Now that GOTG3 is available digitally I am reposting MY (mun's) version of Rocket's backstory that I wrote back in 2019, before we had a MCU canon-- not to be canon to my RPC but just because I wanted to share what I originally came up with. This is written as told by Rocket, and was from a RP where he finally opened up to Peter Quill about where he came from.
Warning: It is emotional and big thanks to the RPer who wrote this with me, @recklessxndrelentless for being so patient with emotionalistic issues boy, Rocket. Read more below (it's long!)
“Whoa!” Peter ducked as the beer can went flying past him, and he blinked confusedly at Rocket, an incredulous look on his face.
“Hey, it ain’t like I meant to! It’s not nice to throw things at people, either.” He continued to move toward Rocket, stopping when he was next to him before sitting down.
“What’re you doin’ up here, anyway?”
“Drinkin’,” Rocket said, grabbing at the plastic bound six pack at his footpaw, two already removed, one can that was nearly pelted at Peter’s face and the other one between Rocket’s bare feet. It seemed he was sharing.
He was in one of his moods, looking up to the stars at a particular quadrant, one he knew to well. His eyes were a little glossier than usual, and he swallowed hard trying to get his mind off what he was thinking about, maybe get away from thinking about the things that occurred on his home planet, and the special someone he lost
At least he got a straight answer. Peter looked down at the six-pack, pulling one of the cans out of the plastic ring and cracking it open. He knew something was off with Rocket– he’d seen him swallow, and normally he’d at least be chattering about something with him if he were okay.
A few moments of silence, and Peter spoke, softer than before. “What’cha lookin’ at?”
The silence was tense, but even if Rocket didn’t want to be seen getting a surge of sadness from whatever mourning he was feeling, he was fixated on it. He had never really talked to any of the Guardians in depth about his homeworld or what happened. He really wasn’t what you’d call “Nostalgic” but somehow it hit him, and he wanted to let people in… even just a little.
“Over there,” he said, pointing up at a cluster of stars that were barely visible. “it’s the keystone quadrant, which is where I’m from…. this is the closest I been to it since I … left.”
The technical word was ‘escape’ but he didn’t want to make it sound so melodramatic. It WAS a traumatic story, which is why he typically chose to suppress those nightmarish memories.
As Rocket spoke, Peter began sipping his drink. Normally he’d be boisterous, asking what the hell was so interesting about a bunch of stars– but Rocket’s attitude was enough to keep him from being rowdy.
He looked to where Rocket was pointing, squinting slightly at first– he’d looked in that direction numerous times, and never did he think anything was there. But hearing Rocket say that was where he was from, it made sense why he was staring there so intently.
“Oh…” Peter didn’t know what else to say, really– he’d never been good with words. He took a swig of his drink, sighing after he swallowed, and after a few minutes of silence, he spoke again.
“Would you, y’know… ever go back?”
“Nothin’ there for me,” Rocket answered. He then took a heavy drink from his second can, though he wasn’t able to drink much more than that, keeping the half full can in his hand.
“Never wanted to go back. I decimated the facility I was made in… lost the only lady I cared about… not exactly a memory lane I wanna go down,” he said.
He was thinking about it, the deep seated loss that had always been a chip on his shoulder.
Shrugging, Peter moved his arm when Rocket leaned against him, switching the hand he was holding his drink in.
“I dunno, I thought when you said you were from that quadrant that maybe you were homesick. I didn’ realize you meant that… y’know, what happened t’you happened there.”
“No… just missin’ someone,” he replied, taking a smaller sip from his drink.
He didn’t look to that cluster of stars feeling anything but her memory. He’d dealt with so much loss over his life and it’d be unfair to rank them, but losing her was what made him different.
“You know…” he said, gently clearing his throat, “I was created to be something of a living weapon– kinda like what Thanos did with Gamora but more bluntly. No halfway brainwashing with family-like affections, just straight up, rigid scientific engineering with no qualms of how I was treated, and if I didn’t survive I was simply another failure to add to their death count. Gamora was enhanced but with no risk to her life. Not that I’m jealous or nothin’, it is just how different it would be. So many experiments never made it out of there alive.” “Ah, okay…” He couldn’t blame Rocket, really. Once he’d found out how to tell what direction a certain quadrant was in, he’d often stared toward the direction of Earth, missing his mother. He still felt that pang of hurt in his chest sometimes, but it had gotten better after becoming closer to the rest of the Guardians.
