Archive of Our Own

𖥧𖤣༉˖°‧₊˚ ⋅

There’s a thud at the door.

There’s a thud at the door — as if someone had thrown their entire body against it — and it slaps you out of your reverie. You’d been lost — for moments, or hours — turning over gold and silver-soaked memories like frost-rimed autumn leaves you’d almost forgotten. You can still almost smell them — taste them on your tongue, thin and crisp.

Old, long-lost autumns on Terra.

Bonfires when the evenings started lengthen, and the fireplace once the nights grew too cold. Hot chocolate, sweet and creamy. Crinkling amber leaves rattling the sky, pressed like dried butterfly wings against the gray cold — sweeping around your shuffled feet in heaps of crumpled paper. The warm comfort-meals your mother used to make, even when money was tight.

You’d forgotten about all the details, really.

After all, it’s not like you’ve had a lot of reminders. Knowhere doesn’t exactly have autumns — or weather, really — after all.

And honestly, you haven’t been cold since the new Guardians moved in, and their chief engineer — also, ironically, the new Captain — had fixed all the climate control systems in the skull. You’d gotten spoiled, you suppose: comfortable in nothing more than long sleeves and the occasional armored vest; sturdy boots and woven pants.

But now Knowhere is stalled in the ice-belt of the Thneed system, battered by shards of something like sleet. Hailstones flurry into the skull through the Maxillary Cavities, and glaze the observation deck in the Mandible Region with verglas. The skull just happens to have broken down in the worst part of the belt: every frozen chunk of space-water is currently being shattered and buffeted by powerful magnetized winds flaring from Fron’s central star, and even the manufactured atmospheric bubble can’t fully keep out the torrent of currents and blasts of broken ice.

The point is — it’s cold. It’s so cold. Your little radiator is not intended to stand up to this kind of temperature. You’d already closed every sliding hatch in your little Knowhere home, trying to keep the heat in your tiny kitchen-and-commons room. Then you’d doubled up on your shirts and socks, added your warmest jacket, and loaded your arms with some spare blankets before heading next door to help your neighbor. Xlomo Smeth has no familiarity with this kind of weather at all, so you’d walked him through radiator safety and how to keep warm. The sudden plunge into old, cold-weather habits had twisted up smoky-gold memories of icicle-autumns, and you’d recalled helping your mother cellophane the windows: taping the plastic down at the sills, using a hairdryer to seal them.

You don’t have hairdryers like that on Knowhere — nor do you have cellophane — but you’d helped your neighbor stuff clean cloth in the edges of his window frames, and hang heavy blankets like curtains to keep out the cold. Then you’d come back to your own place and started a similar process here: curtaining your windows, trying not to be distracted by the glittering whorls and flowers already frosting up the glass — then dragging your mattress out in front of the glowing radiator. It had only taken a little while for you to decide that more blankets and barriers were in order, and you’d ended up dragging your small breakfast table and two chairs over to the side of your mattress, positioning them behind your little bed and draping them with a quilt-canopy to serve as a heat-reflector.

And if it happens to remind you of a blanket fort from the coziest moments of your days and dreams of childhood, who’s around to judge you? In fact, perhaps you lean into it a little — moving a strand of twinkly plasma-orbs from over your kitchen counter to instead decorate the inner edge of your half-open tent, making yourself a little tray of snacks, grabbing the old holopad you use for games and movies and sometimes books. You put some music on your smartphone — little more than a glorified record-player now that you’re out in deep space — and decide to see if you can melt down your small stores of Aladnan chocolate into something resembling hot cocoa. To be honest, while the little slabs of creamy sugar register as chocolate in your universal translator chip, they’re definitely not. They taste more like caramel and toffee and buttercream than the rich dark goodness you would’ve had back on Terra. Fortunately for you, they are still delicious — and they have a similar texture, so you’re hoping you can figure out a reasonable substitute that caters to your sudden nostalgia.

It’s all a mood, to be honest. You’re hovering around the little hotplate in your tiny kitchenette — melting soft golden bars of faux-chocolate into a dented saucepan of Xandaran cream, and savoring the warmth of the steam curling around your face and throat. The skull outside is dark and all the bony openings and inlets – some natural, some made — have created wind-tunnels that continue to flurry sleet and hail all the way to your windows, hidden behind draping blankets. You remember again the quiet sense of anticipation from your childhood: nights spent in bed, wound round and round with thick fluffy blankets. The frozen rain would rattle the windows, and you’d fall asleep wondering if the first snowfall of the year would happen overnight.

When you’d wake, though, there’d be no hint of snow. Instead — ice. The bright dazzle of sunlight, broken and bounced inside sleek pulegoso-glass sculptures — fractured iridescence licking every lingering purple aster and frothy snakeroot with a hungry sort of beauty, crystallizing the last few moments of autumn as if the world were afraid to let it go. Dripping from branches and porch-rails and eaves, glazing every leftover golden leaf with layers of polished diamond. Tall, lengthy fountains of silvergrass and golden oat — normally floating on cold breezes and crisping in the sun — would suddenly bow under the weight of their new jeweled armor. When you went outside, you’d breathe it: something in the air so thin and delicate and anticipatory, like a haze of glittery frost had blown inside your lungs and was unfurling there into flowers and snowflakes. Everything inside you would turn into a moonstone-filagree. The birds would be so quiet in the wake of the storm, and the only sound you’d hear would be the quiet crunch of your feet in the frozen grass, and the hush of your own breath: releasing your warmth out into the world, pulling the beautiful cold back in.

