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A Ravager walks into a bar.
It sounds like the set-up for the joke, but it ain’t. Not when that Ravager’s staggering, not when he’s staring a few thousand miles into Knowhere’s mined-dry crust, not when it’s been a whole fucking lunar since he buzzed off on that solo with the parting words of ‘yer in charge now, Obfonteri; have fun’.
Yondu limps to the counter, ignoring each incredulous stare that flies his way. He props himself on it, leaning far more of his weight on the shiny steel surface than Kraglin likes, and orders something scavengers use to strip paint off salvage before resale.
“Make it a double, barkeep.”
He sounds… well, if he’s usually gravelly, right now the words sandpaper his throat as if he ain't drunk nothing but whisky for the past week. The past year.
Kraglin's got a good nose for danger. Some would call him jumpy, but Kraglin prefers to think of it as always prepared. Right now every hair on his body is prickling, from his mohawk to his crack.
Something ain't right. For a start, Yondu ain't yet marched over to thump him on the back. His head droops close to the bar top. His coat's ripped – tatters drip from his shoulders, spattered and crusted with old dried blood.
Black blood, Kree blood. Not his.
But he still obviously ain’t right. Kraglin's got a duty here. Ain't no one else on the crew who can approach their captain when he’s in a grump, not without getting an arrow to the eye. Perks of being most-trusted and most-fucked.
Kraglin sidles closer. He settles on the stool besides Yondu. From Horuz to Taserface, Isla to Quill, every Ravager eye sober enough to focus bores between his shoulder blades.
“Sir?” he asks.
Yondu flinches. It’s tiny. Fucking infinitesimal, really, but it’s there and Kraglin sees it, and that wrongness infests every cell in his body, a cancer that feasts on booze-steeped silence.
Kraglin's youngest on the Bridge Crew, 'cept Peter, who barely counts. Yondu recruited him fresh after the exile, charming him in with gold-capped grins and seedy glamor and the promise of more than he could ever imagine.
More what? Kraglin remembers asking. Yondu chuckled.
More everything.
After that, Kraglin bounced up the ranks. He has many fine qualities – the speed of his knives, his virtuosity in a cockpit, his expert finagling of a place on his captain's bed. Tullk's first mate and Isla's chief nav, while Horuz assumes the post of acting-quartermaster since their last guy, Gef, took a headshot that rendered him about as much tactical use as a toddler.
But Kraglin is their lead pilot in a dogfight. No one else can spin an M-ship like he can, make it whizz fast as a bluebottle and turn 180 degrees on a pin. That ain't too shabby for a guy who (according to his med specs; he don't kept track) has recently brushed twenty-eight.
As for him and Yondu? Well, that's simple.
Kraglin likes power – to catch it and cup it in his hands, feel the warm lick of its flame. Yondu oozes the stuff.
A captain is king on their galleon, but while Kraglin ain't one for history lessons, he's more than willing to believe in Yondu's divine right. Yondu Udonta is a fortress. A fucking tank. Ain't nothing that leaves its mark – Kraglin's seen him laugh off punched out teeth and anesthetic-free gut surgery. Which leaves open the question of why the fuck he just jumped.
Yondu receives his drink, face a blank stone. He downs it in one, then clinks the glass down and gestures for a refill. The whole while, he doesn't look once at Kraglin.
“What,” he says.
That sense of wrongness persists.
“Uh.” Kraglin's leg jiggles under the bar, a nervy rattle that matches his pulse. “S’been a while, sir. Whole month, not a week. Job took longer than ya thought?”
Yondu grunts. He downs the next glass without batting an eyelid. Kraglin grimaces. That liquor is strong - he can smell it. Could make a Kronan sprout hair on his chest.
“Something like that.” Yondu raises his voice for the benefit of the crew. “How’s about y’all fuck off a while.”
Exchanged glances, slurped drinks. Then a mass scramble, as thirty-odd ravagers abandon whatever they can't chug and break for the exit. Kraglin’s left propped against the sticky counter top. Steam curls from deserted tankards. A puddle migrates from a table top, drip by drip. The bar stretches cavernously on either side, far too large for two.
