Feeling sorry for myself (my circumstances are nothing like this lmao Iām recovering from surgery) and I just felt like writing something angsty.
Rocket had spent a long time trying to hate you. In the beginning, the task had seemed straightforward enough. He knew where to look for evidence.
There were countless small disappointments scattered throughout his memory. Conversations abandoned midway through. Things heād told you that vanished from your recollection as though they had never been spoken at all. Moments when your gaze wandered elsewhere before he had finished talking, leaving him feeling strangely foolish for having expected your attention in the first place.
They were minor things. Forgettable things. The sort of slights most people would never think about twice.
Rocket thought about them constantly.
Over time, they accumulated in the corners of his mind. Not because they mattered, but because he needed them to. Because each one was another stone he could add to the wall between what he felt and what he wished he felt.
On restless nights he found himself dwelling on them. The ship would be quiet, the others asleep, and still he would lie awake tracing old disappointments through the darkness. It seemed a sensible habit at first. If he examined it closely enough, perhaps he would eventually discover some flaw in you large enough to extinguish whatever attachment remained.
All that effort never produced the desired result, and the failure of it irritated him more.
Across the common room, someone said something that drew a burst of laughter from you. Rocket glanced up before he could stop himself. The sight was ordinary enoughāYou were standing among the others, smiling easily, entirely unaware of the attention you had attracted.
He looked away almost immediately, embarrassed by his reaction.
He was old enough to recognise the foolishness of it. Whatever existed between the two of youāif anything even existed at allāwas a thing he had largely invented himself. You had never offered promises. You had never claimed a place in his life that you had then abandoned. If there was disappointment, it originated with expectations he had never been brave enough to voice.
Knowing this should have made matters easier. Instead, it merely deprived him of someone to blame.
Rocket understood abandonment, he had understood it for his whole existence. People left. Circumstances changed. Affection proved temporary. These were facts so familiar that he scarcely questioned them anymore, but whhat unsettled him was not the possibility of losing someone. It was remaining close enough to watch them choose other people.
That particular misery was slower, and less dramatic. It possessed none of the clean finality of departure.
You remained a constant presence in his days, drifting in and out of rooms, exchanging casual smiles, touching his shoulder as you passed, speaking his name with the same absent warmth you offered everyone else. The gestures were insignificant. You probably forgot them moments later.
Rocket never did.
The worst moments were not those in which you ignored him. They were the moments in which you noticed him just enough to keep hope alive.
Whether it be a word, a glance, or an invitation to sit beside you. Tiny things, hardly worth remembering. Yet each one arrived at precisely the wrong moment, usually when hee had almost convinced himself that he no longer cared.
He resented you for that, though the resentment felt increasingly unfair. It was difficult to hate someone for failing to fulfil obligations they had never accepted, or even knew of. More often the anger circled back toward himself.
There was humiliation in wanting what was not freely offered.
Humiliation in waiting.
Humiliation, most of all, in knowing that if you crossed the room now and smiled at him, he would answer despite every promise he had made to himself.
That knowledge settled heavily in his chest.
Outside the shipās viewport, the stars burned against the darkness, distant and untouchable. Rocket found himself thinking that you resembled them more than he liked.
Beautiful from afar.
Close enough to illuminate his life.
And yetā¦so impossibly beyond his reach.
The thought lingered long after he had tried to dismiss it.
He rose from his seat beneath the pretence of finding something to do. Idleness had become dangerous lately. Whenever he allowed himself a moment of stillness, his attention drifted inevitably toward you. Better to keep moving. Better to busy his hands with repairs, diagnostics, inventoryāanything that demanded concentration.
Unfortunately, concentration was in short supply. He found himself standing before an open maintenance panel several minutes later with no clear memory of what he had intended to fix.
Your laughter carried down the corridor again, and Rocket swore softly beneath his breath.
Fuckinā pathetic.
Pa-the-tic. The word had become a familiar companion.
There was a time when he would have mocked someone else for behaving this way. He could already hear the contempt in his own voice, sharp and merciless. Get a grip. Find something better to do. Stop orbiting somebody who doesnāt even know youāre spinning.
Good adviceā¦worthless in practice.
The trouble was that you never treated him badly enough to justify ever hating you. Cruelty would have been easier, cruelty created certainty. Cruelty allowed wounds to scab over into anger.
Instead, you occupied a far more dangerous middle ground. You were kind, often genuinely so. You sought him out sometimes. Asked his opinion. Checked on him after difficult missions. Brought him things you thought he might like.
The problem was that you did the same for everyone else. Rocket could never decide whether those moments comforted him or made everything worse.
A part of him wanted exclusivity. The admission was ugly enough that he rarely allowed himself to think about it. He wanted to be the first person you looked for when entering a room. He wanted your attention to linger. Wanted the easy warmth in your smile to belong to him in some unique and irreplaceable way.
Instead, he watched you scatter pieces of yourself everywhereāGenerous, unthinking, and completely fucking unaware of the damage it caused. Or perhaps there was no damage at all, maybe the injury existed solely within him.
