keepsake

Status: Complete
Published: 07 April 2026
Chapters: 1
Words: 2306
Rating: General
Tags: Mantis/Nebula (Marvel), Nebula (Marvel), Rocket Raccoon (Marvel), the other guardians are also there (a little bit), this is more nebula centric so im not tagging mantis but she is there in spirit. on account of bugborg

AO3 Mirror

Opening Notes:

Original AO3 Note: had a fic that was based off some bugborg art from a few years ago, intermittently worked on it here and there, then i took the vague idea of it and started from scratch and ended up with this. might go back to the other one at some point but for now...there's this :]

Nebula finds her friends in the plaza, sitting at one of the outdoor tables with a spread of colorful stationary between them. They’re smiling and laughing, passing papers back and forth, making an even bigger mess of the paper piled between them.

Rocket notices her first. He’s futzing with some sort of little mechanical thing when he spots her, and as she approaches he calls, “Nice of ya to finally join us.”

The rest of the table looks up at her. “Hey Nebs,” Peter says. He’s holding one of the papers in his hand.

“Mantis sent us letters,” Drax explains before Nebula can ask what this is and what they’re doing.

“Letters?” Nebula frowns. She reaches over Peter’s shoulder and picks one of the pages at random.

It’s definitely from Mantis. Even if Nebula didn’t recognize her looping scrawl (which she does), the colorful selection of stationary and the cutesy designs would almost certainly give it away.

“Letters,” Drax confirms. “She wrote about all of the adventures she’s had since leaving Knowhere.”

“This is terribly outdated,” Nebula remarks, skimming over the page in her hand. “She could have just called.”

“Yeah, but this is more fun. Look, she sent some photos too.” Peter shuffles some papers aside, looking for something.

At the same time, there’s a click and a flash from Rocket’s direction, and then a mechanical whirring sound, and when Nebula turns to him, frown deepening, she realizes this little thing he had been tinkering with is a camera. One of those old Terran ones that printed the photo instantaneously. They’d found one once, years ago, being sold at a marketplace by a vendor who’d come into possession with an assortment of random Terran oddities.

Peter had been thrilled. Somehow, the camera had still worked, and they’d used up all the film that was left immediately. They probably still had those photos lying around somewhere.

Although, looking closer, this one seemed slicker, newer. Looks like it still worked the same, though. Rocket is snickering now that the photo has developed, and he turns it to the rest of the table to show it off.

“Hah! You look so mad,” Drax laughs.

“I’m not mad,” Nebula snaps.

“I am Groot,” Groot says.

And, fine, maybe she did look a little mad in the photo. She isn’t—she’s just…unimpressed, that’s all. It’s not her fault she looks a little mad, even when she’s not.

“Should we send Mantis this photo?” Rocket asks, with a grin that means he is definitely going to send it.

“What?” Nebula demands.

“We’re gonna write her back,” Peter says, “and we are definitely sending her that photo.” He offers her a small stack of photos, apparently the think he’d been looking for before Rocket interrupted. 

“It’ll make her feel like she’s home,” Kraglin chuckles, and Nebula shoots him a withering glare that only makes him wince a little.

Peter swats her with the stack of photos and she snatches them from him with a disgruntled huff. As silly as she finds all of this, Nebula can begrudgingly admit that she’s intrigued, even if only to hear how Mantis is faring on her own.

Everyone shuffles and scooches to make room for her, and soon Nebula has squeezed a chair in between Rocket and Peter, and then they’re pouring over Mantis’s letters together. They shuffle the papers around, swapping letters and passing the little Terran photographs around, taking turns going over one before passing it on.

The photos mostly seem to depict some of the places Mantis has been—colorful forests and strange cliffs, a bustling marketplace and a rainy city lit up at night, to name a few. There’s some other stuff too, anything that seems to catch Mantis’s attention, but the photos don’t interest Nebula much. She spares them only a brief glance before moving on.

The letters, though—Nebula is very interested in those. She takes her time with the letters. She hasn’t really kept up with Mantis on calls. It’s not that she doesn’t care, it’s just that she’s busy with all of the work on Knowhere, with keeping the city running, and Mantis is busy with her travels. The others are better about it, though, and they keep her updated, mostly.

