#agentwennen

;a challenge

"If I were—" His voice sparkles in that jovial tone it wore. If, he says, if. "—you'd have a firm idea of what I'm accusing you of."

"Clarity, dearest, was my first love." He breathes deep and summons the most wistful sigh his heart can muster, and as he sighs long and sad, he lowers himself across the couch, over her knees, arm thrown gently over his face, datapad and work forgotten in his lap. Never say he doesn't indulge in dramatics.

;hasn’t slept in days

The comlink in his ear chattered in the code-talk of the CSF channels. Sleepless nights, he avoided the GAR lines; they only piled concern onto unease until he was physically ill with anxiety. The officers in blue, however, were one step removed from the worries that kept him awake. Their terse cadences followed familiar rhythms, though, just enough to lull him into that reflexive parsing of code and callsign into full-bodied scenes and acts. It was nigh red noise—last thing he wanted now was to think.

The door whispered warning, and her bare feet were near silent against the balcony. He left her too long in an empty bed. She must’ve counted the minutes, until he over the allotted time for a call. He pulled the comlink from his ear and waited.

She draped her arm gently over his neck, and he let her pull his head to her shoulder. 

“Ah, ner vercopa. Olaro par ni,” he sighed. My dream, you’ve come for me. “I know. I know.”

     ;ordo raids your conservator

If you need anything, help yourself to what’s around, she said before she left to run a few errands, Not that I imagine you’ll need too much in the time I’m gone. He needn’t feel guilty, that was explicit permission–but the gap between knowing and understanding is large. He’s still getting used to the domestic concept. It’s so new.

She didn’t even get to say anything, and he already firmly closed the conservator door.

“See, now if I say yes, of course it sounds like I’m lying.” He clicked his tongue, distracted, as he leafed through a sheaf of flimsi. The bundle went into the wastebasket sitting by the desk. The flames flickered as they took in the new reading material. “Wastebaskets, always spontaneously bursting into flame. Very troublesome.”

He ripped more flimsi into quarters and threw that too into the fire. Amazing how some felt it safer to commit information to print than to datachips. There were plenty of those here too, copied to his own, wiped, and now waiting in a new row. For show, mostly.

“Classified material burns a hole right through your desk. But you know all about that.” More flimsi landed in the basket. The flames reached for the idling terminal, also copied and wiped already.

He laid out on the desk in perfect tessellation what remained of the printed scraps. If only some accelerant were on hand. He struck the firestarter he took to carrying of late, and the paper caught flame, modestly. Again, the accelerant would’ve been better, more spectacular. A flamethrower would’ve been nice too. But, the flimsi burned, and he needn’t bring the whole place down for the show he’s laying out.

        ;cleaning wounds

Every bit of transparisteel he pulled out of his skin was another reason for armor. The aim was to go quiet and the trooper rig and the beskar were too conspicuous, especially for a non-sanctioned op, but a deeply embedded shard inspired a little regret over the decision anyway.

Not that he exactly planned to get shouldered through a window.

His name, dressed in an anxious tone of his sweetheart’s voice, floated down the hall, with the sound of her shoes on its heels. He set down her tweezers, and he wiped the blood from his cut lip with the back of his hand in a doomed attempt to look more presentable. He shouldn’t have left his bloody shirt on one of her light blue towels.

She appeared in the bathroom door, and he immediately cleared his throat. “I’d hoped to have this–” He thought of the blood in the living room and the hall. “–all of this cleaned up before you got home.”

On that second para, there may have to be alternatives for them to be shuttled to outside of just the clan and the Altisians, because the Inquisitors can't be so dense for so long, and a large group of Force-users are kind of a beacon to attract them ... iirc even in Rebels just 2-3 force users in one place continuously attracts the Inquisitors.

Hmm. i hadn’t really thought about that tbh. It does raise an interesting question. Like, I wanna wear my rose colored glasses over here and pretend that Etain manages to return most of the children to their kin or other loved ones eventually so hopefully it’s not a super frequent thing...

..but it does raise the question of how to find a safe place for these kids who are already Force-sensitive enough to draw attention when their powers are likely going to just manifest more as they get older, the galaxy is out to kill or harm them, and whoever ends up raising them needs to be “read in” about their abilities and both willing/able to protect them and help them cope with this in a healthy way. Which rules out a lot of Mandalore.