A/N: I don't own Marvel.

MAJOR SPOILERS for Vol. 2. If you haven't seen that yet, don't read this.

See, here's the thing: Yondu doesn't set out to break the code.

He's young, angry, and stupid, but he's also indebted to Stakar Ogord for getting him out of that cage. He might snap at anyone who gets too close, including Ogord, but when he leaves the man's crew to lead his own, he fully intends to keep to the code the Ravager had taught him. That means no double crossing the Ravagers, fair treatment for his crew, and no dealing in kids. Yondu doesn't do well with restrictions, but he thinks he can handle those.

Then he receives a transmission from Ego - which would make Yondu squint if dealing with the Ravagers hadn't prepared him for ridiculous names - asking him to go pick up the man's kid. Apparently the kid's mom has recently died, leaving Ego the sole guardian, and the people Ego usually contacts for handling his offworld business have been arrested by the Nova Corps for doing something stupid.

And the code says they don't deal in kids, but this isn't the slave trade. This isn't a kidnapping or a hostage situation unless Yondu turns it into one. As far as he can tell, this looks like perfectly legitimate business - more legitimate than most of the business his crew gets.

And they don't have a job, and with the crew being so new to him that makes his antsy, so -

So he haggles over the price and agrees.

Most of the crew is too stupid or greedy to care about the code, and those that do seem to generally take Yondu's view of the matter.

The kid, Nera, is a grey little slip of a thing. She screams a bit when they first pick her up, but she calms down when Yondu explains things. She didn't know about her dad, but the rest of her family's dead and her planet isn't exactly kind to orphans, so she's happy enough to go with them. It's just a few jumps to Ego's planet from here, and the kid spends most of the trip bouncing in anticipation.

Ego greets the girl with open arms and hands over the agreed upon price without any trouble. Yondu walks away with the satisfaction of a good deed warming his chest and the even greater satisfaction of credits in his account.

So the next time Yondu gets a transmission from Ego, he's happy enough to open it. Their last client has just tried to double cross them, and though that client is now dead, they never did get their full payment. Ego might be weird, but he paid up last time, so Yondu's willing to hear him out.

When he hears the job's a kid again, though, he gets that itch on his spine that usually means trouble.

It's been two years. It's entirely possible that Ego does have a kid on another planet. It's entirely possible something has happened to that kid's mom. It's entirely possible all this is on the up and up.

It doesn't stop Yondu's spine from itching.

Kraglin shoots him a look that says quite clearly, Are you sure this is a good idea?

Yondu's hackles go up, and he tells Ego they're in. He's not going to stand for his crew questioning him.

The kid, Tey'rin, is little, and Yondu only understands about one word in two that comes out of the kid's mouth. The boy's ID has got pictures of both his parents, though, and Yondu checks it. Just to be sure.

Ego's marked as missing on it, but the picture matches what Ego said he looked like on that planet. It makes Yondu feel a little better about these actually being the man's kids. He turns the kid over and gets his money. He should be satisfied.

It's just - and he could be wrong about this, he barely understood the language - it's just that it looked like Tey'rin's mom was still alive, at least according to the ID.

But it could have been out of date. He could have understood it wrong.

He doesn't use the translator to check. He doesn't worry about the itch between his shoulder blades.

He does wonder, just briefly, why Nera hadn't been there to greet her new brother.

The third time - Well, the less said about the third time, the better. The bottom line of it is that the girl had screamed and cried, her family had definitely still been alive, and that news of the girl's kidnapping hadn't stayed quiet for long.

The Ravagers kick them out. Yondu storms out of the council of captains that had decided this and shoves the image of the look on Ogord's face out of his head. He doesn't care what the man thought of him. He doesn't care what the man had done for him. He doesn't care about any of them.

The property damage in his cabin might say differently, but his crew doesn't have to know about that.

The third time is a mess. Yondu never thinks of it without spitting a curse.

But he does think of it.

The girl's name was Ayla. He still had not seen any of her siblings when he dropped her off.

It's pure stubbornness that has him accepting the fourth call from Ego. Part of him wants to ignore the man, to blame him for this whole mess and get revenge, but doing that would feel like admitting that he's been dragged into something wrong, and Yondu isn't in the wrong here. This is legitimate business.

So he takes the call. He records the details.

And then, before Ego can shut the transmission off, he asks, "The others excited to meet their new little brother?"

Ego's face freezes for just a moment, and then he laughs. "Of course they are! They all love him already."

