I’ve Been Seeing A Lot Of Anti-Nazi Ones, Which Is Great, But I Felt Like We Needed One To Show Our

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pretends.

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

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

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

“F’you’re not gonna sleep…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, you can’t.

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

But she can’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Oh no, not sexy cowboy sheriff Rocket! Guess I gotta run real slow past them cacti. Be a shame if I fell onto a strategically placed picnic blanket and couldn’t run any farther… Also finished writing chapter 16 of Entanglement. A few edits and it’s out there.

✨️AWOOGA✨️

I’d say he’s bringing sexy back, but his sexy never left.

New Rocket album redraw!! I got some requests so today I went with the iconic Purple Rain😄🫶enjoy!!💜🦝

My heart broke reading this. So well written and beautifully loving.

Life on Knowhere II

Around one 'o clock in the morning, Cosmo and I were awoken by a frantic knocking on my apartment door--then suddenly Rocket was bursting into the room, slamming the door closed behind him, racing over to my bed where Cosmo and I were sleeping, waking us. Putting on a small night-light - something that wasn't too bright, was easy on the eyes - we saw that he looked so poorly.

His fur was everywhere, his gaze sunken, and he was drenched with sweat--a result of some of the apartment climate controls needing long overdue attention. Worse, the fur about his eyes was wet with tear tracks. Briefly, Cosmo and I looked at each other; then without any hesitation, she and I were getting out of bed, moving over to just embrace him as he snuffled into us, breath hitching. "It's okay, bud... it's okay, we've got you. We've got you; come on, let's get you into the shower..."

With a harsh, ragged sob, Rocket fell against me and I caught him and lifted him up into my arms, cradling his shaking body to my chest as I carried him into the small bathroom. I set him down very gently - or I tried to - but he didn't want to let go; he shook his head, clenched his eyes closed when I gently tried to pry him off. "Oh, man, it's okay, it's alright..." I murmured soothingly, "you don't have to let go, it's okay..." He did let go, only briefly - only for the time it took Cosmo to gently peel his sweat-stained pajamas from his body - and then he was holding me as we entered the shower, Cosmo turning it on, and setting it to tepid.

Rocket stood there, lost, listless, as I soaped, lathered, and washed every part of him aside from his intimate places, falling back against my body as I thoroughly cleaned and massaged him, getting rid of the dirt and sweat from his fur, then working down, down, to the skin beneath, working him over such that he sobbed again before starting to purr, weakly. "There's a good boy..." I murmured gently. Letting Rocket finish washing himself on his own, I briefly washed myself, too, then it was shower off and Cosmo dried me as I gently dried Rocket with the thickest, softest, fluffiest towel. I thought Rocket would sort of 'come around' after that - that he would wake a little, come to his senses, perhaps laugh a little then thank me and quietly leave...

... But worry grew in my heart for him as he listlessly wandered over to the wardrobe where I kept my clothes--and then my heart ached as he sobbed again, fossicked through my clothes, pulled out a shirt that was way too large, that made him seem so very small, and frail. He put it on, and then, raising his arms like all children do, he cried, "U-Up!" Then, Cosmo whimpered as he repeated the word, sobbing, pleading, "Up!" My heart wrenched as my brain misheard the word as "Help..." My own eyes filling with tears, I knelt down to him and then he cried for real - deep, wracking, body-shaking, silent sobs as I took him up. "Upsy-daisy, li'l man, come on..." Cradling him gently, Cosmo followed a silent guardian behind us as I carried him back to bed in my arms, then Cosmo pulled back the thin sheets so I could settle in, tucking Rocket down beside me, into the warmth of my body, placing a kiss to his headfur.

I felt her hop back upon the bed herself as I petted Rocket, soothed him, stroked him just about everywhere as he hitched another sob and soaked in the attention and care. A little later, he did sort of come around, as we were drifting in and out of sleep. "I... thks..." he roughly murmured. "I... I gotta stop doin' this... but... Lylla, Teefs, Floor. Lylla... still miss 'em so much, god... gotta get over this...!" Now I looked at him, my gaze a little stern. "Hey, man... grief... really isn't something that you just 'get over.' It's not something that just... goes away. It can stay with you your whole life; one day you'll think you're fine... but then you'll see something, or hear something, or taste something - or be doing something, like reading a book - and it'll all come back. Because... grief is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give but can't. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is love persevering. Grief is love - your love for Lylla - with no place to go... because Lylla's not here, anymore. I'm sorry, buddy. I'm so, so sorry."

