Chapter Text
The thing was.
She hadn’t done it on purpose. Really. It was an accident.
Her eyes were still burning from the bucket of tears she’d shed, first out of grief and then out of terror. Her neck was numb from anesthesia – injected via horrific alien gun with a needle the size of a pencil – and the back of her shirt was actually damp from the blood she’d lost during impromptu surgery.
Surgery she’d been awake for because the aliens thought it was more fun to hold her down while she wiggled and thrashed and said a great many words her grandpa would wash her mouth out for than knock her out wholesale.
So she was angry, yes, and scared out of her mind. An alien – a real alien, this was like first contact or something but it was not cool at all – grinned at her with nightmarishly sharp and crooked teeth. The teeth were a pure golden yellow, like corn on the cob, but the lips that framed them were blue. Dark blue like Blue Raspberry, her favorite Popsicle flavor, which tasted oh-so-sweet. But it wasn’t dye, it was skin. Real, actual skin.
Some of the aliens had blue skin – one had what looked like a glass rectangle stapled to his head, owww – and some didn’t. Some were human colored, shades of peach and brown. One was a soft red, like a lava lamp, glowy and bright.
The world swam in her blurry vision like she was looking through a magic mirror at a funhouse, warping everything crazier than it should be. There was a sharp clink sound as some doctor-like instrument was set down next to her head, directly in her line of sight.
She didn’t recognize it, and she’d been spending a lot of time in a hospital lately. It didn’t look nice, though. There was a bit on it that looked like a miniature saw and another that shined in a way that made her think it was quite sharpish.
Both were red and dripping.
There was a trigger and a grip on the opposite end – like a gun, she thought, reaching for similarities she could identify – and then a pipe underneath the scary parts that called to mind horror movies she wasn’t supposed to have watched but did. All the time. Snuck to the bottom of the stairs to peer over the couch so she could see the TV.
Sorry, Mom. I shoulda been a better kid. Then maybe you wouldn’t have got sick.
She could have done better, a lot better. If she had known what was coming then she would have been the best, most well behaved, responsible kid a mom could want.
She wouldn’t have made messes or fussed about bedtimes or hit that stupidhead Tommy at school for snitching her lunch cookie. It had been peanut butter, her favorite, but she’d give up a million peanut butter cookies if Mom would have just, just stayed.
And quite suddenly the aliens were speaking English.
The blue guy with the rectangle in his head asked, “What’s your name, boy?”
His teeth were almost orange – square Halloween jack-o’-lanterns – between the ones that were silver. Neat.
An odd ditty swam through her foggy head: Peter, Peter Pumpkin-Eater, had a wife but couldn’t keep her; he put her in a pumpkin shell, and there he kept her very well.
“Peter,” she slurred, forgetting the rest. How did a person live in a pumpkin? How did they fit?
“Okay, Peter,” the Captain – he had to be the Captain – said. “What my doctor here just stuck in your neck is a translator. Means that now we can have interesting conversations about what is and is not allowed onboard my ship.”
Whoser Peter? she wondered. Does he got something stuck in his head too?
“Rule 1: Do not speak to my crew unless asked a direct question, you hear?”
That was about when she passed out, deliriously thinking, oh. He means me.
And even when she woke up, it wasn’t that far off really so she just…never bothered to correct anyone. Besides, she kinda liked it. Like a secret codename.
Hey, spies were cool.
But space pirate spies were better.
And then she was Peter. Peter Quill. It had a nice ring to it.