So, there was another prompt on guardian-kink. I felt the need to write backstory before working on a fill.

Un-beta'ed.

- o - o -

Charlie-27 dies first.

Yondu is facing away from his friend, whistling and sending his arrow into another bad guy's throat, and then Charlie is falling to the ground, gurgling and choking on his own blood. Yondu's arrow clatters uselessly to the ground as the Centaurian falls to his knees next to Charlie, cradling the man in his arms. Almost unbidden, tears start rolling down his cheeks. It takes Yondu a few seconds to realize that the person chanting "no, not him, please not Charlie" over and over again is him.

He shrieks, then, a raw, animalistic noise of pain and sheer, unadulterated anger. Charlie-27 is the first person Yondu met who never treated him like a savage. Charlie-27 treated him like a person and taught him to speak Galactic Standard and beat the shit out of people who told him to go back to his tree. Simply put, Charlie-27 is the first – and probably only – person Yondu considers his friend.

The shriek lights his crest up and the arrow lifts off the ground. If Yondu had paid attention, he'd see it rocketing around the battlefield, putting holes the size of his fist through the people he and the rest of the Guardians had been trying to stop.

It's not enough, because Charlie's patting his face with a bloody hand and coughing up blood as he tries to speak and Yondu can't make out what the man is saying.

The team takes Charlie to a planet he'd mentioned a fondness for and burn him, letting a breeze scatter his ashes to the four points. Yondu whistles a mournful song for the dead from his homeworld.

The team is never the same after that.

- o - o -

So, what did you think? Good? Bad? Want more of the other Guardian team? Drop a line and let me know!

*The prompt this is based on mentioned that Yondu was, in a different Marvel timeline, one of the original Guardians of the Galaxy. This puts them in the same timeline, decades apart. More or less.