Hi lovelies! I just got an AO3 account so I thought I’d post the link here as well.
Chapters: 4/23
Fandom: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Bad Batch (Cartoon), Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Clone Trooper Howzer (Star Wars)/Original Female Character(s), Clone Trooper Howzer (Star Wars)/Original Character(s), Clone Trooper Howzer (Star Wars)/Reader
Characters: Clone Trooper Howzer (Star Wars)
Additional Tags: Romance, Angst and Romance, Slow Romance, Slow Burn, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Eventual Smut
Summary:
Captain Howzer keep the peace on Ryloth. The healer at the edge of town keeps to her walled garden and a past she won't speak of. Across long, slow seasons of spiced tea and stolen evenings, something neither of them went looking for takes root - a solider beginning to wonder if there's anything in his life that might be his to keep, and a woman beginning to wonder if she might, at last, be safe. Then the Empire comes for all of it, and they find out what they can survive.
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This is my first Star Wars fan fiction, and only the first chapter. I'm hoping to post the chapters bi-weekly. Please take a gander. Any feedback is greatly appreciated! This is mostly a romance.
Trigger warnings apply (this is my first time publishing on Tumblr so I may not be doing this right, but read with caution, especially the later chapters). Also, this is for MATURE/ADULT audiences only.
Chapter Four — The Table
The war, which had seemed hell bent on keeping him at the furthest point from Nabit on Ryloth, did something unexpected. It brought him back, and then it let him stay.
His company was to be stationed in the valley, in Nabit, working with Cham to keep pushing towards Lessu. The resistance was stretched thin out there, necessitating the stationed clones. The gunships that had always lifted Howzer over the ridges instead dropped him there, with Patch and the others. He stopped being a ghost vanishing in the wind to someone who was simply present.
She did not know what to do with a man who was simply there. She had never had one.
It started with the wounds, the way it had started with Patch, though less severe. A trooper with a blaster-burn the field kit had only half-managed. Another with a fever the medics couldn’t break and a captain who, it turned out, would gladly aide a man up a hill at midnight. She applied bandages, cleaned wounds, and argued with their stubbornness, and gossip spread amongst the clones faster than wildfire — the woman in town, she’s the one, she’s better than the droids and she doesn’t make you feel like a number. It didn’t take long for them to start coming to her without injuries.
Eventually her table was rarely empty in the evenings.
For two years she had built her life to be purposefully narrow. Small house, small garden, small circle. Nothing that could attract the wrong attention and be taken from her. Now, there were six clones crowded around a table barely able to fit four, eating everything she set down. It was a cacophony at times, loud, joyous, a bit disastrous in the best way. Six large grins wolfing down stew and leaving a trail of breadcrumbs over her floor. She was happy.
Patch was the ringleader. Healed and insufferable about his scar, which he displayed proudly at the slightest provocation, was teaching the others his lawless card game and inventing rules to fleece them exactly as he fleeced her. There was a sniper named Veil who hardly said three words but laughed silently at everything, his shoulders shaking. Tarn, who somehow seemed bigger than the rest, washed her dishes without being asked because his ori’vod in his previous squad drilled manners into him, the origin of them eluding the entire vode. The habit outlived the brother. There were others that came and went. Howzer was at the head of it all, saying little, enjoying the sight of his men at ease. For him, the warmth of it was the whole point. That and watching Maren sway from her small kitchen to the table with more food and tea.
Howzer liked to sit back and notice the details of her house. It was small, a little living area, the table, the kitchen tucked in an L shape in the corner. A small refresher. Her bedroom door was almost always closed when they were over, but one time she had left the door slightly ajar and he noticed white bedding. She had windchimes, pieces of colored glass and a few tingling brass bells hung from the window overlooking the garden. Windows that were almost always open, unless a storm had kicked up dust. An old couch with a few misty blue pillows and one throw blanket with frayed edges. Candles everywhere, which he noticed she tended to use rather than the overhead light, until Tarn complained he couldn’t see the cards as well. The meticulousness of it, how even after clones had been trapsing in and out in their boots, there was hardly a spec of dust by the next day. Flowers were always in a dark teal ceramic vase. He thought that if she ever wore that color, it would bring out her eyes beautifully.
They couldn’t pay her, and she came to understand how badly it troubled them. These men who owned nothing, a few credits maybe, unable to settle a debt. So, they did what clones were suspiciously good at, which was summed up as creative solutions. Maren would walk out of her house in the morning and find her woodpile split and stacked as neatly as if it were ordinance. Her gate, which hung crooked since she moved in, was rehung with new hinges. The leak over her window was sealed with military precision.
She began to find trinkets left on her step, on her windowsill, tucked beside the water cistern where she’d be sure to come across them but never while one of them was near enough to be thanked. A river stone with swathes of blues and greens worn smooth then polished even smoother. She suspected that one was from Howzer. A bird whittled out of a piece of ration crate with a small knife and patience. She guessed from Veil or Tarn, she didn’t imagine Patch had the patience, although she did suspect the candies were from him. The best one was the blue ridge flower that bloomed only for two weeks out of the year, that someone had hiked Maker knows how far to find and lay on her windowsill before dawn. She suspected Howzer of that one too.
She never caught them. That was the point. They were soldiers and they knew how to leave no trace when they wanted. She would stand in her living room holding the day’s offering in her hand and swallow thickly, chest aching, tears stinging her eyes. She was, in the way a few rowdy soldiers knew how to express though they had never been taught, being loved.
And she longed most of all, that Howzer loved her differently than the rest.
Eventually the teasing began, once they decided she was theirs to tease. It started with her eyes. Maren had large expressive eyes with a blue that stood out sharply against the tans and browns of Ryloth. The trouble was that they gave her away completely once she let her guard down. Whatever she was thinking or feeling arrived on her face long before she could temper it. The clones found this the most delightful discovery since their permanent station in Nabit. It became a game.
They competed to see who could make her eyes go the widest, or roll the most aggressively, by sharing the most outrageous rumors that tore through the ranks, the most absurd things they lived through. Howzer most of all liked to watch her say everything in her eyes without saying a word at all.
“The big one, from clone force 99, I heard it was 316 droid arms he’s pulled off by hand! I heard it from Hardcase in the 212th,” Tarn boasted as if it was his own stat.
Maren’s eyes went so enormous that Patch slapped the table and crowed, “There! There it is boys, pay up! I called the eyes before the stew was set down!”
“You’ve been betting on my face?” she asked, quietly, incredulously, which only made it worse. Howzer watched her closely to make sure she wasn’t offended, but the small grin that played on her lips, which she hid by quickly sucking her lips in, told him she was alright.
“Every night we’re here,” Veil, who said a handful of words in a week, spent half of them just then, keeping a perfectly straight face even as his shoulders shook with supressed laughter. The rest of the table broke into boisterous laughter, Howzer included, and Maren shut her treacherous eyes and laughed with them. It was the first time anyone had ever made a game of her that didn’t end with her hurt. This one ended with her surrounded by warmth and mirth, a real laugh escaping her.
Occasionally Cham Syndulla and a few of his resistance fighters came with them when they were visiting from the hills. Little fearless Hera, Cham’s girl, who Maren had once nursed through a marsh fever, decided that this made her and Maren bound together for life. She would tuck herself against Maren’s side and demand to know the name of every plant in the garden, every flower in the vase. Sometimes Maren would make up a name just to see if Hera remembered from the last time she rattled through all the names.
Sometimes, with all the clones and Cham’s people crowded in her house, even with the extra chairs or crates they produced, Maren would be squished on a bench next to Howzer, bodies pressed against each other, the heat between them rising each minute. She could feel the flush creeping up her cheeks, and told herself it was because there were so many people shoved in her tiny house in this arid place, and not because she was sitting so kriffing close to the captain. Close enough to smell the cleanliness of him, and underneath that something inherently masculine. Her head only reached his shoulder, and it would’ve taken just another few inches before she was leaning against it.
Howzer pretended it was nothing egregious to be sitting so close to her, but his hand drummed on his knee, resisting the urge to snake around her slender body and pull her even closer. Some primal instinct to protect her from the sheer number of bodies in the room ate away at him. He saw how she shrunk into herself as more people crowded in, her anxious tics surfacing even as she greeted them with a smile. He explicitly did not see down the front of her dress, the barest hint of cleavage on her delicate frame. No, he certainly did not notice that.
Everyone else noticed that the captain had stopped being able to talk to her properly.
Normally Howzer possessed the type of voice that exuded authority, clipped and certain. The kind of tone men moved towards instantly. The kind that could quiet a room full of his brothers, who supposedly possessed an identical voice, and did if one didn’t bother to pay attention. But once the crowd thinned, and it became just the two of them with maybe a few stragglers, brothers trying to catch something between the two of them to use as a teasing ammo against their captain later, Howzer would lose the ability to speak.
“This is—” he started one night, wolfing down a stew she’d spent the whole afternoon on. “It’s good. You’re— it’s good. The food.” A pause, while he visibly regretted every word that had just left his mouth. “You’re good at it. The cooking.”
“Thank you,” she said and felt, to her own horror, her face go warm. She, who had been trained from girlhood to catch a compliment and turn it like a playing card, to hand it back so deftly the man felt clever for having paid it, could not now manage a single graceful thing. She looked at her hands to hide the flush. “It’s only stew.”
“It’s not only stew,” he said, with a sudden unwarranted force that seemed to startle them both, and then looked faintly appalled at himself.
Down the table, Patch took in this entire exchange over the rim of his cup, openly delighted.
“Like watching a gunship crash in slow motion,” he whispered to Veil. Howzer caught the remark and nearly threw the not-only-stew directly at Patch’s face.
She watched them, those evenings. The brothers. One face, one origin, one grey beginning under the rain, and yet not one of them interchangeable, not to her, not anymore. Veil’s silent laugh. Tarn’s borrowed manners. Patch’s lawlessness. Howzer’s vigilance. Men the galaxy had stamped from a single model, each of them stubbornly, defiantly someone. She sat among them and loved them and let none of them see how close to weeping caring sometimes brought her.
The dream was almost always the same. A cold building and a long mirrored room where she and her sisters had been dressed, arranged, and taught to move, their reflections multiplying in the glass. All of them turning when the door opened, all of them answering to the same name he called them, because to him no one was an individual, they were only a name and a use. In the dream she was always trying to remember their names, the real ones they would whisper in the dark, but she couldn’t remember a single one. Then a hand would reach out to pull her by her arm and drag her to him, if she was the unlucky one. She was always the unlucky one in her nightmares. Maren would wake, heart slamming in her chest and the taste of his death sticks on her tongue, and she would lie very still in the dark. She used to recite the names of all the planets she wanted to visit and why to ease the anxiousness. Now, she reread the comms he sent, and it soothed her much faster than her recitations ever did.
The others. She had left them there. The guilt gnawed away at her, she had run, and they had not, or could not, and she did not know to this day whether any of them were alive or still standing in that mirrored room answering to a dead woman’s borrowed name.
Underneath the guilt was the fear. The one that took the shape of a tyrannical and licentious man, who left a cold dread pooling in her abdomen because he was the kind of man who wouldn’t let a possession walk away without punishment. Somewhere in his ledger she was still listed as property.
She would get up on those nights, stand at her window in the dark with her arms wrapped around herself, and breathe, letting the gentle clang of the windchimes soothe her fretfulness.
It slipped out on an evening after the others had gone. It was only the two of them in the candlelight, a small lamp turned on in the corner and the harsh overhead lighting dimmed once the card game finished. Howzer was rolling the cup between his hands, deciding whether to broach what could be a sensitive subject. Maren was wiping the counter, bending over slightly, and Howzer’s eyes slid over her movements.
“You went quiet earlier,” he said. “When Hera asked about the garden. You smiled right through it, but you were somewhere else.” He turned the cup again. “You do that more than you let on. I notice.”
She should have deflected. She had a hundred graceful ways. She stopped wiping the counter but couldn’t bring herself to look at him.
“I was a slave,” she heard herself say. She swallowed thickly, upset at herself for blurting that out so bluntly. Too late to go back now, she told herself. “Before Ryloth, where I came from, there were several of us. I escaped, they didn’t.” Howzer noticed her playing with the ends of her hair and wanted to get up to be closer to her, but refrained, not wanting to startle her. “I don’t know what happened to them. I think about it more than I let on, and sometimes someone will ask me something totally unrelated, and my mind still wanders there. That’s where I was when I was quiet earlier.”
She waited, bracing for a barrage of questions. She left it too vague, perhaps I should’ve given him more so his curiosity will be satisfied?
He didn’t ask a single question.
Howzer walked to the counter and stood beside her. He reached, slowly, and brought her hand from the ends of her hair into his own. The grip was gentle and warm, and the weight of his hand eased her nerves. For a moment he didn’t say anything at all.
When he finally spoke, the words were slow and a little halting, but she still couldn’t meet his gaze, too afraid of expression she would find on his features.
“Whoever owned you—” He stopped, and shut his mouth on whatever had been coming, and let a slow breath out. “I don’t have anything clean enough to say about that. Not in front of you.”
His hand tightened, very slightly, over hers.
“But you got out. That’s the part that counts.” His voice started to carry his usual confidence again. “You ran, you made it, and you built all this out of nothing. That takes more than people think. More than holding a line.” He brought his other hand to her chin, lifting her eyes to meet his. “You don’t have to tell me the rest. Not tonight. Not ever, if you don’t want to. Doesn’t change anything. I’m not going anywhere.”
All the apprehension, the anxiety she had about letting him see the broken parts of her, faded rapidly. There was no pity, nor quiet disgust in his eyes. Only calm assurance, and something she thought was tenderness. A small tear escaped her eye, and she looked down at their intwined hands.
She had spent her whole life learning that hands meant harm and that being known meant being owned. And here was a hand that meant neither, resting on hers in the lamplight, asking for nothing, holding that new little piece of her history carefully, as if it might shatter.
“Not tonight,” she managed at last, voice shaky. “But thank you. For not asking.”
“Anytime,” Howzer said. He left his hand where it was, thumb drawing circles on her skin, and let the quiet be comforting, no pressure for her to share more.
He taught her to shoot at the end of that month, on a shoulder of ridge a good several clicks out of town where the sound wouldn’t carry.
It had been eating at him for weeks, if he was honest about it. The Separatist columns were probing further south every day. The line he held was thin and shifting; and there she was at the very edge of the settlement with no protection. He’d lain awake at night thinking on that more than once, a pretty little woman, alone out there, undefended. He told himself it was the same care he’d take for any civilian in his sector. He knew it wasn’t. He brought her a blaster anyway, a compact hold-out model that would sit right in her hand and never knock her over.
