#rfh fluff

[raccoonfallsharder]

I just found out Rockets VA can sing (really good actually) do you have any headcanons based on that?

mmmmm. sorry for the delay, i got distracted by rocket prompt week and also by thinking about rocket crooning in your ear.

he’s always humming, you know? (this is not a headcanon — it’s in the movies.) he’s often humming while he works. and that scene on berhert? where he’s sort of purring along with the music while plotting severe injury to the incoming ravagers? i…

sorry. focusing.

im sure the first few times you hear him mumbling lyrics under his breath, you damn near need to excuse yourself. you know you can’t call attention to it — in a best-case scenario, he'll stop singing entirely. you say nothing, and your silence is rewarded: rocket's mumbling a tune — so low your toes curl in your boots — almost whenever the two of you are working quietly on some project or another. most of the time, he doesn’t even realize he’s doing it. the rest of the time, he thinks you can’t hear him.

once, while the entire crew was dicking around in the common room and rocket started humming under his breath, pete had commented on it. you'd shot him a murderous look but it had been too late: rocket’s ears had gone flat and his tail had tucked between his ankles and his eyes had swiveled around the room. he'd been shifting and snapping out harsh words so frantically that you were sure he was scarlet under his fur. you’d had to go a miserable dozen cycles before you’d stumbled across him lilting low to himself again in the engine room one night.

fuckin pete. you still haven’t forgiven that guy.

but things get easier — at least between you and rocket — after that. there's a day when rocket looks up and realizes that you can hear him — maybe you're swaying slightly to the sound of his voice, or lightly tapping the soft pads of your fingertips like raindrops on your knee. he stumbles to a fumbling halt. you don’t say anything, though: you just pass him an encouraging half-smile before returning to whatever you were doing. you’ll hang out with him regardless of whether you get to lull yourself to the sound of his deep, pretty voice or not, you figure.

it happens again — and then again. and eventually, rocket stops stopping. he sees you walk into the otherwise-empty common area while he’s clanging away on some new cannon, or you slide into the seat next to him while he’s piloting the bowie alone — and he tosses you a little smirk and keeps going, keeps humming those bars or rumbling those words up over his ribs and out the corners of his mouth.

you’re not the first person he’s sung to, of course.

there’s a reason groot loves music. when he was just a sprout, rocket would carefully place groot's small pot right next to where he lay his own head, and he’d croon a lullaby from star-lord’s library of songs. this was how the little flora colossus first learned to fall asleep — and how he woke up — every rotation for the first dozen cycles of his life. even when groot got a little bigger and could leave his pot and run around chasing orloni, he’d still drift off sprawled on rocket’s shoulder or across the top of his head: dozing to the sound of his father clinking away on aero-rigs while humming some melody or another.

even before that — i think rocket probably sung to groot the elder, too, at least once or twice. maybe the first time rocket had seen the big guy lose his limbs, before he'd learned that they would grow back. rocket had promised tibius lark that he’d look out for the flora colossus, and now here's groot — mutilated and in pain. rocket had tried to soothe the groaning, moaning groot to sleep, wracked by guilt before eventually realizing the big idiot was just a giant frickin’ crybaby with limbs that would essentially regenerate.

still, rocket hadn’t minded singing to his friend too much after that.

maybe even earlier, too. maybe there had been a time, after explaining music to his cagemates but before telling them about flying machines. maybe he’d hummed for batch 89 too.

they would’ve thought his childish voice was the most comforting, lovely thing they’d ever heard, i think. sometimes, as you might guess, the members of batch 89 would have nightmares or be in too much pain to close their eyes and rest, and when those nights happened, rocket would have hummed them back to sleep, all low and slow and sweet.

floor would have begged for songs every chance she got. teefs would have marveled at how beautiful rocket had sounded, and lylla — lylla would have told him, very solemnly, that he had a gift.

rocket doesn't think about that very often — tries not to think about those days at all, if he's being honest — but eventually, as you know, his past comes out. it's long after he’s gotten comfortable with you, of course — and raised his son, and saved half the universe, and purchased the skull of a god, and freed himself from the high evolutionary for the last time, and become a captain, but now—

now, he remembers lylla's words.

the star children descend from the arête and different households try to take them in, but it only takes one or two failed sleep-shifts across all of knowhere before it becomes apparent that none of the kids can rest. the children have nightmares — of course they do — and they’re used to sleeping shoulder-to-shoulder with each other in cages, on hard floors. they're used to whispering stories and comforts to each other, listening gratefully to the quiet words of their siblings, small hands gripping small hands in the darkness.

it takes a while to figure out, but eventually arrangements are made — at least until the kids can adjust. spaces are shifted so the children can nest together, and it helps — mostly. drax tries telling stories. cosmo recommends warm milk. howard suggests a quarter-shot of ginsky for each kid (you promptly put the kibosh on that one). nebula comes one night to tell the kids in great detail how she’ll destroy anyone who dares to harm them. you’re so happy mantis went on her journey to find herself but sometimes, when you see how exhausted and hollow-eyed the kids are in the morning, you just wish she were back so she could help them sleep.

and then suddenly it's a few cycles later, and you realize you haven’t heard any more concerns about the kids’ night terrors. you look around and realize they’re bright-eyed again, cheeks glowing, chattering at breakfast. curious as to what ended up working — if it was the indigarran lavender satchets sent by one of kraglin’s ex-wives or it it was the broker boring them with the droning details of the histories of various artifacts he’d once had in his shop on Xandar — you come visiting one night on tip-toe, just to check in.

rocket’s there — curled up on an old armchair someone had brought in for the neverending parade of storytellers and caregivers. his voice rolls over the sleepy children, and their eyelashes droop while he lingers on some notes and skips up and down others. the sound of it curls around them — and you. his voice nestles into the shadows, practically plucking up the edges of the blankets and tucking the kids in all on its own.

you watch as, handful after handful, they drift: eased deeply into dreaming by the power and protection of the captain’s voice, all on its own.

[whitedragoncoranth]

You're Just Purring...

"Your hands had been so warm that even all the metal plates and bolts deep inside had suddenly felt like a part of him — had suddenly matched his own body temperature — every piece slotting together inside him with a rightness he’d never known before. The air in his lungs had turned into little pearls and gemstones, spilling up into his throat like jewelled gravel. He’d made a noise — some kind of rumble — and it had startled him until your hands had soothed over him again and you’d whispered something that had sounded like you’re just purring."--From "Home", by Raccoon Falls Harder. 

[raccoonfallsharder]

rocket raccoon prompt week ✷ day six bite ✷.⁺⋆˚₊

low-grade spice & fluff | no use of yn | gn reader | minific | word count: 2,266.

“That’s — a big frickin’ scar you got there.”

Your eyes flare wide and you twist in your seat so fast you nearly spin off it, staring at the stranger who has just hoisted himself onto the barstool next to you. Not because you recognize the voice — you don’t yet, though you will — but just because it’s such a personal remark.

And you’re a little bit sensitive about the scar, if you’re being honest. It’s something of a souvenir.

Then recognition clicks in. Because there he is: short. Covered in fur. Velveteen ears and a dark mask, and a plush ringtail that sweeps behind him. Eyes like red stars.

Cutie.

You stare at him, breath sucked right out of your lungs. He’s got hesitation scrawled and sprawled all over his face: ears flicking down and tail lashing once, nervously. His claws clink against his massive, nearly-empty stein of Xitarish whiskey. 

You tear your eyes away and stare down at the ring of pearly ridges stitched into your arm — like maybe there were answers carved into your flesh there all along, and you’d just never noticed. Or like each toothmark is a lodestar, and together the circle of them can help get you home. 

“Isn’t it rude? To comment on a stranger’s scars?” you breathe out, trying to buy yourself time as all the pieces begin falling together. 

He blinks at you, and shifts uncomfortably. “Uh, Jemiah.” He gestures at the owner of The Boot, who just so happens to be your boss. “Next drink’s on me.”

“Sure thing, Rocket,” Jemiah says warmly — far more warmly than you’ve ever heard from him before. 

You feel your eyes flare wide. “You’re Rocket?” you manage to utter, eyes scrolling up and down him again. “One of the people who bought this damn skull? The pilot — the Guardian of the Galaxy or whatever?”

Somehow he looks even more uncomfortable. “Guardians of the Galaxy. Plural. We’re — a team.”

You exhale slowly — measuredly — and try to loosen all the small feathers of confusion crowding up your head, downy-soft. And as you let go of all those wisps, adrenaline rushes in to take their place: the intoxication of suddenly seeing him. Meeting him — for real this time. Having a name to put with the memory. 

Your smile blows wide. You can’t help yourself. 

“The cutie has a team,” you murmur under your breath, and you feel the blood rush to your cheeks when his eyes sharpen on you. He shifts on his stool, but his shoulders relax a little, and the corner of his mouth twitches. 

