DISCLAIMER: I do not own any of the characters from Guardians of the Galaxy, either in its movie or comic incarnation. I own any OC I can invent, though. I am not making a £ out of this. It is just for shits and giggles.

This chapter contains a lot of headcanon about the Kree/Xandar war and Kree culture.

In the comics, the Kree are often on the opposite side from the heroes, but they are not card-carrying villains, and Ronan himself has a few heroic moments and is a rather likable character if a bit stiff.

The movie has portrayed the whole thing as a black/white issue, but I don't like those, so I'm changing things a bit, making everything a bit grayer. So, expect the Xandarians to be a bit more morally questionable, and the Kree to be a bit less bloodthirsty.

I am making up Kree society based on Feudal Japanese, Spartan and Prussian societies, with a dash of Ancient Egypt thrown in for the concept of Pama (which is the Kree equivalent of Ma'at) and the penchant for smashing people's heads with a mace. Ceremonial maces were very important in Protodynastic Egypt and the so-called "smiting scene" is one of the longest-lived motifs in Ancient Egyptian art. It basically depicts the pharaoh smashing the enemy of Egypt with a big frikkin' mace. Rings a bell, doesn't it?

If the Kree come across as a bit stiff and archaic, very fond of traditions and rituals, I've done my job well.

Also, Ronan might end up looking a bit like Inspector Javert in space. That is also intentional and closer to his portrayal in the comics.

Enjoy!

It is not until he wakes up in a hospital in Xandar that the memories of what he has done in the last year or so (ever since that ridiculously offensive treaty has been signed) hit him like a spaceship set at ramming speed.

It is a good thing he is tied securely to the hospital bed, because his despair is so great at the realisation of how far he has strayed from the Path of Pama, that if he had had half a chance, he would have taken his own life.

It is a good thing that he cannot. As Gamora has said, dying would have been too great a mercy for him, even dying a criminal's death under the hammer of one of his fellow Accusers. His punishment is to live with the knowledge of what he has done, that he has failed his people on a cosmic level and forsaken any shred of honor he might have had.

He had set out on the path of rebellion to right a grievous wrong against his people, to punish the criminals who had killed so many innocents, and redress the imbalance in the conditions of the treaty between Kree and Xandar, but he has ended up being a worse criminal than the people he wanted to punish.

His original plan had been to obtain a suitable deterrent to force the Xandarians to renegotiate the parameters of the treaty, possibly capture the people responsible for the war crimes against the Kree and punish them. The latter he has managed to bring to partial fruition, but the former...
He has ended up killing civilians by the drove, just to prove his loyalty to Thanos, he has nearly obliterated all life on Xandar, and finally he has delivered the ultimate military deterrent to Xandar and besmirched the image of his people, possibly beyond repair.

From the grave, his ancestors must be spitting on him. He is no longer worthy of the title of Accuser, he is not worthy of being a scion of his ancient House. He deserves to be haaq to a posse of interstellar criminals. He deserves all sorts of dishonour and abuse to be heaped upon him for a lifetime.
The physical pain of his broken bones and wounded flesh is nothing to the agony of his spirit.

Days pass in isolation. The Xandarian medical personnel tends to his wounds, but make no attempts to talk to him. He wishes they did, if only to insult him and berate him. He spends his days fighting the painkillers, concentrating on the pain to stay awake, because as soon as the pain fades and he slips into sleep or unconsciousness, the flashbacks start. It is the hospital: the sounds, the smells, the helplessness and the sense of guilt are the same as they were last time, and they bring it all back.

His parents marry for love, a rare occurrence for two Kree of high standing. His father is a soldier, an officer in the army, wounded in action against the Xandarians, his mother the surgeon who had replaces his lost arm with cybernetics. They recklessly fall in love and, taken by passion like lower beings, conceive their first child, him, out of wedlock.

When they turn to the Ancients to have their match retrospectively approved, it turns out that they have an incredibly high level of genetic compatibility, and would have been likely paired up with each other if they had requested to be assigned a mate. So they marry, and even if it is a bit of a scandal at the time, when he is born, hale and healthy, it is completely forgotten by everyone. Well, almost everyone. His grandfather, a stern traditionalist and a soldier himself, is still none too happy about the match and always considers his mother a social climber and an easy woman, for she is not from one of the ancient Houses and he would have wanted a much more prestigious match for his son.

