The Arcane Teaching (I)

"-. 10 January, 1989 .-"

"You have some nerve," Meredith Quill the Younger said coldly, glaring at Grandpa like he'd just disowned her. "I fully expected this from you, daddy," she practically spat out the word. "But dragging Peter into it? That's one hundred steps too far."

"Because heaven forbid the boy have an opinion of his own," Grandpa scoffed.

"His own opinion? The only one who can provide any basis for an opinion on his daddy is me, and I never put such nonsense in his head!"

"Hah! What's nonsense is you being so sure that scoundrel was an angel and a saint."

"Scoundrel? Scoundrel!? You never even met him!"

"And who's fault is that?" Dad said snidely. "What a brave daughter I've raised, she doesn't even have the guts to introduce her parents to her man."

"I did you a favour, he'd have walked all over you!"

"Don't project your frailties on me, girl. Only one of us is willing to take a pretty face at their word without any second opinions and it ain't me."

"You just say that because he loves me for who I am, like you never did!" Meredith Quill yelled. "Well joke's on you, daddy, because I can love people for who they are, unlike you!"

"Oh spare me the guilt trips," Grandpa scoffed, entirely unimpressed with that ad-hominem. "If he was so great you'd have gotten us to meet right off. And if he was decent then he shouldn't have expected you to be his mother! It's a mother's job to love him for who he is. Your job is to love him for what he did and does. And what he did is put a tumor in your skull!" Grandpa's voice turned into a shout for the first time in the quarrel. "What he does is setting up the end of all life!"

"Enough with the drug-fuelled insanity! Psychedelic visions are not facts! If I'd known you'd take drug-fuelled hallucinations at face value, I'd never have nagged you to take them with me!"

"So you lied to me every time you talked about it 'digging through the soul for the truth,' is that it? You've just been a mind-addled junkie all this time, is that it? No wonder you'd go all-in on whatever feel-good crap that scoundrel hooked you on!"

In case it wasn't clear, drama is real.

The Talk of Talks had not gone well.

In fact, it had gone sideways pretty much immediately. It had gone sideways the moment Peter stepped up to confront his mama about Ego and… didn't. Instead he'd gotten two sentences in and locked up.

Fast forward five minutes and it was grandpa that had to step it and flatly lay out reality.

Which led to an unexpected level of denial on his mama's part relative to whether proven magic gave credibility to DMT-fuelled past life recall. And then there was this.

"You… You… You have no right to cast aspersions on our relationship!"

"Aspersions. Pah! I bet I can guess precisely how your fling with him got on!"

"Fling? Fling!? How dare you! We saw each on and off other for years and he gave me a son! You can't even begin to imagine what kind of chemistry we had!"

"Chemistry? This crap called 'chemistry' is responsible for more broken homes than almost anything else. Call it by its name, girl, it's 'lust.' It's lust and it never lasts. If you get together with someone just because you want to have sex with them, they will either resent you for using them or use you up. And wouldn't you know it, that's exactly what happened!"

"Shut up!" To Peter's dull surprise, his mama didn't try to slap grandpa. Even though every one of his memories of a woman raising his voice to him in his last life was always accompanied by a kick or a slap. Or five. "Shut up, shut up! You don't know anything about us. You don't know anything about him. The kind of man he was-he was perfect in every way you've never been! You'd never be able to even imagine it."

"Is that so?" Dad said mockingly. His hands flexed oddly, as if he'd just tensed and un-tensed his whole body. "I bet I can guess just from knowing your so-called tastes."

"Oh please," mama said, crossing her arms in a gesture that she probably hadn't meant to be as defensive as it was. "As if men could ever understand what women want!"

"That's never been a mystery, daughter mine," Grandpa said just as scornfully. "A woman's tastes aren't complicated, they're just numerous. So long as he knows them, a man can get any woman to fall for him. For a mighty 'Angel' like yours that can be whatever he wants? It would have been even easier! Let's see. He had a good job – or he pretended to, it's something he'd easily have sold you, I'm sure. After all, he had to be away often but he drove that teal and orange 1979 Ford Mustang Cobra you constantly raved about, so he must have been well off. It was obvious he had a super-secret important job. That he was spending all his vacation days with you whenever he could get them? That's fairy tale romance already! But that was just the start, wasn't it? Let's see, he was confident without being too arrogant. He was funny, but not goofy funny. He was tall, but not too tall, and definitely not 'weird' tall. He was spontaneous, but only when you were expecting it. Handsome was a plus, and handsome with good hair was better so he was definitely both. Not a baldy for sure! He definitely also knew the exact time to say all the right things, and the right time not to say anything. As part of that he made sure to treat you like a woman not just in the bedroom but also when you were out on the town. And when you were out, he probably bought balloons and joked with random kids to show you that he's family oriented and good with kids, but not too good with kids like in a creepy clown way. And because he could afford it all and the good car whenever he was around, then he clearly must have been intelligent. Or at the very least money smart so he'd know how to invest for retirement, any kid's college fund and your funeral expenses. And because he also made sure to spend all his time with you when he wasn't gone, then it must have also meant he knew to spend time with his friends only when it was convenient for you. And of course, because your 'spaceman' was so perfect in every other way, then clearly he'd also have known to care about you but not be too controlling if you ever wanted to spend time with other people. After all, sometimes a woman just wants to go out and have fun with the girls or her kids or maybe even her parents without him, and he needs to be ok with that. Not, say, get all like 'hey where are you going' and intruding on you and blaming you for the weakness in his convictions and infecting you with terminal brain cancer that ate you up from the inside UNTIL YOU ALMOST DIED!"

