Chapter three: Old flames

Part One; Sunshine of love.

It's amazing how quickly the terrifying becomes routine and the routine becomes terrifying. Kree hardliners try to murder you, and that's fine. Ronan was a pro, these guys' enthusiastic amateurs. Have a gun-fight and daring rescue in a burning building, and it's nothing, you've done worse. At least no-one asked you to grab an infinity stone. You learn that of six of those damn stones that could end the world, three are unaccounted for, with at least two probably being hunted by the worst bad guy imaginable. Finding one infinity stone nearly kills you all, and an expert on you tells you might have to find two more to stop someone else getting them, and you shrug and add it to the to do list. Get up, get the groceries, save the world.

If only getting the groceries was as easy.

"Moron! Moron, moron, moron, moron!" yelled Rocket, standing inside what was once a paper grocery bag and shredding it comprehensively. A packet of energy bars bounced off Quill's head, followed by a sachet of liquid plant fertilizer.

"Epiphytic fertilizer and chocolate? I gave you a list! A frickin' list! Brand names, ingredients, what to get, what to avoid. I'm wounded and recovering, Groot died, kinda, and may or may not grow back into the Groot I knew, and you manage to bring back Epiphytic fertilizer and chocolate? Newsflash: if ya wanted to poison us we have Tritium and Promethium in the ship's betavoltaic systems! Couldda saved you the walk!"

"Quill my freezy stick appears to be red-flavoured. I wanted blue." Said Drax, holding the offending iced snack. "I no longer want this. Take it back and exchange it for a new one." He said, handing back the freezy stick minus exactly one bite.

"Did you spend all the money I gave you for vegetables on beer?" yelled, Gamora, her head in one of the ship's lockers. "All you brought back was a case of Bligh Blue Ribbon! I can't stir-fry beer and I don't want to drink anything endorsed by leering bounty hunters!"

"Why not, you drink the caffeine when Rocket brews it! And technically Hops are a vegetable!" countered Quill. Another chocolate-chip energy bar hit him between the eyes.

"Hops are a vine, dummy! The flowers of that vine, before you say a vine is a vegetable." Snarled Rocket, looking for more things to throw. He threw the ball he'd been bouncing off the bulkheads when he was thinking, but Quill ducked it. He then found the ship's one clean spoon, and flung it. Quill, who was getting real tired of this shit, caught it mid-air.

"Hops are a vine? Oh are they Rocket? Who died and made you a horticulturalist all of a sudden?"

"Groot!"

"… wow I really walked into that one." Said Quill. He pinched the bridge of his nose with exasperation. So the beer was wilful on his part, and yeah he could see how Rocket would be annoyed by being brought food he couldn't eat, but seriously. It wasn't like the others were falling over each other to trek down to the store.

Deal with the shit in front of you he thought.

"Rocket, so far as we know your Groot's alive and well, and I know it worries you, but seriously you cannot bring that up each and every time someone does something that upsets you. If you stop throwing them so I can take them back in one piece for a refund, I'll swap the energy bars and the fertilizer. Gamora, vegetables are in the bag Rocket's destroying: I didn't put them in the locker because there no room with the beer, and I didn't put them in the fridge because I'm scared to open it. Drax, eat your damn freezy stick, they all taste the same anyway."

"I wanted a blue one."

"I wanted to be Michael Jordan. Life is pain." These Rocket-boots would make me the best Basketball player ever if anyone out here played it, Quill thought gloomily. I have to introduce these guys to earth-sports. "Eat it or walk to town and buy another one, we can afford it."

"Just." Said Gamora, offering a hand to help Rocket out of the bag and pulling out an endotuber. (Nearly three decades on, Quill still thought of them as Space-carrots. But green. And lemongrass flavoured) Rocket grudgingly took her hand and let her help him down off the table: his shoulder was still swathed in blue burn-recovery gel, and he now had Velcro-splint covering his ribs for the good medical reason that it was holding the bone fragments in place until they knit. It didn't stop him hiding weapons in it, though. Or snacks thought Quill gloomily. It had been a shock to discover Rocket sitting on the table patiently picking all the bits of marshmallow out of Quill's secret cereal stash and squirreling them away when he'd got up to pee at 0300. As the team was rapidly discovering, with Rocket's sense of smell, you didn't have secrets from him on ship. Certainly not edible ones.

