A/N: I hope you like this rollercoaster! Oh, and I really, sincerely appreciate all the reviews. They certainly give me a boost in terms of motivation!

"I get it! I left ya stranded!" Yondu's voice came out low and guttural. "Quit smotherin' me for it, woman!"

"I'm not." Meredith chuckled. "You're just bein' a drama queen."

Despite his omnipresent front of self-assurance, which had in no way lessened over time, the alien that kept crashing into Meredith's life had looked awkward once he was shoved into her only armchair. She'd hustled him into her living room once all the spare blankets were taken from her supply closet and stacked in a mound in her arms. And as soon as he'd collapsed beneath her poking and prodding, the woman dumped her threads on top of his head.

It took her an embarrassingly long time, as she played an impromptu tug-o-war game with the growling maniac, to realize that she'd ruined half her supply of bedspreads. Yondu was still damp from appearing out of nowhere in the rain – which had gotten loud enough to be heard from all the way upstairs. Her guest was dripping from his head down to the toes of his boots once he'd entered her home, and had tracked grass and dirt in as well, making dark footprints appear on the lightly-colored carpet.

She'd expected no less, but Meredith couldn't help thinking that Blue had some nerve to come trouncing in and wrecking her fine things after he'd shot her.

"Get this shit off'a me!" Meredith watched him scramble beneath the "assault", a violently energetic shape whose space fixings jingled and jangled enticingly, even while she patiently threw more covers over the bare spots he'd managed to punch his way through.

Quill readied another set of blankets, floral patterned and darn near the prettiest she had (that she'd saved from when she was twelve and had loved the very idea of The Secret Garden).

"What's the magic word?" She sung teasingly.

Yondu let out a frustrated groan in reply. "Motherfu –!"

"Nope!" When it didn't seem like he was going to bend to her whims any more than he already had, Meredith sighed. "You deserve worse, ya jackass. It's a miracle nobody saw you come in here."

She stumbled back abruptly when Yondu tore the layers off completely and bared his teeth. The harsh lighting from the lamp she'd placed in the corner between couch and chair gave the red sliver of metal (or glass? She still didn't know what that thing was) embedded in the top of his head a blinding gleam. Silence descended upon them both as Yondu took in what she'd buried him under, and Meri fought valiantly to suppress the giggles that threatened to erupt from her mouth at how incensed he grew. The alien shook everything down to the floor, virtually shuddering when the flowery coverlet slithered down and out of his lap.

"Okay, now you're really jus' bein' dramatic." Laughter bubbled up from her throat, making her snort. "They're jus' blankets!"

Meredith smacked the side of his shoulder good-naturedly, still laughing a little too hard. "You should see your face! You're such a sourpuss, Blue!"

Yondu stilled, looking up at the woman from beneath furrowed brows. "Wha's tha' now? Some kin'a Terran insult I should be offended over?"

Meredith's mood did a 180 upon the realization that she'd never called him by that nickname aloud – not to his face. "Nooo… it's not… If I called ya 'yellow' it would be, but that's a different story… don't ya know what colors are?"

"I know what 'blue' means, ya idjit." He took her increasingly anxious look at being genuinely idiotic to rise from the chair and stand at his full height. While Yondu didn't exactly tower over Meredith, he was the one looking down at her now, and in her state of mortification it felt to her as though she'd shrunk.

"Oh. Oh! Sourpuss." She laughed it off as heat rose to warm her cheeks. "You are one, and yes you should be offended! A sourpuss ain't nothin' to be proud of, y'all can't have any fun as grumpy as ya are."

She pointed at him directly – fearless or stupid – Meredith figured it didn't matter anymore. "Means you should change your attitude, sir."

"Really?" The man reached out and maneuvered Meredith's accusatory finger in the opposite direction, and had her point back at herself. "I wonder if it's a mirror ya should be sayin' tha' crap to, not me."

His hand was stark and warm while it lingered on her own, but Meri kept her cool long enough to scoff. "You're kiddin' me."

"Mm-hm. Matter of fact, I don' jus' wonder or think neither, I know." He looked at her smugly. "Two standard weeks with you, little miss sunshine, is enough ta drive the saintliest Zatoan to commit sin and throw 'imself outta the nearest airlock."

"Ugh! Well, excuse me for showin' you hospitality!" She didn't care if she was being childish; Meredith stomped her foot on the ground. "Or for comin' around and letting you have a little basic human decency while you was prob'ly dyin' in my backyard!"

