nysalogs | please swallow your pride if I have faith you need to borrow.

Entry tags:

please swallow your pride if I have faith you need to borrow.

Who: Rocket (

volumeone) & Mantis (

uglybug)
What: Rocket learns there's something weirdly and uncomfortably familiar about Simwe Institute, which may cause him to have to confront some things.
When: Shortly after this call, so basically earlier in the week.
Where: Casa Del Guardians
Warning(s): Probably a lot of mentions of and references to animal abuse and animal experimentation.

"You couldn't afford me anyway."

Rocket comes close to punctuating that statement by throwing the communicator, but resists the urge at the last second. While property damage seems like the best thing to do in this situation, it won't help.

But what will?

He has to lay low. He has to- No, he can't. He can't just sit here right on top of that place and pretend like what's going on there isn't his problem or won't be his problem, eventually. He has to- has to what? Blow it up?

No.

Run away?

Seems plausible, actually. Even if they can't get out of Olympia, maybe he can go back to the station and just stay there. He'd be bored out of his skull, probably, but he'd be away from this. It's a solid plan. It's-

"Shit," Rocket swears out loud, pacing the empty house and raking his claws through the fur on his head. There is no easy solution. If he goes back to the station- if he can- he'll be leaving people behind. People who aren't in danger from this threat like he is. People who probably don't even understand the threat this poses to him.

"Shitshitshit," he curses under his breath. What does he do?

By the time either (or both) of his roommates and fellow Guardians come back, Rocket has made himself at home on Quill's bed with a pile of scrap he collected from the crash site that he seems to be reworking into a rudimentary shield.

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Mantis, as per usual, enters the house without fanfare -- without even a word, at that. Her own day had been full of ups and downs and she is more than ready to lock the outside would outside and take solace in a quiet house. Too many questions have been asked, too many assumptions made, and perhaps even too much effort had been put into being a Good Person (whatever that meant.) Mantis feels worn and in need of a good night's sleep, at least.

She honestly does not notice Rocket working until she walks past; it's almost comical, the way she stops mid-step and takes a few step backwards in order to actually see what he's working on. It doesn't help. She has no technical acumen to speak of, so all of what he has simply looks like flotsam and jetsam to her.

"That is Peter's bed," she says, though it's mild and nowhere near accusing. (If she knows anything about Peter and Rocket, it's that Peter will probably raise his voice the second he sees this and she really wants her peace and quiet.)

"Good eye." Why Rocket is on Peter's bed, instead of on the floor somewhere only mildly in the way, is anyone's guess. Despite knowing it's a habit he needs to break when he's feeling particularly low, his solace is pissing people off. He likes having that kind of control over another person's feelings when he can't control his own.

It's, admittedly, terrible, and he's working on not doing it, but Evras ripped into him without ever having to do much of anything. He takes what solace he can.

"Quill will get over it. He always does. He's probably havin' a better day than I am." He looks up- Mantis doesn't look like she's had much of a day, herself. Well, that's to be expected. She hasn't really had to ever get a job before now.

For a moment, she looks as if she might just take that answer and go off to her own corner, to sulk in her own trying day. After all, it's not as if there's room for her to perch on the edge of the bed and she's not going to try her luck by moving any of those random parts he has scattered over the blankets. Mantis doesn't think Rocket would try to bite her again -- she hopes -- but she isn't sure something won't shock her if she touches it.

She twists her fingers around themselves and worries at her lip before asking the question. "What was wrong with your day?"

Peter Quill comes home from a hard day of trying to flirt the clothes off every single person who comes his way. It's tiring, mentally and physically, and he might be walking a little stiffly as he heads back to their place, trying not to take long strides because that's a world of hurt. What he wants to do is crawl into his bed and fall facedown on it and crash, hard, and then shower.

He comes back to some serious bullshit.

Rocket's - okay, so the little bastard took up his bed like it's a workshop and Mantis is hovering and guess what, he still can't just crash like he wanted to. Peter's only (half) human. He gets a little bitchy when he gets cockblocked on the simple goals like sleep/food/casual freewheeling sex.

Peter stops to really digest the scene, eyebrows shooting up before they draw down and he's trying not - and failing - to scowl.

"Dude," Peter chimes up from where he's leaning against the door, arms crossed over his chest. "The hell is this?"

And by "this" he means the whole group huddle with Rocket using his bed like it's a mechanic's wet dream and Mantis...well, he guesses she's being Mantis, trying to catch up with the galaxy and also asking all the real, awkward questions which is fine, it's just she could've done it anywhere but his room.

Rocket's about to answer with a flat response, but then Peter walks in, and with all three of them here, it seems like a good time as any to at least lay out the problems that they might be dealing with in this place.

