Chapter Text
It’s different, having his own ship. He doesn't have to deal with smelly feet or gross armpits. Doesn't have to do at least half a dozen chores a day.
He has more privacy. He can bring girls (or boys, Peter's not picky) back to the ship, he can walk around without pants before his first cup of coffee, and he can, for the first time maybe, really practice with his powers.
His light.
He has been working on making it solid, he could manifest the light sword quickly and he has figured out how to make ammunition for his guns, though it leaves him tired in a way he doesn't like. He hasn't quite figured out how to dim the brightness though. On the other hand, he spends very little credits on lamps. He doesn't need them.
He also has a lot more freedom in the kind of jobs he does. Sometimes he's told to stay out of things, or Yondu tells him to do something, but most of the time he chooses.
He goes for the usual suspects, theft and murder, but also dips his toes into several other things, including bounty hunting.
Peter doesn't like it too much, but he still makes a name for himself.
He's 21 when he decides it's not for him.
The job had been on a planet that was one of the worst possible combinations of backwater and bad atmosphere, and a shootout broke before Peter had even found his target.
He returned to his ship two hours later with several wounds and a broken mask.
In the end he doesn't even make a profit.
Another job that just goes incredibly wrong for him is a couple months later, a heist on a mostly ocean based planet.
The tiara he was sent to steal turned out to be kept on the other side of the planet, the guards took ...offense to his presence and he was seriously lucky to make it out alive.
Once again his mask gets broken, don't those assholes know they are really expensive to repair? Honestly, some people.
It's not until he wakes up screaming from a nightmare days later, that he realized something strange was going on.
Because his mask had broken, twice, while he shouldn't have been able to breathe, let alone get away like a bat out of hell. Yet he still did.
Which was interesting, so say the least.
Let it be said, that Peter's intelligence has never swerved to common sense.
Illith is at its best dangerous, at its worst plain murderous.
It had been nearly idyllic, blessed with gorgeous beaches, voluminous forests, and plentiful mines filled with a rare and strong crystal power source, but overpopulation and too much mining had deeply damaged the planet, driving away a large part of the native population.
And then the natural disasters struck.
Now Illith is a death planet, and it's mostly high risk smugglers and illegal miners that dwell there, the few natives either hidden or more murderous than the planet itself.
Illith is also an oxygen-carrying planet that is relatively out of the way with some of the highest mountains in the galaxy, which is what caught Peter's attention.
Better to test his supposed lack of need for oxygen in a low-oxygen envirement, than a no-oxygen one.
As it turns out it's not a lack of oxygen that nearly kills him on Illith, it's an avalance.
He wakes up three days later, in a surprisingly comfortable bed.
The lights are off.
From what he can see, the furniture looks old. Not broken, but not useable either.
No one comes to check on him.
Not when he calls out, not when he stumbles out of the bed.
First he checks the rooms next to him. A bedroom, with a rusted frame, and moth-eathen blankets. Another room has a broken desk and empty bookshelfs. The last is a bathroom, rusted and broken.
Downstairs, he finds an emptied out room and a kitchen, just as rusted and broken as the other rooms. The pantry has some foodstuff, expired years ago.
The house is empty, covered in layers and layers of dust, seemingly abandoned, untouched, for years.
Yet Peter's bed was clean and whole.
His foot is bandaged, and the bandage looks fresh and clean.
Peter leaves quickly. He doesn't look back, he never returns.