A/N: I don't own Guardians.

Yondu knows his parents didn't want him. Knows they sold him on when he was only a baby.

Yondu doesn't care about this, mind, and he'll fight anyone who says otherwise, but he knows it all the same.

"Dead," the old woman said with great solemness. "Both of them."

The father sat down hard.

The mother was buried with honors in the custom of their world. The child was wrapped entirely in cloth, also in the custom of the world. He was prepared so by the priest.

No one commented on the priests and the midwife's monthly trip to the great city. No one noticed when they came back with their purses heavier for the trip.

The buyer noticed that it was the third child the couple who called themselves the Udontas had sold that year, but he didn't particularly care.

The father grew gaunt with little sleep. He said he dreamed that his son was suffering. He took to wandering the village at night.

Those wanderings led to him discovering a crying baby who'd been declared dead.

The midwife and priest were punished. The father set out to look for his son.

He spent the rest of his life looking. He never found him.

Ego knows he is alone. Not alone in the universe, as he first feared, but the only one of his kind. The only one who has the power to fulfill his great purpose.

Through time and space, their thoughts flitted. Celestials were never alone.

Well, except for one. One brother never seemed to hear their calls. Either he could not receive them, or he was blocking them out.

They never stopped calling, but he never responded.

Not even on the day that his light went dark.

Peter knows that his father doesn't love him. If his father loved him, he would be there, like the other kids' dads are.

For a few brief shining hours, Peter thought maybe he was wrong. Maybe his father did love him.

When said he killed Peter's mother, he stopped caring about whether his father loved him or not. Ego might think he loved Peter, but Peter was pretty sure Ego wasn't capable of really loving someone.

When Yondu gave him the only spacesuit, Peter realized the truth.

His father might not have loved him.

But his dad did.

A/N: According to an online article that I now cannot find, the thing about Celestials is comics canon. Don't know if that's true, but I loved the idea.