“Remind me again why I had to fall in love with a soldier?”
“I seem to remember it having something to do with my soldier’s physique.”
--
A surprise bday commission for @coruscas of her Imperial jarhead Belkor and his husband, the Togruta doctor Kaati Valos, in the AU where they live together on Takodana and Nothing Bad Happens. Happy birthday, my dear friend. 💜
Belkor starts growing his hair out and Kaati thinks it's cute :3
[FICTOBER DAY 2]
I’m almost sure this is not what you had in mind for this prompt, but after what I wrote for them yesterday, I wanted to give them a happy ending. <3
Belkor belongs to @coruscas.
--
In the mirror above the sink, Belkor stared at his reflection.
When he had worked for the Empire, he never looked at himself in mirrors. Vanity, even basic self-consciousness, had been seen as a non-essential quality for the performance of his duty and therefore was not found in his programming. He had shaved himself each morning aided by the automated trimmer he had been issued, and never once in almost fifteen years had he paused to examine himself in a mirror.
It was still a struggle to recognize himself in the man staring back.
His coal-black hair had finally regrown to a decent length, at least on the parts of his skull not encased by his neural implant. After so many years with his head shaved, it was a change he was still adjusting to, but he knew it made Kaati happy to see him looking more like the man he had fallen in love with, so many years before. And since it was one of the few changes he could make with ease, he couldn’t bring himself to refuse.
Other changes were less easily reversible, most obviously the gleaming shell of his implant. The New Republic doctors had shut down the external server feeds and left him with only those internal protocols necessary for him to function, but they could not reverse the damage to his brain – the memories he had lost, the lies that were put in their place.
Even his voice had been altered, made to imitate the posh affectations of the Imperial officers amongst whom he was told he belonged. He knew, now, that the story he’d been told of his own life was a fabrication. He had never been an officer, only an enlisted soldier in the wrong place at the right time.
As he stared at his reflection now, Belkor didn’t see an officer or a soldier. He didn’t see a man at all, but a machine. Expressionless, soulless, unfeeling. Circuitry and logic algorithms. Even the interval at which he blinked was calculated for optimal efficiency.
How could a machine learn to be a husband? How could a machine be a father to a child?
“You’re awake early.”
Belkor flicked his eyes toward the door and saw Kaati standing at the threshold to the fresher, draped in a warmly knitted shawl. When Belkor didn’t answer, Kaati moved to stand beside him, his montrals brushing his husband’s shoulder.
“I didn’t hear you get out of bed,” Kaati said. “Are you okay?”
After a pause, Belkor nodded, but still he said nothing. Kaati waited. He had learned to wait for Belkor to find his words. After a short time had passed, Belkor let out his breath in a shaky sigh.
“I thought it would be…easier…by now.”
“I know,” Kaati murmured. “You have to give yourself time, my love.”
Belkor closed his eyes. “There are times I doubt…that I will ever look at my reflection and see the man I want to see.”
“I see that man, and Lena sees him.” Kaati took Belkor’s hand and placed it over the shallow swell of his abdomen. “...and our little one will see him, too. You are my husband, Belkor. You are their father. One day, you will look in the mirror and see the man we see. I promise.”
Belkor curled his hands around Kaati’s waist and bent to press their foreheads together. Kaati went up on his toes to kiss him, and the two of them embraced in the quiet darkness before dawn.
“I like your hair this length,” Kaati whispered, combing his fingers through the dark locks. “It looks cute on you.”
Belkor twitched an eyebrow. “Oh? I was just thinking it needs a trim.”
Kaati stared at him, then began to laugh – a sound that sang in Belkor’s heart. “Bee! Was that sarcasm I just heard?” Kaati swatted his husband’s shoulder and gave him a cheeky smile. “Stars have mercy on me when you start telling your terrible jokes again…”
Belkor and ISB Director Kallus belong to @coruscas.
--
ERROR 1204. INTERNAL DATA CORRUPTION. ERROR 1204. INTERNAL DATA CORRUPTION.
Belkor shook his head, sharply, as his mind began to clear of the fog and chaos. His eyes opened. He found himself in an unfamiliar and dimly lit room, with no memory of how he had come to be here. A cursory glance around the room suggested that it was used as a janitorial closet. Red and yellow lights flashed at his temples as he accessed his internal memory banks.
I am at the Bank of Kuat. I arrived with Director Kallus. I was ordered to wait in the vestibule while the Director met with Chairman Falken. A Togruta male entered…
The Togruta man and his daughter, vibrant red skin the color of cinnabar. A burst of white, searing pain lanced through Belkor’s skull.