None of that matters though, because his parents love each other dearly and passionately. Kree are not normally a very fertile species, especially the Blue upper castes, but by the time he is six years old and ready for the induction ceremony for young cadets at the Great Temple of Pama on Hala, his three-year-old, incredibly loud, little brother Rory is there to wish him well, and his mother is heavy with a third child. She wishes to have a daughter, this time.

They are all standing there in the Temple, alongside the highest military and civilian authorities, and are listening to the High Priest as he speaks of Pama and of the virtues of justice, fairness, loyalty and mercy that descend from the Supreme Principle, when the Xandarian bombers makes a pass over the city.
They drop a cluster of incendiary bombs over the Great Temple and go. The roof breaks, and the building starts to burn from the liquid fire released by the bombs. They are all burning.
Some liquid drips on him. His clothes catch on fire immediately, and he screams and screams. The pain is unbelievable.
His father is a great soldier, though, able to think on his feet even in the most dire situations. He grabs his son with his metal hand and throws him out of the window, down into the ornamental pond, quenching the fire.
Ronan imagines that they would have all jumped after him, his father his mother and Rory, but the roof caves in, turning the Temple into a burning tomb.

All of this, he learns much later, in the hospital.
Almost all his skin has been burned off and not even the strongest painkillers can ease his agony. Through the delirium, he hears one of the doctors suggest to his grandfather that it would be more merciful to put him to sleep, that even if the stem cell grafts take and his skin re-grows, he might become insane from the pain and the trauma.
His grandfather tells that he doesn't care as long as he survives to adulthood to continue the family line. He says his father should have saved himself, instead of sacrificing his life for the whelp of a lowlife tart.
He spends more than a year in hospital, but, slowly, his body heals. His skin grows back, a smooth, perfect blue like before. His hair unfortunately does not, leaving him completely bald, as if victim of some serious illness.

He goes to live with his grandfather, on Kree-Lar where the holdings of his House are situated.
There is a big, empty mansion and lots of fields. He had been used to company and to the affection of his parents, but his grandfather is an old-fashioned Kree nobleman and has no time for a child. He appoints a tutor for him, to put him at least partially up to speed with the education he has missed.
Ronan tries his hardest, but it seems it is never enough. His father at his age was smarter, tougher, braver. Everything he can do, he could do better, or at least that is what his grandfather says.

He misses his family, but his grandfather tolerates no weakness, and soon he learns not to cry and not to scream when he wakes up in the night, dreaming of fire.
He does not know why the gods have made him survive, why him instead of his father. There must be a purpose to his life, but he doesn't know it and his heart aches with he finally starts the cadet program, two years later than he should have, he is relieved of being finally free from him.
The relief is short-lived, though. He knows no one there, all his friends are either dead or still on Hala, and the children at the Academy are none too friendly with him. He is evidently older, and from the capital, and different. Some of the bolder ones ask him if he is a retard, others whisper that he must be half-breed.
He would like to tell them the reason why he is there and why he is different, but his grandfather has forbidden him to "play the victim" any further by speaking of the accident. The world has moved on, he says.

He hasn't, though. He has seen no funerals, no commemoration speeches.
He was fighting for his life, he had had hardly any time to mourn and grieve. His grandfather does not understand his need to elaborate his loss on his own terms. He condemns it as a weakness, instead, and in time Ronan accepts that he has no right to ask for any conditions of favor because of his history, that by talking about it he makes himself weak and pitiful, unworthy.

He keeps quiet, then. He is lonely, and desperate to prove himself to his grandfather.
He studies hard, trains even harder, much harder than the rest of the kids in the first class. Halfway through the year they move him to the second class. He finishes with honours.
By the end of his second year, he has not a single friend to his name, but he has recovered the two lost years and is on par with the rest of the boys his age.
He has no reason to mention the accident anymore. He has pushed the memories in a corner of his mind. They are contained there and only emerge at night, sometimes.
He is ashamed of those nightmares.

