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

[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."