“You don’t know how to shoot?” He asked.
She looked at the blaster in his hand like he was holding out a live coal and shook her head no.
“Will you let me show you?”
Up on the ridge, with the red light going long across the scrub, he set it in her grip and saw at once how far they had to go. She held it wrong - everyone did, the first time, but it was more than that. It was the way her whole body drew back from it, the wince when it hadn’t even fired, the apology already sitting in her shoulders, as though the weapon were one more thing that was going to hurt her and she’d decided in advance not to fight it. She squeezed the trigger, and the bolt went wide by a dozen meters. She startled so hard at the kickback she nearly dropped it, and turned to him with those lovely wide eyes full of a dismay far too big for a missed shot.
“I’m sorry,” she said, hands and voice trembling. “I’m — I’m not any good at this.”
“Nobody’s good at it the first time,” he reassured her. “I wasn’t. Here. Again. There’s no hurry. There’s nobody up here but me.”
He was patient with her. It came easy; she made it easy. He gentled his voice and walked her through it a piece at a time — the grip, where to put her feet, how to breathe out and let the shot go at the right moment. It was almost the same teaching he’d use with a shiny who’d frozen, except this time his chest fluttered, and no recruit had ever looked at a blaster like it was an old enemy come back for one more turn.
Somewhere in the third or fourth round of it he asked her, easy, not pushing, “Nobody ever showed you any of this?”
“No.” She lowered the blaster, and was quiet a moment, and then said it in a small voice, looking out at the scrub instead of at him. “My master didn’t allow it. Anything like this.” That was the first time she had ever mentioned him using that word. “He didn’t want us able to fight, or run, or hurt him. He liked us helpless. It was safer for him, that way.” Maren’s lip quivered. “I was never even let to hold anything sharp without someone standing over me.”
She said the last part lightly. She said it the way people say the things that have hurt them so long they’ve forgotten how shocking it sounds to everyone else. Howzer stood on the ridge feeling something go very cold and very still in his chest.
He didn’t let it show, which took him enormous effort. He had a long, ordinary acquaintance with anger — the hot useful kind you expended in a fight, the slow grinding kind you carried on a bad campaign — but this was neither. His shoulders and jaw tensed, his hand clenching and unclenching. Someone had owned this woman and kept her unable to protect herself, on purpose, as policy, the better to do as he pleased with her. The helplessness was deliberate on her master’s part and was entrenched in her so thoroughly that it still surfaced in her posture when she was trying to learn how to defend herself.
He wanted, with a clarity that nearly unsettled him, to find the man and take him apart with his hands.
What he said was, “Well. You’re allowed now.” He kept his voice level but quiet, willing the tremble down with a hard swallow, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “You’re allowed to hold anything you want. And I’m going to teach you to be competent with this blaster, if you’ll let me, because the war’s coming here, and I won’t always be down that hill.” He placed a hand on her shoulder and held her eyes. “Nobody keeps you helpless. Not him, not anybody, not ever again.”
Something crossed her face that he couldn’t name. Relief maybe. Determination. She nodded, turned back to the target, and raised the blaster. Her stance was all wrong, the recoil would buck it clean out of her hands, and he made a decision he’d turn over a great many times after.
“Here,” he said. “Let me — can I?”
She nodded.
He stepped in behind her.
He was careful about it. He was careful about everything with her. But there was no way to do this that wasn’t, simply, close. His chest near her back, his arms coming up along the line of hers to settle her grip, his boot nudging her stance wider. He felt the warmth come off her, the smell of her floral perfume. The feel of a few strands of her hair brushing against him in the light breeze. He brought his large hands over her unsteady ones on the blaster and supported them. He lowered his head to sight along the barrel beside her cheek, and said low, hushed, close to her ear: “Breathe out. Let it go soft. Don’t fight it, cyare, don’t fight it. Just let it sit easy in your hands.”
The word slipped out before he knew it was coming. He felt his ears go hot. He hadn’t planned it and couldn’t take it back, and he was halfway to some apology when he felt her — and he’d be sure of this the rest of his life — lean back. Not far. A few degrees. A small settling of her weight into him, her breath gone uneven. He felt it everywhere. He held still around her and didn’t trust his voice and thought, from somewhere far off, that he was in a great deal of trouble.
“Now,” he managed. “Squeeze. Slow.”
She breathed out, let it go soft, and squeezed. The bolt took the rock he’d set up dead center, and she made a sound, a startled, delighted, disbelieving little cry, and turned half around inside the circle of his arms with her wide eyes blown wider still, close enough that he could have counted her lashes.
“I hit it! Howzer. I hit it.”
“You hit it, Maren.” His voice came out rough. He had not stepped back. Neither had she.
For a moment, up on the ridge in the last reddish gold light with the blaster forgotten in her hands and her body still warm down the front of his, it would have been the easiest thing in all the worlds to stop being careful. He watched her understand it too, watched the wonder in her face tip over into something darker and hotter, and Maker help him, he wanted it, wanted it so badly his body ached.
He made himself step back. Same as the garden. Same iron reason. He was getting practiced at the worst order he knew how to give.
He’d called her cyare. He knew exactly what it meant — beloved — which was the whole concern, because he’d known it was true the second he heard himself say it.
He taught her another hour, until the light was gone, until she could hit the rock four times in five, reload without looking, and not wince at the recoil anymore. Until the thing the master had stripped out of her was, in one small measure, handed back. When he walked her down the dark hill to her door, he carried that little blaster’s twin in his own kit. The cold, raw anger still sat heavily chest.
____________________________
What happened on the ridge stayed with him, occupying every spare second he had. Four days afterwards he was lying up in a blind sixty clicks north with his scope on a separatist supply track, waiting on a column that was running late, and he caught himself someplace he had no business being. Her lean into him turned into him leaning over her, her sprawled out under him, his hand tracing her breasts then down further to her slick warm folds. She writhed underneath of him, eyes wide and pleading his name, small whimpers escaping her lips as he slid his whole length into her while he whispered how good she was being for him. Her hands gripped onto his shoulders harder, and -
“Captain.” Tarn’s voice, low, in his ear. “You’re drifting. Column’s coming up.”
He was. He’d missed the lead element. He dragged himself back into focus, put his eye to the scope and did the job, and did it well. But his focus had slipped, on a live mission, with his brothers downrange of his attention, and Howzer was disciplined enough to be honestly alarmed by it. He never once in his life had a woman on his mind in a fight. He’d certainly never let one pull his eye off a target.
He didn’t know what to do about that. He only knew that the thought of her in that house, finally able to defend herself, was something that let him relax just a little, and that the man who had kept her from it had better hope the galaxy stayed wide enough that Howzer never found him.
This is my first Star Wars fan fiction, and only the first chapter. I'm hoping to post the chapters bi-weekly. Please take a gander. Any feedback is greatly appreciated! This is mostly a romance.
Trigger warnings apply (this is my first time publishing on Tumblr so I may not be doing this right, but read with caution, especially the later chapters). Also, this is for mature/adult audiences only (not so much this chapter but will definitely be later on).
Chapter Three — The Soldier Returns
Maren could keep calm while treating a dying man. Poise was one thing she never lost, part her, part her upbringing. So, it was a strange and near frightening experience to stand at her garden wall the morning the LAAT gunships landed in the scrub below Lessu feeling nothing but nerves.
Howzer’s company was to be garrisoned in the valley for six days. Resupply, reconnaissance, and a small rest between one campaign and the next. She counted the days the moment the word swept through town and felt mortified she had done so.
She did not go down to meet the transports or slink around with the nosey locals. She convinced herself it was purely decorum. The truth was closer to dread – that the man she had built in her head over a fragile signal with the plain, dry voice, the one who had written I’d rather read about your garden than almost anything this war has to show me – was not the man she imagined. There was potential he was about to be a body in her doorway, and she was apprehensive if the real man would live up to man over the comms.
He had told himself, the whole flight in, that he was going to be sensible about it.
Six days in the valley. Resupply and refit, send some of the boys out for recon. Somewhere up that thin dirt road was a woman he’d spent a whole season writing to in the dark. Howzer told himself he would do his job, keep his distance, and maybe, if his duties allowed and it didn’t come across as presumptuous, pay one brief, proper call on the healer who saved Patch. A decent captain ought to, he told himself. Nothing past that. He’d prepared a whole speech on the LAAT, bracing himself as if he was heading straight into a heavy artillery barrage.
Howzer held off until dusk of the first day, which was about as long as he honestly expected.
The truth was simpler and worse than any speech. He’d reread her last message four times on the flight in. He had a word for her in his head now that he had never once said aloud to a living soul. And when the day’s work was finally done — the men fed, the perimeter set, the reports filed — the captain, who had walked into fire more times than he could count, stood at the bottom of her hill in the failing gold light. He found that he could not make his boots move, because his heart was fluttering like a shiny’s before a first drop.
He forced himself to continue up the path anyways. He always went towards the objective, never backing down. It was half of what made him good at his job and most of what made him a fool, and he knew it. He tucked his helmet under his arm, his speech entirely forgotten.
She heard him trudge up the dusty path, boots scraping against the tiny pebbles lodged in the dirt, and glanced through her window, chimes swaying gently in the light breeze. When she opened her door, because she didn’t wait for him to knock, he was standing at her gate, the gold light of the sunset casting a halo around him. For along moment neither of them spoke.
It should have been easy. Their comms had felt approachable, they had spoken of things they had told no one else. Now, with no comms to hide behind, with the weight of encountering each other in person, all of the affability evaporated.
“Captain,” she managed, a whisper. She felt like she was staring at a stranger whose diary she read.
“You stopped calling me that,” he said. “On the comm. Somewhere around the second month. I noticed.”
So, he had noticed. Of course he had. He notices people, Patch had said. It’s a command thing. Except it wasn’t. It was him.
“Howzer,” she said instead, quietly, and watched a smile tug at the corners of his mouth.
They were both too sensible to let the awkwardness remain unaddressed. It was easier after that first night. He trekked up the hill each evening of those six days when his duties were finished. She always fed him, and he had a compliment for every dish. You’re going to spoil me, he remarked under his breath one night, earning a soft chuckle. They conversed the way they had over the comms, except now she could watch the expressions on his face, read his body language.
She had braced for disappointment. People were rarely as decent in person as they were over a comm or holo. He was better. He was quieter than what she expected, almost deliberate when communicating, patient, and tired. The comms didn’t adequately convey the tiredness, the weariness, the weight visible on his shoulders. She could see it as he was sitting at her table, drinking her tea and being unfailingly kind to a woman he knew next to nothing about.
They were discussing his fallen brothers. The third evening. He had fallen quiet staring at into the teacup.
“What happens to them,” she asked tentatively, “after they pass? Do you bury them?”
He paused, took a sip, then stared down into the cup. “I wish. But there’s no time for that. There’s how many millions of us, scattered across hundreds of worlds, left to rot under some sun. It’s why I say their names, the ones I knew. If their bodies are forgotten, at least their names won’t be.”
The instinct rose in her smooth and automatic. The warmth, the grace, the practiced art of making a sad man feel important.
Maren stopped. She set that part of her aside, deliberately. Instead of the artificial warmth, she gave him something real and clumsy, which was sitting with him in the quiet and not performing comfort. It was difficult. It left her feeling exposed and vulnerable. But she wanted to be real with him, more than she wanted anything since her freedom. Genuineness meant forgoing every tool in her kit.
He looked up after a while, meeting her gaze. “You’re the first person in a long time,” he said slowly, “who didn’t try to make me feel better.”
“Did you want me to?”
“No.” Something eased in his face. “No. That’s the thing. Everyone always tries. You just,” he paused, “you just let it be.” He turned his cup in his rough hands. “I don’t know how you knew not to.”
“I didn’t,” she replied honestly. That earned her another casual smile from him. He watched her face tilt down to look at the table, hair falling forward. He did not miss the small smile that graced her features in return to his.
On the fourth evening he told her about Kamino. He hadn’t meant to. But she had a way of leaving a silence open and not rushing to fill it, and a man could fall into a quiet like that and find himself saying things he’d kept hidden.
She’d asked him hesitantly. He noticed she had a way of asking questions that made him feel that he could decline to answer, and she’d not think lesser of him.
“What was your training on Kamino like?”
“Relentless. Everything was. Even the environment. Relentless rain, durasteel, live fire drills, military drills. Everything was grey. They flash train us starting as cadets, kids. It was,” a pause with a sigh, “Intense. I didn’t know any better at the time, but I think it was cruel. It prepared us, I thought, until Geonosis.” He stopped there. “There were just rows and rows of us and they moved us along like inventory. I’m still proud of it though. The training. And completing it.”
“Live fire? But –“ she stopped herself. She felt a catch in her chest at the thought. Howzer watched her brows knit together, concern etching on her face. A coil tightened in his chest, someone cares about that?
“Yeah, uh,” he cleared his throat. “That started happening early. And if someone didn’t measure up, they were decommissioned.”
She frowned further, her lips slightly pursing as she processed his words. “Did they try to keep you from being attached to one another?”
“That’s…complicated. On one hand, you fight better if you’re fighting with your brothers and you have a bond. On the other-“ another pause, “They don’t want us to feel too human. Makes things complicated.”
He told her about his own batch. A handful of names that seemed difficult for him to say. There was one who’d been fast and funny. He was gone in the first ten minutes of Geonosis. The one who’d taught him to disassemble and reassemble a rifle blind. He’d lost both hands to a mine and been quietly retired to a desk a long way from anyone he knew. The ones who were simply gone — no story even, a name on a list, a face he still saw when he shut his eyes.
She stayed quiet again, not attempting to make him feel any better with meaningless platitudes. He noticed, and it undid him a a little to watch her wide eyes steady on him in the lamplight, and sit with him in the heaviness of the subject.
“Patch told me you say their names,” she said softly, when he didn’t fill the silence. “The men you lose. Out loud, on the gunship. Every one.” She folded her arms as if she was chilly, and tilted her head to side, listening intently, chin angled down. “Why out loud?”
“Because nobody else will,” he said, a small spark of defiance in his voice though his brows drew together, focused. He leaned his arms on the table, sleeves pushed up, revealing cords of veins and muscles. Maren glanced, just once. He stared into the distance just past her, out the window with the chimes. “There’s no record that keeps us as anything but numbers. No grave. No loved one waiting on word of us. We only have each other. No one else knows that Chime hummed when he cleaned his kit, or that Tell couldn’t tell a lie to save his life, or that Vantage carried me two klicks on a ruined ankle and complained the entire way.” His voice had gone rough while he was speaking. “If I don’t say them, they were only ever stock. Said out loud, they were men. It’s the one thing I’ve got left to give them. So I give it.”
