#* fic

The color of burning. The smell of decay. The pang of guilt, of loss. Mantis. Drax. Gamora.... Gamora!

He sat up with a sudden gasp, grass and dirt falling from the side his face. Panting anxiously, his eyes desperately strained to adjust while they darted around in his head like a jackrabbit. Slowly, surely, the world around him began to come into focus and for a moment, he couldn’t believe what he seemed to be seeing. Something he hadn’t seen since he was a kid - corn stalks, barely illuminated against the backdrop of night sky, reaching up all around him. They were not fully grown, five feet at most and just beginning to bud from what he could tell, swaying and rustling in the warm night air.

It was a far cry from where he had just been. In fact, it was Terra..... Earth. Or, at least, it seemed to be. But he couldn’t understand how he could’ve got there, without his ship, plopped into the middle of a field.

....You've just got to see me through another day

 My body's aching and my time is at hand

 I won't make it any other way

 I've seen fire and I've seen rain

 I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end

I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend...

The faint melody carried on the wind, sounding closer or farther with each passing breeze. Peter found himself humming every note. “But I always thought that I'd see you again....” But his Walkman was gone, and the Zune was somewhere back on the Benatar, wherever it was. Struggling a bit, he picked himself up off the ground and stood, his head lifted a good foot or more above the tops of the stalks.

He turned in place for a few moments, taking in his surroundings. The dancing sea of deep green against the inky midnight sky sprawled out in front of him as far as his eyes could see. But a couple hundred yards to his left sat a car. A real, terran car, just like.....

He took a quick step forward and froze, his heart pounding in his chest. It couldn’t be. But then Peter gradually found his feet carrying him through the field faster and faster, the corn leaves slapping against his body as he rushed past, the smell of the damp, humid soil filling his lungs with each breath. Suddenly, he broke from the edge of the field into a clearing and stopped dead. Just in front of him was the bumper of a rundown, old hatchback. And stretched out on the hood attached to that bumper lay a peaceful, lounging Meredith Quill. Her eyes were closed but the small smile playing on her delicate face insinuated that she wasn’t sleeping. Strawberry blonde ringlets of hair danced around her. She looked young and alive and..... healthy.

“There's just a few things coming my way this time around now....” she was softly singing to herself, completely unaware of his presence.

Peter could feel his whole body swelling with emotion, emotion that defied all logic and sent him reeling. Words were catching in his throat, as tears began to well in his eyes.

“M-mom?” he finally felt himself ask aloud.

Meredith’s eyes slowly opened, and with the same calm grace, she leaned up on her elbows to face him.

“Peter,” she breathed, sounding somewhere between relief and confusion. “Peter...... is it really you?”

His mouth was open and his lip was trembling, but all he could manage was a slight shake of his head. Blinking back the tears, he stammered, “Yeah..... I’m me. I’m Peter. Your son.”

The way his mom looked at him felt warm and understanding, yet equally full of question. She lifted a hand to reach out to him.

“Come here, baby,” she said, tinged with the honey sweetness of that slight southern drawl. “I can hardly see you.”

Peter stepped closer. He put out his hand and hovered just above hers, feeling a hitch in his breath. It was all too familiar. A stray tear found its way down his cheek. Meredith moved to curl her fingers around his, and suddenly Peter could breath again. Carefully, he enveloped her hand in his, feeling the full weight of all the years past in the way it dwarfed hers.

“Your hands are so rough,” she remarked, before her eyes flicked up to his face. She studied him for a long moment. “Look at you, Peter, you’ve gotten so big..... the big, strong man I always knew you would be.”

Peter breathed a little laugh, dropping his head to his chest. His mother sat up, reaching to cup his cheek with her other hand. Her soft fingers brushed across all the dirt and cuts and scars, raised slightly even under the stubble of his facial hair. Even in the night, she could tell how battle-worn he had been. A far cry from her little boy, but still reminiscent of the days he’d come home hiding a black eye.

“You been fighting those bullies again, baby? Out saving helpless little frogs who ain’t done nothin’?” she asked, a brilliant smile lighting up her face.

Peter tried to smile back. “Yeah..... you could say that. Only.... I think the bullies might’ve won this time, mom.”

His mother’s hand slowly slid down his chin, then gently dropped to his arm, trailing along it to grasp his hand with both of her own. “Come sit with me, Peter.”

With some awkward difficulty, he complied, struggling to scoot onto the hood of the car without scratching it with the element blasters on his thighs. Carefully adjusting, he lowered his back against the windshield until he was laying side by side with his mother. Just like they’d do when he was a kid. Only this time he was considerably larger than her. His hand rested open beside him, and she softly placed her hand upon it.

And for a long moment, they just laid there, staring up at the sky. Above them was sprawled the Milky Way, spattered with distant stars. He had forgotten how wide and open and endless the skies in Missouri appeared. But perhaps it was easy to forget when the galaxy was spread out before you on a daily basis, and you had traversed it end to end.