Kraglin shuffles closer. “Sir?”
Yondu toys with the glass. He pushes his wet finger around the rim, first one way, then the other. The tone is high and fluting, pure as a whistle. He wears his collar rolled up, but if Kraglin cranes and the light from the bar display glances off his tumbler at just the right angle, he can see them. Purple-black, faded to mottles at the edges. Bruises around his neck.
The knot in his gut tightens.
Just a fight, that's all. Just a fucking fight. Yondu won, because Yondu always, always wins. But that don't mean he walked away without taking damage.
“Sir, are you…?”
“You can fuck off too.” He doesn’t look at Kraglin as his mouth works silently, then firms. Doesn’t look at him as he screeches back his stool or slams his pistols into their holsters an ounce too hard to be civil. Doesn’t look at him as he heads for the door.
“See ya back on ship,” Kraglin growls. Yondu snorts. He snaps fingers for another shot.
By the time Yondu climbs into the shuttle – still moving too gingerly, too slow – his vibes have transmuted from murderous to maudlin. The tipsiness brings an odd state of withdrawal, unlike the usual flirty cheer. Kraglin doesn't have to simmer and sneer while Yondu clonks fists and exchanges hearty shoulder-slaps and hip bumps with Tullk. Oddly, he misses it.
Yondu lowers himself onto the seat in the corner, far away from the rest. His face registers belated pain through the booze-haze, but it soon washes away again, ironed out by alcohol.
Kraglin would feel more self-conscious about staring if he was the only one.
Isla clears her throat. She turns to Horuz, kickstarting a rowdy argument over which of them gets to handle first shift come morning. It's an effective strategy: attention swivels, and everyone starts casting their lots. But as she pits Tullk and Taserface against one another in an arm-wrestling match, the winner of which earns themselves a lie in, her eyes swim to Kraglin.
They blink out a message in Interplanetary Morse and jerk emphatically in Yondu’s direction.
Kraglin folds his arms.
Yeah. He can tell. Something ain't right. But Yondu’s being unreasonable, acting like a pissy lil’ madam from the colonies. Kraglin's job description may have expanded to include 'letting cap'n ride your dick like a bilgesnipe matador at a rodeo', but 'coddling' ain't on his chore list.
If cap'n wants help, he'll get it. If he don't… Well.
Obviously, Yondu Udonta don't need nobody but himself.
“Wanna shower before bed?”
That ain't no proposition. With Kraglin tired as hell and Yondu dozy with drink, they're bound to fall asleep before they've ground through a fuck.
Still, it stings when Yondu turns to face the wall. “Nah.”
The blood ain't just on his coat – there are little splatters decorating his face and hands too. Itchy crescents gum under each nail, dark as pitch.
The hell's he been doing? Bathing in the stuff?
Kraglin grimaces. “Bed’ll get dirty if ya go in it like that.”
“M'sleep on floor.”
Kraglin shrugs. Whatever.
Yondu does go shower, eventually. For some reason he waits until halfway through the nightshift – Kraglin’s woken by the muffled swearing as he lumbers toe first into the desk.
But heck, whatever floats his boat. All the blood and gubbins must’ve been getting itchy. The night shift is when the dorm block nearest theirs will have an entirely vacated wash rack, but Kraglin doesn’t give that a second thought. If Yondu wanted company bathing, he’d have taken him up on his offer.
Kraglin prides himself on his ability to read his boss. Right now, that book’s closed, but that’s cool. Yondu deals with shit – it’s what he does. Kraglin leaves him to it.
He wakes up and Yondu's gone. No biggie – cap'n ain't the best sleeper. He wakes up panting sometimes, silvery with sweat, but they all have them nights. He don't talk about what he sees in his dreams and Kraglin doesn't ask, and Yondu affords him the same courtesy.
You don't get to the top without doing shit you regret. Kraglin knows about his faction's sin, the reason the other Ravagers shun them and spit in their booze. Yondu's got a lot of dead kids on his conscience. That would torment anyone, even a king.
Right now, Yondu looks very far from royalty - even the pirate sort. Kraglin encounters him after breakfast, suddenly self-conscious of the grits caught in his moustache.