Now, you inhale the sweet toffee-scent of your golden-cocoa, slow and steady, and sway to the low sounds of the music, muffling from the phone still sitting on your mattress. What will Knowhere look like once the flight-engines come back on, you wonder, and the skull is moved out of the storm?

The thud — when it happens — is so loud that it shatters right through the ice-and-amber enamel of your wistful thoughts. You jump, nearly spilling your saucepan, and whirl toward the door. Is someone out there? In this? Nebula had pushed a notification to all the holopads and comms currently running on the skull’s systems to stay inside, and had issued the same warning over Knowhere’s speaker systems. You’d been part of the volunteer team that had been deployed to make sure people knew the safety recommendations for this kind of weather.

You consider opening the door, and some part of you quails. You’re just one person, on your own, and you’d already been nervous around unknown strangers before you’d even left Terra. Your first circumrotation on the skull had done nothing to allay those anxieties — back when the Collector had run the show, and every door had been quadruple-locked, and people had starved in their own kitchens or died in droves from the weird Celestial parasites they’d picked up in the mines. It’s only been a few circs since the Guardians had taken over, and things are so much better now. Sometimes you even forget to lock your door during the day.

But now it’s night, and you’re alone, and the skull has broken down in this weird stellar ice-storm. So you freeze, as certainly as if it had been you caught outside in the cold — one hand on the handle of your saucepan, and the other wielding your stirring spoon. It drips hot gold sugar, and it’s only the bright burn of a drop on your hand – combined with another jarring thump to the door — that spurs you back into action.

You are trying to be the kind of neighbor you want to have in the skull, after all. So you set aside your cocoa and your spoon, sucking on your little patch of burnt skin with a hiss, and you rush toward the door.

Still. You grab your quadblaster from where you’d left it on the table, because you might be trying to be a good neighbor but you’re not trying to be an idiot. You reach for your comm, too. Xlomo will rush over if you need his help — in spite of Nebula’s advisory — and he’s probably one of the most intimidating people you know on this chunk of bone.

And then you hit the sensor that slides open the door.

The gust of stellar wind that blows past you —- filtered through bone and manufactured atmospheric shielding — is so cold it burns, and tiny shards of ice bite your face and throat. At first, you peer into bitter darkness, eyes searching at your own level — only to feel something crash into your knees, buffeting you back as it bursts into your little home.

“Close the frickin’ door!” the invader barks without looking up, flurrying past you, almost faster than the winds themselves. You obey instinctively, back pressed to the now-closed panel and eyes wide as you take in the three-foot-tall bundle of wet wool and fur. He skirts your makeshift blanket-fort and mattress, kicking off his boots as he goes, pressing dark-clawed fingers against the soft glow of the radiator.

The motherfucking Captain.

You’d never met him. To be honest, you’d only ever met any of the Guardians in passing. You’d served Howard’s table at the Boot one time when Kraglin and Cosmo had been playing poker with them. And there was once you’d accidentally run — literally — into Mantis when she’d been skullside, visiting Nebula. Occasionally, you’d interact with Adam down at Sanna Orix’s shop, where he was always searching for trinkets from Sovereign to soothe his homesick-heartache, and you were usually trying to stock up on Aladnan chocolate.

But you’ve seen all of them, from afar. Drax, leading around a merry band of platinum-haired Star Children that included Phylla when she wasn’t away on a mission. The children, in turn, always seem to be followed by a pack of orloni and Terran squirrels, eager to pick up dropped crumbs and treats. Far less frequently, you’d catch sight of Groot, too massive to miss these days.

And you’d seen Nebula countless times, always immersed holopads, reading even while she strides briskly from place to place in the skull. To hear the gossips tell it, the files she’s always so engrossed in might include anything from order spreadsheets to city-planning guides, governance ethics to x-rated love-letters from Mantis.

And then — rarest of all, and only from a distance — the elusive captain. Rocket.

He spends most of his time in space, as far as you know. Hopping from planet to space station to moon, and back again. Described as a lovable curmudgeon by Hoobtoe, a hilarious storyteller by Bzer, and a real fuckin’ piece of shit by Howard. Spoken of in various tones of rueful affection and starry-eyed admiration.

Loved by all, and — from what you can tell — annoyed by every bit of it.

“The goddamn problem is that Kraglin doesn't know shit,” he cusses, his back still to you. “He thinks just because I used some of the Quadrant’s parts to make this stupid skull fly, that means he can handle it like a goddamn Ravager freighter. I keep tellin’ him. It ain’t a goddamn Ravager freighter. It’s a giant fuckin’ head. The aerodynamics aren’t for shit. It’s got a spine dragging up all sorts of galactic flotsam. And now my goddamn tail-fur’s frozen.”

He sounds aggrieved.

“Uhm,” you say softly. “That — sounds like it really sucks.”

You watch as he goes still, shoulders and spine stiffening from where he’s hunched over by the radiator, gilded by the light of twinkling plasma-orbs. His ears flick back toward you, and you haven’t seen his face since he got here but you imagine his nose is flaring quickly in that way that means he’s trying to scent something.

The something in this case, you figure, is you.

