"This," Peter said with deep and tipsy reverence, "is the biggest pile of money I've ever received for not being evil."

They'd liberated the planet from Badoon mostly by accident, in a chain of events truly too ridiculous to comprehend or retell. Gamora remembered most of it as a sort of hazy whirlwind punctuated by explosions and Rocket hooting in her ear. But by the end of the day, beyond all expectations, they had won. The restored local government behaved in a way completely unsuitable for any government Gamora had ever known, and rewarded them without being prompted. Thus: this gigantic pile of money.

They were celebrating on Milano, combining copious amounts of alcohol with licking their wounds. Gamora, whose enhanced metabolism had truly tragic effects when it came to serious drinking, sat polishing her sword and watching everybody, trying not to miss the moment when Peter would switch from "excessive verbiage" to the "ALL MUST DANCE" state of drunkenness, in order to make her escape in time.

Instead, Peter struck a pose over their treasure and delivered a speech.

"Friends, compatriots, fellow delinquents!"

Rocket chucked a bottle cap at him and an affronted Drax growled, "I'm not a delinquent!", but Peter swept both away with a too-wide wave of his arm. Gamora smiled to herself, because Peter on a roll was always entertaining, and drunk Peter on a roll was outright riveting: the best fun always started when he trotted out words of four syllables or more.

"We are now filthy rich! And we can make our way to Knowhere and its many beautifully horrible bars (and weapon shops, of course, don't glare at me, Ranger Rick), and so return to our beloved state of destitution, but! But I have a better proposition for you! I say we take this disgustingly gigantic pile of money and use it - wait for it - to build ourselves a Batcave!"

This earned him an obligatory "Why would we need a cave for small furry flying creatures, friend Quill?" from Drax and a whole barrage of bottle caps from Rocket (and would've earned a bottle, too, had Groot not gently and quietly taken it out of his paw mid-throw). Gamora waited for Peter to make the wounded your-refusal-to-recognize-my-meaningless-terran-references-hurts-me-in-my-soul face and lose it in a grin, stretched and settled in more comfortably to enjoy the show.

"A lair. A fortress! A homebase. A home away from home! Or, let's call it what it is, a place where we can walk around without stepping on each other and sleep without hearing each other snore, and won't fight over the bathroom because everybody will have one."

"I don't mind hearing you snore," Drax (whose snores could be sometimes mistaken for engines working) said plaintively, "and I don't understand why we need a lair."

"Yeah, Quill, what're we, mud-dwellers? What about all your space-traveling romance claptrap?"

"The 'space-traveling romance' is not going anywhere, come on, we're Guardians of the Galaxy," - a group groan as each of them clearly heard every capital letter - "but just imagine, somewhere to stretch our legs between jobs! A workshop for you to make your bloody bombs so I won't have to wake up with sharp, deadly, pointy bits poking me in the back! A training space for you hulking martial types to pummel each other without bumping into furniture! Bedrooms with doors that close! A greenhouse for Groot to grow!"

"I'm Groot", suddenly intrigued, and that made Rocket sit up and take notice, and that tipped the whole conversation from 'Peter being ridiculous' to 'something that might be actually happening'.

Drax was already demanding a garden, Peter was sketching shapes in the air with choppy, overreaching movements, and Gamora tried to taste the idea, rolled the word around in her mouth, worried at it with her tongue. Not 'home', of course; but 'house', 'house'... maybe. Just maybe.

Gamora thought the plan would dissipate with the alcohol fumes, but the next morning it turned out that Groot had neither forgotten nor let go of it, and what Groot wanted, Rocket got. And so the hunt was on.

"We need somewhere nice, and quiet, and close to some boring peaceful civilization so we can get supplies easier, and…"

"Just not too close to any boring peaceful civilization because, let's face it, sooner or later somebody would come to kill us, fuck our shit up and steal our things, and it'd be easier to deal with if nobody was underfoot."

"Peter," Gamora said after an awkward beat of silence, "you're getting paranoid in your old age."

"Me? Me? Does nobody remember what happened last month?"

Going by a collective wince, everybody remembered what happened last month.

"Point taken. Well then…"

Gamora vetoed an asteroid Peter (who was, for all his speeches about greener grasses and wide open spaces, a mildly agoraphobic spacer through and through) was making excited noises about. She didn't tell them it reminded her of Thanos' domain, but nobody pressed the issue anyway.

Peter took one glance at a beautiful ice planet just on the outskirts of Spartax space and said "If God wanted me to live in snow, I'd have fur," and that was that, as well.

Rocket waxed poetic about that one world that held one of the best armories in the known universe, but folded when Groot tasted the air and at once pulled in his budding leaves and flowers.