The letters are the first time in a long time Nebula has heard from Mantis directly, even if it is in such an outdated way, and Nebula is surprised by how much she likes it.

There are a lot of letters. It seems like Mantis had saved up a few weeks’ worth of writing—if not more—before bundling everything up and sending them to Knowhere. Some of the letters are long; those usually come after a particularly interesting mission, or a job that didn’t quite turn out the way she’d planned, even if it did end up working out. Others are shorter, when she doesn’t have much new to share, but still wants to write to them anyways.

Some of the letters have little doodles decorating the page. Sometimes they’re nothing in particular—abstract shapes and patterns scribbles in the margins. Other times, it might be a little drawing of some creature or animal she’s encountered, or a strange plant she’s never seen before.

Nebula’s favorites are the doodles of them. They’re quick and scribbley things, more akin to stick figures than anything, but it’s still, undeniably, them.

The one that’s supposed to be Nebula has a huge frown and exaggeratedly angry eyebrows, and even though it makes her snort it also pulls at the corner of her mouth, threatening to pull into a smile if she isn’t careful.

Rocket knows her too well, though. He sees the hint of a smile and wants to know immediately what’s caused it. He snatches at the letter and lets out a loud “hah!” when he sees the doodles. “Looks just like you,” he snickers, and laughs even harder when Nebula makes a face. “Exactly like you,” he repeats, pointing at her frown.

The others want to see what’s so funny, and they’re all delighted when Rocket passes the letter along and they see the little doodles.

It’s…nice, Nebula concedes, to cluster around the table passing Mantis’s letters back and forth, reading about all the things she’s been up to, the places she’s been since leaving Knowhere. It’s even kind of fun, looking at the photos and trying to see if any of them recognize the planets and cities in them.

Really, the only thing missing was Mantis herself.

She should be here on Knowhere with them, telling them about her adventures herself, laughing about a disastrous missing or regaling them with the time she bested some criminals with her powers.

The realization that Nebula misses her is startling, and the intensity of the feeling even moreso, and as Nebula sits there, holding a photo Groot had just passed her, she becomes uncomfortably aware of the prickly tightness forming in her chest.

She tries to shake it off. She tells herself it’s normal to miss Mantis. They all miss her.

Nebula smothers the thought and moves on to the next letter, the next photo. She picks up the first thing her hand touches, and comes away with a photograph.

Most of the photos hadn’t piqued her interest, but this one…this one was of Mantis. It was out of focus and the angle askew, and part of Mantis had been cut out of frame on one side, but it was unmistakably Mantis, and she was smiling and happy and looked so good—

“You good?” Rocket asks, startling Nebula from her thoughts. “Been lookin’ at that for a while.”

She blinks. “What? Yeah, I’m fine.”

“I dunno if I’m convinced, Nebs, you were lookin’ pretty intense there…”

Nebula can tell he’s teasing her, trying to push her buttons a little. Annoyingly, it’s sort of working. Nebula gives him a nasty side-eye and decides she won’t dignify that with a response…not that that stops Rocket’s quiet snickering at her expense.

The tightness in her chest doesn’t ebb even when they’ve finished pouring over all of Mantis’s letters and they start to tidy up. Nebula helps, gathering up a few of the letters in front of her and straightening them with a distracted stiffness.

“You sure you’re good?” Rocket hands her a few more pages to add to her stack, eyeing her thoughtfully.

“Fine,” Nebula says, voice clipped. She does not turn to meet his gaze.

“Uh-huh,” Rocket says, unconvinced, but he doesn’t push it.

The letters are slowly making their way back to peter, who is carefully tucking them back into the large envelope they’d originally come in. Nebula hesitates before handing her stack over. She’s got the photo of Mantis at the top of her pile.

It’s an impulse to keep it, and before she can stop herself she tucks it quickly into her jacket before passing the letters to Peter.

She doesn’t even know what she wants to keep the photo for. What would she even do with it?

Nebula tries not to dwell on it, but the thought circles her brain, thumping insistently at the forefront of her mind while the photo burns a small hole in her chest.