The universe had never been particularly gentle with Rocket. Long before he met you, he had learned to expect rejection. To anticipate disappointment before it arrived. To identify the precise moment affection began to fade from another personās eyes.
Old instincts were difficult to silence.
Sometimes he wondered whether he was seeing a pattern that wasnāt there. Whether every perceived slight was simply another attempt by his mind to confirm what it already believed.
Nobody stays.
Nobody chooses you.
Nobody ever will.
The thoughts were familiar enough to feel certain. He hated that too. Not because they hurt, but because some part of him still believed them.
Across the rooms, your voice rose above the others. He looked up despite him being nowhere near you at this point.
You were speaking with Peter now, animated by some story he could not hear. Drax interrupted. Mantis laughed. The conversation shifted effortlessly around you.
You belonged there. The realisation carried a peculiar ache. Because you belonged everywhere, with everyone.
Rocket had spent so much of his life existing on the edges of things that he could not entirely comprehend how easily you moved through the world. People gravitated toward you. Trusted you. Sought out your company.
He should have been happy for you. Instead, he found himself wondering what it might feel like to be chosen with the same certainty.
Just once.
The wish was embarrassingly simple. Just the quiet assurance that when given the choice, someone would look around a crowded room and decide they wanted his company most.
A familiar exhaustion settled over him. The resentment was tiring, the longing even more so. Neither accomplished anything.
Tomorrow would arrive exactly as today had. You would smile at him. He would pretend it meant less than it did. Life aboard the ship would continue.
And somehow that was the cruelest part.
There would be no confrontation. No revelation. No dramatic conclusion to bring the matter to an end. Only thisāA feeling that persisted despite reason. An attachment that survived every attempt to dismantle it.
Rocket rested his arms against the edge of the workbench and lowered his head for a moment.
Beyond the ship walls stretched an endless universe filled with worlds he had never seen and distances so vast they defied comprehension.
Yet somehow the most difficult thing he had ever tried to escape was a single person standing only a few rooms away.
He closed his eyes briefly.
When he opened them again, you were still laughing with the others.
And despite everythingādespite the anger, the humiliation, the exhaustion of wanting something he could not haveāhe found himself relieved to see that the light in you remained undisturbed. That his mere existence had not hollowed it out. That you still belonged wholly to yourself.
Rocket knew old abandonment wounds could transform ordinary disappointments into something far more painful. That, more than anything else, convinced him he was doomed for the rest of his days.
Feeling sorry for myself (my circumstances are nothing like this lmao Iām recovering from surgery) and I just felt like writing something angsty.
Rocket had spent a long time trying to hate you. In the beginning, the task had seemed straightforward enough. He knew where to look for evidence.
There were countless small disappointments scattered throughout his memory. Conversations abandoned midway through. Things heād told you that vanished from your recollection as though they had never been spoken at all. Moments when your gaze wandered elsewhere before he had finished talking, leaving him feeling strangely foolish for having expected your attention in the first place.
They were minor things. Forgettable things. The sort of slights most people would never think about twice.
Rocket thought about them constantly.
Over time, they accumulated in the corners of his mind. Not because they mattered, but because he needed them to. Because each one was another stone he could add to the wall between what he felt and what he wished he felt.
On restless nights he found himself dwelling on them. The ship would be quiet, the others asleep, and still he would lie awake tracing old disappointments through the darkness. It seemed a sensible habit at first. If he examined it closely enough, perhaps he would eventually discover some flaw in you large enough to extinguish whatever attachment remained.
All that effort never produced the desired result, and the failure of it irritated him more.
Across the common room, someone said something that drew a burst of laughter from you. Rocket glanced up before he could stop himself. The sight was ordinary enoughāYou were standing among the others, smiling easily, entirely unaware of the attention you had attracted.
He looked away almost immediately, embarrassed by his reaction.
He was old enough to recognise the foolishness of it. Whatever existed between the two of youāif anything even existed at allāwas a thing he had largely invented himself. You had never offered promises. You had never claimed a place in his life that you had then abandoned. If there was disappointment, it originated with expectations he had never been brave enough to voice.
Knowing this should have made matters easier. Instead, it merely deprived him of someone to blame.
Rocket understood abandonment, he had understood it for his whole existence. People left. Circumstances changed. Affection proved temporary. These were facts so familiar that he scarcely questioned them anymore, but whhat unsettled him was not the possibility of losing someone. It was remaining close enough to watch them choose other people.
That particular misery was slower, and less dramatic. It possessed none of the clean finality of departure.
You remained a constant presence in his days, drifting in and out of rooms, exchanging casual smiles, touching his shoulder as you passed, speaking his name with the same absent warmth you offered everyone else. The gestures were insignificant. You probably forgot them moments later.
Rocket never did.
The worst moments were not those in which you ignored him. They were the moments in which you noticed him just enough to keep hope alive.
Whether it be a word, a glance, or an invitation to sit beside you. Tiny things, hardly worth remembering. Yet each one arrived at precisely the wrong moment, usually when hee had almost convinced himself that he no longer cared.