Ain't no need to worry. Yondu doesn’t notice.
He seems shrunken, hunched in on himself like a collapsing star. But that's just because he's being held captive by Doc, one boot on the doorframe of the medbay. Everyone looks tiny besides a four-armed Kronan lady.
He springs away when he spots Kraglin – but not before Doc tucks the needle in his pocket.
“One a day,” she snaps. “Come back next week for the next set of doses.”
Yondu just watches Kraglin. He clenches his jaw, but jerks it up and down nevertheless. Doc sighs at him. Then, in a rare display of solidarity – the woman's a notorious misanthrope – she lets one hand hover over Yondu's shoulder a whole heartbeat before shaking her head and stomping away.
That leaves the two of them at opposite ends of the corridor. Kraglin ain't never seen a bilgesnipe and he don't never want to, but he's heard the stories and knows that you're dead the moment you break eye contact. Even after a clandestine visit to the medbay, Yondu's every bit a predator. He bares his teeth at Kraglin – although the threat display looks wearier than usual, less lively about the eyes.
His head must be smarting from the hangover. Whatever he glugged last night, Kraglin suspects it wasn't distilled with mammalian livers in mind.
Captain looks away first. He stalks off in the direction of the Bridge, that mystery vial of medicine swinging in his pocket.
Kraglin scampers after him. He's a nosy bugger, but he's very far from stupid. He knows better than to ask.
Yondu seems grateful. His shoulders remain tense, but they at least have a downwards gradient. But he don't want to talk, which means Kraglin ain't never gonna know the nature of his injury – not unless he takes matters into his own hands.
Kraglin smirks as he and Wretch, his copilot, brainstorm a new M-ship fighting formation they've co-opted from the Shi'ar. Tonight, he decides, wheeling the miniature holographic fighters around until their trajectories form an unpickable knot. Tonight, he gets his answers.
He waits until Yondu's asleep. He’s on the floor, again, although he’s clean now and don’t have no excuse. Kraglin can theorize, though. He reckons captain took a plasma bolt while fighting off a Kree battalion, and wandered off on a palliative sojourn until he was back on his feet. The cold metal floor must be kind to the burns.
Kraglin tiptoes around him. Captain's well cocooned: all bundled up in a patchwork pelt and dead to the world. His snores seed the air with moonshine vapor.
The wound must be smarting something rotten if doc's painkillers don’t touch it. Cap'n don't like taking anything that dopes him too much to whistle, but recently he's been drunk off his head every single night. If he plans on dosing up on alcohol, why not just down the prescribed opiates to begin with?
Kraglin shakes his head. How cap'n self-medicates is up to him. Ain't no need to step in. This is his captain, after all, and while Kraglin might not understand his methods, Yondu ain't never lost his grip on the reins. Not now, not ever.
Freezing at every creak, he pads over to thumb through the contents of Yondu's coat lining. The greatcoat hangs on the back of the desk chair, bulking it out into the shape of a headless man. The Eclector orbits a supergiant, and the portal window has to be kept on near-full opacity so the light don't scorch their eyes. Now it's the brightest source in the room. A thin beam strikes the desk, sneaking around the edge of the shutters, glancing between high-rise towers of datadex.
Yondu's thrown himself into work since he got back. Oddly, it don’t seem like he's got anything done.
Kraglin, out of sheer curiosity, clicks on the datadex cube Yondu spent yesterday fiddling with. It's still on the first slide.
He tries to imagine Yondu sprawled on his throne, gaze eating up a single picture for hours on end.
Ridiculous. Yondu might be a fidgeter, but he ain't never so lacking in concentration. He must've scrolled through all the information on this datadex and clicked it back to the opening spread.
Kraglin finds the capped syringe in Yondu’s pocket. It’s a standard multi-dose model: the liquid inside has been segregated into seven compartments, one for each cycle of a week. One has been emptied – a process that opens the canal locks so the dosage falls into the next chamber down. Kraglin rubs the label, angling it into the light while Yondu mumbles into the crook of his elbow and twitches like he’s been shocked.
