#jazper

It had sent a stinging ache in your heart to see Mister Kraglin so upset. The former Ravager is more vulnerable in his pain than young Mister Adam or even any of the Star Children — at least while he’s safely at home on Knowhere — and you’ve gathered that this behavior might be due to the hollowing lack of any kind of person-to-person comfort he’d ever received as a child. You yourself are all too familiar with some of that feeling — emotional self-sufficiency and a wrenching desire for affection, bordering on need — in spite of the privilege inherent in being adopted into the Relvoith royal family. 

Or perhaps because of it.

And so, you had soothed him with the softest words you could dream up, worried they might’ve sounded stilted in the formality of the Relvoith tongue. But the universal translator must have worked well, or perhaps the overly-decorous language hadn’t mattered in the end, because Mister Kraglin had sniffled and dried his tears with the back of his uninjured hand. Then he’d given you a wobbly and tremulous half-smile, thanking you so fervently that an observer might have thought you’d saved his life.

Unfortunately, the result is that you are exhausted — feet aching and eyes tired, a dull headache starting to form behind your golden eyes by the time you reach the open casement leading to the door of the apartment rooms you share with Rocket. One of the raccoon kits — the smallest of the litter rescued from the Arête — is waiting on the threshold, grooming itself. It’s only the tiniest bit larger today than it had been on the day you’d inadvertently adopted it, and it lifts its head as soon as it breathes in your scent, ears and nose twitching. Its tail flips from one side to the other when it sees you, and it immediately begins to generate the fast-paced hollow clicking noise that you’ve come to understand means that it’s purring.

“Hello, littlest one,” you say, crouching, and it immediately launches itself onto one of your soft thighs, and then into your chest. You cuddle it against you as you stand, pressing your mouth to the crown of its head, and open the apartment door.

The apartment is a little tattered, but it’s home: the place you and Rocket have made for yourselves, carved out of a little patch of Knowhere. There’s a broad series of patchwork-windows made of frosted and colored glass, and they shine like jewels when the artificial lights outside slant into a manufactured sunset. In certain hours, they cast a glowing, muted rainbow glow onto the rest of the main room. One wall is lined with Rocket’s inventions and tools, and the ceiling is edged in strings of tiny gold plasma-orbs that he’d pinned to the wall while perched on your shoulders. The doors on the kitchenette cupboards had been falling off when the two of you had moved in, so you’d replaced them with miniature curtains made of patterned fabrics and gauzy muslin and a treasured panel of Spartoi lace you’d found in Sanna Orix’s shop. The sofa is a soft corduroy, the color and texture of a purple night-sky, velvety and only a little frayed at all the seams. It had been one of Rocket’s discoveries. He’d made Mister Drax carry it from the Bowie all the way to your little apartment, just because he’d thought you might enjoy it. One arm of the sofa is draped with the rumpled softness of an old quilt — a gift from the citizens of Knowhere to their new Captain and his princess. It’s patched with squares offered up from each of the Guardians, and others, too: red flannel and a dove-gray fabric from Star-Lord’s childhood shirts, a scrap of leather from Mister Nebula’s uniform. Another square had been thieved from an armored vest left behind by Miss Gamora, after she’d been stolen away and sacrificed by Thanos. A couple of rectangles of fabric, cut from the plush baby-blanket that Groot had kept in his pot when he was still small, and little pieces from a strained button-down shirt that Mister Drax had decided to wear for a cycle just so he could have something to contribute to the quilt. There’s a patch from Cosmo’s suit, and another from young Mister Adam’s singed Sovereign cast-off, and silver-threaded stars embroidered in sloppily by young Miss Phyla and each of her siblings. A few splashes of delicate floral prints from Miss Ssssaralami and worn yellow canvas from Mister Blueliver and even an intentional splash of cosmic-green gin from Mister Howard.

At least, you assume it was intentional. Mister Howard claims it was intentional, and you’ve never been particularly adept at spotting lies.

In short, there’s not an inch of your little apartment that isn’t brimming with the soft shadows and glowing warmth of memories that you and Rocket have made together.

Unfortunately, you don’t have long to enjoy the peace of the small space. You can already hear Rocket cursing and muttering inside the next room, and it makes your own ears twitch with concern.

“Shoulda just paid Ssssaralami to do it. No, no, I wanna do it myself. Moron. Like you forgot you were a mechanic, not a frickin’ artist. Frickin’ paint in my damn fur. Better come out—”

“Rocks?” you call softly, snuggling the raccoon kit in against your chest again. The raccoon’s purring never stops, and its coat is a plush and velvety spray against the underside of your chin. “Are you well?”

