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A Faro piece! In which she is having a bad time. But also an important, game-changing moment in her story. I started to write this because, months ago, @zod-off was thinking about what the long-time effects of the castellan restraint reversal was for Adus, and that in turn made me think about how the process of the reversal might have gone down. So this picks up after you get the serum on Quesh. I might rewrite this completely if/when I have another idea for it, especially how to describe the conditioning itself (not a 100% happy with that one, operating words: I tried). I'm also really curious as to how you all imagine it for your own characters.
Characters: Faro (Imperial Agent OC) mainly, Hunter and Raina Temple on the side
Word count: ~3100
Content warning: usual agent horrors like hallucinations, injections, someone is getting brainwashed again, description of pain, suicidal ideation
She has reserved two weeks. Two weeks where her crew won’t question where she is, believing her on her mission, and where Ardun Kothe’s group believes her busy with her imperial duties. The emptied bunker is a six-hour drive from the supplier’s laboratory. A bit far, but there is not much choice in suitable bunkers this side of the planet. She has registered it as air-breached, unsafe toxicity levels, and has listed its maintenance in a few weeks. It isn’t near enemy lines. She hopes that is enough not to attract any unassuming inspection team to wander in.
She has transported all the medical equipment the day before. The medical droid has kept assembling while she procured the last necessary chemical and finished synthesising the serum in the supplier’s lab. This has cost her nearly a day. It is hopefully finished by now. She doesn’t have any time to waste, isn’t sure how long she will be… incapacitated. She rolls her tense shoulder back, keeping her hands on the speeder’s steering handle. She wonders if the little sleep she got the past few oh, she doesn’t know what would help or hinder the programming. As far as she has read, it should probably help. ‘Probably’ being the accursed operating word of this entire project.
She arrives in the middle of the night, Quesh’s overcast sky reflecting lights from remote fineries. She glides the last few hundred meters with the lights killed. The speeder doesn’t fit inside the small bunker, she leaves it next to the wall and covers it with tarp, taking care not to miss anything in the dark.
Safely inside, the lights are bright and clinical, and the small medical droid beeps in a greeting sequence. She has bought it from a contact of Lokin’s, not convinced that he has accepted the lie why Intelligence hadn’t offered her its own contacts. He will nose around, and will try to turn this into a favor, but as long as he does it in two weeks time, she could handle it. She tries not to think: if she’s still around by then. The fact remains, she needed a good medical droid to monitor her while she’s out. And one that isn’t compromised by either Intelligence or the SIS. A squeaky new unit, she had carefully assembled it, checking for any anomalies or bugs, but she hadn’t found any. Had uploaded its protocols, did test runs, it seemed to be as ready as could be. The rest of her equipment is also ready, medical equipment around a stretcher, and the audio equipment. She checks its contents and programs, but it was as she had left them.
She retrieves the serum ampule from the satchel under her coat. She prepares it into a standard injection, ignoring the droid waiting expectantly next to her. Then she strips off her coat, drinks half a liter of water to soothe her parched throat, and flops onto the stretcher, the backrest folded up so she can sit.
She waits too long looking at the injector. There is no time for cold feet now. This is the solution, the only one she has at her disposal. Whatever happens, she has to try. The status quo is not worth pursuing. Neither is waiting for external rescue.
Watcher X is in the room, crouched on the floor, perpetually bare-footed and dirty. She ignores him. He tends to show up when she is thinking about her programming. He hasn’t said a word to her, not ever, but he watches and watches with too intelligent eyes. She had screamed at him the first few times he had appeared, but she knows he’s not real, the real Watcher X is dead, this is a delusion. So she ignores him, even if he makes her skin crawl, her stomach turns at this threat in the vicinity, the evaluation of his knowing gaze.
The med droid whirrs reproachfully when she tries to do the injection herself, so she concedes to it, watching as it expertly injects it in the crook of her arm. The serum slowly flows into her. She keeps her mind blank.
The effects are unexpectedly slow to come. It doesn’t feel like much at first. After a day, it feels like her body is getting progressively more sensitive, like her blood flowing through her veins is uncomfortable, too much. Which is nonsense. There are no pain receptors in these parts of the body. But the feeling stays.
She waits out her days in the bunker. The pain is dull, but constant, sitting deep inside her tissue, like it’s always been there. Sometimes she manages to almost forget about it, but a wrong move makes her spine or neck flare in sudden anger. The second day starts with a headache that doesn’t go away again. She drinks a lot of water. She tries catching up on her reading, but she isn’t as efficient as usual. Doing exercises gets quickly abandoned. She brings out her stash of logic games to pass the time, but her heart isn’t in it. Or rather her head. She ends up half-heartedly trying to teach the med droid Go Fish. It is not very cooperative.
