Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Everything is burning.

Her eye is itching from sweat or blood, and she digs the heel of her hand into it until the pain chases it away. Maybe sometime ages before she could hear the whistle that’s coming from her pursed lips but not anymore. The only thing she hears is defiant screams blending together in grasping, lilting rhythm. She lets the pitch of her whistle blend into it in crooked counterpoint, a composition of cracking bones and the sibilant shrieks.

There isn’t any pain anymore. Soldier pills and adrenaline have taken care of that, and whenever the feel of the world around her starts to filter back in, there’s shots to grab from her belt, flicking caps off and stabbing them into her thigh.

They’re losing, she knows, the signs dripping dull and black in the air around her. Does it matter though? Does it matter whether she dies in blazing glory or in ashes, whether her masters tramp victorious on the backs of their slaves or trample them in retreat? Either way, she’ll be here, whistling hopeless tunes to skies that will never save her.

The Kree are retreating. She can hear the hiss of their ships taking off, cutting their losses as the enemy gains the upper hand, and the scant scattered remnants of her battalion are alone.

When fire cuts the back of her knees, she folds, hands too limp to catch her so the shrapnel littered ground does instead. Pulsing in her head is the tether that ties her to her arrow, the chunk of yaka wedged in her skull letting her cling to it, feel the only thing that’s hers as she dies.

Because she will die. No one on this stars forsaken field is coming for her, and if a stray projectile doesn’t get her dehydration will. There isn’t a water source for miles and nowhere to go after even if she did manage to drag herself to one. Besides, even if the Ravagers cut their losses, they’ll want to gather their dead. If they find anyone alive, they won’t stay that way for long.

There’s no point in forcing another rush of adrenaline into her veins so she lets her eyes close, lets the world burn.

The minders in the creche were mostly those permanently disabled to the extent they didn’t have much other use to the Kree, but in good enough health they didn’t require any attention to be given to them. That makes it easier for them to get away with things the Kree have little patience for – the way they slump in the corner to snuggle the younglings, soothing the wavering betrayal in their cries, humming songs of hope in dark places.

Yondu was too small to remember anything before crowded, scratch-sheet cots and a dozen different hands and dozen different colors helping her up, giving her food and shielding her. She’s given dolls tied together from bits of the straw that poke out of the bedding, along with the other little girls and boys. They're careful to hide them whenever the masters come around.

Even when the children are deemed old enough to endure the brutal training Kree battle slaves are put through, and she comes back bruised and exhausted she’ll still fish it out with shaky fingers, hold it tight.

Aleta digs a hand into her sweaty hair, let it pull hard as she pushes it back off her forehead. Before her is only death and devastation, and she hates the Kree, acid and sour with everything in her.

The field before is littered with corpses, some decked in leather and some in the rags of battle slaves or dark speckled uniforms of their Kree overlords. It’d been longer and bloodier than she thinks either of them had anticipated and so they’ve deserted this place, the Kree. The only ones left are her Ravagers and the dead.

She picks her way through the wreckage, watches her crew gently wrap up the bodies for transport. They’ll give them all a proper Ravager funeral, send them to the next life with the Colors to light their way. It’s only when she hears a tiny, stifled gasp that she looks down, sees she’s just trodding on the edge of battered, blue fingers. The person’s not one of hers, is only half covered in the torn loincloth and scars that mark one of the Kree slaves and on instinct she’s lifting her blaster and pointing it at their head.

Aleta can see bleary, red eyes blinking up at her, something resentful burning deep underneath the resignation and it stays her trigger finger, a second before she would have blown a neat hole in their head.

There’s something about that look that catches her, and Aleta crouches down, grabs their chin with a rough hand and tilts it up to meet hers. The face studies her back, then grates out in Lower Kree, “Ya gonna kill me or not?”

It’s filled with far more sulky bluster than anyone should have lying defeated and half-dead at their victor’s feet, and Aleta can feel the corners of her lips curling up in delight. “Depends,” she drawls out. “Wanna be a Ravager?”

“You’re going to battalion tomorrow”

Yondu’s hand closes jerkily around her arrow, plucking it out of the air. She lets her chin drop forward, turns around to face the Kree Enforcer. The news isn’t really a surprise to her. The only reason it’s taken longer for her than for the others her age is the delay in her training from the experimentation, and every flayed bit of skin is well healed over by now.

“Report in the morning, training ground fifteen,” and without checking to make sure she’s parsed the information the Kree is stomping off to the next slave.

When she tells the others in her creche that night, the female minders form a protective circle, trying to pass on the what she’ll need to know. The warn her of bleeding that might come, although they’re not sure about her species. Scraps of the cleanest rags they have are tucked into her belt just in case. The Kree won’t leave her capable of childbearing for long though once they discover it, she’s told, so she needn't worry about finding more.