“Don’t listen to him, Jemiah,” you call out. “His drink’s on me.”

Your boss ducks to hide his grin even as the cutie in question — Rocket, you think, with a pleased little grin — grimaces. “Wait—“ he starts.

You click your tongue and shake your head, cutting him off and grinning. “Not a chance. You bought this stupid skull out from under the Collector and made it a tolerable place to live? There’s no way you’re buying the drinks. I have to show my gratitude somehow.”

You drop your lids to half-mast and raise a brow, hoping he knows that you’re happy to show your gratitude in a few other ways as well. The risk of offering brings a nervous little buzz to your belly. 

As for him — well, you get the sense that he’s a guy who doesn’t let himself flounder very often, but right now his face is flickering between so many emotions that you can’t possibly catch them all. Shock, and then a brief flash of something like smugness, followed immediately by a flash of narrow-eyed skepticism — then a sort of uncertain hesitance, a brief twinge of humor, and finally, a cynical half-sneer. Then he starts right back at the beginning and does it all over again.

It’s fascinating.  

“Did you know,” you say slowly when Jemiah sets down the fresh drinks, “that I work here at The Boot?”

The stranger — no longer a stranger, you suppose; no longer just the cutie — no, Rocket pauses in his cycle of expressions, takes a slug of his new stein of whiskey, and shakes himself out. 

Where the hell does he put it? you wonder. The stein is as big as his whole torso, you think.

But he doesn’t seem buzzed at all. Instead, he casts you a measuring, sideways glance, entirely too alert for your tastes. 

“You don’t say,” he drawls at last, one brow raised as his spine eases a little more.

“Mmhmm,” you say mildly. “It’s my day off.” You pause meaningfully and take another sip of your own drink. “Didn’t used to get days off in Exitar. Or anywhere else on Knowhere, as a matter of fact.”

His eyes track your hands, and flick to your face. 

“Guess the difference is all thanks to you,” you tell him lightly, and tilt your glass toward him. “Here’s to the happy change in leadership.”

He studies you, and waits till you set your drink down again. 

“So. Uh. How long you worked here?” he asks — as if he didn’t already have at least some idea.

You grin into your glass. “Long enough to have developed a very strict set of rules for my survival.”

His ears flick. You’re glad he’s indulging you — playing along for now. “What’re the rules?”

You lean back. “I’m glad you asked,” you tease, and splay out one hand so you can count them on your fingers. “Number one. Avoid the Collector at all costs.”

He snorts. “Well, guess you’re not a complete idiot,” he mutters, and then slashes his red-amber eyes at you and flinches, like he thinks maybe you’re going to be offended. 

But you only wink at him. Not a chance, cutie.  “Number two. Never hide all your units in one place — or on one datacard.”

A smirk curls the corner of his mouth and his nose twitches.

“Three. Always lock your doors behind you. And four, Don’t walk home alone from the Boot.” The smirk slides off his face at that and his eyes flash, so you rush along to the next rule, hoping to lighten the mood again. “Five. Always get customers’ money before you hand them their booze.”

There you go. The little curve is back at the corner of his mouth, even if his brow is still furrowed — almost like he’s distressed. 

You lean sideways and nudge him with your elbow. “And finally, number six.” He looks up at you and his ears tilt, eyes locked on yours like glimmering red stones. You lean so close you know your breath will flutter in the curve of his ear, and you drop your voice to a whisper. “Don’t try to break up fights.”

The pilot rears back, nearly tumbling backward off his stool, and you reach for him before you both catch yourselves. Reeling your outstretched hand back into yourself, you instead gift him a reckless grin and turn to your drink once more.

“It’s not a comprehensive list,” you tell him pragmatically, “and it isn’t in any particular order, but it’s kept me alive this long.” 

“Oh, yeah?” Rocket says, and his voice is suddenly raspy and low. “Even that last one?”

The laughter surprises you, fluttering up behind your ribs and escaping between your lips, soft  and velvety and hushed. 

“I only broke that one once,” you tell him, lifting your glass to your mouth and half-hiding your grin behind it. You can tell your eyes are sparkling, though. “And it’s not like I ever regretted it.”

He makes a sound in the back of his throat. “Sounds like you got a story.”

“Mmm,” you acknowledge, and you keep your voice playful. “It was years ago, now. I knew all the regulars back then — well, I still do, but more of them were jackasses back in the day. And this guy comes in — someone I’d never seen before. Swaggering, carrying a cannon twice as big as himself. Maybe — three feet tall? A true Short King.”

He’s got his stein to his lips and he chokes on a mouthful of whiskey, sputtering. “A what?”

You ignore him, still casting him that teasing half-smile and raising an eyebrow. “He had pretty eyes, and I remember him being more foulmouthed than a landlocked Ravager.”

“Pretty — what?” 

“Keep up, Rocket,” you taunt lightly, tapping a finger to the air just an inch away from the top of his nose, and his eyes go narrow. Everything on his face is suddenly promising retribution, but you’re reckless with glee now.

And you’ll be happy to pay up if he actually comes to collect. 

“I told him that I needed payment up front when he ordered—“

“Get the money before you hand them their booze,” he echoes Rule Five, eyes still hunting you, and you nod with mock-approval. 

“You get it,” you say with a chuckle. “Anyway, his response was just to swipe another patron’s datacard right in front of me and hand it over.” You can still fucking see it: his challenging half-grin, one brow raised.  “I think I stared at him for a full thirty seconds, but this cutie just smirked up at me. Brazen as fuck.”

You laugh softly at the memory, and Rocket — who might as well be your new landlord, you’ve realized — grumbles something under his breath. 

“Anyway, I was kinda smitten,” you admit with a little curve in your mouth, still buzzing the inside of your belly. 

It’s the truth, too.  You’d never thought that raccoon can get it before, but there you were. 

And here you are. 

To your surprise, Rocket goes quiet at that. The pilot of the famous — or infamous — Guardians of the Galaxy, and one of the new owners of Knowhere: still and silent for a long moment. 

Maybe he’ll slip out of his chair and leave, you think, and the flutters in your belly twist in sudden regret. Maybe you’ve scared him off. 

But when he speaks, his voice is like crystallized maple syrup: rich and gritty, waiting to crumble and melt and scrub against your skin.

“He’s why you got into a fight?”

You weigh out your options here. What to say? You’d lost sight of the cutie thanks to his height and the constant surge of new customers, and you’d sort of forgotten about him in the moment, to be honest — though you’re sure you’d have remembered later, alone in your shitty little room — but then you’d heard the sudden cacophonous boom of his enormous augmented cannon. There’d been screaming and crashing, and you’d woven yourself  between the bodies toward the sound. Just to assess, just to figure out what kind of danger you’d been in—

Fucking B’darl — the worst of your regular patrons — had entered into view and suddenly hoisted the cutie right up into the air before slamming him down into the orloni fighting ring. 

You hadn’t thought about it — about anything, really — just thrown yourself through the crowd, toward the fighting ring. By the time you’d gotten there, B’darl had the cutie pinned to the miniature arena’s floor by the throat.  Both the orloni and the f’saki had cowered back, blood-soaked and wounded, from the sudden interference in their battle-to-the-death. 

Looks like you wandered outta the ring, the fucking brute had sneered.Time to go back to brawling with the other vermin, you little monster. 

B’darl had lifted his other fist, easily the size of your entire head.

My money’s on the f’saki, though. 

You’d surged between them without thinking, latching onto B’darl’s massive forearm, knocking his fist to one side.

You shrug. “It was worth it,” you tell Rocket mildly, and take another sip of your drink.

His eyes drop to the ring of teethmarks in your arm again. He opens his mouth to speak, and you cut in.

“My own fault,” you tell him. “I should’ve known the cutie could handle himself. I got in the way.”

You can still remember how his firelight-eyes had stared up at you from behind a mouthful of flesh and blood, stunned and maybe horrified, teeth sunk almost to the bone.  In a worse timeline, maybe you’d have tried to rip your arm away. But here, in this one, you’d curled around him instinctively. Protectively. 

And then he’d reached around you smoothly and snagged B’darl’s ion pistol, and you’d heard the gun go off as he’d squeezed the trigger, blind.

“My only regret is that I lost sight of him in the aftermath,” you tell him with a shrug. You try for a teasing smile but it suddenly feels strained, tense on your mouth. You’d been too flushed with adrenaline when you’d first started this conversation. Now, suddenly, the nerves are present: rattling and twitching behind your sternum. Your fingers shake a little and you clamp them onto your glass. “Didn’t even catch his name.” 

He doesn’t say anything, and you squeeze your eyes shut. When you finally get the fluttering in your vagus nerve under control, you hazard a look up at him. 