"Nobody was askin' fer your help or your hositaliny!" Yondu barked. "'Specially not me, lady!"

Meredith's brows shot up to her hairline as she stared at the bizarre man. "You'd rather I just left ya there? If I let you die?"

"Cause that might just be the stupidest goddamn thing I ever heard in my entire life! What kind of person do you think I am that I'd just abandon you soon as I saw you?!"

Genuine anger broiled inside of her, as Meredith shot a genuine glare at Yondu from her vantage point. She couldn't remember what had started this avalanche of a conversation, but she did have the image of her companion strewn and bloody in the creek behind her daddy's house. He'd been worse for wear and barely conscious when first she'd seen him, and his blue body had grown colder and heavier the longer Meredith let her fear of his strange appearance get the best of her.

"You don' even know me." He said quietly. If she didn't know any better, Meredith would've believed she'd stunned him just a little bit, which was sad in its own right.

The woman's expression soured, and her nose scrunched in distaste at his claim. She had it in her to debate that belief, because with or without the implant in her neck and the second chance to see Blue again, Meredith felt like she had some idea of who he was. Such a thought may have depressed her as a child who delighted in being far removed from humanity at large, but she appreciated it in the creature in front of her – more than he knew, apparently.

"So?" Meredith argued instead.

"Are you ever gonna tell me why you came back?"

Yawning, Meredith lifted the portable antique clock from her mantle and made a courageous attempt at telling the time while bleary-eyed. She'd gone to bed at around ten o'clock, with the intention of training her mind and body to obey a practical sleep schedule. It was terrifying to imagine that she might be late for work since, unlike the diner, her new job was prestigious and required a real adult to do it, rather than a pimply-faced teenager.

The 'training' hadn't been going as smoothly as Meri would've liked, but she'd made up the rules as she went along since high school, and always excused herself for staying up a few hours extra.

Four in the morning wasn't only a few hours extra.

"Why do'ya wanna know?" They were near her fireplace – still too massive for her shell of an apartment – where Yondu sat on his haunches and tended to a budding fire.

He'd gone out the sliding doors again (without her consent!) and returned with a mountain of singed and already smoking wood of varying size to throw into the grate. Of course, he grumbled himself into an early grave, so to speak, at how 'damn freezing' it was inside. Her stupor over seeing him come and go without the long-coat to cover his arms lasted a good minute, much to her dismay, but she got in a retort about how it was his fault for not bundling up like she'd wanted him to in the first place.

She might've asked where he'd gotten the firewood from in the first place, but after deliberating on it, Quill discovered that she'd rather not hear the crime from his mouth. She prayed to any god listening that she wasn't going to find that patch of woodland near her complex all burned down in the morning, but that was about it.

"Well, I can't imagine it's cus you missed me." Meredith leaned against the cool part of the mantle, which happened to be the scratchiest part of the bricks. "Unless I'm wrong and you really did travel all the way down here just cus you missed me?"

Yondu shoved her poker/ash scraper directly into the fire, causing a plume of smoke to erupt from the grate and travel through the mesh curtains surrounding it. "Nope!"

He had the audacity smirk at her, and while her heart may have fluttered once (or twice at most), she truly felt the exhaustion she'd repressed throughout the night as it creeped up through aching muscles and the soreness of her feet.

"Then why?"

Yondu sprung up, but instead of facing her when back on his feet, he immediately grabbed an ornament from the opposite side of the veneer. "You Terrans sure like ta hoard useless shit."

"Hey! Put that ba –" Meredith balked as she received a faceful of Yondu's hand. He gave her a light shove backward, suffocating her with the copper smell of oil and damp wood, as he inspected the miniature toy car that she had placed rather meticulously above the fireplace.

Meredith pulled back, far enough to rip out of his hold with a snarl. "Yondu… Whatever the hell your full name is! You put my car back where it belongs or so help me god!"

"The hell's a caw-er?" He asked. Yondu put the model back in favor of the trinket right next to it. He dangled the plush monkey with its button eyes and over-elongated limbs far too close to the fire for Meredith's liking.

She made a grab for it, tiredness receding while the blue bastard traded his former curious wandering for dangling her prized ornaments above her head. "Come get 'em, girlie."

