The Awesome Mix

Some objects in the universe are powerful because of what they can do. Mjolnir can call lightning. The Tesseract can open portals between worlds. The Power Stone can destroy entire planets.

And some objects are powerful because of who they came from.

This is a story about an object that was not particularly powerful at all. It could not fire energy beams. It could not summon lightning. It could not stop a Celestial. It was a small plastic rectangle the size of a deck of cards, made of brown spool tape inside two clear plastic windows, with a paper label that said, in neat curly handwriting,

AWESOME MIX VOL. 1

Made by Mom, for Peter

And of all the artifacts Peter Quill carried across the galaxy in his lifetime — the element guns, the yaka arrow, the helmet of Star-Lord — this little cassette tape was the one he loved most.

To understand why, you have to go back to 1988, before Peter was Star-Lord, before he had ever seen a spaceship up close, when he was an eight-year-old boy with a mop of brown hair, a missing front tooth, and a Sony Walkman clipped to the waistband of his jeans.

His mother, Meredith Quill, was the most important person in his whole world.

Meredith loved music. She loved the songs that were on the radio when she was a young woman in the 1970s — funky, warm, bright songs full of horns and harmonies and electric guitars. And when she had Peter, she decided she wanted to share all of them with him.

So she made him a tape.

This was not as simple as it sounds. Back then, you couldn't just push a button and copy a song. You had to listen to the radio, wait for the song you wanted, hit RECORD at the exact right second, listen to the whole song play through, hit STOP at the end, rewind, and start over for the next one. Meredith spent weeks doing this. She wanted only the BEST songs.

She put "Come and Get Your Love" by Redbone first, because it started with a happy electric drumbeat that made her smile.

She put "Hooked on a Feeling" by Blue Swede in the middle, because the opening chant — OOGA CHAKA OOGA OOGA — always made her laugh.

She added "Cherry Bomb" by The Runaways, "Fooled Around and Fell in Love" by Elvin Bishop, "I Want You Back" by The Jackson 5, "Moonage Daydream" by David Bowie, "I'm Not in Love" by 10cc, "Spirit in the Sky" by Norman Greenbaum.

Twelve songs in total. Twelve songs that meant something to her. She wrapped the tape in pretty paper, wrote AWESOME MIX VOL. 1 on the label, and saved it for the right moment.

The right moment came in a hospital in Missouri. Meredith was very sick. Peter was sitting in the waiting room with the Walkman in his lap, terrified to go in and see her. The tape was wrapped on her bedside, waiting.

The next thing he knew, a blue light was pulling him up into the sky.

The Ravagers took him to space that night. He was in shock. He was crying. He was holding onto the only thing he had left of Earth — the wrapped package his mother had given him.

He waited a few days. Then he peeled the paper off. Inside was the cassette.

He pressed play. He heard the opening drumbeat of "Come and Get Your Love."

And he started to feel — not better, exactly. Nothing could make a boy who had just lost his mother feel BETTER. But he felt held. He felt as if her hand had reached forward in time and rested on his shoulder.

For thirty years, that tape went everywhere with Peter Quill.

He played it in the cockpit of the Milano. He played it through battered headphones while flying through asteroid fields. He played it on alien beaches while drinking strange purple drinks. He played it during prison breakouts. He played it in the middle of fights, dancing across the wet stones of Morag, twirling small lizards by their tails like ballroom partners, mouthing the words to "Come and Get Your Love" while the universe collapsed around him.

The Guardians had Opinions.

Rocket complained constantly. "These songs are ANCIENT, Quill! There has been a thousand years of music since these came out!"

Drax tried to learn the lyrics and got every single one wrong. "I HAVE BEEN HOOKED ON A SMELLING," he would sing proudly. "ONLY YOU KNOW WHY I LOVE A BLANKET."

Gamora pretended to find the music annoying. Secretly, she would sometimes hum along.

Baby Groot was the perfect audience. He sat in his little flower pot on the dashboard of the Milano, bobbed his small wooden head exactly on the beat, and stretched out his tiny twig arms whenever the chorus hit.

One day on Xandar, in the middle of a fight, Peter's original Walkman finally broke. Cracked plastic. Smashed gears. It would not play any longer. Peter actually sat down on the curb afterward and looked at it for a long time. The Walkman had survived everything else. He had not expected to outlive it.

The Nova Corps gave him a present a few weeks later. They had heard from a friend of a friend — a Ravager who had once been to Earth — that humans had a newer kind of music player. It was small, silver, and very thin. It was called a Zune.

"It holds FIVE HUNDRED SONGS, sir," the Nova officer said proudly.

Peter took it. He scrolled through it later, alone in his bunk. There were songs from years he had never lived through. "Earth music has gotten WEIRDER, you guys," he announced to the team. But he liked the Zune. He took good care of it.

And he kept the original Awesome Mix Vol. 1 cassette taped carefully to the back, just to keep it close.

Now here is the part of the story that you should listen to with both ears.

Many years later — after Ronan, after Ego, after the Snap, after the long, terrible struggle to get half the universe back — Peter Quill sat alone one night in the cockpit of the Benatar. The ship was quiet. The team was sleeping in the bunks below. The stars were drifting slowly past the window.

He had been clearing out an old footlocker. And at the very bottom, under a stack of old Ravager patches, he found a small envelope. Yellowed paper. The handwriting was familiar.

It was his mother's writing.

The envelope said: For when you are a little older.

Inside was another cassette tape.

AWESOME MIX VOL. 2

She had made him a second one. She had hidden it inside the first package, all those years ago, knowing that one day he would be ready for it. Peter sat in the cockpit and held the tape in both hands and did not move for a long time.

He pressed play.

The first song was "Father and Son" by Cat Stevens. The second was "Brandy" by Looking Glass. The third was "The Chain" by Fleetwood Mac.

Peter sat there in the dark, listening, with tears streaming down his face and a small, quiet smile on his mouth.

She had still been picking out songs for him. She had still been raising him. From across thirty years of space and time, from a hospital room in Missouri, his mother Meredith Quill was still teaching him how to be a man, one song at a time.

Some people get fathers who teach them how to throw a baseball. Some people get yaka arrows from blue-skinned pirates. Peter Quill got a mixtape.

And as far as he was concerned, that mixtape was the most powerful artifact in the entire universe.

The next morning, he played it for the whole crew. Drax made up new wrong words. Rocket complained about the production quality. Mantis swayed gently. Groot bobbed his wooden head on the beat.

Peter looked at all of them, his weird, wonderful, mixed-up family of misfits — and he understood, very deeply, that his mother had given him exactly what he needed. Not a power. Not a weapon. Just a song. Just twelve songs. Just two tapes that said, across all the years, I love you. I am still here.

And that, sometimes, is the strongest magic of all.