He resented you for that, though the resentment felt increasingly unfair. It was difficult to hate someone for failing to fulfil obligations they had never accepted, or even knew of. More often the anger circled back toward himself.
There was humiliation in wanting what was not freely offered.
Humiliation in waiting.
Humiliation, most of all, in knowing that if you crossed the room now and smiled at him, he would answer despite every promise he had made to himself.
That knowledge settled heavily in his chest.
Outside the shipās viewport, the stars burned against the darkness, distant and untouchable. Rocket found himself thinking that you resembled them more than he liked.
Beautiful from afar.
Close enough to illuminate his life.
And yetā¦so impossibly beyond his reach.
The thought lingered long after he had tried to dismiss it.
He rose from his seat beneath the pretence of finding something to do. Idleness had become dangerous lately. Whenever he allowed himself a moment of stillness, his attention drifted inevitably toward you. Better to keep moving. Better to busy his hands with repairs, diagnostics, inventoryāanything that demanded concentration.
Unfortunately, concentration was in short supply. He found himself standing before an open maintenance panel several minutes later with no clear memory of what he had intended to fix.
Your laughter carried down the corridor again, and Rocket swore softly beneath his breath.
Fuckinā pathetic.
Pa-the-tic. The word had become a familiar companion.
There was a time when he would have mocked someone else for behaving this way. He could already hear the contempt in his own voice, sharp and merciless. Get a grip. Find something better to do. Stop orbiting somebody who doesnāt even know youāre spinning.
Good adviceā¦worthless in practice.
The trouble was that you never treated him badly enough to justify ever hating you. Cruelty would have been easier, cruelty created certainty. Cruelty allowed wounds to scab over into anger.
Instead, you occupied a far more dangerous middle ground. You were kind, often genuinely so. You sought him out sometimes. Asked his opinion. Checked on him after difficult missions. Brought him things you thought he might like.
The problem was that you did the same for everyone else. Rocket could never decide whether those moments comforted him or made everything worse.
A part of him wanted exclusivity. The admission was ugly enough that he rarely allowed himself to think about it. He wanted to be the first person you looked for when entering a room. He wanted your attention to linger. Wanted the easy warmth in your smile to belong to him in some unique and irreplaceable way.
Instead, he watched you scatter pieces of yourself everywhereāGenerous, unthinking, and completely fucking unaware of the damage it caused. Or perhaps there was no damage at all, maybe the injury existed solely within him.
The universe had never been particularly gentle with Rocket. Long before he met you, he had learned to expect rejection. To anticipate disappointment before it arrived. To identify the precise moment affection began to fade from another personās eyes.
Old instincts were difficult to silence.
Sometimes he wondered whether he was seeing a pattern that wasnāt there. Whether every perceived slight was simply another attempt by his mind to confirm what it already believed.
Nobody stays.
Nobody chooses you.
Nobody ever will.
The thoughts were familiar enough to feel certain. He hated that too. Not because they hurt, but because some part of him still believed them.
Across the rooms, your voice rose above the others. He looked up despite him being nowhere near you at this point.
You were speaking with Peter now, animated by some story he could not hear. Drax interrupted. Mantis laughed. The conversation shifted effortlessly around you.
You belonged there. The realisation carried a peculiar ache. Because you belonged everywhere, with everyone.
Rocket had spent so much of his life existing on the edges of things that he could not entirely comprehend how easily you moved through the world. People gravitated toward you. Trusted you. Sought out your company.
He should have been happy for you. Instead, he found himself wondering what it might feel like to be chosen with the same certainty.
Just once.
The wish was embarrassingly simple. Just the quiet assurance that when given the choice, someone would look around a crowded room and decide they wanted his company most.
A familiar exhaustion settled over him. The resentment was tiring, the longing even more so. Neither accomplished anything.
Tomorrow would arrive exactly as today had. You would smile at him. He would pretend it meant less than it did. Life aboard the ship would continue.
And somehow that was the cruelest part.
There would be no confrontation. No revelation. No dramatic conclusion to bring the matter to an end. Only thisāA feeling that persisted despite reason. An attachment that survived every attempt to dismantle it.
Rocket rested his arms against the edge of the workbench and lowered his head for a moment.
Beyond the ship walls stretched an endless universe filled with worlds he had never seen and distances so vast they defied comprehension.
Yet somehow the most difficult thing he had ever tried to escape was a single person standing only a few rooms away.
He closed his eyes briefly.
When he opened them again, you were still laughing with the others.
And despite everythingādespite the anger, the humiliation, the exhaustion of wanting something he could not haveāhe found himself relieved to see that the light in you remained undisturbed. That his mere existence had not hollowed it out. That you still belonged wholly to yourself.
Rocket knew old abandonment wounds could transform ordinary disappointments into something far more painful. That, more than anything else, convinced him he was doomed for the rest of his days.
I woke up post emergency abdominal surgery thinking I was in the backrooms of an 1826 mental institution, sobbing because they stole all my organs (Iām down an ovary and fallopian tube)
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