He is ten years old when he realizes that his grandfather has lied to him. People are still talking about the "accident".
They talk about it continuously, in their debates and in the essays written for the Army. He learns that the orbital protection system has failed that day, possibly jammed by the enemy, and that the Xandarians still refuse to admit responsibility for the non-combatant victims of their so-called "surgical strikes".
They claim the Kree have been using the cadets as sentient shields for sensitive military targets, that they have done nothing wrong.
They lie.
The Kree military have different names to call what the Xandarians have done: terrorism, war crimes.

Finally Ronan understands why the ancestors had made him live. He lives to redress that wrong, to bring justice to the criminals who destroyed everything he had. He will become an Accuser, something that not even his father or his grandfather have managed.
It is a hard path, but now that he knows what his purpose is, he spends days and nights preparing for it and when at fifteen he is awarded the hammer of an Accuser, the youngest to be so rewarded in the last century or so, he finally sees pride in his grandfather's eyes. He doesn't demonstrate it, there are no parties, but he leads him to the crypts of the House, and hands over to him the Universal Weapon, the hammer used by all the Accusers of his line. It is a great boon.
Ronan is happy, he finally finds a semblance peace.

For fifteen years he fights against the Xandarians, rapidly rising through the ranks. He is impartial and incorruptible. He has nothing else but his calling. He serves well.
He never forgets his self-imposed mission, though.
Relentlessly, he ferrets out the names of the pilots who dropped the bombs on the Great Temple and several other civilian targets, then the officers who gave the order, then the senior military who approved the battle plan. He talks to the survivors, fewer and fewer as the years pass and the guilt of being still alive when so many have died gets to them, he leaves no stone unturned, until finally he has proof enough to incriminate them all.

Meanwhile, the strategy of the Xandarians evolves from "surgical strikes" to "targeted eliminations" of enemy leaders. His grandfather is among them. The Xandarians hit him with a missile while he is in one of the outermost Imperial outposts, surveying the plantations. There is hardly enough of him left to bury.
The Xandarians seem determined to prevent their dead to commune with the Ancients and keep serving the Empire.
Ronan has never truly loved his grandfather, but he was the only thing he had left. He adds that crime to the list.
There will be a reckoning.

Finally, the Xandarians, unable to prevail on the field of battle and to bend the will of the Kree with their crimes, decide to switch to an economic war.
They convince the neutral potentates to stop trading with the Kree Empire, telling them lies about slavery and mistreatment of prisoners, about religious persecution and other assorted behaviour that, if true, would be totally contrary to the teachings of Pama.
They do take haaq, of course, but they are treated mercifully, and the laws about interbreeding are there for a reason. The Blue Kree are so few because of the war, that no drop of blood can be wasted by watering down the bloodlines. And the other gods are obviously puny compared to the Supreme Being, but this doesn't concern the Kree. They don't care if other people know no wisdom.

The Xandarian ruse works, though, and soon the economy starts to falter. They win on the battlefield, but the war becomes unsustainable.
There are talks of a treaty, of peace. Ronan realises that the people are tired of fighting. His is the third generation of Kree born during the war. It is time that it winds to a close.
Ronan partecipates to the negotiations. He is now Supreme Accuser, part for his merits, part for his stubborn refusal to die even after so many assassination attempts have claimed the lives of colleagues and superiors.
A scion of House Fiyero is head of the council at the time. He has been taken as a haaq by the Xandarians during the war and spent several years on Xandar before the Xandarians let him go. He heads the negotiations, being the one who knows Xandarian culture best.

As he sits at the negotiations table, Ronan recognizes some faces. They are the ones who gave the order for the "surgical strikes".
He calls them out for it, he cannot help it. His skin feels like it is burning under his armour and the screams resonate in his ears.
"I will not sit down at a table and negotiate with war criminals!" he says, then proceeds to throw in those people's faces all the crimes they have committed.
Instead of supporting him, the other Kree delegates reprimand him for insulting the Xandarians delegates.
He should not dig up misunderstandings from the past, they say. It is time to turn the page, to forgive and forget, and move on to a new era of prosperity with their new partners, the Xandarians.