He turns slowly, ears swiveling to keep you in range as he goes — eyes already narrow. They catch the warm amber light and fling it back to you as flat ruby eyeshine.

“You ain’t Xlomo Smeth.”

“I am not,” you agree cautiously, edging from the hatch to the kitchen. Your precious cocoa is still on the heat, and you really don’t want it to burn. “He’s next door.”

The Captain’s ears flick and he eyes the entrance to your little home with a regretful, irritable snarl curling up his lip. Then he heaves a sigh of unfettered exhaustion and strides back toward his discarded boots, bedraggled ringtail nearly mopping against the floor. His fur is cluttered up with diamond drops, you realize — melted ice weighing down the ends of his whiskers, glimmering over the crown of his head in a starry halo. He’s wearing the rumpled mass of a too-large sweater pulled hurriedly over his casual clothes, with a mess of wet red yarn dripping from sodden claws that look cramped with cold.

His shoulders, surprisingly lovely and broad beneath the soaked-through sweater, drape forward in something that you recognize — instinctively, familiarly, deep in your bones — as exhaustion.

Impulse forces the breath through your vocal chords in a little indecipherable noise — a protest, maybe, or a sound of alarm. Sorrow and commiseration. You know what it’s like to be that tired. “Don’t go back out there. You’ll freeze.”

You’re going to fall asleep in the cold.

He blinks, then scoffs. “Just goin’ to Smeth’s. Didn’t mean to bust in on you. I never been to his place before — was just stopping by to warm up between working on the engine repairs.” His narrow face twists into a scowl and his ears flatten further. “I commed him to ask how to get here, but his directions frickin’ sucked.”

“Still,” you urge. “There’s no reason to go back out in — that.” His tail is dripping, the lush brush of fur looking all sad and miserable. If the frost in his pelt refreezes, you know it’ll be a hundred times worse. Dangerous. “You can stay — as long as you need. I don’t mind.” You crinkle your nose. “I bet my place is warmer, anyway. Xlomo doesn’t know what he’s doing to insulate himself, poor guy.”

He tilts his head, stare narrow — puzzling you out. Something in the corners of his eyes looks… weary. Haggard. “You always let strangers stay in your house?”

You shake your head and edge toward your cocoa again. “You’re not a stranger,” you remind him, and your voice folds into something a little more confident — and a little more wry. “Everybody knows who you are.”

He snorts, but pauses in his trudge toward his boots. “They know my name, anyway.” He squints his eyes up at you — copper now, and clear dark coffee swimming with gold flakes. Maple syrup and cinnamon-whiskey. Tired, still. “You sure you’re okay with me staying? Not trying to make myself welcome just ‘cause I’m the captain.” His voice pitches into a low mockery on the last two words, riddled with disgust. You blink, and the corner of your mouth tugs in concern.

“If I had any reservations, that would’ve put them to rest,” you say tentatively, stirring your hot cocoa. It’s a creamy, tawny color in the pan, and you see the Captain’s nose flare, just like you’d imagined earlier — picking up the scent of buttery caramel in the air, you imagine. You nod at his hands, still clenched with cold, wrapped loosely in misshapen loops of drenched and ice-crusted crimson yarn.

“That’s a look.”

His brow furrows — dark scowls forgotten — as he holds up his dark claws and tangled threads like he’s as baffled as you are.

“Kraglin gave ‘em to me,” he admits. “Said they were Pete’s when he was a kid. Told me they were meant to keep humies’ hands warm during Terran winters.”

Your eyes round out as you take in the ruined red fibers, as scarlet-bright as his eyeshine. “Those were mittens?”

He stares at his own stiff, still-frozen fingers. “That sounds right. Can’t believe these are s’posed to keep you warm. Think I’m colder ‘cause they’re so damn wet.”

“Did Kraglin cut the holes in fingers and thumbs?” you ask slowly, because now you can clearly see where someone sliced through the bright threads, and how the leftover material had simply unraveled into a pathetic mess.

The Captain snorts. “Nah. I did. Claws kept getting stuck in the threads. Figured they had some kinda self-heating tech, but if they did, it’s busted.”

You stare at him, and then turn off the heat on the cocoa. Cautiously, you approach him, and then kneel to reach for his hands. He jolts when you tug on the loose threads, pulling his fingers closer. There’s a thick crust of ice on the mittens, collected in the red cloth creases. Though it’s only starting to melt, the woven remains are clearly drenched through. Your fingers brush his, and the cold dark leather of his calluses are so cold that your own skin jumps and tightens at the touch.

“Can you straighten them?” you ask worriedly, carefully pressing your thumbs into his palms. You don’t see any blisters or discolored patches, but his fingers are still curled into the remnants of wool. You tuck your own under his cold wet cuffs: tugging the sopping wool carefully away from his pulse-points, then unspooling the tattered yarn from his hands. When he doesn’t answer, you glance up at his face.

The Captain has gone still — and when you glance up, you can see that he’s staring. Wide-awake suddenly — at least for the moment. His buttered-rum eyes follow your movements: wide and shocked, then shuttered and wary.

“Sorry,” you say with a wince, starting to pull away. “You know me even less than I know you, and here I am, putting my hands all over you.”

Still, you find yourself unable to move as he holds your stare for a moment longer. There’s the vaguest sensation of being taken apart between the cozy-gold glow and shadows. His coffee-colored eyes peer into you, assessing you like a strange new firearm or a rare bit of tech. When he finally blinks, the movement is slow and intentional — almost lazy. Your hands skitter back into your lap.