The roar which ended that tirade sent Meredith Quill stumbling backwards, stunned at all the inferred truth that had just been said by an angry father. She wasn't in tears. Not yet. But her eyes were blown wide and her face whiter than Peter's had been when he realised how close he'd come to killing his grandpa way back when. No matter what grandpa had to say about it.

For his part, the boy felt like he was floating through molasses. Or maybe sinking. Part of it was the uncharacteristically strong emotion his grandpa had just exhibited. But most of it stemmed from stunned astonishment at Jason Quill having this sort of insight into the female mind. Peter had barely considered reassessing his past love life through the lens of this tirade and it already explained everything.

"For the record, daughter mine," Grandpa finally said when the silence stretched on too long. "I do accept you for who you are. But love and like are different things, and only one of them is unlimited. So I do accept you. I accept that you're lacking, hence why I try to work with you to become more and better. Belated as it is." He looked from her to Peter then. "And not just you."

Whatever progress might or might not have been made was seemingly wiped away from mama's face in an instant. "It's not your place to-!"

"STOP!" Peter yelled, jumping between the two of them. "Stop! Just stop it! Enough!"

They stopped.

Everything stopped except his thoughts. Peter could have sworn a memory flashed through his mind about his mama (or grandma?) warning him against people who seemed too good to be true, because it meant they probably were too good to be true. But he didn't remember the memory happening at any point in the past life he remembered for the life of him. The same way he didn't remember his mama (grandma?) telling him not to ever expect a wife to do his mother's job, even though he did remember it. I'm 28 now and still feel the impulse to be loved for who I am. But I know it will never happen. The words were his grandmother's (mother's?). How could it? His mom was still just 25. But the face was unmistakably his mother's (grandmother's?). If you were not loved as a child, accept that loss. Asking others to fix that now only continues the lovelessness to the grave. It is a hell of a tough pill to swallow, but the alternative is much worse. And yet he didn't remember any of it happening. And how was it appropriate to this situation? His mama had been the farthest thing from unloved as a child!

There was an emptiness in his mind. A gap shaped like a blaster scar where memory should be.

"Baby-"

"Grandpa," Peter said, interrupting (!) his mother before she could further confuse him and facing the man first. "You… I don't know what to say to you. But I'm sure there's something big and meaningful I could say to all this, so just imagine that's what I did instead of this total nothing just now."

Jason Quill looked at Peter Quill like a man who'd expected better from him than the greatest failure in character assessment of all time. His grandfather… he was actually pretty intimidating, wasn't he? Even when he wasn't completely overpowering you with sheer force of personality.

Peter turned from the grimly disappointed man before he could be overpowered without his grandpa bothering to call on that force of personality. He faced instead his cowed mother, wondering if she suffered from the same inferiority complex that he did. "And mom, sorry to say but Grandpa's right. Ego was – is­ – the one who made you sick because he's a scruffy-looking, sick, megalomaniacal, shit-faced bastard-"

A hand lashed out. A gust of wind washed over his face. His mother's palm was half an inch from his cheek, quivering. Her wrist was held fast in the gentle but immovable grip of his grandfather whose movement Peter had barely even seen. Unlike her own.

Eyes dull with dismal comprehension looked between his mother's frozen face and the hand she'd almost slapped him with. This… this was like a copy of so many memories of his other life and yet somehow it felt strangely unexpected and unfamiliar.

Then grandpa slowly pushed him away and interposed himself between his mother and him. And he lowly and with startling gentleness began to sing. "~He came on a summer's day ~ Bringing gifts from far away ~ But he made it clear he couldn't stay ~ No harbor was his home." Looking Glass. Brandy (You're a Fine Girl). "~Brandy used to watch his eyes ~ When he told his sailor's story ~ She could feel the ocean fall and rise ~ She saw its raging glory ~" The verses from the love song in Awesome Mix Volume 2 flowed from Jason Quill with the same mastery he possessed in everything else. "~At night when the bars close down ~ Brandy walks through a silent town ~ And loves a man who's not around.~" Then the words and tune abruptly changed to My Sweet Lord by George Harrison. "~My sweet Lord ~ Mmm, my Lord ~ Mmm, my Lord ~ I really wanna see you ~ Really wanna be with you ~ Really wanna see you, Lord ~ But it takes so long, my Lord." Jason Quill barely gave them the chance to wonder at the emphasis on that one verse before he switched one last time. "~ Listen to the wind blow ~ Watch the sun rise ~ Run in the shadows ~ Damn your love ~ Damn your lies.~" Fleetwood Mac. The Chain. "~I can still hear you saying ~ You would never break the chain."

"~Listen to the wind blow ~ Down comes the night ~ Run in the shadows ~ Damn your love ~ Damn your lies," sang Meredith Quill the Younger, faintly and weakly and unable to look at Peter or his grandfather or anyone else anymore.

"~Break the silence~" Grandpa sung at the end, still at that low murmur and that terrible gentleness that never wavered or waned as he moved towards and then with his timorous daughter away from everyone else's presence. "~Damn the dark ~ Damn the light.~"

The song drifted out of sight and hearing just as his mother and grandfather left Peter's sight and hearing by the time it was over. Grandmother, who'd been sitting quietly on a divan throughout the entire ordeal, now got to her feet and went to close the door behind them.

Then she came back, guided Peter to the divan and sat him down next to her. "Well," she said blithely. "I suppose that's one way to make sure all of us know why that alien menace fell for your mother."