His eyes are on your forearm though: the circle of silken raised marks, just three shades lighter than the rest of your skin, and strangely — almost prettily — translucent. His finger reaches out: dark and clawed, his touch like warm leather. You go so still that you can’t blink, can’t even breathe as he paints a ring of warmth on your skin, looping the circlet of scars onto his fingertip like pearls threaded on a string.

The flutters are back, full-force. 

Slowly, Rocket drags his gaze up to yours, sunset-eyes glowing.  “Cutie works.”

@hibatasblog deserves so much more & better than this little ficlet but i am dedicating it to them anyway because they regularly call rocket "short king" and i cannot get it out of my head. deepest love to them & all their writing (please do yourselves a favor and check out their ao3 fics if you have not already)

look i just feel like (1) rocket is a cutie and if you say it in the right tone, he'll be flattered enough to not kill you and (2) there's no way he'd ever forget the stranger who jumped into a fight on his behalf — and probably got scarred for it — back before he met the guardians. which is when the og encounter takes place fyi. forget about the fact that i don't think we know if he had ever been there before gamora brought them along — i headcanon that where two or more lowlifes gather, so too there is rocket.

sidenote oh my god i literally cannot stop with the increasing wordcount. day seven (when i eventually get around to it) is gonna be SHORT. it's a promise/challenge to myself. anyway i think my writing quality peaked with machinery and i'm sorry this is so late

day five. machinery. ✷ day seven. home. rocket prompt week masterlist ✷ main masterlist rocket raccoon prompt week list

taglist ♡ @evolvingchaoswitch ♡ @glow-autumz ♡ @wren-phoenix ♡ @suicidalshitstick ♡ @pretty-chips

[raccoonfallsharder]

rocket raccoon prompt week ✷ day seven home ✷.⁺⋆˚₊

fluff | no use of yn | gn reader | drabble | word count: 661.

Home had been a shining city on the far horizon for most of Rocket’s formative years: distant and gleaming under an impossible blossom-blue dome. Unreachable. Untouchable. He’d left any hope of it behind, a dozen cannon-shots or more before he’d ever even stepped foot off the Arête. No. Rocket had gone straight from the cages and right into his escape pod, out into a sky that had suddenly seemed much less beautiful and much more forever. 

And so home had always been a far-away thing, a thing he could never go back to, a thing that — like love, like peace, like a restful night’s sleep or body that didn’t hurt — Rocket could simply never have. A thing that hadn’t been meant for him. Like the screws slowly grinding away at his bones or the muscle contractures he’s always fighting in his hips and chest, home had just become another old ache that he’d grown to barely notice, except when he’s on a planet where the weather is bad. 

And then, one shift — when it was just you and him — he’d been trying to work the knots out of his shoulders. You’d reached out with dancing fingers and a query on your lips — a gentle little sound of offering — and he’d gone as still as a moon pinned between two gravity wells. Your fingers had felt light as little birds, perched on his shoulders weightlessly, and you’d guided them into a rolling series of rotations. Then you’d tugged him between your knees, and kneaded every small stone you’d found lodged under his skin and fur. 

When he’d finally gone as molten and buttery as a beeswax candle on a warm day, you’d murmured another little question. He’d blinked at you blankly — completely disconnected from anything but the feel of his body, pliant for the first time in possibly his entire life — so you’d pulled him onto your lap and continued your little ministry of touch until he’d fully curled up, his tail a wreath of feathery brushes around you both. His back had pressed itself into your hands as you’d worked your thumbs into the base of his spine: freeing the tension from his hips, beckoning it out of muscle and bone, letting it dissipate into the air between your fingertips. Your hands had been so warm that even all the metal plates and bolts deep inside had suddenly felt like a part of him — had suddenly matched his own body temperature — every piece slotting together inside him with a rightness he’d never known before. The air in his lungs had turned into little pearls and gemstones, spilling up into his throat like jeweled gravel. He’d made a noise — some kind of rumble — and it had startled him until your hands had soothed over him again and you’d whispered something that had sounded like you’re just purring. 

He’d never say any of this in front of the others, never let them know about this: about how soft he is for this, for the warm quiet circle of space in your arms and on your thighs. He’d never climb into your lap like this if they could see it; never make a nest out of your body-heat and burrow into the loose thick folds of your sweatshirt. He  only does it on the shifts when everyone else is asleep, or planetside, or away. 

It’s not that he’s ashamed. It’s just — this is something special and precious and small, and if he looks at it too closely or acknowledges it exists, he may never have it back. But for now — for these moments that he can only measure in the soft wash of his breath or the thrum of his pulse in his wrists, the steady sound of your heartbeat holding him together like gravity — for now, it’s touchable, and attainable, and real — 

Moreso than any shining city on the far horizon, glimmering against the sweep of a blossom-blue ocean and a forever sky.

i did it! i brought my wordcount down! this was just a fun little exercise in writing whatever weird shit came to my mind so sorry if it makes no sense but i figured i'd indulge my inclination toward purple prose (get rekt literary critics). anyway this was fun and i am very much in favor of many future rocket raccoon prompts & prompt weeks, and thank you for creating this and bringing it to my attention, @frostedwitch ♡♡♡

i will be putting out a masterlist for this set of prompts sometime next week probably. i really hope you enjoyed reading as much as i enjoyed writing! ♡

day six. bite rocket prompt week masterlist ✷ main masterlist rocket raccoon prompt week list

taglist ♡ @evolvingchaoswitch ♡ @glow-autumz ♡ @wren-phoenix ♡ @suicidalshitstick ♡ @pretty-chips

[raccoonfallsharder]

rocket raccoon prompt week ✷ day five machinery✷.⁺⋆˚₊

semi-romantic angst & fluff | no use of yn | gn reader | minific | word count: 1,946.

Ka-chunk-hnk. Ka-chunk-hnk. 

Rocket scrubs his knuckles against the fur and flesh that have grown over his metal sternum. His ribs strain like creaky bellows, lungs splitting and bruising against the bones. It’s been like this sometimes, since before he can remember — but lately it’s a chronic condition. 

Ever since the High Evolutionary’s voice had echoed over the comms on the Bowie, lethal and shrill. 

Rocket sits at a table across the street from Nebula’s offices, and waits. His fingers drum on the pretty, dusty mosaic surface. 

Ka-chunk-hnk. Ka-chunk-hnk. 

You step out of the doorway, back arching as you stretch. Nebs must’ve had you hunched over datascreens all day — a waste of eye candy, he’d think, if he’d let himself tap too far into his old jackass-habits. Not that it matters — he’s already been preparing to be an absolute, unforgivable dickhead to you, ever since he woke up the rotation before last and decided he couldn’t bear the sound of it anymore.

Ka-chunk-hnk. Ka-chunk-hnk. 

“Hey,” he calls out, voice low and carrying. “You. New kid. Buttercup.”

Your eyes swivel, wide and startled. Shimmery. He kinda hates that about you, except no he doesn’t. He scowls when you look at him and tap your chest, brow creasing in confusion. Who, me? he imagines you uttering, voice perplexed.

Yeah. You. 

He points at you with two fingers, then slashes them toward the chair opposite him. He can see you hesitate — then you’re drifting across the street like a leaf in a stream, eddying around little obstacles and whirlpools as they arise. It takes too long, but you’re finally sinking into the seat across from him.

“Captain?” you say politely, and he tries to hide his scoff. Nothing says new kid on Knowhere quite like deference. Still, it’ll be useful for him today.

“Yeah,” he mutters. “I gotta job for you.”

You blink those gorgeous eyes of yours. “Me?”

He rolls his eyes and tries not to let himself feel bad about exploiting you — all that kindness, that generosity, sitting right there on the surface, ripe for manipulation. “I need you to get me something outta Pete’s old place.”

You blink those starry eyes again. He really needs you to stop doing that, ‘cause it’s killing him. “Pe — Star-Lord’s apartment?” 

He grunts and flicks his eyes back towards Nebula’s door. “Yup.” He lingers on the y, and pops the p. “Super-confidential, very-official, super-frickin’-secret Guardians-mission. Can you do it?”

“I — what do you want me to do?”

Ka-chunk-hnk. Ka-chunk-hnk. 

And this is how you end up slipping through the barely open door of the legendary, absentee Star-Lord’s bedroom: all for a captain with pretty, heartbreaking almandine eyes. 

You’re such a sap.

But Rocket had given you an override hex for Peter Quill’s rooms, and you don’t see how you can refuse him anything, so in you go, even though you know he’s fucking lying about — well, everything related to this so-called mission, you’re sure. No-one has touched this room since Star-Lord left a few cycles before you’d arrived — other than to fix the Warlock-shaped hole in the wall and window, anyway.  Kraglin, Groot, and Nebula all insist he’ll be back soon, and so the apartment remains as he’d left it. 

You glance around, and sure enough, there’s the treasure Rocket had sent you to find, sitting on a rickety high shelf: a dense ball of bulging white tissue, pressed like dough into a silvery, skeletal cage. 