Rocket’s head pops around the side of the bedroom door: fur mussed and flattened on one cheek, a splotch of purple dripping into the fur between the base of one soft ear and the crown of his head. There’s a smudge of luminous yellow-gold on his nose, glittering and so vibrant and warm that it almost looks like a wedge of amber over a candleflame. His eyes, bright as red stars and sunsets — all the holiest things in the universe — narrow on you immediately.

“You weren’t s’posed to be home for another three hours,” he growls accusingly.

The raccoon kit pats the golden swirl on your cheek with one flat paw, then headbutts you under the chin for more cuddles. Its purring grows louder.

“Mister Kraglin cut off his thumb,” you tell Rocket, wide-eyed as you take in the violet and sunshine smeared into his fur. Most of him is hidden behind the doorframe, but one hand grips the edge, and you can see gold and purple crusted around his claws. “It was the most excitement the clinic has seen in a while,” you admit, “and we have closed early as a result.” You feel your head tilt. “Are you… painting something?”

He doesn’t say anything for a moment — eyes dropping to take in your white-and-red uniform — before he sighs: utterly beleaguered. “Trying to,” he mutters, and rolls his eyes. “Was supposed to be a frickin’ surprise.” He wheels back from the door, gesturing with that dark-clawed, paint-spattered hand. “C’mon in, Starlight.”

You carefully set the littlest raccoon on the sofa, and make your way deeper into the apartment.  

Your breath trips out of your lungs when you cross the threshold into the bedroom. It’s been utterly transformed in your few hours away.

It is, you think in wonderment, like walking into the heart of an amethyst. 

Layers of paint — from the ashen lilac of the sky just after the sun goes down, all the way to the richest midnight-purple — fold over each other in veils of haphazard brushwork, scraped across each other as if the painter were trying to create something deep and glimmering. It’s true that there are some splashes of color on the cracked bone-tiles of the floor, and little ripples where the purple had dribbled too thickly down the walls — but he’s covered the bed with a canvas that you recognize as borrowed or stolen from Miss Ssssaralami, and the plasma-orb lamps are similarly protected. A shabby box sits in one corner, full of wires and frosted glass, but you’re too entranced by the purple walls: the illusion of velvety, luminous depth — the sense of swimming in an endless night sky, or diving into the rift at the end of the universe. 

And against the purple — all misshapen and erratic, in clusters and lopsided sprays, different sizes and spaces between each one — shine a hundred golden stars. They’re gleaming and metallic, shimmering with the same crushed glitter-dust smudged across Rocket’s nose, sparkling and brilliant and warm.

You touch one lightly with the golden pad of your fingertip, awestruck.

“You are an artist,” you say solemnly, awestruck as your eyes travel around the room.

Rocket scowls and shuffles the fur of his forearm against the end of his nose — then looks down to realize he’s smeared more gold paint on himself. A strangled roar of outrage climbs in his throat and hisses between his teeth, gravelly and shrill, and you blink down at him over one soft shoulder.

He looks like he’s ready to pull out fistfuls of his own fur, panting.

“I’d call you a liar if I didn’t know how frickin’ bad you are at it,” he seethes, glaring around the room as if the walls have personally insulted him. “It’s a damn mess.”

You tilt your head. You don’t generally find his aggravation humorous, but it is often endearing — and you know him well enough now to understand that sometimes, a little gentle mockery will make him feel safer.

“Small One,” you tease lightly, letting a smile curve your full lips, flashing your white teeth and the slight gap between them at your beautiful Captain, “the imperfections are what make it so lovely.”

His eyes narrow at you again, distant crimson suns, and for a moment he continues to fume: fists clenched, sharp teeth gritted. He is flawless nonetheless: his casual Knowhere-clothes spattered with bright sparkling yellow, now, and streaked with purple. One whole whisker gleams gold in the artificial Knowhere light that streams through the circular window, open over the head of the bed. 

He sighs suddenly, his jaw and shoulders and hands all loosening, and you can see now that his palms are streaked with gold paint, too. 

You’re always soft for Rocket, but everything inside you suddenly feels even softer: more pliable, more tender. You let your smile shift from playfulness to pure, gentle wonder as you gaze around the room again: jewel-toned, sequined and filigreed with suns and stars made even more sacred by the fact that they’ve come from his own hands. He’s even included some lopsided versions of the holy constellations you grew up studying in the Ositamet sky, which you hadn’t even realized he might remember from your stories. That same place in your heart that had ached over Mister Kraglin’s tears suddenly trembles and heats, overflowing with sunlight. You think it might pour out of your skin. In fact, you can feel it: the warmth in your cheeks, the tip of your ears and nose.

“You’re blushing,” Rocket notes drily, and your brow creases.

“Relvoith do not blush,” you say sternly. Which is true, after all — it’s not as if you can lie, even if you’d wanted to.

Rocket only rolls his eyes. “Whatever. You’re — gold-dusting, then. Sunbursting.”

You touch the warm swirls in your cheeks, knowing they’re bright as the stars he’s painted onto the walls. 

