Chapter Text
All in all, it wasn't the worst death. A lot better than Yondu deserved.
There'd be pain. He was prepared for it. And, as it turned out, it wasn't so bad; he'd had far worse pain from wounds that hadn't killed him.
It helped to know there was no way back. Couldn't back out now. No air out here, no air anywhere. The planet didn't even exist anymore; it was nothing but a roiling fireball under their feet.
Peter clawed at the spacesuit disc, trying to rip it off, but the kid knew as well as anyone that the suit couldn't be removed. Automatic failsafe wouldn't let it come off while it detected vacuum. But just knowing the kid had tried warmed him somehow, even as the deadly cold and lack of oxygen got the rest of him. He reached out with his last, dying strength, to hold --
(his son's)
-- Peter's face in his hands.
Consciousness faded, Peter's face and the soundless, frantic movement of his lips along with it.
The important thing was, Peter was gonna be okay. Yondu hadn't expected the shock, the grief, the agony on the boy's face, but Peter would get past all that. He'd be alive, and he'd be all right, in the end.
And knowing that, Yondu could let go.
What he hadn't thought about was that he'd trained Peter too well.
Know your tech, was one of the things he'd taught the boy. Know it inside and out. Know how to rig it, how to game it. Always learn your way around it when you ain't in the middle of an emergency, else you'll have to figure it out when stuff's blowing up around you.
But he wasn't thinking about that; he was just focused on Peter's face, wanting to burn those features into whatever moments of memory he had left, as his grip on consciousness slipped and everything faded into a soft gray blur.
-- and then, without warning, he could breathe again.
He gasped, his body contorting as he involuntarily sucked in air. The ringing in his ears faded; the gray haze began to clear.
He could breathe.
And Peter was grinning at him, grinning as the tears froze at the corners of his eyes and frost formed on his hair, one hand pressed to Yondu's chest with his fingers curled over the slippery surface above the disc of the spacesuit.
"You idiot!" Yondu rasped, his voice broken, throat cramping and lungs aching as he dragged in air.
He didn't know how the kid had done it. Didn't even know the failsafes could be disabled, though it stood to reason they could, but he couldn't even begin to think how Peter had done it on the fly from inside the suit. Goddamn little thieving prodigy.
Yondu curled his fingers over the suit's disc in desperation, fingers sliding off, and horror crawled over him as Peter's eyes began to glaze.
"Idiot!"
Yondu seized him by a fistful of his jacket and dragged him back as they started to drift apart. Peter's head lolled back; he was dying, dying in Yondu's arms, and this wasn't how it was supposed to go, not at all.
What was the freakin' point of trying to go out like a hero if some asshole --
"Quill!" he snarled, and it had been so long, so goddamn long since he'd cried that at first he didn't know why his eyes stung like they did, why Peter's face was smearing in front of him. "You ain't allowed to die, you hear me? You hang on, boy -- them friends of yours ain't gonna leave us out here, you just hang on, you l'il shit!"
To all intents and purposes Peter looked dead already, and Yondu knew Peter couldn't hear him anyway; there was no atmosphere to carry sound beyond the suit. And yet, Peter's fingers twitched, curling weakly around Yondu's arm. Could be a dying reflex, or it could be there was still some part of him that could answer; something of him was still in there.
All Yondu could do was drag him in and hold him, as if the airless abyss around them could be held back by his arms alone. As if it made any goddamn difference -- as if the universe had ever cared what he wanted, or ever stopped taking things away from him --
Life wasn't fair, he'd grown up knowing that. But this was the worst trick it had played on him yet, that he'd tried, he'd goddamn tried to give up his life for this little shit and now Peter was dying in front of him, probably dead already, and all he could do was watch --
And then light surrounded them and whirled them into the Third Quadrant's airlock.
Yondu tumbled through onto the floor, slapping off the spacesuit even as the airlock repressurized around them. Peter was sprawled across Yondu's lap, ice crackling on his clothes, and so still, so still, so cold and still.
"Quill!" Yondu smacked Peter's face hard. Peter's face, wet with fast-melting frost, was a pasty gray-blue that would've been perfectly normal on some species, but it was the color of a dead Terran and not a living one. Broken capillaries leaking red Terran blood laced the whites of his half-open, unseeing eyes.
Yondu was only dimly aware of more people spilling into the airlock, a babble of voices. Quill's friends and Kraglin -- looked like most of 'em, at least, had made it -- but he couldn't spare attention for that; the only thing that mattered right now was in his arms. He pressed his fingers into Peter's neck until bruises darkened the pale skin, groping for a pulse, trying to tell himself that the faint fluttering was real and not his own heartbeat pounding in his cold-seared fingers.
(His extremities had suffered the most; he left streaks of his own dark blue blood on Peter's grayish skin.)
