Chapter Text
You may ask one request of me, little boy, rumbled the Beyonder, in a voice more ancient than the nebulae.
Anything?
Anything.
It was too late for Yondu to stop him. No time to shout, no time to plot. He couldn’t even whistle, trussed as he was in the Beyonder’s translucent, starlit coils. All that remained was to watch, as the kid blurted his wish in tremulous soprano:
I want my mommy back, please.
“So,” said Meredith Quill (newly resurrected, still finding her spacelegs, one hand propped on each hip as she scrutinized the Eclector’s Bridge with her floral sundress flouncing at a modest mid-thigh). “This is where you spend your… ‘Day cycles’, you call them?”
Yondu had never invited a Health and Safety inspector aboard. Nor did he intend to. This smug Terran floozy – Quill’s frutarkin' mother – was the next worst thing.
The Bridge had looked spick and span when Yondu stumbled onto it that morning (so admittedly, through the lingering haze of whisky-goggles). However, now that Meredith surveyed his kingdom, the illusion twisted, warped, and faded shabbily around the edges. Each crack in the metalwork dripped with mildew. Mold spores were stirred by antique fans, swirling in lazy tornadoes that ambled the length of the deck before being slurped into the vents at its far end. Cobwebs hung like dusty bivouacs between the overhead pipes.
"S'right," he grunted. "When we ain't out stealing shit."
Meredith flipped back her shiny blonde hair and valiantly ignored the cuss. “Well, this won’t do. It’s begging for someone to contract TB. Peter’s been running around here for a year, you say?”
Kraglin nodded before Yondu could reply. His first mate was superstitious in the way of all the Rockless: them who’d been born and raised in the black, no planet to call their own. The Ravagers had left the Beyonder’s lair with one more crew-member than when they’d entered it and Kraglin had been pussyfooting around Miss Quill ever since (“Not Mrs, please; I never married. Mrs Quill is my mother.”) He tiptoed like the first loud noise might shiver her to nothing.
Yondu was no Rockless yokel. He didn’t believe: not in old space-legends, not in the Rockless’s expansive menagerie of minor Gods, not even, until recently, in Beyonders.
He’d been wrong about that. But on this count, he was certain. Meredith Quill wouldn’t be nearly so easy to get rid of.
“He ain’t dead yet,” he growled. What was wrong with the odd respiratory disease, anyway? Toughened you up, that did. Coughing was good for the core. Yondu himself spent his formative years in a transport cage, sloshing around with the assorted corpses and effluvia of a hundred other battle slaves - hadn’t done him any harm.
Admittedly, Terrans were made of a flimsier stock. But even when Yondu towered over her, implant flaring and eyes flashing devilish red, Meredith Quill didn’t show fear.
“Captain Udonta,” she said instead, giving him a prim pink smile. “Where’s your utility closet?”
If he didn't answer, she'd only ask again. If he persisted, so would she. She would repeat her enquiry over and over, until he lost patience and punted her out the airlock. Then the Beyonder would eat his crew and Quill would be sad.
Yondu treated her to his ugliest scowl. “Utilly what-now?”
“You know. Mops, buckets, brooms...”
“Them on scrub duty use their toothbrushes. Wanna try?”
Meredith, to her credit, didn't cringe. “Well,” she said brightly. “That does explain a lot.”
Quill had taken to pottering in his mom's footsteps. He stuck close as an unweaned pup, like she might vanish if he let her stray from his sight. As Yondu approached, he assumed his usual position: clinging to her thigh, cheek pressed against her stomach so she could wind love-knot after love-knot through his thick ginger hair.
Pathetic.
Miss Quill didn’t push him away as she continued her assessment of the Bridge. Her blue eyes trekked from the rust growing on the disused consoles in the corner, to the scraggly fronds of lichen that drooped like jungle creepers from a ceiling grill. For every shortcoming, her faint frown lines grew deeper.
“Oh dear,” she said. “I'm not sure a year will be enough.”
Stroke, stroke, stroke. She carded Peter's hair, combing snarls and tangles to thistle-fluff. Yondu thought of a mother's hand gripping his tahlei, lifting him by the scruff to be placed in the Starwalker's arms. Smacking him when he cried.
He crossed his arms. “Tough luck, lady. S'all ya got.”
A single year of life wasn't long. Not in the galactic scheme of things – even when granted by a Beyonder. However, Miss Quill had been here less than a week, and she was already contriving to make Yondu’s life as miserable as possible.
There she was in the morning, all bouncing curls and despicably cheerful demeanor. She woke earlier than him and far fresher faced, wielding her mop and feather duster like a Nova Soldier with a plasma rifle on parade. She nipped between the consoles, dusting each illuminated keypad with a deft flick of the wrist, and spewed an incessant mantra of 'scuse me!' and 'just a second!' and 'done in two ticks!'
It was like being pestered by a whinging mosquito that none of them were allowed to swat. Yondu enforced that law personally. It gave him much displeasure to do so, but it couldn’t be helped.
No matter how irritating the Terran was, he told his men, Meredith Quill was not to be killed. Nor was she to be harmed severely enough to incapacitate. She was not to be tripped into the frying vats, nor guided into an airlock at the precise point that your elbow happened to clip the eject button – I said no, Scrote; dammit.
