#dawnherald

He walks in and activity stops. Hands still on terminals, mouths half open and words choked out. The only one who keeps moving is the Sith lord himself, boots slamming against the metal like he’s got a grudge against it, mask hiding his face, gloves halfway up to his elbows wound tight. He moves like a predator and hones in immediately on what he wants and Dane doesn’t bother looking up, just keeps cleaning his rifle like it’s nothing to have a Darth stride through and come to a stop before your table.“You never reported back.”The room clears. Nevermind the work, they’re not sticking around to watch this. They’ve seen something similar, the last Agent Cal decided he was going to use dying a grisly awful death in the middle of the cantina. Nobody’d said a word then, either.“You received your report.” Dane’s pale eyes narrow as he looks up, finally, hair pulled back and tied at the nape of his neck, pale grey skin washed at the cheeks with colour. He doesn’t like anyone saying he’s not good at his job and the Darth stares at him from behind the mask, reaches out with the force and breaks his arm.He doesn’t scream. Can’t, with the invisible hand at his throat and Cal’s throwing a fucking temper tantrum again, so Dane kicks out and kicks the mask off him, using the surprise to pull out his blaster and aim it between his eyes. Red, corrupted skin making him so, so pale, cracking the edges of his mouth. Perpetually bloody. Maybe that’s fitting. There’s going to be a bruise where Dane kicked him in the side of the face.Cal stares, really just stares at him before he nods and turns to leave, waving his hand and knocking Dane back against the wall with a heavy thud, his head cracking against the metal, setting him to seeing stars.“Report in person next time.”Dane waits until he’s gone to curl around himself, cradle his arm and /swear/. 

They orbit each other, Twell the sun, Quo the planet. Klue’s a moon, caught between them both but always, always coming back to the start and Twell knows the power he has when he has Quocllif on his knees, when the Darth, the most powerful Sith they know kisses his way across Twell’s hip and breathes against his skin. The hand in his dark, almost midnight hair is a stark contrast and Klue watches for a while, leaning back against the wall and breathing with them, in and out.  Twell’s the sun and Quo’s the planet and Klue returns to his orbit between them eventually but watching them, seeing the way they touch and smile and rip and shred and how Twell pretends he doesn’t like the orders and Quo pretends he doesn’t like giving them-Klue returns to his orbit. Eventually. 

“Dad, will you just-” He’s not even being facetious, that’s the thing. He means it, sees Quo as a father figure and that punches him right in the chest even as he’s furious with him, with the blood running down the side of his face and the way he’s holding himself like he’s been hurt elsewhere, somewhere deeper. “No. Get in the tank.”He has to- He can’t let him get his way, he needs Klue to be okay and after a lot of fighting and pushing and pulling (and force assitance and Klue goes pale blue at that, like the blood’s drained out of his face) to get him in and settled with the mask on his face.He doesn’t sleep, he just watches Quo as he presses the button and the thing hisses closed, the ‘dad’ reverberating around in his head like the beat of a drum. —-“He’s nothing. A Sith, you can get twelve for a credit.”The backs of Klue’s boots are blood-splattered. What did he do, walk through a river of the stuff? His voice is steel, hard and heavy and Quo picks himself up eventually, staggering to his feet on his blown out knee. His first thought is Sean, crumpled in a heap to the side, the beam across his legs and no, no he can’t be hurt he can’t be, he can’t-“He’s my father.” Quiet, almost inaudible and Quo’s barely listening but it sits in the back of his mind, weights and pulleys and his heart beating heavy and hot in his own ears. “He’s given me everything. You can’t have him.”They don’t bother taking the body out of there and Sean heals. Quo heals. Klue doesn’t, but that’s okay.—-“Daddy, please-““Shh.” Klue pulls against the cuffs once more before he settles back, shaking with effort and want and something else, something that has the smile still on his face, that makes him laugh when Quo licks a warm, soft trail over his hip. The hunter wriggles, legs bound as tight as his arms and this is something Quo can give him, something he can take.The first line of blood has him gasping and the second makes him groan. Blood wells beneath his fingers and Quo smiles, watches the way the tension goes right out of Klue’s shoulders as the first cut and leans down, licking the line of the cut and closing his eyes. “Daddy, please, please I need it, I need-““I know, baby boy. I know.” 

