May 21, 2025
please don't eat my soul writing demon i'm working i promise
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please don't eat my soul writing demon i'm working i promise
Luci: Ever heard of a writer's demon?
Bean: Hm. So, writers have demons?
Luci: Oh yea, most of 'em have dozens!
Bean: And the demons...help with writing?
Luci: Sure! We also cause depression, self-doubt, insomnia, suicide, and...drug addiction. The writer's life!
Bean: Uh, I don't know...
Luci: Eh, you're no writer anyway. Nobody gives an elf's ass what you gotta say about your trite little life.
Bean: Up yours, yes I am! *scribbles madly*
Luci: Ehhh, ehhhhh?
Bean: OK, you can stay.
Luci: That's a good start, but if you want to be a real writer, you need to procrastinate a lot more.
...
Luci: Wow, you gotta read this guy's story! It's a lot like yours, but better.
Bean: *grumbles*
...
Luci: You know what would really get those ideas flowing? A nice long nap!
Bean: Oh yea, good idea...NO!
...
Luci: A little more suffering for your art, and you'll be good to go!
I’m supposed to know where my novel is going?
Beech I make a plan for a chapter and three sentences in that plan is ABSOLUTELY WASTED
I’m over here like, “Hey yeah MC you should do this next.”
And my MC just says,”Pfft! Yeah right, that’s not what happened. Write it properly.”
And then I go into a weird haze of writing mania and wake up three hours later with 3000 words and an entire subplot that I had no intention of having happen.
Run Til You Fall Apart
Final Word Count: 7215
——
It’s hard to believe that it's barely been a month since his life came crashing down around his ears, just a little over if he hasn’t lost full track of his days. It’s hard to tell sometimes, when the hours drag and the pressure at his skull feels like it’s going to cave it in. It got like this sometimes, when the stress got to be too much, but then there were always smiling faces and warm laughs and those last few years-
He picks at the hem of his cloak as he waits for the telltale sounds of the thrusters coming out of hyperspace, fraying the edge slightly under the plucking of his nail. This is a risk, an incredible risk that could end with them both executed on the spot, and the chances of them even finding what they’re looking for are slim, so slim. He regrets agreeing to it, regrets suggesting the ways to speed them along. It could be a trap, it could be nothing at all, and here they are, careening after it with nothing but hope.
He snaps off a string, switches to picking at his nails instead. Everything seems suited to drive him off the edge, to pull at the strained corners of his mind, clawing at the walls he’s built over the course of more than a decade of handling all sorts of unpleasant characters, struggling to bring peace to a galaxy that wants nothing but to drown in its own blood. His body still aches with the phantom pains of running, of fear, of agony that both was and wasn’t his; even now it hurts to strain the radius of his vision, to try to push it beyond the surface level of his sight. Perhaps it’s better that way, to only see the brimming layer of emotions around him, to not see through more than the nearest layer of walls, to not try to push her that gives him her power. If he pulls too hard she may shatter entirely from him, leave him dark and desolate and alone, and he thinks that would break him entirely, and so he aches and worries and barely sleeps, because if he sleeps, he will dream.
In his dreams there are memories, hazy things of light and warmth and soft touch, slowly being strangled by a desolate cold. He wakes up frantic whenever he dreams, fighting the urge to sob, to curl in close to himself and tremble, allowing his own sorrow to finally take hold. Phantom frost always clings to his fingertips, to his throat, a vice around his heart. It wants him to crumble, to give in, but he can’t, not now, not when the ache remains, when there is so much at stake.
