100 Marvel One Shots✔️

Too Late >> Yondu Udonta X Reader

"In for another?" the tattooist, Horuz commented over the counter. He was a noticeable man, with his grizzled beard and steampunk-styled glasses pushed high up his older eyes, body inked over the years as well. "You're usually an annual visitor for this kind of thing."

Yondu shrugged. "It's getting' close to an anniversary. Thought I'd...like to remember it for somethin' else."

Horuz didn't raise a brow. "Got any ideas for the ink?"

"Yeah," He replied, flicking through the book on the desk. "Got any spaceships?"

It wasn't that it was an odd date to meet your soulmate. Perhaps, though, it was. Most of your friends had met their soulmates in kindergarten, or at the first day of their first job flipping burgers. You shrugged it off, though, and worked through the days. School ending turned into college, and then, when dropping out, you decided to become a part of the fire brigade, and turned into one of the most renowned people in your county.

But that didn't make you feel like the bee's knees. You were still just a person without their other half, and putting out fires and helping people made that feeling go away for a while when you craved something to fill the empty space beside you in bed and to mean something. Your partner, Gamora thought that it was a load of bogus, the whole soulmate thing, but that was probably because her date was all warped from a burn on the job before you met her.

"So, I was checking out one of those sites online –," she started to say, peeling an orange slowly, the juice dripping down her arms.

You sighed, sinking further into your seat. When you weren't off fighting fires, you guys were waiting for them to happen, and often gossiped or frolicked the internet. More so, Gamora. "Just...no. No thanks, 'Mora." You shook your head, knowing what was coming next. "Not interested."

"There's a whole community of sceptics out there," she tossed her orange aside, leaning over the table on her elbows, eyes wide and desperate. "It could be our only shot."

"I have a date," you hold your wrist up, and gesture to her, "and you do too!"

She didn't bring it up again.

Yondu was not a shy man, in fact, boasted his sleeves of blue and red inked images with pride. He was not a young man, and the date upon his wrist boasted that fact clear as day. In fact, when Yondu checked his Facebook page that day, he saw that the date on the top of his phone matched his tattoo. And it was then when he decided, that for once, he would do one thing for himself. One thing that was not written forty years before, when he was a foetus in his mother's womb, destined.

Yondu Udonta stayed home the day on his wrist.

He ignored the phone on the wall, where it rang every hour or two. Ignored the laptop, which pinged with messages from Kraglin every five minutes or so about questions about lawnmowers or true love. He ignored the sounds of the world outside, and ignored the sounds of the televisions in the apartments down the hall to him. He ignored every thought in his head, and sat in silence, in the dark of his apartment, laying curled on the sofa like a moody teenager he used to be, but in a forty-year-old man's skin.

Yondu remembered all the people in his life who had shared him worried glances. His mother. His teachers. His friends, when they had all been paired up by seventeen, all the bystanders and onlookers to his life who hadn't known a glimpse of his own life, except that he was alone in that moment, and they were not.

He had raised two boys. He had lived through all this crap. He made it all the way to this day without a soulmate.

He could go forty more years without one too.

Many a cat and housefire were put in the right place when you were on the team in your lovely little town, and not too long after you made the newspaper after a particularly good rescue (elderly man locked in his apartment after his locks warped, all because of vandals), you were moved to another town where they needed you, away from all you knew, away from your squad. Luckily, Gamora had been foisted into the move too, so you weren't so very alone in that moment.

You took it in your stride; another day, another sunrise, another action in your life before you met your soulmate. You were a tough one, and settling into your shared apartment in a desert town in Nevada with Gamora was easy. Sure, making the move wasn't a heroic act, but you toughed out the mundane act of it all. Once both of your boxes were unpacked – very few – and your uniform laid out ready for the next day – neatly – you realised two things.

One. Gamora was nowhere to be seen, her boxes untouched on her side of the room.

Two. The fridge, nestled nicely in the kitchen, was as bare as your hopes for this new path of your life.

"Guess it's time to grab some food," you aloud, to nobody.

You'd been so busy in all the business going on, that you hadn't noticed the days clocking down, until that on the wall calendar read the same date as your wrist. But unknowingly, you grabbed your wallet, and decided to not starve, and stock your new home.

It was almost midnight, and yet, when you returned home from your late-night grocery stock up, you felt as awake as ever. Gamora was most likely asleep in bed, or likelier still, off snogging someone she had no business snogging. You managed to get most of the bags in from the car on the first go, but when you made the second trip, you were almost to the door when a bag split, and out tumbled groceries and your precious bottle of top-shelf whiskey. It rolled from your bag, out, across the faded old carpet, until it knocked against the door of apartment 12.

But internally cursing did not save the day, and by the time you managed to get all the other groceries into other bags and reached for the whiskey, the door to apartment twelve opened.

He stood tall and covered in blue and red ink, the thin, low mohawk atop his head tousled by restless sleep, as were the bags beneath his eyes. Those eyes followed from the bottle of whiskey which had knocked upon the door for you, and then, to you, on your hands and knees upon the gross carpet, shopping in shambles. He looked once more to the bottle of whiskey, and then once more to you, and silent all the while, you looked back.

"Are you jus' gon sit there on the floor, or d'you need a hand with that mess there, now, missy?" He asked, bending to collect the whiskey, and a handful of lemons from the ground for you. "Ain't got no words in that pretty mouth of yours, do you?"

You shake your head. "I've got plenty of words," you manage to say, and collecting the rest of the mess, stand. You're tall enough to look directly into his eyes, yet, short enough to have to peer up. "It's just...today's apparently not my day."

He frowns at that. "I'd say a tumble in the hallway doesn't make a day bad, now."

You shake your head. "How about being alone forever?" you sigh, realising how much you're oversharing with a perfect stranger who lives next door to you, and doesn't need to know every sordid detail of your sad life. "S-sorry. I'll just...thanks for helping me." you collect the whiskey, and lemons, and begin to go on your way.

You're not halfway to your door when he speaks up. "Today ain't the fourteenth, is it?" He asks, like he's asking a perfectly relevant question that sounds very irrelevant in that moment to anyone listening. "Missy?"

You glance over your shoulder, hoping that this was the answer to twenty-seven years of waiting. "It is, by my watch...and my wrist." In fact, it was the fourteenth by the breadth of a whisker, as it was just four minutes until midnight came and made it the next day. "Are you –,"

He nods.

"Thought I was too late," he grins, "too old."

You drop the shopping in your arms, and run to him, run to your soulmate's arms. "Never."