You pick up the sphere. It’s heavy in your hand, like it has its own field of gravity — and you suppose, in a way, it does. Turning it, you recognize the OrgoCorps logo, and it’s the final confirmation you need. You slide the sphere into the pouch on your belt, and you slip from the room, shutting the door behind you. 

“Don’t let Nebs see you,” Rocket had warned. “Don’t let anybody see you.” He’d muttered something your translation chip had haltingly tried to identify as fuckin’ narks. “She’ll be all over my ass if she finds out.” He’d looked up at you, those almandine eyes suddenly narrowing shrewdly, and had said, “You understand what I’m asking you to do, right? You’re the frickin’ fall-guy.” 

“Got it,” you’d said mildly, unbothered. So now here you are, tapping with raindrop-light fingers on Rocket’s apartment door. It swings open and you slide in off the street seamlessly, and he’s got his hand in the pouch at your hip before the door’s even closed behind you.

You jolt at the brush of heat and his intrusive nearness, but he’s already got the record-sphere in his hand, turning his back to you and striding toward the… bed? It’s a slab of cold metal with a ragged blanket and no pillows, and you do a double-take around the room. Nope, that’s definitely the closest thing the poor guy has to a bed. 

The Captain’s fucking miserable. 

Still, you’ve decided that light-hearted sarcasm is the best way to engage for now. 

“Geez,” you snip playfully. “Buy a person dinner first.” 

He startles, tossing you a wide-eyed look over his shoulder that’s too shocked and vulnerable to allow you any satisfaction. But then he rolls his eyes and huffs out a disgruntled sound of annoyance, and begins connecting the ball of white tissue to a handful of datapads and small machines he’s got set on the bed. 

“Sit,” he rumbles with a gesture at the hunk of scrapmetal masquerading as a mattress. He already got his eyes locked on the numbers and letters as they  scroll up on the screens, and he’s glaring at them mutinously. “Or get out.” 

You hesitate. But the fact that he’s opened a spot for you in his apartment at all feels like an indicator that he doesn’t want to be alone, even if he’s too frightened to bring any of… whatever-this-is to his friends. Instead, he stands beside the bed, typing shit into his datapads and screens, and you perch on the spot beside them, facing him. You take him in as he works: the furrowed brow, and the crinkles along the sides of his nose as he tries not to grimace or snarl. His ears — one alert and forward-facing, and the other swiveled into a half-flattened scrap of fur and flesh. Even his tail looks a different than usual: tensed and bristling, tucked tight against his inner calf. 

“There it is,” he mutters, and his eyes scan the screen. They jump and widen, then scan again. His brow drops and now both ears lay flat, and he reads it all again. The fur on his neck and the backs of his forearms rises.

Then he hisses a curse that the translator can’t pick up at all this time, and he shoves himself away from the screens, pacing back and forth in front of you thrice before throwing himself onto the bed at your other side. Your eyes follow him, wide and startled, as he keeps up the steady stream of indecipherable swearing.

Slowly— cautiously — you turn sideways, pulling one leg onto the bed with you, away from the pile of ramshackle tech so you can study him while you chew your lip. You want to ask what it is he’s discovered, and if he’s okay — but the words stay trapped in your throat, meaningless and hollow. You hesitate, and then sigh, and lower yourself onto your back beside him.

The two of you stare up at the ceiling for what feels like ages. Outside, the lights of Knowhere grow gold, signaling the end of the second wake-shift. Topaz light slants in through the frosted windows at the head of the bed.

“Your bed is a chiropractic nightmare,” you say after a moment, and he whuffs a startled laugh. 

Silence falls again, but it feels easier, curling comfortingly into all the crevices of the room. Maybe it’s because of your comment, or maybe it’s because you aren’t looking at each other. Maybe it’s because you’re no-one at all to him — just Buttercup, the New Kid, Hey You.

But he speaks.

“Ever since — ever since we got back,” he mutters. “Ever since the Arête — my heart’s been acting weird. I thought maybe it was — I thought maybe it had been injured worse that we realized, or maybe—“

His voice crackles away, and you don’t chase it. You just wait in the fake sunset-light, watching it warm the shadows. 

“It sounds awful,” he says at last. “Like, yours—“ he lifts a hand above you both and taps out a rhythm on the air with deft fingers. “—thud-thud. Thud-thud. Thud-thud.” You can hear the grimace in his mouth. “That’s a good heart. That’s a healthy, normal-person heart. But mine—“ He curls his clawed fingers into a strangling fist, and twists viciously. “Ka-chunk-hnk. Ka-chunk-hnk.”

He drops his hand to his abdomen.

“It’s not fuckin’ good,” he mutters, and his voice is so desolate that your belly suddenly twists and that space behind your eyes tightens. “It’s not… I always knew it didn’t work right.” He makes a tortured noise in his throat that sounds like it’s trying to be a laugh. “But the records say everything’s operating like it should be, so I guess I’m just a messed-up little—“

You roll suddenly. If you’d been thinking clearly, you never would’ve moved so quickly, and later you’ll be grateful that he didn’t lash out at you with startled, defensive claws. But all you can think is to offer him some sort of solace, some sort of peace. 

So you press your ear to his chest.

On the other side of the Indigarran cotton, you feel heat and fur, flesh and metal. He stiffens— frozen beneath you, and then shivering with an uncertainty you’re sure he’d never let show on his face. He smells like fireworks and whiskey and forests in late autumn, and beyond that — a touch or two faster than yours — you can feel the quiet thump of his heart. It’s a little quicker and jumpier than you’d expected, but the longer you lay with your cheek to his chest, the steadier it grows. 

Thud-thud. Thud-thud. Thud-thud.

“It sounds like a good heart to me,” you murmur. “I don’t hear what you hear in it — not at all.”

There’s a crackling, staticky quiet, and then he makes a wounded little sound deep in his chest, and you feel it rumble up under your cheek. His hand shifts from his abdomen and his fingers are suddenly cradling the back of your head, holding you against him. 

“You don’t hear it?” His voice is agonized. Desperate. “You really don’t—?”

You can’t shake your head with the way he’s wrapped around you, his other arm coming up to join the first, almost clinging. And you — well, you don’t want to give him any reason to think that you’re not perfectly content to stay like this. “Definitely not,” you tell him. “I’m no doctor, of course, but — it sounds beautiful to me. It sounds like it works far better than you ever realized.”

Your head shifts as he lets out an exhalation so long and splintered that you suddenly wonder if he’s been holding his breath ever since he got back from CounterEarth.

“I thought—“ His words are all hushed and creased, puffing into the air and then tumbling to the metal cot around you like crumpled balls of paper. “I thought maybe it wasn’t a real heart,” he says raggedly. “I thought maybe it was just a — a broken machine.”

You pull your own hand out from beneath you, and you tap out the rhythm just below his collarbone. 

Thud-thud. Thud-thud. Thud-thud.

“I promise,” you tell him softly. “I can feel it. It’s real.”

lol whatever i'm under 2k words sooooo i am still very cool. (this was a scene i'd had in my brain for like six months. it's the core component of the oneshot i was writing called real but thanks to this "drabble" (i don't think 2k counts as a drabble whateverrrr) i have a new title in mind (broken machinery) and at least part of the main scene written so YAY

day four. family ✷ day six. bite rocket prompt week masterlist ✷ main masterlist rocket raccoon prompt week list

taglist ♡ @evolvingchaoswitch ♡ @glow-autumz ♡ @wren-phoenix ♡ @suicidalshitstick ♡ @pretty-chips

[raccoonfallsharder]

rocket raccoon prompt week ✷ day three emotionalistic ✷.⁺⋆˚₊

fluff | no use of yn | gn reader | drabble | word count: 570.

There are only a few hours, pinned somewhere deep in the sleep shift right before Knowhere’s artificial dawn, that the streets are relatively empty and quiet. Rocket’s sleep schedule is erratic at best, but you know — of all the times in the rotation — this is when he’s most likely to be awake.

You find him out on the observation deck, alone — perched with his feet hanging over the ledge, only an arm span from the intangible barrier that shields the entire city and its manufactured atmosphere from the inhospitable void of space. It’s like a bubble, you think — protecting everything inside. 

You don’t try to quiet your footsteps, knowing Rocket can probably identify you by your stride alone, and by the smell of your hair. The tempo of your heart, even — at least from this distance. And any effort to be quiet would only raise his hackles, ping those deeply-hidden instincts of his that are always on the alert for bigger predators.

“Hey, stranger,” you say instead, and lower yourself to the ledge beside him. You’re not quite brave enough or foolish enough to hang your feet off the edge with him — you’re not sure how the fabricated gravity would work in this situation, but you know the vertigo is real. 

“Hey,” he grunts, and takes a swallow of the blubber ale he’s been nursing since Mantlo’s closed a couple hours earlier. Wordlessly, he offers you the bottle, and you tilt your head before accepting. 

