He closes his eyes, breathing deep and steady, and forcibly pulls himself together. If he wants to have a fucking breakdown he can do it after they've dealt with this and there's not going to be an audience for it. He snorts a shadow of a laugh at the comment, giving a tired nod. "Fuck Thanos," he agrees. Sometimes he thinks the bastard got to die too fast. They should have dragged him out and made him deal with the consequences of his stupid fucking plan, like the rest of them have been doing ever since.
The ghost of that touch lingers on his skin long after it's gone.
The sudden icy white glare of light is so abrupt that he flinches, half expecting to see— but no, it's driving snow, howling through the air so intensely that he can almost feel the biting cold. After the other visions it's easy to pick out the younger Natasha from the ring of girls, a dreadful purpose in her eyes as she watches the others with all the merciless intent of a predator backed into a corner.
He already knows how it has to end. She wouldn't be standing here beside him now if she hadn't been the one to walk away. The brutality of the fight is no surprise; what catches him off guard is watching her, still shivering even in the thicker clothes, start to bury the others as best she can. In the pale light, suddenly she looks painfully young.
The vision fades. He watches the charge fizzle out into nothing and makes an absent, considering noise. "C'mon, let's try walkin' it," he says, picking a direction at random and gesturing off into the mists. "Worth seein' if we can find an edge or somethin'." Maybe everything will just reshape around them, but if there is any kind of boundary, it's worth finding. They're sure as hell not gonna get out by staying where it wants them.
So they walk. They pass other scenes as they go, most of them a litany of pain. He sees himself at what can't possibly be more than eighteen, dressed in a prison uniform, winning a brutal bare-knuckled scuffle by the skin of his teeth; unconscious and being pulled from the cockpit of a crashed ship by familiar figures he doesn't let his eyes linger on; pinned down in a firefight with blood coursing down his face from a wound at his hairline that's showing the glint of exposed metal. Some of them are surprisingly recent: at one point he sees Nebs popping a dislocated shoulder back in for him, which has to be that mission on Cyferios a few months back. If there's any pattern, he can't fathom it.
They learn quickly that ignoring them doesn't work. Any vision they don't acknowledge seems to follow them, fading in and out disorientingly until it begins to give the unnerving sense that they're going in circles. Some are worse than others. The memory of pain doesn't make much of an impression. For the most part old injuries are something he has no trouble being objective about, and he'd honestly forgotten where some of those scars came from. It's the glimpses of faces he'd resigned himself to never seeing again that sting.
It takes longer than he might have expected for the first memory of the lab to show up. The centerpiece of the scene that accretes out of the mists is a surgical table, surrounded by a team of purposeful figures in white lab coats. And laid out on it, ash pale and scared with the straps leaving red welts on his skin, is…
…is a child.
Rocket stops and stares, nearly as pale as the ghost strapped to the table. If he'd been asked, yeah, he guesses he knew he must have been pretty young when it all started. The way the implant scars are distorted where he's grown since they were installed is proof enough of that. But there's a difference between knowing that on an intellectual level, and being confronted with the sight of a fucking kid about to be cut open. As the scene picks up speed, the echoing sounds of businesslike chatter from the surgical team fill the air. One picks up a scalpel. Dread floods the pit of his stomach, hard and fast in an instant, as it draws blood and the first scream splits the air.
There's an energy field keeping the left arm immobilized while they work, filling the air with crawling blue sparks, but it ends just above the elbow: the kid on the table writhes against the straps holding him down, struggling futilely to pull away. Tears are streaming down his face. The surgical team appear indifferent.
Watching now from thirty years of hard road down the line, Rocket seems more embarrassed than anything else, shifting uncomfortably as he turns his back to the scene and keeps moving. At a particularly piercing scream, he winces. “Get it together, kid,” he mutters, half to himself. “There's worse comin’.”
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The ghost of that touch lingers on his skin long after it's gone.
The sudden icy white glare of light is so abrupt that he flinches, half expecting to see— but no, it's driving snow, howling through the air so intensely that he can almost feel the biting cold. After the other visions it's easy to pick out the younger Natasha from the ring of girls, a dreadful purpose in her eyes as she watches the others with all the merciless intent of a predator backed into a corner.
He already knows how it has to end. She wouldn't be standing here beside him now if she hadn't been the one to walk away. The brutality of the fight is no surprise; what catches him off guard is watching her, still shivering even in the thicker clothes, start to bury the others as best she can. In the pale light, suddenly she looks painfully young.
The vision fades. He watches the charge fizzle out into nothing and makes an absent, considering noise. "C'mon, let's try walkin' it," he says, picking a direction at random and gesturing off into the mists. "Worth seein' if we can find an edge or somethin'." Maybe everything will just reshape around them, but if there is any kind of boundary, it's worth finding. They're sure as hell not gonna get out by staying where it wants them.
So they walk. They pass other scenes as they go, most of them a litany of pain. He sees himself at what can't possibly be more than eighteen, dressed in a prison uniform, winning a brutal bare-knuckled scuffle by the skin of his teeth; unconscious and being pulled from the cockpit of a crashed ship by familiar figures he doesn't let his eyes linger on; pinned down in a firefight with blood coursing down his face from a wound at his hairline that's showing the glint of exposed metal. Some of them are surprisingly recent: at one point he sees Nebs popping a dislocated shoulder back in for him, which has to be that mission on Cyferios a few months back. If there's any pattern, he can't fathom it.
They learn quickly that ignoring them doesn't work. Any vision they don't acknowledge seems to follow them, fading in and out disorientingly until it begins to give the unnerving sense that they're going in circles. Some are worse than others. The memory of pain doesn't make much of an impression. For the most part old injuries are something he has no trouble being objective about, and he'd honestly forgotten where some of those scars came from. It's the glimpses of faces he'd resigned himself to never seeing again that sting.
It takes longer than he might have expected for the first memory of the lab to show up. The centerpiece of the scene that accretes out of the mists is a surgical table, surrounded by a team of purposeful figures in white lab coats. And laid out on it, ash pale and scared with the straps leaving red welts on his skin, is…
…is a child.
Rocket stops and stares, nearly as pale as the ghost strapped to the table. If he'd been asked, yeah, he guesses he knew he must have been pretty young when it all started. The way the implant scars are distorted where he's grown since they were installed is proof enough of that. But there's a difference between knowing that on an intellectual level, and being confronted with the sight of a fucking kid about to be cut open. As the scene picks up speed, the echoing sounds of businesslike chatter from the surgical team fill the air. One picks up a scalpel. Dread floods the pit of his stomach, hard and fast in an instant, as it draws blood and the first scream splits the air.
There's an energy field keeping the left arm immobilized while they work, filling the air with crawling blue sparks, but it ends just above the elbow: the kid on the table writhes against the straps holding him down, struggling futilely to pull away. Tears are streaming down his face. The surgical team appear indifferent.
Watching now from thirty years of hard road down the line, Rocket seems more embarrassed than anything else, shifting uncomfortably as he turns his back to the scene and keeps moving. At a particularly piercing scream, he winces. “Get it together, kid,” he mutters, half to himself. “There's worse comin’.”