Chapter 10 – Strange Bedfellows
The Milano - 2015
If Gamora and Rocket expected Peter's father to calmly and succinctly explain himself, they were disappointed. The alien circled around so that he was facing Groot and started to hum.
"Buddy, I don't care whose dad you are, don't touch the tree. He's resting," Rocket commanded, jiggling his gun for emphasis. "You planning to explain that bit about putting Peter back together?"
"He isn't resting. Your Groot is fighting for Peter. He's been holding on to him for some time from what I can tell." He reached a hand out, stopping just short of touching his rough bark. The high pitched whirr of Rocket's gun powering up warned that the raccoon was not amused at being ignored. "This is going to be tedious if you insist on threatening me. We are not enemies. We happen to share a goal that neither of us can execute without the other. Put away your piddling little weapon and allow me to properly assess the situation."
Two things stopped Rocket shooting Peter's father, Gamora's hand on his shoulder and the prick's proximity to Groot. "I may be mistaken," Gamora said, calmly, "but you just said that you need our help. Allies usually start with introductions, some proof of identity, some gesture of confidence. If you really want to help Peter, then we should be allies. My name is Gamora and my friend here is Rocket. We have standard, secured, Xandarian digital documents to prove our identity. Might I have your name and some proof of your relationship to our friend Peter."
Rocket visibly started and looked askance at Gamora. Their ragtag band of former outlaws each had their own skillset. Peter's biggest value to date had been his ability to calmly negotiate disparate parties. Gamora was much better at killing dissenting parties, but she had just done a damn fine Peter impersonation.
"That is remarkable. Completely instinctual," the alien said. "Could you feel him when he did that, when Peter steered you?"
"I don't know what you mean. Steering?" Didn't she know though? How many times in the last few weeks had she felt Peter at her shoulder nudging her away from danger, holding her back from certain destructive tendencies. She had planned to return and eviscerate Mattei for hurting him, for robbing them of precious time. She even programmed a route into the navigation system a dozen times, but something had redirected her again and again.
"The lady asked you for a name," Rocket barked. "You got one."
"My name is a combination of energy pulses outside your visual spectrum. I prefer to be referred to by my profession when interacting in auditory languages. You can call me Gardener, and I suppose we should discuss the situation. It isn't like we have a choice if we're going to save my son's life."
He folded himself gracefully onto a supply crate and smiled, a crooked grin that made him look so much like Peter, Gamora had to look away.
"Have you had enough time to assess the situation, Gardener? Are you ready to explain yourself? Do you know what happened to Peter?" she asked.
"Yondu Udonta did not complete his contract with me is what happened to Peter. We are bioenergetic beings. My son was never supposed to be left to rot in his Terran flesh. He should have been freed from it when he was a child after his mother's death when he had no truly strong bonds remaining anywhere. He would have been safe and he would have been taught to control himself. As things stand, he has flitted around the galaxy, oblivious to his nature." The Gardener gestured at Gamora then Rocket and Groot dismissively. "Seeing it up close, it's apparent to me that he has been making significant exchanges. Everyone he touches takes a part of him with them and he takes a piece of them away. The sheer volume of alien life forces he has compiled in himself by now is frankly horrifying."
"What are you saying? Peter is inside us?" Rocket asked. "I'd know if I had a piece of my Terran teammate in me."
"It's right there. You just can't see it. Peter has left a piece of himself in every living being he has spent a significant amount of time with for his entire life. When he lived in his Terran body, everything wound back to him, a core with a hundred thousand bands of light stretching away into infinity. The body is gone now and Peter, untrained and confused has rebounded away into those discarded pieces of himself. His consciousness spread over light years, from Terra to here to everywhere. If his mind and body can't be consolidated in a timely manner, he could dissipate, fade from existence, die. I refuse to let that happen."
"If what you're saying is true, then we want to help. We just need to know how. You seem to know exactly what's happening, exactly what needs to be done. How do we start?" Gamora asked.
"While studying his displacement from a distance, I counted four nodes with sufficient energy to have generated a physical manifestation. You collect the four manifestations of Peters and I can make them whole. Peter should be self-sustaining at that point, eliminating the risk of spontaneous dissipation. As for how we start. You start here." He nodded to their immobile tree. "Your Groot is holding onto Peter for you. You need to get him to loosen that hold a bit. I'll send a representative to assist."
The Gardener rose, straightened his coat and stepped toward the cargo bay doors.
Rocket let loose with his most sarcastic fake laugh. "Hold up buddy. Do you think we've made a deal? You haven't done anything to prove you are who you say you are. If you think I'm letting you walk off this ship or letting one of your associates onboard, you're crazy."