Green. All he saw was green, a lush emerald canopy sprawling across kilometers of a wild planet, dotted with clear blue lakes and gushing rivers that sparkled like peerlessly cut gems. A village in the foothills where great fields of wildflowers painted the floor of the valley. A cottage with a garden, smoke curling from the chimney whenever he came home.
Home.
ERROR 1204. INTERNAL DATA CORRUPTION.
When the pain had receded, Belkor felt a strange dampness on his brow. He reached a hand to wipe his face and found his skin coated in a light sheen of sweat. Excessive perspiration. Memory lapses. Palpitations. Belkor did not need to query his diagnostic protocol to know that his symptoms were common indicators of a panic attack.
That is not possible, he told himself, shaking his head.
In all the years Belkor had lived with the neural implant in his brain, this was the first time he had encountered an error such as this, and the first time an error had been accompanied by neurological symptoms. What alarmed him most were the hallucinations – so lucid and real, as if drawn from his own memory. Yet he knew that no such memories existed.
“What does it mean,” muttered Belkor, gripping the gleaming shell of the implant with both hands.
A flashing notification pinged within his comms unit, and Belkor realized it was not the first he had received. Fourteen minutes had elapsed since the first. Kallus had been summoning him.
Belkor exhaled. He needed to find the Director and return to ISB headquarters where he would be able to identify and fix whatever was causing this malfunction. When he stepped out of the closet, he located a security guard who escorted him to the landing pad where Director Kallus stood waiting beside his speeder, looking irate.
“Where were you?” Kallus demanded. “I was about to drive myself back to headquarters without you.”
Belkor gave Kallus a salute. “Sir, I apologize. I was forced to leave my post due to an…unexplained malfunction.”
“Malfunction?” Kallus frowned, his eyes scanning Belkor up and down. “Are you able to drive or not? I’m already late for a meeting thanks to your delay.”
“I can drive,” said Belkor. As he circled to open the passenger door for Kallus, he saw the man’s eyes tracking his movements.
The Director regarded him in silence for a long moment, displeasure evident in his furrowed brows, before he finally stepped into the speeder. “We will speak about this later.”
Belkor inclined his head and did not speak.
When they had returned to ISB headquarters, Kallus ordered him to remain at his desk in stand-by mode until he was summoned. To anyone who walked past, Belkor appeared as though in a trance-like state, his eyes half-lidded and the lights on his neural implant gone dark save for a solitary yellow diode, pulsing at his temple.
When his meeting concluded, Kallus called Belkor into the office. The Director stood behind his desk, watching his secretary with the same cautious expression he’d worn on the landing pad at the bank.
“So, would you care to explain this…malfunction?”
Belkor blinked. “Yes, sir. Based on the error code issued, it would seem that my internal memory banks may have been corrupted in some way.”
“Corrupted? How?”
“Unclear, sir, but the error code was accompanied by intense pain and neurological distress.”
Kallus made an agitated noise and circled around the desk. “Start at the beginning. Surely something must have happened to prompt such an…episode.”
“There was a man at the bank.” Belkor paused. “An alien man and a child. Togrutas.”
Kallus narrowed his eyes. “And you recognized them?”
“I…don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
Belkor touched his fingers to the cold steel at his temple. “I have no memory of them, sir, but when I saw them at the bank…it was as if I did. It was as if I had seen them before. I do not remember leaving the vestibule. I recall only a sense of nervous agitation and an urgent desire to leave. When I returned to full awareness, I found myself in a nearby room, alone.”
Kallus pinned Belkor with his piercing gaze. “You are saying that you have no memory of these individuals, yet their presence caused this malfunction. Explain to me how that is possible.”
Belkor shifted to fold his hands behind his back. “Without a diagnostic scan I can only speculate, but it may be that I have previously seen a record of the man or the child on some server that is no longer accessible to me. The dissonance between the livefeed of currently available information and the data cached in my memory banks could have conceivably prompted a system failure resulting in my temporary impairment.” Belkor met Kallus’s gaze with his own. “I recommend sending me for a comprehensive diagnostic at the earliest convenience, sir.”
Kallus nodded, but he did not seem fully satisfied. “Very well. I want you to prioritize this. I can’t have you malfunctioning at random. Be sure to have the technician run a full reboot and data cache wipe. Lieutenant Haskins will take over my scheduling for the rest of the day. I’ll expect you in my office at 0800 tomorrow, and I want a signature from the chief technical engineer guaranteeing that this…impairment has been rectified.”
“Yes, sir.”
Later, in the diagnostics lab, as Belkor lay motionless on the steel table and waited for the ISB engineer to power down the implant in his brain, he saw the face of the Togruta girl again in his mind. Her dark liquid eyes, like pools of ink. Her gape-toothed smile. He heard a voice – his own voice, but not his voice, murmuring words that he was certain he had never spoken.