“I am overwhelmed,” you admit to him softly. You can feel your eyes sting with tears as you turn slowly, taking everything in. Your voice is hushed. “I think perhaps this is the kindest, most generous thing that anyone has ever done for me, Rocks.”

Even though your eyes are on the skewed stars, you can feel the tension leave the little room when he sighs again. 

“Yeah, yeah, princess,” he gruffs out. “Just — got sick of hearing you talk about wanting to redecorate.”

Now you do look at him, tilting your head. “I think that is a lie.”

He scowls, but there’s nothing hard in it at all. His sun-ruby eyes have turned into something soft and melting. “Just a little one.”

You cast another smile at him before turning your attention again to the starscape painted all around you.

“Why did you choose purple for the sky?” you muse after a moment. “I like it very much, but I would not have expected that choice from you—”

“Reminded me of you,” he mumbles, and when you glance at him again, he’s shifting his weight from one foot to the other and looking away, scrubbing at his gold-dipped whiskers with the back of his wrist in the way you’ve come to recognize means he’s embarrassed. “Your uniform-thing, the first time we met. It was, uh, purple and white.” He clears his throat, and your smile turns into a delighted grin.

“You were feeling quite sentimental, then,” you tease.

“Whatever,” he scoffs, rolling his eyes and turning away to begin peeling the canvas drape off the bed, revealing the fleecy turquoise comforter underneath, rippled with velveteen stripes. It’s a bit faded and ragged, and the mattress dips in the middle, but it’s a far cry from the piece of scrapmetal Rocket had been sleeping on when he had still been staying in his own apartment, just off the Guardians’ main office down the street. “You’re such a pain,” he adds, tossing the crumpled canvas into the corner and picking up the box of wire and glass you’d only vaguely noticed when you’d walked in. He sets the dilapidated box on the bed. “Wanna help me hang these? They’re not frickin’... authentic or whatever. Too expensive to get the real ones, all the way from Ositamet. Consider ‘em… off-brand, or whatever.” 

He clears his throat again: a tell you’ve come to recognize; an indicator that he’s nervous. You lean over, peering into the box, and your heart catches in your throat again: full of sunlight, overflowing. 

“You’re gold-dusting again,” he points out drily.

“How did you get these, if not from home?” you ask softly, lifting up one handful of bright-copper wire. He shuffles in tightly against your thigh, leaning one cheek into the soft plushness of your hip. 

“Sketched ‘em up,” he admits. “Wove the wire and made the little plasma-orbs on my own. Had Steemie save the glass from that old building they tore down in Exitar. Cut it an’ soldered it myself.” He swallows. “Wasn’t that hard,” he adds, trying to downplay the time and effort you suddenly know he must have put into planning every inch of this creation. “With the ships, I musta had to patch glass at least a hundred times before.”

But these handcrafted string-lights are not just patched glass. They’re perfect star-shaped lanterns, far more precise than the celestial bodies spangling the walls. And though not every pane of glass matches in color or texture, they’re worth more to you than any import from the palaces and streets of Ositamet. 

“Yes,” you whisper. “Let us hang them.”

Rocket doesn’t wait: he leaps nimbly onto the mattress and then springs to your shoulders. He’s heavy with screws and solder, bolts and plates, but his weight’s  still nothing for your strength. You gather the strings of lights in your hands and they clink merrily against each other as you travel the perimeter of the room. When you hand him the end of the twisted copper wire,  he holds the cord to the edge of the ceiling and fastens it into the bone-plaster with the soft, hollow thud of a bolt-gun. 

The two of you continue around the room, skirting the pan of purple-and-gold swirled paint still on the floor, full of sopping brushes. A manufactured Knowhere breeze filters in through the round window, along with the artificial sunlight; it brightens the still-drying stars, making the room glimmer all around the two of you. You soak in the lullaby made by the measured timpani of the bolt-gun and the pleasant chime of the star-lanterns in your hands, feeding them up to your beautiful captain. There’s the comforting feel of his strong thighs braced between your palms and shoulders: a warm, welcome weight. Your eyes are drawn to a spray of purple on the claws of his left foot, like nail lacquer — it curls the corner of your mouth in a whimsical smile but you don’t dare breathe a word of it right now.

By the time the stringed lights are garlanded all around the room, the artificial lights outside have already begun dimming, and the room is dusky and softly-shadowed. Rocket leaps off of your shoulders, fleet-footed, and taps the sensor on the wall. It’s normally synced to the plasma-orb lamps, but he must have programmed the star-lanterns in too, because they brighten into a quiet glow: every bit of illumination magnified by the glass, refracted into the occasional spray of rainbow-flaked light scattered across the starscape-walls, the velvety bed, the paint-spattered floor. With one foot, Rocket drags the soft, shaggy rug from where he’d shuffled it under the bed, and the room is almost back to normal.

