Three months passed in silence. Then, a flicker. A holographic transmission crackled to life—distorted, half-static, but unmistakable: a child’s scream, overlaid with the cold voice of a genetic architect calling himself . He had found the last remaining specimens of Rocket’s original batch: Lylla’s final genetic echo, buried in a cryo-vault on the edge of known space.
Peter showed up with a terrible haircut and a bottle of Zarg Nut liqueur. “I was doing dishes on Missouri,” he muttered. “You owe me.”
The Last Beacon
The Unraveler was no warlord. He was a curator of extinction, a collector who believed love was just a chemical error to be corrected. “You Guardians pretend to be family,” he sneered, as his tendrils of light wrapped around Rocket’s throat. “But I’ve seen your memories. You’re just broken things clinging to each other so you don’t float away.”
The Benatar stayed docked. No one needed to run anymore. Guardian Of The Galaxy Volume 3 -2023- HDTC 108...
Rocket clicked his mechanical claw against the glass. “To being broken,” he said. “Together.”
On Knowhere, rebuilt as a garden of floating lanterns and laughing children, the Guardians sat around a crooked table. The Lylla-clone—now called Lylla-Two , or “Lily” for short—ate her first bowl of noodles. Groot played her a song on a leaf-flute. Drax told a joke that made no sense and everyone laughed anyway. Three months passed in silence
“You built a family once, 89P13,” the voice hissed. “Let me show you how easily it unravels.”