You regret it immediately.

“What the fuck is that? Battery acid?”

He snickers but doesn’t say anything, accepting the bottle back one-handedly — burning red eyes still locked on a distant asterism. Minutes tread past on whisper-soft feet. Silently, the two of you watch the stars swirl by: the sweeping clouds of stardust, the quiet moons. 

“Why’re you here?” he rasps at last. His voice brushes against the sky: velvet on velvet, broken only by a scattering of crushed-up diamond dust. 

You shrug. “Thought you might be lonely.”

He snorts, and the sound is bitter. “Only when I’m breathing.” 

“Mm,” you acknowledge, trying not to show him the twist in your ribs at his response. “Well, then. I guess I’ll keep trying to keep you company, if you keep trying to keep breathing.”

He tilts his head and leans against the lower railing. “Only if you bring drinks next time.”

“Sure,” you say easily. “I’d better. Otherwise we’re just gonna end up punishing ourselves with blubber ale.”

He huffs something close to a laugh, except it sounds like it hurts. 

The silence grows, and the quiet of the dark sky curls into your bones. There’s the muted slosh of Rocket’s drink, and the occasional clink of his claws on the glass. An hour passes — maybe more — and he makes a stifled little sound, so deep behind his collarbones that you’re not even sure he knows it’s escaped. You cast a sideways glance at him, and you can see the silvering on the rim of his eyes, the glassy tracks of tears underneath his fur: gleaming rivers in nighttime forests. 

His eyes slant up to yours, and he winces when he sees you noticing. But you don’t say anything. You only lean back on your hands and sway to one side, bumping his shoulder gently with your warm upper arm, creating a little intangible barrier of your own — a bubble around you and Rocket, protecting everything inside. 

for the first time in the history of the universe my word count went down between prompts. holy shit

day two. hurts. ✷ day four. family.rocket prompt week masterlist ✷ main masterlistrocket raccoon prompt week list

taglist ♡ @evolvingchaoswitch ♡ @glow-autumz ♡ @wren-phoenix ♡ @suicidalshitstick ♡ @pretty-chips

[raccoonfallsharder]

rocket raccoon prompt week ✷ day four family✷.⁺⋆˚₊

semi-romantic fluff | no use of yn | gn reader | minific | word count: 1,274.

The artificial daylight of Knowhere has gone from bright and pearly to bronze and slanted, and now it’s finally sunk low in velvet purples. The Star Kids don’t really have bedtimes because every adult here is a frickin’ pushover, so they’re dancing under the sleep-shift sky, all spangled and studded with tiny plasma orbs jingling on strings over the streets, glowing like warm white moons. 

It’s not an uncommon part of life on Knowhere — not anymore. Neither is the heartwrenchingly light laughter ringing out from the streets, from the rooftop bars, and from the second level of Mantlo’s, where the usual poker players have meandered out to the mezzanine in order to watch the celebration. 

Rocket leans back against the step where he’s slouched: tail flicking peacefully, ears swiveling to follow the sounds, nose twitching. The Star Kids smell like Indigarran peaches and moonlight, and there are lingering curls of Contraxian tobacco and Ssssaralami’s moonshine. The spiced fragrance of grilled orloni and yaro-stuffed pastries fill the streets. It’s all overlaid by a sugary scent: the bastardized Luphomoid honeycakes that you’d helped Nebula resurrect from her childhood, just especially for today.

Nobody knows when the Star Kids were born — if they were born at all — but you’d insisted there needed to be something to mark a birthday of sorts. 

Children need celebrations, you’d told him and Nebs one night over drinks, and Drax the Dad had enthusiastically concurred. And so this — the anniversary of the liberation of the Arête, of the children’s arrival on Knowhere — has suddenly become some sort of festival, some sort of revelry. Nearly every citizen of Knowhere is out on the streets: eating, dancing, singing, chattering. Ruffling the childrens’ hair. Steemie Blueliver has come down from the mezzanine, and the Star Kids take turns flipping themselves over his tree-trunk arms or letting him spin them over his head. Mantis had come back to visit — just for this, from the frickin’ ass-end of the universe — and she’d picked up Pete while she was at it. Both of them are laughing with Nebs and Kraglin, while Cosmo barks and prances in the center of a bright ring of giggling kids. A cluster of raccoons from the Arête watch from the rooftop of the laundromat: still young, but no longer babies. Their fur is glossy and their bodies are soft and round, and they keep an eye out for dropped street-food. 

And the music — the music is alive. It floats down the insides of Rocket’s bones: sweet and sparkling with little bubbles, like carbonated wine. 

Rocket takes another mouthful of his fruit-flavored milky-fizz — spiked with something you’d sneaked him before the festivities; you’d told him it was strawberry schnapps — and he watches. 

He catches it: the moment you clock him there on the steps. Your eyes crinkle at the corners when you smile, and it looks like you’ve got stardust in your lashes. You’re talking to Hoobtoe and Phloko, but you’ve only got eyes for him — warm, and inviting. He tilts his plastic carton toward you in a mockery of a toast, then clamps his teeth onto the straw and takes another sip. The skull’s ventilation systems kick on and a breeze sweeps delicately through the streets, teasing the scents of food and booze, and playing with the fibrous platinum strands of the Star Kids’ hair. Each child’s head is gleaming: pale and reflecting back dapples of radiance. Rocket swears that everywhere he looks — the tiny candles on the honeycakes, the plasma-orb string-lights, the wide eyes of the kids, and you — he can see halos and rays of light. Soft starbursts, and luminous, hazy hexagons. Little motes of crushed-up bone-dust, dancing in and out of the shadows like antigravity glitter.

A little curl of concern shows between your brows as you toss him another glance — he’d guess it’s hard for you to read him right now, because his eyeshine is probably throwing all that gorgeous light back at you. Like rubies, you’d told him once, which had probably been when he’d first started falling in love with you, if he’s being honest. Now, dazzling in the gold and shadow, you laugh at something Hoobtoe says, and you pat Phloko’s shoulder before weaving away from them — smiling at Xlomo Smeth and Ssssaralami, nodding your greetings while you walk past. You pause at the little table still stacked high with honeycakes.

And then make your way toward Rocket.

You tuck yourself next to him on the step, even when he doesn’t move — content to stay half-sprawled next to you, his arm draped casually across the stair behind your back. He looks up at you with his ruby-eyes, and then down at the honeycake in your hands. It’s got one of those teeny candles in it, lit up like a piece of amber held to the sun. You’re glowing in the gold of it,  warm and apple-cheeked — eyes all glimmery, just for him. 

“You okay?” you ask carefully.

He turns his eyes back to the streets so his heart doesn’t fall apart like the overblown petals of an autumn flower in his chest. The scene there doesn’t help though: everything is as warm as fresh-baked bread. Groot’s joined Steemie, tossing the kids in the air. Even Howard’s come down from the mezzanine, awkwardly patting the head of a child who’s taller than he is, while he tries to protect his cocktail from the jumble of bodies. Rocket eyes him, then snorts and shakes his head. A soft huff leaves his mouth: too short to be a chuckle, too affectionate to be a scoff.

“I’m good,” he rasps out. “Just thinkin’.”

“About what?” 

The corner of his mouth curves in a perplexed, uncertain little smile, like his head hasn’t caught up with the rest of reality. “‘Bout how I used to think I wanted to be alone.” 

He sips his milky-fizz. The strawberry schnapps warm his belly. Howard would love this shit, Rocket thinks. 

He reminds himself not to let the guy near it. 

“Why’d you bring that over?” he asks, nodding at the candlelit honeycake cupped in your palms. 

You reach toward him with it, lifting it for him: a sugar-sweet little offering. “Today is your day, too, you know.” 

He blinks up at you, a protest filling his mouth before he pauses and tilts his head consideringly. 

He supposes you’re right. He supposes he had been trapped on the Arête, for far longer than he’d realized. 

“Okay,” he says mildly, and he can see the way you startle at how agreeable he sounds right now. He shrugs, sets down the milky-fizz on the step between his feet, and takes the cake in his hand. “What’s with the candle?”

“Pete brought them,” you  tell him. “It’s a birthday tradition on Terra. A candle for every year.” You smile at him. “When you blow it out, you make a wish.”

He looks up at you, and then out at the wide glimmering lake of people, all shadow and shimmer. He turns the golden cake in his hand like he’s studying it: trying to read something in the fruit-infused icing and the amber-glow flame. Then he turns his eyes out again to the people of Knowhere: music and mirth and the joy of belonging. And from this angle — up close, and unhidden by eyeshine — you can see the moment when ironic amusement turns into something just a shade off of wonder. 

His fingers are usually so quick you can barely follow them — but now he reaches up with his other hand, almost lazily, and casually pinches out the wisp of candleflame. 

