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“Do you know why you’re here, Mr …”
She trails off. The ‘r’ goes on for a while and Rocket tapped his foot to a nonexistent rhythm. He grinned.
“You’re really not gonna help me out here?”
“Nope,” Rocket replied, popping the ‘p’ before his lips returned to the same curled position.
“Alright.” She nodded. “Do you know why you’re here, Mr Raccoon?”
“Gah, now that just sounds like somethin’ off of a kid’s book, scratch that,” Rocket protested, his face scrunching up to form a grimace.
Since he’d first entered the blinding white room, Rocket’s back was completely slumped against the couch, his legs falling wherever was most natural—and that had apparently been fairly wide apart. To him, that is. One arm dangled behind the cream couch and the other rested on his thigh.
“You chose the name yourself, didn’t you?” The woman smiled with a lower of her head. She pushed up her rectangular glasses on its bridge with a knuckle on her finger.
Rocket’s eyes narrowed. “Yes.”
“I suppose the quote on quote ‘kid’s book’ aspect didn’t cross your mind when you were deciding on it?”
She had a clipboard in her hand and a pen in the other. Though, currently, the hand with the pen held her knee with the pen intertwined in her fingers whereas she kept the clipboard snug on her forearm, holding it by its metal clip at the top.
Rocket sighed, looking away. Even the floors were a bright white.
“What exactly are you writing on there?” Rocket asked, crossing his arms when his eyes made their way back to the woman.
“It’s not anything you’re going to tell me, if that’s your concern.” She readjusted in her seat, leaning a little closer this time. “It’s only so I can remember the things we can work with.”
The smile that seemed to leave a permanent mark on her face was gentle; there was a glint where the light met it, like she had been wearing baby pink lipgloss.
Rocket pressed his lips together every time he was on the brink of spilling just a little bit of his bile onto the glass coffee table between them. Years and years of torment, self loathing, disgust and vomiting all kinds of colors wasn’t really something Rocket had planned on unpacking. He’d had it in the bag for probably two decades, maybe a few more years—unpacking it would make putting it all back so much harder.
It’s not an item he’s unpacking, they’re not even items—they’re pieces. The way they’re deep within his guts was meticulously placed there to fit, nevermind they’re jutting out in every direction and tearing him from the inside out—it fit. That’s all that mattered.
“Okay, maybe we should start somewhere else … Groot tells me you’re a mechanic. A pretty good one at that,” she spoke up, Rocket’s eyes darting back to her own. She was digging into him, he could see it in her gaze—it never left his. But then again, Rocket had been looking away for some time now.
“A little bit of an understatement, but sure,” Rocket remarked in a pitchy voice. He shrugged.
“How so?” She quizzed once more.
Rocket frowned.
“Don’t expect me to do it right now, ‘cuz y’know, I don’t want to, but I can make stuff from basically scrap metal.” Rocket scratched the underside of his chin. “It depends though. I’m not a magician. A lot of people seem to think that.”
“Was it something you had to practice since childhood? Or were you always good at it?”
Rocket’s ears twitch. His chest floated.
Was he really going to do this?
Time, experience, effort—all of it is irreversible. How does Groot know this is going to make it all better? That the jagged pieces will no longer impale him when he’s through? What if it becomes a mess on the floor by the time he’s done?
What if she’s lying there along with it? Blood, guts and all?
But Groot said he believed in Rocket.
Rocket can still taste the coffee Groot made on his leather lips.
Groot believed in him.
Rocket exhaled through the small gap in his lips. His chest sank.
“I was naturally good at it. I didn’t have a good childhood.”
Rocket’s eyes were stuck to the floor below the glass coffee table.
There was silence. Usually the woman was always equipped with a question related to his response, like she could barely wait to pick him apart, piece by piece—but there was silence.
Rocket glanced up at her, not lifting his lowered head to see a crease in her brow. But they were also a lot lower the last time Rocket had looked at her.
She opened her mouth, looking down and blinking. “First of all, I’d like to say that I know that couldn't have been easy. I’m—”
“Proud of me?” Rocket finished, raising a brow.
The woman chuckled, her eyes lifted. Rocket frowned again.
