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raccoonfallsharder · 4 months

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the raccoon, the witch, & the roadtrip.✮part five. montana.

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angst, comfort, friendship, & fluff for @hibatasblog rocket & wanda | part 5/7 | word count: 1975.

what makes a person a monster?

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

Wanda hadn’t felt much like talking since they’d left the bar. She can’t possibly describe the lurch in her lungs when she’d woken alone in the room, and found Rocket—

gone.

She peels it apart when they get in the car: silent, lost in her thoughts. Rocket doesn’t turn on his music right away, and when she casts a sideways glance at him, he looks vaguely uncomfortable: shifting in his seat, clenching and unclenching his fists. He looks like he wants to be taking something apart, inventing something new — anything to take his mind off whatever’s eating him inside.

After the scene in the bar, when the bartender had poured Rocket’s drink so shakily that the mouth of the bottle had clanked against the glass tumbler, Wanda had sat beside her companion quietly. The bartender had wisely left the bottle behind, and then had gotten to work with the rest of the wide-eyed, ashen hotel staff to clean up the glass that had been broken in the altercation. She’d watched her furry colleague bemusedly as he sulked over his liquor, and had tried to tell herself that she had only been concerned because Rocket had been missing, and she’d known that someone walking around looking like a sentient raccoon could only get in trouble, no matter how well-intentioned and well-behaved he’d been attempting to be.

She had tried to tell herself it was just concern for a missing hero in a cruel world.

But her reaction had been too visceral to keep herself convinced. As she’d unfolded the truth of herself, wincing, she’d had to acknowledge that the way fear had suddenly ripped through her belly had been all too similar to the ache she’d felt when she’d lost Pietro: screaming hollowly at the root of her lungs, at the vagus nerve laced against her heart. A shrieking void in the center of a fiery cyclone. It had been an agony of terror: to think her new, small, sarcastic friend had been taken from her like everyone else.

When she’d seen him — safe, but on the verge of becoming a victim of his own temper — she’d wrapped her power around him as carefully as she knew how. And when she’d realized what was happening, her own temper had surged: some strange combination of fire and ice.

She’s so tired of people being treated as less-than, of lives being overlooked.

Especially the lives she loves.

Rocket still doesn’t speak. They make their way through a number of national forests before he even hesitantly reaches out to fuss with the music again. She says nothing as something mellow spills from the speakers, but she can feel her shoulders ease. It takes another hour before his feet are kicking again, and he’s humming something low and husking along with the lyrics.

“Uh, hey,” he says at last, his voice rasping as the sun begins to cast a melting-gold crust over the edge of the trees ahead of them, light hitting the western crest of the world and sprawling upward in sprays of topaz and rose and aquamarine. “Thanks for — I dunno. Sorry for fucking up at the last place. And thanks for, uh, stepping in.” He shifts next to her, one shoulder hitching uncomfortably. She watches from her periphery as his lip curls in a clenched-jaw grimace, like he’s tasted something sour.

She weighs that quietly.

“I was as angry as you were, once I understood what was happening,” she admits.

The wince lingering in the corner of his mouth and eyelids softens. “Saw that,” he acknowledges after a long minute, spooled with the crooning tones of whomever’s singing from the zune now. “Don’t know — I think only Nebs has ever, uh. Stuck up for me like that.” His voice sounds parched and cracked and starved, like he’s not certain what he’s trying to say. Like maybe the words feel disloyal, somehow, to his absent friends. Something answering cracks open in her ribs. She knows he loved the rest of the Guardians — Pete, he’d mentioned, referring to the owner of the zune. Gamora, whom Wanda has gathered had been sacrificed to Thanos’ goals, just like Vis. But it hurts her to think that Rocket’s little adopted family wouldn’t have been just as offended on his behalf as she had been. Or maybe they would have been, and he just doesn’t realize it. Either way, it hurts. It hurts to think that he believes no-one would have been moved to intercede, to demand respect on his behalf, or to offer comfort.

Pietro would have devastated anyone whom he’d perceived as treating her as inferior. And in his own gentle, wise way, Vis would have fought for her as well.

At least he has Nebula, now, she thinks, and a space inside her loosens. She hasn’t spoken with the awkward blue cyborg — not anymore than she’s spoken to anyone else on the team, preferring to stay off to the side, needing to observe. But knowing that Rocket feels like “Nebs” would step in for him allows some of the tension in her neck and shoulders to ease.

“You — you got a lot of power,” Rocket says tentatively. “As much as Danvers, maybe.”

She feels herself go watchful and wary again. The silence is heavy in the little car, even smothering the faint music trailing from the speakers.

“Or more,” she admits at last, quietly.

He acknowledges her addition with a mild grunt and a nod.

“Ya know, the Guardians of the Galaxy numbers are lookin’ pretty slim these days,” he says musingly. “F’you ever wanna get off this planet. Could find a spot for you, prob’ly.” He slants her a taunting grin. “Pretty sure we’re more fun than the Avengers. Less stuffy and judgy, too.”

She can’t help the delicate snort that scrapes up the back of her throat, edged with laughter. And here she’d been worried that he was scared of her. Instead, twice in two days, now, he’s made her laugh.

Regular laughter seems like such a distant memory. It is a distant memory, and a frail one. She’d had it before the Stark industries mortar shell, and then again in her time with Vis — but certainly not since.

Other than that first time she’d seen him bickering with Nebula on the compound lawn.

“Not that every part of this planet sucks,” Rocket admits grudgingly from beside her. The last flickers of sun-gold ricochet off the distant line of tree and mountain, settling into a rosy-lavender and hydrangea-blue. “This section’s kinda nice, if you’re into that sort of thing. Reminds me of specifical parts a’ Berhert or Foresteria.”

She considers the Montana terrain. “Are you into that sort of thing?”

He smirks. “Not enough places to get into trouble for me,” he says with a sideways toss of his head. “No gambling. Or booze.” He pauses to waggle his brows at her, so exaggerated that she can see the gesture even in her periphery. “Or tail.”

This time, when she laughs, it hasn’t crawled up her spine: it’s as bright as it had been the other day, so merry in the air that it’s utterly foreign to her ears.

“You are ridiculous,” she tells him, but he only gifts her a shit-eating grin.

“What about you?” he asks. “You ever think about runnin’ away from Terra? Come hang out with the cool kids in the stars?”

She snorts again and glances sideways at him in the melting velvet shadows. How does the space inside Natasha’s car, with its ruined dashboard and sound system, feel so much easier than anywhere she’s ever been in the past five years? How does it feel so much easier than anywhere she’s ever been at all, unless it was with Vis?

“Not exactly,” she says quietly.

“Not exactly?”

She hesitates and chews the inside of her lip at the corner of her mouth.

“I think about making a place for myself,” she admits after a handful of quiet breaths. The song on the zune blurs into something new. “A place where… where things are the way they’re supposed to be.”

The quiet expands. Doubles.

“Whaddaya mean?” her companion asks at last. There’s tension in his voice, but it’s surprisingly quiet. As soft as she imagines his fur.

She hesitates. “I could — I think I could do it. Make a place — like in the old TV shows. Somewhere perfect, where people can be happy. Where I can be happy.”

The silence drawls through the music, and she can feel Rocket’s anxiety. She’d been silly to think he might be scared of her before, because now she can feel it — crackling and tense. But… it’s also careful. Testing. Cautious. She knows if she’d said something like this to any one of the Avengers, they’d probably try to lock her up immediately. They don’t understand her magic, and they don’t understand her. And they certainly don’t understand her pain.

After all, they’ve always been able to look away.

And while she can tell that Rocket doesn’t like what she’s shared — the dangerous little truth she’s laid out between their armrests — somehow, she doesn’t feel judged.

“I get that,” he says at last, his voice grudging and slow. “Wanting that. Me myself, I never had the — I never had the power to sort of… reshape the galaxy into what I wanted.” He pauses, and she can feel him gathering his thoughts in the dusk like the fireflies that used to litter the Sokovian summer grasses. When he speaks again, his voice has grown as dark as the world outside their car: grim and solemn and hard. “But I definitely been one a’ the poor morons who got caught up in someone else’s idea of perfect, and I can promise — you try to tie other people up like that, and you’re only gonna become somebody’s nightmare.”