"So what's the news down-town?" asked Gamora, picking out the rest of the vegetables and rinsing them under the tap: Gamora hated cooking, and to be frank wasn't that great at it, but there was only so long she could stand eating MRE packs and had decided that the only way she'd get something healthy and fresh was is she cooked it herself. Quill didn't mind: Drax was a better cook, but his grasp of portion control or low-carb was about as good as his grasp of metaphor and Quill wanted to stave-off having to by bigger pants for a few months at least.

Quill shrugged "Still no sign of the mark doing anything, still nothing about Thanos or other attacks he could be behind on the news, still a quiet town on an out-of-the-way agri-world. John Heggerty has got Jane Hatherty in the family way, according to the two old ladies in front of me in the queue at the store, and Old tom has a new hat." After the bar fight the team had voted to lie-low for a while: Quill had taken it to heart: there was nothing of interest on this planet other than their mark. "Oh, and some more refugees hitching planet to planet trying to get transfer papers to travel on to Xandar." Apparently even with a big hole where the CBD used to be, Xandar city was still preferable to living in the Kree Empire, which was getting increasingly unstable since the war ended. "Nothing new from our mark."

Jim Star'l'in's life work had given them a little under seven-hundred possible leads on Thanos and his operations. Most of the leads were so goddam scary that the team had unanimously voted not to go after them without some serous back up, and had handed the intel over to Nova as soon as they could. When there were 100% again, and Quill was frustratingly aware that meant waiting for Groot to grow back, and once Nova had either found where these people were, or, for the ones with serious government or military connections, found some better evidence against them that a journalists word, then Quill felt they should go for them. But without Groot and a small army of Nova Corps operatives to hide behind, he wasn't in a hurry to take on anyone whose rap sheet included the phrase "actual cannibal" "dangerous and unexplained powers" "singlehandedly slaughtered the entire war-crimes tribunal arrayed against him" or whose last name was "the despoiler". Not unless they were in fact someone who removed spoil for a living and it was all a tragic misunderstanding, he mused.

With Rocket injured as well, they'd decided to set their sights a little lower for first take-down of one of Thanos's minions: Vince Sandhurst.

"Ish hesh stillt im dat caffey?" asked Rocket through a mouthful of raw Endotuber before Gamora took the tuber away from him. She examined the bite mark in the end of it before shrugging and tossing it onto the pile of ones she needed to chop.

"Come again? Asked Quill. Rocket swallowed.

"I said, is he still in that café, Captain manpurse?" said Rocket, climbing up on the kitchenette work-surface with some difficulty and plenty of wincing as he worked his wounded shoulder and leg. He perched on the edge of the counter and peered over at what Gamora was doing.

"Sure, in at 0800 standard when it opens, sits by the door watching and listening to forte music until 1200 when the clerk arrives at the mailroom. He checks newly arrived packages, he gets angry, he goes back to his motel. Same as every other day."

"And we still have no idea what package it is he's waiting for?" asked Gamora, chopping off the Racoon-saliva covered end of the endotuber and flicking it towards the waste-disposal. Rocket caught it mid air, ran it under the tap, like he did with all his food, and then popped it back in his mouth. "Weash cannt" Rocket swallowed "We can't tell what he's getting 'cause the delivery company keeps the manifests, not the local mail office. I've hacked the town hall's mailroom, added a keystroke tracker and a back-door so well hidden Nova couldn't find it, let alone a mom-and-pop community post office run out of a shack, and nada. The postal network requires the sender to keep records of interplanetary packages, and since we don't know who's sending him this stuff-"

"We have no way of checking what it might be." Said Quill, gloomily. "But he goes every day, as soon as the county clerk opens the mailroom."

"And he's anxious" said Gamora, getting out a block of protein curd and slicing it into strips. They were having heardbeast with bell peppers. Except they couldn't afford the heardbeast. "Otherwise he wouldn't spend four hours sat opposite the town hall watching to see when the off-world packages arrive."

"And it's late, whatever it is." Said Rocket, reaching in and snatching a strip of protein-curd, running it under the faucet and bolting it down.

"We don't know that. He could simply be impatient" Said Gamora, mildly, before slamming the knife down into the work surface with a thunk as Rocket darted in for a second strip. He jerked his paws back and checked his knuckles, examining the freshly trimmed fur casually as he replied.

