Chapter Text
The stars were beautiful, unfamiliar in the best way, laid into a sky the shade of a Yenai woman’s eyes and reflected in the ocean below. Peter sighed deeply and half smiled as he sipped from his bottle, narrowing his eyes as he started to build his own constellations.
“You ever been off planet?” he asked without looking away from the sky, pulling Brandy a little closer at the waist.
“No,” she replied, her own hand around his waist wandering down and playing with the top edge of his boxers. “Can we go inside yet?”
“I told you,” replied Peter without any hint of annoyance, “I’m Terran, not a god. You’ve gotta give it a rest.”
Brandy huffed out an impatient sigh, still playing with his waistband but not moving her hand any further down.
“I’ve been up there,” said Peter after a long, thoughtful pause and another sip.
“You own a ship,” muttered Brandy.
“Seen half the galaxy,” continued Peter, her words hardly registering against the stars in the sky.
Brandy hummed, her free hand touching his abs and staying there.
“It’s beautiful,” he said with another deep sigh.
“I’m beautiful,” said Brandy, pressing her breasts up against his side so that he could feel her nipples through her shirt.
“But you’re not…” he paused to think, gesturing vaguely at nothing with his bottle. “Existentially beautiful, you know?”
“Does existential want to ride your cock?” she mumbled against his shoulder, her frustration evident in the way she drummed her fingers against his abs.
Peter was fairly certain he wasn’t supposed to have heard what she’d said, so he chose to ignore it, sipping at his drink and humming one of his songs.
"Escape". Rupert Holmes. 1979.
“You know, on Terra,” he began, using his bottle to point up at a meteor hitting the atmosphere. “We call that a shooting star, and when you see one, you make a wish.”
“Wish you’d f...” Brandy paused as the meteorite continued to get larger - apparently it was large enough that it was actually going to land.
Peter frowned as he made the mental calculation of how close it was going to be when it hit the ocean; something was off about it, but he couldn’t place what.
“Is that a person?” asked Brandy, her grip on his waist tightening.
“Nooo,” said Peter, eyes narrowed as he tried to see what she was seeing. “No way.”
“I think that’s a person,” insisted Brandy, concern colouring her voice.
“Shit,” hissed Peter as the meteor-that-was-definitely-a-person hit the surface of the ocean and sprayed water into the sky. “Shit, that’s a person.”
He looked down the beach to his right and saw nobody. He looked down the beach to his left and saw nobody. His brain made the connection between seeing nobody and himself, and he took a deep breath before dropping the bottle into the sand and letting go of Brandy.
“You’re gonna go rescue them?” asked Brandy, her indignant words following him as he started to run on bare feet towards the water.
Peter spun around on his heels, tripping over himself twice before managing to continue walking backwards while he addressed Brandy.
“You know what?” he said, his smile tight as he pointed towards her. “I’m gonna need you to take that lovely pussy of yours somewhere else.”
“Fuck you,” she snarled as he turned back around and started to wade out into the water.
“Been there,” he called back without turning around, “done that.”
Whatever words she said were lost when he double tapped the control for his mask and dove forward. The shock of cold on his arms and chest and balls was more than enough to knock him back toward sobriety, hissing out a curse behind his mask before starting to swim towards where the person had hit the water.
When he reached where his instincts told him was right he cast around - the person was nowhere to be seen. For half a second Peter considered swimming back in towards the beach. The beach, where insatiable Brandy might still be waiting.
He dove down on the off chance that the person he was nominally rescuing hadn’t been dragged off by the currents. No need to experience guilt if he didn’t have to.
The water was cast in shades of ghostly red from his mask, the swim down a blur of floating specks and one particularly curious fish. When he reached the bottom he discovered that the colour of the ocean wasn’t just a reflection of the sky, but also from the faint purple glow of the silt.
Peter spun slowly in a circle until he spotted a silhouette against the glow, pushing off against the silt towards it.
The person was a pale-skinned man in a stupid horned helmet who was understandably unconscious and somehow only minorly singed from the fall. A tiny stream of bubbles escaped between his lips in what seemed to be one long exhale - most likely at least partly non-human.
Peter grabbed onto the front of the man’s coat and made an experimental attempt to lift him away from where he was floating a metre above the sand. It was too difficult for him to manage the trip back to the surface, and so Peter pulled the helmet off and discarded it to the side, the man’s eyes briefly flickering almost open in response to the rough treatment.
He was still too heavy, and Peter grimaced before pawing around at the man’s coat in an attempt to find the clasps. No luck. He didn’t hesitate before shoving his hands up the much shorter front - non-human or not, the man was likely running out of time.
His fingers brushed against something hard and Peter froze for a moment before cautiously investigating. A sheath - a dagger - he grinned behind the mask and worked the dagger out of the sheath before using it to unceremoniously slice the man’s coat up the front from waist to neck.