Drax found them a place he knew once, skipping the cities and bringing them to the untouched wilds, and when Milano glided over the plateau to a mountain lake, Gamora felt her breath catch for a second as she saw the mountains rise over it.

They tumbled from the ship and were embraced by the deep, resonant silence; she saw Peter open his mouth and close it again, cowed just a bit. There was a taste to the air, a clean and strong scent she couldn't recognize; a color to it, too, the deepening violet blue of the twilight.

They took Groot with them, who had grown slightly taller than Rocket by then, and could spend short periods of time outside of his jar. He stumbled forwards with a frantic burst of speed, and when they caught up, he was already settled by the lake, roots burrowing deep into the earth.

"I am Groot," he said, his branches already growing and flowering, and something in Gamora's heart swelled with joy.

"So…" Peter began, and Rocket said over him, "So we're staying here, no vote."

Gamora said, "All in favor," and went to watch the moons rising in the lake.

They paid the local government a slightly obscene amount of money for the land and a second, definitely obscene sum for being quiet about the purchase, and then ran headfirst into the problem of how to handle the building process. Nobody wanted to bring in anybody from the outside to do the work, but neither did any of them have the slightest idea of how to do it themselves.

In the end Rocket contacted people Gamora didn't want to know anything about, took Drax with him in lieu of Groot for support and menacing presence, claimed half of their remaining units, flew somewhere Gamora definitely didn't want to know anything about, and returned with a Creation Kit, an almost impossible-to-obtain set of nanites that could be grown into structures on command.

It turned out that having the means didn't mean having the knowledge: the first group effort, performed with much enthusiasm but not much experience, left them with a misshapen building that collapsed on completion and cost a third of their priceless nanites.

After that Gamora stepped forward. She had never appreciated math and geometry the same way Nebula did, who saw the precise, faceless beauty in equations and impossible intersections of lines, but her level of knowledge was applicable - and she wanted to do it right.

She collected dozens of contradicting requests from the crew, spent two days considering angles and pressures, aisles and arches, corbels and bearing walls, and finally chased everybody away and set the nanites to work.

The common room, with a transparent roof to let the stars in; the kitchen; the armory; the fighting room; the library; the wings of spaced bedrooms, the bathrooms; the cavernous cellar where the generators would go, the storerooms, the medbay, the wide terrace wrapping around the building. The underground hangar thrice Milano's size; the workshop for Rocket, far away enough to protect the house from the worst of disastrous experiments; the delicate ribs of the greenhouse growing weblike over Groot's branches.

At some point she closed her eyes, and she was the house itself, stretching its wings slowly, settling on the ground, breathing in the silent air. The eyes of the dozens of windows, the tendrils and veins of communications twining through the structure, the eyelids of shutters and doors. The fluttering of numbers and angles behind the solid reality of walls.

She held it for as long as she could, urging the last of the nanites to take their places, and when she finished on a final, endless exhale, she opened her eyes (regret, regret) and the house stood before her, solid and softly gleaming in the sun.

She stretched and felt vaguely resentful that the house didn't stir with her movement, then just ridiculous, then full of joy.

From behind her, Peter whistled softly, with unfamiliar reverence in his voice.

"Would you just look at it, oh."

She looked again and cringed.

"What was I thinking? The windows - this terrace - it would be impossible to defend, it's useless - how did I - "

"I'm Groot," Groot said gravelly from the shining greenhouse doors with something like reproach, and Drax said, "It's beautiful, Gamora," and Rocket said, "You leave the defences to me, okay?"

So she did.

Rocket fulfilled his promise by spending three days in the basement with a stunning array of highly illegal equipment, building a forcefield shield around the whole area. When asked how strong it was, he said, "If this planet ever gets annihilated by killer space rays, we'll have fifteen minutes to get away," and after that nobody felt like asking anymore.

Peter, in turn, celebrated their new house by taking one of the small scout ships they'd bought and disappearing for five days. He returned with a blissful expression, a fading black eye and a brand-new audio system, a replica of the one in Milano. They mock-groaned at him in unison, but Rocket lasted exactly ten minutes through his attempts to install it, and then took over.

They drank to their new house ("A lair, you have to call it a lair or it doesn't sound right") in the still-empty room and danced and laughed under the stars. They ended up sleeping in a pile of bedding dragged from the ship, boneless and content.

In the morning, Gamora went to one of the far bedrooms, caught in the twilight, carefree state between sleep and waking. She was still trying to make the walls turn the exact shade of blue she remembered when Peter said from the doorway, "Do you think you can lure her in with color-coordinated walls? I've never considered having walls the same color as your skin a perk."

She flinched violently and turned on him with a snarl, viciously satisfied to see him stumble back and raise his hands in surrender, horrendously embarrassed.

