It was the night before Christmas, and all though the house, not a creature was stirring.

Especially not Starlord, which was a pity because he was supposed to have left on a mission half an hour ago…

BuzzZzzzZzzzzzZzzzZzzz! Screamed the alarm.

Peter "Starlord" Quill rolled over, glanced at the clock, muttered, and then rolled over again. 0830. Plenty of time to…

Wait… eight thirty?

Quill shot up, immediately smacking his head on the bulkhead hard enough to see festive little stars.

"Son of a Bitch! Gamora! We over slept!"

Gamora, in the next bunk over muttered, and rolled over. "Imposable, Peter, I set an alarm with an hour to spare-"

"Oh does it look like this one?" Yelled Quill, scrabbling on the bedside table "This one here that has visibly had the Anulax batteries stolen out of it after someone seems to have clawed the back off!"

Gamora swore, and shot out of bed, fully clothed and heavily armed. "Rocket! I swear one of these days I am going to skin you if you keep messing with my stuff!"

Quill stared, horrified. "Wait, do you always sleep like that?"

Gamora glanced over coolly. "Only if I suspect something is about to go horribly wrong. So most of the time, yes."

She glanced down, and raised a critical eyebrow.

"Santa and Rudolf boxers, really?"

"Hey! These are festive!" said Quill, his reddening face redder in the flashing red light of Rudolf's nose, suddenly cut off as he pulled pants on.

Gamora, still pissed off and half asleep, chose to ignore this and ran up the steps into the main communal area of the ship, yelling.

"Rocket, Rocket you little Gremlin I swear if you've used it to make another bomb… Drax, Groot get up! Thanks to Rocket we are Super late!" she said, slamming the flat of her blade into Rocket's nest angrily as she passed. Since his run-in with the Collector, Rocket had been slowly fortifying his sleeping spot from a simple hammock into a horrifying concretion of junk mounted to the wall at about head height. It looked like what you'd get if Tetsuo the iron-man built a squirrel's drey, or if A sea anemone fucked a sea mine: a nasty, spikey ball of wires, rebar junk and hatred that could probably stop any attack short of exploding rounds and whose only entrance was an approximately racoon-sized hole angled upwards so you couldn't peak in, and from which swearing, snoring, booze fumes and, or rare occasions, Rocket himself would emerge.

"This is your fault for going drinking with him last night!" yelled Gamora, sprinting up the steps to the cockpit to power up the ship.

"Hey, seeing as we were working over the holidays, and glad to, to help avoid getting attacked by any more festive bullshit, I figured we'd have our Christmas party a little early."

"You got boozed up and came back late and now we're late! And stop going drinking with Rocket. Last time you came back with a space pirate you'd made friends with!"

"He was cool!" shouted Quill, midway through getting dressed.

"He was cold. As in, stone dead, for at least 48 hours before you 'met' him. The fact you and Rocket were both too drunk to notice was worrying. The time before that, you left Rocket behind and came back with a live Possum you genuinely thought was Rocket at the time!"

"Not my fault, blame the eggnog. At least I didn't sabotage the alarm for parts!" yelled Quill emerging from the stairwell, now pulling on a "Santa baby" t-shirt and hopping barefoot on the cold metal of the deck. He punched at Rocket's den on his way past, yelping as he scraped his knuckles.

"Asshole, Rocket, seriously Ranger Rick, we had important shit to do today! Some days you make me so mad I could drown you. Drax grab the weapons we need to- Woah!"

Quill ducked sideways and Drax went past, yawning. Groot shuffled past, and Quill grabbed him and shoved him towards the hold. "Groot, grab the stuff, Gamora, start the engine I'll fly, Drax, put a foot up Rockets butt and then get over here we need to-"

"Quill!" yelled Gamora. "It's Drax."

Quill, blinking blearily. Stared up the steps to the cockpit at her. "So?" asked Quill.

"Metaphors!"

"No what do you mean- oh… right. Like that time I wanted him to stop, sit and listen and said take a knee-"

"And he pulled off someone's patella. Drax do not put a foot up Rocket's butt: remonstrate him with appropriate levels of annoyance, and then get in the cockpit and strap in, we leave in two minutes. "

Drax nodded, and went to shout at the nest, and then paused.

There was no swearing. Odd… No rustling. No snoring. No sounds of movement. There was also no trace of the slight fug you tended to get around sleeping people, nor the faint musky smell of clean oily fur that Rocket gave off up close. There was a different odour, an unusual one.

