— SHOOT HIM DOWN〔nar shaddaa [ten leagues] /// 3954BBY /// gray && ten 〕
The lights were less flashy the lower you went in Nar Shaddaa. A hub of criminality, there was a difference between the criminality of the rich and the criminality of the poor, and the Smuggler's Moon reflected that like none other. In a way, it reminded Gray of Taris — a gleaming city that turned darker, seedier, poorer the lower you went. What Nar Shaddaa lacked was the openly warring gangs, the warmth of family, and the monsters… ah, yes, the monsters.
But Nar Shaddaa still was all it was regardless of how low you went; lively, loud, dangerous. By the time he'd arrived at the cantina he usually went to, two noses had been broken, and a blaster-holding hand lay in a gutter somewhere. A normal day on the moon.
Music assaulted his ears as he stepped into the cantina hidden beyond a nondescript door, up-beat, played by a group of non-humans, origins which he couldn't make out through the flash and flood of the lights, accompanied by the general dim atmosphere apart from them. The occasional lights only made the place that much darker. Gray was about to step towards the bar to get a drink when a face crossed his field of view — the sound of a blaster, the groaning of rusted metal, the white-hot pain searing the inside of his skull, the blood… the blood… and a face.
A light burning into his eyes and passing him again brought Gray back to Nar Shaddaa. The music that had been exchanged by yelling, fighting, screaming came back in with full force. His leg ached, seared, burned, even when there was nothing biological for it to feel pain. Circuits didn't have nerve endings, the pain he felt was an old pain — pain he felt after a nightmare, pain separate of his body and the leg he'd left on Taris that day.
Something red stirred in his stomach and moved his feet for him, even when Gray made eye contact, puppeteering his hands towards the man's shirt, guiding his fingers to clench around the fabric and pull. “Mandalorian,” Gray snarled at Ten Ordo, now a symbol of the bloody murder of his family by the Neo-Crusaders all those years ago.
