#queueueueeuue

Palpatine was a nightmare.

Deenlark was a prick.

A small one.

After being dismissed from Thrawn’s third disciplinary meeting with the Commandant, Thrawn and his two leashed pets dutifully followed him back to quarters.

“Tell Eli how much worse you were at Taharim,” Thrass said airily. “I’ve never seen a Human cry before and I’m curious.”

“You see, he had this… special friend,” Thrass began delicately. “And this special friend decided she would rather play with me than him, and he got very upset about that. So, as a compromise, I suggested that we all play toge—“

“Thrass?”

“Oh, good day, Captain Theli,” Thrass said cheerfully. “We’re learning the central political skills of communication, negotiation, and compromise, because Ozyly-knows she will not be learning that from Thrawn.”

“I learned about Courts Martial!” Un’hee said, defending her adoptive-father.

Eli pushed back his sleeves and leaned against the bar. It felt sticky against his skin but he didn’t move. The discomfort suited him fine.

And he was already dirty anyway.

“Thanks,” he murmured when a glass of whiskey manifested before him. He took it up, raised it to no one, and downed it before ordering another.

“Rough day?”

Eli shifted his eyes to the right to see a lone woman. Her tunic, collar undone, marked her as a Navy tech... maybe Naval Intelligence. Grunt level. Probably unwinding after a long day.

It wasn’t often Eli was drawn in by female beauty, but there was something undeniably captivating about her. Thick, dark hair gathered to one side of her head cascaded over her shoulder, let loose now her shift was done. Freckles dotted olive skin and high cheekbones. Her features were severe yet delicate; most striking of all was her eyes: brown and sharp, like a predator’s eyes. And he couldn’t stop looking at the single mole dotting her right eye like punctuation to the most intriguing sentence you ever read.

But now, those eyes were softened in polite concern.

Eli huffed a laugh. “That obvious?” he asked wryly.

The woman shrugged. She said in her low, warm voice, “Maybe reconsider any impending transfers to Naval Intelligence,” a smirk twitching at one side of her mouth.

“Ha, ha,” Eli intoned. He nodded to the bartender droid as it poured him a double.

“Sorry,” she said, extending a hand. “Osprey. Jayda Osprey.” She pulled it back and said hurriedly, “Or, I can be nobody if that’s what you’re looking for. No judgment from me." She gave him an awkward smile and looked away. "Believe me: I get it.”

“No,” Eli said with a tired, half-smile. He extended his own hand. “Eli Vanto.”

Jayda’s grip was soft in his hand. She gave him a small, warm smile and released it to order a drink for herself.

“Hey,” Eli said, “let me get this.”

“Oh, I couldn’t—”

“C’mon,” Eli said, “least I can do for casting clouds over your evening off."

Jayda bit back her smile, but a glimmer of satisfaction shone through. “Alright,” she said. “I’ll let you.”

“I’m warning you though,” Eli told her. “I’m not gonna be very good company tonight.”

Jayda shifted over to take the stool next to Eli and folded her arms across the bar, wincing at the tackiness of it. “Sweetie,” she said mildly, "I’ve been stuck in a basement the last eight hours trying to make heads or tails of a bunch of binary, surrounded by guys who think BO only happens when you exercise and are very, very wrong. You are, quite literally, a breath of fresh air.”  

Eli breathed out a laugh and said, a tad nervously, “Alright then. So, you uh… you come here often?” he asked and cringed at himself immediately.

“Okay, well you were a breath of fresh air until you said that,” Jayda said, amusement dancing in her brown eyes. Eli snorted a laugh and Jayda grinned. “I’ll let you make it up to me, though," she said, her half-smirk dimpling one cheek.

“Alright then,” Eli said. He cleared his throat and waved to the bartender droid. “Can I get a…” he trailed off.

“Alderaanian lager,” Jayda supplied.

“Wow,” Eli said with an approving nod. “Discerning tastes.”

Jayda shrugged and shot him a sidelong look. “I never claimed to be a cheap date.” She mouthed a thanks to the droid as it popped the cork from her beer and presented it to her. She sighed, staring down at it. Her good humor seemed to flicker along with the cheap lights the moment her fingers touched the sweating glass.

Eli gave her a sympathetic frown and returned the question. “Rough day?”

Jayda gave her beer a sad smile and said, “More like poor choices.” She looked up at him and explained, “See, I did used to come here often. And now I’m thinking coming back wasn’t such a good idea.” She smiled half-heartedly and added, “Present company excluded, of course.”

“Bad memories or…”

“Good ones, actually,” Jayda said. “The best, even.” She shook her head to herself and took a sip.

Eli recognized the resigned set to her mouth—the self-reprimanding pinch of her brow. “Did you lose somebody?” he asked cautiously.

Jayda sniffed and nodded. “Yeah,” she said in a strained voice. “He’s gone.”

“I’m sorry,” Eli whispered.

She looked dead at him then. The wetness glimmering in her eyes didn’t make her look vulnerable or sad.

It made her look dangerous.

And when she smiled, she smiled like a knife.

Thrass stared into those cool, green eyes. It was the first time he'd felt himself reflected in the eyes of another in some time, and supremely unsettling. “Lieutenant Mittens is a patently ridiculous name," he said.

“It’s not my name,” the tooka said.

“No?”

“It’s just the name they call me to make themselves feel important by contrast," he said between flicks of his tail. "They don’t define me.”

“Why do you stay?" Thrass asked. "Surely you could slip out if you really had a mind to.”

The tooka shrugged. Tookas really could, you know. “Someone has to look after him now… and she asked me to.”

Thrass followed the direction of the Tooka’s twitching tail to a holo glinting on what might have been a pa’ino if it had the right number of keys. In some cultures you could confuse a wedding from a funeral pretty easily, but there was no mistaking what this holo was. A Human woman with dark skin and curly black hair was smiling so bright Thrass couldn’t make out the color of her eyes. But he’d bet they were as rich and warm as her smile. She was beside a man—Yularen, he supposed, but with dark blonde hair and no mustache—pulling him closer and pushing him away and laughing all at once. It was a wedding, and a happy one.

He glanced at the hook by the door. The one coat. The one pair of shoes on the mat.

“How did she die?”

“The same way most people die these days,” the tooka said. “It wasn’t convenient for her to be alive anymore so she stopped.”

“Inconvenient for whom?”

A shrug.

“So you don’t know how she died,” Thrass said shrewdly.

Another shrug. “How did you die?” the tooka countered.

“I don’t like to think about it.”

“What else do you have to do?” Mittens asked. “You can’t exactly play piano.”

Piano. Interesting. Perhaps it was true what they said—that we were close, once, we distant bookends of the galaxy. Thrass looked for Thrawn. He was in the refresher now, doing the things living people did while pretending that’s not what made them alive. From where Thrass was sitting, it was.

The tooka was more right than he knew. It wasn’t only that there was nothing else to do: Thrass suspected there was nothing else he was supposed to do. Because Thrawn didn’t listen to him. If he were meant to stay by his side as some sort of inept guardian, that was some joke to play. But Thrawn wasn’t just someone to follow, he was a reminder. A star-tag on his questis linking him back to something in an earlier document, a note to himself that said, ‘I know you’ll forget, Thrass, so when you do, go here and look. Read this again.’