"I do: He's been paying for his motel room one day at a time, and yeah, that could just be an attempt to put anyone observing him off the scent, but it's not gonna put me off the scent. The guy's starting to smell, and that's not a metaphor. He's started re-wearing dirty laundry. The motel has a laundrette, but he's not used it. So either he takes Quill's attitude to laundry days, or he's not doing his laundry because each day he expects to get the package and get out of here. He packed enough clean clothes for five days, he's been here twelve. If the package was here on time he would have got it before he ran out of clean socks. Stands to reason."

"Wait, are you having a dig at my hygiene? The only time's I've ever seen you change clothes is when the ones you're wearing acquire bullet holes!" said Quill

"Yeah but unlike you disgusting bald-bodies I don't sweat. 'sept my paws. And I wash my hands at face more often than any of you."

"Discussion of which of you two boys is the most disgusting slob aside, where does this leave us?" asked Gamora, taking down an orb-wok and putting it on the heat. Quill shrugged.

"Star'l'in said the guy had worked at a whole series of tech companies, and that each and every one of them had tech disappear just before he quit, only to turn up in the hands of guys associated with Thanos. We've no proof he's in industrial espionage, but he's defiantly a shifty character. Star'l'in even implicated him in an industrial accident that injured his own brother, Baz Sandhurst."

"So we wait until the package arrives, stall him, or the clerk, or both, and take a look at the package and add a tracking device before he gets his hands on it." Said Gamora, throwing sliced vegetables into the orb-wok before garbing it by the handle and spinning it: Quill watched as the internal baffles caught the veg and tossed it around like a cement mixer.

"That's the plan." Said Quill, gloomily. "The boring, boring plan."

"At least we're planetside. We've got a safe, reasonably comfortable place, food, and water." Said Gamora. "Water that none of us have gotten too friendly with before" muttered Gamora, darkly. The first thing they had done after touchdown was hook up the ship to the parking-lot's standpipe and flush the H2O system. The Milano carried 40 gallons of water on board, which sounded like a lot until you realised that that total included the water vapour in the air, the water used as a solvent for the rebreather system and the water content of food loaded onto the ship and the water content of the crew. As Rocket pointed out to a very surprised Drax when he explained it, a space-ship is a closed system. Once it's left the atmosphere there's no way to add more water and it pretty damn difficult to get rid of any excess. Forget to calculate how much water the food contains or how much the crew are carrying around in their bodies, and when they start to breathe and sweat (or in Groot's case transpire) it out you'll get condensation forming in the ships circuitry, which due to weight limitations was almost entirely un-waterproofed. There was a condenser the ships manual called number one water reclamation, a glorified de-humidifier, but it could only handle so much and the water it sucked out off the air got pumped straight back into the osmotic membrane, as did the waste water from the sink (Number three reclamation) and the water from the centrifuge located underneath the head (Number two reclamation according to the ships manuals. Who says Badoon don't have a sense of humour?) Although the osmotic membrane filtered on the sub-microscopic scale and all drinking water was UV sterilized you never quite got rid of the voice at the back of your mind that reminded you that the glass of water you were drinking today was, best case scenario, re-condensed from your sweat yesterday. Also, to save water and minimize the risk of getting the circuits wet if the gravity failed, the particle shower only used water if connected to a hose from outside the ship: and although the cleaning powder and air-nozzles would clean safely and efficiently in space, you never felt properly clean afterwards.

"We'll I've repaired the link between the waste-disposal in the sink and number two reclamation so we can use the waste disposal without the head making that scary sound, but that's as good as it's going to get. The re-filtration would be better with a secondary osmotic membrane." Added Rocket.

"I'll add it to the if we win the lottery list." Said Quill. "In the meantime, we need to deal with Vince, deal with whatever his package is, and work out what we're going to do with Star'l'in's archive."

