#swtorfic

He wrapped the fabric around his fist, cursing himself for forgetting underwear, and crept toward the case in a crouch. He didn’t see any obvious security measures and there wasn’t time for a more thorough check. The mercs were closing in. There was nothing to do but take the gamble and hope the Duke hadn’t installed anything more serious than a burglary alarm.

  Rhese punched the glass.

  It shattered, exploding in every direction, lashing his skin, leaving tiny cuts across his face and his arms and his chest and his legs. His fist burned as shards of it buried themselves deep under his skin, even with the fabric of his pants to protect it.

  He ignored the pain, too high on adrenaline and annoyance to care. The hilt of Rea’s No Good Very Bad Idea came free from its mount with a tug.

  It seemed to quake under his touch. There was something stirring inside it, something wild and alive. The feel of it coursed up his arm, racing across his skin like electricity, calling to something inside of him, to some dormant part of his--

  Fuck.

  Rhese tossed the thing like it burned him. The hilt hardly left his hand before he felt the tug of the Force pulling it away from him, drawing it into Rea’s waiting palm. Part of him wanted to pull it back, to feel the cool, unyielding metal against his skin, to be the one with his thumb on the switch.

  He smothered that part with a feather down pillow. Let her have it, he thought, a tremor running down his spine. I’m not the crazy one in this family.

  Maybe he should have warned her. Maybe he could have saved the Duke a few million credits and all of them a lot of grief if he’d just mentioned what he felt.

  But probably not.

  Rea’s never let things like total ignorance of what she’s dealing with or the threat of possession by a potentially evil incorporeal entity stop her before, and he doubts she would have started today. He doubts anything would have kept her hands off that thing once she realized she had an excuse to try it out. He remembers how she’d looked at it on their tour, with that hungry glint in her eye, the gears of her scheming little brain turning so fast you could almost see the smoke pouring from her ears.

  Things would’ve turned out the same, no matter what Rhese did or didn’t do. It was already too late for them the moment Rea laid her eyes on that thing.

  She barely closed her fingers around the hilt before the blade was igniting in a shower of sparks.

  If you could call it a blade.

  It was a rope of electric blue light that fell from the hilt in long coils, graceful and deadly, crackling as it melted through the carpet and into the marble floor beneath.

  Rhese had heard of lightwhips before, but never expected to see one with his own eyes, much less one that still worked. He hadn’t thought any still existed considering how badly the stories about them always end.

  And now they have another story for the list.

  Rea gave the thing an experimental crack, sending sparks flying as the thong streaked wildly through the air, a blur of electric blue that lashed across pillars and walls before snapping against a statue of the Duke’s great-grandmother, neatly severing the top half of her marble head. It shattered against the floor as the whip fell limp, leaving trails of lime scarring in the marble as it slid slowly to the ground.

  The flow of blaster fire stuttered, some of the mercs evidently asking themselves what the streak of light scorching its way across the hall might mean for their plans. He doubted any of them were scholars of esoteric plasma weapons, but you don’t survive long as a mercenary without some sense of when the winds of fortune have turned against you.

  Rhese ducked back behind his pillar before Rea made another crack. His night was bad enough without a firsthand lesson on the relative effectiveness of an ancient lightwhip against bare human flesh. He tried to shake the shattered glass from his crumpled pants, but it was no good. Tiny slivers were tucked so deep in the fabric he doubted he’d ever get them out.

  He wondered if he shouldn’t just put them on anyway; he wondered if a little pain wouldn’t be worth sparing himself the humiliation of going hand-to-hand against a dozen armed and armored mercs while his dick flapped in the wind. Then he remembered whose hands would have to dig all that glass out of his balls later and thought better of it.

  With another sharp crack, Rea brought the whip twisting back toward them, lashing wildly between walls and statues and--

  “Fuck!” Rhese swore, rolling out of the way just in time as the tip of the thong sparked against the pillar where his head had been not even a second ago. “Can you maybe try not to kill me?” He shouted.

  “Don’t get your panties in a twist,” Rea laughed, then paused, narrowing her eyes at him. “Where are your panties?”

  Rhese glared back, determinedly ignoring the blush creeping from his cheeks down to his chest. “You focus on the guys trying to blow us up. Let me worry about my panties.”

  “You want my shirt?”

  “No!” The only thing worse than going into a fight with his dick in the wind would be going into a fight with Doc’s shirt wrapped around him like a diaper.

  Rea shrugged.

  And then she was gone.

  She soared through the air, bare-assed and gleeful, cackling as she spun the lightwhip into a whirlwind of a shield. Blaster bolts bounced off it in every direction, blue and red blurring together into a haze of purple light that surrounded Rea like a halo.

  He’d had every intention of helping, of taking advantage of the distraction to drop some of their attackers as mercifully as possible, or at the very least without having to bisect them. But then Rea landed among them, whip lashing, and he watched in abject horror as it tore through their bodies and the walls as easily as if they were flimsi. He watched it snap and whirl and crack with abandon, striking like lightning at anything within twenty feet of his sister.

