pulse of her mouth slowing as she tries to take his advice. Her fingers curl and clutch in the fabric covering his thighs and he digs his heels back into the chair, trying not to thrust against her soft, perfect tongue. Slowly, she draws back — not sucking, her lips just lingering over him lovingly. His hand spasms against the crown of her head when her lips float off him, so glossy and sweet that he shudders.

“Was that—“

“Fuck,” he repeats for what’s gotta be the hundredth time, his heels still buried deep into the upholstery. He drags his eyes back down to her just in time to see his pearl wince.

Fuck, he thinks yet again, and realizes he’s got her hair knotted in his fist — realizes he’s one more openmouthed kiss on his dick away from cradling her beautiful head in his hands and fucking her mouth he’s been possessed by a particularly-overzealous Klyntar. He wrenches his hand open, releasing all that riversoft silk, and scrambles back away from her so fast that she loses her grasp on his knees and tumbles against the edge of the seat between his thighs.

“We have to work out—“ Why hadn’t he thought of this? “If I do something you don’t like, you have to—“

“My safeword,” she says immediately, leaning back on her heels to look up at him like the most submissive little sweetheart he’s ever frickin’ seen. Ore Garden courtesans ain’t got nothing on her, and he feels something in his chest that wants to loosen and flutter away, right on the manufactured breeze of the Dreadnought’s fancy ventilation system.

He clamps it down.

“Can’t say your safeword when you’ve got a mouthful of cock, kitten,” he rasps, and he means for it to sound playful, but it comes out so dry and sharp that he flinches and thumbs the corner of his mouth — checking for blood, suddenly certain he’s cut himself on the words. “Here,” he rushes, slipping the brush of his tail from where he’s had it safely tucked by his side in the chair. He combs his fingers through it, suddenly self-conscious, and then drapes it toward her — letting the tip flick against the back of her hand.

Too tenderly, he thinks, and forces the thing to stop moving.

“Grab onto that,” he orders bitterly. Resentfully — not of her, he doesn’t think.

Well, maybe.

Her hand hesitates where it’s landed against his knee again, and then flutters toward him like a reluctant little bird. Her fingers stroke delicately, and he doesn’t look up from the sight — even when he can feel her eyes on him, questioning.

When he doesn’t respond — can’t tear himself away from the sight of her fingers petting one of his most vulnerable appendages — she carefully bracelets it with loose, loving fingers.

“Like this?” she asks cautiously.

He grits his teeth against the little sparks that prickle up his spine.

“F’you’re gonna suck my dick, you need to—“ His jaw clenches. “F’you need me to stop and you can’t talk, you pull on that. Hard as you can.”

Her hand snaps away from him so hard and quick that it cracks against her sternum with a solid thump and she rocks backward, tumbling onto her ass. He looks up at her finally, spellbroken — only to get stuck like tears in those stricken, starsilver eyes.

He feels his own eyes narrow, the corners of his mouth pull back in a silent half-snarl. “Better for you to pull the whole damn thing off than—“

“I’m not going to hurt you,” she squeaks, every breath a protest piling up in her lungs like rubble. Her chest is heaving, and there — there’s the disgust and revulsion he’s been waiting to see on her face, except he knows it’s not directed where it should be. It’s not directed at him.

“If I’m being a frickin’ gen’leman or whatever, you won’t need to,” he tells her flatly — uncompromising. “You promise, kitten, or you don’t get to have my dick in your mouth.”

Like it’s a fuckin’ favor he’s doing her. Please. It’s fuckin’ laughable.

“Y-you—“ She stammers, but for once she doesn’t sound timid — just appalled. And maybe, almost — mad. “You make it sound like you’re going to kill me with—“

“Won’t,” he interrupts, rigid, “but that doesn’t mean you’re gonna like every second of it. And if you don’t—“

“I’m not pulling your tail!” she cries out, like the words hurt her as much as the action could hurt him. Worse, maybe. He sucks in a breath and slits his eyes at her.

“Then I don’t get a blowjob,” he says, forcing his voice to sound easy, forcing down the bile in his chest. His mouth tastes sour, but it’s not disappointment. It’s something else — something he can’t name. “And that’s frickin’ fine,” he adds, and means it — he needs her to know. “But if you can’t hang onto my frickin’ tail—”

“I won’t,” she swears, and she sounds as close to furious as he’s ever heard her. He can tell when she tries to soften her voice. “I don’t understand. We have the safeword, and I trust you. And we didn’t have a safeword the first time, and you wanted to kill me then, and it was fine. It was — I told you, I liked it. And now you’re already always being so careful of me—“

That moon-damned night on the Arete is never gonna stop haunting him. The thread of misgiving that had already been wound into a knot at the base of his spine suddenly flares and swells — an infection waiting to spring to life.

“Little Miss Always-Asking-To-Get-Gagged-and-Stuffed isn’t willing to dish out a little pain herself?” he sneers, and his stomach revolts before he even knows what words are going to claw their way up his throat. “Little Miss—“ He pitches his voice high and mean. “—Please-Spank-My-Pretty-Pink-Pussy can’t give as good as she tries to get?”

His pearl goes ash-gray, the color leeching from her tawny-pink skin faster than he can vomit up his own words. The toxicity he’s spewing — it’s not even an accurate reflection of reality, but he knows his words are piercing right into the core of all the conversations he’s avoided so far. Unfair of him, he knows — to try to shift all his shame onto her shoulders, to try to make her want to avoid it too — but once he sinks his teeth in, his jaw locks, and he can never let go.

No matter how much he wants to.

“That — that’s different,” she protests, but her lips are bloodless and pale.

His claws sink into the arms of the chairs and he levies himself out of it, sneering down at her while he yanks up his pants, covering himself once more. He leans over her, ominous and venomous, and bares his teeth. “How?”

“Because I liked it!” she tells him, that little flicker of fight back in her voice. “And I trust you. And you—“

“And I what, princess?” he snarls.

Her brow furrows and her voice goes soft once more, but she only looks more — distraught. “You wouldn’t like it,” she says at last. “It would only make you feel like — like shit.”

Ah, he thinks sardonically. A rare pearl curse-word. This must be where things get serious.

“And you don’t trust me,” she adds, and her voice tumbles quietly at the end. “I don’t need to hurt you to — I don’t want to hurt you just for—“

Part of him reels back at that — a reaction so visceral that his feet scramble at the slippery-soft rug she’s still half-kneeling on, and yeah, it does suddenly feel like the Arete all over again. Suddenly he’s launching himself at her — not thinking, just acting. She squeals and tries to scramble back — not playing, this time; just reacting — but he grasps one ankle and drags her toward him, flipping her beneath him again, just like that night — but careful, this time; so frickin’ careful. He pins her with his hands on her waist and his knees biting into the backs of her thighs. She struggles beneath him for a moment, panicked — and then melts.

“Rocket,” she whimpers. “What—”

He stares at the mark on her ass: the pale half-lemniscate, somehow more heinous than any of the other scars he’s given her. A memorial to his intention to sign her — to sign off on her death, her misery, her hurt. It’s the first time he’s seen it since he’d had her fuck her own fingers on the runabout, before Groot had come aboard. Some small part of him suddenly wonders if, subconsciously, this is why he’s kept her panties on every time he’s fucked her from behind.

He’s already reached out to trace the moon-pale scar with a finger before he realizes his hand is shaking. He grits his teeth, and forces the point of his claw — filed these days, but still sharp enough to do damage if it needs to — to trail the curve of it.

“I can’t trust you,” he rasps, and his voice is strangled with rage and something more painful. “You can’t fuckin’ take care of yourself.” He tilts his voice again, sniping, mimicking her. “You should move that. Just in case.”

The silver hairpin.

“If I can’t trust you to do what needs to be done to protect yourself — even from me — then we don’t do any of this,” he snarls.

She’s flat underneath him like a pressed flower, pinned to the floor. He swears to himself that he’ll let her go if she tries to get away from him again, but she doesn’t — she just twists to look at him over her shoulder. He can feel himself baring his teeth: fur bristling, body suddenly trembling.

“Rocket,” she breathes, so softly that he can tell there’s already forgiveness in her voice, and it only makes his blood run hotter and more furious. “That was the first time. That was different. And I—”

“You keep telling me you’ll do what you gotta do—”

“I will—”

“—but you won’t even do this, like a little tail-pull matters—”

“Because it’s not necessary, and I don’t want to hurt you—”

“—as if you hadn’t dragged who-knows-how-many animals right to his—”

His teeth snap shut. Later, he’ll be amazed he’d managed to stop himself at all. But it’s too late — the damage is done. He can see it in the slow widening of her stunned moonsilver eyes, feel it in the way her body goes stiff beneath him — panicked, wounded. Everything around them suddenly goes silent. Even the vent-shafts aren’t pumping air.

And then she’s twisting, fighting him just as hard as she had the first time he’d dropped her to her knees in the Arete. From some great distance — lightyears; no, jump-points away — he forces himself to carefully release her. To back off — palms upright in surrender — as she scrambles away from him, so naked and vulnerable that the sting of regret blossoms into a full-blown ache that consumes his entire body. It vibrates right from his manufactured heart down to all his broken, malformed fingers and toes. Hell, even his tail — so glossy lately thanks to pearl’s tasty kindnesses — feels heavy and stepped-on and mangled. It droops, lacking the energy to even tuck Itself protectively into the inside of his ankle.

“Pearl,” he says slowly as she fumbles herself back into her panties, her shirt. No, his shirt. The words dry up on his tongue, though. I didn’t mean it, something inside him suddenly howls and claws. I take it back.

I fucking take it back. I swear.

She staggers to her feet while he watches — rifling frantically through her drawers in the alcove, pulling out a pair of leggings — the fleece-lined ones for Fron — and two cardigans.

I’m so fuckin’ sorry.

“Where’re you going?” he asks instead, the words harsh and bitten — far more knifelike than he’d intended.

She hazards a look up at him: wide haunted eyes through a drape of tangled curls.

“I don’t know,” she says only, her voice hushed and stumbling. She tucks a set of socks into the pocket of her cardigan and slides barefoot into her little lilac-colored boots, rushing. “I just need—“

The words rip from him, snarling and sharp-toothed. “Figured it was only a matter of time anyway.”

Her brow, already crimped with hurt, creases further. Her eyes search his — desperate — tears shimmering and wetting her lashes. “What?”

Shut the fuck up, he thinks at himself, so furious his blood feels like it’s burning. Shut up shut up shut up—

“Till this whole stupid sham was over,” he growls, and now his claws join in the mutiny against his brain: gesturing to her, to himself, to the space between them. To the bed and the room and the whole beautiful and forever sky around them.

She flinches. “I just — I just need to think, and I can’t with you looking at me like—“

His lip curls, teeth on display. Ears flattened back, tail rigid and bristling, shoulders tense. Fists clenched. “Like what?” he sneers, and she chokes.

“Like I’m a monster,” she breathes out. His muscles, all locked in aggression — in defensiveness — suddenly snap into themselves and he recoils.

Pearl. No.

He reaches out with one clawed hand — not that any of the words he wants to say are finding their way to his bloody, sharp-toothed mouth — but she’s already twisted herself down the narrow hallway, hidden from his sights. Like a snapped rotary belt, he suddenly finds it in himself to move: a clumsy rush toward the corridor. He tries to strangle out some sort of protest, some sort of apology — anything that isn’t poison.

But the door slides shut, and she’s gone.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

i'm sorry. tell me you forgive me
i love you

coming soon: chapter twenty-six. nodrophobia.
summary: the crew travels to knowhere. the experience is explosive.
warnings: this chapter uses descriptive imagery that may be reminiscent of residential and urban environments impacted by bombings, warfare, or natural disasters like earthquakes.
estimated date: wednesday, november six.

other exciting things:
♡ kinktober 2024 masterlist and posting schedule.
♡ monday, october 28. kinktober 2024. evasive maneuvers, part two. the bounty.
♡ thursday, october 31. kinktober 2024. you are cordially invited. oneshot.
♡ wednesday,november 6. cicatrix. chapter twenty-six. nodrophobia.

･:꧂posting schedules, chapter-previews, & more on tumblr♡
･:꧂masterlist & moodboard♡
･:꧂chapter one. nemotia of cicatrix scene by @frostedwitch
･:꧂portrait of pearl♡ by me!
･:꧂my fave rocket & pearl scene from chapter thirteen by me! ♡♡ (scroll down for the whole piece)
･:꧂ scrabbly lil pearl x rocket doodle by me!
･:꧂ adorable pearl x rocket selfie by starriidreams!
･:꧂ steamy/emotional pearl x rocket painting on "water lily" (lotus) fabric by hibatasblog/hibata♡♡♡

Chapter 26: nodrophobia.

Summary:

the crew travels to knowhere. the experience is explosive.

Notes:

warnings: this chapter uses descriptive imagery that may be reminiscent of residential and urban environments impacted by bombings, warfare, or natural disasters like earthquakes.

recap: chapter twenty-five. kairosclerosis.
sorry i feel like i should do a recap since there has been a bit of a gap since my last update. feel free to skip over this if you like!
Rocket, Drax, Groot, and pearl - even Nebula - enjoy a brief respite on Alon-Gim. Everything is very easy and domestic and even though Nebula's still a captive, she's spending more time with the crew. She and Rocket start to bond briefly over pearl's firearm practice. Rocket is starting to enjoy himself entirely too much, and the increasing attachment to his new crew makes him uncomfortable. He continues to enjoy his time (and relationship) with pearl, but also continues to punish himself. When pearl initiates a blow job, his tension rises. He reasons that she won't be able to use a safeword in this situation and demands she pull his tail instead if she gets uncomfortable, and she (predictably) resists the suggestion. He immediately launches into a panicked flurry of accusations regarding her apparent inability or unwillingness to protect herself, and - in a move he immediately regrets - uses her confession of bringing wounded animals to Wyndham against her. Pearl accuses him of looking at her "like [she's] a monster" and departs the captain's quarters.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

nodrophobia. the fear of irrevocable actions and irreversible processes—knowing that a colorful shirt will fade a little more with every wash, that your tooth enamel is wearing away molecule by molecule, never to grow back. Greek μονόδρομος (monódromos), one-way street + -φοβία (-phobía), fear. Pronounced “noh-droh-foh-bee-uh.” The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

“I am Groot?”

“I’m okay,” pearl responds, trying to twist out a small smile for her friend.

“You are not acting like yourself,” Drax notes. “Neither is my best friend Rocket.”

“You look like shit,” Nebula agrees from the table where she’s been chained. The fact that Rocket has even brought her out of the jackroom might seem like some sort of peace offering, but pearl’s not in the mood to read that much into it. She feels like shit, if she’s being honest — not that she would have worded it that way, herself. She’d slept on the floor of a closet in one of the empty officer’s rooms — or perhaps sleep is a generous term. Instead, without the will to go down to the massive linen locker to find blankets, she’d held herself in the darkness while useless rivers of salt had left diamond-dust tracks down her cheeks. She’d had blood on her tongue all night, washing away the smoky-sweet clean taste of Rocket and replacing it with iron and salt. She hadn’t been able to tell if it had come from her knee or her lip.

Eventually, she’d dozed off like a ghost in the darkness, forgetting itself and slipping out of existence, only to reawaken with the certainty that her breastbone had been split up the middle and that the only thing inside her was a cavernous, ice-crusted emptiness. Then she’d scurried nervously down to medbay and the various storage holds, trying desperately to lose herself in the monotony of frantic inventory Before she’d realized that she’d needed to make an appearance — somewhere — before Groot and Drax started worrying.

“I am Groot?” Groot tries again, gently.

Rocket makes some sound from the doorway of the galley, announcing his presence with something between a cough and a grunt, then sidling in to refill his coffee.

“We land skullside in a half-rotation,” he growls. His brow is furrowed, eyes glaring at anything they fall on — though, pearl notes, they seem to fall anywhere but her. He scowls, and spins on his heel, heading back to the hatch that will take him to the cockpit.

“Why are you being so weird, Fox?” Nebula rasps.

“I am Groot?” Groot wants to know.

Rocket sputters. “Fuck off. I’m not being weird.”

“You’re ignoring your kitten,” the Luphomoid says, raising her singular brow skeptically. Pearl feels her limbs trying to curl up and inward, like she can make herself a smaller target if she shrinks.

“The princess,” Drax corrects, and Rocket rolls his eyes.

“Maybe she’s ignoring me,” he says sharply. He turns his glower to Nebula. “And the name’s Rocket, as you well frickin’ know.”

“I am Groot,” Groot huffs. Pearl wishes the galley offered more places to hide, and wonders if she can casually duck inside the dish-sanitizing locker.

“I’m not ignoring you,” she says thinly. She doesn’t know what to offer beyond that. There are moments when she feels hollowed and carved open by the memory of how hateful his voice had been, even when his hand had been so carefully pressed to her scar like a kiss. And then there are moments when she lets herself feel—

Betrayed.

She’s not sure how to feel about that. Sometimes there’s nothing but tired resignation. Other times, it burns and stings. He’d told her he didn’t hate her for her complicity in Herbert’s crimes, and then—

But then again, she’d so gratefully believed him, without ever giving him a chance to process what she’d done. Maybe he’d just been trying to ignore it. To pretend it didn’t matter. To take care of her like he’s been doing since the minute she’d sunk her fingers into his fur and clung on — another burden weighing down his escape from HalfWorld.

“Either way, it’s awkward,” Nebula informs the room, turning back to her lunch. “Please stop.”

“You are even making the Daughter of Thanos uncomfortable,” Drax notes. “And she is used to disharmony.”

Nebula shrugs into her bowl of synth-fish and grain and yaro root, and doesn’t deny it.

Rocket, on the other hand, doesn’t acknowledge that pearl’s said anything at all. Maybe, if she didn’t already feel so guilty — maybe she’d be able to be angry about it. She looks for that pilot-light of outrage but the fact is, he isn’t wrong. Her fingers curl and uncurl — but deciphering whether they’re grasping a plea onto the vaguest shadow of companionship, or clenching into fists? That seems utterly beyond her.

“We land skullside in a half-rotation,” Rocket repeats. “Groot, I’ll give you a head’s up — but I want our prisoner here locked up in the jackroom before we enter the Collector’s airspace. And you stay on the ship, outta sight. Nobody should see you, but keep your Fuck-You-Disk on anyway.” His eyes flick to Drax. “Soon as we land, I’ll put in a transmission to the Collector and see if we can get an offer. He’ll probably wanna see your daggers first, so we’ll stick together till then.”

Pearl swallows. “I’m coming too.”

Rocket’s head swings toward her so slowly that she has to fight not to shrink back. It’s an ominous, deliberate movement, and she quails. His eyes, normally so warm they burn her, are flinty and cold. He tilts his head, and his lip curls derisively. “‘Course you are,” he drawls. “Why not? What could go wrong with a Terran princess who doesn’t know how to shoot, wandering around like a frickin’ tourist on Knowhere?”

She licks her lips. Lets her jaw jut. “I know how to shoot well enough.”

He snorts. “Debatable.”

“The Fox has a point,” Nebula offers up dryly.

Pearl can feel herself making a face — and that might be a first. She thinks she might’ve rolled her eyes. “I can shoot well enough to not hit an innocent bystander.”

“But you won’t,” Rocket snarls. “You won’t do what—”

“If I have to,” she says, and her voice is so sharp and snapping that even she jumps at the sound of it. Rocket blinks, and Drax and Groot stare at her with wide eyes. Only Nebula looks unimpressed, and that might just be because of her implants. “If I have to, I will. And if I don’t, then I won’t.”

His eyes glint dangerously, and then he rolls them and throws his hands up in the air. “Whatever. Bring your Disk and keep it turned on. I’ll get you a fuckin’ quadblaster before we leave the ship. And don’t mess around with the stun-shot, ‘cause you still can’t frickin’ aim right when you use it.” He tosses a narrow-eyed glance over his shoulder. “It’ll be lethal force only, sweetheart.”

The word drips disdain.

“Kill me,” Nebula deadpans. “Give me to the Kylosian. Anything is better than watching this.”

“Don’t frickin’ tempt me,” Rocket mutters, spinning on his heel.

“I would not kill her!” the Kylosian calls after him as he moves through the hatch. “I would make her take me to Gamora, Thanos’ Most-Favorite Daughter!”

“You’re an idiot,” Nebula informs him flatly, but Drax ignores her. He turns solemn blue eyes to pearl, who swallows and starts collecting dishes to put into the sanitizer.

“I don’t like this,” he tells her.

“I am Groot,” the Taluhnisan agrees.

“Whatever you’re fighting about is stupid,” Drax adds bluntly.

“We’re not even fighting,” pearl protests, and the words are a curled-up misery in her throat — small soft animals, hiding away to die. “At least — I don’t think we are.”

“For once, I agree with the Destroyer,” Nebula says. She props one elbow on the table and holds her hand out to pearl expectantly, palm up — waiting. Pearl doesn’t hesitate — just fishes a hand into her doubled-up cardigan pocket and pulls out three lozenges, handing them over. The Luphomoid tucks two into the hidden pouch in her wristguard and carefully untwists the foil on the third. “Stop fighting, or let me go,” Nebula rasps. “How can I be expected to tolerate your angst indefinitely?”

She mutters something about true torture under her breath, and pops the lozenge into her mouth.

“I am Groot,” Groot suggests gently.

“Princess.” The word, from Drax’s mouth, sounds consoling and urgent, as if he’s actually making some sort of supplication to royalty. Pearl flinches. “Can I give you some advice? About making up with my best friend Rocket?”

She closes the sanitizing locker, flustered, and leans back against the sink. “I — sure. Yes. I — thank you.”

“Coitus,” the Kylosian says solemnly, and nods once, firmly.

“Ebony Maw’s Left Tit,” Nebula mutters.

Pearl stares.

“When my wife Ovette and I would disagree, our whole village would feel the strain of our tension. The young adults would become short-tempered and prone to fighting amongst themselves. The neighbors’ babies would cry as if with colic.”

“Drax—”

“Even the elderly people would experience constipation,” he says urgently.

“I am Groot?” asks Groot.

“Our village shares our pain and distress and anger,” Drax tells her gently. “And princess, we are your village. For now, at least.”

She softens. “That’s — weirdly sweet, Drax, but—”

“So you must have sex with him,” Drax concludes. “Quickly. Please.”

That strange barking sound comes from Nebula again — a cracked, sharp laugh, bursting from her like it’s surprised her, like she doesn’t even know what it is.

“There was no argument between Ovette and I that could not be overcome with the bliss of conjugal relations,” Drax urges. “No quarrel that could not be resolved with the assistance of multiple orgasms. Even when we began sexual congress with anger in our hearts, furiously pleasuring each other while we raged—”

Pearl’s eyes grow wider and she presses cool fingers into her burning cheeks. “Drax, I—”

“—by our sixth respective climaxes, all of that vexation had turned into sensual delight and shared gratification. Do you understand?”

“I am Groot,” Groot utters, sounding awed. Pearl slides her hands upward, palms against her face, trying to press her blush back under her skin. She thinks she might actually be on fire. Maybe that should be preferable to the frigidity of the Dreadnought — especially without Rocket’s warmth — but for right now all she wants is to hide away in the cold-storage locker.

“I underst—”

“Nothing resolves conflict like teamwork,” the Destroyer says firmly. He tilts his head, studying her, then leans forward urgently as if he’s not sure she really gets it. “Especially when you are focused on giving each other the gift of repeated ejacu—”

“I take it back,” Nebula interrupts. “Don’t you dare give me to the Kylosian. Do whatever you want. Fight with the Fox. Lock me in the jackroom. Just don’t give me to the Kylosian.”

“He’s not a fox,” pearl protests weakly, grateful for the distraction. “I’m… going to go. Do… something. Groot, can you stay here with Nebula? Maybe play some cards or something, if she wants?”

“I am Groot.”

“He’s a terrible guard,” Nebula warns disgustedly as pearl turns and all but scurries to the hatch.

“Are you rushing to go copulate with Rocket right now?” Drax calls after her. “Please?”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Knowhere is beautiful, in a greasy and unwashed sort of way. Certainly, pearl has never seen anything like it. Nothing remotely similar existed on Terra, and Herbert would have cut her throat before letting her dirty herself in a place like this.

Still, there’s something strangely wondrous and lovely about the skull, pearl thinks. Inside is a forest of purple shadows, with flecks of calcium bone-dust floating in every halo of neon and platinum plasma-orb light. Buildings are carved into the inner slopes of the skull, and molded from bone-dust plaster. Lights glimmer through the murky haze wreathing the different levels, and even though it seems to be close to the sleep-shift on Knowhere, there are so many people out that it almost feels claustrophobic. Still, she’s entranced: all shapes and sizes, different appendages, a cacophony of languages that funnel through her universal translator or unfurl in her ears: sweet, and rasping, and slurring, and melodic, and harsh.

The barstool she’s perched on, right at the counter in the Boot of Jemiah, seems to be the best place to experience it all.

If only it weren’t for the low wrenching clench of misery, anyway.

“Watch it,” Rocket snaps, tugging her cardigan back over the makeshift holster he’d had her strap around her thigh. “You’re gonna get the frickin’ thing stolen before you even get a chance to use it—”

If I need to use it, she thinks mutinously, but doesn’t say.

“Try this,” Drax suggests loudly, plunking a giant stein down in front of her. Something that manages to be both tarry and foamy sloshes over the lip.

“She don’t need that.” Rocket’s words are sharp. “It’ll peel off her goddamn insides.”

She tilts her head and studies it curiously, raising her voice to be heard over the tumult of voices around them. “Really?”

“Nah,” says the barkeep distractedly, wiping down the counters with two hands and pouring drinks with the other three. Jemiah himself, pearl remembers. “But I doubt you’ve got the — hey! Shitbags! No feeding the—” He curses, and flips up part of the counter to stalk out toward a mass of gamblers gathered around a table a few strides away.

“You ain’t got the constitution for it,” Rocket finishes for him, sneering into his own drink.

Pearl stares at the stein longingly, and then swipes a finger through the sludgy foam and pops it in her mouth.

And chokes.

“It’s good, is it not?” Drax asks eagerly, voice raised over the chaos, and Rocket cackles.

“It tastes like—” She breaks off, at a loss. She’s surprised wisps of smoke don’t twist from her mouth.

“Like someone poured old engine grease on a pile of orloni shit and lit it all on fire,” Rocket supplies and takes a swig of his own stein before raising a challenging brow in her general direction. “You prob’ly ain’t used to anything but fancy, watered-down wines, huh?”

Her belly turns over, wistfulness and loss and grief and guilt and something stinging and angry, too. That pilot-light she’d found on Cyxlore. She knows she’s being unwise — childish, even, but when has she had a chance to be childish before? — when she picks up the heavy stein with both hands and drinks.

She’s used to taking small sips — but fuck etiquette, she thinks stubbornly, with a sharp glint of ferocity as her mind stumbles over the curse. She forces herself to relax, to see how much she can gulp down in one go—

“Frickin’ — stop,” Rocket snarls, yanking her arm away from her mouth. The stein, off-kilter, tips and splashes the countertop and her survivor with booze.

Her survivor. It still feels impossible to think of him as anything else.

Then the aftertaste kicks in and she hunches, trying not to gag.

“For fuck’s sake,” Rocket scowls, just loud enough for her to hear him. Someone pushes behind them, and pearl feels herself get nudged against the bar by a wayward elbow. “I wasn’t trying to be a dick. That shit’s strong. It’s gonna knock you on your ass.”

“You weren’t?” she wonders over the noise, and doesn’t bother to hold back the doubt and hurt in her voice.

If he winces, she doesn’t catch it in the dim lights and chaos. He mumbles something under his breath and then glowers up at her. “Nope. I come by it all-natural.” He rolls his eyes. “You should go back to the ship before that drink kicks in. A whole stein of that’ll fuck up a full-grown Frost Giant, and you just downed a full-quarter at least.”

She tilts her chin and looks away, toward the table where the crowd of miners jostle and shove at each other. “I have to make my own mistakes.”

Rocket snorts. “Woulda thought you’d made enough of those since you met me,” he mutters darkly, and she turns her eyes to him — apprehensive, questioning. His own eyes burn at her bitterly, then flick away. She feels her lower lip tremble, and she presses her mouth closed tightly.

“Nothing I’ve done with you was a mistake,” she says, keeping her voice low but hoping he can hear her through the din. She lets her resignation wreathe the words, not bothering to hide it as she turns her stare back to the cracked, bottle-stacked mirror behind the bar. It’s too crowded and splintered for her to be able to get a good look at his reflection, and everything seems strangely swimmy anyway. “I’m only sorry if you regret it.”

From her periphery, she thinks she sees his ears flicker. He swipes the back of one dark hand across the end of his nose. It’s a tell, she knows — a glimpse into his feelings — but she can’t remember what it’s supposed to mean.

“I regret it,” he grunts. “Pretty much every frickin’ day.”

Her belly twists and she sucks in a sharp, pained breath, shoulders hunched. The air tastes like ash and chalk and calcium, burnt everbloom and sweat and the sharp sting of alcohol.

And tears, she thinks.

Rocket’s ears flatten. “That’s not—”

“I heard you say regret,” Drax shouts over the cacophony. “Does this mean you’re making up? Finally?”

“No,” Rocket snaps. She wants to wilt against the bartop, but she stiffens her spine instead. For a moment, she considers tapping into the cold that lives at the root of her spine — letting that iciness take her over. It’s not that she doesn’t feel when she pretends to be M’dame Lavenza, but everything is a little more muted, and she gets to imagine she’s in control of something — of herself, at least. When she reaches for it, though, she finds herself clumsy and fumbling, like the thread of M’dame Lavenza is slipping through numb fingers.

Huh. Maybe that should worry her. She considers the stein in front of her and takes another sip.

Then gags.

“But it’s been hours,” Drax pouts.

“Bastards,” Jemiah mutters, coming back behind the bar, sounding furious. He doesn’t look at them as he whips out a towel with his fifth arm, wiping down the counter where her drink has spilled. “They’re trying to fix the bets by feeding the f’saki.”

She feels herself brighten. “There are f’saki here?”

“No, pearl.”

“Over at the betting tables,” Drax shouts over the noise, like he hadn’t even heard Rocket. “Would you like to see, princess?”

“Abso-frickin’-lutely not,” Rocket snaps, louder this time.

“A bunch of them have just been fed,” Jemiah says moodily. “Don’t know which ones, but it means they’ll be slower on the table.”

“On the table?” pearl asks, fascinated. “The f’saki, you mean? Are they the woolly kind or the scaled—”

“You’re not going to the tables, princess,” Rocket snarls.

“I will take her and keep her safe,” Drax volunteers.

“She’s not going—”

“Why not?” pearl asks. No, demands, she thinks. She tries to mimic Rocket’s scowl. “You told me to not to ask, to make demands, and I want—”

“You do not want,” Rocket corrects her, glaring again.

“Oh, let her bet,” Jemiah says from behind the counter, only half-paying attention. “Just keep the amount small—”

“What are we betting on?” she asks, craning her neck to try and see around the crowd of pushy patrons, hoping for a glimpse of the small animals.

“It’s not the betting I’m worried about,” Rocket grinds out to Jemiah, and then turns back to pearl. She might be imagining it, but she thinks something in his face softens. “You’re drunk, sweetheart, and I promise, you don’t want—”

“We bet on which orloni will survive the longest when hungry f’saki are unleashed upon them,” Drax says simply.

Pearl’s stomach lurches. “What?”

“It’s why we don’t feed the f’saki for a while,” Jemiah adds. “Makes ‘em more aggressive.”

“Hey, Jemiah! We need refills!” another patron calls out, and the bartender sweeps away. Pearl’s eyes whip toward the gambling tables, and she slides off the barstool. The world suddenly staggers around her, and she’s pretty sure she hears Rocket curse.

“Sit back down, kitten — when Jemiah comes back, we’ll get you a Cure—”

She frowns, searching the crowd for a way through. “I don’t think you get to call me that when you don’t even like me,” she says distractedly, and he abruptly falls silent. She shakes her head — trying to clear it of the haloes and cobwebs of light — but it just makes the floor spin beneath her. Her hands float outward as she tries to find her balance.

“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” Rocket demands.

“Are they in cages?” she asks Drax, and the Kylosian blinks down at her. “It’s not fair,” she adds, “that I have to look up at you even when you’re sitting and I’m standing.” She frowns. “I am standing, right?”

“Don’t answer that,” Rocket snaps at Drax.

“Why not?” the Kylosian asks, baffled. “Why would you want to hide that she is standing?”

“No,” her survivor growls. “The other thing.”

“Are they in cages?” she asks, not sure if she’d remembered to say it out loud. Without warning, her eyes suddenly fill with tears and she has to blink them back, lashes fluttering while she scrubs at them. “The f’saki and the orloni?”

Drax blinks. “They are.”

“For fuck’s sake. Now she’s gonna start crying — Jemiah!” Rocket calls out. “We need a frickin’ Cure over here—!”

There’s a chorus of boos and heckling from a handful of nearby tables, but pearl’s already spotted her way through the twisting mass of enormous bodies. She hates that Rocket’s right — that she’s already sniffling — but she’s not stuck anymore. She’s not trapped on the Homonoia, unable to do more than behave herself and hope that it can prevent someone’s death. She’s not some little idiot who doesn’t know when another lifeform is in danger.

She takes a wobbling step forward.

“Pearl, no—”

There’s a brush of fingers — Drax’s, she thinks vaguely — but she twists between two miners and then drops to her knees, weaving deftly between legs and tentacles. The world is still wobbly but apparently, crawling has the added bonus of putting more floor underneath her, and that means more stability. Some part of her is distantly aware of how hard it is to keep track of more than one thought at a time but ultimately, she supposes that’s for the best. It allows her to keep a single-minded focus on her current mission, allows her to not think about whatever-it-is that pushes at the back of her mind: something that hurts.

She only knows that living things don’t belong in cages.

She thinks she’s going in the right direction, though she has to stop once — kneeling under a table that shakes and shudders with the sounds of something happening right above her head — to tie up her hair. It keeps getting stepped on. She steals a loose bootlace from one of the legs nearby and uses it to secure her ponytail, sloppily tucking the ends of her curls down the back of Rocket’s t-shirt when she realizes that her hair still brushes the filthy floor. There’s an anguished squeal from overhead and it cuts through the haze to push her forward:

Find the cages. Let them go.

She doesn’t think much beyond that.

She crosses a sea of boots and hooves and tentacles, and then someone moves and the wall of cages rises right in front of her. She cranes her neck, peering upward from the floor. There’s some kind of disruption in the existing chaos behind her, but she ignores it, studying the latching mechanisms while tears continue to drip down her cheeks. She swipes an impatient hand at her chin, barely noticing. It doesn’t occur to her to be grateful that the cages don’t have locks — she simply figures out how to open them and then she does, twisting and flipping hasp after hasp on the lower levels, and then moving upward.

The animals don’t understand at first. They’ve been in their prisons for so long, and they’re only used to being dumped out onto a table to fight. It takes a moment of curiosity — nosing the gently swinging doors — before they realize what has happened to their prisons.

Which is around the same time that pearl turns her attention to the nearest gambling table.

F’saki and orloni spill forth around her — scores of scaled lifeforms tumbling from their cages and scrambling between feet, over tables and chairs, scaling walls. And it’s not just f’saki and orloni, either. There are a few Gangalorian squirrel-birds and some sort of bat she’s never seen before, and a furry sort of rodent, like a rat with a curly tail. They flood everywhere, scattering and shrieking and flapping and flying. Miners crash to the floor, feet knocked out from under them by f’saki running to their freedom. Drinks spiral through the air. Animals and people alike shriek and bellow in surprise and fear.

Pearl knows she’s not very strong. Herbert’s careful exercise routines had been precisely-calculated to keep her heart healthy but her body soft, her joints protected and her skin uncalloused. But no-one is looking at the small girl with lilac halo — not in the chaos of a scurrying menagerie. Certainly no-one is expecting her to lodge one shoulder under the nearest table and shove upward. Unit-chips and drinks and more animals are all freed to the open air. Somewhere, amidst all the bellowing, she can hear Jemiah yelling and Rocket snarling.

And Drax, laughing uproariously.

She ignores them all, prancing over fallen miners and streams of fleeing animals, then tilting over another table. This one must land on top of someone, because there’s a curse and a whine and a groan, and she suddenly realizes she could accidentally hurt one of the poor scrambling orloni or ratlike things. Solution: she climbs up on top of the next table to release the animals from their confines. A frantic, panicked orloni clamps down on her hand, teeth sinking right between her thumb and her forefinger. She kneels with the patience that feels natural to her — and the blessing of booze-muffled nerves — and gently pinches the hinge of the orloni’s mandible, pushing its head carefully forward into her hand until the teeth loosen and it releases its clenched jaw. Then she lowers it over the edge of the table and opens the f’saki cage that had been tipped onto its back — hoisting out a reptile nearly the size of Rocket himself, and curling her arms around it.

The f’saki bares needle-thin teeth and hisses, eyes rolling.

“Pearl, for fuck’s sake, put that thing down!”

She staggers to her feet on the table, arms still full of angry reptile.

“Pearl?” Drax repeats, sounding baffled. “What do pearls have to do with anything?”

“Get the fuck out of my bar!” Jemiah screeches, and pearl wobbles on the table, looking around at the mess, wondering if she should feel bad. Jemiah had been nice — to her, anyway.

Her wet eyes narrow.

“I don’t,” she says firmly, though no-one had asked. “I don’t feel bad. You shouldn’t hurt them.” She snuggles the f’saki up under her chin instinctively, and it hisses again. The bar sways.

“Catch her,” Rocket snaps, and Drax steps forward as the table tilts. No; the table’s fine, but now she and the f’saki are in Drax’s enormous tree-trunk arms.

“Kitten — here; drink this—”

“Ow,” Drax startles, his brow pulled into a wounded furrow. “Your pet is biting me.”

“Littlefoot, no!” she gasps, stricken, trying to gently pry the f’saki’s finger-long teeth from Drax’s bicep.

“You already frickin’ named it?” Rocket demands shrilly. “You’ve had that thing in your hands for two fuckin’ seconds—”

“Be nice,” she blurts out, cuddling the f’saki in even closer. Rocket gapes at her, jaw fully parted in shock. She screws her face up and squints at the shotglass in his dark, lovely hand. “What is that?” she asks, peering from her place in Drax’s arms.

“It’s a Cure,” Jemiah says testily. “It’s for brats who come to my bar and can’t hold their fucking liquor.”

That seems to shake Rocket from his stupor. “Watch it,” her survivor snarls. “Nobody calls her a frickin’ brat. And she might be drunk, but she ain’t wrong about you. You’re a real fuckin’ asshole.”

“I didn’t say he was an — an asshole.” She scowls. “You’re always putting words in my mouth.” Then she turns her glare to Jemiah. “But you kind of are an asshole.”

The barkeep flinches.

Rocket just glowers at her. “Shut up and put this in your mouth.” He forces the shot glass into her hand. “Don’t spill, and don’t fuckin’ spit it out.”

She blinks at him, but accepts the shotglass with one hand, snuggling the f’saki closer when it tries to snap another bite at Drax. “Wanted to put something else in my mouth,” she sulks, then feels her voice curl into something wounded in her throat. The dusty haze of drunkenness gives way to a new glaze of tears. “Why’d you have to—”

“For fuck’s sake, shut up and drink that,” Rocket says, but he suddenly sounds less angry and far more panicked. “Before you say another moon-damned word.”

She sniffles wretchedly, then tosses back the shot the way she’d seen the locals do outside the bar on Wundagore II. Gasoline, she thinks fleetingly, before her mind goes blank with a white-hot burn. Her lungs scream and heave, and the f’saki in her arms lurches free while she clings to Drax’s arm. Fresh tears scorch through the salt already layered on her cheeks. By the time she’s able to blink them away, she realizes Drax has set her down, one hand resting heavily against her back to steady her. Her cheeks are drenched.

“We better get outta here,” Rocket’s mumbling, eyes darting around. The locals must have picked themselves up while she’d been choking on that vile cure, she realizes — the hushed murmur of confusion is starting to melt into raised voices and cursing once more. “Jemiah’s slunk off somewhere but someone’s gonna put together that you’re the frickin’ reason there’s not gonna be any more wagers tonight—”

She glares at him through blurry eyes. “I still don’t feel bad,” she manages to say firmly, even if the words are rasping and scraped.

Rocket pauses to look at her measuringly, and for a moment, she could almost think his expression was admiring.

Lingering effects of the alcohol, she thinks at herself, annoyed.

“You’re still gonna feel sick,” he says only. “Prob’ly later tonight. We’ll get you some water once we get back to the Dread–”

“Master Rocket?”

The tumult of the bar suddenly lessens again, though it doesn’t go away completely. A woman parts the gathering, locals stepping aside as if they recognize her. She’s tall and lovely and toned, with skin as pink as a plum-blossom — Rocket’s favorite color, pearl thinks, still a little dazed. Every feature is perfectly-proportioned and perfectly-placed.

If only you were Krylorian, Herbert had said regretfully, more than once. Of all the races I haven’t made, their females are the most uniquely aesthetically pleasing.

“Who the fuck are you?” Rocket snaps impatiently.

“My name is Carina,” the Krylorian says. Her voice is sweet and clear, and her head dips deferentially. “I’m here to fetch you for my master.”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Pearl’s head is already pulsing by the time they reach the Collector’s emporium. She’s not sure how much of it is because of Drax’s drink, how much of it is due to the Cure, and how much is because she’s already heartbroken, and Carina’s so perfect and pretty and pink.

“We house the galaxy's largest collection of fauna, relics, and species of all manner,” Carina recites, and pearl feels her lips pull into a distressed little moue. Her eyes flick up to the Krylorian ahead — taking in the assistant’s stiff shoulders, the hollow cheer of her words. But before pearl can process the way Carina’s voice makes her stomach twist, she comes face to face with the Collector’s acquisitions.

Armored-glass lockers — some like rooms, others like coffins — line the vaulted walls. All of them are lit glacial and blue. Even the yellows seem icy. Pearl shudders and promises herself that she’ll never think of the Dreadnought as being cold again. She wonders if Herbert’s labs had looked something like this. She’d never been allowed to see them, but she imagines there’s some sort of similarity. Glass and cages, all built on the devaluation of lives. The main difference, she thinks, is that Herbert’s labs would probably have smelled like antiseptic and blood and terror.

This place smells like rotten wine, and dead moths, and despair.

Her feet drag across the ground. She crushes her fingertips to her forehead. Her brain pulses inside her skull.

They pass a luminous blue butterfly, and some kind of cocoon. One cell houses a person — one with dark armor, and pale skin, and elfin-looking ears.

“Okay, this isn’t creepy at all,” Rocket drawls lazily.

Her steps slow as they pass another glass cage, this one imprisoning a lifeform that looks like a dog in a Terran-style spacesuit. Another floating cube houses someone who appears to be a duck. Someone like Rocket? she wonders hazily, and has to curl her fingers to herself to keep from reaching out to the armored glass. The duck takes a sip of his drink.

“What’re you lookin’ at, toots?”

She flinches. “S-sorry,” she apologizes. The leather-warmth of Rocket’s hand clamps around her wrist before she even gets the second syllable out.

“Watch it,” he snarls, and she’s not sure if he’s talking to her or the ducklike captive. She suddenly thinks of her own prisoner, fawn-eyed and clench-jawed, and locked in the jackroom with Groot keeping her company.

Pearl’s eyes sting. They need to let Nebula go. It had been hubris — to think she could help the Luphomoid find a safer, happier life. To keep her locked up in the meantime. If Rocket is willing to listen, maybe she can convince him that they should give the Luphomoid some options. Maybe she won’t want to return to the Black Order. Maybe she’ll want to be left here after all, or on a nice planet somewhere. Who knows? Nebula might even want to stay, to help Rocket with bounties or something — certainly, she’d be more effective at it than pearl herself—

The labyrinthine path through the emporium seems to wind on forever. They pass a wallcase of small items — the fang of a god, the tusk of a long-extinct beast, a dried flower with a woman’s tiny torso instead of a stigma. Pearl lingers, her fingers floating over every Kree-engraved nameplate. A strange skull as big as her body. A set of gold-feathered wings with rotting stumps. And a small piece of wood — as narrow and slender as a magic wand from one of the Terran fairy tales pearl had checked out again and again from the library, back when she had just been a child trying to escape.

Splinter from a Flora Colossus.

Pearl’s blood, already chilled, grows colder.

Then her feet stop entirely, sunk deep in the museum floor. Rocket pulls on her wrist but she can’t move, staring into the glass coffin in front of her. Filthy, pink-skinned, pinned in place by glowing blue lights and electrodes: a woman who looks like she could be Carina’s cousin, wearing all the same clothes, the same hairstyle.

Pearl doesn’t move, not even when Rocket pulls on her arm again with an impatient grunt. Her eyes fly, instead, to Carina. The Krylorian turns — almost as if she’d felt pearl’s stare — and offers a beautiful, brittle smile.

“I present to you… Taneleer Tivan,” she says, as if she’s introducing royalty in front of a full audience. Pearl’s familiar with the stilted admiration crammed brokenly into every word — the desperate attempt at flattering an oversized ego. She knows it all too well. “The Collector,” Carina adds with a flourish.

Slender-hipped and broad-shouldered, glittering and fey, the Collector sweeps forward. He lacks Herbert’s pragmatism, she notes — the High Evolutionary’s clinical approach to everything. But there’s something in the set of his eyes that she thinks is very familiar — something that tells her that Taneleer Tivan believes he is a god among insects.

“Welcome… Rocket,” Tivan says, like he can’t figure out quite how to greet the leader of their little triad. His voice is thick and heavy, with a shallow, lilting merriment that makes something revolt in pearl’s belly. His eyes flicker over Rocket — assessing. And then, she thinks — horrified — possessively.

She swallows. Her head feels like it’s splitting apart.

“Yeah, okay, whatever,” Rocket rumbles, already sounding annoyed. “Look, we got—”

“If I may be permitted to say so,” Tivan continues, moving to circle him, “you are truly a unique specimen—” He pauses, nearly running into pearl, and she swallows. It’s ingrained in her — to move out of his way. It’s almost an instinct. No, it’s a survival mechanism. But she swallows again and forces herself to stay in his path.

She doesn’t like the way he’s looking at her survivor.

Rocket pivots to follow the Collector’s path, suspicion leaking into his narrowed eyes and graveled voice. “Sure,” he deadpans. “Ain’t no thing like me ‘cept me. Anyway, as I was frickin’ saying — we got two genuine Kylosian bloodsteel daggers we’re looking to sell.”

“Yes, yes,” Tivan says, and makes his way around pearl — eyes curious, now. “And I will want a look at those eventually. But I find myself curious about something else, now.”

Rocket pinches the bridge of his nose. “Look, Mister Fancypants, I just want to—”

“Has anyone ever offered you — let’s say, an all-expenses-paid luxury lifestyle?”

Rocket’s ears flicker back and the fur around his mouth crinkles with a grimace of confusion. “What?”

Pearl eyes flick up to where Carina stands in the shadows, straight-backed, hands folded in front of her abdomen. The Krylorian’s gaze is lowered demurely, but — as if she can feel pearl’s gaze — she raises her long lashes slowly.

“Mister Rocket, are you aware of what I can offer you? The finest of foods, the greatest of comforts. Even if you would only like to avail yourself of these riches temporarily — on loan, shall we say — I might be willing to offer you upwards of two billion units for only a quarter-circumrotation of your time—”

“Two billion units?” Rocket repeats. His voice cracks, eyes opening wide.

“Of course,” Tivan oozes. “Your time and your life are deeply valuable. The funds will be held in trust—”

Pearl stares at Carina as Tivan speaks, and it’s only the prolonged watchfulness — the momentary breath of some old wound recognized and shared — that allows her to see it.

The Collector’s assistant shifts her head minutely: just a quarter-inch to one side, and then to the other.

“Are you in the habit of coercing sentient lifeforms into contracted captivity?”

Pearl isn’t sure where the words come from — only that they spill out of her mouth, as arrogant and cold as if she had somehow channeled M’dame Lavenza without meaning to. She tears her eyes from Carina before the Collector can see where she’d been looking.

Tivan rears back. “Excuse me, child?”

“You strike me as one of the cleverest Elders,” pearl says. The words pool on her tongue: calm, collected — waiting for her to use them, as if they’d been waiting there all along. “I suspect it’s no matter for you to manipulate a binding agreement in your favor.”

Tivan’s eyes narrow — and now they are assessing, though in a different way than they had been when he’d stared at Rocket like he’d wanted to carve her beautiful survivor apart. “You are aware of my — status?”

“Your reputation is well-known across the universe, and your heritage is certainly not hidden information for those who seek it,” she says flatly. It’s true, though her education has been… rather more intentional. She’s well-versed in the names and titles and tendencies of every individual whom Herbert had considered a key player in the universe, including every known Elder in the cosmos. And while the Collector is powerful, he is not — as far as pearl has seen — much different from any of the other entitled, arrogant tyrants she’s handled for Herbert before.

Only now, she’s going to handle him for herself. And for Rocket, and Drax. And for Groot, still hidden away on the Dreadnought.

“Few are interested enough to look so deeply into my history, though,” Tivan replies, seemingly entranced. Now his head tilts, and he doesn’t take his eyes from hers. “Who are you, snowblossom?”

Now. Now she lets the touch of Herbert’s sophisticated, untouchable coquette-bride come through. She tilts her head, and offers the vaguest curve of a distant smile. Entertain, she orders herself. Charm. “A mystery, Collector,” she says smoothly. “Now.” She steps away from Rocket, moving to another glass case. There’s a woman inside, curled up with her knees pressed to her chest, head bowed. Sleek black hair streams over her shoulders and hides her face. Pearl lets her fingers float up and kiss the glass, then turns easily back to Tivan, her eyebrows slightly raised. A challenge. “Just what are the comforts you speak of? Did all of these poor souls also enter agreements with you, only to find this is the luxury lifestyle you promised them?” She clucks her tongue and turns away, casting him a lash-lowered glance and a mild headshake that teases disappointment and then — dismissal. “As much as you might hope otherwise, we aren’t here to barter away entire segments of my employer’s life.”

“What the — what the hell is going on?” Rocket snaps.

“The princess is your employee?” Drax asks Rocket at the same time. “If I had known you were hiring, I—”

She cuts them both off, keeping her eyes on those of the Collector. “We are here to discuss the sale of two star-tempered Kylosian bloodsteel daggers, however. And nothing more.” She raises her brows slightly, letting herself drift around the room, away from all three of them. Weaving herself between blue-lit glass caskets — letting herself slide in and out of view. From the corner of her eye, she sees Carina suddenly tilt her head, then slip silently from the chamber. “Or is that no longer of interest to you?” pearl asks Tivan.

The Collector’s eyes had already flared with interest at Drax’s words. Now they’re sealed on her. “Are you a princess? Of where? I do keep a collection of royals, and I can promise you they are far more well-pampered than my public catalogue.”

She sniffs, then passes him a faintly playful smile. “Collector, I promise you can’t afford me. Just as you can’t afford my employer.” She shrugs elegantly, and leans back against the glass coffin encasing the black-haired woman. Her eyes drop coyly, and land on the coffin’s plaque.

D’au shelRandau, Xeronian Citizen. Inheritor of the Xeronian Council. Sole Remaining Descendent of the Infamous Space Parasite.

Pearl wills her breath not to catch in her throat. Her headache doubles. Instead, she floats her midnight-blue lashes up slowly, and peers at the Collector from between them, willing the illusion of curiosity into her gaze.

“Now.” Let yourself seem as if you are holding your own intrigue in reserve, her etiquette instructor had said once. Ration your favor. “Are you or are you not still interested in the bloodsteel?”

Tivan pulls back slightly, a pleased smile flickering the corner of his mouth. “Perhaps I am in the market for all of the above.”

“For fuck’s sake,” Rocket mutters, and swaggers forward, teeth already bared. “Let's make something clear,” he snarls. “The princess here belongs with me. You wanna get to her, you go through me.” He hitches the laser cannon off his back and lets the barrel extend, snapping into place. “Or, more accurately — I go through you.”

Pearl holds her breath. She doesn’t try to interfere, this time; doesn’t try to put herself between the laser cannon and the Collector. As far as she’s concerned, putting Tivan out of commission for a while would be a public service, and there’s little risk to Rocket of someone on Knowhere finding out who he is and reporting his presence to Herbert. Certainly, the Collector has made enemies out of almost everyone on the skull, in some form or another.

For a moment, the museum is silent — all except for the whirr of the lights and the glug of an aquarium somewhere, and the hiss of special ventilation in a handful of the coffins. Then the Collector scoffs — a soft, mocking chuckle — and gestures to Rocket, currently still holding him at the end of a glowing quadruple-barrel cannon. “Understood. The bloodsteel is still available for purchase, though, I assume.”

Rocket holds Tivan’s gaze a moment longer, then grunts and reholsters the cannon before slicing a claw toward Drax. The Kylosian hesitates, then draws his blades.

“Here,” Tivan says, and gestures to a table strewn with odds and ends. Most of the space, however, is consumed by a strange enormous contraption that looks something like one of Herbert’s diagrams of an electromagnetic vice. The Collector unrolls a soft blanket of red crushed velvet that reminds pearl of Rocket’s eyes, and Drax steps forward with his daggers in hand. The Kylosian’s knuckles whiten on the hilts, and he swallows before resting them gently on the velvet.

Tivan leans forward, pulling a surprisingly delicate set of goggles from his lapel and buckling the narrow strap at the back of his head. He settles them over his eyes and flicks through the series of magnifying lenses, peering at the engravings.

“The blades are sharp,” he acknowledges. “The histories appear to be etched in the authentic Kylosian style. They show the unique blueing associated with acidic solutions harvested from the caverns of Mount Kylos.” He tilts the blade. “It is something of a cosmic miracle that these survived the Kree incursion in such fine condition—”

“Excuse me, Master,” Carina chirrups from the entrance. “I offer my sincerest apologies, but the associates you’ve been expecting have arrived. They are waiting on your convenience. I have escorted them to the side chamber.”

The Collector startles and steps back, and his face flickers through a myriad of emotions. It’s a relief to find he doesn’t seem to hide any of them very well. “Well. I am aggrieved to say this meeting cannot wait, and our negotiation has taken more time than I anticipated.” He turns his nauseating smile toward Rocket, then to pearl. His eyes bounce off Drax like the Kylosian is nothing. “I had not anticipating meeting so many… interesting characters during this appointment.”

“Wait, what?” Rocket snarls. “We’re getting kicked out ‘cause you took too long flirting with my— with her?”

Pearl flushes, stomach curdling, and shifts discreetly out of the Collector’s line of sight. She can’t fight back her blush without going cold, and she hasn’t let herself do that in so long.

“Friend.” Tivan tilts his head in acknowledgement, and something in Rocket’s face goes even sharper and more furious at the endearment. “Give me only a few hours, and enjoy the hospitality of my city while you wait. I promise my assistant will be in touch with you later this rotation. She will come to fetch you with an offer.”

“For the bloodsteel,” pearl says precisely. “And the bloodsteel only.”

The Collector’s smile is thin. “For the bloodsteel only,” he agrees.

“Drax,” Rocket snaps. “Take the daggers back. We’ll bring ‘em when we get the offer.”

“That will be ideal,” Tivan agrees pleasantly, stepping away so the Kylosian can collect his blades. “Carina will escort you to the exit. Carina, once they have departed, please see the next guests in.”

“If you will follow me, esteemed guests,” Carina says sweetly, hands still perched in front of her belly, smile still pretty and perfect and painful. She turns smartly on her heel and leads the way out of the central chamber.

“The Collector thanks you for your time today,” Carina tells them as they trace their way back through the museum. “I am sure he will send me to find you in short order with an offer for your items. Please enjoy the pleasures of Exitar while you wait.” She stands at the doorway and ushers them out. The bone-paved streets radiate out from the Collector’s home: a web of lights and grime spiraling outward. Carina gestures to the roads splayed at their left. “In this direction, you’ll find our local brothels and dancing salons, including the largest Ore Garden house in this sector, the Brass Camellia. To your right, you’ll discover an assortment of bars and casinos, and straight ahead, you can explore various entertainments, from cartomancers and diviners to theatrical performances. And on the other side of the emporium, behind us, are any lodgings you could desire, along with medical facilities, laundry facilities, restaurants and eateries, and general supply shops. Of course there are food vendors in every quarter.” She dips her head in that well-trained deferential bow, and now pearl knows why it squeezes her lungs. “The Collector appreciates your patience and time, and will send me to return you to him shortly.”

The Krylorian turns to head back into the museum, and pearl’s hands move without her conscious permission — fingers threading gently around the taller woman’s wrist. The Krylorian freezes, her dark eyes slipping down to the loose bracelet of pearl’s grasp, then fluttering back up to meet her gaze.

“Will you come with us?” pearl asks softly. The words are a puff of air on her lips, startling her as much as they startle Carina.

“What. The. Fuck.” Rocket growls.

“Please,” pearl whispers urgently. Her eyes flick to Rocket’s, then back to the Krylorian’s. “Please. You’re not okay.”

Carina’s eyes grow wide, and she stares back. Her throat bobs as she swallows.

“Stop offering my moon-damned ship like it’s a frickin’ taxi—“

“I know,” pearl tells Carina. The words trip out: earnest and tangled and true. “Not — not with him. Not with Tivan. But I know.”

Rocket falls silent. Drax shifts. The Krylorian’s dark eyes silver over, lashes suddenly wet with her next wide-eyed blink.

“Do you need help, frail pink woman?” Drax asks after a moment, his voice suddenly creased with concern.

Carina swallows again, and then blinks again. She offers pearl a quivering, sad little smile — wistful, grateful, and hopeless. She eases her wrist away from pearl’s gentle touch.

Then her smile widens back into the dewy-sweet and welcoming expression of Taneleer Tivan’s perfectly-trained assistant.

“The Collector appreciates your patience and time,” she repeats with practiced pleasantness, “and will send me to return you to him shortly.”

The door closes softly between them.

There’s a moment of quiet, and pearl can feel when Rocket turns his stare up at her. It’s as scalding as ever.

“What the fuck was all that?”

She feels her shoulders wilt and scrubs her fingers against her forehead, squeezing her eyes closed. “I’m sorry. I should’ve — I don’t feel well.”

“You’re frickin’ hungover,” he snaps. “Go back to the ship. Get the Big Guy to give you a bag of water and make you some coffee.”

She doesn’t dignify that suggestion with a direct response. If Rocket’s coffee is the concept of bitterness made tangible, she can only imagine how Groot’s would taste.

“I don’t think we should stay,” she says instead. The words sound timid, and she drops her hands, twisting them in front of her belly. She tries to draw back up the confidence she’d somehow fallen into inside. “I think he’s going to try to — try to keep you.”

She’s not looking at him, but she knows him well enough to imagine his eyes widening — incredulous.

“Keep me?” It’s practically a snarl. “You’re the one pretending to be a moon-damned princess—“

“Pretending?” Drax repeats, and he sounds wounded.

She flinches. “Drax, I told you. I’m not—“

“But I assumed you were lying.”

Why does he sound so much more betrayed that she’d been telling the truth?

“Here,” Rocket snaps, and grabs her wrist with one dark-clawed hand, turning it palm-side up. He slaps something in her hand. The square glass datacard from Cyxlore. She’d left it — forgotten — in a drawer in the captain’s quarters. “Do whatever you’re gonna frickin’ do. Buy yourself shit for your new bunk or whatever.”

Something inside her twists all the way around and she does wish she was back in the Dreadnought now, somewhere safe where she could just cry. Her body is so tired.

“Or get yourself a place to stay here, f’you want,” he mutters under his breath. “I don’t frickin’ recommend it, but it’s your fuckin’ call.”

Drax gasps. “Rocket,” he admonishes.

“What?” her survivor shoots back, throwing his hands up in frustration. “I’m just giving her options. You—” He points at Drax. “You ain’t so lucky. Just — stay with her. We’ll meet back here in an hour so that pink broad doesn’t have to hunt us all down.”

“I don’t think you should go alone,” pearl protests. Rocket shoots her a withering glare and she fists her hands in her cardigan nervously, then releases the fabric — tries to put her hands on her hips instead, as if she could command a room. No. Crosses them in front of her. Rocket’s eyes fall to her chest with that move, so she drops them again. Knots them in front of her belly instead.

“Oh, you don’t?” he jeers.

She shakes her head, trying for firmness. “Not with the way the Collector—“

“You joining me at the Brass Camellia then?”

She blinks and takes a step back, mouth snapping shut. Something empties out in her chest cavity. She doesn’t feel cold. She doesn’t feel much of anything. Everything seems extremely far away.

“Rocket,” Drax repeats, appalled.

“What?” he sneers. “We ain’t exclusive. We ain’t anything.”

“That is not true,” Drax says firmly. “If you have agreed upon nonmonogamy, that is one thing. But—“

“We. Ain’t. Anything.”

“Stop,” pearl says quietly. “You’re being a jerk again.”

“Then not much has changed since Day One, has it?” he drawls. “Maybe you just started to frickin’ get it, sweetheart.”

“A lot has changed,” she says, and she hates that it sounds like a plea. “And I trust you. I wish you could understand that. I wish you could trust yourself.”

He recoils, as hard as if she’d pulled back and slapped him with all her strength.

Exhaustion ripples over her. “I’m going to go,” she says, and the words limp out of her wearily. “I have something to look for. I’ll be back in an hour.” She sighs, and rubs the space between her eyes again. Her skull feels split open. “Do whatever you need to.”

She turns and looks around. Pauses, then tucks the glass card into the hidden pocket inside the waistband of her leggings. She glances around herself again — orienting. Her heart aches. Don’t think about it, she orders herself, and steps into the street. Supply shops should be around the other side of the emporium, Carina had said.

She sets off in that direction.

“Go with her,” she hears Rocket growl, and then Drax’s heavy steps are jogging softly up to her side.

“Are you all right, princess?” the Kylosian asks. His voice is knitted with concern.

Pearl casts an exhausted sideways look at him. “You don’t have to call me that,” she reminds him. “I’m not—”

He shrugs. “I have nothing else to call you yet. Are you all right?” he repeats.

She hesitates. “I am,” she says softly. “I wish he’d let you stay with him, though. I don’t trust Tivan.”

Drax hums his agreement. “The Collector is sly and devious.”

Pearl hesitates, then bumps her shoulder gently against her large companion’s arm as they walk. “Are you okay? I hate that you’re selling your knives to that snake.”

Drax’s brow furrows.

“To the Collector, I mean.”

“Ah.” His face clears, though she can see sorrow lingering in the creases. “I hate it, too. But it is the payment I offered.”

She sighs. “I’m so sorry. I wish—“ She can feel the scowl etching along her face. “That rotten — that evil man has — there are so many things wrong with that place, Drax. So many living things, kept captive just for his entertainment. Carina, and the other Krylorian, and that — duck. And the dog.” She sighs. “And the Xeronian. I wish—“ She grits her teeth so hard that they creak. “I need them to get out. To at least have the chance to leave.”

“I could get you drunk again,” Drax offers. “You seem to be exceptionally skilled at freeing things when you’re intoxicated.”

She startles, and then claps a hand over her mouth as a laugh bubbles up inside her, so fast and bright and bell-like that it shouldn’t belong in this place, in this moment.

“I’m so sorry,” she repeats once she’s swallowed down the impulse.

“For what?”

She lets out a dainty snort. She’s still getting used to doing it. “For being a drunken mess earlier.”

“Don’t apologize for that,” Drax says firmly. “I should’ve known your weak body wouldn’t be able to handle such a strong liquor. And also,” he adds pragmatically, “it was hilarious.”

She feels the laugh again. It blooms against the right bands of her ribs, and something inside her eases. She still aches, but perhaps she doesn’t need to be bereft.

“This place,” she tells Drax, bringing them to a halt outside a series of shops full of mining equipment. Some kind of faintly-fluorescent cobwebs cling to the rafters, which are full of enormous drills and shovels and things she can’t identify. Bone-dust gathers — pale gray and grime-covered ivory — in the shadowed corners. “We start here.”

She has to peer into a number of shops before she finds what she’s looking for. Her first priority is procuring protective gear for Rocket. She’s been thinking about it since that night on Sovereign — about finding something to filter air for him when he’s breathing in burnt and melted toxic metals, or grinding them down into laser dust and airborne particulate. When she ducks her head into the third mining supply shop, she finds high-quality respirators and safety masks intended for the local population of Grosgumbeekians — and while it’s a shame that pearl can’t get a mask fitted for Rocket in-person, she’s traced the lines of his face with eyes and hands enough times to be able to guide the leatherworker in modifying the equipment she needs.

“He will love it,” Drax tells her solemnly once she’s paid for everything and the shopowner is packaging her purchases up in tattered, stained butcher-paper.

She laughs again, and this time she doesn’t try to hold it back. “He’ll hate it,” she corrects.

“He will hate it,” Drax agrees, looking relieved. “I didn’t want to say it first.”

“But he’ll wear it anyway,” she says with a wistful half-smile. “Even if he hates me now — I told him I was going to look out for him. And I’m taking that very seriously,” she adds primly.

“He doesn’t hate you,” the Kylosian tells her. “He couldn’t hate you any more than I could hate my Ovette.”

She tilts her head and offers him a melancholic half-smile. Of course, there’s no universe in which Drax is right about this, but she does suspect that her survivor couldn’t possibly hate her as much as he seems to hate himself. But she folds away her misgivings for now, and when Drax takes the carefully-packaged mask from her, she tucks her hands into the crook of his arm. It’s a move she’s practiced a thousand times in her comportment training — different ways of allowing herself to be escorted — but this is the first time it’s felt truly companionable to her.

“Tell me about Ovette,” she says softly. “I mean — if you want to. I’d love to hear stories.”

There’s a moment of quiet between them, softly folded into the shadows and the silty bone-dust, and then Drax takes a slow and shuddering breath as they begin making their way back toward the emporium — wandering a little, taking their time as they stroll, but with the return to the museum at the back of their minds. The stories, when they come, are nothing like the eddur — not sweeping epics after all, though Drax tells them in the same thunderous rising-and-falling voice meant for stone amphitheatres set deep in the Kylosian mountainside. No, these are stories of Ovette’s arms cradling Kamariah, of Ovette’s stoicism in the face of both local celebrations and ceremonial scarring, of Ovette’s forearms slicked with blood during battle. Of the way Ovette had breathed while she slept, of the small bloodsteel knife she’d kept under her pillow or braided into her hair. Her solemn crooning songs, lulling Kamariah to sleep, and how they had often lulled Drax himself to sleep too. The only time that stories pause is so that pearl can purchase a stick of grilled orloni for Drax, and a bag of water for herself. She sips it steadily as they walk, and the Kylosian continues his wistful reminiscing.

“You must miss them so much,” she says softly to Drax, as they near the museum. The hydration has eased her headache, though only by a little.

“It is agony,” he concedes. “Though—” He hesitates. “My life used to be nothing but the pursuit of my vengeance. I never saw anything beyond that. Every breath I drew would remind me of them. I had nothing but my loss and my grief and my rage.” The silence between them lingers and trembles — heavy and uncertain. “Have you ever felt like that?”

She tilts her head up, taking in the building that houses the Collector’s gallery: his centerpiece in the skull. She tries to imagine what this dark city would look like if it were cleaner — if it were happier. What it might be like if the person who ran Knowhere weren’t an arrogant monster, overlooking others for his own amusement.

Stringlights webbing tier to tier, she imagines. Growing things. People who smile — who aren’t starved and angry and waiting for the mine-rot to get into their neurons.

“I have,” she admits tentatively. “Or — something similar. Though I was never all that good at being angry. But I suppose — most of my life has also been defined by — some sort of loss or another. Of people, or of—” She hesitates. “Of control.” She chews her lip.

Drax hums his understanding. “But then, in the middle of all of this, I met you and Rocket and the tree,” he says slowly. He tilts his head, and his brow creases. “And it seems the all the perimeters of my life expanded. Now I think about other things. I help Rocket with the Dreadnought. I recite eddur with you. I play sickles-and-hearts with the least-favorite Daughter of Thanos. I listen to Groot’s stupid stories, even though he continues to say the same thing over and over and over again. And… I think some part of me can belong again. I think I might feel happy again some day.” He sighs and pats the hand she has perched on his arm. “It’s extremely weird.”

She feels the tentative half-curve of her mouth. “It’s strange for me, too,” she admits. “Different, I think, but — similar. I’m still getting used to making decisions based on my own… desires, and not for — survival. Doing things because I want to, and not because someone else does.”

He hums again, and pats her hand once more as they reach the threshold of the museum. “You did a very good job with that while you were drunk,” he confides. “Nobody but you wanted you to do those things.”

The soft huff of laughter is somehow both grounding and freeing. She rubs at the ghost of her headache. “Thank you, Drax. For being with us.”

He looks into the distance and tilts his head thoughtfully. “It’s good to have fr—”

Purple, she thinks, and her hand tears from Drax’s arm just as her body is torn from the street — torn from the air itself. Some part of pearl recognizes her own feet against a violet-lit bone-sky, just as her shoulders slam into the ground, jarring her lungs right into her belly. She must somersault, heels over head, and then feels her limbs snap backward as her body crashes into something hard.

Her vision pulses.

The half-faded headache from Jemiah’s is eclipsed by a high-pitched ringing, and pearl’s suddenly certain that her lungs aren’t working. She chokes for breath, strangling her airways with dust and grit. Her body heaves — ribs rippling and burning — but everything is unmistakably silent and shrill. When she swipes clumsily at her lashes, her hand comes away caked in tears and ivory soot. She pulls her body from where it’s draped over rubble, absently brushing gravel and stone from where it sticks to her skin in a lattice of blood. Dirt and copper slick over her tongue, and she tilts her head slowly, trying to clean the cinders and blurring from her eyes.

Where is she again? And why?

The space around her slowly comes into focus: broken, hazed with particulate. Everything smells like ash and old chalkboard erasers, and something underneath: hot and metallic and electrical, like ozone after a lightning strike. Somewhere, someone is screaming. Somewhere, someone is crying.

The center of Exitar is all but leveled.

“D-Drax?” she calls out, but her voice is a croak lost amongst muted shrieks and cries. There’s a low rumble, and she watches as the wall of a nearby — something — slowly shifts to one side, and then collapses. “Drax?” she calls, more loudly, and staggers to her feet.

Pearl staggers to her feet and wonders, for a moment, if she’s a ghost. She thinks she might be incorporeal — she can see her hands and feet as she climbs over broken barricades and twisted metal, but she doesn’t feel a thing. There’s a bright blotch of blood on the toe of her left lavender boot, and she doesn’t remember it being there before. She pauses and looks around, trying to make her eyes focus. From between the cries, a new sound comes to her ears: barking, echoing from inside the burnt-out husk of the building in the center of the destruction.

Barking. She hasn’t heard barking since Terra. The Collector’s emporium, she remembers. The cinnamon-colored dog in the spacesuit.

And all those caged lives.

She looks at the ruins around her — so much darker now that the majority of the lights in the city have blown, with a few scattered plasma orbs and half-broken neon signs flickering eerily. Faint shapes shift through the dust and the darkness like phantoms, crying their haunted questions into the dust.

Then she looks back to the museum: all broken panes of glass and twisted metal. And between the barks — faint, and mechanical, and lilting with an accent that feels vaguely familiar—

“Help! Please help!”

Pearl turns and runs toward the fallen emporium. She’s neither strong nor particularly adept at navigating obstacles, but she hauls herself over fallen walls and debris with nothing but adrenaline and a need she can’t identify — one she knows predates Herbert, but which was sharpened and used to cut herself apart every rotation since she’d met him.

In the dripping, dusty, stone-shifting dark, the Collector’s home is nothing like the corridors she remembers from one short hour ago. The few lights still alive only manage to whirr and flicker. In some places, the walls have completely collapsed — stacks on stacks of glass rooms coming down on top of each other like a collapsed crystal accordion. Pearl’s stomach wrenches and twists, and she has to stop with her hands on her knees, swallowing down the hot sourness that rises in her mouth before she can go on. The space has been so changed that she wouldn’t even be able to tell her location, except she passes a smashed glass sarcophagus and from under the broken boulder she can see a handspan of gleaming blue-scaled silk: butterfly-wing, dulled by dust.

Tears grow muddy on her lashes and she scrubs at them, forcing her eyes away.

“Later,” she hisses at herself, furious.

The barking grows louder, and her steps speed up. The shell of the museum creaks.

“My friend is here! Help!”

Pearl hits her knees in the glass and debris as the astronaut-dog from earlier leaps toward her. It shoves its front feet into pearl’s shoulders so hard that she sways backward. The dog pushes off, and runs toward a wreckage of bone-concrete slabs and metal beams that appear to have speared their way right through the ground into a bottomless well. Pearl turns her eyes around the room. This is where it happened, some vague part of her thinks. The table where Drax had laid his blades is now nothing but a melted pit; the colossal electromagnetic vice is all but absent, the two opposite ends having been blasted into their respective walls. There are only splintered remains of the display case of teeth and skulls, and shattered panes of floating coffins.

How could anyone have survived this?

“Where are you?” she calls out. Her voice is thin and shaky. “Where’s your friend?”

“I am here!” the voice replies, but pearl can see nothing but the dog, frantic and panicked as it leaps again toward the pit. For a moment, pearl moves to follow, but then she hears a groan from the opposite direction. Her eyes widen and she bolts toward the pile of broken glass and stone. There’s a flicker of movement, and a hoarse mutter.

“Goddammit. Spilled my drink. Fuck, that hurts.”

“H-hey,” she spills out, climbing her way through the broken mess. It’s the duck — one feathered hand pressed to his temple, bright blood marring the rumpled white of his feathers.

His eyes struggle to focus on her. “Oh hey. It’s the broad who stared at me like a zoo-animal.”

She tries to kneel in the uneven wreckage. Half of his body is hidden from view — waist-deep in the rubble. A piece of bone-wall slants over him. “Can you feel your legs?” she asks, and the question wobbles. What will she do if he can’t? If it’s bad? She may have a comprehensive understanding of many species’ anatomy, but of course Herbert never saw fit to have her learn anything of real medical value. She thinks she remembers that you shouldn’t move people with spinal injuries.

The building moans around them.

“That don’t sound good,” the duck notes, then squints at her. “Think they’re bruised. The legs, I mean. Maybe cut up. Nothing that’s gonna keep me from getting the fuck outta here.”

She chews her lip. “Hold still,” she tells him, and casts her eyes around. There’s a thin beam of crimped metal from the edge of his cage. It’s taller than she is, but broken on one end and nearly melted through on the other. She grips it in both hands and throws her whole body into twisting it, leveraging her weight till it snaps. “Tell me if I hurt you,” she orders him, wiggling the thin beam between the layers of broken stone. She leans down on it as she goes, testing gently till it seems like she might be able to safely buy him a few inches. “Can you wiggle out on three?”

The duck’s still watching her with squinty eyes. “Yeah. I think so.”

“One. Two. Three.”

She pushes down with every ounce of adrenaline left in her system, trying to keep the movement slow and smooth and controlled — and then maintained. Her eyes close, every muscle shaking.

There’s a soft, bruised-sounding quack and the shifting of gravel, and then she hears the duck’s voice at her side.

“Got it.”

She opens her eyes to make sure he’s clear, and then eases up on the makeshift lever, yanking it back before the wall can pull it from her hands.

“Is there anyone else who survived? Do you know?”

The duck brushes himself off. “Lady, I’m pretty sure I only made it ‘cause I wasn’t in the shelves.” He nods to the collapsed levels of glass rooms all around them. The museum groans around them, and he mops at his brow, then the cut on his head where the blood is still oozing. “We gotta get out of here. This place could fall apart any minute. Plus, I’m not looking forward to that jackass putting me in another cage.” He scowls. “Not that he’s probably even here anymore. Bet he’s run off somewhere nice and safe till the building’s done falling apart.”

“D’au is here,” the voice says again, and the duck rolls his eyes. “She needs help!”

“Where’re you at, Cosmo?” he raises his voice, annoyed. “Get out here. There’s no way she’s still alive, not any more than Karmani or Carina or that broody fucker down the hall—”

“I am ‘live. And I can hear heartbeat.”

Maybe pearl’s concussed, or maybe her translator got jostled, because she’s pretty sure her ears are picking up a Russian accent. Somewhere below, the dog barks from the pile of rubble. The duck rolls his eyes, then gestures to pearl as he slides down a slab of bone brickwork. She follows, and watches while he props his hands on his hips and glares at the dog.

“Bet you wish that asshole never put that chip in you now, huh? You’d be a lot more helpful to D’au — and all of us right now — if you could use your damn superpowers.”

The dog’s lip peels back and she growls at the duck, then turns pleading eyes up to pearl and sits neatly on her haunches.

“Please? Can you help my friend?”

Pearl presses her fingers to her own pulsing head, surprised when her fingers touch something tacky and warm. She blinks down at them. The museum rumbles.

“Just to be clear,” she says faintly. “You’re a talking dog.” Her nose wrinkles. “And I think you’re speaking with a Russian accent.”

“Da.”

“Sure she can’t be the weirdest thing you’ve seen out here, babe.”

“It’s not the talking dog part that’s strange,” she confesses. “It’s the language. It’s from—“ What? Home, as if it ever was one? And maybe Terra is a silly thing to fixate on right now, so she shakes her pulsing head and says, “I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t concussed.”

The duck snorts. “Jury’s still out on that one.”

“Show me where your friend is,” she says to the dog. Cosmo, she remembers. “Then you two need to leave.”

“But—”

“I’ll do my best,” pearl swears fervently. “I swear it. I won’t leave her. But you two need to go.”

“Sounds good to me,” the duck says with a nod. “I’m fully on-board with this plan.” He waves a hand at the dog. “Shoo. Go show her.”

The dog bares her teeth but jumps to her feet, nudging against pearl’s thigh. “This way,” she says urgently, and runs back toward the caved-in part of the floor. “Here,” she urges, and pearl climbs carefully over the destruction. The floor is dangerously sloped inward, toward a pit where the cages above had clearly punched right through the floor. But pearl can see her: a spill of glossy-dark hair braided with dust and dirt, and skin so pale and fractured by ice-blue that she nearly blends into the crumble of bone around her.

The Xeronian.

“I see her,” pearl says to the dog. “Go.”

“But—”

Pearl tilts her head toward the duck and offers the dog a wobbly half-smile. “Look at that guy. Do you think he’s going to be able to get out of here on his own? You have to look out for him while I look out for your friend.”

The dog’s head sways from pearl to the duck and back again, her tail tucked low between her hind legs. Then she gives a very canine-like huff of frustration, and lopes carefully back up to where the duck is waiting, tapping one webbed foot.

“Let’s go, Lassie,” he grunts as their footsteps recede.

“I told you stop calling me that, Howard!”

Pearl slides herself down between the broken bits of stone. Her fingers light gently on the spot behind the Xeronian’s jawbone, where their pulse is most easily found. She doesn’t think about long-term ramifications — just dips into the years she’d spent learning about Herbert’s planets, and pulls up the memory of the Xeronian language.

“I’ve got you, Little Sister.”

Her accent isn’t perfect — she can’t replicate the way a Xeronian’s facial plates clack softly together, hollow-sounding and musical. But it must be close enough, because there’s a gentle repetitive clicking as the woman shifts, her plates vibrating against each other.

“Careful,” pearl cautions as the woman’s dark lashes flicker open, revealing wide eyes in a vivid, glacial blue that matches the tattoos patterning her face and defining her plates. “There’s been an explosion. We’re in a dangerous place.”

“You speak Xeronian?” the woman asks, dazed and blinking. The skin under her eyes is a darker red than normal for a Xeronian.

Exhaustion, pearl realizes. Malnourishment.

Immiseration.

“I do,” she says. “Let’s get you out of here, and then we can talk more. Can you move?”

The Xeronian lifts herself gingerly onto her elbows, wincing through her aches and pains. “I can. My right ankle may be damaged. I’m not sure—”

The rubble around them shifts, and they both freeze.

“We have to move wisely,” pearl tells her, carefully turning herself onto her hands and knees. “When we’re ready, roll toward me, slow and steady. Put your right arm over my shoulders. We’ll look for safe handholds, and climb up. Try not to use your right foot until we know the damage. But if things slide, you must run — throw yourself over the edge, as far as you can.” Pearl gestures with her chin toward the ridge of debris just above them, and the Xeronian nods. “Are you ready? It might be quick.”

The Xeronian nods again, and pearl hesitates.

“Your name,” she says quietly. “It’s D’au, right?”

“D’au shelRandau,” she confirms cautiously. “Do you know me?”

Pearl shakes her head. “Cosmo was looking for you,” she tells her, and then — on impulse — “I just like to know people’s names,” she confesses. “I think it’s important.” A silly thing to say right now, perhaps. Her cheeks burn under the claustrophobic layer of grime. “I’m ready when you are,” she says, and watches as the Xeronian carefully shifts toward her.

The bone-wreckage below them holds steady at first, but with every careful slither up the side of the pit — aggravated by D’au’s wounded ankle — the gravel slides a little more. It doesn’t help that it’s so very hard to see much in the dim blue shadows of the Collector’s barely-lit ruins.

“Steady,” pearl murmurs, more to herself than to the Xeronian. Above them, there’s a rough, barking squeal, and both of them look up — startled — in time to see the red-and-blue patches of a wide-eyed f’saki staring down at them.

“Oh,” pearl gasps. “Littlefoot! Stay back!”

The f’saki chitters, then disappears.

The Xeronian huffs a tired laugh. “I have a universal translator. The Collector didn’t take it out.” She winces as they inch upward. “If that’s why you were speaking Xeronian, you don’t need to.”

Pearl bites her lip, and turns her eyes back to the edge above them. “It wasn’t the only reason,” she admits. “But let’s get to safety first. We’re close.”

They are close, but D’au is flagging. Her hands don’t seem to grip as tightly as they need to, and her arms shake as she lifts herself up the side.

“Sorry,” she pants from behind her facial plate, pressing her forehead briefly to the rock and closing her eyes. “I was in the display for too long. My muscles have atrophied.” She lets out another groaning laugh. “You may not believe it, but I used to be quite strong.”

Pearl tilts her own head against the stone and offers a shy half-smile. “Well, I was never strong at all, so you don’t need to worry about showing off.” She looks upward. Littlefoot is waiting at the ledge again. “Come on. We’re so close. And then we’ll get you healthy and well again.”

A sift of gravel trails down beneath D’au’s right knee, and something somewhere slips. Her leg sinks into the slope. She gasps, and drags down against the stone. Pearl casts alarmed eyes over her shoulder — a huge slab of wall slides slowly past, toward the center of the pit. Her arm tightens around D’au’s ribs, adrenaline surging once more as she hauls the Xeronian recklessly upward.

“Quick! Quick!” she urges, but the scramble only sets more stones loose. “Go! Go!” She pushes D’au upward, lodging her bruised shoulder under the Xeronian’s right thigh, propelling her up over the side. Littlefoot keens and chatters somewhere out of pearl’s line of sight. D’au crests the edge on her knees and spins: dark-rimmed ice-blue eyes wide, and one long-fingered hand extended toward pearl.

“Back!” pearl cries as the edge crumples away beneath her own hands. “Get back!” The pit deepens and then widens and she slides, bruised and scraping. Gravel shatters against her face and something hard crashes against the already-bloody wound on her brow, and the underfloors of the Collector’s emporium swallow her down.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

hey friends! I'm sorry for the delay. i knew i was going to need a little more time when november rolled around (and the truth is, while i enjoyed this chapter a lot when i wrote it, i'm no longer thrilled with it. o(╥﹏╥)o sorrryyyyy i hope you still enjoy it! i do think i am going to try to standardize the recap in the opening notes, for those of you who find it useful... especially since i will probably be taking a break from cicatrix for the holiday season (yes, i ended you on a bit of a cliffhanger... but not to worry; the resolution is drafted and awaiting re-writes!). NOT because i'm stalled out or don't know where it's going (this will not be an abandoned fic) but because i just have....too many cozy one-shots (hopefully) coming out in the next few months.

as an apology, meet our newest, cutest castmember, littlefoot. i love him and i would die for him.

anyway if you are still here, thank you thank you thank you. i have no end of gratitude for you and your patience, kindness, and encouragement. i appreciate you so very much, truly. may you be safe and happy; may your home be at the perfect temperature; may your weather be sweet and exactly what you want from the season you're in. sleep well, or have a lovely day, and know that my best wishes are with you ♡♡♡

coming soon: chapter twenty-seven. la gaudière.
summary: someone steals from the collector.
warnings: headwounds and near-death experiences. regret and angst. woundcare. some comfort. this chapter uses descriptive imagery that may be reminiscent of residential and urban environments impacted by bombings, warfare, or natural disasters like earthquakes.
estimated date: late january/early february.

other exciting things:
♡ monday, 11/18. cold hands, warm thighs [ONESHOT].
♡ friday, 11/22. take what you need. take care of your goddamn injury.
♡ monday, 11/25. mitten aesthetic [ONESHOT].
♡ saturday, 11/30. bookshop at the end of the universe [ONESHOT].

･:꧂posting schedules, chapter-previews, & more on tumblr♡
･:꧂masterlist & moodboard♡
･:꧂chapter one. nemotia of cicatrix scene by @frostedwitch
･:꧂portrait of pearl♡ by me!
･:꧂my fave rocket & pearl scene from chapter thirteen by me! ♡♡ (scroll down for the whole piece)
･:꧂ scrabbly lil pearl x rocket doodle by me!
･:꧂ adorable pearl x rocket selfie by starriidreams!
･:꧂ steamy/emotional pearl x rocket painting on "water lily" (lotus) fabric by hibatasblog/hibata♡♡♡

Chapter 27: la gaudière.

Summary:

someone steals from the collector.

Notes:

warnings: headwounds and near-death experiences. regret and angst. woundcare. some comfort. this chapter uses descriptive imagery that may be reminiscent of residential and urban environments impacted by bombings, warfare, or natural disasters like earthquakes.

recap: chapter twenty-six. nodrophobia.
feel free to skip this if you feel like you remember everything!
pearl and rocket still have not resolved their fight (pearl had refused to pull rocket' tail in lieu of a safe-word and rocket had gotten in his feelings about hurting her in the past; he then lashed out by brutally reminding pearl that she had brought animals to wyndham). the next day, they land on knowhere. groot stays behind in the dreadnought to guard nebula and stay out of the collector's sights. pearl gets drunk at the boot of jemiah, fights with rocket, and frees all the f'saki, orloni, and other animals from the fighting tables. the collector is creepy (shocking) and pearl taps into her training as Madame Lavenza to handle him. before a deal can be struck for drax's traditional kylosian blades, the collector's next appointment arrives, and our crew is rushed out of the emporium and told to return in an hour. rocket leaves drax and pearl to allegedly visit the brass camellia. pearl shops for a gift for rocket, and bonds with drax. upon their return to the emporium, there's a massive purple explosion that demolishes half of exitar and separates them. pearl worries about the caged lifeforms in the emporium and enters to see if she can help. she enters a pit in the showroom, where the xeronian is unconscious. pearl climbs down into the pit and is able to wake the xeronian and get her to solid ground, but the pit opens and pearl plummets down through a hole in the floor.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

la gaudière. a glint of goodness you notice in someone that you wouldn’t expect, which is often only detectable by sloshing them back and forth in your mind until everything dark and gray and common falls away, leaving something shining at the bottom of the pan—a rare element hidden deep in the bedrock, that must’ve been washed there by a storm somewhere upstream. French la gaudière, from Latin gaudere, to find joy. Pronounced “lah gou-dee-yair.” The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

When the stone ricochets against pearl’s headwound, her vision splinters into a million black stars — not that it would matter, since the world is too dark and moving too fast to make sense of anyway. She tries to grab onto anything she can, but she’s still not prepared for the solid punch in the stomach that has her gagging: a long piece of rebar, caught diagonally in the mouth of the pit. She teeters against it, bent double at the waist, trying to hang on as a mountain’s worth of gravel and stone batters down on her. Her shoulders duck and hunch to shelter her, trying to both protect her head and maintain her balance in the hailstorm of bone and stone.

By the time the deluge thins to a trickle of pebbles and glass shards, she’s choking again on the clouds of bone-dust and ash billowing up from the floor underneath.

“Little Sister! Little Sister?”

D’au.

Pearl coughs, heaving, and carefully tries to turn herself. Her arms tremble as she maneuvers herself over the rebar, lying across it lengthwise: straddling it now, locking her arms and legs around the thin piece of metal.

“I’m here,” she calls up, and even though her voice is shallow and cracking, it echoes and reverberates in the chamber of collapsed floors — funneling up the hole overhead. A few more pieces of debris tumble down, and pearl closes her eyes and cringes as they scatter around her. She can hear them when they finally clatter against the ground — but it doesn’t seem to happen for a very long time.

She swallows over the void. “I’m — I’m safe for now.” Safe, she supposes, is a relative term. “Stay back, D’au. I’m going to see if I can get closer to the opening.”

There’s a muffled sound from above — D’au, pearl thinks, and maybe Littlefoot. She closes her eyes for a minute, trying to stop the slow, subtle spinning that seems to be happening with her vision, and then carefully pulls herself upward along the slant of the rebar.

She gets halfway closer before the bar shifts. The end buried in the bone above — the floor, she realizes vaguely — splinters and cracks. Pearl closes her eyes, and swallows, and pulls herself a little higher. She’s closed the distance by half again when the bonework groans again, and she forces herself to look at where she’s going.

The rebar is peeling itself out of the bone-concrete above.

She sucks in a heavy breath, lungs slow and weighted against her ribs. Even if she breeches the opening, she’s not sure how she’ll get out. How she’ll get to the top. It’s too steep, and her arms and legs are quaking, rattling against the rebar. The ruins are too unstable. She chews her lip.

“D’au?” she calls up. Her voice hesitates. Trembles.

There’s another soft puff of bone-dust, and then the Xeronian’s voice floats down. “I’m here, Little Sister.”

Pearl swallows. “I need you to do something for me.”

“Anything.”

Pearl lays her cheek on the rebar. It’s rough and cold and she suddenly thinks again of the chill living at the base of her spine, and how she hasn’t thought of it in hours. She pictures her little cemetery, with stones for Fairy and Lylla, and the linguist and the maid. She thinks of Groot, and his gentle voice, and the way he spins flowers out of his palms: making something beautiful of himself to leave behind, everywhere he goes. She thinks of his sorrow at the Shrine of the Sybila Nix Ora, and their shared prayers over the Cyxlorade candles. She thinks of his love for Rocket’s terrible coffee. Then she thinks of Drax, and his softness, and the kindness of his hand on hers. His authenticity, and his terrible and strangely beautiful advice. Nebula, and her fawn-dark eyes, and her rasping sarcasm. The sullen cautiousness of her fascination with their odd little crew, and her grudgingly-given insights into gun-handling, and the way she’s taken to waiting with an open palm and a raised brow for lozenges whenever she needs them.

And pearl thinks of Rocket, and the ember-red eyes that she’d let keep her warm forever, if he’d let her. The heat of his leather-soft hands on her body, stinging and burning and melting, holding all the ice at bay. His willingness to honor her choice, even when he’d disliked her — to take her with him, to keep her, to let her do what she’d wanted even when he’d hated it, even when he’d threatened punishments that had somehow never really become deterrents at all.

—as if you hadn’t dragged who-knows-how-many animals right to his—

She tries to shut it out — just for now — but a stray thought floats in on the faint blue glow that filters through the hole in the floor above her.

What if he still thinks she hurt Lylla?

There’s a strange little sound already in her ears before she realizes a whine has crept up her throat. She buries her teeth in her lip and tastes blood, then folds herself tighter: a flower that doesn’t deserve the sun.

“Little Sister?”

Stop, pearl tells herself. I might die like this, but I won’t die like this. Ashamed, and small.

Maybe Rocket does think that, she tells herself, eyes clenched shut tight, tears squeezing out. But it doesn’t change how badly he’d wanted to keep her safe — from him. It doesn’t change that he’d rather risk her pulling his tail off than hurt her.

“Little Sister? Are you okay?”

She swallows, and when she speaks, she wills all the shivers out of her voice. “I’m going to keep trying to get closer — to get out — but I need you to take Littlefoot and go. I know your ankle is hurt, but you need to find a way to get out. It’s not safe to stay.”

There’s a moment of silence. Then, sternly: “I am D’au shelRandau of the Xeronian, the last surviving descendant of King Randau, and I will not leave a companion—”

“I need you to get help,” pearl says, gently and clearly. “I need you to find my friend. He’s a Kylosian. His name is Drax. He’s — he’s loud,” pearl laughs softly, “and he’ll be easy to find. And—” Her voice splinters, and she has to swallow again. Something stings and splinters behind her sternum. “—and my other friend. Rocket. He’ll come for me if he can. If anyone can figure out how to get me out of here, it’s him.” She swallows. “He’ll come for me if he can,” she repeats. The words still feel true. “But — if it takes too long — if it’s too dangerous — will you tell them I love them? And — tell them who you are. They’ll take you back to Xeron, if you want. Rocket will know it’s important. Tell him I said you’re like us.” She laughs again, but it gets caught on a hiccup in her throat. “He’ll hate that, but he’ll do it.” She can feel the tears drip over the bridge of her nose and dampen her hands, still wrapped around the rebar. “But just tell them I love them, okay?”