She takes her eyes off the road, even though she shouldn’t — not here, in the dusk and the trees and the mountains. Her eyes find his in the shadows: glowing red to glowing red. She flicks her gaze over him: the broad shoulders that should be sloped inward, the opposable thumbs where there should only be dexterous fingers, the hard-packed muscle where she would expect a soft layer of fat. She’d decided that maybe he was an alien — and perhaps that’s true — but now she realizes there’s more to it than just that.

Someone’s shaped him into this.

Who was your nightmare? she thinks, and remembers Ultron again. Trying to reshape the world. It’s not the first time in the last five years that her fantasies of recreating a small slice of the world have given her pause — but it is the first time that the uneasiness has outweighed the solace.

Then she thinks of the labs. Of Hydra, yes — and the other one. The one she still isn’t sure if she remembered or dreamed up.

Rocket clears his throat, as if he knows she’s wondering what happened to make him the way he is.

“Take that asshole Thanos,” he mutters at last, and there’s a darkness to his tone that matches her own midnight vortex of thoughts when it comes to the Mad Titan. “So frickin’ committed to what he thought would make the universe better, that he killed half of it and broke everybody else.” Her companion scowls and mutters something in a language she doesn’t understand, but it doesn’t matter, because his words have already opened up a pit in her belly: pinching and frightened.

“I wouldn’t be killing anyone,” she says, and she’s surprised by the stubbornness in her voice. It makes her flinch, and that cramp in her belly tightens apprehensively — but she goes on anyway. Trying to convince herself, she realizes, even as she speaks. “I’d give them perfect lives. I’d make them be happy.”

He lifts his head and even though her eyes are back on the road, she feels his heavy, quiet, steady stare.

“Can’t make anybody be anything, witch.” He clears his throat, and his eyes release her. “Not without making yourself a frickin’ monster.”

sometimes i fuck around with comics-canon and throw it into my mcu fanfics so uh be ready for that with the next chapter. we're gettin weird

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raccoonfallsharder · 5 months

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the raccoon, the witch, & the roadtrip. part one. prepare for departure.

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angst, comfort, friendship, & fluff for @hibatasblog rocket & wanda | part 1/7 | word count: 1371.

rocket gets a very-important mission from danvers and needs a partner to go with him. enter the witch.

It is a well-documented fact (I know you know) that in the comic books, many of the marvel ladies have a thing for Rocket Raccoon. How could they not? Eyes like red beryls and pyropes, teeth and wit both so sharp they can kill long before the perfectly-aimed gravity-blast. Intuition off the charts, not to mention the things they've heard he can do with that tail...

Alas, this is not the comics. This is the MCU, some time between 2018 and 2023.

And while everything else remains more or less the same, Wanda Maximoff was not turned into ash.

“Yeah, yeah, I hear you,” Rocket says, rolling his eyes.

Wanda isn’t sure what to call him. He looks like a raccoon, but insists that he isn’t one. Maybe he’s an alien. Maybe he’s something else. Either way, he’s rolling his eyes at Natasha, so hard that his whole head rolls with them.

“Look, I got a very important mission from Danvers, and Nebs is busy right now, working with Kraglin to make Knowhere a more hospitablistic place for Snap refugees. D’you wanna fuck over a bunch of Snap refugees, Nat?”

He crosses his arms and raises a brow up at the new leader-apparent of the Avengers. If Wanda hadn’t felt so — nothing at all, actually — she might have let a smirk curl the corner of her mouth. He’s kind of a brat, and he knows how to get under peoples’ skin. When she’d been a child, she would have found that entertaining. Endearing. She supposes she’d used to have a soft spot for scrappy survivors. Then she’d had to stop having a soft spot for anything but her brother.

Then —

“Goddammit, Rocket. Go to Washington, then. I don’t care. But we still need the Benatar.”

His challenging look turns into a glower. “Fuck off, Nat. What am I supposed to do, then? Drive your frickin’ car?”

Natasha flaps a hand at him distractedly from behind her desk. “Yes, that’s fine, take the car—”

The look he gives her is withering. “I can’t reach the fuckin’ pedals, Nat. So unless you’re giving me permission to take the whole inefficient machine apart an’ put it back together to suit my needs, you’re gonna have to—”

“I can’t spare anyone, Rocket,” the Russian snaps.

“And I can’t be alone right now,” he snaps right back. Wanda’s eyes flick back and forth between them.

Natasha grits her teeth. “You said this was a mission from Carol?”

“Yes,” he hisses, tapping one booted foot impatiently.

She closes her eyes and sighs heavily, leaning back in her chair and pressing her fingers into her temples. “Fine,” she says at last, drawing the word out — petulantly, Wanda thinks from a great distance. “Find someone who’s willing to go with you and I’ll tell you if I can spare them.”

Rocket doesn’t hesitate. Without moving anything but his arm, he’s brandishing a single dark claw in Wanda’s direction.

“I’ll take the witch.”

Five years earlier — in the first days after the Snap, before they’d left all their hope on 0259-S with Thanos’ headless body — everyone else had belonged to somebody. Cap and Nat had each other, and Nat had Banner and the arrow-guy. Rhodey had the rich guy who thought he was a genius, and the rich guy had that other redhead. Thor had maybe lost the most, but he had Banner too, and his buddies from Sakaar. The Dora Milaje had their whole sisterhood. Only Danvers might have been on her own — but as far as Rocket had been able to tell, Captain Marvel hadn’t seemed to have a lotta close ties she was mourning.

But Rocket — Rocket had nobody.

Again.

Nobody except Gamora’s sister, whose name he’d kept forgetting.

Of course, there was the witch.

Disproportionate number of redheads on this planet, he remembers thinking bemusedly.

He hadn’t been able to remember her name for a while either, but unlike everyone else on Terra, she’d seemed almost as alone as he was. And he hadn’t been able to help but watch her, his eyes slanting sideways to stare at her as she’d sat by herself across the room, hands anchored around upper arms. He couldn't make out the color of her eyes — they’d seemed impossibly dark, with rage or grief or something else, something haunted.

Except for when they’d smouldered like furious banked fires.

She’d never said a frickin’ word, either: face blank and beautiful as a statue’s. Her silence had felt more surreal than any other stupid thing he’d encountered in space, which he supposed was probably just because he’s spent the last four years with a family of weirdos who’d never seemed able to shut the fuck up.

Still. He’d tilted his head when the other avengers had walked past her — watched as they’d seemed almost to forget she was even there. They’d barely talked to her, and once, when they’d been ordering lunch, they’d missed her entirely.

Uh — you didn’t ask the witch what she wants, Rocket had said to Nat awkwardly, and the assassin had blinked and her eyes had hunted the whole room before they’d finally focused on the other woman — like she hadn’t even known where her fellow-Avenger was.

No. The witch had been an outcast. And Rocket has always known something about outcasts. His whole frickin’ family — both, some small part of his brain had tried to speak up before he could smother it; both families were made of the unwanted — his whole frickin’ family had been outcasts and misfits. It had made some part of Rocket’s heart suddenly stretch in his chest. It had reached with grasping fingers, trying to hang onto something he’d already known he’d lost.

Family.

The next day, Rocket had cleared his throat and told Gamora’s sister that he was gonna go starside to touch base with Kraglin on the Third Quadrant — to see if he still exists, he hadn’t said, but he’d been pretty sure the cyborg had picked it up.

“You wanna come, Blue?” he’d asked — wincing when his nonchalance had been too thin to be believable. But the Luphomoid had inclined her head, eyes dark and steady. When that had been squared away — surprisingly a hell of a lot easier than he’d thought — he’d shuffled to his feet, and headed to the bench outside the compound, where the witch had been sitting since sunrise.

He’d stood in her line of vision and stared at the sky too, shifting his weight uncomfortably from foot to foot, tail trying to tuck itself underneath him. It had probably been a full twenty minutes before he’d felt her eyes on him.

“I. Uh. I heard you lost your robot-boyfriend.” The words had been as clumsy as an orloni drunk on fermented Asgardian figs, but he’d been trying.

The witch’s eyes had flared, crimson-bright. “Robot?” she’d repeated dangerously.

Rocket’s ears had flicked back and he’d taken a step away, into the grass: hands extended, palms out.

