For those prompts you shared, 35. "You make me feel safe"
Briefly, Ahuska wondered if she should ever dedicate some time to learning how to smith beskar for herself. Nobody amongst the Free People’s Army that she was aware of could claim such a skill, and she found herself conflicted over that fact. On the one hand, quality working of the metal was one of the few aspects of Mandalorian culture that was reasonably well guarded, and she was reluctant to see it spread amongst people who could not be expected to follow the Resol’nare. On the other… she, herself, wanted to hold onto as much of her culture as possible, especially now that she was facing so much time so distant from the clans.
Still, there’d be enough time to dwell on that later; for now, she had to content herself with getting her and Crow’s armour into as good condition as possible with what materials and skills she had access to. She might not know how to work the metal itself, but she knew her way around filling and detailing, and even the basic tech in Crow’s pieces wasn’t beyond her.
If only she hadn’t once again lost her helmet. For all the good it had done keeping Crow from harm. Maybe her buy’ce was cursed. Maybe she didn’t want it retrieved a second time.
Maybe she’d give it the chance to come back to her on its own, wait and see if whatever path lead them to Nines would intersect with wherever her beloved old bucket currently lay.
She sprayed on another layer of liquid armor, letting it seep into the tiny cracks and dips in her chest plate and carefully, lovingly, smoothing it down before it was fully dry. The stuff would eventually set rock hard; brittle if in a big slab on its own, but brilliant at patching small splits. Not that solid beskar would ever crack and dent so readily, but her armour was not such a luxury.
“When’d ya get that?”
Ahuska startled at the voice; she hadn’t realised she was being watched. “Hm? Oh, hey, Kip! You mean this armour in particular?”
“Naw,” a shadow fell over Ahuska as the speaker stepped forward, a massive reptilian woman with four arms and more teeth than she could possibly need. An Annoo-dat Prime, one of Nela’s friends amongst the engineering crew. “That big ol’ scrape y’ just filled, I meant.”
“Oh! Ha, actually, that happened the same day I got the armour. Stole it off some fancy guards on Bothawui, that’s from one of their spears. Actually, I… nabbed one of their spears as well.”
“Hah! Yeah, we were busy up in the sky that day, hoo boy we were. Most armour got plenty stories to tell, don’t it?”
“Hm, I guess it does. Well, usually. This piece is too new to really say a lot, most of the dings are from that one day. My leg pieces though…” Ahuska gestured over to the small rounded knee covers, the broader thigh plates, and the interlocking pieces that covered her boots. “They’re the same ones I’ve had for years, just got a new paint job. See that?”
“What, the ding in the side of your boot armour?”
“Yeah! That’s from my first date with Crow. I mean, it’s what I think of as our first date, not sure if he does. But he took me on a job on Naboo, right, and at one point I was knee deep in a river holding onto a wounded zalaaca. If you’ve never seen one, they’ve got nasty claws, front and back feet. Fethin’ Trandoshan came over to take me out and kill the thing for its stupid Score…”
“Kriffing Jagannath points,” Kip uttered with a shake of her head.
“Mmm. But Crow got to him first!” There’s nothing but pride in the grin she flashes at that, coupled with a nice hot tingle as she remembers how exciting those early days had felt. How wide-eyed and naïve she’d been. Life had been a giddy rush, and while sometimes it still felt that way… she had to admit, she rather liked the greater perspective and confidence she had nowadays.
“Now that…” the Bothan pointed then to Crow’s chest armour, and the gaping hole on the left hand side that had punched clean through front and back. “Is going to take some patching.”
Kip reached for the piece, turning it about in all four of her hands as though it didn’t weigh a thing. “I could probably shape a couple of new panels for you, if you don’t think he’d mind durasteel…?”
“Stars, we’ll take whatever we can get at this point!”
“I’ll see what I can do. What’s this mark from?”
Ahuska eyed off the scorch mark that traced along the side of the piece. “If I remember right, that’s… actually from Nines. The day you all got back in touch with us. Same with the one the shoulder there, she dropped him with that hit.”
Kip watched her quietly, her expression growing sympathetic as Ahuska’s became distant, completely unaware of the Bothan’s conviction that Nines was still alive, that her execution had been a lie.