But something came back to him that Aleta had once said about death in space ("You can't be sure they're dead until they're warm and dead"), and Peter was still ice cold. Yondu bent over and closed his lips over Peter's slack, icy ones, and breathed for him, exhaling into his lungs.
He only had to do it twice. Maybe it was that they hadn't quite stayed out in the black past a Terran's tolerance; maybe it was a last wisp of Celestial power lingering in Peter's body; or maybe it was just that a galaxy that had withheld miracles for Yondu's entire life had finally deigned to grant him one.
Whatever it was, Peter jerked in his arms, gasped and choked and made a strangled, retching sound.
"Yondu," someone was saying. Hands gripped his shoulders from behind, very strong hands, and he looked up half-blank with shock into Gamora's face. She looked utterly ravaged, her face tracked with tears, and he'd felt her hands trembling in that brief touch, even as now she pushed past him to roll Peter onto his side so he could breathe more easily.
"Jeez, Quill." Rocket's voice, acerbic as usual, but Rocket was crouching to brace his small hands against Peter's hip and help hold him. The twig was on his shoulder. They were all here, all of them alive. Every single one of them.
Yondu didn't know what he was feeling right now. It felt like everything around him was too bright and too fast-moving.
"Gotta get oxygen into him," he said, looking across Peter at Gamora, forcing the words out as his throat tried to spasm in a series of coughs. "An' turn up the heat. He's cold."
"So are you," she told him.
Oh. He didn't really feel cold. Maybe that would explain some of the problems he was having with thinking and moving. And his throat hurt like a bitch, but that didn't stop him from talking, because there were things they needed to know.
"You gotta lower the pressure in here an' bring it up again," he started trying to explain, then broke off in the coughing fit he'd been managing to contain up to that point. It hurt, damn it. His mouth tasted like blood.
"Ever spacer knows that, Cap'n. Basic procedure when somebody's been through a fast pressure change." Kraglin was pulling at his shoulder now, his grasp weirdly gentle. "C'mon, the big gray guy's bringin' blankets."
Rocket reappeared (Yondu hadn't even noticed him leave), carrying a couple of emergency oxy masks from the Quadrant's small medbay. Yondu put up with raccoon fingers helping him put it on -- his hands were still clumsy -- but swatted away the big gray guy when Drax started trying to wrap him up in a heap of blankets and furs that, from the look and smell of them, had been brought down from the captain's quarters. "I can do that," he muttered.
Not that it helped, because Green Girl was wrapping up Peter, much more gently, and Peter was still more or less halfway in Yondu's lap, so they both ended up getting cocooned together. Peter was cold and heavy and Yondu was too tired to do anything about moving him. Instead he swatted Drax off -- again -- and pulled a thick fur around his shoulders.
Something small and tentative touched his leg. He looked down and saw the twig "helping", carefully pulling the end of a blanket over Yondu's leg, patting it into place.
"We're gonna need heating packs," Kraglin said to someone out of Yondu's range of vision. Yondu was aware that he still wasn't firing on all thrusters, but --
-- but it didn't really matter, did it? Ego was gone. They were ... well, "safe" was relative, but at least they weren't actively in danger anymore.
And he was supposed to have died on Ego's planet. His life was nothing but scorched earth behind him -- the Eclector was gone (most of it), his crew was gone (but for one), he'd burned every bridge with Stakar. He'd finally found one goddamn good thing to do with his life, and now the fight was over and he'd somehow survived and he didn't know how to feel about that.
The sensation of the blankets being untucked and rearranged made him open his eyes. Gamora, with an expression that dared anyone to say anything about it, was climbing into the blankets on Peter's other side, sandwiching him between herself and Yondu. She nestled down, and under the blankets Yondu felt her worming around.
"That's personal territory there, girl."
She didn't answer, just neatly retucked the blankets from inside. Peter had an oxy mask on, but Yondu hoped she didn't smother herself under there, especially since the blankets were none too clean.
Whatever was squirming underneath the blanket nest somewhere around his knees was probably the twig, joining in on the snuggle party. He hoped.
.... and, fine. He was too tired, too worn down, too ... something to fight back anymore. Yondu leaned his head against the wall and, for lack of anywhere better to put it, let his hand rest on Peter's damp chest so he could feel its reassuringly steady rise and fall. Yondu's fingers itched and burned with frostbite; gonna need to do something about that too, but right now he didn't really want to move. Especially since every time he moved, he wanted to cough, and it felt like it was tearing up things in his chest when he gave in to it.
Something heavy landed abruptly on Yondu's shoulder. "Oh, c'mon," he growled as a fluffy tail curled around his neck.