Later, when she returns to her apartment, Nebula will toss it onto her desk where it sits while she pretends it doesn’t exist for a few days, until the next time she sits at her desk to tinker with her arm and rediscovers it.

She looks at it for a long moment, arm forgotten. Heat prickles in her chest, blooming between her ribs the longer she stares at the photo.

Her hands move faster than she can think. She pins the photo to the wall above her desk in a quick, decisive motion. Nebula thinks she kind of likes it.

It looks good there, she decides.

Rocket is at her apartment a few weeks later, banging on the door and hollering something about Mantis.

“Fuck’s sake, what,” Nebula demands when she finally throws the door open.

“Mantis!” Rocket exclaims.

“What about Mantis?”

“Her new letters arrived! Pete’s gettin’ everyone else. We’re gonna meet at the plaza like last time.”

Nebula pauses. “Hang on.” She retreats back into her apartment, and Rocket follows her inside. She doesn’t explicitly invite him in, but she doesn’t not invite him, either, and they’ve been friends so long that it isn’t really needed at this point anyways.

She hasn’t exactly been waiting on pins and needles for Mantis’s next set of letters, but she’d be lying if she said she wasn’t looking forward to it (not that she would ever admit that out loud). Now that it was here, she couldn’t deny that she was eager to see what Mantis had to tell share this time.

She tries to ignore Rocket’s palpable amusement as she hastens to tug on her boots. Almost done…

And then Rocket says, “So that’s where that went,” and Nebula looks up, frowning, starts to say,

“What?”

Only to find him at her desk, studying the photo of Mantis pinned to the wall. “Pete thought he lost it,” he laughs. “Awfully cute of you, Nebs.”

“Shut up,” she snaps, face going hot, and that just makes him laugh harder. “If you tell anyone—”

“What, you’ll kill me? I’ve heard that one before,” Rocket snorts.

“Rocket…,” she says warningly, and he throws his hands up.

“All right, all right. I won’t say nothin’, promise.”

Nebula grunts, placated. At least it was Rocket, she thinks. Anyone else and I would never hear the end of it.

Maybe a week later and Rocket finds Nebula while she’s making her rounds around her latest Knowhere projects. He’s rustling around in his pockets as he ambles up to her, before finally pulling out a small envelope and offering it up to her. It was a little creased and rumpled from its time in Rocket’s pocket, but otherwise fine.

“Got a letter,” he says when he catches up to her. “From Mantis,” he adds, as if it wasn’t obvious, because who else would be sending them paper mail?

“She sent us more mail?” Nebula frowns. It seems far too soon for new letters already…

“No,” Rocket says, “you got a letter.”

“What?”

In response, Rocket turns the envelope over to show Nebula her name scrawled across the back. “All you, Nebs.”

She stares at the envelope as if it might burn her before finally snatching it from him. She doesn’t wait. She tears the envelope open immediately, right there in the middle of the street.

The first thing Nebula pulls out is a letter—well, calling it a letter is generous. It’s a few words—just three, to be exact—scrawled on some colorful stationary, but they leave her frozen, and she reads and rereads them uncomprehendingly several times.

For your wall

She reaches into the envelope again and pulls out three photographs.

They were all photos of Mantis.

When Nebula finally tears her eyes away from the letter and the photos, she turns furious eyes towards Rocket. “You said,” she grits out through clenched teeth, “you weren’t going to tell anyone.”

“Yeah?”

“You told Mantis.”

“Eh, well…I thought you meant the rest of the team.” Rocket shrugs, clearly amused. He’s started backing away now, his task complete.

“Rocket—”

“If it makes you feel better, Mantis was very flattered—”

“You are dead,” Nebula seethes. “I’m going to gut you—Rocket! Rocket!”

But he’s already gone, cackling as he goes. Nebula half wants to chase after him and yell at him some more, maybe shake him a little—

She realizes she’s started crumpling the letter and photos, her hands starting to curl into fists. She immediately relaxes her grip and looks at the photos again.

…maybe she’ll add them to her wall first.

Ending Notes:

N/A