and I thought I was mistaken and I thought I heard you speak

[ceptme]

After everything that's happened, it's jarring to come back to Berhert and see it just the way they'd left it.

Or well...just the way he'd left it anyway. The assorted Ravager corpses already half stripped of meat by the local wildlife probably come as an unpleasant surprise to Quill, who'd been long gone on hell's family reunion by then. The familiar reek of death hangs heavily in the air around the crash site. There's something a touch unnerving about seeing those familiar red leathers and flame patches in the cold light of day, caught in traps he set. He wonders how many of them he fought beside in the skies over Xandar. How many faces he'd recognise if he let himself stop for long enough to look.

He stands in silence with Quill, face turned towards the sky as the looming shadow of the ship recedes into the distance with a vast, shuddering thrum of engines. If he's honest with himself, he's not enjoying the experience of being left behind on Berhert without a ride again. But the there's no helping it. The ship needs repairs of her own, and ones lengthier and more involved than what it'll take to get the Milano up and running again. None of them had been entirely happy with the thought of parting ways again so soon after everything that happened, but the fact of the matter is, they need the Milano. In the time it'll take their newly-acquired flagship to limp to the nearest friendly post for repairs, they'll already have the Milano spaceworthy, and probably beat the others there.

The clearing they've set down in - the most convenient one large enough for the bulk of the bigger ship - is a fair walk from the crash site, through a similarly gruesome tableau. Rocket's grown numb to things that'd turn anyone's stomach, but eau de rotting corpse still isn't his first choice. He's holding onto the thought that the smell hopefully won't be as bad in the area right around the Milano; he'd deliberately kept the fight away from the ship, mindful that Groot was in no fit state to be trying to back him up.

He's still pretty sure he could have come out on top of that little scuffle if it hadn't been for Yondu's damn arrow, but if there's a time and a place to bring that up, this certainly isn't it.

He wrinkles his nose at a particularly well-fried corpse and jerks his head toward the treeline. "C'mon," he says, not looking up at Quill. "We got a long way to go. Better get moving if we wanna be set up at the crash site before it gets dark."

Comments

[turdblossoms]

At lot has happened over the last few months, the last few weeks. There's a chance that he hasn't fully processed all of it yet. Sometimes, mostly in those dark quiet moments shivering in sweat damp sheets after he's been shocked awake from nightmares, of sharp thorns of light cutting through him or Yondu floating just out of arms reach struggling to breathe, he can almost convince himself that all of it was just one big bad dream.

Almost, because there's no lie that'll quiet the guilt gnawing up through the bottom of his stomach to sit like acid at the base of his throat, tightening up like a vice every time he tries to swallow around it. There's no amount of imagination that can trick his brain into seeing the sleek lines of the Milano in the steel beams above his bed or believable reassurances that'll promise him he could still find the comm frequencies to a Ravager ship that no longer exists.

He knows it's his fault, is the thing. No one will say it, not even if anyone is thinking it. They're all a dozen different breeds of asshole but even they have lines they won't cross with their own team, which whatever is left of this ragtag family they accidentally ended up knee deep in. But Peter doesn't need them to tell him what he already knows: if he hadn't been so desperate to swallow Ego's hook, none of this would have ever happened.

Fuck, or at least most of it. Peter hasn't been able to bring himself to ask Kraglin what happened when the man seems half ready to snap under whatever miserable guilt of his own that he's been shouldering since they pulled Peter into the ship still clutching Yondu's body, but the list of reasons a captain and his first mate show up without the rest of their crew isn't very long. It was either an attack or a mutiny, and Peter is pretty sure which one put the haunted look in Kraglin's eyes.

Ego is on him, though, and there's no two ways about that. If he'd taken a minute to just...see what was in front of him, if he just tried to look through all the bullshit instead of chasing some 8 year old's dream of what a father was suppose to look like he might still have one.

Hindsight is funny like that, he guesses, and no amount of grief is ever going to undo all the mistakes he made to get where he's standing.

Which is also, hilariously enough, the last fucking place in the galaxy he actually wants to be standing even if it means getting the Milano back.

