Peter listened to the message at the end of the tape, 'Awesome Mix Volume 2' for the thousandth time. The tape had started to show signs of generation loss but the words from his mother were unmistakable.

Peter, my little Star Lord. I am so sorry that I won't be there to watch you grow up and answer the questions that I know you will have. I still hope that your father will find you and take you to him, but sometimes there are events that keep us from the ones we love, no matter how much we might want to be with them. Stay with your grandfather. Listen to him and help him. When you are old enough, he will take you to visit your aunt, my sister Kathy, in New Mexico. She can help you to understand where you come from.

For the thousandth time, he cursed himself for waiting so long to open his mother's gift. He could have had answers so long ago. 26 years! Now he would have to find his way back to Terra and hope that he could find his aunt, assuming she was still alive and still lived in the same place.

His timing, luckily, was good. Rocket had taken little Groot back to Planet X for his graduation from the flower pot and to strengthen him before their team ran into any more trouble. Gamora and Drax had a lead on Thanos and had left the group to follow it on their own. The trick was arriving on Terra without arousing suspicion. The Terrans were still light years behind on technology, and having a strange space ship land in plain sight would not go over well with the locals.

Consulting his charts, Peter navigated to the Terran moon; there was a crater that would hide the ship from sight and then from there he could take a transport pack and jet down to the Earth's surface.

Cushioned back in the pilot seat, he steered the course to the crater. The "Awesome Mix Volume 2" tape had switched back to side 1 and played "Hey Tonight" by Creedence Clearwater Revival as the stars rushed past the window.

-(.:.)-

"Darcy, did you log the lab environmental factors this morning?"

"Yes Jane."

"Oh, OK. Did I already ask you that?"

"Three times."

"Oh, sorry."

Darcy sighed. She swore that if Jane asked one more time if she had logged the lab environmental factors, she was going to start spiking her morning coffee with Gingko Biloba. Or maybe vodka just to see what happened. She had passed bored in the rearview about three months ago. In fact, last week, she had started googling boredom, and then the causes and effects of boredom, which apparently a number of scientists were researching. Probably scientists who, like her, were stuck in internships where the highlight of the day was logging the lab environmental factors.

It probably wouldn't have been so bad if they hadn't had so much excitement with Thor and the Avengers and Shield; once the battle of New York was over, she had hoped that they would be whisked away to Stark tower, put to work on some kind of top secret work, maybe even paid…. But no, here she was, back in New Mexico.

Jane was as absorbed as always in her work, probably more so as she searched for a way to repair the Einstein Rosen bridge and find a way back to Thor. But it just made Darcy feel more alone, without someone to fight for, without a purpose. Oh, except logging the lab environmental factors. How useful. For a while Dr. Selvig had been around and balanced out the crazy a little bit, but even he had important things to do and had left the lab.

She perched on a stool across from where Jane had her head down, examining some sort of fiber that looked suspiciously like a piece of notebook paper through a microscope.

"Jaaaane," Darcy began, using her most reasonable voice. "I need a vacation."

"Uh huh, ok Darcy," Jane said, not looking up. Which Darcy took to mean that she wasn't actually paying attention.

"Jane!"

"Huh?" This time she got a brief moment of eye contact. She was in.

"Jane, I need a vacation. A break. I'm losing it here." Jane looked up, puzzled.

"Why would you need a vacation? What would you do?" Darcy sighed. God forbid someone might have something to do other than science-ing.

"I would take a break, Jane, get out, see people, breath air." She let her hand hover over the eyepiece of the microscope before Jane could resume her examination. "Something you should do once in a while too!" Jane actually looked terrified.

"Darcy, I'm in the middle of this." She said, in a panicked voice.

"You've been in the middle of this for about 3 months now," Darcy noted. "It might be time for a break."

Jane paused, and Darcy thought she might actually cave. She might actually see that getting out would be a good idea.

"Oh," Jane said, "Did I ask you whether you logged the lab environmental factors?"

Darcy didn't even answer before picking up her bag and heading out the door.

-(.:.)-

"Hey Darce, pull up a seat," she heard from the bar, as soon as she opened the door to the Dragon Room.

The Dragon Room bar was a local favorite, a crossover between Mexican adobe and the old west. And it was her little group's haunt of choice. Tourists would find the restaurant, but the Dragon Room, not so much. Normally the crowd was pretty heavy, but it wasn't yet happy hour and it was a Tuesday.

Darcy dropped her bag on a table in the corner and pulled up a seat at the bar to talk to Paul, a friend and, due to a brief misjudgment that luckily didn't ruin their friendship, her ex.

"What are you doing out so early? Shouldn't you be doing amazing science experiments or something?" Paul was multi-tasking, mixing a drink for one of the guys at the other end of the bar while chatting with her.

"Needed a break, taking a vacation." She reached for the rum & Coke that Paul had poured for her, her usual. He smirked at her.

"Didn't know you could take vacation from an internship." Darcy sighed and dropped her head against the bar.

"I know. But I need something interesting to happen. If I have to keep watching Jane watch things through microscopes I'm going to wither up into a raisin." She took a swig of her drink. "What happened to the world saving and aliens from space thing? That was fun. Nope, now it's looking at things through microscopes." Paul nodded sympathetically and added a little bit of extra rum to her glass.

"Hey, I have something to cheer you up," he said. He reached behind the bar and grabbed an envelope. "I was supposed to go to this concert on Thursday with my sister, but I have to work and she ended up with a date." At the word concert, Darcy's eyes lit up. She LOVED concerts.

"Ooh, what is it? Tell me, tell me!" Paul laughed at her as she tried to grab the envelope from her hand.

"It's a little band called Aerosmith," he answered. Darcy SQUEALED like a 13 year old girl.

"No way!" she grinned, mood completely uplifted. Maybe this break was a good idea after all!

-(.:.)-

What do you think so far? I haven't found a ton of Darcy/Peter Quill fics and I think it's such a great match- lots of room for banter.