But he cannot forget, those crimes are branded onto his skin and into his mind, and he cannot forgive thousands of innocent lives shattered like cheap earthenware, an entire generation of children obliterated, the Empire's most sacred place desecrated.
He cannot, and he tells them so, shouting in rage against the Xandarians.
He storms out of the meeting room and runs away.
To vent his anger, he goes to the holographic training rooms of the Academy. He sets up the holograms to bear the face of those officers. He smashes them for hours, but it is hardly satisfying, so he keeps on going until he is so tired that he can no longer lift his hammer.
When he emerges from the Academy, the treaty has already been signed, in record time.
The population rejoices. Everybody is tired of the war.

Their joy only lasts until the text of the treaty is published, though.
Most of those who read it, realize that something has gone horribly wrong during the negotiations and the Xandarians have managed to push several items that threaten to destroy the Kree way of life.
Opening of the Imperial market to free import and export, privatization of the land, authorization for foreign companies to open branches in the Empire.
The Xandarians have obtained a significant foothold into the until-then protected Kree economy. Combined with the general economic crisis engendered by the war, this can mean the dispossession of the lower castes, poverty and even famine in some places.
It is not likely to affect the upper castes, but it is contrary to Pama nonetheless.

Riots spark throughout the Empire and the Council sends the Army to suffocate them. Many officers, among which Ronan is one of the most vocal, refuse to obey. They march to the Council and demand the renegotiation of the terms of the treaty.
The Council refuses. "It is impossible. - they say - The Xandarians are ready to let us starve if we don't sign."
Ronan wants to tell them that it would be better to die than to stray from the path of virtue, but soon realizes that the Council cannot take that decision, even if they wanted. It would be just delaying the inevitable.
The Imperial Army could still wipe out the Nova Corps in battle, but the cowards refuse to meet them in the open field. The war cannot be sustained.
Sooner or later they will have to sue for peace. Better to do it now, the conditions could be even worse later.
They cannot win, but Ronan refuses to think that there is no other way. If there isn't he will find one, no matter what.

He goes rogue and a few other officers go rogue with him. Korath, a lower-caste chief of scouts in charge of the auxiliaries, stays with him through thick and thin.
They appropriate one of the big cruiser-carriers, the Dark Aster, and get out of Kree space as fast as they can. No one moves to intercept. The people of the Empire is still with them.
The Xandarians believe the Kree to be cruel zealots. He will give them what they want.
He will put up a show they will not forget. He will have them cowering in fear, he vows, as he leaves his home, maybe to never return.

They contact Thanos, the universal bogeyman, confined to a pocket dimension on a shattered asteroid, asking his support in exchange for their services.
Ronan fully intends to ditch the Mad Titan as soon as his objective is attained, but, in the meantime, Thanos requests his services more and more often, asking him to kill, to destroy wantonly.
He has pledged his services, and his honour compels him to serve, even if what he is tasked to do is contrary to Pama.
He tells himself that he is doing that for his people, to bring justice to the dead and the living, and forces himself to stay detached from what he is doing.
He forgets benevolence and compassion, he desecrates his weapon of justice with the blood of the innocents, and the more he is ordered to do it, the easier it gets, until he cannot feel anything anymore as he kills, until every death blurs into a haze of blood and destruction.
At night, fire and screams fill his dreams.

He manages to find some of the people responsible for the bombings and brings them to justice, but even smashing their skulls with his hammer does not satisfy him as he had though it would.
Hate blossoms in his chest, it grows, suffocating the virtues Pama has nurtured in him, and soon it is hard for him to remember that his is supposed to be an act, that his threats are aimed at changing the terms of the peace, that he doesn't really want the complete destruction of Xandar.

By the time he has obtained the Infinity Stone, he is guided solely by hate, he is almost mad with it. He only wants to destroy, first Xandar and then Thanos himself, and then the gods only know.
That a ragtag band of criminals has managed to stop him should aggravate him, and it does, but he is grateful that they have.
He is grateful for the humiliating little dance trick, for shooting him into a building, or several, for kicking him when he was down, and especially for letting him live with the shame of what he has become.

He has let his anger blind him and lead him, and now he is no better than the ones who have wronged his people.
He is unworthy of being an Accuser, he is unworthy even of being haaq. He is so lowly that his new masters have left him in the hands of the Xandarians, like an unwanted, cumbersome baggage.
He is nothing.
It is fitting.