Now Rocket was gone again, head sideways on my chest, muzzle open, heaving great lungfuls of air as he cried, and cried, and cried, silently at first, but then an awful noise of anguish escaped him and I made to cuddle him, squeeze him gently, put his ear to my chest, let him hear my heartbeat--fuck, I wished I could share with him my heart but I could not; all I could do was just be there when he needed someone to be with, as his friend, or in times like this when he just needed to be with someone. Cosmo, too, was there; she nosed under the thin sheets, whimpering, concerned, licked at Rocket here and there until he managed a watery laugh; then together, we all drifted to sleep. Tomorrow would be a day for Rocket - we'd go and do all the things he wanted to do, together, no matter what they were.

Rocket then licked all the things…

Peter: That's it! I want you out of this house!

Rocket: Fine! But I'm taking my drink mixer with me!

Peter: It's a blender! That my grandpa gave to me!

Rocket: I licked it, it's mine!

Peter: That's not a thing! STOP LICKING ALL MY STUFF!

Good bless you crazy raccoon.

39. Roach

Everything is fine until the roach is airborne.

Oh my poor sweet raccoon. I’d give him all the pets.

Rocket Secretly Liked Being Petted I

For a moment, Nebula wasn't sure what to think. Then, "You hacked your Cyberbrain?" she exclaimed with a mixture of anger and concern. "Why?!"

Rocket's expression wilted. "Shouldn'a said nothin'... Knew this was a bad idea..." he mumbled. Then, bracing himself as if for retaliation, he answered, "I... it's a piece of code that works on a timer, 'bout half an hour to an hour. It... it sorta half shuts me down, brings 'me' - Rocket - semi-offline, gently; leavin' the... the base animal... but also leavin' enough'a me there so's I can control the base instincts so it don't get scared..."

Nebula puzzled through the jumbled rambling explanation, then, exasperated, asked "What if this piece of code fails?! What if this 'timer' stops working?! You'd never surface again, Rocket! Why would you make such a thing?!"

"BECAUSE WHEN DRAX PETTED ME, I LIKED IT, OKAY, AND I WANTED TO BE PETTED AGAIN!" Rocket suddenly shouted, eyes tearing up. "Because... because I wanted to know what all it was like without me gettin' in the way; all'a my thoughts. "'Touch only brings pain, Rocket! Petting is demeaning, Rocket. It's only for animals, pets, Rocket, and you ain't no animal or someone's pet!' All these awful thoughts, me gettin' in the way. B-But... I saw Quill layin' on the couch in the Milano Commons an' he was 'pettin'' Gamora, he was strokin' her hair an' she looked nearly asleep. I... I wanted that, to know what it was like, this pettin' thing..."

Nebula nodded; she thought she kind of understood? "Just..." she huffed, "when you do this, please make sure someone is with you, just in case..."

Wiping his eyes with his paws, Rocket looked up at her. "Yeah... The other day, when Quill and I were arguing? It was all staged so's I could get him away from you all. I... I got him back to my room, apologized an' then we hashed out a deal..."

Ya’ll. I hate people touching my hair, but I would let Rocket play with it, brush it, style it, and run his fingers through it 4-Evah. 4-EVAH.

✩࿐࿔ brush your fuckin' hair. [new 4/21]

✩࿐࿔ take what you need masterlist | take what you need queue fanfiction masterlist | navigation

fluff | gn reader | no use of y/n | anthology one-shot | word count: 1,649. read ✩࿐࿔ brush your fuckin' hair on ao3 excerpt & warnings below the cut.

the captain is an expert on fur, and he can tell you’re not brushing yours. it’s important to take care of your hair — keeping it free of dust and debris, tangles and shedding strands. even finger-combing it is better than nothing! and who knows? maybe if you can start brushing a little more regularly, the captain will even help you out on occasion. 

for nonnie! ♡♡♡ i really wanted to write this one with eidos-rocket, but i wasn’t sure if you were a fan of the 2021 game. however, please know i was channeling a lot of my eidos-rocket headcanons (like him being VERY VAIN about his fur) while writing this. a few warnings: one very brief, not-explicit off-color joke of a suggestive nature from reader, some assumptions about hair length and texture based on the wording of your ask, and physical affection/hair combing. i hope you enjoy this little story and that it maybe gives you some encouragement to take a little more care of your hair.