The ship shivers as the thrusters power down to a lesser strength, and he pushes to his feet, curling his cloak a little tighter around himself. He sighs, unhappy with the shape of the clothes beneath despite himself. They need to find the end of this gambit soon, find somewhere to hole up, somewhere where he can find new clothes that fit, new binders that aren’t the one he was wearing when he fled, that aren’t worn and old and fraying. This one makes him think of nervous hands, sparking ideas, quiet vehement beautiful-
He winds his way up to the cockpit, following the call of the rage and sorrow that twists and bites through the air like living beasts, snarling and clawing and barely contained by a vicious sort of determination, stronger than he could ever be. He makes no attempts to silence his footsteps, gives them plenty of time to hear him coming, their breathing ragged and sharp as their hands dart from their face to the controls, stubbornly refusing to admit their grief, even though they know he must see, and they don’t speak of it as he settles into the co-pilot’s seat, listening to the sounds of the ship as they break through the atmosphere and begin to descend towards the city.
He knows when they come close. Jedha lets him know, a beacon burning bright. It’s dreadfully ironic, for all the planets he’s seen, all the beautiful places he’s had described to him, this is the one he suddenly wants answers for, and this is the one he’ll never get. They glance over their shoulder at him, but they say nothing of his reaction, not even when they find a decent landing bay and he begins to tense in his seat. Fuck.
He can feel it through the walls of the ship. There’s something about the planet, something about the city, as if someone has layered over his senses, brightened them, made them echo. It compounds the ache in his head and he reaches up to grab his companion’s arm when they move to stand. They look down at him, calculating and sharp, so keen he can practically see it hanging around their shoulders, and then they pull him to his feet, steadying him when he stumbles.
“Think we should do a lap of the city, keep an eye out for any clones. I know I can pick one out of a crowd damn easy and they’ll stand out a lot more than anyone else. If we don’t spot anyone we come back to the ship, cheaper and faster than finding anywhere else to sleep.”
“Works for me. I’ll look as well, see if anyone we pass in the crowds seems likely. I would recommend starting on the opposite side of the city from the temple though.”
They pause with their hand on the controls for the exit ramp, looking to him.
“Why’s that? If it were me and I wanted people to have somewhere to find me, I’d go to the Guardians.”
“No, I know my warlords. If they aren’t already watching any temples or places that hold any form of significance, they soon will. The Guardians would be happy to protect any wayward Jedi even if we’ve all long since abandoned this planet but actually going and hiding amongst them would put them at risk. I wager our messenger is hiding out as far from the temple as they can manage.”
“Hm. Yeah, makes sense. Bad idea to put your civilians with your timebombs.”
“In so many words.”
They press the button for the ramp, and he suddenly understands the feeling in his chest, the echo in his mind.
She is here, and she sings. The city is ice and dust and ancient things, life and death crowded together with her choir growing crystalline beneath the surface and it sends his vision wavering in patterns and lines, his breath torn from his chest as the very ground thrums and pulses with her power, with the faith that remains in the people that stayed even when her pupils did not. It is exponential, elemental, and he thinks for one strange iridescent moment that this must be what it’s like to see color, to hold something in your hands and know what those with eyes would call it in their tongue.
Something snaps in the tangled snarl of dead branches that make up his ribs. He laughs. When they look to him, surprised and confused, he smiles back, all broad and clever and political, laughs some more at the way their distaste hisses like a riled nexu, their face crinkling up in overplayed symphony. He softens it, gives them a familiar tilt of his head, the man they know instead of the diplomat he was. The resonant chorus still rings in his ears.
“Let’s get moving. You lead the way?”
“Yeah. Don’t need you getting us lost. C’mon.”
He follows them down, waits patiently nearby as they pay for their place in the landing bay, soaking in the different auras around him, how bright and varied and vivid they are, as easy to read as those he used to know, their emotions sparking and clashing and intertwining, drawing him in. He barely even notices that the pain in his skull is gone, that his steps have begun to pull towards the temple, drawn to the place below, to the caverns beneath that she must surely curl deep in, humming and purring and waiting for him, tempting him to go there, to sit where she can rattle through him and shake apart the precious few grips on his sanity he has left.
A strong hand grabs his own, long fingers biting ragged nails into his palm as they force him to hold the cup of their arm, the other coming up to snap just in front of his face, breaking his trance.
“Hey. You good? Shit I was joking about getting lost.”
He swallows, shakes his head, then does it again when he feels the haze still clinging to the edges of his mind.
