Translators are strange things. It took him a long time to figure out what certain things meant, as the translators were always literal. (Later, he would wonder if that was the cause of some of Drax's trouble).

He remembered when they had given it to him. Held him down and pressed it to the skin just behind his ear and his hand cried and struggled and hadn't understood.

And then suddenly he did.

"Fucking kid, more trouble than it's worth. I say we kill it now," one of the space pirates said, clutching his hand where Peter had bitten him. dark, reddish black blood ran down towards his wrist and covered Peter's teeth.

It had taken Peter a long time to realise that they weren't actually calling him 'it' as a sign of ownership or as a slur. In fact, they weren't calling him it at all. Their species was non-binary and there was no way to make the different genders equivalent to the ones in English, so the translator defaulted to 'it' instead. Sure, the other things they called him were slurs and they definitely thought of him as property, but... but they weren't calling him 'it'.

That... Peter wasn't sure if it made him feel better or not. He had spent his first months on the Ravager ship being degraded and beaten and treated as nothing more than luggage. He had hated every minute. Just because their use of 'it' wasn't part of that, he was supposed to feel better?

He hacked his translator, making the new default 'he'.

It's Yondu who tells him, laughing, as Peter stands over the body of his first kill.

"I'm not an It!"

"What?" Yondu frowned, face scrunched up, and then he laughed and laughed. "Kid," he said when he wound down, "that's the default pronoun. You don't have a word for the word we've been using, but it's not 'it'. That's just the translator." Peter stood there, blood on his hands, blank faced.

The man (was he a man? Was he a he? He was an it now, dead and cold and without life) lying at his feet was the worst of his tormentors. He called Peter a thing, a toy, a slave. Cargo, he called him. Peter could take that. He could take the beatings, the difficult and dangerous "chores" (like cleaning the bulkhead with his tongue, and getting whipped every time he hesitated), the... the other things they made him do.

But the man took his music. It had been three months and they had taken everything else he had come aboard with. Yondu said he'd get it back if he ever proved himself useful. But he'd managed to hold onto his music.

It was all he had left.

"What's this?"

"It's mine!"

"Nothing is yours. You are nothing. Eventually, Yondu will get over whatever his thing is with you and we'll eat you like the animal you are." He snatched the walkman from Peter's hands and backhanded him across the face for good measure. "You know, I really don't understand what he sees in a thing like you."

Peter didn't really remember what happened next. Just that the man was dead and he had his music back.

Yondu called him his son after that. he gave Peter his things back. He sprayed his mother's cassette with something that Yondu promised would preserve it.

"Primitive technology," Yondu had told him. "It'll wear out soon enough if we don't take care of it. This will make it last." They covered the rest of Peter's belongings too, and Peter hated himself for being grateful.

Things got easier after that.

Not much, but some.

He found out later that the man he'd killed had been Yondu's favourite before Peter had been brought on board. That he had simply been jealous of the attention the new boy was getting.

And Peter had killed him. Sure, he deserved it, but still.

It became important to him, preventing misunderstandings. He kept fiddling with the translator, fine tuning it, refining it. it wasn't perfect, it would never be perfect, but it was better than it was.

So of course when the misunderstanding came, it would be with people who mattered. Sure, he'd occasionally gotten slapped by a one night stand for calling them 'he' when they were intersex or a third or fourth gender, but that didn't really matter. He could always charm them back. Besides, he didn't really care whether they were he, she or other. When your partners were all aliens, little things like gender stopped mattering so much.

It's Rocket who confronted him, but they were all there. All looking at him like he was scum and he hunched his shoulders in for a second before standing tall.

"What?" he asked.

"Why do you keep calling Groot 'he'?" Rocket asked, his tone acidic. "I thought you were just being stupid at first, but you keep on doing it and he doesn't like it."

"I am Groot."

"What? I..." then it hits him. the translator. Groot must be an 'it' or a non-translatable gender. He laughs a little and shakes his head. "That's what this is about?"

"This is not funny, Quill," Gamora said, her arms folded across her chest. He hadn't realised it was an issue, he knew the other three all came from binary species (or rather Drax came from a tertiary species but they had male and female analogues as well as a third gender), and he hadn't really thought about it beyond that.

"No, I'm sorry, I..." he ran a hand through his hair, trying to find the words. Slowly, haltingly, he begins to explain. "It's my translator. I have it default to male rather than 'it' when it comes across a gender term it doesn't recognise."

"What?" Drax frowned, head tilted slightly. "What is the point in that?"

So he told them about his childhood, about why it's important to him, and Rocket's face slowly cleared of anger into something more like empathy. Groot picked the racoon up and sat him on his shoulder.

"Idiot," Rocket said when he was done, but his tone was fond. "You should have just turned off the gendered option. That's what I did."

"What do you mean?" Peter asked and Rocket was across the bay in seconds, grabbing a tool kit on him way. He climbed up onto Peter's lap and grabbed his head, tilting it to the side to give him access. "I'm not sure..."

"Shut up, Quill." So Peter shut up and let Rocket work.

"Ow, hey," he ducked his head as an electric shock arced out into his skin.

"Oh, don't be such a big baby." Rocket fiddled with a couple more things. "There. Done. Someone explain tree genders for this guy."

"Groot's people only have a single gender," Gamora explained. "Zir is what you might call intersex, or bigendered. When you call zir 'he' or 'him' you're lessening zir. You're taking away from zir identity."

Of fucking course. He rubbed at his forehead. He had tried so hard, he had been working so hard not to treat people how he had been treated, and of course he'd screwed it up and managed to constantly offend one of the nicest beings he knew.

"Groot, buddy," he said, "I'm sorry. I didn't realise. I just... I couldn't call you it."

"I am Groot."

"He says he gets it, you're a moron. It's fixed, it's fine," Rocket translated, and Peter huffed.

"I am Groot," Groot said, sounding vaguely chiding, and they all knew that Rocket tended to translate more the spirit than the letter of what Groot is saying.

"I really didn't realise," Peter emphasised. "I'll stick to using your words from now on."

"Well, your translator will take care of everything except gendered pronouns," Rocket explained. "So you won't have that excuse anymore."

"Do your people truly only have two genders?" Drax asked, eyebrow raised.

"Don't most species?" Peter dodged because he knew it was more complicated than that, but he had no idea how to explain, especially when he only had a child's perspective on it.

They all start talking at once, lecturing him on the intricacies of gender throughout the galaxy, and Peter smiles, content to listen.

These people, his friends, they won't ever think of him as something less, as an object. As cargo. And he knows he could never think of them like that.

Just to clarify, yes, I know Groot is male in the comics. I have no problem with that. If I ever met Groot and he self identified as male, I would respect that.

I was thinking about how aliens are often given human characteristics such as being mainly bipedal or having the same standards of beauty and morality etc. Or you know, basically being a human being, just a different colour. And I thought that of all the characters, Groot was the furthest physically from a human and I decided to play with that a bit. I decided on the idea of gender because the way trees reproduce is quite different from the way humans reproduce and I thought it would be interesting.

I'm not saying that Groot is necessarily agender, just that his species has a different way of identifying genders than we do. It also fitted in nicely with my head-canon for Peter.