For a moment she didn’t say anything at all. Then she reached across the table and laid her fragile hand over his rough one and left it there.
“Then, if you’d like to share, and when you’re ready, I’d like to hear about them,” she said softly.
And Howzer, who had lost countless brothers he flatly refused to forget, sat in a healer’s lamplit kitchen with her warm hand over his and found himself about three seconds from coming apart at the seams. He looked hard at the table a while. The back of his neck went hot and red.
“I’d like that,” he said, when he could. It came out barely above a whisper. “Maker. More than I can say.”
On the fifth evening, they walked around her small yard enclosed in tan stone walls.
“Show me the things you grow in your garden?” he asked.
She found she could not refuse him. “You did say you’d rather know about that than anything the war had shown you,” she replied with a smile. She stepped out into the low light of the evening, the sun fading fast behind the cliffs. The golden hue created a halo around her dark hair Howzer found difficult to look away from.
Maren took him along the rows, naming the plants and their uses, chastising herself if some weren’t growing as well as she would like. Some she grew just for beauty alone because she liked looking at them and it made her happy even if they had no other purpose. Some opened up more in the moonlight.
He went still in front of it all as if he was in some grand temple.
“You grew this,” he said. “From nothing. On purpose.”
“From seeds. And a great deal of arguing with the soil.”
“I’ve never —” He stopped. She watched him reach hesitate, mouth pinching in concentration to find the right words. “Everything I’ve ever known was built for a specific purpose and shaped accordingly. Including myself. But these…you nurtured these along, loved them, took time, and I’ve thought about it more than I’ve thought about anything in a long while, and I think I finally —” He shook his head, frustrated with his own words. “It’s just, you should be proud.”
She made a small “oof” sound. He turned.
Maren stumbled over a root in the dark and his hand came up to catch her.
She flinched. Subtly, but he saw it even in the dark.
It was an old reflex from before her time on Ryloth; a hand reaching for her in the dark and her whole body bracing for what came next. She steeled herself for the vice grip her body expected.
It didn’t come.
His hand closed around her arm to steady her, and it was careful. Impossibly careful. A scarred, calloused soldier’s hand, where every mark was earned in the worst places the galaxy had to offer, held her as though she could bruise from being looked at too hard. He felt the flinch. She saw it in his face, the concern. Instead of intensifying his grip he gentled, slowed, and gave her every chance to pull away. When she didn’t, his thumb moved once across the inside of her arm with a tenderness she had never experienced before.
She stilled and let herself be held, her body relaxing but her mind still not fully comprehending.
“You’re alright,” he said softly. Not a question. A gift he was giving her. “I’ve got you. You’re alright.”
Slowly, because he was a watchful man and because he had felt the flinch, he lifted his other hand and brushed a fallen strand of her hair back from her face, his rough fingers grazing the line of her cheek. Howzer looked at Maren the way he had looked at her that first day, while she was cleaning the scrap on his jaw, as if she was the only woman to have ever existed.
The whole world narrowed to the warmth of his hand and his feather-light touch.
And then he closed his eyes for a moment, let out a breath, and stepped back.
“I leave at dawn,” he said thickly. “Day after tomorrow we push north towards Lessu and I,” he paused, reading her face, though for what she couldn’t make out. “Maren,” goosebumps ran up her arms when her name left his lips, “You deserve more that I’m allowed to be.”
She should have agreed. The survivor in her was screaming its agreement — let him go, let it stay unnamed, unnamed things can’t be taken from you — and underneath the relief was a grief so total it terrified her.
“I don’t need more than you are,” she heard herself say. She gathered enough confidence to look him in his eyes.
He studied her for a long moment, memorizing her features as he would a map. As if it would lead him back to her after every mission.
“For whatever it’s worth, whatever a clone’s word is worth, I’ll try to make my way back. But it’s not a promise I can make.”
She took a deep breath to steady herself, pushing down the hope that had started to well up in her chest. “I know, Howzer. But you can try your best to stay safe. And my door is always open to you when you return.”
He didn’t sleep that night. He lay in the garrison bunks with men snoring around him and turned their conversation over repeatedly in his mind – the few inches he hadn’t crossed, the softness of her cheek under his thumb, the delicate bones of her arm that his whole hand could’ve wrapped around, the silkiness of the lock of hair. Most of all the look on her face after the flinch, when her body relaxed and her face opened up as well, unguarded, lips parted softly, eyes softening from panic to relief.
Mesh’la, he’d thought as he stood in her garden, and was thinking now. He wanted, with an intensity that frankly alarmed him, to stop being so prudent. To close those last few inches and find out what her mouth tasted like, and for the both of them to quit pretending that this was anything other than what it was.
He’d stepped back instead. It was the hardest order he gave all year, and he gave it to himself. He wasn’t sure he had ever done a thing he was less proud of and more certain was right. Because she deserved a man who could stay, and he was a soldier in a war for a government that owned him outright. A good man would not start with a woman that good and that breakable on the eve of marching towards another battle. Not unless he could promise he’d come back. But coming back was the one promise a solider was never able to hold to.
He could promise to come through, though. As often as they let him. That much was true, and Howzer would not promise more than that.
He left at dawn the next day. Maren found herself at the edge of town, watching the LAAT ships kick up dust clouds, wondering which transport was his.
Before the dawn though, he found her at her gate while the sky was lightening into grey but the sun had not yet risen over the ridges. He touched her wrist, taken her hand in his and held it.
“I’ll come back through, as often as they let me. That’s the one thing I can promise. And I’ll comm you.”
“I’ll answer,” she replied, her grip tightening a fraction.
As Maren watched the ships fade over the ridge, she pressed her hand to the ache at her sternum.
She just also knew, the way she knew her own plants and her own scars and the precise weight of everything she’d ever loved and lost, that he had given his heart to a woman he knew almost nothing about. That she had let him this close without ever letting him see — not the years before Ryloth, not the cruelty she’d run from, and least of all the truth that lay beneath all the rest of it, the one even she could hardly bear to look at, the one that would change the shape of his careful, decent face the day he learned it. A love built on a hidden thing was a house built over a sinkhole. She knew that too. And she knew she would have to choose, someday, between the silence that had kept her alive and the man who had held her as though she could bruise.
She knew he had given his heart to a woman he knew almost nothing about. She had let him this close to her without letting him in on her years prior to Ryloth, not the cruelty she ran from and the truths she could scarcely bear to remember. The history that would erase the kind look in his brown eyes when he learned of it. Perhaps replace it with pity and distance. Love built with secrets still abound was like building a house over a sinkhole. Maren knew that, and she would have to choose to tell him.
But she wanted to hold onto the honorable, gentle solider for a little while longer, as precarious as it was. She would not ruin their parting in the grey morning while his thumb was brushing over her knuckles.
This is my first Star Wars fan fiction, and only the first chapter. I'm hoping to post the chapters bi-weekly. Please take a gander. Any feedback is greatly appreciated! This is mostly a romance.
Trigger warnings apply (this is my first time publishing on Tumblr so I may not be doing this right, but read with caution, especially the later chapters). Also, this is for mature/adult audiences only (not so much this chapter but will definitely be later on).
Chapter Two — Comms
Patch was a terrible patient, which was how Maren knew he was going to live.
The first two days he wandered in and out of consciousness. Maren sat for long hours by his side the way she had once sat beside her sisters, sponging his feverish brow, dribbling tinctures between his lips, and attentively listening to any changes to his raspy breathing. By the third day the rattling inhales had abated and he was sitting up, eagerly ingurgitating her homemade broth. By the fourth day he was feeling well enough to argue. By the fifth, he had opinions about everything; that she changed the dressing too often, that her table had a warped corner, that the bitter purple draught she made him drink tasted, in his exact words, like something had died in a swamp and then died again out of embarrassment.
She laughed, surprising herself. It seemingly erupted out of nowhere, a real laugh, not the soft practiced giggle she was trained to produce when it was wanted, regardless if it was warranted. She immediately halted, quieting the way she always did when something truly genuine slipped out. She glanced towards Patch, who was grinning wildly.
That was the trouble with the clones, she was learning. They were impossible not to love, and they made it look easy, like it cost nothing. She knew exactly what it cost to make a person feel that they mattered. She knew because it had been built into her, that gift, and it caused in her a tortuous diffidence when trying to express her true self.
But in Patch it seemed to come from somewhere real and unforced, some stubborn warmth that no one had installed and no one could take. Watching it she felt a grief, a forlorn yearning, that she haphazardly shoved down. Because she knew what he was. A man grown for a purpose, named by only himself or his brothers, one of a thousand identical faces — and someone anyway. Specifically, defiantly someone. She knew what that cost. She had clawed after the same thing her whole life and had to withhold parts of it. So, she loved him a little in silence and called it nursing.
“You’re quiet,” Patch observed on the sixth day, watching her grind root at the table. “The captain said you were quiet.”
Her hands didn’t stop moving. “Did he? When?”
“Commed me. You were out. Said you saved my life with leaves and a steady nerve and said, oh what did he say…” Patch intentionally drifted off, a mischievous grin spreading slowly over his features as he took on the voice and air of his captain, “totally calm, entirely thorough, very capable, gentle.” Patch shifted against the pillows, wincing but maintaining his smirk, watching her with a medic’s irritating perceptiveness. Once settled more comfortably, for which he waved her off when she tried to help, the smile finally faded. “He notices people. It’s a command thing. Most captains, you’re a number on a report. Not him. He knew the name of every man we lost at that ridge. Said all of them, out loud, on the gunship. Every one.”
She thought of the captain’s voice over the table. Stay with me, Patch. That’s an order. She thought of how it had cracked something open in her, watching a man treat one of the many as though he were the whole world.
“He sounds,” she said carefully, “like a good man.”
Patch smiled into the middle distance, the loose easy smile of someone talking about home. “He’s the best of us,” he said simply. “Don’t tell him. It’ll go to his head.” He winked.
The first message came through the public relay in Lessu nine days after he’d gone, routed to the only contact he had for her — the town itself. It was short to the point of severity, the way a man writes who has rationed his words his whole life:
To the healer at Lessu. Requesting status on the trooper designated Patch. Would message him directly but his self-assessment may be skewed — Captain Howzer.
She read it three times. Chuckled quietly at how astute Howzer’s assessment of his medic was. Then she wrote back more than the question had asked for, because she could not help it. At the end of it she did something she had not done for anyone.
Captain — He’s mending well and complaining better, which is the surest sign of recovery I know. He’ll have a scar he intends to be unbearable about. He’s taught me a card game I’m certain he invents new rules for whenever he’s losing, and he misses you all, though he’d sooner bleed again than say so.
If it’s easier, you can reach me directly. My personal comm code is below. — Maren.
His reply came two days later, and it came to her comm. It was a small, battered handheld she kept clipped at her belt, that had never once chimed for anything that mattered. It chimed now, and she stood very still in her garden with the dirt still on her hands and read it twice before she exhaled.
That’s a kindness. I’ll prepare the men for his endless bragging about his new scar. Unfortunately, the card game has no rules; he invents them when he’s losing, and he’s always losing. You have my sympathy. — Howzer.
She read that one more than three times.
____________________________________________
Patch left at the end of the second week, walking slowly, swearing, but on his own feet, to a transport that set down in the scrub below the town. At the door he stopped and looked at her for a moment with a medic’s clear eye, and she braced for whatever he’d seen.
“You ever need anything,” he said, “anything at all, on any world — you find a clone, you say my name and yours, and it gets to me. We don’t forget the ones who pull us back. You understand?” Then, lower, with a small knowing tilt of his head she pretended not to catch: “Write to him. He won’t say he wants you to. He does. And we’ll be by.” He offered a wide grin.
And then he was gone too, the way they all went, carried off across the ridges to rejoin his company on someone else’s orders. Her house was silent again, and there was a small battered comm clipped at her belt that had his code in it now.
She wrote to him.
____________________________________________
It became, across that long season, a routine she didn’t want to admit she eagerly anticipated.
The comm rode at her hip through every ordinary hour — kneeling in the garden, grinding root at the table, walking the market with her basket — and when the valley’s signal was kind, if whatever battle hadn’t knocked out a relay, it would chime, and her whole day would shift. The signal was not often kind with the increasing conflict. Nabit sat low between the red ridges, and the relay that bridged it to the fronts beyond the ridges was old and temperamental; messages queued for hours, arrived in the wrong order, dropped into nothing and had to be sent twice. She learned the rhythm of it, the way you learn the moods of a sick patient. She learned to be patient. She had never wanted anything badly enough to be patient for it before.
They were never love letters. Neither of them would have known how, and neither would have dared. They were about Patch, at first, and then about nothing at all.
Patch has told the whole company you’re better than the medical droids, and better than most clone medics. He did not include himself in that list. He insists his scar is lucky — Howzer
How sweet, if misguided, he is. He made a great show of his scar before he left. I hope for your sake your medical droids and medics are more capable than me. Do you rest, when you’re out on the ridges? — Maren
Rest is not so easy to come by. The men have decided that you must be lucky. Patch hasn’t had a scratch since being on the frontlines. They insist that any minor scrape can wait to be treated by you. I’m sorry in advance. —Howzer
I’ll prepare more herbs. As long as they don’t complain as much as he does, I think I’ll be alright. Have you had any injuries? You inquire into the health of every man in your company, but you’ve never once said how the captain is. I’ve noticed.— Maren
I’m whole. That’s more than most days offer. You’re the first person in a long while to ask after the man and not the company. I find I don’t have a good answer ready. I’ll work on it. Can you hear the war from your home? — Howzer.
She read that one walking home through the market and had to stop and stand against a wall for a moment.
Yes. Some nights I can just make out the lights from artillery. Maybe it’s my imagination, but I’m convinced I can see smoke as well. Be safe - Maren
____________________________________________
What it was doing to her, it was doing to him too — worse, if anything, several klicks south where the war was.
Howzer reread her messages more than a man of his rank, or a clone for that matter, had any business admitting. He kept them, which was the first sign of trouble, and he knew it was the first sign of trouble, yet in defiance he didn’t delete them. Every fragment that limped through the bad relays, saved onto the battered datapad he carried through innumerable conflicts, read in the thin minutes between battle. He told himself it was the novelty of it. A steady, kind voice from somewhere outside the war. Any man would hold onto that.