"Quit it!" She snapped, brushing up on her tiptoes to snag the monkey back. "Don' take stuff that don' belong to ya, a-ho –!"

He threw the monkey in her face next. Fuming, the woman pulled the stuffed animal away and set it back to an alternative spot above the fireplace, nose literally in the air as she positioned it just so. It was honestly like she was dealing with a child, and Meredith was considering how much it wasn't worth the effort as Yondu manhandled each, and every decoration she'd scrounged up to make the fireplace less imposing, and more like home. Her home on the other side of town had a mantle too, one that had bared angel figurines that Mrs. Quill had once collected, and pictures of her and her siblings, and some of their old pets playing in the yard. There were the old clay handprints of Regina's and Curt's from elementary school still gathering dust interspersed between everything, from what Meri could remember. That mantle had been made of darkly-painted wood, which was easy to hammer nails into so that they could hang stockings up come Christmas time as well.

She'd done her best to mimic her family's traditions, though she knew in her heart it would never quite be the same. Quill didn't need him ruining that, too.

"Whas this un?"

"That's a snow globe." Meredith replied, after counting to five in her head slowly. She tilted her head to one side. "It's San Francisco… That's a city a hundred miles away from here."

Yondu grunted, still eyeing the tiny thing acutely.

"Daddy went on a business trip. I was fourteen years old and he said I wasn't too old fer a present, so he brought it back for me. Said all kinds a' strange, colorful people lived there." She babbled onward, feeling a tight compression within while they both stood in one place. "I always wanted to go myself and see, but we never could afford it just ta have fun, ya know?"

"All them colorful people live on this weird, red…" He leaned in closer, eyes narrowed while he peered in the tiny glass orb. "This a bridge?"

The woman near him covered her mouth with a hand, trying not to laugh at his ignorance. Who knows what got Yondu's, jackass extraordinaire, knickers in a twist.

"No, but it is the Golden Gate Bridge!" She drew closer, until her previous joy came back in tingles throughout her joints. "It's famous on Earth, lots a people all over the world go there just to look at it, take pictures – the whole shebang!"

"Sounds like a waste o' time ta me." Yondu deadpanned.

"Don' they got tourist-y stuff where you're from?"

Yondu's large, blue hand cut through the air violently as he just about threw the object down, making Meredith clench up in wait for the knickknack to shatter after slamming into the ground. It didn't hit and shatter, thank the Lord, but the blue man didn't open his hand to justify the action. She grabbed a handful of his jacket and tugged before either could react.

"Woah, woah, woah! Ya don't have to be so hard on it!" She shook her head with a frown. "Gently. Be gentler, like this."

The Terran demonstrated with an invisible snow globe in her palm, which she clutched tenderly before shaking it from side to side. Yondu looked at her from the corner of his eye and snorted, but he followed her instructions for once, just to watch as sparkling flakes of white rushed to the top of the globe and came fluttering down to submerge the tiny model bridge and cars beneath it.

Meredith had moved in closer, resting a hair away from against Yondu's shoulder in her haste to get to the object, which she had no doubt seen and shaken hundreds of times before. She even tapped delicate fingers against the glass, tracing the patterns of the glitter, trying to refrain from looking up at her companion's expression

"See? You shake..." She smiled softly. "And then, it's snowin'."

Meredith had the patience of a rambunctious bloodhound. She couldn't resist peeking at his face after a little while, especially when he didn't scoff outright at another one of her possessions. And lo and behold, if this paltry little snow globe didn't make a hidden smile appear on the gruff, militaristic creature's scarred face.

Blue looked more boyish than when she'd first seen him, unconscious and vulnerable in Gunn Wood, and Meredith would've been lying if she didn't find his strange fascination sweet.

"It's not a stereo, but it is kinda magical, huh?"

"Hn." Was all Yondu said. When the last of the glitter and snow drifted to the bottom of the globe, the tiny smile and softened gaze were whisked right off his face.

"Oh! The stereo! Is that why you came back?" The Terran took the snow globe out of Yondu's hand and put it back on the mantle before she grabbed his wrist absentmindedly and stood them both in front of the grand stereo as it faced the rest of the room.

"Did ya miss the music? I bet that's it! You don't get human music in the stars, but you loved mine so much that you just had to come back for more! Right?" It was the most ridiculous explanation that anyone, even Meredith Quill, could've come up with.