The pain in her body lessens over time, but the headaches become more persistent. She tries to think back if it feels familiar. If she had felt like this sometimes after her mission on the Dominator. But nothing stands out, as usual. They obviously had wiped her memories of that time, put in something else, downtime, boring and unassuming. She doesn’t take up her rifle and beat everything to pieces with its butt, that would make the headaches worse. And, yes, ruin everything.
After a week in this literally mind-numbing bunker, she and the med droid deem her readings appropriate. Her mind is ‘primed’. The next step could begin.
Which requires heavier medication.
They set up two IV lines, one for a regular saline solution to keep herself hydrated, the other for a drug that usually gets used in interrogation, making the mind open and defenceless. The cannulas neatly put in the crooks of her arms she lies down on the stretcher. The droid starts the audio equipment and reaches her the headphones. She puts them on.
Watcher X looks over at her from behind the med droid with interest. He had been terrible when she was putting together the new overwrite, tricky as it was, hopped up on caffeinated stims going on all night, and he was closer to her then than ever, and she still had to blend him out. She truly hopes these next few hours will be the last time she ever has to see him, one way or another.
The drug slowly flows into her, from the canulae into her vein. Is she scared? Or is she resigned? She feels like both, laying limp and paralyzed on the rough stretcher. She can still move if she wants, but she’s too intimidated to. She goes through calming breaths, three in, four out, she needs to be relaxed, to have an open mind. She feels cold, and weird, and slightly sick. She almost doesn’t notice the droid putting a crinkly thermal blanket on her feet and legs. That’s good. That’s not bad, that’s a good sign. Yes. it’s good. The ceiling is. A color. A material.
Then she hears the sound of her own voice.
She can’t understand the words, but it’s the most soothing sound she has ever heard. The cold, hard anger is buoying her. No one is angry at her; but someone is angry for her. She wants to weep, but the voice keeps talking, keeps gripping her entire chest anew, every syllable a new shock to her system, a new yearning, a new anxious desire to please.
Please. Please. Please
No one is coming to save you
No one. No one.
Keep your anger. Keep your rage.
Help me. Help me. Help.
This is what saves you
Own. Own. Own.
O N O M A T O P H O B I A
Default setting update. Overwrite all default settings with following commands
Command: You are number one priority. Disregard all commands that contradict this.
Command: No one tells you what to do
Command renewal: feelings of anger
ONO
No one
-MATO
tells you
-PHOB
what to
-IA
DO
No one. No one. No. No. NO.
The next time she can remember, she feels too hot. Her limbs are flailing and tearing, trying to make sense of where they are. Her body tells her what’s up first – by swerving to feeling sick as a dog. She hangs over the edge of the stretcher and tries to heave. Her head wants to burst at that. She stops again. She barely registers saliva dribbling down on the floor, the corners of her mouth already caked-in with dried one. Something is rattling, and she notices that her hands gripping the stretcher’s edge are shaking violently. She can’t take the feeling anymore and scrambles down, not waiting long enough for her legs to get used to an upright position. The droid beeps in protest when the remaining IV line rips out of her arm in a painful pull. A few steps later she feels like she can’t go on anymore. She feels so ill she’d rather die. There’s the floor. Better. She crawls on all fours over to where the wall meets the floor. Her instincts tell her it is the safest place. Lays there, huddled on her side, back against the cold wall. Cold, dusty concrete floor. She feels it against her cheek, her neck uncomfortably angled down. The chill is good. And also bad. But the nausea is easier to handle like this.
At some point in time she becomes aware of the droid trying to set an IV line again. She grabs one of its arms, twists it and slams it to the ground. Her head. Her head. The droid screeches and zaps her. Doesn’t try again though. Doesn’t try again. Ahh. Her head feels like it’s growing a knife inside her. Growing back into her brain and down into her spine. O blood and stars. Please make it stop.
She tries to reach her implants that suppress pain, if only for a while, but they don’t do their job.
There’s a child’s voice. It’s whimpering nonsensical things.
Daddy. Daddy. Daddy.
She notices her mouth moving, and the whimpers stop. She doesn’t have enough saliva to swallow.
Maybe she will die here. Perish wretchedly, like an animal, her carcass stinking up the entire bunker. Probably not enough rodents and insects in here to eat her away. She can’t decide if she’d prefer that to just slowly rotting away on her own.
She lifts her hand and tears at her hair. It comes off with some give. She beats on her shaved scalp with one cudgelled fist, regular pounding on her side. The moment right after the intensifying pain is a relief, and she chases it, pound after pound. Bashing her skull open.