“Sorry, sorry. I...She’s strong here. I wasn’t expecting it. Let’s go.”
“Yeah. Let’s go.”
They keep their hand on his for a minute, encouraging him to hook onto their arm, and he does so willingly, letting them lead the way through the streets, further and further from the gaping maw of the temple until the draw of the melody becomes a little bit less, the reverberation of his senses in the air a little more dulled. He gives them a reassuring squeeze when he feels something close to center again and they drop their hand, though they let him keep ahold of their arm, let him follow them like a blind man towards a market full of bantering barter, bustling trade, auras mixing and melding and sliding off one another as they work to find an even sell. He cultivates the aura of his companion, carves it out from the rest, watches it spark and sputter with patterns of calculation and debate. Their eyes are sharp, trained, and they snatch up every face, examining it before spitting it back out again, unrecognized. He uses them as a center and searches through the swell around them, looking for anything that might call to him, might play a familiar rhyme. For awhile, there is nothing, and they reach the edge of the market, fully ready to continue further on.
Then something passes at the edge of his vision and his heart nearly stops dead because it is familiar and it is shattered and it is angry and for one beautiful wrenching moment he shifts and shudders and thinks it’s him he’s here but then he knows because it’s not quick and it’s not biting and it hurts more than anything before but it is-
“To the right, just about to leave the market down the next street. A clone?”
Their gaze snaps to where he’s described, their short braids cutting through the mists of their aura like blades and he knows the second their eyes catch the sight. He keeps up as their step changes, turning them to skirt the stalls.
“Yeah, older, in some Corellia-type stuff, but they’re definitely a clone. Shaved head, walk like a soldier rather than a smuggler. Could be our bandit.”
“No one with them?”
“Yeah. Message called for two, but I doubt they’re going out together. Risky shit right about now.”
They follow at the furthest distance they can, marking off whenever one loses track of their new target, dodging back and forth to avoid being spotted, distrustful of anything but a trap. It tugs uncomfortably at his sight, trying manage without straining, trying to give them the clearest descriptions he can, but they succeed, closing in when the clone ducks into a doorway along a line of many, one of the hundreds of old places turned crowded apartment, opening and shutting the door with an awkward moment of fumbling that speaks to a newer living space. They approach, slow and cautious, and his companion lets go of his arm to stand by the door, watching for any hasty exits as he lets his sight leech through the wall, looking inside to find the clone yet again. He sees him, and one other.
The tension leaves him all at once, forced out in a single disbelieving breath.
“Of course.”
Confusion sparks and glitters, demanding an answer as he comes to join them in the doorway, setting out trying to make his clothes at least slightly more presentable. They give him fifteen seconds before they give him a firm kick in the shin.
“What?”
He straightens his cloak, squares his shoulders, wants, as he often has recently, desperately for his decorative eye-bands, rather than the makeshift sash he has been using.
“He’s inside, with our second person. I know who they are. They’re trustworthy.”
“You’re sure?”
He nods, reaches out to give them a firm squeeze on the arm, then knocks. Inside, the two auras that were melded comfortably as only a deeply-connected pair can be, relaxed and soothed, go tense and sharp. He watches patiently as one wraps a hand around the familiar shape of a blaster while the other frees a hilt of a saber from the folds of their tunic. They approach the door.
“Zashnu, I really hope you aren’t planning on gutting your guests through the door. It would be dreadfully rude after all the effort we’ve gone through to come here.”
There’s hesitation, flickers of emotions that precede the recognition. He’s actually fairly impressed by how quickly it flares. With the two years between them and the nature of their quiescent personalities they had never managed to be that close, but there had always been a mutual sort of understanding there, the feeling of looking at this person standing across the hall from you and recognizing a fellow malformed chrysalis, though through what lens neither knew. He braces. The door rips open.
He can’t quite manage the cheeky smile from earlier, the politician’s show of teeth, but it doesn’t matter when she wrenches him up off the floor and into her arms, crushing him against her much bulkier form. Her tresses twitch about his face in a cavalcade of relief and barely-smothered sorrow.
