Booties and Grooties

[Halloqueen]

Dont post
or I will honk at you.

[Halloqueen]

The best thing about space is the fact that most woman have a much more enlightened and accessible appreciation on intimate relationships than women on earth. That Peter Quill has any earthly frame of reference because he left the planet before anyone had the chance to explain those concepts past ‘girls don’t really have cooties, Peter,’. So all in all, Peter thinks space is pretty darn okay because his own personal model for relationships is loose and dictates he avoid anything that could even come close to a relationship.

Lying on the flat worn down mattress, which has slipped from the shelf-like support on the wall to the floor, with a warm pink (literally pink) body somewhere next to him, Peter thinks he’s done pretty well for himself. It might get him eat if he doesn’t stay sharp, but as he floats between fully awake and fully asleep he doesn’t let the thought bother him. Instead he focuses on floating because nothing feels the way floating in space feels. It feels like floating, it is floating, but instead the reality that there are planets and worlds and physical things out there just disappear. Everything disappears and the nothingness of space becomes eternal. It wipes out the responsibility and the loss and the ache and lets him forget that Yondu is out there somewhere. Peter Quill lets himself float in a bubble of blankets and breasts and sleepy goodness and pretends its going to last forever.

The sad reality is that space is unconscious and therefore lacking mercy, so it can’t give Peter Quill the sanctuary he craves for long. The cruelty that is the random chaos of science comes knocking on his door, rather literally, and Peter finds himself jolt from his sleep but a thump on the upper deck and the slight shift of the ship and a creaking from the heart of the Milano. Sulfi - or is it Sandu? Sala? S-something? - shifts beside him and he hushes her back to sleep because women and fights always mean trouble. And then a second, identical body lurches up beside him with whimpers of “Peter come back to bed” and his eyebrows shoot up because all he can think is that must be his birthday. Except that can’t be right because there are strange noises rustling around upstairs and he’s being dragged away from this. Possibly to fight some sort of whacky zany murderous space monster. Oh well, nothing new there.

It takes a moment of stumbling around in near darkness - the Milano never goes completely dark because there are soft blue safety lights - but eventually peter finds the familiar bulk of his blasters under his crumpled boxer shorts, and its only as after thought that he slips those on and Peter lets out a sigh. Good job brain, not letting him investigate in the buff, because he was pretty damn close to doing that. He
has to carefully tip toe around scattered trashed and empty pre-packaged protein meals to make it to the ladder that leads to the deck of the ship. The climb isnt easy because peter is a big guy and every time he steps the ladder creaks, and that isn’t good. So he tries to move upwards are slowly and cautiously as possible because he’s not in the mood to be killed just yet.

The entire walk down to the bridge is slow, but at the very least Peter is well acquainted with his ship and knows exactly where the shadows fall and how often the lights flicker. He’s actually surprisingly graceful for a bulky bumbling monkey. Peter stays crouched low as he moves along the wall, creeping forward until the light from a near by galaxy peeks through the windshield to cast the cockpit in an eery pink light. He straightens up, blasters raised at chest level, and he starts to sneak forward to take shelter behind the pilot’s seat when he spots the intruder and halts dead in his tracks.

He squints, with crinkles his face up something fierce, and he just barely make out the sight of a body on his floor. As his eyes adjust to the dim light it becomes clear that the body is female and not very dressed and Peter’s blasters drop down to his side again and then he sets them down on the pilots seat as a wave of relaxation hits him. Unfamiliar females on his ship are nothing new and nothing to panic about. And since his ship is showing no signs of distress or forced entry, he assumes he must have let her on at some point. Its not like he remembers how any of the other woman got onto his ship and honestly Peter doesn’t care. Besides, it really makes more sense and its a much more logical conclusion than assuming she was magically transported onto his ship. Peter can’t even imagine that sort of luck existing for him. He blows air out between his lips, like a horse, and runs a hand through his hair to fluff it up slightly. He got out of bed for this? And from the looks of it, she isn’t even really his type.

“What? You get hungry? Kitchens the other way,” Peter explains, jabbing his thumb back towards his bunk because the kitchen is technically a bunch of shelves with freeze dried food. And of course peter put the bunk as close as possible to the food. He isn’t really off put by the fact that’s crumpled on the floor because he assumes she’s maybe still a buzzed and took a trip while stumbling around in the dark. Nothing to worry about. Except she is his cockpit and Peter is very protective of ship; a ship with very emotionally valuable things on it. He starts to frown a little and gets a little perturb, because if there’s one thing Peter is sure of its that he’s not the only a*****e in the universe.

“Hey, you’re not stealing from me, are you? Cause that s**t ain’t cool man!” Quill whines because it really is not cool. He doesn’t want to be stolen from and he doesn’t need this sort of downer ruining his night. He just happens to be the person who assumes the worst of everyone else, because he’s aware of the worst in himself. So Peter huffs and crosses his arms over his chest, tapping one bare foot against the ground like a very frustrated mother hen. If mystery chick #3 stolen, she is definitely getting a time out. In out space. With no helmet.

[ereht tuo si hturt eht]

xx
x

r i p l e y x i l t c h e n k o - k o n e v a
expert hacker and grunge fashionista and (straight up gnarly as ********) junkie.

• suffice to say, things really aren't going her way. suffice to say, this might actually be one of the worst days of her life and considering everything terrible that has happened to her and probably will happen to her in the future (she has terrible luck, like on her SPECIAL ranking in fall out new vegas her luck would be 13 pitch-black cats and then add about forty broken mirrors and three ladders over her for good measure). the worst part about today is that it had actually started off pretty well. she got high as ********, laid in her mite-infested bed while stretching her arms out and feeling pretty decent. a couple hours passed, she peed at least once (don't worry, in the toilet) and showered twice (she has an obsession with showering) and brushed her teeth at least three times (just an obsession with being literally clean so that she can feel sort of 'pure' and figuratively clean since she's sort of, well, to put it lightly, not). she's one of those really poor drug hobos that lives in the nastiest apartment covered in grime and dirty needles, but also crumpled money, coins, and a rather pungent smell of bleach which is solely used in the bathroom, but it's used so much in the bathroom it fills the whole apartment. she has two dirty dishes in the sink and one fork (it's all she has) and there's no food in the fridge except one cup of blue jell-o and a three-fourths eaten big mac that she bought two days prior.
  
  however, she has ten thousand dollars stashed away that she actually stole from the yakuza through lots of bank transferring, including routing it through tony stark's accounts because she's that good (no joke, i am not kidding when i say mary sue) before routing it to somewhere where she could pick it up as solid cash. unfortunately for ripley iltchenko-koneva, her twin sister that is a four foot nine rage monster of a goblin (identical twin except for height because ripley is six foot one) who is actually a part of the yakuza and has become their leader (somehow, despite being really white, but they also like the part where she has really intense cool powers since she's a mutant and she also speaks really fluent japanese also i didn't make marta up a friend did actually it was her character).
  
  marta and ripley have a strained relationship at best. marta had given up on getting ripley clean after she failed out of rehab for the third time. and when marta had been brutally assaulted by three men in a back alley and all ripley had to say was, 'who gives a ********,' marta sort of lost it and ditched the excess baggage, beat ripley the ******** up and bailed to japan with money the last of ripley's money that she had from the small part time job that she had managed to maintain for a short while and her own money that she had, as well.
  