“Sorry,” you repeat, and you suddenly couldn’t care less about the cold because your face is burning. “I just — I was worried about frostbite.” Your voice crumples apart at the end. The silence lingers and you duck your head, embarrassed and brimful of regret, shoulders tensing with the urge to cringe. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable—“

He interrupts your thoughts with a voice that suddenly seems unbearably smoky. “No need to be sorry, sugar.” One sharp canine flashes as he grimaces and splays his fingers out in response to your question: flexing and stretching each digit against the honeyed light. There’s something still weary in his eyes, but he slants an unexpected smirk at you. “Hard to make someone uncomfortable when they pack as much firepower as I do.”

A startled laugh huffs out of your mouth, and your shoulders ease. You rock back on your heels.

“My bedroom’s probably actually freezing, but if you want to get into something dry, I have a stack of clean laundry on the chair in there,” you offer. Obviously, he won’t fit into any of your pants and there wouldn’t be an accommodation for his tail anyway — but he’ll warm up quicker if he changes what he can, and his own pants don’t look that damp. “Feel free to layer up on shirts and socks — bring out your wet clothes and I’ll hang them above the radiator.”

He blinks up at you again. His eyes are so pretty, despite the wariness and fatigue. “You’re giving me your clothes now?” He raises a brow, and even though his tone is teasing, there’s a tension underneath. “You tryin’ to get in the Captain’s good graces or whatever?”

It’s your turn to scoff. “Maybe I just don’t want to get murdered by the masses if they find out you croaked on my watch.” You slant him a playful smile with soft eyes, hoping he knows you don’t mean it.

He blinks again, then barks a bitter, broken laugh and shakes his head. “All right. M’gonna take you up on the offer for a dry frickin’ shirt and some socks.”

You gesture him toward the bedroom door and rise, turning back to the hotplate and the kitchenette counter. The golden cocoa swirls gently in the saucepan, untouched and still hot as you pocket the sodden mittens, then rummage through a drawer for a ladle. The steam is toffee-rich and fragrant, curling through the dim light while you fill two mugs, humming to yourself and pulling out a tiny tin of Indigarran harvest-spice, which reminds you of something like cinnamon and something like vanilla.

“What’re you makin’?”

You jump and spin on one heel, startled to find him already behind you — wet sweater traded in for what appears to be two of the long-sleeved shirts you’d collected on Knowhere and the hoodie you’d been wearing when you’d gotten scooped. He adjusts the quadruple-cuffed wrists meticulously around his knuckles, though the sleeves are still bunched-up and overlong. The hemline drags down to his knees, and he’s replaced his drenched socks with at least two pairs of yours. They droop around his ankles and you have to bite your lip and clench your ladle to fight back the sudden — and extremely problematic — urge to pick him up and snuggle him.

He’s adorable. And you bet he smells like ice and evergreen and engine fuel.

His brow creases. “What?”

“Nothing,” you say quickly, and pick up both mugs. “I was trying to make a drink based on a Terran tradition,” you explain. “I don’t have all the right ingredients, but I think it’ll be good anyway. Sweet, and warm.” You glance at him apologetically as you move toward your mattress by the radiator, and his gaze follows you under hooded eyes. “I don’t know if you like sweet things, but if nothing else, holding onto it’ll heat up your hands.”

He makes a strangled, grunting noise. When you glance up from where you’re trying to carefully lower yourself to the mattress while balancing both mugs, his eyes are throwing back that implacable, flat ruby-shine.

“I like sweet things just fine,” he grumbles, half-under his breath. But then he’s next to you, and you marvel at how quickly he can move, even in your oversized socks. He plucks the cocoa from your hands, and you toss him a grateful look as you lower yourself the rest of the way before accepting one back.

“You can sit,” you urge, tapping the mattress beside you. A scrawl of hesitation tugs across his features, but then he lowers himself next to you, damp tail flicking against the blankets between your knees and his. He cradles the mug in his dark palms, and you do the same — breathing in the cinnamon-rich smell of caramel and cream and cardamom, letting your own breaths hover and linger between the glow of the twinkling orbs and the radiator. The music from your phone lilts quietly. Outside, the stellar winds bursting from Thneed rattle through the skull, and chips of ice scatter against your blanket-curtained window in an endless cascade of silvery-glass marbles. For a moment, everything feels easy and warm.

“So what’s in the drink?”

You blink slow lashes down at him before registering the words. “Uhm, cream and Aladnan chocolate, mostly. Some harvest-spice.”

“Huh.” He stares consideringly down into his cup, then eyes you suspiciously. “Well, you first.”

You can’t help but laugh softly and tilt your lips into the curve of your cup, blowing softly on the molten gold. “Patience, Captain,” you chide. “It’s still too hot. Just enjoy the feel of it in your hands for now. Let it bring up your body-temp.” Your smile widens and warms. “I’ll tell you when it’s safe to drink.”

His lip curls in something vaguely contemptuous, but you don’t think it’s directed at you. Still, he lifts the mug, and kisses the heated rim of the ceramic against his closed mouth — letting the steam wrap lovingly around the tip of his cold nose and still-dripping whiskers. A grin tilts into your cheek.

“You’re not used to slowing down, are you?”