“I can’t wait to meet you, little squirt. I bet you’re gonna look just like your daddy and me.”
Belkor shut his eyes, clenching his hands at his sides until the knuckles turned white. He hoped that when he woke up, the hallucinations would be gone.
My girl @coruscas is going thru it rn so I mustered every last drop of writing motivation in my pathetic body and finally finished this fic I owed her from like three and a half years ago, to cheer her up.
Jovus Massom and Belkor Dray belong to Gigi and tbh so does this version of Kallus, featured here as the cunty ISB Director we all deserve. 😊
--
Within the sterile white-walled fortress of the Imperial Security Bureau, there was a palpable air of victory.
Publicly, the Bureau’s senior-most officers wore the costume of mourning; Harcourt Falken, one of the Empire’s largest financial supporters, had been killed in a shocking accident. The Joint Chiefs were known to joke over brandy and cigars that Chairman Falken had funded half the Imperial fleet out of his personal chequebook, and what he didn’t pay for himself he negotiated as a controlling shareholder of Kuat Drive Yards. A venerated peer of such legendary men as Governor Tarkin and Colonel Yularen, and an Imperial courtier who, rumor claimed, had been close enough to the Emperor to dine with him once at the Imperial Palace.
In private, behind closed doors, the same men who had spoken heavy words of sorrow and praise at the Chairman’s memorial service lifted flutes of emerald champagne in a congratulatory toast to the man responsible for his death.
Nowhere was the air of victory more palpable than in the offices of the ISB Director himself. For years, Kallus had endured the mockery of colleagues who claimed it was impossible, who derided his theories as a bogus conspiracy and refused to see the corruption right in front of their eyes. They would rather turn a blind eye than confront the possibility that they had given a traitor access to the highest echelons of the Imperial war machine.
Only Kallus had seen him for what he truly was – and when he finally had the evidence to prove it, oh, how he had savored the look of dumb, cow-eyed panic in the face of every man who had ever laughed at him.
Now, the only man laughing was Kallus.
With the Chairman now removed as an obstacle, every ladder-climbing pissant in Imperial City wanted to snatch a piece of his victory for themselves. Kallus let them squabble over the smaller fish while he himself prepared to spear the whale. He was determined to be the one to personally deliver the Bank of Kuat and its septillions in investment holdings into the Emperor’s hands. To ensure his success, the ongoing succession crisis within the bank’s board of directors required careful and constant monitoring – as did his rivals among the intelligence chiefs who were waiting to rob him of a second victory.
So, when he heard the durasteel doors of his office part with a mechanical sigh, Kallus did not so much as glance up from the report he was reading as he said, “What is it?”
“Pardon the interruption, Director,” Colonel Dray began in his polished, emotionless voice. “Governor Massom is here. He demands to speak with you and refuses to schedule an appointment. Should I have security show him out?”
Kallus paused, a deep frown chiseling lines in his brow. Jovus Massom, here, in Imperial City, not a day after the Chairman’s funeral? There was only one thing the stubborn old fool could be after. Kallus should order security to throw him out of the building…but after a moment’s consideration, he decided to indulge his father-in-law’s uncharacteristic display of backbone.
“No,” he said at last. “I will speak to him. Give me two minutes and then show him in.”
Dray bowed and retreated from the room, the doors hissing shut behind him. Kallus took a moment to wipe the sensitive information from his datascreen and collect his thoughts. Jovus’s appearance was not an altogether unexpected turn of events, he mused, especially if there was any merit to the rumors he’d been hearing. He simply hadn’t expected Jovus to be naive enough to march into his office and demand an audience. A thorn of irritation twisted Kallus’s mouth into a sour grimace.
As if the Director of the Imperial Security Bureau served at the whim of toothless Mid Rim governors long past their prime.
As though on cue, the doors parted again, and the proud and aging figure of Jovus Massom appeared in the entryway. Silver was threaded liberally now through his tidy coif of blond hair, and the hollows of his cheeks were gaunter than Kallus remembered. Before Colonel Dray could announce him, Jovus shouldered past the cyborg aide and into the Director’s office, his watery blue eyes fixed on Kallus like chips of sky kyber.
“You,” Jovus began hoarsely, “are a coward.”
Kallus rose from his chair, gloved hands smoothing the front of his crisp white tunic. “Governor. I wasn’t aware we were expecting you. Oriana told me your recent health problems would prevent you making the trip from Gan Moradir for some time.” With a curt wave of his hand, he dismissed Dray and waited for the doors to close again before he gestured to a chair.
