#i can speak/write abilisk now

[raccoonfallsharder]

what kind of names do you think Mantis would give to her new abilisk friends? though at the end of Vol. 3 she collectively calls them her "babies" as they evacuated the Arête and i think that's already heckin' adorable

i've been thinking about this since you sent it. i would love to know what you think, actually. i love mantis but i don't know enough of her canonical background to say anything with confidently, and i honestly cannot decide. so here are a number of things i considered:

i thought about tiny mantis, with baby fat still in her cheeks and eyes even wider than they are now, her antennae always glowing. she tells peter that ego swept her away from her home planet after she was left orphaned in her larval state - but a god like ego can't be bothered with raising a child. i thought maybe, after she'd help him fall asleep, baby mantis would sit and swing her legs, and dream herself up some imaginary friends. you've probably never seen a more sad or lonely thing than tiny mantis, wandering the lush and vibrant terrain of ego the living planet: bickering with the ghosts of her dreamed-up family, playing some self-taught variation on tag or hide-and-seek by herself.

i thought maybe she named her adopted abilisks after them.

and then i thought that - ego is not exactly a reliably storyteller. perhaps he told a young mantis the story of his charitable adoption of her so many times that she believed it - and since she was so young, she'd have no reason to question it. but maybe she was not simply orphaned. maybe he orphaned her the same way he orphaned pete, destroying a family who loved her so much, who had such hopes for her. maybe she had two older siblings who couldn't wait till she was big enough to play with, and they made up all her days and nights and joys and fights. they probably had nicknames. maybe the younger one was still enough of a baby to mispronounce everything, and mantis held onto that memory: the slightly tilted and childish pronunciations, wobbling with affection. maybe her conscious mind can't recall them, but when she reaches out to her abilisks, she finds those innocent, almost-meaningless names rising up in her lungs like flowers. she doesn't know why - she just knows they're there, right on the edge of her antennae.

then i thought maybe mantis would name them the most mundane names possible. very "human" or terran-esque: gladys and john, maybe. maybe she thinks they are very cool names. or she knows exactly what she's doing and thinks it's hilarious.

or - and here's the one i think i like best -

maybe she doesn't know what she's named them.

mantis is not a telepath, but she is an empath. at the end of vol3, she speaks to her babies with a little purring chirrup. she probably doesn't know what it means - not really - but she knows the associations. she knows the vibes.

the sense of come with me˚ ༘ ೀ⋆.˚

the sense of of go with me wherever i go༘*.ﾟ and of ༘ ⋆｡˚i will go wherever you go, too

did that little trill mean come along⋆.˚જ⁀➴ or did it mean * ੈ♡‧₊˚we are companions or did it mean ⋆-ˋˏlet's depart into the silvered sky together✩₊˖°˖⁺‧

mantis doesn't know, but she knows it feels like all of those things.

do the abilisks have names for themselves? maybe. maybe not. mantis will probably never really know. but she probably asks them, because that's who mantis is. i like to think she takes all the little chirps and purrs and clicks and rumbles that feel best to them, and that's what she uses to call and speak to them. words that mean something like ༘⋆✦⋆ ˚｡home and love♡✧˚ ༘ and embrace✲ﾟ｡⋆ and my child, my darling, my little one.ೃ࿔*:･₊⊹

you might think, how silly, that mantis has inadvertantly named the slightly smaller one something like ✧˚ ༘⋆｡Sweetie-Pie♡˚ in their language, and the even bigger one now goes by a series of warbles and churrs that are close to ༘⋆-ˋˏAdorable Baby. after all, they're four times her height and like a hundred times her body mass mass and they vomit interdimensional glitter and rainbow confetti whenever they get anxious, like very large and very nervous cats. but even if mantis knew what she was calling them, she wouldn't stop. and they wouldn't want her to.

all three of them, together, know that she would cuddle them up and tuck them into her heart, and keep them safe no matter what.

#rfh asks #mantis headcanon i guess? #i can speak/write abilisk now #rfh headcanons #mantis #abilisks #gotg headcanons #guardians of the galaxy headcanon