The Facility
There was never any real reason for Yondu Udonta to have any sort of yearning for freedom. It wasn’t something that had ever been offered to him, nor was it anything that he would even be able to comprehend. He’d been sold to the Kree by his parents when he was only two years old, and he had felt no ounce of kindness that he could remember. All he knew was what he had been told. What he’d been trained to do.
Currently, he was ten years old, and he sat silently on the edge of the metal cot that was in his cell. There was nothing aside from the cot in the small room that he had lived in for as long as he could remember. He was served small amounts of food though a small slot in the door and he needed to wait until he was given permission to use the bathroom. Then he would need to be accompanied by a soldier.
He waited inside his small cell until he was retrieved by a tall blue soldier. He was a Kree, not a Centaurian like Yondu; they were two slightly different shades of blue. Yondu also had a red fin that was on the top of his head, which now went from the top of his forehead to the base of his skull.
The soldier unlocked the boy’s cell and barked an order at him to stand in the doorway. He obeyed and stood quietly as the soldier inspected his collar, and the raw skin that was beneath it. “You’ve been pickin’ at it again,” the soldier said in a low gravelly voice. He cuffed Yondu over the head and huffed, “idiot. Hurts more when you pick at it.”
They walked in silence though the corridors of the facility, the soldier making it known to Yondu that he had his gun drawn. They would turn three times, right, left, right, pass twelve doors, which were always closed, and see four other soldiers on their daily walk to the training room. On this day, however, their turns were all the same, though there were no other soldiers in the hallway and a single door was open. He didn’t move his head, but as he passed, Yondu peeked inside the door and saw a child hunched over in a chair and a lot of blood.
“Tried to escape. Just in case you get any ideas,” the soldier said, just as they were turning their final corner. Escape? How could anyone think of escaping? They’d be shot dead or beaten within an inch of their life if, and when, they were caught. Where would someone even go if they escaped the facility? It was all Yondu had. It was all there was.
They arrived at a large door at the end of the hallway and they soldier opened it with a passcode that he punched into the keypad. 7-4-8-1-2-9. The numbers each had their own unique sound, only slightly different from one another. But Yondu had seen enough of them to be able to put the code together. In three days the code would change and he would listen to the sounds the buttons made once again and memorize the new code. He never let it be known that he knew the passcodes, it would only lead to punishment.
Past the doors there was a large room in which Yondu and twenty nine other children around his age would do their training. Yondu’s specialty was archery, he could hit a moving target from a hundred yards away. He wasn’t terrible at sword work or hand to hand combat, but there was something about archery that drew him to it. Personally, he thought it was the sound the arrow made as it whizzed through the air toward its target.
That day was their hand-to-hand combat training day. The children were put into pairs and one pair at a time was forced to fight. Yondu was paired with a scrawny pink-skinned girl, though it was hard to tell if she was a girl or not because her hair had been chopped off like the rest of the children’s. She was covered in scars, which made Yondu smirk a little. She would be easy to beat as most of her scars were the ones inflicted by the trainers. Whichever child lost their fight would be wounded in some way, to remind them that there is no room for error when you are fighting for the Kree.
The pair of children in the middle of the group who had started off the fighting were finished, the Baelsi boy left in a heap on the floor. The tallest trainer grabbed a long brown whip from the wall. The brown synthetic cords that is was woven from shone in a way that made everyone stop and stare at it. The last several inches of the whip near the tip were several shades darker, remnants of the blood that it had drawn in the past. There was a loud ‘CRACK’ as the end of the whip made contact with the boy’s skin. Yellow blood began to pour from the wound as the trainer raised his arm again. With another ‘CRACK’, the boy’s skin was broken once again and his blood spattered onto the ceiling off of the end of the whip. Yondu could tell the boy was fighting off tears, fighting off the urge to cry out. If he’d done that it would only get him more lashings.
Eight more crisscrossed lashes later, the boy was a whimpering mess on the ground.
The trainer barked at him to stand and he, with the motivation of the threat of more lashes, stood and followed the trainer. The trainer next to Yondu nodded as the boy was escorted out and called out two more children, “Two-Eleven and Two-Twenty-Five! You’re up!”