“Hey, m’not trying to be a dick,” he’d protested. “I think I might be part-robot myself.” He’d stabbed a thumb over his shoulder toward the Benatar, where he could feel his new blue companion staring holes in his back. “Gamora’s sister’s almost all-robot, too.”

He could also feel the sister in question rolling her eyes.

“M’just saying,” he’d muttered at both of them, hunching his shoulders and half-turning to kick a patch of grass. “Some of us are solo now.” He’d gestured at the cyborg again. “Might be good to stick together.”

“I was used to being solo,” Nebs had pointed out, and Rocket had winced. “You’re the one who got attached.”

His ears had flattened. “Whatever,” he’d growled. “Just thought — whatever.” He’d spun again, kicking more grass, and muttered bitterly under his breath. “So much for trying to be the captain. So much for trying to look out for the damn strays.”

“You’re the stray,” Nebula had replied with a mutinous jut of her chin — and how the fuck had she heard him? That wasn’t standard Luphomoid hearing range.

Rocket had cursed whatever aural implants Thanos had given her.

Then the witch had made a strange sound behind him — a little huff of breath. A disbelieving, agonized little shred of laughter.

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raccoonfallsharder · 4 months

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the raccoon, the witch, & the roadtrip. part four. south dakota.

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angst, comfort, friendship, & fluff for @hibatasblog rocket & wanda | part 4/7 | word count: 1864.

rocket and wanda get in a fight.

They don’t stop until Rapid City. Wanda looks like she might actually be ready for a nap — her firestorm-eyes somehow blunted by exhaustion — and Rocket himself could go for a few drinks, which is apparently not a thing you’re allowed to do if you’re in a moving vehicle in this corner of Terra.

Stupid, he’d scoffed at the witch. M’not even the one working the frickin’ pod.

Car, she’d corrected mildly, and she still hadn’t let him have a drink. He’d thought about swiping some booze at one of the so-called rest-stops, but then he’d felt all twisted-up inside about sneaking a drink when it was clearly something she didn’t want him to do. In some ways, she reminds him of Gamora — too serious, carrying way too much for her skinny baldbody shoulders — and the thought of fucking around with her rules when she’s got so few of ‘em just makes him feel small and low.

Sometimes he misses the days when screwing with someone brought him twisted shreds of meanspirited joy.

Time to be the captain, he thinks bitterly.

By the time they find a hotel with a vacancy that doesn’t look like a shithole — not that he minds shitholes, of course, they kinda feel like home to him; but Wanda’s muttering something about bedbugs and reminding him that Natasha’s paying — well, by then, he’s a little worried he’s not gonna get a drink after all. There doesn’t seem to be a bar within reasonable walking distance — not that he can see. But when they check in, he can see from the corner of his eye that there’s a bar attached right to the frickin’ lobby, and he thinks maybe Terra doesn’t completely suck after all.

The witch is so exhausted that it actually doesn’t take long for her to drift off this time — at least, not by his standards. He can hear her heartbeat suddenly thumping her awake every few minutes for the first half-hour or so — but eventually, her stifled breaths of wakefulness spread out and smooth over.

It’s not that he’s trying to sneak out. He hasn’t done that since — well, since Pete was around, and that was mostly just to fuck with an easily-annoyed Star-Lord. Really — and Rocket would never admit it if asked — he’s pretty sure that, like himself, the witch finds it easier to sleep when she’s not alone.

So he putters around, quietly working on a series of tiny linked infrasonic mines made from some scraps he’d squirreled out of Nat’s sound system and a pocketful of things called earbuds he’d swiped at one of the fancier rest-stops. Once he’s sure Wanda’s asleep, he scrawls a note for her — hoping he’s remembering the written Terran language Pete had insisted on trying to teach the Guardians before everything went to hell. Rocket had picked up a fair amount of it, even if he’d pretended disinterest.

He wishes he hadn’t been such a frickin’ dickhead about it.

witch - goin to lobby bar. see you in mornin. r

He snags one of the access cards out of the flimsy paper envelope that the front desk had issued them, and carefully eases the door shut behind him. Currently, the plan is to let the poor witch sleep, and to get so wasted while she does it. He’s been sober for cycles now, and he frickin’ deserves it.

Down the hall he goes, whistling a jaunty tune, tail swinging casually behind him. On the way past the ice machine, the door of another room opens. Some baldbody woman looks out, then drops her eyes to his. She blinks, goes white, and closes the door right back up again. He shrugs — weird — and hops in the elevator. He ain’t a fan of the little crack between the floor of the hotel and the little metal box, dropping down countless stories to the basement below. Don’t Terrans know how to make any safe tech? He tries not to think about being in a deathtrap while he hits the button labeled G, which Wanda had explained was for ground floor.

On four, the elevator pauses and a man nearly steps in before noticing Rocket. The interim captain of the Guardians of the Galaxy offers a friendly, nonthreatening mock salute.

“Hey, guy.”

The man goes white, and steps back out of the elevator, suddenly gripping his messenger bag in front of his belly. Rocket frowns as the doors slide shut.

Terrans are so frickin’ weird, he thinks again.

The elevator dings and the doors slide open, and Rocket grins at the sight of the bar, with all its glass bottles reflecting molasses-brown shadows and amber light.

“Hello, gorgeous,” he murmurs, and strolls across the tiled floor and through the little entryway. The bar is nearly empty — perfect for penance-drinking. He leaps delicately onto a stool at the bar. “I’ll take the hardest thing you’ve got,” he tells the bartender — a slender humie with thick, darksilver hair. The man blinks at him, eyes growing wide and face turning to ash. “The whole bottle,” the captain clarifies, suddenly recalling that Terran humies tend to distill some of the weakest liquors in the galaxy.

“I — I don’t think I can do that,” the Terran says thinly. His eyes flicker over Rocket, ears to tailtip.

Rocket’s brow pleats. “Huh? Why not?”

“Uh,” the bartender says, eyes siding nervously to one side, “we don’t serve… pets at the bar…”

It takes a minute for Rocket to be sure he’s understood correctly. His lip peels back from his teeth and he catches himself at the start of a seething hiss when the man shrinks back.

Terrans are just morons, Rocket reminds himself. You’re s’posed to be the captain now. Of the Guardians of the frickin’ Galaxy. A good guy.

Hang onto your frickin’ temper.

“Dude,” he manages to grind out between sharp teeth. “I ain’t a frickin’ pet.”

“Wild animal, then,” the bartender mumbles, eyes nearly as big as Mantis’ had been, but much less kind. It sends a spear of leaden regret right through the fucked-up, half-shredded muscle of Rocket’s heart.

That chick with the antennae, he’d called her. Why’s he always gotta be such a dickhead?

For once, he tries not to turn that pain outward, even though it’s always so much easier. Still, he can’t help but feel his fists curl and his ears flick back, flattening against his skull. “How many wild animals do you know that talk?” he asks the humie behind the bar, trying to be reasonable. “I’m a frickin’ Guardian of the Galaxy. An honorary Avenger or whatever. I fought Thanos for you assholes.”

I lost my whole family for you.

The bartender begins backing away, palms raised in surrender. “Look, I don’t know anything about you being an Avenger, but if you’re not a service animal, I don’t think you can even be in the bar—“

Rocket feels his eyes go round and his spit go sour. The fur on his back and neck and arms splays wide, and his tail puffs to twice its normal size. “A. What?”

The bartender looks like he’s going to cry. “I don’t know, man! For all I know, you could be rabid—“

“I ain’t rabid,” Rocket snarls, rising to his feet on his barstool. “I get my frickin’ shots—“

“—and we don’t serve raccoons!”

His jaw clicks shut. The sharp electric-shock of the word burns every nerve and short-circuits his brain, and all he can think is how much he’d give up for Pete to call him that shit-name again.

“What’d you call me?”

He launches himself over the bar and lands on the mirrored shelf behind it, spraying bottles across the narrow space while the Terran shrieks and cowers. Glass and booze explode against the tile while Rocket spins and hooks his hands into claws, ready to rend.

“I’m gonna frickin’—“

He’s springing through the amber and blue shadows when strands of light, as glowing-crimson as his own warning-beacon eyes, loop around his waist and tug him back, suspending him in midair. He tears at the gossamer-fine threads, but they slip through his fingers like mist.

“Rocket.”

He bares his teeth and glares upward.

The witch.