You can see him stiffen in surprise, but then his ears shift forward toward the radiator glow. His shoulders ease and he shrugs.

“Never had time for it.”

You release a contented breath and set your mug carefully on the floor beside the mattress, then lean back onto your palms. “Me neither.” You raise your shoulders in a half-shrug, and watch him carefully from the corner of your eyes. “Not before the Guardians became the new landlords, anyway. You’ve all changed things here.”

He snorts. “Not me.”

You tilt your head. “Pretty sure the skull didn’t fly before,” you say lightly. “That’s a change.”

He snorts and scrubs one dark palm over his face: pinching between his brows, pulling down on his whiskers. “That’s workin’ out great right now, ain’t it?”

Your mouth twists consideringly. “People are safe,” you offer up slowly to the golden glow and steep shadows. “Nebula sent out notifications. Drax made sure all the kids were tucked securely into their homes, with their families. Cosmo and Adam coordinated volunteers who were familiar with cold weather to make sure every household and apartment was briefed on safety and had working radiators and plenty of rations, and I’m pretty sure we got everyone.”

He blinks over at you again, those velvet lashes of his feathering open with something like intrigue. “You helped with that?”

You shrug. “I’m trying to be the kind of neighbor I want to have on Knowhere,” you admit into the shadows, saying it out loud for the first time. The words feel warm in your mouth and your belly: hesitant, but nourishing. “And as for the rest of it—“ You sway slightly and bump your warm upper arm into his shoulder. “—I don’t mind it. A few days like this. It reminds me of being a kid on Terra.”

He studies you. “You know stellar winds are radioactive, don’t you?”

You slant a glance at him. “I have a feeling you’d be a lot more frantic right now if the atmospheric shields weren’t holding.”

He sighs, and his shoulders slump. He glowers into his golden cocoa. You lean forward to pluck your own mug off the floor and take a tentative sip, and smile.

It’s good. Buttery caramel and bright toffee, cream and vanilla and the faintest nibble of autumn-spice against your tongue. It feels like it fills you with the last sunlit rays of mid-November, or the whisper of heat from a glowing radiator.

“You can drink now,” you offer. “If you want.”

He hesitates, but dips his nose to the rim of the ceramic. You pretend not to notice when he discretely scoops some up with his tongue. Then his ears flick forward and his eyebrows raise, and he darts a glance at you.

You let a smile flirt with your lips. “Not bad, right?”

He grunts noncommittally, but turns back to his cocoa — more intent, this time. Outside, the wind howls. The radiator hums, and the music fills all the cracks in-between. You listen to the quiet percussion of the Captain’s lapping tongue, and take another sip.

“Being the Captain must be hard,” you note quietly, once you’ve swallowed down all that autumn-sunlight and sweetness. “Exhausting.”

You can feel his scowl, even if you’re not looking at him.

“Pete seemed to have it down.”

You crinkle your nose. “Star-Lord?”

The Captain’s ears flick back and his brow lowers. “Yeah. Pete. Star-Lord.”

You hum an apologetic note. “Look… I never met the guy. And people obviously loved him. And I know he was going through a lot — grieving, and lonely. But I’ve never heard anyone accuse him of having it down. Or, like — knowing what he was doing in general.”

You’re pretty sure that‘s a rueful, affectionate smirk tugging at his whiskers now, and you bump him again with your arm.

“And look. I don’t know your situation. But I’ve seen Phylla, and I’ve met Adam. And I know Groot is your kid.” You take a breath and try to make your voice light and cozy-warm. “And I gotta say, I assume you’re doing a lot more parenting on mission than Pete ever had to.”

He snorts at that, and this time there’s a note of fondness in it. Something behind your sternum flickers, and then gently ignites — a little candleflame, breathed into existence.

“It’s okay to be tired,” you say quietly. “And it’s okay to rest.” You let another wry note enter the softness of your voice. “Whatever Kraglin fucked up will still be waiting to be fixed in the morning.”

There’s a strangled sound, and then a snicker — and it turns into a laugh, and that’s even better than the golden cocoa cradled in your palms. You smile into it.

“Captain? Rocket?”

You startle at the crackling voice, and the Captain hisses a curse before fumbling under the hoodie he’s wearing — your hoodie — before pulling out his comm and pinching the bridge of his nose again.

“Yeah, Smeth.”

“You okay, Captain? You never showed up—“

He rolls his eyes and you disguise your grin with another sip of your drink.

“Yeah. Musta got turned around in the dark.” He casts a companionably wide-eyed look at you — Can you believe this guy? — and adds, “I ended up at your neighbor’s. Uh—“

He breaks off, like he suddenly realizes he never asked for your name, but you just grin. “Hey, Xlomo.”

“Oh, hey!” your neighbor says, sounding pleased. “I wanted to thank you! The blankets on the windows really helped, I think—“

“It’s late,” the Captain snaps, then grimaces. “Thank ‘em tomorrow.” He winces again, then shakes his head, like he’s having a hard time getting the hang of something. When he opens his mouth once more, his voice has shifted into something a shade friendlier. “And — thanks for checkin’ in, Smeth.”

“Of course, Captain! Stay warm tonight!”

The comm crackles into quietude. For a moment, you both sit, and then drink from your mugs in unison.

“So,” you say slowly, setting your cocoa aside. You pull the rumple of red yarn from your pocket. Most of the melted ice has been pressed out — dampening the fabric of your own pants instead. “Can I repurpose this?”