Such caveats were necessary when dealing with Ravagers. It wasn't out of any love for the woman. It sure wasn't out of love for Quill. Yondu had shaped the boy into a half-decent thief: his eyes always darting for danger, constantly alert, always ready to dodge a cuff to the back of his head and scamper to the vent ducts and hide. Now though…
The harsh words, the criticism, the occasional disciplinary smack; all the effort Yondu had poured into toughening him into something that the galaxy would chew on and spit out again rather than swallow? A brush of Miss Quill's fingertips against Peter's tousled red-blond hair was all it took to undo it. To have Quill smiling again, like the galaxy was a fun kid-friendly playground, not a monster even greater than the Beyonder and with far more teeth.
But disposing of the woman wasn't an option. Beyonders were prideful creatures. They took great offence when their gifts were rejected.
While the Eclector had journeyed a long way from the Beyonder’s nest at Galaxy's Edge (looping around planets and stars, sling-shotting from one system to the next by gunning their thrusters at the furthest point of the orbit) they had another week before they reached the jump-port for civilized space. Even then, they would still cross paths with the odd barren ship, her engines silent and her gravity generators offline, half-finished gruel bowls floating in the galley. Relics of those who’d wronged something far greater than themselves, and never lived to tell the tale.
Kraglin had filled him in on the lore. If a Beyonder gave you something, you accepted it with grace and gratitude – and gritted teeth, if necessary. When Yondu had, against the advice of every Rockless aboard, taken his M-ship out to explore the strange unregistered protoplanet past the edge of charted space that appeared to be made entirely from shiny gold loot, he had laughed at such backwards superstitions; the sort of thing he always told himself he’d left behind on Alpha-Centaurii IV. Now…
Well, Yondu’s only solace was that the Beyonder had set a time-limit on this miraculous resurrection. Miss Quill wasn't a permanent fixture.
“I don't like it,” he said to Kraglin as they lay in berth that night-cycle, listening to the creaks of their settling mattress. “I don’t like her. Who the hell does she think she is, swannin’ onto my damn ship and makin’ out like it ain’t up to her standards? I’d like to see her lead a raid. Let’s see her fretting about proper plasma-gun storage regulations when them same guns are shooting at her head…”
Kraglin tucked behind him, chest to Yondu’s back, static from the tabs of his electronic exoskelesuit prickling between them. He shifted uncomfortably – either at Yondu's rambling, or because he was lying in the wet patch. Served him right for having over-productive gonads.
“Miss Quill ain't all that bad sir.” His hitchy tone, each word laid as carefully as a foot on a minefield, indicated he was making the most of the Bedroom Amnesty. Yondu couldn't punish him for shit, not when they were together like this.
He could scowl, however – and he did so with dudgeon. “Say what? She paying you off?”
There was an awkward pause. The arm looped over him tensed.
As a Rockless-born, Kraglin's bones were significantly chalkier than Yondu's own. They were prone to snapping if Yondu rolled on him in the night. Luckily, Kraglin healed at a ridiculous rate to make up for it, so long as you kept him glutted on high-carb foodstuffs and didn’t leave him out in the cold. He charged his exoskelesuit full when they went planetside (or when he really wanted to put his cap’n through the mattress). Otherwise, Yondu kept ship gravity at a low enough medium for his mate not to be pancaked while his own bones didn't atrophy.
He still had to be careful when he elbowed him, so as to not crack each and every one of his ribs. “Well?”
“She may have uh. Been in the galley yesterday, sir. Y'know. Makin' sure all our raw meat's separate from the cooked stuff so we don't give her lil' lad tapeworms.”
That was hardly the whole story. Yondu readied his next elbow. Before he could deploy it, Kraglin continued:
“She found a bunch of flour and yaro extract, sir. Said it reminded her of somethin' they used to make on Terra. Van-ee-lar, or somethin'. She used the oven, y'see. Worked her Terran magic -”
“Not magic. I told you – s'only species like Krugarr who have that. An' they use their magic for fightin' and communicatin', not cooking.”
Kraglin’s scratchy carpet of chest hair plastered itself to the cooling sweat on Yondu’s shoulders. “You didn't see her,” he insisted, with a toothy little kiss at Yondu’s neck. “Mixin' shit together, stirrin' it up... When she popped it in the oven it were just lil' pats. But when she pulled it out again, they was all fluffy an' golden, an' they tasted so good...”
“Bakin',” Yondu said, shaking his head. “Not every species eats raw meat like you do – oi. Quit it; I‘m done. No more, tonight.”
“Magic,” Kraglin insisted. He stopped his hickey-sucking, but his eyes shone liquid at Yondu, over his shoulder. The dampened solars sapped them of their weak blue coloration, leaving them a bottomless black, like the starless chasm of the Beyonder’s lair. “She took flour and yaro and salt an' she made it taste good. Thas magic.”
Yondu was too tired to argue. He pulled Kraglin's arm tighter around him and nestled more comfortably against his limp, smelly pillow. “Sure, sure. You just let her know that next time, she better make enough for everyone.”
She did.
Yondu hated her with the fire of a supernova. But he ate his cookie, and when he told her it was overdone, he lied.