#**faro

Vette wakes up in the middle of the night. At first, she isn’t sure why, she’s still sleepy and comfy half in her sleeping bag, one bare leg luxuriously sticking out. But something has woken her up. Something that seems to come from her guts, an innate danger sense. She carefully peeks out from under the covers. The room is dark. The light from the moons that might come through the thin curtains is dimmer than she expects and makes the shadows in the room almost impenetrable. Good thing she isn’t afraid of the dark, right?

Then she hears a dull shuffling sound and freezes.

It stops again, but it has come from outside the room, in the hallway. She tries to make out more, but it’s quiet.

Oh, come on, they said they never come inside…

She’s annoyed now, but still spooked, too, contemplating how considerate she should be. Should she really suffer awake while the others happily snooze the night away? And what if it’s actually something else, some low-budget assassin that can’t even sneak around properly?

She immediately discards that possibility again when a truly awful moan comes from the hallway, keening and gurgling like there’s something thick and wet down its throat. The shadows around the door seem to grow.

“Oh fuck no,” Vette whispers loudly, crosses over Qyrhu’s sleeping form still half in her sleeping bag, “I’m not sleeping on the outside.”

She tucks herself in on the inside of their sleeping arrangement, feeling a lot more like she won’t be the first one getting grabbed if these things come inside, sandwiched between a slowly rousing Qyrhu and a Theron whose back is turned to her. She can’t see his head because it’s under an entire pillow that his arm is holding in place over his head. Wait, has he just been trying to continue to sleep like this? Next to Theron is a motionless Faro, laying flat on her back and her arms on her chest like an entombed mummy.

“Whzhgh?” Qyrhu groggily intones as he appears from out his own sleeping bag.

“There’s things in the hallway. You asshole said they wouldn’t come inside.”

“Hnm?” his eyes still aren’t open while he’s rubbing his face. “They don’t.”

The sound that wafts over to them now is like the splashing of vomit hitting the floor. The air in the room becomes inexplicably thick and damp. There’s no smell to it, but it really feels like it should smell like rotten corpse.

“You wanted to keep that shitty relic!” Vette hisses and pulls his own pillow away from him to bury her nose into. She has forgotten hers on his other side. “So go fix this. I can’t sleep in these conditions!”

Qyrhu grumbles but unzips his sleeping bag and reluctantly rises from their mats. He shuffles through the room, collecting his lightsaber and throwing on a bathrobe over his downtime clothes. He’s taking his sweet fucking time putting on his mismatched slippers while heinous looking shadowy goo creeps in from between the upper crack of the door.

At the sound of Qyrhu exiting the room like he’s just going to the fresher, Theron’s head comes out from bellow his pillow, sleepily looking after him as he closes the door. He doesn’t seem all that enthused to follow though.

Everything is quiet.

Keeps being quiet.

Vette and Theron are straining their ears.

Then there’s one wet slap, loud in the dead quiet, like someone just hit a huge dead fish.

A many throated scream pierces the air, discordant and dreadful. Vette feels goosebumps popping down her entire back. She watches as, out of thin air, deep scratches slowly grow downwards on their walls, and she grips Theron’s arm in horror. Theron tenses and grabs Faro’s arm in turn. Faro is still lying on her back and looking up at the ceiling with a flat expression. She simply shifts the knife she has been holding in her one hand to the other that isn’t restricted by Theron’s grip.

Meanwhile, the hall is still a cacophony. There’s lightsaber noises, screaming that alternates between piercingly high and vibratingly low, sounds of breaking glass and shattering furniture, one enormous stomping thud that shakes the entire floor of the barn floor they’re on. They aren’t sure if the harsh hitting sounds are Qyrhu’s doing or if they are being done to him. The muffled grunts that come every now and then tell them he’s still alive at least.