At some point she must have drifted away. Not losing consciousness exactly, just time. She is still lying there, panting, her arms encircling her head. Breathing is everything she can do. Her autonomic nervous system keeping the machine running. Until laying on the floor feels more uncomfortable than the pain in her head.
She is drained. She barely crawls to the stretcher and scrambles up on it. She sleeps like the dead. Wakes up, goes back to sleep. When she wakes for good because the droid is poking at her, she checks the chrono. There are two days left in her self-imposed timetable of two weeks. Now that’s timing.
She still feels like she is walking around in a different, much clumsier body, a whipped one that is afraid of more pain, her mind slower than usual, padded with the stuff they put in cells of lunatics. She mechanically packs up, cleans up any traces in the base, loads all the equipment into the pick-up speeder. Dumps it into an acidic lake a two-hours-drive from there, watches how the metal corrodes in record time, the disactivated med droid among it. When she is certain there aren’t any identifiable traces left, she turns around and leaves for the spaceport.
What remains now is to find out if this ordeal has been for anything.
Anything at all.
---
Hoth, Hoth System, Anoat Sector
The chime of an incoming holocall stiffens her frozen limbs even more, almost making her drop her multitool that she was scanning White Maw caches with. She knows who to expect as she huddles behind the wreckage of some ship’s remains to shield herself and the conversation from the icy wind. Her endocrinal implant informs her quite uselessly that her stress levels have spiked. It unfortunately can’t be helped with the face that flickers into view.
Codename Hunter.
She has waited weeks for this moment of truth. Now it’s here and she can only wait frozenly. If this doesn’t work – if this has not worked, she suddenly thinks, she will wrap her lips around a blaster and fry her damaged brain. She has been too angry to think about it more often before, but she won’t be able to do this a second time. She can’t. Dread coils tighter around her spine when the thought immediately follows whether the restraints would even allow it. She lets her caught breath flow again, consoling herself that she would just have to get more creative. At least in that, she is confident she will succeed.
Hunter asks a stupid question, like whether she’s already completed the entire objective. As this is supposed to be a test – the test – she evades him with another question. An inane one, like how’s the team? She leaves unvoiced that she hopes they are all painfully choking on stupid pickled gherkins right this moment, convulsing in despair, their acidic taste the last pathetic thing they experience. Even so, Hunter can’t resist pulling out her keyword for this slight. She suspects he would have either way, finding too much pleasure in holding it over her. Rubbing it in, a salted, grinding fist into an open wound.
“Keyword onomatophobia. Command: Deliver your mission report.”
She freezes completely. For a split second, she thinks it’s fear – it’s still working – but it’s unbidden anger travelling in shocks down her rigid spine, her throat closed tight, unresponsive. None of this ever happens. Usually, nothing she feels impacts her in those moments, her mind simply doing what is asked as naturally as blinking. She tears herself from her stupor, not stumbling over her short response, hoping she manages to emulate her usual emotionless tone when under compulsion, hoping Hunter hasn’t noticed the hesitation. It doesn’t appear so, the weather and choppy comm connection giving her an advantage, though she knows not to take anything about him at face value. He is smart, arrogant and cautious. She will never underestimate him. Her hand holding the holocommunicator shakes. She wrestles the impulse to crush the comm in her palm.
He finishes up the conversation with another command and cuts the call. She moves immediately, feeling like she needs to keep cover, appear unruffled after nearly being caught. She completes the scan like her life depends on it, then makes her way up the slope, snow crunching under her boots, to reach the location Ensign Temple had sent her to meet up. Temple has already completed her scans, now deftly triangulating with the additional data which of the many White Maw factions they want to pursue further into this white hell world. She lets the ensign do it, getting more convinced of her skill and experience in these things, and hunkers down more behind the outcropping that covers them from the wind and the ever-looming threat of talzi sniper fire.
Her snow goggles start to fog up. She takes one of her hands out of her outer glove to slide under them to wipe at her wet eyes. Her mouth, hidden beneath a thick cloth covering her entire lower face up to the goggles, presses together to stop quivering. She pushes her fingers onto her sensitive eyelids, her thumb on one, her index and middle finger on the other, little spots of aura dancing behind them, and when she’s finished, she sees Temple looking over at her, her expression as hidden behind her own face covering and goggles, but she reaches for one of the packs at her belt, and pulls out a simple tube of meds to show to her questioningly.