He'd tried to steel himself for coming back to Berhert. On the surface, it honestly isn't the worst place in the world they could have picked for an emergency crash landing. It's quiet and remote with no immediate or pressing threat of savage wildlife or bloodthirsty locals to put a hitch in their plans of patching the Milano enough to get her back in the air, and if the worse thing he had to deal with was memories of Ego crawling their way up under his skin, well, hell, he's definitely survived worse.

And then sees the bodies.

Correction: smells the bodies.

The scent of decaying bodies, of death, isn't something you can scrub out of your senses once it sets in the first time and it feels like they hit a fucking wall of it the minute they come out of the airlock. It takes longer, through those first few unsteady twists of his stomach and the knee jerk instinct to recoil away from it, to understand exactly what it is that Peter is looking at and all at once the ground seems to drop right out from under him.

He never asked what happened here after they left with Ego, or even how Rocket and Groot ended up with Yondu in the first place. With everything that had been going on the only thing that Peter could manage at the time was relief that they were all okay, that they were together. He never stopped to ask what it had to have taken for them all to get that far.

He's been watching Rocket cannibalize anything he can get his hands on to make weapons for too long to be able to miss his handy work in the traps dotted around the fallen bodies, sitting innocently between glimpses of torn red leathers and strips of what had once been people. His people.

Ravagers come and go, sometimes, either because they stepped off at some port and decided to disappear or because they'd fucked up bad enough to have their flames stripped from them or because they took a hit they couldn't get back up from, but...he knew most of them. Grew up among them and took his licks from them and learned what they'd teach him and, yeah, some of them were real pieces of work. Some of them were the kind of assholes he stayed wary around even with the threat of Yondu's wrath making people think twice about messing with him too much.

But for better or worse, they were the only family he ever had out here and now--

He almost jumps when Rocket's voice breaks through the white noise hum building in his head, dragging his eyes up from the bodies ripped apart around them to find the hard lines of Rocket's face. He doesn't think it's just a coincidence that Rocket seems to be looking anywhere but at him. Peter doesn't think he could call him on it even if he wanted to when he isn't sure he can trust his own voice.

"Yeah." It's a thin rasp of a thing, almost getting caught on something jagged lining his throat, and it takes just about everything in him not to look back down and try to but names to whatever dead-eyed faces might be intact enough to recognize. "Yeah, let's go."

It's harder to get his feet moving again than he'd like to admit, forcing one in front of the other and trying to keep his mind as blank as possible before anything ugly roots too deep(how can you just turn your back on them, they were your fucking family--). He knows they got a long trek in front of them before they can make camp. The last thing they need is to be held up right now over shit no one can change.

The body count only racks up as they walk, the serene beautiful of the dense forest marred by bodies dropped like ragdolls, mangled by whatever animals found them or else burnt up or bloody from whatever trap Rocket caught them in, and while it doesn't exactly get easier to breathe around the tight knot in his chest, cinching tighter with every body they pass, he does feel a little less likely to empty his stomach into the nearest bush if he opens his mouth too wide.

He swallows hard, cutting a sideways look at Rocket, and doesn't even know if he wants an answer when he asks, "what the hell happened?"

[ceptme]

Forest terrain isn't his preference to work with. He'll take urban over it any time, something artificial and made by sentient hands, because even when it comes from a wholly alien culture there's always a kind of logic to how things fit together. There's always technology, something he can break apart and turn to his own ends. After spending so much of what he remembers of his life on ships and space stations, it feels wrong not to have the low vibration of engines under his feet.

But wild places have their advantages too. There's something primal in the heart of every sentient being, an animal part of the brain which remembers a time before civilisation too deeply for any amount of reason to overrule it, which instinctively fears an unfamiliar wilderness. All it takes is a tangible threat, something waiting in the shadows, and even the most hardened space scum will buckle under the weight of his own imagination. Numbers are no advantage when frightened senses are suddenly convinced that the enemy is lurking behind every tree.