Star'l'in had forbidden them to destroy his big-book-O-Thanos from his Hospital bed, people having opinions about the torching of their life's work, but on the other hand it was possibly one of the most dangerous privately held collections of information this side of the great lascavarin porn-hub. Names, dates, massacres, murders, mayhem. Leads on Thanos and infinity stones would be useful to anyone trying to stop him, or to a dozen lesser tyrants and generalissimos trying to emulate him. Rocket had been digitising it, painstakingly and with a lot of swearing, and sending heavily encrypted copies to Nova at Quill's instance. None of the crew was entirely sure that they trusted Nova, Rocket least of all, but even he acknowledged that perhaps they shouldn't be the only ones with this intel just in case something happened to them, like horrible lingering death. It was also why they had decided they should hide Star'l'in's original somewhere safe. Drax had wanted to find a remote planet and burry it, Gamora said she knew a Kylarian banking cartel who had unbreakable anonymous safety deposit boxes and asked no questions, Rocket wanted to fly it out to an un-inhabited star system and dump it at one of the Lagrangian points, and Groot had attempted to hide it behind his back, which might have worked if it hadn't been around four times his current size. Quill, however, had what he thought was a better idea, and had taken it to Xandar city's central library and sweet-talked the librarian on duty into showing him where they kept the doctoral theses.

She'd asked what subject. He'd said the history of accounting law. Ten minutes and one gutted tome later and Star'l'in's life's work was miss-filed in the dustiest corner he could find, somewhere no-one would look unless they desperately wanted to check how a long dead doctor of accounting got his diploma, and a convenient ten-minuets walk from Dey's office should something happen to them and they needed someone they almost trusted to pick it up. And it amused him to hide all the intel they had on infinity stones less than two hundred yards from where they'd used one in anger. Gamora had called him an idiot for that, as had Drax, and Rocket, but none of them had tried to take it back, and Rocket at least had seen the funny side of it.

"Right, we need to get a formal list of our priories sorted." Said Quill, as Rocket, sensing imminent food, seated himself at the table in expectation and, having certain unlovely habits in such matters, started striping out one of his guns, the phrase a time and a place being a concept that along with other people's property, privacy and tact had ever quite settled in his mind. Quill noticed him testing the linear accelerator on a gutted rail-gun by seeing how high each coupling could levitate a neodymium slug. Quill grabbed a slug with a wild terran whoop of victory, and advanced across the galley with it.

"Okay everyone, sit back and watch the ultimate, all purpose Terran system of group-organisation and information distribution… stuff." said Quill, striding across the room, writing out a note, and, using the magnetic Neodymium slug, sticking it to the ships refrigerator.

"Behold, the fridge-magnet!"

Rocket and Gamora stared. "What?"

"The fridge-magnet. If you have anything you need everyone to know, you write it down, and stick it to the fridge. See?" he said.

Stuck to the fridge, the note read:

STUFF TO DO

Find package

Work out what to do with packge

Get Vince Snd (crossed out ) sandhrst (violently scribbled out) Sandhurst

Stop Thanos

Get grosseries: eggs milk bread infinity stones ect.

Fame and fortune.

Buy Eddie the Rac his membrain thingie so he'll shut up.

I'm running out of famous racoon names to mock him with Thought Quill. "Well?" he asked.

Gamora shrugged, more concerned with getting food out of the hot wok. Rocket said "Truly a prime example of Terran technology. Hey, you people keep working at it, someone on your planet might invent the chalk-board in, two, three decades tops."

"So that's one sarcastic, one disinterested, one ecstatic, thank you Groot. We have a tie. Drax, what do you think?"

Rocket snorted. "He walked out to buy a freezy stick five minutes ago. Didn't you notice?"

Quill stared, and bit his lip. "He's not likely to do anything… rash, is he?" he asked, as Gamora served lunch.

Rocket Shrugged, a pair of chopsticks in each hand and a napkin tucked under his furry little chin "He's a big guy. I'm sure he can look after himself."


Drax walked down to the local township, more for something to do than to buy a simple water-ice. He understood perfectly the need to observe Vince Sandhurst from a distance and not make a move until he had acquired his package, but he found the waiting tedious and the continual bickering of his ship-mates more so. It was a pleasant day, despite the heat on this dusty little world, and he resolved to walk down to the Café next to the town hall and purchase a cold drink there. If he was regularly seen there, he reasoned, then no one would take his presence there amiss when the time came to intercept and delay the mark at that location.