Littlefoot squeals. There’s a soft thud and shuffle, and then a muffled voice: cursing, and hoarse, and vaguely familiar. The f’saki chitters, and D’au calls down — worried and hopeful—

“Little Sister, close your eyes. There may be some debris.”

“D’au, stay up there!” pearl cries out, wincing as a handful of gravel and silt clatters down onto her upturned face. Careful not to lose her balance, she leans flat against the rebar and swipes a hand over her eyes, blinking away the dust and squinting up through the hole above her. There, poised perfectly on the edge of the crumbling floor as if gravity is of no consequence, is a dark crouched silhouette: shadow against ghosts of shadow, and the occasional glint of metal in the dim and flickering lights above.

A hand extends — as lilac-blue as pearl’s hair when it’s not coated in bone and ash — and the figure leans closer, gripping her around the forearm. Pearl stares upward — open-mouthed — into annoyed fawn-black eyes.

“Hello, princess.”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Rocket would’ve liked to think that when his life finally flashed before his eyes, it would’ve been a too-brief catalogue of the good moments: playing tag with L06 and A95, laughing from the vents with the Captain on the Eclector, the first hug he’d ever gotten — from Lylla — and all the uncountable, ineffably sweet moments he’d had with pearl over the past few cycles.

Not that he would have minded another glimpse of her glorious tits, of course, or the way she’d looked when she’d come on his dick — but somehow, even those moments aren’t his favorites with her. Teaching her how to shoot, though — telling her stories in the runabout, or staying curled up with her under the flight controls — those were the real golden moments. Watching her stand up to the Sovereign, or tell him he was being a jerk, or scamper around with all that joy when she’d seen the abilisks.

Hell, watching her stand tall on that gambling table with a feral f’saki in her arms, surveying the havoc she’d just created like some avenging, drunken, pouty blue-haired goddess — if he could see that one more time before he died, he wouldn’t even care if there was an afterlife, good or bad.

Instead, what happens when Rocket finds himself catapulted halfway down the street is that he’s struck by all the times he’s been an absolute ass, accidentally or on purpose. He’d known she’d misunderstood when he’d said he regretted things between them, but he hadn’t bothered to set it right. And he’d known she would misinterpret his reasons for going to the Brass Camellia, but he’d frickin’ said it anyway.

He was finally gonna die — something he’d both run from and wanted since the moment he’d watched his brother and sister burn — and pearl was gonna think — pearl was gonna think—

I just need to think, and I can’t with you looking at me like I’m some kind of monster.

He isn’t ever gonna get to take her to see a damn Acanti migration.

His body bounces — it’s a miracle it doesn’t hurt more, with all that metal weighing him down — and he sits up slowly, trying to shake the calcium-dust from the fur of his ringing ears. There’s a slice on the side of his nose, he thinks. His ribs ache but his breath doesn’t rattle, and he should take a second to inventory his body — make sure he’s got his fingers and toes, that he hasn’t broken his tail, figure out where the singed-fur-smell is coming from — but as soon as he realizes he’s frickin’ alive, he hits all fours and sprints toward the husk of the museum.

Start there, he thinks. Start close to ground zero and work your way out. Find pearl. Drax if you can.

Then get starside before shit hits the fan.

Rocket has been through enough prison breaks to know that nothing generates rebellion like seeing the center of power demolished, and he suspects a mining colony full of forced laborers won’t be much different. Either the Collector’ll crack down or some other power will step into the void, and Rocket doesn’t want himself or his pearl on the ground when it happens.

His eyes search for the lilac-blue banner of her hair like it’s a song he’s trying to remember. Everything is dim and burnt and broken and maybe he wouldn’t be able to make out the vibrancy of her curls through the dust and dark and shadows anyway, but he tries. He takes in a chestful of air through his nose, hunting for waterlilies and something clean on the air — only to immediately double over when the insides of his lungs are painted with bone-dust and cinders. Something inside him pinches and aches.

“Pearl!” he tries to yell, caution and anonymity forgotten, but his voice cracks and withers in the haze of grime.

What if she’s dead? What if she’s gone like Lylla, like 06 and 95?

And you never fuckin’ made it right?

He swallows and breathes deep and tries again, calling up the lowest, most carrying voice he can from the carved-out hollow of his ribs.

“Kitten!” This time it’s a roar, ripped right from his solar plexus.

“Rocket!”

He whips around so fast that gravel and dust scrape up beneath his toes and his claws scratch for purchase in the rubble.

Drax.

The Kylosian is bent at the waist, hands on knees, heaving. His skin is painted in pale clay, with hollow dark rings around his eyes where they’d been squeezed shut. There’s an enormous slash across his chest, but it must be shallow because the blood has already mixed with the dust to form a chalky sort of red bone-paste in slow-oozing dribbles and drips.

“Rocket,” he heaves, “I—“

“Where the fuck is she?” His claws are sunk into the meat of both the Kylosian’s forearms before he means to, gripping Drax so hard his fingers cramp. Still, he can’t loosen them.

“I had her hand right here,” Drax says, sounding lost as he lifts one hand and touches the crook of his opposite elbow. “And then—“ He lifts his head and looks around the leveled city. The bone buildings creak and groan, walls still slowly crumpling as if they’ve just realized that parts of their foundations are missing. There are cries and bellows but it’s still eerily quiet.

“It’s Kylos all over again,” Drax says softly, and his voice is haunted. His dark eyes find Rocket’s again. “What if—? I could not find Kamariah for days after—“

Rocket’s hand snaps from Drax’s arm to the Kylosian’s face before he consciously realizes it, and he only barely has time to pull back on the slap and grab the Kylosian by the jaw. The Destroyer falls silent and stares at him.

“This ain’t Kylos,” Rocket says, forcing his voice into something fierce and certain when he feels neither of those things. “And it ain’t Ronan. What happened to your family was fucked up, Drax — the worst of the worst — but this ain’t that, and she’s still alive.”

She is. She is.

Drax swallows, and nods. “Yes,” he says, but his low voice is packed with all the uncertainty Rocket’s hiding. “You are right. This is different, and she is.”

Rocket closes his eyes. “Good Drax,” he says, trying to force a thread of comforting condescension into his reedy, rasping voice. He caps it off with two gentle slaps to the Destroyer’s cheek and then drops his hands. “Where’d you lose her?”

My girl.

He never shoulda let her out of his sight in the first place.

Drax straightens and looks around. “Everything looks different,” he says quietly, “but I think—“ He points, and Rocket’s already launching himself over rubble and broken debris, trying to pick up the scent of her. Dust coats everything though, thick and pasty on the air. He looks for anything — a strand of hair, the shoelace she’d magically had in her ponytail after crawling across the entire Boot of Jemiah — a thread from her cardigan.

“Fan out,” he says to Drax — though there’s only two of them, so how much fanning can there really be? Still, they split, looking for anything that could indicate pearl had been by.

“Oh,” he hears, and his ears twitch and he looks back at his companion, who’s lifting a crushed paper package from the rubble. It’s tattered and torn with a scrap of heavy leather dangling through, and Drax straightens and looks up at Rocket. “She bought this for you.”

His whole chest caves in. “Was she carrying it?” he asks, and the words are bloody against his teeth. “Was she — was it in her frickin’ hands, Drax?”

“No,” the Kylosian shudders. “I — I had it— do you think she’s under—?”

Rocket looks at the piles of shattered bone block and a shudder ripples his own frame, too. He shakes his head. “No. She—“

She can’t be.

There’s a wisp of her fragrance, waterlilies tinged with blood, weighed down under calcium deposits, and for a moment he’s sure it’s just the package — her ghost, haunting him from where her fingers had touched the paper. Maybe she’d held it to her chest before she’d given it to Drax to carry, maybe—

“There,” he gasps, and turns, trying to follow it into the still-settling haze of dust. He drops again to all fours, leaping from broken stone to broken stone. The scent wavers and disappears. “She was moving,” he strangles out. “She’s somewhere—”

He freezes, and looks up slowly while whatever’s left of his heart drops through the soles of his feet and into the gravel and bone-sand below. The fuckin’ emporium. The fucking emporium.

“Would she go into the museum?” he asks slowly, as if Drax is going to have the answer — as if Rocket doesn’t already know it himself.

Of course she would. If she thought there was someone in there who needed to be let out. If she thought any of those poor saps in the cages might’ve made it—

He’s catapulting himself toward the broken gaps in the walls where the doors used to be, even as some four-legged canine-type in a fiberglass-suit comes trotting out of the shadows. There’s a biped limping beside her — some kind of avian-looking guy in a tattered frickin’ three-piece — and Rocket’s pretty sure he remembers seeing them in the Collector’s emporium.

“You!” His voice cracks out of him like a bullet. Both the bird and the dog pause and blink at him, startled. “Is there anybody else in there?” he demands, and he doesn’t care that it sounds like he’s yelling at them.

The bird sputters, but a tinny, mechanical voice answers him from the voicebox on the dog’s collar — immediate and urgent. “Da. There is girl. She is helping my friend.”

Rocket strangles out some sort of noise — relieved, infuriated, and still somehow deeply, deeply afraid. The emporium looks like it’s about to frickin’ collapse. “Blue-haired?” he demands.

The bird tilts his head. “Lassie here doesn’t see color—”

“Howard!” the dog protests, with an audible bark. She turns her eyes up to Rocket. “She is Terran—”

“—but I do,” Howard finishes. “And yeah. Blue as a bottle of Curaçao.”

Rocket feels his lip peel back. “I don’t know what the fuck that is,” he snarls, but he launches himself into a four-legged sprint toward the building just as Drax comes trotting up, breathing heavily.

“Hey!” the bird calls after him with a startled, strange quacking noise. “That shithole’s about to fall apart—!”

“He has to help his friend, Howard,” he hears the dog chastise, but Rocket is already skittering past downed walls and broken cages, twisted frames of vibra-duranium alloy and steel. His tail provides a counterbalance as he swerves and leaps, feet nearly sliding out from beneath him more than once. Hallways upon broken, shadowed hallways unfold in front of him, and more than once, he wonders if he’s going the right way. The place had smelled like shit before — grime and dust and grease mixed with unwashed bodies and sludgy aquariums, rotten fruit from rotten wines. It’s an odor that had seemed somehow swampish and ossified and sickly-sweet, all at once.

Now, though, the emporium smells burnt-clean. Ozone, and electricity, and something metallic and hot. Melted glass. The inside of his nose feels singed and he’s worried he won’t be able to pick up pearl’s scent even if it’s right in front of him.

“Rocket!” he hears Drax shout from behind him, the Kylosian’s deep voice echoing through the shattered chambers. He almost twists to yell back for him, but that’s wasted breath and time. Under twisted rebar and fallen walls, over mounds of broken stone and bone, he pivots and charges and darts. And when he finally hits the main chamber, there she is — there she fuckin’ is. He is able to smell her, a half-second before he sees her: muted waterlilies and rivers, sweat and tears and blood, fucking blood. Then his eyes find her and he watches her being hoisted over a rim of rubble by a lean body that he doesn’t bother to pay attention to. For fuck’s sake, she looks mangled — hair dulled by grit and ash, ponytail half-pulled out of its bootlace, and some of it matted with a bright flare of red that he can smell. There’s a crimson ooze along her brow — smudged and smeared and muddied across her forehead, too — and her lip looks swollen and split again, and she’s all bruised and scraped and—

He doesn’t know how he makes it across the central chamber. He doesn’t remember making the decision to keep moving, or to go to her, but here he is — hauling her back from the edge of what he’s vaguely certain is a pit with a giant hole straight through the ground — tapping terrified hands over her ribs and listening for pained gasps before he scrambles up her back, palming her collarbone and then running his fingers up the flared sides of her neck, tilting her head so he can check the cut in her brow, figure out where the blood in her scalp is coming from. There’s a swollen knot on her skull — already worryingly large.

“You’re okay,” he mutters, and it’s not a question so much as a prayer, breathed repeatedly into the shell of her ear and her blood-crusted curls. “You’re all right.”

He’s vaguely aware of her responding, saying something, but his fists suddenly tighten in her hair and he’s tipping her face back so he can hunch over her head and stare down into her wide, dazed eyes. He bares his teeth.

“What the fuck were you thinking?”

Pearl blinks up at him, lips parted, still stunned.

“Fox.”

He looks up, startled, at the rasping tones. The Luphomoid — the frickin’ Luphomoid is out, and she must’ve been the one who’d hauled pearl’s gorgeous, delectable ass out of the hole in the ground. The cyborg stands with one hip cocked, casually, as if there’s no reason for her to not be there.

“How — how the fuck did you get outta the jackroom?” he asks, and he must’ve used up all his energy panicking over pearl because the words come out bewildered instead of threatening. He loosens his fists in his girl’s hair but he doesn’t let go, mindlessly winding the ash-coated locks around his wrists and forearms like ribbons.

Nebula rolls the joints in her metal wrist and grimaces, then looks away. “We heard the explosion from the Dreadnought. I told the tree that the three of you might need my help. That if he cared about you, he would get me out of my bonds.” She shrugs and casts her dark eyes to pearl. “I told you he was a terrible guard.” She clears her throat and looks up into the dark, broken levels above. The building groans again. “Also, we need to get out of here.”

“Rocket!” Drax yells, bursting into the room. His eyes widen, and he stretches out one arm to point at Nebula. “You,” he gasps, sounding betrayed.

“She saved me,” pearl says immediately, and then twists her neck to try to peer at Rocket over her shoulder. “And she’s right. We need to get out of here, and we need to take her with us.” She tilts her eyes, and Rocket follows her gaze, suddenly aware of two more lifeforms still breathing in the debris: a pale-skinned humie with dark hair and brilliant-blue eyes, and a chittering—

“The fuckin’ f’saki?” he growls.

If he wasn’t perched behind her — feet anchored to her waist, clawed toes snagging in the fibers of her filthy cardigan — she probably would’ve glared at him. Little brat. “The Xeronian,” she corrects firmly.

The woman in questions attempts to climb to her feet, but one ankle’s clearly fucked.

“Drax,” Rocket snaps, but the Kylosian’s already there, slipping a broad arm around the woman’s back.

“My name is D’au shelRandau,” the woman says — a mouthful of clicks and hums that almost sound like background music to the words coming through his translator. Her mouth isn’t visible behind her face-plates but her eyes curve when she looks at Drax — a grateful smile, Rocket imagines. Then she turns her head to Rocket and nods. “You must be Rocket. Little Sister told me about you.”

Rocket’s fingers tighten again in pearl’s hair. “Little Sister?”

“Not — it’s just a Xeronian term of endearment. I’ll explain once we get out,” pearl says softly. Her hands sweep her hips, then come to rest lightly on his ankles.

“You can’t ride the princess out, Fox,” Nebula says sharply. “She’s damaged enough.”

He recoils while pearl huffs in protest — because even if he hadn’t found anything broken on a cursory glance, the Luphomoid’s still right. His pearl’s all bruised up — she’s got a couple frickin’ headwounds, and he’s gonna have to make sure she ain’t concussed — and he’s way heavier than most people expect from his size. He untangles his claws from her hair and her sweater, and carefully slides down her back.

But he doesn’t let go.

He anchors his fist in the cardigan, twisting it into his fingers and hand, holding it tight. “Let’s go,” he grunts. “We’re gonna have to not just get outta this particular shithole, but off the whole frickin’ skull.” He waves a hand. “Trust my extensive expertism — shit’s about to go down on Knowhere, and we do not wanna be here for it.”

“Oh,” pearl gasps, “wait—”

“No,” Rocket snaps when she moves to untangle his hand from her sweater. He can see the intention to slip out of her whole cardigan, right as the thought forms behind her eyes, and he snarls and yanks on the sweater. “What do you want? There’s nobody else here. I guarantee anyone who was still alive is out by now.”

“But — there—” She points to the shattered display class of bones and teeth. “There’s something—”

“We have to go,” Nebula repeats, hoarse and impatient. Rocket doesn’t disagree.

“You three head out,” he orders. His eyes flick to the Xeronian chick. “You comin’ with us starside?” he demands — ‘cause he’s given up on not adopting pearl’s frickin’ strays at this point.

The Xeronian swallows. “If you’re okay with that,” she says quietly.

Rocket lifts his eyes to Drax’s and nods once. “Go on,” he says. “Get to the ship.” Then he hauls pearl over to the pile of glass and bone, scowling the whole time. The f’saki hasn’t left — skirting the two of them, once almost fuckin’ snapping at Rocket’s tail.

“Littlefoot,” pearl admonishes, looking horrified. “Manners.”

“Fuck me,” Rocket says flatly. “This thing prob’ly has rabies.”

“Reptilian f’saki are immune,” pearl says brightly, and he rolls his eyes. For fuck’s sake. “So are orloni,” she adds, “which is good, because—” Her voice staggers off, and he narrows his stare on her.

“Because?”

She winces. “I might have gotten bitten earlier?” she offers. Her face scrunches — cute — all embarrassment.

He blinks. “When—”

“At Jemiah’s,” she says meekly, and he pinches the spot between his brows.

“Of course you frickin’ did,” he mutters, and sighs — long-suffering once more. “Okay. We’ll deal with that later. For now, what the fuck are we looking for?”

“There’s a piece of wood,” she says quietly. “Maybe as long as my forearm, and very thin. A stick, really. We’ll just take a quick look and if we can’t find it right away, we’ll go.”

She crouches, wincing, and he winces too. He watches as she carefully lifts pieces of debris, then shrugs and tries to sniff, to see if he can catch anything under the burnt-clean smell of the broken emporium.

“I hate to tell you, sweetheart, but anything made outta wood prob’ly got turned into ash when—” He breaks off, breathing deep, and his brows furrow. There’s a whiff of something forestlike and familiar, and he shifts one foot, nudging aside a sheet of flex-vibranium. “What the—”

“You found it!” she squeals, and he closes his eyes while she snatches at the fucking stick, brushing off the crushed glass and then hugging it to her chest like it’s a moon-damned treasure. He scrubs his free hand into his forehead, then pulls it down his face, taking his whiskers with it.

The f’saki clicks and purrs.

“Okay, okay,” he grumbles. “Let’s fuckin’ go before this shithole collapses on us—”

“We’re taking Drax?” she asks, letting him tug her toward the corridor as the f’saki frickin’ scampers in circles around them, then stops to growl at Rocket for absolutely no discernable damn reason. “And Nebula? And D’au?”

The list keeps getting longer. He sighs noisily.

“And probably your fuckin’ f’saki,” he concedes under his breath, tugging her along impatiently. Thank fuck they have the Dreadnought. This shit would’ve been impossible on the runabout.

But she doesn’t respond to that, only squinting ahead of them into the shadows, moving so much slower than he’d like. He realizes, suddenly, that she must be having a hard time seeing through all this flickering, eerie darkness — he remembers her feeling along beside him down in the engine room of the runabout, and the way she’d let him lead her across the grates and around corners by her wrist.

So damn trustingly.

He flinches back from the thought and hesitates. He doesn’t want to test it; doesn’t want to find out if he’s lost that — that willingness she’d once had, to follow him faithfully where she couldn’t see. Like she’d known he wouldn’t hurt her even before he had.

But the emporium shifts around them and something somewhere makes a crumbling sound, bone walls scraping and crunching in the dark, and he grits his teeth.

“Let me take the lead, sweetheart?”

He sees her part her puffy, bloodied lips, the ghost of a kitten-smile hiding in the corner. It’s the look she always has before she says something painfully cute. But then the smile falters, and she only nods, wide- and wet-eyed again in the dimness.

“Of course, Rocket.”

But there’s no of course about it, he figures. He lets his lip curl in self-disgust, knowing she won’t see it in these shadows and think it’s meant for her. His hand unknots from her cardigan and he circles his fingers loosely around her wrist.

Her pulse taps against his fingertips, and he realizes how lonely they’d felt without her heartbeat underneath them.

“Like the engine room, pearl,” he says carefully, watching her face in the darkness — waiting for her flinch or grimace or pull away. “Close your eyes and follow me.”

And fuck everything if she doesn’t just immediately do it, letting her lashes flutter shut just as quickly as she’d stuffed that rolled-up cloth in her mouth when he’d been preparing to take out her tracker, just as quickly as she’d reached for him when they’d been crossing the rain-slick glass of the Arete walls and she’d thought he might fall.

He swallows, and then swipes at his own eyes, and lets out a slow and shuddering breath that he’s sure she can’t hear. Then he pulls her along behind him, carefully leading her around whatever obstacles he can, telling her to duck when some fallen rebar looks like it might be low enough to hit her pretty head. Their path is marked only by his brief instructions: step down here, doll; now back up. This section is all frickin’ broken and uneven but I got you. Climb up here. And down again.

Good girl.

They move so much faster with him leading her through, and it’s all he can do to keep other praises from dripping between his teeth: good girl, sweet girl, thank you so fuckin’ much for being so good for me, for listening to me, for letting me get you outta here. I’m so mad you came into this place but I’m so fuckin’ grateful you’re trusting me now, sweetheart, you gorgeous fuckin’ angel. You waterlily-goddess.

He needs to apologize, he thinks with a bitter wince into the darkness. Do — something. To make things between them right. And not even, he realizes slowly, because of how much he’s missed her hands all over him, her wet pussy and pretty mouth. Even if she never let him back in, he’d want to fix this.

Because he’d hurt her the other night. Bad.

Maybe even worse than he had on the Arete.

If the thought of pearl being crushed at the bottom of the endless depths of the Collector’s emporium is enough to make a keening whine try to force its way out of his throat, then the thought of her dying while thinking he’s mad at her or that he hates her or that he believes she’s somehow at fault for Wyndham’s crimes — that makes him want to rip his own fur out, fistful by fistful.

Unfortunately, now’s not the time for apologies and rectifications. Every rumble of the emporium has his tail-fur standing further on-end — till they clear the exit, and find themselves back into the shrapnel-shattered city of Exitar. Pearl pauses when they’re out in the relative brightness of the open skull, squinting her eyes open as she looks around.

“Look,” she breathes, and makes a sort of all-encompassing gesture. He tilts his head, trying to see what she’s seeing, and squints one eye.

“What?” he rasps. His hand is still braceleting the wrist he’d memorized cycles ago, the web between his thumb and forefinger gentling cradling that little jutting bone, the callused-leather pad of his middle finger anchored unerringly against her pulse.

He doesn’t plan on letting go any time soon.

She huffs a breath: soft, tender. “People are helping.”

He blinks, and looks again. And it’s true. He’s always kinda thought of Knowhere as the dregs of society, which is why he’d always fit right the fuck in — or at least, he’d come close. Here, and Contraxia, and Conjunction: places for losers and liars and smugglers and thieves, murderers and weaponsdealers and creepy little patched-together monsters like himself. Fugitives and bounty-hunters and bad guys, maybe occasionally interspersed with the random poor asshole who was just down on their luck. Hell, the best person he’s actually met here is probably Jemiah, and that dickhead keeps animal-fighting pits and had dared to yell at pearl.

But here they are, in clusters and coalitions: the questionable citizenry of Knowhere, working together to unearth survivors and administer first aid.

He swallows. He doesn’t know what that means. He doesn’t know what happens if he has to internalize this new truth and hold it alongside the things he already knows: that people are always shit — except when sometimes they aren’t. That the galaxy is a terrible, vicious, isolating place — except when it isn’t.

Everybody’s fuckin’ out for themselves — except when they’re not.

He tugs on her wrist.

“Pearl, we gotta go,” he says, and his voice is so hoarse that it comes out as a whisper. Anyone who’s not helping right now will be looting in the outskirts — not that he blames ‘em; this is what happens when people are kept deprived by a tyrannical power structure, and he’s been at the foot of that pyramid for his entire life. Plus, once people realize how many lives were lost ‘cause of the Collector, things’ll get violent. Something bad is bound to happen. It always does. “We gotta get outta here before things change.”

She turns her eyes to him, still soft and open. They’re red-rimmed ‘cause of the particulate in the air, and probably because she’s been crying too damn much, but he has to swallow again because she’s so damn gorgeous and he doesn’t know what happened in that fuckin’ pit but he’s certain he almost lost her.

“Okay,” she agrees, and the word is so quiet and gentle that he can barely breathe.

He pulls her by the wrist over broken walls and bone-rubble, out past the places where the dust and ash-clouds reach, beyond the scorched smell of the blastzone to where they landed the Dreadnought in one of the larger hangars. He’d never gotten to sell the gold plating but oh well, he figures. Gold is a decent-enough conductor, and between its malleability and resistance to corrosion, he can sell it anywhere.

He’s already got everything he needs from off this skull and that’s all that matters.

Everyone’s in the cockpit when they get there — not just Drax and the Xeronian, but Nebula and Groot too. It’s lucky the space is made for a full contingent of Gold Captain officers, or they’d be crammed elbows-to-assholes. Groot is already fussing over both Drax and the new girl, murmuring woeful I am Groots over both their injuries. His creaky, mournful rumbles break off the moment he sees pearl.

“I am Groot!” Groot cries out, and Rocket winces.

The f’saki growls.

It doesn’t stop Groot, though. The Taluhnisan steps over the reptile like it’s nothing: looming over Rocket and pearl, petting pearl’s hair and whining as he smudges a barkish thumb over the cut on her brow. It has pearl wincing, and Rocket feels some thin thread he hadn’t recognized in himself — feels it snap.

“Asses in seats!” he roars. “Now!”

He wastes no time in getting them starside. They’re up and soaring out the ocular cavity of the skull, into the endless star-spilled commons of space, and then he’s pushing the Dreadnought as fast as it can go toward the nearest jump-point — gritting his teeth anew.

“We should get you down to the medbay,” pearl says to the Xeronian broad, and Rocket’s already shaking his head.

“Have Drax get her a medpack for the ankle,” he says bluntly.

Pearl’s brow creases. “But if it’s just a sprain, we can wrap it and ice it and—“

“Medpacks are meant for emergencies and major trauma,” the Xeronian adds. “If it’s not broken—“

Rocket turns to glare at their new passenger, ears flattening.

“Let’s get this straight right-the-fuck-away,” Rocket says sharply. “This is my frickin’ ship and what I say goes. And if I say we use a medpack so pearl doesn’t have to walk you down to medbay and I can keep an eye on her, then that’s what we’re fuckin’ doing.”

There’s a moment of silence. All eyes are on him, and then Drax says, “Again with the pearls. What do pearls have to do with anything?”

Rocket blinks, and turns back to the crystalline starshield. There’s a moment of hollowness. He can feel all his panic and fury, frustration and grief from the last rotation-and-a-half suddenly bunching up into a dense ball of matter, and he curls his fingers and bares his teeth, trying to knot it into his clawed fists, trying to haul it back. Instead, it punches out of his lungs.

“FUCK!”

It echoes in the glass cockpit.

There’s a pause, and then Drax clears his throat. “About the pearls—“

“It’s the princess’ name, dumbass,” Nebula says hoarsely.

Drax’s jaw drops, then closes as he glowers at the Luphomoid. “Shows what you know. I have it on good authority that she is not a princess.”

“My name isn’t pearl, either,” pearl offers up apologetically.

“Ha!” Drax crows. Rocket’s still got his gaze plastered to the stars but he can feel Nebula rolling her eyes and crossing her arms.

“It’s more of an… uhm, a nickname?” pearl says hopefully.

“She needs to go to the medbay anyway,” Nebula tells Rocket harshly. “Your kitten, I mean.”

His heart squeezes inside his ribs.

“I am Groot?”

“She might be concussed—“

Drax snorts. “Only mildly.”

Rocket blinks. “How the fuck would you know?”

Drax blinks back. “Kylosians are trained in all elements of battle.”

“What’s that got to do—“

“I am an excellent field medic.”

Nebula scoffs and Groot muffles a groan, and Rocket slams his fists against the yoke again.

“Why the fuck didn’t you say that?” he snarls.

Drax pouts. “You didn’t ask.”

I’m going to pull all my moon-damned fur out.

“Get yourself patched up,” he growls, “and then check out pearl and the Xeronian.”

“My name is D’au,” the Xeronian speaks up. “And I want to express my gratitude for — everything. Helping me survive the explosion. Getting me off the skull.”

Rocket’s lip curls. Xeronian. He’s got nothing against ‘em himself, but he knows pearl mentioned being on Xeron before — back when she was still M’dame Lizette Lavenza. Lab 34, Eirene, she’d told him under the flight controls on the runabout, before launching into her little story about the orloni who’d got all up in Theel’s skirts. Might as well have invited a frickin’ Sovereign or an abilisk on board, after all.

Of course, it’s all the more reason why pearl would’ve felt some kind of fucked-up responsibility.

“Yeah, well. You can pay me back by telling me what the fuck happened in the emporium that ended up blowing up half of Exitar.”

The Xeronian hesitates, her ice-blue eyes following Drax as he slides the first-aid kit out from under the flight controls. He pulls out some antibac wipes and begins mopping up the mess on his scarred chest.

“I don’t completely know,” she confesses, her eyes flicking back to Rocket as he guides them through the first jump. The Dreadnought handles it without the slightest hitch in the reconstitution, and the reminder that he’s got one of the most powerful warships in the universe under his clawed hands makes his shoulders ease a little. “To be honest, when you’re a captive in the emporium for a while, things start to blur together. I wasn’t paying much attention when it happened.” He can’t see much of anything below her face plates, but her eyes are surprisingly expressive, her thin brows scrunching together as she tries to think.

And he hates to say it, but he gets what it’s like to be in a cage for too long.

“I want to say it was a group of five who came in. Humanoid, all. I didn’t pay attention to their crests, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were a team of Ravagers. There was a Centaurian male. And a woman — Proselyte, perhaps. Three others — Xandaran, or maybe warm-skinned Kree. They brought in something to trade. I didn’t pay attention much beforehand, but I know Tivan was — excited about it. Willing to pay nearly whatever they asked. I think the price he had offered was somewhere between three-to-five billion.”

“Units?” Rocket asks, his voice pitched high. Even split amongst a group of five, that would set a person up for life.

D’au nods. “He’d been talking about it for at least two quarters. It was part of a specific collection he was starting — six relics. He already had the first of the set, and they were bringing him the second. Then — I couldn’t see what it was, but there was a purple — a purple glow where they were gathered around his worktable. He was — lecturing, telling them about the origin of the thing. I didn’t care to listen. But I heard him say something to Carina — in this tone of voice he uses when he means to threaten us — and when I looked up, I could only see her stepping toward the purple light. Behind her, Karmani — his previous assistant, who had been punished for a past disobedience I know nothing of — she had this expression on her face of — of triumph. She—”

The Xeronian breaks off and lifts her fists, pounding them against an imaginary glass wall.

“—and then it sounded like something burning in a kettle, hissing and popping. There were sparks, I think. I could feel the pressure in the room rising — boiling. Everything grew so bright and I ducked down, and — after that, I don’t really know. I woke up in the rubble, with Little Sister speaking Xeronian in my ear. I haven’t heard my own language in at least six circumrotations.”

The curve of her eyes as she looks at pearl is so warm that it hurts. He wishes he were capable of an expression like that — capable of showing her with his eyes alone, just how sweet and good she is. But this is why she needs humies. Nice people. People who aren’t him.

Pearl pinks right up, and for fuck’s sake, his chest aches and aches, and aches and aches. “Oh, I — I just happened to pick it up.” She glows even brighter under the dust and scrapes. “I tend to be good with languages—”

“You should hear her recite the Kylosian eddur,” Drax interjects as he kneels before the Xeronian and begins easing the boot from her foot. “The princess is very good with languages.”

The blush in pearl’s cheeks is so high now that Rocket could almost cry. He doesn’t know why it’s got him so emotional but something about it is just tying him up in knots.

“You just said she’s not a princess,” Nebula mutters — almost sulkily — and the Kylosian glares.

“Well, she’s obviously not a pearl either—”

The f’saki makes some sort of barking sound, now running in chaotic circles, and Rocket pinches the space between his brows. “So all we know is that some family-of-five came in to sell the Collector a purple bomb, and it sounds like that Krylorian assistant of his set it off, yeah?” he interrupts.

“As far as I can recall,” the Xeronian agrees apologetically, watching him as Drax examines her ankle, twisting and rolling the foot in its joint. The Destroyer makes a little hum in his throat and pulls some clean cloth bandages from the first aid kit.

“Watch how I wrap this,” he rumbles up at the Xeronian. “So you can take it off and replace it as often as you need.”

Rocket sighs and turns his attention to their new passenger, too. “So where are we taking you now?”

D’au eyes flicker back over to pearl. “Little Sister said you could take me to Xeron,” she says quietly.

He glances over at pearl, still perched in the copilot’s seat. His eyes want to cling to her. “Oh, she did, did she?”

Pearl winces, and she looks like she wants to suddenly wither into her seat. “I thought—”

“If that’s out of your way or too far, any planet with access to intergalactic transit will be fine,” D’au adds quickly, her ice-blue eyes darting between the two. “I can get home on my own.”

Rocket’s eyes narrow. “Is the Collector gonna be after you?”

The Xeronian winces. “I suppose that depends on how long it takes him to begin rebuilding the emporium,” she admits. “And how much effort he wants to put into regathering what he’s lost.”

He sighs, knowing it sounds defeated. “So stay with us for this rotation at least,” he mutters. “We can figure out tomorrow how far we’re taking you.”

“Thank you,” D’au says quietly, but Rocket’s not paying attention to her anymore. His gaze is focused on the reflection of pearl in the crystalline starshield. He watches as Drax carefully tilts her head this way and that, rumbling low questions at her that she responds to with meek yeses and nos and maybes while the Kylosian carefully cleans the cut on her brow and tugs it together with a steri-strip, then examines the lump and cut buried beneath her filthy hair.

“She’s got a frickin’ orloni bite, too,” he snaps out at Drax. Pearl doesn’t wait for their resident field medic to ask — just quietly offers him one hand, which he douses in steri-spray and antibac cream before bandaging up.

“Well?” Rocket demands as soon as Drax steps back.

The Kylosian shrugs. “I already told you. A minor concussion. As long as her headache doesn’t get worse and she doesn’t get sick, she should be fine in a cycle or two. She might be a little dizzy or confused, but it will go away quickly.”

“You hear that?” Rocket demands, tearing his eyes from pearl’s reflection so he can look at her face. “You gotta say if anything gets worse. Got it?”

She nods mutely, wide-eyed.

“And she should not sleep alone tonight,” the Kylosian adds.

Rocket feels his lip curl. “That’s not gonna be a problem.” His eyes flare to pearl’s. “Is it, princess?”

She only blinks at him. Drax has clearly only been targeting the more concerning injuries because her lip’s still oozing, and it reminds Rocket too much of the night in the Arete. He forces his voice into something less sharp.

“F’you don’t want my company, you sleep with Groot,” he says quietly. “He’s the only other one besides Nebula who ain’t injured, and he can come get me if you—”

“No,” she says quickly, her voice all kitten-soft and uncertain. “I want to — I want to sleep with you again, please.” Her voice is all forlorn and lonely, and that twists him up too. “Please.”

He swallows, then licks his tongue over his teeth. His mouth is suddenly dry and ashy with dust and shame. “What can she take if the pain is bad?” he asks, glancing up at Drax before he turns his gaze back to the stars.

“Analgesics only. At least for now.” The Destroyer shrugs. “I’m a warrior, not a long-term healthcare provider.”

Rocket snorts, snapping his fingers and pointing to pearl. As if he’d cued her, she protests.

“I don’t need anything. The pain isn’t that b—”

“Oversharpening a blade only damages it,” Nebula interrupts, and Rocket’s got no clue what that means, but pearl’s mouth snaps shut and he can’t help but be impressed. “Take the meds, princess.”

Drax hums. “And a cold compress for that lump on your head,” the Kylosian adds. “One for D’au’s ankle would also be useful.”

Rocket sighs and pulls up a starmap. There are a dozen planets and space stations between here and Xeron — including Xandar — that are hooked up to transit systems and have good med services. If pearl’s symptoms worsen or they decide to drop D’au off, these are the places to land — even if he’d rather not show his face on half of them anytime soon.

“Groot, I need you to go to linen storage and med bay,” he tells the Big Guy. “Two sets of bedding for the officer’s rooms, and two cold packs.” He pauses, then adds, “Take Nebula with you.”

The Luphomoid chokes. “Me?”

“I am Groot?’ Groot asks, curious but seemingly unoffended.

“Because I don’t trust you to bring up the right stuff,” he says flatly. “Knowing you, we’d end up with a handful of dishtowels and a roll of gauze.” He pauses thoughtfully. “And because Drax is gonna make food for everyone.”

“Thank the warrior gods of Kylos,” Drax says fervently. “I am hungry enough to eat an entire auroch.”

The Xeronian’s eyes curve in mirth. “I thought Kylosians didn't engage in metaphor,” she admits, sounding delighted, and Rocket scoffs.

“I don’t think it’s a frickin’ metaphor.”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Rocket pushes their jump-points, cramming three rotations’ worth of travel into a shift-and-a-half before he feels safe enough to set the Dreadnought into a peaceful drift at the edge of a dead star system. Drax had brought out waterbags for everyone and made some sort of Kylosian snack that they’d all picked at, and had even rationed some dried orloni strips to the f’saki, who had growled at him in response before scarfing down every shred of protein. D’au had been particularly delighted by having real food, as she’d called it, even though nearly all the ingredients had been synth — leaving Rocket to wonder what the hell the Collector had been feeding the lifeforms in his zoo. Groot had eventually collected up the Xeronian and her batch of bedding, and gone to help her get set up in one of the officer’s rooms till they could figure out what to do with her. Then Drax had finally retired as well, yawning and stretching, chuckling as he’d retold the events of the previous hours as if they were an illustrious battle fought twenty circs earlier, and not a harrowing near-death experience they’d all just barely survived.

Which leaves pearl — curled up like a kitten in the copilot’s seat with a cold-pack still on her head, making dozy little noises in her sleep — and Nebula up on the bridge above, leaning over the railing and staring out at the stars in front of them.

He sets the Dreadnought into its quiet float and slides out of his own seat. The back of his knuckles coast up pearl’s still-filthy cheek, and he skates the pad of his thumb lightly across the place where tears have tracked through the crust of dust and salt. There’s a bruise forming on her cheekbone and her lip’s all puffy and split by dried blood, and her hair’s almost crunchy with dirt and crimson — but fuck the whole damn universe if she isn’t still the prettiest frickin’ thing he’s ever seen.

He makes his way up to the bridge and the Luphomoid.

“Welp,” he mutters, narrowing his eyes up at Nebula as he approaches. The Luphomoid turns, her own stare just as assessing, but he leans against the lower part of the rail beside her. “That was a fuckin’ disaster.”

She tilts her head like she’s trying to figure him out — then turns back to the stars too, and snorts. “An understatement, Fox.”

He huffs a broken chuckle, and his eyes slip from the bubble of glass down to the girl still curled up in the copilot’s seat: an unbearably soft pile of bruises and matted blue curls. “Between you, me, pearl, Groot, and the damn Xeronian, we’re gonna have every bounty-hunter in the galaxy after us. Maybe more.” He snickers. “The only damn things on this ship that don’t got some kind of price on their heads are the Destroyer and the damn f’saki, and I don’t trust either of ‘em to stay off peoples’ shit-lists for long.”

Nebula snorts. “The princess has a bounty on her head?”

He grimaces, studying her from the corner of his eye. “Ehh, sort of. She’s s’posed to be lying low, if you can believe it.”

This time, they both snort, and it’s in unison.

“And the tree?”

He squints up at her, dubious. “Not sure I should be telling you all this, but he’s like the Xeronian. Collector’s got his eye out for the Big Guy.”

“Which is why he stayed on board while you were nearly getting killed,” Nebula says slowly, putting the pieces together. Her lip curls in a vague expression of distaste. “Tivan is the lowest of lowlives,” she adds with a sneer. “He can’t hope to get the tree while it’s under your protection.”

Rocket feels something in his shoulders loosen at the casual certainty of her rasping words.

“As for me, I’m an escaped convict in twenty-two systems, and I pissed off more besides,” he boasts, with the first stirrings of a grin he’s had since pearl had last been in his arms.

The Luphomoid rolls her dark eyes. “That is unsurprising. I figured you had multiple bounties on your head from across countless planets.”

“Hey!” he squawks, offended.

“Please,” she rasps, looking away. “Don’t be insulted. Look at who you’re talking to.”

He considers that, turning his eyes back to the inky blue, spangled with an endless spill of sequined stars — and the girl underneath it, bruised and blue too. A puff of air escapes his lips — too soft to be a scoff, but too derisive to be anything else. “You going to bed any time soon?”

He’s not looking at Nebula, but he can hear the single raised-eyebrow in her dry, crackling voice. “You’re letting her out of your sight long enough to lock me up?”

This time his scoff can’t be mistaken for anything else. “That’s what you’re waiting for? To be locked up?”

He can see the shrug in his periphery, but he can’t tear his eyes off his pearl long enough to look up at his Luphomoid companion. Still, he hesitates, shrugging his own shoulders — trying to make it seem like no big deal.

“People who save crewmembers don’t gotta sleep in the jackroom. Just don’t kill us in our frickin’ beds.” He hears the crack in her neck from the speed with which her head jerks toward him. The cyborg stares at him so hard he feels it — but he only juts his chin toward one of the other seats on the level below, where Groot had left the second pile of clean, rumpled linens. “Those’re yours. Pick an empty room wherever, till we figure out where we’re dropping you off.”

Nebula doesn’t move, staring down at him without so much as a twitch in her fingers or her face. He grimaces and palms the back of his neck.

“What?” he snaps when she doesn’t stop, even after a full minute has passed.

“Nothing,” she says, but she continues to stand there for at least another ten seconds before turning back to face the galaxy in front of them. Something about her stance, though — the tilt of her head — makes it clear she’s not really seeing the sky beyond the glass. The two of them stand side-by-side while shadows and time drift between them, untethered from the stars and planets. Unconsciously, they slip into nearly-identical poses: forearms braced on railings at their respective heights, hands fisted loosely together, right foot crossed over left. Both of them pretend to study the silence of space, and both of them are a million jump-points away, so far beyond reach for so long that Rocket actually jumps when Nebula finally speaks.

“What about you?”

His ears flicker and his brow creases. “Huh?”

She snorts. Her tone is a mocking repetition of his. “Are you going to take your kitten to bed anytime soon?”

He grimaces, not sure when his eyes had gone back to pearl. She’s mostly bundled under her filthy cardigan — torn and coming unwoven in at least one spot — but his eyes drink her up greedily nonetheless. He’s not the only biting beast who’s fallen hard for her, though — the fuckin’ f’saki is curled up under the copilot’s seat, chittering softly as it snores beneath her.

“Not sure she’s my kitten anymore,” Rocket admits, his mouth parched — cracking with dust and leftover bone-concrete.

Nebula snorts. “Please. She’s absolutely still yours.”

His tongue clicks against his teeth: regretful. “She told me not to call her that any more. Kitten.”

Nebula turns now, leaning on one arm. “She told you not to call her that anymore,” she repeats in a flat monotone. Doubt wreaths every word.

I don’t think you get to call me that when you don’t even like me.

“Well,” he hedges. “Close enough.” He winces. “Shouldn’t keep making it seem like she’s mine, anyway. She ain’t. She deserves someone—” He breaks off, at a loss.

Someone whole. Someone real. Someone who ain’t a monster and can treat her right — who doesn’t say mean shit or make her think she’s bad. Someone who doesn’t repay every gift she gives ‘em with some sort of hostile bite. Someone who didn’t threaten to crush her pretty neck the first time he met her, or try to make her feel small and ugly the first time he fucked her.

Someone who doesn’t leave scars on her.

“Someone who can take care of her,” he says at last, and his voice splinters on the last word. He has to swallow it down. “Someone who can love her.”

There’s a moment of silence, and Rocket’s distantly surprised that it doesn’t feel tense — just weighty and solemn and grievous. And then a sharp, rasping, broken sound splits the quiet — a fucked-up laugh, he realizes. His head snaps up, and Nebula’s staring down at him, a bitter twist on her blue lips. He can’t tell if she’s sneering or smiling. Maybe she can’t tell, either.

All the old defensiveness surges to the surface and his tail, tucked forlornly against the inside of his ankle, suddenly puffs with fury. His slumped ears flatten into blades. “What?” he hisses, all teeth and slashing eyes.

“You’re an idiot,” the Luphomoid says, and yeah, it must be a sneer. “You’re a fool if you think you don’t already.”

His teeth grit hard. Maybe he’ll lock the damn cyborg back up in the jackroom after all. He tries to inject every ounce of scorn into his voice that he can, painting over the needles of misery that somehow still stitch their way through. “Don’t what? — don’t love her?”

“Yeah,” Nebula deadpans, like he really is an idiot. “Love her.”

The growl in the back of his throat falters and fumbles, and he stumbles before he remembers himself, forcing his lips to peel back again in another sharp-toothed taunt. It barely covers up the soft underbelly he’s suddenly so aware of, the fragile hide under his fur. The way his whole body wishes it was big enough to pick up pearl and carry her to the captain’s quarters — the temptation to sleep in the cockpit tonight if it means he doesn’t have to wake her. If it means he can just curl up in her softness and forget the last two rotations.

“What the fuck d’you even know about love?” he jeers instead. “You’ve got the emotional range of a frickin’ rehydrator plate.”

There’s another rush of ruptured laughter — quieter, this time, though no less sharp and jagged. A chuckle, maybe — in some other universe.

“Trust me,” Nebula says, and her voice is dry as kindling. “I may not know love, but I know the lack of it.”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

friends! i am so sorry for the delay ~ and so, so grateful if you've actually returned after such a long hiatus! i hope your holidays were lovely and that the new year has brought you a wealth of beautiful possibilities and happiness. ♡♡♡ and i hope this felt like a satisfying semi-conclusion to that unintentional cliffhanger from november! next chapter will see rocket & pearl actually talking through it. both my babies have a long way to go yet, though.

if you haven't seen my notes on other works, i got sick at the beginning of january (literally on january first) and the virus eventually morphed into a pretty bad case of pneumonia that landed me in the hospital, which has been part of what has led to the delay in my posting. i'm still not fully recovered (soon, hopefully!) and i'm also trying to pace myself with more gentleness this semester, so i will only be posting one chapter of cicatrix every 3-4 weeks or so for the foreseeable future. that said, do not worry about this work being abandoned. it will not be. and perhaps eventually i'll be able to pick up the previous pace. i apologize for the shift in pace but i'm so grateful for your patience, my loves.

at least there will be more littlefoot in future chapters!

coming soon: chapter twenty-eight. momophobia.
summary: bathtime confessions.
warnings: angst & comfort. woundcare. discussion of animal surgery & medical torture.
estimated date: wednesday, march 19.

other exciting things:
♡ monday, 3/3. kiss kiss BANG BANG ~ one to keep. [ONESHOT].
♡ thursday, 3/6. the raccoon, the witch, & the roadtrip | part four. south dakota.
♡ tuesday, 3/11. take what you need | chill the fuck out. | for nonnie.
♡ thursday, 3/13. kiss kiss BANG BANG ~ close call. [ONESHOT].
♡ wednesday, 3/19. cicatrix .⋆☁︎ :･꧂ | chapter twenty-eight. | momophobia.
♡ thursday, 3/27. take what you need | i'm damn proud a' you, kid. | for ao3 guests
there's now a take what you need WIPlist, so you can see upcoming requests and anticipated posting dates.

･:꧂posting schedules, chapter-previews, & more on tumblr♡
･:꧂masterlist & moodboard♡
･:꧂chapter one. nemotia of cicatrix scene by @frostedwitch
･:꧂portrait of pearl♡ by me!
･:꧂my fave rocket & pearl scene from chapter thirteen by me! ♡♡ (scroll down for the whole piece)
･:꧂ scrabbly lil pearl x rocket doodle by me!
･:꧂ adorable pearl x rocket selfie by starriidreams!
･:꧂ steamy/emotional pearl x rocket painting on "water lily" (lotus) fabric by hibatasblog/hibata♡♡♡

Chapter 28: momophobia.

Summary:

bathtime confessions.

Notes:

warnings: infinite angst (& comfort). woundcare. discussion of animal surgery, and medical & (i would argue) psychological torture. lots of non-smutty naked/partially-clothed intimacy and the occasional dirty thought (because rocket). regret, self-recrimination, and self-loathing.

recap: chapter twenty-seven. la gaudière.
[feel free to skip this if you feel like you remember everything!]
pearl falls through a pit in the collector's destroyed emporium, but catches herself on a piece of rebar. unfortunately, she can't get to safety on her own. she asks d'au to take littlefoot and leave, and to try and find rocket and drax, and to tell them she loves them. at the last minute, nebula arrives and saves the day. meanwhile, rocket and drax search for pearl and encounter howard and cosmo, who direct them to the emporium. once inside, rocket ascertains that pearl is okay, and they prepare to leave. pearl stops to pick up a stick from the debris, and rocket leads her out of the collapsing emporium. once on the dreadnought, drax does first aid while rocket gets them starside. d'au explains what led to the explosion: a party of five ravagers who had come to sell the collector a strange purple relic. eventually, everyone retires for the night except rocket, nebula, and pearl, the latter of whom is sleeping in a chair in the cockpit. rocket poromotes nebula from sleeping in the jackroom to essentially benig an honorary member of the crew, on account of her saving pearl's life. nebula repays him by pointing out that he's in love with pearl. and littlefoot menaces everyone.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

momophobia. the fear of speaking off the cuff or from the heart; the terror of saying the wrong thing and having to watch someone’s smile fade as they realize you’re not who they thought you were. Ancient Greek μῶμος (momos), blemish, disgrace + -φοβία (-phobía), fear. Momus was the Ancient Greek god of mockery and harsh criticism. Pronounced “moh-muh-foh-bee-uh.” The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

“Sweetheart.”

Pearl shifts on the copilot’s seat, nuzzling toward the sound of his voice, and Rocket lets his knuckles kiss her cheek again. He sweeps back a handful of hair, and plucks the cold compress from where it had nestled in her matted curls while she’d slept.

Everything in him stretches for her, down to a cellular level.

“Hmm?” she murmurs, soft as kitten-fur. He closes his eyes, and inhales: waterlily, clean canals, bone-dust and salt and blood. The scent of her, even tangled up with so much pain and fear, grounds him. At least she’s still here, not left on HalfWorld or Cyxlore, not—

not a broken, abandoned corpse on Knowhere.

His gut twists and his tongue suddenly feels thick and swollen, his whole mouth slick and sour. The space behind his eyes tightens and prickles.

“C’mon, doll,” he murmurs. “Lemme get you—“

Lemme get you somewhere safe and soft.

“Lemme get you into bed.”

She sits up slowly. The f’saki underneath her seat stirs. Her ponytail had been lopsided from the first moment he’d seen her in that stolen bootlace — tilted as drunkenly askew as she had been — but half her hair has loosened, falling in ragged tangled loops and knotted ringlets next to her face. He tries to keep his hands to himself now — she can’t possibly be interested in him touching her again; at the very least he should probably try groveling first — but he can’t keep himself from carefully cupping her chin in his fingers and tilting her face this way and that. There’s the cut on her puffed lip and the graze on her swollen cheekbone, the bloody divot above her brow that Drax had pulled closed with a steri-strip. It all reminds him too much of the cuts he’d left behind on her body that first night — the brutal, repeated thud of her head against the floor — and his throat throbs when he tries to swallow.

But she just looks at him with sleep-blurred moonsilver eyes, all soft and unfocused and timid.

I just need to think, and I can’t with you looking at me like I’m some kind of monster.

Something slides right between his ribs, so piercing and sharp that his shoulders hunch convulsively and he curves inward, almost staggering under the arrow of it.

“Are you okay?” she asks softly. The words bounce gently around the glass bubble of the cockpit, hushed between the shadows and stars.

His eyes gloss over. “Yeah, sweetheart. Come to bed with me?”

She rises, wincing and wobbly, and he loops an arm around her hips and pulls her into his side. He’s already got an excuse on his tongue — just wanna make sure you don’t topple over, doll; no sense adding to that concussion of yours — but the truth is he just needs to feel her, craves palmfuls of her body safely underneath his hands again. But pearl doesn’t protest — her hand flutters down instead, fingers brushing his opposite shoulder almost longingly.

She’d left him — left their room, their bed — but maybe she’d missed him a little too.

Even though he had been a dickhead. Even though he’d deserved her absence, cutting him more painfully than Theel’s laser-scalpels.

She lets him herd her up the hatch, and it reminds him of those times in the runabout — him guiding her up to the main level after she’d tucked herself behind the bulwark. Up they go, level after level, and he makes her pause every time she seems a little dizzy. She hadn’t noticed the f’saki struggling to navigate the steps in the hatch and Rocket had thought, for a moment, that maybe they’d escaped the reptile for the night — but the damn thing must figure ‘em out because by the time they get halfway to the top, it’s right there with them, wagging its scaly stump of a tail.

“I’m sorry,” she says, looking down at herself when they finally reach the captain’s quarters. “I — I should probably shower before I get into bed. I’m a mess.” She offers him an uncertain half-smile, knotting her bruised fingers in front of her cardigan. “You can go ahead,” she offers. “I’ll be just a little later.”

The offer rises in his mouth before he fully registers it — we’re both filthy, pearl; you wanted to shower together and I guess now’s the frickin’ time — but he bites it back just in time. The thought melts and shifts into something new, and he tilts his head.

“Bath,” he decides instead, and opens the door to their quarters when she blinks her big confused doe-eyes at him. “What’s the point of bein’ captain if I don’t make use of the perks?”

“But—“

“In,” he tells her, and she listens — still — trailing behind him into the bath-and-shower room with her fingers twisting nervously in her cardigan. His hands tremor when she follows, and he clenches them into his pockets. “Strip,” he tells her — just to see if she still will — then turns and fusses with the faucets until the water’s coming out in a nice, hot sheet that he’d guess is close to the temperature she likes. He can hear her shuffle out of her boots, and when he looks back, her leggings and t-shirt and torn cardigan are puddled around her feet. She’s entirely naked except for her bandages and the frail scrap of vibrant, rainbow-shimmer satin still clinging to her hips.

And she’s so fuckin’ sweet that his teeth ache.

It’s not just how soft and biteable she looks, either — tits out and trembling while she shivers, hips decorated with little ribbon-bows. It’s all the little injuries he can see now: faint purpling on her left thigh and right flank, scrapes on both knees and one wrist, swelling in the soft muscle between her neck and right shoulder. She’s a bruise-edged cloud the color of sunrises.

“Check the temperature,” he says hoarsely, “and get in. I’ll be back.”

When he returns — first aid kit in tow — the first thing he sees is her pretty panties on the ground. He’s not sure if he’ll ever get inside pearl’s gorgeous little cunt again, but he figures he’s gotta send Sanna Orix a thank-you transmission once all this is done anyway. The second thing he sees is how his girl’s all hunched over in the steaming, still-filling bath, with another mottled bruise forming alongside her spine.

He lets out a shuddering sound and sets down the kit.

“Lean back if you can, sweetheart,” he mutters. “Lemme start with your face.”

She blinks at him over her swollen shoulder, startled. “What?”

He clenches his jaw so hard that it clicks, and beckons her with one dark-clawed hand. Trust me, kitten, he wants to say. I just want — I just need to get you under my fingers again. I just need to convince my stupid frickin’ body that you’re still here, ‘cause it doesn’t believe you’re not a ghost.

But all that comes out if his mouth is a cracked, parched—

“Please.”

Her eyes grow wider over her shoulder — moon-gray and lined in silver — but she carefully leans back as the hot water rises higher. He circles the bath hesitantly. He’s never been one for showing anxiety — at least not in any way other than aggression — but now he twists the washcloth in his hands, wringing it like pearl does with her sweaters. She watches him with big eyes that slowly soften.

“I can do that, you know,” she says, and stretches slowly toward him, reaching for the cloth.

It’s the impetus he needs to scoff and thrust out his hand away from her, drenching the cloth with steaming water from the wide, waterfall-mouth of the faucet.

It trembles, though, when he reaches for her.

“Close your eyes,” he rasps, and she does.

He leans over the lip of the tub and presses the warm, damp fabric to her forehead, carefully avoiding the wounds that Drax has already cleaned and dressed — dabbing cautiously at the shallow scratches that he hadn’t. Pearl doesn’t flinch or hiss or even gasp: just lets herself go soft and easy under his touch, so absolutely trusting that it wrenches his heart all over again. He gently mops the smears of blood left behind, and the creases and tear-tracks in the dust on her cheeks, all crisp and crystallized with salt.

“Rocket—“

“Just—“ he interrupts, and the word is thick and heavy in his mouth. “Just shut up and lemme do this, okay?” But there’s no venom in his voice, no razor-sharp slice. He almost doesn’t even recognize it as his own.

He cleans every soft plane and hollow in her face: tracing each bone and curve, drawing constellations in her freckles with the cloth. Adrestia. Auxesia. Penthus.

Arete. Astraea. Dicé.

His right hand follows his left: memorizing her hairline, lingering mournfully at the edges of her minor cuts and scrapes. Archiving each little wound into his sensory memory, like a prayer or a punishment. As his palms grow wet, the feeling of her intensifies under his hands. By the time he’s washing the dust off her eyelids, he swears he can identify each and every soft eyelash feathering under his thumb. He cleans the hollows behind the hinge of her jaw, the soft vulnerability under her chin. When he moves down the throat he’d almost crushed that first night on the Arete, his eyes burn.

You’re not a monster, she’d whispered up to him that night, with her ribs bruising between the brutal grip of his knees. You never have been.

“I didn’t fuck anybody,” he blurts out, then cringes. As if that’s enough to earn back her trust. But he can’t stop the words, either — as if, now that he’s opened his teeth, they can’t keep themselves closed. “I had — I have some friends, who work at the Camellia. I mean, friends might be a strong word, but we don’t fuck anymore.” Since you. “I just took one of ‘em for a drink. To talk.” About you. “It don’t mean anything.”

The silence is so loud that it echoes across the tile and porcelain. Pearl’s lashes flutter and, unthinking, he brings up the wet cloth and smoothes it over her eyelids, gently keeping them closed — keeping her from seeing him, from seeing how frickin’ embarrassed and ashamed he is.

“I’m glad you have friends,” she says at last. Her words are soft as the vapor clinging to the air, and his own eyes dampen. “Don’t say it doesn’t mean anything. It does. It means something, even if you’re not close. And it’s good.” A soft sigh. “It’s good to have friends.”

His heart twists, and his tongue feels tense and heavy in his mouth. Swallowing hurts, but he forces himself to do it anyway — allows himself the distraction of moving his hands down her body. He keeps his eyes on her skin as he coasts both cloth and palm over the wings of her collarbone, hissing under his breath when he measures the swelling in her shoulder, already reddening with galaxies of burst blood vessels under the skin. He lifts each arm out of the water and tends to them one at a time: soothing away the dirt and the grime, cataloguing every cut and scrape and bruise like they’re personal insults. He has her lean forward so he can trace the contusion on her back, then washes every pebble of her spine and the plates of her scapulae. His hands sink under the surface of the water, finding her through it: every little blemish and bump now belonging to him forever. The silk of her skin and stretchmarks become even clearer in his mind and on his wet fingers. The shape of her thighs and the delicate curves and hollows of her knees all set down smooth anchors in his sensory memory. Then there’s the warm weight of her dripping, sleek calves when he draws them back above the surface of the water, resting them over the edge of the tub and cleaning them with long, careful strokes. He counts each bone and tendon in her ankles and toes, making sure they’re all present and accounted for.

He lets out the water. Runs it again. Rinses her, just as reverently as the first time — testing himself, recommitting every part of her to memory. The bath is already aswirl with a new layer of floating dust — little drifting nebulae made from the bones of a dead god. He shifts behind her and settles himself on the edge of the tub, then twists sideways so he can reach out and untangle the bootlace from her hair.

She tenses. “You don’t have to—“

“Pearl.” The name is ragged. “I want to.”

Need to.

“Then—“ She hesitates. “At least be comfortable. You can’t be comfortable — sitting like that.”

He huffs and turns, spreading his legs to either side of her shoulders. The hot water closes over his clawed feet and laps at his ankles. He’s as dirty as she is, he realizes belatedly — dirtier, now, and filthying up her mostly-clean bathwater, and ain’t that a frickin’ metaphor? But then she settles back carefully between his splayed-wide knees, and he decides he doesn’t give a damn. Instead, he finger-combs his way through her dust-dripping locks, deftly untwisting the worst of the snarls and using handfuls of water to ease his way when blood or sweat or bone-clay has unforgivingly cinched the strands together. Then he tilts her head back — one palm cupped against her hairline to prevent any spillage over her face — and scoops up a palmful of water to pour over her scalp. She taps his foot gently — his only warning — and then slides her body down carefully against the shell of the tub. Her hair billows around her in voluminous plumes, and she moves to try and loosen some of the filth from the luminous lilac strands.

She looks like a pink-hearted waterlily, he thinks, if only Moraggian waterlily petals were a misty moon-blue.

But then she loosens her grasp on the edge of the tub like she’s going to use her hands to sift the dirt from her drowned curls, and he has to intervene.

“None of that.” He snatches at her bandaged hand before she can plunge it into the water. “You focus on keeping those dressings dry.”

He hinges at the waist, dipping his hands into the clouds of her floating hair. It’s all fine-spun threads of gossamer underwater: so soft he has to close his eyes and bite back a groan. “Up,” he orders. “Empty this thing and refill it.”

He keeps his hands full of her hair when she rises — sleek and heavy with water, curls flattened into smooth sheets of blue-tempered steel. The air around them is still silvered with steam. She leans forward to drain the tub again, and he watches the bruise shift across her back while the water sucks down through the wet-vac pipes in seconds. As soon as she stoppers the valve and turns on the panel of falling water again, he’s gently reeling her back in by her hair, reaching for the little bottles he’d bought from Sanna Orix.

Another reason to send ‘em a thank-you, he thinks distantly, pouring the cleansers onto the wet silk of pearl’s hair and coaxing out bubbles with the flat pads of his fingers. He remembers the way pearl had touched him after his nightmares on the runabout, and he tries to give her that back: tries to stroke patient circles against her scalp — careful of the knot where she’d got hit by some sort of debris — and drive his thumbs gently over the tendons in the back of her neck and up the base of her perfect, unscarred skull. The suds under his hands pop and foam gently, making soft crunching sounds like fresh snow as he works through every strand.

Then he tilts her back again and cups his hand, pouring water over her scalp like wet-diamond offerings. Steam licks up and around him, dampening his fur. It clings to his whiskers and her eyelashes in fat gemstone drops.

When she taps his foot and slides into the water again, he can’t help but let his eyes drift. Not just to her face, beautifully framed in lilac-blue and frothy soap-bubbles, but elsewhere — to her pink-tipped breasts, slippery and bobbing in the water; to her parted knees, scraped-up and still somehow lovely. Even the new abrasions can’t hide the fresh crescents of blunt humie bitemarks on that right kneecap, though — faintly bloodied and bruised — and he grimaces, certain they’re a relic from the sleep-shift she’d spent hiding from him. He lets his eyes cling to them, then sweeps his gaze slowly back to her face. She’s almost upside-down underneath him — literally beneath his feet — and she opens her wet lashes and gazes up at him. Her eyes are soft and wide as a doe’s, the color of gunmetal and spaceships and an impossible hope for the future.

If the universe was perfect, and if Herbert was gone — if you had everything you needed — what would you do?

“You should join me,” she murmurs. “Here. In the tub.” His eyes flare wide. “You need to wash off too,” she urges softly. “And you must be sore.”

“I can’t—“ he starts, his voice hoarse and fractured. “M’not—“

She holds his stare softly from below. He realizes, suddenly, that the bathing room is still capped by the glass bubble, and the crystalline-armor ceiling above them must be full of stars. They reflect on her pupils like sequins and glitter.

“I won’t look,” she promises. Her voice is as gentle and soft as a wisp of moonlight or steam, and she promptly closes her lashes, easing one hand from the edge of the bath to cover her eyes.

His own eyes burn once more. Something stutters up his throat — a scratching, shattered sound he hasn’t made since he lost Lylla. “I don’t—“

“Unless you’re about to tell me you don’t want to, it doesn’t matter,” she says quietly into the steam. She makes her own broken noise — something between a sob and a laugh. “I thought — I feel like I’m rattling apart.” She holds her breath for a moment, then spills out, “Before Nebula came, I thought I wouldn’t see you again.”

The silvery, shivering splinter in her voice — half a broken, stifled sob — forces the decision through his skin and into his gut like a gunshot. He slips out of the water, scrambling back on the ledge. She must hear his retreat because she makes this heartbreaking, wounded little sound.

“Stay put, pearl,” he manages to utter throatily into the warm fog. “Sit up and take your damn hand off your face. I’ll be back in a minute.”

There’s a soft sloshing noise as he turns his back to her, striding wet-footed from the room, already unbuckling pouches and holsters, emptying his pockets. He hesitates when his fingers grip the scrap of metal and jewel and fake-feather he’d snatched on Knowhere — grits his teeth and sets that aside, too, stuffing it in another discarded bag. He grabs clothes for both of them — then rolls his eyes and grabs a second set for himself.

When he comes back through the door, she’s already looking at him, eyes wide and nervous.

“What—“

“You said you wouldn’t look,” he says, more sharply than he means to. He winces. “Turn around, princess. M’gonna scrub off in the shower and then I’ll — then we’ll see.”

She turns immediately, giving him the bruise of her back and the sleek wetness of her hair, already softly crimping into damp waves above the edge of the water.

He strips out of his jumpsuit and climbs into the shower stall, scouring fistfuls of calcium dust-turned-mud from his fur as quickly as he can. He turns the water off and hesitates, then shakes himself free of the excess liquid: nose to tail, then each leg, spattering the walls of the clear glass stall with discarded droplets. Through the fogged-up door, pearl’s still got her back turned to him, quiet and patient.

He hesitates when he exits, then pulls on his soft pants and shirt. The fabric pulls at his wet fur, and he grunts a curse as he adjusts everything — but pearl doesn’t move till he comes up on the side of the tub, easing into her line of vision.

“You still—“ His voice creaks. “You still want me to come in?”

Her eyes are big and solemn and hopeful, edged in tears already. “Please?”

He swallows and climbs over the ledge, fully-clothed. The corner of her mouth quirks softly — so sad it makes him pause, one foot already in and his breath catching in his throat.

“This side,” she urges softly, and he hesitates before sinking into the deep, warm water, then turning and giving her his back.

Her unbandaged arm winds around him, hot and wet and slippery. He’s never had a home, but he thinks maybe this is as close as he’s getting: her body made into a soft den for him to nest in. She snugs him right against her nakedness — pulling him onto her lap, lacing his legs between hers, letting his tail float to one side. Her tits float up against his cloth-covered shoulders, all plush and wet and silky. He could tilt his head and lick a reverent stripe over one if he wanted — curl his tongue around her nipple and suck, tease her with his teeth and leave bruises of ownership and devotion. Show her how fuckin’ grateful he is, just to be allowed back in her presence. Instead, he lets her draw him back, easing into the safe, sheltered slopes of her body. They stay still and silent for a long time — so long that the motion-activated plasma orbs start to dim, and the two of them are left in the velvet-blue steam under a skylight full of stars.

“You looked like a frickin’ goddess.”

He hadn’t meant to say the words — they’d just breathed their way out of him, wanting to be part of the mist and vapor too. She shifts beneath him — startled. Bewildered.

“What—”

“At the bar,” he elaborates, studying the way the ends of her wet blue hair catch gently in the fur of his floating tail. He looks at the glassy water, at the twists of fog dancing patterns into the air — grateful that his back is to her, that he doesn’t have to look into her eyes and that she can’t read his. “On the fighting tables.” He snorts quietly. “The Drunk Avenging Angel of the Boot.” He sighs and tips his head further back, staring up at the quietly spinning distant galaxies. Free of her moonsilver stare, he shudders, then cringes — then presses back against the soft buoyancy of her breasts. Her breath caresses the wet fur on top of his head with a little exhale, and he follows with a sigh of his own — wistful, almost, if he were capable of feeling that way. When his voice parts his lips of its own accord, it sounds sad, and smoky, and nearly lost between layers of steam.

“Can I call you kitten again?”

He’s ashamed of the question as soon as he tastes it. It’s almost soft in the shadows — it sounds nothing like him — as bruised and aching as anything he’s ever felt in his twisted-up body. Pearl’s frame ripples beneath him too, like a shock’s been run through her wet-satin skin.

Never mind, he thinks, but when he tries to wrench open his jaw to say it, nothing comes out. Then she releases a breath into the clouds, and it shivers as it trips out of her lungs.

“I didn’t think you wanted—“ she starts, then tries again. “I thought—“ She fumbles, and when she speaks again, her voice is crushed-up and whisper-thin. “I like it when you call me that. Too much, maybe. It makes me feel like— it makes me feel close to you.” Her arm loosens from his belly, floating her palm on the silvery surface of the water, trailing her fingers through it nervously. “It makes me feel like you don’t feel — obligated; it makes me feel like you want to take care of me,” she whispers, all hushed and tentative. His throat squeezes. “Like we can take care of each other.” Her fingers find the ends of her curls, drifting in the water, and he sees her tug on them — hard. “I probably shouldn’t— you probably shouldn’t, if you don’t — if you don’t l-like—“ Her voice shivers into nothing.

None of those people even liked me, she’d told him once, when he’d asked her about names from her past. You can call me whatever you want to.

He’s not sure what it is — something about the vulnerability of her words, or the harshness of the shallow scrapes on her skin, or just the fact that she’s breathing the mist into her lungs, sharing it with him, when she could’ve been nothing — only a ghost in his palms, lost to the bottomless pit beneath the Collector’s emporium. His heart suddenly kicks in his chest, scrambling and clawing against his ribs. “I should tell you somethin’.” It sounds panicked and cracked, ugly and rushed. “I should tell you—“

Her arm loops back against his belly — steadying him, holding him close. An impulsive indulgence, he hopes — a desire to cuddle him up like she used to. “You don’t have to tell me anything—“

“Yeah, sweetheart.” He tilts his head up and back against her breasts, squeezes his eyes shut tight. “I do. I gotta—“ He breaks off. Collects up the words and the breath and the ragged rampant heartbeats and tries again. Calls the memories up between his teeth and under his tongue, and they taste like blood.

“After L06 and A95, I was — all alone for a long time. I tried — with this Ravager crew. Some others. Tried to have — something. Someone. A family again.”

He sucks in a broken breath and skates his own hand through the water, finding the satin curve of her thigh. Palms her plush curves — revels in the way they fill his hand, supple and soft and comforting. She’s become still, waiting for him. Silence melts between them, between the blue shadows and the steam, the glitter of stars overhead and the soft sound of little splashes every time one of them shifts.

He reaches into himself and rips the memory up by the roots.

“I was — on the Hub, waiting for a bounty, and I got real drunk, and I realized — ya know,with all the supernova-genius of severe public intox — that no matter who I found, no matter what group of frickin’ misfits I tried to settle into, I’d never—“

Everything splinters. The stars above seem shattered and spinning.

“Nobody’s ever been through what I been through,” he admits into the dizzying dark. It feels easier to say right now, in this steam-spiraled starlight-spangled confessional. It feels easier to say when he doesn’t have to look at her. “Nobody’s made of the same parts,” he breathes. “Nobody looks in a mirror and sees what I see.”

She’s so still and quiet beneath him. His shoulders curl up under the ridges of his jaw and he forces them back down.

“After — after 06 and 95, there wasn’t nothin’ else like me in the whole fuckin’ universe.” He swallows. “And I got this stupid idea — I was gonna get Wyndham to make someone for me, so I wouldn’t be — alone anymore.”

“Lylla.”

She says it so quietly he’s not even sure she realizes it, but he hears the soft puff of breath over her lips. He chokes, and it racks his whole body. Something crackles and careens up his spine — maybe a clawing sob.

“I don’t know why I still thought it was a good idea when I sobered up — ‘cause it wasn’t.” He strangles that truth like a sacrifice into the galaxies above, into the shadowy curls of heat and mist. “But I frickin’— once I got the thought of it in my head, I couldn’t let it go. Same with getting the Dreadnought. Same with hurting you, that night on the Arete. No amount of evidence was gonna convince me it was a bad frickin' idea.” He coasts his palms over her thighs, rising up out of the water on either side of him. He traces her knees all over again — gently kissing his thumbs against her scrapes — then circles one infinitely-light fingertip over the overlapping rings of her self-inflicted bites. He keeps his touch reverent. Mournful.

Penitent.

“So I did my research. Found out what to use against the High Shitbag — leverage, I thought. You.”

He twists the words up from his lungs: hunched and grotesque. A sickly, meager offering, broken and unwanted. Pearl makes a little stolen sound in her throat, unintentional — sad, like she’s so frickin’ sorry she wasn’t enough to make Wyndham keep his word. Rocket strokes back down her thighs: miserable, consoling, apologetic. He blinks back tears while he stares through the crystalline ceiling.

Not your fault, pearl.

“An’ then I went to him, and I told him to make me someone like me, or I’d kill you.”

If he thinks she’s going to flinch, she disappoints. She always disappoints his worst expectations, in ways that make his ribs feel thin and tenuously full, lungs brimming with something soft and achy — heart right up in the back of his mouth, swollen and hesitant and sore, twisted up and mangled and monstrous but wanting, so hard.

“He said it would take time — to find a lifeform close enough to my type, to find one the right age — an’ then to remake her.” A sneer bites into his words. “He said that — remake her — and I let him do it anyway. Made him do it.”

Another muffled little sound from behind him, like pearl wants so bad to pull him into her. But he’s already there: spine and ports pressed against her through his soaked shirt, the back of his head crushed as close to her heartbeat as he can get — like if he can just match his pulse to hers, maybe it’ll heal him. He opens his eyes and tries to see if he can find any of her constellations in the stars above them: Aletheia, Adrestia, Anaedeia. Eucleia, Elpis. Pepromene.

Penthus, God of Grief.

“I went and did my own thing for a while, I guess — catching bounties, stealing shit. Trying to shore up resources so that when she was ready, she’d have a nice home. Or we could travel. Anything she wanted. Wyndham said she was some kinda aquaticalistic mammal, so I was looking at finding some nice little spot on Tarka or Aladna or the nicer parts of Morag — some place she might like.” It spills out of him in a rush — then snags. He closes his eyes.

“After her first set a’ procedures, he sent me a transmission.”

For a second, his voice loses its way. The words falter like stones under his tongue: sharp-edged and clumsy, and too big behind his teeth. Impossible to pull out of his mouth.

“I was out on Tryl’sart, all the way in Shi’ar territory.” His voice rasps up his throat, so hard and cutting that it slices a furrow through his voice-box, bloody and hurting. His ribs ache and strain. “She was — fuckin’ gorgeous, pearl. Eyes you could see her whole damn heart in. Five minutes of listening to her, and you could tell she was — good. And kind. Way wiser than me. And—” He swallows. “And in pain, princess.”

His lungs hitch on a broken breath and he floats his eyes up to the stars overhead. His heart kicks, then kicks again.

“It — it all hit me then. What I’d done to her. That I’d put her right into his frickin’ hands. I sent a transmission back and told him not to do another fuckin’ thing to her — said I was coming back for her. By the time he got the transmission — ‘least, according to him — he’d already taken her frickin’ — he took her frickin’ arms. I don’t know why. Maybe just to — maybe just to hurt her more, twist up her body more like mine. Maybe just ‘cause he could.”

The constellations blur out. His eyes burn with salt. His claws sink into his water-softened palms and he lowers his head, letting the tears slip over his lower lids, hidden in his waterlogged fur.

“I sent her transmissions every rotation on my way back, and when I got in range, we’d talk through holocomms. I shoulda—“ He swallows. “You said, he only gives us things to love so he can take ‘em away. I shoulda known there was a reason he let us talk so much.” His breath is shallow and shaky, but he realizes suddenly that his heart has stopped convulsing, stopped trying to drill its way through his prosthetic breastbone. It simply lays there, battered and bloody, on the floor of his ribcage. He breathes out.

“We decided on Tarka. They got these gorgeous waterways, and the people who live there looked kinda like her, and there was all this — this sky, open and gorgeous. She wanted to see it so bad. She was so — excited. It’s so good to have a friend, she’d tell me before we turned off comms every rotation. She said—” His voice crumbles. “She said she loved me, even though — and I didn’t try to hide it. I told her what I’d — what I’d frickin’ done. Begged her to forgive me. Told her I’d take her anywhere she wanted, even if she didn’t want — even if she didn’t want me. I’d give her whatever she needed and make sure she was always looked after, and let her live her life in peace. But she just said—“

“You must’ve been so lonely,” pearl breathes from behind him, her voice all crumpled and achy and brimful of sorrow — and it’s like she’s reached back in time and met Lylla herself, been given the words like a ghost or a gift. The sound that splinters out of his throat is brief and agonized, and he doesn’t even know what it is. He only knows it hurts.

How’d you know? he thinks, but he can’t get enough air to say the words. When he manages to choke it down, he says instead, “She told me she liked the name Lylla. She asked what mine was. I told her — I told her I didn’t have one. I told her she could help me pick one once I got to her.” The words suddenly gutter out and hollow in his chest, but he sinks his claws into them and twists them up anyway, forcing them out of his throat and into the quiet shadows. “She was too good — too good for me. And I was too — too stupid to know Wyndham wasn’t using all that time to make her. He was using it to make a trap. For me. She was — so frickin’ loving and — and forgiving. And perfect. She was her own damn person, who had dreams and wanted to go on adventures and learn things, and he looked at her and all he saw was — was bait.”

Everything hurts. The memories carve through him.

“And then I got there, and we met. And I was tryin’ to be careful ‘cause I knew he was a fuckin’ snake but she — we touched. And she hugged me. And then he — he shot her.” He sucks in a ragged breath. “I made him make her, I let him hurt her — an’ then he shot her.”

He’d wept. For fuck’s sake, how he’d wept — screamed, even; his throat and eyelids all swollen and ragged and raw. His claws had clutched into Lylla’s glossy pelt and he’d felt it, the way her breath had puffed from her lips: sky. The slackening of her muscles, the sudden weight of her body unbouyed by life. He’d barely understood Wyndham — barely heard the bastard — when the High Evolutionary had gestured dismissively to his guards.

Incinerate them.

And then: the thoughtful, sneering pause, pinned between the Monster’s echoing, wrenching cries.

No. The otter pelt, at least, is in fine condition.

And my pearl needs new mittens.

“Rocket,” pearl whispers now, into the warm, heavy air. He winds his arm around her thigh, hugging it close to him like it’s his favorite laser cannon, squeezing it against him the same way she holds onto him sometimes. He blinks upward at the crystalline glass above. He won’t look at her now. Can’t.

“You must’ve been so lonely,” she says again, and her words ache in the spangle of mist and shadow. “Nobody’s meant to be so alone, Rocket. You never would’ve — not if you’d been thinking clearly—“

“You don’t gotta do that,” he utters in a scratching, scraping rasp. “I don’t—" His voice splinters. I don’t deserve that kinda generosity.

Her arms wind tighter. “I’m not doing anything,” she says softly. “I’m just telling you what I know. You never would have, if you’d thought for a second about how much it would hurt her. You would’ve rather made yourself be alone forever than hurt her—"

He shakes his head, trying to swallow, but it feels like he’s being strangled. “You don’t know that—"

“I do,” pearl says, so urgently that her voice shakes. Something falls into the already-damp fur at the crown of his head, and he realizes she must be crying again: tears mingling with the gemstone-condensation. “I do know. You’ve been doing it ever since — keeping yourself lonely. Punishing yourself.”

Something behind his sternum creaks, readying to break its brittle self apart and shatter into a hundred rattling pieces. “Doesn’t matter,” he grates out, trying to sound resolute instead of fractured. “None of it’s a frickin’ excuse. I still—“ His mouth tastes slick and sour, his stomach clenching. “I still gave him a reason to hurt her. I still asked him to.”

Her lips touch his ear and the petal-shape of it flickers instinctively, longing for her mouth and knowing it’s as undeserving as the rest of him.

“Both things can be true,” she muffles into his fur, trying to squeeze him against her, even while he can’t give up the way he’s wrapped his arms around her thigh. “You can have made a terrible, horrible choice, Rocket, and it can still have been born from — from desperation and lonesomeness most people never have to experience. And — Rocket — no matter what you asked for, you can’t take responsibility for what — for what Herbert chose to do with it. He would’ve known how to make it hurt you, how to twist it into the worst outcome you could’ve imagined, how to use it to punish as many people as possible. He would have already hated you for being smarter than him, for escaping. For being yourself. He would have turned anything you asked for into a — into a monkey-paw wish.”

He blinks. “A — what?”

“A — a wish that goes sour. Something—“ Her voice catches. “Something to break your heart.”

He only gives us things to love so he can take them away when it suits him.

“You can’t take responsibility for his actions, Rocket — only your own.” Her voice is fervent. “And you did everything in your power to make it right, Rocket. You’re still doing it.” Everything about her softens against his back. “Lylla forgave you. She understood. She’s the only one who would’ve had the right to be angry about it, but she saw you — how good you are, how good you were trying to be to her — and she loved you so much.”

The rigid, frangible thing inside his chest splits like it’s been lightning-struck: smoking and broken and ruined. He’s got no breath in his lungs, and his heart squeezes and thuds desperately against the sharp, too-tight edges of his ribs. He wheezes for air — gut clenching, shoulders buckling, spine curling protectively over the sucking wound in his solar plexus. Pearl’s still right behind him — all around him — offering a solace that threatens to disintegrate whatever tatters are left inside him.

He swallows it down, panting — then swallows again. Tries to twist his fists in the broken, floating parts of himself and patch them back together, in some misshapen semblance of himself. With a breathless, hollowed-out throat, he forces out the last thing he needs to tell her — the whole reason he’s brought it all up. The thing he needs her to know.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says again. His throat is so tight that it hurts — nearly chokes him when he tries to swallow a third time. “You understand why I’m telling you all this, pearl?” It’s normal for his voice to crackle at the edges, but now — now it’s so bruised and battered that he barely recognizes it. It sounds like broken bottles, filled with gravel. It sounds like he’s carved the words out of his skin with daggers made of his own bone. Pearl’s arm squeezes against his abdomen — but he can feel her sudden hesitation, her uncertainty. He swallows and cinches his eyes shut tight.

“You didn’t do anything wrong, when you brought those little animals to Wyndham. You thought he was gonna help. You didn’t know what he was, and there’s nothing anyone can judge you for, sweetheart.” He clenches his teeth — bites back a ragged noise. “But if anyone were gonna try, it wouldn’t be me. It could never be me. You understand?”

“Rocket,” she breathes again, and he can hear the tangle of her thoughts; he can already feel what she wants to say: you’re being too cruel to yourself; you forgot what to expect from him; you were hurt and all alone for far too long.

Lylla forgave you, and so do I.

“I’m not — I’m not saying any of this so you can try to make me feel better,” he rasps. “I just — I need you to know. I need you to know that I know I was an ass — m’always an ass. And I gotta tell you—” His voice turns over, tumbling and stumbling and urgent in the darkness and the clouds of vapor. “I’m sorry. I know it sounds fuckin’ stupid to say I didn’t mean it, but I didn’t. I just—” He clenches his mutilated fists and thuds one against his vibranium breastbone — hard. Leaves it there, bruisingly deep. “I just say whatever ugly frickin’ thing I can think of. Like if I ruin it now, at least I don’t gotta lose you—“ His voice cracks like low-grade armored-glass and for a second he tries to scrape the pieces back, tries to keep the words from spilling out. But then figures why the hell not? and husks, “At least I don’t gotta lose you later.”

She sucks in a breath, all soft silk behind him. Her arm loosens from his waist and for a second he thinks this is it, this is where she gently removes him from her person and lifts herself over the edge of the bath and walks out of his reach forever. All of this — this spilt agony of his past, the things he’s done that are even uglier than his twisted little goblin-body — it’s finally sinking in for her.

But pearl’s wet hand only flutters softly in the steam, coming to careful rest on top of the fist he’s still got anchored into the metal ridges through his wet shirt. Her scraped and split knuckles look like ruby-rutilated quartz cabochons in the starlight, and her fingers land on his as lightly as moonmoths. No, lighter — like he’s the moonmoth; like he’s something delicate and fragile and worth protecting.

I’d like the chance to look out for you, too.

“You won’t lose me,” she protests softly, but he’s already shaking his head. He will — he knows he will, by death or by desire. Something will happen. Hell, since he decided to be a dramatic bastard and scrape Wyndham’s face off, they’ve probably got the High Evolutionary on their tail already — as if they weren’t tempting the cosmos by carting around another of his little experiments by way of the Xeronian. And even if they don’t get caught, even if Rocket doesn’t get them killed in some other way — even if he manages to keep a lid on his own temper and meanness, which seems frickin’ unlikely considering his track record, regardless of his good intentions —

Well. He still has this fucked-up daydream — one that’s really more of a nightmare, all things considered. One where pearl meets some baldbody who isn’t a hacked-up, cobbled-together terror. Someone who’s nice an’ shit, who’s handsome and more her size, who doesn’t have muscle contractures that ache every night and a bad attitude and more scars than sense. Someone who doesn’t have a price on their head in damn near every system and hasn’t been kicked out of the majority of local dive bars. Someone who gives her presents, instead of buying or stealing her blankets and panties and trinkets and then uselessly hoarding them, afraid to share. Someone whose presence in her life wasn’t inaugurated with bruising and bleeding and hurtfulness.

He closes his eyes.

“The point is—“ He leans back into her, pressing his ports and fur and scars through his soaked shirt and into her softness — steadies himself, so that when he speaks again, the words are firm and smooth and a perfect, heart-deep recall of what she’d given him on the Arete. “The point is, you’re not a monster.”

He takes in a ragged breath — a mouthful of warm air and mist and distant moonlight, waterlilies and the faint neutrality of Sanna Orix’s little bottles of soap.

“You never have been.”

He’s not sure if she understands — if she knows what he’s trying to tell her. That she’d given him a gift and he’s ashamed to have repaid it with bitterness and bone-dust and salt. That he’d meant it when he’d said he didn’t hate her.

I may not know love, but I know the lack of it.

She takes in another one of those shuddering breaths and then both arms wrap around him, bandaged orloni-bite forgotten as she curves them around his waist and pulls him in against her, all tight and desperate in the way that makes him feel like something she could almost love.

“You won’t lose me,” she repeats softly, a promise laced in steam and stars. He shudders against her but doesn’t argue — grateful for the dream of it, for now, and for the soft way she squeezes and clings to him. She tilts her head forward and presses kisses to the wet tufts of fur behind his ears, and he closes his eyes and melts against her — like he’s the one who’s been worn down and beat up, like he’s the one all bruised and battered by being too close to the purple explosion and then tumbling through a hole in the floor by way of collapsing foundations. He lets her give him all her sweetness — no. That isn’t right. He doesn’t let her give it to him — he clutches onto it, tight, trying to make it last. Desperate for her.

“You won’t lose me,” she says again, “and you can call me whatever you want, Rocket.”

You can call me whatever you want to.

The breath rattles out of his lungs. Her arms loosen and her hands trace the line of fur between his waistband and the soft drift of his shirt underwater. Her fingers coast up under his shirt, just a little — enough for him to wince when her thumbs find the ridge of his flex-vibranium rib extensions, buried under his fur. She must feel him stiffen, because she stops there — so attuned to him, reading him so frickin’ well, being so damn gentle with his insecurities that it practically flays him apart. Then her fingers tug down the floating cotton of his shirt and continue their path up his ribs, leaving him protected by the thin wet material.

“Are you hurt anywhere?” she murmurs against the shell of his ear, and it flickers back against her lips instinctively. “I don’t want to—”

“I maybe got a few bruises,” he admits. “Nothing — nothing I want you keeping your hands off of.”

Nothing new, anyway.

She kneads carefully at his flanks and lower back, studying him for hitches in his breath as her thumbs dip deeply into mangled muscle. His belly tightens when she finds that spot just above his tail, but the groan he lets out must reassure her that it’s a pleasant sort of spasm, because she strokes there again before moving on. She guides him into little shoulder rolls and then follows them with her hands, kissing her fingers and the heels of her palms deeply into all the tight and twisted parts of his body. Her scraped knuckles roll loving patterns against the nape of his neck and the base of his skull. Her thumbs sweep up the back of his head, palms cradling him before stroking upward. She carefully folds her hands around the base of his ears, massaging the hundred tiny muscles responsible for their twitching and repositioning, then gently pinching and rubbing the velvety shells themselves. He groans again, unable to stop himself, eyes dampening again as he stares up at the stars.

“How,” he manages to choke out. “How are you not still fuckin’ mad at me?” The galaxy had been so frickin’ awful to both of them — but where he turned vicious and venomous and spiteful, she just doesn’t seem to have it in her to be cruel back. Not a single mean bone in all of her soft, silky body.

“I only have so much room inside me to hold grudges,” she says — almost apologetically — as if she’d read his frickin’ mind. “Right now that spot’s taken up by Herbert.” He can imagine her behind him, suddenly crinkling her nose. “And maybe Theel.”

He snorts, then takes a slow, measuring breath. “Sometimes,” he admits, “I think all I am is grudges, and there ain’t room for anything else.”

She hums some low, sweet, aching consolation into the mist and shadows. “Maybe someday,” she says softly, still running her thumbs up and down the back of his head. “Maybe someday, all this will be over, and you and I will be flying in one of your specially-made ships to see an Acanti migration.”

He huffs out a tired chuckle. He can hear the curve of her kitten-smile, timidly pillowing the words like a peace offering he doesn’t deserve.

“And maybe you’ll do something or say something and I’ll get mad and stay that way for more than a whole rotation.” His ears flick, nervous, but there’s a confusingly-wistful tone in her voice — like this hypothetical future-fight is one she looks forward to. He feels her head drop behind him, and the soft breath against the wet fur at the nape of his neck. “When I do, it’ll be a good thing — just like it was when I got angry for the first time on the way to Sovereign — because it’ll mean I must feel a little bit safer. Because you made me feel safer — safe enough to have room for smaller grudges.”

She lifts her chin, nuzzling into his wet fur, and he lifts one hand to fold over the end of his nose, to stifle any shattered sound that might try to escape.

“Then we’ll figure it out together, and we’ll make up.” Her voice is all dreamy and sweet. “Hopefully with kisses.”

He jumps when he feels the most feathery, breathy touch shift the collar of his t-shirt — and then her lips, so tender and soft he’s almost certain they’re not real, lightly skimming the start of the bare skin above his hem. The water must have weighed his shirt down: tugging his collar a little lower, showing off a ripple of scar tissue unhidden by fabric or fur. He freezes while her lips brush against it, reverent and plush with every whispered word and breath.

“We’ll make up,” she repeats, as if she hadn’t just pressed her mouth against the edge of the ugliest part of him. As if he’s not sitting there, unable to move, locked into his body by the feel of her breath at the top of his spine. Electrified by her. “I know we will. Because — because I see it. You. Your creativity. Your brilliance. The way you see things, invent things, make things new. The way you fly. Your sense of humor. Your resilience, and your dedication.” Her hand splashes softly from the water, and he tenses as her fingers find his chin — thumb stroking damply over the wet fur still hiding his tears. “I see how much you care. How much you love. Your mourning.”

He thinks his sternum might split open right there — some corroded hinge cracking apart, flaked bits of rust falling right into his bloodstream. He thinks his twisted skin is carrying the feel of her kiss, passing it from one mutilated nerve ending to the next, until he can feel her woven into every inch of his body’s surface.

“When I say you taught me that we’re more than just what our creators made of us, this is what I mean.” Her hand floats free of his face, slipping back under his water to tuck tightly against his abdomen. “You might feel like you’re nothing but grudges, Rocket, and I can see why — why you’d think that. But that doesn’t make it true. You’re… you’re this whole, incredible universe full of beautiful, complicated, expansive things, and no matter how mad I get at you, I’ll always remember how good you are, Rocket.”

Another sweet, fervent kiss to the top of his scarred spine: no longer just the delicate brush of lips, but something soft and lingering and loving. It burns.

“You are so good.”

It’s an echo of the words she’d whispered to him under the flight control lights on the runabout, hemmed in by softness and blankets. You’re so good. I know it.

He suddenly realizes that he’d stopped breathing, probably the moment he’d felt her breath on his gnarled flesh. Now his whole body chokes as he heaves in an agonized, frantic fistful of air. “I’m not — you’re wrong—”

“Groot proves it,” she says against him, not perturbed in the slightest by his tensing, by the sudden flail of his lungs, the calamitous thud of his heart against her chest. Her arms wreathe him loosely. “Having him on the ship — taking him to Taluhnia — that proves it. You are good. Drax — keeping him after Knowhere — he proves it. Nebula proves it. D’au proves it. I prove it. You’re so good.” She presses the tip of her nose to the fur just above his scar — coasts it up the line of his neck like she’s trying to scent him, and everything in him shudders with the need to fall apart. Then he feels her lips against his scars again, and the sudden curve of a timidly-teasing half-smile. “Having Littlefoot onboard proves it.”

He barks out a laugh nearly as broken as Nebula’s — shocked into the sound of it, forced from his lungs. “That fuckin’ f’saki,” he says, scoffing to hide the openness of his wound. “Let you outta my sight for five damn seconds and you’re already adopting—” He pauses, brow creasing. “Where the fuck did that thing go, anyway?”

