Hector: my character fights in the place of yours/for your sake.
There are better ways to spend late winter nights.
Her blood sprays in hissing red lines across the shattered stone, and she laughs.
There are always better ways.
She circles the cage, the sand and stone shifting under her boots--boots she's had most of her sad life, boots given to her by a man she saw once and never again, that stayed with her until her ripe old age of thirty odd. The thirty odd she turned yesterday, never knowing she'd find herself in the pit. Again.
The screaming crowd swallows her laughs and feeds the air full of heightened energy--anger, excitement, rage, elation, fear. It tastes like the copper at the base of her tongue, slicked against her teeth and out the two knocked free.
And all she can think is how hungry she is. She's so hungry.
So hungry.
The avian creature rushes her. He smells of perfume, of wild jungle and open skies and exotic fruits off his breath and plumes. His claws scrape the air, winged arms beating the sand into clouds of brown. Intent is written in his eyes, in the way his plumes rustle down to his tail feathers, the shift of his muscles as his claws scrape by again.
White blinds her eyes as the beat of her heart whispers now.
She leaps up, allowing his claws messy, uneven purchase into the meat of her hips and thighs. She brings her hands up, up, up, to the jaw she'd broken with a kick from her boots, and tears the skin of her palms open as she takes hold of the lower and upper beak. The red and the pain makes it slippery, and he caws in threat of letting her fall.
But the opportunity for that has come and passed, he's caught in the mess of her belt and the fabric of her cargo pants, and can only shudder his beautiful, rainbow wings as she screams on the pull and tears the lower break from his ugly shabla face.
Blue spills everywhere. A screech that breaks her ear drum follows her to the crash into the sand as he thrashed above her. Her legs wrap around his, desperately trying to keep him from tearing her in two, and...
...jams his beak into his chest, right where she can feel his heart pulsing in the breath of violence above her.
On the edge of consciousness, and she drinks up the last dying twitches of the feathered creature.
Medics rush to the cage, extracting him with difficulty. Parts of her garments are cut away, her belt salvaged if not much else, as they move her out of the cage, out of the pit, and out of the building.
And all she can think, blinded with pain and suddenly so full, that she should've never brought him into the cantina and fed him like she did so many years ago.
She shouldn't have maintained contact like she did.
Just being around her is a danger that isn't fair. It isn't fair.
It isn't fair.
Hindsight always rests twenty-twenty in the past.
/
//Big Orange retrieved. Coming in for pickup, and cleanup.
/ One hour earlier.
She looks over to the holoscreen, to see her friend, her brother, sitting relatively comfortably in an empty cell. She estimates nothing short of an army of nameless bruisers watched him, out of view of the camera. Boss looks well enough, for the most part.
Cujo the Hutt rarely let unnecessary harm come to fit fighters, and able ransoms. And when he considered it, there was always Cujo the Bimm to pull him back from foolish ideas.
"I agree to do this, you give him back."
Another wager, another deal, another give so they could take.
A thing she hated to her very core... Yet deep in her heart, she knew that was not true--and so did they. No, she was happy to give, and they were happy to force the issue, to open the opportunity to let her take, and take, and take. All she wanted, if only she'd do this one small thing.
Kill someone with her bare hands for a blood thirsty audience who'd never, never, drink up enough.
It was always her will, the something questionable, the moral inside her who had no name, that always brought her to only hold exactly enough.
Never grasping for more, even if she was continuously hungry to keep taking, and taking, and taking.
Another thing they never stopped testing her on. Another thing she'd never rest easy from, because Hutts outlive people, and Bimms sometimes outlived Hutts, and they all had perfect, long memories.
Perfect.
"We missed you, little one."
Without her helmet on, she couldn't outright lie. But older now, wiser now, and no less angry, she still could laugh at the admission.
"I thought I made my peace." The ratted tank she wore felt pathetic, threadbare and torn.
"Would you have come if we asked?" The hutt rumbled low on his bed of simple stone, the sheer lack of extra accessory to reveal his true power and wealth felt sorely in her knowledge of him, and her knowledge of the hutts.
Her chest ached. She ignored it.
And maybe once upon a time the answer would've been a flat no. She wasn't a foolish child anymore. "We'll never know, now," she said instead. She didn't bother to hide the regret. Maybe it was her past foolishness that led them to assume this was the only way to reach her.
That wasn't an excuse.
She didn't have her comms. Didn't have her armor. Her weapons.
Still far from defenseless, but that's not why she wanted them back. His brothers, his true brothers, were coming to get him. And maybe the Cujos didn't fight fair, and maybe they expected her to do the same, but that didn't mean everyone had to.
And his brothers were very interested in his sudden disappearance.
"I'm honored you came all the way to Mandalore's system to make this easier on me." It was a struggle to contain her sarcasm, but she manages to sound at least approaching resigned. "But I don't want to catch up, and I don't want to talk."
The echo of a monster's laugh follows her words. Cujo the Hutt smiles, wide and oozing at the corners, as he motions to the pit.
"He's killed many of our fighters." Cujo the Bimm murmured sadly, as if he's pained by the deaths and not the massive monetary losses they accrued. "We thought you might want a go... having played a lovely role in the ring you dismantled so elegantly in the Inner Rim."
Who is Yain to say no?
"And Boss goes free?" She asks, just to be sure.
"He goes free."
"No matter the outcome?"
The smile falls from Cujo the Hutt's slimy face.
"You will win," he says in Basic, the first he's ever said in as many years as she's known him.
...all alone in the woods with
wolves in the dark
pleading
little red, won't you stay...?
She couldn't say no. Hell, if'n she were to be honest, she knew she wouldn't say no. Get out of the cantina, have everything set and paid for and a warm shelter with basic needs when she got back? An upgrade from the sad ten by ten under the cantina.
Multi-tasking had its uses, of course Manda knows she needed to learn, better, how to balance multiple appointments across more than simple comm-calls.
And maybe having an extra pair of hands in friendly discussion at her three would keep a comfort in a place she didn't want to admit needed filling when she crossed the long-disused tracks and into years-condemned territory. Initial reports pointed to the fifty story block as clear: completely devoid of sentient life. Just scattered remains.
Scattered... fresh remains. A dumping ground, perhaps. Maybe occasionally a deadbeat would take a short trip to cross through, or use the place as his last hit before tanking over the last Force line.
Go in, survey, use your talents and assess the place.
Easy. The Cujoe clearly needed to start her on easy, and Yain refused to give idle thought to the rage that trickled down her spine at the thought. What was she? A child, incapable of simple tasks?
Yes.
The automated lift DING'd the end of it's whisk to open on Level 99 of the Refugee District. She'd originally uploaded the coordinates to one mister Old and Scary, at an open location by a well-used and populated block--one where the clinic she funded with her extra credits found itself situated. It was public enough, open enough, and she had a delivery to make as well as more than a handful of contacts in the neighboring blocks in the event he wanted his fancy firing stick immediately.
And while some concern flitted the back of her mind at whether the man intended to show up in timely manner to the meet, she decided to deal with that issue when the time came.
Even if the time approached rapidly at the turn of the next corner, to the open-air fountain situated before the dipped and scaled up entrance of the otherwise shoddy free-clinic. Her boot heels clicked, noisy across the rotten, rusted grated metal ground, and the delivery to the clinic weighed her shoulder down to the obvious limp she otherwise attempted to disguise in bad posturing.