It wasn’t the novelty. He knew that too.
It was her. The way she noticed, across a whole company of med, that he never once made a deal about his own self. I’ve noticed, she’d written. He had read it standing up and had to sit back down. The memories came for him at the worst possible times — flat on his belly behind a rock with the air lit up from blaster fire over his head, of all the moments to pick — of a narrow house full of gold light and the fresh smell of herbs. Of two soft careful hands cleaning the blood off his jaw like he was something worth the trouble of caring for.
He thought about how she said she could see artillery fire. In Howzer’s professional soldier’s opinion, that meant the war was too kriffing close to her. He’d have to change that.
And then, because he was a man as well as a soldier, the memory would get away from him and go somewhere he had not sent it.
He’d think of her hands and quit thinking about his jaw entirely. Of how soft her fingertips were as they held his chin. He’d think about the line of her throat when she’d leaned in close that afternoon, the warmth coming off her, the clean floral scent of her skin, how her delicate collar bone jutted out as she leaned forward. How fast and how shamefully some half-starved part of him had wanted to put his mouth to the soft place under her ear and find out whether she smelled like that everywhere while he dragged his lips down her neck. He’d think about that long dark braid loose and down, and his hand fisted in it. About what her voice might do, low, with no comm to flatten it and no one else in the house. About hands as gentle as hers on him, tracing every scar. If she was as soft underneath that dress. How blue her eyes looked against the brown landscape.
It shamed him, out there in the field. He’d met the woman once. He knew next to nothing about her — not where she’d come from, not what had given her that sad faraway look, not one hard fact a sensible man would want before he let someone this far in. She’d saved his brother and been kind to him for a single afternoon, and here he was lying in a fighting hole on the wrong side of a war wanting her like a green recruit. It was not decent, and he could not make himself quit.
Mesh’la, he thought once, before he could stop it. Beautiful. He had never once said it aloud to a living soul. He lay in the dirt and turned the datapad over in his scarred hands and thought it, helplessly, at a woman a klicks north.
The order came down the line to move, and he shook the thoughts of her from his mind.
He took the datapad with him, tucked safe in his pack. He always took the datapad.
____________________________________________
There’s a formation low over the ridges tonight — three stars in a curve. Patch called it the Hook before he left. Is that the one you meant once, the one like Kamino? — Maren.
No. The Kamino sky never had stars. Only rain, and the city’s lights thrown back off the water. Grey on grey, every day, my whole life there. I didn’t know I disliked it until I’d stood somewhere else. These ridges would have startled me, I think, the first time. All that open. — Howzer.
She reread that one for an entire evening. My whole life there. A man telling her that his life had begun in a grey dour place not of his choosing, among others exactly like him, under rain. She did not write back what she truly wanted to, which was: I know that grey. I was raised somewhere I couldn’t choose either. Different weather, the same kind of dark. She wrote about her garden instead.
A farmer’s girl came to my door this morning burning with fever. She’s sleeping now, fevers gone down a bit. I think it might be hubris, but I am proud that I grew what brought down the fever myself. It’s so dry here, I find it a bit miraculous every time a seed I plant ends up living and useful. I don’t think I’ve ever told a soul this. It feels almost sacred. Creating a living thing where there was none. I don’t know why I’m telling you. — Maren.
His reply was slow coming — the signal, or the war, or him choosing the words. When it arrived, it was the longest message he had ever sent her.
Because I told you once I’d never seen a thing grow on purpose. Only things built to spec, for a use, and then discarded. I’ve turned that over more than I expected to, out here. There’s a difference I didn’t have words for until talking to you. There’s something different about nurturing your garden than building machines, or clones.Keep telling me. I’d rather read about your garden than anything this war has to offer. — Howzer.
I’ve never been anywhere, you know. Two years here, and before that nowhere I’d choose to remember. I used to tell myself that if I were ever free I’d go and see all of it — every world there was, just to prove I could go where I liked. And here I am, free, and I’ve gone nowhere at all. Tell me somewhere. Anywhere you’ve been. — Maren.
I’m a poor guide for it. They keep us where the war is, and the war’s been here on Ryloth for me. Except Geonosis. Also dry with red ridges. More bugs. Figures. Red ridges and dust are the most of the galaxy I’ve seen. A staging moon once, no name, all mud. Two hours in a spaceport on Pantora in the rain. I remember a street of blue lanterns and the food and not much else. Kamino, where I started, which I’ve told you about. That’s the list. Not much, for a soldier.
But I’ll tell you the one place I think about. If I ever did get to go somewhere just to go, not sent, not for the war, I’d want somewhere with water. A great deal of it, and not too warm. Green. I was trained on a world that was all cold, grey, and steel, and I’ve spent a long time now on a world with almost no water. Somewhere between the two there must be a coast where there’s water but the land is green, and there isn’t so much dust. I’d like to stand in a sea like that, just once. That’s the whole of my dreaming. Don’t tell the men. — Howzer.
She read it twice, and then a third time, and pressed the little comm flat to her sternum, over the ache, and shut her eyes.
She did not write back the first immediate thought; that of all the wishes in all the worlds, he had reached out blind and closed his hand around the very one she carried, the one she had held in the dark since before she was free. I know that water, she did not write. I’ve never seen it either. I’ve wanted it my whole life. She almost withheld it, but something in her was compelled to share it with this man she had met once.
I always dreamed of the ocean too, but I haven’t had the chance to see it. Or the courage. I haven’t deciphered which is the real reason - Maren
____________________________________________
And then, because desire had been getting harder to govern for weeks, and his blunt words had a way of slipping under her guard, she found herself thinking of the man, and not only the letters.
She would be cleaning herbs at her table and think, with no warning at all, of his hands. The rough scarred expanse of them, carefully holding her cup. The contrast she could not stop turning over - that the most calloused hands she had ever seen had been glued to his side, never once raised to her. Not a single touch. She’d think of the gold light along the side of his face while she cleaned his jaw, and how still he’d sat, like a man who’d forgotten he was permitted to be touched at all. And then her thoughts would go somewhere uninvited consciously, low and warm. His hands cupping her cheek then idly dragging further down. Undoing her braid. His lips replacing where his hand had been. If his body was as scarred as his hands. How warm his hands must be, how warm his body must be, how taught, if the heat from his jawline was anything to go by. She would come back to herself standing with the pestle idle in her hand, her face flushed, and her heart going as though she’d run a distance.
It frightened her more than the silence from the front ever could. Wanting had always been a thing done to her, or a thing she performed — a currency, a snare, a leash held in someone else’s hand. She had never once in her life simply wanted a man because the thought of his hands made her breath go shallow. It was new. If she was honest with herself, it was the first time wanting something was entirely her choice, and it frightened her. She scarcely knew how to conduct herself with this overwhelming feeling, arousal and need and embarrassment.
She did not let herself call any of it by its name. Naming things made them real, and if it was tangible, it could be wrenched from her. She had learned that lesson well. So, she resolved to simply carried the little comm closer, and slept with it within reach, waiting for the chime the way her garden waited on rain.
Then the chimes stopped.
Three weeks, and the comm at her hip gave her nothing — no queued message arriving late, no fragment out of order. She thumbed it awake a hundred times a day to check it was still working at all. It was. The valley simply would not let anything through, or there was a relay down, or there was nothing being sent, and she had no way on any world to tell the difference between blackout and gone.
She told herself it was the signal. Perhaps the Separatists had bombed a transmission relay. She kept her hands busy, tended her garden and her patients, laughed with her friends in the market, was by every outward measure exactly the quiet healer she had built. Inside was the coiled snake of anxiety, repeatedly striking at every inopportune moment.
When the snake struck as she was trying to fall asleep again, she finally sat up and acknowledged the ache in her chest, the pit in her stomach. It was the absence, the silence from a man hours away, in a war zone. A man who knew so little about her, and she about him.
This is dangerous, said the old voice, the survivor’s voice, the one that had kept her alive.
She did know. She knew exactly. She just wasn’t sure if she cared.
On the twenty-second day, the comm chimed.
The message was five words, sent from an outpost she’d never heard of, by a man she had begun, against all her training and all her terror, to treasure:
Still here. Coming back through. — Howzer.
She sat down where she stood, in the dark, the little screen glowing in her soft and careful hand, and this time she confessed to herself the names of the feelings.
I think the best thing about a clone hyperfixation is that I only need to draw one to unlock all of them
Anyways, Pasifika love tropical flavours. The clones are often restricted to ration bars and Kaminoan nutrient slop, so when they get the chance they never pass up the opportunity to get nose deep in soft, juicy fruit.
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This is my first Star Wars fan fiction, and only the first chapter. I'm hoping to post the chapters bi-weekly. Please take a gander. Any feedback is greatly appreciated! This is mostly a romance.
Trigger warnings apply (this is my first time publishing on Tumblr so I may not be doing this right, but read with caution, especially the later chapters). Also, this is for mature/adult audiences only (not so much this chapter but will definitely be later on).
Chapter One — The Healer at Nabit
Where Maren came from, hands meant harm.
Always rough. Calloused, scarred, quick. Hands that took hold of you and did not ask. Did not let go. She had learned to read them when she was young. She could read a man’s whole intent in the way his fingers closed. The lesson had been simple and total – hands were dangerous, and the people who owned them more dangerous still.
So when she had finally been free to decide anything at all, she had decided about her hands first.
She kept them soft. Silken, clean, gentle. Scrubbed, nails tidy and barely longer than the tips of her fingers. None of the vibrant polish or lacquered ornaments she had once been made to wear. It was a small, quiet defiance that not a soul on Ryloth would ever think to notice; that her gentleness was chosen. That every time she laid a careful hand on a feverish child or a disoriented elder, she was refusing the ruination hands had meant before.
On the morning the war came back to the valley, her hands were deep in cool garden soil.
It was a small garden, walled in pale stone the heat had bleached to the color of old bone, tucked behind a narrow house at the edge of Nabit, just outside of Lessu, where the settlement thinned into scrub and great red ridges rose against the sky. She grew things there that had no business growing on Ryloth’s arid terrain — silverleaf for fever, the bitter purple stalks she still had no name for that drew the poison out of a wound, a vicious carnivorous plant that kept the insects at bay, a low creeping vine whose sap numbed pain when bacta ran short. And bacta always ran short. She had learned that somewhere far from here, on a cold world, by a lamplight she wasn’t supposed to be using, reading words she wasn’t supposed to know.
Her dark hair was braided back off her face. That was the way she always wore it now. In a plait running down her back if she was working. Sometimes she would experiment with other braids, off her neck, at her temples, depending on the chores of the day. He had liked it short once. Liked it curled and pinned up in a particular elaborate way, displayed just so, exposing her neck and shoulders. Nowhere to hide. She had grown it long and learned to braid it herself, and she wore it back not to hide her face but because for the first time in her life no one got to tell her how to show it.
Maren heard the sound she heard too often over the plateau, the high tearing whine of repulsors, and under it the deeper concussion of something falling that was meant to fall on people. Maren went very still in the dirt and listened to the war come down out of the sky.
___________________________________________
Howzer had buried a lot of brothers.
Sometime back in the first year he almost considered letting himself drop the count. Counts are a heavy weight. A man has to chose what to set down or carry, and he decided then he was going to carry this. Howzer was then even more compelled to keep his brothers alive. He refused to bury Patch. He refused to bury Patch to a wound Patch himself could have closed.
That was the part that kept clawing at him as they ran. The squad’s medic was bleeding out across his shoulder and Tarn’s, and the one man inside thirty klicks who’d have known how to stop it was the man it was happening to.
It had gone wrong fast, the way these things did. A relay station they’d been sent to hold, a ridgeline that should have been clear and wasn’t, droids coming up out of a dry brush where no scan had put them. Howzer had gotten his people into cover and turned the fight, but not before a bolt caught Patch low under his chest plate, in the soft place no armor covered. It put him down in the dirt with both hands clamped to his middle and that flat, terrible calm in his voice that medics get when they have seen these wounds before and know exactly how much trouble they are in.
“Field station’s an hour out,” Tarn had said, low, so Patch wouldn’t hear. And they had both known an hour was an hour Patch did not have.
It was an old Twi’lek woman who saved his brother’s life, in the end, by pointing. She had a wrist that had been broken once and set straight. She took one look at the clone dying across Howzer’s back and pointed up a thin dirt street toward a narrow house at the edge of the scrub, and said a string of words he didn’t follow and one word he did. Healer. The pale one. Closest. She’ll take him.
He had nothing better. He had nothing at all. So, he went up that hill at a dead run with his brother’s blood running warm down his armor, and that was how Howzer came to her gate.
She was already in the doorway when they reached it. Like she’d heard them coming and decided what to do before they arrived.
He took her in the way he took in most things, fast and efficient — slight, pale, dark-haired, a simple dark dress with dirt on the knees, and hands too clean for the rest of her. And calm; calm in a way he couldn’t place at first, until he understood it wasn’t the blank calm of someone who didn’t grasp what was bleeding toward her door. She grasped it fine. She’d already turned to hold the door wide.
“Bring him in,” she said. “The long table, not the cot — I need the height. Get that armor off his chest. Someone find me clean water, there’s a cistern through the back.”
And Howzer, who outranked every soul on that hill and had been the one giving the orders since dawn, found himself doing exactly what the petite woman in the doorway said, because she said it evenly and calmly, and competently. A desperate part of him heard that and grabbed on the way a drowning man grabs a line.
He took watch at Patch’s head and held his brother’s shoulders down on the table when the pain surfaced through whatever she was doing. Howzer did the one thing he’d ever been any good at that wasn’t violence, which was to put his voice low and steady and keep it there.
“Stay with me, Patch. Eyes on me. That’s an order, trooper, and you don’t get to ignore a direct order, so don’t you dare. Stay.”
That was the thing nobody outside their ranks ever understood — the entire galaxy managed to look at millions of identical faces and miss the individuality. That there was nothing identical about it from the inside. That this was Patch. That Patch was loud, and worked too hard, and laughed like a dying engine, and cheated at every card game ever dealt, and had once carried Howzer two klicks on a ruined ankle complaining the whole way. There was not another man in all the long rows of clones who could be lost in his place and have it come out even. The galaxy saw stock. Howzer saw his brother. He always had. It was, if he was honest with himself, the one thing about himself he had never been willing to give up.
So, he held Patch’s shoulders and kept talking, and across the table, the woman worked.
