Rocket
Rocket is a cybernetically enhanced raccoon and the engineer of the Guardians of the Galaxy, a crew of aliens from far outside Zootopia's world. He is the protagonist of "What If... a Guardian Fell from the Sky?", the W-Series What-If episode that introduces him and strands him in the Meadowlands for two weeks.
Background
Rocket was stolen as an infant from a planet called Earth and rebuilt by a scientist who called himself the High Evolutionary. The scientist opened him up, wired metal into his skeleton, and filed him under a designation instead of a name: Subject 89P13. Three others were made alongside him, all of them named the same way, as inventory. Lylla was an otter. Teefs was a walrus. Floor was a rabbit who could not speak properly, so she was given a speaker plate and mechanical legs. The scientist killed all three when they fell short of his standards. Rocket fought, ran, and was the only one who got out.
He found a crew afterward and made a family of them. Aboard the Benatar he flies, shoots, engineers and handles demolitions, because the crew never divided itself into specialties in the first place. The implants along his spine still spark, and they still hurt.
Personality
Rocket's first instinct in an unfamiliar room is to fill it. His commentary runs without pause — power-grid architecture, the ventilation on a transit platform, how long a signal light holds — and it does the work of cover. His paws do the same job. He takes apart any system that offends him and reassembles it better, and the habit has less to do with the machine than with having somewhere to put himself. Mantis has worked out that he argues because arguing makes him feel included, which is precisely the observation he has asked her never to make out loud.
Under all of it he is braced for capture. He assumes any government's interest in him ends in a laboratory, because he has been the thing in the laboratory once already and has spent every day since waiting to be put back in a cage. What he does not doubt is his crew. He never speaks about Quill in the past tense, and never once treats the rescue as a hope rather than a schedule.
Series History
W-Series
What If
The What-If episodes are alternate timelines and do not affect the main continuity.
In "What If... a Guardian Fell from the Sky?", Rocket reroutes a power conduit that already works, on the grounds that it could work thirteen percent better, and tears open a rift the Benatar flies straight into. The bay he is working in tears free of the hull with him still inside. Groot's branches reach for him across the breach and do not close the gap. Rocket welds himself into a maintenance locker, rides the wreckage through re-entry, and comes down in a crater in the Meadowlands on a Saturday evening.
He comes up out of it screaming, waving a device he built from crash debris, convinced that a world of mammals in uniforms is another of the scientist's facilities. Luther decides the way he is holding it means fear rather than intent, and keeps his sidearm holstered. Pawbert crosses the perimeter tape with no badge and no authority, looks at the sparking metal along the raccoon's spine, and asks only whether it hurts. Then he offers a paw. Rocket takes it. Minutes later he asks the lynx to lie to ZSI for him, because he cannot afford to be the interesting thing in the crater, and Pawbert catches Luther's eye and the cover story reaches Costa intact. Walking the streets afterward, Rocket tells the pack the truth about the rift and his crew. Then he passes a raccoon on the sidewalk in a blazer, carrying coffee, going to work, and stops dead. "And nobody MADE him?" The question follows the four of them the rest of the evening.
The pack takes him home. Over two weeks he trades his alien clothing for Zootopian at a raccoon-run outfitter, where the shopkeeper asks whether he is new to the neighborhood and does not appear to want much of an answer. He rebuilds the toaster twice, redistributes the mansion's power, frees up a back-gate hinge that has stuck for as long as the pack has owned the house, and reassembles a transit turnstile without permission so well that Judy can talk her way out of the complaint. Pawbert brings him along to Zootopia Reentry Services and he recognizes the work on sight, because building a life out of wreckage is the only trade he has ever had. And the city keeps handing him his dead friends whole: a walrus named Russ on the Marsh Market dock who answers every question in one syllable and is entirely at ease being enormous; a rabbit stranger reading on a park bench, unhurried and unremarkable; an otter family at a fountain, two parents and two pups. Rocket sits down and stops talking. Nick finds him there, offers his own muzzling as collateral, and gets the disclosure back: Rocket was taken apart and put together wrong. Nick answers it by insulting the name of Rocket's home planet, and it works.
The wall keeps thinning after that. At dinner, Judy asks who did that to his back and Rocket tells all four of them, and Pawbert answers with his own version of being built into someone else's weapon and credits his way out to somebody who stayed. The next morning Rocket admits to Judy why he keeps looking at her, and what Floor was, and what she might have had here. He asks Pawbert to take him back to the weather wall, and stands there with both paws flat on the shimmer, comparing it to the climate-controlled habitats the High Evolutionary built for his experiments, and rules that this one is better. He field-strips Luther's sidearm in seconds and hands it back improved, and the two of them recognize each other as operators who chose family and took the desk that came with it. On the back porch he finally asks about the word he has heard through the wall every night, the one his translator flattens into a dictionary entry. Pawbert gives him "always." Rocket offers Groot in exchange, three words that carry every meaning there is, and decides that every family has their word.
When the rift opens a second time and the Benatar comes down on the lawn, Rocket looks up at it the way anyone looks at something arriving on schedule. He always knew. Quill offers him the chance to stay on a planet where nobody would ever look at his back and see a project, and Rocket turns it down, because his crew cannot survive two weeks without him and the ship is home. Before he goes he sets down the thing he has been assembling upstairs every night since the crash: Zootopia in rotating light, every measurement cataloged off the streets, built from the start as something to leave behind. He made a second one for himself. The goodbyes are calibrated one at a time — Pawbert kneels for the hug, Nick promises to teach him roarball, Luther is told he is good at staying, and Judy turns out to be one of the few mammals Rocket has to look down at — and Groot's branch finds his shoulder at the ramp. Aboard the Benatar he meets Thor and Korg, grants Thor permission to remain as though it were a favor, and settles back into the engineering bay with the second hologram under the console and Pawbert's wooden spoon, which he stole, beside him.
Key Relationships
Peter Quill
Quill is the captain Rocket complains about and the reason he never doubts rescue. Two weeks of the Benatar's fuel, favors and contacts go into finding him, and the reunion arrives as an itemized bill for a lost engineering bay rather than anything Quill could say straight. When Quill offers him a life in Zootopia he means it, and Rocket turning it down is not a rejection of the offer.
Groot
Groot has one sentence and it carries everything, and Rocket is the one who hears the difference. Groot reaches for him as the ship breaks apart and puts a branch on his shoulder at the ramp when he comes back, and in between he does not pick up his game once. The "I am Groot" that means everything at once is what gives Rocket a way to understand the pack's own word.
Pawbert Pawthorne
Each of them was built into a weapon by somebody else, and each of them got out from under it, which is the kinship the episode is built on. Pawbert's mother's green sweater and Quill's mixtape turn out to be the same object, and the wooden spoon leaves with Rocket by unspoken consent.
Judy Hopps
Judy is the one Rocket cannot stop looking at, and she is the one who makes him say why. Her answer is to be glad he found them rather than to offer to stand in for anyone.
Nick Wilde
The muzzle taught Nick what it looks like to watch a life you were supposed to have, which is why he is the one Rocket tells first. His refusal to treat the disclosure solemnly is what makes it survivable.
Luther Pawthorne
Two operators who each traded the field for a family and took a desk as the price. Luther covers for him with ZSI against his own obligations, confiscates his improvised weapon and never returns it, and takes a compliment about staying that he has no idea what to do with.