“Xocen, holy fuck you’re alive. I thought they would’ve shot you the first chance they got.”
With effort, he manages to wrap his arms around her shoulders, give her back a gentle pat. His words come out more a wheeze than anything.
“Yes well, you may finish off the job for them if you continue to crush me.”
Zashnu laughs, a little wet and broken, but drops him all the same. It’s ruined all of his attempts at righting his clothes, but he can’t find it in himself to care, not when she’s smiling down at him with all of those very sharp teeth and flaring with such unmitigated overwhelming joy. A firm hand presses against the back of his arm, grounding, and he silently thanks her around him for the hundredth thousandth time that, as hurt and damaged as they both are, she’d given him the perfect person to keep him on track.
“Right. If you don’t mind, can we continue this inside?”
“Yeah, c’mon?”
She pushes back, clearing the way for them to come inside, to turn the corner into a crowded living area that barely fits the two couches crammed inside it. He settles down in the one that places his back to the wall and isn’t surprised when his companion stands by the arm, watching back towards the entrance where the clone they followed hasn’t moved, watching them with open suspicion, his blaster still held loosely in his hand.
“Zash.”
His voice is quiet, clipped, and Force even though he sounds so different from any of them, so lacking in that vibrant brashness he craves, it still cuts through him like a blade, rending all his hard-won relief away in an instant. The Nautolan turns to him, half a step into the living area, and he can see when she scents the area, registers her clone’s blatant suspicion and the hesitant mistrust from his own companion, picking it all apart and finding the scraps she needs. She would have made a wonderful politician.
“Blue, put it away. I trust Xocen, and that means I trust whoever he brought.”
“Mind explaining how the fuck they found us then? Mind explaining how he knew you were here?”
Ah.
“If you sit, I’ll share.”
Zashnu comes, sits on the couch opposite. The clone stops by the doorway. He doesn’t put away his blaster. He sighs, reaches up to begin undoing the knot that holds the sash around his brow in place.
“Zashnu and Aulat already know this, but for your sake, I’ll explain. My name is Xocen Geguul. For the fourteen years since my Knighting, I have worked as a Diplomat, trying to bring peace to the galaxy as a mediator instead of a soldier. I was very good at what I did for a variety of reasons but one of the many is my species. You sent out a message calling for any Jedi to come to this planet and look for another Jedi and a rogue clone.”
He drops the sash into his lap, tilts his head to focus directly on the clone. His shock jolts through the air like lightning.
“Zashnu looks exactly the same to me as she did when we were children. You look like a clone. Add them together, you have the source of the message, and the people we were looking for.”
Aulat’s humor flickers into being nearby, orbiting them like a star. He lifts the sash to retie it, makes the show of turning to look at them.
“Would you care to share your half of our tracking?”
Their grin is all teeth, just this side of feral, and he can see the surprise in Zashnu strengthen when their back straightens and they begin to speak, intertwining with the first few licks of horror.
“Aulat Inzlem, General of the 568th Sun Corps for eight years as of the last campaign. I found your message by the way. This one can’t read screens, remember? Don’t give him all the credit.”
He shrugs easily, giving way. They settle back on their heels a little, relaxing.
“He saw your clone first, asked me to confirm that he was one. Your disguise ain’t worth shit if you still walk around like a pissed-off buckethead, by the way, look just like my Commander. We tracked him back to here, made sure he wasn’t alone or an ambush, and then we knocked. Pretty straightforward.”
The silence hangs, and he knows only a portion of it is due to the processing of their explanation. Aulat is open with their time as a General, proud of their men if not of the war, but they don’t understand how those from outside see it. There is no hiding the youth in their features, even sharpened by the fight and the death that they have seen. Zashnu looks like she wants to say something, warring dismay and disbelief clashing through the gaps in her tresses before her old mask segments around her like a shield, a placating familiarity leeching out into the air around her that does nothing to hide her from his gaze, shimmering points of pain splintering as they collide in the colorless light.
