The Final Frontier || Tony, Peter Q, Jane
Tony liked space. That wasn’t a secret: one look into his files, his highly publicized early projects, and his massive amounts of donations to independent astrophysicists and astrologers worldwide (NASA be damned) would have painted that picture. Tony liked space a lot, liked it enough to have dreamed half his life about being an astronaut, about stepping foot on foreign planets, about floating, the freedom of zero gravity. And then he’d had that dream effectively snubbed out by Howard Stark’s insistence that NASA had already “done everything that needed to be done,” that the real world needed enough protecting already and that it was “irresponsible” to have his head in the clouds (he’d tried arguing that it wasn’t in the clouds but in the airless vaccuum of the universe where a condensed mass of water vapor was highly unlikely to originate due to the lack of atmosphere but that hadn’t really worked either) and Tony had effectively given up. Tony had dreamed of the stars, and he’d settled for a very tall tower.
And then a spaceship ended up parked in his backyard, and like the Avengers, like the X-Men, a new team had emerged: the Guardians of the Galaxy, and if you thought that was strange, you clearly hadn’t been living in a house full of super soldiers and gods for the last couple of years. Tony had seen weirder things in the time it took between waking up and snagging a cup of coffee, and yet Tony really really liked space, and so while he couldn’t say he was surprised to learn that there was a team of cross-galaxy travellers taking a siesta on Planet Earth, he also couldn’t say he wasn’t out-of-his-mind and ecstatically excited either.
Tony had met with the tree first because somehow his husband--and he really wasn’t over that actually, distracted, usually, just by the sound of the word--had gone ahead and befriended the first talking (sort of) mass of bark he’d come across. Tony had come home on more than one occasion to find the sapling sitting on his own pillow repeating the phrase “I am Groot” half a dozen times while Steve told him a long winded story. It was Groot that had given him the idea, giving him the a-okay to check out the ship, and it was Groot who led him now. Tony whistled as he drew close then raised an eyebrow as he heard a clattering inside. “You got company, Smalls?” he asked Groot, and as the tree pointed, Tony followed his tiny finger toward the figure of a man within, a man Tony half recognized from the poorly put together SHIELD file. Peter Quill, captain, owner, and pilot of the ship. Tony grinned. This day was just getting better and better.