  and so, when marta finds out that there's ten thousand dollars missing (which is a small amount, but enough to be noticed) she goes and plays money sleuth and tracks it down using an equally smart, morbidly obese man with the nick name of 'stubs' (since his d**k is three inches long when erect, so, that makes sense) and wears really thick glasses but has two hot girlfriends that he actually really likes and they really like him because he, surprisingly, has a pretty nice attitude and personality. stubs doesn't like getting involved with the craziness, but when a leading member of the yakuza knocks on his door while he's playing dungeons and dragons with his stereotypically and conventionally hot girlfriends, and said yakuza member looks really angry and is wearing brass knuckles with two inch long spikes on them, one tends to do what they say.
  
  he tracks the money through the fake accounts and the real accounts of tony stark, some guy with the name 'amadeus cho' and another guy with a name that sounds like it came out of a horrible horror movie 'bruce campbell.'
  
  he manages to pinpoint where the money was made and a location is all marta needs to figure out that it is her borderline retarded (no, like, legitimately) twin sister with no life aspirations other than to take as many showers as she can in three minutes. marta flies out to oregon and punches down her sister's door, essentially, with a spectacular blast of energy (marta has full control over her powers considering she's actually pretty healthy and not dying and not actually emaciated or high). when ripley's door blasts open while she's on the toilet finishing up the last of what's in her bladder, and of course the door is open because she isn't expecting company, she jumps up, pulls her too big for her obscenely and offensively bony body hello kitty panties and tugs down on her anatomically correct and labeled short sleeved shirt that falls past her hips but doesn't do much in the way of fitting since it's sliding off her shoulder and is at least four sizes too big despite being a men's small (that might be an over exaggeration, but you get the actual idea - she's really, really, really skinny and not in the romanticized omg she can see her rib cage and hip bones its so hot lololololol way im talking this s**t aint healthy way).
  
  her hair's falling out and her skin is nasty and there's dark raccoon rings around her eyes (making her the third person needed for the trifecta of raccoons: bucky, rocky raccoon and her.) she's covered in tattoos and piercings and her hair is overwashed and limp and everything is too small on her body and her legs are way too long for her torso and her limbs in general are too long and she sort of looks like an alien that has been held in a concentration camp by the american government (which, let's be real, is mulder's wet dream). marta shouts something at ripley, but ripley can't really hear it even though marta's voice is really loud and angry. she's too surprised to actually see her goddamned twin sister for the first time in. . . ripley doesn't know how long (she doesn't even know what day it is or what month it is or. . . what time it is).
  
  ripley barely staggers out of the bathroom and feels so fuzzy and confused and she's rubbing her head with one hand and her runny nose with the other because seriously what the ********?
  
  marta wastes no time; she doesn't let ripley prepare for anything, doesn't give a s**t about playing fair, either. she storms up to ripley faster than ripley can actually respond to by turning away and gives her twin sister a big sharp punch to the side - with her brass knuckles with two inch spikes on it. ripley groans and puts up a hand, but it's no real use - marta is infinitely stronger than her. steel toed boots stomp on her foot and they wind up in a tussle on the floor which is mostly marta beating the living s**t out of ripley - breaking her nose, cutting her open, breaking two more teeth. ripley fights back twice, she gets a grip on marta's neck but it doesn't last long. she also manages to bite marta real hard in the cheek because marta's face gets really close to her mouth.
  
  needless to say, marta screeches with rage because her sister is probably infected with every disgusting thing known to man and then some. marta has more than just an inkling that this bite is going to wind her up in some sort of intensive care unit for being so disgustingly infected with whatever five hundred billion types of bacteria ripley is carrying in her ******** of a mouth.
  
  marta screams more words at ripley, but all ripley can see is red and all she can hear is sort of general shrieking. a couple words do stand out, 'c**t,' 'a*****e,' 'worthless,' and other such things like that. the words still sting because deep down inside ripley doesn't want to be worthless. she wants to do something with her life but at the same time she doesn't want to stop shooting up because she feels content when she's high and slash or asleep (and also she can masturbate or have sex with women forever even though she never really reaches her sexual climax). ripley wants to scratch marta, but it does absolutely less than no good. her nails are bitten down so short that there's dried blood around the edges, and the skin around her nails are chewed down so horribly that any more biting and she might as well be biting the tips of her fingers off, and also marta is wearing a really sweet leather jacket. marta's too enraged to laugh at ripley's sad and pathetic attempts to cause her harm; she'll laugh at them later. right now, marta is only seeing one image and that's ripley's quite literally pulverized face on the ground.
  
  the beat down continues and eventually ripley has enough. her hands glow blue, she's totally enraged and actually coherent (which is pretty surprising since she hasn't been coherent for a couple years, but don't mistake this for competence!) when this sinks in and she decides in a split second that she has had enough. she. has. had. enough. her eyes flash a horrid neon turquoise color (because powers and sue and mutant) and what's left her teeth (which is actually most of them, just some front ones that are chipped and molars that are gone and a canine on the bottom row of her teeth gone) grit down real tight and in this moment, marta looks surprised. she thought she had been the only twin with magical mutant powers, but the moment of surprise drifts away when she remembers - right, twins.
  
  ripley shoves her burning hands on marta's arms and burns through the leather but marta flails away before scrambling to her feet. ripley mimics the motion and they're standing several feet apart in ripley's shitty apartment. marta's steel toed boots crunch on a couple syringes and ripley's bare foot steps on a lego but she's too amped up to feel it and another lego gets stuck between her little two and second littlest toe. she doesn't notice this, either.
  
  and then there's a giant blue flash that's brighter than the sun (not really, that would literally cause so many people to go blind and also be dead). when the flash and dust clears, ripley's gone and marta furrows her eyebrows, but also doesn't give a flying ******** because ripley's gone and no where to be seen which is good enough, even if she did want to beat the s**t out of her.
  
  and then wham.
  
  she lands on her stomach sort of with her shirt pulled up past her neck after scraping as she slides down which shows off her negative boobs (like her sternum pushes out more than her boobs how sad is that but if she was wearing regular clothes she'd have boobs because she wears a (extra padded) bra and stuffs it with socks and tissue) and even more of her sweet tattoos and n****e piercings because she's that hot. everything hurts. she moves a little bit, smearing blood across the floor of the ship and she groans because jesus christ what's happened?
  
  peter's voice is loud and she hears everything and she groans before trying to push herself up. ripley sounds incredibly drunk and her shirt is hanging down and there's a bone sticking out of her shirt like an actual literal bone becuase oops that's a compound fracture. she's on her hands and knees and she lurches a little bit and upchucks some bile, blood and oh, look there's half a tooth she swallowed int he fight. it clinks against the floor lightly. holding herself up isn't working too well and her arms wobble a bit letting her fall face first into her own sick.
  
  it's not like her arms look impressive, considering they're full of tattoos and blackened-silvery sores with pus oozing out of them (including two that look pretty infected).
  
  she's lying flat on her stomach again and god she doesn't want to move. even though she's landed flat on her stomach and therefore right on the compound fracture of her collar bone, she doesn't actually scream in pain because it does hurt, oh boy does it hurt, but she's too pooped to scream. instead her face just scrunches up and she hits the floor because now she can't breathe.
  
  again, she forces herself onto her arms and this time she manages to fall onto her back with a gasp for breath as she spits up a bit more blood and bile and the other half of a tooth and maybe a small tiny chunk of tongue, too because wow her mouth is full of blood. the back of her head lands inches away from her sick and this is better. it's better to be facing upwards than downwards because now there's no pressure on her compound fracture.
  
  she closes her kawaii mismatched eyes tightly and hopes that maybe if she thinks hard enough this entire thing will stop and she'll wake up from this bad dream.
  
  when her eyes open again, she's still there and her situation hasn't improved.
  
  ripley groans again, turns her head to the side so that her cheek is against the ground in the opposite direction of her bile vomit. "******** o-off," she groans and her stammer and her voice sounds so pathetically weak.
  