Yondu nods like he doesn't much care and shuts the transmission off.

But here's the thing: Yondu's not stupid.

He saw that face. He feels that itch between his shoulder blades.

And he remembers trying to calm Ayla down. He remembers Kraglin telling her about the brother she was about to meet. He remembers Ayla screaming at the top of her lungs that she didn't want a brother.

Maybe Tey'rin was so wonderful that she changed her mind. Maybe she's forgotten all about her old family. Maybe Ego just doesn't want to talk about his kids' problems with a Ravager.

Maybe.

But if he were walking into a business deal feeling like this, it would be because he was expecting an ambush, and he'd be right.

He sends the ship to Terra anyway. He picks up Peter. The crew wouldn't stand for anything different.

Peter cries some and screams some, but mostly he fights. He kicks and punches and hides in the tiny crawl spaces of the ship and claws at anyone who gets too close.

Peter's mother is dead. Peter's father is waiting.

Yondu calls Ego.

"Kid's givin' us a lot of trouble," he says casually. "Don't think the crew's slept in a week with his yowlin'. Thought maybe he might calm down if we could get one of the others on the comm, so we could prove we're not lying."

Ego presses his lips together. "I doubt it would do any good. Just get him here. I'll pay you extra for the inconvenience."

Yondu hums noncommittally and shuts it off.

He'd made sure he was alone on the bridge before he made the call. Now he looks down at another job offer he's just gotten and walks to the mess to look over his crew.

"Something's come up," he announces. "We've got a new job. Ego won't be our next stop after all."

The crew rumbles a bit, but they settle when he announces the payoff for the new job. Kraglin's the only one to follow him as walks alway. "What about the kid?"

Yondu glances up at a vent where he catches a glimpse of bright color. He's ninety-nine percent certain that Peter's listening to this.

"He's skinny," he says, shrugging. "He could be useful on this next job. Could be useful on a lot of jobs."

Kraglin's brows come together, but he lets it go. Good.

The itch on Yondu's back subsides.

The kid's a pain in the neck. A useful pain in the neck, which is why Yondu keeps him around, but a pain all the same.

That's his story, anyway, and he's sticking to it.

He teaches the kid better ways to fight. Teaches him to shoot. To fly. To steal. To survive.

It makes Quill a more useful member of the crew.

And if he helps Quill out a time or ten when he's still small enough to need help fighting some of his battles, well. That's his business. Just like its his business to punish the kid when he wakes the crew up at five o'clock in the morning, ship standard, by blaring his music over the ship's intercom.

Yondu cuffs him on the head and gives him kitchen duty for a week. Kraglin looks indignant the kid got off so light.

As Yondu sees it, the kid did them a favor, seeing as they were attacked not twenty minutes later, and this way, the crew was already up and in the mood to fight. Besides, it's not like it's bad music.

"You're soft on the kid," someone says.

Yondu just whistles. The arrow hovers beside him. "Soft?" he says.

No one messes with Yondu when the arrow comes out.

Yondu has nightmares about exactly two things.

In the first, he's a slave to the Kree again. Locked in that cage at night, working till he drops in the day, bleeding wounds on his back slowly turning to scars . . .

There are variations on the theme. Sometimes it's like he never left. Sometimes he dreams he's caught and thrown back there. Sometimes he sees Stakar Ogord looking at him in that cage and this time shaking his head and leaving him to rot.

He wakes up from those and grabs a weapon and holds it tight until his breathing has slowed.

He's a Ravager captain now, whatever the council says. He's stronger now. He'll never be in that cage again.

The second nightmare is about the kids.

Nera. Tey'rin. Ayla. Peter.

He still doesn't know what happened to the first three. And he has tried to find out. Quietly, carefully, but he's tried.

It's weakness. But they keep showing up in his slave dreams, and he knows Ego had no reason to sell them to the Kree, and he knows it's weakness, but a man's got to have limits, and that crosses his. He has to know.

But he can't find them. It's like he dropped them off with Ego, and they dropped out of the galaxy.

He knows that means they probably never left the planet. He knows . . . knows that's not good. Knows in his gut and his bones, even if his head could argue otherwise, that they're not living it up in a palace on Ego's planet.

Ego called him once after Yondu never showed up. Just once. When Yondu didn't pick up, he never called again. Yondu had waited for a bounty, for more hunters, but they never came.

Ego doesn't care. A Ravager's got his kid, and Ego doesn't care. That doesn't bode well for the others, and Yondu knows it.