He feels her straighten behind him, her tits bobbing on the water as she chuckles, then shrugs. “I don’t know,” she admits, “but I think he’ll be fine for a while. Stay with me?”

The space at the crest of his scars still burns with the feathersoft feel of her lips, like someone took a star right out of the sky around them and pressed it to the top of his spine, letting it dazzle its way painfully and beautifully across his broken skin. He’s pretty sure leaving isn’t even a possibility anymore, so he sinks into her instead, turning their bodies into concentric crescent moons — gently cradled together, curved into the shell of the bath.

He’s not sure how long they remain in the mist-filled microcosm of the bathing room. The water in this fancy tub stays hot for a long time — temperature mods in the porcelain plating, Rocket figures. It’s not till the steam has dissipated that he realizes it’s probably been hours. He thinks he might have been dozing, and when he turns in her arms, he finds she’s drifted off too: water-jeweled blue lashes fanned against her cheeks, and the strands of hair around her face slowly drying into damp curls. He hesitates, then leans his chest into hers, rubbing the wet fur of his jaw against both sides of her neck, nuzzling the soft dark tip of his nose into her skin. He doesn’t smell much like himself right now thanks to the bath, but he gives her what he can. That strange clicking pressure rises in his ribs and throat again, aching and yearning. He lets it spill over once more — just for a moment — and the hollow purring sound fills the bathing room, echoing off steel and sky and crystalline glass.

“Wake up, kitten,” he rumbles against her, face still buried between her collarbone and shoulder.

Pearl’s wet lashes flutter, eyes blurry and confused.

“Dry off,” he husks at her. “Get into bed. I’ll bring the first aid kit and we’ll get fresh bandages on you.”

Every wound Drax had mended will need to be re-dressed, Rocket knows. Despite his good intentions, the steam has wilted all of pearl’s gauze, and the steri-strip on her brow looks limp. But then, Rocket had been planning on treating every single minor scrape and bruise on her, anyway — as diligently as he had after the Arete. He doesn’t expect there’s more than an inch or two of pearl’s precious skin that’ll be without anti-inflamm salve or bandages by the time he’s done.

But his sleepy-eyed housewife only blinks at him blearily, her sliced lip tucking into a pout. “Tired.”

He lets the ghost of a smirk haunt his mouth. “You gonna sleep in the frickin’ tub?”

She only looks at him, then nods solemnly. He snorts.

“Get to bed, sweetheart.” His voice husks against the quiet stillness. “You can sleep while I patch you up.”

She sighs, adorably disgruntled with that solution, and carefully disentangles herself from him. When she stands, the water streams off her in silver rivers, and his mouth suddenly goes dry at the sight of her above him: the soft wet thatch of bluing curls between her thighs, the golden-peach skin turned waterlily-pale in the starlight, the undersides of those perfectly-ripe pink tits and their gorgeous, velvety-hard nipples.

“Go on,” he urges, though the words now sound strangled.

When she steps carefully onto the bath mat, the plasma orbs dim on, and she glances back over her naked shoulder at him while she wraps herself in an enormous towel and slips toward the door.

“Don’t be too long,” she begs, and he swallows.

“I’ll be right behind you, kitten,” he promises, and the words feel like a prayer between his teeth: soft and pliant and humble, and still somehow punching right through space and time, printing themselves on the fabric of forever. He swallows at the immense feeling of it, and waits till the door closes behind her before he flips the stopper to drain the tub and peels off his soaked clothes — rushing, now. The wet fabric slaps heavily to the floor of the bath and he leaves them there, scrubbing as much water from his fur as he can with a dry towel, then tugging on the second set of sleep-clothes. He hoists the first aid kit onto his shoulder and lugs it out of the bathing room, heading down the narrow hall and toward the massive bed.

The room is still dim under its web of stars and galaxies — plasma orbs set to quarter-light — and pearl stands paused at the edge of the bed, still wrapped in her enormous fluffy towel. He pauses too, drinking her in, teeth sunk gratefully into his own tongue at the sight of her: perched in the starlit captain’s quarters like a pretty pink-and-blue bird, edged and sprinkled in gold, still damp and practically naked at the edge of his bed, safely within reach.

Back where she belongs.

Then he spots the mischievously-pleased quirk in the corner of her mouth. Her moonsilver eyes peek down at him, then dart back to the bed.

He blinks, and follows her gaze.

The damn f’saki’s huddled up right between their frickin’ pillows, crooning chittered little snores into the dark blue air.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

♡♡♡ i hope you enjoyed. i know that was a lot of feelings. from here, we are going to see rocket's and pearl's relationship continue to grow, though rocket (that dickhead) probably has at least one big fight left in him. just can't let himself have anything nice. and there is more angst to come as they continue to work through their individual shit, too (but i am trying to balance it out with fluff-n-smut ~ like the next chapter. which will be smutty. so i hope you enjoy that one too! ♡)

i am also working on another full-color drawing of them, though it's very detailed and will take some time. when it comes, there'll be a big previous of one of the 40-something chapters. (while future chapters are subject to change, you can find projected content on the masterlist ♡. AND there is a new lil doodle of them on tumblr too ~ rocket likes to comb pearl's hair. i hope you enjoy and i am so thanksful, as always, to those of you who stick around and continue to read this enormous mess. thank you for being here, and an extra-special thank you to those of you who say hi in the comments and let me know you're still around. YOU ARE ESSENTIAL TO MORALE lol. but really. i'm not joking haha. ♡♡♡

coming soon: chapter twenty-nine. amoransia.
summary: nebula gives rocket advice. pearl picks up where she left off.
warnings: d/s dynamics, safeword discussion, blindfold, subspace, fellatio, come-eating, edging, overstim. praise. mild degradation (use of slut/whore, affectionate). dirty talk. brief mention of pussy-spanking, face-fucking. aftercare.
estimated date: wednesday, april 16.

other exciting things:
♡ thursday, 3/27. take what you need | i'm damn proud a' you, kid. | for ao3 guests
♡ i recently posted some headcanons of the way all the rockets (in as many universes as i could think of) dom & sub for you and it has been... surprisingly popular lol. arguably one of the most popular things i've written in the past year or so. if you're interested. find me over there!
♡ i'm still working on the april calendar but the florescence finale should be out next month! FINALLY!
there's now a take what you need WIPlist, so you can see upcoming requests and anticipated posting dates.

･:꧂posting schedules, chapter-previews, headcanons, art, & more on tumblr♡
･:꧂cicatrix art, masterlist, & moodboard♡
･:꧂ most recent new art: rocket likes to comb pearl's hair.

Chapter 29: amoransia.

Summary:

nebula gives rocket advice. pearl picks up where she left off.

Notes:

warnings: d/s dynamics, safeword discussion, blindfold, subspace, fellatio, come-eating, edging, overstim. praise. mild degradation (use of slut/whore, affectionate). dirty talk. brief mention of pussy-spanking, face-fucking. aftercare. little bit of relationship anxiety/post-abuse concerns from pearl.

recap: chapter twenty-eight. momophobia.
[feel free to skip this if you feel like you remember everything!]
rocket wakes pearl up and convinces her to come upstairs to their quarters to sleep. they're both still filthy from knowhere (pearl moreso than rocket). rocket orders her into the luxurious captain's bathtub and washes her as a sort of penance before giving in to her encouragements and getting into the bath himself - fully clothed, of course. rocket ends up telling pearl about what happened between himself, wyndham, and lylla, and tries to explain that the guilt he carries about his role in lylla's "evolution" makes him unworthy to judge pearl for anything that ever happened between her and the high evolutionary. pearl tries reminds him that lylla had forgiven him, that he has spent his whole life since trying to punish himself and make up for his actions, and that he isn't responsible for wyndham's evil decisions and behaviors. when they finally leave the bath, it's only to find littlefoot sleeping in their bed.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

amoransia. the melodramatic thrill of unrequited love; the longing to pine for someone you can never have, wallowing in devotion to some impossible person who could give your life meaning by their very absence. Portuguese amor, love + ânsia, craving. Pronounced “ah-moh-ran-see-uh.” The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

The feathered trinket fits neatly in the pouch on his belt.

Rocket watches his passengers, reflected in the glass — drops his hand and lets his fingers linger over the little buckle that holds his pocket closed. It’s strange to him: having this whole big ship he’d never thought he’d actually get his claws on; having a willing crew of five — and a fuckin’ f’saki — even if the company is only temporary.

Having pearl, however briefly.

And though the Dreadnought is frickin’ massive, all these losers are in the cockpit with him. Pearl and D’au sit next to each other, chattering away in Xeronian. Drax leans against a bulwark, cracking zargnuts noisily between his teeth. Groot hunches on the floor, wedged between pearl and Rocket himself — occasionally commenting on their quiet conversation.

And Nebula sits to his right-hand side, staring out the starshield beside him, like she’s always been there. He tries not to recall their little conversation from a few rotations earlier, but the words sit in his belly like stones, and he can’t tell yet whether they’re jewels or anvils.

“What are you hiding?” the Luphomoid asks now in a low voice, and his fingers flinch away from the pouch at his side. It’s been three rotations since they left Knowhere, and no sign of a tail yet. He’s decided they might as well stop by Xeron after all. Drop off the council inheritor, or whatever-the-fuck pearl had called her. As near as Rocket can tell, D’au shelRandau is a kind of princess in her own right: a leader of her people, on some level, and a descendent of some famous old monarch. Which probably makes him more of an idiot for agreeing to take her home.

It seems moon-damned impossible to stay out of the High Evolutionary’s searchlight these days.

“M’not hiding anything,” Rocket rumbles back under his breath.

The cyborg tilts her head, and her implacable black stare intensifies. “Do you have a weapon?” she asks calmly, and he snorts.

“I got lots of weapons, kid.”

The dark gaze flickers. If Rocket didn’t know better, he’d think the assassin looked stunned for a second. “I am not a child.”

He grunts. It’s a successful change in topic, as far as he’s concerned—

“Did you steal something, then? From the Collector?”

Dammit.

“No, I didn’t,” he gripes. “Not unless you count the frickin’ Xeronian, and I’d say pearl stole her.”

“Then what do you keep checking your pocket for?”

Drax belts out a laugh at something pearl or D’au said, swallows the last of his zargnuts, and joins their weird little huddle. Rocket watches them in the crystalline armored glass.

They all look — frickin’ cozy.

He grimaces. “I got pearl a gift. On Knowhere.”

There’s a brief quiet, rumpled softly by the chatter of his crew.

“And you didn’t give it to her yet?”

Nebula’s voice is hoarse and flat with something akin to disbelief, like she can’t fathom the depths of his stupidity. He bites back another twist of discomfort. “I will when I’m ready,” he defends, though the mountain of soft Cyxlorade blankets and Sovereign lingerie hidden in the back of the captain’s closet seems to indicate that he might never be ready.

“How did you even apologize without giving her a gift?” the cyborg asks, like the words taste sour in her mouth.

Rocket tsks. It had been the exact question he’d asked himself — the exact question that Biobi, his old friend at the Brass Camellia, had asked when Rocket had been pouring out his woes over a jar of Skullfuck Moonshine. Biobi had clucked his tongue and taken a mouthful of his own drink.

How are you gonna apologize? he’d asked. If she’s everything you say, then she deserves something real.

I don’t frickin’ know, Rocket had muttered into his alcohol. How did I win you back over when I said something shitty to you?

Biobi had shaken his head. It was different. You were a customer. There weren’t the same kind of emotions involved — not enough feelings for something like this to even happen. Plus, you were never rude to the workers at the Camellia. You definitely never hurt me. He’d offered a lopsided, optimistic grin. But when you annoyed me, you just made me come till I passed out, and then tipped me even more than usual.

Rocket had scowled into his jar. That’s not gonna work this time.

Biobi had tossed his head back and laughed. Don’t underestimate yourself in the bedroom, he’d leered playfully, nudging Rocket with his elbow. Or the power of a good, thoughtful gift.

She helped me figure out my name, Rocket had replied only, his voice low under the clamor of glasses and steins, the rattle of low voices. How do you give anyone anything that matches up to that?

“Pearl’s a special case,” he mutters to Nebula now. “She’s had nice shit ever since that — ever since she left her dirtball planet.” His brow curls moodily. “She never wanted any of that stuff. Not as much as she wanted to love something.”

Nebula sits silently beside him, and when he slants a glance up at her, her eyes are dark and solemn on the stars. Pearl’s words murmur in Rocket’s head, like the little waves in a river or a canal, full of lilies.

The fawn. Her eyes.
I feel like I’m carrying her to a butcher.

Well, there won’t be any more of that. Not now that Nebs had a perfect opportunity to run off and chose to save pearl instead. Rocket will make it a point to release the cyborg damn near anywhere she wants to go. Hell — he’ll keep her around if she wants. Another set of eyes, looking out for pearl? Keeping his girl from falling down endless holes, or getting bitten up by stray orloni?

“Then maybe, instead of giving her whatever stupid thing you’re hovering over in your pocket, you should just let her love you,” the Luphomoid rasps abruptly.

Rocket’s ears flatten, and he feels his tail puff. On second thought, maybe he’ll hand Thanos’ daughter over to the Nova Corps after all.

“Mind yer business,” Rocket snarls, but Nebula only rolls her dark eyes.

He scowls back, but he can’t help but let his eyes flicker over to the faint reflection of pearl and D’au in the starshield. He can’t help it if he always wants to stare at his girl. She looks like a rosy-gold ghost in the crystalline armor, and she’s all full of moonlight and galaxies. She looks so frickin’ happy — happier than he’s ever fuckin’ seen her — with her hands constantly clenched between her pretty tits and her eyes glittering, lips sweetened by laughter. The cut on her lip is healing up, and the one on her forehead too.

He should know. He checks all her wounds and bruises every night, with more insistence and fuss than he had even in the immediate aftermath of the Arete.

D’au is good for her, he admits to himself. He almost regrets that there’s only a cycle’s worth of travel between here and Xeron. It’s so strange and unexpected — that as many friends as pearl seems to pick up, she still hasn’t turned away from him yet. She still comes to their shared bed in the captain’s quarters at night, and purrs for him when he pets her, and cuddles on him and squeezes him tight while she’s sleeping. She still insists on wearing his old band shirts, stretched tight across her stiff little nipples — doing nothing to hide the bounce of her tits, and the sweet curved underside of them that he can see when she stands above him. She still lets him cover her in his scent, like she doesn’t care if the whole frickin’ galaxy knows she belongs to him.

Not that he’s fucked her since Knowhere. Since before Knowhere, actually. If a person didn’t count his absolutely mangled handling of her sweetly-offered blowjob, then he hasn’t fucked her in nearly a cycle at this point. It’s probably some kind of crime, to be honest: having pearl all snuggly and warm and willing in his bed, and not gently coaxing her into parting her thighs for his apologetic tongue.

The worst part is, he knows it’s got her worried. He’s tried to reassure her: keeping her squeezed nice and tight against him, caring for all her bruises and cuts — holding her hand till she falls asleep, just like before.

It’s just that there’s this twist in his belly when he thinks about her, all soft-mouthed and licking at his dick — then the way he’d treated her after. The things he’d said. The memory of the half-lemniscate scar on her ass. His own ragged ugliness, brutal and blaring next to the soft silk of her body and her warm generosity.

Plus, the fact that the f’saki has taken up a semi-permanent residency on the bed doesn’t help much.

“So what is Xeron like?” pearl asks her new friend — as if she doesn’t know. Or maybe she doesn’t — maybe it’s been a few circs since she last set foot in Lab 34. But she tugs at the ends of her lilac-blue curls, knotting her fingers in them and yanking a little. It’s a nervous habit, Rocket’s realized — but better than sinking her teeth into that scarred-up knee of hers. That’ll be something they’ll have to talk about, he knows. Sooner rather than later, probably.

He’s been putting it off too long, if he’s being honest.

“Beautiful,” D’au says, voice lilting wistfully between the quiet clatter of her bone plates. “Or at least, it’s beautiful in my memory. We do have a lot of orloni, though. The last time I was home, they were running amuck.”

Rocket snorts behind the controls.

“Tell me more,” pearl says excitedly, leaning forward. Herbert didn’t feel the need to waste effort on the people he’d made, he remembers her saying — describing herself as if she were only a watchful trophy on a shelf during her visits to Wyndham’s planets: not to engage in any personal exchanges.

“The sky is always shades of turquoise-blue, and the stars are always out,” the Xeronian says with a wistful smile. “We don’t get rain the way other planets do, but mists that roll from the mountains down into the valleys — especially in the vernal season — leaving condensation behind in silver puddles throughout the city-streets and meadows. Every city is built in a radial pattern, with markets and libraries in the center of each community, and we teach our children the strengths of diplomacy from the time they first begin to reason.”

“I had heard Xeron is a pacifist planet,” Drax says from the seat where he’s lounging. His brow is knitted, as if the word makes no sense to him. Maybe it doesn’t, Rocket realizes — who knows how Kylosian culture grapples with that kind of concept?

“Yes,” D’au agrees with a dip of her head. “Our… maker created us with the intention that we be peaceful. It’s… written into our cellular makeup, I suppose. The desire to avoid conflict and violence.”

Rocket’s claws tighten on the yoke.

“Do you always do what your creator tells you to?” Nebula asks sharply, and D’au startles — not realizing, perhaps, that she’d had a larger audience.

The Xeronian clicks her bone-plates — nervously, or perhaps in annoyance. “We’ve learned to value the gifts which we were given,” D’au says mildly, “even when they were not intended to be gifts.”

Huh. Is there some resentment among the Xeronian people, after all? A twinge of recognition: that their god is a fuckin’ piece of shit?

D’au clears her throat, and turns away. Her eyes flicker to Groot’s, and then to Drax’s. The Destroyer tears open another bag of zargnuts, and Rocket rolls his eyes. With the rate he’s been going through them, he’ll probably empty out the entire supply in a cycle.

“Pacifism is often thought of as a weakness,” D’au explains, “but we’ve learned to use it to feed our strengths. Our relationships with other planets are our pride. We’re known for the aid we provide to people throughout the galaxy — for the strides we’ve made in medicines, sciences, diplomacy, and art. And for how widely and freely we share these advances. We believe that when we share information and resources with those who would benefit from them, the whole universe benefits in turn.

“The result of all this is that there isn’t a planetary capitol anywhere in this sector that isn’t called home by at least one Xeronian ambassadorial family. We have cultural centers in over forty-seven systems, and powerful allies in more than a hundred.” Her eyes settle gently on pearl. “And while refugees will always face struggle, we are well-positioned to migrate from our home planet, if the need arises.”

She knows.

She knows who pearl is. Knows the threat the High Evolutionary poses to his own frickin’ inventions.

She knows who pearl is.

Rocket can feel the jump in his heart, and it must show on his face — or maybe Nebs has some fancy aural implants he’s not aware of, because the cyborg slants a startled glance down toward him. Pearl, for her part, only stares at D’au with wide, moonsilver eyes.

Or maybe she doesn’t, he tries to tell himself. He knows he’s got a tendency toward impulsivity. Maybe the Xeronian’s got no idea. Maybe she never pearl before Knowhere, and she’s been away from Xeron too long to remember any talk of the High Evolutionary’s Flawless Pearl. Maybe she’s just answering Drax’s question. Maybe Rocket doesn’t need to be so frickin’ suspicious all the time—

“What are these markings?” Drax asks, interrupting the sudden tension with his own very special brand of obliviousness. Rocket tries to exhale, but the breath gets caught against his prosthetic collarbone. He catches pearl’s eyes in the starshield, and shakes his head minutely.

His kitten chews her lip, then offers him a subtle nod.

“These?” D’au clicks, brushing her fingertips over the ice-blue lines inked into her forehead. They match the blue of the crevices in her bone-plating, though Rocket isn’t sure if the coloration is natural or not.

“Are they histories, like mine?” Drax asks, gesturing to the scars that cover his torso and ring the thick circumference of his arms.

Something in the Xeronian’s face softens. “Not exactly,” she says lightly. “Along with the diplomacy, my people have a rich history in the art of tattooing. You would be hard-pressed to find a Xeronian over the age of majority who doesn’t have their traditional bluing, and additional art besides.” She touches the symmetrical circles and lines that pattern her forehead. “These are blessings — some from my family lineage, some I’ve chosen myself.” Her fingers trace the design on the outside, close to her temples. “Clarity, foresight, and cooperation.” Then the twin circles on either side, above her brows. “Love, from and for others. Mutual aid.” A ladder of lines and dots, like a starmap down the center of her forehead. “A history of leadership.”

Pearl’s eyes are wide and shimmering in the crystalline window. “Are all Xeronian tattoos are sacred-traditional?”

From her tone, Rocket can tell she already knows the answer — that she’d found it, maybe while pouring over Wyndham’s secret files.

D’au’s eyes curve, her smile hidden by her bone-plates. “Do you want a Xeronian tattoo, Little Sister?”

Of course she does, Rocket realizes. He can already picture pearl, sitting quietly in her Homonoia cage: dreaming of art decorating her pretty body, to go with the brightly-colored hair of her imagination. Dreaming of a choice she could make, all for herself. Of reclaiming the skin that the High Evolutionary had ordered scrubbed and scraped for his own vanity — that he’d kept flawless and freckle-less and out of the sun.

That he’d kept chilled with room-temperature water, and never a soft touch to speak of.

Pearl blushes prettily. “I — if that were okay,” she says breathily. “If it weren’t some kind of — of sacrilege.”

D’au’s smile must widen. “We often hold tattooing events in the markets for tourists and citizens alike,” she confides, “and it’s a regular offering at our cultural centers. I would love to see you wearing Xeronian art, Little Sister.”

And suddenly, Rocket’s dreaming of it too: pearl’s golden-peach skin, patterned in Xeronian blues. A spangle of starry sky, watercolored across her silken back, perhaps. A filigree of lace ringing her pretty thighs, like garters. Or a dazzle of drawn jewels, maybe — something pretty to glitter across her chest like a harness, then drip down between her gorgeous, bouncing tits.

He swallows, throat suddenly dry.

“I am Groot?” Groot asks.

Rocket clears his throat. “He wants to know more,” he translates for the Xeronian — well, for everyone who isn’t pearl. “About life on Xeron in general, I guess.”

Pearl beams at him in the starshield, and he can’t help the flicker of warmth in his flexi-vibranium ribs — the little bit of pride that steals up inside him, smug and snug and satisfied. I never been good with languages, he’d told her — probably a dozen times, or more.

I don’t think that’s true at all. I think you were just expected to learn the wrong ones.

The memory of Nebula’s hoarse rasp comes fast on its heels: echoing against the crystalline bubble of the cockpit, quiet but derisive as they’d overlooked pearl and the stars.

You’re a fool if you think you don’t love her already.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Rocket hasn’t slept with her in days.

Well, he’s slept with her, pearl reminds herself. But he hasn’t — well. He hasn’t fucked her. Which feels all wrong, because prior to their fight, they’d been having sex fairly often — at least as far as pearl can tell.

Not that she’d had anything to compare it to.

And she still, desperately, wants to give him the kind of pleasure he’d given her. She still wants to learn how to make him come with her mouth.

Maybe he’d been frightened by her perceived fragility that night on Knowhere. When she thinks back on the explosion, she’s actually — well, she’s almost happy with the way she’d handled herself. She’d been brave, she thinks. Rocket would probably accuse her of being stupid, but she wouldn’t go back and change anything, not even if he’d wanted her to.

D’au might not be alive if she’d done something different.

And more than brave, she’d been confident. Not that she’d recognized it in the moment. It hadn’t been a feeling so much as a certainty. She’d simply known what she’d needed to do, and she’d done it. The outcome had almost mattered less than the action itself.

When had she last been so sure of herself? She can’t remember a time in her life that hadn’t been full of second guesses, and third guesses, and sometimes fourth. Not since a foolish attempt at learning to fly had ended up with Fairy, crushed into splinters of bone and feather. Not even since before, trying to figure out how to navigate the fleet-footedness of her mother’s moods and the strange men she’d bring home every once in a while.

It’s because of Rocket. She’s certain it’s because of Rocket. Well, okay. It’s also because of her, learning more and more of herself. But she’s only had the freedom to do that because he’d helped her get away. And being with him has opened things inside her — made her realize that she can make her own choices, and have things turn out okay. She can decide whichever of his little shirts she wants to wear, and decide whatever food in the galley she wants to eat, and decide to run into half-melted crumpling buildings if she thinks it’s the right thing to do. She can buy Rocket a respirator-mask without panicking — even when he’s mad — and bring a f’saki home without fear. She bets, if they went back to Sanna Orix’s shop and Wona Beax’s salon, she could pick out her own panties and haircolor without wanting to cry — not even a little.

The realization fills her ribs with an unrecognizable, unidentifiable feeling of pure abundance, and she wants nothing more than to return the favor. To give Rocket back a fraction of what he’s given her. She’s not sure she’ll ever be able to.

But it won’t stop her from trying.

Of course, she could be wrong. Maybe there’s some other reason he won’t sleep with her. Maybe it’s not about her at all. Maybe he’s not concerned that she’s too fragile, too easily-hurt. Maybe he’s the one feeling vulnerable, after he’d shared so much in the bath. After she’d kissed the thin ridge of scarring that she could see over the soaked collar of his shirt.

And if he needs some comfort, some consolation — if he needs her to share some of her newfound confidence, or to help him feel safe — she’d feel grateful to be able to offer him that.

Not that her little plan for tonight is selfless, by any means. Her naked thighs twitch against each other, impatient and needy, while she kneels on the thin rug in front of the chair where Rocket had yelled at her last time. The glass dome of the captain’s quarters is cold around her — forcing her nipples into achy, jutting points — and she gazes out at the stars before adjusting her position.

She’d come up a little early for the sleep-shift: showered and dried herself, then rebandaged the little wounds that Rocket still seems so concerned about. She’d dimmed the plasma orbs, letting the round room dip into a low glow. Littlefoot had already been snoozing on the bed by the time she was ready — and thank goodness for that, because pearl had found herself wondering if his presence was part of the problem. Free of the f’saki’s pursuit for pets, pearl had prepared herself as well as she could.

Still, her heart tremors and thuds against her breastbone. She places her palm to the naked skin there — nervousness skittering outward like a static shock — and she adjusts herself again. Then she reaches for the scrap of fabric in her lap — carefully cut and folded from a spare set of linens — and ties the blindfold over her eyes.

It’s the only thing she’s wearing.

She waits there, kneeling across from the chair where Rocket had sat last time. Goosebumps prickle everywhere on her skin: dancing along her upper arms and down her thighs, spiralling across her belly. Between the soft darkness of the blindfold and the quilted quiet of the room, every sense seems heightened. She can hear the soft purring snore of Littlefoot’s breath — the quiet hum of the Dreadnought, and all its systems and engines. The nervous waltz of her own heart. She almost thinks she can hear the stars themselves, like a gentle ringing from inside a deep well. And her skin — her skin feels so hot, despite the goosebumps. Feverish, almost. The longer she sits, the more her muscles flinch, and the tighter her belly twists. Her nipples ache from the chill, and every time she shivers, she can feel her breasts jiggle against her chest, and the soft wave of her hair tickling her spine. Every fiber of the soft little throw-rug beneath her shins seems like a taunt. She imagines Rocket coming up to their room, finding her like this. It’s possible he’ll be annoyed, or won’t like that she’s decided to take the initiative, in her own submissive way.

But she doesn’t think so.

She wonders if he’ll say anything — if she’ll even know he’s there before she feels the sharp skate of his claws. Or maybe he’ll settle himself into the chair in front of her and she won’t even know it until she hears the buckles of his jumpsuit. Her dearest hope is that he feels safe — safe to take his clothes off, to move around her, to fuck her however he wants with the knowledge that she can’t see the naked body he’s so self-conscious of. She imagines it — the feel of his fur and skin and scars against her, the way she’d felt them that night he’d told her not to come and then forced her to orgasm anyway. The feel of him, comfortable and snug against her.

Her pussy squeezes without her permission — belly cramping — and her teeth catch her lower lip as she feels herself drip against her thighs.

She’s not sure how much time passes. Minutes, certainly. Maybe longer. At some point, her thoughts seem to disconnect. She feels like she’s floating somewhere near the top of the domed ceiling — like she could drift right through the crystalline-armor and become part of the stars themselves. She hovers — so far away and flimsy — that she doesn’t even jump when the door of the hatch hisses open.

“Sorry, pearl. I wanted to get us to somewhere without any traffic before—”

His words crack, like a felled tree in the forest, and he goes silent. Slowly, she feels herself settle back in her body — feels again the thud of her heart in her chest. Then feels the echo — thrumming, impatient, begging in her clit. Her thighs are already a mess.

She can hear the click of his claws on the floor, there and gone again as he moves toward her. He can be silent and shadow-soft with his footsteps when he wants to be. But when he speaks, his voice is so much closer than she’d expected — so close that she can’t help but shiver again.

“What — pearl, what the fuck—”

He doesn’t sound angry, though she can’t place the emotion behind his words. Something seething and heated, and maybe a little panicked. The words sail gently from her mouth, calm and thready, before she even knows what she’s going to say.

“I know it makes you uncomfortable,” she utters softly. “The idea of me seeing you. So now, you don’t have to worry.”

There’s the harsh, ragged sound of an indrawn breath. “Pearl.” It sounds almost like a plea — like she’s the one torturing him.

She licks her lips, and knots her hands in her naked lap. “Will you sit, please? I want to tell you something.”

He barks a sharp, haggard laugh. “You wanna tell me something,” he rasps disbelievingly. “You wanna tell me something while you’re naked on your knees, wearing a moon-damned blindfold.”

She chews her lip. “I want to tell you I’ll use my safeword if I need to. And I still don’t want to pull your tail, but I can do something else if I can’t speak. I can — pinch you, maybe.”

He’s silent now — so silent. Is he even still standing there? For a brief second, her heart bottoms out and her breath catches painfully in her throat. Has he left her? But no — she’d have heard the hydraulic hiss of the door.

“You promise?” he asks at last, and his voice is so hoarse and hollow that it almost sounds sorrowful. Her heart tremors again, and tears sting her eyes behind the blindfold, though she couldn’t say why. “You frickin’ promise you’ll pinch me, if I do somethin’ you don’t like? It’s gotta be hard, kitten. You gotta use your nails, to get through all this fur.”

She swallows. She hadn’t considered that. But she reminds herself that he needs this — needs to be able to trust that she’ll tell him if he goes too far, even if she’s not sure such a thing is possible. Not with him.

It’s that thought that gives her comfort — the thought that she’s unlikely to ever need to do it. And that she trusts him to stop if she does.

“I promise,” she swears fervently.

The silence crawls between them, long and lingering.

He doesn’t break it this time. Instead, the quietness slips over her skin like a tangible thing, teasing every nerve — even sliding between her thighs to stroke her sensitive clit. Her ears strain for the sound of him — for his breath, or the faint click of his claws on the shining platinum-plated floors. The brush of his jumpsuit as he walks. But there’s nothing but her nerves, suddenly buzzing and brightly incandescent — and perhaps the heat of his gaze, warming her cold body in that way it has since she’d first stepped foot onto HalfWorld. Perhaps it’s only her imagination, but she thinks she can feel his stare: hot ember fires licking over her aching nipples, dipping into the soft crease between her thighs. Trailing over the planes of her back and down to the hollow of her spine, then lingering at the cleft of her ass-cheeks and the way they pillow against her bare heels. The contrast — the cold chill of the Dreadnought and the melting heat of his eyes — has her whole body spasming in a shiver.

“Look. At. You,” he breathes at last against her opposite shoulder, and she jolts with unexpected nearness of him, the new direction of his voice. He’s circling her, she realizes — pacing his way around her like a predator toying with its prey. And while there’s a wondering note to his voice that bewilders her, there’s also something dense and dangerous and possessive, gathering in the corners of his words like a growl. “You trust me too much, sweetheart. Makes me think of all the times you let me lead you around in the dark.”

Something shatters over her senses — lighting up her breast and immediately radiating throughout her whole body. She catches a choked lungful of air in her throat as her spine curves into an electric arc. Her lashes flutter behind the blindfold and it takes a moment for her to realize that the bright buzz of her nerves is only due to the silken ripple of his knuckles against one painfully-tight nipple, but the realization comes too late. Rocket snickers, and the sound makes her thighs clench against each other. Her abdomen knits tight, and her pussy flutters.

His knuckles, sleek with a fine layer of short fur, roll against her nipple again — then pinch. Her spine arches again, trying to relieve pressure on the tight nub, and a whine squeezes up through her throat. Her clit twitches anxiously between her tense thighs, and she tries to rub them together to give herself some sort of relief.

“Look at you,” he repeats. His voice is riddled with too many emotions for her to identify, especially when she’s feeling like this: all untethered, only jerked back into her body by the scorching kiss of his touches. “Like a little frickin’ toy I can do whatever I want with.”

Her lips part, and she has to force herself not to pant. He hasn’t let go of her nipple — rubbing his thumb back and forth across the pink button, still pinched tight between the knuckles of his first two fingers. His voice drops even lower than before, a smoky-deep register that sends infrasonic vibrations up through her core.

“You’re all for me, aren’t you, kitten?”

He tugs sharply on her nipple, and her intended agreement gets lost in a small, wordless wail.

“I don’t gotta share my little doll with anybody. There ain’t nobody you want the way you want me.”

Another sharp tug, but she’s prepared this time. “N-nobody,” she stammers out, rising a little on her knees when he pulls. Her pussy clenches on nothing, agonizingly empty, and she can feel more wetness slip out of her and glaze her inner thighs.

“That’s right. My little fuckdoll-wife.”

Oh. A desperate little sound trips up her xylophone-ribs and she’s suddenly drenched, dripping everywhere down her thighs and calves. A feverish flush melts in her abdomen and floods everywhere: up into her breasts and cheeks, down to her knees. Her muscles turn buttery and weak and her clit pulses needily. Her scattered, floating thoughts suddenly seize and cling to his words, trying to make sense of them. Has he ever called her that before — his wife? Is it a common colloquialism in the vastness of space, outside of Herbert’s influence? Does it mean anything more than a throw-away little pet-name?

She’s been the High Evolutionary’s bride and betrothed for over half of her life, but nothing could have prepared her for how it feels to be called Rocket’s wife.

She hears him draw in another sharp breath — an inhalation, like he’s breathing her in. He flicks her captive nipple again, almost cruelly. “I don’t know what just set you off, sweetheart, but—“

“I want to kiss you,” she spills out. “I want to try to — I want to try to suck your dick again. Please, Rocket.” He releases her breast abruptly, and her thighs squeeze together. She can’t help but squirm, her fingers twisted together in her lap. “Please,” she repeats. “Please, I want to try. I’ll use my safeword. I’ll pinch you if I need to. Please, Rocket.”

She suddenly hates the blindfold. She’d give anything to see his face right now, to have some idea what he’s thinking. Instead, she shifts on her knees, trying to ignore the cramping in her belly and cunt, the slipperiness all over her legs. Her heart thrums frantically against her ribs and she reaches for where she thinks he might be, tears stinging her closed eyes. Crybaby. “Please, let me try. I want so badly to — to f-fuck you with my mouth, Rocket — I want to taste you again. I want to make you feel good; I need to—“

“Okay, kitten.” His voice is low and soothing, and she feels his claws hands circle her wrists from one side. He hadn’t been standing anywhere near the place she’d been reaching at all. “See? You don’t need begging-lessons, princess. You’re doin’ so frickin’ good for me already.”

A fresh wave of warmth washes over her, melting and sweet, and she whimpers as he places her hands on the soft edge of the overstuffed chair.

“You keep that blindfold on for me, and I’ll take care of the rest, sugar.”

He disappears from her limited soundscape for a moment before she hears a strange sound, like velvet sliding against corduroy. Another brief quiet, and then a sharp pinch at her hip that has her squeaking and jolting to the side. Rocket chuckles — low and dangerous — and taps her hip.

“Lift your knees for a second, sweetheart.”

Baffled, she obeys — lifting herself into a little bridge on her toes, with her fingers still digging into the overstuffed chair.

“Back down.”

Her knees sink into something pillowy-soft — the cushion from the other chair, she guesses. A little huff passes over her lips: a laugh, or maybe a breathy sigh. Of course he’d been worried about her comfort, she thinks warmly.

His fingers grip her chin from the other side, now; he twists her face in his direction. She can only assume he’s staring down at her.

“You can wait for me naked on your knees whenever you frickin’ want, pearl. But I better never find you without something under ‘em again. Understand?”

She licks her lips and nods, and his fingers tighten.

“Words, kitten.”

“I can kneel naked for you whenever I want, as long as I have something underneath my knees.”

His thumb slides over her lower lip — then dips inside her mouth. Impulsively, she swipes her tongue against him, and a low growl reverberates from somewhere deep in his chest. His thumb presses in: the flat, leathery pad tasting salty against the soft, wet muscle of her tongue, the point of his claw pricking gently. Then he strokes, and a garbled little noise warbles up from her throat as she swallows around him.

“Fuck,” he mutters, and pulls his thumb away. She sways when he releases her — trying to follow him without moving from the position he’s put her in.

“For fuck’s sake, sweetheart. You’re that hungry for cock, huh? An eager little whore for me?”

The yes puffs over her lips, breathless and aching as she turns her head to try and follow his voice. He doesn’t come back, though. Instead, there’s the soft, muffled clatter of latches and buckles, and pearl can hear the whisper of Rocket’s armor-woven jumpsuit as it slides against his fur. She sits obediently, palms pressed to the seat cushion, thighs twitching as she chews desperately at her lips and tries to keep from rocking on her heels. She waits for the dip of the chair — the signal that he’s giving her what she wants, letting her put her mouth on him — and jolts with a little hitching gasp when his warm fingers tickle up her flank instead. Her nerves short-circuit and she flinches and squirms and whines, whimpering as she rocks her hips.

He chuckles — his breath a soft puff against her hair and the back of her shoulder. His claws catch in her curls, sending frissons that sing along her scalp. She arches instinctively in response: spine bowing again, head tilting backward, lips parted.

“Good girl,” Rocket purrs, and she melts again: a little shuddery sob slipping from her lips, and more wetness slipping between her thighs. He twists her hair in quick, deft hands, and it has her abdomen and thighs clenching again, trying to ride something that isn’t there. Hazily, she realizes he’s tied her hair up in a ponytail — high and neat at the crown of her head. The fountain of curls sweeps and brushes against her shoulderblades.

“Please,” she begs brokenly, but his hands only skim her ribs, lifting and pressing her forward until her ass is up in the air, right at the height of his waist. His hands trace her flanks and then steady her hips, gripping and squeezing, tilting her so her pussy is tilted upward and on display.

His thumb glides gently over the half-lemniscate scar on her ass-cheek, and she shudders for a moment — tears up again at the memory of his hands cupping that old wound, full of grief and regret and outrage.

“Please,” she says again — a shattered whisper, this time. His fingertips shift, and he dips them mockingly into her slit — stroking through all her wetness, taunting her with the lightest of touches.

“I like teasing you so much though, kitten.”

She tries to protest — tries to plead, again — but all that comes out of her mouth is another whimper. He leans in, whiskers tickling the side of her hip, and the fur of his cheek is silk against her skin as he leans over and against her.

“M’gonna fuck you like this later — right after you use your pretty mouth on me.”

He scrapes his teeth over her unprotected flank, and she squeaks at the sharp threat — then moans at the lingering sting.

“Please,” she pants again. Any thought of proper begging dissolves in the glaze of heat and want and need. “Please, please, please—“

His fist in her ponytail pulls her back down and onto her heels, and she whimpers needily at the grounding sting in her scalp. Revels in it. The soft seat-cushion dips beneath her hands. She feels the warm fur of his muscled thighs, brushing against her wrists, and knows he’s settled himself on the chair between her resting palms.

There’s a moment of silence — or she thinks there is, anyway, but she can’t hear much beyond the rushing sound in her ears, like a windstorm or ocean waves. His knuckles coast against her cheek, and she sways into the sensation: vulnerable and unseeing, and always so hungry for affection.

“You still want my cock in your gorgeous, slutty mouth, kitten?”

She nods frantically, helpless in her eagerness, and parts her lips.

He groans. “You’re gonna fuckin’ kill me, sweetheart.” Two fingers coast over her tongue and she closes her lips, trying to give the crease of his fingers an experimental lick. He forces her tongue down, though; anchoring her lips open and steady with the force of his hand. “That’s a good little whore. Now — I need you to put at least one hand on my leg, if you’re not gonna hold my tail, princess. So you can pinch if you need to. Or hit me. Whichever feels right in the moment, okay?”

She shifts one hand to his thigh, and it’s bare under her gentle palm — no armor-woven jumpsuit or soft sleep pants, just warm muscle and fur. The feel of him, naked under her hand, has her immediately sinking into a grateful slump, his fingers bumping against her teeth till she tilts her head up so they can sit comfortably on her tongue. Her opposite hand slides over his other knee without her permission: she furrows her fingers deep into his undercoat, luxuriating in the steel-strength of his body and the heated satin threads of his fur. Her fingers curl and twist, tugging gently.

Rocket hisses, and she freezes when the claws of his other hand carve into a fist through the base of her ponytail.

“Keep that up, and this’ll be over before we even get started, little fuckdoll.”

She shivers and tries to stay still for him. His fist in her hair has her scalp singing, and it takes everything in her to not clench her fingers in his fur again as her pussy cinches tight. She hollows her mouth, trying to give his fingers an apologetic suck.

“Fuck,” he snarls, and her lips slide off his fingers with a startled, slurping pop when he pulls them abruptly from her mouth. Her heart clenches under her ribs. Was that wrong? What if he gets mad again? What if he decides he doesn’t want—

“I’m s-sorry,” she laments. “Please—“

“That’s all right, kitten.” His words are immediate, and recklessly sure of themselves. “M’gonna give you everything you want, okay? M’gonna take good care of you. You just let me guide you through it.”

His fist is still clamped harshly in her hair, but the pressure he uses is gentle when he guides her forward.

“Open that soft mouth of yours again, little slut. Nice and easy.”

She feels the hot, warm shape of him — slick and hard — tap gently against her plush lower lip.

“Why don’t you go ahead and play, sweetness.” His voice is a croon. “Lick it, suck it — do whatever you want. Explore.”

She whimpers, and stretches her lips into a little o so she can wrap them around the head of his dick. She makes her mouth soft and pliant, her tongue tender as she sucks gently at the tip of him, getting used to his flavor all over again. Salt and skin, musk and petrichor. His claws tighten in her hair.

“Good fuckin’ girl,” he rumbles, and she can almost taste the vibrations of his low voice. A trilling spiral of pleasure, sweet as birdsong, unspools inside her at the praise. “Can you take me a little deeper, kitten?”

She can’t see him — isn’t sure how much she actually has in her mouth, or how far she has yet to go. Last time, she’d been able to study the hooked shape of him, to try to decide how best to take him — but now she’s blindfolded, unable to see her own predicament. She furrows her brow behind her blindfold and tries to remember everything he’d told her before.

Take your time. Watch the teeth. Breathe through your nose.

She sinks her mouth slowly around him, softening her tongue around him as she goes. His fist sinks with her, following the base of her ponytail as her lips wander the curved shape of him. She doesn’t stop till his silky fur flutters against her lips and she can breathe in the scent of him: burnt wood, blue spruce, marzipan. The tip of his cock sits heavy on the back of her tongue, pressing down on her in a sloping crescent, and her throat convulses gently before she gets used to having him so deep in her mouth.

His claws prickle against her scalp, and his other hand sweeps loose blue strands away from her forehead. “Fuck, sweetheart. My little overachiever, every fuckin’ time—“

But he likes it. She can tell he likes it, by the way his knees tighten against her breasts and his clawed fingers twitch in her hair. And the taste of him — the texture of him in her mouth, like satin-smooth wood under a layer of silk — only makes her more wet. She squirms on her knees, and tries to stroke him with her tongue while keeping her lips pressed to his base. The float of her thoughts spreads wider, hazy and dazed as she sucks him experimentally, loving the feel of him between her lips and on her tongue.

“Oh — fuck, kitten. What wouldn’t I give to keep you curled up under the flight controls like this, huh? Just holding me in your mouth like a good little cockwarmer while I fly us through the stars.”

She hums her enthusiasm for the idea, startled when his hips suddenly buck against her lips and he hisses again through his teeth. The sudden movement has her gasping — the back of her mouth fluttering frantically — and he half-lifts her sputtering face by the base of her ponytail so she doesn’t choke.

“Fuck — sorry, sweetheart. Easy.”

A rivulet of saliva slips past the broken seal of her lips; instinctively, she tries to catch it with a sweep of her tongue. A nervous, impulsive whine rolls up from her throat when she feels it escape anyway. His hips hitch against her lips again and he groans.

“That’s okay, sweetness. You can make a mess. You think your sloppy little pussy doesn’t drench my fur when I fuck into her?” His claws tighten at the crown of her head — and the muscles in her thighs and shoulders and throat all melt. “No, she drips frickin’ everywhere, little fuckdoll. It’s one of my favorite things about her. She’s so frickin’ excited to get fucked that she can’t help but drool all down my dick.”

Oh. Her muscles clench, and her mouth and pussy both tighten desperately. Carefully — gently — he guides her head back down. Her mouth softens around him, welcoming him in before he lifts her back up.

“Yeah, my little housewife’s got the sluttiest, neediest, messiest little cunt in the galaxy,” he purrs, and she whines at the words again, another cramp starting in her belly.

My wife.

“Always wet for me — always begging for my dick. Why would I mind if her pretty pink mouth joined the party, huh? Got me all soaked too — so frickin’ happy to be stuffed with my cock?”

He lifts her head again so her mouth hovers halfway down his length, sucking at him gratefully — and even if she can’t see him, she can feel his eyes on her.

“You happy to have your mouth stuffed with my cock, princess?”

She tries to nod desperately, not wanting to let him go.

“Words for me, doll. Wanna hear it.”

His claws are still tangled in her hair, holding her steady while his dick presses her tongue flat in her mouth. She presses her thighs together, clit pulsing frantically — practically buzzing between her wet thighs. Dazed — still wrapped in darkness — she tries to repeat his words through wet, swollen lips around his cock. Her voice warbles softly as he gently lowers her mouth on him further.

“Can’t hear you, sweetheart.”

She tries again, her tongue weighed down by the heavy, hard hook-shape of his dick, and he chuckles.

“For fuck’s sake, you sound fuckin’ pretty like that. Keep goin’.”

His hand lifts her back up and her lips release him with a wet slurping noise that makes her belly cramp with embarrassment and heat.

“Please, Rocket — I love your — your cock. I love having my mouth stuffed full with it — please—“

“Your pussy, too?”

She all but writhes. “My pussy, too,” she promises, whimpering. “Any way you’ll have me—“

He makes a guttural, groaning sound.

“Listen to me, kitten.” The fingers of his other hand pinch her jaw, tilting her face a little more. “You listening?”

She nods, licking her lips again — trying to focus.

“You can do whatever you want to me, with your mouth. Everything you just did — it all felt real good. When you hum like that, it feels real good, too. But if you want me to come faster, you can use your tongue right here.” He tilts her head and presses her down — running the tip of her nose along the curve of his cock. “Hollow your mouth out while you move up and down. Faster and tighter’ll make me come quicker. You can take breaks whenever you want, sweetheart. Or use your pretty hand to help. I’ll try not to move too much.”

“You can move,” she protests, but her voice sounds slow and slurred in her own ears. Strange. “How else am I supposed to know if you like it — if I’m doing it right?”

He snickers, and his extra hand moves from her chin to brush stray blue strands out of her face again. “Trust me, I’ll like it. And I’ll make sure to frickin’ tell you.”

Well. That sounds more like him. Still—

“It’s not in your nature to not move,” she says, and she feels her brow pleat with concern under her blindfold — her lips pull into a worried pout. “I—”

“I don’t wanna fuck your face the first time you blow me,” he says sharply. She flinches, and he softens. “M’not mad. I just — I’m worried about getting too rough your first time. I don’t wanna be too rough, princess—“

I like it when you’re rough with me, she thinks — but doesn’t say. It’s going to be a tender spot for him, she’s realized now — based on whatever he thinks happened between them on the Arete.

So instead, she kitten-licks the tip of his cock, poised against her lips — then sucks on him lovingly till his fist eases in her hair and she can sink her wet mouth fully to the base once more. It takes her a few tries to find a good rhythm — the best way to use her tongue, to hollow her cheeks like he’d mentioned; to accommodate his sickle-shape.

“Fu-fuck, sweetheart. My good fuckin’ girl.”

A warm little golden glow melts in her belly and she twitches happily on her knees. Saliva collects in the corners of her mouth, pooling at the base of his cock, but he doesn’t seem to mind. Slick sounds fill the air, making her dizzy. Once, he eases his fist at the base of her ponytail, but she lets out such a pathetic, impulsive whine that he goes back to gripping it — hard — giving her scalp a little tug on occasion. Everytime he does, she whimpers and squeezes her knees together.

“Can’t wait to see — what kinda mess you got between those thighs when we’re done,” he pants out hoarsely. “You were so wet earlier, just thinking of me — daydreaming ‘bout my dick in your mouth. Bet you’re even wetter now, huh? Needy from being used?”

She whimpers and sinks down on him faster — rises and falls again, even faster.

“I’m such a jackass,” he admits breathlessly, his voice raspy and smoky and harsh. “I saw your pretty pink pussy, all sweet for me, and I just wanted to give her a good spanking, princess — nicer than last time, I swear—“

For a moment, she wonders if she might be able to come from his words alone. She can still remember the bright, grounding sting of his palm striking her folds that night in the Arete, the way the warmth had burned through layers of ice.

“Get her all red and swollen before I fuck into her—“

She whines again and tries to move even more quickly: plunging his cock deep into her mouth, running her tongue messily over him.

His fist clenches against her scalp — knuckles rubbing against the crown of her head, ponytail battered and loose in its makeshift-ribbon but tight in his hand. His hips buck slightly, and some distant part of her is vaguely aware of his low growl, passing between gritted teeth. Her fingers twist, unthinking: curling in the fur of his thighs, tugging once more as his muscles tense beneath her hands.

He roars: a shattering growl or groan or hissed-back howl. And before she can register the hike of his hips or the coiled danger in his quads, he leverages her up and back off his cock, using his firm grip in her hair to pull her away.

Something warm spatters against her breasts. Then again.

She pants, and her ribs heave. She can feel her breasts trembling, and his warm come dripping down one nipple.

His fingers catch it, hot on the stiff peak of her breast, and she tries not to cry out with the sudden friction.

“Sorry,” he says raggedly, “sorry, sweetheart. I didn’t wanna come in your mouth without — some people don’t like the taste—”

Impulsively, her hand sweeps up her own chest. She can feel the slickness of his come, spread beneath her fingers as she coats them, then sucks them between her swollen lips. He tastes bittersweet and salty, slippery as she licks him off her fingers with a satisfied little hum. The taste doesn’t impact her one way or the other — certainly, she’s had both worse and better flavors in her mouth — but the little starburst of pride in her chest that comes with pleasing him?

That feels better than any orgasm.

But Rocket says nothing, his hands suddenly stiff and tight and tense on her, and pearl falters. Maybe that had been another mistake; maybe she shouldn’t have—

“S-sorry,” she apologizes guiltily, suddenly embarrassed and uncertain. “I just — there’s no part of you that I don’t want—“

His hands move then: cradling her jaw as he pulls her forward and licks at her lips reverently.

“That’s my sweet little housewife,” he mutters, and then his fingers trail burning paths down her throat and across her breasts: mopping up his come, then pressing it to her lips. “Here you go, kitten.”

She takes his fingers greedily, wrapping her tongue around him — licking him clean. His claws are blunted and careful in her mouth as he strokes her tongue, then withdraws to sweep over her skin again, teasing her nipples as he goes this time. She feels him lean forward, his whiskers prickling against her jaw — his teeth scraping her throat carefully.

“M’gonna fuck you now,” he murmurs. “And I’m gonna take my frickin’ time — could prob’ly last all night, since you already made me come so hard.” Another scrape of his teeth that has her eyes going glassy behind the blindfold. “Gonna take care of you. Give you everything you deserve, for bein’ so frickin’ good for me.”

Oh. She melts under his praise. She floats under it. Every part of her feels like syrup and clouds, and a strangled mew curls out of her mouth. He thumbs her lower lip, then untangles her fingers from his fur and lays them on the cushion. it rises under her palms as he lifts himself from the overstuffed chair, and she hears the quiet tap of his feet as he springs to the ground. His tail flicks silkenly against her hip as he circles her, and his claws prickle her ribs when he positions himself behind her.

“Lift up, princess. Show me that gorgeous little cunt of yours.”

She’s beyond heat and embarrassment, lost somewhere in floating hazy layers of need. Eyes closed behind her blindfold — breathing suddenly becoming a series of short, dizzyingly-shallow inhalations — she shifts her weight to her knees and palms, dipping her spine into a little curl.

“For fuck’s sake, sweetheart. You’re drenched everywhere.” His fingers stroke over her wet folds. “Your poor little clit hasn’t been touched at all since you started waiting for me, has it?”

She shakes her head. Her ponytail tumbles over her shoulder to hand down in front of her. “N-no—“

His fingers slip deeper and tickle against the swollen bundle of nerves. She yelps at the sudden friction — the promise of relief — and her hips buckle frantically, chasing his touch.

“Oh, doll,” he rasps, all pity and smug satisfaction. “You’re gonna feel so good on me, aren’t you? Twice in one night.”

He slides in.

She’s so wet — so ready — that all she can do is crumple into a deeper arch at the feel of him, hot and hard and curved. The tip of his baculum bone presses snugly against the front wall of her cunt. She braces herself for the relentless pummeling of his cock inside her, but he doesn’t move: just stands there, nestled inside her as she drips around him, his claws prickling on the fat of her hips. He squeezes, then smooths his fingers over the outside of her thighs. Some distant part of her is certain he’s tracing her stretchmarks now.

“R-Rocket?” she stammers. One hand squeezes her ass-cheek playfully — jiggles it a little — and she whimpers, clenching her jaw to keep from whining. Then his palm rests, warm and narrow and leather-soft against her, before he caresses his thumb over her scar again.

His other arm loops her thigh, dipping down to her folds. She stiffens as his fingers slide through, and he snickers softly.

“My wet little wife,” he muses again, and his thumb finds her clit.

She bucks without meaning to, and the only thing that keeps her from losing his cock is the fact that his arm is locked in around her thigh, preventing her from going too far. He gives her another languid brush of his thumb — releasing a full-throated cackle when she gasps out a needy whine and wiggles herself backward, pushing his dick deeper inside her.

“That’s right, sweetheart.” He thumbs her lazily, teasing her with leisurely, featherlight strokes of his warm calluses. “There you go. Rub yourself against my hand, kitten. Fuck yourself back on my dick ‘cause you can’t even help it.”

The sound that blooms from her throat is hollow and gutted and desperate. She tries to wriggle herself closer to his hand, to give herself more pressure — but he only slides his fingers a little further away, letting her work herself into a frenzy over his negligent touches and the hooked cock that keeps scrubbing over the bundle of nerves in her pussy every time she moves. Stars spark and burn out behind her blindfolded eyes and she whimpers something — a plea, maybe — shoving herself back with her palms braced against the chair, dipping into a deeper arch to try and get more friction against her clit. She’s vaguely aware of him snickering again — fingers still tickling lightly against her as she writhes, speared helplessly on his dick. Tension simmers through her, dragging her almost to its peak before his fingers flutter playfully away, again and again. Each time, the coil in her belly grows tighter and the feeling in her pussy pinches more needily, and she drips more slick down her thighs until the dark shadows in front of her eyes seem to swim and she’s panting, weeping, digging her fingers into the seat-cushion just to stay upright.

“Please,” she babbles mindlessly. “Rocket — please — you said. Rocket, you said—“

“Said what?” he asks innocently, his fingers lightly pinching her clit — tweaking it gently. “Said how pretty you look with my come dripping off your bouncy pink tits? ‘Cause if I didn’t say it, I frickin’ should’ve.”

Her blindfold’s wet with tears now, every muscle clenched bright and tight as she squirms, trying to earn herself just a little more friction, a little more pressure.

“You said — you said you’d take care of me,” she sobs.

His fingers go still against her, and she sobs again — bereft.

“I’m sorry,” she begs. “Don’t stop—”

“No, sugar.” He leans forward against her — his cock rubbing inside her, sparking on that spot once more — and he presses his reverent mouth to the middle of her spine, flicking the soft tip of his tongue against her skin. “You’re right. I’m bein’ too mean, when you were just so nice.”

Slowly, he draws back, and all her muscles clench in panic, certain he’s going to leave her here, unfinished and unfulfilled. He groans low, and then — suddenly — plunges deep back inside her. She cries out, relieved and grateful, as he withdraws and then returns. His thrusts are unhurried — indolent, even — and every gentle slap of his furred hips against her ass has her body bouncing forward just slightly, clit kissing his careful, delicate fingers.

Four thrusts. Four strokes of his baculum bone against the spongy circle of nerves on the front wall of her drenched cunt — four light-fingered caresses to her clit — and she wails when she comes, every nerve in her body suddenly igniting and then scorching up into shimmering flames. Her eyes are closed behind her blindfold, but darker spots still seem to bloom against her lids. She sways, arms nearly buckling beneath her. Rocket crowds her forward.

“Lean on the chair if you need to, sweetheart. Just — don’t fall.”

His thumb sweeps her scar again. She’s so overheated and dizzy — so feverish, prickled in sweat — that she takes his advice, leaning forward to hinge more deeply at the waist, resting her collarbone and damp cheek on the chair where he’d been sitting.

“That’s my girl,” he murmurs, and a little grateful half-sob collapses against her ribs. She shuffles it into the softness of the cushion, whimpery and weak.

Then he begins moving again.

He fucks her, slow and steady — murmuring quiet nonsense into the small of her back, things so syrup-sweet that they make her eyes glaze over with daydreams and tears behind her blindfold; things so soft and tender that she’s not sure he knows he’s saying them at all. Calling her his gorgeous girl, his pettable little kitten, his pretty angel, his perfect greedy whore. Telling her how good she is, how nice and snug and warm she hugs his dick, how her mouth and her pussy both kiss him so sweetly. Telling her that he’s never come as hard as when he’s inside her, and how fucking her is the best he’s ever felt in his whole miserable frickin’ life. How all he wants is to keep her on his ship once they get to Fron, feed her the best synth-treats and morningtea, wrap her warm in blankets and play with her pussy for hours. How she’s the prettiest, sweetest, most precious fuckin’ thing he’s ever sunk his claws into.

She melts around his patient, languid thrusts: dripping along his petting fingers, tears squeezing past her eyelashes and soaking her blindfold. Her heart hurts with all the lovely things that he’s purring along her spine. Another orgasm swells inside her, gold and sunlit and warm — then bursts. Sparkles and stardust simmer through her veins, curling her toes and leaving her soft and panting against the chair cushion, breasts bobbing back and forth beneath her as he doesn’t stop.

“Good girl,” he murmurs against her ribs. His thumb skims her swiveled scar: back and forth, the gentlest kiss of his callused skin to hers. “Can you give me one more, sweetness?”

She nods, helpless and weepy.

“‘Course you can,” he says, his voice husky and low. “My pretty pearl can do whatever she fuckin’ puts her mind to, can’t she?”

His free hand — the one that’s not carefully stroking the little half-lemniscate on her ass — cups her abdomen as he fucks slowly into her. Every movement is deliberate, and attentive, and relentless. His fingers slip down, back between her folds, and she murmurs a little cry as he makes contact with her stinging, overstimulated clit. The darkness of her blindfold heightens everything: the wet sounds of his dick sliding in and out of her, the texture of his soft damp fur against her ass and vulva. The rasping sounds of his breath and the thrum of her pulse in her own ears.

“One more, little housewife,” he soothes. Her pussy flutters softly against him, weak but eager to please, and she moans at the friction of his fingers, then his cock. “Good, sweet fuckin’ girl—“

His pace increases steadily — speeding up just slightly, driving into her with a little more force. The frayed-thin golden wires of her nerves slowly spiral tight once more, coiling in ropes of hot light inside her belly. Sparks and static-shocks sing from her clit as his fingers rub circles into her puffy, swollen flesh, and this time — when her world splits apart in infinite shards of gold-dust sparks and silver champagne-bubbles — his hips jolt and stagger, grinding against the plush curve of her ass as he comes once more.

She sags against the chair cushion as his hands find her hips, squeezing and clinging. His own spine must curve, because she can feel his fur and the ridges of metal pressed into her back, and she wonders if it will leave a pattern of impressions on her skin like lace. His hands knead at her slowly: little palm-sized hugs pressed into her skin with pricking claws that make her think maybe he’s more feline than she is.

He eases out of her, and guides her body down to the cushion and rug beneath her.

“Lay down, kitten. I’ll get you cleaned up in a minute.”

She must dazzle off into darkness then, because when she blinks blearily past her salt-crystalled lashes, the blindfold’s already gone. Rocket’s got her thighs spread, and she blushes weakly as he cleans her with a warm, wet cloth. He blinks up at her from between her knees — dressed in his sleep-clothes already, she realizes with a brief downward tug of her lips — and arches a brow.

“You okay, kitten?”

“Mmhm,” she hums, reaching for him. The ghost of a smirk curls the corner of his mouth.

“Gimme a minute, pearl,” he says, the wet cloth trailing gently over her thighs. His voice is smug, though. “Have a little patience, for fuck’s sake.” He tosses the cloth to one side, and pulls another from his waistband before leveraging himself over her, straddling her waist — anchoring her to the ground as he reaches for her face. She blinks owlishly when he grips her chin, and he uses the clean wet cloth to soften the salt still tracking her face. Her eyes flutter closed, and he dampens her lashes, then warms the corners of her still-swollen mouth. The damp heat soothes lips she hadn’t even considered might be sore.

He smooths the warm cloth down the column of her throat, then washes her still-sticky breasts. Her back arches into the comfort of his touch, eyes already prickling with fresh tears at his gentleness. The cloth eases away, and her damp skin chills quickly in its absence. His hands find hers, and he tugs her gently into a seated position.

“Can you stand up, kitten? Let’s get you warm in bed.”

She unfolds herself from the floor, still dazed and now sleepy too, and lets him guide her to the bed.

My little housewife, he’d called her — and he’d done it more than once.

And each and every time, the sound of the words had made her fall apart, like fairyfloss on the tongue.

Her minds flickers over it, skittish and shy. Pining — and panicky, too. All at the same time. Ice crackles and melts, refreezes and melts again in her veins. Her teeth chatter and she clenches them together.

If Rocket notices — which he might, he must, with his sharp ears and sharp eyes — he doesn’t say anything. Maybe he thinks she’s only devastated by her orgasms, which is more or less true. He guides her to the bed and helps her in — climbs up beside her and grumbles as he moves Littlefoot to the bottom of the mattress. Grumbles, but tries not to wake the sleeping f’saki. Pearl curls on her side, watching him through damp eye-lashes.

She loves him. So much. She’s known that for a while, though. She tries to tell herself it’s okay, to have reacted so strongly to his little muttered claim over her. To have wanted, so badly, to be his little wife. It’s okay. There’s no real danger there. She wraps her arms around him when he comes back into reach — squeezes him like a comfort-toy, so tightly that he actually grunts a little before wriggling himself into a comfortable position. She crushes her teary lashes against his fur.

It’s okay.

It’s not like he means the words anyway.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

i really liked this when i originally drafted it in like.... november. i am not sure it holds up, though. i hope it was okay and you had a good time! i am really trying to buckle down and write more because i'd like to finish cicatrix by september but as always.... once i start getting closer to the end....i start dragging my feet. i have separation anxiety from my fics lol (╥﹏╥) that said i do think the end of this fic is going to be really fun so i hope if you've stuck around this long, you continue to be patient with me!

a reminder that i am SO grateful for every one of you who enjoy reading and especially those of you who take the time to comment. YOU ARE ESSENTIAL TO MORALE lol. but really. i continue to not be joking lol i appreciate you so much and i hope you are deeply blessed in health, love, finances, and cuddles from cute animals. and everything else you wish to be blessed in. ♡♡♡

coming soon: chapter thirty. dolorblindness.
summary: pearl uncovers a lie.
warnings: angst. discussion of gaslighting, murder, grooming. discussion of self-harm (biting) and brief mention of suicidal ideations and planning.
estimated date: wednesday, may 7. (only three week gap this time! yay! hoping to get back to posting biweekly over summer!)

other exciting things:
♡ monday, april 21.| take what you need | brush your fuckin hair. | for nonnie ✮
♡ thursday, april 24. | florescence❀. chapter six year five: dispersal. ❤︎❤︎ FINALE!!! part one.
♡ wednesday, april 30. | florescence❀. chapter six year five: dispersal. ❤︎❤︎ FINALE!!! part two.
♡ monday, may 5. | blue daisies (and other growing things) | for 🦉 ✮
♡ wednesday, may 7. | cicatrix. | chapter thirty. | dolorblindness. ✩
♡ END OF MAY: How to Resuscitate a Dying Cosmic Adventurer. The Very Boring Adventures of Space Pilot & Sweatshirt Girl FINALE!! ❤︎‬❤︎ ‬

 

there's now a take what you need WIPlist, so you can see upcoming requests and anticipated posting dates.

 

･:꧂posting schedules, chapter-previews, headcanons, art, & more on tumblr♡
･:꧂cicatrix art, masterlist, & moodboard♡

Chapter 30: dolorblindness.

Summary:

pearl uncovers a lie.

Notes:

warnings: angst. discussion of gaslighting, murder, grooming. discussion of self-harm (biting) and brief mention of suicidal ideations and planning.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

dolorblindness. the frustration that you’ll never be able to understand another person’s pain, only ever searching their face for some faint evocation of it, then rifling through your own experiences for some slapdash comparison, wishing you could tell them truthfully, “I know exactly how you feel.” Latin dolor, pain + colorblindness. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Rocket’s wife.

Pearl grapples with the thought, again and again, staring through the crystalline starshield at the tangled web of glitter just outside. Two rotations have past since she’d caught his words, dripping into her dizzy ears like honey. It’s become a tangled, indulgent little fantasy for her: thinking of the way he’d purred it at her, the ember-warmth of his tone, the way the memory still makes her knees clamp against each other. And fast on its heels: anxiety. Embarrassment.

Shame.

She tucks it back between her molars — a little nugget of desire and discomfort to think about later — and tries to focus on what she’s got, right now. Right in front of her.

She’s taken to loving these rotations spent lingering in the cockpit: long hours wrapped in the soft warmth of conversation. Drax and Littlefoot snore in unison while she and D’au discuss history and diplomacy and politics, with Groot sometimes weighing in. Nebula interrupts occasionally, asking for lozenges with a wordless extended palm while she sprawls nonchalantly in the second copilot’s seat.

Once, pearl offers to show her where they’re kept in the med bay. The cyborg’s fawn-eyes flicker, and her fingers curl back into her palm before she scoffs and turns away.

Pearl blinks, nonplussed, and glances at Rocket in the reflection of the starshield. Her survivor gives her a meaningful look, but the message must be too nuanced to convey with wide red eyes because pearl finds herself baffled.

“Or I could just keep a few on me for when you need them?” she tries instead, turning her gaze back to the Lumphomoid.

Nebula’s face flickers again. “That works better,” the cyborg agrees, and there’s something in her voice that sounds almost like relief.

That night, pearl leans her head against Rocket’s chest and listens to the thrum of his heart and the soft shore-sound of his breathing. She can feel the metal bars and bolts pressing patterns into her cheek through the thin soft fabric of his Diadem Galaxy Tour t-shirt. He combs his fingers through the waterfall-tangle of her moon-blue curls and stares up at the cold glass dome above them both.

“That was sweet a’ you,” he mumbles after a moment, his voice gruff in the way that means he thinks he’s sharing something he shouldn’t — giving breath to something too soft or too sentimental. “Holding onto those candies for Nebs, I mean.”

She hums, her sleepy brow furrowing, and squeezes him closer with one arm looped tight around his waist, like he’s another pillow for her to cuddle with. The metal under his shirt bites at her, and she snuggles that too — pressing fleeting lips against the nearest ridge. Rocket’s tail flicks softly against her belly as she traces the symbol of the Diadem: a jewel-blue circle ringing a gold starburst-center, like an amulet to protect the whole universe against the evil eye.

“It’s not a problem for me, but it makes me feel — guilty, I guess,” she confesses against the blue ink and fabric. “I don’t want her to think she has to get them from me. Like I’m — rationing them out to her.”

It’s Rocket’s turn to hum. The sound rumbles under his ribs, and she nuzzles her nose into it longingly — rubbing her cheek on him the same way he’s done to her, countless times. She’d rub herself all over him, if she could. She still has the blindfold from the other night, and it’s wound into a neat little spiral and tucked into one of the mostly-empty shelves that line the wall behind their bed.

She’d wear it every night if it meant getting to feel all his scars and bars and fur against her. Sleep in it, if it meant he’d sleep naked next to her.

Of course, she’d be lying if she pretended she hadn’t enjoyed wearing it for other reasons, too. Her only goal at the time had been his comfort, but something about the whole experience — waiting for him, unclothed and unable to see — had heightened everything. She’d somehow felt both grounded by his touch, and utterly weightless at the same time. Floating and free, and utterly his.

Maybe the blindfold had been the only reason she’d reacted so strongly — so positively — to his little claim, however flippantly he’d meant it. Maybe she wouldn’t have wanted it so bad if she hadn’t been so bare and vulnerable and sensitive when he’d licked the petname against her spine.

My wet little wife.

“You would think that. Rations. Tch,” Rocket scoffs at last, and she has to shake herself into the present — flushing at the direction her thoughts had taken. Rocket tweaks a curl when she manages to slant him a teasing glare of mock-offense. “M’not surprised you were worried about that. Not with the way Wyndham wouldn’t let you have anything at all unless it came from his evil frickin’ hands.”

She turns that over in her head, her playful glower melting into a bemused little curl at the corner of her mouth. She presses a lopsided little smile into the heart of gold at the center of his shirt. “Look at you,” she says lightly. “Didn’t you tell me once that you were — what was it? Some negative number on the emotional intelligence scale?”

Well, he’d said emotionalistic intelligence, but that had been too endearing to bear repeating.

His lip curls in a sneer of artificial annoyance, but she can see right through it these days. “Look, doll. All I’m saying is—“ His voice falters, and her eyes flutter closed when his claws dance lightly over her temple, then down her cheek. He pinches her chin delicately, and smooths the pad of his thumb over her lower lip.

“—all I’m sayin’ is, some of us get real frickin’ sappy for a person who’ll just — who just gives us things. A person who wants to take care of us. It’s too hard to let go of that.” He swallows. “Even when we know we should.”

Something melancholy dips the end of his voice, and her brow curls again in concern. She opens her eyes and her mouth, ready to ask him why there’s so much pensiveness and regret stitched suddenly into his crackling, hearth-warm voice, but he leans in before she can get a word out and licks a long, lingering kiss into her mouth. She can tell it’s meant to be a distraction, and she considers refusing it — demanding he tell her what had made his words all hushed and husky with something like remorse.

But if there’s one thing pearl’s learned in her years in training to be Herbert’s ambassadorial bride, it’s how and when to coax.

So instead, she gives Rocket her lips: lets him nibble wordless promises and prayers against her mouth and cheeks and the tender pulsepoint under her jaw. She smoothes her thumbs gently over his cheekbones, and something like a stifled whine tries to sneak up his throat. Her brow curls again, and her fingers furrow — deep and consolingly — into the plush ruff of fur at his neck. She smoothes her hands upward toward his ears, then massages the bases of both swiveling shells until that nervous, anxious sound melts into something warm and velvety in his shoulders and lungs.

That night, he falls asleep before she does: one of his forearms threaded under the back of his head, and the other garlanded around her neck — sensitive palm anchored to her collarbone like a kiss or a brand. She’s pressed tight and cozy against the rare and perfect halo of the Diadem Galaxy on his shirt, which — she feels certain — is somehow still less rare and perfect than Rocket himself. Pearl snuggles in closer and tilts her head just a little. The captain’s quarters are still cold whenever Rocket isn’t there, at least as far as she’s concerned. But right now — cuddled against the relentless fiery furnace of his strong small body — she can appreciate the beauty of the endless starscape that sprawls just past the crystal dome. At her ankles, Littlefoot shifts and snuggles himself closer to her calves. Rocket makes a soft, muffled snoring sound.

Rocket’s wife.

She thinks of the universal spousal electrocontract she’d been meant to sign with Herbert over dinner, so many cycles ago already. It feels both hours and lightyears away. He’d already been her self-appointed warden long before their wedding night, and for all her careful snooping, she’d never been to find out if his claim over her was legally-recognized, or simply a result of his expansive power. As an adult now, she understands that this was the reason Herbert had kept her from learning anything practical: she’d been easy to control when she’d been unable to fly, unfamiliar with money, unprepared to navigate the wider universe.

And ignorant of who she might go to for help.

Pearl had never run away from her mother, despite the minor bruises and neglect. For whatever it had been worth, Liz Lavenza had loved her mother. Had hoped she could fill the void between them with enough patience and affection and care that it wouldn’t matter if everything was one-sided. And — despite a naivete born from the yearning need to trust someone — young Liz had never been stupid, and rarely impulsive. She had heard stories from some of the older kids at school. Stories told of friends-of-friends-of-friends; or of fifth-cousins-on-their-father’s-side who had tried to run away from home. In most of them, the nameless child in question had ended up dragged back to their parents’ homes anyway. In others, they had disappeared into foster systems, moving across the country to be adopted by fairy-tale-new families — or never heard from again.

When she was still a teenager, Miss Lizette had wondered if the same thing would happen a hundred galaxies away — and what price Herbert would demand, once he had her back in her Homonoia tower. Sometimes she would have nightmares that she’d gotten away from him — wherever away was — only to be dragged back by some faceless intergalactic judiciary system.

Then Herbert would march the nameless staff of the Homonoia before her, and he would make her choose who died as a result of her inconvenient rebellion.

Years or circs later, she’d come to understand that there might not be anywhere beyond Herbert’s reach. Even if there were planets that claimed to be safe havens for refugees and asylum-seekers, they probably couldn’t protect against every policy-maker and planetary official who enjoyed a bribe. Not to mention some of the stealthier resources she’d seen Herbert wield: assassins and abductors and more.

And that had been before she’d even realized that bounty-hunters might be a danger, too.

But at that point, it had barely mattered anyway. After the linguist — well, after the linguist, leaving Herbert had never been an option.

Not until Rocket.

I’ll make him think you’re dead.

She strokes her fingers against the blue-and-gold printed on his shirt, treasuring the cushion of his fur and each blunted metal ridge beneath the worn fabric. Her palms skim the tiny lines of lettering below, all in the lacey, beringed text of Diadem Common: multicalendar dates, universal coordinates, the names of over four-hundred star-systems and planets. Her eyes tilt away from a circ’s worth of places she’s never seen, music she’s never heard, experiences she’s never had. Instead, she watches the cold dome overhead, picking out her own constellations among them. The old routine lulls her into something quiet.

Penthus. Eleos. Auxesia. Elpis.

Grief. Mercy. Growth. Hope. Her lips form the words, silent — the corner of her mouth just a breath away from Rocket’s heart. The constellations feel like a starmap from HalfWorld to here — a journey, however undulating, from somewhere cold and dark to the unexplored wildflower-wilderness of her self, with all of Rocket’s crushed-ember fire thawing her out along the way.

The memory flickers before her eyes; she thinks again of the electrocontract. The mental image is foggy at the edges, given that the dinner and signing had never actually happened — and maybe because the night in question already seems so long ago. Time has bloomed since she’d left the Arete — perhaps because there’s been so much more than simple, bone-numbing terror to fill it. New foods, new chances to connect with people. New things to see and hear and taste and feel.

Or perhaps the sudden slipperiness of time has nothing to do with the way she’s been filling up the formerly-barren corners of her days with candle-flames and wildflowers and warm friends. Perhaps it’s only because Rocket has a gravitational pull all of his own, and time has bent around him in ways that she’d never, ever seen before.

Arete. Homonoia. Adrestia.

Excellence. Uniformity. Inevitable retribution.

If Rocket had asked her in conversation — how’d you like to be married to someone someday? — pearl is sure she would have flinched. Recoiled. She’d only narrowly escaped one wedding-cage, after all. The idea of walking into another would have brought the ice back into her bones with heart-stopping suddenness.

Instead, his words had rippled across her skin like sun-warmed secrets and summer prayers. They hadn’t felt like a pit-trap filled with spikes, or a cold prison in the void. She thinks — she thinks maybe she could be Rocket’s wife, and still be herself. She could be Rocket’s wife, and she could be — be a space-explorer or a writer or a — a sociologist, or whatever the intergalactic equivalent of that is. Or she could be something else entirely. She thinks she could be whatever she’s currently in the process of becoming, and he’d help her figure it out along the way.

It should be a nerve-wracking thought — the idea, however fantastical and unlikely, of committing herself to him like that. It is a nerve-wracking thought. She’s already bound her life to his — she already loves him — but she knows she’s been fooled before, yearning so much to belong to someone. And as unromantic as it might be, the ties that currently exist are only the ones she’s permitted herself. Painful though it may be, she can tear them out by the root if she has to.

She cuddles Rocket more tightly, and he grumbles something, slitting his eyes open.

“You okay, pearl?” His voice is raspy with dreams.

“Just thinking,” she murmurs. “Go back to sleep.”

He grunts. “I didn’t fix that for you? The whole thinking thing?” A muffled grumble of discontent, like he’s annoyed at himself. “Not enough orgasms?”

She swallows a soft laugh. “Go back to sleep,” she urges again, her voice as quiet as the stars. “I’ll follow you.”

“Mmph,” he mutters, and the arm looped over her shoulder squeezes before his claws knot sleepily in her blue curls. “Everywhere I frickin’ go.”

“Everywhere you go,” she agrees, the corner of her mouth curving in self-conscious bemusement.

“Ain’t I the lucky one,” he mumbles, and she thinks he must just be too tired to inject the usual sarcasm into his tone.

She turns her eyes back to the dome, and finds two perfect ovals: one upright, and one on its side. Beneath her cheek, Rocket’s heart pumps slowly; at her ankles, Littlefoot curls tighter and snores.

Astraea and Dicé, she mouths to herself.

Purity and justice.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Pearl’s acting all twitchy.

She’s as soft as ever, and as warm, and as generous. Her eyes are still moonsilver-bright and she’s still got all that peachy-pink in her cheeks. Plus, she’s putting on a little weight — which Rocket takes more pride in than he’s got any right to, given he can’t really claim any credit for it. He loves that he can’t feel her ribs these days, though — has to go hunting for them, prying his fingers into the cushiony layer of satin-skin and fat, then skittering his claws along all the vulnerable places when she stifles ticklish giggles and begs him to stop.

He’s gonna get her on his dick, one of these days — trapped beneath him, maybe — and make her wriggle like that till she cries. He bets her wet little cunt will cinch up tight when he’s dancing his claws against all her ticklish spots — bets she’ll interrupt her own laughter with little moans while her body can’t decide whether to squirm away or fuck herself onto him.

He puts that thought away for later.

Knowhere’s bruises are fading on her skin — slowly, but surely — and her little cuts and scrapes are melting away. But she’s been nervy and tense nonetheless, ever since the night he’d walked into their shared quarters and found her kneeling and blindfolded, with her gorgeous tits out — nipples already hard and begging while her pussy had wept and waited for him. He’d swayed on his feet — tail sweeping out to provide a counterbalance — dizzy with the blood rushing from his head and the scent of drenched waterlilies and amber dripping through the air.

She’d been the prettiest thing he’d ever seen, on her knees like that. Lips parted and eyes covered for him, lavender-blue curls gleaming against the backdrop of the stars. After he’d finished, he’d found himself draped bonelessly over her spine — with the satin skin of her back pressed against his naked chest — and it had felt better than the orgasm itself. He’d been so tempted to keep her like that all night: vision veiled, body all naked and soft and pressed against his fur and scars.

It might have been the best night of his frickin’ life.

But here she is now, staring pensively at nothing: chewing her lips and pulling on the ends of her hair, wringing her hands and twisting her fingers in her lap.

Maybe he’d fucked it up. Maybe she hadn’t really been ready for that. Maybe she hadn’t liked it. Maybe he’d said something too mean after all. Maybe. Maybe.

Except — whenever he speaks to her, her smiles are still so frickin’ soft for him that he could pretend they’re a den of blankets under the flight controls or a storm of feathers from a torn-apart pillow. And she still hangs onto him while she sleeps, like she never wants to let him go. And whenever the possibility of sex comes up, her face still perks up like her poor little pussy’s been starved for circs. She keeps her little makeshift-blindfold tucked in one of the empty shelves above their bed, and he’s pretty sure he’s caught her glancing at it longingly — like she wants to be helpless and at his mercy again.

He’d take her up on it, too, if she just didn’t look so distracted and distraught whenever she thinks he’s not paying attention.

What’s on your mind, sweetheart? he thinks, watching a little divot carve its way into her brow while she gazes out the starshield. He’ll ask her tonight, he promises himself. He’ll nuzzle into her soft neck and try to kiss the information out of her with languid licks and nibbles in all the spots that make her weak and weepy. Or if she’s being stubborn, maybe he’ll bring out that blindfold after all — tie her up, too, so he can take his time torturing her till she tells him what he wants to know.

Yeah. He’d like to torture her. Keep her restrained, with her legs spread wide, blowing on her little clit or brushing it with his tail for hours…

“Keep your mind on the flight,” Nebula rasps, rolling her eyes.

He glowers sideways at her. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I can tell when you’re getting all caught up in your kitten,” she mutters. “Your whiskers start twitching and you get this look in your eye. Usually one of your canines is showing.”

He makes a face. “I bare my frickin’ teeth all the time.” He lifts his lip in a silent snarl at the Luphomoid. “See?”

She just rolls her eyes again.

“I am Groot,” Groot says in the background, and Rocket watches as the furl in pearl’s brow smooths. She turns back to Drax and D’au.

“He’s asking if you’re willing to share more about your memories of Xeron, and your time at home,” pearl tells them with her soft kitten-smile. “He’s very curious about how leadership works on your planet.”

“I am Groot.”

“He says there was a federation of thirty-three Houses in Taluhnia, and they honored a monarchy, though that’s not quite a perfect translation.”

“I am Groot.”

“He—” Pearl pauses, and her lips tremble. “He misses them.”

D’au’s eyes soften. “I miss my people, too,” she admits. Rocket waits for it — the I am Groot that explains the depths of the Taluhnisan’s loss. The three simple words that hold a planet’s worth of devastation.

But Groot’s dark eyes only crinkle sympathetically, and he reaches out with one enormous barkish hand to rest his fingertips on the Xeronian’s shoulder.

“Perhaps telling a story will help make them feel closer?” D’au suggests. She glances at pearl. “Drax has told me that the two of you are using storytelling to teach Tahlusian.”

“Taluhnisan,” pearl corrects with another kitten-smile, looking self-conscious. Her eyes tilt toward Rocket’s in the reflection of the starshield, but she directs her question toward the Big Guy. “Are you interested, Groot?” Her eyes flick to Rocket, and curve into playful crescents. “Should we pick up our lessons?”

“I am Groot,” Groot agrees.

“Let me catch you up,” pearl says to D’au. “Taluhnisan stories are long, but I’ll abbreviate.” And she unwinds the story that Rocket’s spent cycles listening to: the tale of the first Walking Taluhnisan. She tells of the Taluhnisan’s fascination with the space-travellers who would occasionally land nearby, and the stories they’d tell each other about their own lives on far-off planets, chasing stars and space-stations — though they’d never understood her own words when she’d asked for more. The way she’d encouraged the Maintenance Animals of the forest to find other travellers wherever they might land, and collect tales of distant civilizations to bring to her. How her roots began to feel like a cage, and how she’d longed to lift herself from the dirt and into the sky. So many new stories had been interwoven since then: blossoming like new leaves and vines spiralling through a trellis, branching out from the initial tale. Rocket’s starting to wonder if all Taluhnisan folktales spring from this one, and they’re all interconnected after all.

Then Groot begins, and the ongoing saga of First House Orchidacea continues to unfurl around them, setting down new curling tendrils and roots.

“As the sciuridae finished her tale and departed — scurrying back to her den built in the branches of a neighboring tree — the young Taluhnisan shook her leaves against the sky,” pearl translates softly. “She pled with the stars that she might be able to travel to and through them, and the stars answered. A spark fell from the heavens and as it grew closer, it grew larger, until it landed amongst her roots. It was another ship, silver and smooth, and from the ship came forth a mighty, shining mammalian figure — an Elder of the Universe.

“I am the Gardener, the figure said. I am the one who made you. Why should you want to leave the forest I have cultivated in your favor?

“The Taluhnisan told the Gardener of all she’d learned, and of how she’d longed to grow, to meet other lifeforms and hear their stories and explore their ways. The Gardener looked at her severely, and made the Taluhnisan feel small, even though she towered above him.

“I shall allow you to uproot yourself, he told her. You shall see great and wonderful enchantments. But it will be your ruin, and the ruin of all your kind. Your longing to live beyond the borders of the forest I have grown for you will be your downfall. The cost of your foolishness will be the shortened lifespan of all the Houses of Taluhnia. You and your offspring may walk the planet — may even travel to the stars — but one day soon, the entire Garden will be reduced to Deadwoods, and the Taluhnisan people will never see regrowth.”

“That’s frickin’ grim,” Rocket mutters. He flicks the flight controls to autopilot and spins in his chair, catching the Big Guy’s eyes with his own. “And you know that’s a buncha shit, right?”

Groot blinks. “I am Groot?”

“Your people didn’t all die because they were ‘foolish’,” Rocket spits. “If some high-and-mighty Gardener created ‘em and then cursed ‘em — and that’s a big if, on both counts — if he cursed ‘em just for asking to walk around and grow, for fuck’s sake—“

“They all died?” D’au whispers. Her facial plates clatter anxiously. “I didn’t—”

“—then he’s a piece of shit, same as all these other egotisticalistic jackasses who think they own the lives they’ve made,” he snarls. “He had no fuckin’ right, Groot, and you don’t owe him a fuckin’ twig of respect. Not a single drop a’ sap, you hear me?”

Groot stares at him quietly, his eyes soft and sad.

“What’s that thing you always say, kitten?” Rocket demands, though he never takes his gaze from the Taluhnisan’s. “‘Bout us and our creators?”

Pearl clears her throat. “We’re more than the people who made us,” she says softly — then reminds him, “I learned it from you.”

For a moment, no-one says anything. The cockpit is quiet except for the hum of the Dreadnought, and the soft sounds of held breath.

“I am Groot,” Groot says. It’s a misty-forest sort of sentiment: thick with nostalgia and the crunch of old leaves, soft and sad for the passing of the seasons. It makes Rocket think of his own stolen family — A95 and L06 and Lylla. It makes him think of the comfort of pearl’s warm arms, holding him under the cockpit, and in the feather-storm of the berth-style bunk on the runabout, and in the bath. It makes him think of her words, urgent and earnest, tucked safely into his fur:

You’re not a monster. You are good.
You are so good.

For a second, Rocket falters. He’d been pissed when he’d turned on the Big Guy, when he’d ranted about the Taluhnisan god — another frickin’ piece-of-shit, apparently. He hadn’t realized — had never even considered — that he was accidentally saying something that might offer Groot any kind of comfort. Much less that it might be the kind of comfort Rocket himself has only received from pearl.

He never would have believed himself capable of anything like that.

Rocket reels back instinctively, palming the back of his neck with nervous fingers, and tries to figure out some distraction he can hiss through his teeth.

“Princess,” Drax interrupts abruptly, and Rocket suddenly finds himself inordinately grateful for the Destroyer’s apparent inability to read a room.

His pearl sighs, the corner of her mouth curving with an indulgent smile. “Drax, I told you, I’m not a—”

“Recite a Kylosian eddur with me,” he urges. “All this talk of our missing and perished homes has made me miss my Kamariah and my Ovette.”

Pearl reaches out, and her soft hand alights on Drax’s like a small peachy-gold bird, warm and comforting. “Something light, maybe? Happy?”

Drax nods, and then — so unexpectedly that Rocket jumps — he throws his head back and booms out a laugh. “There is a funny one. Do you know the tale of Saint Droviah?”

It’s more of a tavern-song than the sweeping eddur that pearl typically recites, but she and Drax sing it anyway: merrily, and badly. Then another, and another. The f’saki wakes up from under pearl’s seat, growling before it decides to start howling and hissing along, which makes Drax bellow with laughter. On the next one, they teach D’au the refrain. Groot and the Xeronian join in — though of course, the Big Guy is only rumbling out deep, crackled iterations of I am Groot, and only marginally in-tune.

It feels surprisingly good, listening to these morons belt out absurd lyrics. It almost reminds Rocket of the drunken singing of the Ravager crew aboard the Eclector, after a good haul — cacophonous and nonsensical and loud. Even Nebula has a smile twitching her blue lips when Rocket finally turns back to the flight controls: spasming in the corner of her mouth like a muscle contraction.

Then pearl launches into another song — a jaunty little Luphomoid folktune, plucked out of thin air. It’s a quick string of words on words, fast and stacked on top of each other, so quickly-layered that Rocket isn’t sure how her tongue doesn’t trip over the sounds of them.

Nebula’s eyes widen when she recognizes the song — then she barks her sharp, broken laugh.

“Where did you learn to speak Luph, princess?” the cyborg rasps. There’s no hiding the amusement lingering under her shattered voice, even if it sounds strange and strained in her mouth. “I know you didn’t ‘just pick up’ all of these languages—”

“I only learned a little,” pearl confesses, breathless and grinning. Her gorgeous tits heave under the Centaurian Riff t-shirt she’s wearing today. She gestures, so pretty in her bouncy happiness that Rocket has to catch his breath too. “My — my guardian had me fitted with a translator and an expansive lexicon, but he didn’t just want me to understand languages — he wanted me to be able to speak them, too. He invited this wonderful linguist to teach me, this — brilliant scholar of sociolinguistics and morphology—“

“And this scholar taught you?” Drax asked. “Luph, and Kylosian, and Taluhnisan too?”

She nods, a giddy smile still on her pretty lips. “And more. Herb — my guardian didn’t care enough about Luphom to make it a focal point of my studies,” she explains apologetically to Nebula, “but the linguist was kind. So kind. He knew I was — well, lonely, I suppose. So he would bring me holorecordings of all sorts of things in other languages — stories, songs — and I ended up learning some Luph that way—“

Later on, Rocket won’t be able to say why it clicks for him then. Maybe it’s the wistfulness that softens her words underneath the joy, like the ghost of an old wound. Maybe it’s something about the adoration in her voice — affection mixed with the kind of reverence that people just don’t use when they’re talking about the living. Or maybe it’s just because he hadn’t even thought of the Wundagorish gossip since he’d realized there’d been no way his pearl had worn Lylla — and certainly not since he’d come to know pearl, with her star-blue curls and her wide-open eyes, her soft generous hands and her stupid bouncy dances.

But the mention of her tutor has all the pieces snapping into place now.

“Oh,” he says without thinking, eyes rolling — because it’s so painfully obvious these days that the locals couldn’t have been more wrong. Little Madame Lavenza, scared to eat a frickin’ vegetable if it might hurt the plant it came from. Now it’s sneeringly laughable to imagine he’d ever believed that she’d been some conniving, cold-hearted, murderous queen. “So that’s the tutor whose family you supposedly killed.” He snickers derisively at the thought.

Her big moon-gray eyes flash to his in the starshield and her gesturing hands freeze in mid-air as if she’d been casting spells against the shadows. “What?”

It’s a breathy little word: transparent; almost airless. Glassy. His ears flick, and he blinks. Fuck. He shouldn’t have brought it up, especially not in front of D’au. As far as Rocket’s concerned, the Xeronian is still an unknown quantity. So he grapples with himself; casts a claw about in an attempt at carelessness as he gropes for words. “Oh, well. Y’know. I told you. I did my research before I met you. The locals all said you killed that guy.” He snorts, like he thinks it’s ridiculous now. It is ridiculous now. He tries to soften the ground glass in his voice — to sound gentle, which he knows he isn’t very good at. “Sorry, pearl.“ He means it. If he’d thought for two seconds, he woulda realized she’d be all tenderhearted about it. ”It sounds like — I mean, I can tell he prob’ly meant a lot to you. And anyone who’s spent more’n an hour with you knows you couldn’t hurt a Sakaaran stingfly—”

“They thought — who?”

There’s something about the quality of her voice — so translucent and splintery — that makes his hands suddenly tighten on the yoke. He slants a baffled, wary glance over at Nebula. The cyborg’s face has been too altered to show much emotion — or perhaps it’s only her training that keeps her looking stoic — but Rocket thinks she might be worried.

“It’s nothin’ to worry about now, pearl,” he tries to soothe, throttling the Dreadnought down and coasting it neatly into an abandoned planetoid cluster. He turns in his seat. “It’s all over—”

But once he’s facing her, he sees what he couldn’t in the reflection on the starshield. Pearl’s so pale her lips are gray, and her eyes are bigger than he thinks he’s ever seen them. She swallows, and the tangle of her fingers over her belly simply stay there: still as death.

