Chapter Text
Grace slams down his modified Uno cards. Made of xenonnite, they clink against the metallic floor. “You’re cheating again.”
“I am not,” Rocky trills, a touch of hesitancy to his tone. He wiggles his carapace, taps his claws together. “You are just bad at game.”
Two years and several months into their trip to Erid, and Grace’s fluency in Eridian (or Rocky’s particular dialect, at least) is pretty dang good, if he says so himself. Which is in direct opposition to Rocky’s opinion. Well, no matter. It’s good enough that Grace can pick up on the more subtle expressions of body language and tone inflections that give away Rocky’s true intentions, the little schemer.
“I’m not bad – you’re just cheating! I see that card you’re hiding in your third-hand, and I know you’ve been trying to peek at mine when you shift over to hear them better.”
“Not true! You are making that up,” Rocky says, more confidently now. “When last sleep, Grace? Is brain even working?”
Grace pinches the bridge of his nose, ignoring the verbal jabs that are a terrible attempt to distract him. “How many times have we had this conversation about cheating the game, Rock.”
“Eleven.”
That little – gah. Curse Eridian memory.
“Rocky never cheats. Tell you over and over. But Grace human brain always forgets this. Human brain terrible at remembering.” The longer Rocky goes on, the more sarcastic he sounds.
He sighs, and begins to gather up the texturised cards on his side. “Now I know you’re just looking for a fight,” Grace accuses. “I’m not buying it.”
“Grace no buying anything,” Rocky chirps. “Rocky has nothing to sell. And Rocky would win fight anyways.”
“You would not!”
“Yes would.”
“No, you–” Arguing with him is pointless when he’s like this. Why is Grace even trying? “Ugh, whatever.”
Rocky warbles something too low for him to hear. He fiddles with his own cards on the opposite side of the xenonite.
“Let’s take a break from the game,” Grace suggests, thinking some alone time might be in order. At least for one of them.
“Fine.” Rocky cycles his cards through the airlock, and with very pronounced footsteps, climbs off to be somewhere else in the ship. Sheesh. Grace wonders how long he’ll be in this mood of his.
Look, Grace didn’t know he would be eating in the cockpit, alright? It’s not where anyone would think their alien best-friend/roommate would be eating. It’s not a normal eating space! And it happened yesterday. You’d think Rocky would be over it by now.
It won’t last forever. They’ve had arguments before, and this lingering irritation Rocky has with Grace will pass too. It’s just what happens when two beings live in tiny, confined quarters for a long, long, long time without anyone else to interact with.
They’ve set boundaries, and they do their best to accommodate the other’s personal wishes. But sometimes things just happen. Like climbing up into the cockpit and finding your roommate eating, when said roommate has explicitly said not to watch them do.
Grace busies himself with some taumoeba-related experiments in the lab, writing down his observations and findings. He’s had to start using another precious physical notebook – they are a finite resource around here. He can hear Rocky puttering around somewhere. Hopefully it’s not taking apart Grace’s bed again.
The clinks and clanks of the ship’s machinery are his soundtrack instead of easy conversation and melodic songs. The longer the silence lasts, the longer it unnerves him. He doesn't dare put on music. That would only add to Rocky's irritation.
Dinnertime comes and passes – Grace diligently eats his portion of disgusting, gooey coma-slurry, and after finishing his last experiment, decides to call it quits for the day. He gets up, yawns, and stretches out his spine. Time to go see if Rocky has chilled out now.
“Hey, Rock? Wanna watch a movie tonight, or…something?” Grace asks, wandering through the corridors to find the Eridian. He doesn’t shout it. He’s meticulously trained that habit out of himself, because Rocky hears him anywhere with his crazy alien echolocation.
Rocky is tinkering with one of his many projects in the dormitory, and continues to remain silent when Grace enters the room.
“Hey. Um…” Grace trails off, unsure of what to say.