She strides across the lobby, smudged and tired, her red-star eyes spiraling and spilling molten fire. Her hair’s all tangled from whatever brief sleep she’d gotten, and her face looks white and pinched and pained. She must’ve woken, some part of him notices — smothered under the heat of his fury, his lashing tail and kicking legs. She must’ve woken, and noticed he was gone, and seen his note.

She looks concerned.

The front desk staff flinches away from where they’d been watching the scene unfold in the bar.

“Rocket,” she says gently. “Stop.”

“I will, sweetheart,” Rocket promises earnestly, still twisting and tearing at her threads of power. “Swear I will. Just lemme take care of this one jackass first—“

“No,” she says, stepping up next to wear he’s suspended, her face just a few inches from his. Her magic pulls him gently over the bar, closer to herself. “He’s not worth it.” She looks around the lobby, and some distant part of Rocket wonders how such a volcanic stare can suddenly look so utterly cold and remote. Is his own eyeshine is picking up the reflection of her light and throwing it back at her? He can picture it: four firestorm-eyes lighting up the entire hotel lobby.

“Nothing in this place is,” she adds icily, and the ends of her hair begin to flicker and float in a wind he can’t feel. His instincts suddenly shudder and go still: the freeze element of a classic flight-or-fight reaction. Something deep under his fur acknowledges the pure threat of her. The witch’s voice is dark, and crackling with raw red lightning. Something at the base of his spine recognizes it as the most dangerous sound he’s ever heard, and his ears flatten in alarm, puffed tail suddenly tucking in against his inner calf. The silk strands of magic lower Rocket gently until his feet rest on the surface of the bar, but they don’t release him — not yet. Never mind that he’s not fighting anymore.

“You are a fool,” she tells the bartender, turning her molten eyes toward the baldbody still cowering behind the bar. She lifts a hand to point at Rocket. “This person is more than just an Avenger. He has saved the entire galaxy — a number of times. In all likelihood, he has saved you. Personally.” Her eyes skim the weeping bartender disdainfully, then flick dismissively over the front desk staff and the two other patrons Rocket hadn’t even noticed, hiding near a potted tree that reminds him too much of a young Groot.

“He’s no animal,” she tells them in that terrifying, midnight-voice. Honestly, Rocket wouldn’t blame any of them if they’d wet themselves. His own bladder suddenly wants to let go and it’s only his superior frickin’ aversion to embarrassment that keeps his body under control.

“He deserves your deepest respect, and your deepest gratitude,” she tells them. Her eyes, still haloed in red radiance, hold onto the bartender.

“Now pour him a drink.”

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raccoonfallsharder · 3 months

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the raccoon, the witch, & the roadtrip.✮ part seven. you've arrived at your destination.

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angst, comfort, friendship, & fluff for @hibatasblog rocket & wanda | part 7/7 | word count: 3006.

rocket and wanda complete the most important mission in the galaxy.

Needless to say, Rocket hadn’t slept that night. He thinks he might never sleep again. The witch had said what she’d said and he’d promptly spun on his heel and said Welp, time for me to get to bed, and parked himself on the sofa at the foot of the mattress. He’d stayed there all night, staring up wide-eyed at the ceiling, each hand clutched into a pocket: the key-plate in his right palm, and the zune tucked into his left. Both memorized so well by his fingertips that he could take them apart and put them back together, blindfolded in the dark — both grafted onto the skin of his hands so lovingly that the ghosts of their shapes stay with him always, whether he’s awake or sleeping.

It hadn’t been his finest captain-moment. He can admit that to himself. Wanda had just told him something all…vulnerable an’ shit, and he’d been a jackass.

He’s been trying to get better about stuff like that. Not that Rocket would recommend himself as an ideal person to talk about feelings with, but he’s been trying. Kraglin’s surprisingly softhearted and Rocket’s had to get used to offering some awkward emotional first-aid every once in a while, even if he is frickin’ useless at it. And both himself and Nebula get drunk enough that sometimes they end up saying things they’d never say sober.

But the witch had said what she’d said, and every strand of Rocket’s fur had stood up in its follicle, prickling with awareness and an instinctive fear. He’d kept track of his sire’s whereabouts, more or less, since his own escape from HalfWorld. At least, he’d listened for the gossip. But he hadn’t considered where else the bastard might’ve had labs back when Rocket himself was still just a kid, still just a scrawny degenerate escapee on the run, living on the streets of Contraxia and Conjunction and anywhere else he could lay low.

He hadn’t considered the High Evolutionary might’ve ever come to Terra. That even this backwater mudball might not be safe.

So Rocket had tossed and turned all night and stared sullenly out at the landscape all morning, drinking the rest-stop coffee Wanda had silently brought him in some kind of terrible cup she called styrofoam. Now he watches her sideways through slanted crimson eyes, calculating. The lab she’d walked into willingly, with the infinity stone — that had been some bad decision-making on her part. But the other — the place in the mountains, when she’d just been a little humie gargoyle? The one where Herbert E Wyndham had probably gripped her jaw with his palm and wrapped his spindly fingers around the back of her skull like he was measuring it, ready to crack it open and feast on what was inside? Unlikely she’d ever had any sort of choice in that.

And besides. Who’s Rocket to judge, really? It’s not like he hasn’t made a bad decision or two since being raised in the High Shitbag’s lab.

“Sorry,” he grunts at last, into the weird plastic lid on the styrofoam cup. The coffee smells bitter and acrid, and it tastes worse. Not like the stuff that comes outta Nat’s Nespresso, or even the shit they’d had at the little diners sprinkled throughout their route across this stupid continent.

Her eyelids flicker. “I’m not sure what you’re apologizing for,” she says at last, dryly, gaze still locked on the mountains and trees ahead of them.

Some kind of weird sound shuffles up from under his ribs: something between a scoff and a reluctant groan. He pinches the bridge of his nose, right between his eyes, and scrunches his body down into the stack of books and the chair cushion under his ass. His tailtip flicks out his discomfort in dots and dashes. He’d always been on the outside — since Halfworld. He’d had his little family — his precious family — in the cages. And then he’d been alone, apart, and separate. No thing like me ‘cept me.

What did the galaxy ever do for you? he’d asked Pete, shrill on the side of a blown-apart skull, still reeling from the tidal wave of purple death. The High Evolutionary’s afterimage had seemed burned into his retinas, glowing the same color as the power stone’s blast. Why would you want to save it?

Because I'm one of the idiots who lives in it!

No thing like me ‘cept me, he thinks again. But he’d found his second family, his second precious family — of morons. And he’d found Nebs, almost as singular as himself in the ways she’d been remade.

And now there’s Wanda. Maybe something like a sister, if he dares to think that way again.

“Don’t give yourself a migraine,” the witch says sardonically with a sideways flick of her own dark-star, volcanic gaze. He cuts a glare at her from behind the squeeze of his fingers, and makes sure she sees it.

“Can’t give myself what I already frickin’ got,” he mutters, and there’s a soft breath of a chuckle from her corner of the Terran vehicle. He sighs again. “I dunno. Shoulda said somethin’ last night. Not good at that shit. But what you said…” He hesitates. Clears his throat. Swallows. “Reminded me of some things I’d rather not think about.”

She arches a dark-cherry brow skeptically. “You met an evil, purple-clad mad scientist with no face, too?”

He cringes, and does what he does best: evades. “More or less.”

I'm one of the idiots who lives in it!

Rocket had been lucky to find his idiots. A little pocket of belonging in the glittering junkyard of the galaxy. He drops the hand that’s been pinching his brow and tilts a curious look at Wanda now: open. Thoughtful.

Ain’t no thing like me ‘cept me — except the witch reminds him of himself: his whole first family lost, and then with nothing and no-one to his name. Not till he’d found himself in a pit-prison with a robot and a flora colossus, promising to take care of Groot. Rocket himself doesn’t need any taking-care-of, of course.

…but Wanda seems like she maybe needs a Groot.

And then her own pack of idiots, ‘cause the frickin’ Avengers sure ain’t it.

He clears his throat again, and flips the zune in his hand nervously. His eyes dampen and he looks out the window at the flashing scenery. Terran vehicles are so slow, but sometimes — like this — there’s so much to see that they still feel fast. “I think we got more stuff in common than I realized, is all,” he admits at last, and turns back to narrow his eyes on the witch until she finally glances over, her eyes shifting from the road to his face.