Then he let the dagger fall down into the sand, grabbing both sides of the coat and pulling them apart, the sound of the last few fibres tearing loud enough to reach Peter’s ears.
“Whoops,” he muttered to himself, his eyebrows going up as he witnessed the man’s shirt come undone along with the jacket to reveal the man’s skin.
Pale. Thin. Ripped.
Somehow, that wasn’t what Peter had expected.
He finished the rip and worked swiftly to pull the man’s arms out from his clothes, allowing himself to glance down the man’s lower body before deciding that he didn’t have the time to strip him down any more.
Another test of the man’s weight - ditching the coat and helmet cut it down by at least a third - and Peter pulled him close, knelt down, and then launched himself upward as hard as he could.
The man gasped and coughed when they finally reached the surface, but didn’t wake, forcing Peter to drag him back to shore in a swim that felt infinitely longer than the trip out.
When he reached the beach he dropped the man on his back, his feet still in the waves - with the tide going out, there was no reason to drag him any further. After he’d tapped the button behind his ear to hide the mask, he reached out to touch the man’s face, jerking his hand back when the man began to cough without any intervention, rolling half onto his side.
“Put me back,” he gasped between harsh breaths.
“What?” asked Peter, leaning forward over the man to keep his face in view. “Were you awake that whole time?”
The man took a moment to reply, one hand coming up to cover his face, shaking his head as he panted. “Some,” he muttered. “Regrettably.”
“Why didn’t you help me?” snarled Peter, gesturing out at the water with one hand.
“I had hoped you would grow tired and let go,” he looked over his shoulder at Peter through his fingers. “If I’d known you were so…” his eyes travelled down Peter’s body. “Much,” he concluded, “I might have…”
His body sagged along with his words trailing off, and Peter was left staring at a man who was definitely-probably passed out on the beach.
It took several seconds for his thoughts to catch up to what had happened, and when it did, he bounced up onto his feet. After a pause to breathe through some of his frustration, he let himself kick sand at the man’s bare back exactly once before turning and striding up the beach towards where he’d parked the Milano.
Half way through the three minute walk he paused, took a breath, cursed, and then kept walking.
Taking the Milano back to pick the man up instead of trying to drag him across the sand was absolutely the best decision; lifting him into the ship with the tractor beam was significantly less work. As he watched the tractor beam raise the man into the hold Peter considered whether to let him lie on the hold’s floor out of spite, but after the beam unceremoniously dropped the man a metre onto the floor, Peter decided the bruises would be punishment enough.
Instead he knelt down and lifted the man with a grunt, carrying him to the drunk-bunk and awkwardly pushing him onto the thin mattress laid out on a nearly-humanoid length shelf. There was already a bucket on the floor next to the bunk, and after a quick once-over of the man Peter heaved a sigh and retrieved a blanket, tossing it over the man in the hope it would keep him from starting to shiver and really looking pathetic.
Peter turned to head towards his own bunk and then paused, stepping back around and kneeling beside the bunk so that he could speak quietly near the man’s ear.
“You weren’t awake for all that too, were you?” he asked.
He received silence, the man’s brow slightly furrowed even in his sleep.
“Because if you were awake for all that,” continued Peter, “you’re a real asshole.”
More silence.
Peter drummed his fingers against the edge of the shelf-bunk, but successfully resisted the urge to prod the man’s shoulder just in case.
He managed a quick shower before collapsing into his own bunk - he’d gone to so much effort to keep sand out of the crack of his ass already and wasn’t about to get it in his bed - the time spent mulling over his swiftly expanding list of questions for the man. Turning off the lights made the questions come faster, but turning on his music softly next to his bed helped quiet them.
Two suns rose, Peter’s hangover significantly milder than it would have been if Brandy had stayed and his list of questions now extensive, and the man hadn’t moved.
Three suns were in the sky, Peter’s early afternoon spent with a beer, nail clippers, and Redbone. The man rolled onto his back, the blanket twisted around in a way that made it obvious he hadn’t actually woken.
One sun set, and Peter’s list of questions was now titled “I’ve Got Places to Be, Asshole”.
He didn’t wait for another sun to set before coming to the conclusion that if the man had wanted to be “put back” into the ocean to drown, he probably wasn’t going to care if Peter took them up into the sky.
Just after the first jump Peter was in the cockpit with leftover takeout in hand, feet on the copilot’s seat and headphones in place. He was humming and watching the stars, enjoying his last few hours of solitary peace before he met up with -
- something moved in his peripheral vision and he jerked away, socked feet falling off the copilot’s chair as he struggled to prevent himself from spilling takeout all over his shirt.
“What the hell?” he snapped as he pulled his headphones away from his ears, watching the man sit in the chair across from him.
“You left my boots on,” said the man, his displeasure obvious despite the fact that his black hair was falling in his face and his shoulders were hunched under the blanket he held wrapped around him.
“Yeah,” agreed Peter without thought before he realized the problem and glanced down at the man’s bare feet.