"Tedious." The Gardener sighed. "Wake your tree up. If he doesn't agree with me, then you can kick my associate off your ship. The Groot can see; actually the Groot might even remember me. They have ancestral memory and we fought opposite one another in the Great War. Their race never really recovered either."
"Why are you leaving?" Gamora asked. "If Peter is important to you, why delegate anything to an associate?"
"We want him to survive, and I'm dangerous to my children when they are this diffuse. Their nature is to reach out, and if they touch me before they're ready, I can burn them up." The Gardener shrugged his shoulders and shrugged out of his Terran disguise. He was light, yellow and mellow, just light, and then he wasn't there anymore.
Rocket frowned darkly, not lowering his weapon. "I really don't like that guy."
Ravager Fleet 1988
A dirty eight year old crouched just outside the mess hall doors, listening to the strange sounds of a couple dozen aliens eating and talking. He could pick out a word here and there, largely thanks to the metal bit behind his right ear. Like alien Sesame Street, the bit constantly tried to teach him words. Probably because he was hovering at one, the bit kept yammering into his inner ear about doors. It wanted him to repeat the word to signify he understood, but he couldn't afford to make any noise right now.
He caught a phrase that he knew, (Time to get back to it.) and slipped into the shadow of a beam. He held his breath, determined to achieve invisibility. Exiting by twos and threes, red-clad aliens poured from their cafeteria, none paying him any mind. Peter waited until the last of them had disappeared down the corridor. Silent as a mouse, he scurried forward. He paused at the doorway for a moment and under his breath, told the language bit what it wanted to hear from him. "It's a door. I get it and I can say it. Door. Going through the door now. Stop harassing me about the door."
It wouldn't keep the bit silent for long, but the device usually at least waited a minute or two before trying to teach him a new word or phrase. Dirty plates and mostly empty bottles littered a pair of long tables. Like the half-starved scavenger that he was, Peter attacked the left overs, eating everything that remained before anyone made it around to clean the area.
The bit spoke up again with an unfamiliar phrase. Peter repeated the words dutifully between mouthfuls of strange alien food, but couldn't figure out the last word. The first word was a pronoun, like someone. The last part was maybe a verb, but not one Peter knew. The language bit tended to keep on topic to what was actually happening, but Peter had already learned every verb associated with eating by now. He tried a couple of English phrases out randomly, "Someone is drinking? Someone is eating?" But he knew the Basic words for eating and it wasn't that. Peter swallowed the chewy green fibrous scraps with some effort and glanced over his shoulder. A tall man with a scraggly head of shoulder length brown hair stood in the door Peter had only just slipped through. A terrifying mechanical eye tracked his movements. Acutely aware that he was being watched, Peter continued his language lesson, pretending he hadn't seen. "Someone is here." He repeated the phrase in English and Basic three times.
The bit chirped that he had demonstrated comprehension.
Peter ran. Pushing his legs like pistons, he cut through the room, trying to put as much distance between himself and the mechanical eyed alien as he could. He pounded the trigger to open the far door, but nothing happened. Peter spun, looking for another exit, but there was only a long narrow room with too much furniture and a looming, possibly hungry, alien. In desperation, Peter dove under the nearest table and made himself as small as possible.
The alien fished him out by the shirt collar despite his best efforts, kicking and biting and holding onto the table itself. The alien spoke to him in rapid Basic, too fast for Peter to catch more than one or two words. It set him on his feet, and guiding him with a firm grip to his upper arm, the alien began handing him dirty plates. When the pile was almost past his eyes, the alien guided him to a slot in the wall where he made Peter dispose of the dirty dishes. The machine in the wall spat the plates out clean and steaming. The alien made Peter repeat the process until everything in the room had been cleaned.
Then he retrieved two fresh, steaming plates of green and orange goop. He presented one to Peter along with a tall glass of brown liquid. The beverage tasted bitter but also made him feel more alert.
"I'm Rak'isk, the cook. You understand?"
Peter did understand that bit, but wasn't sure what had come before. It seemed like maybe the cook wanted him to clean their cafeteria in exchange for his own food. After two weeks of hiding and scavenging every second of the day, the idea was tempting, but it didn't fit with the plan. Peter was going to stay free, learn the language, and escape onto the first planet they stopped at. Then he was going to find an alien policeman and ask him to take him home, please.
Rak'isk tugged on Peter's arm and led him through the door that Peter hadn't been able to open earlier. He showed him the code for entry and led him between an odd array of alien mechanisms to an empty closet. The space was barely seven foot square, but it also had a code entry. "You can sleep here. Your space. I'll teach you to set the code."