Jovus made no move to sit, his back as straight as a ramrod, knuckles tightening around the grip of his cane. “I am not here to talk about my health, Alexsandr.” His gait was slow but determined as he approached Kallus at his desk. “I want to hear in your words, from your mouth, why Colonel Falken was murdered.”
Kallus arched an eyebrow. “Murdered? I don’t know what kind of rumors make their way out to the Mid Rim, Governor, but I can assure you there was no foul play. Chairman Falken was killed in a speeder accident.” Taking a datapad from his desk, he pulled up the relevant file and placed it down in front of Jovus. “There, you may read the report yourself. My own men aided the investigation and found no evidence to suggest a homicide.”
Jovus twisted his mouth in disdain, but made no move toward the datapad. “I know what the report says. It says that the forward stabilizer malfunctioned due to disrepair, and as the driver was flying under the influence, he failed to land the damaged craft safely. It says that the driver was killed on impact, and Colonel Falken was…ejected…from the speeder.”
Kallus nodded, affecting a regretful expression. “Had he accepted medical treatment from the Imperial first responders, he might have lived. He refused, and died of his injuries en route to the hospital. More’s the pity.”
Jovus uttered a bark of cold laughter. “If he refused, it was because he knew better than to trust his life in the hands of Imperial medics.”
A cold glint flashed in Kallus’s eyes. “And what reason would he have to distrust the Empire’s medical professionals?”
“The Empire has been trying to get its claws into his bank ever since the Muuns handed over the Banking Clan, years ago,” Jovus scoffed. “Are you going to pretend that the Empire had no motive to do away with him? His body is scarcely cold and the vultures have already begun circling!”
Kallus was unmoved. “Whatever the Empire may stand to gain, the fact remains that his death was an unfortunate accident brought about by the negligence of his own driver.”
“The driver – his name was Wen Tyrosii,” Jovus persisted. “He’s been flying for Harcourt since the Clone Wars and never missed a day of work. What I find curious about your version of events is that Wen Tyrosii was born with a fatal allergy to practically every recreational intoxicant available in the Core. If he had imbibed enough to be described as ‘under the influence,' he would have been dead before that speeder ever left the ground.”
As he spoke, the indulgent expression slowly faded from the ISB Director’s face. “I see that you are determined to find a conspiracy where there is none to be found.”
Jovus lurched a step closer to the desk, his face a mask of anger. “Answer the question, Alexsandr. Did you order the murder of Harcourt Falken?”
“Are you certain you wish to know the answer, Governor?”
“Answer me, damn you!”
Kallus met the man’s gaze impassively for a moment longer, then reached for the control panel on his desk with a gloved hand and flicked a small red switch, disabling the room’s audio recorders. When he was satisfied that there was no one listening, he turned to Jovus with a flinty expression, his voice no longer the polite and appeasing tone of a deferential son-in-law but the clipped, clear voice of the Director of the ISB.
“Chairman Falken was a known rebel sympathizer and conspirator,” Kallus said. “He used the bank to funnel possibly millions of credits to the insurgents and their military operations.”
“Impossible.”
“He used his connections with Kuat Drive Yards to manufacture cruisers and star fighters for systems with known rebel ties, including the systems of Alderaan and Chandrila. Through an intermediary, he was directly involved in arming and financing the network of terrorists responsible for a campaign of violence against Imperial outposts in the Outer Rim.”
Jovus looked as if he had been struck across the face. Clearly, Kallus mused, the governor had not numbered among the Chairman’s co-conspirators. After a long silence, Jovus shook his head limply back and forth. “You’re lying.”
“Am I?” Kallus swung around the desk, sidling closer to Jovus until he stood less than a foot from him. “You’re not the first to declare the Chairman’s defection to be inconceivable. Do you believe I would stand here now telling you this without evidence?” Seeing the look of doubt on Jovus’s face, Kallus pressed. “I know that you and the Chairman were…close. I don’t fault you for your skepticism. He was no doubt persuaded to their cause by one of their many lies.”
“Like the lie you told him, years ago, about who murdered his wife and children?” Jovus drew himself up to his full height. “Oh, yes. I have known the truth for a long time.”
“If you do know the truth, as you claim, then you know that Senator Chuchi brought her fate upon herself.”
“And her children?” Jovus demanded. “Tell me, were they guilty of her crimes as well?”
“Where the tree is rotten, so will be the fruit. Would you like me to shed tears over the deaths of future terrorists?”
Jovus stared. “Have you no shame? Not even the pretense of remorse? You are a father.”
Kallus sneered. “I am not the father of a half-breed.”