“What?” Wanda asks.

“Meant what I said the other day,” he says at last. The words are slow and measured. Deliberate. For once, he doesn’t leave space to hide behind any sarcasm or jokes. “You should think about comin’ and hanging out with the cool kids in space.”

“Turn here,” Rocket says, consulting the map he’s made on his datapad and pointing at a sidestreet. His clawed hands grip the cylinders that hold the screen open, and the zune is tucked safely between his knees. Then he points. “Now here.” It’s been a maze of streets for the last hour or so, and he wishes Terran travel weren’t so damn two-dimensional. If he’d had the Benatar, he could’ve just dropped down right on top of the place.

“Can you tell me what we’re doing yet?” the witch asks dryly. “How am I supposed to help you if I don’t know—”

“Here, turn here,” he interrupts urgently, and Wanda taps the brakes and lurches to an undignified stop. Her red-dark eyes slash to him, confused, and then furious. Somebody honks, and she mutters something under her breath in a language that his translator identifies as Terran-Sokovian but can’t interpret. She drifts the car across the bikelane and against the curb.

“I said turn,” Rocket mumbles sulkily.

“Microsoft?” she growls. The sound is incredulous, but not condemning. Not yet. “Danvers has you completing a mission at the Microsoft campus?”

Rocket grimaces, then offers up what he hopes is a charming smile, even though he knows he’s a toothy little goblin without an ounce of charisma in his scarred-up, metal-riddled body. He can feel his ears trying to flatten plaintively, against his will. It’s not like he’s suddenly developed a conscience or anything, but…

“Uh. Hm. About that—“

Wanda throws the car into park. A biker swerves around her and gives her the finger, a gesture Rocket recognizes from having seen it delivered almost-daily by Pete. The witch ignores it though, crossing her arms over her chest and turning in her seat to glower at Rocket.

“What kind of evil lurks at the heart of the Microsoft campus?” she drawls sarcastically, but he sees an escape hatch and his ears prick forward.

“Actually—”

“If this is another one of your rants about how fucked-up Terran capitalism is, save it,” she cuts in flatly, and he blinks and tries to remember if he’s heard her swear before. “We all know.”

He gives her a look he just knows can only be interpreted as a pout, and tries to cover it up with a scowl. “Not well enough to change anything, though. F’you people would just adopt the Intergalactic Accords—”

“Enough,” she says sharply, and for a second she’s so like Gamora that it brings a sheen of tears into his eyes and a lump like an infinity stone into his throat. “Rocket. Were you serious about me coming to space?”

He blinks again at the shift in subject. Verbal whiplash. He hadn’t thought she’d even been considering it — not really. Someone should let her know that come hang out with the cool kids really means come hang out with the losers — the people who lose things. But all that comes out of his mouth is,

“I was.”

He cringes. There’d been more sincerity in those two words than he’s entirely comfortable with.

“Then start telling me the truth,” she grows, her voice low and ominous. Each word is clipped and demanding — unyielding. Unwilling to be dissuaded. Rocket grimaces, lips curling back from his teeth, and coughs a little, trying to scratch out some words.

“Okay,” he mutters at last. “Okay. So, maybe Danvers didn’t send me on a mission.”

Wanda groans and rolls her face into her palms. “You lied to Natasha?”

Not, you lied to me, which Rocket decides is a good sign. Or maybe he’s just fundamentally optimistical after all. The captain of the Guardians of the Galaxy lifts one shoulder in a cautious shrug. “I lie to most everybody at some point.”

Wanda makes a sound that might have been a laugh, if it hadn’t been so choked in frustration.

“In my frickin’ defense, I did need to come out here an’ see this place,” he adds quickly. “And Nebs really is busy workin’ on making Knowhere into a place for refugees with Kraglin and Cosmo. Just got in a transport of displaced Xandarans and everything.” He winces. “Not that those three morons are very good at refugee-work. But like Pete used to say, it’s the thought that costs—”

“—that counts,” Wanda snaps. She lifts her head from her palms and glowers. “And you needed to see this place for what.” It’s delivered so tonelessly that his translator almost doesn’t pick up on it being a question. “So help me, if you tell me this is some…. bizarre space-alien tourist-type shit while everyone else is back in New York doing very important things—”

He grapples. He’s such an impulsive frickin’ creature and he never thinks things through. He’s had days to scheme up what to tell her and now here they are, and he’s been caught empty-handed. “Look, I was just hoping for some ideas to improve my tech—”

“Your tech is better than anything on this planet,” she almost-snarls. “And you know it—”

“What not to do, then—”

“Stop lying.”

He hates the way the words claw and crawl up his ribs, scrabbling scabbed little gremlins with gawky unhinged limbs, like bony monsters climbing in his throat. He tries to cage them with his teeth, but they pry open his jaws and tumble out anyway, sticky and keening and malformed.

“I read they made the zune here.”

The words hit the console between the two of them and lay there, pathetic and dripping over the armrests, into the cupholders. Another biker swerves past the car and somewhere, someone honks. Rocket clenches his jaw and looks away, glaring at the decimated dashboard and the upgraded sound system that looks like a wreck. The datapad snaps shut and he grips the two cylinders in one fist, crossing his arms and trying to pull up every defense he’s still got in his arsenal—

Wanda breathes out, and he can feel it when she deflates against the car door.

“You could’ve told me that,” she says quietly.

He snickers darkly. “Would you have come? Drove me out here from New York, and left all the other Avengers doing their very important things?” The words are a sneer.

The witch sighs, and he winces in spite of his commitment to pretending to be unbothered. “I don’t know,” she admits. “Maybe not at first, but honestly, there wasn’t much keeping me in New York anyway. And — look at me, Rocket.”

He doesn’t want to. Sure, maybe he’s acting too sullen to be considered much of a captain right now, but there’s comfort in sullenness and he’s decided he kinda hates being the captain if it means he has to give up Pete and the others to do it. But Wanda waits, and eventually, he deflates too, and turns his firestorm eyes to hers.

But hers aren’t glowing right now — not like when she’s mad, anyway.

Huh.

He’d always thought her irises were dark around the fire, but he suddenly realizes they’re actually a kind of tawny hazel: clear, and soft, and sad.

And honest.

“You could’ve told me back in Chicago,” she says, so gently it hurts. “In Pennsylvania, even. I would’ve said we should keep going. I would’ve wanted you to be here.”

His mouth feels suddenly dry, and every nerve is scraped raw and wounded. He tosses the closed datapad into the backseat and palms the zune from where it’s still gripped between his knees. “It’s stupid,” he admits. “Sen’imentalistic—”

“I think it’s a really good idea,” she interrupts, and her voice is a quiet hum. “I at least—” She hesitates, and he hears her throat working. “Thanos took the part of Vis that made him Vis, and someone—” She stumbles. “I never saw his body after Wakanda. I don’t know who did it, but someone took that away from me, too. And I think not having any little part of him made losing it all so much harder.” She closes her eyes, and Rocket feels his ears flatten further when the corner of her mouth trembles. “I know — with the Snap, I know it was like that for you too. If there’s something you can do that makes you feel closer to — to Pete, then you should do it.” Her eyes open and meet his again, and hold them. “We should do it. Together.”

Rocket feels himself swallow. The witch doesn't remind him of Gamora right now. Instead, her voice and all the words in it sound like they're coming from Lylla. He looks away — out the front, and then out the copilot-side window. Passenger-side, he corrects himself mentally. Tears clutter up on his lower lashes, silvering everything in his line of sight. “What about your very-important Avengers things?”

There’s a sound in the back of her throat that he can’t identify: something cynical, and amused, and sad.

“I’ve never really been much of an Avenger,” she admits softly. “Besides. At this point, I’m beginning to feel like this is the most-important thing we could be doing right now.”

The silver runs over his lower lids and into his fur. He sighs, and scrubs the back of his paw over the end of his nose, and slants his head toward her. When he speaks, he can’t keep the words from sounding strangled. “There’s, like, tours or some shit here. At this Microsoft-place.” He tries to wrangle out a cocky smirk, but he knows it falls lopsided on his mouth. “Real tourist-type shit.”

