Yondu's first memory is of being crammed into a cage with three other boys. There are other cages stacked all around them, and there is an overseer stalking down the thin aisle. His voice is raised so that they all can hear him.
"You are here because you were unwanted. You are here because even your parents thought that a bit of coin was worth more than you. But because you are here, you have a chance to become part of a greater purpose. A chance to fight for the glory of the Kree! You will earn this right by blood." He paused in the middle of the floor. "Or you will die like the rats you are."
The words are garbled because the translator chip implanted in Yondu's head is cheap and only newly implanted. It throbs, and he has to fight the urge to scratch at it.
One of the other boys gives in to the urge. The site of the injection grows infected. He dies.
Yondu is stuck in the cage with him until morning when the overseer throws the corpse out and dumps it in a bin with the others. He spits on the grill. "Weak trash."
These are Yondu's first memories. Anything before that fades quickly, replaced by these truths:
He is hungry. He was unwanted. He must be strong or he will die.
Everything else -
His father fights like one of the warriors of legend, his eyes burning with hate. He stands in front of the door, guns firing in a constant rhythm.
"Zana, take him and - "
The Kree shot finds his heart and steals his words.
Zana vaults off the balcony and rushes for her son's room, wishing it were not so far away. The shot that killed her husband is bright in her mind, but it only adds speed to her run.
There is already a Kree warrior in her son's room. Zana snatches her knife from her belt and charges him.
"You will not take my son!"
The Kree warrior looks up, surprised. Her knife sinks into his neck. She snatches her son from his crib while the warrior falls.
She never sees the blast that sinks into her back, but she turns as she falls. With her last moment of life, she makes sure that Yondu is cushioned with her body. He is not harmed by the fall.
- is just a daydream, and Yondu has no time for those. With the drugs the Kree are pumping into all of them, it takes all he has to remember his name. He's not sure what he did yesterday, never mind how he got here. If the Kree said he was sold onto them, well - Yondu has no reason not to believe it.
He is a battle slave and normally that means being posted on a warship, manning the dangerous guns in conditions that kill most slaves within a year, or being drugged into a berserker rage and unleashed in a horde on a target.
If there's a reason Yondu is picked for weapons' testing instead of those tasks, he never learns it. He's too busy cursing the scientists to care to.
His last three subjects have died. He needs results soon, or his head will be the one on the chopping block.
"Get me the hardiest slaves you can," he demands.
The overseer grabs some of the older boys at random. He figures that if they've survived this long, they must be tough.
He wakes up with a long fin sticking out of his head. It's attached to some kind of metal plate. He fights the straps holding him down and spits out every curse he knows.
When they give the survivors arrows and talk them through how to work them, there's a mention of how, if this works, Kree warriors might get them.
Yondu imagines the arrow going through the speaker's throat.
He works harder than the others. He is determined to make this work.
Yondu practices long into the night. He pours all his hatred, all his fear, all his desperate longing for freedom into it.
The arrow dances for him even when the others can barely get theirs to twitch.
When the Ravagers attack, the others' do what they have been broken into doing. They fight their masters' enemies.
Yondu finally puts his arrow through that speaker's throat.
And the overseer's. And every other Kree he can find.
He meets the Raveger captain's eyes and tries to sound confident when he says, "I'm coming with you."
Stakar Ogord looks around at the damage and says, "All right."
Yondu relaxes, just a bit, satisfied that his skills have won him a place.
Stakar Ogord lives by few rules, but he holds to those rules he has.
Two of those rules are: Ravagers don't deal in slaves. Ravagers don't deal in kids.
Yondu's definitely one and possibly both, and Stakar likes his spunk. The kid's all but bristling with spines now, but he's got all the makings of a Ravagers, and Stakar figures the code will sink in given enough time.
Yondu joins the crew and survives the only way he knows how: Fiercely, with blood, and by not letting anyone get too close.
Some of them sneak beneath his walls anyway. He figures as long as he acts like they haven't, he's still fine.
Once Yondu has his own crew, he keeps to the code, more or less.
The Ego thing doesn't count. The kids are fine.
There's this one girl from a race of telepaths who spends the whole ride there talking nonstop in his head. Yondu's glad to be rid of her.
Right up until that night, when he suddenly hears her screaming in his head, a scream that is abruptly cut off.
Yondu can't quite talk himself out of unhearing that.
The whole crew heard that scream, and someone blabs about it.
Yondu never forgets the look on Stakar's face when he casts the deciding vote and Yondu is exiled.
Yondu's ready to spite all of them. Ego, Stakar, the whole galaxy.
So he takes Peter. And he keeps him.
And the whole thing eats at him until he'd run after Stakar if he thought it would make the other man give him another chance.
He remembers the cages. He dreams of the cages.
It's that feeling of helplessness that seeps into his bones as they drag his men out into the void of space.
They'd dragged the dead away and dumped them into bins, but only when morning came, and until then they were pressed against him, and he'd tried to save some of them, but he never, ever could, because he didn't know how -
He's going back there. After all this time, he's going back.
But Peter's in trouble.
And Yondu knows he did that boy wrong, but he knows that whatever Ego will do is worse.
He doesn't know how to be a good father. He never had an example.
Yondu's father roared defiance at the Kree raiding party and kept fighting till they shot him down, because his wife was behind him, his wife and his boy -
But Ego's way is wrong. He knows that much.
And this time he's willing to let himself get thrown away. He's willing to not do what it takes to survive this fight if it means Peter will.
His last memory is of his son's face.
A/N: I don't own Guardians.
Presumably, after that whole disaster, the Kree abandoned the arrow idea, and Yondu eventually worked out a smaller fin for himself.