#he is a grief stricken child he is a homicidal maniac he knows more than everyone combined he is a naive child

[bartholomew-junior]

my beautiful son his name is hydrochloric acid with a side of every disease

[sarkastically]

Drifting in the Black

(Spoilers for GotG 2 so you might not want to read if you haven’t watched it yet. Always warning for cursing and mentioned but not explicit child abuse.)

Sometimes Peter imagines conversations with Yondu--dead dad Yondu he tells himself and then laughs until he cries, tells himself he's laughing anyway because that's better than admitting that he's just choking on years worth of tears and sentiment for a man he always held at a distance because that man never, couldn't really because he didn't even know how, showed him how to hold him close, how to hold anyone close--in the twinkling space between worlds, in the coldness of the stars, in the silence of the enforced night cycles when the rest of the crew sleep. Peter walks the halls and mutters to himself like some fucking loon, like a Ravager, and pretends that Yondu saunters along beside him all sharp quick smile and big open laugh and nonsense words and threats that don't mean much in the end except as a way to save face. Though Peter has not forgotten any of the blows that rained down on him, mostly bestowed by Yondu's hand, the hand of a man who never knew gentle and couldn't parse it, couldn't offer it when it was needed.

Peter's not excusing his behavior, the years of emotional and mental and physical abuse that were heaped on him by the man who swore he'd eat him, kill him, the same man who choose not to take him to his homicidal maniac planet father all those years ago because it was wrong. Yondu had a shaky sense of right and wrong, one built as a slave to the Kree suffering unknown horrors that Pete won't ask Kraglin about because he doesn’t want to know and doesn’t want to put the other man through saying, but Yondu still figured out that Ego was wrong. And that meant a little more than the money he'd pay. Enough to save Peter's life.

He remembers being thirteen and skinny but getting taller, starting to become all limbs and cracking voice, and how Yondu would show him how to use all sorts of weapons, just the two of them, when the crew would be on R&R or out doing a job. He remembers one blue arm wrapped in leather that smelled like something out of a garbage shoot wrapped around his shoulders and holding him tightly for a moment, just a small, precious little blip in time that passed by too quickly because he realized what was happening and Yondu realized what was happening and it. It wasn’t in their emotional language. And how empty his shoulders felt, how empty his heart felt, when Yondu pulled away with a gruff sort of laugh, tugging at the neck of his jacket as though it had canted strangely. He remembers how Yondu whistled then, and they both watched that arrow soar through the air and catch falling leaves until they had forgotten about the span of moments when they were not captive and captor, when they were something else, something a little bit closer.

He remembers:

“I bet you’re nothing like your father. Must be like your momma.”

“How would you know?”

“I don’t. I’m just saying.” A beat. “Cause you’re soft.”

And how Peter had taken those words, how he had turned them over in his head and made something terrible out of them. Soft from Yondu’s mouth had to mean something bad. Soft as in easy to kill. Soft as in worthless. Soft as in not a Ravager. And how Peter had told himself he had to prove him wrong. How he had built walls ten thousand stories high, walls no one could get through, and then stood on top of them and laughed, fucking laughed with his head thrown back in a challenge like the way Yondu himself laughed, like he had finally beat all of them.

Nowadays, walking the halls at night with only the music from the Zune for company, that and the ghost of Yondu that lives somewhere between his heart and his head because Peter can never get it right, he wonders what the man actually meant by that exchange, if he meant it the way that Peter took it. Or if it was something else?

“He might be your father, but he ain’t your daddy.”

“I bet you’re nothing like your father.”

“Cause you’re soft.”

After meeting Ego, after knowing Ego--someone else, someone more inclined to turning over the meanings behind things might contemplate how apt a name that was, but that is not what Peter does so he will leave it for Gamora who will suss it all out and then probably never tell him about it until he needs to hear it but doesn’t want to hear it like she always does--Peter knows that Yondu was right. Peter is nothing like Ego.

But he’s not completely like his mother, either. There are pieces of Meredith Quill in him, no doubt. A lot of her. A world of her. But there is more than that. His mother was kind and giving and gentle. She was, as Yondu had said without ever knowing her, soft, but that was her strength. Peter has not been able to achieve this feat. It is greater than he can ever dream of being.

He remembers:

He had run from the hospital as fast as his legs could carry him, and he had been so angry with her. How dare she? How dare she be sick? How dare she make up some crazy story about his father being from the stars? How dare she leave?

He had run. Out. Into the night. To escape. To hide. It was all too much for him at that moment. It might have been too much for him forever, but Peter never got the chance to find out. That chance was taken from him.

By a bright light. By a blue man with a red stripe down his head and facial scars and bad teeth and bad breath and a weirdly warm laugh even if it sounded like a monster waking up, reaching from the cool darkness of the world that existed under the bed.

“I’ll eat you, boy. I’ll feed you to my crew. Just you hush up right now.”

And Peter, stricken with fear and grief and anger, had done the only thing he could think of, he had reached a hand into his backpack and pulled out a toy, a KITT car, that his mother had given him and thrust it at the blue man as though it were a weapon, as though it were a knife that he could stab and kill him with. Just a car. Just a simple, tiny trinket, a bobble. Nothing expensive or fancy or good. Just plastic and metal, cheap, a throwaway toy, but Peter had loved it. His mother had given it to him. It was his favorite TV show. It was the best thing that he had other than his Walkman, which he would never give away, not even to save his life.

He thrust it out like a shield, and Yondu took it. In wonder. In awe.

Peter didn’t understand the look on his face back then, but he does now. He understands it. Because he saw that look in small glimpses over the years. He saw it when Yondu died. For him. Because he was--is, will always be--Yondu’s son. It was shock, yes, it was awe from a man who had been given so very little over his life, who had to take everything he had in whatever fashion he could.

And it was the start of care, of love, though neither of them really understood what that meant, how to express it.

“Soft,” Yondu had said not as a curse, not as a criticism, not as something that needed to be washed away. “Soft,” as a compliment, as a mark of honor, as something to aspire to, as something that he had never known but maybe would have liked to. In some other life. Some other universe. Some other Yondu that neither of them will never know because all those chances are gone now, drifting in the black.

Sometimes, walking the halls, wandering the night, listening to Cat Stevens, which makes him cry in the sort of fashion that Yondu would have scoffed at and teased him over, Peter wonders how things would have been different if he had never handed that car over, if Yondu would have taken him to Ego instead of kept him, raised him, fathered him in the ways that mattered even if they weren’t great, even if they weren’t what a kid needs. He doesn’t know. He can’t say. Yondu’s mind, as ever, is a mystery to him, something alien still.

Though his heart, that arrow flying through the air, that arrow that struck people down in the thick of battle who dared to get close to Peter, that arrow that protected him first, last and always even when he could protect himself, is something that he has begun to understand. Now. Only now that it is gone.

“I bet you’re nothing like your father.”

He carries that phrase, and he hopes that Yondu was right.

“Must be like your momma.”

“I am,” Peter Quill whispers into the night, hand pressed against a pane of thick thick glass as he peers out at the swirling stars, stars that Yondu saw, stars that Yondu is spread across now as dust and char in the Ravager way, the way that he wanted. “I am like my momma, but maybe I’m a little more like my daddy.” He thinks, he imagines, he hopes that a star winks at him the same way that Yondu would at those words.