Author's Note: This is my attempt to retell the Ogords' backstory, keeping the comic book canon elements I liked and trying to merge it into the movie-verse canon. This will be a 3 part fic, mainly covering the adolescent years of the characters and ending right after the ending of "For Whom the Bell Tolls". Enjoy and please review!


A Narrative on Legend Founded

By: Silver Spider

When Aleta first heard Meredith speak of Terra, she thought that perhaps that was what Arcturus IV was like many generations before her time, before the whole world went to hell and fractured beyond repair. Like Terrans, the people of Arcturas harnessed the power of the atom and, with it, nearly destroyed themselves. In the aftermath of their exchange, only two factions remained: the warmongering Reavers, a race completely bent on the obliteration of the peaceful but sickly, horribly disfigured mutants.

Of course when she was a child, Aleta knew none of this. Or rather, she wasn't consciously aware of it. She'd always been told she was lucky. The daughter of a Reavers commander, she'd been raised with the absolute certainty that she and her family were naturally better than those that scraped off a living out there in the wasteland. They were going to die anyway, the adults around her reasoned. It was humane to put them out of their misery.

Sometimes the soldiers came back from raids with children. It didn't happen often because healthy children were extremely rare out in the radioactive waste, but when one was found, he or she was brought back to be integrated into Reaver society. Aleta, only four or so, was there when her father and his group came back with with a little boy, maybe a year or so younger than herself. In hindsight, he couldn't have been cognizant of the fact that he was being taken away from whatever family he had, but his eyes were wide and alert, and that alertness had been mistaken as bravery by the Reavers.

Unsurprisingly he wasn't in her first class a couple years later. There were so few children that a single school - an academy - provided the educational space for the entire city. Wherever the boy had been for the last few years, he'd clearly caught up. Standing just a row in front of him in the class as all the children recited the Reaver pledge, Aleta noted that he wasn't speaking. Turning her head slightly, she glared at the boy. His shy smile completely disarmed her.

Over the coming years, he was always there, just in the peripheral of her vision. She came in first in most of her classes, as expected for the daughter of a now-general, but the boy was not far behind. The only place he was consistently at the bottom of the class was in physical education and combat. It wasn't that he was bad, just… uninterested. Aleta found this annoying to no end.

When she was fourteen, her instructors took a subset of her class to the very edge of Reaver territory, right to the ruins. She'd seen images before, even videos, but the real thing was nothing like that. The smell of decay was overwhelming. Everything was rotten: from what little plant life there was, to the crumbling buildings, to the… Aleta saw movement. Something was… crawling the rubble. Something that might have been humanoid once, but now was barely recognizable as such with skin covered in boils and face half melted off. The instructor was saying something about it being their duty to cleanse Arcturus from this rot, but she only half heard the woman as bile rose in her throat. Many of the students were already in the rubble behind them, retching. She half turned to do the same, but the boy caught her upper arm.

"Don't." He warned, and she briefly wondered if those were the first words he'd ever spoken to her. "The instructors are watching."

On their long trek back to civilisation, she hung towards the back of the group. The boy wa still with her, and Aleta had the sensation that he kept glancing her way, almost as if checking on her. She should've been annoyed at that, but in truth she was mostly angry with herself for her own weakness.

"You must think I'm pathetic," she said, so quietly that only the two of them could hear.

He looked a little surprised, but quickly shook his head. "No. I'd be more concerned if you felt nothing at the horrors. There's no shame in having a conscience."

She wanted to say something biting, something akin to that she didn't need his pity, but somehow couldn't bring the words forward. It was the first time she'd ever questioned how her society did things. Only in the privacy of her own mind, of course, but the spark had been kindled.

"What's your name?" she asked the boy, suddenly embarrassed that she didn't know what to call someone she'd been aware of since childhood.

The boy smiled, apparently not at all put off that she hadn't known. "Stakar."

"I'm…"

"I know who you are, Aleta."

Right, of course he did. She searched for something else to say. "No family name?"

"Foundlings are wards of the state. We don't get family names. Not until successful completion of the First Contest."

Aleta winced. "Sorry."

"Don't be."

She took more notice of him afterward. In the coming years, they remained on the same academic track. At sixteen, Aleta went through her First Contest with ease, putting down a man twice her size in nearly record time for her class. She looked up at her father watching from the balcony overlooking the sparring yard and saw pride in the old man's eyes. In that moment, Aleta felt proud as well. She couldn't quite understand why, when her own eyes scanned the crowd and failed to find Stakar, she felt crestfallen despite her victory.