  "s-sick," she mumbles, because she can't really string together a whole sentence and instead winds up saying like a couple of words here and there.

[ereht tuo si hturt eht]

xx
x

r o c k e t
tactical genius, weaponry expert, thug and the farthest thing from vermin.

• "we're not a taxi service," rocket grumbles to groot as they're standing a safe distance away from the gal they want to hire to be their mechanic. unfortunately, they don't have too many units to spare. their last job wound up getting them very nearly killed and in such a tight situation that they had to bargain and bribe their way out -- it is the most grim kind of job that they had ever gotten themselves into and boy rocket is going to make sure that he never encounters that kind of a thing ever again and he's going to make sure that the guy or woman hiring them is a little more squeaky clean than having connections to crazy radicals in the galaxy (and universe). in the process of trying to get away, the people (?) they had pissed off did basically everything in their power to make sure that rocket and groot's form of transportation was completely useless.
  
  even if rocket and groot had plenty units to pay her, chances are they wouldn't have much left over. but their mechanic, named grace, which rocket thinks is kind of a weird name because who would want to be referred to as grace. of course, it's not really rocket's say but that isn't going to stop him on commenting on it in the (most likely) near future.
  
  "i am groot," groot responds.
  
  rocket can tell the subtleties in groot's words and can hold an actual conversation with groot despite the fact that his vocabulistics are narrowed down to i and am and groot exclusively in that order only.
  
  "i know, i know we can't afford it but we're --"
  
  "i am groot."
  
  rocket groans and runs his hands across his furry face, wrinkling his whiskers a bit. "fine. fine! but don't say i never did anything for us," his voice is a little more harsh than he means it to be and groot wears a proud smile because he managed to convince rocket of something, which isn't something that happens too terribly often (if ever). rocket trots over to grace and looks her up and down in a rather scrutinizing sort of way, as if trying to judge whether or not she'd actually be able to help them -- she looks young, younger than aged mechanics full of who knows what kind of wisdom. (his main problem is that she's young and if she screws up their ship even more, they're essentially stranded until they can hitchhike or sneak on some sort of massive ship which probably would be full of ravagers rather than someone nice. he has no problem with the fact that she has lumps of fat on her chest that indicate she's of the female variety.)
  
  "okay, it's a deal. you fix our ship and we'll take you wherever you wanna go," he raises a fur paw and holds up one finger as if he's making a list of points and emphasizing each number with that number of fingers. "one, you do not touch anything. two, you do not touch anything. three, you do not touch anything. four, you do what we say when we say," he pauses for a bit because he realizes that might come off as creepy and he doesn't want her to get the wrong idea about them (well, mostly groot, rocket doesn't care too much about whether or not he comes off as a jackoff, but even though he calls groot an idiot, groot is his best and dearest friend), "but don't flatter yourself - nothin' like that."
  
  while grace fixes their ship, which is pretty small and basically big enough for four passengers and important cargo (or one person and a groot), groot occasionally chatters with grace which is, of course, limited to 'i am groot.' rocket occasionally snaps at him and tells him not to slow her down because he wants to get off this pile of s**t for a rock.
  
  groot chews on his arm a little bit and rocket winds up scrounging around for things that look like something he could use to make either a bomb or a ridiculously powerful weapon. technically, it's stealing, but if she's going to fly off with them, then what's it to her?

[Halloqueen]

Peter seriously wonders if he’s brought a guy onto his ship by mistake, expect he doesn’t remember getting that drunk back at the cosmic bar and casino. He isn’t thinking it maliciously, but Ripley is so bony and thin and its rather dark and really Peter can’t help wondering. Its not like this would be the first time anyways. He’s in the middle of thinking he’s having a horrible night when Ripley interrupts him by politely puking all over his floor. Well, not straight out puking, it has to be gross spitting up blood and bile – lord, is that a tooth? - kind of disgusting puking. “Aww, man, come on!” Peter whines in irritation like a teenager watching a friend puke on his mom’s carpet at high school party. And Peter is really pissed by it because he knows he’s going to be the one to clean that mess up. And knowing Peter, it wont be cleaned for a day or two, so it will be doubly gross when he finally has to deal with it.

There’s an echoed call of “Everything okay up there Petey?” from the deck below and Peter has to tell the girl to entertain themselves without him, and that is a very painful thing for Peter Quill to say. He mentally asks what he did to deserve this and several things pop up, and he begrudgingly pouts at his own inability to really pity himself. His eyes dart over to the door lock and it wouldn’t be that hard to just duck down into the lower deck and leave the door open for a quick second….

But naw, he can’t do that. Quill isn’t that horrible. He can think about it, but he can’t do it, like someone thinking about murdering their in laws while they share a civilized Christmas dinner. Not that Peter knows anything about that tradition. Peter stumbles around the clutter of the flight deck and eventually finds a light switch to brighten up the cockpit so he can actually see. There’s a couple minutes of Peter hissing and swearing and hiding his eyes in the bend of his arms, Peter comes to terms with the light and finally gets around to looking at mystery chick #3.

And holy s**t. Eww. Gross. “What the hell?” Peter snarks because he’s not expecting the girl to look so absolutely horrible. Peter has tried a couple weird species over the course of his life because, come on, how could he not indulge in the fruits of the universe and all the different flavors? So its not Ripley’s alternative look that metaphorically kills Peter’s equally metaphorical boner, it’s the fact that she looks so sick. Peter knows the difference between weird alien and just plain sick, and Ripley is a prime example of very sickly. Now he’s starting to think he couldn’t have brought her onto his ship because even he’s not dumb enough to risk catching space hepatitis.

Peter Quill is an a*****e but he’s not a heartless monster, so he actually feels kind of bad when he takes in all of Ripley’s appearance and the fact that she’s nearly lying down face first in her own puke. He’s no doctor but he knows when someone isn’t doing so well, and he can recognize that right now Ripley really needs help. Even if maybe she’s snuck aboard his ship. That’s starting to become Peter’s theory on this whole situation – maybe she snuck on board to bum a lift or swipe something before he took off. He isn’t really thinking too much about her being part of anything more malicious, because she looks to beat up to be part of raiding party or anything like that.

“I swear to god if you die on my ship,” is what Peter winds up saying as he makes a slow approach. Because that’s all he needs. They’re in space, but its not the vast expanses of unexplored universe – its monitored and federated space with people that would just love an excuse to arrest him. Its full of people that could see him dump a body or track him down if they find it, and he certainly can’t land with a dead body in his cargo. No, dying is straight up not an option for anyone on board his ship.