  Before Rhese could decide if saving people who’d come here to kill him was worth the risk of Rea cutting something from his body he’d much rather have attached, a terrible crack echoed through the hall. A column, gouged and abused by the slashing of the whip, crashed to the floor between them.

  The columns, as it turned out, were not entirely decorative.

  The ceiling groaned where the column had stood just moments before, large cracks splintering out like a spider’s web from the place where the column broke away. Dust and debris poured from the crack, and the alarms finally began to wail as other cracks echoed through the hall, the other columns straining under the load.

  Rea’s laughter and the sharp snap of the whip grew distant as the columns crumbled, and Rhese knew what was left of the mercenaries had tried to run. He knew she was giving chase.

  He dodged chunks of marble and bits of gilded metal as he scrambled through the collapsing room, columns and pieces of ceiling smashing against the floor in turn. His nakedness was forgotten, and he hardly even felt the shards of glass and broken rock buried deep in the soles of his bleeding feet.

  The nakedness is the thing he’ll regret most later, when he sees himself in the holos, dusty and bleeding and wearing nothing but a too-small censor bar over his genitals.

  He follows the path of destruction, hardly noticing the household staff and other guests scrambling past him to escape the building. Definitely not noticing the way they were noticing him, running through the halls with his wang in the wind, screaming bloody murder at his sister.

  It is not one of his finest moments.

  He thought it wasn’t one of Rea’s either. As he was running through the halls, deflecting crumbling chunks of stone and durasteel with the Force, he was so sure she’d been possessed by the sweet pull of chaos he’d felt inside that lightwhip. He was sure that this time, she needed to be saved.

  As usual, he’d been wrong.

  Rhese heard a second explosion just moments before he spilled out into the palace’s rear garden, where the mercs and all their reinforcements were trying to clamber past each other through a hole in the outer wall that had not been there that morning. Rea was there too, strolling toward them almost lazily, snapping her whip in arcs so graceful she might’ve been making them her whole life.

  It’s only then Rhese notices how there aren’t bodies and bits of bodies littering the yard. Only then that he realizes he hasn’t seen a single cut up corpse since the mercs she dropped at the very start of the attack.

  It’s only then, standing in the courtyard ass naked and bleeding, with household guests and staff pouring in from every direction, their holocams live, that Rhese realizes what a complete and total dumbass he is.

  Rea was never possessed by some dark force of chaos trapped inside a lightwhip. She wasn’t murdering mercenaries left and right in a fit of uncontrollable bloodlust. She was putting on a show. With her lightwhip and her crazed laughter and bare-assed acrobatics, she was just trying to scare them off.

  And he fell for it.

  “Fuck,” Rhese swore. Again.

  Rea turned to him, a satisfied smile on her face as the lightwhip fell to the ground beside her in perfect coils “You okay?” She asked, the triumph in her eyes turning quickly to worry.

  “I’m fine,” he lied.

  A voice from the growing crowd shouted, “Yeah you are!”

  Rhese felt another blush rising, setting his chest and the tips of his ears on fire. Laughter spread through the courtyard as he stood there, paralyzed by his own embarrassment.

  Rea, taking pity on him for once in his life, stripped out of Doc’s shirt and tossed it to him. No one would ever laugh at her nakedness. He wasn’t sure what the difference was, but it probably had something to do with how she would never blush about it.

  Rhese’s entire body was flaming red by the time he managed to cover what remained of his dignity.

  And then, as they stood there together, filthy and bloodied and naked, the entire east wing of the Duke’s palace finally collapsed.

  Rea watched it crumble with a smile on her face.

  “You know,” Rhese observed, thinking of how gracefully she’d lashed the lightwhip back and forth when she was menacing the mercenaries out through the wall, “you didn’t have to destroy the whole thing.”

  “Don’t you wonder why the mercenaries came to kill him in the first place?” She asked.

  “To kill him?” Rhese stared. “I thought they were here for us.”

  Rea rolled her eyes. “They would’ve brought bigger guns if they were here for us.”

  That was probably true. Mercenaries didn’t stay mercenaries very long if they were stupid. “And you think they were after the Duke?”

  He was a foolish, frivolous sort of man who was easy to dislike, but Rhese had difficulty imagining what he might have done that would be worth killing over. He didn’t even have much of value to steal outside of the palace the mercenaries had clearly planned to destroy anyway. That and the lightwhip they likely hadn’t even known about.

  “You remember what he said this morning on the tour? About his family owning this place for centuries?”

  The Duke had bragged about that quite a lot, and the fact that he’d doubled the palace in size during his time at the head of the family. Rhese nodded.

  “He’s selling slaves,” Rea said, watching the Duke stare at his wrecked home in abject horror. “He used his own product to build the east wing. But our friend there’s not a very good salesman, and his supplier isn’t happy with him. This is what a negative performance review looks like in the slaving industry.”

  Rhese thought for a moment, frowning. “We were never here to negotiate for a listening base on his land were we?”