Two Person Job: part one; the pitch.
Quill gritted his teeth, bracing for the pain he knew would come. It was a tough call, but he was the captain dammit, and pride wouldn't let him get beaten by this in front of his crew. Sweat beading his brow through the physical and mental focus demanded of him, he shifted his grip, reached out…
… and swore to himself for the third time in a minute as the chopsticks skittered out of his hand en-route to his mouth and his shoulder exploded into pain as he spasmed and dropped the chopstick under the table somewhere. He went to pick it up, and then realised that with one arm and one leg in a cast, and the other arm in a sling, he just couldn't reach.
"Dammit." He yelled. His crew looked up sympathetically from their meal. Well, Gamora and Drax did: Groot was sympathetic but not eating (although Quill guessed that as the light was on he was technically photosynthesizing. Quill wasn't sure if that counted or not) and Rocket made a snorting noise that could have been a half-hearted attempt to hide a laugh, but didn't look up from his food.
"Do you want me to-"
"No." said Quill, stubbornly cutting off Gamora. "I can get it." he said, squirming and trying to contort into a position where he could get an arm under the tiny fold-down table on the Milano. What with one thing and another, like the repeated attempts of Quill's old crewmates to murder them, they still hadn't gotten fully moved into their new base yet, and having destroyed what passed for the Watt's brother's kitchen in their final fight with Yondu, they still had to prepare their meals on the Milano.
Well, technically they didn't, they could have just gone to the Nova aid stations and gotten fed their like 90% of Knowhere's populous was right now (and it didn't look likely to stop until they sorted out the political situation) but Gamora and Drax had cooked a nice little meal to celebrate Quill's release from the Nova med-bays and skipping it would have been pretty rude.
Although a least I wouldn't keep accidentally playing footsie with Drax each time I try to move.
It had been a week since the big fight, and Quill had never been happier to get back to his own ship, no matter how cramped, uncomfortable or downright unsanitary (although with him off ship and Rocket too injured to leave part-built bombs lying around he had to admit the place had never been cleaner). The Nova med-ship he was on had laid-on full room service for him as hero of the hour, full holo suite with unlimited, no questions asked pay-per-view and a bed the size of a small country whose main export was ridiculous comfort, and he'd hated every second of it. Quill loathed Hospitals. Deeply and atavistically. Even the smell just brought back too many bad memories, and he just couldn't, couldn't separate it in his mind from what happened to his Mom. In his mind, hospitals were still somewhere people went to die.
That and giving someone free unlimited holo-porn when both of his arms were disabled was just rubbing salt into the wound, in his humble opinion. A private room without Gamora snoring in the next bunk for first time in months, and he'd sent his nights trying to get to sleep by watching leopluodon week on the documentary channel. All you'd have needed was Rocket and Groot in togas dangling some grapes just out of his reach and you could have slapped it on a lunchbox and sold it as an Aesop fable. The morphine button was disabled too.
That said, at least he'd taken it better than Rocket had. Although he'd got considerably less banged about by Yondu, Rocket had still been falling-over-tired, partly squashed by Quill, and bleeding quite heavily when Nova had arived, and an initial radiograph had fried a twenty-thousand unit Nova medical scanner that clearly wasn't expecting to find that much cybernetics inside him and couldn't cope, so Rocket had had to wait while Nova med-techs built an old-fashioned (and to Quill reassuringly familiar) looking film x-ray under Rocket's instruction before Rocket could even find out which of his ribs were broken. At least five, as it turned out. Then he had to go thought the indignity and waiting of a Nova call to the veterinarian on Fairport to try and find some, any, advice on just how Rocket's biology worked.
While he was being splinted and corseted to support his sternum and get his chest wound cleaned (he'd insisted Nova leave in the Groot-staples rather than re-stich it, and surprisingly no-one had wanted to argue with the blood-covered furry lunatic drifting in and out of consciousness without easing his grip on his gun) Rocket had, understandably, eventually fallen asleep from sheer exhaustion and the medics had just decided to lay him out on the exam couch he was on, take the gun away, and try to clean up his wounds while he slept, which had been a good plan right up until the point fifteen minutes later where he'd woken up in an unfamiliar place with a surgical lamp in his face and two masked and scrubbed figures leaning over him and poking at his bionics trying to work out what they did.