So to avoid the inconvenience of a dead body on his ship, Peter bends down and carefully scoops Ripleys ragdoll body into his arms and wow, is she light. Light and wet in a lot of places from blood and spit and Peter doesn’t want to know what else. He spots the broken bone, swallows hard and fights off the urge to faint at the sight, and staggers out of the cockpit with his newly acquired junky tag along.

Peter doesn’t really have a bathroom on the milano. It’s more a corner with the toilet and a sink that fold out of the wall, and there’s no shower because he needs to conserve space and water and he does just fine with a sink and a towel. He sits Ripley down on the floor and leans her up against the wall so she doesn’t wind up drowning if she winds up puking again. Peter looks at her for a moment because she’s a mess and he doesn’t even know where to start.

He starts by grabbing a bowl and a cup, and filling the cup with some luke warm water from the sink. He holds it to her mouth and nudges her into drinking, and holds the bowl out for her to spit into. He doubts that’s the most urgent thing to attend to, but Peter takes a guess that if he were in his position he’d want to clean his mouth out more than anything and get a little sip of water. When that’s finished with, Peter gets a cloth towel and wets it in the sink so he can start to clean up her face. He figures the best thing to do is figure out what’s just blood and whats an actual injury. As he works, he becomes more and more surprised that the little thing is still alive because she’s not in good shape. Not at all.

“Alright buddy, you better start telling me what happens so when I get booked for traffic a dead body I know what my excuse is,” It’s not the most comforting thing for Peter to say as he dabs the blood off her chin, but its true. And Peter Quill isn’t a very socially competent person. He even mumbles a little “s**t” as he works because he can’t bring himself to look at her collar bone (literally look at the bone because its right there in his face) and he doesn’t feel like a midnight trip to a hospital full of people who are going to ask questions.

[Halloqueen]

The Devil in Hell ✘ we're told was chained
✿✿✿✿ ✿✿✿✿ A thousand years he there remained ✿✿✿✿ ✿✿✿✿
He neither complained nor did he groan
But was determined to start a ๑ ๑ Hell ๑ ๑ of his own

Gracie Not-Her-Real-Name Stanton stands off to the side while a talking raccoon and a talking tree debate on wether or not they’ll take her aboard. She tries not to show that she really wants the job with them and stands with her hips cocked out to one side and her hands neatly folded on them. She tries to look bored but her eyes stay sharp on the raccoon because he doesn’t look very happy. At least, she thinks he doesn’t look happy. Other species facial expressions can be confusing sometimes.

Gracie’s ticked they’re even taking so long to decide and its making her nervous. She’s offering to work technically for free and still that doesn’t seem good enough. Its not a great job - the ship is a disaster and she could charge an arm and a leg for a job like that - but she’s more interested in the ride. She’s had enough of the planet she’s currently on - the men are ugly and the drinks are disgusting and there’s no suitable entertainment. So getting a ride is more important that getting paid right now. And since she has no where important to be, picking a decent crew is more important than getting paid or going somewhere good. That, and Meela has made it clear that she likes the Raccoon. That’s right, Meela’s here curled up in the big collar of Gracie’s suit. You can’t escape the Meela.

For a while she just watches them with curiosity because they make a very strange pair. She isn’t going to judge them because a relationship is never the business of anyone who isn’t involved, but she’s certainly going to give them weird looks as she tries to figure out how a raccoon and a tree even work together.

The little comes padding over and Grace doesn’t like his tone. She snaps her head back and elongates her neck like Rocket is some sort of bug because no - she doesn’t like being talked to in that tone. She doesn’t like being give orders either. She doesn’t like orders either, so she snaps down to crouch on her knees so she can look Rocket in the eye.

“Look sweet heart, that’s cute and all, but considering your ship won’t lift off the ground without some serious work and there isn’t another mechanic in this galaxy that’ll fix it for free -” Grace pauses to raise her hand so she can make points of her own, “Number 1 - I stay on board until my work is done, however long that takes. When you drop me off it will be somewhere hospitable with indoor plumbing. Number 2 - I don’t take orders from you or the tree unless you start paying me. Number 3 - I touch what I want, when I want, because its my goddamn job to touch the ship.”

Grace straightens up, squints down at Rocket and then turns to Groot because Groot really seems more in charge. “You two cross me and I turn you into a cute hat and a new set of dressers.”

The ship is so badly damaged that Grace has to spend a few hours patching it up before they can even get off the ground. Luckily she has some spare units and has a couple connections she leverage them parts incredibly cheap. Groot chats away with her for a while because he seems generally curious in how the ship works and how she fixes it. Grace listens in, tapping her earring in frustration because its really a universal translator and it seems to be frustrating. She spends twenty minutes tinkering on it until Rocket laughs at her and explains how Groot works. After that, Grace tries her best to follow along but leverages the opportunity to blabber about boys and gossip without any talk back.

Grace actually likes the way that Rocket snaps at her, even if she snaps back, because used to taking jobs from men that try to flirt and talk her into staying longer. She doesn’t trust him completely because that would be too dangerous, but she appreciates the way that all his body language and vocal tones suggest he really has no interest in her beyond her talents. That’s really all Gracie can ask for.

They finally get around to taking off by early evening, and the ship rocks a little as it moves through the air. The engine is loud and various things rattle and grind, making Groot frown and glance around with a look of rather urgent concern but Grace assures him there's nothing to worry about. "Look, the thing was nearly totaled and I don't think any of us wanted to stay grounded another minute. So I did what I could. It'll hold as long as Rapid - sorry, Rocket, whatever - doesn't do anything stupid. The engine and the outer panels should all hold, same for life support. I'll tune up everything else along the way." Which, unfortunately means the heat and the AC will be out of control for most of the trip, but Grace cleverly neglects to point that out.

[ereht tuo si hturt eht]

xx
x

r o c k e t
tactical genius, weaponry expert, thug and the farthest thing from vermin.

• when she makes her demands, he winds up having to go along with them because in reality she is their only way off this shithole of a planet that's actually looking worse than seven of the twenty-two prisons he's managed to break out of. he groans and clenches his fists when she makes her demands, but winds up reluctantly agreeing to it, even if by not touching anything he actually more or less meant the giant boxes of bombs and massive gun prototypes that are just waiting to go off because they're not really in safe places. his response is more or less a, 'fine, whatever.' and when she makes her threats about them crossing her, he scoffs and rolls his eyes dramatically because what is she going to do to him and groot? it's one of her and two of them and neither him nor groot are swayed by her bouncing fleshbags.
  
  when they're finally in the air, the ship rocks and jolts about and she reassures groot (and by essence, rocket, since they're in the same cockpit) that it should hold and the life support should be good to go. and that's after she says that his name is rapid-something, but corrects herself to say rocket. he's bitter towards the mistaking of his name because who could really forget a name like rocket? but he decides, in the end, it's better than being called a rat or vermin or monster or literally anything else and so he then decides that he'll focus on the should instead of the wrong name.
  
  "should hold?" he asks her as he turns his head to look over at her. she gets a seat behind groot and rocket because groot gets shotgun since he's groot and he actually takes up a lot of that side and towards the back the ceiling is a bit lower so groot has to stay sort of hunched over and even rocket isn't mean enough to make his best friend crouch down and hunch over for long periods of time.
  