She did find him later though, predictably in the academy's library that had become his refuge between and after classes early on. No one else was present - few ever were - but he didn't seem to notice with so many thick tomes stacked all around the desk and an old map laid out on the table before him. If she wasn't still annoyed at his absence from the arena, she might have found it hilarious.

"You should be getting ready," she told him sharply.

He didn't even look up. "For what?"

"Your First Contest," she couldn't keep the exasperation out of her voice. "I hardly ever see you train."

"I'm not interested in training."

His finger glided over the surface of the map in front of him as if searching for something until it finally came to rest on some point that he tapped twice. Aleta felt her blood boil. What's wrong with you! she wanted to scream. Do you want to die? Then she remembered the ruins, remembered that he'd been born to it. A small part of her, the one that her father and school worked so hard to cultivate, demanded he be grateful for everything the Reavers had given him. But the truth was that more than anything else, Aleta was afraid for him. She knew what a failed First Contest meant, especially for a foundling.

Not knowing what else to say, she walked out of the library.

It still bothered her though, especially when he didn't show up to any of the classes next morning. By mid-day, she went to search for him in the library again but found nothing but the abandoned books. Apparently no one had bothered to put things back where the belonged. Even the map still lay open on the table. Aleta walked over to study it, recalling how his fingers had traced a certain path that ended… She tilted her head, looking over the map. Beyond the ruined city of the mutants, there was another landmark that she couldn't quite make out. It might have been an even more ancient palace or a temple. Aleta couldn't help but roll her eyes as she realized that it was just the sort of place that would attract a history nerd.

There was no real concern that any of the instructors would report her skipping the rest of the school day. The year was almost over, and as an unwritten rule, most youths got a rare bit of slack right after passing the First Contest. Besides, the location on the map was a long hike away, but if she hurried, she could make it there before sundown.

The location turned out to be a temple, with crumbling, yet still larger than life, statues proclaiming that it must have once been dedicated to some sort of avian god. Generally speaking Reavers were agnostic at best, with talk of religion hardly encouraged, but she wasn't surprised to see it part of Arcturus IV's long-forgotten past. Carefully making her way through the ruins and around several traps that may or may not have been active, she found herself deep inside the temple. Aleta wondered around for a bit until she caught sight of the glow of an artificial light. Following it, she found herself in one of the largest rooms she'd ever seen. Covered from floor to ceiling in shelves contain books, maps, and scrolls, it easily dwarfed the academy's library several times over.

Aleta was not even remotely surprised to find him sitting in the middle of the dirt floor, piles of books and scrolls around him in a semi-circle. He was so absorbed in his reading that he probably didn't even hear her enter. At least he didn't look up, not until she was standing right over him.

"You certainly get credit for courage," she said, trying but failing to put admonition into her voice. "This place is riddled with traps."

To her mild annoyance, Stakar actually grinned and held up a piece of paper. "I have a map."

"Of course you do." She sat down on the floor across from him, but her eyes scanned the enormous room. "This place must be like a paradise for you. So many musty old books…"

"It's fantastic!" Clearly he hadn't caught the jibe. "I saw it in the distance on our last excursion into the ruins. Asking any of the instructors was useless, but I did a little research and… Did you know it's a temple of a hawk god? I'm uncertain if older cultures on Arcturus were monotheistic or polytheistic, but this one seems to have been very important judging by the size of the temple and the treasure hoard."

"Treasure?"

Something about that word, like it was straight out of a children's books, peaked Aleta's curiosity. As she grew, like all Reaver youths, she'd been taught to put aside such childish notions found in stories. But now everything around sang to her of adventure and excitement.

"There's rooms full of it," Stakar casually gestured in the direction of the hallway. "Precious metals and stones and the like, some archaic weapons. Probably useless to the Reavers now, but the historical value is… Actually, I like the books better."

Aleta actually laughed. "You're such a nerd."

It was more than she could ever imagine. Apparently he'd figured out the core of an entire ancient language most of the books were written in in under a day. Buried in his books, Aleta gave him some space and wandered around for several hours, until the nagging sensation that they should be heading back could no longer be ignored. Apparently he felt the same, because when she returned to the large room to fetch him, he was already packing but then looked at her with the first signs of consternation she ever remembered seeing.

"I can't decide which to take back," he all-but pouted.

Aleta rolled her eyes and pointed at the one that looked most likely to survive the return trip.


Author's End Note: The one fact I'm absolutely married to is that deep down, beneath all that Stallone tough-guy exterior, Stakar is an enormous nerd ^^;;