“Who, Rocket?” she repeats softly. “They thought I killed who?”

His tongue flicks out to wet his lips, and his skin suddenly feels too tight: buzzing under his fur. The space behind his eyes is fuzzy and hot. “The language-teacher, doll,” he says, and he hopes again that he sounds gentle. “An’ his wife and kid.”

He can see her throat flex from across the cockpit as she tries to swallow, and her silvery eyes don’t blink.

“How?” she asks quietly. “Did they say — how? Or when?”

He lifts one arm in a helpless little shrug. He can see Drax’s eyes bounce back and forth between him and pearl; he can feel D’au and Nebula doing the same, even though they’re too far in his periphery to see clearly. Groot, for his part, never takes his soulful eyes off pearl.

“It’s not a big deal,” Rocket says, trying to keep his voice as slow and steady as she had when she’d talked him out of his nightmares in the runabout. “Just — gossip from the locals. They said you—”

They said you tried to seduce him, and had him executed when he wouldn’t fuck you. They said his wife came with their kid, to plead with Wyndham for some sorta justice. But you heard they were coming, and you had ‘em thrown into the incinerator too.

Still alive, they said.

Under pearl’s feet, the f’saki snuffles and whines.

Rocket swallows. “They said the tutor, uh. They said he did something you were insulted by, so you had him killed. A few cycles later, his wife and kid came to see — came to your guardian, I guess. For support. But you found out. And, uh. And you had them killed too.”

Something cracks in her eyes and it’s like he watches the moonlight drain right out of them. Her collarbone shifts under her skin and he suddenly remembers the way her whole body had rippled under his hands that night in the Arete, swallowing her sob into silence.

“His family’s dead?” she whispers.

His ears fall flat against his head. He hadn’t thought — well, he’d assumed she’d known. “I didn’t—“

“His wife,” she interrupts. Her voice is thin as the blown-glass architecture of Indigarran temples. “She came for him. You said — she brought their child?”

“It was just gossip,” he says — too quickly. It’s a lie. And he’s never been good at lying, and he knows she can hear it.

It might have been gossip, but the deaths had been real.

Her eyes flit away from him — skim over the top of D’au’s head, and Drax’s — out through the crystalline-armored glass and into the stars. Her gaze skitters back and forth, like her eyes don’t know where to focus, and she blinks rapidly.

Lost. She looks so frickin’ lost.

He’s struck by the memory of her on the runabout, squished against the glass, dried salt on her cheeks and a fresh ring of tooth-shaped bruises in her knee. Then pressed up against the drawers on the far side of the captain’s quarters, huddled under the starchy quilts with her teeth chattering while she’d stared out at the stars and mourned her broken-legged fawn, and the Luphomoid captive in the jackroom.

She’d still never looked this fractured.

“He told me if I — if I stopped trying to — He said if I did what I was meant to do — that they’d be safe. Healthy. Looked after.” Her voice is a ghost. “I don’t know why I believed him.”

The words are slow — almost sluggish — and marvelling. Vague and blurred with a half-dazed, immiserated wonder. Something inside him twists, wringing the air from his lungs at the hollowness of her voice, her eyes. His too-tight skin crawls.

“I don’t know why,“ she murmurs blankly. “I don’t know why, of every lie, I decided that one might be true.”

But Rocket knows why. His heart kicks in his chest, strangled and starved of air.

Because you frickin’ needed to, he thinks. Just like I needed to believe he’d let Lylla come with me, or Drax needed to believe that killing Ronan’s family would bring him some fucked-up kinda peace, or Nebula needed to believe she could earn the Mad Titan’s frickin’ approval.

He reaches for her, and his hands make a twisting, grasping sort of motion in the air between them. A beckoning, pleading sort of motion.

“Let’s go somewhere else, kitten,” he urges quietly. “I’ll tell you whatever you wanna know. Whatever I can.”

Her brow tilts, eyes still glazed and gazing emptily out at the stars. “I barely even thought — I barely even thought about trying to go again,” she whispers. “Before you. I thought — if I just stay, if I just try harder — maybe I can keep just two — maybe just two people will be okay.”

She looks at him then, and his breath hiccups in his lungs. Next to him, Nebula sucks in a breath.

Pearl offers him a tremulous, desolate smile. Her eyes are already half-dead and she wraps her arms around herself unthinkingly — not even realizing when she rubs her hands against her biceps like she’s cold.

“I’m really stupid, aren’t I?”

He forces his hands down so they can push him out of the chair, nice and slow and careful. Cautiously, he moves toward her. His palms are raised, like she’s some kind of scared and wounded little animal. Maybe she is, he thinks.

“Go up to our room with me, kitten,” he tries again. “This ain’t a conversation you wanna have in front of—” He pauses, and grimaces, and tilts his head, trying to indicate all three of their most-recent crewmembers. “In front of everyone.”

Her brow furls, and her eyes slip over the other silent bodies around them. He watches the self-consciousness break over her face, and then the fuckin’ shame. It feels like a fist in his belly, and he can’t help the guttural exhalation he releases with it. He watches as she takes a breath, and then another.

No, he thinks, but he’s too slow to say it before all the petals that make pearl pearl start falling away. He watches the chill as it stiffens her spine, drawing up her shoulders into a brittle, practiced posture. She tilts her head and grants him a small, regal, polite little smile.

“You’re right,” she says, in that glacially-gracious voice he’d all but forgotten. “Of course you’re right, Rocket.” Her eyes filter over the cockpit, distant and untouchable. “My apologies,” she says, with a little tilting bow of her head.

Then she turns and sweeps from the room as if she’s still wearing damask and ice, leaving him to grip at the air.

He whips around in a circle, tail lashing — brandishes a claw at Nebula, then at Drax. “The ship stays here. No outgoing comms or transmissions.” His eyes slash to D’au. “Not from anyone.”

There’ll be fallout to manage from this. He’s not sure how much the Xeronian has put together, but it’ll need his attention.

Just not right now.

His claws skitter on the metallic sheet-flooring as he throws himself after pearl’s waterlily-scent, after the starlit-blue of her hair. He trails her with his nose and ears, not wanting to risk misplacing her like he had that second sleep-shift on the Dreadnought when she’d gone missing without ever leaving the captain’s quarters.

But there’s no real risk of that. She heads right up to the dome at the top of the Dreadnought, and he flounders when he’s halfway there.

You should drink something. It’ll ground you.

He clenches his teeth, so hard that the enamel grits off in bitter dust against his tongue. A flustered growl hisses between his canines. With a furious ripple of fur, he turns and darts to the galley instead — tosses a few strips of synth-auroch and lyophilized fruit in a bowl, then stuffs a couple bags of zargnuts into an open pocket and snatches two waterbags from one of the lockers. He turns — double-checking to make sure he’s got straws — and nearly stumbles over the damn f’saki.

The lizard’s sitting on its haunches in the doorway, staring up at him with annoyingly-soulful eyes. A high-pitched whine curls from its throat.

Rocket glares. The fucked-up thing is that he trusts the frickin’ f’saki to make pearl feel better — way more than he trusts himself.

“Come on, then,” he growls, striding past the smaller lifeform. “And keep up,” he tosses over his shoulder as reptilian claws scrabble after him. “I ain’t comin’ back to let you in the room if you’re stuck outside the hatch, scratching and whining like a moon-damned flerken.”

He knows it’s a lie as soon as he says it — but the f’saki doesn’t, he reasons.

“I mean it,” he threatens, and winces at how half-hearted his own voice sounds. He slows his pace despite the tension riding in his shoulders. F’saki are fast, of course, but they’ve got nothing on Rocket’s agility. Hell, if he hadn’t been worried about needing to make pearl eat and drink at some point, he wouldn’t have stopped for snacks at all — would have sprinted through the Dreadnought on all fours and already had her pinned to the bed, licking all her sadness away.

It’s just as well, maybe. He’s got a feeling that orgasms won’t be enough to distract her from — whatever this is. He’s pretty sure he understands what happened now: Wyndham held that teacher’s wife and little gargoyle over pearl’s head as some kinda threat. And at some point — whether the wife had heard the rumors or had been notified by one of Wyndham’s messengers is anyone’s guess — but she‘d eventually found out that her husband was dead. And she’d believed little Madame Lavenza had been behind it. So she’d probably gone to Wyndham to plead for —

Justice. Vengeance. Support. Something.

Rocket had always thought it was the most shocking part of the gossip, back when he’d still believed pearl was as evil as the man she was betrothed to: the idea that anyone would willingly seek the High Evolutionary out. Not that he blames the teacher’s wife, exactly; it’s just that he’s so baffled by it.

But then, pearl had left the Arete with Rocket himself, hadn’t she? Despite the fact that he’d hurt her; despite the fact that she’d had no reason to believe she’d be safe with him. The tutor’s wife had probably never met Wyndham before — had maybe never even seen him. She’d only known that he was her god and creator. Despite the fearful stories — because while the gossip had been wrong about pearl, it had often been right about Wyndham — she might have hoped for some sort of benevolence, some sort of consolation.

She might’ve needed to believe something could be done, same as pearl had when she’d tried to protect the little family in the first place. The same as Rocket had, when he’d gone to Wyndham and demanded the bastard make him a companion.

He keeps his nose and ears open as he makes his way up and through the Dreadnought — just in case pearl had decided to take a detour at any point, or changed where she wanted to run off to. But no: the river of waterlily leads him right to their shared quarters at the top of the ship, and he leaps up to slap the sensor with the bundle of rations tucked into the crook of his other arm.

“Git,” he mutters at Littlefoot, who’s already trundling past him down the corridor and into the glass-domed bedroom.

Pearl’s not in the bed — but then, he hadn’t expected her to be. She hasn’t bothered to turn on the plasma orbs, either, though the low blue glow of the stars keeps the space lit well enough for his eyes to work just fine. He rounds the massive mattress, and sure enough, she’s tucked into the little alcove with her spine pressed against the drawers, thighs squished tight against her chest and arms wreathed around her shins. Her teeth are already sunk halfway through her legging, embedded deep in her knee. He can smell a bright, coppery wash of blood, just faintly ringing through the air.

She must realize he’s there, because she stiffens.

But for maybe the first time, she doesn’t look toward him when he enters the field of her vision. Instead, she pulls her bite from her knee, staring blankly out the glass wall opposite from her. The stars glaze her with a sugary, silvery sheen, and her cheeks are gleaming and mirrored with a layer of tears. He watches as she fills her lungs, all slow and shuddery — chest filling, tits squishing further against her knees. It isn’t till she starts the exhale that he realizes what she’s doing.

Turning back into a corpse.

He darts forward, dropping the waterbag and straw at her feet and gripping her by the shoulders. Even with his claws filed down, they dig into her skin. He gives her a little shake.

“Pearl.” The word is more of a snarl than he means it to be. “Stop it—“ He cuts himself off with a curse, and then a sharp whistle. As if it had been waiting, the f’saki bounds around the corner of the bed, shoving Rocket aside so it can plant its clawed paws on her shoulders and lick sloppily across her cheek. Ugh.

But pearl blinks, startled right out of her ice-queen-transformation, and he can’t help but be grateful to the fuckin’ f’saki after all — even if he’s gonna have to make sure pearl scrubs her face before he kisses it later.

Because as far as Rocket can tell, pearl has never been able to resist hugging something that wants her love.

Sure enough, she drops her knees to make room for the reptile, winding her arms around it to pull its face away from hers — then cuddling it tight. When she peers up at Rocket, her eyes are teary and bright in the starlight.

“I didn’t do anything—“

Her voice is tiny and thin. He hates the uncertainty of it, the open wound of it. His mouth feels dry and sharp.

“You’re doin’ the Madame-Lavenza-thing,” he says, trying to smooth the sawblade-edge of anxiety in his own voice. It doesn’t work. “Knock it off.”

Her eyes flicker. “I — I’m sorry.”

Dammit. He hadn’t meant to make her feel worse.

He grimaces, and picks up the waterbag and straw — piercing one with the other, then sidling toward her with the bag extended.

“Here,” he says, he tries to make the words coaxing. “It’s s’posed to ground you. Remember?”

He watches her hesitate. She shuffles the f’saki into the loop of one arm and reaches out with the other, accepting it with shaky, uncertain fingers.

Then she stares at it, like she’s not sure what to do with it.

“I’m surprised you didn’t ask for answers sooner,” she says instead of drinking. But she doesn’t look surprised. She doesn’t sound surprised, either. She only seems miserable. “I wouldn’t have blamed you.”

He licks his lips again and takes another step toward her, measured and cautious — puts his back to the ridge in the alcove wall, and slides down beside her so they can both look out at the stars.

“Didn’t take me too long to figure out the gossips had the wrong guy, so to speak,” he says carefully.

Her lips quiver and press together, but she doesn’t look at him. “Did they?”

Did they?

He could be wrong about her. She’s still so quick to flip a switch. One of these two faces she shows has to be an act, and maybe he’s being reckless and stupid to think he knows which one’s which. But his tail puffs softly and he traps it at his inner ankle. He remembers the ghost of her thumbs, smoothing the fur of his cheekbones on the Arete.

You’re not a monster. You never have been.

“They did,” he rasps.

“You’ll be wanting answers now, though,” she says, and her voice wavers.

His fingers clench with the urge to reach for her. He slouches and hunches beside her against the wall — shoveling his hands into the pockets of his jumpsuit, hooking his thumbs to the outside and pinching to keep them anchored.

“Only if you wanna share ‘em, sweetheart,” he tells her. The words feel broken and meager in his mouth — limping from his ribs to his tongue, and staggering out into the starlit room. “Don’t have to. We can just rest. Take another bath. Find your little constellations.”

Something flickers in her eyes and her breath catches; she shakes her head so sharply that the wisps of curls around her face fly out in a lavender-blue cloud. He knows the impulse — too well.

The compulsion to shove oneself away from any shred of undeserved kindness.

There’s the sharp click-click of her teeth, chattering briefly as her fingers curl into the waterbag. A little burble of water pushes up out of the straw and splashes on her legging, darkening the fabric over her thigh like teardrops. He watches as the fine tendons in her throat convulse. She loosens her arm around Littlefoot; the lizard grumbles and tries to burrow in closer on her other side. But she only brings her newly-freed hand to her lap, and licks her lips, and closes her eyes.

She breathes out. Her shoulders roll again — up and back and down — and her neck straightens and her chin drops, and when she opens her eyes again she’s all Madame Lavenza, as cold and remote as Fron itself.

His fur ripples with the instinct to lunge for her again — to shake her again. That twist in his stomach grows sharper, and he feels his brow hunch in on itself. But he doesn’t move. Maybe he’s just gotta let her do whatever she has to do to get through this.

She turns her face toward him, and her empty eyes collide with his: meteors made of ice and ash. Desolate.

“I killed the maid when I was seventeen.”

Her voice is flat and expressionless and every strand of his fur rises in its follicle, prickling dangerously.

“Pearl—“

She interrupts him, as if he’s saying nothing at all.

“I told you about Fairy.”

He looks up at her sharply. Her sleet-gray eyes hold his for a moment, then turn slowly toward the stars outside the glass.

“You didn’t kill that little bird,” he hisses. “Theel—“

“I was responsible, then,” she intervenes smoothly, as if the words cost her nothing.

But Rocket knows better. His eyes narrow and he flattens his ears, fur bristling — but he forces himself not to say anything, even as his upper lip peels back from his teeth in a silent snarl.

“Two years after Fairy — about a circumrotation and a half — I started making plans to leave the Homonoia. Permanently.” Her eyes aren’t looking at stars, but through them. Flat and lifeless. “I thought I was being clever and quiet.” She tilts her head and her brow twitches, and then it’s gone. “I was wrong, of course.”

The words are emotionless, but Rocket’s heart is suddenly thudding against his vibranium sternum, fast and bruising.

“One of the Recorders found out, I suspect.”

Her language is so much more frickin’ formal — like she has to choose every word with precision. Like she hasn’t petted him under the flight controls or held him in the bath; like he hasn’t gotten used to the comforting scent of her in his too-small t-shirts — hasn’t bandaged up her cuts and bruises, or coached her into slicking up her pretty pussy with salve.

She’s so fuckin’ far away.

Come back to me, pretty pearl.

He wonders if this is how she’d had to recount her mistakes and sins to Wyndham — if the bastard had held court from one of his stupid chairs or desks or daises and made her—

Made her—

“You can stop, pearl.”

She tilts her head, and then shakes it. Just once: a quiet negation. “You should know. I should tell you.”

His teeth clench. “I don’t—“ I don’t need to know. You don’t gotta tell me.

But his words break off and his eyes narrow, and then he huffs a furious growl. Because he’d had to tell her his own crimes, hadn’t he? A compulsion: to make sure she’d understood the kind of monster he was, the kind she’d never be. And even though he can’t imagine a world where she’s done anything that could make him want her less, he won’t deny her the same kind of comfort she’s been giving him, all this time.

“Go on, then,” he says, but all he can think is how badly he wishes he’d done more than just claw off Wyndham’s face.

“The maid wasn’t allowed to talk to me, other than to answer direct questions,” she says quietly. Coolly. “Most of the staff weren’t allowed to speak with me, in fact. But Herbert knew I was fond of her anyway, of course. I think the Recorders noticed something, and reported it to him.” She pauses, and nothing in her face changes. In flat tones, she says only, “I wasn’t careful enough.”

Another breath, another resettling of her shoulders and deadening of her eyes. Her words are measured and even.

“She was so young at the time. I was seventeen, and she was probably only thirteen or fourteen. Little, still. Large, sad eyes.”

Fawn-eyes, Rocket suspects.

“She wore bracelets, braided from ribbons. I don’t know if she made them herself, or if a friend made them for her. Perhaps her mother. I’m not sure. As I said, she wasn’t allowed to talk to me, so I made up stories.” She lifts one hand in the elegant, practiced, one-shouldered shrug he remembers from the runabout. “I’m sure I got most of it wrong. But I always thought she seemed sad, and lonely, and afraid.” She touches her sternum lightly — lingers, like she’s testing an old burn. “It did something to me.”

He can see that. He can see that inside her, transparent as leaded glass.

“I wanted to give her some… comfort. Some safety. I would try to smile at her whenever I could. Thank her. If I had an extra ribbon that Herbert didn’t care about — that still used to happen back then, before he started rationing those too — I’d give it to her. I’d try to make her laugh — silly little jokes I hadn’t made in years.” Her ice-gray eyes are far away and empty. “It was selfish,” she confides at last, quietly. “There’s no excuse for it. Showing that I cared for her — trying to have a friend. And then, trying to run away — from Herbert, and my responsibilities.” She doesn’t swallow, or clear her throat, or cry, or tug at the ends of her hair. She only stares, hollow-eyed and stately. “I didn’t include her or anyone in my plans, of course. But it was foolish to think that would protect them. And when he found out I was trying to leave, he had her executed. Thrown into the—“

She breaks off, the first bit of something alive crackling through her frosty voice, and her eyes skitter sideways at him. She doesn’t finish the sentence.

Rocket wants to vomit. He wonders if she does too. He wonders how the fuck she lived like this for so many circs.

“I didn’t adequately learn my lesson, though. Or maybe I was too stubborn. I suppose I don’t really remember. But by the time another circumrotation and a half had passed, I started looking for —“ She pauses, her words fragmenting for the first time since she’d started. Then her eyes narrow and she goes all blank and dead again.

His claws twitch again in his pockets.

“I began to plan a different means of escape. A contingency plan, in case I couldn’t tolerate being — in case I was too weak to tolerate it anymore.” She flinches — not at the sentiment, he thinks, but at the brief stumbles in her speech.

Then her words catch up to him and that fist in his stomach clenches more tightly, and everything behind his breastbone disappears. That thundering heart of his just collapses in on itself like a black hole — a perfect, sucking, vacuumous singularity.

“I had been trying to be distant with the staff—“

“Wait,” he interrupts. “Wait a frickin’ second. What the fuck do you mean, a contingency plan?”

She looks at him with those flat ice-moon eyes of hers, and says nothing.

Saliva pools in his mouth and his stomach lurches right into the vacancy left by his heart. He almost gags on it. “Pearl—“

“I had been trying to be distant with the staff,” she repeats, as if he’d never interrupted at all. “Most of them were too frightened to develop any kind of relationship with me, and if anyone did make an attempt, I made sure it was not repeated.”

The words are calm and even. His mouth tastes sour-slick. He wonders how he ever looked at her on HalfWorld or Wundagore II and saw someone whom he’d thought was in control, someone who was pleased by her own power.

No. She’d just been brittle on the edge of breaking. She’d just needed so badly to believe that something soft and comforting existed, and when she couldn’t find it, she’d tried to be it.

For him.

Even when his hands had been wrapped around her neck.

“I always expected there was talk of my being — something. Entitled, maybe. Even cruel,” she muses. There’s still nothing on her face, but her smooth voice seems suddenly less rehearsed, more… pensive. “I expected them to think I was unkind. I was unkind. I didn’t want anyone else to be caught up in my mistakes. But Herbert brought in a linguist to teach me obscure languages, and he—“ She pauses again. The words don’t crack, don’t wobble. She just halts, and stares at the stars through the dome, and locks everything down inside herself again. “He was good.”

She doesn’t say anything for a long time — for so long that Rocket wonders if she’s lost inside herself, if she’s stepped too deep inside her memories or too far outside her body.

“He was good,” she says, so suddenly that his skin jumps on his body. “I was confused. It’s not an excuse, but I was confused, and I tried to be cold.”

He remembers her voice, that second night on the runabout — echoing in the tiny empty crevice between shadow and metal and star.

I had a bird. It’s not an excuse.
I’m so sorry.

“The linguist kept being kind, and I believed if I could be… cruel enough back, he’d give up.” her lower lip shivers — just for a second. “I spent every class we had together being as vile as I could imagine being, and then I would cry myself to sleep, sure he’d hate me the next day. But he never seemed to.”

Rocket can’t help the feeling that pearl’s concept of vile and his own are hopelessly mismatched, but he doesn’t have time to linger on it. She’s already shaking herself — physically snapping her shoulders and her head back and forth with a shudder — then breathing out again. Every frickin’ time, it just gets more painful and sick-making to watch, like she’s killing herself piece by piece.

”He told me once — no-one without compassion can learn Cotati and Taluhnisan. So I think I—“ Another pause. “I think that’s why I couldn’t convince him to give up on me.”

Rocket feels his eyes growing bigger, his ears growing flatter, with every word. His claws clench around the edges of his pockets.

“That part doesn’t matter, I suppose,” she says, her voice dismissive. Each word is a smooth, flat stone. “What matters is that Herbert learned about my contingency plan, and he executed the linguist.”

He remembers her hoarse, carved-out whisper, like crushed velvet under the crash of thunder and rain — the sound of her ruined, strangled voice while she’d been bruised and sprawled underneath him on the floor of her pretty cage.

He’ll kill you if you touch me—

“His wife and child were supposed to still be on the outskirts of the city, outside the lab. Herbert said he’d only spared them because I hadn’t actually tried to end my life yet. He said they’d be allowed to live — that they’d be protected and kept safe and healthy, and given every opportunity to be happy — if I played my part the way he’d asked.”

Rocket’s stomach churns. His ribs ache. His vagus nerve is screaming.

He only gives us things to love so he can take them away when it suits him.

“Hey,” he says. Why does his voice always sound so much harsher than he means it to? It sounds like a hundred claws ripped through silk bedding. It sounds like it’s shredding his own throat. “You said you were responsible. You weren’t frickin’ responsible. Not for any of that.”

She tilts her head against the stars and gazes down at him with those sleet-gray eyes. “You heard that they were both dead?”

He hates himself. Not as much as he hates Wyndham, but every time he squints at the mental image of his sire, the feeling seems increasingly fuckin’ close.

He nods hesitantly.

The coldness in her eyes flickers. Then she nods again: that brief, singular, elegant nod that he suspects her deportment instructor — the last person to touch her before him, he remembers — must’ve taught her.

“I thought — Fairy, the maid, the linguist. Three people dead, specifically because of my choices — blood on my hands. I suppose that was stupid, too.”

He swallows and his throat is so dry that the action hurts. His spit feels like gravel going down.

“When it comes down to it, I don’t truly have any idea how many people died because of me.”

“Pearl, no,” he rasps again. “Wyndham executed people because he was a shithead. It didn’t have anything to do with you — not really.”

She doesn’t bother to respond to his protest. “Did you,” she says slowly, measuringly, “happen to learn their names? Any of the people they said I killed?”

He blinks, eyes round and baffled.

“They weren’t allowed to tell me,” she explains quietly, evenly. “And later, I wasn’t allowed to ask. I never knew who they were. I think I should know. I think they deserve that.”

Something inside his sternum cracks open. What was her name? she’d asked, forehead welling with blood and the flawless round jewels of her necklace still rolling and clattering across the floor. Her voice had been so heavy — as if Lylla had mattered to her, too.

It’s just been so long since I’ve learned anyone’s name.

“I don’t — If they knew, I didn’t hear ‘em, kitten.” His throat aches. Everything aches.

She nods, and then looks up and stares out at the void of stars above his head. Something in her crumples, and her spine curves and her shoulders rise up under her ears. She squeezes her eyes shut tight.

She ain’t Madame Lavenza, he realizes, so suddenly and sharply that it nearly sucks the breath out of his lungs. He’d known — of course he’d known it wasn’t her. But he’d thought of pearl as all these layers of petals and pollen and stardust, and Madame Lavenza as the deadened kernel left underneath when pearl herself had been stripped away.

It’s the inverse that’s true, he realizes now. Madame Lavenza is a shell, freezing around a flower like the crystal-clear verglas left after an ice-storm. What makes pearl herself is everything underneath: vulnerable and shivering, and so beautiful she hurts to look at.

He flounders. Her fingers squeeze the waterbag again. The f’saki on her other side whines and tries to snuffle into her flank, begging for another cuddle in a desperate bid for affection and comfort that Rocket can empathize with annoyingly well. Another shiver splits her stillness — teeth chattering, goosebumps prickling the limited flesh he can see on the side of her neck and her cheek. She curls her spine protectively, hunching more deeply into her sweater.

“I’m cold,” she says suddenly, and when she looks at him, there’s enormous tears suddenly clinging to her lower lashes again and she’s shaking. “I’m so — when did it get so cold in here?”

It’s bullshit. Or it should be. After that first drunken rotation, he’d kept the runabout absolutely frickin’ tropical, hoping that the extra heat would keep her pretty nipples under control. The Dreadnought is harder to heat the same way, but he’s managed to keep the captain’s quarters warm enough for her to be comfortable, especially when she’s fully-clothed like this. But pearl is shivering, and when he reaches out careful fingers to touch her hand where it grips the waterbag, her fingers are freezing. Like all her blood has scurried back up to her heart, trying to keep it warm when the rest of the galaxy is so inhospitably cold.

He looks at her. He looks out at the sky. He looks at the frigid gap of space between her body and the stars, and the way her bones rattle under her skin with shivers that she suppresses as soon as they rise.

It’s all wrong, Rocket realizes. It’s not cold water and the wide-open stars that she needs — not right now. He’d known this before, but somehow he’d forgotten in his own aching lungs and staticky nerves. His heart knots, because there’s a risk to this — a cost.

He lurches to his feet anyway, and leans into her — claws dimpling her soft chin as he pinches it and turns her eyes from the glittering open sky. They’re moon-silver and luminous when he catches and holds them with his own: sheened over and teary, wet lashes starry and diamond-dripping. He feels his own stare burning into hers, searching them.

“Stay,” he says, and his voice cracks before he can get the rest out. He swallows, and tries again. “Stay here,” he tells her.

She blinks at him, and her eyes flutter closed before she nods. She looks — defeated. He grimaces, tongue pressed hard against his teeth and lip curling back in something like pain and fear and hurt. He backs away cautiously though, not taking his eyes off the dark crescent of her lashes, the wetness of her cheeks. His claws linger on her jaw before he’s too far, and his arm drops away.

“I’ll be back,” he tells her. “M’not leavin’ you.”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

kind of a meandering (and then really sad) chapter but i really hope you enjoyed it anyway (╥﹏╥) three weeks till the next chapter and then i'm hoping to be back to posting about every 2ish weeks ~ thank you for your patience with me ಥ‿ಥ

the diadem galaxy (as it is referred to by its inhabitants) is a real thing! kinda. it's basically hoag’s object, which is one of the prettiest and coolest and weirdest structures in the sky. people sometimes talk about how certain fictional structures (like the sovereign planets) would never exist in real life but like, (a) they were potentially completely manufactured by the high evolutionary and (b) even if they weren’t, things like hoag’s object exist. there are stranger things in heaven and earth, horatio.

as before, groot’s story is (still) based on hc anderson’s “the dryad.”

coming soon: chapter thirty-one. emorries.
summary: rocket takes care of his wife.
warnings: woundcare, angst, discussions of death and grief. self-blame, gaslighting, and abuse. panic attacks and intrusive thoughts, mention of self-harm. mild pain-play. spanking, praise, vaginal fingering, squirting, dom/sub dynamics.
estimated date: wednesday, may 28.

other exciting things:
♡ monday, may 12. the raccoon, the witch, & the roadtrip | part six. idaho. washington. | ao3 crosspost ✮
♡ thursday, may 15. take what you need. | stop being a jerk to yourself | for nonnie ✮
♡ wednesday, may 21. Domestic Scenes in Space Travel | How to Resuscitate a Dying Cosmic Adventurer. The Very Boring Adventures of Space Pilot & Sweatshirt Girl FINALE!! ❤︎‬❤︎‬
♡ wednesday, may 28. cicatrix. | chapter thirty-one. | emmories. ❤︎‬❤︎
･:꧂posting schedules, chapter-previews, headcanons, art, & more on tumblr♡
･:꧂cicatrix art, masterlist, & moodboard♡

Chapter 31: emorries.

Summary:

rocket takes care of his wife.

Notes:

warnings: woundcare, angst, discussions of death and grief. self-blame, gaslighting, and abuse. panic attacks and intrusive thoughts, discussion of self-harm. mild pain-play. spanking, praise, vaginal fingering, squirting, dom/sub dynamics.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

emorries. vivid memories of a certain experience that you carry in your head for years until they’re casually disputed by someone who remembers it very differently—correcting basic chronology, clarifying a misread gesture, or adding context you never knew—which makes you want to look again at all the images you’ve been using to piece together your worldview, wondering what details might’ve been hidden in shadow all this time, or washed out by your own naïveté. After documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, whose work often addresses the fallibility of memory and how little of reality can be captured in a photograph. Pronounced “em-uh-reez,” like memories, but with a piece missing. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Rocket’s had the closet nearly-emptied for a cycle, but he hasn’t been able to convince himself to move the last few boxes of cannons and ammo. As far as he knows, pearl hasn’t so much as ducked her pretty blue head in since they’d first boarded the Dreadnought, so she probably still thinks it’s full of firearms and bombs.

But it’s not.

The last few crumbling boxes are only in here to hide his stash: a hidden stockpile of Cyxlorade blankets and silky Sovereign panties, over a dozen delicate luxuries he’s bought or stolen for her over the cycles. Rocket’s claws slit open the vinyl of the vacuum-sealed cylinder from Sanna Orix’s shop, and he has to be careful not to snag them on the fine silk chenille underneath. Satiny-soft fibers bloom from the opened bag. He grimaces as his fingers sink into the plush woven fibers, somehow simultaneously smooth and woolly beneath his touch, and he begins tugging them from the vinyl confines.

He hadn’t wanted to give ‘em to her — not like this. He hadn’t figured out how, though. Every half-planned scheme had resulted in his belly knotting and sinking deep in his gut. Maybe she’d hate them. Worse: maybe she’d love them, and he’d have to see that sweet, grateful look on her face that twists his heart and makes him want to keep her stolen away in his ship forever, all warm and snuggled up to him.

Or — maybe he’d never wanted to give ‘em to her at all. Maybe he’d just wanted to hold onto them forever: another thing to keep with him once she leaves, like the ghost of her skin and scars on his hands.

But it doesn’t matter what he frickin’ wants right now. What matters is what pearl needs.

So he hauls the blankets from their vinyl casing, tail trying to provide a counterbalance and ears flattening as he pulls. Every layer is voluminous and sleek and soft: shimmering in shades of pale wheat-gold, and deepest teal, and fire-ruby, and a color as moondust-blue as her hair. Then the pillows — bigger than he is — in the downiest Cyxlorade cashmere. They shine, too: two in different tones of plush faded-rose, and one apiece in champagne-silk and aquamarine. He curses, and crushes as many as he can into his arms, and drags them out of the closet.

Pearl’s still sitting with her back to the drawers, each handle biting into the hunched crescent of her spine. She shivers. Littlefoot has given up trying to wriggle under her arm and is curled up in a spiral beside her, pressed tight against her hip.

He drops the blankets and pillows and reaches for her again — gripping her chin in demanding fingers and forcing her gaze to his once more. Her eyes are dim — the color of rain — and he forces one brow into a demanding arch, keeping his voice smooth and even and utterly in-control.

“You trust me, kitten?”

Normally, a question like that would put a furl in her brow. Of course, she’d say, aghast that he’d even had to ask. Or, in other situations, she’d be needy and staring at him with dilated pupils, wetting her lips with the pink tip of her tongue, heart fluttering behind her fragile humie-ribs.

Now her eyes barely flicker, jaw clenching and unclenching as she tries to keep her teeth from chattering. She nods, though — just once, just barely. He decides to take it as a good sign.

“Move,” he orders, keeping his voice solid and certain. It’s a command, and he watches the tone of it settle into her skin.

The shivers ease — just a little. When his hand drops and he jerks his chin to the right, she moves away from the drawers — scooting toward the glass. Anxiety ripples her brow, but then she just brings her knees back to her chest.

“Pants off,” he says — then grimaces. “You can leave your panties on though, sweetheart.”

She doesn’t say a word, though — just starts working the leggings over her soft hips, like the task is a distraction from whatever horror-show is rattling around in her skull. While she peels her pants down, he turns and tugs furiously at the enormous floor-pillows: propping one against the drawers and the little six-inch outcropping of the alcove, and another next to that. Creating a nest of pillows for her to sit in, to be surrounded by.

He can tell when she gets the leggings past her knees. There’s a soft intake of breath, like the fabric has pulled on the wound, and the splash of copper in the air tastes just a little bit brighter. When he turns, she’s back on her haunches: arms wreathed around her legs, every muscle locked tight against the shudder that occasionally wracks her shoulders.

“Here,” he says, and points her to the pillowy makeshift throne. “In.”

She leans forward and crawls into the little pile of bedding. Under other circumstances, it might be sexy, but all he can think about is how cold and wounded she is, how haunted and gray her eyes are, how her knee must ache with the pressure of her weight on the platinum flooring.

She curls up on the pillows, pulling her thighs back into her chest — trying to make herself small.

“None of that,” he rumbles, and hoists the damn f’saki up in his arms. The frickin’ thing growls at him. “M’doing you a favor,” he growls back, and as soon as pearl’s loosened her death-grip on her legs, he dumps the lizard into her lap. “Hold onto that,” he mutters, and wraps a blanket around them both — then adds a second one, too. She startles as he tucks the ends behind her shoulders — nice and tight — but he’s already got both hands knotted in her hair, tilting her face toward his again. “Stay. There,” he tells her, and then strides away.

He comes back with the first aid kit wedged over one shoulder — smaller than a lot of his guns, but all sharp-edged and digging into his neck. It clanks quietly when he sets it on the ground so he can crouch at her feet. She’s still shivering, but her eyes are wide and aware now — fastened to him, following his every move. The f’saki’s just a lump under the blanket, circling and kneading in her lap.

Rocket keeps his eyes fastened on pearl’s, reaching out to snake one dark, clawed hand under the hem of the chenille blanket. The silk-soft fibers brush the back of his knuckles as his palm skims her foot and coasts over the delicate bones of the bridge. His fingers curl gently around her ankle. His hand’s too small to cuff the whole thing the way he’d like to, but he gets a good grasp on her anyway. Even with the gap between his finger and thumb — pinching gently just inside the dainty tendon that runs up from her heel — she wouldn’t be able to get out of his grip without a fight.

It comforts her in a weird way, he realizes now. His hands on her — no matter how demanding. Maybe ‘cause Wyndham never touched her at all. Maybe for some other reason. Either way, he’s happy to do it.

He pulls slowly — inexorably — on her ankle, until her knee-joint loosens and her rounded toes peek out from beneath the blanket. They’re followed by the delicate architecture of her ankle — still held captive in his fist — and the sleek curve of her calf.

The bloodied bruise of her knee.

He hisses when he sees it, and reaches out with his other hand to open the first aid kit.

“Why d’you do this to yourself?” he mutters, and when she doesn’t answer, he pauses in his one-handed hunt for sanitizing wipes and glances up at her, giving her ankle a gentle squeeze. Her eyes are wide on his — baffled. “Well?”

The f’saki makes a chirping sound from under the blanket.

“Lots of reasons?” she answers at last, her voice timid and thin. He doesn’t stop staring at her. “Uhm. It’s hard to explain.”

“You wanna hurt,” he enunciates, slowly and clearly. “You think you deserve it.”

She flinches, and her shoulders sag beneath the blanket. “I do,” she says — not an agreement, but a protest. Softer, then: “I do deserve it.” She shakes her head. “But it’s not just that.” His eyes narrow on hers, and then he goes back to digging around in the kit. There they are. He rips open one paper packet of wipes with his teeth and tugs out the scrap of fabric inside. He knows firsthand how the sterilizing wipes sting on an open wound, but pearl doesn’t even wince when he pats delicately at the bloody crescent in her knee.

“Go on,” he says, cleaning the wound and then the skin around it. It’s bruised and inflamed, and he can still see the dark-garnet crust of her bite from a few rotations earlier — the bouquet of yellow-and-green bruising. He shoulda dealt with this sooner, he thinks, and his mouth tastes suddenly like salt and ash.

“It — kind of distracts me?” she says uncertainly. “And helps me focus at the same time.”

He tilts his head, still staring at the wound.

“Distracts you from what?”

Maybe it’s a cruel question, ‘specially when he’s pretty sure he’s already got a good idea of the answer. But he bets she’s never been able to say it out loud before — not with Wyndham and Vim and Theel all crouching over her shoulders like a bunch of frickin’ vultures, ready to swoop in and tear her apart the second she showed any heart.

Still, the silence goes on for so long he thinks maybe she won’t answer after all. When she does speak, her voice unfurls against the ripples of the chenille blankets and the silvery floor, rattling off the sky.

“Sometimes,” she says softly, “I think about the people who loved them.”

He reaches for the anti-bacc spray, careful not to let his thoughts crawl across his face. It ain’t natural for him, to hold back like this. But any wrong move — any flicker of anger or disgust — and she’s gonna think it’s meant for her.

And there’s no frickin’ universe in which he does that to her. Again.

“What d’you mean?” he asks only, keeping his voice as even as he can. Which isn’t very, but luckily, she doesn’t seem to be hurt by his bewilderment.

She shifts, and he tightens his grip on her ankle, tilting her leg so he can spray her knee. This shit stings too, but again, his pearl doesn’t even flinch. He’s reminded of all the times he’d hunched over her in the runabout, carefully smoothing salve over the dozens of wounds he’d inflicted.

“Back on Wundagore II, I’d sometimes get… stuck. I’d… fall into imagining what the maid’s mother must be thinking.”

The spray silvers her knee, painting it slick and shining. Goose flesh pebbles her calves again, and he finds himself wanting to kiss his way up the sleek hard bone of her shin. It isn’t even sexual at this point — just reverent. Repentant. Holy.

“Not in general, either,” she whispers. “That was — the whole point. Not to think, oh, she must be so sad. It never felt like — enough. So vague, like she could be anyone. But the maid wasn’t anyone. She was a very specific someone.” Her head turns slightly, and though he doesn’t look up, he knows she’s staring out at the dark sky, teeming with stars. “I think — that little girl must’ve had parents who loved her very much. Maybe a younger brother — they’d have played together when she came home for an off-cycle, I think. Picked berries and caught sunspot-fish in the rivers. When she’d leave to stay in the Homonoia every quarter, I thought — he’d probably pouted and sulked. Maybe even cried. Missed her — terribly. And then one quarter, she just — never came home.”

She shifts.

“I imagined — the maid wore these bracelets made from braided ribbons. I imagined her mother, holding onto one. Maybe she’d made them for her daughter. Maybe she’d been working on a new one to give the maid when she came back. I pictured her, holding onto the braid like a — a lifeline. Or a noose. She’d wonder — Where did my baby go? Is she still alive? Is she scared? Is she cold? Is she afraid? Is she in pain?” Pearl’s voice falls apart: wilted. Shattered. “Was she all alone when she died?”

“Pearl—“

“I had the same thoughts about the linguist,” she confesses, and now the words are spilling out of her: clattering across the platinum-plated flooring like a hundred lab-crafted pearls scattering from a broken rope of beads. “Imagining his wife — his baby. How worried they must have been — how sad. Trying to imagine how they’d found out, and how much it had hurt. I might not have known his name but he was still a person — a real person — and he liked drinking spiced Indigarran tea, especially in the morning by an open window so he could watch the sunrise. And he liked reading by the hearth when he wasn’t teaching me. His eyes crinkled at the corners when he thought of his wife, and he always looked sad when he got transmissions from home. And he was so, so kind.“

Her voice catches on a hiccup, and her teeth dance against each other in a sudden shiver. Rocket’s throat burns, and he has to swallow back some terrible sound of his own, clawing up from his lungs like grief or terror.

“I would lock myself in the bathroom or hide in the closet,” she admits, the words coming faster, more fractured. “I’d think about him, and about the maid. About other people Herbert had — about other people. I’d get lost, thinking — someone loves them. Someone is supposed to wake up next to them, to make them breakfast, to tell them stories, to ask about their day. Someone has a hundred inside-jokes that will never be understood again. Someone has a hobby they liked to share with them, or a place they liked to go together. Someone will miss them. Someone will wonder. Someone will mourn.” Her voice is high and thin and urgent. “And what if their last words to each other were hard or unkind, and they can’t forgive themselves? What if there was something they were waiting to say, and they have to carry that with them for the rest of their lives?”

A shudder wracks her frame under the huddle of blankets and the warmth of the f’saki.

“How many hopes for the future died with them? Dreams of — of shared joys. Memories their families still wanted to make. How many nights did they cry through their sleep?” Her voice rattles against her shivering teeth. Under the blankets, the f’saki whines, and pearl’s chest stutters, quick and sharp and shallow. “The linguist wasn’t allowed to tell me much but I knew his child was young — still little. I could tell how much he loved his wife; she must have been so good; she must have been loved by other people too. Did the two of them just vanish? Did their families worry and wonder forever—“

His fur ripples over his spine. “I think they knew,” he says, not sure if it will help or hurt. He tries to keep his voice soft and careful. “They were Wundagorish, right? The tutor, and his wife and kid? Everyone on that planet knew, pearl.” He swallows as her breathing grows tighter, shallower, and her tears come faster. “They didn’t know the right story or the whole story, but they knew that the teacher and his family were dead.”

She makes a strangled, hitching, gasping sound.

“Breathe, kitten.” His own words are just as guttural. Gutted, really. Rocket kneels by her single bare, extended leg, and stares up at her: ears flattened, hand still cuffing her ankle, thumb massaging gently at the inside of her ankle. “You gotta breathe for me.”

She tries. He can see her trying. But her next exhale shudders out of her with a shaky, high-pitched, grieving whine unlike anything he’s heard from her before, and her breaths only come faster.

“I’m s-so stupid,” she confesses shakily, her voice stretched thin without enough air behind it. Her teeth are chattering, and her eyes swim: tears, yes — and a lack of oxygen.

“Pearl, slow down. Breathe—“

“I barely even thought about — I barely even thought about trying to escape again, before you. I — it was so many years — I w-wasted — trying to save p-people I’d already k-killed—“

He hisses, and does the only thing he can think of: slides his hand up the sleekness of her leg and presses his thumb to the circle of teeth in her knee. Regret floods his mouth before he even does it — bitter and stinging — but he does it anyway, and he’s rewarded by her steep, deep intake of breath. He keeps his thumb pressed evenly into the bruise, keeps his eyes on hers when they dart to him from whatever ghosts she’d been staring at.

“Breathe,” he repeats again, and his voice is gravelly and dense in the silvery-blue shadows. “Don’t make me tell you again.”

Or what? Or he might have a frickin’ panic attack of his own — too desperate to calm and soothe her; unable to actually do it? It doesn’t matter that it’s an empty threat, though — and he’s willing to wager all the units from Sanna Orix that pearl knows it’s an empty threat. She responds anyway: teeth still clattering together, jaw still juddering convulsively. But she does respond — dragging in a hollow breath, trying to fill her furious lungs.

She sucks in another broken breath. Then another.

He eases his thumb from her shallow wound, keeping his eyes locked in her as he reaches for the anti-inflammatory salve. “You remember what you told me?” he asks at last. The words scrape up his throat, spiked and scratched raw with something almost-sorrowful. Hell, maybe it is sorrowful. The thought of her doing this to herself — the loneliest fuckin’ girl in the galaxy — makes him want to pull out his own fur, and all his ports and prosthetics.

But pearl just shakes her head, eyes still wide and wet, cheeks and lashes lacquered with tears that he doesn’t even remember her actually shedding. They must be a constant at this point: cascading from her eyes and down her face and throat, probably pooling in her collarbone where they’re hidden behind the blankets.

“You told me, you gotta stop blaming yourself for shit that he did.” He wills his voice to be as soft as it can be when he wraps it around her. “You told me, you’re doin’ Wyndham’s work for him.”

He makes his hand gentle this time when he brings it back to her knee: soothing the cold, creamy salve into her skin; stroking his thumb over every shallow crimson wound, and the purples already blooming up under them, and the red-and-silver rings left behind by old bites. The thick white ointment smells like Falligarian peppermint and something medicinal. It glimmers in the starlight, like diamonds have been crushed into the paste. For a moment, Rocket wonders if he’s forever-destined to treat pearl’s wounds — if it’s a curse levied on him since he’d been the first person to scar her. Then he thinks it’s not such a bad curse, if it means he gets to keep her around forever after all, and maybe make her feel just the tiniest bit better than she had before.

And he’s just gonna have to do a better frickin’ job of keeping her from getting damaged in the first place.

“It ain’t your fault, what he did to ‘em,” he reminds her, his thumb lingering over her salve-slick knee: stroking, trying to comfort. He arches a brow, hoping it looks like the most-mildest of challenges. ”Least, that’s what you said to me.”

Her brow slants, then squeezes tight. His eyes paint starlight over her wrecked, weary form. “I know,” she confesses, her voice a little ripple of misery. “But it’s harder to believe when it’s me.”

He snorts, and turns back to the first aid kit. “Beg to frickin’ differ,” he says, unrolling a section of gauze and tearing it along its perforations. He places a square of it over the salve-covered knee, then reaches for a wrap before manipulating her leg into a little bend. “But it doesn’t matter. Whenever you got a hard time believing it, I’m gonna remind you.”

Like you’ve been doing for me.

He fastens the wrap and guides her leg back under the chenille blankets, covering every inch of bare skin that isn’t her face. Then he closes the first aid kit, shoving it further down the hall with one foot before settling back on his haunches, forearms perched on his knees as he studies her. Every instinct under his skin is urging him to wrap her up, squeeze her tight the way she likes.

But it feels important to look her in the eyes when he says this.

“Look at me, sweetness.” It comes out of his mouth more coaxing than commanding, but she listens anyway, eyes flickering up to his — nervous and ashamed. His heart twists and plummets, then twists again. Slow and steady, he measures his words. “You did everything you could think of to keep that family safe. You did everything in your power, at every frickin’ turn, to keep all those people safe.”

She begins to shake her head and his hand flashes out, dipping under the billow of blankets currently tucked up to her chin. He collars her throat as far as his one hand will span, but he doesn’t squeeze — just startles her, holding her head steady and straight.

“You did,” he murmurs raspily. “I know you did.”

“If I’d been smarter — I should never have believed him—“

“You were a kid,” he interrupts bluntly. “You were a kid at first. Nothin’ but a little humie gargoyle. He trapped you as sure as he did all those little animals you love so much. And by the time you were old enough to realize it, you were all alone.” He holds her eyes steadily. “You did the best you frickin’ could. You survived, and you didn’t forget—“ He swallows, throat suddenly tight. “An’ you didn’t make yourself forget how to care about people. You still tried to lay yourself down to protect everyone you thought you might be able to. Don’t shrink that down and call it nothing.”

He leans forward, into her face — mouth just a breath from her own. His lips peel back in a snarl.

“And don’t ever fuckin’ do it again.”

Her eyes somehow grow wider, before they’re flooded with all that soft, sweet moonlight he’s missed so damn much since he put his own foot in his mouth down in the cockpit. His fingers twitch against the vulnerable flesh of her throat and he can feel her pulse grow steady against his palm. His tail — still puffed with agitation — sweeps the floor behind him. He leans back a little, but doesn’t let her go.

“As for believing Wyndham,” he says smoothly, “of course you did. He gave you the chance to feel like you had control over something. Maybe he even meant it, when he said it — that he wouldn’t hurt the kid and the wife. But I’d guess they forfeited that the day they showed up with complaints.” He grimaces. “Not their fault, of course. Only his. But the point is — of course you believed it. When everything feels like it’s slipping through your fingers, you gotta try to hold onto something. The idea — maybe something can frickin’ change. Maybe you can make one damn thing happen the way it should.”

His fingers twitch again — this time with the memory of Lylla. She’d been so briefly in his hands, but he can still feel her there whenever he thinks of her: her sleek fur, silky and resilient. The warmth of her muscle and fat. The deceptive delicacy of her vibranium-alloy arms, so secretly strong. The vibration of her purr under his palms, against his ribs.

Then the sudden jolt of her body; the contraction of muscles. The way her limbs had gone limp as she’d sagged to the ground in his arms. The stutter of her heart — that last puff of air as she’d prayed to the sky. It had stirred his whiskers. Now, every time the vents kick on, he runs the risk of catching a current the same way — having it trigger his sensory recall.

He swallows, and when his eyes refocus on pearl’s, she’s staring back. Her gaze is all soft and silvery once more. Fresh tears glitter on her slick, starshaped lashes. Her lips part — painfully-soft words just waiting for him, he’s sure — before she closes them again, head tilting uncertainly. Lilac-blue curls tug free of the edge of the blanket. Her jaw still trembles with the chill she’s manufactured inside herself, and her eyes still drip endless rivers of silver, looking bruised and exhausted.

“C’mere, kitten.” The words are a rasp in his throat. He resettles the remaining floor-pillows, then climbs onto them and leans into her body — pressing her nice and tight into the scant inches of wall that form the alcove. He can feel her hesitation — the sight resistance to letting him shuffle her smaller, squeeze her tighter. The way she tries to deny herself even this meager comfort, like she still doesn’t believe she deserves it. He tugs at the blankets around her, and at the two others still on the floor. He’s never made a cocoon before, never bothered building a den like the one she’d made under the cockpit of the runabout—

But he tries to do it now.

He winds them both in soft silk-chenille, surprised by how easily the compulsion rises in him — an instinct he’s never had the time or space or inclination to feed. But it does feel kinda good, doesn’t? To create a little haven for the two of them to rest in. To be cozied up with her, spooled in warmth and softness. Bundled up in the illusion of safety.

Burrowed.

“Let’s get you warm,” he rumbles.

The f’saki snuffles a snore from under the blankets, and Rocket shakes his head before skating his palm over the bare curve of pearl’s thigh — hunting for the hands she’s currently using to cradle the reptile. His fingertips find her wristbones — the silky valleys between her knuckles — and he plucks her palm from where it cups Littlefoot’s hip, collecting it against his own thigh instead.

“Oh,” she says softly, and turns her hand under his. Her palm against his always makes his nerves light up — electricity the same shade of lilac-blue as her hair — and he has to bite back on the ripple that tries to shudder its way down his spine, from the nape of his neck to the tip of his tail. She exhales shakily — but it’s not in that terrible way that looks like she’s carving off parts of herself. It’s just weary, and wounded, and sad. “You’re warm, though.”

Well, his face is warm now, burning under his fur. He probably shouldn’t feel so pleased by her admiring, wistful tone — not when he’s pretty sure that her being so cold is some kind of trauma-induced thing. Pearl squeezes his fingers with a sigh, even while her eyes continue to look hunted and those plump jewel-tears continue to paint wet mirrors over her cheeks.

“You were so warm in the Arete,” she adds. Her voice is a melancholy whisper, shuffled into the soft muffle of blankets piled high around her throat. “The warmest thing I’d ever felt.”

He hesitates, then traces his fingers lingeringly over the soft pillows and creases in her palm, following the paths he’d previously only memorized while she’d been sleeping. Every brushing touch feels more intimate than a kiss to him; the smoothing slide of his thumb over her palm Is as familiar as home might be, if he’d ever had one.

“Lucky you,” he says with an exaggerated eyeroll and begrudging tilt to his mouth. He winces, though, when his voice comes out sounding splintered and hoarse. “Guess I’ll keep you warm, then.“

I’ll keep you warm forever.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

It takes a long time and a lot of false starts, but pearl eventually dozes off maybe an hour before the sleep-shift starts: squished between his body and the f’saki, the drawers and the narrow edge of the wall. More than once, she stirs — starry eyelashes dampening before they even open. Not for the first time, Rocket wishes he was bigger: big enough to wrap one arm around her shoulders and tuck her into his chest, humie-style. Hell, he’d give up the ability to stare up under the edge of their shared band-shirts and catch glimpses of her tits — one of the few benefits of his stature — if it meant he could give her that kind of comfort right now.

Instead, he strokes pearl’s hand, and then her thigh — leans into her to keep her tethered.

For the first time — patterning the satin curve of her thigh with the heat of his palm — he lets himself consider what it might’ve been like, if they’d crossed paths when he was younger. Softer. What it might’ve been like if the High Shitbag had brought his pretty bride to HalfWorld instead of Wundagore II.

Maybe young Miss Lavenza would have slipped away from Vim and Theel one day — gone exploring, and found him and his brother and sister. Maybe she would have thought they were animals too — tried to pet and stroke them. The minute A95 or L06 had uttered a word, she’d have fallen in love with them. Rocket knows she would’ve, more certainly than he’s ever known anything else. It’s too much a part of who she is. She’d have promised to come every rotation to check on them — hiding snacks in her skirts, telling them stories. Listening to them. Playing with them.

He hears her words again from the night she’d built him their shared little den on the runabout — but in his mind, her velvet voice turns young and girlish.

If the universe was perfect, and you had everything you needed, what would you do?

And his own-voice, equally innocent and lilting:

I’m gonna make great machines that fly. And me an’ my friends are gonna go flying together into the forever and beautiful sky.

She probably wouldn’t have understood what Wyndham was yet — not when she first found them. But she’s a smart girl. She would’ve put it together — maybe even quicker than Rocket had — once she saw all their scars and sutures. Her little heart would have cracked right open. She probably would’ve tried to free them, the same way she’d freed her flerken-kit and the thing she’d called a little mouse — freed them, even if it meant staying behind herself. Misdirecting Vim and Theel, trying to distract them. She’d have done anything to try and get Rocket and his siblings out into the sky.

He’s sure of it.

He’d have been halfway in-love already, back then. He’d always been a sappy, soft-hearted little kid — always too quick to be devoted. His adoration for her would only have grown once he was free, even when he was starving in the streets. He’d have thought of her every single day once they were off HalfWorld. No. More often than that. He would’ve prayed to her every morning and every night. He’d have sworn to himself and to his siblings and to all the stars in the damn sky that he’d go back for her as soon as he was strong enough.

And he would’ve.

Every sliver of his childhood that wasn’t spent surviving and protecting his family would have been invested in just trying to get to her as soon as possible, in trying to get her away from Wyndham. He can picture it even now: he’d have been so driven to get back to HalfWorld, so much sooner. To find her when they were both still young. He’d have stolen her away before all Wyndham’s violence could break her soft little humie heart.

Rocket tries to imagine showing up at the window of her pretty cage — not as a monster from a nightmare, this time, but as some kind of hero. A frickin’ prince, even.

An ugly fucker, but still.

What would it have been like — to have that? To be that, for her? A shining savior? He'd have still been himself, probably — unfortunately. Still greedy and eager to get his claws on her. But it would have been different — not being there to hurt her or to scare her — not being there to fuckin' kill her.

But to be something good, for once.

His claws prickle into the plump satin of her inner thigh before he can stop them. ‘Cause he ain’t a hero. Maybe he’s not so much of a monster anymore, but he’d never saved her, or anyone else — not even when he’d tried. He’s a gnarled, scarred-up, cobbled-together mess of spare parts, greed, and resentment — all bitterness and bite.

Besides, he reminds himself. In reality, the timelines never would have matched up. He’s pretty sure that his escape from HalfWorld had happened long before she’d ever left her mudball-planet, though perhaps not before Wyndham had found and targeted her. No. There’s no universe in which he meets her earlier, in which he’s able to give her all the softest and sweetest parts of himself — the parts that have long since withered and shriveled and died. In which he can be everything she needs and deserves.

Except.

She had kissed the scars on the crest of his spine when they’d shared the bathtub. She’d blindfolded herself for him, and begged for him, and tried so hard to please him. She’d wanted him, scrabbling sharp claws and sharp teeth and sharp bolts and sharp everything. She’d seemed to want all his meanness and harshness, and at the same time, she’d believed there was something more there too — something still capable of tenderness.

And for fuck’s sake, maybe she’s been right all along, because here he frickin’ is: finally starting to get drowsy on the pile of pillows and blankets he’d spent good units on, cuddled up on the floor with a fuckin’ f’saki when he has a perfectly-luxurious bed waiting for him just a few short strides away.

But he doesn’t move, other than to quietly unfasten the utility belt full of pouches and ammo and at his waist, tossing it gently aside so he can snuggle in more closely against her flank. Then he lets sleep weave itself around him, loose and lazy. At some point, he’s vaguely aware of the f’saki waking up and snuggling its way out from under the blankets, presumably to make itself a nest on the actual bed — but beyond the drowsy realization that he’s turned into a fuckin’ sap, Rocket doesn’t think much of it at all.

Some hours later — probably two-thirds of the way through the sleep-shift — wakefulness digs its heels gently into his ribs.

It’s pearl. She must’ve jolted awake again, because he can hear her soft little heart ricocheting off her ribs. When his eyes dart up, he finds hers already glassy and distant: cheeks re-crystalled with tears and salt, breath broken into sad little pants. She’s already got her knees curled under her chin, looking like she’s about ready to bite through the chenille blanket and all the bandages, all just to get to her own flesh.

It’s a split-second decision. Maybe a bad one, all things considered. But a little bit of sleep seems to have given his instincts some clarity. A lot more makes sense about her now, he figures. The way she’d thrown herself whole-heartedly into physicality with him. He’d thought she’d just been touch-starved, and she had been, of course — but that alone doesn’t explain how easily she’d embraced the scars he’d given her, how pleased and happy she’d looked every time he’d accidentally sunk his claws into the fat of her hips. Why — after everything that had happened on the Arete — she still looks so damn hopeful whenever she asks if he’s gonna slap her pretty cunt.

I do deserve it. But it’s not just that.

He tugs at the extra pillow behind her, placing it over his thighs — then reaches out and grasps her upper arm, drawing her down into his lap. She startles at first, but down she goes: hair spilling over the pillow in a tumult of rumpled lavender-blue silk. She shudders against him, hiding in the shining mess of her curls. His head cocks to one side as he frowns, then plucks up the second pillow that had been behind her back, arranging it on the floor at his other side — tucking it under the crown of her head while she blinks up at him sideways with solemn, silvery, tear-dripping eyes.

It distracts me and helps me focus, all at the same time.

He adds one of the extra blankets to the cushion that’ll go under her head. Then — with a light scrape of his claws — he combs her hair back from her wet face. A few blue strands lick and cling to her damp, pale cheeks. He leans in, till he knows his breath will tickle the shell of her ear.

“You trust me, kitten?”

She hiccups, then nods.

“Scoot forward, over my lap. On your belly. Little more, doll. I want your head and shoulders over here, and your ass right here.”

She’s still got her own blankets twisted around her hips by the time he gets her where he wants her: face down on the padding at his side, with her hips turned up and inviting over the pillow on his thighs. Her knees and shins rest on the cushion she’d just been sitting on, though her legs are hidden in a tangle of silk chenille — almost immobile.

He skates one hand caressingly over the covered curve of her ass.

“M’gonna spank you,” he says casually, not missing the way she softens first, then stiffens with confusion — like she’s thinking about how long she’s been begging him to smack her sweet ass again, about how getting it feels like a reward she doesn’t deserve — not after confessing to all her so-called crimes.

“You trust me?” he repeats, and he can feel her hesitation before she softens again. “Words, sweetheart.”

“Of course I do,” she says, voice adorably muffled by the blanket her face is buried in. The urge to gag her rises inside him again. Not today, he tells himself.

Not today. But later, for sure.

He traces the curve of her ass again. “Think it might help,” he says instead, and palms one cheek — then squeezes. “You remember your safeword, kitten?”

She is like a kitten too: sprawled, all warm and soft, over his lap like this.

“Cyxlore,” she says dutifully, though her voice still quavers with the remnants of her weeping.

“Yeah, baby,” he purrs. “Good girl.”

She makes a muffled sound of protest, and when she speaks, her words are thick with misery again. “I’m not, though. I’m not a good girl.”

Well. He doesn’t frickin’ like that at all.

He tugs the blankets down over the plush curve of her ass, leaving them spooled tightly just above her knees. She’s wearing some kind of tiny scrap of satin from Sanna Orix, with a good three-quarters of each cheek visible: soft and round and curved beneath a splay of silky ruffle. They’re the perfect panties for this, as far as Rocket’s concerned. He fingers the short ruffle — doesn’t miss the way she shivers in reaction to the slight shift of satin over her ass.

She’s so damn responsive. His mouth waters, and he strokes one palm over her, then cups the curve — letting his claws prickle before stroking light, gentle circles against her skin.

“You ready, kitten?”

She nods into the silky material beneath her face, then warbles out an uncertain, “Yes, Rocket.”

A half-grin cocks the corner of his mouth and his eyes zero in on all that soft, bouncy flesh, and he draws back a hand and levies a stinging slap! to her ass-cheek.

Fuck.

Her whole body jolts with a little gasp of surprise, quickly stifled — and her ass jiggles beautifully. He waits, watching as a light pink flush crawls over the curve.

“How’s that feel, pretty pearl?”

The question is practically a purr.

She sniffles. “G-good.”

“Yeah?”

His hand comes down again with a ringing crack, and her body buckles again: legs tensing with the need to evade the next strike, hips rolling pitifully against the cushion in his lap like part of her wants more. He lowers his palm carefully, rubbing away the heated sting. He can feel her stiffen again.

“I — I shouldn’t be—“

Rewarded. Feeling good. He knows how all these internal monologues end. He slaps her ass again, harder this time. She yelps, hands fisting in the blanket by her face, and he presses his other palm into the small of her back to keep her steady against his thighs.

“Listen t’me,” he growls. “You wanna say your safeword, then that’s just fine.” Another sharp swat, and she bucks against him. “Other than that, the only things you’re allowed to say are what I frickin’ tell you to say, understand?”

Another swat. She gasps and nods into the blanket and pillow beneath her head.

“Say yes if you understand, doll.”

“Y-yes—“

“Good girl.”

Another sound of protest, cut off when he strikes her again: keeping his hand light and quick, reveling in the sting of his own palm and the way her ass is starting to turn all rosy.

He tsks. “Good girl — but stubborn. You know what your problem is, kitten?”

He angles his hand to catch right on the underside of one cheek: not bothering to bite back his smirk at the way it bounces, and her corresponding hitch of breath.

“You think too damn much,” he croons, massaging away the burn. “I need you to just focus on this.”

Another angled slap of his palm — to the opposite cheek, this time — and her gasp turns onto a whimper. He shuffles one of his knees higher: tipping her hips up, admiring the swell of her pink cheeks and soft thighs, the newly-revealed satin gusset of her panties. His fingers shift from where they’d been soothing and stroking her flushed skin, and he lets his claws dance teasingly over the little strip of fabric between her thighs. She jolts with a startled hiccup, but he keeps his other palm anchored at the base of her spine — holding her steady under the light taunt of his fingers. His claws may be filed down, but they’re still too sharp for him to not be careful with her soft little cunt.

“You gonna make a cute little wet spot on these panties for me, sweetheart?”

She whimpers again, squirming against him. He slips his fingers just inside the cloth, gliding them through her folds — already slippery — and letting them glance teasingly off her clit. When he withdraws them from her panties, they’re glossy and slick, and he flicks his tongue out to lick them clean. For fuck’s sake, she tastes so frickin’ good. He swats her again.

“Answer me. You gonna drench your panties for me, little doll? Just from getting your ass spanked? You gonna get ready to come for me?”

Her breath is a little pant against the cushions. “I shouldn’t,” she mews. “I don’t deserve—“

He hisses — angrily — and makes the next strike sting. She cries out this time, but her hips wriggle like she’s eager for more.

“That sounds an awful lot like thinking,” he snarls, and slaps her ass again — in the same spot, this time. “Pretty sure I told you to not do that right now, to just pay attention to how I’m making you feel.” Another spank — twice on the opposite cheek. She bucks and warbles out a nonsensical sound, and he strokes gentle fingers over the inflamed skin, soothing it again. “Be good for me, kitten.”

A whine rises up from her ribs — not one of pleasure, either, but one of regret and distress and sorrow.

He can practically hear her thoughts: an echo of her words from moments before. I’m not, though.

His whiskers twitch with his own regret, and he tugs her pretty panties over the curve of her ass and halfway down her thighs, till they can’t go any further thanks to the twist of blankets binding her helpless legs.

He draws his hand back high, and slaps her ass sharply.

Her whine turns into another mew — and then a moan when he spanks her again.

“Focus on me, sweetheart,” he murmurs, coasting his callused fingertips over her exposed pussy — tickling her soft folds and her little clit before levying another series of rapid, stinging swats. For fuck’s sake, his palm is tingling with the heat of each blow, and it feels frickin’ good. “I want you to tell me what a good girl you are.”

Her breath catches, a startled hitching gasp of confusion that she manages to strangle back before it can become a protest. He doesn’t wait, though — just spanks her again.

“C’mon, little fuckdoll,” he urges. “Focus on how I’m makin’ you feel, and tell me you’re my good girl.”

He can practically feel her wrestling with herself.

“R-Rocket—“

Swat. Swat. Swat. Then a gentle, smoothing palm over her reddened ass-cheeks, and a shallow, teasing dip of his fingers into her sweet, syrupy little cunt.

“Tell me,” he coos.

“B-but—“

Swat. Swat. Swat.

“Kitten,” he purrs, stroking a thumb over her pussy. It’s so cute, tilted up like a little toy for him to play with. He pinches her clit delicately between callused fingertips, and she swallows a shaky, shuddery gasp and lifts her hips higher for him. “Don’t be stubborn. I can do this as long as I need to, and I’ll be having fun the whole time.” A deft stroke of his fingers has her whining again, and then he deals her another solid set of slaps: four this time, just to throw her off. Another careful, comforting series of circles, massaged onto her heated skin. Another playful flick of her clit, a gentle pinch to the lips of her pussy.

“You’re such a good girl, sweetness. Now say it.”

Two spanks this time, and he holds off on the third — letting her wait for it, watching her hunch onto her knees and wiggle her pretty, reddened ass for him. When the third strike never comes, she collapses back against his lap, a little sob bubbling up over her lips. He runs a caressing, consoling hand over her blushing ass: calming the burn, gently blowing cool air against the inflamed flesh.

“I know, I know, kitten,” he agrees, all mock-sympathy. “You don’t believe me. That’s why you gotta stop thinking and just do what I say, so I can make you feel nice.”

Swat. Swat. She squirms against him and sobs again: hair a lavender-blue wilderness against the blanket and pillow, hands fisted in the cloth and her own tangled curls. His t-shirt’s all tucked up under her armpits, and he can see her bare tits are squished against the pillow beneath her. Her nipples are probably rubbing against the Cyxlorade blankets, he realizes. Abruptly, he imagines playing with her pretty tits through the slippery weave of silk chenille.

“You need more, angel?” he hums, massaging her cheeks. Her spine arches, pushing her ass up again. “I got you, baby.”

Swat. Swat. Swat.

He’s careful this time, compared to the night on the Arete — so frickin’ careful. Uses a light hand, and rarely hits the same spot twice — not before it has a chance to cool. Admires the splashes of pink spreading evenly over her ass-cheeks and upper thighs. He loses track, so focused on giving her what she needs: checking in between every few blows, constantly teasing her now-twitchy pussy — reminding her how good she is, how nice and sweet and loving. How thoughtful and selfless. When his hand slaps against the vulnerable, sensitive juncture where her ass meets her thigh — so close to her cunt that he bets she can feel the whistle of air blow over her buzzing, begging clit — her sobs and moans turn into a warbled mess of broken words.

“Good — Rocket, p-please — I’m your good girl—“

He grunts — pleased — and sinks two fingers smoothly into her dripping cunt. She squeals, hips arching up and back to meet him as he lifts his other hand from the base of her spine to smack her ass at a new angle.

Her cunt squeezes his fingers so tight that he wonders if she’ll break them. It doesn’t make him pause, though: he just grins savagely and strokes along the front wall of her pussy till he finds her little strikepad of nerves, then strums his fingers against it viciously. She squeals again, and he slaps her ass as she squirms.

“Again, kitten,” he orders. “Say it again.”

“Rocket, I’m your good girl — I’m — I’ll be good for you—“

He tsks and drums his fingers harder — meaner. “That’s right, baby. You’re so good. Take that hand of yours under your belly and my knee. Stick it between your thighs, sweetheart—“

“C-can’t—“

“Yeah, you can,” he croons. It’s a weird angle, but he’s got faith in her. “Seen you do it before, kitten. Put that hand between your thighs and play with that pretty clit for me—“

She wriggles and writhes, trying to reach her pussy in a hopelessly-tangled knot of her own limbs and his.

“R-Rocket—“

“I said, play with that fuckin’ clit,” he snarls, slapping her ass again.

She pants and keens into the blanket, hips hitching as she rubs herself desperately and he tattoos the inside of her pussy with ruthless, relentless fingertips. Sweat prickles out on her skin, glimmering like the crushed glitter of distant stars. His palm smacks down on her ass again, and he hisses out a rasping curse when she clenches on him with a pleading cry.

“Gonna spank this ass pink every frickin’ morning once we get to Fron,” he promises, levying another swat. “Maintenance spankings, just to remind you what a good fuckin’ girl you are. Every time you sit on that rosy ass of yours, you’ll remember, won’t you?” Swat. “Won’t you, kitten?”

“Y-yes, Rocket — I’ll remember—“ The words are hiccuping and slurred as he thrums his fingers more insistently.

“Then I’ll make you sit on my cock — keep it warm in your drippy little pussy till I finish my morning coffee. Every frickin’ morning.”

“Please,” she gasps, hips stuttering. “Please — I n-need—“

“Tell me again,” he orders. “You’re so good, kitten. Tell me you’re a good girl, and I’ll let you come.”

“I’m — I’m a good girl,” she weeps, breathless. “Rocket, I’m a good girl—“

“That’s right,” he growls, somehow moving his fingers even more punishingly than he had before. “Come for me, good girl.”

She wails when she comes, and he clenches his jaw at the same time that she clenches on his hand, soaking his lap with the same flood of wetness she’d given him that first night he’d licked her little cunt and called her a brat. Her hips hitch and roll, riding his fingers in endless waves as she ripples and flutters around him. She keens, the sound muffled into the cushions under her face until it melts into a whimper.

Rocket waits until the knots of her muscles slowly loosen — her pussy still sweetly spasming around his fingers — and then eases his drumming digits into languid, tender strokes along her inner walls. She jolts with the shock of overstimulation, but then her body sags gently into his lap once more: draped over his knees and his now-drenched jumpsuit.

Pearl breathes heavily against the blankets, and he carefully eases his fingers from her with a sweet, wet sound that makes his mouth water. Her fluids gloss his knuckles and claws, and he licks them with a low, rumbling purr of satisfaction. The whole damn room is doused in the scent of waterlilies and amber. His head tilts, and his eyes stroll down the slumped spill of pearl’s body: still sprawled over his lap, exhausted and spent, shimmering with sweat.

For fuck’s sake. She’s so damn perfect it makes his teeth ache and his sternum strain. He swallows and tsks.

“You okay, sweetness?”

She nods into the padding beneath her face, and he reaches out to sweep back a handful of her hair from her face. Lilac-blue strands cling to his still-damp fingers.

“Words, kitten,” he chides.

“M’okay, Rocket,” she mews into the soft chenille.

“Mm,” he purrs back. “Good.” He leans into the pillow still tucked behind his spine, admiring the blushing curve of her ass, the balanced pink glow over her skin — gorgeous as a Krylorian sunrise, he thinks. “So fuckin’ pretty,” he adds, licking his canines as he studies the swollen, petal-like lips of her pussy, slick and gleaming. He lets his eyes scrape over the slope of her back to where his t-shirt is rumpled up over her shoulderblades — then to the tender nape of her neck, vulnerable under a spill of lilac-blue curls. Her plush, parted mouth is pressed into the pillow, and her eyelashes and cheeks are still slick with tears, though he’s pretty sure these ones aren’t from sorrow.

My fucked-out little wife, he thinks smugly. The predatory edge of a smirk curls his mouth, flashing one bright white canine. Her breathing slowly starts to even out, to become close to normal. He grins at the sight, leans forward and hugs her hips, resettling her on his lap — and plunges his fingers back inside the sleek, squelching, wet-velvet sheath of her still-quivering cunt.

Pearl gasps so hard that her breath catches on her clavicle: hips already hitching and spine already curling — offering him more before her body can even think twice. Her lashes flutter and she stares up at him with one dazed, silver doe-eye, face half-hidden in the blankets and pillow.

“Rocket?” she quavers, brows and words all furled into a little flower of a question.

He grins: sharp teeth and savagery.

”Now we do it again, till you believe it,” he says, and his fingers flutter inside her.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

(╥﹏╥) i hope this chapter was okay!

i'm REALLY hoping to get back to posting every other week with this fic (next posting will be in two weeks, and the one after that.... i guess what i should say is i am hoping to maintain that). i have been spending way too much time working on birdie, an upcoming expansion inspired by evasive maneuvers, which will also start posting in june. it's definitely got a darker vibe but i am hoping to offset it with a more meandering, sweet, smutty little side story with windfall vibes base don the ludicrous netflix show love is blind. in any case, i am so grateful to you all for sticking with this lengthy story. We are like... two-thirds of the way through (jeezus christ). i appreciate you, i'm grateful for you, i hope and pray you continue to enjoy if you're still around.

coming soon: chapter thirty-two. elsewise.
summary: presents, flight lessons, confrontations, and a xeronian dinner.
warnings: didn’t expect this chapter to contain quite so much dirty-talk or allude to so much sex. talk of spanking, cockwarming, nipple clamps, etc. brief, light pain-play (biting, prinching, bruising), nipple-play, more fellatio, face-fucking.
estimated date: tuesday, june 10.

･:꧂posting schedules, chapter-previews, headcanons, art, & more on tumblr♡
･:꧂cicatrix art, masterlist, & moodboard♡

other exciting things:
♡ tuesday, june 3. take what you need | do your damn stretches | for @raccoon-coded ✮
♡ thursday, june 5. the raccoon, the witch, & the roadtrip | part seven. you've arrived at your destination. | ao3 crosspost ✮ FINALE.
♡ tuesday, june 10. cicatrix. | chapter thirty-two. | elsewise. ❤︎
♡ tuesday, june 17. birdie. | chapter one. untitled. ✩ | ❤︎‬
♡ thursday, june 19. birdie. | chapter two. untitled. ✩ | ❤︎
♡ tuesday, june 24. cicatrix. | chapter thirty-three. | untitled. ❤︎

Chapter 32: elsewise.

Summary:

presents, flight lessons, confrontations, and a xeronian dinner.

Notes:

warnings: didn’t expect this chapter to contain quite so much dirty-talk or allude to so much sex. talk of spanking, cockwarming, nipple clamps, etc. brief, light pain-play (biting, prinching, bruising), nipple-play, more fellatio, face-fucking. really more mentions of smut than explicit scenes?

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

elsewise. struck by the poignant strangeness of other people’s homes, which smell and feel so different than your own—seeing the details of their private living space, noticing their little daily rituals, the way they’ve arranged their things, the framed photos of people you’ll never know. From else, other + wise, with reference to. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Pearl wakes up sore in the morning.

Sore, and feeling better than she probably has any right to feel. Her muscles are languid and achy, and she feels swollen and tender between her thighs.

And peaceful.

She blinks salt-diamonds from her lashes, scrubbing at them with her fingers, trying to figure out where she is. The stars spiral mistily outside the crystalline glass, and she’s sprawled on her side, legs and torso tangled in countless blankets, each one softer than anything she’s ever felt before. She strokes her fingers over the satiny, wooly fibers, and hums quietly at the silken feel of them, like jewel-toned clouds all around her.

Rocket’s curled into a crescent at her belly. He’s hidden under another swath of shiny-soft fabric, but she knows it’s him before she even reaches for him. She thinks she could recognize him by the sound of his breathing, by the heat rippling from the hardened muscles and metal of his body. By the scent of him: campfires and blue spruce and marzipan. Pearl stretches her body slowly, and slides one hand beneath the blankets to find his fur.

He’s still in his jumpsuit, and she realizes with a wince that he’d never left her side — not for longer than it had taken him to pull these heaven-soft blankets and downy pillows from wherever they’d been hidden. No, he’d held her sprawled across his lap and spanked her ass till she’d lost track of every guilty, shameful, grieving thought of self-recrimination and blame, then made her come so hard she’d been dizzy in the aftermath, warbling out agreements to all his claims that she was—

—good.

She shivers, though it isn’t with cold this time — just a sudden ripple of yearning tension. She’s pretty sure he’d immediately brought her to orgasm a second time, too, though she doesn’t remember him spanking her again. No, the second time, he’d only stroked and petted her curves — teasing the small of her back and tickling her doughy thighs with the lightest scrape of his claws — while his fingers had pumped in and out of her pussy with wet, slick-sounding noises. She remembers the smug, satisfied croon of his voice against her damp flesh, ordering her to pinch and pluck at her clit, to rub her nipples on the blankets, to fuck herself back on his hand — ordering her to confess that she was a good girl, a sweetheart, a fuckin’ angel who deserves to be fucked silly, who deserves to come her pretty brains out.

Afterward, he’d made her drink some water, still keeping her splayed over his thighs. Then he’d held her hips steady and played with her pussy again and again, repeating the same exercise until — at some point — she must have passed out.

But he hadn’t left — not as far as she can tell. He’d just rearranged her panties and covered her in blankets, and curled up next to her. Her heart throbs in her ribs, and the ache feels so sweet that her eyes sting. Maybe other people would think it’s strange, or unhealthy. Maybe she should be embarrassed. But she thinks it’s the nicest thing she’s ever been given: a disruption of her spiraling grief and self-loathing, overwhelming her miserable opinion of herself with his praise and his stinging palm — a shield against the coldness creeping inside her bones.

In fact — she’s pretty sure her ass still feels warm. She wiggles experimentally against the blankets. It doesn’t hurt, exactly. If anything, it’s a comforting heat. After she’d turned sixteen, Herbert had kept her out of direct sunlight and starlight whenever possible, telling her that it was bad for her skin and that he’d supplement her diet with the appropriate vitamins. But she remembers the feeling of the last hot summer day she’d ever seen, prickling her flesh — the faint warm tingle of a slight sunburn, fading in less than a night’s worth of sleep.

That’s what her ass feels like.

She hums again, curling around her survivor — wrapping him in her arms. He grunts sleepily, but shifts closer to her when she pulls him in.

She’s still — sad about the linguist’s family, though sadness seems like such a weak word for the haunting hollowness lurking to swallow her up. The self-disgust is ready and waiting for her, too — just below the surface, like an open cut hidden beneath a flimsy bandage.

At least the wound feels a little cleaner, now. A little easier to look away from.

Maybe that’s not fair. Maybe it’s unjust, for her to let herself move forward when they’ll never have that freedom—

“Careful,” Rocket growls grumpily from under the blankets. “Too soon for me to slap your ass again. Don’t wanna bruise you.”

Her arm tightens around him, startled. “I didn’t say anything—“

He scoffs, and she can feel him shifting before his head emerges from the silky-soft quilts. The fur on one side of his face is flattened, and his crimson-ember eyes are still sleepy and scowling.

“I can tell where your mind is headed,” he mutters with an irritable squint in her direction. “You think too frickin’ loud, pearl.”

His hands are gentle as they trace the waistband of her silky panties, though. His voice drops, quiet and low.

“You feeling okay, kitten? You hurt at all?”

She shakes her head against the pillow: a fervent no.

“I feel good,” she confesses.

A smirk curls the corner of his mouth. “You are good.” His fingers pluck at the waistband, snapping it lightly against her fleshy hip, and she lets out a breathy squeak. “Don’t worry,” he purrs with a grin that seems surprisingly wolfish on his narrow face. His tail sweeps against the seam of her thighs. “I’ll remind you again tomorrow morning. Gonna have fun with these spankings now.”

She wets her lip and presses her thighs together, but of course he can feel what she’s doing. His sharp-toothed smile grows even more predatory and she shivers, but the flattened fur on his face makes him look at least as adorable as he is threatening. Her hand parts the blankets and she strokes her fingers through the bent, mussed strands, fluffing them tenderly. His whiskers are resilient against her palm, but the fur itself is silky-soft, more feathery and fluffy than even the luxurious blankets wrapped around them. She presses a reverent, grateful kiss to the tip of his nose, and doesn’t notice when he blinks up at her with big, suddenly-hazy eyes.

“Where did all this come from, Rocket?” she asks instead, her voice downy-quiet and feather-soft.

“All what?” he rasps, his voice sounding strangely dazed.

She snuggles sideways into the pillows, pulling him with her and dropping her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “All these soft, lovely things.”

His eyes sharpen and he swallows, ears flickering.

“Uh. Well.” His tail shifts against her thighs again, but this time the movement seems unintentional — apprehensive, even. “I got ‘em a while back. Just — wasn’t sure the best time to bring ‘em out.”

Her head tilts as she lifts it slightly from the pillow, brow furrowed. “On Knowhere?” she says uncertainly. The skull had been an amazing place and she’d love to go back and explore some day, but she’s quite sure they hadn’t had many things quite as decadent as this.

His tail flicks against her again.

“No. I. Ah. I got ‘em on Cyxlore.”

Oh. That makes sense. The luxury of the soft, thick fibers, silky and fluffy at the same time — the rich, gleaming colors. She wonders if they’d been hanging in Sanna Orix’s shop, and she’d somehow missed them.

“They’re so pretty,” she admires them, and nuzzles her cheek in again. “And soft.”

Something eases in the lines of his face and shoulders. His ears flick. “Yeah?”

“I love them,” she admits, running her fingers along the fabric draped over his shoulder and flank. Her lips purse into a little moue. “Should we put them on the bed?”

“No,” he says quickly, and she blinks at his vehemence. “Well, maybe one,” he agrees at last, grudgingly. “If you want it.”

She fingers the tassels, each strand as thick and fuzzy as a caterpillar. “You don’t like them?” It’s baffling that he would buy such beautiful cozy things only to not enjoy them.

“No, I — I like ‘em.” He sounds more flustered than she’s ever heard him. “I thought—” He gestures weakly down the corridor. “I been cleaning that out. It’s — I know you like a small space to squeeze yourself into, kitten. Thought we could make you a better den than the ones on the runabout, under the flight-controls or behind that frickin’ bulwark in the hold.”

She stares at him, then cranes her neck slowly to look toward the closet, where he’d pointed. Hadn’t it been full of his firearms and bombs?

He’d emptied it for her?

He’d brought all these lovely-soft blankets and pillows for her, with the intention that she have her own comforting little cave in the stars somewhere?

She’d be lying if she said the idea of some small, tucked-away corner didn’t fill her with a sense of security. The closet would be so much better than this shallow alcove, with drawer handles digging into her back. And though she’s gotten used to the cold expanse of the Dreadnought — it barely bothers her anymore — it would be nice to have someplace small and warm, where she could still see the stars.

“It’s stupid,” Rocket says suddenly, harshly — but when she looks at him, his brow is knotted with something closer to apology than anger. His ears lay so flatly against his skull that they’re trembling. “Putting a frickin’ princess in a closet. I dunno what the fuck is wrong with me—”

“Nothing,” she spills out urgently, her fingers sinking deep into the fur of his upper arms as she pulls him in closer. He lets her — wriggling upward in her embrace a little so he can sink his jaw into the soft stretch of t-shirt hiding her breasts. “I — I love it,” she tells him, tears already silvering her voice. Such a crybaby, still. “I was just surprised.” The more she imagines it, the better it feels. Her face heats gently — a flush of pleased color she can feel. “It’ll be a good place to go when we have nightmares.”

He grows still under her carefully-kneading palm: shuddering out a surprised exhalation, and then not moving at all.

“It was s’posed to just be for you,” he tells her at last — cautiously — then flinches. She can feel the flinch, the slight recoil right under his fingertips. “Not that I wouldn’t — I mean, if you wanted me to. Uh. Hold you. Or whatever. If you needed—”

His harsh voice splinters, but she’s already so soft around him: ready to cushion every broken shard.

“If I needed you,” she finishes, and squeezes him more tightly — just for a second. A half-smile tilts the corner of her mouth. “Haven’t you figured it out yet?” she asks gently. “I always need you, Rocket. And I’ll always want you with me.”

She can feel him swallow against her, a protest rising and then stifled in the threads of his fur. She nibbles back a soft sigh, offering him another little squeeze and smile anyway.

“So these are — gifts?” she queries, hoping it doesn’t sound too presumptuous. Her voice tilts uncertainly. “For me?”

He’s silent for a moment, but when she winces and looks down at him — worried she’s assumed too much — he gives a short, brisk nod.

Something soft and shimmery swirls up inside her solar plexus, and he must see it, because his lip peels back in a snarl.

“Don’t go gettin’ all sappy about it, either,” he adds abruptly, cinder-glow eyes snapping away from her like sparks off a fire. Something warm blooms deep inside her ribs, soft and slow as a sunrise, and colors her cheeks in tinges of pink. She can’t help the bemused cradle of her mouth, curving tenderly despite herself.

“You know,” she confesses in hushed tones, “you’re the only person who’s ever given me gifts. I mean, unless you count the things Herbert gave me, which I don’t think were ever really gifts at all.”

More like shackles.

Rocket’s ears flicker, though, and something shifts in his expression — from pensive and wary to vaguely intrigued. “Yeah? Not even your family or your clan or whatever, on Terra? Your people?”

She snuggled him in closer and curves her spine, brushing feathery little kisses over the fur of his brow. “I didn’t really have people,” she admits. “My mother didn’t notice me very often. And the way our town was — people didn’t consider themselves responsible for each other, really. Not outside of their own little families.” She feels pensiveness curl her own brow. “I do wonder what happened to my mom once I — once I left. I think she — I think some part of her would have cared, once she realized I was missing. But I hope she wasn’t sad for long, and I hope she didn’t get in any trouble.” She half-shrugs against the blankets. “I hope they all just thought I ran away. I mean, that is what happened.”

Rocket grunts. It’s a sound she can’t fully decipher, other than knowing that it means he’s dissatisfied with something she’d said.

And then, a quiet rasp against her skin:

“You deserve presents, sweetness.”

She feels her muscles tense with the need to contradict him, the impulse already forcing her lips apart in protest. But she snaps them closed and lets his words melt over her instead, like crystallized syrup and honey slowly warming in the sun. The blankets aren’t the only gifts he’s given her — nor the clothes and panties, nor the little bottles of cleansers and lotions, nor the morningtea and pretty hair, nor even the whole closet for a cave. Or a den, as he calls it. His gifts hadn’t ended with the physical. He’d gifted her with the ability to travel the stars, to not be alone, to be free. He’d gifted her with her very first real choice, ever since she’d first climbed into Herbert’s ship and left Terra in the stardust.

And now this. The previous night, and today. And in the bathtub a few rotations earlier, and the last time he’d found her huddled up here in the dark.

A gift of words.

She won’t be so rude as to not accept them, even if they don’t quite feel true to her yet. But he must pick up on the tension looming at the edges of her muscles, because he shifts against her and cocks a brow.

“You really shouldn’t be trying to get me to spank you again so quick, kitten. Not with your cute ass still sore from last night.”

Another blush rises in her cheeks — this one even warmer — and she feels her eyelashes flicker with something she can’t name — intrigue, or embarrassment, or misplaced apprehension. Want. Rocket’s other brow rises to match the first, then he chuckles and squeezes her hips in his small dark hands.

“You deserve presents,” he repeats, and something on his face shifts in the dim light of the stars. His eyes, warm and red as hearths, slant away from her. “Maybe I’ll — maybe I’ll find you some others. Wherever we stop next. Xeron, I guess.” His ears flick and he glances back up at her searchingly. “You — you’d like that.”

Pearl tilts her head. Anyone else might think he sounded nonchalant — condescendingly indulgent, even. In fact, she’s certain that’s what he’s aiming for.

But she’s equally certain that she can hear a tendril of anxiety, unfurling at the center of the words like a wisp of smoke, turning it almost into a question.

“I’d love that,” she agrees softly, letting eagerness color her voice in warm reds and patient lilac-blues. “I’d love anything you’d want to give me, Rocket.”

Those burnt-star eyes go smoky and dark as she holds them with her own gaze.

“Yeaaah,” he drawls slowly. “Yeah, you would. Wouldn’t you, kitten?”

The hand on her hip sweeps up her spine, claws dancing in the hollow of her back and then up to the silk between her shoulderblades, and she shivers. A breathy little sound breaks over her lips: shaky, half-dreamy. Rocket’s smirk widens into a smug bite.

“Love to make you purr, princess. Barely have to even do anything.”

All her muscles go fluid and buttery under his touch. She’s not sure if it’s meant to be comforting or arousing, but she feels her eyes flutter again, closing.

“I got you a present too,” she confesses into the morning shadows. Her brow furrows. “I don’t know if we still—“

“Drax picked it up,” he interrupts smoothly. His hand lingers at the middle of her back, prickling and soothing. She sighs into the fur on the crown of his head, somehow both relieved and more tense, all at once.

“Did you see it?” she asks worriedly. “It’s not — it’s not as nice as these—“ She smooths one hand regretfully over the soft blankets, wishing she had thought to get him something soft and comforting, too. She can feel her brow knot. “I’m not very good at giving gifts,” she confesses.

He huffs a breath against her breasts — amused, she thinks. “Why d’you think that?” he asks, ignoring her question.

She puzzles over his question for a moment, tossing it back and forth — giving it thought. Taking it more seriously than he’d intended, perhaps.

“I didn’t have much on Terra,” she says at last. “If I wanted to give someone something, I had to make it, and I was never very — crafty, I guess. Even my mother was — unimpressed, I suppose, with the silly things I gave her. After that — well. Herbert didn’t want much from me by way of presents, and in enough time, I didn’t want to give him anything, anyway.”

Rocket huffs again — this time, it’s a scoff. Pure disdain for their maker. Regardless, it still feels good on her skin. His hand shifts from her back, sinking instead to the pillow of her hair — delicately clawing the overnight tangles from her curls. His voice husks against her, low and thoughtful.

“You gave that little girl ribbons,” he says carefully, like he’s afraid she’ll shatter if he brings up the maid. And maybe she would have, any other morning — blamed the child’s execution on her own bits of satin string. But she feels strangely fortified, as if Rocket’s hand branding her ass had somehow freed her from everything else. “And you’re always givin’ Nebs those candies. Lozenges. Whatever.”

He nuzzles between her breasts, muffing out a contented-sounding sigh when gravity has one gently smothering him. The tip of his nose hits her sternum and he slips his tongue between his teeth, licking the soft flesh pressed against his whiskers.

“I don’t know if those count,” she says weakly, uncertainly.

“They count.” He’s the one purring now — really purring, a deep and contented rumble so low and tumbling that she can feel it not only vibrating against her breasts, but all the way down to her bones. Her ribs shiver and rattle against each other with the force of his rolling exhalations. “Bet you give a lot more than you think, kitten.”

He gives her another lick — so sweet and soft and lingering that it makes her eyes sting — against the inner curve of her breast, right over a lilac-blue vein that carries his kiss straight to her heart.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Pearl is surprised by how pleased Rocket seems by the respirator-mask. She’d expected him to loathe it — to only wear it to appease her concerns. But his ears had flicked when he’d opened it, and his eyes had widened — just briefly — and he’d gotten a smug little curl in the corner of his mouth while his tail had swished behind him.

Lookit that, he’d muttered, drawing a claw down the nose of the mask — then picking it up and flexing it, testing the soft leather. He’d run his fingers over the seams, testing the straps, circling the brass-colored rings that fastened the filters in. Then he’d lifted it to his face. It had been a bit longer than his nose required, but the buckles had held it firmly in place — and when he’d lifted his eyes to hers over the ridge of leather, she’d felt something in her abdomen flutter.