"Gamora, chill, I get it, everybody gets it, okay? She's your sister. Granted, she's your homicidal, crazy, evil sister, but it's not like any of us has a leg to stand on in that regard."

It took the fight out of her; she felt the familiar exhaustion creep back in. "It's just a flight of fancy. You're a bad influence on me, that's all. Of course she wouldn't…"

"Well, to be fair she hijacked a ship and flew away, instead of hijacking a ship and flying back to electrocute you some more. If that's not a declaration of sisterly love, I don't know what is."

She smiled, almost despite herself. "She did say she hated me least of all our siblings."

"See? Job half done, there. And she can't be a worse dinner guest than Yondu."

That distracted her for a second: "Are they really cannibals?"

Peter grimaced. "Uh, I don't - they never ate anybody sentient as far as I know, okay. I choose to believe that it was just a horror story they made up to fuck with me, and I'm sticking with that theory for the sake of my sanity and sound sleep at night."

They grinned at each other, and Gamora trailed her fingers along the wall, the color rippling in their wake, finally settled into the correct shade. "Drax is not going to be happy if I ever find her."

"Drax broke some guy's mandibles a month ago for calling you 'the hound of Thanos', and was smug about it for weeks afterwards. If you want to bring Nebula that much, he'll live with it."

"Do I, though? We're not even of the same blood. And yet…"

"And yet, family. We get it. And there's universe and time enough."

"There is," she said, "maybe there is."

They all knew Rocket had nightmares: it was impossible to conceal anything on a ship of Milano size. The bedrooms in their new house ("Lair," Peter said petulantly in Gamora's head) were vigorously soundproofed, but Gamora still woke up with a hammering heart and dry mouth, hand reaching for the sword lying by her head.

She took some time to make sure there were no intruders in her room, then put a robe on and padded quietly into the corridor. She glimpsed the lights in the workshop through one of the windows and left the house, shivering a bit at the bite of the night wind. She decided that if Rocket was building one of his violent delights, she'd leave him alone, but if not…

He was sitting by the worktable, one paw still in a sling from their ended-up-using-plan-D job before, staring at nothing, eyes dull and glassy. She knocked on the doorframe slightly, went in and leaned on the wall. Slow movements, open arms; slowly, slowly.

"Hey," he said flatly, and she said "Hey back" and made a hole out of her silence for him to fill.

"I wanted to finish this engine but I can't remember how to do it. The parts are all here and none of them fit."

"I'm not sure anything fits anything else at this hour of the night, Rocket."

"But I always can - I should always know how to do it. I do - I make things - if I don't make them, if they're not right, what can I even - "

"Rocket," she said as gently as she knew how, "how about we go visit Groot? I think he sneaks most of his growing in at night."

He stirred at that, losing some of his awful rigor. "He's probably asleep, I shouldn't…"

"Nonsense," she said, "we most definitely should. Come on."

She walked him to the greenhouse, picking her way through the wet grass. Inside, it was still and dark, but she heard the controlled, steady hum of his growth, of straining green life. She stood at the threshold, letting Rocket do it alone, and not three steps in Groot stirred and stretched his limbs towards Rocket, his voice resonating between the glass walls.

"Don't talk nonsense, you dumb tree, I'm fine," but he was still walking forwards, "I'm fine, I just wanted some fresh air, and your place has a roof - "

She smiled to herself and went back to the house, glancing back once to see Rocket curling up by Groot's trunk, branches twining about him gently.

In the morning Rocket wasn't there, Groot was silent and serene, and she found Drax there instead, planting something in the soft soil.

"A garden after all?"

"I was a farmer on my home planet, you know. Our family grew crops for generations."

"I wouldn't have thought it."

He kept at his work, a steady, unfaltering rhythm to his movements; she watched, mesmerized.

"When Ronan killed Yvette and Kamaria, I left my fields. I wanted to destroy everything, to kill everybody in my way until it was Ronan. To bring destruction and destruction alone."

She stayed silent, considering how much more terrifying it sounded from a man as literal as Drax; and how familiar.

"Friend Gamora, now I think they would like me to grow things again. I'd like to, in any case?"

"I'll be honored to watch them grow," she said, and it wasn't a lie.

Sometimes, Gamora decided, the world should be more discerning when providing a backdrop to their lives. At this specific moment, she and Quill were separated from the others, surrounded by the group of slave ring guards - former guards, to be correct, since the ring itself was now ruined - and Gamora just felt that cheerful sunlight and rustling grass was not quite proper for what they were doing on their impromptu battlefield.

The Universe didn't care.

She slashed and leaped, a well-worn and comforting cadence. When she got enough space and breath to check on Peter's progress, she saw him dancing: weaving in and out of enemies with gleeful abandon, step-step-step-swirl to a jaunty rhythm. Though she couldn't hear it over the din of shots and shouts, his lips moved along to a familiar song, not losing the thread even when he shot one of the guards in the face point-blank and twisted around to kill another.