Quill had been out cold in the next room at that point, and the yelling still woke him, and apparently it had taken Gamora quite a lot of fast talking to stop Nova security storming the room and that was nothing, nothing compared to the frantic negations Groot had conducted to convince a hysterical Rocket to take the syringe full of air out of the hostage's neck. Groot had apparently stormed out with Rocket cradled in his vines and to the relief of both Rocket and the Nova crew, Rocket had not had any contact with them since.
Gamora and Drax, as well as the ship's captain had visited Quill in his med suite and they'd all agreed to talk to Rocket about it at some point, but right now everyone was still mentally beat from dealing with Yondu and seeing as Ranger Rick was flat our refusing to acknowledge it had happed or speak to anyone but Groot about it, they'd decided to bide their time. The most Rocked had said about his past to date was still his drunken rant in the Bar, and other than drunken outbursts he just would not talk about it, but the scars told a pretty clear story. Quill knew his Nosocomephobia was kinda bad, but at least he knew why he hated hospitals and it was a single event. He had to wonder exactly what it took before someone's instinctive reaction to lab coats was syringe first ask questions later, and Quill didn't doubt that if Groot hadn't been there, someone could have easily died.
It was then that Quill came to a horrifying realisation.
"Shoot: I think the chopstick just went down my cast." He said, wriggling furiously.
"Do you need a new one or…"
"No Gamora, I'm fine just let me… yep… yep… no. it's defiantly stuck.
Gamora watched sympathetically for a moment, but Rocket struggled not to spit-take and Groot tried to grow his fingers into a new set of chopsticks as the Racoon hastily swallowed and then said:
"That's what? Four stuck down there already?"
"I am Groot."
"Three and a stylus?" repeated Rocket, looking to Groot. "Really? And you've been out of hospital for what, an entire hour?"
"Hey, the stylus and one of the chopsticks was me trying to reach an itchy bit and…. Hey, Quit growing your fingers at me Pinocchio! Firstly, I can get it out my myself, thank you: I'm not a complete cripple, and secondly I'm not going to snap your fingers off just so I can keep eating! And no, I don't care if they grow back it's still weird."
"It is indeed both fascinating and disgusting." Agreed, Drax, not taking his eyes off Groot's pair of rapidly extending digits even as he ate.
"Yeah well, you get used to it after a while." Said Rocket, disinterestedly, as the pair of fingers slowly encroached across his seating position towards Quill. "Besides, you may as well take them: lately he's not been real good at shrinking himself again, something to do with the growth-spurts he keeps having. If you don't snap them off then he'll just be stuck with two really long fingers until the rest of his body catches up." He said.
"Yeah, well, puberty's a bitch. It's no call to go snapping bit of people." Said Quill. "Except maybe Matthew Broderick, and he deserves it for skipping class."
It was true about his growth spurts, Quill conceded. He'd been amusing himself by getting Groot to stand on a doorframe on the Milano and marking of his height with his age since his destruction in weeks (and amused himself even more by measuring Rocket in his sleep and adding his height on too just to annoy him) but whilst he was on the Hospital ship, Groot had shot up and was now the same height as Rocket and rapidly overtaking him. Quill guessed that if Groot kept up his current rate of growth, he'd be back to his full height in a few weeks, two months at the most.
And Rocket seems to be getting less edgy around Groot the closer to his old self he gets the cunning, captain-ly part of his brain thought. Could be a good time to try and wheedle some info about his past out of him without getting murdered, now that he's less stressed out playing momma to Giving Tree there.
But not at the dinner table. Quill would want Drax and Gomora briefed on his plan and ready to back him up before he sprung it. That, and he didn't want to get stabbed in the crotch by an angry chopstick-wielding racoon, so he would have to pick his time and his place.
"So what's the plan with Nova?" asked Quill, picking a safer topic of conversation and studiously ignoring the wiggling joint-less wooden finger now under his nose. Gamora shrugged.
"Their captain here seems to be un-aware of our arrangement with Nova Prime and we decided to keep it that way, so we've been having some trouble thinking of ways to contact Nova and update them on our status with the peace-keeping ships monitoring all the coms, but I think we've found a way."
"How?" asked Quill. Rocket answered.