He dreams of what might have happened to the kids. He dreams of them begging him to keep the code.

He dreams of dropping Peter off with Ego. He dreams of going to Ego's planet and finding four piles of bones.

Weapons don't help dreams like that.

If Peter's on watch that night, he'll wander over to the boy's post and pretend to be doing a check to make sure the kid's doing his job. If Peter's not, he'll head over to the cams where he can see the whole ship.

He can't just go to the kid's room. He can't show weakness.

But he can see Peter through the screens. See him quietly sleeping, or, some nights, see him shaking in the throes of his own nightmares.

Either way, he's breathing. Not vanished. Not dead. Breathing.

In Yondu's world, that's good enough.

At some point over the years, Peter becomes his. He's not sure what that point is, but he realizes that point has passed when he catches himself scraping up whatever information he can to make sure the kid's developing like he's supposed to.

It's hard to get much information on Terrans. From what he can tell though, the boy looks basically like he's supposed to. His height seems acceptable, and though Yondu's not sure what Terrans are supposed to be physically capable of, Peter's in good enough health to keep up with a crew of Ravagers, and that's good enough for anybody to getting on with.

The rest of it, he's not so sure about. Peter's obsessed with Terra, unhealthily attached to his music, and reckless enough to account for about a third of the dents Yondu's kicked into the wall of his cabin. He's not sure if that's a Terran thing, a Peter thing, or a mentally scarred from being raised by Ravagers thing.

The thing is, Yondu's father sold him into slavery as a baby. He's not exactly sure how this whole fathering thing is supposed to work. He's pretty sure he's messed up somewhere. The whole crew's got issues; it would be a miracle if Peter didn't.

But the kid's survival skills are good, and he's got the makings to be a captain someday. Yondu might have messed up, but obviously he didn't do so too badly.

And anything's better than giving him to Ego would have been.

Yondu owes those kids. He can't save three of them, but he'll set fire to his ship before he fails Quill.

Quill is an idiot.

Deciding to declare his independence is one thing. Doing it like this is an entirely different matter.

"Give me your coordinates," he demands through the transmission. Quill hears the demand, he knows. What Quill won't hear is what he's thinking.

Tell me where you are, kid. Just tell me where you are, so I can come find you. It'll be like this never happened. The crew never has to know. Just tell me where you are, kid. Don't you dare drop out of the galaxy on me. Not now.

Quill does not give him his coordinates. Yondu can't do nothing and keep control of his crew.

So he puts out a bounty worth most hunters' trouble, and he stamps it with ALIVE.

If a hunter comes to him with Quill dead, that hunter won't be leaving the ship alive is what he doesn't say.

He doesn't know what he wants. If Quill's brought to him, he'll at least know where he is. He'll know his father hasn't dragged him in and done whatever he did to those other kids.

But if he sees Quill, he'll have to hurt him and hurt him bad to keep the crew from going off the rails. Even then he'll be pushing it. The crew expects him to kill the kid.

When he finally gets his hands on the kid, that's exactly what he threatens to do. He threatens it at length.

He stalls, in other words.

Give me something, kid. Give me a reason not to kill you. Anything. Give me anything.

If the kid doesn't, he'll either have to kill the kid or kill the rest of his crew, and that's not a choice he wants to have to make.

The kid gets the message and gives him a reason. A good reason. Yondu might have gone for it even if it hadn't been Peter making the proposal.

And then the kid goes and makes him proud. He saves the whole galaxy and he pulls a trick worthy of a Ravager.

He's in a delicate position with his crew, but he'll manage. He uses the Nova Corps' favoring of the Guardians as a reason to keep his distance, and he puts that troll doll in pride of place.

The thing is, he doesn't want to go after Quill again, but if he doesn't, someone else will, and his crew can't see him back down after the scene that's just happened.

So he tracks down the kid's friends and tries to get away with just claiming the batteries.

It doesn't work out.

See, here's the thing: For a long time, Yondu's priority list went like this: himself first, then his crew, then everybody else. And there wasn't much left for "everybody else."

Then Peter came along, and, well - Kraglin's not wrong. The list shifts to: Yondu, Peter, the rest of the crew.

And Peter just kept inching up from being firmly second place to -

To one aerial rig and one spacesuit, and given the chance, Yondu doesn't take the spacesuit.

He's left enough kids to die on Ego's planet.

Yondu holds onto his kid as they blast into space. He's got the satisfaction of dying a proper Ravager, and the even greater satisfaction of knowing his kid's going to be alright.