Cocking his head on one side, Drax leaned over, and, standing on tip toes, gingerly reached into the nest, trying to avoid slicing his hand on the random metal, and half expecting either teeth or a trap. He winced as suddenly and unexpectedly, his finger hit something soft.

Too soft. Drax paused: he'd petted Rocket before, after the fight on Xandar, and after the thing with the Collector. Both in times of extreme stress, and so his memory might be wrong because of that, but he was pretty sure that Rocket's fur, while soft, was a lot coarser, with long rough guard hairs. He was also a lot warmer, and a lot bitty-er.

Drax heisted for just a second, and then reached into the nest elbow deep and with some difficulty pulled out…. A dead possum. Dressed as a space pirate.

"Peter Quill… are you sure you came back with Rocket last night?" he asked, walking up to the cockpit, staring at the dead possum in his hand.

"Yes." Said Quill, powering up the engines and taking off.

"So he's not… for example… still in a bar, or in his room in the warehouse, or passed out on the street?" asked Drax, as they headed off out towards the eyes of Knowhere and out into space.

"No. that would be like… really really stupid. And slightly contrived. " said Quill "FTL jump spot coming up in ten. Huh…. Why do I feel like I've forgotten something."

"It's Rocket." Said Drax.

"No… like I've forgotten to pack something."

"It's Rocket." Said Drax.

"No, like something is missing."

"It…. It could be Rocket." Said Gamora, staring at the dead Possum with a look of horror.

"No Gamora, " said Quill "More like-"

"I am Groot!" Objected Groot, rushing back into the cockpit and pointing back the way they had come, towards Knowhere, while making a racoon shaped bundle on leaves with his other arm.

"No, like something is missing!" said Quill, as they hit the FTL jump point.

"It's quite clearly Rocket." Said Drax, as they when faster than light.

There was an awkward pause, as they all just stared dead ahead out of the cockpit blister.

"So… we're doing Home Alone this year?" Asked Drax.

"Looks like it." Said Gamora, settling own in her chair for the ride.

*Joy to the world plays loudly.*

A Bit of Both, Holiday special number five: Clone Alone.

Some days earlier.

"NO, look, this is an important mission, we only need to take the essentials and we have to pack light! Take only what you absolutely need!" Yelled Quill, standing in the warehouse on Knowhere, as the crew manhandled stuff into the ship.

"And I absolutely need that!" yelled Rocket, looking up at Quill, arms held wide in protest, data-slate in one paw.

"That's a nuke! An actual Nuke!" yelled Quill, pointing at the two-ton fat-man style bomb Rocket was standing in front off, in a desperate attempt to hide it from Quill. "I mean, you've put a towel over the top of it, and written 'totally not a nuke' on the side, but I can still tell!"

"And I need it for this job!"

"This is a humanitarian mission, from Nova. Frickin' Nova! We're delivering aid, for Christ's sakes Rocket!"

"Um, about that?" asked the Xandarian in the Nova Denarian's uniform, waiting to one side.

"This…. This counts as humanitarian aid!" protested the Racoon, weakly.

Quill put his head on one side, and crossed his arms

"A star just went Nova, flooding a Nova planetoid in Gama rays and killing all their crops and turning half the population into big green monsters, we're the only Nova-corp. sub-contractor in range, and you think that what these people need is more radiation!? There are two million mouths to feed!"

"Not if I set off this baby. Then it's only, like, a million mouths to feed. I've halved the problem! Malthusian collapse averted! It's practically Utilitarian! And that sentence had the word Nova in it to often! It sounded silly."

Quill buried his head in his hands. "Gamora, stop buying him flimys on philosophy, it's not making him a better person, he's just got better a rationalising being an ass-hat!"

"Stop buying him nukes!" Yelled Gamora, walking past with a crate of iodine tablets.

"Excuse me!" said the Nova Corpsman.

Quill glared. "I said ass-hat. Calm it, dude. And the nuke was on his Christmas list! What am I supposed to do, Scrooge him?" he yelled, an Rocket, futilely, tried to drag the bomb closer to the ship.

"Yes!" yelled Drax and Gamora, merging with the "I am Groot!" yell, as they loaded up the ship.

