Chrysalis
Warning: You could say there is some dubious consent in this story. I didn't realize how dubious when first writing it but on second read through... yeah. Read at your own discretion if you think that might upset you.
Author's Notes: This story shifts back and forth in time. If you dislike shifting perspectives and non-linear stories, this is not for you. Also, I pick and choose bits of Marvel canon to modify and create my version of Peter's heritage. There is no Spartax empire involved in this story.
Revisionist history: I am aware that the walkman wasn't really launched in the US until 1980, but I'm going to play fast and loose with that.
PART I - LIFE
Chapter 1 - Conception
1979 Earth
Meredith Quill appreciated simple honesty. Her doctor told her how she would die. He didn't varnish the truth or try to give her hope. The cancer had started in her brain, deep and spidery and impossible to remove. Her doctor explained the options for therapy, everything ending in death, some more torturous than others. Deciding whether to undergo chemotherapy and radiation hadn't been hard. Why live her last months in pain just to die anyway?
No, Meredith took her death sentence, a large bottle of prescription pain killers, packed a bag, and bought a bus ticket to Atlanta. A music festival would be starting this weekend and live music might just make her feel a bit better.
Slipping into the crowded festival world, Meredith danced with strangers, slept under the stars and tried to forget why chewing pain pills had become her new favorite hobby.
Out of the anonymous crowd a figure emerged. Tall and handsome, with light reddish blond hair, he found her among the thousands night after night. They got acquainted with their hands and bodies, touching, swirling, but never speaking. Their dance on the fourth and final night of the festival didn't end with the music. Meredith led the tall, quiet stranger back to her campsite. She had always been a good girl, careful of consequences, but a girl with six months to live, could afford to be a little reckless.
They fell together in a tangle of limbs and lust. Every muscle in her body spasming with pleasure, Meredith knew she had to be hallucinating because her silent beau became fuzzy around the edges, glowing and growing, blinding her with his light.
She hoped this was her ending. The tumor could take her now in this perfect moment of pleasure and that would be for the best. No more pain.
Then she heard his voice and the rest of the universe vanished in it's perfect intonations.
"I see you, Meredith Quill. I see your truth, your death eating you from within. If you're willing, I can give you time, a few years free of pain and disease."
Meredith held the being of light to her chest, his energy still pounding between her legs, eliciting waves of pleasure. Too wracked to articulate a response, she moaned and arched.
"In return you will carry my son, raise him, and let him go when I come for him. You will tell him that he is of the stars, directly descended from the ancient line. Tell him that he is a Starlord."
The light shone too bright, the pressure inside magnifying until she knew her body would tear apart.
"Do we have an accord, Meredith Quill? You must speak your ascent or I will allow your brain to bleed and die as it is trying to do now. Will you be my vessel?"
"Yes!" Meredith screamed her answer, unable to resist the seductive light and it's mesmerizing voice. "Anything, yes."
Greeven Asteroid Mining Camp: Pit #37129A 2015
Peter settled at a grimy booth with three bottles of the local spirits in hand. Setting two in front of his companions, Gamora and Drax, he straddled his chair and took a tentative sip of his bottle. The liquid was thick and grey and tasted a bit like fermented sweat, typical for homemade space-miner booze.
Gamora sniffed the liquid and curled her lip. "No thank you."
"Hey, it gets the job done," Peter said, still sipping slowly. Drax drained half his bottle in a single long draught, apparently undaunted by the taste or appearance.
"We are not here to drink. We are here to acquire defense protocols," Gamora replied tensely. "I would like to discuss how we are going to manage that. Our contract is under a time limit and our mole has asked far more than we can afford for the information we need to complete it."
"I have dealt with Onians before. I can squeeze her fleshy appendages until she is begging to give us her employer's security protocols. It would be my pleasure to do this." Drax finished his beverage and received quick permission to start Gamora's.
"Thanks buddy, that can be plan B, but I think we can manage this without any torture of fleshy anything. You two head back to the ship, check in with Rocket and Groot, and give me a chance to negotiate one on one, with our Onian friend. If I haven't worked something out by tomorrow, we'll decide a new course of action."
Gamora frowned, ready to argue, but she bit back the inclination. "Her name is Nere, not Onian woman." With a terse nod to Peter she tugged Drax by the elbow to his feet and then out of the bar. She had read a detailed dossier on Peter before they ever met and that dossier had been very clear on a few points. Quill had well-documented, uncanny skills at negotiation, especially with females of just about any species, especially if he could get the female to join him in an intimate indiscretion. As distasteful as Gamora found it, Peter's 'pelvic sorcery' might solve their very real problem.