Peter thought about his precious, vulnerable possessions hidden in a service duct and he caved almost without thinking about it. The plan could be altered. He could help the cook, eat some regular meals and have a safe place to keep his things. He could still learn the language and he could still escape. A safe place to sleep didn't mean he couldn't find a policeman to help him when he escaped his kidnappers.
"Okay."
"Okay." Rak'isk retrieved a bucket of soapy water and a brush. "You clean. I cook."
Yondu wasn't surprised when Peter escaped his new cell on the larger ship. Hell, he planned on it. If Peter was going to be a Ravager, he had to learn to survive and learning to survive on ship full of hostiles where you couldn't speak the language would be a nice first lesson. Of course there were precautions taken. Yondu made sure the crew knew not to kill, maim, or eat the Terran. He was cargo, currency on legs, and you don't mess with a Ravager's pay day. He also set Kraglin to Terran watch, keeping tabs on the kid's progress to make sure he didn't damage the ship or die of starvation before he found a food source.
So far, the kid had done decent. According to Kraglin's last report he had a nest in one of the deeper, harder to access maintenance shafts and was robbing the mess hall at least once a day.
Survival, Yondu expected, but what he found at evening meal was strange enough to give him pause. The Terran was racing around the tables, collecting dirty dishes, wiping down tables. He even took orders from some of the crew and returned with their food. Yondu spotted Kraglin already eating and settled next to him. "How the Hell, did this get started?"
The amused grin, vanished from Kraglin's face and he swallowed quickly. "Captain, um, this started today. Rak'isk claimed the Terran and put him to work. He's sleeping in one of the empty pantries now."
Yondu grunted speculatively. "He seems awfully comfortable." He took Kraglin's half-empty plate and dropped it so that the metal clattered loudly and splatters of food flew across the floor. The room went ominously silent and everyone turned his way. "What's a fella got to do to get some food in here?"
The skinny redhead peeked out of the kitchen and followed everyone's gaze to Yondu. He visibly paused. The kid wasn't an idiot. He remembered who snatched him up off Terra. Yondu could see the kid weighing his options, deciding if he should run, but Peter stepped forward and stood in front of the most feared man in the room. He barely trembled at all when he asked. "Blue or green?"
A quick glance at the food on his crew's plates and he knew how Peter was handling orders with his limited Basic. Yondu grinned, showing off all his jagged sharp teeth. "Green, please."
The Milano 2015
While Gamora, Rocket, and Drax discussed how to handle the alien that claimed to be Peter's father and his proposal, Groot listened with half an ear. The rest of him was focused elsewhere. He knew from the moment Peter first became ill that they were missing something important. Peter was radiating energy on a spectrum quite familiar to the ancient tree.
Groot had to retreat from his physical form a step to get perspective, but almost immediately he could see what was wrong with Peter. His friend was becoming a Flare Devil, a race his kind had fought against in the last great war between the Celestials.
The races that fell on opposite sides of the war were no more evil than one another. They were servants to their Celestials. They didn't choose to fight any more than they chose to exist. As Groot remembered, Peter's particular race could be stubborn and controlling and violent when provoked. Though being violent when provoked was really just good survival skills at the end of the day. He hadn't thought there were any of them left, but there had to be one or there would not be a Peter to make two.
Groot's response to learning his friend's race wasn't to reject him, but to pull him close and try to hide him from anyone else who might be able to see, anyone who might want to exploit or harm him at his time of transition.
With Peter's father's arrival, it became clear that his efforts at hiding had failed, but the Gardener hadn't lied on the surface of his requests. Peter did need to be consolidated into a more stable, circumscribed being. It was time to head back and help out. Groot loosened his hold on the bundle of energy and light that he had held close for the past few weeks, and slipped more completely back into his corporeal form.
Peter manifested on the Milano first as light and heat, but quickly he settled into the shape he was accustomed to, Terran and thirty-something with his signature red coat. Groot stepped from his pot and patted Peter on the head companionably. He rather enjoyed the shocked expressions on his other teammate's faces. He had missed them, especially Rocket. "I am Groot."
"Hey," Peter added, eloquently.
Author's Note:
I hope the bit about Basic being the standard galactic dialect comes across adequately. I just kind of left that to context. And I may have miscalculated how many chapters are left. Things keep shifting and taking too long. I'm through 1/3 of what I'd planned to have finished by this chapter.
The chapters are not coming out weekly like they were. Just know that I'm not blocked. I'm writing every week. The last two weeks I've been working 12 hour days which means I'm only writing on my days off, which does slow me down a bit. I will finish this. The path is set out. It just may take a little longer than it was.
Peace!