Quill groaned, and then turned to the Denarian. "Yes? What is it? We're busy here. As you can clearly see. Just let us get in, secure a landing zone, and distribute some basic meds, and then you boys can bring in the big transports with the food-aid-"

"Actually, sir, I'm not from the humanitarian division, I'm Nova security." Said the Denarian, tapping at the rank-bars on his chest. "And it's not that we're not grateful for the help on this op, it's just that, well, you guys have a reputation for…. Collecting usual materials." Said the corpsman, eyeing up the nuke meaningfully. "Some of which would be very valuable on the black market, sir, so we'd just like to know, are you really leaving this warehouse un-manned and unguarded for the entire holiday season?"

"Un-manned, yes. Un-guarded? Rocket?"

The Racoon grinned, evilly, and then swaggered over, leering at the the guard as he looked him up and down with his usually dislike of cops.

"Well, see here, Nova-pants, right now you're in what we call the 'guest' area of the base, which explains why you're still 3D and not a stain on the floor. Right now, you're being scanned by dna and brainwave scanners and tracked by little-helper.

"Little Helper?" asked the corpsman. Rocket grinned, and tapped a claw to one of his wrist implants.

The floor of the warehouse origami'd open and a giant metal tentacle topped with a plasma-cannon the size of a car popped out, an inch form the Corpsman's head, an a dozen death-ray turrets de-cloaked on the ceiling. Ominous read light flare, and the nuke slid into the hole in the ground and vanished. Rocket swore.

"Awwww shit third one this week… we should really find out where those wind up."

"Yeah." Said Quill. " We should. Okay Rock, knock it it off: you're pitching a tent, and the corpsman has gone pale and I don't want to see with of you ruins your pants first."

Rocket laughed, but de-activated Little Helper.

"Yeah." Said Quill "After Nebula broke in and fucked up our stuff, we've upgraded our security."

"Gleet bio-filters for DNA, Tyrel Corp brain-scanner for long-term thought patterns." Said Rocket, drooling slightly over the technology.

"Full genetic and memetic scanning." Added Quill. if it walk in here and strays beyond the designated public area, it had better match the DNA and engrained thought patterns and memories of my crew or else."

A feral widgeion fluttered in, crossed over the line painted on the floor and a turret appeared and hit it with a zap, turning it into a small gobbet of goo that fell out of the air and landed on Quill's boot. Quill looked at this, and then Rocket.

"Seriously, a goo gun?"

"Hey I was bored and working on a particle that changed the size between atoms, and it kept turning things into gloop, and then I realised, hell, who would want to change the space between atoms when you can just melt your foes into goo? Gotta love the gloop-gun!"

"You have issues, Rocket." Said Quill. "But yeah, anyone breaks in here, unless their DNA an memories match our template, they get glopped, long, long before they can get to the armoury, Rockets room, or our mainframe of classified documents."

"Which are all the same place." Added Rocket.

"Or my porn stash." Said Quill

"-which is not." said Rocket, wrinkling his muzzle and stalking off, disgusted.

"So, yeah." Said Quill turning back to the guardsman "We're good for security. No one is getting in here but us."

The guardsman smiled, a sly smile. "Good to know." he said, giving Quill a joking salute, before he turned to leave.


Fleek Xan'Yothen leaned over between the two front seats of the hover-van parked outside the warehouse, and turned off the holo-projector on the dash, dumping his crumpled Nova uniform with the other hand an adjusted his normal cloathing. There was an awkward pause.

"And you're sure they didn't notice you recording?" asked the river of the van. His name was Flip. The large one was Flop.

"No chance, the recorder was hidden in the rank bars of the uniform. The rodent was is the only one who might be tech savvy enough to notice, but he couldn't see from that height, the angle is wrong." Said Fleek. "Perfect infiltration, they told us exactly what their security is."

"Yeah, and their security is fucking terrifying!" Said Flip. "Sentient plasma guns, maser turrets, an frickin' gloop guns!"

"Shit man, I don't want to get Glopped. " Said Flop. "None of my clothes would fit."

"And you'd be dead." Said Flip.

"That too." Said Flop.

"Yeah, but that's not the point." Said Fleek. "The point is we know what we need to do to rob it. Think of that place, there is a fortune in tech in there, and that's zargnutgs compared to the value of the information. The data on Infinity Stones, covert Nova opps, blackmail details, we'd be rich for life."

"Gloop. Gun." said Flop. "Gloop."