"This the hell is-" Rocket enunciates the words with a bit of a mocking lilt, "- the beginning of a very, very big problem." Not the parts and tools scattered about- those, he's already swiping away between his pockets and a bin he has at the edge of the bed, proving this entire affair was just because Peter's bed is more comfortable than the floor... and a little bit because he's in agonizing emotional distress, and pissing Peter off redirects that to someone else. He's really gotta stop doing that.

"I called up the Institute today to see if I could get a legitimate, honest job." Be proud of him, everyone- he did it without anyone forcing him to, and maybe if it had worked out for him, he'd be more proud of that, but it didn't. "That Evras dude? He's bad news- like real bad news. You know what his big specialty is?"

He pauses to finish swiping the remaining spare bits into the bin, but he doesn't give them long enough to find an answer or force him to get to the point. He just spits out, without looking at him, "Animal experimentation."

Oh, she should have just left Rocket alone. Left him to his own devices on Peter's bed while she disappeared into her own corner, without asking questions and without drawing attention to herself, because now Peter is here too and he's obviously a bit unhappy with them both. Mantis folds her arms across her abdomen and hunches her shoulders a bit; the apology is on the tip of her tongue, but Rocket speaks first.

If she thought Peter is annoyed, then there's nothing on Rocket's levels of... frustration? Anger? Something. She's not quite sure, not without actually touching him. One thing she is certain of, though, is that she will get bitten if she tries that now.

As obviously upset as Rocket is, what he says still doesn't make much sense. (Rocket has never been an animal in her eyes; he is simply Rocket, of some species she has not seen before. She hasn't seen her own species before; it's not so strange.)

"Why," she stutters a bit on that word, "is that bad?"

Peter had something real bitchy on the tip of his tongue. That fizzles when Rocket blurts out what's got his tail all twisted.

Oh.

His body language shifts as he stands up a little straighter and his eyes dart from Rocket to Mantis, to see how she's taking this and of course she doesn't know, they hadn't exactly had a chance to fill her in on everyone's life stories. Some of them, like Rocket's, suck more than others.

"Yeah, it's pretty bad. Same breed of assholes basically did a number on Rocket."

He still doesn't know the details. Just the scars, the way Rocket gets twitchy about certain subjects.

He moves to - well, he can't sit on his bed because Rocket's done the equivalent of licking it and claiming it until he moves all his crap off. But he can find one of the crates Rocket dragged in here and use that as a stool, the wood creaking as he makes sure he won't flatten it on accident.

Rocket was distracted by Mantis's complete obliviousness, so when Peter speaks up, he turns away from her to snap, "Hey!" That's as far as he gets, though, before he flattens his ears and looks back at Mantis.

She didn't know. She honestly didn't know. It's so freaking bizarre to him that someone might actually look at him and have it not occur to them that he's a freak. He has a few things he could say to that (they're mostly mean, which Mantis doesn't deserve), but he figures it's more important to focus on the situation.

He picks up one of his pieces of scrap and turns it over in his hands. "Look, I'm not gonna sit here and say we need to get outta here- even if we could sneak across the border, there's no telling whether or not the other places on this rock are worse." He still won't really look at either of them. "Hell, I don't know if he'd even do anything to me. I wouldn't turn the video on the comm on when I talked to 'em, so he never saw me, but that's not gonna work forever. I kinda stand out, so sooner or later, he's gonna know I exist and we'll see what his opinion on a highly evolved genetic experiment really is."

He finally tosses the part into the box with the others, growling a bit in frustration. "Look... I just don't know how to frickin' play nice in a society that lets a dickbag like that have so much power."

She clenches her hands into fists in an attempt to keep from wringing her hands and she can't help the frank sympathetic look that lands on Rocket. He may notice it, but he turns to the piles of scrap metal on the bed in short order.

"I mentioned your name when I was speaking to people on the device. A handful of them knew of you already." Which probably doesn't help dial down the tension in this room, but she feels that it needs to be known.

"Maybe we should've been using codenames," Peter says, sighing. See, this is exactly why. You never know which asshole might be out there, which one makes it personal. And people gave him crap for the whole codename thing.

He leans forward to rest his elbows on his knees, glancing at Mantis who's doing that thing again, that thing where she looks like she's twisting her fingers together like it's a stalling tactic to buy her time to think. That's what he would've said, if she was anyone else. For now he takes her at face value: she might not be stalling, but she is nervous, unsure.

As for Rocket, he's a ball of angry energy, doing what he does when he's either pissed or stressed: tinkering, improving gear or (what's more likely) working on some new toy that could blow whoever he's got a bone with to kingdom come. Peter sits there and watches for a bit, waiting until he's good and ready to talk instead of pushing the point just because of a little awkward silence.

"So what's the plan? You keeping your head down? 'Cause you're right, we're not exactly in a position to go out guns blazing," as much as Peter hates to admit it, because he's nice and spoiled about life in a galaxy where you had tech and weapons and actual ships. "We need to start working together, and not just on the whole gig thing."

