As awkward silences went, the one that greeted Quill's revelation was by far and away the most excruciating he'd ever had to suffer through. The utter absence of any vocal response seemed to reverberate throughout the Milano with more impact than the loudest shout. Nervously, his eyes jumped from face to face, looking for a clue as to what came next. Drax looked perplexed, as though trying to unravel some mental knot. Rocket was fidgeting in barely restrained... well, he wasn't sure what emotion it was, though he suddenly had a clear mental picture of the raccoon grabbing Groot and using him as a bludgeon to wail on him. The tree, for his part, was also studying faces, looking thoughtful. Gamora's expression was calm, bordering on blank. That was a worrying look on someone who had spent a good portion of their life as a living weapon, suggesting calculations were being made as to the easiest method of dispatch. Worse though was how guilty it made him feel. Despite years of experience at disappointing women (emotionally, not in the other way, thank you very much), he never quite got used to the fallout.

It was Gamora who spoke first.

"Just so that we're clear, you're saying that you spent over a year planning a heist on a facility owned by a powerful and influential crime boss solely because you believed he possessed a collection of audio cassette tapes from Terra?" The words came out with the wince-inducing air of someone who was having difficulty believing events had led to this sentence actually having to be uttered. Quill's guilty feeling increased, making him feel more and more like a dog being forced to study the crap he'd just taken on the living room carpet.

"You see, you say it out loud like that and it sounds kinda stupid..." He rubbed the back of his head, cringing at the lameness of his reply. He was almost thankful that no-one was given time to dwell on it, as Rocket's restraint finally snapped and he collapsed into hysterical laughter, doubling over, tiny furry fist hammering the table as his whole body shook with the force of it. Groot gave his companion a perplexed sideways glance and shuffled away slightly. Drax took a moment to study Rocket, then looked at Quill.

"I believe his laughter is genuine."

"Thanks for that, Drax. I would have been haunted by uncertainty if you hadn't given me that staggering insight." Quill scowled, not exactly overjoyed at the reception he was getting.

Drax looked confused at the response. "That seems an extreme response to not knowing the authenticity of someone's laughter."

Quill sighed. "That was sarcasm. I was being sarcastic."

"Ah, a way of lying." Drax nodded.

"Now there's a surprise..." Gamora added icily.

"That was also sarcasm." Drax noted cheerfully.

"I didn't lie!" Quill retorted, ignoring Drax's analysis. "We needed money, we couldn't get work, I knew this place would have other stuff worth taking. I just didn't say why I had wanted to go there in the first place."

"Even though I asked you that. Which means you lied." Gamora pointed out "I want to know why."

"Why?" Quill gestured with both hands over at Rocket, who was just about getting himself back under control. "You would have laughed me out of the room, regardless of the plan, and we'd be back to square one."

"So you didn't trust us?" Gamora asked, face still carefully blank.

"Can you honestly tell me you would have agreed if you'd known what I was after?" Quill waited for a reply, but none was forthcoming, his friends looking at each other. "Yeah, that's what I thought."

He held the 'Awesome Mix Vol. 1' tape, having used it earlier to explain exactly what he'd been after. "I left Earth when I was 10, with no way of getting back, having just watched my mom die. This tape was all I had to remember her, to remember my home, by. I just..." He trailed off, sitting down and slouching over the table. "Part of me knew it was impossible and stupid. I just wanted so badly to have another piece of home."

There was a long silence, and then Gamora leant across the table and placed a hand on his arm. Her touch was warm and, to Quill's surprise, so was her voice.

"Peter, we've each of us lost our homes. If you'd just told us this from the start we would have understood."

Quill managed a weak smile and placed his hand on hers. "I'm a jackass."

Gamora replied with a smile of her own. "Yes, but you're our jackass. Just be honest with us in future."

"I have a question." rumbled Drax. "What is..."

Quill pre-empted him. "It's a donkey."

"Oh." Drax looked him over. "I do not see how you resemble an equine of any type."

"Ask my exes." Quill smirked as Gamora rolled her eyes.

"Oh please." snorted Rocket. "I saw you during processing on the Kyln, you're not that impressive."

It took the raccoon a moment to realise that everyone was now staring at him. "What? Too much information?"

Every crime has clean up. There are loose ends to be tied away, else someone is liable to tug on them, at which point you're in for more hassle than you can be bothered with and potentially quite a bit of trouble. It doesn't have to be the neatest job in the universe, just secure enough to ensure whoever looks into the matter is disinclined to take things particularly far. Of course, some crimes require more tidying up after than others...

"Denarian Dey, nice to see you again. What can I do for our favourite corps man?" Quill smiled, leaning back in his chair and putting down the implements he'd been cleaning his blaster with.

Dey smiled too, wearing the look of a man who knew he was playing a predetermined game but had no objection to not winning. "You tell me, Peter. Had a couple of strange incidents recently I thought you might be able to shed some light on."

"Anything I can do to help out." Quill fought the urge to lean back further in his chair. It wouldn't do to look too nonchalant. Or fall on his ass.

"We had a report of an old cargo shuttle being stolen a couple of days. Then we had a report that it had been returned, now containing twice its units worth in antique jewellery."