“Apology,” Rocky unexpectedly sings, lowering himself to the floor in a rare display of guilt. “Grace is right – Grace not have known Rocky was eating in cockpit. And Rocky did cheat.”
“Hey, it’s okay,” Grace assures gently. “I get it. Personal space is important.”
Rocky turns the side of his carapace he usually uses during conversations towards Grace. “Grace forgive Rocky, question?”
Grace presses a fist against the barrier for a fist bump, which Rocky returns with a happy trill.
“Always, buddy,” he says, smiling wide.
“Even for cheating, question?”
“We all cheat in Uno, Rock. It’s inevitable.” Grace points an accusatory finger. “You, however, do it every time.”
“Rocky will try no cheat next time.”
“Thanks buddy.” He’s glad they could work things out.
Rocky moves to his airlock where his ball is attached. “Should watch movie in Don’t Go Crazy Room,” he says, grabbing his camera.
Grace pumps a fist, mentally celebrating. It’s a rare occurrence when Rocky wants to watch Earth entertainment with him. Visual media just isn’t as enticing to him as it is to Grace, for obvious reasons. “Yes! Awesome! I need to grab some stuff, then. I’ll meet you there.”
Rocky is already his ball and rolling along as Grace collects his blanket and pillow. He throws the blanket around his shoulders like a cape, because why not. There’s no other humans around to judge.
He runs through a list of things he's been wanting to show Rocky. Jurassic Park (a classic). The Princess Bride (one of Grace’s favorites). Alien (is Rocky even ready for that kind of horror?). Or maybe Rocky would like the Fast and Furious movies. He’s a big fan of action. But not crazy action, where the screen gets too busy for his texture monitor to properly display.
Alien, per Rocky’s insistence, is surprisingly a hit. Watching it makes Grace all the more glad that, out of all the possibilities, his best-friend happens to be a nice, friendly alien, and not one that will lay an egg or baby alone inside him.
Rocky finds Grace’s comment about this as a perfect opportunity to torment him.
“Grace aware Eridians lay eggs, question?”
Grace kicks his xenonite ball. “Wrong time to bring that up again, bud.” He hopes the image of a chestburster exploding from someone’s ribcage will not be featured in his dreams tonight. Oh, who is he kidding, it probably will be.
“Grace better watch out,” Rocky sings. Grace kicks his ball again.
Rocky chitters a laugh and rolls ahead of him to the dorm, effectively escaping kicking range. Grace yawns for the hundredth time as he follows – it’s definitely past his bedtime. He’s got his blanket and pillow tucked under his arm, and suddenly has the impulse to lay down in the corridor right then and there.
Nope. Onwards to his bed, because his back will kill him if he sleeps on the floor.
Grace is halfway to the dormitory when things get…weird. Just plain weird, suddenly and without any kind of warning.
He doesn’t know how to describe it. Reality itself begins to stretch and bend and twist like taffy. Up is down and left and right. His insides flop outside and his outsides flip inside. The stark whites of the ship turn to blue, the greys melt into bright reds, the blacks burn with bright, luminous intensity, the lights flicker out and then come back on to burn him to cinders.
Everything is wrong, wrong, wrong.
And as suddenly as it occurred, it stops.
Too bad gravity has stopped too. Grace finds himself floating and tries not to freak out that they’re no longer moving and that the emergency lights are on and that Mary’s saying something and just what the heck was that?!
The ship is bathed in eerie, menacing crimson light. It adds a whole new level of terror to what Mary announces:
“Unknown anomaly detected. Emergency engine cutoff initiated. Emergency mode: activated.”
Blinking tears from his eyes, Grace swallows the bile that rises in his throat, desperately fighting the urge to empty his stomach. He fails spectacularly, but not before managing to tear his pillow out from its case and shove his head inside to contain the mess. Rocky would find this absolutely disgusting.
Rocky. He needs to find Rocky.