“No. I’ve barely met you. I was going to say I’m glad,” she corrected, pointing her pen matter-of-factly. “What about your childhood, Mr Raccoon?”
“Okay I’m only saying this because I’m uncomfortable with those two words together, so it’s either ‘Rocket’ or ‘Raccoon.’ Pick one,” Rocket grunted.
“Okay, Rocket,” she emphasized on his name with a wider smile, and Rocket felt something twist in his stomach. “Go on.”
Rocket huffed through his nostrils. Averting his gaze once more. The walls were eerily blank. A cement canvas, forbidden from ever meeting color.
“Long story short, I was raised by a big bad scientist who made dolls outta’ animals and treated them like they were just that. Dolls,” Rocket explained in his usual gruff voice. Low and unaffected, it was everything he was.
“I’d like to ask about that, actually. The word ‘dolls.’ Why do you use that word?”
She asked this while quicking jotting down something on that big clipboard of hers she held so dearly in her arm.
Her eyes were keen on him right after she’d finished.
Cause that’s what we were to him probably wasn’t the answer she was looking for. And judging by her narrowed gaze, she seemed to have some sort of trust in Rocket regarding this. Like she was examining him. And she was. That was the whole point of this.
At this point, sighing had been the equivalent of letting out exhaust from a pipe, drumming to life before he’d let his precious possessions leave his grasp to be eaten and mangled by the rats.
“He was the manufacturer. And then, he was also the patron, the buyer, the audience, whatever you wanna call it,” Rocket paused. His lip trembled. He put a fist to them, giving them some sort of support to rest on.
When he looked back at her, she nodded once in response.
He swallowed his saliva coarsely, and slowly disconnected his knuckle from his fist. “So, basically, if you had fat in areas that weren’t ‘optimal’, he’d cut it right off of you. And if your parts were useless, he’d either throw them away like trash or stick metal into it like it would fix everything that was wrong with you.”
She nodded a little bigger this time, scribbling something again and looking back up at Rocket.
“I understand that’s obviously a horrible experience, but I want you to tell me what you feel or felt. Don’t be afraid to say what’s on your mind, because everything you say has substance. I want you to understand that.”
Rocket shook his head, now finding that his frown was not going to wane any time soon, even if it formed a cramp in his facial muscles. His eyes, specifically where they landed on, felt like they were chained to a weight he couldn’t see. A weight he couldn’t lift. Looking at the woman was an endeavor.
“Pain,” Rocket spat through gritted teeth. “He didn’t even …
“He did even use anesthesia.”
Rocket saw her eyes flicker from the corner of his eye, and he shut them as his brows dug further into the dip of his eyes.
“It’s stupid,” he sputtered with unstable lips.
“No, it’s not,” she cut in.
Cut in, ha, that’s convenient.
“You wouldn’t know,” Rocket insisted, his head shaking a little faster now. He resolved to putting both his hands over his eyes as he threw his head over the headrest.
“Everywhere I go, I see people saying that have shit. Baggage. ‘Trauma’, whatever you wanna call it. But you find out what it is, and it’s always similar to something someone else said. Me? I don’t come from anywhere. Yeah, Raccoons are from earth. But I go there, I’m nothing like the animals there. They don’t understand me when I talk to them. And then I come here, supposedly where people would understand, I go to multiple planets and get thrown into multiple prisons, but everyone calls me an animal.”
Rocket’s vision becomes muddled. The lights are swimming around, fusing with the ceiling. It’s blinding. It makes him see some other colors. He continues to stare.
“That’s all I am. An animal.”
Shit. It’s becoming familiar now, too. Fuck. The blinding lights. The dilating ceiling. The inability to move. The shivering cold brushing his fur in a quick swipe to his skin.
He lifted his wrist. He could lift his wrist, it was just difficult. But he wasn’t bound to anything. He had to check.
“I’m done,” Rocket sniffed, standing up all too abruptly only to feel the way his head protested in a wild spin.
“Rocket, we still have—”
“I can’t. I’m sorry.”
“Please, just at least finish this session—”
But the door slammed shut before he fall further in.