#ordomaze

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Maze doesn’t quite connect the paper cup of caf to his right to Ordo’s momentary absence from the room until he’s half-way through his drink.

It’s early morning: watery sunlight comes in through the row of windows at Maze’s back, shines on the dust motes within the room, makes them dance. It’s a morning like any other, and they’re going through their respective inboxes in silence that while Maze wouldn’t necessarily call companionable it is nonetheless—comfortable. Almost comforting. Ordo sits to his right, half a dozen datapads in a tidy little pile at his side, and he frowns down at his terminal, his ungloved fingers moving quickly over his keyboard.

When Maze nudges him under the table he scowls down at his screen and doesn’t look up. He moves his ankle out of Maze’s reach, and his typing speeds up.

“What.”

“Thanks,” Maze says.

The typing stops. Ordo blinks up and at Maze, his scowl softening.

“What?”

He looks so genuinely confused. It’d be cute if it wasn’t so—awkward. Maze clears his throat.

“For the caf,” he replies. Ordo looks at him for a long beat, face blank, and then he blinks, looks away. He shrugs and turns back to his work. 

His ears are pink.

“Next one’s on you,” Ordo tells his screen. 

“Okay,” Maze says. Ordo presses his lips together, shoulders lifting towards his ears.

Maze glances back at his screen: a new message appears in his inbox with a cheerful little noise. He opens it with a sigh—it takes him embarrassingly long to understand what it says, the words and their meanings blurring together.

Okay. 

His caf is lukewarm and bitter and full of grounds. Maze takes a sip and attempts to scrape the acidic aftertaste off his tongue with his teeth.

Maze sneaks a glance in Ordo’s direction: he’s already staring at Maze from the corner of his eye. He blinks and looks away.

Okay. 

Ordo grits his teeth. If this were any other situation, he’d be fine.

He shifts his weight and glares across the alley, to where Maze is standing, at the figure behind him and the blaster pressed into the curls on the side of his head. This bastard bounty hunter they stumbled onto also has a tight grip on the other side of Maze’s face, tight enough it might bruise.

“Now, now,” the bounty hunter laughs. “Don’t want anything to happen to your buddy here, do you?”

If this were any other clone, besides maybe his brothers, Ordo wouldn’t care about the danger. He’d fight this annoyance of a bounty hunter and if the other clone got shot that’d be a waste, yeah, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world. If it were his brothers, well he’d rage, but he’d be able to go on.

But this is Maze.

He hasn’t thought about it before this moment, but standing in this alley, he’s not sure he can handle  what happens after he rips this shabuir’s throat out.

The bounty hunter scoffs. “You clones are all the same.”

Maze is grimacing, pressing his face into the tight grip to ease off the barrel of the blaster. He’s keeping his arms down right now, but the hand under the blaster is spread. He has the strength and the smarts, he can get out of this on his own. With minimal chance he’ll end up a smear against the wall.

Ordo can’t take that chance.

“Sounds like you really don’t want us to go looking into whatever you just got out of,” Ordo drawls. He breathes in, the bounty hunter’s attention focuses on him, Maze’s arm bends and his hand hovers just out of the limited view of his captor.

The bounty hunter scowls. “Nothing for you kids to go poking your noses into.” His fingers dig further into Maze’s cheek.

“Right,” Ordo drawls. He steps forward.

The bounty hunter’s finger dances against the trigger. “Keep yourself well and back,” he snaps. His fingers spasm and Maze grimaces in pain as his hair catches.

Ordo holds his hands up, makes a show of taking half a step back. “Just hand ‘em over and we’ll get out of your way.”

The bounty hunter’s scowl morphs into a sneer. “Yeah, yeah. Like that’ll work.”

Ordo keeps his eyes trained on the bounty hunter’s face. In the dim light, he can see that his face is dirty, caked with blood and muck already. Whoever he killed put up a fight. Whoever he killed wasn’t a proper bounty, either.

Not that Ordo cares. All he cares about is Maze, right now.

He breathes.

Maze brings his hand up quick as a bolt, grabbing the bastard’s wrist from the back and levering it forward.

The blaster goes off.

The bounty hunter hits the ground head first, but there’s the stench of scorched hair, of scorched skin.

“Maze!” Ordo yells, already running forward.

Maze is hunched over, one hand pressed against the side of his head where the blaster had been against, his eyes glinting and glassy even in the dark of the alley.

Everything almost seems to go black and white, grayscale, with violent red splattered against Maze’s hand. For a moment, the opposite wall of the alley, too. Ordo pins the bounty hunter who is already trying to get back up, his boot against the bastard’s wrist.. “You made a big damn mistake,” he snarls.

“Ordo! I’m fine!” Maze shouts. “It’s just a graze!”

Ordo takes the bastard’s own blaster and aims.

“Ordo!” Maze is angry. Oh well. “Ordo shut up and just get him in binders!”

Ordo snarls at the bounty hunter, at the sudden stink in the alley. He breaks the blaster with his hands, tosses Maze the pieces. Hears Maze fumble with them.