Basically a super fast drabble thing that has almost no plot, but I wanted to write it, and I'm not sorry. An exploration into his relationship with his tape player and the person his music has made him into.
There's mention of other people he's been with - but it's nothing but fun-fact notation.
yay for bastardised alien languages yo.
This is his introduction to his new life: Bright light, a sweeping hook in the gut of a sudden drop, and an argument.
The grinning people scare him, their faces are pink and green and alien, alien, alien. Harsh voices gabber into his ears, he doesn't know what they're saying, but they seem to be in an argument and are roughly split into two groups. Eventually one – the leader Peter thinks, judging by the way he?/it?/he stands – whistles, a gold arrow thingy zipping out, hovering threateningly and effectively ending the argument. The leader turns and bends down to Peter where he stands stiffly frozen, holding on to the straps of his backpack with tight white knuckles.
"All right Terran." The leader starts, it's english and Peter can finally understand him. The man says certain words funnily, with an accent Peter can't place. "You listening boy – or you wer moh?"
Peter scowls deeply, "Where am I. Who are you! Take me back!"
He's scared, yes. His heart flutters like a panicking thing inside his chest and he doesn't know what's going on, but his mother is dead and if he dies now then at least he'll see her again. He punched a bully in the face two weeks ago and he's not a coward.
The leader chuffs roughly at him, white blunt teeth bared at him in a dangerous smile. "They wanted to eat you." He says, flinging an arm at the looming aliens grinning in a circle. "I argued against it. You gone serve on this ship for the foreseeable future. You do as I say; you don't argue back and you don't get in the way. Or they'll eat you."
Peter tightens his fists, but nods. This the way that it will be from now on, he can tell.
"What's that? I didn' hear you."
"I understand." Peter says, before shutting his mouth with an audible clack of teeth.
"Good. You gotta name Terran?"
Peter, he wants to say, but cannot. The words jam their selves against his lips, heavy on top of his tongue so the only thing that floats out is silence.
"Alright – don't answer. Don't bother me none. You'll have to tell us eventually. My name is Yondu. You speak to me with respect. Gottit?"
Peter nods again, stiff neck, stiff head- it is as if iron as been poured down his spine and cooled there.
"Gesnev there'll take care of ya." Yondu points towards a younger skinny alien, whose skin is an unfortunate colour of off milk, with eyes that blink rapidly down his cheeks like black jewels. He turns as says something sharply in their jabbering not-English to the skinny alien. Gesnev opens his mouth as if to complain, but shuts it quickly when Yondu continued with what must have been a threat because all his eight eyes fluttered rapidly, and his skin went even whiter.
Nodding with satisfaction, Yondu turned back to Peter. "You follow him, listen to what he says. And learn the goddamned language. I hate speaking Terran-english. All right wer moh?"
Then, exchange abruptly over, their leader turns away and strides off, leaving him with the resigned looking Gesnev, who sighs, says something Peter can't understand, before twitching his fingers in an unmistakable 'follow me' motion.
His new life has begun, and Peter has almost nothing, and knows even less.
His tiny bunk hole, more of a prison than a room, is a veneer of a sanctuary. After four escapes and even more thwarted attempts at fleeing Gesnev's hold, Yondu eventually gets sick of the panicking alien trying to find the Terran kid in the air ducts.
"Kid – much as I like your spunk. It's getting to be a fucking hott shuh."
He can understand nine words out of ten, but hott shuh is one he hasn't heard before. The confusion must show through the stony demeanour of his face because Yondu continues with: "It means nuisance, boy. A pain in the ass. So I'm going to give you some advice. You're not going back to earth. You're in deep space. With us. You might as well stop trying to piss me off, or try to continue with your pointless escape attempts, and instead get used to the fact that you are now one of us."
Looking down at his shoes, Peter refuses to allow the tears sparking at his eyes to fall.
"I like you kid. Don't get me wrong." A heavy hand on his shoulder makes his head fly up, only to meet the gaze of Yondu who has moved to crouch in front of him. It is a move so reminiscent of his granddad, that his heart breaks a little. "You're clever, quick, and I think you could go far as a Ravager. I want to see you go far. I'm going to teach you, understand? Old Yondu's going to teach you how to survive in this big old galaxy of ours. Which is probably a damn sight better than what that idiot over there has told you." He jerks his head over at Gesnev who blinks rapidly, but says nothing. "You with me kid?"
"Peter."
"What?" Yondu says, quirking his head, his strange crest glinting under the ship lights.
"My name's Peter. Peter Quill"
Yondu grinned. "Well how about that then Quill. You want me to show you how to rule the stars?"
It is has been months since he last saw Earth, last saw his mom. Peter looks up into the blue face of Yondu and nods. "Yes."
Though Yondu has decided to take Peter under his metaphorical wing, that the corridors of the ship with her cockpits and hidden holds beginning to become more familiar than his old house with his mom, the wide star filled fields spread before him promising far-flung adventure; the cassette player is still his most precious belonging.
It's due, in part, to the fact that space music is strange. A fact Peter decided early on into his new life as a Ravager. In fact, music in general doesn't seem to be a 'done' thing in space. What music that does exist is discordant – all vibrating jumbling strings with no beat, no voice to them. It's as if someone grabbed a handful of wire, threaded an electric current through them, before rubbing them liberally over the strings of a harp. God-awful. It is utterly unlike the music of his terrestrial earth. The cassette player with its one mix tape is his solace when the unfamiliarity is too much; the foreign stars shutter past his small porthole in his tiny bunk hole on Yondu's ship, utterly alien and reminding him always that it Earth is long lost to him.