He had watched a lot of people treat a wound. Field medics, surgeons in proper bays, his own brothers doing rough, desperate treatments with whatever the kit held. He had never seen anything like her. There was no searing agitation or roughness. No uncomfortable disquiet. Her hands went down into the worst of the wound meticulously, without a flinch, sure and unhurried even when the blood welled up over them. She packed the wound with something out of a jar — some bruised purple stalk, not bacta, nothing he could name — and the bleeding slowed under it like the plant had been told to. She talked to Patch the whole time too, low, in a different key than Howzer’s voice. Telling him he was doing well. Telling him to stay where the captain put him. Soothing in a way most soldiers never had the pleasure of hearing. Never once stopping.
It took the rest of the day and the sun started to cast gold and pinks over the dusty city as it set. Howzer could see it exhausted her, and by the time she was finished, the cost of exertion had settled over her fine features. She let out a soft sigh as she straightened, washed her hands, and then wiped her brow.
She turned to Howzer and said softly, wearily, “He’s through the worst of it now.”
He looked down at his brother and finally registered Patch’s slow and even breathing, the deathly grey color abandoning his face. Alive.
He didn’t have words for what that did to him. An ineffable feeling of relief, wonder, and gratefulness washed over him. He wasn’t sure where to put that emotion so he sat with his hand still on Patch’s shoulder and breathed, and his ears went hot, and he said nothing at all for a while, because anything he tried would have been utterly inarticulate.
Maren glanced at him while she was cleaning up, then stopped suddenly and frowned at him.
“You’re bleeding too,” she said gently. “Here — hold still and let me see to it.” “
“It’s nothing,” he replied, too brusquely for his own liking.
“Please.” She was already wetting a cloth, already crossing over to him. “Let me take care of it.”
He went motionless. He was good at it; stillness was a better part of the job. But it was a wholly different thing to be still while she leaned in close with the cloth, closer than anyone had ever been to him that wasn’t a brother or a droid trying to kill him, and cleaned the dried blood off the graze along his jaw, her touch so light he barely felt the sting.
And that at moment he was ambushed by his own senses.
He smelled her.
Not blood. Not char from blasters or bacta or machine oil or the flat recycled tang of a hundred identical clones on a ship. Her. Something fresh and faintly floral, green, clean. The warm ordinary scent of a woman who had spent the morning in a garden and not in a war. He had not, he realized, smelled anything like it. He had nowhere to put it. It vaulted straight over every wall he constructed and lodged somewhere undefended, and the careful, dutiful captain sat very still under the tender work of her hands. He did not trust himself to speak.
And this close, for the first time all that long day, he looked at her. Not the way you clock a stranger in a doorway, but the way you observe a person. Her eyes were gazing down at his jaw, her brow drawn in concentration, and he found, with an emotion near enough to alarm, that she was beautiful. Not the arranged, artificial kind of beauty he’d caught now and then on a holoscreen or on a senator’s arm. It was quieter, and a great deal harder to look away from. A few tendrils of dark hair coming loose at her temple. A soft, sorrowful mouth. Skin too pale for the parched environment of Ryloth. Eyes a blue that ran toward green where the low gold light of the sunset caught them, lowered and focused on his wound. Wholly unaware of him watching. He hadn’t let himself see it before, with the blood and the running. He saw it now, all at once, and it landed about as gently as a blaster bolt.
Her hands. Soft, clean, careful. He looked down at his own where they rested on his knees; rough, scarred, a soldier’s hands, good for exactly one thing. He could not work out how a person came to have hands like hers in a galaxy like this one, nor what it was about being touched by them that made his chest feel like ground giving way underfoot.
“There,” she said, and stepped back, and the air rushed into his lungs again. “Keep it clean and it won’t scar.”
“Thank you.” He said, then hesitated before adding, “For him. For me. You didn’t have to take us in.”
“It’s no trouble,” she said softly. “I don’t mind. I’m only glad he’ll be all right.” She set the cloth down. Here eyes met his. “Maren. My name’s Maren.”
“Howzer,” he said. And then, because it seemed to matter and he couldn’t have said why, he added. “I won’t forget it.”
___________________________________________
The rest of his squadron came for him at dusk.
He heard the gunship settle in the scrub below the city and read the coordinates off his comm. He felt the soldier in him take over from the moment of softness he just experienced. His helmet tucked under his arm, the strange afternoon was already stowing itself away into the place where he stored memories he wasn’t technically supposed to keep. Patch was sleeping. He would rest here a week, the woman, Maren said, and she’d keep him safe. And Howzer believed her. That was the part he couldn’t account for, how completely he believed her, a stranger, on the evidence of one afternoon.
He stopped at her gate. There was no reason to. There was a gunship waiting and a war that did not care what any man, clone, wanted. He stopped anyway and turned the helmet once in his rough hands.
“We’re pulled to the southern lines by morning,” he said. “I won’t be able to get back through here. Not for a while.”
“I’ll look after him,” she said. “I’ll send word when he’s well.”
He should have put the helmet on and gone. He didn’t, for a moment, and he couldn’t have told a living soul why. He’d known her one afternoon. He had no business standing at a stranger’s gate in the last of the light feeling like he was setting down something he’d want back. But that was the feeling, clear as the ground under his boots. So he swallowed, took a breath, and he looked at her one more time, the way he looked at everything, head-on.
She was looking back at him with a soft and wistful gaze. Her chin tilted down and a little to the left. And something moved in her face that he had no word for; open and tired and sorrowful and real. He didn’t understand it. He only knew it landed somewhere in him the armor didn’t cover, and firmly planted itself there.
“Goodbye, Maren,” Howzer said, because it was that, or say a something he might regret.
Then he put his helmet on, and the soldier took over the man and carried him out.
___________________________________________
She stood at her gate long after the gunship had lifted over the red ridges and the engine sounds had thinned away to nothing. She pressed one hand flat over the strange new ache beneath her sternum.
She was a healer. She was familiar with most wounds.
She did not, yet, have the courage to diagnose this one.
A/N: writing smut is so excruciating to me omg. like I get through it 'for the plot' but WOW idk how some of you do it so often
Chapter Word Count: 5.4k
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The dark engulfed Howzer, the only light being that of the moon and stars that were littered through the sky as he and Kisku walked the streets of Lessu. A gentle breeze sent leaves scattering over the floor, tickling at his skin and lightly ruffling his hair. The fragrance of Kisku’s perfume was carried to him on the wind — something sweet, understated and soft but with a noticeable presence. It matched her perfectly in that way. He glanced over from his place beside her and couldn’t help but stare.
In many ways, she was the antithesis to him, a reflection of everything he wished he could be. Much of it was given away simply by her footfalls; where his were the inelegant scuff of boots against the cold stone of the cobbled street, hers was the tapping of delicate heels, sounding more akin to a steady drip of water into a lake. Where the war had carved into him hard edges and military coarseness, she was made up of soft contours and political courtesy.
He was beneath, she was above. Him the soil, her the sky. Trivial, and indispensable. These things were true of the place they held in the galaxy, but when he stood next to her, all of that seemed negligible. Their idiosyncrasies fit together to create one picture, one he didn’t think he’d come to know until he had laid eyes on her for the first time. Although, as much as they were different, they seemed to hold a similar space within their separate lives, echoing each other’s values. They were both bound by duty, a duty which kept them from seeking true happiness. And yet, watching Kisku stroll through the moonlight felt like exactly that: happiness.
Kisku began to veer off away from her street, but when Howzer went to ask where she was going, she was already answering the question.
“I've been moved” she told him quietly, a small smirk at the expense of his confused expression.
“Moved?” Howzer probed.
“Mhm”
“Why?”
Kisku shrugged, but the action was more rigid than she perhaps meant for it to be, more tight than her strangely easy-going voice. “It was more appropriate, supposedly”
The clone was no fool. He could see clear as day that there was something she wasn’t saying. Something she didn’t want to divulge. An opinion unshared. Part of him wanted to press, to ask more for once rather than just leaving her to her secrets, but the other part of him knew not to. If she didn’t want to talk about it, it was probably because she was still sore from her admonishments from the senator.
He just let her guide him further towards the centre of the city, towards the courtyard overlooked by the bureau. Facing the government building was one of smaller stature, cut from the same stone and reinforced with the same durasteel panels — an extension of the larger building. Howzer wasn’t one to read into conspiracies, but something about Kisku having been moved into a room that was under the watchful eye of the galaxy’s governing body struck him as odd, or maybe more sinister. His mouth dropped open as if he might speak that thought aloud, but the shared silence seemed too sacred, and he also knew that Kisku would have already considered it a great deal more than he had.
She guided him through the foyer and into the elevator, pressing the button for the 12th floor; the top floor. So high up, he couldn’t help but notice as the lift climbed. Why would it be any more appropriate for her to be here than her previous home? With the time it took to get to the correct floor it was really no closer to the bureau.
Kisku walked down the corridor, passing a number of doors before halting outside of one and swiping her key to open it up. She turned back towards him as the lights switched on automatically, silhouetting her against the warm glow. She observed him for a moment. He could see her eyebrow twitch as if puzzling something out, or hesitating to suggest it, and her lips parted minutely before she spoke.
“I’m going to put the kettle on” she told him, leaving a lengthy gap to let the words hang in the air. “Would you care to join me for some tea?”
Howzer took her up on the offer before she had barely got the words out, and she ushered him in with an amused smirk that she failed to hide. The space was a bit more modest than he was expecting, but he assumed that he most likely viewed her as being more important than those who organised her living arrangements. There was a neat kitchen to one side, a homey looking sofa on the opposite wall, a small dining area between them, and two doors off to the side which he could only presume were the bedroom and refresher. It was humble despite its sleek lines, especially compared to the mansion they had just left.
Howzer watched as Kisku pinched the fabric of her scarf between her fingers, pulling it off. The sheer fabric slid over her smooth skin like water over transpiristeel, and Howzer was positively mesmerised. It was such a simple action, but he was coming to understand that anything Kisku did was a little more than appealing to him.
“Make yourself at home” she smiled at him as she glided over toward the kitchen to put the kettle on, leaning against the counter to take her shoes off.
Home.
The term struck Howzer as something unfamiliar. He watched Kisku move about the space, her navigation of the layout instinctual even as it was almost as new to her as it was to him. He found himself almost desperate to reach out, just to feel her skin against his once more, but forced himself to look away to try and do as she’d said, make himself comfortable in the space. He placed his helmet on the dining table, and noticed the flimsibook that he so often saw clutched between her hands was open beside it, her stylus laid along the spine.
He didn’t mean to look. He knew he shouldn’t, it was private, but when his eyes skimmed the page and he recognised the scrawl of his own name, his heart stopped in his chest. He picked the book up, unable to help himself, and ran his fingers across the unfamiliarly textured page as he read from it.
It was… poetry?
The writing that she had been so intently working on were poems, lyrical waxing interrupted by words scratched out and replaced in the space above, further scribbles in the margins suggesting edits. It seemed that he was a recurring character.
Howzer was floored. He couldn’t believe that such sweet words were written for him, a man made for such violence, and by someone like Kisku no less. He turned page after page, and his name appeared numerous times. Upon further reading, there were points where he wasn’t mentioned by name, though it was obvious that it was images of him she was conjuring. Mentions of armour, scars, chestnut brown eyes. Instances from their time together — the day at the lake, descriptions of sitting opposite him under the whiptree, so far as just passing him by. In each corner, a date was marked. As he flipped backwards through the pages, the kettle’s hissing masking the sound, he found one dated under the day that Kisku had arrived in Lessu.
The words spoke to a recognition of comfortability, of a quiet understanding with no need for words. Eyes meeting and a warmth that reaches over, feeling like a promise, a vow to be fulfilled in time. A desire to see the vow through and not let that warmth fizzle out.
From the very beginning, Howzer realised, Kisku’s own feelings had been aligned with his. She had recognised the pull that he had as soon as he laid eyes on her. Howzer felt his breath cut short, his heartbeat suddenly thundering in his ears as blood ran hot through his veins. His eyes lifted to Kisku, leaned against the kitchen counter and tapping a rhythm against it as she waited for the kettle to finish boiling. He called her name, and she looked over to him inquisitively, but her face dropped when she saw what he held in his hands.
“I didn’t know you wrote… this kind of thing” he stated, the first thing he could think to say.
“You weren’t supposed to” she spoke quickly, her embarrassment obvious as she strode over in just a few steps and snatched the book from him, shoving it into an empty drawer when she made it back to her original position.
Howzer watched as a deep mauve blush pricked the skin of her cheeks, and he offered up an apologetic look. He hadn’t meant to embarrass her, he only wished to convey how much it meant to him.
“I didn’t mean to look, I just—” he found himself at a loss for words, “it’s… beautiful”
“It’s…” she glanced over to him from under her lashes as if they would hide her, shame still colouring her cheeks, “it’s private”
For a moment neither one of them moved, watching each other carefully to see if the other would go on. Kisku shortly began to grow more flustered by the whole ordeal, fingers fiddling with the silky fabric of her dress and shifting on the spot. She hung her head, lekku spilling over her shoulders, and let out a long breath.
“I’m so sorry, Captain”
Howzer’s eyebrows shot up, and he took a step forward on instinct, “you’re sorry?”
“Maker, this is so mortifying” she planted her face in her hands, “I don’t even have the words to explain myself”
He couldn’t help but chuckle at that assertion, deciding to try and lighten the mood; let her know it wasn’t so bad as she was making out. “I don’t know about that, seems like you might have quite a few”
Kisku groaned as her body curled in on itself more, drawing another small laugh from Howzer as he made his way over to her. He tentatively wrapped his hands around her wrists, pulling her hands away from her face. She looked up at him with a bashful expression, struggling to maintain eye contact as he slipped her hands into his.
“I—” he began, not entirely sure of the direction he was going. “I wish I had any sort of talent with words that you have, so that I might be able to express my feelings more clearly, but…” he paused, seeing the timidity begin to recede from her silver eyes, “perhaps I could show you instead?”
His eyes were trained on hers as he awaited her answer, one hand lifting to skim their joined hands over her waist and feeling the silky fabric of her dress slip over his skin, the other ghosting over her arm as it made its way up to hold her jaw.
She stared back at him with widened eyes, “I thought— you said that we shouldn’t”
A reserved smile wormed its way onto his face, one that he hoped conveyed a sense of apology as he shrugged, “I changed my mind”
He could feel some of the tension drain from her body, shoulders relaxing, and she stepped into his space so they were chest to chest. Her nose almost touched his as she tilted her head upwards, her eyes dropping to his lips that were only a hairbreadth from her own. Howzer felt her breath warm on his lips as he wet them with the quick tracing of his tongue between them. He had to fight to keep from shivering at the sensation. Eyes finding his again, he could see more confidence in her gaze, and it sent a certain thrill through him that was impossible to ignore.