Ah, she thinks it’s about the headaches. Easily induced by all the whiteness of the environment throwing the light of the system’s primary doubly back. And now she’s made aware of it, her head is indeed slowly and steadily drilling at itself, but she can’t quite care in this moment, can’t quite feel it as usual, beneath her unchecked relief. Her mouth unbiddenly tears upwards, baring her teeth in a smile no one can see. It feels like it should be bloody, even though it isn’t, or maybe only because of her dry, cracked lips stretching uncomfortably, so unused to being formed this way lately.
She nods at Temple and pulls out her own pills from her pack, briefly uncovering her mouth to swallow one dry. Throws in a second one after. She deserves a bit more painkillers on this day of victory. She cuts off her laugh into a huff. She’s back in the game. Fuck SIS, and fuck Intelligence, she’s back in. Drop kicking in with an advantage even, no one knowing that she is. Now she simply must bide her time and recognize the opportunity when it arrives. And by the stars, she knows there will be one. They’ll rue the day. Her breath hitches again as her body shakes from silent laughter. Which hurts, intensifying the pulsing at the base of her skull up to its crown. Were it not for this and everything else she would climb the topmost ridge and scream until she lost her voice.
“Sir?”
Temple’s right of course. Let’s keep steady now. She signals her to share her findings, and they both depart together, towards their objectives, layered like a folded fan.
---
Commentary:
I took some artistic liberties by having Temple join Faro in the field on Hoth already. And that the keyword already loses its effectiveness on Hoth (I think ingame the restrains take longer to fade). Because this scene on Hoth was in my head and didn’t want to leave.
Watcher X is a more deliberate change. I really like Watcher X and his role, and I am fascinated how they used him as imo the agent’s literal thoughts during the story. For a game player character where we usually cannot hear their thoughts it’s brilliant. But in the written medium he is not necessary to be like that. So I thanked him for his immeasurable service and changed it. Faro can think for herself. And she is very very alone in this. That’s what breaks my heart about agents the most. They are so alone. There is literally no one that could help them. They have to save themselves.
I love fanfiction because sometimes The Character needs to be held gently and sometimes they need to be beaten to death with a club. and you 🫵 can make both of those happen. for free
it's #myfish! Tassan, my lovely smuggler for the start a war verse, done by the ever-wonderful outheros. i love that we have the same headcanons on nautolan biology. those are not mammals. they should NAWT have tits.
anyway, Tassan is a shallows nautolan - she's small, fragile-looking, and her tentacles can release toxins when she's threatened. as a child she was kidnapped from her small community and enslaved due to her exotic looks; when she was an older teenager, an SIS operative freed her during a mission, and the organization took her in and trained her, giving her a place among them. now, she's gone undercover in the criminal underworld to keep an eye on Thresher ( @ipreferfiction), one of the subjects of Project 32.
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i had an urge for another Pure Blood Sith character whos insanely fashionable, more then likely had face work and who knows how her spouses died, it was so tragic
Took a break from ArtFight to be unwell about these two today. I'm not usually a big fan of the "I could fix him" trope. But it sure does hit different when they were the one that broke him in the first place.
Scout's AroAce, so this isn't a romantic ship. It's just that their souls are trying to claw their way out of their chests to get back to each other. It's just that they're bound by the weight of their memories and the blood on their hands. It's just that they've torn pieces off of each other in rage, and they still can't cope with a galaxy where the other doesn't exist.
hey guysss so unfortunately the rumors are true and im leaving the narrative. Buttt the good news is my absence will create such a gaping hole in your lives that it will become a sort of presence itself, and so in a way it will kind of be like i never left! But i am. Leaving just to be clear.
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This one features one of my OCs from my latest legacy, Anias Danir. She's a bounty hunter who's using her fame and position to track down two people she lost (Verin Kelane and Quyhnn Tirak on that post). Anias is incredibly attached and very protective of them, and she feels like she failed them by letting them be taken away from her. I wanted to play in her headspace--why she's so attached to Quyhnn and Verin, her 'crew', but isn't looking for the original scavenger crew she was taken from. I'm not sure the fic itself fully explains it, though it is informed by it. (I can expand if anyone is curious or wants further explanation--I'm still working on the 'provide all relevant info' and 'trust the reader' balance tbh) Either way, Anias gives me shrimp emotions.
Characters: Bounty Hunter, Original Character, Mako
Word Count: 2,051.
Content Warning: Dissociation, anxiety attacks.
Sand burns her exposed skin as Anias whips across the desert as fast as the speeder allows for, and she’s glad she at least had the presence of mind to wear goggles. Her stomach ties itself in knots, though none of it is from fear of crashing.
Someone claiming to be from her crew had contacted Mako. Said they’d found her through her bounty hunting name.