The Captain’s eyes catch the firelight, and something reluctant twitches the corner of his mouth.

“They — uh. They used to be Pete’s,” he echoes from earlier, and then clicks his sharp teeth shit. You study him — then the yarn.

The Captain is sentimental. Who would’ve guessed?

“They’re — kind of unusable like this,” you say slowly. “I’d like to unravel them — use them to hang your wet clothes over the radiator.” You nod to the pile of cableknit and armored letter and synth-cotton weave he’d left by the door, sometime between exiting your bedroom and spooking you in the kitchenette. It’s all meticulously-folded, but clearly sitting in an actual puddle. You rub the damp crimson fibers between your thumb and forefingers. “I could make you something else with the rest of it,” you offer carefully.

He hesitates still.

“Yeah,” he says after a moment, staring down into his cocoa like it has answers to questions he can’t ask. “Yeah, whatever. Sure.”

You hum another note, and take another sip of your cocoa, and begin to carefully unravel what’s left of the mittens. You can feel his eyes on you: watchful — warm. He laps at his drink again, then shifts beside you on the mattress and clears his throat.

“So. Uh. What’s your name?”

You slant an amused smile up at him, untangling the wool. “Better not to say,” you tell him, leaning toward him and dropping your voice into a conspiratorial whisper. “You don’t know who I am and we’ve never officially met. If we stay strangers, then you can tell me whatever you want, and we can pretend it doesn’t matter.”

He blinks wide eyes. You have the feeling you're startling him a lot tonight. “What?”

You hum and focus again on the yarn, picking through the last few stitches. “You can tell me how tired you are, or how much you secretly dislike being the Captain, or how annoying Steemie Blueliver is—“

“He is,” the Captain hisses, like he can’t believe he’s found a kindred spirit in you. “How does nobody else see it?”

“—and when you leave, you never have to see me again. It can be like… well, not screaming into the void, so much as confiding in it.” You shrug one shoulder. “And if you decide you want to know my name after all, you can come back and ask. After all—” You shrug and raise an eyebrow, and smile. “—you definitely know where to find me now.”

There’s a lingering silence. You stand up and move to the lopsided desk that sits in the corner, rifling through for your staple gun. He doesn’t seem to breathe until you sink one metal fastener deep into the bone-plaster wall and tie an end of red yarn to it — and then, when he does, it’s only to change the subject.

“What’s this thing?” he asks, and you glance over your shoulder to see him holding your phone. Soft music still spills out of it, cluttering up the shadows. “Some kind of zune?”

You’d heard of the legendary zune. The first time you’d heard old Terran music wafting over Knowhere’s speakers, you’d asked where it had come from. Star-Lord had still been around in those days, and the stories of his zune had turned it into some almost-holy artifact, passed down to the new Captain.

“Sort of,” you admit. “It’s really only good for playing music out here, but it does a lot of things on Terra.”

“Huh,” he muses. “Like what?

The Captain is quiet while you hang up his laundry and tell him about smartphones, and when you join him back under the canopy of blankets, you show him how it works. You end up sprawled on the mattress, guiding himthrough your countless songs and playlists. He scrolls while the storm snaps ice-shards against the windows, and wind whistles low through hollows of the skull. Lazily — half-distracted by the device in his hands — he asks about how you ended up on Knowhere, and about what you remember of Terra, and if you’ve ever been to Missouri. He tells you stories of his own past prison-breaks, and missions that sound more like chaos. You listen with wide, incredulous eyes — gasping at some points, and choked with laughter at others. The two of you share the snacks you’d brought out earlier — sugared zargnuts and salted yaro-root chips, dried strips of seasoned orloni — and if he’s wary and reluctant at first, it fades quickly in the cushions of gunmetal-and-gold shadows. You offer up another round of warm cocoa.

“This is good,” he concedes sometime around the middle of the sleep-shift, licking his tongue over sharp teeth. His canines flash in the golden glow. He slants his eyes sideways toward you: dark-caramel-coffee. Not quite as sardonic as you’d assumed, given all the times you’d seen him from a distance — rather mischievous, instead. “Sweet and warm,” he quotes you, his voice deceptively mild. Something about it brings heat to your cheeks, though you couldn’t say why.

“Sweet and warm,” you agree, feeling like you’re missing some joke. “I’m glad you like it.”

He hums, his mouth curving just slightly on one side as he studies your playlists. “I guess I do.”

The conversation continues to unfold: deepening, then lulling — music in its own right. Dark shadows linger like charcoal smudges, soft in every corner — the strand of tiny plasma orbs, slung between the chairs forming the pillars of your fort, twinkle merrily and cast everything in a warm splash of honey and amber. At some point, sleepiness steals over your limbs, and it feels like the mattress and blankets soften beneath you. You lift your heavy eyelids to see the Captain leaning against your pillows, with your phone cradled in one dark palm. His eyes skim over you, then the string of lights, then his own laundry — and his coffee-warm gaze picks up flecks of light like gold leaf, turning them flat as ruby cabochons.

“You still not gonna tell me your name?” he asks quietly.

Drowsily, you shake your head. “You can come back another day if you still want it.”

He hums a note, and it seems like your answer resolves something in him. “So we’re still technically strangers, then.”

“Mmhm,” you agree, muffling your response into tired arms. “And you never have to see me again.”