“See, Blue? It’s fine, they’re fine, put the fucking blaster away and come sit down.”
Despite the soothing she is pushing out, there is a hardness in her voice. He does well to obey. When she turns back to them she’s smiling, close-mouthed and kind, the perfect Jedi. It’s remarkable how it unsettles Aulat almost immediately, their wiry arms clenching and releasing in time with the urge to bolt, to find cover, to fight. The humor flickers out like a dying sun. Zashnu doesn’t notice, or simply decides to push through anyways.
“Okay, so we sent out that message to try to gather any Jedi who might have escaped their men here together, anyone who was close enough to them to have picked up enough slang to decipher the message. We want to hear your stories, to try to figure out what happened, and what we can do next. We weren’t expecting a response as quick as you, so I’m sorry for him, but we would still really appreciate hearing what happened and how you survived.”
“You don’t know?”
Her attention slips to focus solely on him and there’s something sad there, something deeply mournful, but it isn’t shattered, not like him, not like Aulat. Suddenly, he needs to know her story beyond just idle curiosity. What made her so different as to deserve the safety of her heart? What made her clone?
Zashnu intertwines her broad fingers, shakes her head, her tresses falling about her shoulders with the motion.
“No, we weren’t with the rest of our men when everything happened, and Blue wasn’t affected. Didn’t even see another clone before he got me onto a ship and offplanet. I didn’t even really know what happened until the gossip got to where we were hiding. Decided to come here and send out the message after that.”
It takes him a second, to realize he can’t breathe. One second he is, normal and easy, and the next there is nothing, just a straining stuttering emptiness, a cold vise around his heart, and he gasps, desperate suddenly for more air, for open space. Aulat’s hand lands hard on his shoulder, pinning him, grounding him, and their pain is as clear as his no doubt is as he grabs for their grip, squeezing it back, their voice flat and even as they speak the words for him, the things that have never failed him before.
“Completely unaffected? How?”
The clone’s face contorts in a grimace, discomfort a haze around him, but he blessedly doesn’t even try to hesitate.
“There’s something the rest of them have that I don’t. I had my comm with me in case of emergencies and an Order came through, from high up. Had I been like them, I would’ve tried to kill Zash, would have wanted to for whatever reason it would have given me, and I would have moved on. But I don’t have it, so it didn’t work, and here we are.”
There’s relief that washes away the pain, cruel and vicious, woven in with the urge to sob and snivel and scream, to pray that maybe there has been some mercy, maybe his men do not know, do not care, that maybe that icy grip that haunts his dreams has frozen them cold. It is a desperate thing to think but he thinks it anyways, because to think otherwise is to think they still live, that they are still awake, still alive. He let’s go of Aulat’s hand and grips his own, musters all of his hard-won venom and hopes that the distant mirror of his heart is dead. He hopes he does not suffer.
The clawing of his sorrow tears rents in his soul, spits and howls and maims, begging him to break, to finally cry, to let her take his pain and to hell with the suffering she has already borne. He breathes, and lifts his head to Aulat.
“You know my story already. Do you want to hear it again?”
Or do you want to murder the memory of the person you held dear in privacy, away from prying eyes? Do you want to bury their being beneath the foundation of this tiny crowded place and let no one ever know your pain?
They lift out of their militant stance, shaking their head. He begins to cut their aura from his sight, to give them at least the facsimile of confidentiality.
“Nah, know it by heart at this point. You guys got a kitchen I could look through?”
“Yeah, down the hall.”
They nod, walk down and right past it. He leaves them as much of a void as he can, focusing solely on the two in front of him.
“Where do you want me to start?”
“Early as you can would be great I guess, what were you doing when it happened? I mean, you weren’t a General like me or, uh, your friend, so…?”
“I was dodging fire from a Senator’s guards and trying to give them a piece of my mind on what their boss might consider appropriate dinner for guests in the future. I, ah, I guess you could call it playing around.”