Wanda huffs out a low, forlorn little laugh. “I have a feeling you’re going to be disappointed,” she tells him. “This company has nothing on your inventions, so don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

He shrugs, and something in him eases. He allows himself a single sniffle while the tight knot of ice in the back of his throat starts to melt at the edges. “If it’s all crap, I can still enjoy myself by makin’ fun of it,” he reasons, and she snorts softly. Those eyes of hers are warm with affection.

“Even though they made the zune?" she teases gently.

He opens his palms in mock-helplessness. “Even a broke multicalendar is right once a circumrotation.”

She smiles and shakes her head, and turns in her seat to wrap her palms around the steering wheel. “You’re going to have to teach me what all these phrases mean, if I’m coming out to space with you,” she tells him lightly, and shifts into drive.

His ears tilt forward, and he grins — small, but real, this time. There’s a little flare of gleeful triumph at the base of his skull. His legs swing in front of his seat without his conscious permission, and he turns the zune over in his palm, fingers tracing the well-known ridges and rounded corners without taking his eyes off Wanda’s profile, and the sun glancing all gold-and-green off her hazel irises.

Yeah. Maybe she could be something like a sister, after all.

“We can start on the way back to New York,” he promises.”You’ll have the best guide in the galaxy, sweetheart.”

“Okay, okay,” the witch utters sardonically, one eyebrow raised. She glides the Terran vehicle carefully back out into the street. “Guide me to a parking spot first, Captain.”

that's it. that's the fanfic. clearly i’ve never been to the microsoft campus before so i was relying a hundred percent on maps and streetview and reddit and the campus website lol. thank you thank you for suspending your disbelief, and for all your kindness ♡ i hope you enjoyed this LENGTHY fuckin headcanon of mine, all inspired by the magical @hibatasblog, the gorgeous rocket raccoon, and the incompetence of the endgame creators lol. my gratitude to them forever. ˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗

the raccoon, the witch, & the roadtrip masterlist prev | main masterlist this will eventually be posted on ao3, probably as a one-shot.

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raccoonfallsharder · 4 months

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the raccoon, the witch, & the roadtrip masterlist ✮

angst, comfort, friendship, & fluff for @hibatasblog rocket & wanda | pending | word count: pending. main masterlist.

part one. ✮ prepare for departure. rocket gets a very-important mission from danvers and needs a partner to go with him. enter the witch.

part two. ✮ pennsylvania. ohio. indiana. rocket appreciates the turnpikes. the heroes discuss music, memories, and state-of-the-art tech.

part three. ✮ illinois. wisconsin. minnesota. night falls on the outskirts of chicago. wanda and rocket reflect on the horrors of the universe.

part four. ✮ south dakota. rocket and wanda get in a fight.

part five. ✮ montana. what makes a person a monster?

part six. ✮ idaho. washington . our heroes share their secrets.

part seven. ✮ you've arrived at your destination. rocket and wanda complete the most important mission in the galaxy.

fluff ✮ | spice ✩ | some smut ❤︎ | much smut ❤︎❤︎

banners & dividers by @saradika-graphics taglist ♡ @evolvingchaoswitch ♡ @glow-autumz ♡ @wren-phoenix ♡ @suicidalshitstick ♡ @pretty-chips

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raccoonfallsharder · 3 months

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the raccoon, the witch, & the roadtrip.✮ part six. idaho. washington.

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angst, comfort, friendship, & fluff for @hibatasblog rocket & wanda | part 6/7 | word count: 2210.

our heroes share their secrets.

The city of Missoula spreads out underneath them like a lakeful of stars or a well of distant coins, glimmering in the night-velvet hug of the mountains. When the sun crests the horizon, they'll make their way through Idaho and onto the last little part of their journey — but for now, Wanda leans against the open window of the bed-and-breakfast where they’ve holed up for the night and lets the Montana breeze kiss the ends of her hair. She closes her lashes, and for a moment, she can almost imagine it’s Vis, leafing through her crimson locks with gentle, marveling hands.

You’re only gonna become someone’s nightmare.

Well, she thinks savagely — she’s always been someone’s nightmare. They hadn’t decided to call her a witch for no reason. Made by circumstance and bastardized science — layers of folded power. Sure, people fear Danvers for her strength, too — but Danvers has blond hair and an impulsive, crooked smile. For some reason, blond hair and an easy grin always seem to set the rest of the Avengers at ease, as if it’s skin and hair color that make a person good.

Wanda — with her dark eyes lit from within and her hellish tendrils of magic — stands no chance when compared to a woman who radiates iridescent power like something avenging and divine. No — the Scarlet Witch is made of nightmares, and she has been since long before Hydra. The only ones who have looked at her with anything other than trepidation or terror or disdain were her adopted parents, and Pietro, and Vis.

And now, perhaps Rocket.

Yes, she’d made the captain of the Guardians of the Galaxy nervous — she can tell. But that was a fear she’d earned — a result of her less-than-noble confession. If Rocket had been anxious in that last hour on the road, it hadn’t been because of who she is.

Or what she is.

She sighs, and leans out into the breeze.

“Don’t go making any magic cities out there, now.”

She half-turns, casting a look over her shoulder. He’s sauntering up beside her, scrabbling up onto the desk chair next to the window to peer out over the sweep of the midnight city, studding the valley like a jewelry-box full of diamond strands. From this angle, she can see the lights catching and flickering in his eyeshine, turning them into flat red coins and then back again. She feels one brow arch.

“We’re making jokes about it now?”

He shrugs, peering down into the spangled mountainside. “What’s the alternative?” A sideways smirk. “I blow you up?”

She snorts. “You could try.”

His grin widens.

Well, his fear has apparently been short-lived. Something about that feels like a quiet reassurance — a flicker of candleflame in the winter solstice of her life.

“You’re not worried about me turning myself into a monster?” she asks anyway. She’s trying to make it sound light, but the words are laced with bitterness and salt.

He shrugs. “Not yet.” He raises his own brow and slants her a calculated glance. “Hopefully not ever.”

She keeps her eyes on the city, unwilling to spare him her own stare.

“Where’d you, uh, get your powers anyway?” he asks after a moment. The words ripple in the cool night air. “Lab or infinity stone?”

She huffs a soft, almost-laugh. “How do you know I wasn’t born with them?”

“What, like Dazzler?” he asks doubtfully.

She tears her eyes from the valley now, brow creased. “You know Dazzler?”

He shrugs. “Sure. She sings, doesn’t she? Wouldn’t mind getting some of her stuff on the zune, actually.”

An incredulous chuckle bursts in the back of her throat like a ripe cherry. “Not like Dazzler,” she concedes. “Dazzler has a genetic condition—”

“That makes her cool as hell,” Rocket supplements, and Wanda offers an acquiescing half-shrug laced up with a half-smile.

“That makes her cool as hell,” she concedes. “I was born with — something else. And then, I think—” she pauses, feeling the crease form between her brow. “Well. Whatever it was, it was enhanced, I guess.”

“Lab then,” Rocket says, and sighs. “How come so many of you Terran-types can walk into labs and say, hey, fuck me up, with no frickin’ regard to your own lives and bodies? And then you come out with cool powers and super-strength and shit?” He scowls down at the city and his next words are so low under his breath that she almost doesn’t hear them. “Need a t-shirt that says, all I got was chronic pain and indigestion.”

She could leave it. Pretend she hadn’t heard him, which is probably what he’d intended. But for whatever reason, his sarcasm always seems to pull out these bite-sized heart-to-hearts from her. “Anxiety and depression.”

He blinks up at her, nonplussed. “What?”

“My t-shirt. I got experimented on! And all I got was anxiety and depression.”

He holds her eyes, his own rounding out, then flicking away. “Yeah, well. You say yaro root, I say yaro fruit.”

She lets the moment slide through her fingers, lingering and bittersweet over the star-spattered valley. “Besides,” she says, and she’s surprised to hear a thread of humor weaving together her own words, “I’m special. I was made by an infinity stone and in a lab.” She feels the corner of her mouth twist. She hadn’t been going to admit it, but why not? Who else would she ever tell, now that Vis is gone? “Labs, actually. I think.”

His ears flicker. “Plural? Wait, how’d that happen?”

The twist turns into a quiet smirk. When was the last time she’d smirked? “Which one?”

He furrows his brow. “The first. No, the most recent. Both.”

She braces her forearms on the window sill and leans out further, letting the wind whisk her words away: keeping them as short-lived as a luna moth. Maybe shorter. There’s safety in the brevity of the words, in how transparent and transitory they seem when they’re caught up and spiraled in the shadowed mountain-breeze.

