He wakes up to cold fingers on his face. It takes every single ounce of sense within him that those are not Yondu's hands, frozen in the vast expanse of space. He cracks open his eyes and winces against the fluorescent lights in the main hold of The Milano. He leans forward in his seat, wincing at the pounding in his head. It hasn't gone away since they left Ego's planet a short number of hours ago. They left behind Yondu's glittering ashes- a pang rattles through his chest, and he ignores it- and the Ravager ships that had sent him off. They had left Mantis behind on a nearby planet, after she expressed her wish to find someone else to soothe, as each of the Guardians silently agreed an empath put them all a little on edge.

They had flown to a nearby system to just- float. They were all a little numb. Sure, they were the "Guardians of the Galaxy." But it was less a promise and more an employment tactic. Of course people were more likely to hire them if they went by a name like that than something like "A Previous band of Criminals, who like, Saved the World Once or whatever." But they weren't expecting to actually save the world. Again. (Peter hoped that they wouldn't make a hobby of it.)

He had settled in a chair, mind simultaneously racing at high speeds and so slow and numb he wasn't sure he knew how to function anymore. It felt like a piece of him was missing. (He reasoned with himself he was likely feeling an Ego-and-his-Planet shaped hole that he had never before realized existed. He wasn't sure what to do with the information now that he was aware of it. For now, the best solution was to pretend it didn't exist.)

There's a blanket across his lap. He figured he must have fallen asleep. (And, alright, he gets it. He was not meant to be a detective.) It takes him a long moment to remember once again the fingers on his face. He blinks blearily upwards and realizes that those fingers are attached to an arm. Which is attached to a person. That person is Gamora.

(His brain is at, like, 30% capacity- at best.)

"Oh." He says. "Hey." She gives him an unimpressed look, and he pushes his brain to fire up at least two more neurons, so that he can create a minorly intelligible sentence.

"Touching my face?" He figure that's good enough, and doesn't bother with useless things like proper grammar. Pssh. She continued to give him an unimpressed look.

"Your forehead is hot. Is this regular in humans? Or… celestial beings?" She asks, concern coloring her tone. (Peter has to hold in a giggle at that thought. Coloring. Haha. Because, you know, she's green.) It takes his brain a long moment to process what she said, and formulate a response that doesn't worry her and doesn't make him sound like a complete idiot.

"Did you just call me hot?" He replies sluggishly. And then blinks, thinking about the words that just exited his mouth. Then shrugs, because it is definitely not worth it to come up with the complicated words it would take to explain that he's fine. So he clicks his mouth shut.

Gamora pulls her hand back, giving him a look that says she's letting it go for now, but only because he is so exasperating he is not worth her time. He shrugs, a smile pulling lazily at the corners of his lips based on instinct. She scoffs, and leaves the room, heading back to wherever it was that she came from. (The destination is not worth Peter's dwindling brain power.) He slides downwards in his seat until his head hits the top of the seat, a sigh escaping his lips. He closes his eyes, and drifts off to sleep in a matter of seconds

—

He wakes up again, later, in his bed. He doesn't want to think too hard about how he got here, because there's currently only one teammate who can carry him, and it is entirely too awkward to think of Drax carrying him to his bed bridal style. He shakes his head to clear the image.

"Star-Munch!" Peter's Head jerks towards the door, and he sees Rocket standing there, a mass of wires and parts in his hands. (Peter, at this point, has deemed it prudent to just stop asking what Rocket is tinkering with, because he usually has to sit down afterwards and rethink his life choices.)

"You're awake! Jeez, you've been sleeping like the god-damn dead in here. Such a buzz kill. There's nothing fun to do around here without making fun of you!" Peter blinks at him.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

The blinking does not help him understand the jumble of words just verbally lobbed in his direction. He grunts out a response that he is fairly sure is almost a word, and turns over into his side, fully prepared to go back to sleep.

"What the hell? Quill, those aren't even words." Rocket waits (im)patiently by the door for clarification on the mumbling- tapping his foot, crossing his arms, the whole nine yards. His waiting is futile, however, as Peter has gone back to sleep.