  "what do you mean should?" he knows exactly what she means by should -- should means it's not certain, should means it probably will, but there's a chance it'll fail. the look on his face is anything but nice and forgiving and instead is something that suggests she's actually a d'ast idiot. he's unaware of the heat and air conditioning being out, because he's pretty much focused on the should and the rattling (the fact that oxygen circulation and carbon dioxide levels are good don't even reassure him even though they should and they don't have a fuel leak anymore which is also a benefit, even though these are all sort of, well, essential for flying through space).
  
  he turns his head again so that he's facing out the windshield because he doesn't want to look at her anymore for fear he might actually rip her stupidly pink, purple, whatever hair out. "flarking idiots," he murmurs under his breath because that helps him hold onto the boiling anger under his fur for just a little bit longer.
  
  "i am groot."
  
  "yeah, yeah, i know she got us off the ground but i don't like taking chances in a flarking vacuum. i don't got that long a life span, i don't really want to end it before it's my time," he explains to groot who seems to actually get it, but at the same time he doesn't because he is groot an he has lived for a very long time and he's going to live for longer. grace's words of saying that rocket needs to not do any stupid maneuvers sticks with him and suddenly he's flying real carefully as if he's walking in steel toed boots over egg shells and somehow not cracking them.
  
  groot decides that he likes grace because she has enough fire to combat rocket and while groot would never see harm come to rocket, he does find it a little funny that grace manages to win in their verbal spats even if it's because she's technically right.
  
  "tune up along the way," rocket grumbles, "probably just trying to get free meals out of us."

[ereht tuo si hturt eht]

xx
x

r i p l e y x i l t c h e n k o - k o n e v a
expert hacker and grunge fashionista and (straight up gnarly as ********) junkie.

• death is not something ripley really wants to experience because she's too cowardly to die and she thinks that it's bad and dangerous and terrible and will probably be extra boring. but right now, right now she kind of feels like maybe dying wouldn't be so bad -- it could be like an extra long nap and wow that actually sounds kind of nice. it even brings a small twitch of her busted open lips into a small and pretty much tiniest smile ever. the idea of sleeping forever isn't bad right now and actually sleep, in general sounds really good because the fact she used her crazy powers means she's actually extra drained and depleted of energy. she has like negative calories in her body right now.
  
  she doesn't try and fight when peter lifts her up because she isn't really registering this as real. it's either a hallucination or some weird trip or maybe she's still having a trip from the lsd and she's actually still seventeen and the past eight years have been some super long vivid dream.
  
  when the water is nudged into her mouth, she doesn't really fight it. too tired and out of it to fight anything right now and the taste of water is actually really nice even if it doesn't taste like home water. it tastes weird. it tastes. . . fresher? purer? she doesn't know because she's not coherent enough to think about the subtle differences in the taste of drinking water. when the bowl gets nudged under her mouth, she gets the picture and spits out the now more than just slightly tinged rainbow (remember she has rainbow blood i totally remembered that at the end of the post and had to go back to change this) water. at least there's no more tooth particles coming out of her mouth, that's a plus. she doesn't even groan as this happens because this is just too surreal and it might just be the straight up shock that she's experiencing with it all (even though it's doubtful that she's even gotten to the point where she's processing what's happened to her to feel shock).
  
  she does feel the warm water on her face and man that feels good against her clammy skin. the super small twitch of a smile gets featured on her face again and her shoulders slouch forward as she sort of leans her face into the cloth because man that feels good that feels better than actually achieving an orgasm after playing with herself for a couple hours. she's enjoying the silence, aside form the occasional turning on of the faucet and running water. her vision is still blurry as all hell, but she's kind of okay with that because she realizes that she probably doesn't want to see what's going on.
  
  she can just sort of make out a the outline of a body.
  
  it's talking to her and asks her what happened and she doesn't actually know aside from she was having a big fight with marta and now she's. . . not?
  
  "i-iunno," she murmurs, "m-marta c-came i-in, i-i w-was j-just d-done p-peeing a-an' sh-she ******** a-attacked th-the ******** o-out o-of m-me." this isn't going to narrow it down for peter and even though losing blood makes it harder for people to talk, it makes her feel loopy enough that words just come spilling out of her mouth, but with her trademark stutter.
  
  "b-b***h ******** b-broke m-my b-bone," she whines because now that it's been a little while, the endorphins are starting to wear off and pain is starting to settle in. one of her hands even reaches up and touches the sharp edge of her collarbone that's sticking out and actually ripped a hole through her shirt.
  
  "th-then fl-flash o-of l-light a-and th-then th-this."

[Halloqueen]

Peter isn’t the galaxy’s best medics but he knows a little bit. Being a ravanger isn’t as carefree and fun as it seems (and isn’t that saying something) so Peter is used to the occasional bump and scratch and concussion and homemade stitches. Even the occasional small puncture wound that never have anything to do with certain people who shall not be named. It means that even though he barely has any healthy food or clean clothes, he has a small supply of first aid materials. And he knows enough to keep talking to her, keep reminding her to stay awake as he taps her cheeks gently and tries to help keep her head propped up.

He puts the bowl away so that he can start prepping other stuff to make Ripley stop dying when wow, that is some weird looking blood. Or maybe its spit? Either way its more colours than the stand 1 colour that blood tends to be. It would almost pretty if it was A) from inside someone and B) full of what Peter is assuming are tiny chunks of barf or little shards of teeth. Gross. Peter dumps the bowl into the sink and tries to forget about it forever.

Peter listens to her explanation of what happened why she was bleeding (if that really is blood) all over his precious cockpit. There’s a moment of “who the ******** is Marta?” before he’s glancing back at the stairs to his living quarters. Did he bring a Marta home? Or, s**t even worse, is there another girl loose on his ship doing god knows what? Never again, Peter swears to himself in his head, never again is he trying to bring home more than one girl in the same night. Even if they’re twins.

There’s also the concerning issue of Ripley’s stutter and because Peter doesn’t know that its just a part of Ripley he thinks maybe it has something to do with her body going into shock. So he tells her not to go anywhere, because he’s hilarious like that, and ambles off to get a blanket from the lower deck. He’s disappointed to find the girls have gone back to sleep and its all rather boring downstairs, but he has other things to pout about. So he snatches a thread bare blanket and brings up stairs for Ripley, letting it rest gently on one shoulder. Trying not to upset her worst injury and wraps the blanket around her body like a toga.

“Don’t remind me,” Peter gripes when she complains about Marta breaking her bones. Just because Peter is a super tough space ravanger doesn’t mean he can’t get squeamish about bones sticking out of skin, because that’s just the normal human reaction. But he knows sooner or later he’s going to have to deal with it. “This is gonna hurt but I promise its good for you, okay?” Peter says and winces because he can imagine what feels like as he lays the towel over the fracture and carefully applies pressure. He doesn’t know a hell of a lot about broken bones but he figures they need to set it, so with one big push Peter realigns the break before Ripley has a chance to react to the pain and try to get away.
Peter nearly passes out himself when he feels the bone pop back into the skin because it’s disgusting and he has a sensitivity stomach. But now that its in he doesn’t have to look at any more. Peter mops away from of the shimmering blood from around the end of the wound and then he seals it up with a can of aerosol bandages, which creates a shiny blue layer of thin plastics that solidifies over the wound and disinfects it.