They both stare at him, their mute disbelief intermingling in the air, and despite the pain, despite the wrenching inside of him, he can’t help but smile. They look so much like the rare times they got new men, their shock at what their new job often entailed, protective detail often in name only. He straightens his back a little, separated from the fond tangle of memories before they can freeze over.
“They weren’t very good guards.”
“And your troopers weren’t doing anything?”
The clone’s aura is ramping up higher and higher in confusion, and he does his best to mitigate.
“They were back at the ship, waiting for me. They would have shot back if I was in any true danger, which I wasn’t, and it was better for the overall mess if they didn’t. I had been planning to break off and run to them when…”
“When they started shooting.”
“Yes. And they were much better shots than the guards. The only reason I managed to have my saber on and up in time was because I was exerting myself enough to have them within my sight.”
His bolt came so close. It would have cut him right through the throat had he not turned towards them. Had he not gone to step that way, wanting to know what had happened to his men, to-
“Because you had them in your sight? Did they seem different?”
He cocks his head, deciphering the different sparks of confusion and interest and otherwise that circle around Zashnu. It’s an odd first question to ask, and it takes him a minute to piece together why.
“Zashnu, have you not seen another clone since this happened?”
“No, like I said we got offplanet before I ran into any others and none have made it here, or to the planet we were hiding on.”
He sighs, struggling to pin down the words to describe the creeping pain, the frost that claws at him.
“I...You may understand it the next time you see a clone, but...yes, they felt different, as much as feeling and seeing differ to me. It’s...like reaching for something warm and finding it frozen instead. Like a sudden blizzard swept through and left statues where my men were. One second they were themselves, and the next they weren’t. And then they shot at me.”
She nods, leaning back at the same time her clone leans forward, curious and cautious.
“So you had the guards and your troopers shooting at you and you didn’t manage to get shot?”
“I did fight on the battlefields during my Padawan years, and despite my greatest protests to the contrary, my dear Sergeant Hix did believe in fairly regular training drills. I make no attempts to say it was pleasant or that I got out unscathed, but in the chaos of the guards suddenly having to deal with ten clones with rifles shooting back at them, as far as they could tell, I managed to get to a different landing pad and steal the ship that was there. I ran into Aulat on Carida two weeks later. Neither of us knew anything except that something had gone horribly wrong. We were on Coruscant for two days.”
They had seen the pyres. Aulat had nearly crushed his hand in their grip, fighting the urge to step forward and maim and he very nearly hadn’t stopped them. After that he had shared his story in its entirety with them, made it clear his call to her power rings with as much hunger for death as any furious fighter, and they had accepted him without a second thought. Zashnu takes a deep breath, lets it out slow and steady. She seems finished. Her clone, however, is not.
“Ten troopers? Not a corps or a company or anything? Assuming just a squad, considering you mentioned a Sergeant.”
He hesitates, his hands clenching against each other. It’s so hard to talk about them. But he will not stop now.
“Ten. A squad for my protective detail, including my aide.”
“A protective detail you weren’t using. And a clone for an aide? Not a birthborn? They train birthborns for that sort of shit.”
“Yes, but he is who I had.”
With his beautiful smile and his righteous anger and his quick tongue and-
“Don’t think they could have been serving better elsewhere? You would have been at zero risk then and they could have been fighting the war.”
He realizes too late that it’s a jibe that meant to hurt, that there’s shock radiating off of Zashnu even as the clone remains calm and calculating. It doesn’t matter, the words snap out anyways, violent and bloodied and venomous, soaked in the frostbitten memory of an aura full of awkward grief and unsure hope underpinning words that were far too steady, a frayed binder held carefully in calloused hands.
“No one should have been fighting in this fucking war.”
Zashnu recoils impossibly further into her couch, her gaze suddenly riveted to him, but it’s her clone he only has the focus for, watching as his aura soaks through with that same unpleasant suspicion from earlier.
“You really weren’t a fan of the war.”
It’s not a question, just a statement. He lifts his chin, unswayed by the piercing glare. He’s felt far worse.
