Rocket pulled the tab on his second Coke and tipped it back.
"I like this," he said, with the satisfied certainty of someone issuing a verdict. "I like this."
Groot reached up from his pot, got two fingers into Rocket's can before Rocket noticed, pulled them out wet, and put them in his mouth. His whole body shivered. His expression went somewhere between shock and rapture.
Drax picked up his own can, examined it, and took a careful sip. He set it back on the table with the expression of a man who has confirmed a hypothesis.
"This is a poison that makes people want more of it."
Jason Quill tossed him a bottle of mineral water from across the room without getting up from his chair. "That one has no tricks in it."
Drax unscrewed it, drank half in a single pull, and nodded. "This is real water."
Gamora had taken a polite sip of the Coke and put it down. She was watching Jason with the quiet attention she gave to people she hadn't fully categorized yet. He was old by human reckoning — white-haired, unhurried, at ease with a green-skinned woman and a large gray-tattooed man in his living room in a way that Missouri residents generally weren't. She filed it.
Jason looked at his grandson. "Tell me what happened to you. All of it, if you want. We spent a long time not knowing."
Star-Lord leaned back in his chair and started talking.
The version he told was honest and a little edited — Yondu, the Ravagers, twenty-plus years of working the outer systems, the things he'd seen and the trouble he'd found. Jason listened without interrupting, which was more than most people managed. He asked a question here and there, the kind that showed he was tracking the geography of it — specific systems, specific factions, specific types of jobs.
He didn't mention his own history. He didn't mention the Spartan Empire, or the war, or the crash landing that had kept him on Earth, or why a man whose heritage ran through the Large Magellanic Cloud had spent sixty years in rural Missouri raising a daughter and now a grandson he'd thought was gone. He listened to Peter's life and kept his own under the same quiet cover he'd maintained for decades.
"Sounds like you've been busy," Jason said, when Star-Lord finished.
"I've been very busy."
"Why come back now? It's not just to see an old man."
Star-Lord was quiet for a moment. Then: "We're also looking for something called the Dragon Balls. They're apparently somewhere on Earth. I don't know much about them — just that they're worth enough that it made sense to make the trip."
Jason's expression didn't change. "Dragon Balls."
"I know how that sounds."
"I don't know what they are," Jason said. "But good luck finding them."
He reached over and topped up Rocket's Coke.
Smith Doyle stood in front of the Monolith.
Up close, it was larger than the photographs had suggested — roughly two meters tall, dark gray, the surface texture uneven where HYDRA family members had cut fragments away over the years. The cut sections were clean, almost surgical. Someone had been careful with those pieces.
He pressed one fingertip against the surface and felt the material push back — hard, dense, significantly more resistant than the geological readings had suggested. He pressed a little further and left a clean fingerprint in the stone.
He could take the whole thing apart if he wanted to. That would be counterproductive.
The useful approach was acoustic activation — a specific frequency shockwave against the surface would liquefy it and open the transit point. On the far end: Maveth, a dead planet in a remote system, currently inhabited by one parasitic organism and one surviving human the Hive had left alive for reasons it hadn't bothered to explain.
The Hive itself was not a serious problem. A parasite that required a functioning nervous system would have poor results with Smith's biology, and a single concentrated ki output would handle the organism cleanly. The return trip was even less complicated — once the planet's coordinates were recorded, the Space Stone made the Monolith redundant.
What he wanted the planet for had nothing to do with the Hive.
Maveth had water. Residual vegetation. Ruined infrastructure. Distance from Earth. All four were useful properties for a secondary location.
He stepped back and let the glass close.
"Sealed," he said to the agent behind him. "No access, no tests, no one opens this room without my direct authorization."
"Yes, sir."
He walked out.
The Guardians needed to move on before he activated the Monolith. Having them on Earth while he was traveling to Maveth to deal with the Hive created an unnecessary overlap of situations requiring attention. Better to sequence it properly.