With that done Peter busies himself trying to clean the rainbow stains off his hands in the sink before he catch anything worse that what he’s already got. As he scrubs up he glances over his shoulder because now that Ripley will probably survive the night he’s got other things to worry about. “And uh, what exactly were you fighting about? More importantly, where were you fight? Because now you’re on my ship and your bleeding on it and frankly, this is all a little awkward for me.” Peter says as if poor bleeding Ripley should apologize for having her a** kicked. Peter is still thinking about what she said – something about a flashing light – and now he’s worried because that sounds like a spacey cosmic thing and those things never work out too well. He loves space, but the universe can be a real b***h sometimes.

[ereht tuo si hturt eht]

xx
x

r i p l e y x i l t c h e n k o - k o n e v a
expert hacker and grunge fashionista and (straight up gnarly as ********) junkie.

• she's heard that exact same line before -- it's good for you, i promise. she's heard it before and it wasn't good for her. it was like the opposite of good for her. luckily for peter (and her entire body and state of mind) she's too wiped out to actually do anything about the line or reconnect it to someone either ******** her without her permission or shooting her up with heroin to make her more compliant or anything else of the sort.
  
  "m-marta, m-my t-twin s-sister," she explains, her voice starting to kind of drip down into super extreme tiredness and exhaustion. of course she doesn't go anywhere, but she also does't really react to peter's wit and sass about saying that to her. she doesn't really get it.
  
  the spray is cold, but it smells sterile and clean and so it calms ripley down a bit because it reminds her of the scent of bleach. bleach calms her. bleach is clean. bleach is good. her head tilts back a little bit and her eyes close again (were they ever open?) and she grits her teeth because there's still a bit of lingering pain from having her totally fractured bone sticking out. there's also a little bit of ghost pain there, but she figures that's also from the whole having her bone sticking out of her body thing.
  
  he asks what she was fighting about and ripley wants to shrug to say that she doesn't know, but that's a lie and also she can't really shrug too well at the moment. "s-stole t-ten th-thousand d-dollars f-from th-the y-yakuza," she admits because she is actually pretty into telling the truth as frequently as she can. despite the fact she's completely bonkers, she's an honest completely bonkers person.
  
  "d-didn't m-make m-marta h-happy," her eyelids flutter a bit and they open a little so she can actually see the blurry outline of peter. she recognizes the voice as a man's, but again, she's still a little too dazed and tired and pooped to do anything besides be compliant because there's a lingering fear deep down inside that he could do something real gnarly to her if she doesn't do what he wants.
  
  "c-c**t m-managed t-to t-track m-me d-down. ******** b-b***h," ripley pretty much hates marta with a burning passion and marta pretty much hates ripley with a burning passion (to be honest, marta has much more reason to hate ripley than ripley has to hate marta). "f-flew a-all th-the w-way f-from ******** j-japan j-just t-to t-try a-and k-kill m-me," this is a lot more than she normally talks, and once she sobers up from being drunk with tiredness, she'll probably become a lot a lot more quiet.
  
  "w-we g-got i-in a-a f-fight a-and th-then --" her bleached eyebrows furrow a bit as she tries to put things together. "sh-she u-used h-her ******** m-mutant p-power a-and i-i h-had t-to, y-you kn-know, d-defend m-myself s-so i-i u-used m-mine a-and th-then b-bright f-flash a-and -- w-wait, a-a sh-ship?" she squints real hard because she presumes that it means a boat. "s-so, i-i'm i-in th-the m-middle o-of th-the o-ocean n-now?" this is definitely more likely than being, uh, across the universe.

[Halloqueen]

The Devil in Hell ✘ we're told was chained
✿✿✿✿ ✿✿✿✿ A thousand years he there remained ✿✿✿✿ ✿✿✿✿
He neither complained nor did he groan
But was determined to start a ๑ ๑ Hell ๑ ๑ of his own

Despite the fact that Rocket is sort of a grade-A a*****e Gracie doesn’t mind so much. She can bare his bad temper because its expressed through a little fury face and tiny little balled up paws. He’s a jerk, but an adorable jerk, so Grace smirks when he lashes out rather than gets aggressive or defensive. If Meela’s any evidence, Gracie is more than okay with rodents as company. The tree is strange, though. Nice, but strange.

“Should hold.” Grace repeats, nodding hear head as she kicks her feet up on the back of Groot’s chair. She’s young and female and lives on the edges of the universe, she’s used to being doubted. So rather than sound pissed or insulted she sounds confident and relaxed.

And as rude as Rocket is, at least he isn’t threatening. He seems to just want to be on his own, and Grace can completely respect that. Regardless of how small and cramped the ship is, this might actually be one of her better jobs.


“Just don’t go doing any fancy maneuvers to try and make up for your lack of height or sense of dignity.”She points out as Meela curls up in her lap for a good ear scratching, “And try not to go too fast, I don’t want to freeze to death if you rupture a whole in the side of the ship.”

Grace just snorts when he tries to call her nasty names because she respects herself too much to care what a raccoon thinks. 

“Miles, Rocket. Miles, not meals.” Grace reminds him as she climbs out of her seat, patting his fuzzy little head. She should remind him that she deserves free meals because they’re getting free labour, but she doesn’t exactly want to risk getting space rabies if a fight breaks out.

She’s down in the hull of the ship, wedged between a part of the engine and other part of the engine, when the ships lurches to a halt. To make matters worse she’s floating when it happens and she winds up smacked flat against an uncomfortably hot piece of metal. By the time Grace scrapes herself off the wall she can hear Rocket screaming at her and she screams right back.

“D’AST, WHAT’D I TELL YOU ABOUT - “

But Gracie’s words die in her throat as she climbs out of the hull because she suddenly realizes why the ship has stopped. There’s a gentle golden light streaming in through the wind shield. Rocket hasn’t done anything. Its the Nova Force that’s stopped them

s**t and s**t are about the only things going through Gracie’s head. She’d run into the feds before and never had a real problem get out of most situations but it doesn’t stop the dread from surfacing. There’s always a chance this might be the last smooth the run. This might the time they actually check her record, might be the first time someone’s been smart enough to track or someone cared enough about the bodies she left rotting somewhere in deep space. She swallows the painful limp in her throat and tries to calm her heart from thumping so violently in her chest. And speaking of chest...

Gracie remembers to tug down the zipper of her suit as she scrambles up stairs, shielding her eyes from the light because the engine hold is pretty dark. “Is there a problem out here?” Grace asks in the sweetest voice yet as she surface, glancing at an agitated Rocket and a frightened looking groot. Her attention gets drawn away when she sees the face of the office who’s pulled them over, displayed on the ships dashboard screen as he hails them from his ship.

Oh.

Gracie’s lips twitch into a smirk because he’s male so she might stand a good chance, and he’s absolutely gorgeous so she doesn’t feel so bad about degrading her. Grace tugs her shirt down a little more and leans into their end of the video imaging, leaning her hands against the dash board so her arms innocently push up the bouncing flesh bags Rocket seems so disgusted by.

“Oh, don’t tell me, our tail light’s out?” Gracie asks, fluttering her little pink eye lashes at the attractive centurion. “Look, I know this might not look street legal considering the ship’s falling apart and all, but we were just in such a bad neck of the woods we had to keep moving. I promise we’ll patch everything right up as soon as we reach a safe vector. Maybe we could even get an escort?” Grace asks and throws in a big pout just in case. If he’s nice enough to give them escort, maybe even toe them in his tractor beam, Grace can get out of a lot of work and maybe even save Rocket some fuel. “How bout it hun? Make is a personal favor to me?” And grace caps the show off with a little wink and very subtle darting of her tongue over her bottom lip. Either he's gay, or they've got a ride to the nearest planet with a decent metal shop.