Almost normal, but transformed into something divine.

You stand for a moment, and take in the coziness of the room, the glints of far-off skies and dreams, the shimmering warmth in your heart and the knowledge of how much you truly mean to the beautiful Captain of Knowhere.

He must be able to tell your thoughts are shifting into sentimentality, because he breaks the quiet with a dramatic sigh. 

“Now I gotta get all this damn paint outta my fur,” he laments, looking down at his purple-streaked feet and the shimmering yellow smeared across his forearm. When he turns his palms up, he groans, his whole head leaned back so he can curse the ceiling. The dark leather of both hands are glazed with sun-bright gold, as if he had fingerpainted the stars. 

“Dammit,” he curses, as his fists begin to curl all over again.

But you catch one narrow wrist, watching the way he shines. “Look,” you say with a sun-bright smile of your own, and his knotted fingers loosen in your gentle grasp. You open your own hand next to his. The pads of your fingers and creased palm are ashimmer just like his, like you’d both been caught with fistfuls of sunlight and stars. You turn your hand over top of his, and you lace your fingers into the soft spaces between his knuckles: gold pressed to gold, so bright that it’s a wonder that sunshine doesn’t fan out from between your clasped hands in glittering rays. 

Rocket swallows, whiskers and tail and ears all twitching, his glowing sunrise-eyes going soft in the dusky evening glow. “Starlight,” he says, and his voice is a husky rasp. “I wanted to tell you — but I ain’t good with words—”

Whatever he had been going to say is suddenly broken by the sound of a mechanical chime: the doorbell. You both look up, and it rings again.

“Dammit,” Rocket snaps for what must be the third time in just an hour or two. He tugs his hand from yours, stalking toward the door and flinging it open.

Miss Cosmo and young Miss Phyla are there, the former sitting on the step with a nervously-wagging tail. You can see Rocket’s shoulders ease, and you know it’s because he’s secretly soft for children and animals. Well, he seems to think it’s a secret, anyway. The sight makes you melt even more. 

“I’m so sorry, Jazper,” the Star Child says, apology written all over her childish face. “I know the Captain was planning a surprise for you tonight, but—”

“But Adam has broken the ocular cannon,” Cosmo pipes up, and her tail begins to move twice as fast. 

“The — what?” Rocket repeats, and you can hear the tension rising again in his voice. “What was he even doing with it?”

Miss Cosmo tilts her head as young Miss Phyla winces.

“Messing around,” the cosmonaut says, and her mechanical voice lilts in such a way that it sounds like a quote.

You move to lean by the door, and Rocket pinches the bridge of his nose. “Unbelievable,” he mutters. “Can’t get a frickin’ minute a’ peace—”

“It is okay,” you say with a wide smile. “I will be here when you come home.” 

Rocket glances up at you, and his expression is pained. “I don’t—”

“Uhm,” young Miss Phyla interrupts hesitantly, teeth bared in a sorrowful grimace, “I hate to tell you this, but your — your guest is making a mess?”

Both you and Rocket turn to find the littlest raccoon kit meandering through the apartment living space, then between the two of you, and right out the open door. In its wake, from the bedroom to the front door, trail a ribbon of paint-slick pawprints sinking into the bone-floor forever: shades of purple, smeared with starlight-gold.

Rocket stares after the littlest kit as it ambles away. His mouth wobbles in something torn between bone-deep exhaustion, and a desire to bare his teeth and commit murder.

The corners of your own mouth curl, and your shoulders shake with feathery laughter. “Go,” you tell your Captain, and lean toward him. Young Miss Phyla and Miss Cosmo have seen the two of you together often enough to know that everyone will be happier if they turn their backs and pretend not to know that you’re dropping a kiss on the crown of Rocket’s paint-spattered head. “I will see you later tonight.”

You’re rising back upward when his gold-dipped fingers curl into the collar of the clinic uniform you’re still wearing. “Wait,” he mutters, tugging you back down and levying a quick, fleeting flick of his tongue to the fullness of your upper lip. “‘Fore I go.”

It’s a ritual, at this point: the soft kiss, the tug at your collar, the brief lick or nip at your mouth. And then the question, rumbling up from the bottom of his lungs, low and warm:

“Who’s yer favorite Guardian?”

You smile, your lips just a breath away from his nose — the answer the same now as it’s always been. 

After all, you cannot lie.

“You are.”

thank you for giving me the chance to write this! it was such a fun idea and it was so interesting to work with someone else’s oc in this context, and try to integrate the formality of jazper’s language into the writing without making it sound unnatural (i hope i accomplished it!). i’ve never written for someone else’s character like this so i hope i did jaz justice ♡ thank you for trusting me with them. it was truly a privilege and i hope it was everything you were looking for ♡♡♡