They gently clonk their foreheads to hers, a secret passing on of strength and luck as she’s taken out of their hands. Yondu closes her eyes, and locks the memory deep down where nothing else can touch it.

The first few days about the Ravager ship are spent in a med bay, as Yondu is patched back together. It’s strange, and overwhelming, and people are always talking too fast for her newly implanted translator chip.

This morning when the nurse comes bustling in it’s with a set of soft, blue leathers in his hand, that are draped across the foot of her bed. Must be hers, and there’s a thrill tingling up her spine at the thought of herself standing tall, swirled in buckles and menace like the woman with the jagged-toothed grin that had saved her.

Blue though… blue was the color of some of the medics, not green like the woman. She squints at them, and decides that as long as the nurse is here she might as well ask.

“What do the colors mean, then? ’S blue for people who aren’t important?”

The nurse seems to almost choke a little on nothing at that, before swallowing and saying, “Navy’s the color of Captain Stakar, the one who’s taking you on as crew. The green you saw was Captain Aleta’s colors.”

“What,” Yondu squints up, “I ain’t gonna join her crew?”

Yondu doesn’t understand, wasn’t Aleta the one who had offered her a way out, the one who’d made her a Ravager?

“Captain Stakar’s probably the one that had the space, Captain Aleta don’t take on much crew,” then after a pause, the nurse adds almost as an afterthought, “And when she does they’re normally other women, and you’re male after all.”

What is stars-flaming hell is the nurse blathering on about? Yondu purses her lips and rolls her eyes.

“Thas stupid, ‘m notta male.”

“Not a…” The nurse looks down in her in confusion, then his expression widens as something seems to dawn on him. “Wait, do you think… did the Kree tell you that you were female?”

Yondu blinks. Truth is no one had ever told her really. It had always been obvious, hadn’t it?

“I gotta cunt,” she says, suspicious.

The nurse blinks, and then continues, “Yondu, you’re a perfectly normal Centaurian male, this is how Centaurian males look. See?”

The nurse shows her his holopad, points at a bunch of squiggles that don’t mean shit to Yondu, but there’s pictures there, of people who look just like her crests like the one she had when she was a little kid before infection made the Kree cut it off and wedge the chunk of red metal into her skull in its place.

When he sees she doesn’t understand, the nurse is patient in his explanation. It doesn’t really matter though because Yondu feels like someone’s grabbed everything in front of her and swung it to the left, wobbly and sharp and dizzyingly wrong, a joint snapping out of place.

He has to be lying to her, he must be wrong.

The nurse’s explanation is cut short by the swoosh of the med bay doors, and through it stalks the knife-eyed woman accompanied by a square-jawed man who looked like the world had tried to chew him up before deeming him too tough and spitting him back out. Enough pain still filters in through the fuzz of the drugs they’d given her that she winces when she pushes up on her elbows as they come to a stop by her bed. But like hell she’s gonna face them lying all flat and fainting on her back.

The nurse powers off the holopad, turning towards the pair as he says, “Here for an update, Captain Stakar, Captain Aleta? He’s recovering well, there was only minor head trauma, dehydration and exhaustion for us to fix. Doc says he should be ready for discharge later today.”

The man’s mouth quirks up at the corners, some of the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes softening.

“Good to hear,” he turns to Yondu, “So you’re the tagalong Aleta’s brought on board, huh? I’m your new captain, Stakar Ogord.”

Yondu’s eyes bounce between the two captains for a moment before she squares her jaw obstinately.

“She’s my captain.”

Three pairs of startled eyes blink back at her, but Yondu doesn’t back down. She doesn’t know the rules here, what type of painful consequences come with mouthing off like that. It would be far from the first time her cheek had gotten her into trouble. But Captain Aleta was the one that plucked her off the hellscape of the battlefield, who didn’t kill her even when she should have – so she’s Yondu’s captain, not this other man.

When Stakar moves, Yondu barely controls her flinch backwards but he doesn’t move towards her. Instead he elbows Aleta in the side with a smirk.

“Hear that, darling?” Stakar ignores the narrow-eyed poisonous look she shoots him, “Looks like he wants to stay with you.”

Aleta’s fist swings around to connect solidly with his gut and he oofs a little, curling in on himself with the smirk still firmly in place. She cocks her head, studies Yondu’s face for a moment before speaking.

“What’s your name, kid?”

“M’name’s Yondu,” Yondu glares up at her a little. She hasn’t been a kid for years.

Aleta smirks, “Well then, Yondu, welcome to the Silverhawk. Ready to get outta med bay?”