“Show me” she whispered, lips practically brushing his.
Howzer closed the minimal space between them, lips meeting with ardour as his arm wrapped around her waist to hold her close. He slid his lips over hers with intent, taking his time in the hopes that it would convey every unsaid notion of admiration. Her hands curled around the top of his chestplate to pull him flush against her, and the fabric of her dress bunched up under his tightening hold.
“You look so good in my colour” he mumbled against her lips, sounding just as drunk as he felt at the intoxicating taste of her.
“I hope so” she returned, “I wore it for you”
A groan left Howzer’s lips unbidden as he deepened the kiss, pressing Kisku back into the kitchen counter. He could feel the way her lips drew up into a smirk. Hands explored her body, finally allowing himself the pleasure of indulging in the feel of her skin.
He was suddenly overwhelmed by a desire he had never known, desperate to be as close as he was physically able after her admission. She had worn this excruciatingly captivating dress just for his eyes, and the prospect of being the one to take it off made his mind fog over with desire. One hand cupped the back of her head as his mouth devoured hers, exploring every inch of her he could reach, the other trailing down her body to grip at her hip. She raised to her toes to push back against him, matching his fervour, her arms snaking around his neck to bring him closer.
In a swift motion, Howzer hooked his hands under her thighs, placing her on top of the counter behind her and standing between her spread thighs. She threaded her legs around his waist, pulling herself into him and earning a breathy groan at the sensation of her pressing into his now uncomfortably tight codpiece.
Howzer had never felt a want as pure as this one. He’d had encounters of a similar nature with others, but never had it been so anticipated, never had he felt this aching within him, the need for closeness — not only physically, but to be tethered to another by something less temporal.
Impatient and overwhelmed by his own state of mind, Howzer’s hand ran down Kisku’s leg and found the hem of her dress, already ridden up a little by that point, and lifted it so he could slip beneath. His fingers danced along her skin, skimming the softness of her inner thigh as he made his way towards the apex in a slow motion.
A shaky breath passed her lips and fanned over his as his knuckles brushed her clothed sex. He ghosted over the fabric of her underwear in featherlight touches, the most infuriating of teases if Kisku’s heavy sigh gave anything away. She was just as impatient as he was.
“No need to be so gentle, Captain” she murmured, voice thick with desire, breathy but confident, “I told you before, I’m not made of glass”
“And I thought you weren’t going to call me that anymore” he pressed his forehead to hers and peered into her eyes as his first finger hooked the edge of her underwear.
“Maybe I just want to” she whispered, an intention behind the words that didn’t go unnoticed. Though initially a little stunned, Howzer’s lips formed a particularly rakish grin at the implication. He gave in to her impatience and sped along the process by pushing her underwear to the side, the tips of his fingers sliding between her folds with ease.
“Fuck” he breathed out shallowly, his forehead dropping to her shoulder, “how are you so wet already?”
His voice was hoarse, being unable to hide the genuine perplexity and pleasant surprise that coloured his tone.
“Didn’t you read my poems?” she asked, a contented sigh passing her lips, “you look very good in this armour, Captain”
A chuckle rumbled through Howzer’s chest, and he heard Kisku’s breath hitch as his thumb grazed over her clit.
“So good you had to match, apparently” he breathed out, his lips against her throat and drawing a shudder.
He continued his teasing, every motion in response to the way she writhed and squirmed under his touch. Dragging his teeth along her collarbone, pressing kisses to soothe, he heard a whimper sound in her throat, and as she parted her lips to reply to his previous comment, he sunk two fingers inside of her. Howzer could feel his knees almost give out at how easy it was to slip his fingers past her entrance. Kisku’s breath stuttered, and a breath escaped her in a sharp and unsteady exhale.
His fingers set a steady pace within her, and he watched every twitch that played on her features as she responded to his efforts. Her face was twisted with pleasure, thin brows pinched and teeth digging into her bottom lip. It was as if she was an instrument, him the air, the strings, that allowed her song to sing. Her soft moans were melodic to him, the most beautiful tune he had heard, and the fact that it was him pulling it from her only made it sound sweeter.
“You’re taking my fingers so well” he muttered against her lips.
A small whine left her, and Howzer attached his lips back to hers, swallowing the sound. His thumb nudged her clit as he wound her up, and she let out a delighted moan into his mouth.
“Tell me how it feels, baby. Tell me how good I make you feel” he rasped, the fingers of his free hand digging into the flesh of her thigh.
“It— fuck” she was interrupted as Howzer’s fingers curled to find a particularly dizzying spot within her, “it feels so good, Captain”
“Yeah?” he asked, adding pressure to her clit so she could only nod in reply, “you like calling me that, huh?”
A small ‘yes’ slipped from her lips in a whisper, looking up into his eyes, and Howzer could see something uncommonly shy swirling within them. He wasn’t going to have that, not now.
“Yes, what?” he challenged, and watched with pride as the timidity receded and a flicker of desire took its place.
“Yes, Captain”
Howzer smirked broadly, his teeth catching his bottom lip as he looked down at the positively alluring sight of Kisku at his mercy.
“Good girl” he praised, and felt the way she clenched around his him in response. He was quickly coming to understand exactly what it was her body was asking for.
He brought her closer and closer to finishing, chest heaving and breath short and uneven as her walls tightened around his pumping fingers, but before she could reach the peak, he pulled his fingers from her completely. A sharp whine slipped from her lips at the loss, but Howzer just offered up a teasing simper.
“Not yet, mesh’la” he spoke lowly, hand kneading her thigh as if a form of apology, “I’ll let you know when you can come”
He could tell his words were having the most effect on her. She was breathless, looking up at him through her eyelashes, and the sight alone was enough to set his skin alight in an entirely new way, his cock throbbing beneath his armour. A hand found its place on her cheek, needing an affirmative before continuing.
“How’s that sound? You think you can follow my orders?” he ask, his tone more reverent than he perhaps meant for it to be. He couldn’t help it, after all.
“Yes, sir” she breathed out, and Howzer couldn’t deny the way the sentiment set his nerves alive.
He kissed her deeply, taking a moment in the flurry of desire to make her understand how much this meant to him, to show how deeply he truly cared for her. His fingers traced her jaw, then wound their way behind her head in a soft brush of skin against skin. He kept his touch light as he drew a path up to one of her lekku, and gently swiped his knuckles over the sensitive area.
A shiver rippled through Kisku, and she drew away from him with a shaky breath, Her eyes were a little wide, and Howzer worried that he’d pushed a boundary, but then her fingers hooked into his belt and she yanked his body towards her’s.
“How do I take this off?” she asked, fumbling with the clasp.
Howzer laughed, her actions so sudden that he couldn’t help himself, “here, let me”
He shooed her hands away, unclipping his belt and then going about removing the remaining pieces of his armour as quickly as possible. Kisku just sat atop the counter, one leg crossed over the other and watching him with a fascination. He caught her gaze, and a smile broke out over his face.
There was a sense of affinity between them, an understanding and trust that had been growing since the beginning, and he had never been as sure of it than he was in that moment. Howzer didn’t believe in fate — his time in the war had only taught him the certainty of everything being up to luck and random chance — but something about the way Kisku looked at him, the way her eyes found his and things seemed to make sense, it felt that it had been brewing for a long time, something in the back of his mind that came forward when they met.
Once Howzer was just down to his blacks, armour scattered about the floor surrounding him, her hands were on him before he could go any further. She pulled him towards her, tasting his lips again, and he melted into it, running his hands up her thighs.
Her hands travelled over his chest an took a downwards path, fingers brushing against the hard muscle of his stomach before they wrapped around his hardened length. An unbidden groan left him at the action, unintentionally grinding himself into her hold and gripping the flesh of her thighs as she palmed him through the material. He could feel himself crumbling under her attention already, and before long he wouldn’t be able to wait to feel her around him.
“Where’s your bedroom?” he asked, breathless.
“Door to the right” she answered in a mumble and pressed a kiss to his neck.
Kisku couldn’t have imagined ever feeling this charged by another being.
Howzer hooked his hands under Kisku’s thighs and wasted no time in heading over towards the bedroom. His hand smashed into the door panel with an urgency, making her chuckle against his skin as she littered kisses up his neck and along his jaw. When he found the bed in the darkened room, he placed Kisku down gently, laying her down beneath him. He took the opportunity to explore her body with his lips, pressing open mouthed kisses where her dress would allow, and nudging it aside when he seemed unsatisfied with how little skin he could reach.
Then he pulled back, head tilted as he looked down at himself, then to her, “I think we’re still a little overdressed”
Kisku’s lips lifted into a half-smile, half-smirk, “you think so?”
Howzer chuckled and pushed himself from the bed, holding out his hands, palms upwards. Kisku took his offer with no thought, happy to let him lead her anywhere now. Her hands left his to trace her fingers underneath the fabric of his blacks, feeling the warmth of his skin on hers, then she pushed upwards, bringing the top with her and sliding it from his body. She was vaguely aware of him removing the bottom half of the suit, leaving him in just his underwear, but she was far more entranced by the scattered scarring across his chest and stomach to pay attention. The tanned planes of his chest were decorated by a number of marks, one of them significantly more prominent just below his collarbone.
Kisku’s eyes left Howzer’s chest to find him watching her, that weary smile of his beginning to crack, the scar on his chin pulling taut. Her heart soared at the sight. In that moment, any notion of leaving the planet had flown from her mind. How could she leave this man behind? This man who had been kind to her since before they met, who inspired in her poetry she had not written the likes of in years, who stood before her now in all his glory and yet looked at her as if she were the single most precious thing in the universe.
“You’re incredible” she whispered.
Howzer’s smile widened, and he slipped two fingers beneath one strap of her dress to push it from her shoulder, “not like you are”
She was entirely caught up in his gaze, amber eyes that appeared warm even in the light of the moon, as he removed the other strap. The silky material of her dress folded easily, sliding from her body and pooling at her feet in one graceful motion. Howzer’s lips parted, pupils dilated, and his hands reached for her to trace his thumbs over her bare hip bone and take in the sight of her.
“Kriff, mesh’la. Look at you” his tone was nothing short of worshipping, adoration and infatuation laced into his words.
One side of her lips quirked up at the compliment, however incomplete the thought was. Kisku wound her arms around his neck and pulled her body to his so that she felt his hot skin against hers. Howzer’s forehead dropped to her’s, hands squeezing her waist but seemingly unaware of it. Kisku smirked up at him.
“Don’t lose your nerve now, Captain”
His lips met hers with a protesting grunt, and he used the action to walk her backward, catching her just before she hit the bed to lay her down again. His thumbs hooked into the waistband of his underwear to tug the final piece of clothing from his body. Taking a hand in his, he interlaced Kisku’s fingers with his own and pressed it into the bed.
“You ready, pretty girl?” he asked in a whisper, leaning down to press a slow kiss to her jaw.
Kisku nodded, her breath leaving her as Howzer positioned himself at her entrance. He sheathed into her, and a gasp got caught in her throat as he slowly filled her out. The fingers of her free hand gripped onto his shoulder as he bottomed out, the other tightening in Howzer’s as his grip became more firm. He pulled her close, foreheads together and eyes closed as their bodies were flush with one another. He pulled out slowly, a careful procedure, and then sank back in with a shuddering breath.
“Fuck” he choked out, running a soothing hand up her side, “you feel so good, baby”
He set a steady pace at first, but soon enough his ministrations turned more impassioned, driving into her and hitting deep inside with each thrust. He was mumbling acclamatory words against her lips as if he couldn’t concentrate enough to speak properly, and especially when her lips were on his neck. It made Kisku’s head spin, more arousing than she realised, and she felt positively high. He was invading his senses like spice.
The feeling that it gave her, the intimacy of it more than anything, was euphoric. She had never felt so close to another person, so understood and frankly loved, whether or not it was the case. The two of them were connected in a way that she couldn't fully comprehend.
Howzer felt her walls tightening around him, and kept his pace up as he spoke, “ah, ah. You don't come until I tell you to, remember?”
“Yes, Captain” she whimpered, eyes screwing shut.
“Hey” he said more gently, slowing down as his hand caressed her face, “look at me.” Kisku’s eyes opened once more, and a smile broke out on his face.
He bumped his forehead with hers as he resumed his punishing pace, his eyes burned into hers and hers burning in kind. She was only just hanging on, determined not to come undone until he spoke the words.
“You take me so well baby” he whispered, his voice reverent and gentle as he buried his face in her neck, nipping at her skin and sending shivers all through her body. His breath stuttered, like he was unable to hold on for much longer himself, and Kisku’s whispered pleas told him that she was right there with him. “Where do you want me?” he asked, his voice strained.
She was breathless as she replied, almost relieved, “inside”
“I'm protected” she assured him, “please Captain, I want to feel you”
That was evidently all Howzer needed to resume his shattering pace, hands holding her hips firmly in place as he pounded into her and finally spoke the words, “come for me, baby”
Kisku was easily pushed over the edge, and Howzer rode her through the high until he came undone with a harsh grunt, spilling his seed deep within her. It took more than a moment to come down from the pure bliss of fulfilment, and when she did, her eyes opened to look up at him, still panting, and he was doing the same. He let out a breathy laugh, grinning at her spent expression.
He slipped out of her, sitting back on his heels to catch his breath, and watched as his seed spilled out of her, making his teeth sink into his lip. His eyes found hers once more as his hand gently kneaded her thigh, shaking his head.
“What?” Kisku asked, a gentle smile playing on her lips.
“You're just—” he breathed out deeply, “you're so beautiful”
She grinned at him, sitting up on her elbows, “thank you”
He pressed a kiss to her knee and stood from the bed, “don't move, I'll be right back”
He left the room and Kisku dropped her head back to the softness of the bed. For the first time in months, her mind was still. Nothing crossed her mind as she stared at the ceiling. She could rarely afford to be selfish, but for one moment, it occurred to her that it was a state of being she could get used to.
Howzer returned with a damp towel in hand, and helped her clean up before crawling over her again, cupping her face between his hands and pressing a tender kiss to her lips. Kisku couldn’t remember a moment where she’d felt so complete as this.
She hummed contentedly against his lips, her own hand caressing is face and outlining the scar on his cheek, “will you stay the night?”