“I think I’m good on wishes, actually.”

there's that critical mass word-count. i personally think it is very cool of me that i took till thursday to break a thousand.

day three. emotionalistic ✷ day five. machinery rocket prompt week masterlist ✷ main masterlist rocket raccoon prompt week list

taglist ♡ @evolvingchaoswitch ♡ @glow-autumz ♡ @wren-phoenix ♡ @suicidalshitstick ♡ @pretty-chips

[raccoonfallsharder]

‧₊˚ ⋅♡ ࣪ ִֶָ☾. Autopilot Systems Check ‧₊˚ ⋅☽ ࣪ ִֶָ♡.

fluff | no use of y/n | gn reader | oneshot | word count: 1,406.

reader wakes up in the middle of the night and rocket is nowhere to be found. drabbly.

reader x rocket soft fluff & domestica. MCU-based, post-Endgame i guess. @rebel-21 said a thing and i thought about it all morning so now it is a little <1500 word ficlet (unbetaed & unbothered - be prepared for typos & messiness). it is pure soft fluff for your sunday afternoon. some romantic undertones.

When you wake in the middle of the sleep rotation, the Bowie is quiet. The flight engines murmur their little lullabies, and everything in your bunk is layered with soft ink-purple shadows, pinned at the floorboards by tiny gold security lights shivering like fireflies. The engines are purring, but there are no accompanying purrs from Rocket. You wait in the stillness, listening. You would know if he was here, even if - unlikely though it might be - he wasn’t pressed against you in some way. After all, you can pick him out of a crowd by the thrum of his heartbeat alone. Blindfolded, you think you can find him in a Praxius IX windstorm, just by the sound of his breathing. He had been working on something with the fuel injectors earlier. And a shifting mechanism for the shields. Dreaming up a more intuitive thruster steering system. Something with the atmospheric barrier, too, and the air re-filtration chambers. He’d been making repairs, all day, and you’ve missed him. The sarcastic cracks and slanted glances. The smirks and snickers. The lingering touches: sometimes when no-one is looking, and other times almost defiantly, as if to say to anyone in the room: yeah, I belong to ‘em. And they belong to me. And we touch each other all the time and we’re very frickin’ intimate an’ affectionate. You gotta problem with that?

read more on ao3. anthology masterlist | main masterlist

[raccoonfallsharder]

✩࿐࿔ schedule your fuckin' appointments. [new 2/26]

fluff (smut-free) | gn reader | no use of y/n | drabble | word count: 1,222.

look i know it sucks but right now i need you to call your doctor or open your patient portal and schedule the damn appointment you've been putting off forever. otherwise you're gonna be in trouble with the captain.

“Hey! Cupcake!” You swear Rocket starts every conversation with a demanding yell from across the street, like he has to let everyone know he’s seen you and is claiming your time. You roll your eyes and don’t move from your seat on the laundromat steps, but you can feel a smile playing at the corner of your mouth — he wouldn’t be Rocket if he wasn’t trying to assert his bossiness everywhere he went. “Yes, sir?” you snark back, waiting till he’s within a reasonable distance and you don’t have to shout. He nudges you with the toe of one boot, and you sigh good-naturedly and scoot over on the step, giving him room to sit beside you. He pulls out his zune and fiddles with it, till something low and quiet swells in the speakers. The citizens of Knowhere shift into something more relaxed: paces slowing, conversation quieting, heads tilting toward one another as they let the music unconsciously shift their moods. Rocket eyes them all with a smirk of satisfaction. He’s so damn proud of himself that you have to try not to chuckle and ruin it. But then he’s leaning toward you, bumping your knee with his, head tilted conspiratorially. “Did you schedule that doctors’ appointment yet?” You blink, then wince. “Uhm. No?”

read more on ao3 ✩࿐࿔ for LunaAfton on ao3

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).

this is about as wholesome as it gets (for me) i think. can be read platonically or romantically. mcu-based, 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) for LunaAfton ♡ ࿔ do your goddamn dishes. [est mid-march] for nonnie ♡

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

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. if you’d like to join my fanfiction taglist, please comment or send me a message or ask! ♡

@suicidalshitstick ✩ @glow-autumz ✩ @evolvingchaoswitch ✩ @wren-phoenix ✩ @pretty-chips

total word-count: 16,388

[raccoonfallsharder]

rocket raccoon prompt week ✷ day two hurts ✷.⁺⋆˚₊

fluff | no use of yn | gn reader | drabble | word count: 626.

The frickin' Badoon fleet might've lost the battle, but they'd sure as shit beat the hell out of the Guardians while they were doing it. Rocket looks blearily around at the group, counting heads again just to make sure: Pete's got two black eyes and is trying to patch up a scrape on the back of his sister's shoulder that looks like ground-up orloni. Groot's sitting with his head bowed, elbows anchored to knees. He's got the laser burn kit next to him, waiting for Gamora. The Zen-Whoberi in question is currently busy trying to wrestle a medpack onto Drax's broken ribs, but the big idiot is such a frickin' baby that he keeps whining and trying to twist away, only to end up wheezing.

But where's the fuckin' new kid? Where are you?

Rocket's heart clenches up and twists and his bright eyes go wide suddenly, nose up and searching, ears alert. He could've sworn he'd seen you—

"Hey."

He deflates, the brief resurgence of adrenaline enough to make him suddenly want to puke all over the grated floors of the Bowie. "Dammit. Where'd you go?"

You circle around from behind him, a white cloth in your hand. Your voice is frayed and tattered by exhaustion, and you're bruised and scraped as hell, but his eyes stick to every square inch of you that he can see, and it doesn't look like you've got any major injuries.

You toss a tired glance over your shoulder and take in the scene behind you — a misshapen crescent of wounded Guardians. They'll be all right. But the guy in front of you? Him, you’re far less certain about. He's shaking — shuddering — like all his bones and implants are gonna rattle right out of his body. His eyes flick over you again, looking for an injury, looking for the clean scorched hole of a laser pistol shot right through the heart — then they scrape back over his friends, cataloging and re-cataloging every open wound, every minor bruise. His stare returns to you once more, and the cycle repeats. Rocket's got a head wound he probably doesn't even notice — blood black and sticky, clotting in his fur before it ever reaches his eyes. It's the whole reason you'd gone back to the linen locker and the sink in the first place.

You plant yourself between him and his friends, a barricade for his eyes, and he tries to lean around you without thinking about it — trying to keep all of you in his line of vision.

"They’re okay, friend," you say softly. "Don't let them scare you."

His eyes snap to yours, stunned and wide. It's a look you've never seen on his face before: vulnerable, bereft. The bright, glowing red of his gaze had always seemed like a stop light, but now —

You try to ignore it. You're sure he wouldn't want you to notice. Instead, you reach out with the cloth, still warm from the hot water you'd soaked it in, and touch it carefully to the crown of his head. The wet white fabric turns to rust: blood soaking up into the fibers.

Rocket stares up at you like you're a ghost. He knows there’s no way you could possibly know that those words and this gesture are so close to another’s, just the slight tonal shift of a voice echoing off a lifetime’s worth of vast, empty mountain expanse; there’s no way you could know how deeply that moment is carved on his makeshift heart — rising to the surface right now, in this second, with you. "It's okay," you tell him gently, tenderly pressing the soft cloth to his bloodied fur. You hope he knows you're not talking about the head wound. "You're gonna be okay."

not me watching my wordcount trend upward. i am trying to fucken control myself.

anyway i hope you enjoyed, my little daffodils

day one. explosives.✷ day three. emotionalistic. rocket prompt week masterlist ✷ main masterlist rocket raccoon prompt week list

taglist ♡ @evolvingchaoswitch ♡ @glow-autumz ♡ @wren-phoenix ♡ @suicidalshitstick ♡ @pretty-chips

[raccoonfallsharder]

so @thirteens-lucky-tardis had a lovely headcanon about Rocket just absolutely entranced by lava lamps. And I love it and it made me think like, take a moment to just breathe, or relax for a second or something? Just sit here and look at this frickin’ lamp thing. Idk it was such a nice visual I thought I’d bring it up to you ☺️

i went hunting for this but couldn't find it! i need to read it o(╥﹏╥)o

it makes complete sense. i'm just imagining you notice how much he likes yours - maybe you come home one day and you can't find him. he's normally clanking around with some invention or another - dismantling your toaster or building a new gun. muttering to himself, or humming one of those old songs. but today your apartment is silent, and if it weren't for the runabout still parked on the roof like a goddamn sleigh, you'd think he'd gone right back up into the stars.

you find him in your room, staring at the lava lamp that he must've turned on at some point. he's transfixed. it's the first time you've seen him still and quiet in your entire time of knowing him.