“I was not. However, I would dare say it ended far more upsettingly for me than it did for you, so you can kindly fuck off with your suspicions, whatever they may be.”
“Just find it interesting that you didn’t have your troopers anywhere near you at the time that it would have been most useful for them to be a protective detail.”
He feels the frost grip his fingers, curl into his bones. He lets it sink in, shutting off all the unnecessary corners of his mind. If that’s how it is.
“There was no reason for my men to be at unnecessary risk. The longer the guards focused on me, the longer no one was noticing what one of the cooking staff was doing to the Senator’s dinner. Not that it matters anymore, I doubt the lovely Representative who was in line to replace him will be of much use to anyone in the glorious new reign of the Empire. I doubt any Senators will be.”
Such a useful poison too. A pity. Zashnu’s shock spikes anew. Her clone laughs, sharp and mean.
“Holy fuck.”
“Jedi assassin, never seen one of those before.”
He bares his teeth, a bright and toothy smile meant for only the most vile of warlords, the most cruel of Senators, the one that meant the Hunt was coming, whether they knew it or not. He can see the way they go for their weapons despite themselves.
“Call me what you will, I upheld the Code, and I do not deny any of the blood on my hands, even if I was never the one to strike the final blow. The Jedi have been changing the course of destiny our entire lives, involving themselves in the fates of planets with every fight, every campaign. There is no ignorance, there is knowledge. I refused to turn my sight away from the pain and cruelty I was shown, and when given the option, my men chose to do the same.”
“Xocen that’s fucking insane.”
“Maybe. But I know that while the culture of my heritage might not believe in good and evil, I do, and I’ve seen it myself. And I couldn’t just let it slide. No one should have.”
The clone watches him, cold and dark next to Zashnu’s flashing emotions.
“So you gave staff poison, went on your way? Not exactly foolproof.”
“No, but it was often poison, or garrotes, or the rare useful situation, to the right people, at the right time. All three of those are hard to find in sequence. Guards, staff, lovers, revolutionaries, all people with the strength and resolve in their skin to do what they need to do when they are presented with the means and motion. And clones, when next to a Jedi Diplomat, are rarely looked at twice. Haar Oka’karir be te Paklalat.”
The clone frowns, narrowing his gaze. When Zashnu looks to him, confused, he answers.
“The Hunt of the Silver Tongue. Your squad’s name for itself I take it.”
“Much better than any military assignation if you ask me. Now, I believe you asked for my story and I’ve given it. I will go retrieve Aulat so they can tell you their story, and then we can decide what to do from there.”
He pushes to his feet, straightens his cloak. The clone stands too.
“One last question. Your men, were they anything but further tools for you, just like so many of the other Jedi out there? Certainly fucking seems like they were just means to an end.”
The ice melts, and there is rage. He doesn’t even know he’s moved until he’s in the clone’s space and Zashnu is forcing him away.
“Don’t you dare. Each of my men came from hell, came from places where others turned their backs on them. My men were my equals, they were not faceless soldiers to die by the thousands in one of a million useless battles. My men’s opinions mattered and they chose the same as me which plans to bring to fruition and which to let die in the dust. Hix, Canvas, Jagel, Skive, Bes, Drome, Ude, Taye, Bits, and...and Vy. They meant more to me than you will ever know and don’t you dare slander them like that.”
He turns on his heel and storms away, marches down the hall until he finds Aulat, curled on the ground at the very end. They look up when they see him approach.
“Hey. Take it they started asking the fun stuff. Even I can feel you’re pissed off.”
He collapses next to them, hunches down hard into his cloak and presses his hands to his temples. They’re sparking and slashing at the edge of his vision, arguing, and he curls his sight in as small as he can make it, opens it up to just his companion next to him and tries to block out all else. Their hand pats him on the shoulder, awkward and perfunctory but soothing all the same.
“You know I get it.”
