Ego

Listen closely, because this story is the one that mattered most to Peter Quill — more than any battle, more than any adventure across the stars. This is the story of Peter finally meeting his father. And it is not the story anyone would have written for him.

His father arrived in a golden ship, descending onto a Sovereign planet in a blaze of warmth and light. His name was Ego. He was tall and handsome and kind-eyed, with a voice like a campfire — deep and comfortable and easy to trust. He said he was a Celestial, one of the oldest kinds of beings in the universe, so ancient that his body had become a whole planet, a beautiful world of crystalline spires and glowing blue rivers that he called his home.

He took Peter there. He showed him wonders. He placed Peter's hands out, palm up, and said: feel this. And something happened. Between Peter's palms, a small glowing ball of Celestial light appeared — warm and buzzing, the size of a grapefruit, hovering. Peter looked at it and felt something he had been trying not to feel for his entire life: the sense that he had come from somewhere, that he belonged somewhere, that his father had been waiting.

Can you picture it? Peter Quill, the kid from Missouri who had been flying through the galaxy feeling like he came from nowhere, holding a little piece of Celestial light in his hands, and laughing.

But Mantis saw the truth.

Mantis was a gentle, quiet empath who had grown up at Ego's side, absorbing his moods and his secrets. She had antennae on her head and enormous dark eyes, and when she touched someone she could feel exactly what they were feeling — joy, grief, love, fear. She crept to Gamora in the dark and told her everything.

Ego had done this before. Thousands of years of scattering his children across the galaxy — sons and daughters on a hundred different worlds, hoping one would inherit the Celestial power that would help him fuel his great plan. The plan to spread himself. To seed every planet with pieces of his own body, to grow until Ego filled the galaxy. He called it the Expansion. He needed a Celestial heir's power to ignite it. None of the children he had gathered could do it. Until Peter.

And the children who couldn't help? Ego had ended them. Their bones were stored in a cavern deep in his planet's surface. A whole cave of small lost futures.

And there was one more thing. One terrible thing. Peter's mother, Meredith Quill, with her golden hair and her mixtapes and her way of naming him her Star-Lord — Ego had loved her. He had feared that love, feared what it meant to care more for one person than for his infinite, galaxy-spanning plan. And so he had given her a tumor. He had let her go quietly, painfully, so she would not distract him.

Peter Quill raised his Quad Blasters and aimed them at his father.

"I'm going to kill you," Peter said. And he meant every word.

The battle for Ego's planet was enormous — Rocket and Groot dove deep into the planet's core to plant the power crystals that would destroy it, dropping through tunnel after tunnel while Ego's planet shook and screamed. Gamora and Nebula fought through the crackling surface. And Peter — glowing with Celestial light, blazing gold and fierce — fought his father in the sky above the planet's core, light against light, power against power.

Ego tried to take Peter's mind, to fill him with the Expansion the way you fill a glass with water. Peter fought back. And then he chose.

He chose to be human again. To let the Celestial power go. To be a kid from Missouri with a mixtape who had found his family in the strangest possible crew of misfits and outcasts.

The crystals blew. The planet cracked. And Yondu — old blue Yondu, sharp-finned Yondu, the pirate who had kept a sobbing eight-year-old on his ship and called it charity but meant something much closer to love — gave Peter his space suit. His only space suit. And then he was gone, into the cold of space, with the stars all around him.

Peter held the silence of the sky for a long time afterward.

He still had the mixtape. He still had the Milano — well, what was left of it. He still had Gamora and Rocket and Drax and Groot and Mantis, gathered together on a new ship, flying on toward the next impossible thing.

His father had been a planet. His father had been a disaster. But his real family? His real family was right there. And they were going to be okay.