"are you okay?" you ask him cautiously.

he doesn't look away - just reaches out with one clawed hand and beckons you. "here-" he says, gesturing for you to come over. "-get over here. look at this weird frickin' thing."

a little chuckle huffs its way up out of your lungs, a breath like the beat of a small bird's wing. you come and perch next to him on the bed. i like to think you both lose time like this: breath slowing, hearts slowing, eyes growing heavy. At some point, he shifts and curls into a ball next to you, a compact bundle of fur pressing warmth into your thigh and flank. He rests his chin on your knee, eyes following the soft floats of wax, reflecting the slow-moving light.

i imagine you both end up dozing off, actually. much-needed naps for the two of you.

of course rocket remains entranced in the coming days and eventually - maybe for winter holidays, or as a parting gift - you give him a package to take with him back to knowhere. two lava lamps: one to keep, you tell him, and one to take apart.

i imagine he comes back to visit you often. you're basically best frickin friends - how could he stay away? no matter how much he hates this rotten mudball, you're here, and that makes it a little bit of a home. on one visit - months later; maybe a year - he finally convinces you to join him. he's still trying to get you to move permanently out to knowhere so you can hang out whenever he's not, like, saving the galaxy - but for now, he just wants you to see how it is. a little vacation, he tells you.

he's sure you'll fall in love.

and you do. the streets, the people, the life. cosmo and kraglin and nebula. drax and the kids. yaro root is surprisingly delicious, and they put it in everything. the streets are built on music. string-lights spangle the streets when the artificial sun sets, and the milky fizzes are way more delicious than they'd sounded when rocket had described them.

and those aren't even the best parts.

the best part is when you head in to rocket's place later that night, after meeting everyone and sharing food and playing card games and listening to music and talking for the majority of the night. though rocket has a few other places he think you might like to actually live if he's successful in persuading you to stay, he'd planned on you crashing at his place for the duration of your visit. you both stumble in the shadowy doors - a little buzzy out of pure exhaustion and happiness.

and then he turns on the lights.

rocket doesn't think about it - doesn't even realize he hadn't already told you about it. but the dark room slowly blooms into a soft, moon-pale glow, all the light emanating from dozens on dozens of smooth, luminous columns.

rocket's whole apartment is jeweled with lava lamps.

they're set into shelves lining the space above his workbench. there's a massive pillar of soft light shining next to his bed - his real bed, mattress and everything, because he knew you were comin' and though he'd never say it, your comfort is important to him. there are lamps set into the walls, into the corners. a hundred strange, alien light-forms, plucked from planet earth like flowers and improved: made safer, made softer, made more hypnotic and soothing.

inadvertently, from millions of lightyears away, you've touched this place. you've helped turn his shell of a living space into a home for him - into a haven.

a soft bed.

blankets and pillows.

the beautiful living light of countless shimmering columns, welcoming him into something close to peacefulness, something close to rest.

the two of you stay up late that night: sprawled on the soft, cozy mattress, bundled up in blankets. talking, warming the air with your words and your breaths and your quiet laughs. you both watch the shifting shadows on the walls and the swimming shapes of the wax, as slow-moving as moon-jellies, and just as lovely. your eyelashes and his both grow heavier and heavier, softer and softer, until they rest, finally, feather-light on your cheeks.

and eventually, wrapped in these plush shadows and quilts and the quiet glow, you both fall asleep.

[raccoonfallsharder]

I think Rocket would be like, INSANELY good at Hanayama Enigma puzzles. They're these little puzzles made out of interlocking metal parts, and the goal is to take them apart and then put them back together. I could see him just coming across one and fiddling with it for a few seconds before having it taken apart not even realizing it's supposed to be a challenge. He's so good at intuitively knowing how things fit together that these puzzles would be no match for him.

sorry for my delay, sweet nonnie. i've been a little burnt-out and reclusive lately, and i apologize! i'm back now (sorta), and so grateful you sent me this ask. i had to look these up and then i fell into a hole watching youtube videos of people solving them. wild. my brain does not work this way.

rocket's brain, however, absolutely works this way. you are 100% correct. of course, you'd know. the first time he sees you fucking around with one of these puzzles, he peers over your shoulder for a whole two seconds before being like, you're doing it wrong.

you don't even know what i'm trying to do, you say, annoyed, and he rolls his eyes.

fuck off. do too. twist that piece there. no, not that much. moron.

you follow his less-than-stellar directions - more out of curiosity than anything else - and outside of a few false starts when he's just not being clear about what he wants you to do, every new step takes you closer to the perfect solution.

it would be enraging if it weren't for how fascinated he looks. not by the puzzle itself, so much as the idea that it is a puzzle. for him, it just makes sense. he looks at these pieces of metal and - from your perspective - it's like he can see right through time, to the thing it's supposed to be. and god forbid he gets his actual hands on it. he's even faster when you convince him to try one himself and to do it blindfolded. if anything, it's almost like his eyes get in the way.

of course, it makes sense. every gun and weapon and ship he builds is ultimately just a bigger puzzle.

he doesn't understand why any of these toys are more difficult for you to figure out than something as simple as a clothespin, and that's what's got him all entranced. if you can understand how a key works in a lock or how to take apart a quad blaster to clean it, why can't you understand how to dismantle this tiny sculpture and put it back together again? that's the real puzzle, as far as rocket's concerned, and it's the one he decides he's gonna solve. so he starts making puzzles of his own - for you - little bits of interlocking metal, shapes that come together into new shapes. he tries to figure out the perfect combination of pieces that makes a thing hard for you to solve, but not too hard.

when a planet isn't being saved and the galaxy doesn't need guarding, this is how the citizens of knowhere find the two of you: in the dim dusky light of the artificial knowhere sunset, sitting outside mantlo's with either a pair of gargleblasters (yours is watered down) or milky fizzes, depending on the night. both of you are clinking away, the streetlights reflecting on the smooth glossy pieces of metal in your hands. you're trying to figure out the most recent puzzle rocket has given you, and rocket's busy bending and twisting metal to make the next one.

i'm using you, he tells you one night, after he's finished crafting your next puzzle and is just drinking his booze and looking down the street, watching people snack on streetfood and the star children play something like tag because drax is a pushover when it comes to enforcing bedtimes.

yeah? you mumble distractedly.

mmhm. he nods solemnly. i figure out how hard a puzzle is, depending on how long it takes your dumb ass to solve it. then, when some asshole comes to ask me questions or wants something, i give it to them so they get distracted and leave me alone.

yeah, okay, captain, you drawl, taking a sip of your drink and going back to the cool metal between your fingers. you've seen him doing exactly what he's describing, but you've noticed he never gives anyone a puzzle that's too difficult for them - just something for them to wrap their minds around for a few rotations, something to stretch their brains. they're always so proud when they come back to their captain with their toy figured out, even if he just gives them a blank stare - pretending he really does think they're idiots.

of course, the people of knowhere see right through him.

rocket's such a hard ass, you mock. who knew.

he makes a typical scoffing sound, but when you look up, you can see him: watching his people with soft eyes. nebula's out today, talking with some of the vendors, and one of the kids is perched on her back. you can hear drax laughing down the street, and somewhere, cosmo barks happily. rocket's shoulders are relaxed, and his tail flicks lazily, and you're not sure you've ever seen him so at ease.

you lean over and nudge him with your elbow.

joke's on you, bud.

everyone here just thinks you're handing out presents because you like them.

[raccoonfallsharder]

˚₊‧✶ headcanon 20 ✶‧₊˚

comics-rocket raccoon has eclectic cinematic tastes.

you'd think a guy like that would be all about the action and heist movies, but they actually annoy him to the point of fury. imagine skottie young's rocket waving rageful fists while he screws up his furry face and bellows cursewords at the screen, crimson eyes gleaming and teeth flashing.

they're so flarkin' impractical, he tells you later, mournfully, cradling his second six-pack of acanti blubber ale against his chest. i'd do it so much better.

ewing's rocket is too serious and cynical to allow himself to be seen enjoying movies, but you're suspicious. He always seems to have something to work on in the common room when drax is watching his intergalactic soap operas and his very-earther k-dramas. you're pretty sure you once saw him dismantle and rebuild an ion blaster four times in one sitting just so he wouldn't miss the end of romance is a bonus book.

he never acknowledges the screen and if you'd asked him to tell you about what you'd missed in today's episode of drax's current favorite historical love story, the missing princess of zen-whoberi, rocket would probably just stare at you blankly and tell you he didn't have a frutackin' clue what you were talking about.

but he knows. you know he knows.

mcu rocket? well. like many of his space-faring contemporaries—

he just frickin' hates actors.

they're liars, he reasons. pretending to be something they're not. and worse. kevin bacon's not too bad, but rocket only has a soft spot for him because he met the guy personally, and kb had apologized for the raccoon-comment. you try to repackage the idea to rocket: actors aren't liars, you say to him. they're story-tellers.

but the idea of a fiction that isn't a lie is hard to sell. and games of pretend are dangerous.