As he walked he noticed the increasingly large shanty settlement forming around the spaceport. Although a small peaceful farming world, this planet sat uneasily close to the frontier between Nova empire and Kree empire worlds, and with Kree nationalists unhappy about the peace deal with Nova, refugees had been flooding into border areas like this. The problem had become so bad that Nova, it resources stretched to breaking point by the incident with Ronan, had agreed to let the Kree consulates on a swathe of border worlds, this one included, set up an extraterritoriality authority for refugees: people fleeing the Kree Empire got to border worlds to find that the Kree empire was already there to meet them, and that didn't sit well with many. The locals wanted the Kree police to round up the refugees and take them back to wherever they came from because they didn't want them filling up their schools or taking their jobs, the Kree authorities wanted to use this as a chance to stop skilled workers it needed to rebuild it war-ravaged economy from fleeing and silence any dissidents who might try to set up governments in exile in Nova space, and the Nova Corp was trying to work with the locals, the refugees and the Kree police they had invited over to ensure that anyone at genuine risk of persecution if sent back to Kree space got moved on to Xandar, whilst at the same time trying to make sure that hard-nat nutters like the ones who supported Ronan didn't. this planet wasn't as bad as some, but there was still a lot of tension as this small, deeply pro Nova town found itself cheek by jowl with an ever growing refugee shanty town policed by the same Kree authorities they'd been at war with less than a year ago.

All in all, not a bad place to want pick up a dangerous or illicit parcel: if you could get it from the post-office, all you'd need to do was make it a few hundred paces and though the gates of the space-port into the refugee processing area and suddenly Nova had the mother of all jurisdictional headaches as you fell, temporarily, under Kree law. For the first time in a hundred years, there was land border between Kree and Nova, albeit a temporary one. That was another reason Quill had picked Sandhurst as the first one of Thanos's minions to go after. Nova Corp. couldn't touch him until he got the package, as he'd never been found guilty of any crime, but if the package was something illegal, they couldn't follow him easily if he fled into the refugee camp and straight onto the next ship back to Kree space. The Guardians of the Galaxy, on the other hand, could drag him out kicking and screaming safe in the knowledge that anything illegal they did to capture him, so long as it happened in the Kree camp, wasn't Nova's problem. Quill assured them that they could gag, hog-tie, wedgie and wet-willy him to their heats content so long as they got him back in one peace and didn't do anything illegal on the Nova side of the impromptu border, and whilst Drax had no idea what a wet-willy was, he was confident that if this individual had been working with Thanos even unknowingly, then he deserved it.

If fact he hoped it was as gruesome as it sounded.

In fact it was because he was trying to work his way thought some of Quill's more colourful terran sayings, and because he was wondering if the café still did that nice granita, that he didn't notice her until he was through the door and waiting to be served at the bar.

It was the forte music that made him turn around.

It was the toccata overture to the quod cadit tempus molliter, a piece he hadn't heard played since he left his home, a deceptively simple sounding piece, slow and soulful and speaking of lost loves, and popular, if that was the word, on his world in the aftermath of Roman's attack as so many struggled to express, without the use of clumsy metaphor or awful bluntness, their feelings of loss.

He turned, and she was there.

She was simply dressed, as if for travel, leaning on the forte and looking sideways across the room towards the veranda so he saw her in profile, and she was every bit as lovely as he remembered her, and that cut deep as knives. Large as life and twice as beautiful, was the women he almost married, back from the dead.

She has no right. He got up and, unthinking, checked his knives.

He walked over, in a swimming, soupy daze, and stopped just across the forte to her, and called her name.

"Isha?"

She looked around, suspired, and saw him. She stared deep into his eyes, and he felt lost in hers. She always did look so terribly innocently vulnerable when she was surprised.

Then she threw her drink in his face and, in the same frantic motion, tasered him over the forte.

She was out of the door and gone before he managed to struggle up from the ground.


Drax returned to the Milano in a daze. Quill, Gamora and Rocket were having a heated argument when he got back, and he sat down at the fold-out table without really hearing it. He didn't hear what they were fighting about, and no-one tried to explain or ask where he had been, which he was obscenely grateful for. They may have spoken to him, but if they did they didn't wait for a reply, and he didn't notice. In a very real sense, he wasn't there.

In his mind, he was back on his home planet, twenty five years ago on a spring day. He was on a year-in-industry placement that his collage had found for him, what would later turn into his first real job, and he wouldn't meet his wife Yvette until a mutual friend introduced them at an office party, five years down the line. He ate his lunch in the park, as he often did on nice days, and admired the architecture surrounding him: it was a small inner-city park, but one in an area of the city were people had tired new things and modern, elegant buildings were going up at the rate of two a year. He'd brought his drawing pad to make some notes and sketches, for company and degree. He's still held up hopes of becoming an architect at that point, but his draftsmaship in ink-pencil wasn't good enough. He didn't know he'd end up as a modeller, and if he had at that point it would have upset him. He didn't yet know the great calming peace he would find when an architect or designer would walk in with their sketches and concept panels and they'd sit and talk and he'd go and get the easy-carve foam, and make their dream come to life for them in elegant 3D. He didn't know how soothing he'd find the physical act of shaping, turning the flat designs he was given into something whole, and formed and weighted and real in foam or plaster or balsa wood.