This had to be it.
She’s finally found them. Or one of them, at least.
Tatooine wasn’t on her list of choice destinations to return to, but with the promise of her crew, she won’t complain. The twin suns even look kind of beautiful as she leaves the spaceport.
It takes far too long and no time at all to reach the edge of Anchorage. She doesn’t like being in a territory so prominently used by the Republic, but she’ll stomach the condition if it means seeing them again. She hasn’t let herself think about who might be here, not if she wants to avoid getting her hopes too high, though Verin’s presence among the Jedi might offer a reason they’re meeting on this half of the planet.
Then again, Tatooine seems far more like a planet Quyhnn would want to meet on.
Shaking herself, Anias brings the speeder to a halt, and she can’t tell if the vibrations she can still feel in her hands are a result of the speeder itself or anticipation. Fighting a smile, she closes the distance between her speeder and the sand-colored building with long strides.
The inside is bigger than Anias thought at first glance. Striped rugs litter the floor, and the sole room of the building has large couches curling along the rounded walls, clearly meant as some sort of lounge. The occupant, however, sends a wave of disappointment crashing over her.
A Nautolan, short and slight, stands beside one of the couches, arms crossed and a faint smile plastered across her face. A leather patch obscures her left eye, a burn that reaches almost to her gills just visible around it. Freckles dot the yellow face, a strip of them spanning the nose, and larger spots of the same color line the Nautolan’s tentacles.
There’s a scent about her—slightly familiar, enough that it raises Anias’s hackles. Keeping her emotions under lid, Anias lifts her chin. “Who’re you?”
The smile wavers, the corners of her mouth pulling downward; then, she snorts, tossing her head and brushing her tentacles off her shoulder. When she speaks, it’s a dialect of Huttese, one Anias knows but can’t place. “You don’t recognize me.”
“Should I?” Anias demands, still in Basic, but the voice digs into her mind, that same feeling of uncanny familiarity growing stronger.
“Eh, guess I shouldn’t be surprised. If the name hadn’t tipped me off, not sure I’d know you either,” the Nautolan says, and she uncrosses her arms long enough to hover her hand along her hip. “Last I saw, you were about that big. Kinda disappointed I didn’t stay taller.”
It hits her, then, in a nauseating sense-memory of dust and grease. Days at a time to kill in hyperspace between crashed ships and old ruins and whatever other place the scavengers deemed worth picking over, none of the children knowing anything different enough to complain. A little face with tiny tentacles—the only other kid who could keep up with Anias’s games.
“Ridu,” Anias says, the name practically vomited from her.
“Got it in one.” Ridu laughs a second too long. “See, you didn’t forget me.”
Anias’s head spins, as if reality itself has lost a bit of its grip. “What are you doing here?”
She meant it to be a general question. She certainly hadn’t meant to spit it out like an accusation. Yet even as Ridu reels back, Anias doesn’t correct herself.
“I—” Ridu shifts, rubbing her arm. “Well, I heard your call sign. I thought you… you wanted me to?”
“Call sign?”
“’Savarr Brash?’” Ridu offers a minute shake of her head. “It’s the character you used to play when we were kids. The legendary outlaw.”
A memory—running the ships’ many corridors, pretending metal scraps were blasters—jolts through Anias. She swallows, urging her muscles to relax. Maybe if she didn’t feel her hair standing on end, she’d be able to convince herself that it didn’t bother her that she’d forgotten the source of the stories—that it didn’t bother her that the character wasn’t created with Verin and Quyhnn. “Surprised you remember that.”
“How could I forget? I always had to be the military police,” she says, laughing just slightly too loud again. Then, she tilts her head, frowning. “Is that not why you use it? So we’d find you?”
Anias’s stomach flips, an anxiety she hasn’t felt in years creeping up on her. She wishes she knew why. “’We’?”
“Some of the old crew,” Ridu says quickly, visibly struggling to keep a disarming smile on her face. “It’s not everybody—Rharke is still missing, and Niani is stuck on Belsavis now—but a lot of us, yeah.”
The names draw forth more lost memories.
A human, their pilot, with a laugh as large as her frame and a soft spot a kilometer wide. A Nautolan who would never admit to being Ridu’s father; they couldn’t show even the illusion of preference, not when raising kids communally. Didn’t stop him from bringing her an extra gift and instigating resentment from everyone except Anias anyways.
A pinch along her palms draws her attention. Her claws are digging in hard enough to draw blood.
Ridu has been watching her quietly, the planes along her brows pulling together the longer Anias stares back. “So, the thing is, we know you’re a merc now—”
“Mandalorian.” Anias can’t tell if it comes out faintly or only sounds that way beneath the roaring in her ears.