If he closes his eyes he can still see the shifting shadows of the forest at night, still hear the Ravager boots loud and clumsy through the undergrowth, every trap a beacon in his mental map of the terrain. Most of them are still visible, in their effects if nothing else; the forest floor is littered with scorch marks and broken branches scattered among the decaying bodies. It's almost jarring to come back and see the aftermath of his handwork after enough time has passed for the dust to settle. Usually he's long gone before the bodies have even gone cold.

He's aware of Quill's gaze taking in the carnage around them as they walk. He tells himself it doesn't bother him. They've been running together long enough for Quill to know exactly what he's capable of. It's hardly a surprise.

He should have expected the question, really. They haven't had much time since what happened to fill people in on the bits they missed, and the awkward silence over the bilgesnipe in the airlock isn't exactly helping with their communication issues either. But it's only when Quill breaks the quiet they've been walking in that it really dawns on him that...they never did fill the others in on what happened here after they split up. Nebula had been on her way again with barely a word as soon as she was healed enough to walk straight, which is something Rocket respects, and Groot has documented issues when it comes to lengthy explanations. And as for Kraglin, anyone can see the poor fucker's in no fit state to be trying to talk about what happened. Not without a vat of booze and someone a hell of a lot more capable of giving emotional support than anyone on their fucked up little crew.

"They came after us," he says with a small shrug, keeping his eyes on the uneven ground under his feet. "Bounty from the Sovereign. Couldn't risk 'em getting near the ship with Groot in no state to fight, so I had to get creative. Mighta figured somethin' out if it hadn't been for the whole...mutiny thing."

There's no point in getting into the ugly details: that no matter how you talk around what happened with the mutiny, Kraglin started it and Nebula ended it. It is what it is, and the dead don't hold grudges.

[turdblossoms]

He tries to imagine it. He tries to imagine the way Rocket would have sat up a little straighter when he heard the low distant ripple of noise when the Ravagers broke atmo, still for half a second before immediately moving to action. He wouldn't have known who was coming and, Peter imagines, probably wouldn't have really cared. None of them really believe in coincidence and the chances of someone just happening to stop by on the same scrap of a remote planet as them for a friendly visit are slim to fucking none. Of course he would have been ready to draw first blood.

Shit, and it wouldn't have been difficult. Rocket doesn't stay idle for long and in the relative short months they've all been together after Xandar Rocket had outfitted the Milano with enough bombs, traps, and weapons that would have put most armies to shame. He thinks he knows Rocket enough to guess that the only thought sitting front and center in the guy's mind would have been to make anyone dumb enough to follow them regret ever getting out of bed that morning.

Rocket wouldn't have known who was coming for them until he caught the first whiff of leather and whatever other miscellaneous filth Ravagers tend to be covered in at any given time and even then...

Ravagers don't play nice, not even with people they consider occasional allies. Especially not with people they consider occasional allies. They may live a lot of their life around their code but at the end of the day the Guardians aren't Ravagers and when they come trying to creep up on you with guns drawn the best thing you can hope to do is get the first shot in.

He's not angry at Rocket for doing just that. He's not even surprised. They protect their own and even if Peter had been here for it he doesn't think he would have tried to stop Rocket. The Ravagers raised him, they were his family, but their loyalty is a fickle thing and Peter is pretty sure he burned up the last of whatever goodwill he had with them when he gave Yondu the wrong orb back on Xandar.

Peter snorts out something that might have been a laugh once. "Guess no one was lyin' when they said those assholes don't know how to get over themselves, huh?" Of course they put out a bounty for them. Of course it fell into Yondu's lap. And how could he say no when it did with a ship full of eyes on him? It was never exactly a secret that the others always thought Yondu gave Peter too many chances, always let him take that mile when Yondu was only ever offering him an inch.

All at once a picture opens up for him, the word mutiny twisted up around that knot squeezed around his heart, and, really, what else would have turned Yondu's own crew against him? What else had been the repeating problem, that one constant point of silently shared contention whenever Yondu was pressed to choose between his mostly-loyal crew and the one Terran nightmare who never learned to toe the line as good as the rest of them?