“Mom,” he finally said, breaking the silence. “I think I’m dead.”

The wind picked up around them, catching in his auburn hair, and on it came the earthen smell of rain. A smell he hadn’t quite experienced in such a way for a long time.

“No, Peter,” she said. “You’re home.”

The hush of the swaying corn stalks fell between them. On the horizon, mountains of cumulonimbus clouds, gargantuan and stunning in their beauty, sparkled with lightning. A distant roll of thunder came sweeping across the plains. It reminded him of the same energy that had lived inside himself. Though always a Missourian and a Terran at heart, he was destined among the stars.

Peter swallowed hard, but tears began to trail down his jaw.  

“This isn’t my home anymore.”

He looked over at his mother, afraid he had hurt her with his words. But she was just looking at him, silent, yet her eyes begging to know why.

Clearing his throat, Peter continued.

“I found a family, mom - not.... not that you aren’t my family, and not that we didn’t have one, but you were..... gone.... and I was taken. Against my will, at first, but Yondu, well.... he turned out to be the dad I never had. And my real dad - mom, you wouldn’t..... I can’t believe what he... well, he just wasn’t what you thought he was. He wasn’t what I thought he was, either.”

“You found your father? Where was he?” Meredith asked, her voice full of wonder.

“Actually, he found me,” he said, hesitating to find his next words. How could he ever admit to his impassioned mother that the love of her life had put a cancer in her brain, forced her suffer a slow and painful death, and tried to use her only child as a god battery to fuel his plan of galactic destruction and power? That the love of her life was a murderous, filicidal planet?

“Mom, you didn’t need him.... and I didn’t need him either. He wanted me to be a god like him, but... I just wanted to be like you. Besides, you were the strongest person I’ve ever known. You still are. Way stronger than he could ever be.”

Tears were welling up in Meredith’s eyes as she looked at her son.

“And I already had a dad, like I said. Yondu was tough on me, but he helped me survive this far, even if he threatened to eat me sometimes. And he was really cool, he had this arrow he could control just by whistling, which is about as neat as you can get. Oh, and he was blue. You woulda liked him, probably... eventually. When my Walkman broke, he gave me a Zune, and you wouldn’t believe how many songs that holds.”

She chuckled at Peter, always so enthusiastic and animated, just like she remembered.

“What happened to him?” she asked.

He glanced down at the stars reflecting in the car’s glossy paint.

“He saved my life.”

She smiled softly, stroking Peter’s hand with her thumb, feeling the pain of his loss but also gratitude for his sacrifice.

“Then he really must’ve been a good father. I’m grateful you had him, Peter.”

“Me too,” he said. “He wasn’t my only family, though. I have Rocket and Groot, Drax, Mantis, this crazy blue chick named Nebula who hates me but that’s okay, and then her sister...... Gamora.” His voice cracked.

Suddenly, he remembered hitting that ugly purple bastard in this head over and over and over and over, yelling at the top of his lungs....

“Gamora?” Meredith asked, noting her son’s blank stare and the way his voice had trailed off.

“I lost her....”

Another deep rumble of thunder rolled through the silence between them, he could feel it reverberate in the body of the car beneath him. He cursed himself and his foolishness under his breath. Suddenly, a drop of water landed on his nose. Then his cheek, and his hand, until the sky opened up above them and rain began to fall steadily. Among it all, Peter finally allowed himself to cry.

Meredith Quill, reclaiming all the years she had lost, wrapped her arms around her trembling son and pulled him into the crook of her neck. His cries were coming out in choked sobs and ragged gasps for air. She sang quietly into his ear, “Lord knows when the cold wind blows, it'll turn your head around.... well, there's hours of time on the telephone line to talk about things to come, sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground....”

She didn’t even need to ask to know how special this woman was to him. How deeply loved. And she hoped - no, she knew - he had been deeply loved back.

Gradually, Peter began to calm down to the sound of her voice. He wiped his cheeks with the palm of his hand, despite the rain slowly drenching them anyway.

“Then go find her, Peter,” his mother whispered.

He looked up at her with his reddened, moss-colored eyes like a scared child once more. He squared his jaw as he sat up to look at directly.

“I.... I don’t know how.”

She took another look over him, all dressed in leather with his gadgets and guns, just like when he would dress up like Indian Jones and run around in the woods fighting bad guys. Only.... a spacefaring Indiana Jones now. There was nothing in this galaxy he couldn’t find, she was sure of it.

Wrapping her arms tightly around him again, Meredith rested her head on his shoulder. He sank into her hug, holding her as close as he could manage.

“You found me again, didn’t you?” she said, fighting back her own tears. Peter squeezed his eyes shut.

“I love you, mom.”

“I love you too, my brave little Star-Lord....”

The rain stopped. The wind went still. The scent of burning filled the air.