A/N: I'm in the process of reposting most of my GotG fics to here from AO3. This is 2 of 5.
Warnings: Alcohol. Brief, non-graphic mention of a logically gory injury.
!
Drax is the one who somehow gets a flowerpot out of the awed crowd. Rocket wants to know exactly who was in the middle of some light gardening when they finally noticed the giant space battle going on overhead, but he's a little busy with the whole clinging-to-that-last-scrap-of-hope thing and carefully packing soil in around what appears to be an entirely inanimate stick.
He swears he can feel life in it. It took him a while to notice, what with Ronan and the Infinity Gem and the clawing grief, but something in this tiny remnant of the big guy feels alive. He knows it the same way he knows – knew – what Groot was really saying every time he spoke. There was nuance in it, drawing from the way the tree stood and the tone of his voice and how he directed his energy. It's an energy Rocket has never been able to completely understand, but recognizing its presence was what finally let him see the meaning in his friend's words – and he feels that same energy now, in this little twig.
(He's not sure how much of that he managed to garble out at all intelligibly, but it was enough for Drax to get up and stumble towards the clustered onlookers. For a moment Rocket could only gape in disbelief, until he finally worked up the stamina to shout, completely ignored, "There's a freaking hole in you, sit the fuck down!")
The thing is, he thinks he might owe Drax an apology. The other thing is, he doesn't do apologies.
But.
He remembers the moment when the grief became a seething, overwhelming rage. He remembers the driving need to hurt Ronan, to fucking kill him, the need that utterly bypassed all the insignificant details like 'he's five times my size and has a magic rock that can destroy literally anything,' because Ronan killed Groot and nothing else mattered.
He's sitting on his bunk in the temporary quarters the Nova Corps have given them, staring at the pot, at the still and silent twig that he's been trying to convince himself looks slightly bigger than it did a couple hours ago. Across the room, Drax is cleaning a knife. It's practically gleaming, and Rocket has a horrible suspicion that he is being kept company.
"You know," he says, and his voice is flatter than he'd intended but he'll take what he can get today. He is slowly losing hope that this stick is anything but a stick, and the physical effects of slamming into the ground from thousands of feet in the air are beginning to take their toll. (He has made an executive decision to push off the creeping horror of having felt the unfathomable power of an anomalous artifact pre-dating perceivable time itself coursing through his body to deal with some other time, preferably when he has access to some good drinks.) "I can't even say 'hey, at least I didn't call up an omnipotent evil jackass to come fight me and kill anyone in the way,' because the omnipotent evil jackass was polite enough to fall out of the sky with us. He was already right there. I don't know what I would've..." He trails off, shakes his head. He knows what he should say but not what he's trying to say. He's too tired for this and he's pretty sure Drax is, too.
"It is the past," Drax says, not looking up. "And any actions you might have taken... do not make those I did take any less wrong."
Rocket shrugs. It hurts. "Yeah, sure."
When Groot wakes up, Rocket almost actually does apologize. Between this and that surprisingly half-decent Nova Corps guy's "I have a family. They're alive because of you.", he's beginning to seriously rethink his statement about everyone having dead people. Maybe it's just Drax.
He knows for a fact that's not true, even between just the five of them, but Drax is the newest at it and still not so good at pretending nothing's wrong so maybe it just stands out more, and seriously, come on, at this point it's unfair that the guy's wife and daughter haven't just shown up in the kitchen. Gamora's sister flew away in a stolen ship in the middle of a battle with a body count none of them want to even guess at, and Rocket's best friend is regrowing himself in a damn flowerpot.
"I have no wish for others to share in my loss," Drax says, when Rocket less-than-tactfully puts some of this into words. "I am grateful for every family we saved from Ronan." He is quiet for a moment, and Rocket bites his own tongue to shut himself up because he honestly hadn't meant to say the whole kitchen-sister-flowerpot thing out loud.
Drax glances down the corridor to the cockpit, where Gamora and Quill are arguing, back around to the tiny tree swaying contentedly in his temporary home, back to Rocket, and finally smiles. "Including ours."