He twists the pillow-case of vomit around and leaves it floating in the corridor. Mega ew, but he has more important things right now. He springs off the wall and flies down to the crew dormitory compartment.
“Grace!” Rocky cries when Grace soars into the room. He’s desperately clinging to his ball’s handles with all five limbs, bobbing around like a sharp, oddly-shaped bubble.
“I’m here, bud,” Grace sighs, relief flooding through him. He drifts over to Rocky, grabs a nearby handle, and pulls them both to the wall. “You…ugh, alright?”
“No…no damage. You are the same, question?” Rocky sounds about as good as Grace feels.
Grace rubs a hand down his face, closing his eyes to stave off the growing nausea. He’s lost his glasses somewhere in all the chaos, and the room swirls a little too much for his liking. Zero-g does not help him in the slightest. “Yeah. I think so. Man, what was that?”
“Do not know.” Rocky shifts uneasily, and presses closer. “We figure out together. But when Rocky no hear too many things. And when Rocky can think normal again.”
“And…once everything stops swirling together,” Grace adds with a groan.
It takes a few moments, but eventually Grace can tolerate existing. His entire body aches, and weirdly, feels itchy and all askew. Like he’s a puzzle that got put together with a few pieces shoved in the wrong place, or a book with pages torn out of the middle.
But they’re alive and in one piece. Whatever has happened to them, they’ll face it together.
With some effort (and a few unintended collisions) he’s able to connect Rocky’s ball to his airlock, and Rocky happily crawls into his much more stable tunnels.
“Okay,” Grace declares. “That was seriously strange, but Mary isn’t falling apart around us, so that’s a good start.”
“Yes.”
Like she’s been summoned, Mary speaks. It is not with a reassuring comment. “Blip E detected.”
“What?!” Grace yelps.
“Bad bad bad,” Rocky says. “What Blip-E?”
“I don’t know,” Grace says, springing off the dormitory’s wall. Rocky follows along in his tunnel. “Let’s go see. We gotta check on life support, too. Whatever that was, it did something to the ship. We’re in emergency mode.”
“Bad bad bad bad bad bad–”
He doesn’t make it to the cockpit because Grace catches sight of “Blip E” through one of the windows. He presses his face against the glass, staring in shock.
“Holy shit,” he whispers.
He thinks he can allow the use of profanity for this.
“When will Mantis and Quill be here?”
Nebula inhales. She exhales. She, miraculously, does not punch Drax in the face. “You’ve asked me that eleven times now.”
Drax stares at her, unblinking. “Yes. And every time I do so, your answer is different. The first time, your answer was four days. The second, seventeen hours. The third, five-hundred and forty-six minutes. Now what is it?”
Nebula hoists the crate of foodstuffs onto her shoulder and makes for the bar. “You do the math. I’m busy.”
Drax wanders off, muttering nonsensical numbers. She snorts to herself. They will be here soon. Drax just has to hold out a little while longer.
Nebula’s known the answer to Drax’s question for a while now, which doesn’t really help with the wait, but Knowhere doesn’t run itself. The bar has to be restocked. Kraglin wants help getting the Bowie ready for a supply run. One of the houses needs their plumbing fixed. There’s apparently a flesh-eating rat thing running around biting people’s ankles.
She’s not distracting herself. She isn’t. They haven’t seen Mantis and Quill since they parted ways, and that was….forever ago. No big deal, really. She is perfectly patient and calm, unlike some people.
Rocket’s been irritated all day, no doubt as anxious as Drax is. Maybe even more so – the raccoon is a special kind of cranky, yelling at everyone and everything. Nebula is glad he’s busied himself with a “special surprise” to set up. She’s got enough with Drax following her around.
Groot is…just Groot. But it seems the excitement has spread to him, too.
“I am Groot?”
“No,” Nebula says. “Not really.”
“I am Groot!”
Nebula rubs a hand down her face. “They’re not that close!” She stomps away. “Why does everyone feel the need to ask me when they’ll get here? I’m busy!”