The silence came before the stillness, as always. She pushed her remaining opponent off her sword to finish dying on the ground, and looked across to find them the last ones standing - her, Peter, the sunlight.

She cleaned the sword, walked away from the carnage and sat cross-legged, a warm stone at her back, welcome post-fight lassitude stealing through her, sweet and golden. Tipped her head back and didn't stir when Peter's shadow fell over her, didn't move when he sat down.

"Do you know it's sort of disturbing when you fight that way? Shouldn't you be our conscientious captain of good morale?"

She opened her eyes just in time to see him fall back, rest his head on her crossed ankles and grin at her upside-down. A year ago he wouldn't have dared. Six months ago she'd have had her knife to his throat before he finished his movement. Today, she smiled back.

"Gamora, Gamora, light of my life, I was raised by Yondu and his merry band of Lost Boys. I only pass for sane because you guys are crazier than me."

She ghosted her fingers against the fresh red gash on his cheek, looked at him, considered.

"Was it truly bad? With them? You were very young."

She should have felt as if she were trespassing, but didn't. There was something in the sun, the quiet, the blood drying on their skin and clothes. She didn't think he'd mind.

"Not really? It should have been, maybe, but they took me, you know," and there was nothing but the same languid quiet in Peter's voice, "on the day when Mom died."

"She was sick for a very long time, and pretended she wasn't, at first, and all these adults, family and friends, they all came to help, and they'd talk and then fall silent around me, and all the aunties would be poor Peter this and poor kid that, and at some point I just. I just realized that she was dying, only it was happening and happening and happening, so slowly. Like a dream, but it lasted forever. Like breathing underwater."

She listened to his breathing, to her own, to the leaves rustling overhead.

"And when she died, and I should have - expected it - and still didn't - I ran away. Yondu picked me up not fifteen minutes later, and it made so much sense. My entire world ended and took me with it, and this was a whole new world and a whole new me. Waking up."

"Not the best place to wake up, the Ravager ship, was it?"

Peter laughed, surprised, and glanced up at her.

"Oh, I'm still not recommending Yondu's babysitting services to anyone, believe me. They scared the shit out of me for the first several months, but a ship is a ship and space is space, right? And then I knifed the asshole who tried to - well, never mind - and Yondu decided it was the most amusing thing since sliced bread, and suddenly I was his favorite mini-Ravager, and we were fine. Still terrifying, but mostly fun. In a terrifying way."

"Haven't you ever wanted to go back to Terra, since then?"

"What for? It's just a dream I had once."

There's music at your belt that says that's a lie, she thought of saying, and stayed silent. Peter hummed a snatch of a melody, something that wasn't on his treasured tapes, and she leaned against the stone again, closed her eyes against the light. His hand crept up and found one of hers.

Then there was a whine of engines in the air, and Rocket's voice booming from the sky ("Hey, you two! Only assholes hog all the fun!"), and it was, maybe, time to get up - but they both stayed where they were. Just for a little while.

She left the house before sunrise, chased by a weird, formless dream of falling through space. Her room yawned behind her, empty of anything but furniture and her sword, left by the bed.

She crept through the hallways on silent feet, touching the doors slightly as she went. The remains of her contact with the nanites whispered quietly in her mind, bringing her glimpses of what lay inside.

Peter's, consciously or unconsciously mimicking his bunk on Milano, crammed with his useless precious treasures from all over the Galaxy; Drax', spacious, speared by sunlight in the late afternoon, white except for a motley rug Peter had gotten him at some faraway market somewhere and a gleam of his knives on the wall; Rocket's den, full of sharp and metallic things, with a tangled nest of pillows buried among them, and a wall knocked out into an adjascent room, where Groot slept with his leaves turning towards the sun that would come through the windows. Nebula's, empty, waiting for her voice and touch.

The walls of the main room held the echo of music and laughter; the door of the training room made her skin tingle with the remembered sweat of effort; the library whispered with Peter's voice. In the greenhouse Drax' flowers were getting ready to bloom.

She dropped the forcefield with a quiet command and walked slowly to the lake. Left her clothes on the shore and dived soundlessly in.

She made her way to the middle of the lake, muscles burning pleasantly with the shocking cold of the water, the last cobwebs of her dream trailing behind. The house was waiting to wake up; she thought she had to solve - something - before waking up along with it.

She thought: if I'm not of Zen Whoberi anymore, and not of Thanos, and not of Nebula, and not of my past, who am I?

At the center of the still dark water she lay on her back and looked at the sky.

Told the stars: "I'm Gamora. I'm home."