Damn near perfect, he’d said, and even with his face half-obscured, she’d heard the admiration in his tone. How’d you get my measurements so close, doll?

Thankfully, she hadn’t had to answer — hadn’t been forced to confess.

I have you memorized.

Instead, he’d been distracted: adjusting the jaw of the facepiece, going nearly cross-eyed as he’d peered down at his own nose. And she’d realized slowly — her eyes meeting Drax’s equally-surprised expression over Rocket’s head — that maybe it didn’t matter so much what she’d chosen to give him. Maybe he would’ve been just as pleased and impressed by any gift made so carefully with him in mind — as if, like her, he’d received too few gifts in his life.

She’s going to fix that, she decides.

Nevertheless, she’d still been struggling to manage the leftover scraps of her embarrassment from the rotation before, when she’d reacted so strongly to the deaths of the linguist’s wife and child. But Drax had simply beamed when pearl had entered the galley, offering hot Kylosian breakfast — a special dish set aside for her, made with only synth-products — and Nebula had slouched, half-sprawled at a breakfast table with one palm already extended for lozenges. Before pearl had even been able to fish one out of the pocket of her cardigan, D’au had swept up and taken her cold fingers into her own warm ones, then tucked them into her elbow and guided her to the electric kettle to make morningtea.

Pearl knows none of them have forgotten — but they don’t make her feel foolish, and she’s grateful for that.

That rotation takes them on a quiet course through the stars. Rocket quizzes her on the flight controls again, and other basic ship information: the different fuels used and how to access their tanks, speed adjustment through the UNTN, emergency procedures.

“Might let you get your hands on the controls later today,” he says approvingly, and a flash of excited nerves sizzle goldenly on her skin.

“Really?” she demands giddily, unable to hold back a quick bounce of excitement in her seat.

He rolls his eyes, but there’s a grin in the corner of his mouth and the flash of his sharp canines.

When he lets her fly later in the wake-shift, her nerves are buzzing and singing. He has her sit in his own chair and climbs in her lap, telling the others to fuck off so they don’t distract her.

“How’s it feel, kitten?” he asks, stroking his hands firmly down her thighs as he sits cushioned between them, pinning her to the captain’s seat with his forty-odd pounds of muscle and metal.

“Like the yoke is humming in my hands,” she whispers, wide-eyed as she stares through the crystalline starshield. Rocket hands dance up and down, prickling and occasionally pinching at the fat on her thighs, fingers nipping at her flesh like he’d like to take a bite of her himself. The quick, sharp pinches and plucks have her abdomen clenching.

“That’s my girl,” he purrs, sounding inordinately satisfied by pearl’s response. “Light hold on the yoke now. She’s real responsive. Needs just the lightest frickin’ touch—“

It would be easy for the lesson to devolve, she thinks. His tail is pinned between them, draped over her hip, and it keeps flicking impatiently — restlessly. And without the controls in his palms, Rocket’s hands are prone to wander: constantly dipping into the vulnerable skin behind her knees, or threatening her with tiny, flower-shaped bruises. As if the recent spanking had freed something in both of them, he seems much less concerned about hurting her now. It’s as if he’s realized he can trust himself to give her as much pain as she wants and needs — and as much as he wants and needs — without going too far.

And every sharp little pinch grounds her.

Between the nips and nibbles of his fingertips, he rumbles little rewards into the empty air of the cockpit: telling her she’s doing so well for him; that she’s a frickin’ natural behind the flight controls; that she deserves a little reward and if they didn’t have to worry about the rest of the morons walking in, he’d be eating her cunt right there.

“Want you dripping all over my seat, kitten,” he purrs, and she can hear the sharp grin on his voice. “Once we get rid of these losers, this is where I’m gonna make you cockwarm me every morning, right after your spanking.” A chuckle. “Maybe I’ll smack your pretty pink pussy while you sit here — make you gush for me. Want the cockpit to always smell like waterlilies.” A wet smacking sound, like he’s licking his lips — theatrically, for her benefit. “F’I slap it enough, you’ll be all swollen and hot — stinging and squirming and crying — before you even sink down on me. Think you’ll like that. Bet you’d moan.”

“You’re making it hard to concentrate,” she protests, eyes blurring as she tries to ease the enormous ship into a series of simple maneuvers he’d laid out for her.

“Poor girl,” he snickers, levying another pinch to the doughy softness of her left leg. “Maybe I want an excuse to frickin’ punish you, huh? Did you think of that?” He sighs dramatically — trying to sound wistful, she thinks, but only succeeding in sounding amused. “Not much I can do to punish a girl like you though, huh? You want everything I give you, don’t you?”

Her throat is dry and her eyes are wide, pinned desperately to the stars. She tries to keep her grip on the massive ship light and easy. Delicate.

“I do,” she breathes. “I do want everything—“

“That’s right. A little slut all for me.” He’s gloating — she can hear it. Somehow it only makes her knees tremble more. “Could make you cockwarm me with your mouth instead,” he muses, pretending to be thoughtful. “Or edge you for a whole cycle without letting you come. Or — make you come till you cry. No,” he decides quickly, “that one’s too easy. My kitten cries all the time.”

Her thighs shift restlessly beneath him, clenching together, trying not to pedal for friction — and Rocket grins and gloats, half-turning to flick one stiff nipple with a precision that has her vision blurring once more.

“Gotta get those nipple clamps,” he mutters, almost to himself. “Shoulda got some on Knowhere. Guess I’ll hafta make ‘em.”

She can hear his grin widening.

“Gonna put some cute little bells on my kitten.”

She wouldn’t say she makes it through the flight lesson flawlessly, but she’s only a little shaky by the time it’s over, and Rocket seems overwhelmingly pleased with the situation as a whole.

He doesn’t actually spank her the next morning, but that might only be because he wakes to her already tugging gently at the waistband of his sleep-pants. She’d never undress him without his explicit permission — and even though he seems more willing to pinch her, to spank her, to be rough with her, she’s seen nothing to indicate that he’s more comfortable being unclothed. So instead, when he wakes up bleary-eyed, it’s to her pressing her cheek lovingly against his inner thigh — brushing her lips carefully over the hard ridge that’s already tenting the fabric.

“Can I try again, Rocket?”

He blinks at her, for a moment looking utterly nonplussed as to who she is and why she’s nuzzling so reverently into the inside of his thigh. His fur’s all rumpled and askew, flattened on one cheek, and his mouth is parted in something like shock — like he’d been dreaming of something and isn’t sure of whether or not he’s awake.

“I want to try kissing you again,” she explains patiently, just because he looks so bewildered.

He groans and rolls his head back against the pillows, smashing both palms into his eyes.

“Kissing me,” he repeats under his breath. “For fuck’s sake, never gonna get over — yeah, sweetheart, you can kiss me all you want.”

He tastes so good in her mouth: faintly salty, all petrichor and cedar, that whisper of warm marzipan. And he feels like silk on her tongue, pulsing and curved like a hook. She laves him with her tongue, loves on him worshipfully — paying attention to anything she can about the way he moves and moans and mutters, and when his hands fly to the top of her head and knot in her hair, and why his hips hitch up against her mouth. At one point, he twists both his fists into her curls and hauls her head against him, sinking so far into her mouth that he almost touches the back of her throat twice. Then he wrangles control of himself and eases his fingers once more, gently stroking the blue-silk crown of her head and murmuring fervent, desperation-wracked apologies. Her scalp is tender and buzzing from his tugs but she loves it — loves the flustered heat of his brief thrusts into her mouth, the sting and burn of her pulled hair. She offers her forgiveness by moving faster, and she swallows him down when he comes this time. It’s surprisingly easy: a quick flex of her throat, with only the faintest salty tang on the back of her tongue.

Too easy, maybe.

She delicately swipes at the corners of her mouth when she draws back, brow furrowed.

“You okay, princess?” he asks. The words are all breathless and broken but he’s already propped himself on his elbows, alarmed by her expression. “If this is about — I’m sorry for—”

“I’m okay,” she says quickly. “I just — I think I swallowed too quickly.”

A flush rises in her cheeks, red and oh-so-warm — much warmer than she’d ever thought she could feel, before him — when he blinks at her, wide-eyed.

“I like the way you taste,” she says, and maybe it’s not exactly true — she’s ambivalent to the flavor itself, except that it’s him, and she wants to hold onto whatever she can for as long as she can. “Is it better — for you? To come in my mouth?” Her voice falters uncertainly. “I liked it last time, when you—“

“When I came on your tits?” His eyelids have dropped to half-mast now and he studies her from beneath lowered lids, testing one canine with the tip of his tongue in that way that always makes her flutter. “Could do that again. Wouldn’t mind.” He reaches out with one slender dark hand, and his claw traces her lower lip carefully: pinning her mouth open with its dangerous sharpness. “Or I could come in your mouth and tell you not to swallow. Make you sit back on your heels and open your mouth like a good little whore — show me you still got me on your tongue.”

Oh.

He must see — or hear, or smell — her reaction, because he chuckles and smooths the pad of his thumb over her swollen lower lip: soothing her with it.

The rotations continue to pass. She helps Drax make Kylosian breakfasts in the galley, and the first wake-shift is spent drifting ever-closer to Xeron. There are flight lessons in the start of the second wake-shift, during which Rocket kicks everyone else out of the cockpit even if he doesn’t use the time to murmur filth into her burning ears. And then, later: dinners together, and stories, and sometimes games in which Rocket continues to win favors from her that he never quite seems to collect on.

Of course, pearl hasn’t forgotten anything. In quiet moments, she still turns over the news of these new deaths in her mind. Tries to rearrange her memories and experiences around these new truths. Lets them settle into her skin.

So many decades ago — back on Terra — Little Liz hadn’t believed in Santa Claus for very long. It had been nearly impossible when one of her very first memories had been her mother’s admission that she had forgotten Christmas entirely that year.

Somehow, trusting that Herbert had kept the linguist’s family alive feels like an infinitely-more foolish faith.

One day, maybe pearl will be able to forgive herself for that. Maybe she’ll be able to make things better for the people left behind. In the meantime — in the cemetery of her mind — pearl plants two more white stones: beloved wife and mother, and darling child. Around them, she weaves a groundcover of forget-me-nots in shades of dusk-blue.

“I am Groot,” Groot says from behind her, and pearl pulls her attention back to the here-and-now. D’au is shaking her head at something Drax had said, a frown perched between her brows.

“You underestimate the elasticity of our approach,” she disagrees.

“But it can’t work in every situation,” Drax protests. “You must be able to fight sometimes. To protect yourselves.”

D’au shakes her head again, regretfully — then pauses when her eyes meet pearl’s. They’re stunningly, startlingly blue — electrically blue — and there’s something in them that pearl can’t place.

“I’ll tell you a secret,” D’au offers quietly, turning her eyes back to Drax.

Nebula snorts.

“I wouldn’t,” Rocket volunteers from the pilot’s seat. Pearl suspects he watches them all — reflected in the glass dome — when he looks like he’s staring at the stars. “That idiot seems like he’s prob’ly not very good at keeping ‘em.”

“I am trustworthy,” Drax says, offended.

Pearl rouses herself, shaking out her shoulders and stretching, then turning to face the Xeronian and her other friends. “A secret?”

D’au nods slowly, her eyes flitting from Drax to pearl and then — pointedly — flicking to Rocket’s reflection in the crystalline-armor starshield. Then she drags her stare back to the Destroyer, studying him. Measuring him.

“I mentioned before that our creator always intended us to be a peaceful race; that an aversion to violence had been written into our genetic code. What I mean by that is that Xeronians have visceral physical reactions to even the mere thought of engaging in violence. The reactions might vary in severity and presentation, but they are there nonetheless: accelerated heartrates and hyperventilation. Hypotension and syncope. Nausea and vomiting. While we truly value our pacifism, it isn’t lost on us that these biological cues have likely shaped our perceptions — nor are we ignorant to the fact that our physical limitations put us at a disadvantage against those who might harm us. Our scientists and doctors have been working for generations on ways to overcome these ailments, if only under extreme circumstances.”

Her electric-blue eyes flick back to pearl, who feels her breath stutter in her lungs. And though the Xeronian’s stare is a lance between pearl’s ribs, everyone else in the cockpit has gone quiet, too.

Watchful. Waiting.

“Our people tried to create a champion once,” D’au says quietly into the silent shell of the cockpit. “One who could defend our people. If needed.”

Pear’s eyes widen. This — this is new. She doesn’t recall anything like this being in Herbert’ historical records of Xeron, though of course it’s possible she missed one, or had perhaps forgotten it.

“He was my many-greats grandfather,” D’au continues. Her words are hushed, but they echo across the crystalline bubble nonetheless. “He was a quiet, community-oriented man — a lover of diplomacy and mercy. Our people hoped he would retain a sense of fairmindedness and compassion, even when cured of the restraints our creator had coded into our genetic makeup. My ancestor agreed to their proposal — despite the risks and the burden — and underwent a series of experimental genetic treatments that broke down portions of his sequencing and rebuilt them in the hopes that he might be able to protect our planet should the need arise.”

Pearl’s always been quick to put pieces together. Herbert had said it was because of how she thought about things — linking them with scraps of other information from throughout all her memories, braiding them together with a hundred other bits and pieces. There had been records — hidden, of course — of the anomalous Xeronian, but Herbert had never understood where he had come from.

How he’d been created.

This should have been impossible, she’d seen scrawled into the margins of his ancient holotexts, underlined so fiercely that the image in the datapad had skittered and jumped — as if Herbert had broken the original screen when he’d written it.

“King Randau,” she breathes now, and Rocket darts an anxious glare at her. She jolts. “It was on — on the cage,” she defends, flustered. Her silvery eyes skitter back to D’au. “On your nameplate, in the emporium. ShelRandau.”

“Yes,” D’au acknowledges, and her own gaze filters around to her listeners. “My family name comes from him,” she explains. “ShelRandau indicates a leadership lineage stemming from the last days of our monarchy. King Randau set up the council before stepping down from his throne and into the Xeronian labs. His line — my line, the shelRandau line — is one of the oldest on Xeron.”

“Then you truly are a princess,” Drax concludes. Pearl glances at him, baffled at the smugness of his tone. “I knew there was a princess on board—“

A crinkled ball of foil bounces off the side of his head, and he looks affronted when he picks up the empty zargnuts-bag that has tumbled into his lap.

“We’ve only got room for one princess, and it isn’t the Xeronian,” Nebula sneers at him.

Rocket clicks his tongue against his teeth and rolls his eyes. “You’re all idiots.”

“I’m not a princess,” the Xeronian adds gently, eyes curved in that way that seems to indicate she’s smiling. “As I said, King Randau stepped down, and ever since, Xeron has been governed by a council of both elected and inherited positions. I am on the council though, thanks to my lineage. There’s no direct translation for my role. It’s primarily a stewardship position, ensuring that the Council remains accountable to the wellbeing of the people and doesn’t stray from service, and coordinating public ethics reviews on a quinquennial basis.” D’au’s eyelids flicker. “I say my role, but it is possible they have disinherited my position in my absence, and passed the responsibilities and honor onto some other Xeronian line.”

“A disenfranchised princess, then,” Drax mutters stubbornly, and D’au frowns.

“A people can’t just allow one of their leadership roles to remain vacant,” she defends, and pearl can see Rocket’s brows arch in the glass. She’s not surprised at his skepticism. It’s a more empathetic approach than most would expect from royals and monarchs, and an inherited council position is as royal as Xeron gets at this point.

“I would like to hear more about your ancestor,” Drax dismisses with a wave of his hand. “The pacifist who tried to become a warrior. Was he successful?”

D’au cocks her head consideringly. “In a manner of speaking, I suppose,” she concedes. “The treatment caused…. some kind of overcompensation. Maybe it was a mistake on the part of our science. Maybe it was a failsafe that our creator embedded within us.”

It wasn’t that, pearl thinks. At least, if it had been because of Herbert’s tinkering in their genetic code, he hadn’t meant to cause it.

“At first, Randau was able to access violent behaviors upon need or desire, but still felt… resistant to doing so. As his body and mind adjusted, that… shifted. Over the course of a few quarters, he found himself more and more prone to rageful inclinations, until he realized he was fantasizing about the subjugation of any who opposed him. It was as if — rather than weakening his aversion to violence — we had instead created a need for it.

“Eventually, Randau found the need couldn’t be satisfied. Failing to act on his violent desires brought new symptoms: symptoms of starvation and malnourishment.”

D’au shakes her head.

“I did not know my many-greats-grandfather, but the stories say he was still in his right mind at the time. He chose to leave Xeron for an abandoned void in space, hoping that he would soon waste away before he could harm anyone living. For a long time, we thought that was what had happened. But then he resurfaced, galaxies and sectors away, with a new moniker we didn’t recognize at first. The Infamous Space Parasite.”

Drax blinks, and snorts, and crosses his arms as he leans back in his seat. “You said you would share a secret. That is not a secret.” The Destroyer scowls. “Everyone knows about the Infamous Space Parasite.”

“Yes,” Nebula says hoarsely, “but not everyone knows where he comes from, or how. I didn’t, and I’m Black Order.” Her eyes flick briefly toward pearl: fawn-dark and hunted. “I was Black Order,” she corrects, her cracked voice faltering. But then she adds firmly, “Black Order normally knows these things.”

D’au nods. “Few outside of Xeron know,” she agrees, and her words are quiet and even. “And fewer still know why we truly made him.” She inhales, long and slow, as if she’s about to plunge herself underwater. “Which is what I will now tell you, my friends. As a show of good faith.”

She casts her bright, electric-blue eyes around the circle. Pearl sees the moment D’au’s eyes meet Rocket’s in the starshield. Her survivor tenses — ears swiveling toward the Xeronian, hands tightening on the yoke.

“We didn’t make him to fight off a hypothetical future threat from other planets,” D’au whispers into the hushed shadows. “We made him to protect us from our creator.”

A strangled, guttural, growling noise snarls from the captain’s seat, ricocheting like bullets off the starshield. Pearl’s eyes fly to Rocket — taking in the flat blades of his ears, the sharp triangle of his bared teeth.

“I am Groot?” Groot asks, cocking his head and stealing the attention before pearl has a chance to lift herself out of her seat and go to her survivor. She shakes herself — licks lips that she’s sure have gone pale while she tugs on the end of her ponytail.

“Groot wants to know if your creator is… bad,” she translates. Her voice sounds washed-out and nervous, even to her own ears.

D’au lifts her chin. “He doesn’t believe so,” she says, with a flatness that pearl hasn’t heard from her before.

“But he is,” pearl replies — too quickly — and she knows it sounds too much like an argument rather than a question. Rocket flashes a warning glance in her direction. “I mean, you think he is.”

D’au’s brilliant eyes narrow. “I do. All Xeronians do. We know our god is a malevolent one.” Her blue eyes flick to Groot. “Perhaps similar, in some ways, to the Taluhnisan Gardener.”

“Your god is a fool,” Drax says firmly. “To create a people and then leave them unable to defend themselves—”

“He isn’t a fool,” pearl says sharply. “That’s the whole problem. He’s not a fool at all. He’s just evil.”

She hears Rocket swallow a groan. When she glances over at him, he’s pinching the space between his brows.

She sinks her teeth into her lip for a moment — nervous, however briefly — then rolls her eyes and makes some sort of open-handed gesture: slicing her palms through her frustration. “At least, he sounds evil. But the Xeronians aren’t — they’re not unable to defend themselves. Right?” She turns her eyes back to D’au, trying to sound reasonable. “You said you have allies, yes? People who might help? And safety-plans? Places to go?”

D’au’s head tilts. “We do. People who might fight on our behalf. Ways to get off-planet. Safe-stations in the stars and communities we can migrate to, if the need arises.”

“Kitten,” Rocket interrupts. “Go get me some more coffee?”

Pearl’s next words die on her lips. She blinks at him, then down to the half-full mug resting on the arm of his chair.

“It’s cold,” he defends. “Could prob’ly use a snack too. All of us. Take Groot with you, to help carry.”

She watches as his eyes flick to Nebula’s. The Luphomoid clears her throat.

“I am hungry,” the cyborg lies awkwardly.

Pearl frowns. She’s not an idiot. She knows when she’s being handled. Still, they’ve figured out the perfect way to do it, haven’t they? Two people, asking her for nourishment. They think that’s not something she has it in herself to ignore — even if she knows they’re colluding against her.

Jerks.

“I know what you’re doing,” she says firmly. “It isn’t going to work.” Still, something inside her wavers. She chews her lip and tugs the ends of her curls — nervous now. “If you’re really hungry, I’ll get you a snack after, but you don’t get to just send me out of the cockpit because you want to say something you don’t think I should hear.”

Rocket’s brows arch higher than pearl’s ever seen them and Nebula makes a rasping, barking noise. A laugh? pearl wonders, but it’s stifled too quickly to decipher.

“Fine,” Rocket grumbles, locking in the autopilot and spins in his chair, facing the Xeronian, narrowing his eyes at her. “Sorry ‘bout that,” he says nonchalantly — as if pearl and everyone else can’t see that he’s not sorry at all. Well, perhaps Drax is fooled. “Pearl here has a tendency to take stories like yours real personalistically.” He juts a thumb at Nebula. “You shoulda heard her with this one. You’da thought pearl had grown up under the thumb of the Black Order herself.”

Nebula raises her eyebrows but nods. “That might be true, if she weren’t so soft,” the Luphomoid admits. “Thanos would not have allowed that sort of kindness to survive.”

“Point is, just because she gets real invested in your sob story doesn’t mean you should make any assumptions about her, all right? Her — or any of us. We’re just passing through, and happen to be doing you the favor of savin’ your sorry ass from the Collector’s cage, and taking you home while we’re at it.”

D’au stares back at him evenly. “You know I like Little Sister very much,” the Xeronian says slowly. “It’s clear that she knew who I was when she pulled me from that pit — one of the most politically-powerful Xeronians alive. But I don’t think that mattered to her. I think she would have tried to drag me from the edge of death no matter what, even if there had been no real hope of success.”

Silence layers thick throughout the stardust-flecked cockpit. Pearl twists her fists in her cardigan, a wave of hot self-consciousness slowly spreading from her sternum to her brow.

“Then you see why we gotta look out for her,” Rocket says at last. There’s a warning in his words, and it only takes half the sentence for pearl to understand.

Rocket thinks D’au knows who they are.

Or at least, he thinks D’au knows who pearl is, anyway. It seems like the existence of Batch 89 had been kept from public record — pearl herself had never stumbled across mention of them, even when she’d found her way into Herbert’s most-secret notes. Perhaps the High Evolutionary had been ashamed that someone had escaped him, or perhaps he’d considered the experiment itself too great of a failure for others to know about. Perhaps he’d destroyed all those notes. The point is that D’au wouldn’t have known of Rocket before all this, and if there’s a bounty out for him now, the Xeronian is unlikely to have heard of it between the emporium and the Dreadnought.

It is, however, likely that D'au had known of the High Evolutionary’s Flawless Pearl, had perhaps even seen her before — even if she has no reason to believe that Madame Lavenza is on the run.

Yet.

For the moment, D’au’s eyes are locked on Rocket, and she nods slowly. “I do,” she agrees, tilting her head cautiously. “That‘s why I offered my tale.” She raises a brow. “In good faith.”

“Huh. You did do that, didn’t you? So you know that if you had any thoughts about running to some shitbag or another and telling ‘em we’re carting around precious frickin’ cargo, we—“

Pearl makes an angry little noise in her throat: a growl of her own that’s all protest, all indignation. Rocket’s glare collides with hers: burning bright, red as hot coals.

He makes some sort of frustrated, half-furious growl in his throat, then rolls his eyes.

“Look,” he mutters, palming the back of his neck. “I don’t hold with genocide, okay? We’re not gonna tell anyone your frickin’ secret.” His gaze snaps back to D’au, gaze already seething at the potential of a threat. “But don’t make me fuckin’ regret it.”

D’au arches her second brow to match the first, and in spite of the coverage her face-plates provide, it seems very clear that she’s smirking. “I—”

“She won’t,” pearl interrupts, offering her best, sweetest smile. She reaches for D’au, fingers extended. “Will you, Little Sister?”

It’s a calculated move, though not insincere. Despite Herbert’s training, pearl knows diplomacy doesn’t have to be disingenuous. And that authenticity pays off when D’au blinks at her — then accepts her hand, blue eyes curving in that gentle way that indicates a smile.

“Of course I won’t,” the Xeronian agrees.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Xeron is as beautiful as Da’u had described, and even lovelier than pearl had remembered. Of course, at the time of her last visit, she’d been deep in her M’dame Lavenza shell, only allowing it to fragment briefly when an orloni had made its way up Theel’s robes before escaping into the city streets. Everything had seemed faraway back then — untouchable, unreachable.

Now, she soaks it in.

The sun is distant, though warm enough to keep the local temperature mild against her skin. Even when it rises, the turquoise sky only lightens by a few shades, still studded and dappled with stars. The light refracts strangely through the outer layers of the Xeronian atmosphere and the moisture in the air, turning every distant flicker into a hexagonal prism of rainbow-edged silver. The air is cool and humid, though not uncomfortable, and there’s already a haze of mist garlanding the mountaintops surrounding the city where D’au has them touching down. The Xeronian had sent a transmission ahead, informing her people that she was coming home after being trapped in the Collector’s emporium — that she had escaped during an explosion on Knowhere, and had found her way back to her home-planet thanks to a band of travelers. Nothing in her words had indicated that there is anything special about their little crew, which Rocket had seemed both appeased and disgruntled by.

“Guess we’re s’posed to be laying low,” pearl overhears him muttering to Nebula, who only grunts in response.

Still, the welcome they receive is warm and grateful. D’au is greeted in the landing field by a handful of friends and family, and a retinue of political allies and guards. They spend the night in her family home, which is narrow and multi-tiered — like a spindle in the city — and nestled close to the capitol library in the center of town. The streets radiate outward from it like a starburst of commerce and laughter, dazzling with small metal lanterns that have been pierced in dizzying constellations and swirling designs. Some match the traditional tattoos that D’au had told them about — charms to imbue spaces and communities with safety, creativity, good fortune — and others are simply pretty: stylized spirals and mountains and stars, repeating lacelike patterns of illumination.

At first, pearl thinks that Rocket will want to sleep on the Dreadnought, as they had done with the runabout on Sovereign and Cyxlore, and as they had planned to do on Knowhere — but all his reclusive tendencies pale and thin in light of the luxury of the shelRandau family home. It’s as opulent as the Amber Palazzo, but infinitely less cold and harsh: as if Sovereign wealth had collided with Cyxlorade sensibilities, resulting in an expensive, expansive blend of fibers and color and design. Clusters of pierced, glittering luminaries swing from delicate chains in every corner. They cast delicate patterns of gold and silver light on the harshly-woven walls, rippling liquidly over the rough texture. The tables are low to the ground — flat surfaces made of stained glass — while the windows themselves are clear and tall, and narrow and numerous: three-pointed arches and trefoils, ogee arches and pointed cinquefoils. The panes are pure and leaded, cut into diamonds and eight-pointed stars — almost as flawless and glistening as Indigarran glasswork.

For dinner, they eat fruit-studded grain-dishes, drizzled in honey and nuts, while D’au’s loved ones ask her questions about her time starside, and mourn the circs she’d lost to the Collector’s emporium. They’re careful — at first — not to discuss too much about politics or the state of the planet and the council, though D’au is quick to tell them that she trusts the crew of the Dreadnought and that they can speak frankly. Still, they’re wary — not that pearl blames them. They only skate lightly over their strengthening alliances, their expanded cultural centers and ongoing ambassadorial outreach. A triad of three stewards had been appointed in D’au’s absence, though Xeron had not permanently disinherited her from her council position, and D’au is welcome to return to her role when she’s ready.

“I want two cycles,” D’au clatters at them, blue eyes sparkling and curved with the radiance of her smile. “To catch up on all I’ve missed, both politically and with my family.” Her eyes slide to pearl’s and she nudges her with an elbow. “And I want to take Little Sister to get her first Xeronian tattoo before she and her crew leave.”

Surprisingly, Rocket agrees to stay in shelRandau home — curious, pearl supposes, about the unique comfort and decadence afforded in these narrow but lavish quarters. Their room is sandwiched snugly between Drax’s and Nebula’s. Groot graciously thanks the Xeronian for his own quarters, but asks instead — through pearl as his interpreter, of course — if he might stay in the greenhouse at the top of the spindle-shaped house. From the outside, it glitters like a silver needle, but walking into it feels like falling into an endless emerald. The tiered inside is an abundance of local flora: blooming flowers used for teas and salads, and vines and trees with heavy fruits. Sprays of greenery give away the hiding places of sleepy, hearty root-vegetables, and the air is softened with the hushed chatter of a dozen delicate round ponds with trickling waterfalls, full of Xeronian oryza.

Groot is enchanted, his ligneous fingers lingering longingly on every delicate stem and leaf and anther. I am Groot, he rumbles wistfully.

“The starlight tastes like spring-mornings and dew here,” pearl translates for D’au, who looks charmed by the concept.

When they go back to their own room, Rocket examines every single aspect and element of the space. A thin strip of hardwood flooring that rings the perimeter of the room in a narrow walkway. The center of the space is entirely composed of a recessed mattress, set deep and flush in the middle of the floor, overflowing with cushions and quilts. None of them are as luscious and silken as the Cyxlorade blankets in the Dreadnought, but they’re still delicious against her stroking palms and questing fingers: velvet and velour, lush and plush underneath the weight of her body. The softness envelopes her, holding her snugly.

“Now this is a den like you deserve,” Rocket tells her, pinning her against the pillows — hooking his elbows behind her knees and folding her in half before she even realizes what he’s doing. He grinds against her through her leggings and his jumpsuit, and she whimpers at the unexpected friction. “All soft and shit. Not as soft as you—” Through the layers of material, the hard hook of his cock catches on her clit and she whimpers again, hips rolling. “—not as soft as my girl, but frickin’ close,” he says raggedly.

“Rocket,” she squeaks when his mouth roots under the thin layer of his t-shirt, stretched tight over her bobbing breasts, and his tongue curls around one taut nipple. His teeth scrape her areola and her whole body buckles upward into his mouth — or at least it tries, straining against the position he has her pinned in. He pins her nipple threateningly between his teeth and the danger of it — the sharp prickle on her skin — has an embarrassing deluge of wetness flooding between her thighs. Her abdomen tightens mercilessly and she bucks again. “Please—”

He releases her with a pop and a snicker, only to nip the inside of her breast so sharply that she squeals. His tongue soothes the spot, then sucks an answering bruise into the soft flesh. Everything in her melts at the steady throb of dark heat and pressure.

“We’ll go out tomorrow,” he muffles between her breasts. “Buy or steal whatever you want and fill your frickin’ closet with—”

“We’re not stealing,” she protests, sinking deeper into the pile as he presses her down. “Not from these people—”

He cackles. “It matters from who, then?”

She tries to consider his question, but he doesn’t allow her more than the brief flicker of a thought before he drives any form of cognition from her mind. And when she falls asleep later, it’s naked and happy and thoroughly fucked-out: curls knotted and snarled, still sticky between her thighs, and a smugly-grinning Rocket cuddled up tight around her.

The five of them browse the streets the next day while D’au begins to meet with her loved ones and catch up on all the things that have happened in her absence. The stones fit together in perfect spiral patterns beneath their feet, and the library and surrounding buildings are all built in the traditional Xeronian architectural style, similar to D’au’s ancestral home. It’s still early in the day — the distant sun turning the sky a slightly paler shade of teal, spangled by distant, starry prisms — and the streets are quiet and still and charming, though the lack of people means that pearl spots at least fifteen different orloni darting from alleys to boulevards and back.

Rocket and Nebula make dry observations to each other while Drax peers in windows, and Groot strolls along behind them all with a gentle smile in his dark eyes. Perhaps, if pearl had come to Xeron by herself, she might have been nervous and overwhelmed by old memories — but now, surrounded by Groot and her survivor and his crew, all she feels is the golden resurgence of an old, hungry curiosity. She drinks in the sight of over a dozen closed tattoo parlors, each advertising traditional and modern methods of inkings. There are learning centers that look like miniature museums, and bakeries with the doors already swinging wide open, letting the scent of warm oryza-dough sweeten the air.

“We should try some,” pearl urges Rocket with a gentle nudge of her hip to his shoulder, barely able to keep her eagerness tethered. She’d been to Xeron at least a handful of times, but Herbert had never allowed either of them to eat the food here.

Rocket opens his mouth, and pauses when he looks up at her. Then he sighs, and shrugs, and they end up feasting on breakfast pastries while the light and stars shift and the other shops begin to open.

“C’mon,” Rocket grunts as pearl licks the last of the sweetness from her fingers. Nebula watches her from the corner of her fawn-dark eyes, then follows suit. “Time to not-steal from a bunch of guys.”

“Shopping?” Nebula asks dryly, even though pearl’s certain Rocket told her that they needed to pick up some supplies.

Drax belts out a shout of laughter. A nearby shopkeeper — currently using a broom to urge two orloni from her front door — jumps at the sound and stares over at the Kylosian.

“I love shopping!” he all but bellows.

“I am Groot,” Groot agrees.

Pearl knows Rocket made a lot of units from the sale of her unstrung necklace to Sanna Orix, but his eagerness to spend — on her — still startles her. She’d never known what Herbert’s luxuries had cost — at least, not in terms of money. But now that she’s trying to manage her own shared finances with Rocket, she finds herself falling back on the learned frugality of her childhood — trying to make every fraction of a cent stretch into groceries that could feed both her and her mother for a week. Still, Rocket insists: ordering every pillow or blanket she so much as looks at into a vacuum-shrunk package. Nebula doesn’t help, either. The cyborg is silently pointing them both toward every pretty lantern and luminary, drawing Rocket’s attention to strings of twinkling plasma orbs, and little potted Xeronian plants that thrive with only the limited light of the stars to nourish them. Between Rocket and the Luphomoid, Groot’s arms are weighed down with packages of all shapes and sizes, each one balanced more precariously than the last until pearl finally puts her foot down and demands to carry some too. Graciously, Groot allows her one tiny, hammered-tin bowl, which weeps with the silvery fronds of some kind of fluffy-soft fern.

“I’m done shopping,” Drax mutters sullenly, when it becomes clear that Rocket is planning to veto every item he suggests, which have mostly included a large neon painting of a giant orloni and an expensive musical instrument that reminds pearl of an enormous Terran saxophone. The Destroyer’s blue eyes drink in the city around him. “It’s insulting that you reject my decor-ideas in spite of me being your best friend.”

Rocket snorts. “It’s insulting that you’d think I’d let you put either of those things on my ship.”

“You think you’re his best friend?” Nebula asks incredulously.

“I am his best friend,” Drax snaps, but his voice is sullen — almost pouty. “I don’t think I enjoy shopping with you. I would much rather meet with the pacifist council-members. I want to learn more about—”

“You ain’t stepping outta our sight,” Rocket informs the Kylosian dryly. “All I need is you picking a fight with people who can’t frickin’ defend themselves.”

Drax looks affronted. “I would never.”

“I can keep an eye on him.” Nebula rolls her eyes. “You and your kitten can continue making purchases—”

“Oh no,” pearl rushes to say. “We should get back to the Dreadnought anyway. We can drop off what we’ve gotten, and I can feed Littlefoot—”

“Nebs and Drax can feed the f’saki, and Groot can drop your shit off in the captain’s quarters,” Rocket says dismissively, then squints one eye at Nebula. “M’trusting you to be the level-headed one here, Nebs. No pulling your gun on random strangers ‘cause they looked at you funny.”

She glowers at him. “I’m Black Order—“

“You were Black Order,” he reminds her pointedly. “You ain’t anymore.”

Pearl watches, wide eyes swiveling between them as Nebula crosses her arms and rolls her eyes. The Luphomoid glares.

“Don’t be a dickhead. Either let me babysit the moron and the tree—”

“I am not a moron, and you will not be sitting on me,” Drax interjects sullenly.

“—or don’t.”

There’s a long pause.

“I am Groot,” Groot suggests, and pearl’s eyes widen before heat floods her cheeks, golden and pink. Her hands fly to her face, cool fingertips pressing into her cheekbones to try and quell the embarrassment.

Rocket blinks, but there’s already a smirk curling the corner of his mouth as he loops one arm between pearl’s thighs, tugging her closer — nuzzling into her hip with his mouth, right there on the street, like he doesn’t care who sees them.

“Yeah,” Rocket agrees, and nods at Nebula. “Go on then. Watch those too. Feed the fuckin’ f’saki. Go do what you want but just keep those two—” He nods again at Groot and Drax. “— outta trouble.” His grin widens, and pearl jumps when his teeth nip at her through the armored weave of her leggings.

“Per Groot’s excellent frickin’ suggestion, the princess and I are gonna find whatever passes for a Xeronian lingerie shop somewhere.”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

i always struggle with these chapters where the relationships have mostly been settled and we're moving into the final plot-pieces, so i'm sorry if this felt clonky. i've been having a lot of insecurities in my writing lately and i think it shows. i expect this chapter and the next chapter to both sort of plod along (i'm so sorry; i'm doing my best) but i am hoping we can start picking up with more significant plot in chapter 34 and ride that wave through to the end. for those of you who have continued to stick with this absolutely massive wreckage of a story, and who have been so supportive along the way, please know i'm so appreciative. and i can confirm i am finally going to be back on an every-other-week posting schedule (with some possible brief disruption in july, when i'll be traveling to visit my family - but i am still going to try to be prepared to post either right before and after, or possibly once during my trip). anyway you all are absolute candy-red sugar-glass and i appreciate you so much.

coming soon: chapter thirty-three. apolytus.
summary: rocket collects on a xeronian bounty. pearl muses on life and death.
warnings: lingerie-shopping. angst about relationships and mentions of past abuse, descriptions of tattoo-related sensations, brief mentions of cunnilingus, biting, cockwarming, and pussy-slapping.
estimated date: tuesday, june 24.

･:꧂posting schedules, previews, headcanons, art, & more on tumblr♡
･:꧂cicatrix art, masterlist, & moodboard♡

other exciting things:
♡ tuesday, june 17. birdie. | chapter one. untitled. ✩ | ❤︎‬
♡ thursday, june 19. birdie. | chapter two. untitled. ✩ | ❤︎
♡ tuesday, june 24. cicatrix. | chapter thirty-three. | apolytus. ❤︎

Chapter 33: apolytus.

Summary:

rocket collects on a xeronian bounty. pearl muses on life, death, and fron.

Notes:

warnings: lingerie-shopping. angst about relationships and mentions of past abuse, descriptions of tattoo-related sensations/pain, brief mentions of cunnilingus, biting, cockwarming, and pussy-slapping fantasies.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

apolytus. the moment you realize you are changing as a person, finally outgrowing your old problems like a reptile shedding its skin, already able to twist back around and chuckle at this weirdly antiquated caricature of yourself that will soon come off completely. From apolysis, the stage of molting when an invertebrate’s shell begins to separate from the skin beneath it + adultus, sacrificed. Pronounced “ah-pahl-i-tuhs.” The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Pearl had been both right and wrong about picking out panties.

In some ways, it had been easier. At least, she hadn’t been so terrified of making a wrong choice. But then she’d just liked so many things. Xeronian underwear is constructed in a fascinating way, she’s realized: two interlocking loops of soft, stretchy fabric that will cross-cross over the curls between her thighs, curve over each respective hip, and then form another x to cup her ass. The gusset between her legs can be split apart easily — a fact which Rocket had commented on with gleaming, molten-ruby eyes and a flash of teeth. He‘d watched as she’d skimmed her fingers over seams and stitches, each garment made with slightly different fabrics that all feel opulent against her fingers.

The brassieres are sewn similarly: two wide bands of cloth cradling her breasts, crossing over her heart and spine. She hadn’t been wearing one before, but these had looked surprisingly comfortable and soft. She’d fingered the fine fabrics, browsing different styles: some made with wider or slimmer bands; others with cutaway-keyholes that turned parts of the clothing into nothing but strappy little confections. A few had been crafted from a material so scandalously-fine that they might as well have been made of air.

The entire time, Rocket’s eyes had licked at her fingertips, and she‘d had the vague sense that he’d been cataloguing every piece that she’d lingered over.

“Could get more than one pair, you know,” he’d suggested mildly, examining the split-gusset on a pretty pair of panties with laser-cut lace patterning the edges. But pearl had shaken her head — still leery of overspending — before finally settling on a matching set made of inky purple-blue stretch-cotton woven with golden thread. It had reminded her of stars set deep in the wide expanse of space, and she’d felt a warm spark igniting in her belly at the thought of wearing them for Rocket under the dome in their quarters: surrounded by stars, and wearing them too.

When they’d finally made their way back to the shelRandau home, the rest of their little crew — their family, as pearl’s been starting to think of them — had already returned. An early-afternoon meal had been spread on the low tables, and two new Xeronians had been sitting with them, sharing fruit and bread and cheese. They’d barely noticed Rocket and pearl, too entrenched in a heated conversation with Drax about pacifist defensive strategies.

“Who’re these two?” Rocket had asked Nebula, who’d been sitting to one side with Groot, nibbling on sliced-and-sugared yaro root.

Nebula had shrugged.

“The Fourth and Sixth Xeronian Treasurers,” D’au had responded, sweeping into the room. One eye had curved in what pearl had assumed was a dry, lopsided smirk. “They’re here to negotiate the transfer of funds.”

Rocket had blinked, nonplussed. “The what for why?”

The corners of D’au’s eyes had crinkled. “The transfer of funds,” she repeats. “In exchange for bringing me home safely.”

He’d blinked again. “Didn’t realize you had a bounty on your head, too,” he’d said cautiously, and D’au had shrugged.

“Neither did I,” the Inheritor had said mildly.

The Sixth Treasurer had apparently managed to extricate himself from the conversation from Drax. “We had multiple publically-broadcasting transmissions that offered rewards for information leading to her whereabouts,” he’d added. “You’ve not only done us a great service by locating D’au shelRandau, but in liberating her from the Collector’s emporium and bringing her safely home.”

“As well-positioned as Xeron is in the greater intergalactic community, they wouldn’t have had the resources to retrieve me from Tivan, even if they had known I was on Knowhere,” D’au had added. “There’s nothing that they could have offered him in exchange for me that he would have accepted. And as you know, our capacity to fight is lacking.”

“The debt we owe you is incalculable,” the Fourth Treasurer had said, looking toward Rocket — eyes curving in the unique version of the Xeronian smile. “But let us begin to try.”

“Guess m’not gonna frickin’ argue,” Rocket had muttered under his breath, though he’d sounded strangely pleased.

“While you’re discussing, Little Sister and I will go spend some time together,” D’au had added, extending one palm toward pearl. Rocket’s eyes had gone narrow — and so had Nebula’s, actually.

Pearl’s eyes had narrowed right back. At both of them, actually.

“It will be fine,” she’d said firmly, taking D’au’s hand in hers.

Rocket’s brow had arched, and his lip had curled in something that pearl is starting to realize is amused admiration. “Brat.“

A frisson of delight had spiralled up along her spine at the subtle threat. She’d tilted her chin mutinously. “Rocket.”

He’d rolled his eyes. “At least take Groot with you,” he’d grumbled. “For me.”

“I am Groot,” Groot had agreed.

Nebula had snorted. “What is he going to do if something bad happens?”

“I am Groot,” Groot had gasped, offended.

“He’s got a blaster if he needs it. And comms,” Rocket had said, and he’d given Groot a nod.

“Should I go with them too?” Drax had piped up.

“No,” Rocket had said sharply. “You need more babysitting than she does.”

Pearl had scowled. “I don’t need a babysitter—”

Rocket’s expression had matched hers. “Yeah, well. I need you to have one.” Something had softened in the stitch of his brow. “You’ll have me pulling all my fur out if you go alone.”

“Again with the sitting,” Drax had muttered beneath his breath.

“I think I’m insulted,” D’au had added mildly, but she’d sounded more amused than anything else. She’d extended her free hand toward the Taluhnisan. “We’ll be gone for a few hours, at least. I hope you’ll stay with us another night — delay your departure until tomorrow morning.”

Rocket had frowned, and his eyes had caught pearl’s. “Is that what you want to do?”

She’d squeezed D’au’s hand — then cast her eyes to Rocket and to Groot — and finally to Nebula and Drax. “Do you mind? I know we haven’t talked about our very next steps after we leave here…”

Her gaze had flicked back to Rocket’s meaningfully. As far as she’d been aware, they’d still planned to drop Groot off on Taluhnia eventually, then make their way to the Thneed system. But they hadn’t spoken about parting ways with Groot — or Drax and Nebula — since Knowhere, and at some point, she’d known they’ll need to address it.

As much as she might not want to.

“I’m fine to stay another night,” Nebula had rasped, her dark eyes flickering over their surroundings with something in them that pearl hadn’t been able to decipher — something had seemed both bitter and wistful, all at once. Drax had nodded.

“I am Groot,” Groot had offered.

“All right, all right,” Rocket had muttered, but he hadn’t sounded annoyed at all. Pearl had flashed him a grateful smile, clutching onto D’au’s hand and bouncing lightly on the balls of her feet. Something had flashed in his eyes then — hot and fervent, sending a spike of desire lancing through pearl’s core — and then he’d turned away, ducking his head and palming the back of his neck as if he were blushing,

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

“Laser tattoos are quicker and less painful,” D’au says, “but if you want an authentic experience, we should get it done traditionally, with Shuddering Needles. It’s still much faster than it would have been even a few decenniums ago — but it does hurt more than the lasers.”

Pearl’s mouth curves. “I don’t mind pain,” she confesses, and feels her cheeks coloring at the brief intrusion of certain more-memorable moments, stolen with Rocket in the captain’s quarters and cockpit.

“I am Groot,” Groot says mildly, and pearl’s blush grows exponentially hotter, prickling from her eyelids and all the way down her chest. She thinks even the roots of her hair might turn pink, and she tosses Groot a look that she hopes says, I’d pinch you if you had skin.

But if D’au notices her Terran friend’s sudden embarrassment, she gives no indication. She simply turns down a clean alley where two orloni fight over half of someone’s discarded or stolen oryza bun, and tugs pearl with her. The Taluhnisan follows with a bemused smile on his face, eyes soft and indulgent, as D’au leads them to a door of beveled-glass diamonds. It disturbs a set of punched-tin chimes as it opens, sending a soft clatter into the air.

The inside of the parlor is lovely. Surprisingly dim, for what pearl thinks of as essentially an art studio. But the light and shadow paints over everything in a comforting, cozy way, lacking the distracting lacelike patterns of most of Xeron’s lamps and windows.

“S’aundik,” D’au greets the tattooist, her eyes crinkling above her face-plates. “Thank you for making time for us. This is Groot. And this — is the Little Sister I told you about.”

S’aundik turns from where he’s preparing his inks, and rises from his stool. He’s significantly larger than most Xeronians, he almost makes Drax look normal-sized. Even Groot no longer seems quite as oversized beside him. One eye is hidden behind a patch and a scar blossoms over his temple and cheek, while the scowl that etches into his brow distorts his traditional Xeronian-blue blessings. He looks furious — but pearl’s well-versed in dealing with fury, so she doesn’t flinch when he reaches for her.

She is, however, startled by the gentleness he uses when he gathers her hands in his own. Whatever accident had taken his eye appears to have taken some fingers as well, and his large hands clasp hers like she’s made of glass.

“Does Little Sister have a name?” he asks, and his voice is a soothing rumble, like ocean waves on a smooth-stone shore. “I’d like to thank the woman who saved my friend.”

Pearl falters. So far, every Xeronian has seemed content with the Little Sister designation that D’au has used to introduce her, and they hadn’t discussed an alternative—

“I am Groot,” Groot replies, and S’aundik nods to him without letting go of pearl’s fingers.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Groot.”

“Oh,” pearl interrupts. “That — that is his name. But that’s not what he’s saying. He’s Taluhnisan, and — well — the ligneous larynx — I mean, it sounds like he’s only saying I am Groot. Ever. But there’s a lot more complexity. I’ll — I’ll translate.”

D’au chuckles.

“We mostly call her Princess,” the Inheritor says mildly, and S’aundik’s singular eye shimmers thoughtfully, even though his face still seems to be set in a scowl.

“Well, Princess,” he says, and inclines his head slightly while still holding pearl’s hands carefully captive. His shoulders look even more massive from this angle, and for the first time, she realizes that his arms, hands, and throat are all covered in tattoos as well. “Thank you for bringing D’au shelRandau home. She is precious to many of us.”

“Oh,” pearl says awkwardly. Wandering Xeron with her friends has brought tears to her eyes more than once in this past rotation. She’s seen the planet before, but only from the side of Wyndham or the Recorders. Few Xeronians had been permitted to engage with her, and those who had spoken to her had been deferential at best. More often, she’d felt the underlying fear, the occasional disdain.

And while she’d chatted briefly with D’au’s family over their meal yesterday — and the Treasurers today — this feels different.

She’s out in the city she’d often seen but never truly visited, standing in the tattoo parlor of a lovely, gruff Xeronian with gentle hands, and he’s not looking at her with apprehension or contempt. Only with kindness and acceptance, as if she’s just another person who he might like to know.

“I wish I could claim all the credit,” she says uncertainly. “It was a bit of a group effort, though. My friends—”

“Yes, I’ve heard about them too,” S’aundik says mildly, tugging her hands to gently herd her toward an adjustable synth-leather cot. “But none of it would have happened without you.”

Pearl’s brow curls in disconcertion. “Oh, I don’t—“

“Are we working with lasers today?” S’aundik interrupts, and pearl blinks.

“I thought… traditional, maybe?”

Rocket’s voice lingers in her ear: a smirking growl. Say what you want, brat.

“Traditional,” she repeats more firmly, and both of S’aundik’s brows drift upward. He casts a questioning glance at D’au, who settles into a nearby chair with the hint of a grin in her eyes.

“Why are you looking at me?” she clicks, folding her arms and nodding toward pearl. “You heard Little Sister.”

He chuckles and turns back. “That I did,” he acknowledges. “And what would you like tattooed on your skin, Princess? Xandarans tend to like watercolors, and sparkling city-skylines. Kree request geometrica most often, in solid blacks and golds.”

Pearl hesitates, her eyes flickering over his arms. One is covered from shoulder to knuckles in traditional blueing: dozens of blessings-on-blessings. The other is a flowing patchwork of different images and styles: lace and script, portraiture and illustration. Detailed mechanical schematics and solid black cuffs around his bicep, stippled grays and bright punches of color, jewels and architectural wonders, celestial starscapes and delicate botanicals.

Her eyes cling to the curling vine and its spray of blossoms, spiraling and coiling around his forearm. They look so real, so bright and alive that she can feel the glossy satin of the leaves, the thin silk of the petals. She can smell them. Her fingers reach for the flowers before she realizes it, but she manages to snatch her hand back before touching him.

“Do you… do you do florals?” She can hear that there’s something wistful and longing in her voice.

“I am Groot,” Groot murmurs, sounding delighted.

S’aundik looks surprised. “I do,” he admits, and he sounds admiring. “To be truthful, I’ve never tattooed them on a woman,” he admits. “They’re considered a more masculine theme in Xeronian culture.”

Pearl blinks up at him, then laughs giddily. “Even better,” she says, delight turning the edges of her words golden and crisp. “On my arm, maybe? A sleeve?”

S’aundik pulls a datapad from beneath the cot. “Are there particular flowers you’d like?” he asks. “I have a library of references, or we can look in the Intergalactic Archives—“

Her hands tug at the ends of her hair — but it feels like an act of excitement this time, and not anxiety. “Do you have access to Terran flowers?”

He inclines his head with a faint smile, then taps a few screens. “Some,” he says. “Perhaps you can describe the ones we can’t find?”

She chews at her lip. “I don’t remember them very well,” she admits. “Or at least, I’m not sure my memory is right. But maybe I can find some other ones that look similar?”

S’aundik hunches his large body closer to hers, and they pour over the images together. They’re able to find cherry blossoms and lilacs and forget-me-nots, delphinium and anemones — but the hydrangeas and feverfew daisies are more difficult. Pearl ends up choosing globes of fluffy, fleecy Aladnan viburnum to replace the hydrangeas, and luxurious, gleaming-white asteraceae from a moon off Deneb-7 to represent the feverfew.

Pearl inhales as S’aundik sketches a pattern on a datapad — fills her lungs with something quiet and steady. Fairy and Lylla and the maid and the tutor; his wife and their child and a few other new additions to her imaginary cemetery. It’ll be a memorial on her skin: something that feels tangible, and real.

Something that can’t be gaslit into nothingness.

The exhalation empties her out of more than air, and when she breathes in again, it feels like something clicks into place. Old bones that had been supported only by the structure of her grief and guilt seem to resettle, back where they belong.

Her next breath is shallower, but it comes more easily than she’s felt in years.

“I am Groot,” Groot says quietly, squeezing her shoulder.

“May I make a suggestion, Little Sister?”

Pearl turns moonsilver eyes toward D’au as she wriggles out of her fluffy silver cardigan. She’s grateful she wore the sleeveless Bzermikitikolok and the Knowheremen shirt today, though goosebumps prickle out on her skin.

“Here on Xeron, our blessings are given to us by friends and family,” D’au explains. “If you’re willing to let me, I would love to choose some for you. S’aundik can ink them somewhere separately, or hide them in your flowers.”

Pearl feels everything under her ribs soften. “D’au.” Wistfulness curls around her words. “I’d love that.”

“What did you have in mind?” the tattooist asks his friend. D’au winks at pearl, then leans toward S’aundik and murmurs in his ear. The words are in Xeronian, but they’re too quiet for pearl to pick out more than a few soft clicks and clatters. S’aundik grunts softly, and nods.

“Would you like them hidden, Princess?” he asks, and pearl shakes her blue curls emphatically. The tattooist grunts again and lifts his chin toward D’au, who opens a small drawer in one of his cabinets and pulls out a little circlet of stretchy flex-vinyl.

“Let me tie your hair out of his way?” D’au offers and pearl nods.

“Sorry,” she apologizes to S’aundik, and his single eye crinkles up at her.

“No apologies, Princess,” he rumbles gently. D’au’s hands fly through the blue curls, sleeking pearl’s mane into a loose semblance of a braid. She drapes the tassel over pearl’s opposite shoulder, tucking it safely out of S’aundik’s way.

“I think they’d be pretty above the flowers, right here,” the artist adds, drawing a line with his finger on pearl’s upper arm. “We’ll make an inverted window down into the blossoms — an ogee-shape, or a pointed cinquefoil. We can line your blessings right up the middle. Does that sound good?”

She hums a happy agreement as S’aundik pulls out a stylus of soft red wax and draws them on her skin: patterns of lines and starry dots, like constellations and rotational maps, planetary rings and asteroid belts. And then, scalloped around them like lace, he sketches in a ruffly patterns of petals and leaves, intricate knots of interwoven stems. The linework flows around her arm from shoulder to halfway down her forearm.

“More?” S’aundik asks, and she’s so in awe of his work that she can only shake her head mutely. His shoulders shake and his face-plates clatter as he laughs. “If you want more one day, Princess, you can come back to me — free of charge. I’ll bring your bouquet all the way down to your knuckles if you want.”

“Color?” D’au asks, and pearl nods.

When S’aundik begins his work, the parlor fills with a low hum. The traditional Shuddering Needles feel like hot streaks of sparks on her skin. S’aundik starts his work at her shoulder, and every nerve in her arm blurs into a buzzing, biting heat. Pearl leans into the feel of it, drinking in the sensation. It doesn’t hurt — not exactly, anyway, and not all the time. There are moments when it does — parts of the back and inside of her upper arm feel like he’s carving into them — but mostly, it just feels interesting. Good, even: warm and stinging, something she can sink into. The quiet hum and the constant whir of her senses pull her in, and she finds her thoughts ruffling lazily, like feathers or fur in a breeze. Time slips. She thinks of Rocket, of course. Of Nebula and Drax, Groot and Littlefoot. She thinks of how many choices she’s made today, from nice things to soften the captain’s quarters — all the way down to the flowers being inked into her arm. She thinks of how lovely Xeron is, how pleasant all the people she’s met seem to be. She thinks about their hospitality. She thinks of the story D’au had told them — of her many-greats-grandfather, and the defenses they’ve built in spite of the pacifism programmed into their genes.

“Do you have diplomatic ties to Sovereign?” pearl asks on a buzzy, endorphin-drenched whim.

There’s a moment of silence. S’aundik pauses in his work to adjust something before the Shuddering Needles begin to hum again.

“No, Little Sister,” D’au says quietly, confusion coloring her voice and the soft clatter of her plates.

Pearl hums a note. “Something to look into, maybe,” she offers dreamily. Then, “What about Luphom or Kylos?”

“Not Kylos, though I can see why you might think diplomatic ties with them could be useful. We did have a relationship with Luphom, but it crumbled after the Mad Titan attacked. Our cultural center was demolished by his Black Order.”

“It might be worth re-establishing ties to Luphom, and reaching out to Kylos,” pearl says, her eyelids drooping in the euphoria of the tattoo. When S’aundik pauses again, she takes the opportunity to flex her fingers. “Both suffered significantly after the Black Order attacks. They’d likely be open to partnerships that can bring stability, resources, and aid into their communities. Luphom may have been set back by their losses, but even so, their medical technology is decennium — at least — beyond most other planets. Kylosian culture is rooted in combat, but outsiders overlook how much of it is built on ideas of honor, and the desire to protect. Alliances with either of them…” She trails off and makes a loose gesture with her free arm, as if to toast the idea of it. “Win-win. No. Win-win-win. Mutual beneficence, all around.”

“I think you mean mutual benefit,” D’au corrects gently, with a smile in her words.

“Mm, no,” pearl disagrees as her eyelids flutter closed again. “I meant what I said.”

There’s a moment of lingering quiet.

“I am Groot,” Groot says at last, and D’au laughs softly — self-deprecatingly.

“Fair enough, Little Sister. I wish all interplanetary negotiations could go through you.” The statement doesn’t seem mocking though — just rueful. And fascinated. “Do you have other cosmo-political recommendations for me?”

“Mm-hmm,” pearl hums. She’s not sure how long she rambles: asking after Xeron’s current ambassadorial relationships, suggesting slight changes to some of them, nodding in agreement to others. Gently — almost whimsically — bringing up her knowledge of different languages, and using them to tease out notes of Xeron’s knowledge of a number of other planets and systems as well. There are three more planets she suggests the Xeronians try to make contact with — Atraxia, Deon, and Wxxyn — before her thoughts fade into something soft and fuzzy. She dozes for a while, floating in and out of consciousness on the buzzing hum of the needles. Time slides past her again, and what finally pricks her back into wakefulness isn’t the song of the Shuddering Needles — which has now become a low throb over her whole arm — but something more melancholic.

“I am Groot?”

“Little Sister? Are you all right?” D’au asks as pearl’s eyes flutter open and her brow creases. She raises her other hand to her eyes, trying to brush the cobwebs from them.

“Your tolerance is impressive, but we can take a break,” S’aundik adds, but pearl shakes her head.

“I’m just — getting emotional,” pearl protests, dismayed at the sudden sting of tears in her eyes. She scrubs the back of her free hand across her lashes. “I’m not sure why.”

“Sometimes that happens with long tattoos,” the artist says gently. “The body releases adrenaline and endorphins, and it can leave some people feeling — vulnerable.”

“What’s on your mind, Little Sister?” D’au asks quietly.

Pearl hesitates, and fights down the impulse to shrug. Her free fingers tug on the end of her braid. She blinks up at Groot.

“I am Groot,” he encourages softly.

Pearl crinkles her nose at that particular bit of advice, then turns toward D’au. “Can I ask you a question, Little Sister?”

“Of course,” the Xeronian says fondly. Pearl chews her lip.

“I don’t think you would be surprised if I admitted that I was in an… unhealthy relationship for a long time,” she says quietly.

D’au stiffens. “I would not call that a relationship, Little Sister.”

S’aundik remains silent, gently rotating pearl’s arm so he can work on the soft, tender skin inside.

“I just wonder,” pearl continues doggedly. “I was with him for so long. I watched him hurt so many people. I almost—” Her voice falls into a whisper. “I almost married him.”

“He hurt you, too,” D’au says quietly. “And as you’ve said before — he is evil.”

Pearl draws in a slow, steadying breath. “I don’t…”

There’s a long moment of quiet, gently rumpled by the serene hum of the needles.

“You don’t what, Little Sister?” D’au asks softly, and when pearl shifts uncomfortably, S’aundik latches a hand onto her arm.

“Don’t move, Princess,” he utters, not unkindly.

“Sorry,” she murmurs, and her eyes flick back to D’au’s. “It feels wrong,” she says at last, “to want… certain things.”

D’au’s blue eyes are wide and solemn. “What do you mean?”

Pearl chews her lip and wishes more than ever that she could pull on the ends of her braid, or fumble her fingers into her cardigan. She flexes the hand attached to her free arm: curling and stretching each knuckle nervously.

“It took me less than a cycle to know I wanted to stay with Rocket,” she whispers at last. “And I think some part of me knew, even then, that I wanted forever. But I’ve been… thinking about it more lately. About… what it would mean, to be bound to him like I almost was with H— like I almost was with my — my ex.”

She swallows, and when she speaks again, her voice trembles.

“I don’t even — Rocket doesn’t even want that,” she says quietly. “To be my — to be together like that. But I want it. And I feel — stupid for wanting it, because I — because of my ex. And scared, too. And maybe… maybe guilty? For all of it? No,” she corrects herself. “Not guilty, exactly.” She takes in another breath — tries to keep her arm still as it trips up her lungs. “I think I feel ashamed. For wanting something that I — I don’t think I should want.”

D’au sucks in a breath. Her brow hunches mournfully. “Little Sister—“

“Do you think I’m stupid?” pearl asks quickly, before she loses her courage. “It’s okay to be honest. Or — I don’t know if I’m asking the right question. Do you think it’s — wrong, or bad, or foolish of me? To — to be like this? Clingy? Or — or dependent?”

S’aundik pauses in his work, gently wiping away the blood that has risen to the surface of her skin. His brow is furrowed too, but pearl doesn’t notice — her eyes are locked urgently on D’au’s.

D’au swallows. “Little Sister,” she says quietly. “If you’re dependent on Rocket, he’s equally dependent on you.”

Pearl snorts softly. “I don’t know if that’s true,” she says with a subtle scoff she never would have dreamed of giving, even just a quarter ago. “But even if it were, I don’t know that codependency is much better.”

“Rocket is an ass,” D’au says suddenly. Pearl’s mouth parts and her eyes widen, but D’au is holding up a slender palm before pearl can jump to his defense. “He is. You won’t convince me otherwise. And yet. I think he’s also… very good. And I think he cares about you very much.” She shrugs. “All social species in the universe look for bonds, Little Sister. We seek them out because they’re a matter of survival.”

“No-one knows this better than Xeronians,” S’aundik adds wryly from his place hunched over pearl’s forearm. “When you are a pacifist species by nature, relationships are the only way you can survive.”

D’au nods. “Do I think it’s stupid for you to love him?” she asks with her head tilted — rhetorically. “Even to want to marry him? No, Little Sister. I think if you find someone in this whole cold cosmos to hold onto — and they want to hold onto you back — then it’s something we can celebrate.”

Pearl takes a shaky breath as the Inheritor holds her gaze.

“It would be easy not to trust yourself,” D’au adds quietly. “Your former betrothed taught you that, didn’t he?”

Mute now, pearl nods. Her eyes feel big as moons in her face, and the space behind them tightens with new tears.

“I don’t think daydreaming about marrying your lover means that you’re stupid,” D’au says softly. “I think it means that you’re healing.”

Pearl can’t help the shudder that hits her collarbone when she tries to breathe in. The air in her lungs catches on a single, dry sob, but S’aundik has already paused his work.

D’au reaches for both her hands — squeezes them again in her own.

“And I think, as you keep healing, you’ll learn how to trust yourself again, too.”

Pearl’s tears spill over, and she withdraws one hand to blot them on the back of her wrist.

“S-sorry,” she says shakily. “I didn’t — I never thought of it like that—”

D’au squeezes her one hand again, then reaches up to thumb away what’s left of pearl’s tears. “You would have,” she says affectionately, “if someone else had come to you and asked the same questions you asked me. You just couldn’t see it for yourself, Little Sister.”

S’aundik peels off his gloves and washes his hands — fills a pretty tin cup with cool water from a fountain-sink and hands it to pearl. “Drink that,” he tells her mildly. “When you’re ready, we’ll finish. It will only be a little longer now.”

She does, and she settles back into her position. The Shuddering Needles hum to life, and pearl turns D’au’s words over in her head and wonders if they’re enough. It’s impossible to tell, but for right now — with the pulsing heat of her arm and the buzz of the needles, and the sugary flood of endorphins still dancing in her system like champagne — for right now, it’s a start.

“All set,” S’aundik says, so soon that pearl wonders if she’d dozed off again. He sits back, allowing her to ease upright and swing her legs over the edge of the cot. The full-length mirror on the wall shows pearl herself: chaotic lilac-blue curls wrestled into a messy braid, the Knowheremen shirt barely covering her. Her left arm is lacy with misty blues and pinks, lavenders and creams, and silvery touches of green: a sleeve of blossoms and memories — some for people she’s never met, but all of whom she’s connected to, somehow.

“I am Groot,” Groot says emphatically.

“What do you think, Princess?”

Her lips curve into a wobbly half-smile as she turns her arm, admiring the sheen of smooth color, the wispy linework. Every furled flower looks so soft and silken, so rippling and ruffly that she almost thinks she could hold her forearm to her nose and breathe in a lungful of lilac-perfume and cherry blossom. The forget-me-nots and the almost-hydrangeas nearly match her hair, just a shade more lavender than the three blue blessings that line their way up the slope of her shoulder.

“It’s so beautiful,” she breathes. Her smile blooms wider. “Thank you so much, S’aundik. Both of you,” she adds, eyes flickering to D’au as well. She doesn’t want to look away for long, though — not from the satiny image stamped on her skin. Her nerves continue to throb — a vague awareness of heat and pulsing pain, but nothing that bothers her; nothing that does more than lightly press against her awareness. It reminds her of the calescent weight of Rocket’s gaze, heavy on her skin: branding her with warmth, leaving shiny pink burns in its wake. Like his stare — like his hands — the pulse of the tattoo is reaffirming, in a way. It’s proof that she’s alive.

More importantly, it’s proof that she can still feel.

And it’s not only a memorial. It’s not only a dedication to those who have been lost to Herbert’s hubris. It’s a reclaiming of her self, too. It’s a mark of her ownership over her own body, and everything that’s inside her, too.

“Do you want to know what blessings I chose for you?” D’au asks, and for the first time, pearl thinks there’s something tentative in the steward’s voice — as if she’s suddenly nervous. Pearl can feel radiance widening her smile even further as she looks up at D’au.

“Yes, please,” she says eagerly, and D’au smiles behind her faceplates.

The pale woman gestures toward the bottom-most symbol: a pattern of interlocking circles, spangled with tiny dots. “Family, first of all.”

There’s a happy flutter under pearl’s sternum. She has that, now. For the first time in her whole life, pearl thinks she has the start of a real family. D’au reaches for her hand, and the Xeronian’s electricity-blue eyes turn solemn. Her finger hovers over the next tattoo, just above the first.

“Freedom,” the Xeronian steward says quietly. “I want freedom for you, Little Sister. From anyone who hunts you, and from the guilt that haunts you. I want you to be able to put it down.”

“The Xeronian blessing for freedom and forgiveness is the same,” S’aundik adds mildly — gentle, despite the low rumble of his voice. “The difference is only found in how it’s used, in context.”

“Which is immaterial when it comes to traditional blueing,” D’au finishes, and cradles pearl’s hand in her own. “For all intents and purposes, you’ll receive the abundance of both.”

Pearl’s voice tightens, and her eyes sting — a pain far sharper than anything in her arms. Her heart twists: remorse, still. Guilt, still. Some fragments of shame that linger. But also, something grateful and generous and hopeful.

“One more,” D’au says, and reaches out to touch the crest of pearl’s shoulder, just above the final tattoo. “Right here at the top.” It’s a circle, slightly elongated: an oval, with a series of dots.

It looks, pearl thinks, strikingly like one of her made-up constellations.

“Justice,” the steward says, and pearl feels the word like a ripple of electricity along her system: a jolt of awareness and recognition, and of resonant, crystalline familiarity.

Dicé, she thinks.

“Justice,” Da’u repeats, her voice fierce and even. “May you see it done to anyone who’s ever wronged you, Little Sister.”

Pearl’s throat tightens, and her eyes sting. She can feel her lashes dampening, clustering together in sooty blue star-shapes.

“I want to see it for everyone,” she says softly, and D’au squeezes her hand again.

“I know, Little Sister,” she says quietly. “And you will.”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

The night had been a blurred haze of honeyed fruit-desserts, with Drax and Groot and the rest of D’au’s family all sprinkling praise over the quality of pearl’s tattoo, making her rotate her arm this way and that so they could admire it through the hazy veil of ointment that S’aundik had slathered over it. Even Nebula had looked impressed. Rocket had taken one glance at the flowering sleeve and turned away, and pearl might have been hurt by it if he hadn’t immediately begun to interrogate D’au about proper care and healing.

Because of course he would.

Later that night — after Rocket had made her try on her Xeronian lingerie for him, leering over the open gusset of the panties before licking her between the panels of soft fabric — he sits at her side where she’s sprawled sleepily in the sunken, silken Xeronian bed. He holds her delicately by her left wrist, turning her arm gently, watching the way the ink collects up different shimmering shades of violet-blues and roses.

“Do these flower-things mean anything special?” he asks. “Or you just like ‘em ‘cause they reminded you of home?”

Pearl stares up into the dark wood beams of the ceilings: draped with shadows, stitched with the lacey light from the tin hanging lanterns. She could find her constellations in the manufactured starscape, if she wanted to.

“In my part of Terra,” she says slowly, “when someone died, usually their family would bury them.”

He grimaces. “What the fuck, kitten.”

A soft huff of laughter parts her lips. “Then people would come and put flowers on their graves. Plant them, sometimes.”

There’s a moment of silence, and then he says begrudgingly, “Well, that’s kinda nice, I guess.”

“It is,” she agrees softly. “It’s a way of honoring them. And — for me, anyway — it helps to think about how life doesn’t end. All a person’s matter just… breaks down into energy, and becomes something new. There are lots of Terran philosophies that consider death to be more of a — a transition than an ending. The beginning of a transformation. For me, that’s part of what these flowers mean too.” She hesitates. “Of course, death is still sad — of course it is — but it gives me some comfort to think of it this way. To think about how a person is never really gone.”

His breath is soft on her inked skin. “These are for all your friends who died?” he asks, and she startles.

Of course he’s right. Of course he’d know exactly who she’d gotten them for, and of course he’d cut right through the heart of the matter to call them her friends. She’d never allowed herself to think of them that way — not really.

They’d always been the people she’d been responsible for hurting.

“I—” Her voice fractures and softens, and she swallows — then nods. “Yeah. Yes. My friends.”

Her skin is still stinging and raw under the ointment, like a flush of sunburn, and she’s careful not to touch the blooms when she turns her arm to show them off to him again. “These pink ones remind me of Fairy. Cherry blossoms. And these pale, purplish-blue ones are for the linguist. They look like a Terran flower — a hydrangea. And the white delphinium is for the maid.”

“An’ these?” Rocket asks, peering at the plush clusters of tiny blossoms that fill in the empty spaces between stem and leaf with layers of deep, lacy blue. Pearl feels a faint, wistful tug at the corner of her mouth, bittersweet and soft.

“Forget-me-nots,” she says quietly. “For the linguist’s wife and child.”

He shakes his head slowly, though his eyes don’t leave the tattoo. She can feel them, twice as hot as the lingering sting of the ink itself. “You’re a strange girl, pearl. Puttin’ a frickin’ columbarium on your arm.”

Another laugh filters up her throat, warm and floating. But before she can respond, he’s hovering two fingers just a breath above another thick, frilly fountain of pale purple petals. “What about these ones?”

Her heart trips over itself, suddenly floundering. She hadn’t thought about how he might react to her makeshift memorial to his own family.

His gaze flicks to hers, a little knot of concern tightening the space between his brows. “Pearl?”

Her voice comes out crumpled and hushed. “Those are lilacs. For Lylla.”

His crimson-hot eyes widen fractionally, and then dart down to her arm again.

“I’m sorry,” she spills out, trying to sit up — tugging her forearm out of his grasp. He lets her. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

“Wait—”

“I just thought — ever since you mentioned her, I thought about her—”

“Pearl, shut up,” he interrupts sharply, and his claws prickle against her pulse as he bracelets her wrist. He tugs her arm back toward himself. His voice is dense and heavy in his throat, and she can’t tell if he’s hopeful or furious — only that he sounds so full of something that the edges of his words crackle. “Lemme see.”

Her apologies crush into stardust in her mouth and she winces, then gives in: turning toward him, letting him continue to peer at her new sleeve of soft color and flowers. The silence clings to everything around her, draped like gossamer and spidersilk, glistening over her skin and Rocket’s fur and all the tiny beams and freckles of light.

“Yeah,” Rocket breathes at last, his breath sifting gently over the sting of her arm. He’s nearly got his nose pressed to her skin. “Yeah, okay. I can see that.” When his eyes cant up to hers again, her breath catches behind her clavicle.

They’re wet.

The sight of him becomes soft and blurry in her vision — sequined at the edges by the flakes of lantern-light — and it takes her a slow moment to realize she’s got tears studding her own eyelashes now, like little mirrors and prisms.

“They’re one of the most-loved flowers on Terra,” she breathes softly. “I don’t remember much from when I was a kid, but I remember there were a bunch of them growing wild in one of the creeks near my neighbor’s trailer. She — my neighbor — she loved gardening. She only had this tiny yard with a falling-apart rusted fence and broken concrete, but every spare patch of earth was full of flowers. She taught me so much. And the lilacs were some of my favorites. In the late Spring, I’d play in her yard by the ditch so I could breathe them in. I’d go there to hide from my mom’s boyfriends. When I got a little older, that’s where I’d take my schoolwork.” She swallows. “They were so beautiful. Comforting and lovely. Like the softest lace. And they smelled like pure springtime: sweet, like honey and roses. Light and airy. They always seemed like a promise of better things. And — on Terra, anyway — a name like Lylla—” She says it slowly: breathing out the syllables, and letting the consonants cling to her lips. She’s not sure what language the real Lylla had named herself in, but in pearl’s home language, the allusion would have been clear. “On Terra, where I lived, Lylla would have been a reference to lilacs.”

His throat works, and blinks rapidly. She watches the silver in his eyes spill into his fur.

“Yeah,” he repeats at last, his voice hoarse and broken. “I can see that.”

She tugs a handful of curls with her other hand — nervous, with a twisting ache behind her sternum, and the urge to reach out for him so strong in her fingertips that they tremble.

“I—” She takes in a ragged breath. “These—” Her fingers ghost over the pale pink and ivory anemones peeking through here and there. “A95,” she says softly. “They reminded me of the way you described him. I don’t know why. The dark eye. The soft fullness of the petals. They symbolize sincerity.”

Something catches in Rocket’s throat. His shoulders shudder, and all pearl wants to do is wrap him in her arms. But she stays still as he rotates her arm this way and that. The fur of his face is damp and his breath kisses every flower on her skin.

“This one,” he mumbles at last. “Is this one — for L06?”

She nods, and her teeth sink into her lip. “It’s—”

“Asteraceae,” he fills in. “It’s a pricey flower out here. Rare, but popular. Everybody knows what it is.” His voice splinters. “Everybody loves it.”

Pearl presses her lips together softly. “I wasn’t familiar with that background,” she admits. “Herbert didn’t care for me to learn much about frivolous things, and he thought flowers were frivolous. But — the way you describe it makes me feel like it was definitely the right choice.” The corner of her mouth curves quietly. Wistfully. “Rare and well-loved.”

Rocket makes a soft, choked sound. “Why’d you choose it, then?” he asks.

She tilts her head to try and catch another glimpse of his eyes. “It looks like a flower from Terra, called feverfew,” she says slowly. Gently. “They’re so small, and pretty, and sunny. They’re associated with happiness, but more than that, they’re medicinal. They — they ease pain.”

Rocket’s hand releases her wrist. His clawed fingers curl into a loose fist over the end of his nose, and his shoulders rattle. A gutted, gasping noise — a sob — lurches up from his lungs.

“Rocket—” His name breaks across her lips, soft and tattered. She wraps her other arm around him and tugs them both down, deep into the cushions of their Xeronian bed. He buries his face between her breasts, but there’s nothing sexual about it this time; his claws prickle over the slopes of her back and then cling to the satin skin there, pulling her in so close that it feels like he’s trying to crawl into her heart.

As if she didn’t already carry him there.

He weeps against her for a long time: almost-silent, other than a few heaving breaths. His hands clutch and spasm against her, and hers stroke against the back of his head: threading her fingers into all his fur and sadness, all his loss and grief. Trying to hold onto some small amount of it for him, so he can feel what he needs to feel without being crushed by it.

Slowly, his breaths begin to steady. His hands ease on her flanks, and he mutters something against her, fierce and fervent, that she can’t quite hear.

“What was that?” she asks softly, but he only shakes his head against her and pulls back. His damp fur is all mussed and splayed — gleaming in the lantern-light spangles — and she combs her fingers through it gently. His whiskers twitch against her palm.

“Nothing, kitten,” he utters, and clears his throat. His fingers find her wrist again — claws scraping the delicate bone as he lifts her arm and rotates it again. His eyes are clear now, though. Bright, and as ember-red and glowing as ever. When they catch the lamplight, they burn: flat copper-moons. “The work’s not bad,” he says grudgingly, like his grief had never happened.

She laughs, then: startled and bright in the quiet gold and shadows. “I’m pretty sure it’s the work of the finest tattooist in the area,” she confides. “It was done by D’au’s artist.”

He snorts. “That don’t necessarily mean anything.” Still, he studies the fine lines, the soft purple-blue blushes and rosy glows, all etched into her skin between glossy leaves and spindle-thin stems. The blessings that trickle down from her shoulder. “You like it, though?” he asks gruffly, and she smiles at him softly.

“Do you?” she asks, a little teasing lilt of a challenge in her voice.

His eyes, hot as live-coals, narrow on her face. “Doesn’t matter if I do,” he says firmly. “This is yours. Do you like it?”

She can feel her smile sweetening. “I love it,” she confesses.

The corner of his mouth twitches and he leans down toward her, tilting his nose downward so he can bump his forehead against hers. “S’pretty,” he admits in a whisper, with a puff of air and whiskers against her skin. “Don’t tell anybody I said it. I’ll frickin’ deny it.”

She gasps dramatically — all mock concern — her whole body filling up with a mirth that sparkles on the ends of her nerves, like fireworks and sparklers and champagne. “You’re not allowed to think things are pretty?”

He scoffs. “M’allowed to do whatever the fuck I want.” His nose prods softly against the side of her throat, and she shivers when his canines brush against the pulse in her neck. “Just don’t wanna have anyone thinking I’m soft for you.”

A rare giggle finds its way over her teeth. “I think they might already know,” she whispers back, and he nips sharply at her earlobe. Retribution.

“Sounds like I gotta make it more obvious how rough I treat you, then,” he mutters, and she laughs when his teeth ghost over her skin — then moans when they sink into the soft flesh of her breast. The bite is just hard enough to leave an ellipse of red marks that will turn into bruises tomorrow.

He fucks into her slowly — carefully. His teeth and tongue tease over her collarbone and breasts and belly: everywhere that he can reach. There’s none of the roughness he’d threatened, though. Every stroke is deliberate and smooth and sleek, and in spite of her muted cries and quiet whimpers, for once he says nothing: utterly silent, absorbed only in manipulating her body, in carving as much pleasure as he can into the soft lines and curves. There’s a ruthlessness, though — an intensity and determination that leaves her teary and weak as he pulls her relentlessly to the edge again and again before he finally lets her come in waves of sparks and glitter that leave her sweat-slicked and breathless.

Afterward — when every one of her limbs is buttery and molten, and the wispy blue curls at her temples are drenched with quiet tears — he tucks an arm around her: cradling her on her unmarked side, cuddled against his cloth-covered chest. When she can move again, her weak fingers crawl up her belly and over her breast. She traces the ring of reddened teethmarks as if they’re jewelry.

From this angle, the bite reminds her of Dicé, just as much as her Xeronian blessing does.

“Maybe someday, you’ll bite me for real,” she says wistfully, and his claws pause in their dreamy stroke against her spine.

“Kitten,” he murmurs into her hair. “You don’t want that.”

She frowns. “You’re not supposed to tell me what I do and don’t want,” she reminds him, and she feels the sigh stirring the blue strands at the top of her head. Then he rumbles and pulls her in closer.

“I got us a fuckton of money from the Xeronians,” he says, changing the subject. “Makes what we got for your necklace look like pocket-change. We’ll be set on Fron. Anywhere else we wanna go, too.”

She scoffs softly. “And you wanted to steal from them.”

He scoffs right back. “I wanna steal from everybody. They ain’t special.”

“I learned something about Fron,” she confesses. “It might change our plans.”

He blinks. “How?”

She shrugs. “It’s not like it’s a secret,” she hedges. “It just… came up.”

“It just came up,” he repeats dubiously. “You didn’t tell anyone we were going there, did you?”

She crinkles her nose, and he snorts.

“Well, tell me, then,” he demands, tugging on a curl.

“Sometimes when you're talking about diplomatic relationships, you just happen to list off all the languages you’re familiar with,” she says innocently, “and gossip about each planet with your high-ranking Xeronian friend. While they assume you’re blissed out on endorphins, I guess.”

Rocket tosses back his head and cackles, and pearl’s smile broadens and sweetens. When he pulls her more tightly against his chest — still chortling — and traces a spiral into her shoulderblade, she melts into him. This might be the happiest she's ever been, she thinks.

“That’s my kitten. How many frickin’ languages do you know, anyway?”

“Fluently? Only twenty-six,” she says with a grimace. “But the tutor taught me a lot of tricks to figuring out sister-languages and I know the basics of probably about twenty — no. More.”

He blinks. “For fuck’s sake, pearl. You made her talk about twenty-six planets?”

Embarrassment flushes her cheeks. “More like thirty,” she confesses, and it spills out in a rush. “I don’t know Fronnish yet — but I’ve been practicing Glacian and I think I’ll pick it up quickly—”

She swallows. For a heartbeat, she feels as uncertain as she had way back when they’d been on the runabout together, and she’d been trying to convince him to keep her — trying to convince him that she could be useful. Her teeth sink into her lip and she tries to throttle down the sudden insecurity, eyes flickering nervously away — and then Rocket’s dark claws are prickling against her hairline, and his thumb glides over the crease carved between her brows. His touch softens the furrow there, easing her, and his nose presses against the crown of her head.

“That’s my fuckin’ genius-girl,” he murmurs into her curls. “Using all her fancy diplomatical an’ linguistical skills. What do I need to know?”

She chews her lip and splays her palm across his chest. Feels the cushion of his fur beneath the thin fabric of his shirt — the metal ports, the bars and bolts and buttons. The scars.

Someday, maybe he’ll let her kiss them.

“Everything is very recent,” she says quietly, “but there are apparently rumors of a crew of fugitives heading in that direction.”

His whiskers twitch against the crown of her head, and she feels him swallow. His hand tightens on her.

“You think those rumors are about us?”

She shrugs her tattooed shoulder. “I’m not sure,” she confesses. “It’s possible.”

“It’s too coincidentalistic to be some other group of fugitives,” he mutters.

“Well, technically, I’m not a fugitive?” The words lilt into a tentative question. “And neither is Groot. Or Drax.”

He snorts. “If you don’t think every single one of you morons is obviously on the run…”

“Either way,” pearl says reasonably, “we talked about this when we picked up Groot. What’s the likelihood that Herbert hears a crew of fugitives, and thinks of you? Of us?” She shakes her head, and presses a kiss to his metal sternum through the fabric. “He’ll expect you to be solitary.”

He shakes his head with a tsk of consternation. “Okay, but still. Do we wanna go anywhere that people already think is a frickin’... refuge for criminals?”

“We went to Knowhere,” she reminds him.

“And look what happened there,” he growls.

“What happened was that we saved someone’s life,” she points out mildly. “We made a new ally, and got them home. And we made a bunch of units doing it.” She smiles to herself contentedly. “And we got Littlefoot.”

Rocket grumbles something that she can’t quite discern.

“I had big plans for Fron,” he mutters forlornly. “Daydreams, even. You know how long it’s been since I daydreamed?”

Her eyes flutter wide and she rolls half on top of him, tugging at his shirt when he grunts. “You had daydreams? About Fron?”

He scowls, but his hand moves from her back to stroke over the crown of her hair. “Your hair’s gonna get in your tattoo-cream. Needs to be redone.”

She tugs his shirt again. “I don’t care. I want to hear about the daydreams.”

He raises a brow in warning. “Brat.”

“Please?”

He rolls his eyes, then drops his lids to halfmast. “Was gonna slap your pussy red every morning, then use you as my cockwarmer while we drank morningtea and watched the snow.”

She feels her eyes widen, and she swallows. “Oh.”

A brief flicker of canine. “Yeah. Oh.”

She swallows again, and chews her lip. “You know what this means, Rocket?” she asks softly, and he arches another brow.

“What, kitten?”

“You are soft for me.”

He snorts and scoops a handful of curls off her back. “You’re gonna be in so much trouble when I get you somewhere soundproofed,” he says mildly. “Now sit up and lemme take care of your hair.”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

i have a lot of feelings about this chapter! i don't know what any of them are!
deepest gratitudes for everyone who has continued to support me as i've struggled with what feels like underwhelming writing the last few chapters. ♡♡♡ all the encouragement has kept me goin' through this slump, truly, and i'm so grateful you all have stuck around for an absurd number of chapters and length of time. ♡♡♡ our next chapter (in slightly less than two weeks! if all goes well) will be focused on growing the family-vibes and the rocket/nebs friendship, and then... smut with a heavy dose of pure sugar. pearl's romancing rocket and neither of them even realize it.
its lookin' like she's pretty successful tho

 

one of the things i've really loved about writing this fic is that i've been able to pull a lot from the comics, but haven't really added it to the notes thus far. i am going to rectify that right now!

 

● Littlefoot is the f'saki that we briefly see in gotg1 when Drax, Groot, and Drax get into the fight at the Boot of Jemiah on Knowhere (and Rocket almost blows peoples' faces off). Here's a screenshot!

● D'au shelRandau is a completely made-up character based on the Xeronian we see in the Collector's Emporium in Thor: Dark World. I think we also see her in Vol 1 (and Vol 3 and the Holiday Special as a citizen of Knowhere). In the comics, they're described as a pacifist race created by the High Evolutionary (they look very different though), and it was really fun to figure out how Wyndham might have fashioned a "pacifist race" in this universe. D'au's ancestor, King Randau, was a real comics figure who did.... almost exactly what King Randau did here.

● Almost all the races I mentioned in previous chapters that were made by Wyndham were mentioned in the comics as being created by him as well, though I might have altered the spellings of their names and their exact origins and purposes (otherwise we would have had thirty-seven races with the word "New" + an existing marvel race in them).

And I'm sure there's more! But as we begin to say goodbye to D'au (for now...) I wanted to make sure to add this here. Ciao, D'au. We'll see you soon.

coming soon: chapter thirty-four. anderance.
summary: the crew moves on to the next mission.
warnings: angst, fluff, found family shit. rope-bondage, blindfolding, dirty-talk, begging, tit-slapping, nipple-play, clit-play, edging.
estimated date: tuesday, july 8.*
*this date is an estimate only! for the most up-to-date schedule, please check the monthly forecast on my pinned tumblr post.

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Chapter 34: anderance.

Summary:

the crew moves on to the next mission.

Notes:

warnings: angst, fluff, found family shit. rope-bondage, blindfolding, dirty-talk, begging, cunnilingus, tit-slapping, nipple-play, clit-play, edging, maybe a hint of dumbification.then a little more angst and a whole lotta fluff.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

anderance. the awareness that your partner perceives the relationship from a totally different angle than you—spending years looking at a different face across the table, listening for cues in a different voice—an odd reminder that no matter how much you have in common, you’re still in love with different people. Dutch ander, another person, someone else. Pronounced “an-der-uhns.” The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

The old lab on Xeron was Wyndham’s thirty-fourth, according to pearl — Eirene. The personification of peace, she had shared with him, way back when she’d been crooning soft little stories to him under the control panel on the runabout.

But the planet isn’t bringing Rocket any peace — at least not tonight.

You gotta keep me now.

The words haunt him for the rest of the night — in spite of the fact that he’s pretty sure pearl hadn’t heard them when he’d uttered them against her skin and hair like fervent prayers. It’s just that — when she’d shown him her tattoo; when she’d walked him through the memorial she’d inked into her skin, the way she’d decorated herself in flowers for his own lost loved ones — something had wrenched open inside his ribs. His vagus nerve had thrummed, and his lungs had somehow been too full. He’d had to claw the air for breath. The sobs that had long ago been sewn silently into his ribs had somehow — finally — ripped themselves free.

He’d wept. Really wept. For the first time since Lylla.

Please keep me around, kitten.

The irony hadn’t been lost on him.

Don’t make me stay on Cyxlore, she’d begged him. It feels simultaneously like a few rotations, or damn near a decennium. I won’t try to make you take me if you really don’t want to. But I’d rather be here. With you.

Please.

She’d pleaded with him to keep her — tear-stained and knee-bitten and folded in thirds between the runabout’s hidden starpane and the bulwark. And now here he is, with the words somehow both bitter and sweet in his mouth, trying not to need the same promise from her.

Once he’d managed to swallow the words and the tears down, he’d tried to hide them by teasing her — playing with her a little, getting himself out of his own fuckin’ head and his stupid vulnerabilities. And even so, when he’d finally sunk his dick inside pearl’s perfect, waterlily-wet pussy, he’d found the words crowding at his teeth again: broken rasping prayers and wretched supplications, hidden behind gravel and coarse growls. His throat had worked desperately, and he’d gritted his teeth together and choked them down while his ears had flattened against his skull and his tail had pressed tightly to his inner calf.

It had probably been the first time he hadn’t muttered filth into her ear while he’d fucked her, but he just hadn’t trusted himself not to say something frickin’ ridiculous and desperate and raw. So he’d stayed silent.

But he’s pretty sure she’d felt it.

Afterward — when he’d been curled around her and telling himself that the sudden compulsion to beg her to stay was just a matter of endorphins and habit — pearl had shared what she’d learned about Fron. He’d always been good at piecing things together — tech and machines and sometimes chemicals, too. Flight paths and maneuvers and blaster trajectories. But with every cycle he’s more and more certain that his girl’s a genius too, and the way she puts pieces together when it comes to people and politics is a strange sorta magic he has a much harder time following.

But in that short breath where he’d been trying to hide his marvelling, he’d watched her suddenly become all panicked and flustered. He hadn’t heard her quite like that since before Cyxlore — defensive and uncertain, and still trying to prove her worth.

Don’t make me stay on Cyxlore.

I could be your translator, maybe, she’d told him back then: begging, really. Nervous and earnest and gorgeous — with her hair still so dark and rich a brown that he could have drowned in it, and his stupid blanket still tied around her hips, and his bandages still white against her belly. She’d followed him down into the dark of the mechanical room, blind and vulnerable and trusting, and he’d led her through the shadows. I know I’m not very useful yet, but I could learn.

And what had he said to her? Something like, Not a fuckin’ chance, pearl.

Your little linguistical skills ain’t gonna be very useful to me.

An answering surge of panic had risen in his own chest at the memory. It had taken him a shuddering handful of heartbeats to strangle back his twisted, tangled urge to apologize. Instead, he’d forced himself into something resembling calmness: stroking a thumb down the divot of concern etched into her brow, and trying desperately to soothe away whatever misplaced anxiety he’d given her. Every soothing stroke had made it more impossible to take back the words he’d wished against her skin and hair, watered with his own gnarled sobs.

Please keep me around, kitten.
You gotta keep me around.

Afterward, he’d teased her some more, and braided her heavy lilac curls — letting them spill through his fingers and over his palms, silken as sunlight on the surface of blue canals. He’d curled into her and toyed with the stray spiral wisps — escaping the confines of the braid as surely as if it were a prison — and tried to get some rest.

It takes him almost the whole night to get himself fully back under control. To push that urge to be kept, to be claimed deep down under his skin, into his bones. He’s never been a part of anything but Batch 89 — though he’d tried with the Ravagers of the Eclector, and with Lylla; he’d tried — but the urge is still there.

He buries it deep.

It’s got no place in his life these days. Not anymore. He’s going to let pearl stay with him as long as she wants because he’d promised her that, and because he owes her that, and because he’s the greediest little monster to ever crawl out of the gutter — but one day, there’ll be a humie almost as pretty and good as she is, and she’ll leave.

And when it happens, he’ll be okay.

It takes a long time to convince himself of that — hours. And even then, it doesn’t quite settle right. He doesn’t quite believe it — the myth of his own survival. But he manages to persuade himself just enough to sink uneasily into a few moments of rest before dawn.

When Rocket wakes, it’s late — almost halfway into the first wake-shift by intergalactic standard time — but he doesn’t worry about their delayed departure. Pearl seems happy and pleased as she hugs D’au and says her good-byes.