Yondu nods jerkily, satisfied, and settles pointedly back into the bed. It’s about time the let her out of this little white room with all it’s too nice nurses who always smiled. Awful sketchy, it was. Yondu would be glad to be away from their fishy benignness

She’s told to dress, and then follows some medic through winding metal corridors, past curious looks from others humanoids in similar green or blue leathers, and through a docking bay onto another ship. Nearly empty rows of triple-stacked bunks line the walls of the room where they finally stop, and there’s one neatly made that the medic points to before bidding her a hasty farewell.

No one comes after to tell her what to do or where to go, so she flings herself onto the bed, worrying at her lip with one yellowed incisor. She’s still got a surprising amount of her her own teeth, chipped and metal filled as they are, but she thinks about the shining points on Captain Aleta’s teeth and thinks maybe she wouldn’t mind if she looses a few more.

The leathers on her body feel strange, constricting, and Yondu doesn’t like them. Peeling everything off her top half she flexes her toes against the luxuriously soft blanket, thinks about what the medic said. It doesn’t make sense. She doesn’t feel like a boy, but why would they want to lie to her about this?

It’s not like the Kree had even cared about which one of their slaves were male or female, pouring them in and packing them tight in the filthy, dark-shadowed barracks. As many different varieties as the species there came in, it wasn’t like they had the time or need to sort them. Besides, with them all doped up on some combination of uppers and downers wasn’t like they had much will for anything but surviving.

Her hands start twisting in the blankets, pulling up the neatly tucked edges and she squirms unhappily on the bed. Maybe she really is a man. Maybe it’s just another thing the Kree have stolen.

Chapter Text

"You the nub?" There's a hand on her shoulder, shaking her awake and Yondu snaps up, chin nearly lowered to her chest and hands moving behind her back.

"Hey, no need for all that, boyo," the man's white dreadlocks swing gently, golden bangles clinking off each other as he cocks his head at her and grins. "Chow's on, and no one's gonna save any for ya if you sleep through it."

Yondu waits a minute, but the man just raises an eyebrow at her and jerks his chin in the direction of her jacket. Oh. Must be a rule, keeping her jacket on. She shrugs it on hurriedly, shoves her feet into her boots and then at his approving nod follows him out the door.

She ends up shadowing the man, Tullk, around through his normal routine. Turns out he's Captain Aleta's quartermaster, which means he's in charge of organizing shit and telling people what to do. He's a good teacher, patient. When she isn't with him she's with his other current apprentice, a tousled black-haired Krylorian named Patch. They constantly look bored with everything that's going on around them, but whenever Yondu's not really paying attention they'll drawl out some sarcastic, sniping comment that makes her choke down giggles.

It's good here, this ship. But it happens every day, the being reminded that when they look at her they don’t really see her. The feeling of wrongness doesn’t ever change. It’s like someone’s running their hand up the raw sensitive scars of her spine every time they call her ‘boy’ or ‘him.’ She sets her jaw though, grimly digs in her heels. After all, maybe it’s like her leathers – starting out all constricting and stiff, needing time to break them in.

"Hey Patch, c'n you hand me the most recent roster?" Tullk holds one hand out towards Patch, doesn't stop tapping on his datapad with the other. Patch makes a face at Yondu, a hilariously exaggerated caritacture of his furrowed focused expression and it sends Yondu into silent paroxysm behind Tullk's back.

When Patch deposits the requested roster in Tullk's waiting hand he takes it with an absent, "Thanks, boyo." It wipes the smirk off Patch’s face, and they grunt out, "Tuuuuuullk."

He blinks, then brings his head around and says apologetically, "Sorry 'bout that. Wasn't thinking."

Yondu asks Patch about it later, why Tullk had to apologize for that.

"Oh, when I first met Tullk I thought I had to be a boy," they say breezily, "But I didn't like it, 'cause I'm not. Tullk just gets forgetful some times, is all."

And that's... Yondu hadn't realized that was a thing people did. Patch just hadn't... felt like a boy? She doesn't ask anymore, but she doesn't forget.

She wonders, sometimes whether to ask Captain Aleta about it. Surely if anyone can tell her about this, it's her. She's captain of a whole ship of Ravagers, and she's been all over the galaxy. Surely she knows something about this.

The next day when she wanders onto the bridge, she sees the bridge crew clustered around a datapad, excitedly crowing over something. She wanders up to Tullk, who gives her a grin.

"Gotta new job, laddie," he says, and Yondu ignores the twinge at the moniker. "Looks like the Collector's willing to pay a pretty penny for some fancy painting,  some rich boy with his own planets not willing t'give it up." The ghostly images swirling in the air show the outline of the planet.

"It's a simple snatch and grab, yeah?" Tullk points to the entrance of what looks like an artificial cave. "Cept there's two problems. The canyon here, see, is too narrow for any 'a our ships."

He spreads his thumb and finger apart to bring the inside of the cave into focus. "And see here, inside is rows of offset guard nooks, means a few straight blaster shots to take out the hired help is out is out of the question."