"Shaddup," Rocket said, sitting on his shoulder, back legs braced in the front of Yondu's coat and gripping the buckles with semi-prehensile toes. He leaned his back against the wall and started cleaning one of his guns right in Yondu's ear.
"This is an excellent and most judicious use of our resources," Drax declared, and Gamora gave a startled squawk from under the blankets when Drax plunked down beside her and wrapped his arms around the side of the bundle of blankets that contained her and Peter. She kicked him. He didn't seem overly concerned about it.
"You're smothering me, you oversized fool --"
"Got some heating packs, Cap'n," Kraglin's voice said, and Yondu turned his head from gazing at the spectacle to find his first mate -- former first mate, anyway; hard to have a proper first mate without a ship -- settling down into a lanky heap of elbows and knees against the wall beside him. Kraglin's shoulder was almost, but not quite, touching Yondu's: the shoulder, it so happened, with Rocket on it. Rocket glanced at him and went on cleaning his gun. "Er -- you still need 'em, or --"
"May as well." Yondu managed to untangle a hand from the blankets to take a couple of them and put them down underneath to add to the body heat that was starting, slowly but surely, to chase the chill of deep space from his own core, and hopefully from Peter's as well.
Kraglin had the sense not to try to hug him, but he edged a little closer, with cautious glances at Rocket, until Yondu could feel the slight pressure of his body through the furs. Rocket didn't bite him, which coming from Rocket was probably a glowing endorsement.
Well, that accounted for most of them. The part of him that had enabled him to ride herd on a chaotic crew of Ravagers for decades made him look around to pinpoint the missing members of Peter's weird little gang. The bug girl was sitting next to Drax, looking droopy, but as Yondu watched, she hesitantly put out a hand and rested it on Drax's shoulder. Her antennae lit up faintly at the tips -- Yondu watched, fascinated -- and a look of utter peace and contentment came over her face, erasing the misery that had been there a moment before. Drax relaxed, too.
Nebula was all the way across the room as if she expected someone to grab her and wrestle her into nonconsensual snuggling. When she saw Yondu looking at her, she scowled.
"Stop staring," she snapped. "I'll ... go stop us from crashing into any asteroids or anything, since no one else is of any use." The door hissed shut behind her as she departed.
"Do we trust her flyin' the ship?" Yondu asked no one in particular.
"Want me to go keep an eye on her, Cap'n?" Kraglin asked.
"Ah, hell, if she wants us dead, it ain't like she hasn't had opportunities."
Yondu had his fingers curled into the front of Peter's jacket -- like they were still hanging out there in space and he had to stop the kid from drifting off, though now with the warm pressure of Gamora's arm over the top of his hand. And so he felt it when Peter stirred, started to squirm, and then subsided after a few token twitches. After a long moment, Peter said from somewhere under the blankets in a faint, baffled tone, "... what?" Followed by a choked, pained cough. Yondu could relate.
"Go back to sleep," Yondu told him, giving him a little shake by his grip on the front of Peter's jacket, "an' let these idiots take care of you."
Rocket ostentatiously rested his elbow on top of Yondu's head, beside the fin, possibly in retaliation for the "idiots" crack.
But Peter settled down, whether because he'd heard Yondu and some part of the sarcastic l'il shit still had those old habits of semi-obedience that Yondu had drilled into him at arrowpoint, or maybe because he was aware of the presence of said idiots (Groot had now nestled down on top of Peter with one of his little twiggy hands gripping Yondu's thumb) or, hell, maybe he'd passed out again, who could tell.
And Yondu figured he probably ought to take his own advice. All his problems would still be there in the morning. But for now, the battle was over, and they'd somehow survived.
(It probably said a lot about his life that this hadn't even been the worst day he'd ever lived through.)
And he was kind of, almost starting to get warm -- which had everything to do with the blankets and the heating packs, and not much to do, he told himself, with the raccoon weighing down his shoulder, or with having a lot of Peter and some of Gamora in his lap, or the twig holding onto his hand, and Kraglin beside him, where he always had been ...
He just. He wasn't okay. But some things were okay, and maybe ... maybe some of the rest of it would sort itself out when he'd had a chance to put himself back together a little bit.
And maybe it was all right to let go now, and let someone else keep watch for awhile. A captain rarely had that luxury. But he wasn't a captain anymore.
"Get some sleep," Rocket said, his tail wrapped around Yondu's neck like a furry scarf. "Idiot."
"Don't tell me what to do, rat," Yondu rasped out, but actually, it didn't seem like a bad idea.
The crazy thing was that he really did trust them to keep watch while he slept.
And Peter was going to be okay, Yondu really had saved one kid from Ego in the end, and even if it wasn't enough, would never be enough -- the slow rise and fall of Peter's chest under his hand was everything.
He closed his eyes.