Howzer sighed against her, “I can’t be caught leaving here tomorrow”
Kisku’s heart deflated a little in her chest. She chewed on her cheek, looking away a moment, “just for a little while?”
He smiled, a genuine contentment in his dark eyes, “alright. A little while”
He settled into the space beside her and pulled her body flush against his, placing a kiss to her forehead as he held her close. Her face was buried in his chest, breath tickling at his skin. Kisku tried not to let the magnitude of what had just transpired wash over just yet, but her practical side was kicking into gear. Before all of this, she had a plan to leave. Now? She didn’t think she could. Not yet, anyway. Not without him.
“Howzer?” she called softly.
“Hm?” he rumbled, his arms tightening around her.
“What—” she stopped before she could blurt out something she didn’t mean, and he pulled back to look at her.
“What’s up?”
She swallowed her pride and asked him quietly, “what does this mean?”
Howzer’s brow flashed a frown but he smiled, like the question might have been a pleasant surprise. His fingers brushed against her cheekbone as he looked down at her adoringly, “it means whatever you want it to”
Kisku tilted her head, a small crease in her brow, “well… what do you want?”
“I only want whatever I can have, however much that is”
A somewhat sad smile tugged at her lips, the realities behind his words striking a chord. That was all it could be at present. Kisku hoped it wouldn’t always be the case as she put it from her mind.
She lifted her head to place a quick kiss to his cheek, “I just want you… in any way I can”
“Then I’m yours” he whispered, “in any way that matters”
Captain Howzer x Kisku Neirkinn (Fem!OC / Twi'lek!OC / Politician!OC)
A/N: this might be my favourite chapter so far. and now i've caught up with myself on ao3! so new chapters from here on out
Chapter Word Count: 6.1k
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Rep. Neirkinn,
We have been reviewing your housing circumstances, and concluded that your current lodgings are inadequate. Within the next few rotations, you will be relocated to an apartment more suitable for someone of your station (see attached). We hope you will find this accommodation preferable to your situation at present.
Best,
Umizzi Zures, Sen. Taa’s office
Kisku stared at the message for perhaps the 50th time that day. It was the chime of her comm receiving it that woke her from sleep, and she hadn’t dared leave the house since then. Not for work, not anything. There was no denying now that she was being watched more closely, she just wished the message hadn’t come so clearly from the more insipid of Senator Taa’s aides.
Would she just have to find a way to come to terms with this? Could there be a way to stay in her position and do some good? These were the questions that roamed unanswered around her head. It wasn't that she though her actions wouldn't have consequences when she spoke out, but that it was all coming to a head too fast. This was another direct threat, clear as day. They knew how to play the game, and this was one she was unfamiliar with.
She figured that by now she knew the rulebook by which most politicians played, but throughout her time suffering the shadows of more important figures, it had never occurred to her that they would change the game altogether. As it was announced, the Empire was promised to provide security to the galaxy, and maybe in the Senate’s haste to put the war behind them, they had blindly accepted this change as necessary.
What could she even do about her position now? If she attempted to refuse the housing offer it would only worsen things, and she’d most likely be in more danger.
Just then, Kisku’s comm started buzzing in her hand. She flinched on instinct, snapping from her daze, but stayed perfectly still a moment later as a new fear gripped her. Were they expecting to hear back from her? Was she going to be reprimanded for not attending work today? She figured that Orn Free Taa would have been all too happy to be shot of her. The caller’s identification eventually showed when she garnered the courage to click the button to the side, and she was surprised to find the call coming from a friend on Courscant.
“Riyo?” Kisku placed the puck down on the table just ahead of her as the image of the Pantoran Senator flickered to life.
“Kisku! I was just quickly calling to— oh…” her voice trailed off as she seemed to be sizing up the Twi’lek who sat rigid in her place, “is everything alright?”
“Yes, yes of course” she replied quickly, then swallowed back her pride, “well…”
The image of Riyo folded her arms as her brows drew together, “what’s going on?”
“Is the line secure?”
“Yes of course, it’s my personal comm”
“That doesn’t make it secure”
“Kisku, what are you talking about?”
Kisku sighed and let herself relax. Perhaps she was being a tad too paranoid. She told Riyo everything that had transpired since her arrival on Ryloth, everything Orn Free Taa had said that hinted to the Empire being something more than was seen.
“Kriff…” Riyo breathed out as she looked down, then raised her hand to her chin as she stood in silence, either puzzling it out or entirely shocked. “What do you need?”
“I need to leave” Kisku said pointedly, “there isn’t anything left for me here”
Riyo shook her head, though not in dismissal, “you don’t sound yourself, Kisku”
“I— well, that’s probably not far wrong”
Kisku watched the small blue figure take a deep breath.
“Look, I was calling to tell you that I’m coming to Ryloth for the Senator’s ball in a few days” she said, then paused for a moment. “We’ll have to be careful but… I think I could get you out of there”
Days later, Kisku watched as the clones shuffled in and out of her new apartment with crates of her possessions. It was bad enough that this was happening to begin with, but to have the clones be the ones to do it felt like salt in the wound. She didn’t want these men as her personal assistants, she wanted them free. Having dedicated so much of her time to trying to see that happen, she could now feel a rage growing in her that was barely containable. She would hold it back from the clones at least, it wasn't them she was angry with.
The new apartment was bigger than her previous accommodation. It was extra space she didn’t need, and it only served to make her feel more lonely, more isolated. A small fish in a big pond. With any luck, this would be her first and final night in the place, and she could put all of this behind her.
But she didn’t want to, not really. She wanted to stay and believe that things could be made better, no matter how bleak it might become. Perhaps that was just too unrealistic.
Kisku took a seat at her new vanity and looked at herself in the mirror once the last crate had been deposited. The bags under her eyes were more prominent now, with two days of limited sleep under her belt, and she’d have to work harder to cover them for the Senator’s ball tonight. She hadn’t intended to attend the function after everything that had transpired, but now that she knew it could be her last night on Ryloth, she was more tempted to throw caution to the wind.
Without much effort of her own, her thoughts dwelled on Howzer. Much as it hurt that he’d drawn a line between them, she could understand the rationale in distancing himself. She didn’t know exactly his reasons, but the more she thought of it the more she agreed. She couldn’t bring him into her life in good faith when she knew, or at least heavily suspected that there was a target on her back. However she felt about him, it wouldn’t negate putting him in the line of fire if she chose it.
She hadn’t intending on forming such an attachment to the clone, at least not in any way that would break rules and make him feel as if he was going against his code. She didn’t want him to feel guilty just talking to her, that would hurt her just as much. It did also occur to her that just because rules were rules doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily denoted by what’s right. Though, trying to argue that would make her sound desperate.
Maybe she was. She’d not had a connection like the one she had with Howzer. Something so easy, where they were able to co-exist so simply and comfortable. She suspected it had got too comfortable for Howzer’s tastes, that was what had reminded him that he may be neglecting his proper duty to the Empire. Either way, it was inconsequential now. If everything went smoothly she’d be off the planet by daybreak the following morning. It was for the best that she would be leaving as much behind as possible.
That thought line did pain her. She hadn’t made time to visit her mother in between everything going on, and now she may never be able to return so easily. Though she’d been initially reticent to return to Ryloth, forced by her superiors, the thought of leaving it now made her chest constrict. She’d forgotten what it was like, not being so directly wrapped up in politics all day every day. She didn’t realise until returning, but while on Coruscant she hadn’t ever managed to fully switch off.
That’s what she had appreciated, and already missed, about Howzer. Around him her mind could relax, stretch to other ideas that she’d been neglecting. When he was with her, she felt a certainty of self, a sense of confidence in her mind and clarity of who she was and why she went into public service to begin with. Though she’d miss this planet and its people, she knew now with surety that it was Howzer she would miss the most.
Kisku’s eyes travelled across the room to the dress that she’d hung from her wardrobe in preparation, and despite herself, she managed a smile. One night of frivolity in the face of a galaxy caving in on itself couldn’t be a bad thing, surely.
Ostentatious. That was the word Howzer would use to describe Senator Orn Free Taa’s estate.
High ceilings, gaudy silver curtains and a vivid blue carpet that ran throughout the marble halls. It resembled the more imposing areas of the senate bureau, but devoid of any of the charm. Thankfully, the room that Howzer would have to be standing at attention in for the duration of the evening was slightly less over the top, though no less opulent with its golden chandeliers and dark wood floors.
The people, however, left much to be desired. Extravagantly dressed senators and others of political import shared sparkling drinks in crystal glasses, talking, laughing and dancing with one another. Every smile Howzer saw seemed false, an act that should be genuine reduced to a political play. He couldn’t help but think that Kisku didn’t fit in amongst this crowd. Then again, she wasn’t here. He hadn’t seen her in days, and with the celebration already in full swing, he didn’t presume he would.
The lavish party was supposed to be a celebration, an important day in Ryloth’s history, but with the way the people in front of him went on, how the discussions of late had been, Howzer couldn’t help but let indignation rise in his gut. Not a single one of these politicians cared about Ryloth. They didn’t care about its past or its present, and they certainly didn’t care about its future.
It was sickening. The wealth that surrounded him was unmistakable in a particularly vile way, a way that only highlighted their unwillingness to do right. It was all a distraction from what was really going on, the corruption that was embedded within the people who held the power here.
It was no use to dwell on it now. He’d drive himself crazy just by stewing on it all night long.
As if a conjuration of his own mind, the very best distraction he could imagine, he caught the figure standing at the top of the staircase to his left side. He was pretty sure that his heart actually stopped beating at the sight of her.
Kisku had forgone her heavy robes in favour of a silky dress that hung from her figure and perfectly framed her body, a thin scarf that laid over her neck and draped down her back, and a headpiece adorned by pearls that dangled around her face and down her lekku. The thing that caught Howzer’s attention the most, however, was the colour of her dress. It was teal, the exact shade that decorated his armour. He couldn’t help but think that she looked divine in his colour, perfectly complimenting the hues of her skin.
He watched as she gracefully descended the staircase, one hand sliding along the banister, the other holding her dress so as to not trip. She was a vision, like an angel descending from the sky, and a feeling of finality washed over Howzer. Only a second passed, and he knew that something so fickle as a rule, a law that sought to strip him of any happiness, could not stop him from being at her side.
At the base of the stairs, Kisku was greeted by a small crowd that had gathered during her entrance. Howzer had been too enraptured with Kisku herself to notice, and his mouth still hung open a fraction as he watched her navigate through the people demanding her attention. He wasn’t surprised in the least, she was the most gorgeous being here by far.
As she made her way across the room, seemingly zeroed in on something, or someone, Howzer saw how her dress plunged down to her lower back, the only thing covering her skin being the sheer, almost non-existent scarf that hung from her neck. He had to bite into his bottom lip to save from letting his jaw hit the floor.
She made her way over to a Pantoran woman dressed in maroon, whose eyes widened comically upon seeing her, throwing her arms around Kisku’s neck and almost knocking her back. Her laughter carried across the room, entering through Howzer’s ears and bouncing around in his head, the most joyous thing he’d ever heard. The Pantoran handed Kisku a drink, clinking her glass against the other as they beamed at each other. Even with her back to him, Howzer could see that this was the most she had lit up around anyone since he'd known her.
Try as he might, he could not stop his eyes from trailing down her figure as she caught up with her friend. He distantly wondered what it might be like to be close to her in this dress, how her skin might feel as he ran a hand down her spine. It felt like she was taunting him, begging him to lose his composure. He imagined it wasn’t her intention, not with the way she shunned him a few days prior, but it was working nonetheless.
He took a deep breath and dragged his gaze away, pulling at the collar of his blacks as if it might give him some relief from the heat rising to his cheeks. The hot flush of his blood rushing through him was hard to ignore, but he did his best to push it away, scanning the room and keeping track of the members of his squad that were stationed at the exit points. When his gaze landed on the auburn locks of Teddy, it wasn’t hard to notice how his hand moved in signals, eyes locked across the room.
Howzer already knew who he’d find at the other end of Teddy’s stare, so the devilish grin and mischievous glint in Oscar’s eyes was not a surprise. He couldn’t help but roll his eyes, though not without a quiet fondness. His arm raised to his lips as he pressed a button on his vambrace that would alert the two of them, and gave a short word of warning. Both soldiers instantly straightened to proper form.
Oscar chanced a glance over to Howzer out of the corner of his eye, snapping his gaze forward when he was met by an unimpressed expression. When his eyes travelled over to Teddy, he could see that he was not so easily scared. His first finger pointed to Howzer, a cheeky grin forming even as he tried to fight it. Howzer raised a brow, cocking his head in challenge, but Teddy doubled down, pointing again, and nodded his head over to the the right. Howzer followed his gesture, and finding a certain lilac Twi’lek as the object of his brother’s accusation, tightened his grip on his helmet. He shook his head at the red-headed clone and raised his vambrace to his lips again.
“Mind your post, soldier” he spoke firmly as he provided his best look of warning, “and mind your business too, while you’re at it”
Teddy’s lips parted in a chuckle, and if it wasn’t at his expense, Howzer could’ve laughed along from the joy in his eyes. Teddy and Oscar were the only two of his brothers that he could discern had not been affected by whatever shift the rest of them had undergone. Nothing about Teddy’s playful grin and Oscar’s caught-off-guard wide eyes struck him as anything different than what he knew of them. Among so much uncertainty, it was a comfort to him.
Howzer let his eyes scan the room in an absentminded sweep, taking in the scene with a level of objectivity he had lost in watching Kisku. His gaze fell on her as he finished the sweep, and he felt that focus receding again. It wasn’t an unwelcome distraction from the disgust he felt for the rest of the guests, but really he shouldn’t let himself indulge in it. He had a job to do, however tedious and flawed he thought it.
He was so lost in admiring Kisku that he missed the way her friend nodded to him, catching him in the act. She turned, her eyes searching across the room before her gaze settled on him. It froze him in his place, eyes locked with hers. She swirled her drink gently in her hand, offering a small smile to him before turning back to her conversation, but not before Howzer managed to catch the blush that tinted her cheeks.
Kisku continued to talk to her Pantoran friend until she got called away by another guest, leaving her by herself for the time being. Howzer was itching to go over and talk with her, just to be close to her in any way she would allow, despite his previous words of how forbidden it was. Before he could make up his mind to take the first step, someone else — a pale man in a dark suit that complimented his piercing blue eyes — slid up next to her, a wry smile on his lips and a playful glint in his eye that made Howzer’s mind cloud with frustration. He watched on as they settled into the conversation, noticing how the man carried it for the most part. Kisku gave him the time of day all the same, much to Howzer’s chagrin.