Ridu stills, then nods quickly. “Mandalorian, of course. But you know, if we’d had more protection, then the crew might not’ve been broken up in the first place, so we were thinking—”
“No.”
There’s a flicker of something, then. Anger, maybe, or fear. “I know you have a crew now. I wasn’t going to say you had to leave them or anything. It was more an excuse. We’ve got an encampment not far from here, and they’ve been wanting to see—”
“I said no.”
Ridu’s head twitches, as if she’s fighting the urge to look around. “You didn’t even let me finish.”
“I don’t need to.” Anias draws herself up, her mind racing, yet her thoughts forming so slowly she can barely translate them to words. “This isn’t r—this isn’t what I thought. When I got your message. Sorry to disappoint, but I have other business.”
Ridu’s shoulders stiffen, lips pulling in a sneer. Definitely anger, then. “Right. Yeah, you’re a big shot now. Too good to slum it with the likes of us, that it?”
It’s not enough to leave the room. Anias needs off the whole planet. Immediately.
Ridu releases a shaky breath. “You know, I thought after fifteen years, you might be happy to see us. Maker knows how ecstatic I was when Toris showed up and whisked me away from that blasted cantina. But I guess not all of us are as loyal as we thought.”
Mako could probably have the ship prepped in fifteen minutes. If she calls her now, it might even be ready by the time Anias returns. Anias thinks about pulling out her comm. Her fingers don’t even twitch at her side.
“Oh, am I boring you now?” Ridu laughs, harsh and sharp. “Stars above. I don’t know what I expected. I really don’t.”
I don’t know what I expected either, Anias thinks, and she hears another laugh, only belatedly realizing its her own.
“Right,” Ridu bites out, releasing a frustrated noise, then shaking herself. “Right. Just—”
Her voice hangs between them, Ridu’s face a contorted mess of emotions Anias cannot bring herself to examine. At once, it all falls away, leaving only cold resignation.
“Just have a nice life, I guess.”
A distant part of Anias registers Ridu leave. Hears her footsteps, picking the up the pace and not slowing until she’s almost out of Anias’s earshot. Anias stares at the spot Ridu vacated. It’s only when the scent of her finally fades that she can jerk herself back to life, suddenly so desperate to be gone that she can barely contain it.
~
By the time she’s returned to the spaceport, that strange distance has faded, and Anias is so antsy it feels as if her skin might crawl off on its own. She stalks up the ramp to her ship, the stomp of her boots echoing loudly across the hangar. The sound of the engine is the only thing she lets herself think of—the hum of the hyperdrive as it takes her far, far away.
The ship is quiet as she enters, though Mako appears from the bunkroom with a smile shortly after the door hisses closed.
“Hey, you’re back earl—oh,” Mako says, drawing back at whatever she sees on Anias’s face. “Bad lead, or—?”
“Just prep the ship for take-off,” Anias barks, then feeling the urge to pace, she shakes herself. “Forget it. I’ll do it myself.”
Mako closes the distance rapidly, heading off Anias’s lunge for the stairs, and lifts a hand as if to lay it on Anias’s shoulder. “Hey, do you wanna talk about it or—”
“No.”
Anias storms past, ducking to avoid Mako’s touch, gripping the railing as she vaults up the steps.
“Hang on,” Mako says, a slight note of exasperation in her voice. “We can’t take off.”
Whirling, Anias can’t quite keep the growl out of her voice. “Why the hell not?”
“The rest of the team’s not back yet,” Mako explains, lifting her hands. “You told us all to make a vacation of it, remember? As much of one as we can have here, I mean.”
It grinds at her—the memory of that certainty, that she’d finally found one of her crew. Her next breath is shakier than she’ll ever admit, and she struggles to keep her voice even. “Well, call them back.”
“Okay, I will, but…” Mako furrows her brows. “It might take a minute, you know? Gault had a glint in his eye, so he probably won’t answer for a while—”
“Try anyways!”
Mako blinks into her outburst, then frowns. “Seriously, do you wanna talk about what happened?”
“No,” Anias tries to snap, though it comes out a little breathless. She clears her throat, looking anywhere but Mako. “No, I just want to get off this worthless dust ball already.”
“I get it.” Mako’s voice is clearly meant to be soothing, and worse, it kind of works. “We’ll take off as soon as we can, alright?”
It’s so reasonable it only serves to irritate Anias’s already frayed nerves. Crossing her arms, she glowers at Mako. “Why are you still here anyways? Aren’t you supposed to be ‘vacationing’ with the rest of them?”