“Half-breed? You, who came up out of the gutters of Coruscant, you would dare use that word?” Jovus was red-faced with outrage. “You don’t know the first thing about good breeding. Have you any idea how many generations House Falken has endured? Their forebears were among the founders of the Republic.”
“The Republic and its old families were rife with nepotism and corruption, relics of a bygone age.”
“And the Empire stands upon a foundation built of corpses!” Jovus spat. “How many hundreds of worlds destroyed, how many tens of millions murdered in the name of peace and order? Your hands are stained with the blood of children and you dare to call that loyalty.”
“No – I call it my duty. You seem to have forgotten the meaning of the word, Governor.”
If ever Jovus Massom had truly looked the part of a retired fleet admiral, it was now, his countenance as austere and commanding as Kallus had ever seen him, but the fury went suddenly out of him then, his face turning white as pain radiated through his right side and down his arm. Breathless and weak, Jovus clutched desperately at his cane for support, bracing himself at the hip where the cold joint of his metal prosthesis met the flesh.
A sneer twitched at the corner of Kallus’s mouth, and before Jovus could speak, a heavy black boot lashed out and kicked the cane from under him. Jovus went down, hard, unable even to cry out as pain exploded at his hip and the air went out of him in an anguished wheeze.
Kallus spat on him. “Doddery old cunt.” The posh High Galactic accent he affected in the company of his peers was abruptly absent, supplanted by the thick broguish twang of the Coruscanti lower class. “How’s all that good breeding feel now, huh? You pompous fuck.”
The doors hissed open behind him, and Kallus turned to see Colonel Dray flanked by two of his death troopers, the sterile white light of the antechamber reflected coldly off the black carapace of their armor.
“Sir – I heard a noise and thought you required assistance,” said Dray. His gaze fell on Governor Massom, prostrate on the floor at the Director’s feet. The governor’s eyes were open but unfocused and dark with pain. “Should I…call for a medical team?”
Kallus took a moment to compose himself after his outburst, straightening his posture as the posh affectation slid effortlessly back into place. “No. No, I don’t believe that will be necessary, Colonel.”
Assured that the Director was in no danger, the troopers retreated to their posts outside the door. Colonel Dray remained, as motionless and impassive as a statue, red and yellow lights blinking at his temples as he watched the ashen-faced Jovus lapse into gasping convulsions on the imported Wrodian carpet. Kallus didn’t seem to notice that his aide had remained in the room as he paced, circling Jovus like a Loth-wolf closing in for the kill.
“What I understand that you don’t is that the Empire is the way forward,” he said in a light and reasonable tone, as though they were having a mild disagreement over wine. “Men like you and Chairman Falken – you are a dying breed, relics of a corrupt and backward Republic. I will confess that Imperial High Command rarely agrees upon much…but upon one thing we are agreed – that is past time for men like you to get out of the way of progress.”
Kallus lowered himself onto one knee beside Jovus, lacing his gloved fingers together over the pristine black gaberwool of his jodhpurs.
“Tell me,” he purred. “Did you actually imagine that if you marched in here and accused me of murdering the old man that it would make up for your lifetime of impotence and complacency? Oh, and yes – I was the one who ordered my agents to sabotage Chairman Falken’s speeder. But if I may be honest, for all that I loathed the Chairman and what he represented, I find I’m forced to appreciate his mettle. Few men have the backbone to put anything more than words behind their convictions. Now, Chairman Falken he put his convictions into action, but you…what have you done, Jovus? What have you done, other than accepting a cushy retirement posting in the Mid Rim, where you have served at the Emperor’s pleasure and cowered upon your laurels?”
Jovus opened his mouth, but the only sound that came out was a weak, strangled sound as his eyes rolled back in his head. Kallus made a low noise of disgust.
“You called me a coward when you walked into this office. But I am not the coward here, Jovus. You are. I want you to die knowing that the galaxy will remember you and Chairman Falken in the same way that all traitors and cowards are remembered, which is to say…”
Kallus leaned closer, his voice dropping to an insidious whisper in the old man’s ear:
“Not. At. All.”
Rising from the floor, Kallus dusted off his trousers with an orderly flick of his wrist. When he spoke again, his words were for Colonel Dray, but his eyes remained fixed on the man who lay dying on his floor.
“Wait an hour, and then call my wife,” Kallus said. “Tell her that Governor Massom has had an unfortunate accident.”
In the final moments before he lost consciousness, Jovus thought of his daughter, trapped in a marriage to this monster with her son, his grandson. The horrifying truth of his failure – as a father and a husband, as a friend, as a servant of the Republic – twisted like a razor blade between his ribs even as the edges of his vision went black.