As for why they'd come to Earth — he'd thought it through and arrived at two options. Either they were following some lead on the Infinity Stones, possibly at Thanos's direction through Gamora, or they'd picked up enough information about the Dragon Balls to make Earth worth the trip. Given the Cosmic Bank bounty Ronan had filed before his death, the second option was more likely.
Neither of those possibilities required urgent intervention. He'd let Coulson's team manage the contact and wait to see what the Guardians did next.
The next morning, Star-Lord stood on the sidewalk outside Jason's house with his team assembled behind him and said goodbye.
Jason came to the door and watched him from the porch. He looked at Peter's face for a long moment — the eyes that were Meredith's, the jaw that wasn't — and thought about the bloodline he hadn't mentioned and the profession he didn't like and the years that had gone the way they'd gone.
"Come back again," he said. "If you're passing through."
"I will," Peter said.
He meant it.
Jason went back inside. The door closed quietly.
Rocket fell into step beside Peter as they walked. He already had the network hijacker running.
"The Dragon Ball information has been scrubbed," he said. "Not just buried — actively erased. There were bounties posted years ago, tens of millions of dollars each, from multiple sources. All of them were pulled after Ronan showed up. The posting accounts don't resolve to anything. Someone with significant institutional authority pushed the delete button across every accessible record."
"Ronan's invasion triggered it," Gamora said.
"Has to be. The timing matches. Before Ronan arrived, the information was fragmented but findable. After — nothing. Whoever manages this planet's information didn't want anyone connecting the bounty history to the Dragon Balls."
Star-Lord walked with his hands in his jacket pockets. "So the people who know what they do aren't advertising it."
"The director of SHIELD knows," Rocket said. "I'd bet everything in my pack on that. The strongest person on the planet, who personally destroyed Ronan — you think he doesn't know what Ronan came for?" He put the hijacker away. "We need to go back to SHIELD, fix the ship, and find a way to have that conversation."
"Without making it obvious that's what we're doing," Gamora added.
"Without making it obvious," Rocket agreed.
Star-Lord nodded. He was about to say something when movement registered at the end of the block.
He went still.
A man was walking toward them. Broad-shouldered, silver-haired, unhurried — the kind of unhurried that came from having an effectively unlimited amount of time. He wore a long coat and a small smile and moved like the distance between himself and them was already solved.
Peter's hand went for his energy pistol.
Drax had both daggers out before the motion finished.
Rocket's hand was in his pack.
The man kept walking. He spread his arms slightly — not a threatening gesture, an opening one.
"I've finally found you," he said. "My son."
Nobody moved.
Peter's hand stayed on the pistol but didn't draw. He looked at the man's face — the bone structure, the eyes, something that didn't quite resolve into any category he had a name for — and felt something run through him that he didn't know what to call.
"Who are you?" he said. His voice came out rougher than he intended.
The man stopped three feet away. He looked at Peter with something that was unmistakably recognition — not the recognition of a file or a description, but the recognition of something known and long absent.
"My name is Ego," he said. "Your mother was Meredith Quill. I loved her. And I have been looking for you for a very long time."
He stepped forward and put his arms around Peter.
Peter stood there.
After a second, his hands came up slowly, and he didn't pull away.
Behind them, Drax lowered his daggers and looked at Rocket. "All that maneuvering you did to shake him at the jump nodes—"
"I was creating space," Rocket said, his voice carrying the particular tone of someone who has decided on an explanation and is committing to it fully. "A strategic buffer zone. For precisely this kind of encounter."
"You were afraid of him and you ran."
"I created," Rocket said carefully, "a controlled separation."
Drax considered this. "Mmm."
Peter finally stepped back from the embrace. He looked at Ego. He looked at the face, and thought about a cassette tape that had been with him since he was eight years old, and a mother who had called his father an angel composed of light, and the long years of having filed that story under things I'm not going to think about.
He'd spent most of his adult life burying the question.
He hadn't quite managed to bury it all the way.
"Okay," he said. His voice was steadier now. "Start from the beginning."