What he finds makes his fist clench. He barely stops himself from crushing the syringe – but he imagines it: an explosive hail of shards, sharp as the pins that prickle in his lungs when he draws his next breath.
Venereal vacs.
That bastard.
Kraglin might have slept – and butchered, and pickpocketed, and piloted – his way up the ranks. But now he's at the top, he don't like sharing.
Heck, this just ain't fair. They both fuck bots, but that’s different - like using a toy. You can't catch shit from a bot. They're sterile – every slippery part of 'em leaks anti-bacterial gel, and a respectable madam will sluice them down after every use.
No wonder the jackass has been playing hard-to-get. He's trying to hide this.
Everything makes sense now. Kraglin can see the events of Yondu's absence playing out before him, clear as an unpirated holo, free from static interference. Yondu galloped off on an expedition, slaughtering Kree and liberating items of value, and generally treating himself to a rollicking good time. He snagged a local from a bar with which to celebrate his victory. But now he's come down from the high and discovered a few more warts down below than he’s used to - that's when the regret sank in.
Fuck him. Kraglin’s so mad he can’t think.
He replaces the vac with all due care, then gathers his boots and jacket and everything else identifiable as his through the red haze on his vision. He occupies his bunk so rarely that Isla will have assigned it to a rookie. But perhaps there’s an empty storeroom he can kip in. He sure ain’t hanging around his captain one second longer than he has to.
Honestly. Just because Yondu's the toughest guy in whatever room he walks into, that don't give him license to do whatever the fuck he pleases.
Or rather, it does. That's what power means. Kraglin knows he's young, but he ain't never thought of himself as naïve – not until now.
Of course Yondu forgets about him, soon as he's out of his sight. What is Kraglin, anyways? Just some skinny brat from the mine rigs. ‘Memorable’ ain’t the adjective that springs to mind.
Captain doesn’t show up on deck. Must’ve woken up and groped for a bottle, kept digging deeper into his stupor. Kraglin, viciously drilling the dogfighters through their new formation, bids him a heartfelt good riddance.
When Cap’n finally heaves his haggard carcass into the light of day, the shifts have changed. Kraglin’s heading to mess. He passes Yondu on the way, glancing at him just long enough to impart a sneer.
He hopes it conveys everything he needs it to – disgust, betrayal, disillusionment. But just in case Yondu doesn’t get the message, he turns his back on him, with his dull red eyes and sunken blue cheeks.
Yondu doesn’t need him? He doesn’t need Yondu. Simple as that.
Peter realizes first.
Kiddo's sixteen: only just past the stage of scuttling in his captain's shadow and stoking Kraglin's jealous ire for every precious minute of Yondu's attention he steals. If Kraglin's second youngest among the Bridge crew, Peter, some ten years his junior, did him a favor by bearing the brunt of the whippersnapper-jokes. Quill's the same age now that Kraglin was when he joined, and considerably brawnier for it. Sometimes the universe is unfair like that.
Means Kraglin's back to being first choice on jobs that involve eeling around vent ducts. Also means Peter can haul him about whenever he pleases.
Kraglin stomps towards his new quarters. After leaving the captain’s suite, he set up shack in one of the Eclector’s plunder holds. Those are vaults accessible only by the command crew, scattered across all levels of the ship. It ain’t classy accommodation, but Kraglin pilfered a pillow from Horuz’s stash, trading him for one of his less loved knives. The blanket he took from Yondu’s cabin was technically his to start with, meaning it ain’t stealing but an act of reclamation. He’s looking forwards to putting his head down, leaving this day far behind him.
He doesn’t make it. He squawks at the hand on his arm, and again as Peter drags him into a storage closet and pins him to the wall by his throat.
“The fuck did you do to him.”
Kraglin splutters. He yanks on his wrists until Peter realizes that in order to answer, he first needs to breathe.
He removes his thumb from his windpipe, but doesn’t release his neck. Crowding in on him, he looms until Kraglin can count every spike of fresh, boyish stubble. Then he shakes him, hard enough to bounce his head off the shelf.