"When Greeny and Tats here were visiting you in the sickbay, I was having a sniff around the rest of the Nova Fleet, and while their gear is top of the line they've clearly never had to think deceptively once in their frickin' lives. I asked them to send an innocuous message to Denarian Dey for me, Quantum encrypted, Uncrackable and you'd know as soon as they try and look at your data, and sure enough, they looked at it, delayed, and then refused to pass on any encrypted messages unless I gave them the kea to look at the contents."
"So?"
Rocket shrugged. "So I gave them the kea, knowing that everyone involved, Dey included, would get a copy. Not my fault if the kea itself has a hidden message in it, unlocked using the same kea Dey uses when he sends jobs to us, prefixed with Dey's birthday so he knows to look at it. Let captain fancy-pants wonder why we're swapping meaningless small-talk with Dey all he likes, the fact is we got a report on your fight with the Ravengers out to Dey to fill him in on some of the details we left out of the official version, without anyone else in Nova finding out."
"Uh-huh? That new report include you firing on Nova, not Yondu?"
"Hey, I'm wounded, not stupid. But it did include the request for any know side-effects of infinity stones. He should get back to us on that today. He hinted they might have a job for us, too."
"A job?" asked Quill, trying to eat his remaining food with a folded-up coaster "He does know that I can't walk right now and they you're barely better than me, right?"
"Well for a start, I'm infinitely better than you anyway, s'just nature: whether I can move without wincing has nothing to do with it and yeah, I kinda mentioned that. It's the little things like I refuse to get out of bed without painkillers this week, and by the way Starlord needs a brace and crutches to stand to pee that may or may not have a bearing on our combat effectiveness. It's a non-combat job. Two people, three max, needs brains, and someone to look mean for the mark without them laughing, and even un-injured, the first rules out you and the second me. The sort of thing me and Groot would do in the old days." He looked sideways across the dinner table. "Guess it's on you to now." He said to Gamora and Drax.
"Which am I in this scenario?" asked Drax, mildly, still watching Groot try to pick up things with his new chopstick-fingers. "Brain or brawn?"
Rocket pulled a face at Drax, but said. "I dunno, why don't you and Greeny toss for it?" Gamora frowned at this, but pulled out a subunit token and tossed it to Rocket, glaring. She didn't like Rockets sardonic habit of mocking Drax's literal nature, but Drax never seemed to notice so she wasn't about to point it out to him and start a fight over dinner. They had Quill for that.
Rocket caught the coin in his chopsticks without looking and balanced it on one furry wrist, straddling the slightly grubby cuff of his bodyglove.
"Heads of tails?" he asked, looking Gamora in the eye as she glared at him, trying to provoke a reaction from her. While she was glaring at him, Drax paused to consider his options.
"The options are essentially meaningless given the random nature of events and the small number of possible permutations, but heads: Heads give a stronger, more active impression than tails. That and I do not care for the current design on the tails. I was under the impression that our heroics on Xandar against Ronan were going to be commemorated on a coin and I am disappointed by the lack of progress on this matter."
"Yeah, about that" said Quill. "Turns out the various sub-committees you need to go through to get yourself on the back of a subunit token are pretty tedious, even by Xandarian standards, so last I heard from Dey we're not getting a coin anymore. We're getting a stamp."
Rocket cracked up laughing at that, descending into a hacking, painful sounding cough as he doubled up, clutching at his wounded ribs as tears streamed down his snout. After a moment or two in which Groot propped him up to stop him falling off the seat, he managed to acknowledge the stupefied looks the crew were giving him and speak again.
"Good. I've always wanted to be on a stamp."
"Why for the love of god?" asked Quill, taking the opportunity to steal Rocket's chopsticks, wiping them surreptitiously on his sleeve to remove any lingering racoon saliva. Rocket wheezed and snorted as he whipped away tears.
"Ahahaha, well, you lick the backside of stamps don't you? Heh, I always said that those stuck-up Xandarians could kiss my a-"
"Not while I'm trying to eat." Said Gamora. "Honestly, you have got to be the least mature person I have ever-" she stopped: Quill was laughing so hard he was shaking the table. She threw down her chopsticks and pinched the bridge of her nose in frustration.