Rocket walks over, for once making an effort to keep himself quiet. He sets his mound of wires down on Peter's nightstand with a soft clunk. Peter does not stir.

"Um… Quill?" Rocket comes close enough to see his face, and sees that his mouth is slack, eyes closed. He lets out an exasperated sigh, one hand going to rest on his hip, and the other to massage the creases in his forehead. After a moment, he drops his hands back down to his sides, all the while grumbling quietly. He reaches out a small hand, his target Quill's forehead, to bump until he wakes up.

He never gets there.

Peter's hand snatches his out of the air. His grip is strong on Rocket's arm, and he winces in pain.

"Quill what the- what the hell, man?" Rocket tries unsuccessfully to pull himself from Peter's grip. His fingers are like steel, and Rocket is trapped. He looks up towards Quill's face, ready to give him a tongue lashing the likes of which the other man had never experienced.

He stopped short as he saw Peter's face.

Although his eyes were open, he was obviously not coherent. Sweat ran down his pale face in rivers, and Rocket shivered in disgust. The man shivered with him, and after a moment Rocket noticed his shirt was sweat soaked. Rocket once again tried to pull back, but to no avail. So Rocket was left with his least favorite option. Reasoning.

"Quill… Peter. Come on, man, what the shit are you doing? Stop being so weird, and just let me the fuck go." With a last, vicious pull, Rocket drags his arm back into his own possession. And Peter down onto the floor. He shakes his arm out, as if it'll fling off the non-existent Peter cooties.

He turns, at last, to make sure that Quill didn't do something dumb- like break his neck when he fell off the bed- and is surprised to find Peter on the floor, clutching his hands over his eyes, and maintaining a consistent muttering that Rocket couldn't hope to understand. He leaned down towards the floor, bringing his face somewhat close to Quill's so he could hope to understand what the other was muttering about, curled around himself.

"Don't touch me… don't touch me… don't… my mom… my eyes… the stars." Rocket stood back up abruptly. He was not meant to deal with this shit. He high-tailed it (no pun intended) towards the door, leaning out and yelling, at the top of his lungs.

"Gamora!" He swept back into the room. As much as he was unequipped to deal with this (and boy, wasn't that a new one. Rocket, not having enough equipment,) he was not just going to leave Quill on the floor to choke on his own spit or...whatever. His reasonings were solely based on the fact that Gamora would flay him alive if Quill died on his watch. It was not because he was worried. Nope. Never.

After a few moments, Gamora comes careening into the room, a look of panic on her face and a sword in her hands. Drax is not far behind her, expression steely, baby Groot on his shoulder, and a pair of giant knives in his hands.

"What the shit, you two! Put down the sharp skewers and help me." Gamora and Drax take this entirely too literally, and let their weapons thunk to the ground without a second thought. Rocket has to jump out of the way of their skittering weapons.

Gamora comes forward, kneeling down in front of Peter and pushing sweaty hair out of his eyes. Rocket wrinkles his nose in quiet disgust.

"I was researching humans while Peter was asleep." Gamora says with no hesitance, as if that is not totally, 100% creepy. "I believe this is a common sickness. He should be fine if we place him in his bed and make efforts to cool and hydrate him. He may be delusional-" Rocket cut her off his a scoff, and she turned to him with one eyebrow raised. In that moment, she looked every bit the assassin she was born and bred to be. Rocket gulped.

"He was just… muttering. Before. He was talking about stars… and his mom?" Gamora had, by then, placed Peter back into his bed. She turned to look at him for a moment, before sighing, and losing some of her imposing figure.

"He's probably reliving the battle with Ego. And, consequently, losing Yondu. It's in his recent subconsciousness." Rocket let himself process the information he had just been given.

"Ok so… he's stuck in a nightmare?" Gamora gave a nod to Rocket. "You said the way to unsick him or whatever was to cool him down. Do we just stick him in the freezer or something?" Gamora gave him a look, and he put his hands up in mock surrender.

"A wet cloth." Grumbled a voice from the doorway. Both Gamora and Rocket turned in surprise, having forgotten of Drax's presence in their hyperfixation on Peter's condition.