Peter got the uncomfortable impression that Gamora not only knew how he planned to get their information, but that she did not approve of his methods. He would argue with her on the topic, but he didn't exactly understand his methods enough to defend them.
He knew that if he could gain proximity on their mark and maintain it, a natural attraction would usually emerge. Peter was aware that it wasn't the same for everyone. From what he'd been able to gather from the other Ravagers, his natural magnetism was fairly unique. It didn't matter that Peter's human appearance was not universally considered attractive. It didn't matter how repulsive he found the woman from a distance, the closer he got, his perspective would adjust to the situation.
Peter took his half-consumed, sweat-flavored booze, and settled into the bar seat closest to Nere, a nine-foot-tall, painfully-orange alien. He didn't try to speak to her at first. He just sipped his beverage and stayed close. He could feel it start, a shift in his perception. Instead of tall and thick, she seemed delightfully sturdy. Instead of oily and florid, her skin seemed enticingly supple. When her scent shifted to a tempting spicy range, Peter knew it was time to start talking.
He chatted, he flirted, he bought her drinks. After only a few short hours, they were upstairs fumbling their way to bed, rocking together in perfect rhythm. Peter wished he had the words to explain this next part, the part that made sex perfect pleasure and sort of terrifying. In the moment of orgasm, of bodies squirming and screaming their over stimulation, Peter stopped being himself. He was Nere. He was an Onian women locked in the throes of pleasure. He was desperate for a large pay day for the security protocols of his employers, but wasn't willing to risk prison for anything but top dollar. He needed the money to free his children from their mining contracts. Their fate meant everything.
The moment ended and their bodies slipped apart. She didn't speak about the experience, women rarely did, but Peter knew without explanation that for a moment she had been him. His dreams had been hers, his needs and wants, his pettiness and his nobility. After seeing the worst and best in him, and knowing he had seen her own truths, finding an accord barely took words.
"I'll give you every credit we can afford, everything we have left, and you have my word that we'll return to help your sons. Those contracts aren't legal. They're slavery plain and simple." Peter stroked the Onian woman's face, brushing her stiff, black hair back. "Agreed?"
"Agreed." Nere calmly returned Peter's caress, carding her large fingers in his hair. "What are you?"
"Nothing special, just Peter, just a Terran."
"No, you are very special, but not mine, not for long; my special friend for the night. Promise you won't forget my sons." Nere began to rock, holding her much smaller partner to her chest. "I want your word that they will be free."
"You have it. I'll do everything in my power." Peter shifted in her tight embrace, kissing her neck and chest, working himself back into rhythm, ready to show her the truth of his promise in the same way he had learned the truth of what she really needed.
1979 Earth
When she rode out on a bus to Atlanta, Meredith hadn't planned to come home, not until she ran out of music festivals to chase or her disease made it impossible to enjoy them. Her original itinerary had included a stop in Savannah, Mobile, then Gulfport and finally the Jazz festival in New Orleans. But the night she spent with the stranger made of light changed everything. It was far too early to take a pregnancy test, but Meredith could swear she felt the child inside her growing, a warmth in her guts. If it was real, if she was pregnant, she needed to be home.
She sighed. Maybe it was all just a hallucination, a trick of her tumor, but if this was a progression of her cancer, the absence of pain was a nice side effect. She hadn't realized how heavy the chronic pain had become until it just wasn't there anymore.
Meredith bounced down the steps of their local bus terminal and strode out toward the highway, not even considering calling home for a ride. Home was a five mile hike, barely far enough to stretch her legs. She still wasn't sure what to tell her parents. She had never been anything but honest with them, but the truth was so farfetched that she only half believed it had all happened herself.
Growing up in Mount Olive, Georgia was a little like growing up on an island. Everyone knew everyone and without a cinema or any other diversion to speak of, gossip had long replaced baseball as the city's pastime. Dad was a deacon at the Baptist church. Mom taught Sunday school. Their only child coming home pregnant would be big news, embarrassing news.
She could just keep it all secret, at least for a while.
All too soon, Meredith was picking her way up the gravel drive and climbing the porch steps. It wasn't hard to find her mom. She could smell cornbread baking from the porch. The screen door shrieked her arrival, and Meredith dropped her knapsack on the couch. She followed the heavenly baking smell to the kitchen where her mother stood scrubbing a pan at the sink.