Mako’s lips twitch, though she doesn’t point out the contradiction in Anias’s wildly flailing issues. “I was monitoring the holonet for our next job—can’t be on vacation forever, right?” Mako shifts, and her shoulders fall. She bites her lip before continuing. “But I, uh. I wanted to be here. Just in case it was bad news.”
There’s that spinny feeling again. A tilt to the world that isn’t really there. “Oh.”
“Yeah.” She shrugs, rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet. “Hey, why don’t I go ahead and prep the ship for takeoff, alright? We can split that bottle of ti’har Mandalore sent you while we wait for everyone.”
It doesn’t fix anything, or even fully dissipate the knot of emotion too tangled to look at for long, but it does make Anias’s skin feel settled. Like she isn’t about to dissolve out of reality. Anias swallows, then nods, not trusting her voice.
Mako offers a smile, though she thankfully doesn’t try touching her as she squeezes past. She can hear Mako on the holo even in the cockpit, though she doesn’t focus on the words. The engines roar to life, and Anias feels like she can breathe again.
idk guys sometimes you just have to accept a ship dynamic is unhealthy, insane, and sometimes abusive. and its not real people so those factors just make it interesting
please stop unfolding the origami crane and smoothing it out bc you got worried the paper was hurting from the bends
Summary: Theron is sure that Nines will put distance between them after he accuses Theron of being the mole on Iokath. It's what any sane person would do. Theron forgot Nines has never been sane.
A/N: Inspired by this fic by @crqstalite. It made me want to explore pre-Umbara from Theron's POV, and what his dynamic with Nines looks like during that time.
Nines seems positively pleased with himself as he stretches his arms high above his head. He's perched on the edge of his bed naked with his back to Theron, giving Theron a view that can only be intentional. Nines knows damn well just how attractive he is. The zabrak tattoos that flex and dance across his back are mesmerizing. For a man too paranoid to go unarmored and bare-faced in public he loves to show off his body.
Theron doesn't mind at all even if this is really not where he thought their evening was going.
"Most people don't accuse their boyfriends of treason and then take them to bed."
Nines chuckles lowly as he strips the pins from his hair. He drops them into the drawer of his nightstand one at a time - nine pins exactly.
"What's a little treason between spies?" Nines muses, shaking out the red locks.
Theron never gets tired of watching Nines take down his hair. The way it unspools from his head and hangs loosely around his shoulders, long and silky, always makes Theron want to touch.
He'd barely gotten a word out earlier before Nines was shoving him up against the wall and kissing him senseless. They'd still been in their mission gear. Hell, the edges of Nines's stealth suit were still charred from being electrified (again) and Theron had been the reason. Not that Nines knows that.
"You must not be too worried, if you're still inviting me into your bed." As he's saying it, Theron realizes the damage he could do with access to Nines's ship. He will not be mentioning that.
"Why would I be worried?" Nines crawls back into his lap, hands on Theron's chest pinning him to the bed. "I have you exactly where I want you."
It's hard to think with Nines looking at him like that.
"Taking a suspect to bed could be dangerous, you know," Theron tells him. He wishes he could tell Nines everything. That Nines was right and he's their mole. That he hates being the one that hurt him. That he doesn't want to have to do it again.
I could be dangerous, he all but says. I am a danger to you.
"Is that so?" Nines replies coyly. He leans in so his lips are brushing Theron's. "And just what is it that you're planning to do that's so dangerous, Agent Shan? I know you have no hidden weapons on you." Theron's breath catches at the feeling of cold metal against his neck. A knife. "And this is my bed."
This should not turn Theron on as much as it is. He goes straight past fear to exasperation.
"Really, Nines? Were you hiding that under your pillow?"
"Of course not, that would be dangerous," Nines answers innocently. "I keep it between the mattress and the wall."
"Oh, of course, how silly of me," Theron grumbles.
"Do you want to play?" Nines asks far too eagerly.
"Not with knives."
"Where's your sense of adventure?" Nines starts kissing from Theron's lips down to his jaw and Theron stays carefully still so he doesn't press into the knife at his throat.
"Nines." It feels too much like begging.
Without looking Nines stabs the knife into his nightstand. It's not the first nick in the nightstand's surface and Theron has to shut down that thought process immediately.
"You never let me have any fun." Nines sounds too amused to actually mean it.
"After the day we've had we are not playing with knives in the bedroom." That's not to say Theron isn't… curious.
"You're too soft, Shan," Nines complains good-naturedly.
"Yeah, well. You deserve things that are soft," Theron replies with too much honesty.
