Zey had been feverish and listless ever since that night, his skin pale and beaded with swear and his appetite nonexistent. When Maze stood near him he could feel the heat radiating from Zey’s skin, and when he looked the older man in the face it always took him by surprise, how hollow and faraway those sharp Jedi eyes were. Maze could remember first meeting Zey, and being so taken aback by how Zey’s eyes always seemed to find his through the screen of his visor, unerringly. Even when the fever broke, even when the bruises faded, even when they made it to Mandalore and talked Skirata down and were safe at least for a moment, the wounded air never left Zey and he never quite met Maze’s eyes the way he once had. If no one would talk to him he only sat quietly, lost in some private world.
It couldn’t have been easy, Maze thought. Losing everything and everyone, and feeling all of it lost in that way Jedi were said to, half in each other’s minds.
They had been at the compound for six days. Zey hardly left the rooms Maze could only think of as borrowed, or more likely rented; he was sure Skirata would have wring a pound of flesh from them for his clemency, one way or another.
The voice, and the niceness of it, startled him out of the funk of his thoughts, and he looked down to see the blue Twi’lek girl. Laseema. She’d crept up next to him, which said a lot either for his distraction or her ability to go unnoticed. On the counter the caf machine finished spluttering out hot liquid with a pleasant chime.
Maze coughed and focused on pouring out two mugs of caf. “Just fine, ma’am.”
Laseema smiled. “Looked like some serious thinking, just now.”
“Not from me,” Maze said. He stirred a spoonful of sugar into one and then crossed the room to the conservator for the cream. Laseema loitered behind him and snagged something just before he closed it; when he turned to put the cream back in the conservator she was leaning against the counter opposite, eating pickled jogan flowers out of a large jar. She smiled again, mouth full, and wiggled her fingers at him as he left.
It was easy to creep around Kyrimorut as long as you didn’t have to open any doors, which Maze approved of in a general sense; a silent door was a barrier to a secure dwelling. Some of the doors were hinged, and creaked; others were sealing blast doors, which never failed to open or close without a hiss and a hard whoomph of air. Maze really wished that they didn’t. Every threshold he crossed felt like he was blowing his own cover, as if one of Skirata’s yes-men were waiting to ambush him at any moment with cries of self-righteous outrage; maybe the man himself was lurking, ready to yell himself purple in the face and brandish about that fucking three-sided knife.
Even Zey looked up when Maze reentered their quarters. The doors were that loud.
“Caf for you,” Maze said, crossing the room to sit next to Zey on the bunk. “Not too much cream.” He passed the cup over, and Zey wrapped his hands around it with a sigh.
“Thank you,” he said, bowing his head over it to inhale deeply. Maze watched his shoulders rise and fall.
“It’s good,” Zey said eventually. “That some things stay the same.”
One hand was resting on his thigh, the other cradling the cup of caf. His eyes were closed; Maze looked openly at the back of his hand, thought briefly about touching it, turning it over and tracing the lines on his palm.
“It is,” Maze agreed. “Brings things back, doesn’t it?” If he closed his eyes too, with the smell of the caf in the air—his with sugar and Zey’s with a little cream—they could be back in Zey’s old office, slogging through a backlog of paperwork together, or in the break room, watching the machine snarl and spit, trying for just a few minutes to ignore the responsibilities waiting for them on the other side. Maze could remember the anger and guilt and worry he had felt, the fierce and bitter sense of injustice that had leapt into his throat so often then—or rather, he could remember that he had felt it. The smell of the caf he shared with Zey only brought back the feeling of the place, the familiar halls and the familiar faces that populated them, the warm light of Zey’s desk lamp when they had worked late together.
“Memory is a funny thing,” Maze said. The heavy feeling that had been floating miasmically around his lungs for days abruptly crystalized into a sharp ache in his throat. He looked up, and met Zey’s eyes. They were sharp and knowing and sad.
SEND ME A NUMBER AND I’LL WRITE A MICROFIC
