Mantis landed in a cloud of emotional residue, weeping uncontrollably because she could feel the sorrow of a dying star three systems away. Nebula came silent, her mechanical arm replaced with a wooden prosthetic carved from Groot’s first branch.

But the moment that mattered wasn’t the explosion. It was after.

That’s when Peter Quill, completely sober for the first time in years, swung a ship’s battery into the Unraveler’s face. Drax threw a child’s sock puppet that exploded into a gravitational singularity. Mantis touched the clone-Lylla and wept so hard that the otter’s programming cracked, revealing a flicker of real fear—real self .

Drax arrived inside a child’s backpack, having shrunk himself to fit through a dimensional rift. “I taught thirty-seven orphans to fold socks. This is less relaxing.”

“Who are you?” she whispered.

And Groot—teenage, lanky, and self-conscious—stepped off a comet. “I am Groot,” he said quietly, which meant: I grew legs just to be here.

Rocket didn’t hesitate. He sent a single coded message across the quantum frequency—the one they’d all promised never to use unless the galaxy itself was ending.

Rocket clicked his mechanical claw against the glass. “To being broken,” he said. “Together.”

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.”

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.

The Benatar stayed docked. No one needed to run anymore.