“I remember the second one best. I was older, and — foolish. And fixated on revenge for the loss of my parents.” She gives him a sideways look. “The horrors of the universe, you know. Pietro and I had been orphaned and adopted, only to be orphaned again. I joined a — well, I joined the bad guys, I guess, and I let them experiment on me with the mind stone. It was before anyone really knew what the mind stone was. At the time, I thought it gave me my powers, but now…” She hesitates.

Rocket stares at her, then scowls. “I meant what I said earlier. What is with you morons walkin’ into labs like that? Sure, I don’t know what this glowing rock is. Hit me with it,” he mimicks — but there’s something half-shrill underneath his voice, clenched into the back of his teeth. She wonders if it’s concern, just a decade or two too late. “You know, I kinda liked Banner at first. He seemed like a genius-idiot, and — you know—” He holds up two fingers, a scant half-inch apart. “—tiny little temper problem. Kinda like me. But he did that to himself?” Rocket clicks his tongue against his teeth. “Thought I liked Steve too, but he just walked into a situation with strangers and said, yeah, gimme this highly-experimental drug and let’s see what frickin’ happens.” He shakes his head. “You morons are reckless. And ungrateful.”

She hums. And she doesn’t deny it.

“But now, what?”

She blinks and casts him a questioning glance.

“You said, you thought the stone gave you your powers. But now. But now what?”

She grimaces, dark-cherry brows furrowed. Not a thing slips past him, apparently. “I don’t know,” she admits. “Maybe it was just a dream. But—”

She hesitates, and he waits — surprisingly patient.

She takes a breath. She can already tell the words are going to hollow her out. She tries to say his name so little, because it guts her every time, and because so few of the Avengers seem to want to hear it.

And she has no-one else to listen.

“Vis never had a childhood,” she says at last. “Not a bad one or a good one — just none at all. The idea of it — all the complexities of physical development combined with cognition and learning and vulnerability — it meant so much to him. He thought it was beautiful, and strange. One of the great mysteries of the universe, he said.” The last few words are strangled. She’d opened her mouth and said his name, and it had floated up out of her like a butterfly tethered to ghostly memories she’d tried to keep down. Ribbons and bows in the tail of a haunted kite. Each word starts to drift up and out of her and she just knows, if she doesn’t choke them back, they’ll keep rising. And while she’s happy to sacrifice the words of her own past to the nightsky, every bit of Vis is too precious and rare to let them slip away into midnight mountain breezes.

“He’d always ask about mine,” she finishes abruptly, shrugging. The words quietly click the whole story closed. “The more he asked, the more I think I remembered.”

Of course, Rocket doesn’t let anything rest, she’s learning. Not unless it suits him. He squints one gleaming red eye up at her.

“What’d you remember?”

She looks out on the sea of tiny lights, like fireflies and gemstones and stars. Over seventy-three thousand little lives, all cradled in the palms of a single mountain range on an unremarkable little planet the midst of a galaxy and universe far wider than she can ever really know.

“I think it was another lab,” she says quietly. “One in the mountains. Not like these mountains — more severe. Cliffs and crags. It felt….haunted.” She takes a steadying breath. “I think there was a man — cold. Casually cruel. He would be silhouetted against these vaulted glass windows overlooking a sheer drop, staring down at me and Pietro. I could feel his disdain — even as a child.” She hesitates. “Sometimes he would hold my head in his hands and stare into my eyes like he was trying to see into my brain. I remember having nightmares after we were adopted. I would dream that he carved into my skull while I was sleeping, to try to find where I kept it.” She shivers. “The magic.”

She can feel Rocket shuttering closed next to her, and she supposes she’s already said too much. Made things uncomfortable between them — been too vulnerable. These intimate little exchanges are never supposed to last more than a handful of sentences, but here she is: spilling them out onto Missoula, as personal and quiet as if she were on a midnight walk with Vis, or curled up beside Pietro in their dark orphanage bed.

But then Rocket sighs beside her, and even in her periphery, she can see his stiff shoulders loosen. He wedges his own forearms against the sill, mimicking her posture as he leans out over Missoula too. She turns her head slowly to look at him, and the breeze that has been playing with her hair now ruffles his fur, too.

“I knew a guy like that once,” he says roughly. “I knew a guy — too much like that.”

She inhales, more slowly than she has since long before she’d ever heard of Thanos. She thinks she can remember the last time she took in air like this: the morning before the Black Order had found them in the streets. She’d stretched against the faded sheets of the bed she’d shared with Vis, and everything had come easy — even her breath.

She exhales — just as slow.

“I don’t trust my memory,” she admits. “I was a child. Maybe I made it all up.”

Rocket grunts. “Don’t sound like something little humie gargoyles just make up.”

She huffs a laugh. “Maybe not, but my adult-mind says he can’t possibly be real,” she tells him quietly. “My memories make him into too much of a… a ghost story. Too much of a legend, or a monster under the bed. A caricature of what he probably really was.”

Rocket doesn’t look at her, but she can see him raise his eyebrow doubtfully. “Prob’ly we all do that with the things that fucked us up when we were kids,” he concedes grudgingly, and she shifts uncomfortably. How to make Rocket understand? The imposing figure, so severe — the words, so cultured and sophisticated — the surrealism of the mountain, snowy and mist-shrouded, stabbing the sky? It’s too fantastical to be real. She’d told Rocket her secret, perhaps ill-advised dream of a town based on the old TV shows she’d seen her childhood; how can she explain how these shadows of her childhood seem like the other side of the coin? She thinks of the man again, and all she can picture is a caricature of a cartoon villain.

“In my memory, I think he always wore all purple,” she explains. Like a uniform. Wanda shakes her head, frustrated. It’s not clear enough. She inhales again, slow and steady. She exhales again — just as measured. When she speaks, her voice is hushed, and she can’t keep that old childhood terror from seeping in at the edges. “In my memory, I think he came back one day without a face.”

scarlet witch was one of the high evolutionary’s subjects in the citadel of science at mount wundagore pass it on. look this is a fluffpiece so will anything come of this? not beyond a lil bit of emotional bonding. maybe volume three would play out a bit differently but we're not going that far. still, i couldn't bear to leave this bit in the comics ♡♡

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raccoonfallsharder · 4 months

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the raccoon, the witch, & the roadtrip. part two. pennsylvania. ohio. indiana.

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angst, comfort, friendship, & fluff for @hibatasblog rocket & wanda | part 2/6 | word count: 806.

rocket appreciates the turnpikes. the heroes discuss music, memories, and state-of-the-art tech.

“What’s this place?”

Wanda glances over at Rocket from behind the steering wheel. He looks like a child: sitting on three hardbound textbooks the Hulk had dug out of somewhere, legs swinging casually over the edge of the chair. He’d spent the first two hours fussing with his seatbelt, muttering about how Terran transport vehicles are deathtraps before either satisfying or resigning himself.

The car is currently gliding through a twisting crevasse, cut deep into old mountains. Outside, the spring thaw is melting snow into little waterfalls that cascade off the manufactured cliffsides, carefully funneled away from the road. A sign warning of rockslides floats past. The trees are budding and there are little pink and yellow sprays of wildflowers peeking through the patches of grass.

“The Pennsylvania Turnpike?” Wanda offers uncertainly.

“Huh.” The Captain of the Guardians of the Galaxy — down from six but up to three — swings his feet again. She can see his face reflected in the passenger window. His ruby-flecked, bourbon-brown eyes glow, wide and thoughtful. “It’s kinda pretty.”

Wanda blinks at the road ahead.

“You like music?” Rocket asks, feet still swinging.

She cants another sideways glance down in his direction. “I do.”

“What kind?”

She lets out a huff of air — almost a laugh. It feels strange. It’s been a while. About five years, actually. “Sokovian rock,” she tells him archly. “Some metal.” She raises a brow at him. “You know Sokovian music?”

Of course, she already knows the answer.

Still, he’s looking at her with nothing but open intrigue. “No,” he says frankly, and his eyes are hungry. “You got some?”

It’s not quite the response she’d expected. She tries to remember the last time anyone other than Vis had asked about — home. Had wanted to share her memories, know her life.Had wanted to hear the music she’d grown up with, and listen to it together.