"....he wasn't gonna do it, was he? Hand us over. He was angling for a double cross."

[ceptme]

They've all had to find their own ways of dealing with everything that's happened. Quill got hit harder than most, but none of them really came out of it unscathed. Rocket knows he got off lightly compared to everyone else. He wasn't all that close with anyone they lost, doesn't have any family issues to deal with; maybe he should be carrying a little more guilt than he is for kicking off all that bullshit with the sovereign, but he's been kicking around on the edges of the galaxy where the margin of survival is razor-thin for long enough to know that you can't predict the chain reaction of trouble some things start. There's no point in thinking too hard on it when he knows that relatively speaking he came away without a scratch.

Which is all well and good. But it doesn't explain the aching sense emptiness like a missing tooth he hasn't been able to stop poking at ever since.

He steps over a tangled mass of roots and shakes his head. "No," he says eventually, glancing up at Quill. "No, I don't think he was gonna." He doesn't know all that much about duty or responsibility, about what it means to try to balance the demands of captaining a rowdy crew with doing right by those that matter to you as best you can, but...well, him and Yondu had clicked a little quicker and easier than either of them were proud of. It's easy to see through bullshit when it's the same brand you're selling yourself. He gets it. And fuck, he doesn't know what he would have done in the same impossible position.

The smell of decaying flesh is thankfully starting to fade a little as they get closer to the wreck of the Milano, replaced by a whiff of ozone and scorched metal on the air. They're lucky the wind is with them. It's going to be a rough enough haul getting the ship up and running again as things stand; he could do without having the constant carrion reek of a battlefield hanging over them the whole time on top of that.

"I think we coulda figured something out," he says with a small shrug. "If we'd had more time. But I guess by then it was already too late. The rest of the crew weren't gonna wear it."

[turdblossoms]

Maybe he should be angry at Rocket for more of this. For stealing batteries they didn't need, for outright insulting the Sovereign for no other reason than because he could, for fighting with Peter over the Milano's controls and helping wreck them on this stupid planet in the first place. For killing Ravagers. Maybe he should be angry at him or blame him, but he isn't and he doesn't want to. They've all done some stupid shit, whether it was necessary or just out of spite, but no one ever expects for it to feed into things so far in front of them that they can't see where the bottom falls out. None of this was really Rocket's fault and Peter knows it. If he wants someone to blame that bad all he's gotta do is look in a mirror.

Peter snorts softly and shoves his fists deep in his pockets. "On a ship like that, all you need is just a few too many assholes with more balls than brains." It's an echo of something Yondu told him once, Peter all of eight years old and staring up at Yondu caught somewhere between wide eyed fear and angry determination to get back to Earth. And don't'chu be one of them assholes, boy, 'cause I ain't mind havin' one less belly to keep full. "Once a fire like that gets started, it's gonna be a bloodbath any way you slice it."

It was easier once to believe that Yondu only kept him around because he was useful but part of him, some tiny little flicker hiding behind his breastbone, always knew that wasn't a whole truth. Yondu was an asshole on even his best day, sharp and mean and prickly, delighting in winding up whoever he could just for kicks. He might have told Peter he was only good for squeezing into tight spaces and he might have threatened to eat him, to kill him, whenever he didn't want to toe the line, but Yondu still raised him, still taught him to shoot and fly and fight and steal. Yondu taught him to survive and maybe he couldn't risk losing face by being soft, maybe he didn't know how to be soft, but he cared. Even if Peter had been stupid and stubborn enough to dig his feet in over it not looking how he thought it was suppose to, he knows Yondu always cared.

"But I guess it doesn't matter much now, huh?" He pretends not to notice how tight his voice sounds just on the edges, threatening to collapse no matter how hard Peter is trying to force his tone to stay casual. Luckily he thinks he has a pretty good chance of Rocket pretending not to notice it either.