This cubby plays host to a bunch of outdated space gear – full body suits and helmets and the like. A gauntlet rolls to the floor, pulling feathery cobweb boas after it. Kraglin doesn’t notice. His eyes are full of Peter. Or, more specifically, Peter’s snarl.
“I’ll ask again,” grits the Terran. “The fuck. Did. You. Do. To him.”
Kraglin wheezes, boots thudding hopelessly off Peter’s shins. “T-to who?”
Peter seethes pure vitriol. That’s not something Kraglin’s ever seen before. Certainly not directed at him. And, he’s man enough to admit it, it’s more than a little intimidating. He clutches the knife in his sleeve.
“To Yondu,” the teenager snarls. “Who’d you fucking think?”
Ridiculous – as if Kraglin could ever hurt his captain. Yondu’s… Yondu. He’s fucking invincible, or as close as mortal men come. Kraglin puffs up. The bulb swings overhead, disturbed by Peter's charge. It illuminates their faces in chunks, each ruddy as the other's.
“I ain’t done shit! I ain’t seen him in three fucking days! The hell ya talkin’ about, Pete?”
“You know full damn well what I’m talking about!”
Peter looks ready to take a bite outta him. Ain’t that supposed to be captain’s joke, that they’ll eat him if he misbehaves?
“No,” Kraglin chokes. “No, I don't got no fuckin' clue. Let me go, Pete. Let me the hell go.”
At the end of the day, Pete's still just a damn kid. When posturing fails to wring a confession, he ain’t got no clue what to do next. After a tense moment of indecision, he releases him and steps away.
Kraglin collapses onto his knees, hacking, dredging spit.
“The fuck’s your problem,” he groans. He glances up through his stringy Mohawk. Peter blocks the light from the bulb. Silhouetted as he is, all Kraglin sees of his face is the bright amber reflection from his wide-popped eyes.
“You don’t know.”
“Course I don’t know, you didn’t fucking tell me nothing before you slammed me against a wall and tried t’strangle me! Seriously, Pete, if ya think you can get away with this…”
Then the words percolate. Peter’s insinuating something. What exactly – well. Kraglin can’t contemplate that. He ain’t no blasphemer; he ain't never called his captain weak.
“What you talkin’ about,” he says, quieter.
Peter swallows. He studies his grubby toecaps as Kraglin sets his rumpled jumpsuit to rights.
“I was in the Milano,” he mutters. "Practicing your new formation." Now his eyes are all big and shiny, like he's about to cry - though that makes no sense, since Kraglin's the one who just got attacked. “Came back around midnight and, uh. Found him in the shower.”
Yondu tends to march to the main shower blocks whenever the amount of grease on his skin goes from ‘oily’ to ‘itchy’. But showering more than once a week? And why wait for midnight? Boss ain’t self-conscious. He’s pretty as an angel, he is, and he’ll tell you so until you believe it. Last time the power cores fritzed and the whole place heated to a hundred odd degrees, he swaggered around the ship in underwear without a single shit.
Peter spots his confusion. “Just… just talk to him. Yeah? Please. He… he’s trying to hide it, but he ain’t right. You musta noticed.” He lowers his voice, leaning in. Now he's burned out his fury, terror fills his stupid pink face. “Kraglin, I think something happened to him. Something real bad.”
That's Terran drama talking. Yondu's untouchable.
“You really think he’s gonna tell me?" asks Kraglin. "This is Yondu we’re talkin’ about.”
Peter doesn’t deny it. He sucks his lips bloodless before retreating, leaving Kraglin alone with the shadows and the dust.
Way Peter’s talking, Kraglin expects to find Yondu keeled over in his death throes. It ain’t like that.
He ambles back onto the Bridge next morning, just to see how the blue bastard fares. His steps falter at the door. Stars - that’s one frigid atmosphere. It’s like walking out into deepspace; Kraglin checks the backs of his hands in case ice crystals flow over the skin.
Isla’s the only one who meets his eyes. Kraglin wishes she wouldn’t. He racks his brains, but he can’t think what he’s fucked up enough to warrant her glare.