“What’s your name trooper?”
Howzer couldn’t help but jump slightly at the unexpected voice to his left, and he swivelled his head around to the cause. The Pantoran woman that Kisku had embraced was stood just next to him as if she had been waiting for him to notice her for some time, a curious expression lifting her features.
“Howzer, ma’am” he replied firmly.
“Please, drop the formalities” she waved her hand in a dismissive gesture, wearing a smile at the corner of her lips that, combined with her words, reminded him of the first time he talked to Kisku. “I’m Riyo”
The woman stuck out her hand, and Howzer shot a quick nervous glance to his right before shaking it firmly, a small smile of his own forming. Now that he could see her properly, he realised that he was somewhat aware of who she was. He had seen her on the holonews before.
“Now,” she spoke, something amused and conspiratorial sliding across her face, “are you actually going to go and talk to Kisku, or are you just going to stare at her all night?”
Howzer’s eyebrows shot up, and he felt his face heat under the scrutiny of the small woman beside him.
“I— uh, Senator, I don’t know what you— I wasn’t— I wouldn’t—” he stumbled through a number of poor retaliations before Riyo took pity on him and cut him off.
She caught his attention with an utterance of his name, a small smirk on her lips as her gaze lingered on the darkening flush of his cheeks, “you can drop the act with me. I saw the way you were looking at her”
Howzer’s throat was tight as he tried to swallow his embarrassment. Riyo let the half-spoken accusation hang in the air, excruciating in its implications. He shifted in his place, eyes anywhere but the figure beside him, and coughed into his tight fist, trying to come up with an excuse.
“She wants you to go over”
Howzer’s lips parted as his brow furrowed, “she told you that?”
“No” she admitted firmly, a quick shake of her head, “but I’ve also never known anybody to make her blush before”
His heart stuttered in his chest, for a reason he had to work to find. It was the idea of him being an exception of some sort, in being able to break Kisku’s composure where others had failed. His blood ran hot at the realisation. He cast his eyes back over to her, locked in conversation with the same imposing man and listening intently as he leaned back against the far wall, his head tilted towards her. When he turned back to Riyo, she gave him a knowing smile.
“Just don’t wait forever” she instructed with a hand resting at his elbow, a delicate touch that offered a sense of approval he didn’t know he wanted from her until it was given. He nodded to her in thanks before she turned away.
A determination set in as he found Kisku’s form again. A somewhat rattled sigh passed his lips, taking in the way she stood with her weight rested to one side, her hip jutting out just a little as she brought her glass to her lips. Howzer adjusted his grip on his helmet, watching the way her throat moved as she took a sip.
Kisku’s eyes momentarily left the man in her company and slid over towards Howzer from behind the rim of the glass, and he had to suppress any reaction when she discreetly rolled her eyes, mocking the man who failed to notice her do so. The corner of his lips twitched even so. It pleased him beyond measure to know that he could grasp and hold her attention from across a room, when the same couldn’t be said for someone stood right by her.
After a few minutes entertaining the man’s advances, Kisku interrupted him with a pointed finger, excusing herself. Howzer’s breath caught at the prospect of her making her way over to him, but instead he watched as she walked to the opposite side of the hall and slipped outside, cracking the wooden door open just enough for her slim frame to fit through.
Howzer glanced around the room, to Teddy and Oscar, to the dark-haired man Kisku had been subject to, to her friend Riyo. None were looking his way, so he followed in Kisku’s footsteps around the edge of the large room. When he pulled the door open, he was greeted by the sight of her leaning her elbows against the stone railing that lined the patio, looking out over the expanse of the Senator’s gardens. He had to admit that the view was stunning, but the sight of Kisku leant forwards, her dress pooling at her sides and exposing more of her skin to the moonlight, was a far more alluring sight.
Kisku’s head twinged at the click of the door closing, her lips quirking into a half-smile.
“Captain” she nodded to him in acknowledgement.
“Ma’am” he replied, a subdued smirk winding its way across his face.
A breathy laugh left her lips, her head shaking as she turned to rest her back against the cool stone, “I’m not— you shouldn’t call me that”
Howzer shrugged with a newfound sense of uncaring for what he should or shouldn’t do, “you look the part”
Kisku chuckled and drew her bottom lip between her teeth as she eyed him from beneath dark lashes. The headpiece she wore caught the light of the moon, perfectly contrasting with the warm glow of indoors that was reflected from the other side. Once more, Howzer couldn’t help but draw forth the comparison to a painting, a masterwork. He almost felt that this was one he’d seen before. It was a scene most worthy of being captured, a moment he should like to revisit, one he was sure he would.
Howzer’s features became weighted by a seriousness as he observed her, and true awe captured him enough to speak it aloud. His voice was softer, more sincere, without any great effort of his own but given by the truth of his words, the gravity with which he felt them.
“You look beautiful”
Kisku’s lips lifted carefully, a low, amused hum reverberating in her throat. Her eyes skimmed along the ground ahead of her instead of holding his intense gaze, and he noticed the flush of colour in her cheeks that she tried to hide in doing so.
“Thank you” she replied, a little too cordially, “as do you”
Howzer’s lips curved into a genuine smile at the unexpected compliment, albeit somewhat of a deflection from his own.
“Are you enjoying the party?” he asked after clearing his throat.
Kisku’s eyes flicked back to his, and she paused with her lips parted for a moment, dropping her head to the side before answering, “not really”
“How come?”
She shrugged one shoulder, her smile rueful, “not my scene”
Howzer briefly glanced inside at the outlandishly dressed party guests and the splendour that surrounded them. Kisku wasn’t like them. It had always been obvious, from the very first moment he had laid eyes on her. His gut twisted with guilt for his accusations at the lake, even if they weren’t sentiments he had shared with her.
She was so much more authentic than anything going on in the Senator’s hall. If he had to really pinpoint why, it would be that she actually felt real. Not like a twisted conjuration of some cruel god’s imagination, not a blank slate with a cavern behind their dull eyes holding nothing but contempt. That could be left to the other politicians. She was as much herself as she was a governor, and anyone under her governance would be all the more better for it. It was beyond a shame that that authority was actively slipping from her grasp, probably further still in the time it took for the thought to occur to him.
“I was thinking I might leave, actually”
Howzer’s gaze found her again, and noticed the more rigid set of her shoulders.
“Without a dance?” he raised an eyebrow in an attempted tease.
Kisku laughed gratuitously at the idea. “I don’t want to dance with any of these…” she waved her hand vaguely towards the people inside, “idiots”
Howzer chuckled, taking a moment to peer inside once more. This time he focused in on a few individuals; a Twi’leki man with narrow lips and a thinly-veiled contempt for the woman talking to the group he stood with, a blue spotted Nautolan that pulled at the cuff of their too-tight suit, the Senator of Ryloth himself who laughed boisterously as if the fate of a planet didn’t rest on his shoulders. No one was paying attention to anyone but themselves. They weren't concerned with things going on outside the walls of the ornate room they stood in.
“Would you dance with me?”
Howzer wondered to himself, having not the focus to realise his lips had formed the words and his tongue had betrayed him in pushing them forth.
Kisku cocked her head a little, a dubiousness written into her furrowed brow, though mirth in her tone, “they teach you to dance on Kamino?”
“No” Howzer said in a soft, humbled laugh, “but they did teach us how to adapt, how to learn quickly”
The crease between her brows relented a fraction, and he shrugged as if the whole ordeal was completely normal for him. It was a foolish pursuit, really. He was sure Kisku knew he was feigning confidence. He placed his helmet down on the railing anyway, then slipped off his gloves and tucked them into his belt.
“I know how it’s done. More or less” he offered a shy grin, one that admitted to his lack of practice in the skill, and held his hand out to her, “can I have this dance, m’lady?”
Kisku chuckled lightly and reached for his outstretched hand, letting him pull her towards him, “it should be ‘could I have this dance’, really”
“Hm” he bowed his head, tentatively taking her waist with his free hand, “can’t say I’ve ever asked anyone to dance before”
“Well, now you know” she smiled gently, her hand coming to rest against his chest, “for next time”
“Next time?” he asked, one eyebrow raised.
Kisku tried to suppress a smirk as Howzer led her into the dance, settling into the medium tempo given by the band inside, “in case you find yourself dancing with another member of the Senate, of course”
“Of course” Howzer parroted, his tone falsely grave, “though I can’t imagine I will”
He brought her hand up and spun her around in time with the music as he’d seen others do in his time guarding the room, and pulled her back to him so they were almost chest to chest. Her silver eyes bore into his as his hand slid to the small of her back, gently brushing her skin and witnessing the shiver that ran up her spine. As he lead the two of them further from the transpirasteel-paned doors, the dance taking form more clearly as they each relaxed into their roles, his palm pressed against the warmth of her skin, bringing her body closer to his. For the first time, he wished that he owned any other clothing but his armour, so that he might be able to really know what it was to have her pressed up against him. He’d settle for a glove-less hand against her back for now.
There was something in Kisku’s gaze, something troubled behind her eyes that soured her smile as he looked at her. Howzer didn’t know if he was diagnosing the problem correctly, but he wanted to speak his mind anyway.
“What you tried to do the other day was very admirable” he muttered, earning a sigh that made Kisku’s whole body slump towards him, resting her forehead against his chestplate.
“I’m afraid of what is happening to this planet” she admitted, “to the galaxy”
Howzer nodded, his hand sliding up her back to gently rub what he hoped would be comforting circles between her shoulder blades. She continued to let him lead her through the dance, moving her feet in tandem with his despite her collapsed posture.
“I know” he spoke quietly, “but… you can’t give up”
Kisku’s head lifted from his chest, her eyes slightly wide and startlingly close to his. She seemed conflicted, and if he wasn’t mistaken, truly frightened by something. He felt as if he could see his own soul reflected back at him in that moment, a deep rooted fear set alight in the back of his mind that would not yet be given a name.
“I feel like giving up” she told him, but he just shook his head. He couldn’t let her think this way.
“You can’t” he replied firmly, his arm wrapping around her as he slowly let the dance draw them both from the light spilling through the door once more.
“But I can’t do anything. Not as long as the Senator is here” she said desperately, her brows pinched and mouth twisted in a frown.
It was strange to see her so defeated. Howzer had only known her to be quietly confident and hopeful in a particularly steadfast way, but now she had been beaten down by the truth of the situation, and for whatever reason she was looking to him for help. He chewed on the inside of his cheek for a moment, a question forming in his mind that he didn’t know he’d like the implications of.
“Will he not go back to Coruscant eventually?”
Kisku’s eyes dropped for a moment, then found his again with a hesitance he wasn’t sure was born of just the question itself, “I suppose so”
He was quiet for another moment, then— “and what about you?”
“What about me?”
“Will you be sent back to Coruscant too?”
She shook her head, but more in dismissal than as a negative, “I’ll have to do what I’m told. Though it does seem that my days on Coruscant are over”
She seemed sure, resigned to that fact even. Howzer didn’t know why she was so certain, but he was inclined to trust her judgement on the matter.
“Then maybe you’ll get your chance”
Kisku sighed, “but you don’t kn—”
“No buts” Howzer interjected with a growing smile, aiming to lift the mood if he could, “just do what you can, right? Isn’t that what you told me?”
“Yeah” she almost scoffed the word, her lips curling slowly into an appreciative smile, “I can’t believe you remember me saying that”
Howzer offered a frown, “why wouldn’t I?”
“I… don’t know. I suppose I’m used to people just ignoring what I say”
It was a upsetting thing to hear, from anyone. The sharp pinch in his chest made Howzer realise that it was probably one of the most vulnerable things she had told him.
“Well they’re fools” he assured.
Kisku huffed a short laugh as he spun her again, not much humour behind it, “if you say so”
“I mean it” he pulled her back against him and held her close by her waist, “I never— no one ever gave me the time of day to… just talk, before you. No one saw fit to educate me about anything, most don’t even talk to me like I’m human”
Her brow creased at his words, “that’s horrible. I’m so sorry”
Howzer’s lips lifted into a teasing grin at the misunderstanding, “that was supposed to be a compliment, I wasn’t looking for sympathy”
“Oh” she chuckled in a self-deprecating manner, and the dance died down to a light sway as the music did, “right, well— you’re welcome I suppose. Although, what you described is really just… basic decency”
A scoff passed his lips, “so that’s the only reason you talk to me, huh? Decency?”
“Well, no. I—” she faltered, diverting her gaze, “it’s like I said before, you’re a good man”
Howzer just hummed in response, every nerve buzzing beneath his skin as he fought the smile that threatened to split his face in half. Inside the walls of the mansion, the musicians finished their song, a small round of applause following their final note. Kisku stepped away from Howzer with a particularly reticent expression, perhaps guilty, as if the intimacy of the moment had finally caught up with her.
“I think I’ll be going now” she said softly as the band lead into their next tune.
Truthfully, Howzer didn’t want her to leave. Even if it wasn’t in such a troubling way as the previous times, he wasn’t going to watch her walk away from him again.
“Please allow me to escort you back to your quarters, ma’am” he suggested, the corner of his mouth twitching and breaking the mask of sincerity. She gave him a hesitant and dubious look, making his smile only grow.
“You should probably stay here, no?”
Howzer shook his head confidently, his resolve firm, “I am tasked with protecting the people of this party. Should one wish to leave, it would only be proper to ensure they get home safely”
Kisku’s responding laugh was soft, not mocking. Her teeth caught her bottom lip as if to bite back a remark she’d later regret, and her eyes narrowed like she might be able to try and read his thoughts.
“I suppose that makes sense” she finally mumbled, sounding just a little less enthusiastic that he had hoped. His lips lifted into an easy smile anyway, and he gestured towards the set of steps that led back towards the front of the estate.
“Lead the way ma’am”
She rolled her eyes playfully as she strode over to the steps, “I thought you agreed never to call me that when we first met”
Howzer shrugged, brushing past the false annoyance in her tone, “maybe I just want to”
He held out his hand to her once again at the top of the stairs, all four of them, and she scoffed while slipping her hand into his to let him assist in her descent. He knew he was pushing his luck, trying to be so affectionate with her after he had shunned her for doing the exact same thing only a few days prior, but he couldn’t help himself. Especially when she seemed receptive to it.
She thanked him quietly before taking back her hand to clasp it in the other behind her back. The pair of them made their way back up through the large courtyard of the Senator’s mansion, stately trees lining the way and casting them into darkness. They settled into a comfortable silence, letting the sounds of the people dwindle to nothing as they traversed the city.