And because there are certain universal conventions in place, it was at this point that the com's console in the corner bleeped, and began to spool out filmys: One routine request for any info available on Thanos, and the other one, hidden within the first, detailing the job. The holo flickered for a moment, and a harried looking Denarian Dey appeared, projected over the table and was confronted with two laughing idiots, a scowling g woman, and a tree person trying desperately to pick up a glass of water with two freakishly long fingers.
"Is this a good time?" he asked sarcastically, as the team tried to make themselves presentable. Or at least stop coughing stir-fry over the table.
"Sure, Two of us crippled, I can't move and the station on lock-down, sounds like a fine time to send us on a job." Said Quill. Dey snorted, and nodded to the coms console.
"Yeah, I figured you'd want a break, go somewhere less insanely dangerous than your own base, so I've cleared you to travel to Xandar for a conference on Thanos and come and go from Knowhere at will, and he's been informed that as far as we are concerned you're fully licenced to bear arms and aren't about to go and start a war with the Ravengers if left out of his sight." Dey paused, and bit his lip nervously.
"You, you are fully licenced for all those weapons and aren't about to start a war, right?"
"Yeah sure. Licenced. Mostly. More or less." Said Quill, trying to muster all the dignity possible to a man with three chopsticks and a stylus burrowing their way into his arm. "We're not looking for a ruckus with Yondu, hell, we're not looking to go anywhere near him. We don't want a fight with anyone right now," said Quill, turning to the screen with an exaggerated awkwardness, showing off the sling and cast. "So I'm hoping that either we are just going to a conference, or that whatever errand you've got for us is going to be a nice gentle girl scouts' cookie selling sort of errand. 'caus Rocket would struggle to handle more that coconut crunch right now, and I'm not too sure I could manage even that."
Dey clearly didn't get all the cultural touchstones, but got enough to get the gist, and smiled at them.
"Trust me, it's a pot-stirring job. We've got a corporation whose books don't add up, cash being funnelled into projects that don't yield any revenue, but it's not our remit to look through their books. So long as they pay the correct tax and don't do anything overtly illegal, we have no reason to go in-"
"-But the Nova corp. can't be blamed is some wandering busybodies stick there oar in." Finished Quill. "Fair enough, but why do we need to play Nacey Drew with this?" he asked. Drax nodded his agreement.
"We are no detectives or forensic accountants. What is the Nova corps. interest in this matter? Why should this concern us?" Rocket and Gamora nodded.
Dey nodded towards the com. "Full details are there. Simply put, the company in question, EIR Tech Solutions, has bought out Baz Sandhurst's old employer, and taken possession of a lot of the research data not destroyed in Ronan's attack. So there is an infinity stone angle. It's also hiring a lot of the employees laid off by Ker Industries following Benoit Ker's untimely death, and Ker industries new owners have a 49% stake in EIR-TS, which is instantly suspicious."
"Why?" asked Drax. Gamora filled him in.
"Enough to be the biggest shareholder, but just avoids the 50% stake where you would be legally responsible for any misdeeds the subsidiary company might perpetrate."
"Plus given this is a defence contractor we're talking about, I'm willing to guess that these EIR Bozo's have set up on some backwater world where you guys don't have much legal clout?" asked Rocket, stealing back his chopsticks.
Dey kept his facial expression carefully neutral as he nodded, unsure if Rocket was just filling in his team based on his experience, or if this was a veiled reference to Keystone. "Altair four is in an incorporated defence agreement with the Nova Empire: we are responsible for their defence, but cannot interfere in their internal affairs unless a risk to our security is immediate and apparent."
"Oh, so just like we wanted for Knowhere. How'd they swing that deal?" asked Quill, scathingly. "They blow the right trade delegate or something?"
"They let us put a naval base in orbit, within striking distance of the Kree border when we needed to launch a major attack on them." Said Dey. "You want a good deal, being able to help us out eight-hundred years into a thousand years of total war is a pretty good negotiating point."
Quill tried to look affronted for a moment, and then shrugged, as much as you could with both arms disabled.
"Fair enough, that's a pretty good reason. So what's the plan, Gamora and Drax waltz into their corporate HQ and what? Ask a bunch of questions and hope they get spooked into revealing something stupid?"