The music player is the one (of the very few) things that is so sacred to him that he will: A. Not let anyone touch, B. Not show anyone, C. Put himself in harms way to keep safe. The only person who'd touched the music player without getting their eyes scratched out was Yondu, who was a very hard man to say no to. Yondu had demanded to see it when he'd burst in on Peter listening to it while cleaning the corridor just out side the washroom.
"What's that Quill?" He'd said, holding out an impatient hand to inspect this unknown device. "Show it here."
Reluctantly curling his hands over the player, Peter hesitated before removing the headphones and passing it over. He clenched his fists like a gunfighter, fingers twitching and tiny tremors shaking down his legs to the floor.
If you take it, I'll bite your ears off, punch you, and run away, Peter decided as he watched Yondu carefully pull the headphones over his be-ringed blue ears. He really needn't have worried through. The look of confused repulsion on Yondu's face when he heard the music that Peter and his mother loved so much, would be something Peter would remember for as long as he lived.
"Fucking kilven goa'tu. What neckakei is that, boy?" Yondu pulled the orange headphones off his ears as if he'd just heard a recording of someone describing everything that they'd shat in the past week, instead of the perfectly acceptable Pina Colada Song that Peter had just been listening too.
"It's a music player." He said, controlling the small cheeky smile that wanted to make itself known. "It's from terra."
"Hah! Keep it boy." Yondo had said, shoving the player back at his newest and youngest member. "I can't think of why you'd want to listen to that. You terran's are a strange buncha beasts." Peter clutched the music player close to him, ducked his head, and did not
argue. Yondu was the kind of person who'd take something just to put someone else out. He was just lucky that the blue leader hadn't taken a liking to it and declared it his own, the way he had with fuzzy pink haired troll that promptly found its way into Yondu's pocket.
There's no harm done, but the Cassette player stays hidden in his bunkhole until Peter gets older and big enough that he can put most people off from thinking about 'requisitioning' it. The ones his size can't put off, his blasters do – and if the blasters don't do it, there's always the threat of Yondu's ire. It is a small-concealed fact that despite the utter uncaring dickishness of Yondu, Peter is something of a son (project) to him. Fuck with Peter, and you fuck with Yondu.
In some sense, Peter does owe Yondu something. It's Yondu who sticks little Peter Quill behind a starship and teaches him how to fly. It's Yondu who teaches Peter how to wangle contacts and contracts, steal, creatively requisition, shoot, fly, and just basically be totally badass. It's left up to the rest of the crew to teach him how to drink, pick up people in bars, fuck (though the finer points of that are left to a sweet-smiled pleasure seller when he turns 15), talk his way out of shit, get into shit, and wiggle his way out tight situations. It's a fucked up adolescence, he can admit that fully, but it's the only one he's got. It's also kept him from dying multiple times, which is, you know, a good thing.
The Ravager leader is the person who teaches Peter the most about his new life, and how to become a Ravager that people not only respect, but also fear. Not that Peter's too good at fear, or even the respect thing, because he grows from a skinny blond terran with a squeaky voice to a tall, blond terran who kind of resembles a teddy bear. A teddy bear with muscles and a beard, who is, if he says so himself, smokin' hot. He's never quite managed the 'effortlessly cool' thing either, he's tries, sure, but on Terra he's pretty sure he'd be called a nerd. In space he's just… strange.
If he looks back, he can say that the Ravagers gave him the skills to be Starlord, but they didn't make him Starlord. That is down to his formative years of Terra, his Mom, and the cassette player.
He listens to Aint no Mountain while practising with blasters, and Go All The Way while running baby cargo runs guaranteed not to go wrong. He lives and breathes the tiny cassette of 12 songs and they make him who he is. It forms the soundtrack of his life and he honestly doesn't know who he'd be without it.
When he drives a starship on his own for the first time completely alone without someone baby-sitting in the co-pilot seat, he puts the music player on fucking loud and rocks out to Blue Swede feeling like a total god. The little part of him that isn't revelling in the sheer freedom, remembers doing the same thing with his mum on the beginning of road trips back when she wasn't so sick.
Yondu grins at him and ruffles his hair when he gets back. It's as close to a fatherly gesture as he's ever given. "You might be a terran boy, but you're a natural born pilot aright. I did good when I didn't eat you." And Peter, ducking, grinning on teenage limbs, only laughs.
His ship, when he gets her, stolen from a port like a true Ravager, is beautiful. He paints her up, gives her a new name and christens her with a hot silver-eyed Vantu-aszi who almost looks terran. But she's is only truly his when after scavenging for the space equivalent of months, he installs a terran cassette tape player. This time when he flies, he blasts the music throughout the whole of his ship. He knows these songs better than his own hands, he hears them in his dreams and it a beautiful pleasure to hear his Marinea screaming out his music. It's in that moment somewhere between I Want You Back and Cherry Bomb, where the wide ecstatic freedom and unfettered opportunity spread before him collide, when 'Starlord' is truly born.
A small cassette tape has made him who he is, and it's the small things – a warm body, a scavenge resulting in a ton of credits, his music being played during sex – that make things worth while. With those things, he is content with what he has.
Fin.