The air is blessedly clearer up ahead, the mess of bodies eventually thinning out and giving way instead to the chaos of broken tree limbs the Milano left behind on her clumsy crash landing. If they didn't know they were walking in the right direction before, the huge swath their ship savagely cleared would have solidly confirmed it and Peter can't help but think that it was lucky they only broke through mostly uninhabited forest. His shoulders feel heavy enough without adding the destruction of another city full of people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Ozone and scorched metal might be worlds better to have stuck in your nose than rotting bodies, but there's still something ugly that twists in his stomach for it all the same. He's never liked seeing the Milano take damage, even from the very start when he managed to pry ownership of her out of Yondu's hands, and it's not exactly a secret that Peter never learned how to let things go. Especially not now, not when he's desperately in need of something familiar to cling to, something to prove that his memories are real and reassure him that he won't forget. He got his second chance with the Milano back on Xandar. He can't help but hope that with Rocket at his side to fit the pieces back together, he might get a third.

Still, he can't help but let out a low whistle when they finally make it to the clearing the put the Milano down in, his hands on his hips as his eyes take in the mess they had to leave her in and his stomach turns over a little for how much worse the damage is than he remembers. "We sure did a number on her this time, didn't we?" If Rocket thinks they can get her back in the air again, Peter believes him, but that doesn't make it look any less impossible. "Fuck."

[ceptme]

Rocket snorts. "Guess we got some of that goin' around on our ship too," he says, casting Quill a wry, sideways look. It's as close as he's ever going to come to admitting that he might have fucked up by fighting Quill over the controls right before they met Berhert's tree-covered surface at high velocity. Either of them could have made that flight blind if they hadn't been too damn busy bickering over who got to sit in the hot seat. But for better or for worse, it's never exactly been in his nature to sit back and let someone else take the controls.

Having people he can count on when push comes to shove isn't something he has a huge amount of experience with. In as long as he can remember, ever since he first came to in a sterile white room with nothing in his head to tell him who or what he was but pain and driving fury, there's only ever been Groot. And if he's honest with himself, he knows the fact that their partnership has endured owes a lot more to Groot's patience and good nature than it does to any positive qualities on his part. He doesn't know how to defer to someone else and trust them to lead the way. He's never had to before.

He can hear the cracks in Quill's offhanded tone, but even he has the basic courtesy to pretend he doesn't notice a damn thing. There's a whole conversation there he doesn't know how to even begin to navigate, an abyss of guilt and grief and regret that he couldn't touch even if he wanted to. Even if it was his place to. It's real people shit of the highest order, dealing with losing family, and Rocket knows it's nothing he's remotely equipped to understand.

The Milano though. That's something he can see and touch, something he knows how to fix. She's torn up pretty bad, but he'd made a solid catalogue of what needed fixed and made some headway on getting started before Yondu's crew caught up with them. It's all fixable. It'll be a few days of hard work, and it won't be pretty or perfect at the end, but they have what they need to at least get her airborne again. Once they catch up with the others they can deal with the rest.

The view she makes when they clear the treeline isn't the most reassuring one, tendrils of smoke still rising raggedly from her torn hull. But he's salvaged more pitiful piles of scrap in his time; he's confident he can get her to break orbit, and after that, all they really need is for the main drive and life support to last long enough to let them limp off to a friendly port with a decent dry-dock.

"Four days' work," he says, bumping his shoulder up against Quill's. "A week tops. We'd already made some headway before everything went to shit."

The smell of ozone only gets stronger as they approach the ship; she's definitely got a coolant leak somewhere. The sinter beam's still sitting where he'd left it, ready to continue knitting the hull back together as soon as it's reprogrammed with the shape of the next section of plating. Those tools he hadn't hastily grabbed to serve as makeshift weapons are still scattered around the floor near the hatch. It's almost as though he'd just stepped away for a few moments, instead of a few weeks and the near destruction of all sentient life in the galaxy.

He squints critically at the sky where it's already flaring fiery shades of sunset beyond the spindly silhouettes of the treetops. "Dunno if we can get anything much done before it gets dark," he says. "But if you wanna get a fire going, I'll walk you through the damage report."

