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Peter thought it was a temporary thing.
It made sense, at first, that Rocket didn't want to let that little stick in a pot out of his sight. Groot had been his best, and for a long time only, friend. It was a little weird, sure, but Peter kind of got it. Peter didn't really feel like he wanted to let any of these assholes out of his sight for a while, after the whole thing with falling out of the sky and holding an infinity stone and almost dying like a thousand times and whatever, so he could see where Rocket was coming from.
"He's gonna grow back," Rocket insisted, and at first Peter just patted him on the shoulder bracingly and Gamora arched an eyebrow and kept her mouth shut and Drax ignored them and sharpened his knives. But then Groot actually started growing back, and they all had to eat their non-words because apparently Rocket wasn't quite as crazy as they'd originally thought.
He was still pretty fucking crazy, though.
But anyway. If Rocket wanted to babysit a stick in a pot, that was his business. Well, it was kind of everybody's business, because they all apparently lived on the Milano now, but it was mostly Rocket's business.
Didn't mean Peter couldn't give him shit about it, though.
He was asleep, kind of, lying in his bed and trying to think about anything but Gamora's ass in those pants she'd been wearing to fix the light speed modulator earlier, when Rocket started flipping out from one of the back rooms of the ship.
"Holy shit!" he yelled. "I knew it! I fuckin' knew it!"
Peter sat up, yawning. "What did you know, Rocket? And if this is about that thing you were saying with the video from the Xandarian strip club, I really don't want to hear it."
"Fuck you, Quill, Groot's back!"
Peter jumped up and threw himself up the ladder. He was not wearing pants. He hoped no one would notice.
"What the hell do you mean, Groot's back?" he said, skidding into place between Gamora and Drax, who were hovering over Rocket, who was hovering over that stupid pot with the stick, and the stick - the stick was blinking.
"I'll be damned," Peter said.
"I fail to see what this has to do with your inevitable descent into hell," Drax said.
"I told you assholes," Rocket said, bending down so he was eye to eye with Groot's tiny, rough-hewn face. Groot blinked at him. "You didn't think he was still in there. You thought I was crazy, didn't you?"
"You are crazy," Gamora said.
"Will he speak?" Drax asked.
"Of course he will," Rocket said.
"Maybe we could teach him a little more in the way of vocabulary this time," Peter suggested.
Rocket snorted. "Why?"
"If you really don't know the answer to that, I can't explain it," Peter said.
Rocket, however, was immune to mocking, and Peter couldn't blame him, because even though all Groot could do was blink and look almost absurdly cute, Groot was, undeniably, back.
-
Now that Groot was definitely alive and arguably sentient, though, Rocket's interactions with him became a little... strange.
"Rocket?" Peter said, watching as Rocket wrapped a towel around his waist and carried Groot toward the head. "Are you... taking him into the shower with you?"
"What, he needs water," Rocket said.
Peter held his hands up in surrender.
-
"Groot wants to come," Rocket announced as Peter grabbed his jacket and Drax laced up his boots.
"No," Peter said. "We need our arms free."
"I'll carry him," Rocket said.
"We need your arms free, too," Peter said. "Come on, we don't know how long it's going to be before we stop for food again. Earlier you said you wanted to buy a thousand bags of chips. How are you gonna carry a thousand bags of chips if you're carrying Groot?"
"That is far too many bags of chips, anyway," Drax said. "We could not possibly eat them all."
"He's coming, and that's final," Rocket said, marching down the ramp, Groot's pot clutched in his arms.
"Are you sure he even wants to come?" Peter called after him.
"Yep," Rocket said.
"The tree hasn’t spoken. How could he possibly know its wishes?" Gamora said, crossing her arms and watching as Rocket toddled over to a display of eggs of various sizes that was set up outside the market.
"I'm already learning not to ask," Peter said.
-
"You don't get to complain about it if you can't help clean," Peter overheard Rocket saying a few days later as he walked past the door to Rocket's quarters, which was really just a mid-sized hole in the wall with a pile of old t-shirts that served as a bed.