you eventually get him to settle into your living room for some reality television, which you remind him is still cut and clipped and manipulated to represent something that is only perhaps marginally-true. he snickers and makes rude comments the whole time, but seems to enjoy it — falling asleep curled around the enormous bowl of popcorn you'd made to sustain him while he binged the latest season of love is blind.

eventually, he shows a willingness to try to watch some other things with you. he's distrustful at first, but after some time, you catch him sniffling during certain scenes, and on the edge of his seat in others. like his skottie young counterpart, he's not a big fan of action and heist movies, always rolling his eyes with annoyance. he finds space-comedy to be boring as hell, staring flat-eyed at the screen — but serious space-dramas are hysterical to him. he cackles through every star wars movie and is literally crying with laughter during jupiter ascending and rebel moon. perhaps unsurprisingly, it's the documentaries he loves: nature and culture and pyramid schemes, though he's always mumbling about how frickin' primitive terrans are. he's also weirdly into slow, pensive coming-of-age dramas, which had surprised you until you'd realized that rocket's transition into adulthood must have been something far more traumatic than you could ever dream.

one more thing you've noticed about his viewing habits — he's got no taste for horror. when you mention it, he tells you that there are too many monsters out there to watch more of them in here.

except for michael flanaghan's fall of the house of usher, which rocket has watched in-full at least three times — possibly more often, because you're pretty sure he's hacked your netflix account and is watching stuff from space when you're not around. and you're not sure why he keeps watching it, when it makes him so damn morose afterward.

wish there was justice like that in the universe, he only mutters when you ask.

it's a haunting little curl of sound, coming from his mouth. so you don't press it — just hand him tonight's bowl of popcorn, studded with m&ms, and wrap the blanket around the both of you together.

find more headcanons & imagines here

i had to take a break from pompt week i'm sorry! the bite prompt is killing me. i rewrote it fifty-seven times (well, five) so i'm just gonna give myself a day or two to come back at it with fresh eyes. in the meantime please have this kinda depressing headcanon as a peace offering

also now i just gave myself the idea for a oneshot of rocket as a - participant? player? - on love is blind sooooo that might happen. eventually. i currently have too many ideas and not enough time.

[raccoonfallsharder]

rocket raccoon prompt week ✷ day one explosives ✷.⁺⋆˚₊

spice | rocket x f!oc | drabble | word count: 187. excerpted from a future chapter of ꧁･:☁︎⋆. cicatrix .⋆☁︎ :･꧂

“Why do you always smell like marzipan? Everything else — the forest, the campfire — that all makes sense. But the marzipan—“

“What the fuck is marzipan?”

She laughs — something between a giggle and a chuckle. “A little…cake? Kind of? Made from sugar and honey and almonds. It’s like — you have this sweet, nutty smell —“ she buries her nose into the plush fur where his throat meets his shoulder and he bites back a groan. It’s like she’s trying to scent-mark him, her cheeks all scrubbed up against his fur. He wants to return the favor — stroke his nose along her throat, between her thighs. Make sure she smells like him —

“Uh.” He can feel the heat under his fur, looking away from her and then closing his eyes, swallowing. “Some of explosives I use, prob’ly. When the compounds start breaking down, they uh — they smell like that.”

“Your shirts do, too,” she adds. “Sometimes I just want to—“

Her voice cracks off into something self-conscious and shy but his brain picks up right where she’d left off. What, sweetheart? You wanna rub me all over yourself? That’s just fine. 

??? i don't know. anyway i've had this little drabble in my head for months and months, and i embedded it into the draft of cicatrix (not sure which chapter it'll end up in yet), and now i'm taking it out and dusting it off for this. ta-da! anyway check out #rocketraccoonpromptweek and i will do my best to keep up!

day two. hurts. rocket prompt week masterlist ✷ main masterlist check out the rocket raccoon prompt week list!

taglist ♡ @evolvingchaoswitch ♡ @glow-autumz ♡ @wren-phoenix ♡ @suicidalshitstick ♡ @pretty-chips

[raccoonfallsharder]

i like to imagine that if one were to give Rocket a sudoku or crosswords puzzle, he can fill them all out at an unbelievable rate. like, you'd introduce him to the concept of sudoku, how each row and each column and each 3×3 grid should have nine distinct and non-repeating numerical digits–

but you haven't finished explaining the rules and Rocket's already filling out the empty boxes with his pencil like ticking off items on a laundry list. not a minute later, it's solved. he then gets confused at your jaw dropping while showing you the filled-out paper puzzle.

"what? you're- you just, fill out the thing with numbers, right? what's so surprising?"

i love this! im sorry i didn’t see this ask sooner but YES. thank you so much for this PERFECT mental image lol. i am actually working on a oneshot that’s not about this EXACTLY but is about rocket’s brain in relation to some of these things lol. the way he sees shit.

sudoku, i think, is easy for him. you explain the rules once and he just looks at the grid and he knows where everything goes. it’s like looking at a bomb or a gun. all the pieces have a home — it only takes one glance with soft eyes to see where each thing fits.

word searches, too. once he knows what a word is supposed to look like, he can take in a box of letters with that same glance and be like — oh, there’s fifteen words. sometimes he finds words that aren’t even intentionally included.

the trick with both these puzzles is that rocket does not get caught up in the sequence of things. he doesn’t go line-by-line or letter-by-letter. he has a more holistic way of understanding things — a big-picture kind of guy. looks at them and says “this is where the thing fits.”

now, crossword puzzles? those i’m less sure of. i think rocket would be the type to be annoyed by “bad clues.” his vocabulistics ain’t always standard, so to speak, and i bet he sometimes makes up words. plus, having to remember how they’re supposed to be spelled? that’s a problem. sometimes the clue will be like “more yellow than blue; a French liqueur” and instead of writing in “chartreuse” rocket is like “greeeeeeen” because why the fuck not, this game is stupid. he finishes in record time but when you look at it, most of the answers are like… only sorta-conceptually-correct? and usually with creative spellings? occasionally he’ll throw in a cluster of letters in kree?

“so i can see you answered this column with crow but you used a character i don’t recognize for the w and it’s overlapping with the g in lasagna. and uhm neither of those are technically right.”

“yeah in shi’ar that letter makes a sound like wuh or guh. little further back in the throat though.”

“uh huh. but this is, uhm, a US-english crossword.”

“so?”

“…good talk.”

now maybe when he’s a little older, and the Star Kids have grown up and have Star Kids of their own, and Old Man Rocket is sitting outside a cantina on Knowhere making origami versions of cosmo for them — maybe in between he pulls out the giant book of puzzles pete sent him for christmas last year. adjusts his reading glasses and strokes a claw over his grizzled whiskers. the kids come up and ask him what he’s working on today and he shows them and teaches them how to do each one.

“this one you can’t repeat any numbers.”

“that seems hard.”

“nah, it’ll be easy for you. you’re almost as much of a genius as me. now, this one you gotta find these words in this graph.”

“okay. i think i like this better. what about that one?”

“ah, i used to hate those ones but now they’re my favorite.”

“yeah?”

“yeah. for these ones, you just make shit up, and you bend all the rules till your answer works.”

[raccoonfallsharder]

✩࿐࿔ take your goddamn meds. [new 2/19]

fluff (smut-free) | gn reader | no use of y/n | drabble | word count: 1,288.

hey. hey you. have you taken your meds today? inquiring anthropomorphic space-raccoons want to know.

“Hey!” You grimace at Cosmo. “Captain’s in a mood already this morning, huh?” you ask the canine under your breath, ruffling the silky fur at the base of her ears. “When is he not?” her crackling voice asks from the speaker at her throat. She’s laughing, though: big doggy grin on her face, and sparkles in her eyes. “I can frickin’ hear you, you know,” Rocket snaps from right behind you. “Not all of us have bad humie ears.” You roll your eyes exaggeratedly at Cosmo, and she giggles through her speaker. Dramatically, you turn to face your Captain — right at eye-level, since you’d already been kneeling to give the Russian cosmonaut her post-breakfast scratchies. “I see you got up on the right side of the bed,” you snark, rising, and he glowers. “How long’ve you been up, kid?” You check your phone. “Like, three hours?” “You ate breakfast?” he demands, scowling, and you roll your eyes yet again. “Yes, sir.” You inject all the droll sarcasm you can into the response, with the laziest little salute you can muster up to go with it. His eyes narrow. “Take your meds?” You blink. You hadn’t been expecting that question, especially not this early in the day. “Uhm — what?”

read more on ao3 ✩࿐࿔

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).

this is about as wholesome as it gets (for me) i think. can be read platonically or romantically. mcu-based, 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. [est 2/26] for LunaAfton♡

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

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. if you’d like to join my fanfiction taglist, please comment or send me a message or ask! ♡

@suicidalshitstick ✩ @glow-autumz ✩ @evolvingchaoswitch ✩ @wren-phoenix ✩ @pretty-chips

total word-count: 15,166