“I am Groot.”
“Then go do that!”
It’s a long day, but finally, Quill and Mantis set foot on Knowhere. Their arrival is accompanied by warm, happy cheers, a crowd of adoring citizens, and a generous blast of the finest, stickiest glitter this side of the galaxy has to offer (courtesy of Rocket and his newest weapon, the gruesome Glitter Gun). Mantis laughs and laughs, and after coughing and spitting out mouthfuls of the stuff, Quill joins in.
The Guardians of the Galaxy are thus reunited. Sitting around a table in the bar, laughing, exchanging banter, throwing insults, and eating their favorite meals while trying not to let Groot steal things off their plates – it’s just like old times. Nebula missed this.
You’d have to kill her before she’d admit that to their faces, though.
She gets annoyed when it doesn't last as long as she hoped. They’re interrupted by a crackle of Rocket’s comms, and the table falls quiet as they listen to Kraglin’s report.
“I dunno, it was just real funky,” he says. “And the ship is pretty banged up now. Those asteroids were heavy hitters, and densely packed. It’s almost like they were thrown right at us.”
That’s a concerning thought.
“You took the ship into an asteroid field?!” Quill asks, unimpressed. “Seriously? Dude, that’s like, one of the things you try to avoid in space. Piloting 101.”
“W-well, uh–”
“Didn’t you hear him? That’s where they followed the weird creature to,” Rocket interrupts, poking Quill in the leg. “But I don’t like the sounds of it. An energy signature that powerful? It just screams ‘I’m a big bad douchebag, come fight me!’.”
“The space-time distortions emitted by this unknown entity shorted out our quantum singularity sensor,” Cosmo adds.
Oh. Damn.
“I am Groot?” Groot asks.
Quill snorts. “Yeah buddy. That’s bad.”
Bad is an understatement. Something is seriously weird about this encounter, and the more they talk about it, the stronger Nebula’s gut feeling grows.
“But anywho,” Kraglin continues, “it got away, and now, we’re stranded here for the time being until we finish repairs, but that shouldn’t take too long.” A pause. “We, um, think it might be heading to the Mira system, though.”
Double damn. The Mira system’s difficulties recovering from the Blip are well-known in this sector. An attack from something that could seemingly throw entire asteroids and has the capacity to disable one of the most well-armed ships in their arsenal? Mira has no working military or defense system. They are ill-equipped to handle what Kraglin described.
She isn’t the only one thinking it; they all exchange matching grimaces.
“Alright,” Rocket decides, when Quill gives him an encouraging nod. “We’ll handle this. No one better than us, am’I right?”
“Yes!” Drax cheers. “I shall take up the mantle of Drax the Destroyer once more!”
Outside, a pair of Star Children run past, laughing and screaming in joy. Rocket follows her gaze, and nudges her gently. “Nebs,” he says. “They’ll be alright. We won’t be gone long. You’ve made this place too damn solid that it won’t fall apart as soon as you leave.”
It is a logical deduction. But something inside her still hates the idea of leaving them.
“Come on,” Quill joins in, grinning widely and showing off his teeth. “Just for old times’ sake.”
She cannot resist the call of an adventure. She nods once, and the table erupts.
Rocket matches Quill’s grin, showing off his even sharper teeth. “Oh yeah! Who’s ready for a road trip?”
“What?” asks Drax, stopping mid-cheer. “There are no roads to Mira. It’s a different planet. Why would we go on a road trip?”
He’s answered with a chorus of sighs and giggles.
“We’ll have to take a ship to get there,” Drax continues, oblivious.
“I am Groot.”
Even after time spent apart, they are a well-oiled machine as they gather their weapons and supplies. Quill even has the good sense to change out of his Earth clothes into some of his old gear they kept for him. She’d almost be able to take him seriously, were it not for the fine, sparkling glitter that coats his hair.