Yondu squints at the jagged nooks. No way to get a small team armed with blasters through there but maybe...

“I could do it with m’arrow,” she says.

Tulk raises an eyebrow at her. "You haven't been on any jobs yet, boyo, you think yer ready?"

Then he squints at her, turns to look at Captain Aleta. "Though suppose this one shouldn't be a tough one, if we c'n stay outta blaster range, have you take 'em all out with your arrow b'fore we go in."

Captain Aleta eyes Yondu up and down, arms folded as she lounges against the control console.

"You can keep your head, not fuck it up?" she asks, and from someone else it might sound condescending but from her it's only the inquiry of a captain making sure she's not putting her people in a bad situation.

"Yes, Cap'n," Yondu pulls every inch of her stocky frame up straight, thrusts her shoulders back. When Aleta gives her an affirming nod, she struggles not to punch her fist into the air. Finally she gets to do real Ravager shit – and not just any job, one with Captain Aleta. She's gonna be the goddamn best.

In spite of Tullks trepidations, the job goes smoothly. Yondu whistles her arrow sharp and true, burns neat holes through every guard before singing it back to where she can snatch it out of the air.

It feels good, feels like she's doing what she was born for, with people she trusts at her back. It’s even better, the way Aleta smacks her happily on the back, how Tullk hums out an approving, “Nice” as the pack up what they came to get.

Then Tullk says casually, “Ready to go, son?” and all the happiness wheezes out of her like she taken a punch to the gut.

Tullk grinning, arms stretched up behind his head and suddenly Yondu hates him. He may be the quartermaster and Captain Aleta’s right hand man, but if he calls her son one more time she’s gonna stick her arrow where the sun don’t shine, damn the consequences.

“I’m not yer goddamn son,” she grits out, “an’ I’m notta fuckin’ boy neither.”

Eyes startling wide, as his arms drop to his side Tullk ekes out a blank, “What’chu say?” 

Yondu stomps down hard on the fluttering anxious thing careening around her chest, and says lower, “Notta boy, Imma girl.”

The words float in the air a moment, twisting idly. Tullk swallows, opens his mouth to say something and then stops as Aleta’s boots thunk off the rock where she’d propped them and onto the floor.

“You heard the woman,” Aleta grins, a sharp toothed, metallic glinting one, as she stands. “She’s a lady, don’t call her son.”

When they get back to the Silverhawk, Aleta flicks a beckoning finger over her shoulder as she strides towards her office. Yondu follows, clinging silently to Aleta’s words. If Aleta had told her she was wrong, had something broken off and warped in her head…. Yondu swallows against the sour taste of panic that rises in the back of her throat.

But she didn’t. She’s agreed with Yondu, waited until Tullk had given her an apologetic pat and a promise not to talk about her like she was male again.

When the office door closes behind them with a slick whoosh, Aleta sprawls herself over her chair and looks up.

“So,” she drawls, “Anything else I need to know.”

Yondu doesn’t want to talk about it. Except…

“I’m gonna tell all the crew,” she warns, “An’ I might punch ‘em if they laugh.”

“Darling, if they laugh feel free to punch ‘em twice,” Aleta yawns, “just to make sure to the point really hits home.”

Somehow Aleta makes even a yawn look menacing, goddamn. Yondu’s gonna learn how she does it and how to do the same, if it ’s the last thing she does.

But… the worry still niggles in the back of mind, worming it’s insidious way around. If there’s anyone Yondu trusts to answer it, it’s Aleta. “You think it’s wrong, being what the Kree made me?”

“You’re what you have made you, Yondu,” Aleta sits up a little straighter, looks Yondu dead in the eye. “Everyone has what they’re born with and what they pick up along the way. Don’t make you any different than anyone else.”

She waits until Yondu nods and her, then settles back in her seat. “So if you know you’re a woman, you’re a woman. Simple as that.”

Yondu swallows, gnaws at her upper lip with a metal-tipped incisor. Somehow it doesn’t feel as simple as all that, but the words make her feel better anyways.

“Good?” At Yondu’s slow affirmation Aleta pushes herself to her feet. “Get some rest then. You got the cycle off tomorrow for working the job, then it’s back on normal shifts.”

Yondu trods slow back to her bunk, Aleta's words rolling warm and glowing in her chest as she thinks about you heard the woman and don’t call her son. The world around her finally feels like it fits, like it’s not rubbing her raw in her sensitive spots, wrapping a little too tight around her chest. Yondu swallows against the rightness welling fierce and sweet in her throat, makes her strides just a little bit wider.

Fuck  what the nurse said, what everyone thinks, all the things the Kree have taken and warped in her – fuck anyone else who tries to tell her who she is.