Experiment: The Ravager Code

Learning

"That was comin' from in there," he said, again glancing where her quicker-beating heart laid. The heart that would've stopped by now if it weren't for him. "Now use it again, and summon that power. Show me what you can do."

She stiffened her lip, nodding once. A command from her Captain. Kraglin may be First Mate, but one day... one day she would be a Ravager, and one day she hoped she could be one of the ones that stood the closest at his side. One of the ones he trusted and knew could handle anything he threw at her.

Surely she could at least make this damn animal inside her wake up and show itself.

Tess looked back across the shooting range, rolling her fingers slowly into fists. They began to shimmer platinum from her nails downward, glistening with steel until it crept down her hands, her wrists, her arms, humming near imperceptibly.

Yondu watched, holding his breath, marveling at the wonder she was. He had seen a lot in his life but this... this was new. "Don't overthink it, kid."

Tess put her one foot out, feeling the same shifting take place in her flesh of her leg, a dull ache in all her bones that she ignored, stamping her foot once on the metal ground had it groaning, reverberating in contact with her. Magnetizing to her.

She decided she could at least make use of the metal all around her, and punched her two fists together in front of her, sending out a mild wave of energy that shivered the room.

She took a shuddering breath, calming the restless edge that always seemed to wake when she tapped into this ability, and calmed it down to a steady thrum. Hers. It was hers. She was not its own.

It was like when Yondu wielded that arrow at his hip: a dangerous, lethal weapon. But his own. He was the master of it. He controlled and commanded it. She could do the same.

She cast her eyes to the side, getting a small nod of approval, and stepped back to where her feet were side-by-side. Her foot left a dent where she had placed it.

Yondu watched her stare at the dent in the ground, a gentle result compared to the bloodletting he had seen her do the night before. That raw, savage power that awoke in her and tore bone and flesh like paper, the strength she had that was anything but normal.

And looking at her now, at her skinny, roughly five foot and a half stance and big, starry eyes that had already seen too much, he couldn't imagine the strength that hid behind the harmless-looking facade she had.

Even if her eyes and her scars and the metal in her body may give it away, most wouldn't notice soon enough.

"You did good," he told her, his voice low.

Tess instantly turned to look up at him, her eyes wide, the approval soothing that urge inside her to do anything he asked. "I did..?"

"Yeah, kid. Maybe we'll wait 'till we're planet-side. Can't be affording to patch up holes in the bulkhead."

"Yes, sir." she nodded quickly, holding her hands tight at her waist. He realized she seemed timid at those words, nervous.

It was odd, really. How utterly afraid she was to do the wrong thing.

A deep, wound-opening sorrow ate at him from the inside. She was just a kid...

A girl her age should be in a home, with a family, giving her daddy gray hairs with every boy knocking on the door. More worried about school and friends than surviving with a band of thieves and mercenaries in the middle of Empty Space.

Had the man who hired them to get her known she was just a kid from Terra? Gods help him if he did, because if Yondu ever found that out he would track him down and kill him slowly.