As they are beginning to wonder if they should maybe go look if he needs some help the screaming changes into blubbering gurgles and finally, a relieving silence. They hadn’t noticed how dark it had become as the shadows seem to return to grey instead of deepest black, and beams of cool moonlight trace the floor.

The door opens on creaking hinges. Qyrhu comes back inside, re-tightening the belt of his bathrobe. There’s something dark staining the front of his robe, but otherwise he looks surprisingly unscathed.

Theron releases himself from various forgotten grips and clambers over to look at the stained robe. His fingers come away red.

“Jam has run out,” Qyrhu says to that.

Faro intones a sigh from deep within her chest, not having budged from her mat.

“I always thought that kitchen was lacking,” she says. “The next one is all in stone.”

“It’s not that bad,” Qyrhu assures, “but um… I’m going to the market tomorrow. The milk is all curdled.”

“How about durasteel for the kitchen,” Theron adds, sucking the jam off his fingers, “I don’t want any more stone in this hut, feels like all of it’s cursed.”

“When did you say that buyer comes in again?” Vette angles her head over to Faro, “Please say tomorrow…”

“You know it, Vette,” she says with eyes already closed again.

Unsurprisingly, Qyrhu scoffs at that and looks at them reproachfully. “Excuse me? You just decide to give away the one thing that makes this hovel look like it has some class?”

“Yes,” everyone intones at the same time.

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.

Tevuuk + Fears

Many of the smuggler’s fears are tied to their freighter. And rightfully so, as it was the means for their financial stability, their first and successful foray into independence. Being a freelance smuggler wasn’t easy at first, they had to scrape by for a lot of it. All their anxieties turned around their ship. What if they don’t have enough money for the next fixing, what if it breaks irreparably, what if it gets taken from them? In their mind, this ship had become their salvation from the dregs of the underworld. They had had to start over many times in their life, and used to think that they were good at that, that if there was one, they would find a way to survive. But now that they tasted a life they actually enjoy, the thought of losing that is too horrible. They can’t do it anymore. Please no, please no, please no.

Prologue time was, predictably, a nightmare come true. Corso was surprised later on that Tev could relax and crack a genuine smile, because that’s not how he got to know them. Also, Tev was ready to tear Risha apart when they first met on the ship, and it took a while until they let her implement changes to the ship unsupervised (Risha rolling her eyes while going over regular calibrations as the Zabrak equivalent of a growling little dog scrutinizes her every move)

(they recognized what a godsend Risha was, being an experienced mechanic and pimping up their ship in a way they never could do themselves. They still were worried that she would either abscond with it or build in something she could then blackmail them over. But she never did. She knew all too well this was the captain’s baby, and she treated it like that. Surefire way to the captain’s heart.)

Even when they could afford new freighters, several of them, it was always out of the question to change that ship. Maybe the self-rending anxiety was lessened, but it still was kind of a superstitious no-go. I want to explore an old Tevuuk finally realizing that this ship cannot be fixed anymore and will never fly anymore, and how they have to come to terms with that. Or maybe it’ll go as they wish and they will die on this ship, flying apart as it does. But this is needlessly dramatic, as everyone keeps telling them.

Faro + Scars

Faro collects an assortment of scars over her career but is used to have the more egregious one’s buffed out by Intelligence. The still a bit visible facial scars she covers with a thick layer of foundation. For professional reasons, she doesn’t want to attract attention to herself with memorable facial features. (She briefly used to wish that the non-physical scars were as easily dealt with. It would be nice if they could be buffed out, too. But then she got ill at the thought of more tampering with her mind. Wish dropped immediately).

When she gets older, she starts to not care so much about her scars being visible. Starts being defiant to that part of herself that cringes away from being noticeable in a genuine way. It’s not really about the physical scars anymore, but letting others notice that she’s the ways she is, that she has her dysfunctionalities and quirks and damaged ways to do things. She’s letting her cool and smooth manner be a bit more grainy and scruffy, and a byproduct of that is the presentations of her scars.

Faro + Safe