Peter looked back down at Rocket once he started talking, a frown crossing his lips as he listened. “Wish neither of you had t’go through what y’did… by comparison, my life was better. I mean, constantly being told I’d be eaten sounds better’n anything you guys dealt with.”
“Oh there was that too. When I was a bounty hunter my targets were always talkin’ about eatin’ me or skinnin’ me or whatever. That or the prisoners, anyway. You were the first humie… to even treat me even half decent, same for Groot… but when I look up at them stars… I just feel… broken?”
Rocket didn’t know much about love or heartbreak, his heart was full of loss and grief but it all started there, in that quadrant. He took another drink from his can, he was feeling a little miserable talking about it. He though confiding might make him feel better but perhaps the years of suppression were amplified by it.
His body crumpled against Peter, legs curling inwards as he made himself smaller, his tail clinging to his own body, ears folded back, even his toes curled in more, and beer can in hand his arms wrapped over his head. He grit his teeth. Maybe it was just being drunk, but he sobbed dryly.
Out of everything Peter had seen from Rocket, this was the first time he’d seen him this upset. Yes, he remembered just how upset he was over Groot— but it hadn’t been like this.
He was startled when Rocket curled up against him and started sobbing— but while he was terrible at comforting people, he wasn’t just going to sit there. Setting his beer down, he wrapped his arms around Rocket, leaning down slightly so he could hug him properly.
“Hey… hey, it’s okay…” His voice was soft, gentle even. “You’re not broken, Rocket. I know you might feel that way, but you’re not.”
Rocket wasn’t just crying for himself, he cried for his mother, his siblings, the other experiments… Lylla….
It came pouring out of him, for the first time in years, he mourned. He felt so foolish, crying there. He wasn’t going to dump it all on Peter, he couldn’t. Peter wouldn’t understand. Peter never knew any of them.
Rocket set his drink down, so he could at least wipe his eyes, even if it was a little pointless since the tears didn’t stop. He was an emotional mess, it was so indignifying but he couldn’t help it. Any sense of dignity melted away the drunker he was– and even if he was only slightly intoxicated, he felt vulnerable and oddly safe.
He wasn’t going to gush on about it, he was just grateful Peter wasn’t acting weirded out by it, or making him feel more self conscious about his little crisis. Reminiscing on the past wasn’t something that did him any good. He was sensitive about it. Talking in depth was practically impossible, he usually brushed it off in any conversation as if it didn’t bug him– but it DID.
He let Peter comfort him, because he was in no state not to accept it. He felt so much shame for acting like that, but he was so frustrated having dug up those old wounds.
Peter would never be weirded out by Rocket— grief was grief, he’d had his share. They all had. But keeping it in for as long as he had was probably damaging to Rocket, and that, along with him being his friend, was one of the reasons why he was trying his best to comfort him.
He decided to do something he’d done before, which was to gently place one hand on Rocket’s head and stroke him, down to the back of his neck, before moving his hand back to the top of his head. He didn’t know if it was still comforting, but at least he was trying.
“You don’t gotta keep it in. If you wanna talk… well, I ain’t gonna judge.”
“What’s there to tell?” Rocket asked between pathetic sniffles… although it’d be a good opportunity for Peter to ask questions. Rocket didn’t even know where to begin. He didn’t really consider that anyone would want to hear about Halfworld or the facility he was made in. No one probed about it before. Normally he’d probably be better talking about it, not so many tears, but he had done this to himself, thinking so hard about it and letting himself grieve, even before Peter came out, he was upset before he even showed up.
He didn’t fuss about having the other stroking his fur. It had been a long time since he let someone do that.
Peter never really liked asking people about their pasts— it wasn’t just something you asked people, not normally anyway. Meeting people like Drax and Gamora who told him all about themselves not long after they’d met made him more comfortable talking about his own past, but with someone like Rocket, he didn’t want to shove his problems in the other’s face.
Shrugging and continuing to pet Rocket, Peter tilted his head. “Whatever you wanna tell. I’m not gonna judge.”
Rocket tried really hard to stop himself from crying, or at least to get his eyes to stop welling up. “Sometimes I do worry that I’m gonna die and no one is gonna really know anything about me…” Rocket admitted.
“It’s not like I don’t wanna talk about it, I just don’t know how… I mean I aint the kinda person who wants to live in the past or nothin’ but it’s weird when no one knows about it… I just keep it in because I don’t think anyone cares.”
Peter listened, nodding his head while Rocket spoke. He didn’t comment on how Rocket was still crying— he figured he knew that already, and he wasn’t going to make it worse.
