No. 5 - I’VE GOT RED IN MY LEDGER
betrayal | misunderstanding | broken nose
Characters: Lana Beniko/Master Notiac Carlo(Theron Shan mentioned)
Affiliated Fic: Meet Me on the Battlefield
Word Count: 333
Rating: G
Lana shut the door behind her and thumped her head against the cool metal. She’d have slammed the damn thing if she could, anything to let out this burning fury over Theron’s betrayal. He’d tried to kill them, two of his closest allies. Of course, everyone fantasized about throwing Fynta from a train from time to time, but she’d thought…
The sentiment evaporated in another wave of anger as Lana shoved from the door to rid herself of her filthy attire. Theron had played her like a fool. He’d even had the audacity to throw that bit about Rishi back at her. Lana snorted, that had been years ago.
The door slid open in the main room. By then, Lana had moved to her bedroom, angrily ripping off her soiled garments while envisioning the balled-up fabric between her hands as Theron’s head. She held onto that rage, pushing against the serenity that preceded Notiac into the room.
“I just heard.” The Jedi folded her arms and leaned against the wall by the doorframe, watching Lana with sightless eyes. She’d been away seeking answers to other problems when Lana and the extraction team returned. “What will you do?”
“I’m going to find him,” Lana growled, shoving the soiled shirt into the laundry bin. “Then, I’m going to show Theron what it means to be Sith.”
Lana rounded on her lover, venting her anger because she knew that Notiac wouldn’t hold it against her. “I’m going to hunt him to the far edges of the galaxy if I must. Then I’ll—I’ll—”
The anger left Lana in a rush, replaced by an overwhelming sense of loss. She dropped onto the bed, face cradled in her hands. Theron had been her friend, one of the few she’d thought to trust. Lifting her eyes, Lana found Notiac standing before her, arms open to accept her in a moment of weakness. Lana curled around her lover, pressing her cheek against the Jedi’s stomach. “I don’t know what I’ll do.”
Sorely needed context: I started writing this in 2016! Post-Ziost but pre-KOTFE, Theron goes to Nar Shaddaa to catch a corrupt officer. He runs into his kind-of-ex, the Imperial Agent from Tactical Disdvantage, who proceeds to play a song that may or may not be Tom Jones' 'It's Not Unusual' eight times on a jukebox to get his attention. No, I don't know what I was thinking, either.
~1600 words
@theronshanweek-official for Day 2 - Relationships
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The sixth time the song began, a Rodian chucked a glass at Thrisc's head. He dodged it effortlessly and sauntered to the jukebox. Theron watched in fascinated horror as he inserted not one, not two, but eight tokens, jabbing the same sequence of buttons for each selection.
Then he paused by the serving droid on his way back to the bar and bought a few more tokens.
That was it. They had to speak before Thrisc got stabbed. Theron stood and drained his drink in one go - which really didn't help much due to the implant he had to regulate alcohol levels, but it probably looked cool, providing the necessary psychological boost.
A deep breath, a cursory scan of his surroundings. Theron headed for the bar in determined strides, marching past everyone else planning to confront Thrisc. The song finished again before he'd reached the other side of the room.
Thrisc wasn’t facing him, and he gave no indication that he’d noticed his presence. He tried throat-clearing. Loud coughing. An exasperated sigh. No reaction.
Theron grit his teeth and said, “Hey.”
"Well, well. Fancy running into you here," Thrisc had the audacity to purr as he turned around.
Theron’s eye twitched. He told himself it was nerve feedback from his cybernetics.
"There are better ways to get my attention," Theron said.
"I have no idea what you're talking about," Thrisc said.
"I don't like this song that much."
"That's too bad, since it's going to play seven more times."
Theron leaned against the bar counter with an exaggerated sigh. “Why ruin everyone’s evening? Did the Empire declare war on fun, too?”
“It's already a bad night for anyone who's here voluntarily, the Republic declared war first, and this is fun. Besides, I was hoping -” Thrisc swiped his tongue around his lips. “To do you a favour.”
Theron realised that they were being watched.
Watched by dozens of seedy patrons with unknown loyalties, who would identify him as hailing from Republic-space if they’d been attentive enough. And he was talking to an obvious Imperial. A Chiss Imperial, at that. Crap.
"Code phrase recognised. I completed my task without incident," Theron said, switching to a clipped Kaas City accent, extra-snooty. Most of the interested parties immediately looked away. They were eavesdropping, but at least they'd assume it was standard Imperial business, not worth the trouble of disrupting. "Shall we leave?"
Thrisc raised an eyebrow. Theron liked to think he was impressed.
"I dunno, maybe we should stay and talk a while," Thrisc replied, in a thick low-level Coruscanti drawl.
What. The fuck.
Every head in close proximity whipped in their direction. Theron continued to gape; Thrisc offered nothing by way of response but an impassive expression. Most of their audience were trying to make sense of the scene unfolding. Others were approaching the bar. Dead silence seemed to descend as tension crept to a breaking point.
Until the jukebox warbled, It's not un-usu-AL to be LOVED BY ANYONE...
What happened next was a blur. Theron heard a scream of rage from the upper floor, followed by a veritable chorus of screaming, followed by an entire live Nikto being flung over the railing and crashing through a table. The cantina exploded into pandemonium. Five different sets of people started punching each other over Thrisc's song choice, although Thrisc himself wasn’t directly involved in the fighting yet.
Thrisc ducked under the Nikto’s swinging arm and pointed nearby. Still in that damn accent, he told Theron, “Your man is there.”