They meet at the garage, where their now declared “secondary” ship – the good ol’ Benatar – awaits. Nebula just about loses it when she sees inside.
“This is where you’ve been putting all that junk I told you to throw away?!” she shouts.
Offended, Rocket huffs. “It ain’t junk.” He grabs at a trinket in one of the many piles and fiddles with it as he heads for his pilot seat. “It’s all useful stuff. And why would I throw it away just because you told me to?”
Mantis, also still covered in pink glitter, is pulling on a pair of what Nebula hopes are not jet-boots. “Yeah! This all looks way too fun to throw away!”
Whatever. They’ll make do. Nebula tosses what she can off the ship, ignoring the threats and violent protests. They do not need a box of microscopic grav-scopes, a concerning amount of ionizing photon emitters, or a honest-to-gods repulsor drive coming with them to fight a space creature.
Nebula manages to throw one last box off before Quill and Rocket fly them up and out of the garage. The trip to Mira is uneventful, save for the wrestling match Drax starts and Mantis’ stunt with the jet-boots.
It’s the moment they leave their last jump point that sets off their adventure.
“I’m not picking up anything on the scanners–wait.” Quill peers closer at his screen. “Huh, that’s weeeiiirrrrdd–”
His last word stretches out and fades into meaningless noise. Everything stretches, then snaps like a rubber band, and expands once more. Reality as she knows it twirls into something unrecognizable. Her circuits fire and fire, electric signals fizzing out with nowhere to go as her body both ceases to exist and exist everywhere at once.
The conscious part of her recalls Rocket describing a time he went through more than 50 jumps through the Universal Neural Teleportation network. Violent mutations, physical changes, and temporary disfigurement. Biologic beings are just not meant for that extreme of space travel.
Nebula thinks this is worse.
It ends in an instant, or maybe it lasts an eternity. Either way, it’s over, and Nebula is beyond relieved to exist normally again. Her body aches, but she doesn’t register any physical damage.
The only sounds on the ship are an echoing beep, someone vomiting up their dinner, and a chorus of groans.
“What the hell was that?” Rocket is the first to speak. “And stop puking in my ship,” he moans.
“No clue.” Nebula connects to the ship – there are several alarms blaring that she silences.
“Uh, guys?” Quill calls out, an edge of panic to his voice. He glances up from his screen. “We’re ain’t in Kansas anymore.”
“We never were in Kansas, Quill.”
“Not what I mean, Drax!”
Drax tilts his head and closes his eyes. “Then what do you mean?”
“He means we’re not in the Mira system,” Nebula says, running through the ship’s nav computer and scanning the diagnostics. “In fact, we’re not in any known system.”
Rocket curses loudly. “Then where the hell did we end up?”
“I am Groot?”
“No, we were never going to Kansas! Enough about Kansas!”
“Everyone shut up and let me think for a minute, dammit.” Rocket scrubs his face. “Something must have gone wrong with the jump. Maybe the teleportation network has an unresolved anomaly that we just happened to fly through.”
“Maybe,” Nebula says.
It’s highly unlikely. The chances of an anomaly in the network are 3,097,605,432 to one.
The chances of a weird space creature warping them to some gods-forsaken corner of the universe, however, are much higher than that. Especially because they don’t even know what they’re dealing with yet. They haven't even seen it.
Mantis, who has helpfully stopped puking, has her attention fixed on the viewport. She points outside to space beyond. “Look! Something is out there!”
Nebula climbs out of her seat to get a closer look, and the other Guardians follow.
“That is the strangest ship I have ever seen,” Drax announces.
“It’s so…primative,” Rocket says. “What’s with the solar panels and columns of fuel tanks? What, they don’t have an antimatter core or quantum fluxuator? Or even a sub-light drive? Psh, what amateurs.”
“It kinda–” Quill stares intensely. “It almost looks like it’s from–” He falls still.
“From where?” Nebula growls. "Just say it already!"
“Earth.”