[Halloqueen]

Most of what Ripley says whizzes through Peter’s ears as gibberish because she’s a stuttering stow away that probably has some kind of concussion or brain damage or blood loss or something. Mutant powers, what the flark? He has no idea what she’s talking about and who the hell is Marta and its just not making sense to him. And Peter’s getting frustrated because this is a very weird situation that has ruined his night and dumped a bunch of responsibility on him, and its really not getting any clearer. Its all gibberish and Peter has a sinking feeling in his guts because Marta sounds nasty and she stole ten thousand dollars –!

Peter snaps his head up from where he’s staring at his hands, previously trying to make sure he’s gotten all the rainbow blood off his skin. Dilated eyes stare at Ripley and something inside Peter jerks. Dollars. She stole ten thousand dollars. Peter’s figured out from there, even before she starts to talk about Japan and oceans. Dollars, not units. s**t.

Its in that moment that Peter melts a little bit and his heart warms to Ripley, because she clearly doesn’t understand where she is. Peter doesn’t understand what’s happen, but he figures it must be the same for her. There’s a part of him that remembers his first moments in the space, the absolutely grief and agony following losing his mother all tied in with the sudden confusion and terror of being dragged unwillingly into the depth of the universe. He looks at ripley’s slumping body, all black and blue and stained with every other colour of the rainbow, and there’s a painful wave of empathy that hits him. Its incredibly rare, but Peter Quill feels a genuine urge to be nice to her. Maybe he can be the person he needed when this all started for him.

“Yeah,” Peter murmurs in a voice that is suddenly soft and reassuring as he crouches down next to her, “Yeah, in the middle of the ocean. Looks like you’re gonna be out here for a while. On a good ship though, with one hell of a captain,” It’s a lie because he doesn’t want to freak her out right now. He doesn’t need an injured girl freaking out because she’s in space. And technically space is basically an ocean. And he is one hell of a captain.

Peter stomps down stairs after setting the Milano to autopilot and rouses his other lady friends. He tells them they have half an hour before they land and they’d better be ready to go. Its not the planet they started on, its pretty shitty and backwater and not a nice place to drop off ladies, but Peter doesn’t care. He has other priorities now. There’s yelling and arguing and throwing of things when Peter actually physically kicks them off his ship. His stay on the planet is just long enough to ditch the girls and restock on first aid supplies, and then he gets his bird back into the air as quickly as he can. He can’t remember if he double-crossed an arms trader on this planet or the next one over, but he sure as hell isn’t sticking around to find out.

Once the ship is finally empty Peter takes Ripley from the co-polite seat he carefully strapped her into and scoops into his arms so he can carry her down stairs. On the way down he melts a little more because Ripley barely feels like anything in his arms. He could over look everything when he thought she was alien but now it hits Peter hard that’s she’s human. He’s not trying to be cruel or anything, but Ripley doesn’t look that great for a human. He’s convinced even more now that she’s probably dying or infected with something horrible, but there’s something inside him telling him he can’t just leave her. Something inside reminds him of Yondu and the way he was treated and how Ripley just needs someone who won’t hold it against her. So Peter takes her down stairs and tucks her into his lame excuse for a bed with the few blankets he has and tries to think up exactly how he’s going to explain this to Yondu.

[ereht tuo si hturt eht]

xx
x

r o c k e t
tactical genius, weaponry expert, thug and the farthest thing from vermin.

• like peter quill, rocket is aware of the worst in himself (let's be real, he knows he's a shithead) and as such is wary of people who seem like they're giving them a deal that's too good to be true -- like fixing a ginormous heap of metal into a ginormous heap of metal that moves for only giving them a ride to somewhere that isn't where they were before. it seems much too true to be good.
  
  rocket screams, though it's more like a dignified yell because he's a dignified creature, as everyone knows. groot doesn't make a sound, but he visibly flinches as rocket has to make an immediate sharp stop that sends every body crashing forward into either the control panel, a hot piece of metal or in groot's case - the windshield. in fact, groot's face is so up against the windshield that his body is actually going through the side of richard rider's call -- not through his face directly, but through some background.
  
  rocket would have much rather preferred gracie to stay down there because when he looks over his shoulder, she's got this wicked smirk on her face that suggests she's trying to woo him and she also has the zipped of her outfit pulled down. rocket only notices that because he sees more green than he had before rather than being into the fact that she has her boobs on notice (he is fine with feminine aliens and humans that want to do that - it doesn't make them sluts, but right now it's making him look kind of bad because she's also got grime and dirt from the ship all over her and that makes her look like she's been busy with them). one of his paws runs across his face as he turns back around to see a baby-faced nova centurion.
  
  he quips, "isn't a speeding ticket a little bit below your paygrade?" rocket lowers his paw into his lap, and groot gives him a little gasp because that isn't going to get out of this situation. "i mean, you're a. . . centurion, you're like the tip top nova corpsman, and here you are pulling over decent civilians!" his voice is actually pretty condescending, even for an a*****e. he hopes that he can get the corpsman to forget all about the fact that gracie is standing right there with her suit zipped down and when rocket looks over his shoulder again at her, she's continuing to talk and she's licking her lower lip and rocket sighs before christ this isn't going to end well at all.
  
  
  
  the centurion is novacorps member designate some number he remembers but i don't and don't want to look into the comics to find it because ive deleted all them and don't want to waste time doing that because i'm using precious battery life is also named richard rider and he is completely terran -- meaning, from earth. he shares a similar physiology and anatomy to nova prime (well, in that they're both human looking), but he very well knows that nova prime isn't human. (she probably isn't.) he had gone out into space pretty young, about seventeen, and now he's nineteen and while at first he might have been a little rowdy, he has now become sort of a pillar and pinnacle of justice - a shining example of what each nova corpsman should be.
  
  he notices the pretty alien woman with a nice bosom, he notices the flirty wink and the lick of her lips and the tone of her voice. it's hard to not notice. no matter how hard it is to not notice, he isn't swayed by any of it. man or not, he's just not swayed because he's more interested in getting to the bottom of this problem. his attention is also grabbed from gracie by the furry rodent trying to be vicious with him.
  
  "this isn't a speeding ticket or a busted tail light stop," richard responds, his voice slightly distorted over the transmission since rocket's ship isn't in the best of conditions. the image flickers and almost cuts out. rocket sort of wishes it would so he could claim ignorance and be on his way.
  
  "but there's a warrant on this particular make and model of ship," richard begins and he can see the look on rocket's face jump from thinking he's going to get out of this to a sort of 'oh flarking flark this d'ast universe.' "this ship has been tied to a trafficking ring and at least seven murders across both this vector and the kravlov vector," richard continues because this is pretty important and since it is used for living being trafficking, he kind of presumes that gracie is one of the people being trafficked because she's wearing a low cut shirt and she's greasy and she came from down under.
  
  
  
  rocket seems to get this; he can tell by the look on his face. he turns to look at gracie and he hisses, "zip that suit up, you d'ast idiot! he thinks you're our flarking cargo." rocket's voice is hushed and actually a little mean, but he really needs to get out of this alive if he's going to survive anything in the future.
  