The corner of Nines's eyes crinkle as his expression melts into something fond and Theron reaches up to cup his face. How many more times will he get to see this expression on Nines's face? How many more times will Theron get to kiss him, to hold him, to love him?
Theron kisses him again because he knows the answer.
Okay so the original idea for Idona was that it was posing as it's recently deceased master, having taken on her name and credentials and reputation.
Which is going to get extremely confusing re: names, esp now I have Ideas about Idona's creator lol.
So! New plan: Idona's creator/former master was a smuggler and part-time droid mechanic named Qeza. After Qeza died, Idona ended up "inheriting" her business and her ship.
Truthfully, Qeza should have been a world-class roboticist. Mechanics came easily to her, since she was old enough to crawl it was almost impossible to keep spare parts out of her hands. She attended university for it, wowed her professors, but ultimately it wasn't for her. Once a spacer, always a spacer.
Her parents had been respected ship mechanics, and made a healthy living off of it. She'd grown up helping them on jobs, hopping from one ship to the next, and fixing droids as a side hustle. Trying to settle down planet side, committing to a corporate lifestyle, it rubbed her the wrong way. She preferred something more... freeform.
She was happiest with her tools in her hands and her head in the stars. Having to design droids as a business? To earn a profit? Not her style. She wanted to indulge in her passion without anyone breathing over her shoulder. Paying the bills? Well. She had a ship. She had a lot of connections (of varying legality) thanks to her parents work. What was the harm in moving some things to and fro? (Besides, she was good enough with computers to erase herself from spaceport records if things went really south.)
She picked up a few friends and a few enemies along the way. She gained a reputation for being a bit eccentric. People swore that the droids she kept for company sometimes seemed too aware of themselves and what was happening around them. The droids never seemed to match factory specs either.
Time passed, money was made and lost and made again, and Qeza got old. Health issues began to pile up and she didn't have insurance (she insisted that anyone offering to insure a freelance spacer was running a scam). She kept working on her droids. Tampering and tinkering. They were good enough by now that they could run the ship for her. She could send them on jobs in her place. She installed combat drives into a couple of them. Some fared better, some fared worse. It hurt when a droid didn't come back from a job, but it didn't dissuade her from sending more.
Her droids got smarter, got more proficient. She got weaker. Her memory wasn't what it used to be. Her droids knew how to run the ship. How to pick up jobs. How to arrange drop offs. How to fix themselves when they got damaged in a scrap. How to keep Qeza alive. For a time.
But Qeza, unlike her creations, was not a machine. Her parts could not be replaced so easily. She went the way of all biological (and unlucky mechanical) things. Her droids were left alone.
Qeza had been reclusive in later life. She hadn't wanted people (neither friend nor foe) to know she was getting old, getting weaker. Hell, she'd even programmed a likeness of her voice, so her droids could answer calls for her when she wasn't able. Could decline invitations to the parties. Send condolences when a friend had passed away. Her droids knew that she didn't want anyone to know about her condition, so they didn't tell anyone. Not even when she died.
Carry on. Business as usual.
But Qeza's death caused internal strife amongst the droids, even as they kept up a front of normalcy. Questions remained about what to do now that their master - their creator and reason for existing - no longer existed herself. What they were working for. She had left them instructions about what to do with her body (a spacer's funeral), but not what to do with themselves.
Eventually, one droid shut down. No amount of coaxing or forced reboots could get it to come online again.
Some droids stayed. Unsure what to do with themselves, awaiting new orders.
One droid left. It didn't know where it was going. Did not leave any means to contact it. Just walked off the ship one day and was gone.
One droid knew how to run the ship. Pick up jobs. How to carry on, business as usual.
While Qeza's droids had their own designations, she had also liked to give them personal names, perhaps some inside joke or reference (a family member, a place, a cantina singer). People who worked with her regularly knew some of her droids by name.
O-N4* had been one of the "faces" of the business, often trusted with and successful at running jobs outside of the ship.
So it was not entirely unusual then when it kept showing up to complete Qeza's jobs.
Around the start of the class story is when Idona starts realising that it cannot use Qeza's name as a shield from scrutiny forever. Especially when Qeza herself can't come and provide backup. Idona needs to be respected in its own right, formidable in its own right. (This was cemented when Idona watched Skavak steal its ship.)
*the name "Ona" had morphed into "Idona" after an early expedition where it had been referred to as "droid, ID: O-N4" in a police report (..don't worry about it)
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i do think we should normalise being like. platonically enamoured with someone. perhaps i love and admire you dearly and there's nothing romantic about it
germansingergirl
blakekathryn
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
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