He didn't realise just how good he was working with knives yet. That came later.

He was sketching the curve of the cable-car pylon over the river when the music started, quod cadit tempus molliter by a local amateur orchestra occupying the shimmering crystalline ovoid of the bandstand at the centre of the park, and that made him look over.

A young woman was sitting on the grass under a heavily blossomed tree, hugging her knees and laughing at a friend's joke, and as he turned to look at the band she saw him, their eyes met and she waved. Drax smiled and waved back, ink-pencil in hand. She saw it and laughed, and asked him to draw her and her friend. He smiled, a little unsure, but they were framed so well by the tree on one side, with the cable car behind and overhead, and the bandstand on the other, that he did. He usually hated drawing people: they didn't stay still, and he could never capture their essence the way he could for buildings. The nuance was always slightly off. But the young woman had an almost architectural beauty to her: in all honestly handsome rather than conventionally pretty, but with high elegant cheekbones and a nose that was strong but perfectly shaped.

She asked if she could keep the picture. He added his coms-number to it.

Awesome Mix tape 2: Sparky Wilson: sunshine of your love.

They dated for about nine months. She was a research student at the electromechanical chemical centre at the same university as him, but on a different campus within the city. She loved seafood and was a keen amateur musician, but nothing about her was quite as musical as her laugh, and her large, vulnerable looking eyes were what comforted him most when the company he worked for and the dean of his facility sat him down and told him, without preamble, that he'd be better changing his course of study from architecture to architectural modelling. They made love most every night, and within two months Isha only really used her room in the post-grad dorm to change out of her lab coat on the way over to see him. Their break up was sad, but amicable: she'd been offered a place on a research project that included a funded doctorate and post-doc work in the field she wanted to pursue, in a different city, he'd just been offered a contract as a modeller at his company and wouldn't move away, and sweet as it had been, they both knew it wouldn't work long distance: they were both people whose silences said more than their words, and teleconferencing cannot replicate that. He walked her to the airport and wished her well. It seemed polite, and they owed each other that much.

That had been the last time he'd seen her for 19 years.

He'd been married for 14 of those, and his daughter was around eight. He did not know at that point that she'd not reach ten, but he still worried, as fathers will. If he feared for anything, it was that he and his wife might divorce.

Yvette was the love of his life, pure and complicated, because nothing is every quite that simple. The modelling job paid well, but he worked on commission by that point, mostly in wood, for vehicle designs. He'd known before he trained that computer-deign would always handle the final moulding of any architectural or vehicle project, but when he'd fist trained there was still a need for some to get a big block of foam and carve out in perfect detail what the finished ground car or building or boat would look like, so the designer could show executives and so the bodywork guys would know what they'd got themselves into. But 3D printing and a generation of designers taught from their first day at collage to think in 3D who knew how to make their own computer models had really reduced the work he was getting, and although his wife also worked and held down a pretty good job, money was tight, and the second job he took as a personal trainer (he'd always been a fitness freak) left him next to no time with her. They'd fought. Bitter, bitter rows sometimes, and although the love was still there, deep as ever, Drax was a realist: he knew that sometimes that wasn't enough to stop people you loved leaving you.

If it was, no-one would die.

It was in a bar on the way back from the gym: one of the other trainers and Drax's occasional sparring partner was buying to celebrate getting his qualification to teach MMA and it would be rude to refuse, when he saw her. Well, she saw him. He was drinking a paradisi and tonic (thirst-quenching but non-alcoholic) when he heard the creak from behind him and a hand touched him gently on the shoulder. He turned and she was there.

The years had been kinder to her that they had any right to be, but those cheekbones would defy age, he'd always known that, and her eyes were as big as he remembered, and when he started in surprise to see her and spilt his drink, her laugh was as musical as ever.