"John?" she said without looking up. "Lunch will be on the table shortly. You're early."
"No he isn't." Meredith happily accepted her mother's excited chirp and slightly sudsy hug. "Missed you Mom."
"Baby girl, I thought you would be halfway to Mobile by now. Did you decide the travel wasn't worth the music? Those busses are horrible. I was going to be worrying nonstop until you made it home." Her mom shuffled her into a seat and poured a glass of iced tea. "You can have lunch with me and your daddy. Do you want a fried egg sandwich or ham or tomato?"
"Momma, I want a slice of that cornbread when it comes out and a big tomato would be heavenly." Then next few minutes passed in a pleasant blur of catching up that mostly involved her mom listing their town's latest gossip, their relatives' ailments and the Church's bible school summer activities.
"Hey Daddy."
John Quill wasn't a large man or a particularly small one. He was solid, tanned skin lined by weather and work and time. Meredith was hugging her dad before he had a chance to enter the kitchen properly. She loved the feel of his strong arms around her, his callused hands rubbing her back. He had already scrubbed his hands and nails removing the grime of the shop, but the machine oil smell clung to his clothes, familiar and welcome.
Sitting at the kitchen table, eating and laughing, Meredith felt peaceful and safe. She enjoyed the moment, while it lasted anyway.
"You want to tell us what happened? You worked all year to buy those tickets and visit those festivals. Are you okay?" he asked. "Thought the doctor said you had a sinus infection and gave you some antibiotics? Are you still having those headaches?"
"No more headaches," Meredith answered. The truth had never stuck in her throat like this. It had been different, not telling them she was dying. There was no shame in a brain tumor. Alien one night stands were a different kettle of fish entirely. "No sinus infection either. There is a better than average chance, that I'm pregnant."
Abruptly, her dad had gone red under his tan. "Was it Benny or David?" her dad asked, gruffly. It was a reasonable question. She had had exactly two serious boyfriends in her life.
"Neither. You don't know him. I didn't know him." Before Meredith could explain that bombshell, her mother wailed aloud and started sobbing.
"My poor baby. I knew there would be trouble with you working those late shifts at the Waffle House."
Dad shoved his chair back and stood. He paced the kitchen, clenching his fists.
Meredith shook her head at her hysterical mother, practically having to shout to be heard. "No! It wasn't like that! I wasn't attacked. It was a one night stand, consensual."
If anything her dad seemed angrier with that pronouncement pacing giving way to absolute stillness. "I don't know you. My little girl doesn't do reckless, Godless things. She doesn't have one night stands."
"Daddy." Meredith wrapped her arms around her abdomen, hunching and hugging herself. The whole truth that it had been something more than human, that it had stopped her brain tumor in exchange for her gestating its child just wouldn't come, and for the first time, Meredith wondered if the being of light had tied her tongue on the topic. "I already love him, my baby."
"I know you like that song, All You Need Is Love, but you need money and a job and a home. You need a daddy for that baby. How far are you going to get working nights at the Waffle House? Community college won't be happening now. You planning to use your mother for daycare? Your mother works three days a week so that we can make the mortgage."
"I'll figure it out. Maybe you need more than love to make it, but it's a good place to start, and Daddy I love my baby. I love him so much." Meredith didn't bother wiping her tears. They cut paths on her cheeks, pooling at her chin and soaking into her t-shirt. She squeezed her eyes shut against the disapproval of her father and the silent horror of her mother.
She hadn't expected them to be happy with her news. She knew there would be a period of shocked disapproval. There was even a chance her father might ask her to move out. Knowing to expect disapproval, didn't make the reality of it any less painful.
A familiar callused hand cupped her cheek. "Look here," her father commanded. He gently cleaned her face with a soft, faded handkerchief, then stepped back awkwardly, the anger from just a few moments earlier apparently already cooled when faced with her tears. "We'll figure it out. It's the seventies. People having babies all the time without husbands these days."
"We will figure it out," Mom agreed, with a surprisingly steady voice. "I read an article about single parents in Redbook just last month. It said that having extended family for support was essential, and we have plenty of extended family. Your Aunt Evelyn would make ideal day care when I'm not available. She'll act a martyr about it, but you'll still be able to attend college if you want. You were always her favorite niece."
Clutching her daddy's handkerchief, Meredith almost started crying again. "Thank you. You're going to love him too. He's special. I can already tell."
Her mom pulled her into a tight hug. "Oh baby, of course he's special. He's part of you."