And apparently, that’s the thing that finally brings him some sort of peace.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

“Next stop is Lamentis,” Rocket lies once they’re starside. They float in the void somewhere at the edge of the Aeron-Honj-Verserin triple-star system, just outside of Xeronian-controlled space. It would probably freak the locals out, if he hadn’t used the Fuck-You-Disk to cloak the Dreadnought as soon as it reached the border regions. Instead, to any watching satellites, it probably just looks as if they’ve slipped beyond the reach of home-system satellite tracking. Convenient.

“If the next stop is Lamentis, why are we stopped now?” Drax asks curiously.

“M’asking if we need to hit anything else up along the way.” Rocket leans back in his seat. “F’you wanna be dropped off somewhere between here and there, you gotta let me know now. There’s a couple planets connected to intergalactic public transit. If there’s somewhere else you wanna get to before we hit the backwater rim of the known frickin’ universe, now’s the time to speak-up. Otherwise we’re gonna be stuck together until we leave Lamentis — and even then, it might be hard to find someone you can hitch a ride with.”

There’s a handful of heartbeats of silence — well, silence if you don’t count the f’saki’s constant chittering. The thing’s been hogging pearl’s lap since they climbed back aboard the Dreadnought.

“I’m offended, Rocket,” Drax says at last — and the big lug does sound offended. Wounded, almost. “I’m your best friend. How could I leave you?”

“You’re his best friend?” Nebula repeats dubiously. Rocket rolls his eyes, because this is easily the third or fourth time these two idiots have had the exact same conversation.

“Who else?” the Kylosian demands, offended.

“I don’t know,” Nebula rasps. “The princess. The tree. Literally anyone.”

“I am Groot,” Groot offers.

Rocket’s eyes dart back and forth between pearl’s three adoptees, mouth slightly ajar before he pulls it closed in a scowl and pinches the space between his eyes. Unbelievable. He should‘ve kicked ‘em all out on Xeron. Instead, he’s basically committed himself to countless cycles of stress-induced migraines.

But pearl laughs softly — giggles, really; light and airy and for once, completely free — and the tension-headache recedes. Which is a first. Usually once he starts to feel the splitting pain between his brows, there’s no coming back.

“No,” Drax says confidently. “It’s me.”

Nebula snorts. “This only proves that my lack of friends is not a disadvantage.”

Something twists in Rocket’s belly and he drops his hand, scowling at Nebs with his ears flattened into dull blades. “Hey now,” he interrupts with a growl. “It’s good to have friends.”

The words swing out of his mouth like a ghost from the past, like a bullet he’d never meant to shoot. Not that his own voice sounds particularly friendly, either. Nebula’s mouth pinches, even while pearl’s hand floats across the space between them and threads through the fur of his forearm.

He swallows, and rolls his eyes. Carves the habitual defensiveness out of his voice — well, most of it, anyway — and tries to give the cyborg what’s left. “I mean, c’mon, Nebs. You don’t think we’re friends?” He wrangles out a limping smirk — not that he could say why it frickin’ stings so much. “I’m hurt.”

Nebula’s galaxy-dark eyes round out. Her mouth snaps shut — then opens again. Closes. She blinks rapidly, like there’s a glitch in her ocular moisture distribution programming.

“Don’t be a dickhead,” she says at last, though her hoarse voice tilts into uncertainty. She shakes her head a little. “I should have you drop me off somewhere along the way. I’m Black Order. Thanos will—“

“You were Black Order.” It’s apparently pearl’s turn to speak the reminder into existence.

Nebs scowls.

“You said it first,” Rocket adds with an arched brow, leaning back and crossing his arms over his chest.

Nebula’s rigid brow twitches — about as close as she can come to what Rocket would guess are her natural facial expressions, adapting around the vibranium orbital socket and countless other prosthetics hidden underneath her synthetic blue skin. The delicate hydraulic joint hidden in her jaw pulses as she clenches her teeth. Then her gaze hardens.

“It’s been… nice,” she says at last, grudgingly. Her lip peels back like the words taste of salt and tar. “To… pretend.” A grimace, or maybe a flinch. “Foolish, but nice. However — ultimately — no-one truly ever leaves the Black Order.” There’s a slight hesitation in the stitch at the corner of her mouth. Her eyes flick away and she glowers out at the stars. “Even if they want to.”

The words are a quiet, reluctant mutter that echoes against the crystalline-armored glass. Rocket’s mouth parts, but he hesitates — not sure what he can say that won’t make shit worse.

“We will fight anyone who comes for you.”

His ears flicker and his eyes round out as every head on the flightdeck swivels toward Drax.

“Don’t go,” the Kylosian adds steadily. “You belong here.”

“I am Groot,” Groot agrees.

“See? The tree agrees with me.”

“You don’t know what he’s frickin’ sayin’,” Rocket points out hoarsely — then shrugs and sighs. “But — I guess you’re right, in this case.”

Nebula blinks her black eyes, still staring at Drax — then shakes her head and snorts, like she’s trying to rattle herself back into reality. “You’ll fight whoever comes for me?” She sneers. “None of you idiots stand a chance against any member of the Black Order. And if Thanos thinks I’ve betrayed him, who knows? He might come for me himself.”

Drax’s eyes widen and his grin brightens the entire frickin’ cockpit. “All the better!” he bellows, letting out a laugh that comes straight from his cavernous chest.

“We obviously stood a chance against you,” Rocket points out drily.

Nebula makes an exasperated sound and slaps at the air impotently. “You received me already bound,” she snaps — practically sputtering. “And one of you—“ She narrows her eyes at Groot. “—let me go.”

Rocket shrugs. “You do gotta point,” he concedes, then points at Groot. “Actually, you an’ I still gotta have words about that.”

“I am Groot,” Groot mumbles, and Rocket’s jaw drops.

“Just ‘cause it all worked out don’t mean it was a good frickin’ idea—“

“We all want you to stay,” pearl interrupts quietly. Her hands are tangled in the ends of her hair — nervous again. Rocket lets his eyes linger over the slick ink of her tattoo, still shiny with salve. She’s not wearing her cardigans while it heals, which would be all well and good if it didn’t mean he was constantly getting distracted by her soft little nipples, begging for a little love underneath his shirts. And the quiet curve of her belly, still spangled by constellations of little white scars, with some new pink pinpricks from the night before that make his mouth water with memories.

“If you want to leave, we won’t try to keep you.” Pearl’s lips purse and twitch to one side. “But — Nebula, I’m not sure how you’d go back.”

Nebula blinks. “What do you mean?”

“I am Groot,” Groot says softly, and turns to look out the crystalline bubble of the sunken cockpit. Rocket feels something in his chest twist. His eyes burn.

“Family changes you,” pearl translates quietly.

The cyborg hisses, then swallows the sound down. She gestures to herself and all her prosthetics contemptuously. “You think I — of all people — don’t know that?”

Rocket’s lip curls — involuntary, and almost mean. “The guy who thought he made you ain’t your fuckin’ family just ‘cause he told you to call him dad, Nebs.” He squints at the cyborg. “Thought you were smarter’n that.”

The silence of space fills the cockpit slowly — deep enough to drown in. Neula’s eyes blink rapidly before she looks away again. She shakes her head once more.

“Maybe family does change you,” she says at last. Her voice is flat and dull. “Maybe that’s why I won’t stick around.” She clears her throat, then scrapes out more words like a grudge. “Perhaps I finally have something I want to protect — and the best way to do that is by getting far away from it.”

Rocket flinches. The impulse she’s talking about — yeah. He knows it. Too well, as a matter of fact.

You gotta keep me now, kitten.

He crushes the errant thought down — ruthlessly. Around them, the silence somehow swells: impossibly deep, and so dense that it nearly blots out the stars.

“Don’t go,” Drax repeats, the rumble of his voice like shifting stones in the quiet void — cracking softly against each other. There’s another beat, another breath of emptiness. The Kylosian lifts one massive paw and knuckles the wetness rimming his blue eyes. “You four strange morons are the only family I have now.”

The f’saki growls from pearl’s lap.

“Five,” Drax adds kindly, reaching out to plop a heavy palm on the lizard’s scaly head. “Five strange morons.”

“Look,” Rocket says at last. “We got less than a cycle till we pass the space-station off Morosx-3. That’s the last place connected to intergalactic transit. Then it’s a straight shot to Lamentis. That means you got about eight, maybe nine rotations to make up your mind.”

“I’m staying,” the Destroyer says confidently. “I will always stand by this family of idiots.”

Nebula opens her mouth, but Rocket cuts her off. “Just think about it, Nebs.”

The Luphomoid shifts uneasily in her chair, then scoffs, and scowls, and rises. Rocket watches as she leaves the cockpit, and doesn’t let himself think about the fact that maybe he’s afraid of what her answer will be.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

The rest of the rotation passes in stilted quiet. Groot and Drax decide to play a card-game, though the former doesn’t seem to understand any of the rules. Rocket has pearl practice flying, and she takes them through her first jump-point. There’s only the slightest tilt to the ship on reconstitution. He’s seen pilots with five circs’ worth of experience make their jumps with less stability and steadiness, though he supposes he shouldn’t be surprised. Of course his pearl would take to flying like a frickin’ natural. He’s not sure whether it’s innate talent coming through, or just her fuckin’ flawless ability to flourish with just a little praise and plenty of autonomy, but either way — watching her soar through the stars is a thing of beauty.

“It feels like you’re breaking me out of the Arete all over again,” she confesses under her breath. Her kitten smile had turned into a full-on grin after the jump, eyes glowing like silver moonstones and distant stars, and Rocket thinks he’s probably never seen anything prettier than his pearl wearing freedom.

And he got to give it to her. He did.

When this thing ends, he knows he’s gonna be fuckin’ ruined.

I may not know love, but I know the lack of it.

He’s not confessing to any ridiculous romanticalistic delusions or anything. He’s not sure he’s even capable of love anymore, at least not the way Nebs and the rest of ‘em probably mean it.

But Fron still hovers on the horizon of his consciousness — a sliver of a promised paradise, frosted and glazed in diamond-clear ice, perfect for a little while.

Drax and pearl make dinner, and they eat together in the cockpit while Rocket flies. The meal is as delicious as ever, though the lack of Nebula’s presence sets his teeth on edge. Afterwards, pearl excuses herself, blushing as she admits she’s going to start opening all her purchases from Xeron, and dropping a grateful little kiss on the top of Rocket’s head. His belly turns over lazily and he rolls his eyes, and the blue wash of her curls tumble over his face like a waterfall. He breathes in the scent of waterlilies and clear canals, and his heart shudders a little in his ribs from the softness of her lips on the crown of his head.

He bats the wave of curls away from his eyes and sputters.

“You’re obstructing my frickin’ vision,” he growls, but his heart isn’t in it, and he suspects pearl can tell. Her fingers leaf playfully through the fur on his shoulder, and her touch lingers long after she’s gone. The f’saki trundles behind — just about as addicted to her presence as Rocket himself.

Luckily, Groot’s honestly grown into the perfect company on the flight deck, as far as Rocket’s concerned. The Taluhnisan perches in one of the chairs — a tight fit, but better than his spot on the floor of the runabout — and watches the stars, making occasional observations in his mild, creaking voice. Drax naps off-and-on. The ferocity of his snores make Rocket wince for about an hour before he gets used to ‘em. The realization triggers a quiet, rueful surprise. A few cycles ago, he would’ve been far more likely to pitch a zargut into the snorting Kylosian’s gob as meanly as he could, then snarl at him to go to his fuckin’ bunk to snore up a storm.

You four strange morons are the only family I have left.

Rocket sighs, and something in his chest twinges. He’s not sure when he went from wanting to get rid of all his annoying passengers — good luck and good riddance — to kinda wanting to keep them around, but here he is. Maybe it was when Drax had tried to help him look for pearl’s bruised and battered body on Knowhere, or when Nebula had hoisted her out of the pit in the emporium. Maybe it was even earlier: nights of playing cards and sharing dinner over a campfire on Alon-Gim, when the cyborg had pointed out pearl’s weak grip on the quadblaster and Drax and Groot had helped him strip the gold plating off the Sovereign ship, and all of them had gambled for favors late into the night on a Terran pick-nick blanket.

It doesn’t really matter, though. The same part of him that had wanted to beg pearl to keep him also wants to clutch at this handful of idiots and hope they claim him back, too.

He’s a frickin’ idiot.

The problem is, now he’s ended up liking ‘em all enough to worry about them. Nebs, hiding somewhere in the Dreadnought now, debating a return to her father. Groot, currently quiet and solemn as he stares tranquilly into the beautiful forever, waiting to go back to his own hollowed-out planet full of ghosts.

Maybe Rocket should say something to the Taluhnisan. To both him and Nebs, even. Make sure they both know that going back hasn’t ever provided him with any kind of closure or peace or relief: not when he’d been staring at the cages and evolution chambers on HalfWorld like his worst memories come to life. Not when he’d forced himself to run shaking fingers over the door of the cold incinerator. Not even when he’d clawed Wyndham’s face off.

But — aren’t things better now? something inside him asks tentatively, curling between his ribs like the tenderest spring sprout. Maybe HalfWorld didn’t give you closure — but maybe you need it less now.

His hands tighten on the yoke before he remembers to gentle them, mentally reminding the Dreadnought how much he loves her and would never-ever hurt her, and apologizes for the brief tension of his touch. He should talk to Nebs, he decides. Tonight. And then, sometime in the next few cycles, he should remind Groot that the two of them had decided to be a team, way back when they’d been on Sovereign — remind the Big Guy that he can mourn his people on Taluhnia, but he can’t stay. He’ll be needed on Fron. And maybe beyond.

They all will be, Rocket admits grudgingly.

There’s a moment of silence there in the sequined sky — companionable, and calm. And then Drax sucks in a snore so deafening that Rocket jumps in the air and recoils — hands convulsing on the yoke — and the Destroyer jolts himself out of his sleep, nearly falling out of his chair.

“For fuck’s sake,” Rocket mutters drily, his ears laid back and his tail puffed with alarm beside him. “Go to bed.”

“Has Thanos’ Least-Favorite Daughter returned yet?” Drax asks curiously. Worriedly, even.

“I am Groot,” Groot says mildly.

“Maybe if you want her to stick around, you should stop calling her that,” Rocket suggests, his own voice wry. “And no. I’m gonna go check on her before I go to sleep.”

Drax hesitates. “Maybe I—”

“No,” Rocket clips out, then grimaces. “No,” he repeats, a little less sharply. “I’ll take care of it. Figure I know where she is, anyway.” He cocks a brow challengingly at the Kylosian. “Do you?”

Drax considers, then shakes his head reluctantly.

“Didn’t think so. Go on to bed. Tired of hearing you snort up all the oxygen in here.”

Drax rises, and Rocket thinks he’s gonna leave — but then the Destroyer’s reflection turns in the crystalline-armored starshield, and he steps forward to drop a heavy palm on Rocket’s shoulder. Rocket’s eyes flare wide and his ears flicker rapidly, swivelling. He feels his tail puff in alarm and confusion.

“Don’t stay awake for too long, best friend Rocket,” Drax says, and squeezes. “And good night, Groot,” he adds with a nod toward the Taluhnisan.

His hand disappears and he turns once more, his thudding footsteps echoing through the ship as he makes his way from the cockpit.

“I am Groot,” Groot says with the soft, pleased huff of wind through branches, and Rocket shakes his head.

“Yeah, I think that’s the first time I heard him call you that, too,” he admits.

“I am Groot?”

“Yeah,” Rocket says, easing up on the throttle and gently coasting the Dreadnought into the shadows of a lifeless system, designated GZ-372-446 on the common Kree starmap. “I’ll head up in a few.”

“I am Groot,” the Taluhnisan says lightly, and Rocket shoots him a glare — but he can’t help the twitch in the corner of his mouth.

“Everyone thinks you’re such an innocent, but you got a dirty mind, Big Guy.”

Groot shrugs, an indulgent smile curving his broad face, and shrugs helplessly. “I am Groot.”

“Get outta here,” Rocket scoffs, flipping a number of switches and pulling down on a lever to shift the Dreadnought into a quiet float for the sleep-shift. The Taluhnisan rumbles a final, quiet I am Groot and rises with the hushed crackle of branches and twigs, before leaving so quietly that it’s hard to believe he was ever there at all.

Alone in the stars, Rocket sits for a moment: quiet, and calm. Despite the uncertainty of — well, despite the uncertainty of Groot and Nebs, and the future of this questionable crew, the breath in his lungs feels easy. His muscles feel loose. He’s always had something achy in him: a fucked-up joint here, an impossibly-twisted muscle there. But now — with these frickin’ morons all tucked in bed on his ship, and a blue-haired goddess waiting for him in his quarters, and the endless velvet spread of the glitterdust sky — his normal tension dissipates into a spray of misty galaxies and sequined stars, each one glowing against the crystalline bubble of the cockpit. All the pain seems distant when he’s not starving, not straining for breath, not existing every moment with his muscles knotted and his fists clenched, claws digging into palms, hackles raised, teeth sneering, tail puffed. It almost feels small enough to hold in his hands.

He sighs, and rolls his shoulders, and sets off looking for Nebs.

He follows her scent through hatches and down hallways. At one point, his nose flares, and the scent of her — vibranium and ozone, pepper and leather — splits in two directions, like she’d doubled back at some point. He tilts his head and inhales again, and the fresher trail pulls him exactly where he’d expected. Of course he finds her in the first place he looks — his intuition’s always been good, after all, and he understands her better than he wants to admit. When he leaps up and taps the sensor on the door, there she is: hunched on one of the beds, wrapped in the shadows and anonymity of the jackroom. Her hands fumble something as the door whispers open — it flashes briefly, bright gold in the low glow of the corridor, as she slides it into a zippered pouch at her hip. He narrows his gaze on the zipper, then lifts his eyes to hers. Nebula is already staring back — waiting.

“I saw that,” he says mildly.

She swallows, and there’s something about the motion that has his own chest clenching in response. “I know,” she growls.

He cocks his head, ears twitching. “You gonna tell me what it is?”

There’s a short silence, full of an electrical charge that fades so abruptly he’d almost think it wasn’t there. Her eyes flicker closed, then open again. She takes some kind of breath that sounds like a cross between a grunt and a growl — but he knows it’s really a sigh.

“Not yet,” she rasps wearily.

He studies her in the shadows. The corridor lights are dim, cycled low for the sleep-shift, but it’s more than enough for him to see her. Her own dark, prosthetic eyes drink up the light instead of reflecting it like his, but he’d bet she can see just as well as he can — maybe even better. Her hands — empty of whatever weapon or bit of tech she’d hidden — hang limply from her wrists, and her forearms brace against her thighs as she leans over herself, like she’s girding herself for a punch in the gut. No, he thinks — like she’s already received one. Like she’s breathing through the sickening lurch of a blow to the belly.

He slouches against the doorframe, crossing his arms against his chest and one foot over the other. His tail swings behind him and his eyes narrow, probably glowing in the darkness.

“Glad to see you’re still here, anyway,” he drawls. “Thought you mighta taken off in one of the billion extra escape pods we got.”

She snorts. “I thought about it,” she admits after a moment. “I went down there, and looked at them all.”

“Yeah, I figured,” he says mildly. When she peers up at him, he taps a claw lazily to the side of his nose. “Besides,” he adds. “I figure we’re a lot alike. And it’s what I woulda done.”

She scoffs under her breath, and turns her arm — reaching into another little pocket, this one at her inner wrist. His ears flicker when he hears the telltale crinkle of a lozenge-wrapper.

“Do you want one?” the cyborg asks reluctantly. “I carry a few, for when the princess isn’t around.”

He chuckles and shovels his fingers into his pockets, then eases further into the shadows of the jackroom. “Ain’t you hospitable,” he drawls, but he knows his voice sounds more like he’s teasing her than anything else. “Nah, I’m good. Why’d you laugh, though, huh?” A smirk. “When I said we’re alike?”

She blinks at him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says stiffly.

He arches a brow. “You ain’t a very good liar.” He strolls lazily to the bunk across from her and leans against the thin mattress. “What? You think you’re the only one whose so-called father ripped ‘em apart and put ‘em back together, over an’ over again?”

There’s a moment of silence. Nebula’s shoulders sag, like the elbows digging into her thighs are the only things holding her up.

“No,” she utters hoarsely.

“No,” he agrees flatly. “Fur’s a nice cover, Nebs, but I got so many scars — been so twisted around from the bones up. I know what it’s like to look down at my body and remember I’m a monster.”

Her eyes widen, but they hold his steadily. He can see the recognition reflected in them. She stares at him, solemn, and he blinks back. Silence fills in all the spaces and shadows between them, thick and heavy. Not cloying, though. Not suffocating.

“The thing is, if you stick around here, nobody’s gonna look at you like that except yourself,” he says honestly, then grimaces. “I mean, believe me, nobody understands better’n me that there’s a cost to hanging out with these morons.” He rolls his eyes. “I swear to fuck I’ll kill Drax myself one day. Pearl’s got my fur turnin’ gray ‘cause fuck knows that won’t be the last time she falls into a death-pit or gets bit by some rabid f’saki that she wants to adopt. And Groot’s about as hopeless as she is. Trying to deal with all of ‘em is frickin’ exhausting.” He shrugs. “On the other hand, at least no-one here is gonna go diggin’ around in your body unless you want ‘em to.”

Her face is utterly still — the only evidence of her shock in the rapid clicking of her eyelids. Rocket tilts his head again, in the other direction this time: peering at her arm measuringly.

“Like, that thing’s gotta suck. Looks like it was fitted to your shoulder all wrong. Bet I could make you somethin’ that hurts less, if you wanted.”

She straightens. Stares. Follows his gaze down to her arm, stretching it out in front of her — flexing her mechanical fingers.

“Why?” she says at last. Her voice scrapes the air, like a skinned knee on a baldbody. He offers a half-shrug.

“‘Cause I can. I done my own repairs a time or two.” He taps the exposed metal of his prosthetic clavicle, glinting just over the edge of his jumpsuit-collar, then raps his knuckles along his clothed ribs. “I bet I got almost as many manufactured bits as you, and when I left my maker, I wasn’t done growing. I had to reshape some things when I got bigger, add to ‘em.” He grimaces. “Surgery’s not my best skillset, but I did what I had to. And you—” He squints again. “You look like you’d require more engineering and less surgery,” he says at last, pragmatically. “Which is good, ‘cause I’m way better at engineering.”

Nebula opens her mouth. Closes it. Opens it again, then closes it and looks away. “I don’t know—” She starts, then stops. Her voice doesn’t tremble or crack — but he still feels it like an old bruise. “I don’t know how much of myself is organic anymore.” Her breath is slow and steady, every word measured. “I don’t know how much of me is real.”

Rocket feels his eyes narrow, and his own breath escapes him in a hiss. “You’re real, Nebs. All of you is real.”

There’s a long pause, and then her fingers brush her jaw, tracing the shape that he’d guess is probably a vibra-duranium alloy mandible with a steel synovialistic joint, all wrapped up under synthetic silicone-based skin. Her fingertips crawl over the seams of her cheek, then rub over the dull chrome orbital enhancement surrounding her left eye.

“Am I?” she asks flatly. “None of this feels real.”

His fists clench in his pockets, and there’s a weird little twist in his chest. “If I’m real, you are.”

“And this?” she asks sharply, her hand thrusting outward and splaying wide. Her fingers clench into a fist, like she’d grab the entirety of the Dreadnought in her hand and crumple it into a ball of paper. “Family? We’ll fight anyone who comes for you?” Her lip curls back in a warlike sneer.

You looked out for me, he remembers pearl saying to him once, ages ago. I’d like the chance to look out for you too.

It’s his turn to swallow. Scowl. He pushes himself slowly off the edge of the bunk, and Nebula watches him warily, her black eyes glistening in the dark as he lopes toward her with more confidence than he feels. He reaches out one hand, and she practically seizes when he does: her whole body jolting, snapping into a half-defensive pose, one forearm raised like she’s prepared to ward off a fist in the face.

He slows, and holds her eyes with his, and rests his hand on her shoulder. He can feel the warmth of her original skin under his hand, and the ridge beneath her armor-woven shirt that signifies the edge of her prosthetic arm.

He squeezes gently, then pats her shoulder — awkwardly, twice. His mouth is dry with his own uncertainty and disbelief, but there’s no room for either of them in this moment.

Time to be the Captain now.

“That’s real too, Nebs,” he says gruffly, and hopes he’s not lying. He releases her shoulder. Her one working brow quivers — just for an instant.

Please, he thinks. At least some of it has to be real.

“‘Sides,” he adds carelessly, “just so you know — you’re safe while you’re on this ship. We’re cloaked. Got a little thing I like to call a Fuck-You-Disk. It’s an energy-and-data disorganizer. Highly unlikely that your dear ol’ dad is gonna be able to find you while you’re in range of the Dreadnought.” He tilts his head. “If you’re trying to go the reformed-route or whatever, I could prob’ly make you your own. You’d have to hang around for a minute, though.”

Nebula’s one working brow twitches again. “Is this a ploy? To keep me here beyond Morosx-3?”

Rocket snorts. “I mean, if it’s a ploy, it’s pretty frickin’ flimsy, don’t you think?” He gives her a pained look. “Full honesty? I can’t handle Drax and the f’saki all by myself, Nebs. And pearl and Groot are shit at keeping ‘em under control. They’re just as likely to pick up more strays everywhere we stop.”

Nebula’s eyes flicker closed, and she makes a soft barking sound: her rusty, broken, scoffing laugh. Her head dips down, toward the hands still resting limply over her knees. He pats the back of her forearm awkwardly, then turns on his heel, and points himself toward the open hatch.

“Don’t stay down here too late,” he adds over his shoulder, in what he hopes sounds like a bossy snipe. “You don’t belong in the jackroom.”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

When Rocket makes his way into the captain’s quarters, he’s expecting to find one of two things: pearl, so hyperfixated on her den — their den, some obnoxiously-hopeful little part of him protests — that she’s lost track of time and is still shifting things around in the closet. That, or she’s fallen into an exhausted sleep without him, all moon-blue curls and pinky-peach curves, spread warm and welcoming under the blankets on their shared bed.

Instead, he walks in and turns the corner, and finds pearl quietly waiting, perched on her knees in bed with her blindfold already over her eyes, the scent of waterlilies dripping from the stars and the crystalline dome. She’s wearing a silky scrap of crimson panties from Cyxlore, and a bundle of silk ropes — one set just as scarlet, and the other dyed a starry-soft lavender that nearly matches her hair — are clenched in her curled fingers.

His heart slams into his ribs, clunky and manufactured, and suddenly so full that it hurts all over again.

“Hi,” she offers tremulously.

He swallows. Any lingering concerns for Nebula dissolve into the stars beyond the glass.

“Looks like someone had an agenda for comin’ up to bed early,” he manages to drawl at last. He won’t look at the shiny-sleek cordage in her hands. Can’t look at it. Not if he’s trying not to make assumptions. Not if he doesn’t want to completely lose his mind. She already smells like she’s been soaking her silk panties for at least an hour — waiting for him. Anticipating him. He leaps nimbly onto the bed, then traces a claw gently across the soft, fragile cheek below the blindfold. “How long you been plannin’ this, kitten?”

Her head tilts, blue curls bobbing. “Planning? Not very long at all. But I was thinking about it for a while.”

Her cheeks pink up beautifully, and he’s already imagining turning her ass the same color.

“Yeah?” It’s a croon. “I know you’ve been missin’ that blindfold. Bet you’ve been wanting it almost every night since that first time.”

His fingers dart out to tweak one of those perfect, ever-stiff nipples, and she gasps and jolts into a little arch, perking her tits right out for him like an offering, like she’d do anything to get his touch on her again — no matter how mean he is.

“Yes,” she admits breathily. “And—” She falters, her fingers tightening incrementally on the ropes in her hands.

“And what, pearl?”

She licks her lips and wrings the ropes as if they were a handful of her curls of the hem of her cardigan. He reaches out again and flicks the loops of braided silk in her hands.

“Somethin’ to do with these, maybe?”

Her plush mouth opens, then closes, then opens again. She chews nervously at her lip.

“Go on, kitten,” he drawls. “You know you’re s’posed to tell me if you want something.”

“I thought — maybe you could tie me up?”

It’s what he expected, but he still finds himself staring at her — trying to hold the moment in his eyes and ears forever. Her voice is all trembly and uncertain and oh, so eager.

“You did, huh?” His eyes narrow. “Tell me exactly what you had in mind, pearl.”

She shifts on her knees, and he can tell she’s feeling vulnerable. Does she have a cute little wet spot in her panties already? No, better question: how wet are they? Are they dripping? Could he wrong them out?

“I want you to tie me up however you like,” she breathes out at last. Each word is hushed and gauzy. “I want you to keep me that way all night.”

His mouth curls as he paces around her, feet sinking into soft mattress and the one Cyxlorade blanket he’d let her add to their bedding. A shiver traces her spine as he leans in and breathes against her throat: drinking in a dream of waterlillies and clear canals, amber and resin. His soft exhalation stirs the tiny lilac-blue wisps at her neck.

He indulges in a quick, pinching nip of her shoulder.

“What brought this on, kitten?”

She flushes — gorgeous. “Oh, I — n-nothing.”

His brows flare up. “Nothin’? That sounds like a lie. You lying to me, pearl? Right before I tie you up and get you at my mercy?”

“No — I — you just remind me of a story sometimes,” she spills out — almost panicked — before she blushes so hot that he could warm his hands on her cheeks, cradling her face in his palms like a treasure. Rocket stares at her for a moment: shimmering fairy-blue hair and miles of glossy peach skin, pink cheeks and nipples and that luscious frickin’ mouth, just made for all kinds of kisses.

And the perfect rectangle of her blindfold, keeping her vulnerable for him.

His breath leaves his lungs in a whoosh, and then he sucks in another just to let out a hoarse crackle of laughter.

“You say the most unhinged shit when you’re naked, pearl,” he points out, then pitches his voice in a breathy mockery. “I wanna talk ‘bout my plan to save the abilisks while I let you lick me. I wanna tell you something important while I offer to suck your cock.”

“That one was about my safeword!” she protests, hands squeezing tighter on the ropes. ”It made sense to tell you then!”

“Yeah, uh-huh,” he agrees blithely, even though she’s right. “And now you wanna tell me a story.”

“No, I—“ she wrings the ropes anxiously. “I don’t want to tell you a story. I just said you remind me of one sometimes. I don’t want to tell it.” She shakes her curls emphatically and he grins.

“Well, now you’re gonna have to,” he mocks. “Right after you tell me just exactly what I’m s’posed to do with you all frickin’ night.” He leans over the opposite shoulder — pressing the tented ridge of his jumpsuit into the soft valley of her spine — and gently thumbs one quivering nipple, watching her breath hitch as he teases it into a stiff peak. Then he pinches it — sharply — and doesn’t let up. “Go on, pearl. What am I gonna do with you tied up for a whole — moon-damned — sleep-shift?”

She takes in a shaky breath, her gorgeous tit rising in his grip, filling his curled palm. He can hear her strangling back a little mewl that tries to blossom under the ache of his cruel fingers.

“Whatever you want,” she hushes out, a needy sigh catching in her lungs.

He rolls her nipple thoughtfully, playing with it, squeezing it — nuzzling into her neck, scraping his teeth teasingly over her flesh. She whimpers and thrusts her tits up even higher.

“Beg for it, sweetheart.”

Her soft exhalation sounds like pure longing. The wistful breath curls its fingers in both his heart and his abdomen, tightening gently.

“Please tie me up and do whatever you want with me.” The words shiver on the starlight, each one a plucked silver string. ”Please fuck me however you want, use me however you want — please m-make me your—“ She pauses, and he can tell by the flutter of her eyelids behind the blindfold and the skipping-stuttering of her heart that her thoughts are racing. “Please make me your slutty, cockdrunk fuckdoll—”

His heart leaps right up into his mouth and his dick jerks hungrily behind the panel of his jumpsuit. For fuck’s sake — he’s not sure he’s ever realized what a filthy frickin’ mouth he has. Not till those words come pouring out of his little housewife’s mouth. He releases her breast — it bounces generously — and skims his other hand up from the nape of her neck to the crown of her skull. His fingers knot into all that waterfall-silk, so close to the scalp that he knows his claws scrape gently against her head.

“Then get on your knees and crawl, sweetheart.”

He jerks her head — carefully, just hard enough for her to yelp and tumble sideways. She scrambles alongside him unseeingly on her hands and knees till he gets her in the center of the oversized bed and shoves her down onto one hip. Her tits bounce as she hits the mattress. The crimson panties don’t cover much in back, and her ass jiggles invitingly too. Her fist loosens on the silk cords as she tries to orient herself, and he whisks them away from her grasp, leaving her floundering in the dark of her blindfold.

He turns the ropes slowly in his hands, trying to decide if they’re soft enough. He’d rather have her bound up in wide ribbons of Cyxlorade chenille, if he’s being honest — something that won’t leave marks — but these are probably the highest quality of their kind. He whistles low.

“Where’d you pick these up, pearl?”

Her cheeks flame. “There was, uhm — a shop. Next to the tattoo parlor D’au and I went to,” she admits, flustered. His brows arch.

“A kink shop?” he clarifies, and she hesitates before nodding. “And you didn’t come back to take me?” It’s a mockery — a taunt — but poor pearl suddenly looks so stricken that his heart kicks against his ribs again. “That’s all right,” he says — more quickly than he would have otherwise. “Just have to punish you for it, huh?”

How does her face glow even more rosily?

“Yes, I think so,” she agrees readily, and he snorts, lacing his fingers with the hand on her tattooed arm, then looping the rope daintily around her wrist.

“You gotta be careful,” he tells her, knotting her second wrist to the first before dropping off the edge of the mattress, towing the ends of the silk to one of the supports under the bed. “You gotta tell me if your fingers get tingly at all, okay?”

Her breath comes out in a whimper as he hoists himself back on the mattress. Pearl still hasn’t given him a real response, so he smirks, then levies a sharp slap to one gorgeous tit as he passes her. She yelps and bows upward, flesh jiggling and trembling.

A perfect handprint flushes the pale golden-peach skin around her rosy areola.

He snickers. “Right on that naughty pink nipple,” he congratulates himself. “Perfect frickin’ aim.”

Her exhalation is a series of shuddering pants, and his smirk widens.

“Asked you a question, kitten. You gotta tell me if your fingers get tingly. Try to flex ‘em all.”

She shudders, already frickin’ squirming across the sheets. “Okay,” she agrees fervently. “I’ll tell you if my fingers get tingly—“

He swats her other breast and she cries out, arching into the heat again.

“Good girl,” he croons. “First one was a punishment, but that one was a reward.”

She rocks her hips side-to-side, desperate for friction, as he tugs her chenille blanket out from under her. If he has it his way, she’s gonna drench the bed more than once this sleep-shift, and he doesn’t want her getting all upset when she realizes she’s flooded out her new gifts.

“Can I have another, please, Rocket?”

His cock twitches again — exposed to the air now, aching to be inside her. He pinches her other nipple instead — a mean little tug that has her twisting and panting, squirming on the sheets.

“For fuck’s sake, sweetheart. You’re acting like I didn’t fuck you less than a rotation ago.” He tilts his head. “Is it the rope and the blindfold, working you up? Or does the waiting get you to the edge before I even touch you?” The corner of his mouth twitches upward, and his vagus nerve seems pleasantly heavy and warm behind his ribs. Something almost playful, almost affectionate tilts his voice. “Or are you just a silly slut for my cock?”

A wiggle. A whimper. He moves down to her ankles and loops them reverently in silk, licking his tongue over each inner ankle-bone and nibbling on her arches as he goes. The ropes are run to two separate support-struts beneath the bed, tugging her thighs so wide that the silky gusset of her red panties begins to slide between her parted folds. They are wet — drenched, really — dark with shadows and desire. Her thighs are already shiny and slick, too. He presses his tongue to one canine — hard — steeling himself. If it weren’t for the bright blood-iron in his mouth, he might lunge for her, he admits to himself. Lick up every silvery drop from her thighs and then sink his teeth into the dimpled flesh, leaving a mark where she shouldn’t have one.

She should never have been scarred by him in the first place.

He backs up, studying her heaving, jiggling tits and each constellation of scars on her hips and waist while he unbuckles his jumpsuit with slow deliberation. The armored fabric is peeled off and tossed aside, falling to the platinum floor somewhere with a muffled clunk.

He tugs on one of the ropes at her ankles.

“How’s that feel, kitten?”

“G-good,” pearl stammers.

“Yeah?” He nestles himself between her dimpled knees, breathing in the clear waterlily and musky amber of her cunt. He’s not able to see much, but his gaze strokes over her anyway, and something knots at the base of his spine — a tugging pull that almost has him thrusting against the blankets. He blows gently against the exposed edges of her sex, and his gorgeous pearl writhes. “You like bein’ stretched open and helpless for me?”

“Uh-huh,” she mews. “Yes, Rocket.”

“Yeah, you do.“ He presses his knuckles into the doughiness of her inner thighs and coasts his thumbs over the thin layer of drenched fabric, leaving the soft wet petals and curls inside untouched. He lowers his face closer to the crux of her thighs and breathes in, and hold her in his lungs like a prayer, like a treasured memory.

Then he sighs and tilts his head: letting his whiskers kiss the inside of each damp thigh. She jolts, and a startled giggle hiccups over her lips. His lips quirk in a grin and follows each ticklish brush on her satin-soft flesh with careful nips, lapping at the thin sheen of syrup already slicking them. His thumbs knead into her pillowy folds — still keeping the soaked cloth of her panties between them, still not dipping inside.

“I meant to take you rough,” he admits. She writhes around his hands, trying to get his fingers where she wants them. His brows arch; he draws back and swats her — just once, squarely between the thighs, the sting muted by cloth. She gasps and bucks. “Stop moving, kitten,” he orders, and to be fair, she frickin’ tries — of course she does — sinking back into the thick mattress, thighs trembling with the tension of stillness.

He goes right back to massaging her through her panties.

“Saw those ropes in your hands and thought, this is the time to introduce my little slut to facefucking; this is the time I spank her clit till she comes,” he continues steadily. “But now I’m here, and all I wanna do is show this perfect little pussy how grateful I am.” He nudges the fabric with his nose. “Tease her, play with her, tell her thank you for bein’ so soft and wet and sweet, even when I’m bein’ an unforgivable jackass.” He pets the strip of silky-wet fabric, leaving her covered. The soft nub of her clit nudges against the cloth, and he ghosts a claw over it — lifting his finger when she jolts.

She’s so moon-damned responsive. And pretty, too. The combination’s gotta be frickin’ illegal.

“F’you like being stretched open for me, kitten, how about I stretch you a little more? Fuck you open on my fingers?”

“Yes, please,” she begs prettily, and he thumbs the panel of silk to one side, showing off her glossy pink folds and glistening midnight-blue curls.

“Oh, princess, she’s dripping.” The words are a taunt. A tuft of springy, sapphire-dark hair splays out against the red silk, right above her clit. He threads his fingers through the curls, claws prickling, and his digits slide through the strands. She moans, arching as well as she can with the way he has her spread and secured.

Then he tugs — just a little sharply, mean enough to sting. Pearl gasps on a choking sound. Her hips roll, seeking him. Seeking him: aching for his touch, for anything he wants to give her.

“And your tiny pink clit’s all swollen for me.” Another tug, followed by a breath of cool air — blown right over the tender bead of flesh. “Maybe when I make you some pretty clamps for your nipples, I should make one for her too.”

He gives the shiny-slick nub a mean flick, and pearl yelps and wriggles — but not so much that he can’t admire the desperate clench of her pussy.

“That’s right, sweetheart.” He pinches her clit just hard enough to make it feel threatening, and pearl responds so predictably and perfectly that it makes him ache: bowing up as much as she can, crying out just a little. He pulses his fingers, squeezing and tugging.

“Maybe I should fuck you first,” he muses as she tries to writhe against his careful attentions. His abdomen is tense, hips wanting to flex — aching to drive his dick into the pretty cunt spread wide in front of him. A broken wine has him flattening his digits — gliding them between her folds, teasing her while he glosses them up with her wetness. He fans the pads of his fingers over her abused little clit, rubbing slick gentle circles against the tiny bundle of nerves. She shudders and arches. “Maybe I should take the edge off for myself, at least, before we get started,” he continues, murmuring the words against the tender flesh of her inner thigh. “But I’m gonna be honest, sweetness. Now that you can’t get away, I don’t really wanna go anywhere either.”

She whimpers.

“You ready to tell me your story?” he asks, and when he peers over the slope of her mound and her soft belly, between the silky hills of her tits and their stiff achy nipples, he can see that she’s shaking her head emphatically.

“No, please,” she begs. “Please — I can’t, I need—“

He circles his tongue thoughtfully at her entrance, licking up just enough of her flavor to tease himself while he lightly strokes her clit. She jolts and gasps, then lets out a sob.

“I think you need to do what I tell you,” he growls. “F’you want anything more than my tail and my breath tonight.”

A desperate wiggle. “I do, Rocket, please—“

His tongue flickers against her clit, just enough to have her hitching her hips, trying to chase him.

“Tell me the frickin’ story, pearl,” he snarls. His own hips itch to swivel, to mimic hers.

She mews and rolls her hips. “It’s a — another Terran myth,” she chokes out around little hitching breaths and moans. “Don’t — don’t be mad.”

He teases the very tip of her clit with a featherlight fingertip — the kind of touch he normally reserves for nudging around finicky wires in bombs. She strains against her ropes, more silken liquid spilling from her slit. He leans in — lapping at her while he taunts her with the ghost of a touch.

“What, kitten?” he mocks. “Your little story doesn’t make me look good?”

He’s never gonna get tired of the little sounds she makes.

“There’s a girl, and she’s all alone,” she babbles. “And she’s supposed to marry, and there are gods — and monsters — and she only has sex in the dark—“

He chuckles. “Well, it ain’t really dark in here, sweetness,” he purrs. His thumbs part her weeping cunt. “You’re all covered in starshine. And I can see every—“ His fingers plunge inside her once. “—single —“ Twice. “—inch of you.” Three times.

Then he withdraws — leaving her empty. Pearl whimpers and tries to squirm closer.

“Every inch,” he croons. “I can even see her flutter, kitten; she’s so needy.”

Pearl’s questionable storytelling skills dissolve into a frothy moan as he slicks his tongue deep into her waterlily-pink pussy. He stretches the muscle long, swirling it inside her — trying to sweep every drop of sweetness onto the rough texture of his tongue, then curling it again to nudge along her walls. He can feel her legs straining, trying to clamp closed around his head; his ears flick forward to funnel every one of her panting sobs into his brain.

He licks his lips when he draws back, lapping up her petals and clit as he goes. She cries out again — a wail, really; a plea for him to come back, to push her over the edge. It wouldn’t take much, but then, that’s not really what he’s going for tonight. Not while he has her held helplessly open for him.

He settles onto his side again, pressing his naked back into the plush softness of her thigh — letting her skin warm his ports and implants, letting the brush of silky texture soothe his itching scars. A shuddering breath leaves him — hidden by her own whimpers, he hopes. He ghosts his touch over the trembling tip of her clit again, and grins — more than a little sadistically — when a whine punches from her lungs, pitched high and begging.

“Go on, sweetness, tell me more,” he taunts. “Does this girl got a name?”

She wriggles so desperately, brow furrowed above her blindfold — that he’s pretty sure his eyes would be hazy and blurred if she had them free. He chortles, and nips carefully at her thigh while he pets her clit with light, haunting fingers.

“You don’t even remember, do you? Got you drunk even without using my cock. Dizzy and dumb.”

“Eros,” she slurs. “I never made constellations for the — the main pantheon, but that’s you—“

For fuck’s sake. He rewards her with another lick to her soft little pussy, already dripping cream again, even while he continues to skim her clit with faint, merciless touches. Her hips hitch desperately and when he peers over the slope of her belly, he can see that she’s spangled with tiny diamonds of sweat: every inch of her feverish and slick.

“I’m a god now, huh?” he teases, and she nods pathetically.

“Rocket, please — Rocket, please—“

He leans in again and splays both hands over her thighs, brushing the sides of her clit lightly with his thumbs — then plunges his tongue inside her again, flicking at her clit with quick, deft, alternating strokes, till she clenches so tight that he can feel her thighs shivering against his whiskers.

Pitiful.

At the last second he draws back, thumbs spread wide and not touching her at all. A wail of disappointment parts her pink lips, echoing against the dome full of stars above.

“Aww, sweetheart,” he croons, all false sympathy. “You did say I could do anything I wanted to you tonight.”

He blows a light gust of air against her clit — taps it lazily, then fucks two fingers into her: deep as he can, right up to his knuckles. He spreads and flutters them, growling as he taps along her walls while she squirms and begs and pleads and sobs.

“That’s a good girl,” he taunts, pulling back at the last moment again — only to attack the spongy spot inside her once more: pressing against her cushiony walls, massaging till she’s shaking and shivering, flushed all over, covered in tears and sweat. He licks up every drop of her come, though — if he’s not using it to gloss her pretty pussy-lips and clit, anyway. “That’s my beautiful fuckdoll-wife.”

She moans.

“Lookit you, kitten. Staying right on the edge for me. You’ll stay there as long as I want, won’t you, sweetness?”

“Uh-huh,” she burbles drunkenly, more slick spilling from her cunt. He laps it up — sweeps his tongue inside again. “Rocket — please—“

“Gonna tease my silly slut all night,” he hums gleefully as she thrashes against the ropes, begging him for friction.

The next hour or two are almost as painful for him as they are for her. More than once, his cock pulses with need, and he has to squeeze a hand around the base, gritting his teeth as he holds himself back. But — poor, sweet pearl — he brings her to the edge nearly a dozen more times till he finally lets her come: one palm pressed against her lower abdomen while all four of his other fingers strum cruelly inside her. Between flicking licks of his tongue, his teeth nibble dangerously at her swollen clit. When her body snaps against the restraints, she gushes over her panties and thighs, and he swears the drops of come fuckin’ glitter in the starlight. Sure, they’ll have to wash the blankets tomorrow, but it’s worth it for the way she curves against the silk ropes like a captive rainbow, for the way her scream strangles out of her throat — rasping and broken from all her pleas and prayers.

When her body wilts against the mattress — spent and softened, sheened in sweat — he patiently licks her thighs and pussy clean, then gently tugs her panties back over her pink folds and blue curls. Her blindfold still shields her eyes, but it’s twisted and lopsided. He adjusts it carefully — finds it soaked against his fingertips, sopping with tears — and licks a delicate kiss to her salt-crystalled cheek. Then he crouches between her knees — cock still stiff and bobbing, though far less urgently now — and begins his tireless idolatry of her body. He starts by spangling her hips with tender licks and kisses, then tracing every curve and plane of her body with his studious, sensitive fingers. It’s not until he begins quietly kneading the sore, still-shaky muscles of her thighs that she stirs with a dreamy, murmured moan of pleasure.

He squeezes and smooths his palms over the sleek muscles, hands recalling the first time he’d massaged her body in the runabout, when she’d still been bruised and cut open from his claws and his brutal fucking. He slides his hands over her mournfully, now — perhaps even adoringly.

He’ll never be done being sorry, he thinks quietly, and he’s more glad than ever that she can’t see his face. Never done being sorry, and never done cherishing her body.

He swallows, then flutters his fingers lightly up her inner thigh. “You still wanna be tied up for the night, sweetheart?”

“Mmhmm.” It’s a dazed muffle of a response, but he thinks she sounds happy and content.

“M’gonna need your words, kitten.”

“Yes, please,” she mews, and he watches as a little curl of concern carves its way between her brows. “You didn’t come—“

He chuckles, and the sound is dark and gravelled. He doesn’t mind edging himself for longer — not as long as he can tease her twice as much.

“Sweetness, you better start worrying more about yourself.”

He licks his lips — makes sure she can hear it.

“Trust me when I say I’ll get mine.”

A little shiver flutters down her spine, making all her softest parts jiggle for him.

“For now, though,” he murmurs, sprawling himself back on his belly between her legs, resting his long chin against her abdomen. Her doughy thighs snuggle against the sides of his chest, cuddly and soft, and he revels in the feel of her silky skin against his bare fur and scars. His eyes nearly roll back in his head at the way she warms him. This whole frickin’ blindfold-thing is the best idea she’s ever had, and if he’s being honest, she’s had a lot of good ideas. “For now, why don’t you tell me exactly what I’m the god of, hm?”

She squirms again — weakly now, a faint blush rising in her cheeks and flooding down her chest, like her body’s too tired to make her as beautifully pink as it wants to. Still, he admires the warm hue that paints itself over her face and breasts. She swallows, and he can’t help but smirk.

She’s so bad at evasion. At least with him.

“Did I say you were a god? Not that it would surprise me,” she adds quickly. “You—“

“Airos,” he interrupts, drawing lazy circles against her star-speckled belly. She trembles under the light scrape of his claws, then swallows again.

“Eros,” she corrects softly. “He was part of the Greek pantheon — the one Herbert named all his labs after. But those — the labs, my constellations — are mostly lesser deities. And Eros is an older god, more well-known, though the stories of where he comes from differ. I usually think of him as a — a primordial personification.”

He hums, and nuzzles against her belly. “What’s he personify, then?”

That pink flush grows, blooming more vibrantly against the shadows and starlight and the blue of her hair. She wriggles. Her words spill out in a trembly, self-conscious confession.

“Erotic love.”

He blinks, then barks out an incredulous laugh. Heat blooms anew in his ribs, in his belly. The laugh turns into a smug cackle. “Sweetheart.”

She squirms beneath him. “Don’t be mean,” she pleads, and he grins into her skin.

“You like it when I’m mean,” he reminds her, “or you wouldn’ta let me tie you down.” He licks a kiss against the soft convexity of her abdomen. “Go on. What’s the story with this god of erotic love?”

She’d be hiding now, if she could. He can tell by the way she flexes against the ropes.

“You want out, kitten?” He tries to gentle his voice for her. “I can untie—“

“No,” she says meekly, and he watches her surrender against the blankets. ”I — don’t be mad,” she repeats, and he quirks a brow at her even though she can’t see it.

“You just called me the god of erotic love.” He snickers again. “I don’t think I can be mad at anything you’ve got to say right now, pearl. You might as well get all your bratting out now.”

Still, she draws in a nervous, shaky breath. He glides his thumb over her hip, and licks another reassurance into her navel.

“M’not gonna be mad, kitten.”

Still, she shifts uneasily beneath him.

“There was a girl,” she starts again. “Her name was Psyche, and the stories say she was beautiful, but all alone. No-one would marry her.” Her cheeks stain, even rosier. “It was a big… thing. Back in ancient times on Terra. Not in all cultures, but a lot of them. Women had to marry to be worth anything.”

His grin falters. He thinks of her again, that night in the Arete: Wyndham’s bride, valued only for how she could further the High Evolutionary’s plans.

Or how she could be used to hurt his pride.

But Rocket swallows, and tries to shove his own regrets away — to stay focused on his pearl, here in this moment. He presses his mouth sideways into her skin and nuzzles in — lets her feel when his grin curls and widens.

“Oh, yeah?” He prickles his claws playfully along her flank, and she bucks up against him with a rare, ticklish giggle. The sound eases something in him — opens a knot in his chest. “What happened to her, then?” he teases. “Did the god of erotic love fly her away and seduce her?”

He loves how her body settles when he smooths his palm along her side.

“Yeah,” Pearl admits softly. “That’s pretty much exactly what happened — though of course it’s more complicated than that. It’s always more complicated.”

She wiggles beneath him, getting comfortable in her ropes.

“I think — I think she was so lonely,” pearl confesses. “Her family was worried she’d never marry, and their — their lack of faith probably made her even sadder. They took her to the Oracle at Delphi — a high priestess dedicated to another god, famous for the power of her visions — who told Psyche that the gods had decided she’d marry a giant winged serpent. Her whole family was terrified on her behalf — none more than Psyche herself, of course. They all thought she was marrying a monster. They thought he’d kill her, or eat her. You know how Terrans are,” pearl adds, sounding apologetic, even though he doesn’t really know how Terrans are.

He can’t imagine any of ‘em like his kitten, though.

Instead of asking, Rocket only whuffs an acknowledgement against her belly and turns to rest his cheek against the softness of her skin, gently thumbing every moon-pale scar he can see.

“Psyche was meant to be taken and left all alone at the top of a mountain, dressed for mourning. The gods said her husband would retrieve her from there.”

He nibbles the plush curve of her belly. “He didn’t, though.”

She half-shrugs, eyes still hidden from him. “Who can say who was responsible in the end? Whether it was arranged by her intended husband or not, she was lifted from the mountain by a breeze, and it took her far away — to somewhere beautiful, and tranquil. There was a lovely house, and a voice that told her to rest, to eat, to make herself safe and comfortable. And she did.”

He nuzzles his cheek against her, letting the silk of his softest fur brush lovingly over her skin. “An’ then what, princess?”

She lets out a quiet, wistful sigh. “And then someone came to her. In the night. In the dark.” The corner of her mouth curves into her kitten-smile, like the curl of a candleflame against the blue stars and satin sheets. He almost wishes she wasn’t wearing the blindfold after all, because he bets she’d be looking at him with those soft moonsilver eyes, like gunmetal in the darkness. “Maybe he was a serpent. Maybe he was a man. Maybe he was her intended husband, or maybe not. She couldn’t see anything in the shadows — not even the shape of him — but she could feel the firmness of his touch and the wetness of his tongue, and the occasional brush of soft feathers.”

He hums a note — lets the brush of his tail echo the story, sweeping against her calves and knees.“Eros?” he asks, and pearl nods.

“And then — of course—“ Her voice tilts teasingly, less embarrassed now. “—they had amazing sex.”

He snorts and nips at her navel, and she ripples another little laugh into the air before growing solemn once more.

“Psyche was happy, at first. She loved him very much. But she was alone during the day, because he would only come to her in the darkness, late at night. She never saw him. And she was still so lonesome. Eventually, she became so sad that her lover noticed — even though she tried to hide it — and he brought her sisters to visit her.”

He snorts. “Was one of ‘em shaped like a tree, and the other a Kylosian moron?”

A soft puff of air parts her lips. “No,” she says, “and Psyche might’ve had less heartache if they were.” She tilts her head. “Or maybe not, in the long run. Her sisters came, and they saw Psyche's beautiful home, and how happy and glowing she was. She told them that her husband was lovely and kind and wonderful, and treated her well — that he loved her well. Perhaps she told them he was a man, or perhaps they assumed it. Perhaps all of them believed it. No matter what, I’m sure none of them recognized him as a god. And I’m sure her sisters asked to meet him — which is when Psyche would have had to confess that she’d never been allowed to see him.”

He smooths his palm against her again, committing the velvet of her flank to his memory. His ears flicker toward the sound of her voice, and his tail sweeps back and forth — softly brushing against the insides of her knees and calves.

”At that point, her sisters became — well, the stories differ. Most say they were jealous of Psyche’s happiness, but I think they were genuinely worried. Foolish, yes — but worried. Afraid for her safety. They convinced her to light a candle one night, and see who her husband was. Maybe he was a monster after all, they told her. Maybe he really was a winged serpent, one who would eat her. I suppose — well, I suppose their fear was contagious. They went home, and she was all alone again, and thinking about what they’d said. And in her loneliness, she became frightened.”

Ah. That’s why pearl had been worried he’d be pissed off.

“She did it,” he says, and pearl nods, a moue of sadness carved into her soft mouth.

“She did,” she admits. “And when she saw him, she was so distracted by how he looked — so overwhelmed — that she wasn’t paying attention, and she tilted the candle too far. A little drop of hot wax fell on him.” She makes a sympathetic little sound. “He woke up, of course. And he saw that Psyche had seen him, and he felt — so, so betrayed. That she had looked at him. That she hadn’t trusted him. That she had been afraid of him.”

He swallows, and begins mapping constellations onto the scars he’d given her. Each one is a wish, and a regret. “So what’d he do?”

He can’t see pearl’s hands from here — they’re stretched above her head to her bindings — but he just knows her fingers are twitching with the desire to comb comfort into his fur.

“He flew away,” she says softly.

His throat tightens.

“I’m not flyin’ away,” he rasps against her skin. And he’s not, he tells himself. He’s taking her to Fron, just like she asked.

In the end, it’ll be her who leaves.

“I know,” pearl says softly. “You’re like Eros — but you’re not just like Eros. You won’t fly away and leave me. But I’m not like Psyche, either.” Her inhalation is shaky and shuddering and sweet. “Nothing and no-one could make me afraid of you.”

His eyes sting, and pearl breathes out a wistful sigh.

“Sleep with me naked tonight,” she says.

It’s such a shy, soft little request, made with her whole damn heart in her voice. He opens his mouth, but no words come out. He’s not sure what he’d meant to say anyway.

“Let me feel you. I’ll stay blindfolded the whole time.” She tugs gently at her restraints. “I won’t be able to peek, not even if I wanted to.”

He swallows again, and tilts his head, and presses his mouth reverently to a starburst-scar along the curve of her belly. It glows white in the light of the spiraling galaxies outside. Then he moves to the next scar, and the one after that.

“The story ends happily,” pearl whispers into the glass bubble that surrounds them — like it will encourage him to stay beside her, uncovered and vulnerable. “Psyche has to go through a number of trials — I don’t remember them all — in order to prove herself and her love, and she almost gives up a bunch of times. But in the end, they’re reunited. They get—” Her voice stumbles. “They get married in the way of the gods, which means she’s made into a goddess, too. And they stay together forever.”

He kisses another scar. And another. “What was she the goddess of?” The question is muffled between each tender press of his mouth, each gentle swipe of his tongue. Her belly trembles beneath each one.

Pearl huffs a soft laugh. “The soul,” she says lightly — as if it’s silly, or doesn’t matter. But it only makes Rocket’s chest cave in. The tears that had been silvering his eyes for minutes finally spill into his fur.

It’s funny, really. A real laugh-riot. He’d always wondered if he’d had a soul. If that was something intrinsic to any creature with life, or if he’d lost it somewhere between the shattering surgeries and broken hopes. Or maybe he’d been missing it entirely, since the day he was formed — maybe a soul was a wisp of something divine and vital, something that the High Evolutionary hadn’t been able to replicate in his lab.

Sometimes, it had felt safer for him to assume that he’d never had one after all.

But I have one now, he tells himself, and the words are fierce and fiery in his brain.

I have one for as long as she keeps me.

He laps gently at another scar, and another. This is the night, he decides. The night he finally kisses every frickin’ scar he’s ever cut into pearl’s flesh, every wound he’s ever given her. His thin, soft lips are warm and worshipful, and pearl sighs again, sweet and dreamy between the sequins of stardust.

“Was he really a snake with wings?” Rocket asks between kisses.

He’s not sure why he asks, or why his voice is so hoarse and rasping. He’s not even sure why it matters, because he’s seen races that are basically snakes with wings, and they’re thought of as frickin’ gorgeous in a lot of sectors — so clearly Terrans’ beauty standards are fucked-up anyway. But—

“I mean, did she — did she really see a monster?“ he tries again, and he hates the way that desperation roughens his voice. But he can’t stop. “Or was he what she wanted after all?”

Pearl's quiet for so long that he grimaces, then dares a glance up at her face, expecting to see the curl of her dismayed brow. But instead, her kitten-smile is so soft he could wrap himself in it — softer than the Cyxlorade chenille. Softer than a serpent’s feathered wings. His claws tighten against her hip. He knows she’d be cradling his face if her hands were free — staring down at him with those infinitely-gentle starsilver eyes if she weren’t blindfolded. And for a moment he thinks that maybe all his reluctance — hiding his body from her, this perfect girl who’s already seen him at his very worst — is only making him miss out on a hundred sweeter, more satisfying moments.

But—

But he doesn’t untie her.

And he doesn’t loosen the blindfold.

“The stories all say Eros was one of the most beautiful gods,” pearl murmurs at last. “The art and the myths usually depict him as a — a certain kind of humanoid man. Slender, and young. Overwhelmingly the product of a — a limited imagination.”

Her smile turns tender.

“But — he‘s usually depicted with wings.”

Something trembles behind his ribs, raw and vulnerable.

“I think he was a giant serpent,” pearl confides to the stars and to Rocket. “I think that was why he didn’t want Psyche to see him.”

Her exhalation is a little sad, and so sweet that it hurts.

“I think he was afraid,” she whispers.

Rocket presses his nose into her side, and licks longingly at another scar.

“In the end, I’m not sure it matters if he was a — a monster or not,” she breathes into the silvery air. “Psyche was the only one who saw him, and she thought he was beautiful. It’s that simple.”

He moves to another scar, each kiss a quiet devotional pressed into her skin. An apology, and a prayer, and a promise.

I’m not flyin’ away.

Pearl’s voice trickles between the shadows and stars, as hushed and reverent as every press of Rocket’s mouth to her body.

“She always thought he was beautiful.”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

this is such a long chapter; i apologize. it's like twice as long as it should be. i should probably have cut it in half.

also i made some major revisions at the last minute tonight so i apologize if the editing's rough. i will eventually come back and reread and probably fix (most of) the errors.

starting next chapter i think we're hitting some of the more plot-heavy pieces and, if i've done my job well, things will start to come together. if you've stuck with cicatrix this long, i am everso grateful, and i hope that you continue to enjoy and that all your patience and support feels like it pays off. ♡♡ you are a fucking delight.

i am going to be traveling for the next week, starting friday, and i will be busy for most of the trip so i am not sure how that might impact the next posting, but i am trying to take it into account with the projection below! if that changes, i will make sure to update the monthly posting forecast on tumblr. i am also (slowly) working on an art piece for one of the future chapters in cicatrix and will be trying to post the linework next week while i'm out.

coming soon: chapter thirty-five. heartmoor.
summary: groot says goodbye.
warnings: more bondage, a little light somno, pussy-slapping, cunnilingus, angst and regret, discussions of genocide, more found family shit. (more warnings to come.)
estimated date: tuesday, july 29.*
*this date is an estimate only! for the most up-to-date schedule, please check the monthly forecast on my pinned tumblr post.

･:꧂posting schedules, previews, headcanons, art, & more on tumblr♡
･:꧂cicatrix art, masterlist, & moodboard♡

Chapter 35: heartmoor.

Summary:

groot says goodbye.

Notes:

warnings: more bondage/blindfolding, a little light somno, dirty-talk and slight degradation, praise, pussy-slapping, tit-fucking, come-eating and cunnilingus, angst and regret and fluff, brief discussions of genocide and implied systematic ecological devastation, more found family shit.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

heartmoor. the primal longing for a home village to return to, a place that no longer exists, if it ever did; the fantasy of finding your way back home before nightfall, hustling to bring in the cattle before the rains come; picturing a cluster of lanterns glowing on the edge of a tangled wood, hearing the rattle and hiss of meals cooking over a communal fire, finding your place in a crowded longhouse made of clay-packed thatch, where you’d sit and listen to the voices of four generations layered into a canon, telling stories of a time when people could still melt into a collective personality and weren’t just floating around alone. From heart + moor, to tie a boat to an anchor. Pronounced “hahrt-moor.” The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Rocket had kept his promise.

He’d worshipped every scar on pearl’s sweet body — at least all the ones he could reach while she was tied down to their bed — and then he’d lounged between her thighs and licked another holy orgasm right from her beautiful, pink-petaled cunt.

Afterward, he’d checked her comfort and her circulation — how are your fingers, kitten? can you touch your thumbs to your pinkies for me? wiggle your toes — and then covered her with her blanket and curled himself snugly at her flank. He’d wound one arm over her ribs, thumbing her side through the soft chenille as he’d drifted off. He’d always been a sporadic sleeper — getting more rest with pearl than he’d ever gotten before. Predictably, he’d woken a few hours later. His dreams hadn’t forgotten that his pearl was tied up and helpless for him, though, and he’d amused himself by playing with her tits while she’d continued to slumber. His claws had prickled delicately against her skin, plucking gently at her nipples under the blanket. Eventually, he’d slowly swept the blanket away, letting the luxurious silken weave linger over her breasts. Her sigh had wavered sleepily, and it had felt like a cosmic gift: to have her, soft and slumbering and defenseless — there to be tickled and toyed with at his leisure. He’d rolled on top of her belly and stroked the tenderest parts of her curves, watching every shift and jiggle as he’d teased her — then firmly cupped one breast, holding it as still as he could while skimming the softest parts of her areolae with the tips of his claws, careful not to break her skin. Even in her sleep, her body had reacted — nipples growing harder and harder until the usually-stiff peaks had become pouting and achy.

Then he’d tugged and twisted them, ‘till they were even harder.

Pearl had moaned softly and whimpered, responsive even in her sleep. He’d watched — practically frickin’ entranced — as she’d wiggled in her restraints before finally gasping herself awake.

She’d been so needy already.

He’d growled low and lifted himself to straddle her ribs, then fucked his dick between those perfectly-bouncy tits of hers — squeezing them together around his meanly-curved cock, with his hands still pinching her nipples. The little pink nubs had been cherry-red by then, and he’d snickered when he’d used them to help drag her gorgeous breasts up and down his length while he’d thrust between them.

Open your lips for me, kitten, he’d purred when he’d felt the tug at the base of his spine. Lemme fill that greedy mouth up.

The orgasm had crackled through him like the lightning in the HalfWorld sky on the night he’d stolen her: white and bright and blinding. He’d shuddered as he‘d come, every muscle locking — his knees clamping against her ribs. Then he’d thumbed the spillage from her cheeks with shaky hands, painting it over her lips so she’d be able to taste him all night.

Blearily — devotedly — she’d thanked him, and he’d been so frickin’ charmed that he’d turned around and swatted her through her soaked panties, punishing her for how damn sweet she was. With two fingers he’d spread her folds wide, and spanked her clit again while his tail had soothed and tickled her abused tits. Once, twice — he’d been careful, but he’d still lost count.

That’s my perfect little fuckdoll, he’d hissed gleefully when she’d started writhing again. That’s my good frickin’ girl. She’d been a beautiful frickin’ mess: squeaking frantically, babbling and begging, thighs straining to close — to protect herself, or to buy herself some friction.

Look at that puffy little pussy. Look at that swollen, sloppy little snatch. She wants to be slapped. She likes when it stings. It makes her want dick so bad. Even orgasms ain’t really enough for such a silly little twat, huh? She doesn’t know what’s good for her — just wants to be stuffed full all day, squeezing and slurping on cock.

What a slutty little fuckdoll-cunt you got, kitten.

What a needy, greedy li’l cocksleeve.

His pearl had come squealing against the smack of his palm.

He’d stayed perched on her as her abdomen had flexed beneath him, her muscles rippling beneath the layer of soft fat and flesh — and he’d been so pleased at the sight of her helplessly rolling hips, at the sting remaining on his wet palm.

The smug satisfaction had faded as he’d padded away to get a warm wet towel to clean her up. Something new had started to weigh down his fur, slowing his steps as he’d walked back to her.

You okay, pearl? The question had been cautious and uneasy. Still blindfolded and bound, she’d tipped her head toward him, a crease forming between her brows.

I feel wonderful, she’d said softly. Are you all right?

For a moment, he’d stared at her. He might have tied her up, but she’d done this — given him this. All her vulnerability. In spite of the way he’d trapped her beneath him in the Arete: his knees clenched cruelly into creaking ribs, the white froth of her dress pooled and puffed around her midsection, his hand still burning with the force of his slaps against her bruised ass and abused cunt — far too similar to the way he’d just treated her.

Not even gonna fight, huh, pearl? Fucked that stupid?

What if that night had been too similar to this one? What if he’d scared her, or hurt her again — really hurt her, beyond the rosy-warm sting and grounded ache she likes so much?

I probably will, once you start, she’d responded in the past: shakily, with her fingers gently looping his wrists on the rain-dappled, shadow-lacquered floor of her HalfWorld cage. But I don’t know how else to get out.

In the present, pearl had called his name, still trapped in her ropes and her blindfold, utterly defenseless.

Rocket? Are you all right?

He’d had to swallow down the whine that clawed up his throat. He’d crawled back to her: licking at her mouth, combing through her curls, nuzzling her throat and her sides and her thighs.

M’fine, pearl, he’d said hoarsely. You sure? That you’re okay?

There’d been a moment of silence, and somehow he’d known she’d been able to feel him — to see him, right through her blindfold.

I’m fine, Rocket, she’d whispered at last. That felt — so good. She’d wiggled a little in her restraints. Won’t you come back to me, sweetheart? Let me hold you as well as I can? You can untie me if it makes you feel better.

He’d swallowed. She’d never called him anything but the name he’d chosen for himself — the name she’d practically gifted him — but the endearment had sounded so warm and safe on her lips.

How are your fingers, kitten? he’d rasped instead. Wiggle ‘em for me again. And your toes. Any tingling?

No, Rocket. Come back to me.

He hadn’t. Not the way she’d meant, anyway.

He’d washed her: cheeks and chin, breasts and belly, the honeyed mess of her waterlily-cunt. And the whole time, she’d murmured praises and promises to him: telling him how good he always makes her feel, how he always seemed to know just what she needs, how much she loves being with him, feeling him, being at his mercy — how safe she feels, tied down with him there. How much she trusts him. How she’s loved everything he’s ever done to her and how she’ll never get enough of him, and how good she believes him to be, how brave and loyal, how clever and generous and strong and smart. How beautiful he is, in every way she can imagine.

He hadn’t believed the words — not really — but for once, he hadn’t scoffed, either. He’d let the reassurances sink under his fur, loosening some of the weight there, and then tossed the used cloth to the platinum-gleaming floor when he’d finished cleaning her. He’d licked a silent, reverent, grateful kiss against her collarbone — she’d sighed sweetly in response — before he’d layered her in blankets.

Then he’d crawled beneath them and spent the rest of the sleep-shift curled between her thighs. He’d dozed cuddled against her cunt, and anytime he’d roused even a little, he’d been sure to lick at her syrupy, sleepy little pussy — keeping her needy for the entire night, even through her dreams.

Reminding her of all the reasons she should keep him.

He hadn’t been able to bear leaving her tied once he woke up for good, though. He’d kept her blindfolded while he’d carefully unlaced the rope from her limp limbs — gently easing another warm wet cloth everywhere that had strained against the ropes, rotating her ankles and wrists, massaging salve into the red marks and blossoming bruises — sucking tender kisses into every pulsepoint. She’d barely stirred except for once, while he’d been thumbing cream into a raw spot on her inner ankle. One slender peachy-gold hand had fluttered to her blindfold, but she’d only asked, “Rocket?” Her voice had wavered, and he’d bent to stroke the side of his nose along her calf.

“M’right here, pearl. Go back to sleep. You can take your blindfold off when you wake up again. M’gonna go shower.”

Her hand had floated gracefully down to her chest, nesting like a bird between the blanketed mounds of her breasts, and something in his ribs had eased. She’d never even tried to take the strip of fabric from her eyes — but he’d been more surprised by how little concern he’d felt.

She’d already seen the proof of his ugliness, after all. Hell, she carries some of it on her own perfect skin. Maybe, if she sees it again — sees him again — it’ll be okay.

She always thought he was beautiful, she’d told him the night before, unfolding the myth from her home-planet like flower petals — shelling it apart like layers of flawed nacre so he could see the perfect heart at the center of it all.

Rocket’s not stupid. He knows what she’d been trying to tell him.

He carries that thought with him for the next handful of rotations, tucked neatly into his pocket. And every sleepshift, pearl’s waiting for him with the blindfold on. He doesn’t want to tie her down again — well, he does, but not yet. Not while she’s still got marks from the last time. But whether they fuck or not — and it’s true that they usually do — she sleeps curled up naked next to him, bare of anything but the ribbon of cloth covering her eyes, and sometimes a pair of panties.

And he sleeps shirtless. At least. Presses as much fur and skin against her as he can — hungry for the feel of her. She’s always so warm and resilient in his arms, under his palms, against his scars and chest and back. The ports on his body leave crescents and full-moon indents on her belly and breasts. One night, he rouses as he rolls back to face her, and finds her fingers blindly tracing the slivers and coin-shaped divots embossed on her skin.

“Spinal uplink port,” he tells her without thinking. Her fingers freeze in the darkness.

“What?”

He falters. His voice crackles uncertainly in the shadows. “That one’s from my spinal uplink port.”

Her fingers quiver, then trace the shape again. Her other arm winds around him cautiously, and he feels her fingertips leaf through his fur, then glide silkenly over his scars. A sigh eases its way out of him and his muscles soften under her touch, without any conscious decision of his own. He feels the delicate tug of the metal embedded in his flesh as she carefully touches the implant. It sends a frisson zipping up and down his nervous system, lighting up the column of his spine and tingling all the way down his limbs, like a static shock or a shiver. His fur puffs instinctively, ears flattening and tail doubling inside as every hair follicle prickles in his skin. He’s snagged the metallic port on clothing before — scraped it, getting in and out of tight places. He’s always associated the twinge in his spine with discomfort: a reactive physical sensation beyond his control, reminding him of his differences and all his vulnerabilities. But now — under pearl’s careful, reverent fingers — the shudder rippling through him becomes sensual instead.

“Is this okay?” she asks softly, her touch tracing his port and its corresponding stamp in the plush flesh of her breast. Finding the similarities, he imagines. Memorizing this part of him that he hasn’t let her look at since the night he’d terrorized her on HalfWorld. “It doesn’t hurt, does it?”

His throat is dry. He knows most humies rely more on their eyes than their sense of touch, but almost everything that Rocket understands about the universe has been learned through his hands. He feels like she’s seeing him through her fingers, no matter how he’s tried to hide behind jumpsuits and bandshirts and blindfolds.

“It doesn’t hurt, kitten.” His voice is hoarse and raspy. There’s a moment of silence, and the scent of something bright. He glances up from concentric circles pressed into pearl’s skin, and sees that the lower edge of her blindfold is already damp. Salt tinges the air: clear canal water turned into sea spray. Impulsively, he pushes the velvet tip of his nose against the soft side of her neck and shoulder. “It doesn’t. I frickin’ promise.”

It’s mostly true. His scars still itch and ache — and his muscles, and his joints, and his bones. He can feel the burn of the exposed metal when it gets too hot or too cold — a discomfort he’s already resigned himself to on Fron — but the ports themselves don’t hurt anymore, not even the one entwined directly into his spinal cord.

Pearl doesn’t acknowledge his reassurances.

“And these?” Her fingers card through fur split by scarring, and skim the pure-vibranium protrusions just inside his shoulderblades. He watches her own fingers dance across her chest, finding the matching lace-patterns in her skin.

“Cybernetic upgrade ports,” he mumbles against her skin. Her fingers tremble delicately against the vibranium. He can’t feel her touch directly, but he can feel the way the metal shifts against his skin.

“How do you know all this?” she whispers, and he winces.

“Updates were pretty common, back when I was with L06 and A95. I got ‘em at least once a cycle for a while. Probably had ‘em more often before I can really remember.” He tries to shrug. “Vim and Theel would talk about ‘em while they were hooking me up. Like a checklist.”

He watches the blindfold grow wetter. Her lips tighten — her jaw too. He tilts his head and floats one leathery hand just over the elegance of her throat. His fingers lift higher and he brushes the wet edge of the cloth covering her eyes. His kitten’s weeping behind that blindfold — but she looks almost pissed, too.

On his behalf.

I’d like to look out for you, too.

Rocket’s never run cold in his life, but this brief evidence of pearl’s anger — for him — fans the warmth he keeps hidden beneath his ribs. He feels the embers rise on an updraft, drifting up through his prosthetic clavicle, leaving shiny little burnmarks wherever they land inside him. Something tenses in his belly — something too close to adoration. He doesn’t have the strength or will to put the flames out, though. He nuzzles into her again.

“Don’t gotta be angry about it, kitten,” he purrs. “It’s over.”

She grows still under his hand: jaw relaxing, eyes fluttering behind the fabric of her blindfold. “He won’t ever get his hands on you again.”

It’s a vow. A promise. She sounds so fuckin’ fierce — a ferocious little kitten who still avoids eating anything that had once been alive, and has yet to reliably fire a frickin’quadblaster — and it’s cute a hell. He can’t help the slight curl at the corner of his mouth.

“Oh yeah?” he teases, the little smirk growing wider. “What are you gonna do about it, pearl? You gonna protect me?”

“Yes,” she tells him solemnly.

Then her lower lip wobbles, and she sniffles. Rocket can’t help the snicker that clatters from between his teeth as he lurches upward into the pillows: pulling her blindfolded face into the crook of his shoulder, winding his fists into all her silky, waterfall-curls. Her arms garland his torso: cuddling him tightly to her face, finding the ridges of his flex-vibranium ribs with the softness of her lips. He wraps around her and she wraps around him, and sleep finds them both — deep and welcoming as the forever-sky.

“I want to stay,” Nebula tells them the next wake-shift, as they enter the star-system surrounding Morosx-3. “At least — until the next stop, on Lamentis.” Her eyes cut across to Rocket’s. “If I change my mind once we land, you’ll give me one of the escape pods. And a Fuck-You-Disk.”

Pearl chokes, and Groot murmurs a surprised rumble.

“You think so?” Rocket asks with an arched brow. Nebula’s eyes narrow and she lifts her chin.

“I do,” she says evenly. There’s a challenge in her hoarse voice, and Rocket leans back in the pilot’s seat, crossing his arms and smirking insolently up at the cyborg. He opens his mouth to speak, but Drax beats him to it.

“Best Friend Rocket,” the Destroyer says plaintively, and Rocket winces. He’s starting to feel like it’s Drax’s actual name for him or somethin’. “Don’t promise this Luphomoid cyborg an escape pod.” He drops his voice into a loud whisper that ain’t escaping anybody’s notice. “Convince her to stay.”

Rocket rolls his eyes. “I can’t convince her to do anything she doesn’t w—”

“Of course you can,” Drax says, looking stunned as he pulls back. Gone is any semblance of secrecy. “You’re the captain. You can do whatever you want.”

“You convinced me to stay this long,” Nebula admits drily, with a disdainful curl to her lip. “But for love the Sharra, please spare me any more of your heart-to-hearts.”

Rocket makes a face at her in the reflection on the crystalline-armored glass. “Frickin’ rude,” he mutters. “I don’t do heart-to-hearts.”

“I am Groot,” Groot breaks in gently.

“We’re very happy you’re staying, Nebula,” pearl translates, her kitten-smile curving the corner of her mouth as she strokes the scaled f’saki in her lap. The damn thing sprawls over her thighs, limp in every limb.

“Okay, enough sappiness,” Rocket grunts, and he doesn’t miss the fact that Nebula looks relieved by the redirection. He waves a hand carelessly. “I’ll work on the disk when we’re on autopilot. It’ll be done by the time we land. But — uh—” He grimaces. “On that note, lemme come clean on a few things. One, we ain’t goin’ to Lamentis.”

Nebula bolts upright in her seat and Drax furrows his brow.

“We’re not?” the Kylosian asks.

“This is the correct route toward Lamentis,” Nebula points out suspiciously.

“I am Groot?” Groot asks quietly, and pearl nods.”I am Groot.”

“I had hoped to see Nok Tamal,” Drax mutters under his breath. “I wanted to take the princess shopping this time.” He scowls. “Maybe, without constant criticism from you two, she would be able to appreciate my taste.”

“Your taste is just fine, Drax,” pearl consoles the Kylosian, patting his burly forearm. “It’s yours. The next time we go shopping, let’s get things to decorate your bunk.”

The Destroyer pauses in his pouting, considering that possibility as if he’d never even thought of it. His face frickin’ lights up.

“Groot’s right,” Rocket says, electing to ignore the fact that pearl’s just volunteered to turn at least one room on his ship into a nightmarescape. “I didn’t wanna give away our next location to anyone who wasn’t planning on bein’ there with us, on account of the fact that two-thirds of this crew’s on the run.”

Nebula snorts. “Only two-thirds?”

Rocket rolls his eyes. “Well, Drax apparently did his time and got released all — legalistically or whatever. And the damn f’saki kinda counts too, doesn’t he? Nobody’s looking for him either.”

“Do you hear that, Littlefoot?” pearl croons to the reptile, plucking him up under his forelegs and cradling him like a frickin’ baby. The f’saki churrs softly and settles into the new position like a pampered housepet. “You count!”

“Kinda,” Rocket stresses, but pearl just beams at him in the reflection of the starshield.

“Where are we going then, Best Friend Rocket?” Drax asks.

Rocket hesitates, then pulls up the starmap. “Here’s the outer rim of the Greater Magellanic Cloud, just beyond Kree territory,” he says, tapping the screen, then swivelling the view — sending it spinning a few hundred lightyears past. “Lotta this area hasn’t been fully-colonized by any of the empires yet, so these planets and systems and satellites are just marked with placeholders. Here’s Lamentis. And just two systems over, there’s this one—”

He zooms in on a small planet, gently whirling and bobbing: a swirl of ash-brown and smoke-gray, blotted by faint flecks of green and dusty brown that melts into blue. It looks almost like a desert-planet, with spots of verdancy and tiny oases here and there, and is marked only by a single letter.

“This is where we’re going.”

“Planet X?” Nebula repeats doubtfully.

“I am Groot,” Groot sighs, and the sound is a yearning rush of autumn breezes, blown between rattling leaves.

“That’s Taluhnia,” pearl says softly.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

It takes a few cycles to reach the target star-system, which is similarly unlabelled on the map. The limitations of an empathetic language mean that Groot’s references to the star at the center are mostly a wave of feelings: holiness, home, warmth. A champagne-silver and golden glow. In the more limited languages of the rest of the crew, it remains nameless.

The Dreadnought glides silently past Morosx-3, and later Lamentis, with no trouble at all from the outside universe. Inside the ship’s walls, they eat dinners together and play games, tell stories, bicker and tease and laugh. Even Nebula has taken to making more sounds of amusement than before. Her laugh is still both rare and harsh — a sudden, brutal bark that always seems to surprise the cyborg herself — but everytime pearl hears it, something inside her eases a little more. The lot of them gamble for favors — meals, songs, exchanges of chores that are always so easy anyway thanks to the Sovereign Dreadnought’s advanced cleaning and filtration systems. Pearl practices flying — sometimes taking over for Rocket for an entire shift while he provides running commentary in the form of instruction, encouragement, and something filthier when they’re alone. The freedom of flight makes her hands sing on the yoke. When she’s not revelling in the comfort of her newfound family or relishing the fresh flutter of freedom in her ribcage, pearl continues the seemingly-endless job of cataloguing and inventorying the Dreadnought, often wondering how they’ll ever use all the food stores or medical supplies. And when she has time — which is often — she works on creating a den in the closet. Slowly, it becomes a cozy little room of soft fabrics, spangled by tiny Xeronian lanterns lit with miniature plasma orbs, and little potted plants that thrive in the starlight.

The captain’s quarters have begun to be transformed, as well. A softer, plusher rug sprawls between the two chairs where pearl had first given Rocket a blow job, and there’s a few more Xeronian plants on the mostly-empty shelves behind the head of the massive bed. More pierced patterned lanterns — these ones nearly twice the size of pearl’s head — hang on either side of the mattress and in the corner with the thick new rug and chairs. When lit, they cast constellations and Xeronian blessings all across the room in a mosaic of light: bringing the cold stars in from outside the dome, warming them up, and laying them out across the ground in a layer of lace. Xeronian quilts take the place of most of the old covers that had been reused from the runabout: cushiony and luxe-velvet, drinking up the light and gliding against pearl’s skin almost as beautifully as Rocket’s fur.

Most sleep-shifts are spent in their shared bed, but every few rotations, she ends up in the den for at least an hour or two. The tight cozy confines settle her, and she thinks she can feel the tension dripping out of her. Rocket joins her as soon as he’s able, and more than once, they fall asleep there.

“Are you nervous?” she asks one night. She’s sprawled on her belly in piles of glossy-soft Cyxlorade chenille, naked except for her Sovereign panties, with her moon-blue curls pulled into a high ponytail and spilled to one side. She tilts her cheek against her folded forearms. Normally, she’d be watching the wedge of starry dome outside the closet door, framed up in the twinkle of the tiny lanterns while flecks of light and stardust linger over skin and fur and fabric — but, for now, she’s snug and happy in the shadows of her blindfold. Rocket sits cross-legged beside her, and she can feel his knees pressing into her flank. His jumpsuit’s been rolled down to his waist, she knows, and he’s hunched over her — shirtless, probably with his ruby-glass goggles shielding the red glow of his eyes — working on the pieces of Nebula’s first Fuck-You-Disk, which he has spilled across the slopes of her back.

“Don’t move, pearl,” he orders, and she hears the soft zzpt of a miniature laser drill. Then: “Nervous? ‘Bout what?”

His voice is tense, though.

“About Taluhnia,” she says quietly. “About Groot. Nebula. Fron.”

He snorts. “No.”

“Mmm,” she hums. She doesn’t bother to give voice to her skepticism.

“But what’s he gonna do there?” Rocket continues. She can picture the furrow between his white brows, the way he pauses to gesture with his multi-tool and his laser-drill. “He said everyone on his planet is gone. Is he just tryin’ to pay his respects? He never said anything to you about leaving with us, did he? Goin’ to Fron?”

“No,” she admits. He picks up something from one shoulderblade, then sets down both tools. A handful of little bits of cool metal — tiny screws or ball bearings, maybe — spill into the shallow hollow at the base of her spine. One of them is plucked up — she feels the faint scrape of the claws on his thumb and forefingers — and then the tiny drill whirrs again.

“See, I don’t like that,” he frets. He picks up another one of the little bits, and the drill buzzes once more. “That’s some fucked-up self-imposed isolation, or whatever.”

“Hadn’t you been living in self-imposed isolation for a while?” she asks gently, and there’s a moment of stillness.

“You’re lucky you’re my workbench right now,” he mutters, “or I’d spank that ass red.”

“And I’d like it,” she shoots back mildly, and he snorts.

“Besides. That was different,” he reasons. He moves something else along her far flank. “I was — that was ‘cause I was frickin’ responsible.”

She can hear the slight crackle in the last word. “You weren’t,” she says quietly. “Remember? Don’t do Herbert’s work for him.” She sighs, and he curses and pinches her hip as some of the little bits roll.

“Don’t move, kitten.”

“Sorry,” she apologizes, and then adds, “But don’t you think — I think he feels responsible, too. Don’t you think you can feel some of that? When he speaks? When he’s telling the story of the First House?”

There’s a lingering pause, then he blows out a breath that puffs across her back. She can feel gooseflesh rising in its wake as he sets down a thin ring of cold metal. She can feel it slowly warming with the temperature of her skin.

“I guess there’s something,” he admits hoarsely after a moment. “When he was tellin’ it two rotations ago, about how the First Walking Taluhnisan left, and all the other Taluhnisans begged her not to go — it felt—”

She can hear him grapple for words. “It felt personal,” she says, and her voice is hushed against her forearms.

“Yeah,” he says quietly. “I think — I mean, maybe I’m wrong ‘cause I couldn’t understand him in the beginning, but it seems like this story started out just being a — like a fairy-story or somethin’. What’s the word?”

She squints one already-closed eye behind her blindfold. “A parable?”

“Yeah. That’s what it felt like. And every time since, it’s felt more and more — personalistic. Like you said.” There’s a pause, and she can almost feel him scowl. “Like that shit with the Gardener. What the fuck. If he’s even real, then he’s a real fuckin’ shithead—”

“He’s real,” pearl interjects. “He’s an Elder. Like Tivan.” She tilts her head. “He’s been attributed with the creation of a lot of empathetic, arboreal races. The Cotati on Lamenti, for instance. Pretty much every race and species that has evolved from the Ex Nihilii.” She tries to shrug without moving much. “I don’t know if it’s true that he made them, but he is real. And if he’s anything like the Collector, he’s worth fearing.”

There’s a pause. “You think he’s responsible?” Rocket asks slowly. “You think the Gardener-guy—”

“Ord Zyonz.”

“Ord—? Ord frickin’ Zyonz, I guess; whatever. Stupid frickin’name. You think he killed all Groot’s people?”

“I’m not sure,” she says quietly.

Another pause. Then, more cautiously:

“We’re s’posed to land planetside in a rotation and a half. You think he might be there? Zyonz, I mean. You think he might be waiting?”

“I don’t know,” she repeats truthfully. Then: “I wouldn’t think so. If Taluhnia’s really — if everyone’s gone, then there’s nothing there for the Gardener. But even if he is, I think — I think we have to go anyway. Don’t you?”

The silence lingers along the quiet cushions of the den. Rocket sighs.

“For Groot, huh?” He sounds bemused — like he’s baffled by his own willingness.

“For Groot,” she agrees.

“M’turnin’ into a frickin’ soft-touch,” he mutters against the little pieces of tech lined up along her spine. His knees press into her flank and she pictures him again: hunched over her naked skin, goggles shielding his ember-red gaze, the spangles of lantern-light glinting off the metal pieces lined along her back and hidden beneath his fur. She imagines him squinting and scowling at another small ring of vibranium as he settles it into the Fuck-You-Disk.

“A sap,” he grunts. “A bleeding heart. A moon-damned pushover.”

And I love you for it, she thinks, wiggling her body more snugly into the pillowy chenille.

Another sharp pinch to her hip.

“You don’t get to be my table if you can’t keep still, doll.”

She smiles into her forearms. “I’ll keep still,” she promises.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Taluhnia shows up like a dirt-and-ash smudge against the jeweled sky: a sphere of smoky rutilated quartz, striated by black scars and intrusions of aged bronze. Rocket sits pearl in the pilot’s seat and perches in her lap, grounding himself with the soft warmth of her thighs beneath him, her belly and breasts behind him. She breaks atmosphere for the first time as they approach the planet, and the Dreadnought barely hitches as the porcelain plates lick fire against the bubble of the Taluhnisan sky.

“Good girl,” he murmurs under his breath, stroking a thumb over her knee. Her tension eases under his touch, but everybody’s got their hackles raised today.. They’re worried about the possible presence of the Gardener too, though both Groot and pearl seem doubtful that he might be hanging around.

“I am Groot,” Groot says, and Rocket hears the question underneath his patient, crackling voice: Why would our maker return after all our people have perished?

“Maybe in case of stragglers like you,” Rocket points out wryly, but Groot only shakes his head.

Nevertheless, he directs pearl to circle the planet four times, scanning for any obvious signs of life. The biological energy signatures remain low — if anything, they emphasize just how barren Taluhnia has become. There’s nothing beyond a few patches of slow regrowth, and no visible structures outside of the sprawling ruins of spiralled Taluhnisan cities, etched on the landmasses in browns and grays, with hearts of weak green.

One he’s satisfied that there don’t seem to be any gods or Gardeners still on the surface, Rocket asks Groot where they should put down the Dreadnought.The Big Guy gestures, and pearl responds: lowering them to a swath of low, sloping gray mountains and valleys carved by ancient glaciers. An abandoned city — which pearl tells them is called a grameet — crowns one of the lower peaks, and as they grow closer, Rocket can see that the whole thing is built like a sprawling, roofless labyrinth, in a series of radiating concentric circles.

Then they fly lower still, and Rocket feels his ribs tighten on his lungs. Because Taluhnia is still beautiful, in its own bony, stony, desolate way.

“I am Groot,” Groot says quietly. “I am Groot.”

Rocket swallows. “He says this all used to be — old growth forest. Ferns an’ flowers everywhere.”

“I am Groot.”

“Mammals could — uh. Mammals could fall from the highest treetop and it would feel like jumping into a pile of pillows.” He pauses and scrubs his knuckles against his sternum. “Pearl, lighten up on the vertical thrusters, real slow. We’re gonna set down right here.”

“Where did it all go?” Drax asks, and his booming voice sounds more hushed than Rocket’s ever heard it.

“I am Groot.”

“Groot wasn’t here, but he — he heard from someone that a Leviathon had come. He destroyed a whole region of forest in one night — the entire planet in cycles. Used all the bio-matter as fuel.”

“I am Groot.”

Rocket soothes his thumb again along pearl’s knee as her brow furrows. She’s almost going too slow, but he can appreciate her caution. She’ll get quicker. He’s only feeling kinda impatient because the sooner she lands, the sooner she can focus on translating. He doesn’t feel like he’s doing Groot’s story justice, and it’s making his sternum twinge.

“He says that without the trees and canopy to protect the understory and soil, the rain prob’ly eroded it all pretty quick. Most of the ground cover wouldn’t have been able to hang on.”

Rocket can see it, too. Can imagine it. Between the slanted gray stones, there are patches of bleached brittle earth. Cracked frail phalanges of old vegetation — plants that used to drink up the dappled light of Taluhnia’s revered star through the shelter of layered leaves — stab upward from between slate and stone. They’re dried and arthritic, and look as if they’d dissolve into dust and bone-bits if he so much as blew on them. The ragged stumps of stolen trees have toppled to their sides, root systems exposed and husk-dry.

The Dreadnought settles against the gravel and rock. There’s a moment of collective quiet, hushed and pensive, before their little crew starts moving. They rise slowly from their seats with a strange, brittle kind of silence, layered over them as if they can all somehow feel that they’re on holy ground. It’s the desolation, Rocket figures. When they step down the ramp and out onto gray rocks — overlooking a valley of splintered tree trunks and salted earth — everyone can tell that this whole planet is a mass grave. Something about it squeezes Rocket’s lungs in his chest and he has to force himself not to wheeze at the slow plummet of his belly. He swipes the back of his hand along the end of his nose and glances sideways up at Groot. The Big Guy stares out at the empty devastation of the valley in silence, with heavy and soulful eyes. Pear stands beside him, equally silent, with tears already lacquering her cheeks. Her blue curls are the most vibrant thing in the dusty Taluhnisan landscape, spilling like a torrent of clean, clear canal-water against the ashen sky.