"Yeah well, we're nearly a million in debt to a guy to literally has the name Ball-buster Harris, an he's indebted to someone even worse who wants this info. Gloop be dammed. We need this score. So, options?"

"Suicide?" joked Flop. The other two ignored him.

"Get a blood sample, silicone fake finger full of blood pressed to the gene-coder?"

"Gleet bio filter: scans you're whole body. Plus the memory scan."

"Get a bio-hacker to cook up a custom virus, put a little of their DNA in each of our cells-"

"Would still have our DNA register as foreign. Gleet version ten point two can spot chimeras, and I doubt the rat would cheap out on this. Plus, memories."

"Suicide." Said Flop, morosely.

They all paused for a moment, glum.

"Didn't these guys run afoul of the Collector a while back? Something about fucking with their memories?" Said Flip.

"Even if we could recover a copy of memory files, one, they're encrypted. We wouldn't know what they were until we stuck them in someone's head. Which would probably drive whoever it was insane. Two, data degradation. Memories would be full of gaps. Who knows if the memory scan would even recognise it as the correct memory, or fry them as an intruder? Three, if we put the memories in one of our heads, our memories would still be there. We'd get flagged as having foreign memories, and then gloop. We'd need a perfect genetic match, an no pre-existing memories. A blank slate…"

The three considered that.

"Cloning vat?" asked Flip.

Fleek nodded. "Cloning vat. Or golem forge 3d collagen printer, that would do. And I know a guy: churns out black-market doubles for spare organs, but they're blanks, no higher brain functions. Wouldn't be cheap, but were near a million under anyway, so compared to the pay-out... we could get a few cook up and then jack them with the correct memories, subliminally plant some programs to make them bring the info to us…"

"Sounds like a god damn plan. One where we get to keep our balls." Said Flip.

"And not get Glooped." Said Flop, sadly. "Not that it'll matter, because to clone one, if not all of them, we'd need to get their DNA, and I doubt they' be that obliging…"

The side door to the warehouse kicked open, and Rocket and Quill spilled out into the street, thrown by Gamora.

"Pack light! What part of that don't you two understand? That means no nukes, Rocket, and no disgusting trash, Peter! You empty your wastepaper basked and throw out the toenail clippings, you don't ferry them from place to place like a ghastly trophy!" she yelled, thrusting a small trash-can into his hands.

"Okay, so the hummie is gross, we knew that, why am I getting singled out for this?" yelled Rocket.

Gamora, making a disgusted frown, dumped a black, slimy hairy mass into Rocket's palms. "Because when I ask you to clean out the drain in the shower, I don't then expect you to dump the giant hairball you pull out in the sink, on top of my toothbrush! Look at this, it's gross! It's racoon fur, and my hair and twigs and…. what the hell is this! Is this a waxing strip? Drax, are you waxing your chest?"

"I don't like the hair obscuring my tattoos!" yelled a voice from inside the warehouse.

Gamora groaned, disgusted. "Just get rid of it! We have work to do, take it to the dump, seeing you to choose to put our base somewhere with no trash-collection!" yelled Gamora, turning on her heal and heading back inside."

Rocket and Quill considered this for a second. "Rock-paper-scissors?" asked Quill.

"Yeah, if you like Quill but in all honesty, if you lose this, are you actually going to take this all the way to the dump?"

"Hell no, I'm tossing it in the gutter and pretending it wasn't me!"

"Yeah, me too, so why the pretence?" said Rocket, tossing the hairball in the trash. Quill then tossed the trashcan over his shoulder, and they then went back inside.

"Or, they're idiots." Said Flip.

"So, we have DNA…" said Fleek, as flop ran out and grabbed the bin. "We have a guy who can churn out some programmable clones in a few days, we can get partial memories, and we know when they're going on this mission and for how long. We'll be in and out and get that intel without them ever knowing we've made a copy." Said Fleek, as Flop got back in the van. "Walk in the park."

"Gloop gun." said Flop, sadly. "Something will go wrong."

"Oh, come on man." Asked Fleek. "So long as every Guardian gets on that ship and leaves, and no one is left behind in that warehouse, it's a piece of cake! What can go wrong?"

Cut back to the present. Rocket waking up in an alleyway wearing a Santa-hat and clutching a bottle of rum.

"Owww. My head? What the hell happened? Ugg… oh man, I have to get back home for Christmas!"