“They feel disgusting,” said the man, voice just soft enough to keep the tone this side of accusatory.
“Well I don’t just go around stripping a man down without -” began Peter, his words stopping short when the man sat up straighter and opened the blanket to remind Peter of his bare chest.
“But removing my soaking leather boots was a step too far,” said the man, slumping back into the chair and dropping the blanket so that it wasn’t quite covering his entire front, a strip of skin visible all the way down to just below his navel.
“I ain’t gonna apologize for saving you from drowning,” said Peter, remembering the takeout in his hands only when he used his spoon to gesture fiercely in the man’s direction, a tiny piece of noodle flying off the end to hit the man’s chest.
They both went quiet, Peter staring at the man and the man staring at the wall behind him.
Slowly the man looked down, fingers going to the half-noodle stuck to his chest and peeling it off as he first directed his eyes out the front window of the ship and then back to Peter.
“Why are we in space?” asked the man, timing his words for the same moment that he tried to flick the piece of noodle back into the takeout box in Peter’s hand.
“Shit,” hissed Peter - the timing and the man’s aim were just good enough that Peter didn’t manage to lift the box out of the way. He wrinkled his nose as he located the offending noodle in amongst the rest, looked back up at the man, and deliberately pulled out a spoonful of food that included it.
“Just ‘cause you were auditioning to be Sleeping Beauty doesn’t mean I ain’t got a job,” he stated before shoving the food in his mouth and resolutely starting to chew. The extra salt really wasn’t that bad.
The man’s eyebrows rose, the corners of his mouth twitching ever so slightly up.
Got him, whispered Peter’s thoughts.
“So,” said the man, placing one elbow on the arm rest and sliding even further down in his chair so that his slouch started to look like a comfortable lounge, “to whom do I owe my thoroughly unwanted rescue?”
“Peter Quill,” he replied between bites. “You?”
“Loki,” said the man. “King of Asgard. God of Mischief.”
Peter paused with the spoon still in his mouth to study the man across from him - Loki expected him to think he was serious.
“Sometimes people call me Star-Lord,” added Peter. He was 98.7% sure that Loki was absolutely full of shit, but on the off chance that he wasn’t, managing to get the buy-in of a god-king might make the name properly catch on.
“Do they?” asked Loki with gentle disbelief.
“It’s a thing,” confirmed Peter as he gathered the last of the noodles into the corner of his takeout box.
“Peter Quill,” Loki repeated, “Lord of the Stars.” He let his head fall back against the seat to once again look out the window. “You could do worse,” he decided.
“It is pretty cool,” agreed Peter, nodding along with a smile as he followed Loki’s gaze out the window.
“How many?” asked Loki after a pause.
“How many what?” asked Peter, blinking himself back to the present and setting the takeout box with the spoon on the dashboard in front of the window.
“How many stars are you the lord of?” clarified Loki - he was watching Peter with his chin resting on his knuckles.
Peter blinked. “I mean -” he’d never thought it through - “it’s, uh, more of a metaphor?”
“A metaphor for what?” asked Loki, interest in Peter adding some life to his expression.
“What’s being called the god of mischief a metaphor for?” countered Peter in a desperate attempt to buy time.
“Being the god of mischief,” replied Loki without a hint of hesitation.
“Mischief is a pretty lame thing to be the god of,” said Peter.
“Perhaps,” agreed Loki after a brief hum before his almost-smile graduated into real entertainment. “But I can promise you the other gods have less fun.”
“Prove it,” said Peter, grasping hold of his best bet at a distraction.
“I’ll be honest with you,” replied Loki, “I don’t usually show how much fun I am to men who go around stripping me down without -”
“Prove that you’re a god,” interrupted Peter, sitting a little straighter in his chair and crossing his arms.
“Nice try,” said Loki, reacting to Peter’s shift in posture by leaning forward, letting the blanket slide off his shoulders and placing elbows on his knees and chin on his laced fingers. “But right now we are talking about you, Star-Lord.”
Peter sighed deeply and looked around the cockpit. “This is exactly what I get for playing hero.”
“You left my feet wet,” said Loki, the entertainment gone and replaced with his former annoyance in a heartbeat.
“Would it kill you to give me a thank you?” asked Peter.
“Thank you,” said Loki, the words coming out almost before Peter was finished his question. There was a pause in which Loki looked to the ceiling, head cocked slightly to the side as though listening. “Sadly no,” he concluded, eyes back on Peter.
“What happened to you?” asked Peter, his curiosity rearing its head.
Loki’s expression went cold.
“What kind of king is pissed off he didn’t drown?” he pressed.
Loki studied him, the intensity of his gaze enough to hit Peter’s spine but not enough for him to cave and take the question back. Then Loki leaned even further forward, chin no longer on his hands.
“I want a shirt,” he stated with all the gravitas of declaring someone’s execution.