Look, he gets Rocket has his own history he's close-lipped about. And Mantis is new, painfully new. But they're stuck here, they're all they've got (so far) and this has to work...somehow.

"That's not the problem." Rocket's response is muted, fully aware his damn username displays his name to all available and he's too attached to his own self-given name to go by anything else. "Everyone from the station knows me or knows of me, and word will get around town, eventually. I just have to play nice with the locals, and hope that works out for me."

He's pragmatic, paranoid, and generally always prepared for any eventuality, which means he's already aware of how stupid staying here is going to be, but also knows how completely out of their element they'll be if they try to leave. There's only one option and it involves a lot of swallowed pride and teeth-gritting on his part. He hates it so much.

"And if that goes well, then the best I can hope for is that nobody decides to..." He doesn't want to say the words. He doesn't want to reduce himself to that. He looks between Mantis and Peter, and then snatches something from the top of his dump bin, noticing one of its wires is loose in a bid to keep from seeing their expressions when he says, "...Make a few extra units at my expense."

But that's where the working together part comes in- he looks like he breezed over that part entirely, but he circles back around, gruffer. "So y'know I keep in touch with you two, so if I happen to go missing or something, somebody knows where to look for the big explosions."

Like it would be that simple- Rocket can martyr himself like it's going out of style, but he will never be the victim.

Mantis worries at her lower lip during the conversation. She has imagined scenarios in which everything goes wrong -- simply because she can't seem to stop doing it sometimes -- but Rocket running into this particular problem has, of course, never been one of them. (How could she, when she doesn't know his history?)

She nods firmly, though, when it's suggested that they keep in touch. That would be the best and most useful thing to do, she thinks. But perhaps there is more. "Should we talk to anyone else?" She hesitates, just for a moment. "It's hard to know who to trust just yet, but perhaps we know some people who could help."

So this got heavy fast.

Peter's had some first hand experience of what Rocket's capable of and he knows the general blueprint of why he is the way he is: science experiment for years on some unknown planet run by unknown assholes, maybe, and he's got a big chip on his shoulder. Seems like he's always got something to prove. Seeing Rocket almost withdrawn and subdued like this, though, throws him back a step. He glances at Mantis, as if searching for a hint on how to handle this, and realizes she's trying to roll with it as best she can, with an alien she basically just met.

"We wouldn't let that happen. You get in trouble, you call in the cavalry," Peter flicks a finger at himself and Mantis, and he hopes he didn't rope her into anything she wasn't prepared for. If she could take on a Celestial, then he figures some assholes after Rocket would be a walk in the park compared to that. ]

His jaw works for moment as he tries to figure out what to do next. Do the whole leader thing since he'd told the Nova Corp he'd be the one looking out for his new crew.

"Let's just snoop around, poke our heads into some other places. Try to find out if they'll gun for you; that type of thing," Peter isn't sure he knows how to handle Rocket when he's down in the dumps instead of his usual (sometimes hilarious) dickish self. "But if there's any one getting shifty toward either of you, you say something."

Because Peter's all for ganging up on the asshole in question, Guardians style, and making them regret their life choices. Maybe it's not fair with the whole outnumbering thing but hell - it isn't like the galaxy's all that fair.

Rocket looks away from them, scowling and looking about ready to bite back with something to draw this stupid ordeal into a conflict that he can control. One of the lessons he's learned over the years is how malleable situations can be. If they start going one way, there's almost certainly a way to derail it. It applies to strategy and it applies to people, as well. Throw a spanner in the works and it all breaks apart.

He doesn't. He just keeps sitting there with his teeth bared and his shoulders tensed while Peter goes into his leader mode- the state he enters where everything he says actually sounds so convincing, you don't have much of a choice but to follow along. It feels right to give him that much- let him believe there's hope that this can be solved simply.

Maybe it can be. But Rocket's dealt with these demons for so long that he's never had to fathom facing them anything other than alone. He's always going to be doubtful.

"All right, y'all don't have to get sappy. I was just laying it all out." The sardonic tone begins to creep back into his voice as he slides off the edge of the bed. "I'm sure there's people here we can trust- I know a few myself- and we won't know anything for sure 'til we get a good look at what the Institute is really all about."

He reiterates all of this in a mildly condescending tone, like yes duh of course Quill- I could've figured this out on my own. But, at the same time, he looks grateful. "So it's all good, then, right?"

His gaze looks up to Peter, cockiness vanishing for a moment as he eyes him. It's only for a second of eye contact before he turns away, but there's a strangely pleading note that speaks volumes. I know I'm a dickbag sometimes, but this is important to me.

Of course, Peter can't read thoughts or emotions and Rocket is terrible at verbalizing his feelings without getting frustrated and violent, so it is what it is. "...Right."

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please swallow your pride if I have faith you need to borrow.

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