Only Pietro, she thinks.

“No,” she says quietly. “I haven’t got anything.”

Rocket’s not sure how this planet goes from lush mountain forest into the flat nothingness of the Ohio Turnpike, but it does. As far as he’s concerned, this only confirms that every good thing on Terra has to be followed by a bad one.

And also, what the fuck is a turnpike? It doesn’t register in his damn translator.

Still, Cleveland’s not terrible when they stop for food — there’s some little cafe where they can eat outside, though Rocket’s surprised the witch doesn’t want to go in; it’s still kinda cold out for a baldbody, afterall. But it’s a good break in the monotony — especially before they start driving through an even more boring region that Wanda tells him is Indiana.

Thank fuck he’s got something to tinker with now, though.

He’d chewed on her response to his question about Sokovian music for a while. It had sounded like a sentiment that had lived in his own head for years — I ain’t got nothin’ — and he hadn’t even realized the sound of it had faded until he’d stood at the edge of a dead star and pretended to be some kind of captain.

I could lose a lot. Me, personally — I could lose a lot.

Then he’d asked Wanda if she’d had a zune.

The witch had blinked. “I — no. Nobody has zunes anymore.”

He’d scoffed. “I do.” He’d pulled Pete’s zune from his pocket and wagged it at her. “State-of-the-art music-portation and listening device,” he’d taunted, and something in the corner of her mouth had flickered.

“Most people use their smartphones nowadays,” she’d said — and her voice had been sort of mild instead of flat, which he’d counted as a win. “They’re a little newer,” she’d added apologetically. “Better tech.”

He’d dipped his head and stared at the zune. For some reason, the words had felt like a bruise in his heart, and he’d scrubbed his knuckles against his metal breastbone. “Better, how?”

She’d glanced at him again and shrugged one shoulder. “Faster. Sleeker. They hold more data, and they can access the Internet. Make calls, send texts. All sorts of things.” She’d shrugged again.

He’d dug his knuckles in hard to his sternum, trying to relieve — or maybe counterbalance — some of the pressure there, and he’d stared down at the zune. “This was Pete’s.” The words had come out before he’d been able to drag them back. He’d never intended to say them in the first place.

The witch hadn’t said anything, and he’d slid his tongue over the front of his teeth, then had cast a sideways look up at her, trying to keep his face nonchalant.

“Those smartphones ain’t got more than three hundred songs on ‘em though, right?”

Her eyes had flicked to him, then back to the road. “Oh, absolutely not,” she’d said, so confidently that he’d immediately felt smug. “Fewer, I think.”

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raccoonfallsharder · 4 months

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pretends.

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

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

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

“F’you’re not gonna sleep…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, you can’t.

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

But she can’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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raccoonfallsharder · 3 months

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i just finished the rough draft of the last installment of the raccoon, the witch, & the roadtrip and i think im really happy with it so i hope you are toooo

˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶

#the raccoon the witch & the roadtrip

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raccoonfallsharder · 10 months

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navigation | art masterlist (reminder: it's rocket raccoon all the time) fluff ✮ | spice ✩ | some smut ❤︎‬ | much smut ❤︎‬❤︎‬

check out navigation for recent updates & upcoming posts, recommended works/creators, and more. or browse these tags: #rfh art | #fic preview | #fic update

complete fiction masterlist

sfw masterlist | nsfw masterlist | headcanons & imagines | writing thoughts & "advice"

everything is in alphabetical order with links to future projects at the end, but if you can think of a better way to organize, feel free to hit me up ♡

Domestic Scenes in Space Travel ✩°｡ ⋆ The Very Boring Adventures of Space Pilot & Sweatshirt Girl 18+ only MDNI | no use of y/n | f!reader | word count: varies. reader x rocket domestic fluff & smut with feelings. comics-based but you don't need any comics background knowledge to ride this ride. collects Installments 1-5 and an Interlude. The Very Boring Adventures of Space Pilot & Sweatshirt Girl | Outer Space Safety & Spaceship Maintenance Training | Reconnaissance for Beginners: An Instruction Manual | Critical Interview Questions for Potential Room & Crewmates [explicit & smut-free versions] | Proof: A Moment in Space | Untitled Installment 6

florescence❀ ˖⁺‧₊˚ (a meetgroot) 18+ only MDNI | no use of y/n | f!reader | 3/6 years | wip | word count: pending. Rocket & Groot leave their friends behind on Knowhere, despite the latter’s protests, and end up hiding out on a nothing-planet (with a non-extradition policy) at the edge of the Shi’ar Galaxy. It was the flowers that drew you in. mcu-based, slight au, medium-burn, eventual smut circa Year Four. tentative allies to friends to lovers. the middle is angsty but there are only happy endings here. Year Zero: Seed | Year One: Sprout | Year Two: Growth | Year Three: Flowering | Year Four: Formation | Year Five: Dispersal

˚₊‧✶ headcanons & imagines ✶‧₊˚ smut-free | no use of y/n | gn reader | oneshots & drabbles various guardians of the galaxy headcanons, minifics, and more.

°˖✧˚♡ kinktober 2023 ♡˚✧˖° 18+ only MDNI | no use of y/n | f!reader | oneshots | word count: varies. based on @flightlessangelwings Kinktober 2023 prompt list. please read all warnings.

✩࿐࿔ take what you need smut-free | gn reader | no use of y/n | 16 complete reminders | word count: varies. the world is hard, and sometimes it's difficult to complete daily tasks & take care of yourself. rocket bullies you for your own good. non-smutty. reader is gender-neutral. accepting requests via reblogs, asks, and tumblr & ao3 comments. collects various Reminders (ongoing) ࿔ eat somethin ࿔ go to frickin bed ࿔ get outta bed & get your shit done ࿔ take a damn bath ࿔ leave your frickin skin alone ࿔ take a fuckin study break ࿔ drink some goddamn water ࿔ stop destroying your fricking clothes ࿔ just buy the damn thing already ࿔ it's frickin laundry day ࿔ get some goddamn sunshine ࿔ have you taken your meds today? ࿔ schedule your fuckin appointments ࿔ do the goddamn dishes ࿔ brush your frickin teeth ࿔ nobody fucking hates you ࿔ stop biting your goddamnm nails ࿔

the raccoon, the witch, & the roadtrip. angst, friendship, fluff | rocket & wanda | 7/7 parts | complete | word count: pending. for hibatasblog ♡ During a watch party for Avengers: Endgame on Twitter, Markus revealed the idea to team Wanda with the Guardian of the Galaxy captain actually made it into several versions of the film's script. "We had whole drafts with Wanda on a road trip with Rocket," Markus wrote, "but after the Vision plot in Infinity War, nothing we came up with was anything but wheel spinning for her character." CBR prepare for departure. | pennsylvania. ohio. indiana. | illinois. wisconsin. minnesota. | south dakota. | montana. | idaho. washington. | you've arrived at your destination.

⭑˚.⚘𖡼𖥧𖤣 windfall 𖤣𖥧𖡼⚘.˚⭑ (a meetgroot) 18+ only MDNI | no use of y/n | f!reader | 3/3 parts | complete | word count: 44,521. wind·fall /ˈwin(d)ˌfôl/ noun. an apple or other fruit blown down from a tree or bush by the wind; an unexpected piece of good fortune. semi-shy ultrafeminine touch-deprived reader tries to avoid meeting knowhere’s intimidating captain. is profoundly unsuccessful. Sugared Violets. | Crystallized Ginger. | Candied Apples.

Window Across the Galaxy *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧ 18+ only MDNI | rocket x f!oc | 27/27 chapters | complete | word count: 235,940. girl falls first; raccoon falls harder. Rocket is captured by a Ravager crew hoping to get rich off the excessively large bounty on his head. Throwing a wrench in everyone’s plans is the Terran girl they hired to do some freelance assessing on a recent haul of goods they’ve seized from a Xandaran luxury liner. Oops. slight AU starting pre-GOTG volume 1 (but will hit most of the same major plot points). slow burn + eventual smut with a lot of pining in the middle. kinda enemies-to-lovers? (but only one of these idiots thinks they're enemies). collects Chapters I-XXVII. *:･ﾟ✧

what's on the horizon? future projects

masterlist banner & fairylight divider by @/saradika-graphics raccoon dividers by @/thecutestgrotto

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