The maze should have prepared him. He just found it vaguely annoying. Punted a few orloni, little swarming bastards. Dug in his pockets for the cheap recycled map he'd gotten earlier in the mission to leave little wads of paper on the ground in order to keep from backtracking. He's been in situations like that before. Labyrinths are an old style of a deterrent for a lot of folks that just like to make shit complicated for no good reason. He's a mercenary and thief. It's something he's run into before.
But the worst part? Is when he gets to where things are nice. When everything feels right. When grated metal clangs under the thick souls of his boots. When there's a damn rustic pre-industrial inn right next door to a lush, flowering garden, there's the smell of salt sea air, the cries of distant birds. All of it gives him that genuine 'new' feeling that comes with places, combined with the little ticks of familiar sensory input that feel so much like home. It feels unbearably good.
Then the voice. Oh god, that voice. Tough guy drawl with something jovial and unconquerable in it, perfectly manufactured to sound like a badass. "Yondu!" it says, and just the sound of his name without hate in it is like he flew his arrow through his own heart.
"Stakar?"
He follows the sound to a man leaning against one of those tavern walls, as out of place as anything. An older guy, but broad as any heroic VoidTrekker, would be well fit with a purple uniform if he weren't in black Ravager gear, a good solid set of broad shoulders decorated with two glowing photonic sails, glowing orange. He pushes away from the wall and walks over to Yondu, reaching out to grab him by the arms.
Yondu flinches like he expected to be handled violently despite the comfortable warmth this place puts in his stomach. But he doesn't back away from it even having expected that, he doesn't shy, and the moment those hands are friendly his own blue ones jerk up and grip Stakar's coat lapels.
"This ain't you, is it?" he rasps out the tragedy of the situation. "I'm gonna be honest I ain't sure I give a damn. I got so much I messed up an' I need to get right..."
MISERY LOVES COMPANY | CW: Torture and abuse
The same grated metal gives him a new feeling. A corridor in the Eclector, sickeningly familiar leading to an airlock and a chair with a pair of restraints sitting on the floor by it as if dropped carelessly there. Waiting.
The last time he was in this room he was surrounded by his crew, screaming for the blood of their brethren. But now it's filled with the frozen bodies of those former Ravagers. Just floating like miserable nightmarish decorations, waiting, lingering uselessly and drifting in this enclosed area like they would be in space.
In one hand Yondu has a small ceramic frog and in the other a little trinket windmill. Poor weapons but he's been holding onto the both of them trying to remind himself that he has other friends he's gotta get to by the end of this. He gets out, he helps them, he helps his new crewmates get out of this shit, right? But he sure as shit was helpless to do anything for this crew. What did he do, make the culprits pay afterwards? He refused to let them continue their lives as Ravagers after disrespecting their kin so violently.
But it didn't bring them back. They're still out there in the black somewhere.
And now he can see them. They weren't exactly friends, but they were loyal. They were steady men, good men, that found joy in life. They were real Ravagers through and through and they depended on him, and he'd been forced to watch them all meet their ends with fearful eyes. Not to a fight, but to having the air and warmth seep out of them.
You're the one what killed those men. That's what he'd been told. By leading them down the wrong path.
"I was ready to be with ya. I was okay with it." Yondu, as a rule, doesn't cry. He got that beaten out of him long ago. But he more than makes up for it in the sheer anguish in his expression, the look of a man holding a bloody stump and reliving the shock of a lost limb. Only he's whole. He's alive. And that's unfair.
"It shouldn't be me, here. I don't deserve it. It shoulda been one of y'all." The objects in his hands have warmed under his nervousness to the point he's nearly forgotten they're there.
no subject
But the worst part? Is when he gets to where things are nice. When everything feels right. When grated metal clangs under the thick souls of his boots. When there's a damn rustic pre-industrial inn right next door to a lush, flowering garden, there's the smell of salt sea air, the cries of distant birds. All of it gives him that genuine 'new' feeling that comes with places, combined with the little ticks of familiar sensory input that feel so much like home. It feels unbearably good.
Then the voice. Oh god, that voice. Tough guy drawl with something jovial and unconquerable in it, perfectly manufactured to sound like a badass. "Yondu!" it says, and just the sound of his name without hate in it is like he flew his arrow through his own heart.
"Stakar?"
He follows the sound to a man leaning against one of those tavern walls, as out of place as anything. An older guy, but broad as any heroic VoidTrekker, would be well fit with a purple uniform if he weren't in black Ravager gear, a good solid set of broad shoulders decorated with two glowing photonic sails, glowing orange. He pushes away from the wall and walks over to Yondu, reaching out to grab him by the arms.
Yondu flinches like he expected to be handled violently despite the comfortable warmth this place puts in his stomach. But he doesn't back away from it even having expected that, he doesn't shy, and the moment those hands are friendly his own blue ones jerk up and grip Stakar's coat lapels.
"This ain't you, is it?" he rasps out the tragedy of the situation. "I'm gonna be honest I ain't sure I give a damn. I got so much I messed up an' I need to get right..."
The last time he was in this room he was surrounded by his crew, screaming for the blood of their brethren. But now it's filled with the frozen bodies of those former Ravagers. Just floating like miserable nightmarish decorations, waiting, lingering uselessly and drifting in this enclosed area like they would be in space.
In one hand Yondu has a small ceramic frog and in the other a little trinket windmill. Poor weapons but he's been holding onto the both of them trying to remind himself that he has other friends he's gotta get to by the end of this. He gets out, he helps them, he helps his new crewmates get out of this shit, right? But he sure as shit was helpless to do anything for this crew. What did he do, make the culprits pay afterwards? He refused to let them continue their lives as Ravagers after disrespecting their kin so violently.
But it didn't bring them back. They're still out there in the black somewhere.
And now he can see them. They weren't exactly friends, but they were loyal. They were steady men, good men, that found joy in life. They were real Ravagers through and through and they depended on him, and he'd been forced to watch them all meet their ends with fearful eyes. Not to a fight, but to having the air and warmth seep out of them.
You're the one what killed those men. That's what he'd been told. By leading them down the wrong path.
"I was ready to be with ya. I was okay with it." Yondu, as a rule, doesn't cry. He got that beaten out of him long ago. But he more than makes up for it in the sheer anguish in his expression, the look of a man holding a bloody stump and reliving the shock of a lost limb. Only he's whole. He's alive. And that's unfair.
"It shouldn't be me, here. I don't deserve it. It shoulda been one of y'all." The objects in his hands have warmed under his nervousness to the point he's nearly forgotten they're there.