[turdblossoms]

There's no stopping the smile that curls on his face when Rocket's shoulder knocks up against his, small and tired but genuine in its warmth. For as often as they like to catch on each other, bickering until Gamora is ready to kill them both or else Peter somehow getting coaxed into a game of chicken he's incapable of backing down from(but that he rarely wins), he likes Rocket. They all got their baggage and he suspects Rocket's is probably more fucked up than any of the rest of theirs put together, but he's still here and, even if he'd probably laugh in Peter's face if he suggested it, he knows Rocket is doing the best he can to figure out how this teamwork shit is suppose to go down. It's all they can ask from each other. Fuck, it's more than enough. "After saving the universe a couple times what's a few days of puttin' in some elbow grease, right?"

He knows it could be a lot worse than a week of hard work to get his baby up and going again. He could be doing it alone, for one thing, which would only yield mixed, potentially literally explosive results. Whether or not his ego would ever let him admit out loud that the Milano might benefit under the sweet, sweet love of another mechanic's hands, he knows that he's damn lucky Rocket had been willing to come back to Berhert with him to finish what he started.

And it turns out that, for once, the luck just keeps on coming for them. The pro to touching down in the middle of some massive fuck off forest is that there's no shortage of wood to burn and coaxing a fire big enough to keep them warm for the night to life is only a matter of a little TLC and patience. There's something steadying in it, something calming, to letting his mind hit a little bit of autopilot while he's stripping bark and stacking wood and stoking a flame around it all, poking at it until he's satisfied enough to see what kind of rations they have to work with for the next handful of days. The Milano stays much better stocked on food and water these days than it ever did while Peter was flying solo, partly out of necessity and mostly because people like Gamora are smart enough to take inventory more than once every few weeks, and while they may not be looking at any five star feasts they should have enough to keep the two of them going until they can drag themselves into a real port. They'll be fine.

Unless, of course, the local wildlife decides it's tired of old Ravager and want to see what else is on the menu, but they'll just have to shoot that bridge whenever it tries to sneak up on them.

"Alright," he says when he settles up around the fire, his jacket tossed over the log he's sitting on and a bowl of something that smells much better than it probably tastes in hand. He tries for a crooked grin that probably misses the mark by miles, but it's just gonna have to do. "Talk dirty to me. What are we looking at?"

[ceptme]

Say what you will about the Ravagers, there's no denying that they know what they're doing when it comes to ships. The Milano is living proof that you can put an M-ship through hell and she'll keep on limping along long after lesser ships would have given up the ghost. She was as good as new once she'd been repaired after the crash on Xandar. He doesn't doubt that they'll be able to restore her to her old self again this time with a little care and elbow grease. He checks her over as Quill sets up the campsite they're going to be calling home for the next few days. The wind has blown fallen leaves into the ship, and the interior has clearly been investigated by a few curious animals if the muddy paw-prints on the floor are anything to judge by, but other than that things are much as he left them.

Night is falling by the time he steps out of the ship into the warm, flickering light of their campfire. There's a chill creeping into the air as the sun slips down somewhere beyond the treeline and the sky starts to grow dark. It's always a little strange to see the stars from the surface of a planet, dim and distant through the haze of the atmosphere; from down here, it's almost understandable why planetbound races start off believing that the sky is a vault with points of light painted onto it, tiny and static just that little bit further beyond the clouds. They seem untouchable, impossibly cold and distant.

He crouches down beside the fire and helps himself to a bowl of whatever it is that's simmering in the pot. He doesn't know what it is, but it's hot and plentiful with a savoury smell, and a texture to it which promises to be filling. It'll do just fine.

"It's not as bad as it could be," he says, steam billowing up into the cool night air from his bowl as he settles in to sit by the fire. "Hull's pretty torn up, but structurally there ain't actually all that much damage. Patch job mostly." He stirs the contents of the bowl, poking distractedly at it with a spoon. "Apart from that...we'll have a better idea what needs done systems-wise once we get the power lines that got ripped loose in the crash reconnected and we can run diagnostics. Software might need a hard reset or two. Physically, it's mostly gonna be about gettin' her airtight again."