“So I can tell you anything.”

The fuzziness in your limbs suddenly fades, and you tilt your head up to look at him more fully. You can’t read any expression in those implacable, shining eyes, but you feel it in the air — an apprehension, suddenly weighing down all the silvery shadows and golden light.

“It will be like tonight never happened,” you promise firmly.

He swallows. “I thought…” He trails off, then starts again. “I thought I would like being Captain,” he says slowly. “But I just — feel frickin’ sick all the time.”

Something in your belly knots sympathetically.

“M’reckless,” he admits, and his voice is even softer than the darkness. Outside, the storm mourns. “Violent. And I still say mean shit. I’m — frickin’ selfish. Greedy. Don’t care enough about anybody else.”

You swallow down the impulse to call him a liar.

“Everybody—“ His voice splinters and snaps: a layer of ice on a frozen lake, splitting dangerously underfoot. “Everybody likes me.” You can almost hear the lip-curl of disgust in his grimace. “Maybe even — Maybe they even love me. For no damn reason.” He swallows. “I ain’t done nothin’ to earn it.”

You tilt your head at that, everything inside you aching quietly at the hollow certainty of his words.

“Someday, they’re gonna figure it out.” His voice sounds less gravelly now — more hoarse, more hunted. “They’re gonna realize I’m more of a loser than all the rest of ‘em put together. That I can only ever figure out how to be selfless or brave by trying really frickin’ hard. And I’ll — fuck up. Hurt somebody. Lose somebody. And then—”

The word crackles apart like a broken log in a hearth. You watch quietly as his jaw clenches and unclenches — again and again. He swipes a dark hand over the end of his nose, then clutches at your phone.

“An’ then I’ll be alone again,” he utters at last, and the words are almost low enough to get lost under the hum of the radiator and the howl of the wind outside. Something under your sternum carves itself empty.

You swallow, and inhale — then hold your breath while you wriggle closer to him on the mattress, army-crawling toward the Captain himself. His eyes flicker away — apprehensive. Regretful. You can see the sneer starting to form on his brow, but you pluck your phone from his hands and set it on the pillow beside him before he can say a word. He jolts, his head snapping down to stare at the way you’ve got his slender claws gently enveloped in your own fingers, folding them softly inside your warm palms.

“I don’t know a lot,” you admit quietly, “but I’m pretty sure the only way to be truly selfless or brave is by trying really hard. It has to be.” Your mouth tilts in a rueful, sympathetic smile. “I don’t think it’s selfless or brave if you don’t know exactly what it could cost you.”

Silence curtains the room — softly shadowing everything until it’s parted by a quiet, high-pitched keening sound, quickly muffled in the Captain’s throat. He swallows it down, eyebrows tilted and hunched and agonized. Something in your ribs thuds and hurts, and you can suddenly see it: a truth etched into the fabric of the galaxy, currently pinned by the stellar winds of Thneed. The stillness of the skull, perched in a sleet-storm of stars.

You draw in a startled sudden breath at the ice-crystal clarity of it all.

“You adopted this whole damn colony, didn’t you?” you breathe wonderingly, still holding his hands like gentle captives in your own. He winces, then blinks up at you with wide, wounded eyes. They glow — gold flakes and clear dark coffee, hot cider and cinnamon — and when he flicks them away, they catch the light of the radiator and toss it back at you, flat and shiny. You watch as they grow more luminous in the shadows. Oh, yes. He’s tired — so tired he looks ready to cry. “You adopted this whole colony of misfits,” you repeat in a reverent whisper, “and decided to take us all with you — wherever you could — in this great big flying machine in the sky.”

His lower jaw drops and his brows tilt for a moment he looks so wounded, so bereft, that your heart splits apart right at the middle, torn in two like a fallen leaf or a snapped icicle.

“Used to — used to think about it,” he admits, and the rasp of his voice is hushed and hollow. “Making — great big flying machines, like you said. Taking my fr — my family flying forever.” Something rattles in his lungs. “It’s — all this. It’s all, ultimistically, selfish a’ me.” He cringes. “And then the damn engine breaks down and I got hundreds of people trapped in an ice-storm, all because I couldn’t — because I have to—“

You squeeze your own eyes shut around the tight sting of tears, and — impulsively — lift his hands to your mouth, letting the soft warmth of your lips skim the short glossy fur across his knuckles. You hear his words and his breath both catch and break — and you swallow and sigh, and give him a rueful half-smile, squinting open one embarrassed, self-conscious eye.

“For whatever it’s worth, I think it’s beautiful,” you confess gently. “I think I’m lucky I get to be a part of it.”

His mouth snaps shut again — teeth clicking together softly — and it’s amazing just how big his eyes can get. You tuck your self-conscious smile back into the corner of your mouth, and let go of his hands — pressing your phone back between them and curling his fingers around it gently.

He doesn’t say anything else. He just leans back and watches you with those glinting cinnamon-coffee eyes, while the cold rattles outside and the radiator hums, and the music floods softly from your phone. And you don’t say anything else either — content to hold the shape of this space with him for as long as he wants it.

When you finally fall asleep, you’re sure he’s beginning to nod off too: surrounded by grays so soft and deep that you could wrap yourself in them, and the honeyed glow of the radiator.

