I'd uploaded this on my AO3 account somethime ago and completely forgot about it. I ran into it again today while doing some post coursework submission spring cleaning on my laptop and decided that I'll upload it here on since I've never really put anything up here. The fic's terribly cliché and the grammar needs a lot of work, but since it's my first actual fanfiction I both love it and am horribly embarrassed by it at the same time.
Fair warning this thing is completely unbetad by anyone other than myself
Comments, suggestions and criticisms are more then welcome. I know I'm horrible and would love any advice that would help me improve.
There's something about death and life after death that draws the attention and alongside it the curiosity of mortal beings. Mortals have an instinctive need to know, to understand to remember and to a certain extent pass on a part of themselves and their understanding to those who will someday stand in their place. Consider Peter Quill's beloved Walkman, gifted to him by his loving yet deathly ill mother in an attempt to pass on her love for music to her only son. It went on to become so much more, an anchor for the young and frightened Peter to give him strength and to remind him of his courage and the love of his mother, surrounded as he was by the hostile and yet strangely accommodating Ravagers. It became a touchstone to help the still young Peter remember the burning passion of his mother and the sense of wrong and right that she had once instilled in him even as he learnt out of necessity another lesson in thievery, imorality and treachery at Yondou's hands. It was The Walkman and the memories it held that allowed the young, moral, kind and ultimately good part of the not hundred percent a dick to continue to grow into his own.
While the Ravegers encouraged the grown man to wreak havoc and care only about survival. The innocuous Walkman cradled within its seemingly brittle plastic shell the remnants of a child with a budding potential to do great things, and earn the name that his beloved mother had once affectionately bestowed upon him, until such a time he could meet others who held a similar potential for great things. And who would help, however unwittingly, the sheltered and fragile bud of potential within the now fully grown Peter bloom and come into its own. Indeed the harmless seeming piece of Terran technology is a prime example of the mortal need to be remembered long after death and in doing so affect others.
Actions greater in scale to that of this one desperate dying mother have led to the formation of nations and entire solar systems, empires have risen and crumbled into dust overnight as a result of grand gestures and highly prized jewels and trinkets that are reverently passed on from one generation unto the next. Entire planets have been saved solely on the history and value of golden crowns and 'holy' swords and those who had once passed them on Kings, Queens, Priests, Ministers and heroes are held in the highest regards and remembered long after their deaths the somewhat limited impact they have made after death.
Meredith Quill was a fierce, passionate, brilliant and yet simple woman she was neither famous nor rich she had no shiny baubles or holy relics to pass on to another in order to mark her place within the world. All she had to gift to her only son on her deathbed was a cheap $10 Sony Walkman and two homemade mixtapes, Meredith Quill's supposedly 'worthless' legacy would go on to save the fate of an entire galaxy. In the end what had driven the often disremembered Meredith was not a need for recognition or universal remembrance but her love for her son, her handsome little star lord, and her wish to share her deep love of music with him. It was this unending love coupled with the human tendency live on in the things around us that helped shape one of the greatest guardians of the galaxy