The cafe was small and warm and smelled like espresso and old wood. They'd taken a corner table — partly for space, partly because having Drax sit anywhere visible from the street tended to create discussions.
Star-Lord had a coffee he wasn't drinking. Ego had ordered a pastry and was eating it with the unhurried appreciation of someone who had been to enough planets to know which ones had good pastries.
"So you followed us," Star-Lord said. "Through five jump nodes."
"Six, in the end," Ego said pleasantly. "You were moving quickly. I nearly lost you after the fourth." He set the pastry down. "You're a difficult person to keep pace with."
"I've been told." Star-Lord looked at his hands. "You said you're not from Earth."
"No."
"I saw you standing on the outside of your ship. No suit."
Ego smiled slightly. "Vacuum doesn't particularly trouble me."
"Because you're—"
"A god is the simplest word for it." Ego looked at Star-Lord steadily. "That's not arrogance. It's a category. I'm something old and singular, and god is the word most civilizations settle on eventually."
Gamora, across the table, was watching him with the patient intensity of someone running a continuous background threat assessment. Drax was drinking a coffee he appeared to find acceptable. Rocket had stopped pretending to look at the menu and was listening openly, triangular face turned toward Ego with an expression that was three parts suspicion and one part genuine curiosity.
Star-Lord looked at his own hands again. He thought about the Xandar prison processing center — the examiner who had paused at his results and said only partially human and moved on as though that explained something rather than creating an entirely new category of question.
"So I'm—"
"I don't know yet," Ego said. "Whether you've inherited my nature — I genuinely don't know. It's not something that can be detected from a distance." He leaned forward slightly. "I've had children on many planets, across many years. None of them inherited it. They lived their lives and they died, as mortals do. Your mother was—" He paused. "Meredith was the last. I haven't looked for anyone else since her."
Star-Lord absorbed that. Then: "Where were you? All the years I was growing up. Where were you?"
Ego's expression shifted — something honest coming through the composure. "There were matters that required my attention. Things that don't resolve quickly when you operate on the timescale I operate on." A pause. "When your mother died, I hired Yondu Udonta to bring you to me. He didn't."
"I know why he didn't," Star-Lord said.
"Tell me."
"Because I was small. I could fit into places adults couldn't. I was useful for getting into things that were locked." He said it without particular bitterness — it was just a fact about his childhood that had been true for a long time. "I was a tool. So he kept the tool."
Ego looked at him. Something moved across his face that was harder to categorize than the composure. "I've been looking for you ever since."
Drax set his coffee cup down with the gravity of a man about to offer a significant observation.
"I always assumed Yondu was your father," he said.
Star-Lord turned. "What?"
"You have the same energy." Drax appeared entirely sincere. "I've thought it for some time."
"Drax, Yondu has blue skin."
"The resemblance is in your manner," Drax said patiently.
Rocket looked between them. "He's got a point about the manner."
"He kidnapped me," Star-Lord said. "He physically threatened me on a regular basis, taught me to steal, and told me for years that his crew wanted to eat me."
Ego looked at Star-Lord with what appeared to be genuine concern. "Eat you?"
"That's what he said."
"He's a bastard," Ego said.
"He's my bastard," Star-Lord said, and then stopped, because that had come out sounding more affectionate than he'd intended.
Gamora looked at the table.
Ego folded his hands. "I'd like to take you to my planet, when you're ready. It's some distance from here. You'd be able to test whether you've inherited anything — that question can only be answered in the right environment." He glanced around the table. "Your friends are welcome. All of them." His gaze landed on Rocket for a moment. "Even the triangular-faced one."
Rocket's hand went to his cheek. He pressed his fingers against his own jaw, feeling the architecture of it, his expression going through several stages of reaction before settling on offended. He did not, however, tell Ego he was wrong.
Ego pushed back from the table. "Excuse me briefly."
He went toward the back of the cafe.
The moment he was out of sight, Star-Lord leaned forward.
"I don't trust this."
Gamora was already nodding. "He's had twenty-six years to find you. He shows up the day after we land on Earth. He followed us through six jump nodes without announcing himself." She looked at the back of the cafe. "That's not a coincidence."
"He could have come straight at us on the ship and didn't. He could have knocked on my grandfather's door and didn't." Star-Lord turned his coffee cup in his hands. "He could be trying to lure me somewhere."
Gamora said: "That's possible."
"And even if he's not — even if every word he said is true — this is the worst possible timing. We're still trying to figure out the Dragon Balls."
"I know."
"Come outside," Gamora said.
They stood on the sidewalk, just far enough from the cafe window that the conversation could be private. The Missouri afternoon was quiet around them — a car passing, leaves moving, the distant sound of a lawn being mowed.
Star-Lord looked up the street.
"He shows up and he wants to be my father now," he said. "After thirty-odd years. And I'm supposed to just — go with that."
"I'm not telling you to go with it," Gamora said. "I'm telling you that you have a choice that you didn't have yesterday."
Star-Lord was quiet.
"Do you remember the story you told me?" Gamora said. "When we were on Knowhere, after the first round of drinks. About the man with the talking car."
Star-Lord frowned. "Which story?"
"The one where the man's car talked to him. Helped him fight crime." She watched his face. "You said his name was—"
"I know who you mean." He looked away. "I told you that when I was drunk. It was supposed to be private."
"You said when you were small, you used to carry a picture of him. Tell the other children that he was your father, just — away for a while." She kept her voice steady. "That he'd come back."
Star-Lord said nothing for a moment.
"It's a sad story," he said.
"I know."
"I was a weird kid."
"You were a kid who wanted a father," Gamora said. "That's not weird."
He looked at the sidewalk. A crack ran through it in a long diagonal, filled in with old tar. He'd stood in front of his mother's grave yesterday with flowers he'd bought at a gas station, and now his father was sitting inside a cafe eating a pastry and telling him the universe was explainable.
"What if he's lying?" he said.
"Then we find out and we deal with it," Gamora said. "But Peter—" She reached out and took his hand, her green fingers over his. "I don't want you to find out later that he was real, and you walked away."
She realized she was holding his hand, and let go.
Star-Lord looked at where her hand had been.
"After the Dragon Balls," he said. "That's the condition. We handle the reason we came here first. He's waited this long — a few more weeks won't break anything."
Gamora looked at him with the particular expression she used when she was deciding not to say everything she was thinking.
"Whatever you decide," she said. "All of us. We're with you."
Star-Lord looked back through the cafe window at Ego, who was returning from the back of the restaurant and picking up the last of his pastry with the composed ease of a being who had genuinely nowhere urgent to be.
"Yeah," Peter said. "Okay."
He pushed the door back open and went inside.