𖥧𖤣༉˖°‧₊˚ ⋅

When you wake, everything is still, and silent. Muted manufactured light filters through your frosted windows, and the cheery lights of your plasma-orb strand sparkle like morning stars against your blanket-fort ceiling overhead. You listen, and realize that the lullaby you’d fallen asleep to — the melancholic croon of the wind, like a sad clarinet, and the clatter and clink of the ice against your little home underneath the cushion of the Captain’s soft breathing — has all melted away into the same kind of pensive, anticipatory quiet you associate with the mornings after sleet-storms back home.

You lift yourself on sleepy arms. The Captain’s clothes are gone — your sweatshirt and socks folded and left on the mattress beside you. The woolly red thread remains pinned above the radiator. There’s still a chill in the air, but the storm outside has calmed.

When you tentatively crack open the door to the outside, everything is quiet and glazed with scintillating light: smooth and glossy and gleaming. Icicles glimmer and drip from the eaves, and somewhere there’s the chime of verglas that has grown too heavy: sliding down some slanted roof or window, and falling apart like silver bells on the glassy road below.

He must’ve gotten up early, you realize. Left you, and fixed the engine, and flown the skull out of the ice-belt.

You smile, and make yourself some breakfast, and then some soup. When you leave to take a container over to Xlomo Smeth’s, your breath puffs tiny crystalline clouds into the air — glittering like diamond-dust in the artificial sunlight — and you tell your neighbor to leave his blankets in the windows until the skull has fully warmed up again. When you get back to your place, you pull out your little craft-box full of armored waterproof fabric and old cotton-soft scraps that you use for mending, and you cuddle up in your tiny tent made of blankets and lights and chairs. You replay the Captain’s eclectic music-choices from the night before and cut shapes from the fabric, stitching them together around a shell of old thin t-shirt material. It had been circs since the Guardians had taken over Knowhere, and you hadn’t met the Captain till last night. Who knows? Maybe you’ll never cross paths again. But you had told him you’d make him something with Star-Lord’s old mittens.

So you do.

The gloves might be a little big on him if he ever comes back — but serviceable. They should hug each finger right up to his distal joints, and the cloth flap that converts them into mittens is smooth on the inside, making them less likely to tangle with his claws. You stitch a clumsy, cheerful pattern of red yarn discretely into the cuffs. You pause when they’re done and you picture him again as he’d been last night, clutching his cold-cramped fingers against the radiator-glow. The splay of his soft fur against his knuckles when he’d rested his cheeks against his fists, and the tear-shine in his coffee-and-buttered-rum eyes. The rumple of your soft sweatshirt and socks, too big on his small body.

You soak in the soft sounds of the music and the tap-tap of dripping icicles against your window, and the corners of your mouth twitch fondly. Yeah, you’ll probably never see him again — not up close — so you indulge a little further in the mental image of the Captain. Bundled up in a puffy, cozy coat, maybe — with red-stitched mittens dangling from his sleeves, connected to each other by a fuzzy thread of yarn, just like you’d had when you were a kid. You imagine him swaggering through the city with that hitch in his step, like you’ve seen from afar: tail and mittens both swinging behind him.

That’s a look, you imagine telling him again — warmly — with laughter in the crinkles of your eyes.

A chuckle bubbles behind your ribs and you shake your head, snipping off the last ends of the yarn as the light outside starts to turn golden again, slanting into a tawny twilight that somehow still feels like late-autumn.

You stack the mittens and wrap them in their long strand of red, and set them on your desk. Tomorrow, you decide — tomorrow you’ll take down the blanket fort. But for tonight, you heat up your soup, and prepare to make yourself another saucepan of cocoa.

And then there’s a thud at the door.

You startle, and your heart flutters in the back of your throat for just a moment because maybe it’s him: your temporary houseguest, your one-night-friend, the Captain of the Guardians of the Galaxy — who made this whole beautiful stupid city fly so he could keep his friends with him wherever he went. And then you tell yourself that it’s silly, that it’s probably just Xlomo Smeth coming to thank you for the soup and bring your container back.

You turn the temp on the hotplate down, and wipe your hands, and head to the door. And when you peer out onto the street — glistening with thinning shells of ice, shining silver from the thaw — it takes you a moment, again, to drop your gaze.

The Captain’s warm-coffee eyes blink up at you, flashing with garnets and gold. You stare, and he clears his throat, whiskers twitching.

“You said I could stop by if I wanted your name,” he says slowly.

Your shoulders ease and when you exhale, your lungs and heart all soften inside you. A smile melts onto your mouth, curving your eyes into happy crescents. You’d been wistful all day at the idea of him coming back, but you hadn’t expected it to happen — hadn’t been prepared for the way his return made everything in you as warm and sweet as melted Aladnan chocolate in a late-autumn ice storm.

You slide the door wider, and step back to let him in. “You’re just in time,” you tell him, and close the door as he crosses the threshold with hesitation in the soft scuff of his boots against the floor. You skirt him carefully and head back to the kitchenette. “I’m making cocoa again.”

He leans against the wall, watching you as you pull two mugs from the cupboard. His head tilts, and when you glance back over your shoulder, his eyes are gleaming and maple-syrup-lovely in the gathering honey-dusk. He hums a note.

“If you’re offering,” he agrees, and one canine flashes in a startling grin. “Been thinking about something sweet and warm all day.”

𖥧𖤣༉˖°‧₊˚ ⋅