He asked how she was, and introduced her to the guys from the Gym. She was well, amicably divorced, just in town for a conference, new research project, can't talk, company confidentiality and all that. She asked how he was, and made congratulatory and sympathetic noises at all the right points, and ooohed and ahhed over his daughter, as everyone of course should, and he oohed and ahhed over a picture of her son, a little younger, because it was only polite. He offered to buy her a drink, to be social, and she bought him one back, and quite soon both were a little drunk. She clapped him by the shoulder and pulled herself to her feet a little unsteadily, lab coat swirling, and he was the gentleman and called her a cab and walked her too it. As she got in she giggled.

"Hey, I just remembered." She said, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a note book. "I found this the other day, clearing out some old stuff, and it was so pretty I just couldn't' bear to throw it away. Been using it as a Bookmark." She said, as she handed him a scrap of paper. "For you. She giggled, as she slid easily into the back of the cab, and was gone form his life again.

He opened up the paper.

There were some lab-notes, some equations scribbled in the margins, and the sun had faded it a little over the years, but on the paper a pretty girl smiled in a spring park, her friend barely an outline, like the cable car and the bandstand, and the spring of his youth came back to Drax, a spring where he was going to be a successful architect, and build cities that touched the sky, with the pretty girl form the park on his arm.

On the bottom, next to his old coms-number, she'd written out her hotel address and room number.

Drax hesitated, and then called a cab.

A chopstick flew past Drax's face, and he was rudely snapped back to the present (except of course that he had never left, that being in every real sense a bad metaphor) to discover that Rocket was standing on the table and howling at Quill as he looked for more things to throw. Gamora looked like she was about to join in and was only being held back by uncertainty as to which side, if any, to fight for. Quill realised he might soon me outgunned and decided a human shield was his safest route out of here and grabbed Groot and started yelling:

"Pax! Pax! No violence around the baby!" Rocket froze-up mid-pitch as he was about to lob his dammed ball at Quill he's getting quite attached to that. It's just an old containment sphere thought Drax.

"Coward!" snarled Rocket, putting the Sphere down and glaring at Quill's body as if seriously considering if he could slip something smaller than a ball, say a Taser-bolas, past without hitting Groot.

"But then he's only drop the pot." Muttered Rocket to himself as his fur settled back down from I'm angry and trying to make myself look big mode. Gamora scowled.

"Honestly, if none of you want to do anything useful-"

Drax Stood up. Clearly his expression gave something away, because all the others, even Groot stopped and looked to him.

"I have achieved something useful. I know what the package is."

"How could you possibly know what the package is?" scowled Rocket, as Drax stood up and walked over to his painfully neat sleeping area, and took out his wallet. "I mean we went over the guys known associates and on-line activity with a fine tooth comb, and we couldn't find a thing. He barely leaves the Motel exempt to go to that café and stare at the post-office and he never speaks to anyone, so what could you have found that I missed?"

Drax opened his wallet to the front card-slips, he took out a picture of his wife, and for a moment his fingers, sure, strong sculptor's fingers trembled, before he reached under the picture and pulled out a smoke-stained scrap of paper.

"I found nothing. I heard Nothing. I was Taserd by someone I thought long dead, but they did not stay to talk about this Vince Sandhurst or his package. But none the less, I know what is in it." Said Drax, walking over, the scrap of paper delicately balanced on the fingertips off one hand.

"How?" asked Quill, frowning as Groot (now quite bored) pulled at his hair.

"Because I hold in my hand the thing that has caused me more regret than anything else in my life. Because Thanos has sent his minions to get this package before." Said Drax. "And my world and my family paid the price."

Slam!

The crew leaned in, as Drax pulled his steeple'd fingers away to reveal an old scrap of drafting paper on which smiled a young woman in the eternal spring of a life long ago.

"Ohhhh!" went Rocket, Gamora and Quill with sudden understanding.

"It's a package of pictures?" Asked Quill a second later, ruining the effect. Rocket winced and he and Gamora shared their idiot captain look for a second.

"It's a package of control." said Gamora. "Total and complete control."

"But for me." Said Drax. "it was a package of death."

He paused.

"Was that an appropriate use of metaphor? The package did not in any literal sense contain death, it was just responsible for it."

"No, no that's good." Said Quill.

"Do I need to…?" said Drax, making the finger to the throat gesture.

"No, that was fine as it was." Said Quill. They all looked at the picture again.

"Kinda killed the mood of there a bit." Said Rocket.