In the end, Quo’s not even sure what he’d been laughing about in the first place. An explosion to the left and a body cartwheeling away maybe, or the flip of his skirts as Klue ran past him to shoot someone in the face, it was /something/ but Klue laughed, a half-chuckle that had Quo stopping, staring at him in utter disbelief as the last man fell to his knees and got a blaster bolt between the eyes for his trouble.“What’s up?” Klue asks, holstering his blaster and turning to Quo, concerned. The pureblood just raises an eyebrow at him in response, hand on his hip, putting all his weight onto his good knee. It has the added effect of looking sassy as hell and Klue made that noise again, that dirty chuckle that somehow grabbed his (and his dick’s) attention and- “When did you start doing that?”A blank look. Of course Klue wouldn’t know he was doing it, but his sense of humour was always a little skewed. Sighing softly, Quo took the offered arm and started walking forward again, leaning on Sean as Klue bounded ahead, blurrg trotting along behind him.“I didn’t imagine that, did I?”Shrugging gently, Sean squints at him, a beat of sweat leaving a clean track through the dirt on his face. “Don’t rightly know, boss.”“….You’re no help.” 

“Why not?” It’s out before he can take it back and Jituss is laughing at him, a quiet sound that you’d miss if you weren’t looking for it. Foxoe fidgets, slender, pale fingers working at his sleeves and Jituss watches that for another second before she puts him out of his misery. “If you were going to be in trouble for your Queen being self-absorbed we’d /all/ be in a lot of trouble. I just wanted to talk to you about your options.” Options? He has options? Jituss leans back in her chair, a lazy, feline sort of sprawl and Foxoe’s smacked right in the chest with regret over not finding women sexually attractive in the slightest. He’s sure half the Weyr’s in love with her to begin with. She waves a hand, reaching for her glass and tossing him a piece of fruit from the table. He’s always hungry; they say it’s because he’s growing but he’s sure he’s eating for both himself and Aldarath. She’s wrapped in him enough that he’s pretty sure he could never love another woman anyway, so he takes the fruit and settles in to eat. “As far as I see it, you’ve got four options. One, you can stay at this Weyr, and when Aldarath rises in her mating flight you can become one of the junior Queen riders here. You can go to another Weyr, get out from under your father’s thumb and be one of the junior riders there. You can have her eat firestone, even though it wouldn’t work and torture yourself and everyone else in an effort to render your girl infertile,” A loud /No/, both from himself and Aldarath and he can feel her quailing in his mind, as if he’d ever agree and he would not, he would never and Jituss nods like she’s learning something about him. “Or you can wait to see if she has a mating flight at all. She may not. We’ve never had a gold dragon Impress a boy before.” They didn’t seem like great options to him. Either way he was trapped in one Weyr or another just like his father would’ve trapped him in the Hold and he can’t look at her, can’t look his Weyrleader in the face. “You don’t have to decide now,” she says, not unkindly. She wouldn’t be unkind, not to anyone. He finishes his fruit and stands, legs a little wobbly. He needs to get to Aldarath, he needs to reassure her and Jituss lets him leave with a quiet parting remark. “If you can find another option, I’ll listen.” He hopes he can,  because the last thing he wants is to be trapped somewhere, especially now when he won’t be the only one. Aldarath meets him halfway on one of the balconies, halfway between totally distressed and really angry. She barrels into him, her huge head pressing against his torso and wow, her head is /bigger/ than his torso when did that happen? He wraps his arms around her anyway, as much as he can, squeezing and talking to her, rubbing his hands against the ridge of her jaw. “I would never hurt you, you know I would never.” /I know/ Of course she knows, he loves her so much he’s barely got any room left for himself and she curls around him, tail pressed against his back, forelegs wrapped around him completely. /You’re mine. I’m yours./ The only person he has left and he can feel her gratitude at the fact he thinks of her as a person first and an animal second and if that isn’t love, then what is?

“Not that it stops anyone.” Keeping herds in large forests was a good way of keeping them safe from the dragons, regardless of the tithe. Dragons ate a lot of meat; large, carnivorous animals that weren’t too good at diving, they went to the ocean occasionally for food but a vast majority came from the herds. He could see, now he was looking for it, the large swathe over towards the west where the ground had been cleared and the logging had started. They didn’t stay for long. Aldarath needed a break back at the Weyr (and a good scrubdown if she was any judge of her own needs) and K’lue looked a little disturbed, so when they land back at Csilla Foxoe voices the question he was turning over in his mind on the flight back. “If you can point out why the logging’s a bad idea, why the Weyr’s going to so much trouble to keep the place safe, won’t they listen?” “Holders tend to think they know what’s best, and Lord Holders are worse.” K’lue doesn’t sound bitter, just a little resigned as he pulls his helmet down off his head, tucking his goggles back into the fur-lined hat. “They think because we can’t grow our own crops up here we’ve got no idea what’s going on. They’ll learn eventually.” Eventually seemed a long time away, but Aldarath was already heading off to the lake and Foxoe was quick to follow, belatedly shouting out a thank you to the man who waved at him before he walked back into the keep proper.