"What?"

"A wet cloth. On his forehead. This will cool him down. I used to use this on my daughter." Drax crosses his arms, as if daring the two of them to argue with him. Gamora and Rocket looked at each other, and Rocket shrugged his shoulders in a clear expression of why the fuck not.

—

Peter woke up with a wet coldness on his forehead. He cracks open an eye and can only make out a blurry figure, perched on the edge of his bed. They reach towards Peter's forehead, and he jerks back sharply.

"No, Ego, no." He doesn't wanna see the stars. He doesn't want to think of the tumor in his mom's head and he doesn't wanna think of her on the bed, flatlining. He pulls his knees to his chest, pushing himself hard into the corner of his bed, and refuses to come any closer to the hands reaching for his forehead telling him "I'm no longer alone." And he can't convince himself of the same, the dark, endless nebulas and Ego's plans swirling behind his eyelids. Once again, he drifts off into sleep.

—

He wakes up to his team perched anxiously around his bed, a safe distance away, staring at him. He clears his throat.

"Uh… hey? Why are you guys… in my room?" They all seems to lose some of the tension in their posture at his words.

"You were… sick." Gamora says hesitantly. "I believe you are better now? I am not sure what sort of illness you had contracted, or from where, but you were very hot and sweaty." Peter feels like there's a joke to be made somewhere, but he is entirely too exhausted to find it.

"Oh. A fever? I think you mean a fever. This happen sometimes. Sometimes from exhaustion?" Rocket crosses his arms and leans back into the corner nonchalantly, as if moments before he was not just as worried as the red of them.

"You humans are so fuckin' fragile." He grumbles. If Peter detects the underlying relief in his tone, he chooses not to comment.

At that moment, baby Groot decides to climb into his lap, garnering his attention. As he ropes his vines around Peter's ears and pulls himself onto his shoulder, it is then that Peter realizes he is pressed up against the corner of his bed and the wall. His brain stops short. Why the hell was he sleeping sitting up?

"Why… am I sitting in the corner?"

Rocket winced.

"You enjoy sleeping sitting up." Drax said, with absolutely no hesitation. He then turned to Rocket and whispered in an unintentional stage whisper. "Do you think he believed that?"

Everyone in the room rolled their eyes simultaneously.

"Drax. I know that I do not, generally, sleep sitting upright in a corner." Gamora stood, moving away from her chair in the corner and taking a step towards the bed.

"You were stuck- in a nightmare. We believe that you were reliving Ego's attack on you, trapped in a dream that you could not escape. You would not allow us to touch you." Peter winced.

"We- I… what happened, before we got there?" Rocket asked. For once, his voice was soft. His usually ever-present accusatory tone absent.

"When…" Peter pauses to clear his throat, voice suddenly hoarse. "When I was on Ego's planet… Ego tried to convert me to his side. He touched my forehead and all I could see was the stars, my vision was filled with all his plans in a grid before me mapping between nebulas and galaxies and creating some bullshit nefarious blanket." He pauses again to heave in a breath.

"And I loved it. I wanted it. It was amazing to look at the stars and all the cosmos and forget what always has been and focus solely on what could be. Then he- he told me the truth about my mom. He said that he put the tumor in her head. He said he-" Peter heaves in a shaking breath. "He said he had to. As if he had no choice." Rocket's expression is steely.

"Peter-" Gamora begins to protest.

"It's fine. It let me break the trance. It was worth it, in a way. And at least I know the truth, and I can stop idolizing the asshole."

"Q- Peter." Rocket's gruff voice catches Peter's attention quickly. "You went against your own flesh and blood, promises of immortality and infinite power- for your family. If I didn't know how strong of a person you had to be to do that, I might call you an idiot." They all look at Rocket in surprise, having expected a joke or jab. Peter smiles sadly at him.

"I may have been able to snap out of of it because of my family from Earth. But… it was you guys that allowed me to fight back. To take control of that same power and use it to protect the universe- to protect you guys. It was my true family that got me through it." They smiled at him, and he smiled back.

And God dammit, if he wouldn't do it all over again for this bunch of assholes. They were a team.

They were a family.