Safest to avoid confrontation. He slopes for his plinth: a tabletop projection that represents space’s topography in miniature, concentric circles demonstrating the gravimetric influence sphere of each celestial body. Wretch has it up and running. He appears to be doodling something by altering the M-ship algorithms, but he wipes it at Kraglin’s approach.
Kraglin doesn’t get chance to scold him. Isla disengages from the Nav control. She storms over, an asteroid on a flaming collision course. Kraglin refuses to turn tail and flee – until he has to jump back to avoid taking a fist to the face.
"Whoa!" The fuck is everyone beating on him for, today?
Yondu creaks a sigh. “Quit it, Is,” he grumbles
Isla does so, though she don't look happy about it. She shoulders past Kraglin, back to the navigation gear, and takes out her anger on the buttons instead, punching in coordinates for their next course with unnecessary vitriol.
Kraglin gulps. The fuck was that about? He slouches towards his captain - but Yondu rises before he reaches him. Deepspace provides a reflective backing, the bridge window a vast mirror, speckled through with stars.
“Hey, Obfonteri.” He doesn’t look at him in the window, not once. “Walk’n’talk.”
He leads the way, as always. Kraglin squints at Isla’s back. He clocks Tullk’s scowl, and the way Taserface watches every movement with his little burnt-raisin eyes. Shuddering, he jogs to catch Yondu up.
“Sir,” he says meekly, once they’re alone in the corridor. Yondu’s got his eyes closed, pinching the skin over them like it's hurting him. “Sir, look where yer goin’, else you’ll walk into somethin’.”
“Don’t’chu tell me what to do,” comes the reply, as Kraglin hoped it would. But the words are spoken from memory – no resonance, just a lifeless shaping of sound. Like a recording, or an AI, or one of those rote phrases programmed into bots.
He smells of booze again. His walk’s more a stagger and he shoves his hands in his pockets so Kraglin won’t see them shake. That circlet of bruising peeps from under his cravat.
Kraglin doesn’t know why looking at that makes him hurt. He’s got a matching set, courtesy of Peter. But Yondu’s bruises are smoother, no individual prints. More like someone collared him.
Yondu swooped off to steal something unmentioned from a Kree base. He returned empty-handed, covered in blood, and with collar marks around his throat.
Yondu was gone for a fucking month.
Suddenly Kraglin needs to know. He has to.
He grabs Yondu’s wrist. One tug, that’s all it takes. Yondu stumbles to a halt. Stumbles, like an old man, or a drunk, or a child. Yondu is none of those things but a little bit of all three, and he stares at Kraglin’s fingers, so pale and thin that they’re almost lost against the blue of his wrist.
“What happened?”
Yondu doesn’t reply. Terror hits Kraglin like a snort straight from an M-ship exhaust, a pain that spikes sharp between his temples. Kraglin squeezes tighter, and tighter still. There’ll be a matching band around Yondu’s wrist if he doesn't stop soon - but captain's fingers only flex once before dangling limp, and he doesn’t push Kraglin off.
Doesn’t fight back. Doesn’t do anything at all.
Captain just stands there and looks at him. He looks and he looks, and Kraglin remembers one of the lessons he picked up from a lifetime spent scampering around spacecraft.
Some ships burst loud and fast. They pop like squeezed boils: brilliant pinwheels of flame, there and gone again, extinguishing as fast as they flare. Others break slow. They’re the dangerous ones. A fissure pierces your oxy-seal and your air depletes so slowly that by the time the alarm sounds you’re adrift in limbo, high as a fucking kite, welcoming Lady Thanatos with a giggle.
Yondu’s skin shines cleaner than Kraglin’s ever seen it. Kinda raw actually, like he’s been scrubbing hard enough to slough off the top few skin layers as well as the grime. It looks so thin, where it bunches in fine creases at the corner of his blank pink eyes. Tissue paper stretched over soft meat and raw nerves.
“What happened?” Kraglin asks again, softer. “Yondu?”
He don’t use captain’s name. Not unless they’re alone together, face to face and tracing one another’s scars.
Yondu’s throat moves too much when he swallows. “Thought you’d worked it out,” he croaks. “Thought you knew.”