“I was scared as hell. Honestly thought we were both about to die. But I think… I think deep down, as much as she hated and blamed him, she must’ve been trying to give him as much opportunity as possible to redeem himself. She wanted him back. She could’ve killed us both, easily, plenty of times over…” a faint smile ghosted over Ahuska’s snout. “I don’t know. I guess she could have just been enjoying making us suffer.”
“Probably the first thing though,” Kip offered, a rough attempt at making her feel better.
“It’s okay. You don’t have to excuse her. And… and things got better. See this?” She turns back to her own armour, tracing over a dimpled section of one of her thigh plates. “That’s from Dxun. Not even from an enemy shot, I just slammed myself into another soldier when we flew into one of the trenches. Were you there for that?”
“Nope… well, not on the ground.” Kip threw two right thumbs over her shoulder toward the Dreadnought hanging in the sky. “I’ve been pretty well stationed up there since we busted out of holding. Ain’t spent more than three nights in a row on land anywhere until now.”
“I was!”
Ahuska twisted about to see that she had, in fact, been starting to attract a small audience, the individual currently chiming in amongst the handful of beings settled in a loose ring around her being another of the Deserters’ Bothan contingent.
Steely blue-grey fur with pale dapples on her cheeks and shoulders, Ahuska recognized her swiftly and gave her a slow nod as a wash of self-consciousness made her falter. This was someone she knew had seen her at peak misery, after all. “Ralsko! Yeah, I… ah. I wasn’t exactly at my… I mean I wouldn’t blame you for thinking I…”
“Don’t sweat it. You did grand. Only thing we hold against you is not reaching out to us more then, hey?” Ralsko shot her a quick, tight little grin, but Ahuska wilted somewhat beneath it.
“I had no fething idea what I was doing,” Ahuska admitted, dropping her gaze.
“Psssh. Most of us didn’t, to start. Just knew we wanted something better, aye? Besides, we all knew you were pining at the same time. There was only one particular bit of company you really wanted back then, wasn’t there?”
Ahuska felt her ears burn at that, and followed the quick jut of Ralsko’s chin as she indicated just over Ahuska’s shoulder.
Crow was there, leaning against a stack of crates just two paces behind her, arms loosely folded across his bandaged but otherwise bare chest. He was grinning, because of course he was. The man’s expression was, by and large, variations of that grin, and people only meeting him briefly might be excused for thinking he’d suffered some kind of stroke, rendered incapable of any other look. But Ahuska knew better than that; despite his bared teeth, the little crinkles in the corners of his eyes, she could see something pensive in the way he watched her.
Ahuska tilted her head gently, squinting for a moment. “How long have you been there?”
“Long enough. Long enough to wonder how the feth you’ve put up with me all this time?”
A couple of the others gathered snorted to themselves, and Ahuska let out a short incredulous laugh. “The stars do you mean by that?”
“Every one of those cracks in your armour, and half the ones on mine even! Those are all times your life was in danger. Times you could have died. And I’m pretty sure most of them are there because of things I’ve dragged you through or put you up to… stars, we ain’t even up to the wampa ones yet,” a sweep of Crow’s hand indicated a dent on one of Ahuska’s plates, and a filled in split on his own buy’ce. “How are you not terrified every time we go somewhere…?”
Ahuska laughed again at that, still incredulous but far more bright, and she patted the ground beside her, inviting him down. “Are you kidding me? You make me feel safe!”
If he hadn’t still been in recovery, she would have dragged him down beside her; as it was, she waited until he’d settled at his own speed before sitting up tall enough to give him a gentle headbutt and then start motioning to all the cracks and dents a second time over. “This one here is the first time you saved my life. These remind me of when you screaming through the streets of Mos Ila, demanding to know where I was. This? I see that, and remember you coming out of the sky to get me, ha, and fighting with you, back to back, ‘cause you helped me know how. And these…” she patted over the marks he most recently indicated, acquired during that fateful visit to Hoth, the onlooking Deserters briefly forgotten as she locked eyes with Crow. “They’re from when I realised I was willing to stick with you for the long haul. You damn di’kut, this is everything we’ve survived together. This is everything I’ve lived through because of you.”