“I used t’do that, too. Y’know… for all the shit I talked about Yondu, he coulda been worse. I kept my mom’s death a secret from him for a while ‘til he asked why I was so frantic after he snatched me… almost couldn’t tell him ‘cause I was so upset.”
He sighed softly. “Point is… someone cares. I care. No matter what it is, I care what happened.”
“Well… there was a lot of us in there, bein’ tested on. A lot of my memory is fuzzy about what they all did… it felt like it was never ending, and I don’t even have any idea how long I was in there. I was on so many sedatives and drugs, reality just fazed in and out like some lucid dream. I’d wake up for a moment, my insides just… hanging out as they modified me, I’d wake up another time, my hands were being ripped apart… and even worse things… but never for long. We’d get knocked out, fed through tubes to keep our bodies alive, when they stopped tinkering long enough to let us wake up… and of course it all hurt. Every bit they changed I remember vividly it channeling with pain. They threw us into observation chambers to let us ‘heal’ from the operations… and that’s when I met her… Lylla… in the chamber next to mine. She was like me, but… you know… also different,” he started to describe his time on Half-World best he could.
“We still didn’t know what was goin’ on, but it was like they opened our ‘third eye’ as they call it. We understood what the people were saying when they talked, we could talk to each other, we could understand how all the mechanics worked around us. As our bodies were given a chance to recover we saw what was happening to the other experiments. There was a lot of talk about what the scientists did, the tests they ran, and of course the injections for the subjects that didn’t pass.”
He shuddered a little, remembering how the other experiments would be put down.
Whatever Peter had been expecting to hear… well, it wasn’t quite this. He remembered just how upset Rocket had been when he was drunk and yelled at Drax and Gamora before they saw the Collector, of course, but he didn’t expect that it was worse than what he’d said before.
Having finished his first beer, he reached over and pulled another one out of the plastic, downing about a third of it before he spoke again. “Jesus…”
Somehow he knew that there was more. It was just something in the way that Rocket spoke that told him there was something else he had to say. So instead of saying anything else himself, he was silent again, putting his drink down and watching Rocket. He nodded to show he could keep going, and that he was still listening.
Rocket swallowed hard as he continued the tale…
“We saw what happened when they didn’t like what they saw, so we knew we had t’get out, but the place was pretty air tight on security… so Lylla and I started to devise a plan. I was really hellbent on gettin’ my ma and siblings out too, they hadn’t been altered, but they’re family, so … Durrin’ our tests, we had to fight drones and take ‘em down unarmed. Each test we took, we destroyed them and we’d start very carefully stealing parts. They always scrapped the drones we broke, and each one was supposed to both train and test a different skill… so its not like they’d notice a little something was gone.
Lylla and I started working together to make a micro computer to disable the security and open the cages. It took us weeks but when we were close to done we talked about our plan. We used the computer we made to find the building’s blueprints, and figured out all the access codes and altered the hand scanners so they’d activate from any touch. She suggested we open all the cages and used the chaos as a distraction, that way every test subject, altered or not would have a chance to escape. Her family had already been tested on and disposed, but mine were just in cages, and we were doing so well in the tests we were the only subjects that were still alive that had the alterations done.
I never told her about my family, I didn’t wanna bring her down and remind her of what she already loss, and when we finally opened those cages, we opened the stock cages too… Lylla was about to run for the exit, if we both went, well… I’m sure we would have made it, but I thought if I ran to get my family, she’d go get my family free and we could meet outside somewhere. It caught her off guard, and she followed after me instead. She didn’t even know what I was doing, she just followed… I told her to run, that I could meet her outside when we were free. She said, ‘not without you, we’re in this together.’”
Peter had a feeling– a bad feeling– that he knew where this was going. Somehow he knew that this plan wouldn’t be as good as it seemed.
He continued to listen, and slowly his gaze turned toward Rocket again. Once Rocket said that Lylla was telling him they were in this together, that was when he really knew…
“Rocket…” His voice was quiet, and his eyes showed pity– pity for his friend, and what he went through. “She… didn’t make it, did she?”
“Long story short, no… she didn’t… “ Rocket said softly. He was having trouble telling all the details.
“It was my fault,” he added even softer. “If she wasn’t following me, if I explained what I was up to, something mighta been different…”
He didn’t want to go as far as expressing it was a waste to try and save his family because they saw him as a threat when they were united, but all the talk wore him out already. He just wanted to be done with it, maybe being willing to talk more later, but Peter got the jist of it, he told him more than he had ever discussed before. He could stop there and be alright knowing Peter might understand him a little better.
The End.