It took Theron longer than usual to parse this information. He was about to say something like, My man is right here and I’m going to punch him in the mouth with my mouth then possibly my fist, when he noticed the telltale flicker of an overworked disguise generator and it (thankfully, figuratively) hit him. Kalor had been there all along.
“Really?” Theron hissed. “You couldn’t have sent a message?”
“I did. Eight times!”
----
"What the hell was that?" Theron almost shouted, once they were outside.
Thrisc blinked a few times. "Your return ticket to the SIS." He grabbed Kalor by the collar and shoved him at Theron. "He's all yours."
Theron dumped Kalor onto the ground and stepped over his unconscious body.
Theron took a deep breath and tried to see it from Thrisc’s perspective. As far as he was concerned, he'd given Theron a vital present while providing excitement and a foolproof soundtrack. It may have been one of the most thoughtful things he'd ever done.
And annoyingly, it was in danger of beginning to work, for all of five seconds. Theron couldn't have that.
"So that's it for Ziost, huh?” Theron challenged. “Dump a corrupt officer at my feet because I'm too stupid to catch him myself, wait for praise and head-pats?”
Thrisc bristled, a welcome change from his earlier attitude. "I should remind you that it was your actions which complicated Ziost so badly in the first place."
"I know that!" Theron yelled. "If you’d recall correctly, I've said so several times.”
“Yet you never actually apologized.”
“It was implicit.”
“But I have to grovel aloud?”
Fuck. “It'd be a start.” Fuck.
Something flashed on Thrisc’s expression. Dismay, danger, he didn't know.
“I didn't come here to fight,” Thrisc said quietly. They heard renewed yelling and crashing from within the cantina. “I didn’t come here to fight you,” he amended.
“You should've expected it. Or did all of your planning revolve around the most convoluted, obnoxious way to capture one guy?” Theron scoffed, briefly shoving his shaking hands into the pockets of his trousers; he didn't know what to do with them otherwise. “Wouldn't be surprising, given your track record weighing the fate of the galaxy on a single person.”
“Surro is alive. Last I heard, she was doing well. It's over,” Thrisc bit out, each syllable whittling with spite. “You won.”
“It's not about winning!” That single word had superseded Theron’s irritation, opened something raw and aching and tinged with self-loathing. “Tell me why the Sith handpicked by the Emperor to enforce his will had more compassion than you. Tell me why you've been on the receiving end of torture and abuse, but you supported experimenting on a freshly traumatized woman on the off-chance we could learn more about how screwed we are.”
“Was there an actual request buried in that, or was it just a nifty way to describe how disappointing I am?” Thrisc looked Theron up and down. “You want to do this, Theron? Fine. You fought for someone who chose to be there. But did you spare a thought for everyone dead because they were on the wrong planet at the wrong time?” Thrisc stepped back further, arms spread. “How's that for a piercing moral question?”
“You don't know anything about how I felt after I left.”
“I know everything you tried to pull during the truce on Yavin IV,” Thrisc replied coldly. “I know Imperials don't really register as people to you. You could probably only bear to be with me by focusing on how I'm Chiss.”
“Okay, two of those things aren't true. Don't bring - you into this -”
“Vitiate is an immediate threat to the Empire, and outside help is clearly out of the question. So maybe you can understand why Lana and I were willing to sacrifice one duty-bound Jedi for a shot at learning more about the monster who killed billions, trillions before that.”
“Jay was Vitiate’s thrall for months," Theron pointed out. "Kira Carsen was an Emperor’s Child since she was a kid. Why haven't you suggested experimenting on them, too?”
“That's different -”
“Why? Because you know them personally? Because you’ve looked into their eyes often enough that you'd see them every time you imagined someone else dragging the scalpel? What if it’d been Niayes in Surro’s place, huh? Or Siennh? Or me?”
“Stop it, Theron,” Thrisc snarled.
“Clever, loyal Imp!” Theron shouted instead. “So eager to encourage sacrifice unless it actually hurts him!”
“Kind, sensitive Republic lackey! So protective of innocents as long as they're on his side!” Thrisc shouted back. He caught his breath in a heartbeat; in a cooler tone, he continued, “I'll apologize for not sharing your incidental idealism when you apologize for jeopardizing an entire world over your mommy issues.”
"What are you - " For a moment, Theron sputtered angrily, unable to find sufficient words to voice his disbelief. "Why the hell do you think it had anything to do with my mother?"
Stars, he wanted to bite the condescending curl off Thrisc’s lips. “You defied literally all of your superiors to secretly send a Jedi team to Ziost. You're a Force-blind from a lineage of powerful Jedi; abandoned at birth, unable to become Jedi, then forced to work with your estranged Grand Master mother. Do you expect me to believe Ziost had nothing to do with your hang-ups?”
"I can't swing a baby gizka without hitting three Force-users or a long-lost relative," Theron snapped." I sent Jedi because I thought if anyone in the Republic was equipped to deal with the potential appearance of a disembodied world-eater, it's the Jedi.”
Theron charged forward, and Thrisc actually shrank back as Theron continued:
“The next time you want to criticize me, fine, you're probably right by default, you're smarter and more experienced and more stable than me. But do me a real favor and skip the shitty analysis."
A pause stretched between them, the first one in minutes. Thrisc’s face fell into an unfamiliar expression which Theron could only assume was distraught.
"I'm sorry," Thrisc said. "That was...wrong of me, to assume. And say. And I'm not more stable or smarter than you, not most of the time. Sometimes you're even smarter than me.”
"Great." Theron laughed harshly, turning away too late to ignore how Thrisc gulped. "If you wanna dissect something, how about why I'm attracted to emotionally-constipated assholes in variations of a doomed forbidden romance? It's like I'm trying to recreate the magic of my parents."