Yondu's expression said as much, at least. "What? No!"

"Well then why the hell are you here?" She stamped her foot, scuffing up more of the ruined carpet in her wake. The alien sighed through his nostrils, like a steer before it rampaged.

"You still got that sweater, don't ya?" He asked snidely.

"What sweater?"

"The one you forced on me after I was stuck up in that shack o' yours. Or whatever the hell it was you kept me in."

"It was a barn."

He threw his hands up. "It don't matter! Show me where you put it!"

The man had followed her down the hall and, in the most un-gentleman-like fashion possible, hung inside her room while she dug in her tiny, personal closet.

He was grinning savagely when the sweater was revealed, wadded up and stuffed inside a garbage bag inside a tub of a box. "I knew you'd keep it."

"Yeah, okay, but why does it matter?" Meredith's face was surely red as a beet at all the implications of her keeping her former guest's former, temporary sweater – which had once been her brother's, before this whole mess got started. There was no simplistic explanation for why she'd kept the ugly thing – the best explanation that she could make on the spot was that it was a sentimental keepsake from Bill, but Meredith didn't have any clothes from Curtis or Regina in her apartment.

"Look at that. You didn' even unwrap my present. Smart girl." By his tone, it sounded to Meri like Yondu had assumed she wouldn't have done more than gathered the ugly thing up and kept it hidden at the bottom of a box.

Without another word, Yondu ripped the clothing out of her hand. In the same instant, a square, metal chip with a big red button protruding from its center greeted the floor from the confines of the wooly monstrosity. The glow of it matched the glow from Yondu's head ornament – it was a dead-giveaway that this thing belonged to the spaceman himself, though Meredith couldn't begin to imagine how or why it'd appeared.

"I don't remember this being in there a year ago." Meredith couldn't blink. She bent down and picked the chip up, feeling its smooth metallic surface lined with grooves and teeny-tiny knobs at every corner. Yondu invaded her personal space long enough to press his thumb against the button and the blaring red glow dimmed until it was dead.

"It's a tracker."

She gazed at Yondu, immobilized. "What?"

"A tracker." He repeated. "I put it here 'fore I was gone, so I knew where ya were all year long. Now I'm here to get it back. Happy now?"

"You did what?" Meredith questioned pointblank. The twirling, whirling feelings inside her surrounding the mystery of just what her former guest had left behind slowly ground to a halt when his sneer didn't waver. "You didn't."

"You heard what I said." He answered smugly. "But relax, it's already done, no reason ta get –"

Meredith didn't think twice before she smacked him across the face. The action prompted her to drop the tracker chip entirely, and it was flung to the other side of the room.

"After I saved your life?!" She shrieked.

It wasn't a second later before she gasped, eyes as wide as globes. "I'm sorry! I'm sorry…"

He advanced forward a few steps – for Yondu, a few steps were an awful long stride. He was looming over her, eyes lit with irritation while he massaged the side of his jaw that she'd struck.

"Oh, would you give tha' a rest, already?!" Any imposing, dark words she might've anticipated coming from his sharp tongue were curbed by his complaining. He was grouching… but that was it, funnily enough, as Yondu made no further moves to return the slap or scream in her face.

"I was doin' ya a favor. I couldn't stick around forever, so I stuck a tracker on ya fer your protection!" Amidst his yowling, there was a moment where Yondu froze entirely, like he'd just said too much. It was a curious thing, that disappeared within the blink of an eye.

"Not like ya noticed, anyway. Airhead." He grumbled quietly, barely rubbing the roughened cheek with just as roughened fingers.

"Protect me? From what?" She demanded, legs locked and hands on hips. He didn't answer quick enough for her liking.

"If you went through all the trouble of making it easier for us to talk –" Meredith started. "Then why the hell won't you talk to me?!"

"Listen! It don't matter anymore!" Yondu said gruffly, holding her at arms-length. "You wanted ta know why I came back, and now ya know! Don' ask if you can't handle what's comin'!"

She wiggled in his grasp incessantly. "What were you protectin' me from?"

"It. Don't. Matter. Now." He grit his shiny silver teeth with the aggravation. "Drop it, ya loon."

Meredith pitched forward. "Drop me!"

Her feet had been lifted off the ground before he released her, and by that time they eyed each other in much the same way as when Meredith had tried to keep him from escaping her family's barn. There was no arrow in her face this time, however.