"Basically, yes. We'd like Rocket to think of a way to accesses their computers, and then Gamora or Drax installs it, we've arranged a meeting for you, posing as minor buyers. Once we have access to their computer systems, reveal that we're onto them: we can them analyse their internal traffic. Even if we can't decrypt it, the volumes of traffic should give our signals analyst's enough to build up a map of who they're talking to, where, and who they run to in an emergency. The accountants will see if they transfer money suddenly if they think their caught, which should reveal any undisclosed subsidiaries or silent partners in whatever it is they are up to. Place a worm in their system, and then shake the tree and see what falls out, then walk away. Non-combat, strictly low-risk job for two people posing as clients, absolute deniability of Nova involvement a must-have. Twenty grand on completion. You guys up for it?"
Quill looked to the others, before answering.
"So long as it turns out better than our last brush with Ker Industries, sure thing. We need the cash, and frankly a little time away from Knowhere could do us the power of good. You sure this won't suddenly turn nasty tho?"
Dey stared. "With you guys involved? No. But it's flagged as low risk, and Nova Prime felt that with you and Rocket sitting it out the risks of violent mayhem actually went down."
"Hey!" yelled Quill, insulted. "Gamora and Drax are just as good at violent mayhem as anyone, you talk like that you're gonna make them feel left out!" Dey snorted, not un-affectionately.
"Enjoy your meal, Starlord. Dey out."
Drax got up, and took a filmy print-out from the com and begun to scan it.
"This does not appear to pose any great difficulty." He said, leafing through. "It simply requires that two persons, posing as a diplomat and their bodyguard approach the company with the pretence of trying to convince them to join a trade delegation to the Kree empire. We should toss the coin to determine who posies as the bodyguard and who must pretend to be able to tolerate the murderous machinations of the Kree empire."
"Well, sounds like someone is hankering for the diplomat roll." Said Rocket mockingly, pulling out the coin again (although, Gamora noted, a lower denomination than the one he had been given) "We still good for Drax as heads?"
"Just toss the damn coin Rocket." She said, gritting her teeth. A week on this tub without Quill there to peace-keep, and she'd had about as much as Rocket as any reasonable person could be expected to put up with. She felt she understood him better than the others, and they still ran into each other late at night when their terrors happened to synchronise and had a mutual code of non-judgemental silence on the matter, but he never, ever let up and other than a life-or-death moments or some glimpses in the midst of a bad night, he didn't have any personality that wasn't rough edges.
Groot must have the patience of a bodhisattva. Then again, maybe life's simpler when your made of wood. Or may as well be made of wood. She thought, glancing to Drax, who stills seemed completely un-aware that Rocket was mocking his literalness and bluntness.
Rocket tossed the coin, and Drax might not have, but Gamora knew a foul toss when she saw one. She didn't break eye-contact with Rocket, and he didn't look away from her, a slightly smug, sardonic twist to his whiskers and a half-smile not changing one Iota as he reached out, and took the coin to his wrist and, without even looking at it revealed it and called out. "Heads it is, big guy. You get to pick. What do you feel like?"
Drax stared, appalled. "Like muscle and bone! What else could I feel like you tiny whiskered misfit? My bodily texture has no bearing on the matter at hand, unless you are implying that I am a better physical match for the bodyguard roll?"
"Well, you do look the part." Said Quill, lying flat on the table so he could bring his face close enough to his bowl to shovel in food with his credit-slip. "Yoush hash to consider appearanceshes for thish things." He pontificated, spraying crumbs. Drax considered this.
"Point taken" he begrudged. "And I do now which to have to emulate the roll of anyone involved with the Kree empire, or be forced to lie or speak in riddles. My people did not make fine diplomats. Even Thanos who did not stress diplomacy left his daughters better prepared for this arduous task. I just find it irksome that I am often perceived to be little more than dumb muscle."
Rocket looked from Quill, now starting to choke on his welcome back dinner and flop like a fish stick on the table with no hands to lift himself, to Groot still trying to pick up a glass of water with his new fingers and said, completely deadpan. "Don't worry Drax; I can assure you that no-one at this table looks the least bit stupid." He said, as Groot accidentally poured water over Quill's head.
Gamora snorted in disgust, and left the table barging past Rocket as she went, and snapping off Groot's useless chopstick fingers and slamming them down in front of Quill, as she went to set the autopilot for the journey.
Whatever they ran into, it couldn't be worse than this.
Awsome Mix tape Vol 2: Marvin Gaye And Kim Weston - It Takes Two