Quill gave a shrug of calculated casualness. "Shuttle rental places have such complicated paperwork these days. Sounds like someone was willing to pay over the odds to avoid the hassle."

"Uh huh. Then there's the matter of a large number of farm animals being left at a wildlife sanctuary in the middle of the night, along with a sizeable donation for the organisation running it. We traced the animals back to a series of large scale rustling we've been investigating over the past few months."

"Clearly there are some dedicated critter lovers out there." Quill said, nodding sagely. In truth, he was rather unsure as to what exactly the deal with the cattle was. All he knew was that it involved Rocket, but his attempt at questioning the fuzzball about it had been halted before it began. He might not be able to understand what Groot said, but frantic gestures about a particular line of questioning being unwise were universal enough for him to grasp.

"Clearly. And of course there's the small matter of Aarzan the Facilitator being found tied up in a previously radar-blocked asteroid facility, surrounded by billions of units worth of black market goods and about a dozen dead bodies. Apparently someone took it upon themselves to bring down a man we've been unable to capture for years and leave plenty of evidence for us to convict him with."

Quill donned his best look of wide-eyed surprise. "Wow! That guy's supposed the top crime boss in this sector! Sounds like someone did the galaxy a big favour. He say who it was?"

"No. He's surprisingly reticent on that. Almost as if he were worried about reprisals if he talked." Dey replied carefully. Aarzan's silence was unsurprising to Quill. Gamora had made it quite clear to the man what she would do if they were implicated, not to mention the simple fact his previous clients made decide to take actions for their own security if there was the implication he was loose-tongued at all.

Quill gave another shrug "Well, I'd love to be able to help, Dey, but there's nothing I can tell you about any of that. We're pretty busy here with our entirely legitimate enterprises."

"Right, right." nodded the Denarian. "After all, we had that whole talk about how you can't break the law anymore."

"Exactly! Great talk, with the whole spine removal question and all. We're following it to the letter."

There was a moment of silence, then Dey smiled once more and shook his head. "Alright Peter. If anything comes to you, you have my number."

"Of course, Dey. My love to the family." Quill grinned, holding in his sigh of relief until he was the call was terminated. Setting himself over his part-dismantled blaster once more, he had just raised tools once more when there was a knock at the door.

"Come in, it's unlocked."

The door slide open and Rocket's head poked round the frame.

"Hey Quill, you got a minute?"

Quill swivelled round to face the raccoon. "Sure man, what's up?"

Rocket padded in, fur damp from yet another shower, having been insistent that he still smelt of the manure he'd been smuggled in. Quill worried that he was looking to inflict the earlier threatened groin assault and began to mentally calculate if he could grab his protective cup from across the room in time.

"I've been going over the computer data we pulled from the warehouse." he gesticulated with an interface pad clutched in a paw.

Quill blinked. "We pulled computer data?"

Rocket rolled his eyes "For frick's sake, I explained it when I told you about the program I used to hijack their computers! It set up backdoor access and I ran an autominer to gather anything that fit a criteria for usefulness or value!"

Quill pointed to himself "Dumb hairless monkey." Then he pointed at Rocket "Genius fuzzy guy. You need to dumb it down for me, remember?"

"Fine, fine, you moron." Rocket sighed "We stole stuff off their computers. Potential targets, evidence on stuff the Nova Corps would love to hear about, and something else..." Furry digits ran over the pad, and then suddenly music began to play over the ship's speakers.

Music Quill had never heard before.

Music without the faint echo of autotranslation.

Quill looked at Rocket in mystified disbelief, the raccoon replying with a little grin.

"Radio-waves travel. Turns out Aarzan had receivers pointed at Terra for years to collect this stuff. Guess he really did have an interest in this stuff, he just lied about the format."

In truth, Quill was barely listening to Rocket at this point. The music had his attention: guitars and drums and an English voice (not Bowie; rougher, less refined). A broad smile colonised his face.

"I was able to compress it down to fit on our systems with no quality loss. Not sure yet how much there is yet, but it looks like weeks' worth. Whatcha think?"

Quill stood. "Rocket, I'm gonna have to hug you now."

"Wait, what?" Rocket's bewilderment at the response stopped him reacting until Quill had seized him, the loving grip too tight for his struggles to break as he acked and squirmed. "Would you knock that off! I have a reputation to uphold!"

"Are we hugging now?" The query drew both Quill and Rocket's gazes to the doorway, where a baffled Drax stared at them.

"No!" growled Rocket.

"Yes." said Quill at the same time, still grinning.

Drax considered both statements for a minute, then walked over and wrapped his arms around them both. "I like hugs."

"I hate you both." said Rocket, with more resignation than venom.

"You're all idiots." Gamora stated from the doorway, having apparently decided to investigate the source of the new noise, making no attempt to hide her own smile, either from her face or her voice.

"I am Groot." added Groot, who went over and locked himself around Quill's legs, the group all together as the song exhorted them not to look back in anger. At that moment, anger was the furthest thing from their minds.

Wow.

This is the first time I've ever managed to finish any non-academic writing project. I am a painfully slow writer at times (as the gap between chapters attests) and prone to backsliding and plain old giving up. That this has been finished is down to the folks who gave their favourites, watches and comments. My thanks to each and every one of you. If you enjoyed this then keep your eyes peeled and spread the love.

-BloodiedFox