“It looks like Mount Kylos,” Drax whispers, his voice more subdued than Rocket’s ever heard it. “It looks like Mount Kylos after the battle with Ronan.”

“I am Groot,” Groot says softly, and the words don’t need any translation. They’re so full of rustled leaves and sorrow that Rocket’s pretty sure anyone could gather the basics of what he means. The Taluhnisan turns slowly, every ligneous limb creaking, and gestures them up the shallow incline to the edge of the grameet. Rocket feels his ears flick back under the shadow of the vaulted walls, made of some kind of woven wood — like braided roots or entwined branches, and strong slender tree-trunks grown so closely together that there’s less than a leaf’s-width of space between them. On instinct, he lets his sensitive fingers brush the wall as they enter. It’s dull and grayish, but glossy-smooth, so sleek that his hands sing with the silken texture. Underneath the lusterless surface, Rocket can see the undertones of something silvery and moonstone-glowing. He bets this Taluhnisan wood would have been prized more highly than even Atraxian lumber in its prime — but now it’s only colorless and ghost-pale and weather-damaged.

His head tips back and he stares up between the narrow walls at the barren sky.

“Why no roofs?” he asks without thinking. His voice echoes along the wooden chambers, resonating low, and carrying.

Groot doesn’t seem to mind though. “I am Groot.”

“There used to be roofs, of a sort,” pearl translates as they walk. “The Oortet that make up the chambers of this grameet would have also grown a canopy of leaves, allowing in the dappled light of Taluhnia’s holy star, glimpses of sky, and the occasional sprinkle of a rain-shower.”

“Oortet?” Nebula rasps warily, eyeing the walls.

“I am Groot,” Groot adds quietly. “I am Groot.”

“The Oortet Tree is the heart of the grameet. One grows from the center of each of the thirty-three Houses of Taluhnia. The taproots reach so deeply that the old stories say all the Houses are connected — that the original forest started with the first Oortet Tree, in the First House. As each Oortet grows, it develops a secondary root system — a fibrous root system — and new sprouts form from the fibers, becoming the surrounding saplings and trees. The Arbor Masters and respective citizens cultivate the Oortet to form the grameet around the central tree — expanding the city one layer at a time, each Taluhnisan year: ring by ring.”

They twist and turn through the narrow paths, spiraling back and forth and around in a labyrinth of concentric circles — like a set of whorled fingerprints, or the dendrochronology of a tree. Higher they climb, and the closer they get to the sky, the more Rocket finds small signs of life. The grameet walls begin to seem more luminous — though only slightly. The ground itself shifts from dry, dead mulch and dusty gravel into something more loamy and rich. Even though Rocket doesn’t really like the feel of it on the bare soles of his feet, he has to admit that there’s a kind of relief in seeing evidence that there’s still some life to be found on this otherwise-empty planet. New moss begins to color green patches against the increasingly iridescent wooden walls and the dark soil below, and tiny sprigs of some kind of clover he’s never seen before — not that he’s been particularly attentive to botany in his travels — tremble slenderly from between stones. In some places — uncultivated — new shoots spring out of the grameet’s walls: fragile silver spires and spindles topped by feathersoft, pale baby-leaves. The circular paths wind tighter and tighter. Rocket finds himself sinking deep into the quiet, holy sound of his friends‘ footprints against the forgotten ground, and a cleaner breath of air seems to blossom out of this oasis of verdant green.

“I am Groot,” Groot utters. His voice is as hushed as the soft crush of mulch and moss beneath their feet. “I am Groot. I am Groot.”

“What’s he saying?“ Nebula asks. Her voice rasps, and unlike her usual calculated coldness, every hoarse note seems heavy.

“He says he’s surprised to find any life here at all,” pearl says gently. “While he was away, he‘d heard that all of Taluhnia had been demolished by the Leviathon. He had expected the whole planet to be barren. But though the Taluhnisans are gone — except for, perhaps, some stray travelers like himself — the planet lives on, and someday, it will thrive once more.”

“I am Groot,” he adds solemnly, and pearl’s mouth curves into a pensive, saddened smile.

“Slowly, she heals herself.”

Nebula nods, her dark eyes thoughtful. “Slowly, she heals herself,” the cyborg echoes.

“She’d heal herself quicker with some help, though,” Drax mutters, unconsoled. Rocket can’t help but agree, even if he keeps his mouth shut. But Groot pauses abruptly in his slow, lengthy strides, and turns to blink down at the Kylosian.

“I am Groot.”

Drax wrinkles his nose. “You’re… welcome?”

Rocket’s eyes flash to pearl’s. She looks grimly pleased.

“I am Groot,” Groot says gently, turning again and leading them onward and inward. “I am Groot.” A pause. “I am Groot.”

“Taluhnisans were meant to care for Taluhnia, not to outlive it. But that doesn’t mean Groot didn’t—” Pearl’s moonsilver eyes grow haunted and confused. “Didn’t let them down.” Her brow fuels. “Groot—”

“You weren’t even here,” Rocket interrupts. Annoyance leaks into his voice — not toward Groot specifically, but toward a universe that seems to keep piling blame at the feet of the people who deserve it least. “How could you have let ‘em down?”

Groot doesn’t turn, and at first, Rocket doesn’t think he’ll answer at all. They reach the center of the circular grameet — twisting back and forth in shorter paths and tighter circles — and though the sunlight is pale from a layer of haze that has yet to be filtered from the atmosphere, it still feels warm and sweet. Honeyed. It’s no wonder, Rocket thinks, that Taluhnisans evolved to consume light as their main source of fuel. How could they not, when their star offered such deliciousness? He thinks he can almost taste it himself. It drips through his fur like nectar.

Groot pauses in front of the next threshold. It’s clearly the birthplace of the entire grameet. The wood is different this close to the heart: luminous and bright. When Rocket brushes his fingers against the grain, it feels warm to the touch. It’s not gray at all, he realizes — it’s not even the shade of pale silver he’d expected. Instead, each layer of bark is translucent and glassy. The clear sap inside catches every soft, frail bit of light from the sky, and reflects it through the layers and layers of bark and syrup in rich glowing hues of opalescence.

There’s no lintel on this doorway — just a break in the towering walls. The branches are delicate and intricately-designed around the frame — each slender vine more structured and deliberate in its patterning, with twigs and stems evenly-spaced and balanced. Letters, Rocket supposes. Words. A strange alphabet, unlike Kree or Shi’ar. An inscription.

“I am Groot,” he replies at last, and Rocket feels a lurch in his belly.

“He says that is how he let them down,” pearl translates for the sake of the others, her own voice wobbling. “By not being here.”

The light slants down from between the crests of towering wooden walls in golden shafts and beams. They somehow add intricacy to the fey architecture, falling around the last remaining Taluhnisan like a blessing or benediction. Rocket can only imagine how it would have looked decennium ago, when the misty brightness had been channeled between a lattice of leaves.

“I am Groot,” Groot says softly, turning to gesture to the letters on the wooden frame. “I am Groot.”

“Taluhnisan letters are made of stems and branches, read from bottom to top — up the tree, so to speak,” pearl says. “This is the entrance to the very First House, the one from our story — Orchidacea.”

There is a long pause, and then—

“I am Groot.”

Rocket feels his jaw drop, gaping, and when he rips his eyes from the Big Guy so he can glance at pearl, she looks just as stunned.

“What did he say?” Drax asks, sounding panicked in the face of his friends’ silence.

“His House,” pearl utters at last. “He says — he says it’s his House.”

“That don’t mean anything though, right?” Rocket tries to reason. “That’s just — that don’t mean anything.”

Groot smiles wanly, and beckons them through the towering entrance.

“No,” pearl says quietly, glancing down at Rocket with enormous moonsilver eyes as she trails behind Groot. “I mean — it doesn’t not mean anything.” Her eyes flick to Groot and she knots her hands in her cardigan — th first time Rocket’s seen her do that in a while. She takes a confessional breath. “I knew when Groot first introduced himself that his name wasn’t quite… accurate,” she admits in a rush. “It felt… off. Too short for a Taluhnisan name.”

Rocket feels his eyes widen before he glares — furious. “You knew he was lyin’ about his name and you brought him with us anyway—“

“Well,” she protests, hushed. “I wasn’t telling him my given name, either, was I?”

“Who are you, then?” Rocket snaps, whirling on Groot before he remembers that he’s basically standing in the cemetery of a lost civilization. He flinches, even before Drax gives him a disapproving look and even Nebula’s single working eyebrow twitches.

“I am Groot,” Groot says softly.

The silence lingers. The light drips silently around them, sweet and soaked up by the soft mosses, glancing off the sharp rocks where they still stab through the slow regrowth of green.

“Well?” Drax prods.”Who is he?”

Pearl shrugs helplessly. “He says he’s Groot.”

“I am Groot.”

“That’s what he wants his friends to call him. To know him as.”

“What did others know you as?” Nebula asks slowly, her eyes narrowed — not in annoyance, Rocket thinks, but in speculation. Curiosity.

Groot hesitates. Rocket can read it in the slight twist of his shoulders, the flinch before he begins to turn away and lead them deeper into the First House.

“I am Groot.”

Pearl sucks in a breath and stumbles, even as Rocket freezes mid-stride. Nebula catches his girl’s arm, keeping her from hitting her knees, and some distant part of Rocket takes note so he can thank the cyborg for it later. What Groot had said — well, as with Taluhnia’s holy star, a name isn’t easy to translate in an empathetic language. Especially not for a novice like Rocket. But he thinks what he heard was—

“His Divine Majesty, King Groot XXCVII,” pearl manages to say, and her voice is squeaky with something almost like panic. “First Arbor Master of Taluhnia, Custodian of the Branches, and Ruler of All the Shades.”

Nebula and Drax pause, both blinking rapidly, but Groot doesn’t stop or turn — not this time. He continues forward, into the heart of the House and the grameet.

After a long, lingering breath, the crew trails behind him.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Groot drifts through his empty House for hours, like a loose seed on a spiralling puff of wind. His long ligneous fingers trace the patterns of the branches and trunks, and no-one says a word as he lingers in different chambers and hollows. The crew simply follows him silently, watching as he floats fingers over every knot and split in the wood like a yearning memory, every refracted bit of light like a forgotten dream. The central room is wide open: an aperture to the sky that had never been closed by leaves or branches. The collapsed husk of the First House’s Oortet Tree stands in the center of the dais like a crumpling megalith. Rocket figures that Groot and Drax could lay down on the stump, head-to-head, and still have space before their feels hit the outermost ring. There’s some debris around the base — some withered-looking roots twisting under sad moss and gravel — but it’s clear that when the Leviathon came through, he must have consumed the rest of the exposed Oortet, if not the root system beneath.

Groot peers up at the circular view of the sky as the light begins to slant at a new angle, and he gazes around his home like it’s an old lost friend — one whom he had missed terribly. One whom he had wronged, and who might not forgive him. The Taluhnisan sighs with the sound of rustling leaves, and he guides the four of his friends out of the House, back through the grameet — stopping, this time, at various locations: wordlessly kissing his fingertips to more doorways, peering again upward toward the vaulted sky.

And the crew follows once more.

It’s a solemn processional. Rocket’s never been one to observe ceremony, but interrupting feels wrong — no matter that part of him is still vaguely insulted that Groot hadn’t shared his royal heritage with them. Sure, pearl’s right — they hadn’t exactly been forthcoming with their own fucked-up histories — but it doesn’t stop Rocket from feeling what he feels. Which is a little frickin’ offended, thank you very much, and a little — well, maybe a little sad about it. And a little hurt.

But he also thinks back to the quiet conversations he’d had with pearl in their den.

I think he feels responsible too.

Rocket supposes he can understand a person feeling so guilty and ashamed that they can’t bring themselves to speak of it. He can understand a person feeling like their choices had led to the death of their loved ones, and not being able to give voice to it.

Eventually, Groot leads them back to the Dreadnought.

“I am Groot,” he says gently.

“We should eat,” pearl translates. “Rest.”

“I am Groot,” he adds, waving toward the ghost of a path — nearly lost to rubble and abandonment — and then gesturing to a quiet overlook above the grameet.

“He’s going to go up there and… think,” Pearl explains softly. “To take some time to — remember. To mourn.”

“Alone?” Drax asks worriedly, and Groo’s mouth curves into a tender, saddened smile.

“I am Groot,” he says simply, and pats the Kylosian’s shoulder — and goes.

For a moment, Rocket thinks they’ll all listen to their Taluhnisan friend. Head back inside the ship. Drax will cook something and pearl will help, and the damn f’saki will beg for scraps the whole time. Nebs and Drax will bicker and then they’ll go to bed, and in the morning, they can figure out what happens next.

But the thought has his ears flattening and his tail puffing, and his fur trying to crawl off his skin.

“I don’t want to leave him,” pearl says softly. “I don’t think he — I don’t think he wants to be left.”

“Mourning alone is much more painful than mourning with friends,” Drax says, as if it were common knowledge and not something Rocket’s only just started to let himself learn.

“Well,” Rocket drawls reasonably, hitching himself around on his heel, “I never really like to listen when someone tells me to do somethin’ anyway.” He tilts his head over his shoulder. “You comin’ too, Nebs?”

The cyborg rolls his eyes in the silvery dusk. “I suppose you’re all better company than the f’saki.”

Pearl scowls. “Nobody appreciates Littlefoot. He deserves better.”

Rocket snorts.

“I need to run inside for a moment, though,” pearl adds, casting a meaningful glance at Rocket. It takes him a moment to figure out what she’s referring to, but when he does, he grimaces.

“Go on then,” he mutters. “I’ll wait.” He turns his attention to the other two. “You wanna go on up? It’ll take her a while to get all the way up to our quarters and back.”

Nebula hesitates, then nods — even as Drax is already striding toward the pathway. They make their way up the rocky slope, disappearing around an outcropping of boulders as Rocket waits.

When pearl emerges from the ship, she has one of the Xeronian planters nestled lovingly in her hands. The hammered tin reflects the fading dusky light of Taluhnia’s star on soft, brushed-silver facets. Whatever blossom or shrub had been growing there originally has since been liberated — probably to join some other little plant in another tin somewhere.

“You decided it’s ready?” Rocket asks, surprised.

Pearl shrugs — elegant and lopsided — and offers a nervous curve to her mouth. “I’m not sure,” she confesses. “It was dormant for so long, but I think it’s made some progress since I was able to get a pot and some soil for it on Xeron. Look.”

She lowers her hands so Rocket can peer at the stick she’d stolen from the wreckage of the Collector’s emporium. It stands straight up from the tin, with a smudge of moss greening up the splintered tip.

“It looks… less dead, I guess,” he says reluctantly. “You sure you planted it rightways-up?”

A puff of nervous laughter parts her lips. “God, I hope so,” she confesses. “I’m pretty sure Taluhnisans can correct their growth if they’re propagated upside-down, though. And look.” She leans over to gesture to some grooves in the wood, an inch or so from the top of the twig. “Doesn’t that kind of look like a face?”

Rocket covers the tip of his nose with one hand and pulls tiredly on his whiskers. “I guess,” he mutters, trying not to let himself worry. Instead, he focuses on knotting a fist in the edge of pearl’s cardigan and pulling her gently toward the trail.

The path winds all over the mountain side, splitting and swirling in a tattoo across the rocky Taluhnisan earth. It kinda reminds Rocket of the looping labyrinths that the Indigarran priests use to meditate on the gifts of the Sky Lords. As they draw closer, Rocket’s nose picks up the scent of their friends: Nebula’s vibranium and ozone, pepper and leather; Drax’s salt and stone and ginger. And then — almost as familiar to him as pearl’s clear, sweet waterlily and amber — he breathes in rosewood, and vetiver, and summer-green leaves. Groot. The smell of his friend pulls Rocket forward, and even though the only plants up here are dead splintered husks and a few patches of soft moss, the scent feels like it belongs here.

The three of them are sitting quietly on an outcropping of stone — Nebs to Groot’s left, and Drax to his right — staring down at the abandoned grameet below as the sky turns purple and gauzy. Rocket gestures pearl forward with his chin, and she settles herself at Nebula’s side, tucking the pot between them. The cyborg blinks down at it before her eyes shoot to pearl’s, and his kitten shrugs with a helpless, hopeful half-smile.

Rocket settles himself beside pearl. The shadows cluster in the rings of the grameet below, filling all the gaps and grooves in the concentric circles of the Oortet’s offshoots.

“I am Groot.”

“I want to tell you another story,” pearl translates softly.

“I am Groot.” A hesitation in the whisper of crackling branches and windblown leaves. “I am Groot.”

“It’s another story of the First House Orchidacea,” pearl murmurs. “A newer story.”

From Rocket’s right — far down the chain, where Drax anchors them — Rocket hears the Kylosian sigh. It’s not an exhalation of annoyance or frustration, though. It sounds like relief.

Like understanding.

“I would like to hear it,” the Destroyer says quietly.

“Me too,” Nebula rasps, leaning back on her palms and gazing up at the bruised sky. Sharp-edged stars begin to prick their way into the darkest part of it.

There’s a moment of silence before Rocket catches movement in his periphery and realizes all the humies in this little row are staring at him. Only Groot is still staring quietly out at his empty home.

“Well, obviously I wanna hear it,” he scowls. “Don’t be waiting on me.”

Nebula snorts, but Groot pulls his clinging eyes away from the emptiness below to offer Rocket one of his gentle, knowing smiles.

“I am Groot,” the Taluhnisan begins.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

NEW ART (well, it's a sketch)

so, this chapter was a LOT of worldbuilding but i hope you didn't hate it! if you missed the mentions of pearl collecting baby groot (or forgot them), you can find them in chapters 26 and 27. ♡♡ some notes on the worldbuilding below, but in the meantime: DEEPEST gratitude for sinikettu and his willingness to share his encyclopedic knowledge. ages ago, he shared with me the purposes of rocket’s cybernetic ports, which he learned from (i believe) various interviews with gunn and the vfx team, as well as some art books. he mentioned thinking pearl would be upset about them and, well. here we finally are.

other worldbuilding notes:

taluhnisan cities are (by my design, not canonically) based loosely on the idea of clonal forests like pando, which are all part of one root system: the trees are just branches and stems of a single organism. in a clonal forest, the original tree is called an ortet, and each individual, subsequent tree is a ramet. i tried to make these words to seem more “grootlike”, which — as far as i can tell from the comics — consists of a lot of double-syllables and insertions of the the “gr” prefix (likely based on the word “green”) + a forestry root-word (no pun intended). see: groot, granopy, gleef, tweeg. i also thought about altering the words to echo some of the fluid, sylvan notes of the name “taluhnia” (which seems, on the surface, fundamentally different from the earthier tones of grootspeech — like the difference between elves and dwarves)... but i decided that grameet and oortet are actually quite fluid words on their own, and don’t seem too out-of-place in a language called “taluhnisan.” let taluhnia contain multitudes. oh, and the written language of taluhnia is based loosely (stylistically) on ogham. it’s an ancient irish alphabet or cipher based on, well, trees — likely used by scholars for pragmatic/political purposes, though it’s been adopted by a lot of neopagan practitioners today.

that said, i sure wish i had pearl’s encyclopedic knowledge and instinctive understanding of linguistics!

granopy and furnax (the leviathon) are pulls from the comics, as is groot’s title. spoilers for annihilators (2010, issue #1): in the comics, groot is not king groot XXCVII (also referred to as king groot the 23rd — which does not match those “roman numerals,” which are not roman numerals at all), but he was impersonating king groot lol. this groot, however, is king groot XXCVII. i also took the liberty of altering his title slightly — from His Divine Majesty King Groot XXCVII, Monarch of Planet X, Custodian of the Branch Worlds, Ruler of All the Shades.

coming soon: chapter thirty-six. tenderhooks.
summary: groot says goodbye.
warnings: more brief discussions of genocide and implied ecological devastation. (more warnings to come.)
estimated date: tuesday, august 12.*
*this date is an estimate only! for the most up-to-date schedule, please check the monthly forecast on my pinned tumblr post.

･:꧂posting schedules, previews, headcanons, art, & more on tumblr♡
･:꧂cicatrix art, masterlist, & moodboard♡

Chapter 36: tenderhooks.

Summary:

in some ways, we’re all ramets in a clonal forest colony. or as some might say, we are groot.

Notes:

warnings: more brief discussions of genocide and implied ecological devastation. angst. more found family shit.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

tenderhooks. feeling the primal satisfaction of being needed by someone, which makes you feel that much more rooted to the world, even if the roots belong to someone else. From tender, emotionally raw + hooks, a tool for binding one thing to another. Compare on tenterhooks, which is a state of anxious suspense. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

All Taluhnisan histories branch from the same taproot: the First House Orchidacea.

And so the new story begins with the old story, handed down from the ancient Arbor Masters — not through the Taluhnisan verbal language of empathy, but through the much older and holier language of Light. The tale of the First Walking Taluhnisan had long been considered a cautionary tale, in which the Walker had given up the length of her own life — and that of all Taluhnisan civilization — simply for her selfish and infantile desire to travel into the stars.

It’s a mistranslation to refer to Taluhnisan governance as a monarchy — but there’s no word in any known language to express its equivalent. Every House had been led by an Arbor Master — often understood by outsiders as a ruler — under the stewardship of the First House. But in reality, rather than kings, the Arbor Masters had been teachers — storytellers. Guides. Protectors. Cultivators. Guardians of the people and forest and undergrowth, and scholars and sages of hereditary photonic knowledge. They had ensured that none of their shared learned lessons had been lost as they were passed from generation to generation. For centenaries — for chiliads — the Arbor Masters had taught younger Taluhnisans the old story of the First House Orchidacea as if it were a prophecy, reminding them that leaving their lush garden-planet would bring catastrophe ever closer to their home-world — and that every Taluhnisan child who departed for the stars would halve the lifespan of their collective.

Some still left, of course. There were travellers in every-other generation — saplings whose curiosity compelled them into the far reaches of space. Occasionally, an alien ship would land on Taluhnia, and some Taluhnisan or another would find their way into the crew, and away they would go — each one perhaps stealing millions of circumrotations from the future of their people.

Once in a while, the travelers would even return: decennia older, with crackling limbs and wiser eyes, with scars in their ligneous skin and stories to tell the curious Taluhnisans left behind. Their tales were added to the summary of photonic knowledge, recorded in the language of Light like tendrils and new leaves — all branching from the ancient myth of the First House. And the Arbor Masters believed that the end of the Taluhnisan people loomed ever-closer as a result.

Perhaps it did. Perhaps it didn’t. In the modern age, most Taluhnisans believed the tale was only a fragment of their distant history, so archaic that it may even have been refracted in transmission — not an ongoing curse. What remains true is that, for as long as they could remember, the only Taluhnisans who left their planet were distant offshoots of the thirty-three Houses: seeds that had been flung far from their taproots.

Never before had an Arbor Master abandoned the planet. Never before had a descendent of the First Walking Taluhnisan returned to the stars.

But never before had there been a Groot XXCVII.

He was still young when the opportunity had presented itself in the form of a strange ship from a distant planet. He, like many others, hadn’t believed in the sybelline nature of the old story. He had thought that he could aid his people more by gathering new knowledge, by drinking in the light of strange stars. He had argued with his many-greats grandmother, King Granopy CCLXXV, who hadn’t wanted him to leave. She had been nearly ready to pass on the mantle of Her Divine Majesty to her young heir. But Groot XXCVII had been stubborn. He had decided to leave anyway. He had promised her he’d come back. He had sworn he would return in a decennium or two — barely the blink of an eye for an elder Taluhnisan.

He hadn’t.

The crew he’d joined had taken him from planet to planet, satellite to space station, and he’d loved every moment. He’d met so many beautiful souls, tasted the light of so many beautiful stars. Somewhere along the way, he lost his numeric suffix. It was unnecessary in a universe which held so comparatively few Groots. Perhaps he should have known something was amiss when his newfound “friends” still had not learned to understand him, many circumrotations later. But he had still been young by Taluhnisan standards. Naive. Eager to learn from and to love each and every strange lifeform he’d come across.

The crew had sold him to an intergalactic zoo.

He hadn’t understood, at first. He’d blamed miscommunication, the barriers of Light Language and Taluhnisan and rigid vocal chords. He’d thought his friends would come back for him. It had taken longer than a circumrotation for him to realize he’d been given away — for nothing more than a bit of binary code in an account. Longer still to realize what he would have to do to escape, while simultaneously understanding that he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Not yet. Perhaps, in a centenary or two, things would change. Perhaps he would become desperate enough, or angry enough, to threaten people if he needed to. To hurt them, or take their lives.

He hoped not.

Decennia had passed. One, then two. He wept on the day he broke his promise to Granopy CCLXXV. Three more decennia came and went. The zoo decayed. The other inhabitants grew old. Some with shorter lifespans died, never having seen the outside of their cells again. Another decennium went by.

Oh, I know this one! he overheard a guest say once, peering through the electric laser-screen that had separated Groot from freedom and home. Flora colossus. Not very smart, as far as sentient species go. They just keep saying the same thing over and over. The planet itself was gorgeous, though. A clonal colony forest covered almost all the primary landmasses. It was a beautiful landscape — awe-inspiring — before everything was destroyed.

He’d lurched to his feet. I am Groot? he’d asked — first disbelieving, then frantic. But the tourist hadn’t understood the question. Perhaps they wouldn’t have wanted to answer, even if they had.

Perhaps another decennium had cycled past. Perhaps yet another. Groot had begun to lose time — first to grief, then to apathy. He stopped trying to speak. The owners of the zoo grew disinterested. While the existing exhibits continued to bring in enough units to be worth keeping open, the zoo eventually stopped earning enough to retain biological staff. Every cycle, another person disappeared from Groot’s limited social circle. And for every three zookeepers dismissed, one robotic caretaker was phased in.

One such robotic caretaker was Tibius Lark: synthetically-skinned to look like a biological mammal, chirpy and cheery and bright. Groot had looked at him through bleary eyes when Tibius had greeted him at the start of each wakeshift for over a quarter, and finally — creakingly, listlessly — Groot had responded.

The first time Groot had spoken to Tibius Lark, the android had understood him immediately.

The Taluhnisan had reeled. He’d gaped. I am Groot? he’d asked, bewildered and desperate — seeing more compassion than he’d experienced since he’d left home, all condensed into a mass-manufactured heart.

Of course, Tibius had chirped, and had turned on the artificial starlight that had kept Groot just this side of starving.

And so Groot’s first real friendship outside of Taluhnia had begun. Between the care and feeding of lifeforms and the cleaning of cages and cells, Tibius spent his time talking with the captive Taluhnisan. He told Groot about his life as a fully-fabricated android — CustodialBot 887713-TL, before he’d named himself — and Groot likewise shared stories of his own. His fears, his loneliness, his agonies. But also his joys and his hopes.

At some point, Tibius took it upon himself to learn as much as he could about what had happened on Taluhnia — or Planet X, as it was denoted on most starmaps. And this was how Groot learned about the destruction of his home and his people: the coming of the Leviathon, who had devoured a tenth of the entire Taluhnisan forest in a single cycle.

And all the Taluhnisans with it.

Three of the thirty-three Houses had been lost that first day — and not just the taproots either, but the bodies and branches and leaves, the new shoots at the edges of the cities. Even the sprouts and seedlings that had been flung throughout the region.

Then the Leviathon consumed another tenth. And another — burning a swathe across the planet that had once glimmered in the stars like a malachite marble.

The rest of the planet hadn’t been able to keep up with the devastation. Burnt ash filled the skies. When the rains came, they were harsher and heavier and laced with toxins. Fish died in shallow streams while storms eroded the grasses and flowers, then washed away the dirt. The mycelium shriveled, exposed to too much light and wind and rain. The undergrowth withered in some places — swelled and rotted in others. The little maintenance mammals — whom Groot had loved so much — starved or fell victim to exposure. Or both. If anything had survived, Tibius had told Groot gently, it was likely only the microscopic animals that aided in decay.

Groot had thought he’d never stop grieving. Perhaps it had only been a terrible coincidence: that the Leviathon had arrived when the heir to the First House had stepped out into the stars. Perhaps it had been the divine consequence of a childish kingling following his selfish ancestor — triggering the conclusion of the God-Gardener’s curse, bringing annihilation that final stride to the Taluhnisan people.

Either way, he’d abandoned them.

Groot had withdrawn into himself again: shedding bark, growing hollow and gray. Eventually — without any guidance from Groot himself, who had surrendered himself to isolation and imprisonment — Tibius had hatched a plan for the captive Taluhnisan’s escape.

And then the android had made it happen.

He’d squirreled the lost Taluhnisan king out of the zoo and back into space, and he had carefully nursed his new friend back to health.

And eventually, Groot had smiled again.

The two of them had adventures together for a long, long time. But that is another story — another series of leaves on the tree — and when Tibius’ parts finally wore out and could no longer be replaced without resetting his personality and memory files, he had asked Groot to dismantle him and leave a piece of him on every planet with a beautiful star.

Which is why Groot had been on Cyxlore, trying to light thirty-three candles in the Shrine of the Sybila Nix Ora when he had met a strange little blue-haired mammal. Cyxlore is a moon, of course — not a planet — but it’s known for the unique light of the Telladore star system, which has the only radiance in the known universe that can grow the silky grasses they weave into local cashmeres and cottons and chenilles. Telladore’s light tastes like cool breezes on summer afternoons — like wildflower honey and iced tea — and Groot had pressed Tibius’ second-to-last bolt into a gap in the grout of the mosaic-tiled streets. Every morning, when morning crests the Cyxlorade mountains, Telladore will kiss that bolt. Cyxlore’s star will bless this small bit of Tibius Lark, and it will reflect the light back into the sky: a little sun in its own right.

The last bolt had been saved, of course. For Taluhnia, whose holy star shines most sweetly of any Groot has ever tasted.

And for Groot, who had planned to stay on his empty home planet until he died: alone with the final piece of his friend and savior, and what remains of his peoples’ ashes.

A king of ghosts and mourning.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

The sky is ink-dark when Groot finishes his tale. Pearl peers up at the distant stars — hazy beneath the fine layer of ash that remains from the Leviathon’s destruction — and watches them blur in the silver sheen of her tears. Three small moons tangle in an intricate dance of gravity, weaving butterfly-patterns slowly over the sky. The smallest swims so quickly through the asterisms that she can trace its path with her finger.

“You planned to die here?” Nebula asks, her rasp somehow softened under the velvet weight of the sky.

“I am Groot,” Groot says quietly.

“But you can’t,” Drax reasons, and pearl blinks. She lowers her chin slowly, and Rocket’s eyes catch hers: flickering flat eyeshine like live coals in one moment, and plum-black jewels in the next. His white brows are arched in the shadows.

“You can’t stay here, alone,” the Kylosian continues, oblivious and huffing a disgruntled noise. “We established this cycles ago. You’re family. We’re family.”

“I am Groot,” Groot says, and there’s the quiet crackle of his barkish body as he shifts. Pearl turns, and peers past Nebula. Her eyes strain in the purple shadows. The ligneous panel of Groot’s chest opens like a knotty cupboard door. Inside, she can see the glimmer of the Fuck-You-Disk that Rocket had given him on Sovereign. A curled-tight tendril of vine lowers — there’s a glint of duranium-silver, catching starshine and shadow — and unspirals to reveal a small metal bolt that Groot hugs delicately between gnarled fingertips. His chest closes and he cradles the bolt in one palm, then lifts his face to acknowledge the grameet below. The rings of the city are all but invisible in the night. “I am Groot.”

“Enough,” Nebula snaps, and pearl jolts. “You said your robot liberated you from a life of isolation and imprisonment. And you think you’ll repay him by — what? Returning to it?” She sneers in the darkness. “You think that’s how you’ll honor him?”

“Watch it, Nebs,” Rocket growls from pearl’s other side.

Nebula turns to glare past pearl. “I’m right. You know I’m right.”

“You are right,” Rocket agrees. His words bite. “But if we’re talkin’ about people who throw away their chances at freedom, you an’ me don’t really have room to talk. Both of us’ve got a history of running toward the shitbags who’d tear us apart.”

“I am Groot,” Groot says gently. His empty palm lights briefly on Nebula’s forearm. She looks strangely small beneath his large hand. He pats her reassuringly. “I am Groot.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” Drax says, rolling out his heavy shoulders with a sigh. “When I joined this crew as Rocket’s second-in-command—”

“What,” Rocket barks.

“—I didn’t expect to spend so much time and energy trying to keep you all from defecting.”

“Hey,” Rocket growls. “Groot and I have had an agreement since Sovereign—”

“So did we,” Drax reminds him, sounding wounded.

“My agreement with you was to drop your ass on Knowhere in exchange for some units from the sale of your frickin’ butter knives,” Rocket snaps. “Now I’m down a bunch of money and up a bunch of morons—”

Drax gasps in horror. “They are not butter knives — they are star-tempered Kylosian bloodsteel daggers—”

“Ebony Maw’s Left Tit,” Nebula mutters resignedly under her breath.

“I am Groot,” Groot interjects kindly. The Taluhnisan sighs, and the sound is a comforting rustle of twigs and leaves, of all the forest winds and grasses that seem to haunt this empty planet. The noise of bickering fades underneath the heavy hush of it, and silence ripples outward in its wake.

“Nebula is right, though,” pearl says at last, when it feels right to speak again. Her voice rises out into the purple air and floats up the mountainside, tangling in the husks of old plants and trees as it goes. She wishes she were closer to her friend, so she could reach out and squeeze his hand. “We can’t honor them with loneliness and death. Not the thirty-three Lost Houses of Taluhnia, and not Tibius Lark. Not any of the people we mourn.”

She lifts her eyes to Groot’s over the soft gleam of Nebula’s head, then drops them to the cyborg’s. Looks to Drax, and then turns to gaze at Rocket.

“I’m learning that,” she says softly.

There’s a long, lingering silence. Rocket’s tail sweeps around the tin pot between them and brushes against her legging-clad hip.

“With what, then?” Nebula asks, and her voice — always hoarse — cracks in a distinctly different way. “With what do we honor them?”

The Taluhnisan chuckles: soft crackling branches, velvety autumn leaves underfoot. “I am Groot,” he confides, and though his voice isn’t light, it still wraps around all five of them with the kind of warmth and grace that is wholly Groot. He gestures loosely to Drax.

She’d heal herself quicker with some help, though, the Kylosian had said a few hours earlier, and Groot had stopped to thank him.

Now — still cradling the bolt of silvery starshine in one palm — he raises the other to the purple sky: cupped upward, and glowing. Pearl smiles.

“I am Groot,” he says softly, and beside her, Rocket makes a quiet, shuffled noise.

It’s good to have friends.

Groot’s cupped fingers overflow: topaz fireflies and amber beads, golden sparks and yellow stars. Drax and Rocket draw slow, stunned breaths, and Nebula makes a sound in the back of her throat: something faint and lost and mournful. They watch, silent and reverent, as Taluhnisan spores spangle the nighttime mountainside. The seeds drift in eddies and whorls, twirling in the breezes that coast over the gravel and broken stems, the weary patches of moss. A memory of fireflies flickers in pearl’s chest, and she draws in a shaky breath as still more pinpricks of light spill over Groot’s hand: a palmful of prayers, floating far and wide as they settle against the Taluhnisan earth.

Seed by seed, spore by spore, the grameet below transforms into a mirror of the sky: shimmering with little gold embers, studded with starlike flickers. They ripple over the rings of the grameet, gemmed and jeweled — twinkling along every surface. The Oortet offshoots at the center are still alive enough to capture the soft glow and reflect it back, and the heart of the First House glimmers to life like a diamond in the dark. Still, Groot pours the Taluhnisan spores out into the winds, until his shoulders sag and his eyes grow tired. His empty hand drops to rest heavily in his lap.

“I am Groot,” he sighs softly.

“It’s…” Nebula’s harsh voice cracks in her scarred larynx, and pearl watches as the cyborg swallows. Her lashes blink rapidly. “It’s beautiful.”

“I am Groot,” the Taluhnisan rumbles.

“They‘ll grow?” Drax repeats, sounding doubtful.

“Taluhnisan spores are uniquely life-giving,” pearl supplies. She sends a soft glance toward her friend. “Correct me if I’m wrong, Groot. I was told that there were travelling Taluhnisans who had been known, from time to time, to bring whole planets back from the edge of destruction — at least in terms of the local flora. If the linguist was correct, the moss we saw earlier will probably have doubled by morning. Any seedlings or roots that still have life in them should sprout within a few rotations. Some of the Oortet’s offshoots may even revive and show new growth in a cycle or two, though it will be a slower process without a community of Taluhnisans to cultivate it.”

“I am Groot,” Groot adds.

“Oh,” she breathes. “I didn’t know you could do that, too.”

“I am Groot,” he says with a quiet shrug.

“Huh,” Rocket muses. “Makes me think of—“ His voice crackles, and he clears his throat. Pearl watches him curiously as his gleaming eyes find hers. They’re ember-red and warm in the starry dazzle of Taluhnisan spores. “Makes me think of your little constellations, you know?”

Groot whuffs out a sound of acknowledgement, even as pearl feels her brow crinkle.

“How so?” she asks softly.

On the other side of Nebula, Groot inclines his head. Shadows and starlight paint the crevices of his strong, lovely face, turning it into glossy polished wood. He raises one finger to the distant horizon, tattered by low rolling mountains. Against the bright spangled sky, he traces the shape of a teardrop. Beside her, Rocket shifts.

“Penthus,” he mumbles — presumably for the benefit of the others. “God of grief.”

Pearl eyes widen, and Groot’s mouth curves softly as he adds the tiny, twiglike stem at the base, turning it into a leaf.

“Aux — Auxesia,” Rocket says, stumbling over the name. “Growth.”

“I am Groot,” her gentle friend says softly, and pearl swallows. The spores below blur in a fresh swell of tears that she can’t hold back, turning each one into a hexagonal prism of golden light. There’s no direct translation, of course, but pearl can feel the vibrancy of blooming things, of sprouting things, of the fresh trickle of sap into slender saplings — of the split forming into two baby branches. She can feel the sense of moving forward, of making friends, of making choices. Of making conscious decisions of how to exist in this universe — how to move through it in a way that celebrates lost loved ones, and keeps their presence rippling forever through the cosmos.

We honor them with life.

“Speaking of, uh, living tributes,” Rocket mutters, and nudges the tin pot next to her. Sudden self-consciousness crawls over her skin in a heated, prickling wave. Even the roots of her hair feel tight. “Pearl’s been working on somethin’.”

She hesitates. “I wanted to be sure he could — could still grow before I brought him to you, Groot,” she says softly. “I wasn’t trying to keep him a secret. I kept him in a kitchen pot for a while, but we didn’t have soil till Xeron…” She trails off, suddenly flushed and uncertain.

“I am Groot?” Reassurance and curiosity color the words, and pearl takes a shaky breath.

“I found him on Knowhere,” she says, twisting to cradle the Xeronian tin pot in her hands. “In the Emporium.” She lifts it, then turns to pass it to Nebula, who blinks — and stares — at the potted stick in her hands before handing it reverently to Groot.

“Splinter of a Flora Colossus,” pearl recites, offering up the label that had marked the narrow, wandlike branch in Tivan’s display. “I know it doesn’t make the loss any easier, but — you’re not the last one. Not anymore.”

Groot’s breath catches. He accepts the pot carefully, and even from here — in profile — pearl can see the glisten in his dark eyes. His tears collect the low shimmer of the city below, turning them into a sheen of gold paint on the polished planes of his face.

“I… am Groot,” he murmurs to the Taluhnisan twig, lowering his face to the mossy tip of the branch.

And then: a soft noise. A brief glimmer.

The little Taluhnisan’s eyes open.

Groot gazes into the sleepy eyes of the young arboriform. “I am Groot,” he murmurs, and the smaller Taluhnisan blinks back. He opens his little mouth, and a tiny creaking noise emerges.

“Thank fuck,” Rocket mutters. “I was worried she planted ‘im upside down.”

Nebula barks a sharp laugh that echoes over the glittering city, and Groot jumps a little at the sound before chortling too. Tears run through the rivulets of bark, and pearl feels her mouth forming a playful pout even as she presses her fingers into her tear-slick cheeks.

“You could have some faith in me, you know,” she says to Rocket — then thumbs his whiskers to let him know she’s teasing.

“Pearl, I got more faith in you than I ever had in anything else,” Rocket grunts, but something about his tone and the flat fire of his eyeshine makes any other reply stick in her lungs. Tears sting her eyes again. Maybe it’s because of the bittersweetness of the small Taluhnisan waking up under Groot’s gentle, radiant love, lit by the glow of their home-planet’s memorial — or maybe it’s something under Rocket’s voice that she can’t quite identify — but pearl suddenly thinks she could weep.

Thankfully, Drax reaches over, and pats Groot on the back with surprising care — attentive to the small pot in his palms. “Show your son his ancestral home,” he urges Groot softly. “Let him see how beautiful you’re making their memory.”

Groot raises one ligneous finger, and gently draws it down the small Taluhnisan’s tiny cheek. The little one creaks again — a surprisingly chirpy sound — and Groot makes a soft huff of contentment before settling the tin pot between his massive thighs, and turning him to face the grameet.

“And then, later,” Drax says, dropping his voice into a conspiratorial whisper that eludes no-one, “please let me hold him.” He sighs, heavy and wistful; his electricity-blue eyes sheen silver in the darkness. The few glowing spores still clinging to the night air in front of him flurry in his puff of breath. “It’s been so long since I’ve held a child.”

“I am Groot,” Groot responds. Perhaps it’s hard to tell if his voice breaks, given how splintered and crackled he always sounds. But Taluhnisan is an empathetic language, and nothing can disguise the raw, aching wonder of his words — the gratitude for his new family and their love. Nothing can disguise how much he feels he owes them for gently tugging him from the edge of his quiet despair and loneliness, how deeply he treasures their understanding of his words and his wounds and his self, or how intensely he cherishes every moment they share with him and every gift they’ve given him — often without even knowing.

Rocket lets out a shuddering breath on pearl’s left, and she knows without looking that tears have spilled into the fur of his cheeks. Groot’s face and Drax’s face both shine wetly in the glow of the grameet below — matching her own, she’s sure. And beside her, Nebula makes a broken choking sound, ragged and stifled.

Their little newcomer churrs a quiet, curious noise between them all, and they sit silently on the mountainside for hours: shrouded in the soft crush of shadows, lit up by memories and love, and the hopeful floating seeds of the future.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

They spend a handful of cycles on Taluhnia: travelling from House to House, reseeding the soil with Groot’s glowing spores. Letting the damn f’saki out of the ship to bolt through the labyrinths of each grameet, barking and chittering and churring till pearl gently calls him back. He always returns to her side — an impulse Rocket might be able to empathize with, if he weren’t so frickin’ annoyed at the frickin’ pest.

He knows it’s stupid to be jealous of a moon-damned lizard. He doesn’t fuckin’ care.

In the meantime, they begin integrating their newest crewmember into the family. The little Taluhnisan still doesn’t speak beyond a few creaks and chirps – each one laden with a cacophony of amorphous feeling — but he’s begun watching everything with wide eyes. Groot rests the tin pot on the console when they fly over Taluhnia: pointing out blasted burnt mountainsides and lost forests and dried riverbeds, and distant smaller fallen grameets. He describes what they used to look like and who used to live there, and what they might become again. His soft I am Groots are punctuated by a gentle pulsing glow in the crevices of his ligneous skin, and brief soft flashes that somehow don’t seem to bother Rocket’s sensitive eyes. The language of Light, he figures.

Taluhnisans have a beautiful history, pearl had told him once, when he’d mocked her for her softness for talking plants. Literature. Songs. Stories passed down through photonic tradition.

It’s something Groot prob’ly never thought he’d be able to share — not since he’d heard Taluhnia had been destroyed. Rocket watches his friend with the younger Taluhnisan, and feels his eyes dampen and his throat tighten.

“I am Groot,” Groot tells him one night, when it’s just him and Rocket, sitting on one of the Dreadnought’s wings, staring out at the gold-beaded landscape. The kid’s being fawned over by Drax somewhere, and pearl’s feeding the f’saki, and Nebula’s who-knows-where.

“I know,” Rocket says, and his voice rumbles slowly over the gravel. “I know you’re not the last anymore.”

“I am Groot.”

Rocket snorts. “Or the only one of your kind.” He doesn’t mean for it to sound bitter — honestly, when he thinks of the people who don’t deserve to be alone, Groot and pearl are right there at the top of the list — but the bright seething sting is there in his words anyway.

“Sorry,” he grunts. “I’m happy for you, ya big idiot. Really.”

And it’s true. It’s just… frickin’ complicated.

“I am Groot.”

Rocket’s throat tightens again. “Dammit, Groot. Don’t start.”

“I am Groot,” his friend says gently. It’s the quiet pleasure of new leaves in spring, new sprouts nudging their way from the soil. It’s finding a flower he’d thought was dead, only for it ready to bloom again with proper light and water. It’s the light of Taluhnia’s holy star, spilled out on a landscape coming to life again, ready to be shared with a child. Then—

“I am Groot.”

—the sweeping quiet of solitude on a hillside, melancholic but accepted. The final stage of grief, turned into resignation. The silence of an empty, formless world, understood and acknowledged — only to be interrupted by a gentle touch on the shoulder, and the sudden realization of life all around.

And Groot’s hand, extended to Rocket in invitation.

“Fuck off,” Rocket rasps, swiping angrily at his eyes. “That’s just somethin’ a person says when they don’t want you to feel bad—”

“I am Groot,” the Big Guy murmurs, and rests his palm gently on the crown of Rocket’s head. The latter ducks away, making a halfhearted swipe at Groot’s hand.

But of course he misses. On purpose.

By the time the Dreadnought returns to the First House, the change there is already evident. Thick, cushy carpets of moss quilt nearly every stone along the mountainside, and turn shattered empty tree trunks into green velvet obelisks and cenotaphs. Sprays of tiny blue flowers pool in hollows and gulleys. Saplings — no larger than their newest crewmember — sprout up from the new growth, and dainty, slender-stalked patches of violet-capped mushrooms trail into the shadows beneath broken logs.

Rocket can’t help but stare, biting back his own awe at the transformation despite the growing lump in his throat.

Groot spends the rest of the rotation poking through the new vegetation throughout and surrounding the grameet. Parts of the Oortet’s offshoots won’t ever regrow, Groot tells them. They’re truly dead, and must eventually become part of the moss and mycelium. But the heart of the city shines like opals and labradorite in the light of Taluhnia’s holy star, and feathersoft leaves begin to sprinkle the silvery twigs at the very top. Groot guides them back to the First House: the central room with its raised dais and the open aperture of the skylight, and the massive, shattered remains of the first Oortet Tree. Though the trunk is splintered and gray, the base — the roots weaving through the mossy soil — glow with that same deeply-layered iridescence that seems to signify life in the rest of the grameet.

There are few fallen branches and leaves — the Leviathon had consumed everything taller than Rocket himself, apparently — and the remains of the Oortet are mostly short enough that Rocket can see over it if he stands on his toes. It’s here — in the central room, with the sweet-syrup light of Taluhnia’s star pouring in through the open roof — that Groot brings forth his spores once more. They glow in the shadows. They dance in the spillage of light. They land in the mosses and beckon the moonstone-tones of silvery sap at the roots of the Oortet. Rocket feels his jaw hinge open loosely when the ragged trunk begins to sprout twiggy tendrils and slender stems, right in front of him. For a moment, he feels like an idiot — standing there, mouth gaping like a moron — but when he gathers enough of himself to glance around, he sees that each of his fellow crew-members are just as awestruck. And frankly, pearl’s amazement and Drax’s stupid expression aren’t that unexpected — but even Nebula’s lips are parted, and the glowing spores reflect asterisms in her galaxy-dark eyes.

The base of the First Oortet Tree becomes an altar, thick with green mosses, studded with tiny jewel-toned mushrooms and garlanded with tangled vines of vetch. Lush sprays of ferns and wildflowers unfurl at Rocket’s feet, blanketing the mossy room with something so luxe and soft and dense that Rocket’s pretty sure it rivals pearl’s den for cushiony comfort. He’d thought that Groot had been exaggerating — laying it on thick in the way of legends and tall tales — when he’d claimed that the old undergrowth had been so plush and pillowy that you could fall from the treetops and remain unhurt.

But if the forest floor had been like this, Rocket can believe it.

Groot continues to work: his brow tipped forward, his enormous hand delicately brushing each plant as it sprouts from the soil — as if he’d reached down into the Taluhnisan dirt and found the vestiges of old seed pods and cuttings tangled with the lacework of Oortet roots, and had somehow resurrected them. Every tendril stretches and curls up the moss-and-moon trunk, embroidering the plinth with little blossoms. Delicate branches weave and whorl atop the altar, just beyond Rocket’s line of sight.

He twists a fist in pearl’s cardigan. “What’s he doin’?” he hisses under his breath.

She tears her gaze from the work he can’t see. Her eyes reflect the same light as the Oortet Tree, glimmering like twin moons as she blinks down at him.

“Making a nest,” she murmurs, marveling. Her face softens; she gives him her sweetest kitten-smile and his heart turns over again, like it always seems to do these days.

Keep me around, pearl.

“Do you want to see?” she offers gently. “You can climb on my back.”

A dozen cycles earlier, he’d have been annoyed. A dozen cycles before that, he would’ve lashed out at her for daring to offer.

Now he’ll snatch up any excuse to get close to her.

“Lean forward, sweetheart,” he orders under his breath. Once she’s braced, he leaps nimbly upward, catching himself on her shoulders and notching his feet in at the plush softness of her hips. She stumbles a little on her feet, but he rebalances himself accordingly — accommodating her, tugging her into a more stable position.

“That’s my girl,” he murmurs into her ear, sweeping her fountain of blue curls out of his way as he peers over his shoulder. He feels the frisson in his cheek as his whiskers brush her throat. “Thanks, kitten.”

Groot is making a nest — of living flowers and vines, of Oortet twigs and tendrils. It sits on the altar like a coronet, blossoming and blooming.

Then the Taluhnisan opens his heart, and takes the silver duranium bolt in his hand. It tumbles along his rough palms with the sound of a bullet casing rolling on wood — then glides gently into its new cradle of mosses. Rocket would almost swear that the metal drinks up the light of the Taluhnisan star overhead: shimmering, lit from within. An incandescent silver jewel, nestled in a leafy bower.

The crew sleeps in the mosses and ferns of the First House that night — the gravel of their beds barely noticed beneath a thick mattress of fresh, clean-smelling growth. The f’saki burns off his endless energy rampaging around the grameet and then collapses against pearl’s side. As his girl’s eyelashes begin to flutter, Rocket winds a fist in her ponytail and tugs her head down to rest in his lap. She gives him a look so grateful and sweet that his heart lurches in his chest, but he only rolls his eyes.

Drax falls asleep shortly after pearl, and Groot lowers himself to the ground a few strides away, with his back leaned longingly against the Oortet-altar and their adopted Taluhnisan in his lap. The child creaks and coos.

Nebula’s synth-leather armor creaks too as she settles herself at Rocket’s other side. She leans back against the wall of woven wood behind them, her cerulean scalp pressed to the glossy grain. Some of Groot’s glowing seeds still drift through the air: flickering like distant signal fires in Nebula’s dark eyes, or floating softly down to nest in pearl’s lilac-blue curls. The moonstone-quality of the wood catches their light, throwing back silver-champagne glimmers from below the layers of bark, like shimmering glowfish flashing briefly beneath the water.

Rocket sits with pearl’s head in his lap, and someone who rapidly feels like she’s becoming a friend at his other side. His palms are full of the riversoft silk of pearl’s hair as he strokes the curls over his knee: delicately untangling every knot the way he’d done that night under the flight controls of the runabout. His hands are addicted to the feel of her, and every satiny thread of shiny blue feels like coming home to his fingertips. Drax and the f’saki snore in concert: inhalations and exhalations harmonizing with each other unsettlingly well. Across the Oortet, Groot rumbles to the young Taluhnisan in his care, occasionally flickering softly with that strange inner radiance that feels uncomfortably like a frickin’ metaphor. Everything smells like tuberose and juniper and midnight sun-showers.

Quietly, Rocket and Nebula watch.

Rocket’s not sure how long the contentment stretches. Minutes, perhaps. Or hours. It’s such a foreign feeling — golden under his ribs — and one he’s previously only associated with making things, and flying, and certain moments with pearl. So when he interrupts the tranquil spell of rumbling snores and shimmers, it’s with his voice sanded down — as smooth and quiet as he can make it.

“You can understand him now, huh?”

Something in the cyborg’s face flickers. She inclines her head slightly, dark eyes trained on the two Taluhnisans. “I can,” she admits, voice so hoarse and low that it’s almost a whisper. “Something about this place… his story. I—” Her voice splinters. “I felt it.” Her fingers reach up and knot in the leather straps of her armored jacket, right over where her heart should be, if the Mad Titan didn’t move it. “I wasn’t sure I could, anymore.”

Her eyes blink rapidly — dart to him, and then to pearl — then away. But they don’t return to the Taluhnisans. Instead, they linger on Drax’s sleeping bulk, his shoulders heaving with each snore.

“This planet reminds me of Luphom,” she admits slowly, before she clenches a soft, hushed scoff between her teeth. “Luphom was nothing like this place. Very little by way of nature and wilderness. But — after Thanos—” She hesitates. “No matter how different two planets are, there’s some atmosphere of similarity after they’ve been decimated.”

She falls silent. Clears her throat. Fishes one of pearl’s candies out of her little pocket and unwraps it, then pops it in her mouth. Her eyes remain fastened on Drax, and Rocket says nothing. He’s been on enough half-destroyed homeworlds to know what she’s talking about.

“I’ve done this countless times,” Nebula rasps at last, her words still low and slow. “Not by myself, of course. But I am Black Order, no matter how much I wish I weren’t. I am a Daughter of Thanos. And I’ve behaved like one.” Her throat works. “I won’t say it never mattered. It always mattered. But I didn’t let myself think about them, because if I did — if I had—”

The cyborg shakes her head, then shrugs against the darkness. She looks down at her hands: one gloved in synth-leather, and the other glinting silver in the glow of Groot’s spores.

“I’m a world-ruiner. I’m a monster.”

The epithet rings along his bones, as if the metal replacements had been hammerstruck. He can only shake his head. “Nebs. You’re more than—“

“More than what our creators made us,” she huffs, with a curl in the corner of her mouth that doesn’t know whether it wants to be scornful or affectionate. “I know you believe that. And your kitten does too. All of you seem to. But—” She shrugs again, and her eyes stay on Drax. “—I don’t know if that’s the case for me.”

He speaks before he thinks. “Both things can be true.”

Both things can be true, Rocket. You can have made a terrible, horrible choice, and it can still have been born from a desperation and lonesomeness most people never have to experience.

Nebula’s eyes pull from Drax for the first time since she started talking. A question hovers next to the resigned desolation Rocket sees there. It’s his turn to clear his throat.

You can’t take responsibility for his actions — only your own. And you did everything in your power to make it right, Rocket.

You’re still doing it.

“You can have done shitty things, Nebs,” he points out out quietly. “Terrible, shitty things on a terrible, shitty scale — and still be more than what Thanos tried to turn you into. Believe me. I know, okay?” He takes in a breath between his teeth. “Personallistically.”

She snorts. “What, are you trying to offer me forgiveness?”

He scoffs right back at her. “No. That’s between you and the people you fucked over, and prob’ly most of ‘em are dead.”

She doesn’t flinch, but her eyes flicker back to Drax.

“But you don’t get to fuckin’ cut-and-run, okay? You might never make up for what you did, but you sure as hell won’t if you spend all your time punishing yourself.”

There’s a long, gold-glimmering quiet. Drax snorts on a snore, catching his breath, and resettles himself with sleeping sniffles before falling back into his rhythm. The luminous spores float like lanterns in the new lush ferns and mosses and flowers.

“I think,” she says slowly, “that making up for what I did… might mean I have to kill Thanos.”

His head snaps sideways and he stares up at her, then hangs his head and pinches his brow with the hand that isn’t buried in pearl’s curls.

“Unbelievable,” he mutters, shaking his head. When he finally drops his hand and turns his eyes back up to the cyborg, she’s already gazing down at him.

“What?” she asks flatly.

“Look around, Nebs,” he mutters. “You said you understood Groot earlier. You said it was this frickin’ story that made you understand him most. Did you miss the whole moon-damned lesson or what?”

Her lip twitches in a grimace. “I don’t—“

“Tryin’ to run off an’ kill Thanos is only gonna get you dead. You wanna make up for shit? Live. Stay on with us. Lay low for a little bit. Work on being better, for fuck’s sake. Then we’ll figure out how to make it count out there.” He jerks his chin toward the glitter of stars visible through the aperture above.

The cyborg makes a hushed, crackling sound of laughter. “Is that what you’re doing?” She leans over and flicks one of pearl’s curls where it sprawls over his lap and into the thick mosses beneath them.

He rolls his eyes. “Look,” he reasons, “I know I got next to no right to talk. I’m still—“

I’m still learning how to be a person.

“—I’m still figuring shit out.” He snorts. “You know what Groot said to me a couple rotations ago?”

Her face doesn’t change its expression, but something grudgingly curious flickers in her eyes.

“We were sittin’ on the wing of the Dreadnought, watching the spores settle on that last grameet. He was tellin’ me how happy he was to have the little sprout. How excited he was to get to know him. How good it was, to share all the Taluhnisan parts of himself. To know that the stories wouldn’t end with him. To know he wasn’t the last of his kind. An’ after he was done telling me all these things, you know what he said?”

“I think we’ve established that I don’t,” Nebula says dryly.

“Don’t be a pain in the ass,” Rocket shoots back, and continues without missing a beat. “He said that since we got here, he realized he hadn’t actually been the only one of his kind in a while, even though Taluhnia fell damn-near a centenary ago. He said he ain’t been the only one of his kind since Sovereign, when he an’ pearl an’ I all really became—“ Rocket’s voice splinters like an old log in the forest, heavy and hollowed, and crushed under its own weight. “—since he felt like we really became a team. Or — or a family.” Flustered heat climbs in his cheeks and he scoffs, staring down at the rivulet-pattern of curls in his lap. “You know Taluhnisan ain’t got a good translation to Kree. And I never been good with words.”

“Fox,” Nebula interrupts quietly, and he doesn’t correct her this time. He’s got important shit to say.

“Then he said I didn’t have to be the only one of my kind, either. That being part of a kind has to do with more’n just nuts and bolts.” Rocket nods to the Oortet altar — toward the nest, with Tibius Lark’s last metal piece nestled gently inside it, resting on a bed of soft moss, drinking up the silvery light of Taluhnia’s triple-moon.

“Well — and I’ll frickin’ kill you if you tell him this — the Big Guy was right. And you an’ me, Nebs—“ He tries not to choke. The words are strangling. “We got more in common than most of these morons. We got the nuts and bolts in common, too.” He swallows, and smooths his hand over the rippling blue silk in his lap. “We got people who seen our worst, and we gotta make it up to ‘em. And I don’t think—“

He chokes again. Thinks back to that night on the HalfWorld, hands still sticky with his sire’s blood as he’d hacked the lock on the Arete window.

The otter pelt, at least, is in fine condition.

“—I don’t think running’ off to kill somebody is the way we do it. Not anymore.”

There’s a lingering silence. Nebula sighs, and leans her head back against the wood. Her eyes close.

“You’ve got something to protect, Fox.” It almost feels like a nickname by now. Borderline affectionate or whatever. “I — the only thing I can do for the universe is leave it. And hopefully, when I go, I can take one of the bigger monsters with me.”

“No,” he snarls, so sharply that pearl stirs in his lap and Groot peers at them from across the room. Rocket smooths his thumb over the pleat in pearl’s brow, soothing her back to sleep. His voice drops back down to a furious hush. “You stay with us, Nebs.”

Her lips purse. “I — want to,” she admits, and he can hear the harsh waver in her voice. “But—“

“You stay with us,” he repeats in a growl. “You stay with us, and you make something better first.”

“I—“

“You ain’t a coward, Nebs,” he says sharply. “Stop acting like one.”

Another moment of quiet — then a quiet scoff. “Does that mean you will take your own advice?” she challenges, flicking her eyes pointedly from Rocket to pearl. “You’ll admit you love her? You’ll tell her?”

He blinks, and opens his mouth. But nothing comes out: no sneering protests, no incredulous scoffs. His eyes fall from Nebula’s dark gaze — less embarrassed, more ashamed. He drinks up pearl’s profile, parched for it; he thumbs the peachy gold-and-pink shimmer of her skin, freckled and no longer ice-queen-pale. His eyes memorize the lacy fans of her sapphire-dark lashes, and the waves and twists and spirals of lilac-blue silk, floating and feathered around him. Every shred of peace he has comes back to her: in soft whispers under flight controls, in the featherstorm remnants of nightmares on the runabout — in the starry vapor and clear warm water of the bath after Knowhere. In the tangle of her arms around him, every frickin’ night, and the consoling squeeze of her body, the soothing stroke of her hands.

And even without all that — all the things she’s given him — there’s so much more. He’d love her for her quick sharp mind, and her general softheartedness. Her resilience in the face of all Wyndham’s evil, and her way of reading people and situations. The way she always tries to save whoever she can: monsters and cyborgs and abilisks and orloni, and whatever little pets the High Evolutionary gave her with the intention of hurting her. For how she always seems able to dream up the kinds of solutions that he never would’ve even thought of. For the way she picks up strays like a star-miner’s trawl, and the way she gets so excited over every new thing she wears or tastes or tries.

For her made-up constellations, and all those stupid, stunning dances she does when she’s happy.

“Ah, Nebs,” he says quietly, and wrangles a wretched half-grin that he slants upward toward his friend: all teeth, all regret.

“Unlike you, I always been a coward.”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

WE'RE IN THE ENDGAME NOW.
i mean the endgame is a subjective thing, right? but this chapter marks the first of the final ten chapters, and i am REALLY hoping to continue publishing every-other-week until we're done. maybe even more often, if i can swing it. (but i always drag my feet at the end because i have separation anxiety). this month my day-job is also intensifying as we head into the new academic year, so there could be delays (but it will hopefully only be by a day or two if it happens!)

for those of you who have continued to read, to comment, to support and show love - i can't tell you how much it means, especially with a project this stupidly long. this community means the world to me and i am so, so grateful for those of you who have stuck around. ♡♡♡

shout out to my boy tibius lark from the mcu. you never got the film short you deserved my dude

coming soon: chapter thirty-seven. heartworm.
summary:the dreadnought lands on fron.
warnings: smut. continued use of The Blindfold™ and The Tail™. discussion of choking/breathplay; use of nipple clamps. little bit of angst.
estimated date: tuesday, august 26.*
*this date is an estimate only! for the most up-to-date schedule, please check the monthly forecast on my pinned tumblr post.

･:꧂posting schedules, previews, headcanons, art, & more on tumblr♡
･:꧂cicatrix ART, masterlist, & moodboard♡

Chapter 37: heartworm.

Summary:

the dreadnought lands on fron.

Notes:

warnings: smutty with a lil bit of angst/comfort. more use of The Tail™ and The Blindfold™, nipple-play/nipple clamps and mild painplay, creampies galore, edging, little bit of orgasm denial/delay, discussion of choking/breath play and pussy-plugs, use of “slut”/”whore”/“cumsut”/etc (affectionate), praise and mild degradation, mention of clit-clamping, little bit of subspace, objectification, dumbification, real filthy talk.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

heartworm. a relationship or friendship that you can’t get out of your head, which you thought had faded long ago but is still somehow alive and unfinished, like an abandoned campsite whose smoldering embers still have the power to start a forest fire. From heart + earworm, a catchy piece of music that compulsively loops inside your head. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Pearl frowns into her shallow drawer of panties.

It’s been two and a half cycles since they’d left Taluhnia. Groot had announced that he and his young charge would like to continue traveling with their hodgepodge little family aboard the Dreadnought, which had triggered a similar — albeit less emotional — confession from Nebula. Drax’s response had been predictable in the most-adorable way, as far as pearl was concerned: relief — a child on board is exactly what this crew needs, he’d said with damp eyes and not a shred of irony — followed by celebration. Nebula had nearly stabbed him on instinct when he’d wrapped her in an impulsive hug, lifting the rigid cyborg off her feet with a bellowing, triumphant laugh.

“Knock it off!” Rocket had barked, while pearl had watched with half-a-smile and stinging eyes. “You’re gonna make her frickin’ systems malfunction, and I ain’t got time to fix that!”

Drax had set the Luphomoid back on the ground and held her at arm’s length. “Are your systems okay?”

She’d glowered up at him, shrugging off his grip. “My systems are fine. You are making me rethink my decision, though.”

Later, pearl had found her down in the medbay, squirreling away lozenges as if they were secrets.

“Hey,” the Terran had said softly, and Nebula had recoiled like a startled cat before curling her handful of sweets behind her back, eyes shifting side to side. Pearl had hesitated, then reached carefully for the taller woman: opening her palm, then tucking each one of the hard candies into the open-zippered pouch on Nebula’s forearm. Once they’d all been safe and sound, pearl had folded her hands around the other woman’s. Nebula had been staring at her when she’d glanced up: a curl in her one working brow, and a defensive slant to her shoulders.

“They’re for when you’re not around—“ she’d started, but pearl had cut her off

“Thank you.”

Nebula’s hydraulic jaw-joint had snapped shut as pearl had peered up into her fawn-dark eyes.

“For staying with us, I mean.”

The other woman had swallowed uneasily. Her eyes had darted away.

“I’m so glad you decided to.”

“Blame the Fox.”

The interruption had been terse and tense. Pearl had felt the corner of her mouth curve.

“You know his name is Rocket.” She’d leaned closer — confidingly. “And don’t tell Drax, but I think you might be becoming his best friend.”

The cyborg had snorted rudely, but something around her eyes had gone strangely soft, without any visible change to her expression at all.

“Can I hug you?” pearl had asked, sudden and impulsive. “It’s okay to say no, obviously,” she’d added quickly: cheeks heating, fingers wanting nothing more than to knit into her cardigan.

The cyborg’s throat had worked behind the panel of her collar. She’d rolled her eyes again. “Be brief,” she’d rasped.

A surprised, grateful little huff had puffed out of pearl’s lungs before she’d wrapped her arms delicately around the other woman’s ribs. On tiptoe, she’d been able to tuck her chin right over Nebula’s shoulder. For a moment, pearl had thought of all those years alone, with no-one permitted to touch her except her deportment instructor — and later, no-one at all. On impulse, she’d squeezed her hug into Nebula’s lean, strong frame: once, briefly — but sweet and tight. Almost a cuddle.

She hadn’t thought it was possible, but the cyborg had stiffened further — then, cautiously, lifted her own arms. It might have been overly-generous to claim she’d hugged back, but pearl had felt the careful loop of the Luphomoid’s arms, and the wary pat against her spine.

“I always wanted a sister—“ It had been a reckless, instinctive thing to say, and pearl had immediately thought better of it: dropping her arms, sweeping back a step, tugging her ponytail over her shoulder and combing through the curls. Nebula had been staring at her, eyes too wide to be impassive anymore. Pearl had forced her fingers to uncurl from their nervous grip on her hair, tucking her shoulders back — not like an ice queen, but at least like a girl who no longer wove regret into every breath and bone.

“I’m sorry,” she’d told Nebula, the words honest but strong. “I know that’s probably… weird. I just thought — maybe someday, we’d be close enough to—“

“Stop, princess.”

It had almost been a bark — more panicked than angry. Pearl had gone still. Nebula’s lashes had flickered again, her dark prosthetic eyes darting around the medbay. For just a brief second — so quickly pearl almost doubted she’d seen it — the cyborg’s lower lip had trembled.

“I — I have always wanted a sister, as well.”

Relief had been a warm bath, and all of pearl’s tense muscles had melted in it. It hadn’t been lost on her that Nebula did have a sister — or something approximating it — under Thanos’ ruthless fist. Wildflowers of bittersweet gratitude and melancholy had unfurled between pearl’s ribs. She’d reached for the Luphomoid again — cupping the taller woman’s elbow and tugging her away from the med-counter. Of course, Nebula could never have been moved by the likes of pearl if she hadn’t wanted to be. But she’d allowed it— apparently flummoxed — and had stared as pearl had tucked her prosthetic hand into the crook of her own arm, patting it gently.

“I’ll be a good sister,” she’d promised fiercely, guiding the Luphomoid out of the bay. “I’ll look out for you.”

Nebula had snorted, her working brow still half-furrowed in perlexity. “Oh? Has the Fox finally made a blaster you can fire?” she’d asked dryly, and pearl had shot her a grin.

“Don’t you underestimate me, too,” she’d scolded lightly, squeezing Nebula’s arm closer to her side. “I’ll do whatever I need to in order to make sure you’re safe.”

“I think I’d rather rely on my own skills and my Fuck-You-Disk,” the cyborg had drawled, and pearl had shot her a grin that had felt brilliant on her face. And it must have looked it, too, because Nebula’s lips had twitched upward fleetingly.

The next few rotations had been spent adjusting to the rhythms of their newest crewmember, who had already seemed to be flourishing under the collective care of his adopted family. Groot had explained that Taluhnisans aren’t named until they can speak — when they put their own name out into the world. Since then, everyone had taken to calling their young charge some variation on Sprout or Child or Kid, all of which had seemed to delight both Taluhnisans.

Groot had obviously been smitten with the sapling since the moment he had opened his eyes — but Groot hadn’t been the only crewmember to fall in love. Drax had started taking the baby with him into the galley while he’d cooked: telling Sprout stories of Kylos, cradling the potted Taluhnisan in his arms and carting him to and fro whenever someone else hadn’t claimed him. Nebula had seemed to be trying to figure out her own role — something that pearl had only been able to describe as similar to that of grumpy but adoring uncle. Even Littlefoot would rear back on his leathery hind haunches and beg for the tin planter to be put on the floor so he could curl around it and nap.

Which Rocket, of course, had hated.

“Don’t put the kid down there,” he’d said multiple times, with a roll of his eyes. “For fuc— I mean. Whatever. Just — don’t put the kid on the floor. I got a spot for him right here.”

He’d patted a portion of the flight controls where a bucket had been molded into the console for datapads and other supplies. At some point, he must have cut some fabric from the old Sovereign quilt that used to be on their bed: a perfect nesting spot for the Taluhnisan’s pot. Rotation after rotation, pearl had watched with a curve in one corner of her mouth, eyes soft as Rocket had murmured flight lessons to the sapling: rambling about fuselages, fuel injectors, engine toggles. Flight paths and maneuvers.

But pearl’s favorite moments had come late at night: after the sleepshift lights had cycled low and dim, after Drax and Nebula had gone to their bunks and Groot had quietly folded his lengthy limbs into one of the many officers’ seats. Sometimes, when the baby had seemed unable to fall asleep and the stars and galaxies and flight controls had all sent kaleidoscope-flakes of color spinning dizzily over the darkened cockpit, pearl had heard Rocket’s voice, layered thick and rumbly beneath the spangled air.

He’d hummed. Sometimes, mumbling and muttery, he’d sung.

It hadn’t been the first time she’d caught the edges of his tattered songs, but she’d never heard him give his voice to music for any real length of time when he'd known others would hear him. But there, in the shivery starlit darkness, he’d crooned tangles of words in gravelly little melodies, baritone-low and smoky-sweet for the young Taluhnisan. Pearl had understood some of them — her linguistic talents and education had even allowed her to start making sense of some of the patois embedded in the haunting little miners’ lullabies that Rocket must have picked up on previous trips to Knowhere. But even when she hadn’t been able to understand a single word, she’d wanted to wrap herself in the hearthside-crackle of his voice forever.

“I love when you sing to him,” pearl had told him one night, her arms laced around his neck and her fingers laced into his fur.

He’d scoffed into her hair, deft fingers adjusting the blindfold still covering her eyes and then tucking her cheek into the fur of his shoulder. She‘d nuzzled in, breathing in the fragrance of his fur: blue spruce, burnt wood, and buttery-warm brown-sugar marzipan. She’d held the scent in her lungs for as long as she’d been able to, then exhaled with a lustrous sigh, only to cuddle him closer.

“For fuck’s sake, princess,” he’d groused, but there’d been a pleased chuckle hiding under his voice. “You’re so damn clingy.”

“Mmhm,” she’d agreed sweetly, then yelped at a bright sting in her nipple — a mean pinch, she’d assumed. Her head had tilted upward so she could run her nose along his throat. The silken strands of fur had feathered over her face. “Sing for me?” she’d asked him, her voice shy and her cheeks hot beneath the blindfold.

”I’d rather make you sing,” he’d growled. His voice had been dark and velvet. It had ignited something fluttery in her belly: warming a path down her abdomen, tingling somewhere low. Her pussy had fluttered in response.

“I’ll sing for you,” she’d teased, though the words had come out breathy and thin, “if you promise to sing for me after.”

“Oh.” It had been a mocking, menacing chortle. One hand had fisted suddenly-tight in the hair at the nape of her neck, yanking her head back till her throat had curved in a vulnerable arch. The sting had prickled over her scalp, and the buzz below her abdomen had concentrated in her clit. Her thighs had twitched. “Kitten thinks she can negotiate, huh?”

She’d arched both brows over her blindfold and let a smile curve her mouth playfully. “Not negotiate,” she’d corrected. “Demand.”

It had been his turn to nose along her carotid — mapping the warmth beneath the surface of her skin. Maybe he’d even been able to hear her heartbeat, with those sensitive ears of his. He’d licked a threat along her neck and jaw, and nudged her thigh with one foot. Pearl had parted her legs for him, and his tail had swept in: feathery and taunting along her naked folds. She’d shivered.

“Now you’re learning,” he’d told her, mocking approval rippling along the low timbre of his voice. “Don’t know whether to reward you for that, or punish you.”

Her breath had turned into a moan as he’d reached downward, managing to grasp her knee and pull her leg higher and wider — opening her up even further so his tail could flick with expert precision against her bare folds. The ever-so-slight brush had forced a jolt of her hips, thigh straining against his grip.

“Why?” she’d panted — head still pulled back by a handful of hair as he’d chuckled. Her abdomen had knotted into a crackling tangle of static electricity, snapping and zapping at each ticklish whisper of his tail, and her clit had been nearly vibrating with unanswered need. “Why punish me?”

Another teasing graze of his fur. Another mean tug on her scalp. The sudden hot burst of pain in her nipple — prolonged this time — had triggered an answering pulse of need in her neglected, aching clit.

“‘Cause I want to,” he’d said frankly, and she’d heard the smug bite of his teeth as his fingers had slowly twisted and tugged at her nipple. “‘Cause you want me to. Don’t you, kitten?”

He’d released her breast to trace one finger over the flushed, heated peak, and she’d tried to arch again.

“Y-yeah,” she’d gasped out. Her offer — a song for a different kind of song — had become just a ghost of a thought in her mind.

“And ‘cause you’re my very own fuckdoll — aren’t you, sweetheart?”

His hand had slid upward from her breast: hot leathery palm coasting over her sternum, fingertips dancing over her collarbone. Claws had prickled along the vulnerable underside of her jaw and for just a fleeting moment, she’d felt the weight of his handspan on the column of her throat. His grasp hadn’t been anywhere near large enough to fully-collar her, but it had still felt heavy. Scalding.

Claiming.

A moan had trickled over her lips, but she’d only had a moment to bask in the glow of his palm before he’d snatched it away. Her belly had twisted — not in a pleasant way, this time. She’d known — without knowing how she’d known — that it had been the memory of the Arete that had triggered his sudden retreat. The last time he’d had his hands around her throat.

She’d groped sightlessly for his retreating fingers, but he’d braceleted her wrist instead and pinned it above her head, rolling her the rest of the way onto her back and using his feet to spread her wide.

“Don’t gimme that look,” he’d muttered.

“I can’t be giving you a look,” she’d pointed out — and then yelped when he’d used his other hand to levy a light slap to the side of one breast.

“Brat,” he’d purred against her ear before his hand had found its way back into her curls.

“You can — ah — you can put your hands on my throat if you want,” she’d said huskily, then writhed against the torture of his tail — certain he’d been trying to distract her. “You can choke—“

“Never, pearl,” he’d snarled. “Don’t even—“

“But I didn't mi—“

“You didn’t mind,” he’d interrupted. She’d heard the sneer in his voice, and known it hadn’t been for her. “I know. But you’re a fuckin’ moron if you think m’gonna risk that again.” His teeth had surprised a soft melting mewl from her: sharp canines scraping over one shoulder, incisors nibbling a trail of meteors across her breast. “I coulda hurt you, pearl. For real.”

There’d been something more desolate than penitence in his voice. He’d sounded almost fearful — even though that night on the Arete had seemed so far in the past.

“But you said—“

“Pearl,” he’d snapped.

For a moment, his whole body had gone still and tense, down to the light sweep of fur feathered between her thighs. She’d wriggled, but Rocket’s hand had only tightened on her wrist before she’d felt his fingers pinch her jaw — turning her face toward his, even though she’d been unable to see him.

He’d sighed, and the soft whuff of his breath had teased along the flush of her throat.

“There’s a — I dunno what it’s called. A frickin’ artery or whatever,” he’d muttered at last, and she’d felt the tickle of his whiskers on her jaw, then the velveteen brush of his cheek along her throat once more. “Right here,” he’d breathed against her, the soft-leather tip of his nose nuzzling along her pulse. “This is the part you gotta cut off flow to when you’re fucking. Protect the airways, but stop oxygens from gettin’ to your brain through the blood.”

He’d nuzzled in closer, lowering his body onto hers — the always-surprising weight of him pinning her down, pressing her tight and safe into the mattress.

“That’s the way you’re s’posed to do it,” he’d said raggedly. “That’s the safe way.”

Pearl had tilted her head back, as far as if her curls were still knotted into his demanding fist.

“You did do it that way,” she’d reminded him, trying to soften herself for him. “When you were — when I came the first time—”

She’d been able to feel the agitation rippling from him, radiating into the air.

“Yeah, but before — an’ after — I was gonna—”

“You didn’t,” she’d interrupted, and her hand had slid reverently through his sheaves of fur. “You didn’t, and I want you to do it. If you want to. I trust you.”

He’d muffled a curse into her skin — something mournful and angry and surprisingly hungry, all at once.

“I think it would feel even better, now that you don’t hate me anymore,” she’d added, and he’d made another strange, desperate, guttural sound against her. “Like it does when you hold me down. It makes me feel real. It makes me feel like you’ve — like you’ve pinned me to my body and reminded me that I’m part of it. It feels warm. It feels like I’m alive.”

His canines had scratched lightly on her throat. He’d licked kisses into the tender scrapes.

“If — if you don’t want to, though—“

“Can’t frickin’ tell you no about anything,” he’d muttered. “But not tonight, kitten. If you still want me to, we’ll try it out some other time.”

His voice, like coals and embers after a fire burns low, had sounded almost shaky.

“Okay, sweetheart,” she’d soothed. Her free hand had risen to cradle his cheek. She’d swept a reverent, consoling thumb over the seam of his mouth, then his whiskers. His claws had caught her wrist in midair, and he’d licked a wordless promise into the valley of her palm.

“Besides,” he’d said against the tissue-thin skin of her wrist — nibbling at her pulse while his voice had darkened into something more sinister, “I told you I was gonna make you sing tonight.” A smirk. “You’ll need your throat uncollared for most of that.”

And he had made her sing: torturing her for hours with the light taunting touch of his tail, plucking at her nipples — snickering at her increasing desperation until she’d been keening and crying. When he‘d finally buried himself between her thighs, she’d wailed — and when he’d finally made her come, her whole body had lit up in sparks and stellar flares. She’d arched into a silent crescent: breathless and straining, lips parted in a helpless, voiceless song of pleasure.

Afterward, when she’d been drifting dreamily — all her limbs slack and achy and sweet, and her face pressed against Rocket’s marzipan-fur and metal ridges — she’d heard his voice. It had been low and uncertain — barely more than a hushed rumble of a hum — but it had rolled over her skin like warm syrup and melted maple-sugar, like butter and crushed candied almonds.

She’d squeezed her eyes shut more tightly behind her blindfold, and pulled him closer to her, and snuggled in.

And she’d slept even better than she had before.

But as sweet as that memory is — along with the fact that Rocket’s been crooning quiet songs to her every sleep-shift since — it’s just distracting her from the current conundrum in her panty-drawer. Because the Thneed system is still three cycles out, and inhabited planets are few and far between out here on the rims of the known empires. They’ve all discussed that they’ll need to find an inhabited settlement once they get planetside, so they can make sure that Drax and Nebula have warm clothing and protective gear for the cold.

Which is why it doesn’t make sense that pearl keeps finding new pairs of panties in her drawer.

She lifts up the latest set — in the Xeronian style, but gauzy and thin, with hand-painted florals in shades of violet and rose. It comes on the heels of yesterday’s offering — a wispy scrap of fine white netting, sewn with tiny bits of Sovereign iolite. The shred of mist and jewels could only have been called fabric by the most charitable of observers, and pearl’s pussy and curls had been protected solely by a negligible spray of rich royal-blue gemstones.

Two rotations before that, there’d been a gossamer tangle of soft strings, and before that, a fluttery full-bodied romper of plummy gauze and a neckline that had plunged past her navel.

When had he had the time?

She’d tried to ask. More than once. He’d stared at her blankly without the slightest flicker of recognition in his ember-hot eyes, and had said that he hadn’t known what the hell she was talking about.

Liar.

The thought is braided with a sort of baffled affection, especially given how those same eyes had flared when he’d seen the gifted panties on her over the course of the following rotations.

“More a gift for me than for you,” he’d muttered heatedly, tracing a dark, filed-down claw over the iolites held together by mist and cobwebs. His nail — still sharp enough to do damage if he’d wanted — had clinked against the vivid blue jewel-chips. They’d been the only barrier between his finger and her empty, aching insides. “How d’you think these are gonna hold up after I put a couple loads in this little pussy?”

Her clit had twitched desperately against the finely-woven netting. She’d felt his eyes on her — seen the slow, wicked widening of his grin.

Then he’d proceeded to slip aside the new panties and do exactly what he’d threatened, keeping her in their quarters for an extra two hours that morning so he could fuck his come into her twice, following each round with a light thumb on her clit while he’d patiently stuffed any spillage back inside her.

He hadn’t let her come, though. No matter how she’d begged. And when he’d convinced her to wear her pink skirt for the day — prob’ly won’t wanna wear it much once we land on Fron — too cold, he’d reasoned with a teasing glimmer in his sideways gaze — she hadn’t realized how he would use it to his advantage. On three separate occasions, he’d spirited her away to some locked closet or hidden hold, or an unused bedroom in the lower officer’s quarters. Again and again, he’d teased her to the edges of orgasm, only to cup one palm over her swollen, needy clit and angle the curve of his cock away from what he’d called the “sweet spot” inside her. Then he’d fill her again, chuckling breathlessly as she’d squirmed and begged and squeezed around him, tears salting her lashes and cheeks, and dampening the hair at her temples.

Each time he was done, he’d pulled out slowly — thumbing every bit of excess back inside her till she’d moaned and writhed — before carefully arranging her sopping panties over her pussy and admiring the scene like a work of art.

“Tsk,” he’d clicked reprovingly, but his grin had been wide and white-toothed and smug. “You mighta ruined your new panties already, kitten. If you can’t keep all that nice hot come inside, maybe I should start plugging you up, huh?”

She’d sucked in a breath, eyes wide and fluttering. She hadn’t known exactly what he’d met, but just as with his mention of nipple clamps, she’d thought she understood the basic mechanics.

He’d chortled. “Ohh, you filthy fuckin’ slut.” The words had felt like praise. “You like that, huh? The idea of me packing this pussy full of cream and making sure it all stays inside?”

“Please let me come,” she’d pleaded, panting.

“Mm, I don’t frickin’ think so,” he’d purred, giving her dripping panties a consoling little pat. Her hips had bucked instinctively, and he’d grinned again — looking more self-satisfied than she’d ever seen him.

And menacing, too.

“Not for a few more hours, at least.”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Another cycle passes, and brings them that much closer to Fron. The stars feel more still and silent out in the Rim, even though pearl knows that’s nonsense. When Rocket lets her fly — which is often — she skims the Dreadnought through diamond-dust clouds in shades of tourmaline, and it truly feels like they’re the only people left in the universe.

He still hasn’t admitted to providing her with the abundance of panties — now overflowing her shallow drawer in ripples of silk and soft lace. When she finds the latest pair — a flouncy satin set of sapphire ruffles and ribbons — she can’t help but let out a muffled squeak of delight. They’re the pair she had lingered over at Anaya’s Armoire, and eventually dismissed as being too impractical: fluffy and frilly, held together at the hips with glossy, voluminous bows. While she hadn’t regretted choosing a slightly more-practical pair — opal-lace that had felt like it had been woven from clouds — she had remembered this set with a surprising, unexpected wistfulness.

They’re too lavish — too generous in flounces — to fit comfortably in her armored leggings, so she wears them under her skirt again a few rotations later. And when she strips down under Rocket’s watchful eye, she can see the moment he registered what she’s wearing.

“Fuck me,” he mutters under his breath, eyes narrow and so hot they scald her skin everywhere he looks. “I been thinking about slapping your ass in these ever since I saw ‘em.”

“Is that why you got them for me?” she teases, and his eyes narrow before something wicked curls his mouth, flashing teeth.

“You know, now that you mention it, I did get you a gift, pearl.”

She recognizes the tone: taunting, smoky, low. It reminds her of that night on the runabout when he made her sit still in his lap with his cock nestled inside her while he’d clinked away on a Fuck-You-Disk.

“Or — made one, I guess,” he drawls. “You don’t mind a homemade sorta gift, do you, princess?”

Her smile feels radiant, even as her abdomen flutters with that strange blend of excitement and trepidation that he seems to so easily provoke.

“I love anything you give me, Rocket.”

“Yeah,” he rumbles, throaty and smug. “I know you do, you needy fuckin’ slut.”

A frisson of heat cartwheels up her spine in electric threads of gold.

“Get in the den,” he orders, mouth still curved in a smirk that leaves one canine glinting. “Face down, ass up.” The grin widens, sharp and predatory. “Wait for me.”

Her teeth sink into her lip and she springs to her feet from the edge of the mattress, one forearm pressed to her chest as she bolts to the closet. Rocket’s snickering prickles the air behind her.

“Don’t cover up those fuckdoll-tits when you run,” he calls lazily behind her. “Lemme watch ‘em bounce.”

She feels herself dampen as she scurries.

The light-spangled den is plush and thick with blankets and pillows. She grabs her blindfold from the small basket in the corner and ties it snugly behind her head. The sway of her high ponytail tickles against her bare shoulderblades as she sinks into position, pressing her breasts and shoulders into the cushions with her ass raised high beneath its cloud of sapphire ruffles.

He usually moves so silently — except when he wants her to hear him. His claws click against the platinum-plated floor now: a lazy stroll. She can picture the easy, predatory roll of his hip, the languid sway of his tail. There’s a soft sound from the corridor: fur and fabric brushing something solid, like he’s propped himself insolently in the doorway.

She can feel his stare burning through the gusset of her panties, and wonders if she’s already soaked through. Her fingers curl into the soft blankets and her thighs twitch. The minutes scrape by, teasing her plump folds and wet satin.

“Stay there,” he says at last, voice tilted with amusement. “M’gonna go get your present.” A pause. Then — deliberate and intentional — “Don’t move while I’m gone.”

She squeezes her eyes shut behind her blindfold and chews at her lip as he moves away. The door to the captain’s quarters swishes open and shut. He does this on purpose, of course. He knows — and she knows he knows — how the waiting gets her anxious and wet and whimpering, till she’s lost in a gold-sequined haze of need: so flushed she begins feeling dizzy with heat, losing time, shivering. Feeling like she might die if she doesn’t get to feel him, to taste him, to make him feel good.

He stays away for so long that she fades in and out of her thoughts, thighs twitching and trembling. At some point, dazed and half-delirious, it occurs to her that she has ten perfectly-capable fingers all of her own. She hasn’t had to make herself come since those first few times on the runabout: Rocket has always been there with a flared nose and wicked leer every time she’s had a dirty thought, ready to capitalize on her need for both their sakes. It’s the first time he’s left her. A twinge pinches behind her breastbone like a poorly-tuned, badly-plucked harpstring, but it’s hard to decipher under the watercolor-blur of her need. Tentatively, she wriggles her arm beneath her, then reaches back with hesitant fingers to run them lightly over the soft satin between her thighs. It’s already soaked-through and slippery, she realizes, though the recognition is misty and half-formed. She can feel her clit nudging against the wet fabric and her fingers. Her thighs squirm against her hand as she strokes herself: not trying to get off; just trying to give herself some sort of friction while she waits so that she doesn’t completely lose her mind—

“Well, what the fuck do we have here?”

Under normal circumstances, she might have squeaked at the sudden intrusion — at the way she hadn’t heard him re-enter the room or advance on their den at all. But she’s too far gone: only a breath too frail to be considered a gasp leaves her lips.

“Here I am, goin’ to get you a nice gift, and I find you petting your needy little pussy without me?”

Her mind blanks. The offending hand sinks back to the blankets, spine arching deep as she rearranges herself in the chenille, hips wiggling. Her skin ripples a full-bodied shiver when the points of his claws dance over the soaked satin clinging to her. She can feel the dangerous tickle against her lips, then her clit, and she shivers again — body almost convulsing, flesh prickling with tiny spasms. His hand shifts; his knuckle presses the wet cloth shallowly into the soft hollow of her pussy.

“You think that’s fair, kitten?”

Thoughts splinter into little rainbow prisms as his knuckle rubs her through the slippery fabric. “You — you l-left for so long,” she manages, voice reedy with protest.

“Yeah,” he coos, all mock-sympathy. Even through the broken kaleidoscope of her awareness, she can hear the delighted, mean-spirited grin in his voice. “And you were so frickin’ empty without me, weren’t you, doll?”

She feels herself try to clench on him, but his finger isn’t deep enough. A faint whine curls into the air before she even realizes it belongs to her.

“Poor little slut,” he croons, teasing her with his knuckle. “Thinking you get to start without me. Maybe you won’t get anything inside you at all tonight.”

Her gasp is so visceral this time that it catches in the back of her throat, cracking open like a geode. “R-Rocket — no, please—“

His hand leaves the sopping satin between her thighs, and a wet slap rings out before she registers the hot sting of his palm against the tender spot where her asscheek meets her thigh.

“Look at her bounce,” he snickers, and she feels herself sink into the warmth as she waits for the next strike.

But it doesn’t come. Instead, she feels his body curve over her, and her blindfold loosen. Her heart rises hopefully in her throat. Maybe—

“Eyes forward,” he orders easily. “Hands behind your back.”

She swallows her disappointment, too dazed to hold on to it for long anyway, and wobbles onto her shoulders and chest as she folds her arms loosely behind her. The thin strip of cloth winds quickly around her wrists, binding them together, while Rocket slips his fingers between the fabric and her skin to make sure it’s not too tight. She moans — half a protest, desperate for contact. Her fingers try to fumble for him, tied behind her back.

“Uh-uh,” Rocket tsks mockingly. “Silly sluts who can’t be patient don’t get to touch at all.”

Her scalp prickles in a way that has her shivering again — right before the flooding heat of a mean tug on her whole ponytail. She yelps, hauled back into a tight arch as Rocket winds his fist in her glossy blue curls.

“Up you go, little fuckdoll,” he purrs, pulling back until her shoulders leave the ground and she finds herself tottering on her knees, wide eyes tipped toward the ceiling. His other arm winds around her hips and his fingers slip through the flounces and ruffles to find the drenched gusset of her panties again. She tries to brace herself, but his fingers press ruthlessly into her soft cleft, finding her clit once more and scrubbing cruel circles. She writhes against him, pussy fluttering and clenching as she chases the friction.

“That’s it, kitten. Ride my fingers.”

Breathless pants pour from her as her abdomen and thighs tighten, body arching against his grip on her hair and his relentless touch. The silver-bright arc of hot electricity in her belly grows crackling-taut as she rubs against his circling fingers, the wet satin snagging gently on his calluses. Her view of the shadowed ceiling and twinkling lanterns blurs and her belly coils tight and her hips snap. Almost—

His ruthless fingers suddenly retreat, and the heat of his palm stamps itself on the small of her back as he gently shoves her down onto her side. She tumbles, a desperate keening cry unspooling from her lips as her climax slips out of reach.

Rocket snickers again from behind her. “Aww. You really wanted it, huh? Needed it. Poor little cumslut, missing out on her orgasm.” There’s a rustle as he shifts pillows or blankets. ”Well, c’mere, pearl. Wanna give you your pretty gift. An’ maybe you can convince me to let you come.”