“You ain’t brushed your hair again.” The words make you stiffen in alarm. You’d been standing at the tiny counter of your kitchenette, opening two milky fizzes — one for yourself, and one for the Captain — and pouring a carton of zargnuts into a bowl when he’d decided to interrupt you with what sounds an awful lot like an accusation. You whirl around to face Rocket, one hand automatically flying to the back of your head — finger-combing the strands and checking for snarls. “Whaaat?” you manage to ask with a little laugh that you hope sounds incredulous, but probably sounds cornered instead. Your eyes skitter from Rocket to the book shelf, the ceiling, the holoscreen — to anything in your cozy studio apartment that isn’t him. The air is velvety and blue right now — just a few shadowed shades past Knowhere’s artificial sunset. There are only a few sources of light against the darkness: one dim plasma orb glows on the narrow coffee table, and there’s a handful of tiny twinkle-lights dotting your kitchenette shelves. Outside the window, a net of stringed lights shimmer against the newly-gathering night. The Captain isn’t deterred by your frantic lack of eye contact or your sputtered semi-denial, though. He’s twisted in his seat on the couch, peering over the back of the cushions with his head at a ridiculous angle. He rolls his eyes. “Don’t try to lie. I can see right through you, kid.” Your fingers fuss at the back of your skull and you wince. Your somersaulting belly decides to tie itself in a neat knot of dread instead. “Does it — look bad?”

read more on ao3 ✩࿐࿔ for nonnie ♡ ✩࿐࿔ take what you need masterlist | take what you need queue

need more reminders from rocket?

the world is hard, and sometimes it's difficult to complete daily tasks & take care of yourself (aka rocket bullies you for your own damn good).

feel free to ✩ request reminders ✩ via reblogs, asks, and tumblr or ao3 comments if they would be helpful for you. it may take me a hot minute to get to them depending on life n stuff, but i will do my best. ♡ view the take what you need queue to see upcoming installations & the current backlog. SOFT HIATUS: feel free to request things but i am going to take a brief break from twyn after chapter 29 posts next month. i got a few requests here on tumblr for other things i'd like to take a crack at!

this is about as wholesome as it gets (for me) i think. can be read platonically or romantically. mcu-based anthology, meant to take place post-volume-3, but headcanon however you want ♡

✩࿐࿔ take what you need masterlist

eat somethin. (wc: 576)

go to frickin bed already. (wc: 737)

get outta bed & get your shit done.(wc: 925)

take a damn bath. (wc: 1,375)

leave your frickin skin alone. (wc: 1,579)

take a fuckin study break.(wc: 1,020)

drink some goddamn water. (wc: 1,209)

stop destroying your frickin clothes. (wc: 1,609)

just buy the damn thing already. (wc: 1,271)

it's frickin laundry day. (wc: 1,923)

get some sunshine, sunshine. (wc: 1,614)

did you take your damn meds today? (wc: 1,288)

schedule your fuckin' appointments.(wc: 1,222)

do your goddamn dishes. (wc: 994)

brush your frickin' teeth. (wc: 1,774)

nobody fuckin hates you (wc: 1,231)

stop biting your goddamn nails (wc: 2,920)

take a frickin' shower (wc: 1,359 )

take care of your fuckin injury (wc: 2,102)

cook some goddamn food. (wc: 2,707)

clean your frickin room. (wc: 2,465)

stop hittin shit. (wc: 1,862)

do your frickin homework. (wc: 2,121 )

chill the fuck out. (wc: 1,499)

i'm damn proud a' you, kid. (wc: 1,639)

fuck heartache. (wc: 1,781)

stop frickin' apologizing. (wc: 1,207)

brush your fucking hair. (wc: 1,649)

if you find any of these at all helpful, they're meant for you.

teacup and teal line dividers by @/saradika-graphics | support banner by @/saradika-graphics | raccoon divider by @/thecutestgrotto. total wordcount: 43,690.

Mantis: I fall in love with others regardless of their gender, appearance, species or personality.

Rocket: That explains why you’re into Nebula.

[A plate is thrown at Rocket, presumably by Nebula]

The H.E. Deserved worse.

Tw blood , trauma

-

POV: you’re the high evolutionary😭😭😭

Enjoy!!