  "i am groot!" groot says.
  
  "not now, buddy," rocket adds, still looking back at gracie instead of at groot or richard. under most circumstances, rocket would simply speed away. this is not the case with this bucket of metal, nuts and bolts, though and he has no means of outrunning a centurion with what looks to be a rather nice new piece of ship equipment.
  
  
  
  richard then returns his attention to gracie, "you might want to reconsider attempting to bribe corpsmen," he adds.
  
  
  rocket gives gracie a 'see, i told you!' look.

[ereht tuo si hturt eht]

xx
x

r i p l e y x i l t c h e n k o - k o n e v a
expert hacker and grunge fashionista and (straight up gnarly as ********) junkie.

• another luckily for everyone pops up when he carries her to the co-pilot's chair. she a) doesn't freak out when he touches her and even carries her (too tired to comprehend everything, but once she sobers up, oh boy will it be horrible) and b) doesn't realize that the pretty stuff she's looking at is real instead of a hallucination because to her there's no way in hell this is a hallucination. pretty might be the wrong word, but it's interesting and neat looking and there are lights everywhere and stars and she presumes that it must be night time wherever she is in whatever ocean. his words about being stuck in the ocean for a long time with a good ship and a hell of a captain sort of wanders in one ear and zooms out the other ear. she doesn't hold onto it for very long, but when it's in her head, it reassures her and makes her feel like maybe she is going to be okay in the end.
  
  she passes out, which probably isn't good, but it's not like there's anyone preventing her from doing so the entire time, for a brief period of time and so she completely misses the angry yelling and screaming from peter and the twins he's dropping off on some hick planet.
  
  it takes her about an hour and a half to wake up again, and she's still tired as all hell but through some painkillers, which she presumably had injected into her because space first aid and blah blah blah, she's actually feeling a little coherent. she's lying on her back and staring up at a ceiling that doesn't look familiar at all. she doesn't remember anything peter had said to her about good ships or having a hell of a captain. she does remember something about the ocean. that's the only option. her eyes glance around and wow she kind of feels like she's traveled back into time. with the radio and the trolls and the nasa backpack and wow she actually starts to wonder if she's traveled back in time. oh goddammit, she's stuck in the ******** eighties.
  
  i'm going to godmod and say peter ducked out for a moment and now is coming back because yeee.
  
  he doesn't look familiar to her and he looks weird and she can finally make out his face and frame and he's not a real big fuzzy blur anymore and it's a he and [********].
  
  her eyes go wide and she suddenly bolts upright, which puts a straight on her chest and causes her hand to reach up and cling to her collar bone which is back inside her skin but it still hurts and her shirt is soaking wet with blood mainly (maybe some spit, too, from marta and her) and she sinks her hand under the ripped collar of the shirt and feels something weird. there's blue on her skin and she tries to claw it off because that's not right! unfortunately, she has negative nails and so clawing it off doesn't do much good since she can't get any underneath the nails to scrape away.
  
  then the words float into her head again.
  
  middle of an ocean. good ship and one hell of a. . . what's the word for a boat pilot?
  
  boat pilot.
  
  but it's still a he and hes are scary and so she winds up flailing out of bed with as many of the blankets as she can hold onto because this is her means of protecting herself and she tries to heat up her hands to make them bright neon blue and crazy colored but she can't because she doesn't have the energy to do so and this makes her a little bit more frustrated than she's ever been. as she flails out of bed, she kind of stumbles over her own legs and blankets which causes her to ungracefully try and catch herself, but she sort of walks into a low-hanging beam and whacks her head against it and in the end she just winds up on the floor again, rubbing her head for a moment before scrambling herself as small as she can into a real tight corner because this place is scary.
  
  it's the eighties and she's on a boat.
  
  "a-are y-you th-the b-boat p-pilot?" she asks in the smallest, teensiest and most pathetic voice ever.

[Halloqueen]


If Peter knew Ripley was passing out he’d probably feel bad. But there’s only one of him and he can’t look after her and restock his ship at the same time. And he figures that Ripley needs to eat and she probably needs some antibiotics which he absolutely does not have his ship. Begrudgingly he spends a few extra units to get antibiotics from a legit pharmacy than more ‘local’ suppliers. So when Peter comes back he has a back pack of goodies and slightly lighter pockets. Medical supplies have been getting steadily pricer since the start of the Kree war.

But being Peter Quill he tries to keep a positive attitude going. The outdated orange headphones over his ears help him out as he dances on to his ship and shuffles downstairs to check on his new crew member. He hooks his headphones around his neck as he approaches because it looks like she’s finally up. At first peter thinks this is a good thing because maybe they can start to make some head way on this whole situation. He wasn‘t expecting Ripley to be so jumpy.

Instinctively Peter looks over his shoulder because normally when people scramble away from they’ve either just woken up next to him or there’s a giant space monster with huge teeth right behind him. It spooks Peter so bad and he whips around so fast that he winds up tripping down the last three steps, sliding, and landing smack on his a** with a shout of “Flark, goddamn!”. He rubs his very tender a** as he focuses his attention back to Ripley, who is tripping around with the blankets. That’s concerning to Peter because he doesn’t want her reinsuring herself.

“Wow, hey, its okay, its okay,” PEter shouts, sounding rather panicked himself as he outstretches a hand towards her to signal her to stop. He’s not as freaked out as Ripley because he’s not as damaged, but he is a little freaked because he doesn’t know anything about Ripley or what she’s capable. He takes a couple minutes to catch his breath and the haul himself back up onto his feet so he can get a little closer. He notices that Ripley shrinks as he approaches so he crouches back down a feet away, trying to make himself look less threatening.

“Yeah I’m the ‘boat pilot‘“ Peter explains with a huffy little laugh because boat pilot. He sort of likes the sound of that, for some reason. But it does make him wonder if there’s something wrong with Ripley upstairs. Not that’d he judge her for it, but thats certainly something he feels he should be aware of if its true. “My name’s Peter Quill and I’m not gonna hurt you, I swear. But you’re hurt - remember, Marta, and the a** kicking? - and I’m trying to help you.”

Peter’s been in space long enough to know that those words mean absolutely nothing if he can’t back them up. There are millions of people that ‘just want to help’. So peter shrugs of his back pack and pulls out a little silver bar. The silver is just a wrapper which Peter undoes to reveal a small square of brown material. It’s not delicious food, but it is high protein and something that can be stored for a long time. “See, I brought you food,” He extends his hand towards her with the bar, which actually has a strong dark chocolate smell. Very quickly he realizes that wont work, so he wraps the bar up again and slides it along the floor right to Ripley so she doesn’t have to compromise her personal space to eat.

“Look, you gotta trust me if you want me to help get you home.” Peter says and the words make his stomach sink. Earth is a damn long way away and its going to cost an arm and a leg in gas alone. Maybe he can get her part way and just set her up to make the trip alone - he’ll think of something. As he watches her cower on the floor he just knows he can’t take her back to Yondu. She’d never make it as a ravanger, hell, he’s got a feeling she has a tough time to making it as a human back on earth. s**t, he really doesn’t want to back there. But s**t, double s**t, he can’t keep her here and he can’t take her to Yondu.

Peter tries to calm himself down and take things one step at a time. Get some food in her, get her some antibiotics and check her wound, and then break the news that she’s in space. Man, Peter is not excited for that part.