"No, seriously," Rocket said. "I don't want to hear it." Peter peered around the edge of the door and looked in. Rocket was holding a small washcloth in his hand and - dusting? Was he dusting? They lived in space. Dusting wasn't really a priority. Peter's bed did not, currently, have any living creatures in it. That was clean enough enough for him.
As always, Groot stood in his pot, blinking.
"You don't even have lungs!" Rocket continued. "Or a nose! You are not physically capable of sneezing!"
Groot swayed a little.
"All right, all right," Rocket grumbled, climbing up on top of a shelf to swipe at the windowsill. "Better?"
Groot did not react at all.
"Good," Rocket said.
-
"The small tree moves like you move," Drax said.
"What do you mean? Groot doesn't leave his pot. Groot doesn't even have feet."
"It... dances."
“Really. You’ve seen Groot dancing.”
“No,” Drax said. “But I can sense it.”
Peter rolled his eyes. Everyone he knew was out of their fucking minds.
-
"Does he need food?" Gamora asked, frowning down at Groot, who was watching her fixedly as she sliced up some kind of weird fruit they'd picked up in Knowhere. It was bright orange with green spots and small purple shoots coming out of both ends. Peter had gotten used to a lot of things in his 20 years in space, but there were some things he still wouldn't put in his mouth.
Rocket tilted his head and set down his sandwich. "I dunno," he said, his mouth full of food. "He used to take care of that on his own."
"Surely starlight and water are food enough for a plant-based life form," Drax said.
"Does he get enough, though? We don't take him out of the ship much. Maybe that's why he's not growing very fast," Peter said.
"He's not growing very fast because he's Groot," Rocket said, as if that explained it. Maybe it did: Peter still wasn't totally sure if Groot was a name, or a species, or maybe a planet. It was totally possible that there were a million Groots and Grootellas and little Grootitos somewhere on the other side of the galaxy.
Gamora popped a slice of the gross-looking fruit into her mouth. "Perhaps he is hungry."
Rocket jumped off his perch and grabbed the knife she'd been using. He picked up his sandwich and cut off the smallest portion possible, barely more than a piece of meat between two crumbs, and held it out to Groot.
Groot smiled widely - Peter just barely stopped himself from going awwwww - and took the miniature sandwich from Rocket's paw. It was almost as big as his head.
"Eat it, buddy," Rocket said. "You know, in your mouth."
Groot looked at the sandwich, then up at Rocket, then around at each of them. Peter mimed eating a tiny sandwich out of the palm of his hand, figuring that maybe an example would help. "Mmmm," he said. "Delicious."
Groot blinked, and then pulled the sandwich to his chest and cuddled it, like a pillow. He looked extremely content. A drop of mustard fell into the dirt near his trunk.
Rocket shrugged and went back to his sandwich.
-
The thing about Rocket being a raccoon was that he was generally pretty normal, but occasionally he reminded them he was actually an animal by doing something like skittering through the air ducts of the ship or eating something he found on the floor or, today, curling up and falling asleep in the co-pilot seat.
It was kind of sweet, really; one minute he'd been setting coordinates and talking shit about some weapons dealer he worked with "back in day", which considering Rocket's life span probably meant like six weeks ago, and the next minute he'd been passed out, his arms still wrapped protectively around Groot's pot.
Groot was awake - Groot was always awake, as far as Peter knew. Did sentient trees need sleep? God, if he ever learned to speak Groot, he was gonna have so many questions - and he was staring at Rocket and smiling in a way that Peter could only call "fond." It was an adorable scene, and it would also make great blackmail. Peter considered calling for Gamora to come take a picture.
Groot reached out one of his tiny, tiny arms, no more than a twig, toward Rocket's face, but he was too small - he couldn't get close enough. His face screwed up in concentration, his tiny mouth pursing, and then, suddenly, his arm was growing - just a little bit, an inch or two - and soon the tips of it were brushing Rocket's cheek.
"I am Groot," he said, his voice small.
"Yeah, you too, buddy," Rocket mumbled, yawning.
Peter swallowed and turned back to the Milano's controls. Maybe he was picking up some Groot after all.