It takes a few heartbeats before she can make sense of his words, still bereft from her stolen orgasm. Shakily, she lifts her tousled head, blinking blurred eyes that she hadn’t realized were teary until now. When she turns, Rocket is already sprawled lazily against a hill of pillows and blankets, propped like clouds against the wall. Even dazed and needy, she can feel the sharp drop of disappointment that he’s already in soft sleep-clothes. She had hoped—

“C’mon, sweetheart.” A smirk and a beckoning curl of his claws. “You’re gonna straddle my lap and rub yourself on me just like that time in the runabout, and it this time, you’re not gonna come till I say so.” The grin widens. “And maybe, if you do what you’re told like a good little slut, I’ll fuck that empty, achy pussy after all.”

She wobbles toward him on her knees — a few scant steps — and whimpers as she slings one clumsy thigh over him. His callused palm glides from the hollow behind her knee up to the bow at her hip, squeezing her dimpled thigh as he guides her into place. His voice grows low and smoky, sharp edges softening to something velvety and almost gentle.

“Bounce for me, baby.”

She thinks she can feel the raspy rumble between her legs, grazing against her drenched panties and twitching clit. Her hips buck instinctively and she rolls into an unsteady rhythm. The hard hook of his cock juts against her, separated from her only by a thin layer of soaked satin and rapidly-dampening cotton-jersey.

“That all you got?” He snickers, both dark palms squeezing at her thighs, then her hips and waist: holding her stable since she can’t use her own hands. His claws dimple her skin. “Faster, pearl. Harder.”

Her muscles tense as she follows his instructions. Warmth swells and radiates from the crux of her thighs, sending another wave of rosy pink over her skin. Her lips part, flushed and swollen, and her breasts wobble and bounce with every little hop of her hips.

“You want your present now, sweetheart?”

Her eyes catch his: hot red embers, burning her up. The panting in her lungs turns into a gulping, hiccuping gasp, then a broken sob as she tries to fight off the champagne-bubbles in her nerves.

“Y-yes, please, Rocket—“

His grin gleams in the starry lantern-glow, and her tears turn it into a dazzle of danger and moonlight. He fishes in his pocket, and something glints dark and silver in his palm. No, two somethings. She tries to focus.

“I didn’t say slow down, pearl.”

She whimpers and resumes her rocking motion, awash in pulsar-flares and meteor-tails. Every time her clit notches on the hard curve of his dick, she spasms and melts and spasms again.

“Made these from some ball bearings and little scraps of metal,” he says conversationally, as if she isn’t a teary, ruined mess rubbing herself frantic against his cock. “Coulda been a quick project, but I wanted to make sure they were nice an’ smooth for you, kitten. Took my time. Had to be sure they wouldn’t nick your pretty skin.”

He pinches one in the finger of his opposite hand and holds it up in front of her dazed eyes. It’s a slender strip of metal — barely more than a thickly-gauged wire — bent into a V with the ends ground glossy-smooth. A round metal bead rests at the bottom, with a strand of three more dangling beneath. When Rocket flicks his thumb, the bead sides up and down the two arms of the wire: drawing them closer together, then letting them spring back apart.

Pearl turns glazed eyes back to him. Her thighs tremble and strain — sticky and slick — as her pussy rubs against his dick. He snickers.

“You got no frickin’ clue what this is, do you?” he jeers. “Not a thought left in that pretty head ‘cept for gettin’ stuffed with cock.”

A needy little sound — something between a plea and a protest — squeezes the back of her throat.

“Lemme show you, sweetheart.”

He darts forward and drags his harsh, rasping tongue over her right nipple, and she utters a breathless, broken squeal, hips stuttering.

“Uh-uh, kitten. Keep up.” His teeth nip at her, tongue flicking and rolling. The bright bite of pain sends an electric current zinging along her nerves, right down to her swollen clit. She pulses against the satin panties.

“That’s my girl,” Rocket purrs against her nipple, rubbing the prickling whiskers of his cheek against her sensitive flesh. “My pretty, dickdrunk wife—“

She buckles with a wail. Every time he calls her that, it ignites some beacon buried in her subconscious — as if he’s named her his wife a dozen times before while she’s been too desperate to notice, and now every time he says it, each cell in her body lights up in post-hypnotic response. Her muscles snap taut.

“Don’t you fuckin’ dare, pearl,” he growls around a mouthful of her breast. She rises higher on her knees — trying to give herself some space from the friction she’d just been chasing so desperately — and the wail shatters into a sob.

“Back down,” he orders with an arched brow, forcing her hips back against his lap. “Keep riding, and don’t come.” The stern expression melts into a smug, shit-eating grin. “Actually,” he taunts, “why don’t you take a look at that tit I was just playin’ with. Tell me what you see.”

Unthinking, she bows her head, vision fuzzy at the edges. “T-teethmarks?” she warbles out uncertainly.

“Yeah,” he croons. “Teethmarks on a needy little nipple that keeps distracting me all the frickin’ time. Brat.”

His teeth pin the pink button again, and his tongue curls around it — pulls on it. Pearl squeals at the pressure, her body bucking desperately against him. When he finally releases it with a wet pop, it’s harder than she’s ever seen it — achy and throbbing.

“Watch,” he orders, and it’s almost a snarl. She peers down blearily at the wet, hard bud — watches as he slides the silky-smooth, wide-open tongs of the little metal contraption around her nipple, as if it were hugging her. Then he slides the ball-bearing bead upward, drawing the ends of thin metal closer together.

She shrieks. Stars burst behind her eyes — she thinks they burst on her skin, too. Certainly in her nipple, and in the heavy weight of her bouncing breast, and in her abdomen and her clit—

“I can’t — I can’t—“

He pauses. “Safeword, pearl?”

She shakes her head, slapping herself in the face with the blue curls at the end of her ragged ponytail. She’s still bouncing — instinctive, compulsive — spine arched so deeply that the crux of her thighs rides up against his abdomen instead of his cock. He loops an arm around her; some distant part of her is vaguely aware of his hand flattening against the small of her back, trying to keep her balanced. But all that spills out of her lips is—

“No, Rocket — please — I can’t — please—“

He chuckles. “Ask for it then, pretty slut.”

“Ah — ah—“

“Use your pretty manners, princess. Beg me for the other one.”

She manages to pull herself back into an upright position, grinding her pussy desperately against his cock.

“Please — Rocket, please give me the other one—“

He raises an eyebrow. “I know you can ask filthier—“

Her mind scrambles. Heat blooms from her right nipple: grounding, drugging, mind-splintering. She thinks she can see her heartbeat in her nipple: pulsing, throbbing, scalding-hot. The sensation echoes in her clit.

“The — the clip — the clamp—“ Her voice sounds broken and hoarse and smoky, and nothing like her own. Had she screamed? “On my other nipple, please, Rocket, please—“

He reaches out casually and flicks the dangling chain of ball bearings, bouncing and clicking on her right breast, and the slender metal clamp tugs meanly on her nipple. She wails again, yanking at her bound arms — not sure if she wants to protect her vulnerable chest or clutch onto him and never let go.

“Why should I?” he smirks. “Why would you want that, huh?”

Another flick. She arches and buckles, body completely beyond her control.

“‘Cause I’m your slut!” she squeals. “I’m your — your cockdrunk whore to play with, Rocket, please — please—“

He chortles, loosening the arm wrapped around her hips so he can pinch and pull on her left nipple, already nearly as hard as her right. She pants, freezing against him, no longer moving — just staring as he teases the taut pink bud into something even firmer and more swollen. Then he places the second clip and slowly slides the metal bead upward, closing the little arms tightly around the vulnerable nub of flesh.

She can only moan brokenly when the heat spreads along her areola. Her cunt spasms. The ruffled panties are sopping.

Rocket flicks the little weights dangling off the clip, and her whole body shudders. Some distant, shattered part of her wonders if she’s already coming — some sort of deranged, prolonged, full-body orgasm. He shifts, loosening the drawstring on his already-soaked sleep-pants. Then she feels the tug on her own ruffled panties — the sudden loosening of the silk bow over one hip, then the other. Another broken moan rolls up her throat as the satin slips away and cool air licks at her fevered wet skin and dripping curls. He leverages her body up and over him — rubs the bright pink tip of his cock along her dripping folds.

“I’ll let you hop on my dick this time, if you promise not to come.”

Her field of vision narrows down to only his sharp-toothed smirk. ”I p-promise,” she’d stammered, the words stumbling and pathetic and pleading. “Please — I promise—“

“I wanna see how long you last when you got these on.”

Another flick — another leer. Another scintillating burst of heat crackling along every inch of her, electrifying her right down to her clit. She can’t speak.

She sinks down on his hooked cock with a grateful, fumbling cry: pussy already clutching at him feverishly, gripping and grasping needily as he stretches her along its mean curve.

“Go on, little slut.” The nasty, pleased grin. The live-coal embers of his eyes. “Get back to fuckin’ work. And bounce those fuckdoll-tits while you do it.”

Everything trembles and clutches and shakes as she rocks against him, sloppy and uncoordinated. With every desperate jolt of her body, the weights on her nipples jolt too, tugging and sending new flares and fires licking along her entire body. Chills ripple her spine.

“Look down,” Rocket tells her with another lurid grin. “Don’t you like the present I made just for you, princess? You’ll hurt my feelings if you don’t watch ‘em. Watch ‘em squeeze and pull on those poor little nipples of yours.”

Her eyes fall and she suddenly can’t look away: staring mindlessly at the bounce of her breasts, the jut of her tortured nipples, the flash of the gunmetal-silver jewelry adorning their flushed, spit-glossy tips. Heat — embarrassment, lust, need — sweeps through every inch of her, pulsing and powerful.

Fuckdoll-tits, she thinks deliriously.

“Ain’t you gonna thank me, kitten? — no, don’t look away from those naughty nipples of yours — Where’d all your fancy manners go?”

She can’t breathe. Her breasts feel heavy even as they keep bouncing up and down, pink tips turned cherry-red, tugging this way and that as she chases the tightness in her body. “Th-thank you — thank you f-for—“

He flicks one set of ball-bearings and she keens, hands clutching helplessly where they’re bound behind her.

“Thank you for punishing my spoiled frickin’ nipples,” Rocket suggests sardonically. “For turning me into a squirming brainless fuckdrunk slut, and fillin’ me up.”

He pulls at her hips, shifting her angle, and she squeals when the curve of his cock finds that sparking spot along the front wall of her cunt. Her eyes roll back and flutter; she squeals again and writhes when he does something to her aching nipples, and her clit throbs in response.

“I said watch, baby.”

She pants and arches her back — as if sticking her tits out will give her some kind of relief — and stares through wet lashes at her bouncing, jostling breasts.

“Thank you for p-punishing me,” she tries to repeat, words bouncing along with them — body burning up and twisting into steam as she babbles. “Th-thank you for turning me into a — a squirming — a brainless, fuckdrunk — thank you for f-filling me—“

“That’s it, kitten. Fuck yourself absolutely stupid, dizzy girl.” A tug on one flashing clamp this time — another broken, brittle cry. “Stick ‘em out for me again, sweetheart. That’s a good fuckin’ girl. I know you love showin’ me these perfect tits while you make a frickin’ mess all over my cock—“

He reaches up with two hands and flicks both steely spangles — at the same time. She’s vaguely aware of her jaw dropping in a wordless cry. Her vision splinters silver at the edges; her pussy spasms around the scythe-shaped cock buried between her thighs—

“My filthy li’l show-off. Oh — fuck. My slutty, sweet little wife—“

Pearl‘s scream liquifies her body — dissolving her in violent, pyrotechnic sprays of molten silver and champagne fire — and the universe bursts into brittle blinding sparks and crystal confetti around her.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Pearl hadn’t woken up till the next morning, her body clean and naked and wrapped in chenille, with salve already smoothed into her still-aching breasts. The rawness had felt good, though — like the pain of overused muscles after a day of dancing or an afternoon spent climbing trees — little joys she hasn’t had since Terra. Guilt had rushed over her in a drowning wave when she’d realized that Rocket hadn’t gotten to orgasm — at least, not with her — but he’d swept back into the den with a tray full of Kylosian breakfast, Cyclorade morningtea, and a cocky smirk before she’d been able to spiral.

“You think I care?” he’d chortled when she’d tried to apologize. “You squeezed my dick like an Unoxxian vapor-vice. Those clamps are the best frickin’ thing I ever made, and I can’t wait to get ‘em on you again.” The smirk had grown sharper: all pointed teeth and fang. “S’my own fault anyway. I knew what I was doin’ when I left you panting and whining and wiggling your ass up here alone for two hours. I’m surprised I didn’t come back to find you pumping four fingers knuckle-deep into that pretty pink pussy.”

Her eyes had widened and her breathing had gone shallow, and he’d winked: dramatic, exaggerated, showy.

“I made an extra clamp, you know — a triple-set to use whenever I wanna fuckin’ wreck you,” he’d drawled with a leer. “But I didn’t think you were ready for that third one just yet.”

She’d gone scalding hot, flushing from her toes to the lilac-blue roots of her hair, and her thighs had snapped together with an audible slap beneath the blankets. He’d cackled and nudged her over, lowering himself and the food both to the blankets. They’d picnicked in their den with the stars just outside, much like they had in the quiet days on Alon-Gim.

The rotations dance past in swirls and constellations. The flight lessons continue — and the card games, the gambling, the songs and stories. The baby begins to creak out soft crackling woodland noises that were sounding more and more like words, however few. In between orgasms and cuddles and her hands curled around the yoke, between the comforting bicker of her new family-members and the looming nearness of the Thneed star-system, pearl brushes up on her Glacian languages and tries to teach herself Fronnish while she strokes Littlefoot’s scales — readying herself for the mid-sized settlement where Rocket has decided they’ll set the Dreadnought down first.

Eventually — in a way that feels both too soon and not quickly enough — Fron appears in the starshield as a tiny blue spark, steadily blossoming into a marble of jewelled tanzanite and aquamarine. It doesn’t take long for pearl to fall half in-love with it: the distant blue ball, glowing and growing larger through the viewport. It’s somehow become cocooned in the misty fantasies that Rocket has begun crooning into her ear every sleepshift — fantasies which he probably assumes are filthy but which feel so achingly sweet to her that she’s almost afraid they’ll be snatched away. Fron, the polar planet: infused it with all their collective hopes and dreams.

It’s silly, of course — dangerous, even — but pearl can’t help but gaze at the polar planet with her heart already both on her tongue and in her eyes. She’s eager for snowy sunrises spent on top of or underneath her lover, with sweet Cyxlorade morningtea warming her belly and his callused-leather palms warming her skin. She’s wistful for things that haven’t even happened yet.

The planet itself looks rimed in thick-frosted ice, even from afar — but pearl stares at it, and she only feels a comforting flush along her breastbone, and the slightest thread of worry that the dreams can still be snatched away.

“Bundle up,” Rocket orders, tossing her fleecy pants and onto the bed. They’re followed by her heat-paneled coat, and the still-unused boots and gloves, woven with warming-tech — and the hat and the scarf and the cozy-soft socks—

“I can’t wear all of these right now,” she protests, half-laughing as she perches on the bed beside the mound of clothing. “I’ll be sweating before we even break atmosphere—“

He rolls his eyes. “Pants and boots and socks and stuff. We’ll bring the rest down to the cockpit so you can put it on before we leave the ship.”

“Isn’t it midsummer where we’re headed, though?” she challenges gently.

He snorts, rolling his eyes and herding her toward the bed till the mattress catches the back of her thighs and she has to sit. “‘Still in the negative temperatures,” he reminds her.

“Sure,” she agrees easily, “but I’ve done the conversions. That’s normal for winter where I lived on Terra. Nice, even. My coat and regular boots will be fine—“

“M’not riskin’ it,” he mutters. She watches, bemused and affectionate, as he lifts one of her still-bare feet and rolls a thick, woolly Cyclorade sock over her toe and heel, then smooths it up along her calf.

“How come you’re only bringing some of your gear, then?” she challenges, a smile curling starbright on the corner of her lips as he fusses with her boot.

He really is the grouchiest, sweetest, most wonderful person she’s ever met.

“I got fur,” he grumbles, and she tries not to let her delight show as she indulges him. When he’s got her dressed in all her warmest clothes, and all her heated gear and extra layers tossed over his arm along with his own coat, she reaches out and catches his face in her hands, fingers woven between fur and whiskers.

“Thank you, Rocket,” she tells him, and she knows her voice is as sweet and clinging as honey. His warm, hearth-red eyes widen, and his free hand flies up to grip her wrist. “For looking out for me. For taking such good care of me.”

He blinks rapidly, like an old Terran computer trying to process, and she admires him while he does. It’s both sweet and sad, how confident he can be when he’s training her to fly or shoot, or when he’s making her come, or when he’s building some sort of massive weapon or flying the ship — and how uncertain he is every time she thanks him for his tenderness.

Her palms cradle him steadily, though. She tries to pour her love through her fingertips, and into her gaze.

“Someday I’d like to look out for you too,” she reminds him gently, before pressing her softest kiss reverently against the tip of his nose.

He huffs and swats her away before palming the back of his neck in the way she’s sure means he’s blushing. The scowl settles into his brow — comforting and familiar, she supposes — and he herds her into the cockpit and the pilot’s seat, then lets her break atmosphere over an extensive, empty ice-sheet. When the dust and smoke and fire and fog of re-entry have subsided, he takes over the flying again, and she doesn’t mind. Her first landing had been smooth, but she doesn’t trust herself to set the Dreadnought down next to a settlement of people just yet. Instead, Rocket transfers her to comms as he coasts leisurely along the luminous blue edge of one of Fron’s largest glaciers.

”This is Gold Captain 232. We’re an independent vessel that just entered the atmosphere over—“ Pearl checks her maps. “—the Fr’onshin ice-field, planetary coordinates 324-822. We’re moving north-westerly toward Inglink on the N’iklin peninsula, and requesting permission to land along the south-eastern edge of the settlement, coordinates approximately 256-988. Our only desire is trade with Inglink, and to hopefully camp just a few finjka outside of the community.”

She records the message in her best Fronnish translation: all soft crushed-together consonants, long low vowels, and clicks and clinks. Some of the words are probably completely, idiomatically wrong, and she’s sure her accent is all off — but she tries. Then she follows it with a repetition in more-confident Glacian: fluid and flowing and jingling, like an ice-river filled with sea-smoothed pieces of glass wind-chimes. Finally, she begins recording in Kree.

“This is Gold Captain 232–“

“Ugh. The ship needs a better name,” Rocket mutters to Nebula.

“We’re an independent vessel—“

Nebula tilts her head. “Like what?”

“I dunno,” Rocket says with a scowl. “Somethin’ better than Gold Captain 232.”

“I am Groot,” Groot suggests gently. Drax grimaces.

“That is a terrible name.”

”—moving north-westerly toward Inglink—“

“Iam Iam!”

“You know nothing about names,” Drax reminds the baby. “You haven’t even chosen your own yet.”

“I am Groot!” the older Taluhnisan protests, and Drax shrugs.

“We’re requesting permission to land—“

“You have a better suggestion?” Nebula asks the Kylosian wryly, unwrapping a lozenge and popping it between her teeth.

He nods gravely. “There is an eddur—“

Rocket barks a laugh. “We ain’t naming my Dreadnought after some mythicalistic Kylosian monster—“

“Our only desire is to trade with Inglink—“ Pearl blinks, the words dying in her throat. “What’s that?”

All eyes dart to her — even Littlefoot stops chittering his anxiety, growing still in the face of her alarm. She lifts one arms, pointing to the leftward horizon. Something massive is hunched on the ice-field — bigger than the Dreadnought by quite a fair amount, though Rocket’s ship is better-outfitted, especially in terms of weaponry. Nevertheless, the larger spacecraft doesn’t look like it belongs on this planet. Her crewmates’ gazes follow her outstretched hand, and then Rocket curses and banks leftward, veering toward the massive metal beast slouching across the blue-shadowed snow.

“It’s another ship,” Drax says slowly. “One that has been here for a while, judging by the snow—“

“A Ravager ship,” Rocket corrects under his breath, eyes narrowed and watchful. Pearl’s moonsilver eyes dart to his, tensing at the sudden unease threading his voice. As the ship looms larger, she can see a few smaller spacecraft — only slightly larger than the runabout — perched in the ice at its feet.

Pearl knows about Ravagers. The basics, anyway — which may be inaccurate. She’d only had the stories dripped into her ears by Wyndham and his tutors, so who could say how true they’d been?

“Is it — they’re space-pirates, right?” she asks uncertainly. “Maybe — maybe these are the fugitives D’au mentioned hearing about? The rumors of a crew of criminals on the run, headed to Fron?”

Rocket’s stare twitches toward her reflection in the crystalline-armor reflection. “Maybe,” he agrees warily. “Get that transmission sent out, sweetheart. We’re gonna wanna make contact with Inglink as soon as possible.”

Pearl’s eyes stay fastened on him as she finishes the recording in a rush and sends it hurtling toward Inglink’s major comms-station. Rocket curls his shoulders and glowers out at the snow and apparent Ravager ship.

“Why are we going toward them?” Nebula asks, her working brow arched. “If they have a full crew, we don’t want to try to take them on—“

Rocket just grunts. His ears are flat, shoulders tense with alarm — tail lashing furiously where it hangs down the back of his chair.

“Wanna see if I recognize it.”

“Ravager ships don’t have registration numbers or names on their hulls,” Drax reminds him, and pearl watches as her survivor’s shoulders grow higher under his jaw.

“I know,” he says tightly. “But—“

He squints, and curses, and banks sharply right, pushing forward on the thrusters — picking up speed. Pearl’s eyes snap back toward the Ravager ship, and the smaller craft that suddenly dart into the skies.

“M-ships,” Rocket spits, pushing the Dreadnought forward. The Gold Captain is fast in space, and perhaps if there were no inhabitants on Fron, Rocket would push it to its full potential. But its mass makes acceleration dangerous this close to the planet. Full, sudden propulsion in range of the ice-field would likely cause massive melt and a subsequent environmental hazard — at least — and the locals would probably not be too welcoming after that.

The M-ships gain. The Dreadnought’s comms beep — too quickly to be a reply transmission from Inglink — and Rocket curses before nodding at pearl in the reflective crystal, hunching forward as he nudges the thrusters a little more.

Pearl accepts the call on one-way.

“Milano to Gold Captain 232.”

Rocket swears more colorfully than pearl has ever heard, and she’s pretty sure she’s listened to most of his worst. At least half of this new string of curses is in miner’s patois, and though she’s been piecing together his lovely little songs to the baby, most of this is beyond her limited grasp of Knowhere dialects.

“They’re… identifying themselves?” Drax asks, brow furrowed in bafflement.

“I am Groot?” Groot offers.

“This planet is under our protection. State your purpose, or prepare to get wrecked, bitches.”

“This little fucker—“ Rocket snarls, nudging the Dreadnought a bit faster — then jerking the yoke back, tipping the ship skyward and buying a little more distance from the ice so he can hit the thrusters harder when he banks left, doubling back.

The comms beep again.

“Inglink to Gold Captain 232.” The voice is delivered in husky, feminine Kree, clipped with a Fronnish accent like the sharp crack of ice underfoot. “Welcome. Please dock at coordinates 256-986. A warrior contingent will be waiting to escort you for your arrival and intake. Please report any Class-3 toxins on board.”

“Tell ‘em to call off their Ravager watchdogs before we accidentally blow a hole in this ice cube,” Rocket snarls.

Pearl doesn’t bother with translating, since whoever is at the Inglink comms seems to speak Kree fluently. “We are being pursued by the Milano, which claims to be in your service. Please advise—“

The comms beep again and pearl fumbles to hit send. “Last warning, dickheads, or my sister and I are gonna take your whole freakin’ big-ass wartank down—“

Rocket squawks a bitter laugh. “Turn ‘em over to me, princess.” The Dreadnought careens sideways and pearl stumbles, and both Drax and Nebula lunge to catch the young Taluhnisan as he nearly topples off the console.

“I am Groot!” Groot rumbles out — as close to a yelp as such a deep voice can get — and Drax cuddles the potted baby protectively against his chest. Rocket swears again as pearl manages to flip the comms over.

“Fuck you, Golden Boy,” he snarls into the audiolink. “Inglink cleared us. We got peaceful intentions, and also — I don’t frickin’ answer to you. So back the fuck off — we got a kid on board.” He pauses, then glances at the Taluhnisan in Drax’s arms and mutters, “Shit. Uh, sorry for swearing, Sprout. Don’t say stuff like that.”

The strange pilot chuckles into the comms. “Yeah, right. This ‘roided-up gunship comes in peace.” There’s a burst of speed from one of the M-ships. Rocket barely swallows another curse and Littlefoot chatters frantically, winding around pearl’s legs as the Ravager pulls up next to the glass bowl of the cockpit. The comms crackle.

“I don’t see any ki — holy crap, are you a raccoon?”

Rocket darts a glance at the M-ship pilot and bares his teeth through the armored glass. “I don’t know what that is. Now back off.”

“It’s what you are, stu—“

The comms snap into silence as Rocket’s fur bristles, and pearl feels her own eyes widen. Raccoon. She hadn’t realized it at first, lost in the rush of adrenaline, but—

“He’s Terran,” she gasps. “He speaks my language—”

Rocket shoots her an aggrieved glance in the glass. The comms beep again.

“Today’s your lucky day,” the pilot of the Milano says — sounding distinctly sulky. “We’ll see you once you’re docked at Inglink, Ranger Rick. Then you can thank the Eclector.”

Pearl’s lashes flicker frantically. The Eclector? That’s—

“Eat dicks, ya frickin’ loser,” Rocket sneers, and cuts the transmission. The M-ship drops back, and Rocket tilts the Dreadnought leftward just to be spiteful — nudging the smaller craft out of this strip of sky.

“Why didn’t you just shoot him?” Drax asks plaintively, cuddling the little Taluhnisan into his chest — only reluctantly yielding him when Groot reaches for his son. “The Dreadnought is covered in weapons—“

“It would be bad diplomacy to shoot the protectors of this planet,” Nebula drawls as she resettles herself into her chair. The corner of her mouth twitches, though — as does her one functioning eyebrow — and pearl wonders if she was startled by the attack itself, or by her own reaction to it.

“Yeah,” Rocket mutters. “Bad diplomacy.”

Pearl stares at his reflection in the glass: the furrow of his brow, twisting into something agonized. Her heart thumps against her breastbone with bruising strength, and she has to anchor her palm against it as he gazes back at her in the crystalline-armored glass, his expression gaunt and wounded.

“Somethin’ like that.”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

we are finally reconvening with our source-material, for those of you who recognize a bit of an adapted scene from Letter IV of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein! which means, of course, that we are getting closer and closer to the end. which means, of course, that i am experiencing pre-emptive separation anxiety and dragging my feet. seriously. i usually have a few chapters drafted and waiting in the wings, but i barely finished drafting this one a few days ago (and i like to have more time to edit so thank you for your patience and generosity in dealing with any persistent typos!). i'm VERY excited to continue work on the next few chapters but we are headed into opening this week (my job is pretty unpredictable but this is one of the known busy-times!). so i will hope and pray to get the next chapter out in two weeks and i will do my absolute best to stick to this timeline as we head into fall.

thank you to each and every one of you who has persisted and read kept reading despite how obscenely-long this fic has become. i appreciate you so much more than i could ever say and it truly means so much to me ♡ ߹𖥦߹ ♡

coming soon: chapter thirty-eight. currently untitled.
summary:siblings of all varieties are reunited. nebula reveals a secret.
warnings: angst, comfort, found family shit. the plot thickens.
estimated date: wednesday, september 10.*
*this date is an estimate only! for the most up-to-date schedule, please check the monthly forecast on my pinned tumblr post.

･:꧂posting schedules, previews, headcanons, art, & more on tumblr♡
･:꧂cicatrix ART, masterlist, & moodboard♡

Chapter 38: aftersome.

Summary:

siblings of all varieties are reunited. nebula reveals a secret.

Notes:

warnings: angst, comfort, jealousy, found family shit. the plot thickens.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

aftersome. astonished to think back on the bizarre sequence of accidents that brought you to where you are today—as if you’d spent years bouncing down a Plinko pegboard, passing through a million harmless decision points, any one of which might’ve changed everything — which makes your long and winding path feel fated from the start, yet so unlikely as to be virtually impossible. Swedish eftersom, because. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

The Dreadnought — Gold Captain 232, Rocket mimicks in a pitchy internal voice, and why the fuck didn’t he think up a new moon-damned name? — skims down neatly into the snow outside of Inglink. The top layer of fluffy ice-flakes blossom upward around the ship like white moonmoth-wings, glowing under a vivid cerulean sky. Foothills of ancient mountains flatten into the wide, drift-frosted valley that they’re currently using as a landing field — then the snowy meadow folds again, splitting into narrow paths that wind between sheer ice-canyon walls. The small settlement is nestled in a wide, flat valley in the foothills of ancient mountains worn low by wind and ice. Slender evergreens spindle upward here and there, their needles pricking the clouds as they angle for the pale translucent sunlight of the Thneed star system.

Fuck. Of all the backwater rim-planets in the universe, the Eclector had to come to this one—

A cluster of M-ships settle into the snow at their side at the same time that a figure appears at the edge of the canyon wall. A Fronnish woman stalks out of the crevices in the ice. She’s gotta be almost three times Rocket’s height: lanky and slim, and covered in a layer of glistening, white-blue velvet that grows long and shaggy on her bare forearms and calves. She’s clearly a warrior — decked out in the sleek black feathers that signify victory or royalty or both — and her sleek pale hair is knotted into loose loops and ornate, dark-brass beads.

Rocket grits his teeth and points to pearl. “Coat and mittens and sh— stuff on.”

He’s never gonna get used to watching his moon-damned mouth in front of Groot Junior — which is what Rocket’s mentally been calling the Sprout. He grimaces and shakes his head, then darts another glance at pearl. Of course, her eyes are starry and silvery and wide, and if Rocket had expected her to give him a little sass back, he’d be sorely disappointed. If anything, his girl just looks — shell-shocked. Confused.

Maybe a little hurt.

He winces. What the fuck did he do now? he laments, scrabbling through his brain to try and figure out what jackass-thing he’d said to get her looking so wide-eyed and baffled. His mouth tastes sour. He scrapes his tongue against his teeth. Pearl’s over here looking fuckin’ edible in one of Rocket’s too-small shirts and a fluffy cardigan, about to get all bundled-up and adorably frickin’ cozy in her winter layers, and she’s two seconds away from meeting the the Captain’s Golden Boy — and Rocket’s already sabotaging himself so hard that he doesn’t even know how he’s doing it.

He scowls at himself, then shakes his head — morose.

Fuck.

When he forces them open again, he sees the Fronnish woman circling around the Dreadnought — presumably heading toward the airlock. Rocket flicks through the holocam and yeah, sure enough, she’s waiting at the enormous exterior hatch. Icy irises glint in the dark hollows of her eyes, set deep into her skull to prevent damage from wind and the daylight-glare of the snow. A wooden mask with gold hardware rests on the crown of her head, where she’s probably slid it up off her face the way he sometimes does with his goggles. Like the black feathers, he’s pretty sure the mask is a warrior-thing, too. Or maybe it’s a royal-thing. He can’t remember which.

Pearl would probably know.

He sighs as a bunch of baldbodies climb out of the M-ships, approaching the Fronnish woman like they’re her frickin’ guard-dogs. When did the Captain decide to go into the protection-racket, anyway? Rocket can see the Centaurian’s big bald blue head with its sleek red fin glinting in the reflection of the ice and snow and sun. Tullk climbs out of the Warbird, and Kraglin drops clumsily off the loading dock of the Reaver. Huh.

Looks like the moron never fixed the moon-damned ramp.

Idiot, Rocket thinks, and if there’s some rueful affection there, he tries to squash it underfoot. There’s a new kid, too — slender and girlish, with a set of tinted goggles hiding big, dark-pupilled eyes that probably need extra protection from the sun, out here on the ice. Her hair is glossy-black with streaks of mint under a hat made of fur and hide — a local artifact that’s been downsized to fit her smaller head. She’s kinda cute, in a puppy-ish sort of way. Alert, curious, soaking everything in — with a vague air of perpetual astonishment.

The other one, though—

Rocket’s lip curls into a silent snarl, and his eyes narrow on the security-holo. The Dreadnought’s cams are high-quality, but even if they’d still been on the runabout, poor resolution alone could not have hidden how damn pretty the kid is. Frosty sunshine glints on brassy-gold curls, furled into a headful of rosettes. Olivine eyes squint up at the viewing lens, and there’s a slight copper scruff on his chin, and his cheeks somehow only look more roguishly charming thanks to the faint pink flush of cold and windburn.

Humie. Terran.

Handsome.

Captain Yondu’s playboy-son, who can charm the frickin’ teeth right outta an A’askavariian’s mouth. The writing’s on the wall, and even if Rocket’s never been good with reading or words, he still knows what it says. It’s only a matter of time now.

Eat it up while it lasts.

Rocket barely swallows a growl. It strains against his ribs as it goes down, clawing to escape.

“Let’s go,” he mutters instead, though he doesn’t power down the Dreadnought. It takes too long to get back online. If they need to bail, it’s better for him to keep the behemoth idling. He slides out of the pilot’s seat and throws on his coat, leaving it open for now — then gestures the others ahead of him and toward the hatch.

Drax. Groot and the Sprout. Nebs.

Pearl wavers, hesitating like she’s waiting for Rocket to say something, but he only stares at her blankly. His stomach’s already low and knotted — not with apprehension, but with certainty. She chews her lips and her hands twist — coat and cardigan open, the String Theory t-shirt stretched over her tits and a bare rectangle of soft belly visible. Gloves peek out of the pocket where she’d stuffed them. Something under his ribs twists at the sight.

She sighs, moonsilver eyes soulful and tinged with sorrow, and moves to float past him.

He doesn’t mean to do it. He doesn’t think about it — he’s all instinct. His claws hook into her fleecy leggings as she passes. Pearl stills immediately, one foot nearly off the ground, and he huffs at himself and mentally orders his fingers to release their hold.

But he can’t let go.

With a groan of resignation and regret, he pulls — tugging her toward him so he can grab a fistful of coat, then tugging that too so he can drag her down to him. Climbing her in reverse.

“C’mere,” he mutters, and she obliges with soft eyes. And as soon as he’s in reach, he slides his dark hands hungrily into the shadowed space left by coat and cardigan around her belly. He fills his greedy palms with the silk of her skin, prickling his claws down her flanks as he scrubs his cheeks over the String Theory logo and her perfect plump tits underneath. Then he pulls her lower, one hand reluctantly leaving the recesses of her sweater so he can fist it in her ponytail instead. She squeaks and stumbles when he bends her in half, bringing her close enough to thrust his narrow nose along her throat — scrubbing his jaw against her left shoulder, then her right; rubbing the crown of his skull and his forehead under her chin. He pulls her face into the furred crook of his neck like he thinks he can hide her there — steal her away like a roll of units or a fancy little Sovereign battery. It’s a useless compulsion — marking her like this. It’s not like Star-Dork can smell for shit. Despite how much pearl blushes and cards her fingers through Rocket’s fur, telling him he smells like forest and fire and marzipan-whatever, he’s pretty sure Terran-humies aren’t olfactory-forward. So trying to claim her this way is stupid, and he knows it’s stupid—

But he can’t stop.

He tucks the crown of her head under his chin, slathering her face and hair and neck in his scent, trying not to shiver as he holds her against him.

“Rocket?” Her voice is muffled by fur.

“Just a second, pearl,” he growls, wrapping both arms around her head and sucking a breath of her waterlily-scent into his lungs, and holding it. She falls quiet, letting him — her hands fluttering to cling to his belt as he keeps her bent at this impossible angle. His sternum aches. He waits a handful of heartbeats. A handful more. He clicks his tongue against his teeth, regretful and annoyed. Waits another moment, then reluctantly loosens his arms and steps away. She straightens slowly — blue curls mussed and eyes wide and watchful — and he grunts in exasperation when the compulsion still doesn’t ease.

“Gimme your scarf,” he mutters. “And your hat.”

She hands them over silently, and he glares at them both balefully before tucking the hat into the collar of his jumpsuit and looping the scarf around his own neck.

“Lemme know when you get too cold,” he says sullenly. “And don’t wait too long. I’ll give ‘em back whenever you want ‘em.”

By then, they’ll smell like him.

She tilts her head worriedly. “Rocket—“

“There you go, pearl,” he interrupts, gripping her hips in his claws and bodily turning her toward the hatch. He’s already frickin’ exhausted, but when she cranes her neck to look over her shoulder and down at him, he gives her plump, perfect ass a consoling little pat. “Need you to be the diplomatical face of the crew, now.”

“But—“

He wrangles up a lopsided smile — tries harder, and manages to flash a canine. Grimaces, remembering the few times he’d seen Golden Boy’s blunt-toothed, flat-faced, baldbody-grin. It’s basically a match for pearl’s — though hers is sweeter. Brighter. Warmer. More genuine. And she’s way more of a stunner.

Still, though. Still.

It’s still a frickin’ match.

Rocket tongues the tip of one offending fang, belly curdling. He juts his chin toward the hatch that will lead out — eventually — to the airlock.

“Go on, kitten.”

His voice is hoarse — crumbling and coarse in his mouth. He gives her haunch another pat before forcing his hands and eyes to the task of fastening his coat. She turns back to him like he hadn’t tried to send her on her way twice already.

“Rocket.” Her voice is firm, this time. He feels his ears flatten against his head. The tip of his tail flicks nervously against the Cyxlorade snow-boots he‘d jammed his feet into earlier. He frickin’ hates boots — they’re unnatural — but he recognizes that they’ll be important if he wants to keep all his toes, especially once the Fronnish summer fades.

“What?” he grunts, focusing with far more attention than necessary on the simple buckles of his coat.

“You know them.”

He flinches — ears probably practically invisible, they’re pressed so hard to his skull — and hazards a nervous glance up at her. Those gunmetal-gray eyes are soft and patient, and he swallows.

“Not all of ‘em. And they don’t know me. Not really.” His ears flicker; his whiskers twitch. “How’d you know?”

“Eclector.” Her kitten-smile curves one half of her mouth, pensive and melancholy. Sad. “It’s your safe-word.”

His eyes widen — then he winces again. Why had he ever said that, anyway? Because she’d insisted he have a safeword, even though it had always been clear that she’d never be able to do anything that he wasn’t hungry for? Or because he’d never felt as safe as he had when he was with her, and the Eclector was just the first thing that had come to mind?

Or because there had been a brief moment — once — when he’d thought he might feel safe with a ragtag frickin’ family of reject, wannabe-Ravagers?

Stupid.

“Are they the ones you told me about?” she asks, her voice still all warm and soft as a den full of blankets.

His brow curls. “I told you — no. When? I don’t think—”

“In the Arete,” she says gently. “That first night.”

His gut suddenly feels carved-out and hollow. For a moment, he doesn’t think he can breathe.

“You said you took care of the ship,” she continues carefully, her brow knitted in concern. “You said you stayed in the crawlspaces. You spoke to the captain from inside the walls. You — you loved them. Like family. I could tell.”

His eyes flicker closed. He doesn’t even remember that part of the conversation — not really. Not until she says it in that tone — you loved them — and even then, it’s just a twisted echo of venom in his mouth and the blur of her wide-eyes, frightened and gray and sad. He takes a breath, and sighs it out, and feels his shoulders slump.

“C’mon, doll,” he says tiredly, reaching for the hem of her coat. He adjusts the thin, flexible heating components beneath the soft puff of insulation — folds together the interior panels and begins to buckle the latches he can reach. “I wouldn’t call ‘em family, but I guess you’re about to meet ‘em.”

He trudges behind her till they get to the cluster of their friends, hovering inside the airlock, waiting. In spite of saying that pearl should be the face of their outfit — and she should be, since she’s the only one with a frickin’ iota of diplomatical sense between them — he changes his mind as soon as the airlock opens and he wedges himself in front of her. She can still do the talking, Rocket decides — but he knows these Ravagers. There’s a chance whoever comes out of the Dreadnought first will end up with an arrow hovering between their eyes, and he just —

He can’t have her scared like that.

After all, some grudging part of Rocket still admires the Captain of the Eclector. He doesn’t want to have to rip the old man’s throat out.

The ramp lowers and Rocket steps out, hands tense and ready to reach for his firearms. His eyes are already alert and flickering, bouncing from face to face as each individual comes into view.

Tullk. Kraglin. Captain Udonta, of the Yondu Ravager Clan.

The Captain’s kid — Peter Quill, also known as Star-Loser — who always seems to be pissy with his pops even though Rocket would have done unspeakable things for a chance to have a dad like that.

There’s two other humie-types, too: the girl with the goggles who’d been riding with Quill, and one who appears at the edge of the ice-canyon walls, exactly where the Fronnish woman had exited. It’s another baldbody, of course, because that’s his luck. Green-skinned, this one — could be Proselyte, but the wavy two-toned hair makes him think Zehoberei. She’s in dark leathers that look like they might have heating panels too, and a ruff of black feathers similar to the Fronnish collars for royalty and warriors.

At least there’s the Fronnish lady. It’ll be kinda nice to have someone with fur around—

Nebula steps onto the ramp behind Drax, then hisses and lunges backward like she’s just gotten zapped by the stun-setting on a suped-up quadblaster. At the same time, the Zehoberei’s confident gait melts into a vengeful, pantherine grace. As if he's high on synthetic everbloom, Rocket sees what’s happening before her leather-gloved fingers even curl around the hilt at her back.

“Back!” he barks, crowding pearl behind him. His head crashes against her hip as he herds her deeper into the ship, and they both stumble when she collides with Drax. The Kylosian nearly topples over Nebula, who’s already backpedaling into Groot and the Sprout.

“Sister!” the Zehoberei shouts. A fancy collapsible sword snaps forward from the hilt, locking in place and already pointed right toward Nebs’ eye as she stalks toward them, so fast that Rocket’s eyes can barely follow her.

Well, fuck—

“Daughter of Thanos!” Drax crows — for once, putting things together more quickly than Rocket would like. “Are you the favorite child?”

“Shut up, Drax!” Nebula snarls, grabbing pearl by the upper arm and jerking the Terran behind her augmented body. It’s pearl’s turn to tumble into Groot, who curls himself around both her and Groot Junior, and Rocket would heave a sigh of relief if he had time for one. Nebula’s already got her own blaster in her left hand, while her right grips her electrobaton and extends it with a snap. Rocket just got a split-second to be grateful that he thought to give them back to her along with the Fuck-You-Disk.

“Sister!” Nebula shouts back. Her voice is always raspy and rough, but when it cracks against the air this time, it sounds splintered. “I don’t want to fight you!”

“You always want to fight!” the Zehoberei yells back, every step kicking up furious sparkles of snowdust in the air.

“Get back on the frickin’ ship, Nebs!” Rocket bellows over the click-clack-clack of his laser cannon unfolding. He doesn’t even register the piercing whistle until a slash of glowing red parts the air in front of the advancing Zehoberei woman. The favored Daughter of Thanos halts abruptly, and Rocket stares.

The arrow’s not pointed at her, but it is hovering in the air, sideways, right at her eyeline — not the lethal warning that it could be, but only the flimsy suggestion of a barrier.

“Why don’t we just hold on a minute, girlie?”

Rocket cringes. Behind him, he feels Nebula faltering, her baton and firearm both wobbling in the air.

“Girlie?” the Luphomoid repeats, sounding baffled.

“I told you not to call me that in public, Yondu,” the Zehoberei growls, peering over the hovering line of the arrow. The thin golden tinsel of her cybernetics glimmer in the snowy light and her brow pulls low and furious. “If my sister is here, nothing good—”

“See? I told you!” Golden Boy crows, and Rocket clocks it in his periphery when both the Captain and Nebs’ sister roll their eyes. “I told you that you can’t trust them just because you thought you recognized—”

“I didn’t think I recognized,” the Captain drawls slowly, and Rocket winces. “I know what I heard, boy.”

Beside him and a few paces back, Tullk nods. “I reckernized his voice, too.”

“See?” the Captain says smugly, then flicks his eyes from Rocket toward Nebula and back again. “Now, can y’all put away your fancy toys so’s we can talk like civilized people?”

The Fronnish woman advances beside him, towering over the Centaurian. “Indeed,” she murmurs, her full blue lip tugged into a barely-discernable moue of distaste. Glowing eyes slide sideways to the Captain, silvery-pale blue with pinprick-pupils set into smoky hollows. “Your son claimed you’ll provide us with protection while you’re here.” Her tone is skeptical, one corner of her mouth tucked into disbelief, as if to say, Yet here you are — bringing us more trouble than you’re worth.

A half-smile curls the Centaurian’s mouth, and he claps the warrior on the back in that rough Ravager-way that still manages to make Rocket’s throat tighten. He’d wanted that, once. The coarse, belligerent affection of a Ravager-family.

Of this Ravager-family.

His fur bristles.

“Happy to put away our toys,” Rocket snaps out, each word clipped and dangerous. “‘Cept my crew ain’t the one pointin’ ‘em at your people.”

The Captain’s crimson eyes gleam, and his smirk shows the edge of his angled teeth — both the originals and the tarnished replacements. Rocket bares his own teeth back, laser cannon still drawn but pointed only at the snow two strides in front of the Zehoberei. The Ravager grins more widely, then sobers — skims his gaze over Nebula, taking in the fact that while her stance is defensive, her blaster isn’t aimed directly at her apparent sister either.

Her sister. Unbelievable. If Rocket had his hands free right now, he’d be massaging the spot between his brows. Or pulling his whiskers out.

For fuck’s sake. His luck is absolute orloni-shit.

“Fair ‘nough,” Captain Udonta concedes at last, and turns his gaze toward the Zehoberei in Fronnish warriors’ garb. “C’mon, sweetheart. Let’s see what your li’l sis wants, huh?”

“Sweetheart?” Nebula echoes again, and her low voice is as close to shrill as Rocket’s ever heard it. He flashes a quick glance up in her direction, wondering if she’s about to blow a frickin’ fuse.

She’s not the only one, either. For a moment, the Zehoberei looks like she might just kill all of them — probably to protect her reputation. A purplish flush rises under the green in her cheeks, and Rocket wonders vaguely if she’s got enough mods to keep her head from popping right off her skinny neck. Then she blows the most beleaguered fuckin’ sigh out of her lips and sags forward, dropping the blade to her side.

“I’m not sheathing it yet,” she snarls, slanting her eyes up at Nebula again. “And for Sharra’s sake, Yondu, stop undermining me with pet-names when I’m trying to kill someone.”

“Yeah, Yondu,” Golden Boy tacks on smugly. “I’m the only one who should be calling her pet-names, anyway.”

The Captain snorts while the Zeherobei’s eyes flutter shut like she’s suddenly wishing she’d stayed in the canyon.

“You ain’t got a cornered market on affection, kid.”

“Probably because you never gave me any,” the brat snarks back — then turns on a dime to grin at the Zeherobei. “But we’re making up for it now, aren’t we, Gamora?”

The woman rolls her eyes, exasperation painted along every golden line of her cybernetic implants.

“Gamora?” Nebula asks weakly from behind Rocket. “What the fuck is happening?”

“I didn’t imagine we would be welcoming such fools,” the Fronnish woman mutters, stepping forward. She stares down her nose at all of them — not too difficult, Rocket figures, given she’s about eight frickin’ feet tall — and inclines her head in acknowledgement. “Welcome to Fron, travellers. My people call me Jink — Warrior of the Peak, Battlehand to the King, and Sole Heir to the Fronnish Throne.”

“Huh,” muses Drax. Rocket’s already rolling his eyes before the Kylosian even spits out the rest of whatever moronic thing he’s gonna say. “Yet another princess.”

The princess in question eyes them assessingly, then flickers her attention over the expanse of the Dreadnought. “You‘ve come armed.”

“Excuse me.”

Rocket flinches. Pearl’s gonna try to push her way to the front to do what she does best — diplomacy or crowd-control or whatever-the-fuck — but he doesn’t want her out here in front. Not where a handful of Ravagers can stare at her — even if they are his favorites of the bunch. And not where two of Thanos’ best assassins could start stabbing each other any second.

And definitely not where she can see Peter Quill.

But he doesn’t have a quick enough excuse to hide her away, and then she’s there: hair glowing lilac-blue against a scintillating white backdrop and a piercing blue sky, cheeks all peachy-gold and freckled and pink. For fuck’s sake, she’s pretty — and the opposite of everyone else in this ring of losers. Soft and plump where they’re all angles and bruises. Clean and shiny where they’re synth-leather and blood. She’s not M’dame-Lavenza-cold, but she’s peeled aside all her playfulness and pulled on something classy and refined. Regal.

As of right now, the only one who can match her for pure presence is the towering warrior-queen.

“Our gratitude is limitless,” pearl says, and she’s only got eyes for the Fronnish woman. She’s looking down into that glowing gaze right now — just because the ramp’s given her a little bit of a height advantage on the taller woman — but she’s basically nothing but a blue butterfly, caught in the sights of a massive arctic cat. “For your welcome, and your kind hospitality.”

Something flickers in the woman’s — Jink’s — eyes, and she tilts her chin again. “Gratitude is the foundation of future friendships.”

Pearl smiles, soft and warm, but doesn’t show her teeth. “The weaponry is… unfortunate,” she replies evenly, with a gesture that seems to encompass the whole ship, as well as all their firearms. “Neither our ship nor our personalities are easily disarmed. An asset, considering our history.”

Jink’s glowing eyes narrow faintly. Her accent clicks over the Kree words. “You departed your point of origin with some haste.”

Pearl’s smile sweetens just a little in modest acquiescence. “It’s for the benefit of everyone that we remain well-appointed.”

Trying to follow this vague back-and-forth makes Rocket feel like he’s losing his moon-damned mind, and a quick glance at his companions — as well as the Ravager crew — tells him he’s not alone. Only Groot and the Sprout seem unbothered, and Rocket’s not sure if that’s because they understand the intention behind each weird turn-of-phrase, or because they’ve completely clicked-out of the conversation.

Either way, Jink’s stare only grows more shrewd. “I expect there are concerns—” The clip of her Fronnish accent stumbles, and her brow twitches under her blunt fringe of bangs. It’s a barely noticeable flinch, but it’s there.

And then pearl’s responding anyway, uttering a brief loose stream of Glacian that he sort of recognizes but can’t understand. The slight, barely-discernable tension in Jink’s brow fades, and she nods once, briskly. Pearl pauses, and casts him a careful, questioning glance that he can’t interpret — then seems to make up her mind and adds something else in Glacian.

“I am Groot,” Groot murmurs behind him.

“What’s she saying?” Drax asks — as if Rocket knows.

There’s a pause, and then pearl says quietly, “She wants to know whether there will be additional travellers — people in pursuit of us.”

Jink says something else in Glacian, maybe with a couple Fronnish words thrown in — gesturing to the Ravagers behind her with a faint toss of her white-silk mane. The brassy beads woven into her hair rattle and clink, like glassy shards of ice chiming against each other in an frozen river. Pearl keeps her benevolent smile and responds evenly, in her own blend of fluid Glacian and stilted Fronnish.

“You’re wondering if Fron is going to become known as a safe-haven for criminals,” pearl says then, projecting her voice with an easy, elegant grace that Rocket can only imagine must have been trained into her by one of Wyndham’s many tutors. It’s a translation — for him, for their crew. For the Ravagers, too, he imagines. “I invite you to consider that there are worse things to be.”

Something flares hot in his chest at that. Pride, maybe — even though he knows he’s got nothing to be proud of, himself. He certainly isn’t the one who taught pearl her morals. Nah, she’s seemed to come by those all on her own. Maybe he’s just proud to be at her side, then — proud that she thinks he’s worthy enough to take care of her, if only for this little bit.

He’s not one for sentimentality, generalistically-speaking. But he’s starting to finally admit that it’s been a fuckin’ privilege.

Then the sunlight catches on Golden Boy’s bronzed curls, and the bright white-gold flash of pride in Rocket’s ribs withers immediately into cinders.

Jink’s eyes are still on pearl, though: calculating, and curious. “It seems this is a story that will take some telling.”

Another no-teeth smile. Rocket finds himself wondering if it’s a Fronnish-etiquette thing — but this probably isn’t the right time to ask. Pearl tilts her head downward: accepting an offer that Rocket isn’t able to catch or interpret.

“We would welcome a meal over which to tell it.”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

The walls of the ice-chasm rise on either side of winding paths, which eventually flare into city squares and commons. Inglink is strange and lovely: a patchwork of towering, gleaming walls that shine like glass and mirrors in the light slanting over the edge of the canyon. Everything is silvery-blue and luminous ocean-green right now, but Rocket would bet that when the sun begins to set, the city will turn rosy and golden wherever the light touches. Even now, little sequins of yellow topaz and vermilion glimmer against the snow near the stone-lined pits that stud the streets, each one shimmering with low, banked fires. There are only a few people out and about — some Fronnish folk wandering to and fro, speaking in low tones, or tending the hearths that keep the city warmer than the world outside. There are a few humie-types, too — people who Rocket doesn’t recognize, but who he imagines are leftover Ravagers from the Eclector based on their clothing. 'Course, it helps that one of them shouts a greeting at Yondu before her companion elbows her roughly and reminds her, We ain’t s’posed to be loud no more! On account of the av’lanches, ‘member?!

Yeesh. Maybe he had been lucky to get kicked off the Eclector.

Rocket doesn’t get much time to enjoy the entertainment, though. Jink — Battlehand of the King and apparent princess or whatever — leads both shabby little crews into a cathedral carved right into the chasm wall. Ornate ice-slab doors open into a massive frozen room with vaulted ceilings. Formal chambers, pearl explains under her breath. Everything is etched in geometric shapes and stripes — shimmering beveled patterns that would put both Xeronian and Indigarran glassworkers to shame. Silvery burnished mirrors channel rivers of light into the cathedral, and enormous braziers crater the floor of every room they wander through. Depending on the chamber, they're either discreet or they're centerpieces — but either way, they heat the air enough that Rocket finds himself feeling a little warm in his fur and his coat, despite the fact that they’re still surrounded by ice. Despite the apparent warmth, an inch-thick frosting of snow — shimmery and crusted over layers compacted beneath — crunches underfoot as Jink guides them between the glossy walls.

It isn't till Rocket turns his attention back to his companions that he notices that Nebs and her sister — Gamora, Rocket reminds himself, the Most Dangerous Woman in the Galaxy— are still flashing each other wary, unsettled glowers. Gamora grips her sword-hilt in one hand, knuckles gone hard and bony, and Nebula’s dark eyes keep flickering guiltily. Golden Boy is lingering a pace behind the Zehoberei’s right hand, and while Rocket can’t see his expression, Quill’s big stupid round humie-head keeps tipping in pearl’s direction. Rocket can just imagine the look on Star-Loser’s face: considering. Intrigued. Curious. Wondering who the pretty waterlily with the fairy-blue hair is, and if she likes to flirt and have a good time — if she’s got any interest in fucking around with a handsome Terran shit-for-brains—

He won’t be able to do it for you, kitten. I’ve overheard him with other lovers, and I know he won’t pet your pretty pussy the way you like. He’s more likely to want you to slap him around, and I think that’d just make my little fuckdoll cry, wouldn’t it?

“The internal chambers will be more comfortable for mammals such as yourselves,” Jink informs them all, though her eyes flick to the Taluhnisans with a curious glimmer. Rocket supposes he’s starting to pick up on some of the Fronnish way of speaking, which seems to drip into the Battlehand’s Kree. It’s — ceremonious, obviously. A little pretentious, if one were to ask him. And it seems to rely on a whole lot on inference, which is probably easier to navigate if you’re someone who understands the cultural context better than he does. Luckily, pearl seems able to understand most of it with ease, and before Rocket knows it, their little group has been guided into some chambers that seem a whole lot more cozy than the glassy-ice ballrooms they’d come through. The Fronnish woman pauses as they push through another door — tall, arched, made of some kind of hide stretched over a frame: silvery and shaggy on the side facing the ice-chamber, and dyed in rich reds and yellows on the other. A woven rug made of thin strips of leather sprawls the floor in front of them, and Jink makes a loose, twisting gesture with one wrist that Rocket can’t decipher.

“This is where we take off our boots,” Kraglin pipes up. Sure enough, Captain Udonta and the others are already toeing out of their footwear. Only Tullk leaves his liners on, stained and shabby at the seams, and Rocket suspects it’s ’cause the first mate doesn’t have any socks on underneath. Kraglin’s and the Captain’s are both sporting tattered holes that reveal at least one toe apiece.

Rocket grimaces.

“The floors in this part of the lodge are heated,” Jink murmurs. The smooth twist of her wrist sails upward, fingers curved in the general direction of a series of shelves built into the walls: homes for their winter-shoes, based on the spaces that are currently occupied. Rocket watches pearl bend to unlatch her heated boots, then reluctantly pries his own footwear off by stepping on each opposite heel. Nebs and Drax do the same while Groot merely shrugs happily, unbothered by his own lack of snow-gear. Once their boots are tucked into tiny cubicles, they step onto the sunken flooring.

It’s so warm against his leathery soles that he almost jumps back.

“Oh,” pearl breathes, staring down at her toes still hidden in her thick woolly socks. He watches as she wiggles them, then drags his eyes up her plump curves as she rocks on her heels in a more subdued, restrained version of her usual happy-dance. “That’s lovely.”

It is, Rocket can admit to himself, half-grudging and half-fascinated. The floor’s made of some kind of dried and glazed clay, almost like the porcelain that makes up the re-entry plating on most ships. He wonders if the floor is heated through circuitry or some other means. Maybe, if this little chitchat goes well, he’ll be able to ask about the local tech — see if he can install some heated floors in the main rooms of the Dreadnought. ‘Cause yeah, a little warmth in the ship’s cold floors will be a nice little luxury, especially when the Fronnish winter hits. But more importantly—

He looks up again at pearl, wiggling her toes in her socks and smiling to herself.

Yeah. Heated floors are gonna be a priority.

“C’mon, kids,” the Captain says with a grin, like he’s entertained by all of them. “Keep goin’ if you want your eats.”

Jink doesn’t lead them to a fancy dining chamber — that’s probably out in the formal section of the cathedral, if it exists at all. Instead, there’s a small section of the kitchens that’s been curtained off by a slanting canopy of dyed hide. When Jink gestures, the Ravagers file into the opening, and Rocket tilts his head to peer inside as Nebula lowers herself to the other side of the bench and slides herself awkwardly in. It’s a neat little octagonal pit, he realizes. Each wall is lined with cushioned benches, and a low dark wood table stands in the middle, set with a silver brazier full of red-gold flames. Amber light and hearth-warmth both shift and shiver around the cozy little nook, making it into something almost as warm and friendly as his and pearl’s den on the Dreadnaught.

“Sit,” Tullk grunts, shuffling out of his ragged coat. Both he and the Captain are pretty big by humie-standards, but it’s clear by how small they look compared to the table and benches that the space is meant for much larger Fronnish-folk. “Take off yer gear, f’you want. S’one of the warmest places in the lodge.”

Quill’s sitting in the bench next to Gamora, and there’s an open spot next to him. The kid has the frickin’ audacity to give pearl a revoltingly-warm smile, tapping the seat beside him.

“You’re Terran too, huh? Sit by me. When’d you leave the planet? Maybe you can update me—”

A growl rises in Rocket’s ribs and he punches it down.

“Pearl,” he clips out, claws looping her wrist as he lowers himself into the sunken bench and begins sliding toward Nebs. “You’re over here. By me.”

Pearl shrugs at Quill, but she doesn’t seem bothered by Rocket’s bossiness — thank fuck. She just gives him her sweetest kitten-smile and slides herself toward him without hesitation.

Captain Udonta, on the other hand — his eyes flicker over pearl, then Quill. Then they dart back to Rocket, and a smirk curls the corner of his mouth, all knowingly and shit.

Bastard. Rocket’s hand grips pearl’s knee under the table, squeezing tight — more for himself than for any other reason.

“It would be beneficial to know everyone’s name,” Jink says once they’re all seated in the cozy, dim cove — coats and mittens nearly stacked between them on the benches. It’s the Fronnish way of asking for introductions, Rocket supposes. The fire in the brazier glimmers merrily, and pearl reaches beneath the low table to squeeze his hand.

“I’m between names at the moment,” she says gently. “My companions call me a variety of things.” Her fingers squeeze his again — a subtle betrayal of her nerves. “Usually, I go by pearl.”

He winces. They really should have come up with something different for her by now — a better name. Something to keep her hidden better.

But princess and doll probably ain’t gonna cut it here.

“I’ll go next,” the Captain cuts in easily, leaning forward to prop his elbows on the table. “As a gesture of good will or somethin’.”

Rocket snorts — more at the idea of a Ravager Captain focused on good will than anything else — but the Centaurian’s crimson gaze fastens steadily on him.

“Name’s Yondu Udonta. M’the captain of the Yondu Clan, operatin’ outta the Eclector.” He pauses, tilts his head, and narrows his eyes. “Well, formerly.” A smirk curls his mouth and he tilts his chin upward. “She’s currently got somethin’ so wrong with her that not even you could fix her, Rat.”

Things happen too quickly for Rocket to understand — to wrap his head around. Pearl’s fingers, still gently squeezing his own in comforting little rhythms, suddenly freeze. Her whole body goes rigid and her chin dips and her eyes narrow; she half-rises from the carved cushioned benches sunk into the floor. And when she speaks — well, it’s like she’s never been M’dame Lavenza at all. She’s all fire and fury, barely-banked, outrage simmering under her skin and soft gray eyes turned into a molten silver that burns.

“Think again about what you call him.”

The Captain blinks: mouth parting and red eyes widening, though not as dramatically as Rocket’s own gaping expression. But pearl never tears her eyes off Captain Udonta, and when Rocket pulls himself together enough to glance around, he can see his companions are nearly as startled as he is.

Except Groot and the Sprout, who look utterly unperturbed.

“Hey now, sugar—“

A rumble rolls out of Rocket’s lungs before he can stop it, and Yondu rolls his eyes before holding his hands up in a mockery of surrender.

“For fuck’s sake. Y’all need to get your heads on straight.” He eyeballs pearl and Rocket swallows another warning growl while his hackles continue to rise. “It ain’t some kinda insult. He don’t have a name—“

“He does now,” pearl interrupts.

The Captain shrugs. “Well, we ain’t got to that part of the introductions yet, have we? When I knew him, he didn’t have a name. And he was hidin’ in the walls of the Eclector. So we just called him Rat.”

“That’s what you meant?” Golden Boy interrupts now. “All those times I came in and you were blabbing and nobody else was there, and I asked who you were talking to — and you just said the rats in the walls like it was a freaking joke?”

“We had a stowaway and you din’t tell us?” Kraglin adds, and he sounds wounded.

“He was a mite skittish,” Tullk excuses with a half-shrug. “An’ he more’n earned his keep.”

Heat rises up Rocket’s throat and into his cheeks. He forces himself not to duck his head or palm the back of his neck — not to give away his blush. Stupid, he berates himself. All this time, and he’s still stupidly flattered by the idea of praise and acceptance from these two idiots.

“We woulda been dead in the water and halfway-rotted by now — three times over — if not for this little fucker saving our asses more than once,” the Captain agrees, and now Rocket can’t keep from dipping his chin self-consciously, mortified by the way the warmth spreads in his chest. “Not to mention the upgrades Rat did on the—“

“Name’s Rocket now,” Rocket interrupts. The flare of pride in his chest shrivels at the edges. Rat. Maybe it hadn’t been meant as a casual cruelty after all, though it had grated on Rocket’s raw exposed nerves in the same way that vermin and creature had. He hates it — had always hated it. Would only have overlooked the insult for these morons.

But he doesn’t wanna be a rat or a thing or a monster anymore.

To his credit, Captain Udonta just nods thoughtfully. “It’s a good name for you, kid.”

“So… you recognized him by his voice?”

That comes from the pale, twitchy, round-eyed girl — her first time speaking since they’d arrived. She pulls off her hat, and two soft-looking antennae spring free. Her hair is a staticky nest underneath.

“Yup.” The Captain nods, his sharp-toothed grin returning. “Me an’ Tullk and Ra — Rocket — spent a lotta time talkin’. ‘Bout the Eclector, the crew, the armory. Strategies for heists and shit. Ravagers don’t normally do fancy-style heists — we tend to like a more blunt approach, if ya know what I mean—“ His grin widens. “—but we were startin‘ to think a little more precision wouldn’t hurt our accounts.”

The broken-glass smile fades, and Yondu’s eyes narrow.

“Once we get through these introductions, you’re gon’ owe me an explanation, boy,” he says flatly. “‘Bout why you runned away, an’ stole a damn runabout to do it—“

“I’ll answer that right-the-fuck now,” Rocket interrupts smoothly, turning his hand in pearl’s and squeezing her fingers back under the table. She’s still tensed — still poised to fight, as if she had any ability at all — and it makes something inside him soften and seize-up all at the same time. But he only leans back lazily on the bench, tugging her back down to her seat before pulling his hand free. He interlace his fingers behind his head. “Your boy found me sleepin’ in the vents. Chased me out with the help of some of your other losers. If I hadn’t jumped ship, they prob’ly woulda grilled me up right there.” His lip curls in a sneer. “Kinda a low point for me, Captain. Wasn’t gonna stick around to get eaten by a buncha moronic shitbags.”

The Captain’s brow dips low — furious.

“It wasn’t me,” Golden Boy says defensively. “I’m not ‘the boy’ in this situation.”

“Nah,” Rocket agrees with an eyeroll. “You’d already run off again, like a spoiled little—“

“Hey!”

“You are kind of spoiled,” Gamora murmurs, her eyes rocking between Rocket and the Captain. Quill sucks in a wounded gasp and she quickly amends, “At least, for a Ravager.”

Rocket snorts.

“They used to threaten to eat me, and now you’re calling me spoiled?”

The playful tone takes Rocket by surprise. Not that the kid isn’t normally playful — he always has been, as far as Rocket knows; especially with people he sees as potential bedpartners — but because he’s always been so easy to aggravate. Defensive over every perceived slight, and quick to take even the most most affectionate Ravager-roughhousing as cruelty. The you-were-gonna-eat-me schtick is played out and boring as far as Rocket’s concerned — he’d heard it a million times in the cycles he was sneaking around the Eclector — but this is the first time he remembers Golden Boy saying it without any real resentment in his voice.

“Who was it?” The Captain’s voice, on the other hand, is hard. Furious.

Rocket rolls his eyes. “Does it matter?” he sneers. “I don’t see most of your old crew around here anyway—”

“We’ve got a team over at the Eclector, tryin’ to figure out how to fix it. Worthless, the whole lot of ‘em,” Tullk says blandly. “The rest of ‘em are stayin’ here in the city. S’posed to be helping guide the Nogu migration around the canyon when the autumn hits.”

Rocket blinks at Tullk, then turns his eyes up to Yondu. “Those dickheads agreed to help people?”

The Centaurian scowls. “They do what I say, Ra — Rocket,” he corrects, catching pearl’s eye. “M’their captain, after all.”

Rocket leans back and crosses his arm. “Okay then. I’ll bite. Since when do you help people?”

There’s a lingering quiet. Star-Dork grins, and Kraglin looks uncomfortable, and Yondu’s eyes slide away. Tullk and Gamora are the only ones who manage to hold his gaze, ‘cause the chick with the antennae is staring moonily into space.

“Maybe we should finish introductions first,” pearl says quietly.

“Indeed,” Jink murmurs, even as two other Fronnish-folk slip down into the warm sheltered dining space to serve communal bowls of warm soups, and breads with steaming spiced sauces. Veils of vapor waver through the firelight, golden and misty and smelling even better than Drax’s Kylosian breakfasts.

As the food begins to cool, introductions resume. Tullk and Krags describe themselves as the first and second mates of the Eclector. They share a little more than Rocket had known before, too. Apparently, Tullk had been a refugee from Hala who’d been thieving independently before he got in the crosshairs of the Stakar Clan. He’d been there when they’d taken in Yondu, and he’d left with his Captain when they’d been and had left the original family when they’d been ostracized. Kraglin had been a Xandaran runaway — the unwilling heir to the Obfonteri crime family — when Yondu had picked him up, just a couple circs before they’d scooped “Pete.”

Never one to be overlooked, Golden Boy himself jumps in to introduce himself as the Captain of the Milano — for fuck’s sake, it’s just an M-ship — and his miniature crew: Mantis, who’s apparently his newly-discovered sister, and Gamora—

“My fiancée,” the kid finishes with a broad grin.

“What,” Nebula says flatly. The Zeherobei across the table rolls her eyes, but Rocket can’t tell if it’s directed at her sister or at her apparent betrothed.

For fuck’s sake. It’s not the first time Quill has picked up a partner who shoulda been way outta his league — not that Rocket has much room to judge, given the perfection of pearl — but it is the first time he’s come anywhere close to sounding committed. Granted, some Ravagers have been known to take ground-wife in every sector they pass through, but that’s never been Peter Quill’s style before.

And Thanos’ Favored Child doesn’t seem like a ground-wife.

“You know me,” Gamora says quietly, her eyes flicking over them — lingering on Drax, and then fastening again on Nebula. Narrowing.

“Thanos’ Favorite Daughter," Drax supplies contentedly, and there’s a brief tightening at the corners of Gamora’s mouth.

“The Most Dangerous Woman in the Galaxy,” Rocket offers instead, cocking his head and slitting his eyes up to the Zeherobei. “Yeah, sure, you’re Thanos’ adopted kid, but you’re a bogey-man assassin all on your own, too. Everybody’s scared of you.”

Quill nudges Gamora with his elbow. “Well, not everyone.” Then the big fuckin’ baldbody winks at pearl — winks — and Rocket suddenly doesn’t care if he’s supposedly marrying the Zeherobei or not.

“Everyone who’s got two frickin’ brain cells to rub together, anyway,” he says witheringly, flashing one canine. Quill’s pretty peridot-eyes narrow, and Rocket feels his ears flattening to his head. His tail puffs against the seat beside him.

“I am Groot,” Groot interrupts, and settles the little Taluhnisan on the table beside him, gesturing to the child. “I am Groot.”

“I am! I am!”

Rocket sighs, and translates for Groot: explaining his limited lexicon and the situation with Groot Junior, occasionally glancing at pearl to see if she wants to chime in. She only smiles gently. Then Drax is booming out his speech about Kamariah and Ovette, and about — eventually — destroying Ronan the Accuser.

“Uh,” Quill says, half-raising one hand. “We kinda already did that, actually.”

Rocket blinks, and Yondu sighs — pinching the space between his brows in a gesture that feels painfully familiar.

“You asked about helpin’ folks,” the Ravager Captain says to Rocket. “My idiot-son and his sweetheart—”

“Yondu, please,” Gamora mumbles, another purple flush gathering in her cheeks as her eyes dart away. Nebula stares at her sister, apparently fascinated.

“—got some fool-idea in their head about doin’ the right thing with a little ol’ relic they picked up in one of the more-unstable regions of Morag. It was s’posed to rightfully mine — value added to the Clan cache — but this brat snuck out and got to it first.” He shrugs. “Anyway, it ended up bein’ worth a little more’n any of us bargained for—”

“Except for me,” Gamora says quietly. She’s leaning forward now, staring into Nebula’s eyes threateningly. Rocket feels the fur on his forearms rise and his lip curl into a silent, defensive snarl.

“‘Cept for Gammy,” Yondu agrees, and the Zeherobei’s flinch at the nickname seems to lessen the impact of her glare.

It would be easy pickings, Rocket thinks. If it were him sitting across from Gamora, he wouldn’t hesitate to laugh outright at the nickname. But Nebula’s eyes only dart away from her sister’s.

“I’m not interested in your relic,” the Luphomoid rasps.

“Good,” Gamora says evenly. “Because it’s somewhere safe. Where no-one else is ever likely to come looking for it.”

Now Nebula starts. Stares back. “But you didn't bring it here.”

The Zeherobei sniffs, and doesn't deign to answer.

“Look, you might not be interested in this relic, Nebs, but I am,” Rocket drawls. “‘Specially if someone’s gonna come lookin’ for it. If you ain’t worried about Ronan, then I’d guess you’re thinking Thanos might follow you out here. We got our own evil on our tail, and we don’t need to worry about another.”

“Thanos doesn’t know we’re here,” Gamora says evenly, and pearl clears her throat.

“There are rumors reaching at least as far as Xeron — about a crew of fugitives making their way to Fron from Knowhere. They could have been referring to us, but even our own friends didn’t know where we were going until—” She breaks off, eyes widening as she sees something in Gamora’s face. The Zeherobei straightens and shoots a look over at Yondu, and the rest of the Ravagers cast startled, concerned glances amongst each other.

Rocket sighs, and now it’s his turn to massage the space between his brows. “You jackasses were on Knowhere, too.”

“Not for long,” Quill mutters, but the one called Mantis hops in her seat a little. It reminds Rocket of pearl’s excitable little dances.

“They were!” she chirrups, her dark eyes lighting up. “That is where I met them!”

It’s the most Rocket’s heard out of her.

“It’s lucky I was there!” the girl adds solemnly. “They may not have gotten back to their ship if I hadn’t been present to help after the blast!”

Rocket’s eyes narrow. “What blast?”

“There was a big purple one,” Mantis responds with wide, earnest eyes. “It was from their relic—”

“Hey now, sis!” Quill interrupts, slinging an arm over the slim woman’s shoulders. “We don’t need to—“

Pearl makes a strangled sound and Nebula straightens, and even Drax sucks in a breath. Rocket curses.

“Yeah, that rumor was definitely about you,” he spits. “We were too discreet to set off a frickin’ bomb!” His eyes snarl at Yondu’s. “What exactly are you fuckers messin’ around with?”

The Fronnish woman lets out a slow breath. It’s measured and steady, but Rocket can feel the frustration in it, and her lungspan must be three times the size of a normal humie’s because the sigh goes on forever.

“Transparency would be appreciated. It is clear that these stories are intertwined.” It’s the most direct thing she’s said so far. Her glowing irises slide toward pearl, and she rolls out a few clinking words in Glacian. Pearl’s lips pale, and she sinks her teeth in them, then turns to Rocket.

“She wants us to begin at the beginning.”

Rocket searches his girl’s sad, moonsilver eyes. “An’ where’s that?”

Her brow creases. “Back on HalfWorld, I suppose.”

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Rocket edits the story. Of course he does. He can’t tell bring himself to tell bunch of fuckin’ strangers about L06 or A95 — or about what he’d done to Lylla. He only explains in a tight growl that there had been experiments. Torture. Death. He skips his whole first escape — pinching pearl’s thigh under the table when she opens her mouth to speak up. He’s not gonna risk her by letting ‘em know who she is. They’ll figure it out themselves if they know enough about the High Evolutionary and his flawless bride. Instead, he makes it sound like he attacked his creator with revenge on his mind and then decided to escape, while she just happened to tag along. Then they stopped on Cyxlore, and met Groot there.

He’s honest about most of the trip to Sovereign, though he doesn’t mention the Fuck-You-Disks. He just tells ‘em that he and Drax fended off the abilisks — and when the Kylosian opens his mouth to refute it, Nebs nails him in the ribs with her elbow. Rocket slants her a grateful look, then admits that they’d earned both the Dreadnought and Nebula as payment for the endeavor.

He’s bitterly honest about their temporary stop on Knowhere, and the blast that had fuckin’ killed people — nearly his own girl. He glares the whole time, with a special-made glower just for Gammy when he explains that pearl had only survived thanks to Nebula.

And if he notices the cyborg in question tensing next to him, he doesn’t point it out.

He glosses quickly over the side-trip to Xeron, mainly touching on how pearl learned the rumor of the fugitives traveling to Fron. That little detour, plus their trip to Taluhnia, must account for the gap in time between the Eclector's arrival and their own.

“We’re just tryin’ to lie low,” he says at last. “We’ve got no interest in trouble. We’re staying on our ship, an’ we got units to spare for buyin’ necessities here in Inglink.” He hesitates. “Could take a look at the Eclector, too. Repair it — maybe even improve it.”

Captain Udonta nods thoughtfully. “We’d ‘preciate that, kid. Maybe take you out to look at her tomorrow, yeah?”

Rocket flicks a glance toward pearl, then nods reluctantly. “Uh, sure.”

Yondu grins, then turns surprisingly-warm eyes toward Gamora.

“Why don’t you tell our story, girlie? Starting with you on the Dark Aster.”

Gamora sighs again at the endearment, but Rocket’s starting to get a read on her, and he doesn’t think she’s anywhere near as annoyed as she pretends to be. Still, she hesitates and cocks her head at Nebula, clearly trying to come to a decision. Her delicate jaw tenses and clenches.

“If you tell our father or any of his ilk, I will cleave you in two,” she promises quietly. Nebula’s eyes flicker.

“If she tells her father or any of his ilk — whatever the fuck an ilk is — I’ll frickin’ dismantle her myself,” Rocket growls back. “But it ain’t a concern, ‘cause Nebs ain’t Black Army anymore.”

Nebula releases a quiet, shuddering breath that makes him slant his eyes to her in concern.

“Your lung-pumps workin’ okay?”

“I’m fine, Rocket,” Nebula rasps, and his ears twitch. He’s pretty sure that’s the first time she’s called him by name.

Gamora draws in a breath, and the story unspools: reluctant at first, but then gaining both mass and speed like an avalanche in the Southern Fronnish Mountains. It begins with Nebula being sent by Ronan to pursue various leads on the locations of the Infinity Stones. When her sister had been captured on Sovereign after attempting to pry the soul stone — or what they’d believed to be the soul stone — from the skull of the High Priestess’ unborn son, Gamora had been dispatched in her stead. The Zeheborei had coordinated a discreet contract on the side with Taneleer Tivan, in case she‘d actually secured any of the stones.Then she’d followed two false leads before discovering a lone Ravager fleeing Morag, where the power stone had allegedly been hidden inside an orb-shaped secure containment unit.

Unknown to Peter Quill, she’d planned to encounter him outside the fine antiquities brokerage where he was headed. After tolerating a brief flirtation, she’d stolen the stone from him. She’d underestimated him though, and he’d caught up quickly. They’d both ended up in Xandar’s offworld prison — until Yondu had gotten sick of waiting for his boy to be released. The crew of the Eclector had stormed the prison in a move that had accidentally coincided with Ronan’s attack on it — otherwise, it probably never would have worked. But Golden Boy had escaped, and dragged both Gamora and the stone with him.

She’d been able to bargain with Yondu. A split of the profit: a mere billion units for her — a finder’s fee for the setting up the fence through the Collector, and enough to flee Thanos’ reach and set up a quiet life somewhere far away — and three billion for the Eclector’s cache. It had been far more than most Ravager crews would see in a decennium or longer — and certainly more than the Yondu Clan had dreamed of, especially since they’d split from Stakar Ogord and the other Ravagers.

Unfortunately — predictably, Rocket thinks with an eyeroll — the hand-off on Knowhere had gone horribly wrong. The Collector’s assistant had attempted to harness the power stone for herself — likely to get away from her master — and the entire emporium had been destroyed as a result.

Pearl’s breath hitches at the mention of Carina, and Rocket squeezes her knee under the table. He might not have even remembered the Krylorian if it hadn’t been for pearl offering the girl an escape from Exitar on the Dreadnought, but now the memory twists in his vagus nerve, wringing it tight.

Will you come with us? he remembers pearl asked the girl. Please? You’re not okay. I know.

Not with Tivan — but I know.

Rocket doesn’t look at pearl, but he knows that her eyes are probably big and tearful and wounded. D’au had told them all this when they’d hit the skies of Knowhere — Carina’s death, and a slightly-skewed description of this team of idiots — but he’s not sure what pearl had actually heard in the aftermath of her near-death experience. His whiskers twitch and he strokes his claws lingeringly over her knee, again and again — trying to paint some comfort into her skin through her leggings.

If Gamora notices pearl’s aching expression, it doesn’t sway her from her story. Instead, she simply tells them that when Carina’s outstretched fingertips had folded over the stone, the emporium gallery had seemed suddenly to start boiling. The four Ravagers and their recently-acquired Zeherobei had bolted as the air pressure had suddenly increased, and they’d barely avoided the blast of venomous purple power that had leveled the building and taken out a good portion of the city, as well.

They’d only taken one M-ship from the Eclector — better to keep an eye on troublemakers, the Captain had said, glowering at his prodigal son — and they’d raced toward it, trying to escape the fallout that was likely to happen in the wake of such an explosion.

Ronan had been waiting for them there, ready to kill them and seize the orb.

Fortunately — and unbeknownst to anyone — Mantis had been waiting too. Apparently, she’d been sitting atop the Warbird, kicking her feet and keeping her eyes open for them to return. She’d only been there as an emissary from Quill’s dad, apparently — to try to convince the kid to visit him — but when she’d seen the Accuser attacking her brother, she’d leapt from the Warbird, landed on Ronan's shoulders, and ordered him to sleep.

He’d crumpled, right in the middle of his self-aggrandizing speech.

“That worked?” Drax asks incredulously, eyeing Mantis dubiously. For once, Rocket’s thinking along the same lines as the Destroyer. But Mantis snorts on a laugh, like Drax has said something silly.

“He wasn’t prepared to fight me,” she chides, still giggling. “And he is not a god.”

“Might as well be,” Rocket mutters, but the words dry up when Yondu slants him a look. Those Centaurian-scarlet eyes are heavy with some kind of meaning that Rocket can’t decipher. He shuts his mouth, but arches one brow and gives the Captain a look of his own, which he hopes says, You owe me a frickin’ explanation.

“We took off as fast as we could,” Gamora continues, as if she’d never been interrupted at all. “We didn’t know who Mantis was at that point — Peter just dragged her with us. There were Chitauri all around the skull, waiting — for us, or maybe for Ronan’s orders. But, you know how they are—” She rolls her eyes. “Useless without explicit direction. They literally just sat there while we flew between them, docked with the Eclector, and got out of there as fast as we could.”

Unfortunately, Ronan hadn’t stayed down for long — perhaps, Gamora murmurs regretfully, she should have sliced his head off when she’d had the chance. Within a rotation and a half, they’d been back on Xandar, having somehow convinced the Nova Corps to fight Ronan with them.

“Thank goodness he’d never gotten his hands on the stone,” Gamora murmurs. “It was a long, deadly, bloody battle. So many lives were lost — all without Ronan having any extra power at his disposal.” Her lips tighten. “I don’t think anyone would have survived if he’d managed to get the stone from us.”

“But he didn’t get it.” Quill’s voice is firm. Gentle, but persistent — as if he’s repeated this dozens of times in the cycles since the battle. His hand reaches over, and he strokes his thumb over her tightly braided fingers. “And we didn’t lose.”

Gamora doesn’t respond at first, but her eyes settle on Golden Boy’s blunt, tanned fingers, cradled over hers like he’s holding onto a moonmoth in his palms.

“Ronan was taken into Xandaran custody,” she says at last, and her eyes slip away from the set of three clasped hands. She turns them up to Nebula’s, and holds her sister’s gaze steadily. “He’s facing charges for breaches of intergalactic law including mass extermination and environmental devastation. He’ll be found guilty, and he’ll be executed. And — surprisingly, I suppose — the Kree Empire hasn’t done anything to protect him. They released a rather — anemic statement right after the battle. Essentially saying that Xandar is entitled to respond to acts of terror in alignment with all existing intergalactic law, and that there will be no retaliation from them. For all that the Kree have been useless at stopping Ronan, at least they don’t seem to be shielding him, either.”

Nebula lets out a breath that Rocket hadn’t even realized she’s been holding, and Gamora’s eyes shift toward pearl’s. The Zeheborei shrugs.

“At that point, we departed Xandar with the intention of hiding on a distant rim-world, where nobody was likely to look for us. And we didn’t tell anyone — so how rumors started about Fron, I have no idea.”

“But you didn’t leave the stone on Xandar,” Nebula says, so slowly that it makes Rocket’s fur prickle. He slants a wary, questioning glance at her, and Gamora’s lips tighten.

“It’s somewhere safe,” the Zeherobei says coldly.

“Is it here?” Nebs asks, and now Rocket’s ears swivel toward her and his tail flicks nervously where it’s draped over the bench seat.

“Somethin’ on your mind, Nebs?”

The cyborg’s fawn-dark eyes catch his. Stoic, if he didn’t know her better. Predatory, even. But he does know her better, and he can see she looks—

Hunted.

She shakes her head, and he bites his tongue — chewing at the inside of his cheek. His gaze slides to pearl’s, and her brow is furrowed too.

“I am Groot,” Groot says quietly.

There’s a long, lingering moment of silence. Then Drax speaks up, his voice making the soft hide walls tremble against the candlelight.

“How is it that you came to find your brother Peter Quill?”

Rocket blinks over at him, nonplussed, scrabbling to try to follow the change of topic with as much difficulty as he’d been trying to decipher Jink’s indirect way of speaking. But Drax is only eyeing the broad with the antennae, his head cocked curiously.

Mantis herself looks startled to be addressed, and she fidgets with the hide hat still knotted in her hands. In some ways, she reminds Rocket of pearl, especially back in the early days: timid and shy, tugging her hair and twisting her hands. Knitting her fingers into her cardigans.

“My mast—our father, I mean.”

He feels his brow wrinkle at the weird stumble, but the girl goes on.

“Our father sent me to come look for him. To bring him home. Peter is his favorite child. He loved Peter’s mother very much, and it pained him to — to leave her.”

Quill scowls, and Rocket feels his eyes roll. Golden Boy’s got two dads looking out for him, apparently, and can’t appreciate either one—

“Sure, but he kinda seems like a real a-hole. He abandoned me and my mom.” The Terran’s square jaw clenches. “And — he shouldn’t have a favorite kid, Mantis. That’s messed up. You’re freaking awesome, and he should be glad he’s got you.”

Huh. Well. Maybe the kid’s not entirely self-obsessed.

“Oh, he is glad that he has me,” Mantis rushes to explain, though her cheeks begin to shine with a moon-white, bioluminescent blush. “I put him to sleep — much like I did with Ronan.” She looks around the table earnestly. “He doesn’t sleep on his own, you see. So I help him! With his rest, and as his messenger and servant.”

“Yeah, see?” Quill scoffs. “A-hole.”

Rocket studies her. His eyes skim to Quill, then back to Kraglin — and finally to Tullk and the Captain. The first three just look — well, tuned in to the conversation. Nothing unexpected between them. But Tullk — he looks wounded, as if bug-girl’s words have hurt him personally. Equally baffling is the Captain’s expression: eyes bitter and furious, the corner of his mouth twitching. His callused blue hands clench and unclench against the tabletop.

“How did you do that?” Nebula rasps, interrupting Rocket’s thoughts. “Make Ronan sleep?” He drags his attention back to the rest of them. Mantis is blinking at her owlishly.

Her pale face splits into a wide, eager grin, dark eyes twinkling like twin galaxies full of stars.

“I am an empath,” she tells the Luphomoid, and her antennae begin to blossom into a moon-pale luminescence that matches her blush. “I can sense emotions. It is clearer when I am touching someone — and then I can manipulate their emotions, too.”

Nebula draws back, distrust scrawled into every prosthetic feature.

“Worried she’ll see your true motivations, sister?” Gamora asks quietly. But even though Rocket’s hackles rise with the need to defend his friend, it’s not a vicious question. It’s just — sad.

And tired.

Something in Nebula’s face hardens — the corners of her mouth pursing. Then she reaches out, and her fingers wrap firmly around the dark-haired girl’s flimsy wrist.

“Hey!” Quill protests, but Gamora shoots him a look.

“Will it work?” Nebula asks harshly. Her voice is the sound of grinding metal and torn tissue. “I don’t know how much of me is organic anymore.”

Gamora flinches so hard that Rocket catches it in his periphery, but before she can do more than open her mouth, Mantis is already twisting her hand in Nebula’s. The Luphomoid jolts as pale fingers close around her blue wrist, brushing the synthetic skin under her cuff.

“That doesn’t matter,” Mantis says in a voice that suddenly seems less timid and more gentle. “You’re still you.”

Nebula blinks, but the empath’s dark eyes are already going soft and unfocused. Her antennae shimmer more brightly, and she breathes a broken gasp.

“Oh,” Mantis whispers. “You are racked with guilt. Sometimes it must seem like the only thing holding you together. Remorse. Regret. The need to fight, and the need to hide—”

Rocket’s throat tightens, just as Nebula rips her hand away.

“Satisfied?” she asks her sister hoarsely, not sparing Mantis another glance. Gamora stares back, her eyes wide and more than a little haunted. For a moment, silence lays broken and jogged between them. Then the Zeheborei sighs, and looks away.

“Despite what you think, I’d never be satisfied by you being in pain, Nebula,” she says quietly. “But if you want to know whether or not it’s easier to trust you now, the answer is yes.”

Nebula’s throat works. She pivots her arm at the elbow, holding her open palm to pearl without taking her eyes off Gamora’s. Silently, pearl fishes a lozenge out of her cardigan pocket. The wrapper crinkles, and the fire in the brazier crackles, and the only other sounds are the breaths of the thirteen people wedged around the dining table in this dim, cozy little cove.

”Oh,” Drax says, his voice muffled. “This is very good.”

Rocket jerks his attention back to the Destroyer in time to see him peel a chunk of bread from the loaf in his hands — apparently, not his first. He dips it with syrup ring delicacy into a still-steaming bowl of deep red sauce.

“Yeah?” Kraglin says, perking up from where he’d been slumped and silent in one corner. “I don’t think we had this one before—”

“It has not been served recently,” Jink confirms, and takes another small loaf — splitting it into thirds and handing one chunk to Kraglin and the other to Tullk.

There’s another long pause. Drax tries another sauce, and Tullk and Kraglin begin eating too. Mantis studies her wrist for a moment longer, as if she can still feel Nebs’ iron-grip there — then she tentatively reaches for a little lump of bread and one of the tiny clay bowls, scooping herself some stew. There’s a quiet crunch as Nebula bites down on the last sliver of her lozenge.

Then she speaks.

“The power stone can’t stay here,” she says quietly.

Yondu raises a brow. “Why’s that?” he asks. “Even if there is some talk about fugitives on Fron, nobody knows who we are or what we got, ‘cept the Collector, I guess. Even the rest of our crew thinks we left it on Xandar — and they’re mighty pissed we lost the payout, by the way. Hell—” He gestures loosely to Jink, who blinks icy wolvish eyes in the dim shadows and firelight. “—even the Battlehand of the King agrees that this might be one of the safest places for it in the whole universe, f’only ‘cause there’s five-quadrillion backwater rim planets and nobody’s gonna expect it to be on this one.”

Nebula swallows, and her eyelids flick closed, then open again. And maybe Rocket and Nebs are becoming best friends, just like pearl says — because before Nebs can say a word, Rocket already feels his gut twisting with dread.

“Because I have the reality stone,” she says hoarsely.

꧁:･☁︎･:꧂

Notes:

***The Obfonteri Crime Family (or Syndicate) is a creation of ao3 author hibata as featured in her AMAZING fic, Entanglement. i just loved the idea of it so much that i had to reference it here. 1000% favorite kraglin-headcanon. thank you, hibata!

i really enjoyed writing the very first third of this chapter and the last little bit, but i had a very hard time with the middle. i think it drags a bit, and for that, i'm eternally sorry. in a better world, i would have had this drafted weeks ago and would have been able to edit down with clearer eyes. alas, i always drag my feel in the endgame. i'm trying to give myself a touch more time as we head into kinktober, so we might move to posting every 2.5-3 weeks for a while. if you've still stuck with me for this insanely long fic, i am so deeply appreciative.

if it's been a while and you're curious about references you might have missed or forgotten that are relevant to this chapter, you may want to refer back to chapter twenty-six. nodrophobia for the initial interaction with the Collector and the subsequent explosion, or chapter twenty-seven. la gaudière. for Nebula's act of heroism and D'au's description of the events that led up to the explosion. (the little taluhnisan is featured in twenty-seven, too!) oh! and maybe chapter thirty-four. anderance. for rocket's talk with nebs about her being prostheses and for a glimpse of the stone. ♡♡♡ all the plot pieces are finally coming together! (i only wish the writing itself was, too)

regarding justification for the "ravagers'" storyline: rocket was, of course, pivotal in the mcu kyln and the battle on xandar. re: the kyln, i imagine gamora and pete were there a bit longer than in the mcu, since the eclector and ronan's forces converged on the prison at the same time. and while rocket was key to the victory on xandar - saving a ton of people, crashing into ronan on the dark aster with the warbird, building/resurrecting the hadron enforcer, and being the last link in harnessing the power stone - i'm going to go ahead and say that ronan was much less of a threat in this timeline since he never actually got the power stone in the first place. i also waffled a bit on whether or not mantis would be enough to knock out ronan, but since he wasn't expecting a psychic attack (and she was able to put down a god, willing and unwilling, and almost put down thanos when he had multiple stones in his grasp) i am going to go ahead and say it worked lol. we will explore a tiny bit more of all these so-called "ravager" dynamics in the next few chapters, but man, i hope they write more easily than this one.

coming soon: chapter thirty-nine. currently untitled.
summary:we get to meet more of the ravager crew. pearl gets to comfort rocket. rocket is certain that this is as good as it gets.
warnings: this will probably be a smutty chapter, but i might end up having to split it into two.
estimated date: sunday, september 28.*
*this date is an estimate only! for the most up-to-date schedule, please check the monthly forecast on my pinned tumblr post.

･:꧂posting schedules, previews, headcanons, art, & more on tumblr♡
･:꧂cicatrix ART, masterlist, & moodboard♡