Oh stars. Kraglin can’t handle this. He expected confrontation – hurled jibes, old wounds scratched open and salt poured on.
“I geddit,” Yondu continues. His hand just. Hangs. In Kraglin's. Like that of a fresh corpse, not yet stiff. “Ya need me to be strong. I weren’t. I couldn’t – I. So. S’okay, y’know.”
Everything makes hideous sense. Kraglin's brain whirls. How the fuck's he meant to deal with this? He runs through potential options in his head, and settles on what is, by anyone else's accounts, the stupidest. But anyone else ain't been shacking up with their cap'n for the past five solars.
“No need to sound so het up over it, boss.” He flashes a grin far brighter than he feels. “Ya just cheated on me, right?”
Yondu’s lips crack open. “Cheat –“
“Yeah.” Kraglin catches Yondu’s gaze and holds it, firm and earnest. “Saw some hot young bod, went for a ride. Didn’t think about venereals.” He effects a careless little shrug. “Or me. Dick.”
Yondu wrenches away. “Ya think – ya really think –“ But then his bluster cuts off. He registers Kraglin’s expression. His hand, freed of Yondu’s wrist, remains outstretched and open, palm upturned.
Yondu swallows again. He knots up his fists, then abruptly releases them.
“Cheating,” he repeats. Like he's trying out the word. Kraglin nods. And, after a long pause, Yondu copies him. “Yeah,” he says, and – oh. There’s that old Udonta growl. Quiet as-of-yet, but it draws a smile to Kraglin's mouth - a genuine one, this time. “Cheatin’, thas right.” He hadn’t realized how much Yondu was slouching. When he stands tall and straightens his shoulders, he only grows by another inch or so, but to Kraglin’s eyes, he might well have sprouted up a mile. “What’chu gonna do about it, boy? Gonna – gonna claim me back?”
While Yondu grins, showing off his metal teeth, something hollow undercuts the act. Kraglin might be a selfish git, but he ain’t enough of an egoist enough to think he can cure everything with his dick.
“I ain’t sure I’m ready to forgive ya yet,” he says. Then, before Yondu can look hurt – “Uh. As in, I’m thinkin’ we oughta take it slow, to start with. Me an’ you.”
Yondu quirks a brow. “Slow?”
“Yeah.” C’mon, think. When does Yondu work best? When he has a task to pile all that energy into, barrelling into it with all the demented glee with which he likes riding Kraglin's dick.
They might not be doing that for quite some time. Kraglin’ll miss it, but not nearly as much as he misses Yondu.
Thank flark he made it back alive.
Under his smile he’s frothing furious on his captain’s behalf, and there’s a little chunk of him – a sliver, more like – that wails about weakness. Yondu's weak like the wee brats sold around the grimier parts of the market, eyes too large for their starved faces. Weak like the women with sores around their mouths who vie with the bot-hookers for custom at every port. Weak-weak-weak-weak-weak.
But that voice is barely a whisper, and it sounds very much like Yondu himself. Kraglin would punch anyone’s lights out, for talking about his captain like that.
“Thinkin’ a date’d be a good place to start,” he says.
Yondu’s eyebrows rise. “Scuse me?”
“Yeah. You organize it, boss. An’ lay down the units.” He levels a finger. “It better be good, is all I’m sayin’.”
Yondu scowls, and all of a sudden everything feels very-almost normal. “What, ya can’t cough up for half-n’-half?”
“You’re richer than me,” Kraglin points out. “And anyway, yer the bad guy here, remember?”
Sometimes it’s easier to fall into a role you know, rather than playing the victim. Yondu crosses his arms.
“Cheapskate.”
“Look who’s talkin’.”
“Fair.”
It ain’t. Life ain’t. Kraglin’s going to need to blast off solo in his M-ship after this and scream for a very long time. Maybe find a few Kree, instigate a fight for an excuse to introduce 'em to his knives.
But Yondu’s here. Yondu’s filling his usual persona like it’s a new leather coat in need of breaking in. And like this, they can both go on pretending – just a little longer – that Yondu Udonta is as untouchable as the stars.