The children weren’t given names by their owners or the soldiers or the trainers, but they did tend to give each other names in the small amounts of time during which they could sneak in a few words to each other. Yondu, then known only as “Two-Thirteen” at the time, had gotten his name from a Xandarian boy. The boy had said that he’d heard of a Centaurian, like Two-Thirteen was, who had been a fierce warrior and defender of his people. He went by the name of Yondu Udonta. And so, Two-Thirteen decided that he would steal this man’s name, and attempt to someday live up to it. He had no idea if the man was real or simply someone that the Xandarian boy had completely made up… But it sounded much better than Two-Thirteen. Anything was better than a slave's number.
By the time it was Yondu’s turn to fight the pink-skinned girl, the floor was bathed in blood. Each new pair needed to fight in the same place as the pair before them, each fight and the following punishment leaving it’s own deposit to the floor. Yondu stepped in the puddles as he squared himself off against the small girl. He’d play with her a little, wouldn’t want to cut the fight off too quickly.
They each threw a few punches, some making contact, but Yondu got bored quickly. He lunged at her and quickly had her pinned to the floor, she writhed and tried to get him off of her. She swung her arms wildly at Yondu, landing a few well-placed punches to his face and head. A fist made contact with Yondu’s fin and made him gasp, which was enough for the girl to shove him off. In an instant the girl grabbed Yondu by his fin and forced his head to collide with her knee several times, until he began to go limp. She let him drop and stood over him, her body covered in blood (none of which was her own), and placed her foot on his neck. She would be unable to kill him because of the solid metal collar around his neck. She looked up at the trainer and he gave her a slight nod, signalling that she could join the other who had won their own battles.
Yondu coughed and groaned slightly, feeling as though the room was spinning. How had he lost? And to someone so small? He looked toward the trainer and noticed he didn’t have the whip in his hands. Instead there was a shiny saw with sharp teeth that seemed to sparkle in the lights. The trainer, as well as two others, approached him and he could sense that he was going to wish for the lashings that the other children had gotten.
Two of the guards grabbed his arms and pinned his legs down with their knees while the other grabbed Yondu’s fin and grinned. “Two-Thirteen, you need to try much harder than that if you want to survive training. Maybe this will remind you of that.”
The pain that Yondu felt then was unlike any he had felt before. He tried everything to get away from the men, but they had a vice-like grip on him as the tallest trainer hacked his way through Yondu’s fin. He looked around to the other children as he screamed and jerked his body as much as he could; and all they did was watch.
Yondu had added more than his share of blood to the floor by the time his fin was completely removed. He lay on his side once he was let go and all he could do was stare ahead in shock. The tall trainer laughed as he dropped the amputated fin in front of the boy’s face, and laughed harder when it splashed blood onto him. Yondu touched the fin, then the raw, open wound on the top of his head. He couldn’t believe it was gone.
“Get up! Now!”
He could barely stand, but Yondu tried his best to walk normally down the corridor as a soldier escorted him back to his cell, though in reality he walked very similarly to a wounded animal. He heard the beeps from the keypad, which for his door was only four numbers instead of six - 3-6-7-4. Too bad it could only be opened from the outside.
The young Centaurian collapsed on his metal cot, still covered in blood, and sobbed. His chest heaved and he felt like he was going to be sick and his hands kept going up to where his fin used to be, hoping that somehow this was all just a horrible bad dream and that he would wake up and everything would be back to normal. As he lay on the cot, Yondu stared up at the ceiling and tried to imagine a world outside of the facility. Some of the children who were older when they arrived said there were so many things to see, so many things on the outside that they missed. Planets, people, animals.. Some talked of their mothers and fathers, and how they used to tell them stories before bed.
For the first time in his years at the facility, Yondu yearned for that. A family, to go outside, to see new things and meet new people who weren’t going to hurt him. He wanted to escape. He thought of the child that he had seen earlier, beaten and bloodied in his cell for attempting to leave. That’s what would happen if he tried too, thought Yondu. He’d be beaten nearly to death and then they’d leave him there to think about what he’d done. That was the only working solution that he Kree had found.
He decided, at least for the time being, that it was best to do as he was told, try his hardest to win his next fights. There wasn’t much worse they could do to him, besides kill him. But if Yondu saw a window of opportunity, any chance at all to escape the facility, he would take it in an instant.