And they do, which is sad and fascinating in a distant sort of dichotomy, this grown-up child soldier he might call a friend, so different from himself and yet so similar too. Their acceptance had been full of their own stories, the ways they had broken the rules to rescue civilians no matter the cost, the fights they had gotten into, bloody-knuckled and sharp-tongued. In their militantly disordered mind, they found him kindred, and he found them very much the same.
“Want to stay here while I go tell mine?”
“Yes, yes I think I will. Shout if you need anything.”
“Will do.”
They go and he watches, unmoving until they cross beyond his sight and he’s forced to open it up once more, to let the other two back into his sight and take in the way they crush down the remnants of their fleeting distrust of him and hope for a better time with them. He could laugh.
Their emotions flicker and die in nova bursts of painful energy, flashes of anger and sorrow and agony as they sit stiffly where he was minutes before and begin to talk about those final moments, freshly bandaged and seated around the campfire, unawares of the countdown to the crumbling of their world. He can’t hear the words but the movement of their hands is almost identical to how it was when they shared with him and he recognizes Zashnu’s horrified disbelief as clearly as he recognized his own. He knows they’re keeping it surface level, the barest of briefings, but it still hurts, still aches them with grief to yank the words free of their mouth, and he wonders in a moment of self-flagellation what it would have been like to witness a sacrifice such as that, to see it and now know they’ve avoided being enslaved by this cold and crushing thing that’s swept all the others away. Would it be worse with someone you love deeper than family? Better?
He wonders as he watches Aulat pull the blaster from where they keep it pressed against their back, far too big for their thin hands. He watches them cradle it close, their aura shot through with pain, and he brushes the thought away.
He sees the flickers of light around Zashnu, the knowledge she doesn’t want to concede, and he hopes she will not speak the words aloud, will not burden Aulat with that knowledge. Eight years is far too long for the Council to go without considering a Mastership and while he and Zashnu may have had their excuses, this young crushing person who sits across and tells them their story of woe, who never got to be a child and now is far too grown, may never have known how close they brushed against the curse. Those who loved them dearly must have worked hard to keep it so.
The emotions change, lighten, the swirl around them packing itself away to be dealt with later, to be torn and beaten and shredded apart when they are alone and there is no one to see the scattered remnants of their heart. A strike of strange recognition strikes across the clone’s aura and his bitter laughter is loud enough to hear. He pushes to his feet, trails back to the living area.
“-re batchmates. Never thought...glad he was with you.”
The space around Aulat shimmers, trembles, barely holds itself together. They’ve put the blaster back against their spine.
“Yeah. He was.”
There is still the tang of guilt in the air, a cloud of dissatisfaction about them that he wishes he could wave away, but all he can do is come sit next to them, to offer his presence beside them, an echoed memory of a body at their side. His words will not help, not now, because there are none he has that could help them truly understand that this is not their fault, this life they were given. No one should be sent to die at fourteen, barely trained but for the history of their ancestors, unknowing of the horrors they would see. It is a blessing in its own cruel way that their connection to her touch is so muted, so raw, that they can reach out to her but they can only just barely hear her song. When the screams hit him it was like his world was tearing apart; when they hit them, they barely felt the clawing itch under their skin.
He pats the couch next to their thigh and tries to bring them comfort as he turns his focus back to Zashnu and her clone.
“So, you’ve heard our stories, what now? We came in hopes of finding answers, but clearly those aren’t here. Do we leave?”
The last question is a little more pointed than it should be, but what does he care? They were the ones who went digging. Zashnu lifts her hands, placating.
“No, no, if you don’t mind the more people who stick around to hear out the other people who show up, the better. Maybe you’ll understand something about their stories that we don’t. We’ve got a spare room.”
The clone says nothing, but his feelings on the matter spark and twist like icy meteors above his head. Zashnu clearly isn’t comfortable with him either, but it’s Aulat who they care about, Aulat who at least one of their hearts aches for.
Aulat’s hand lands on top of his.
“Thanks, but we’ve got a ship. We’ll sleep there. I’ll give you my comm signal so you can get in contact if anything happens.”
They’re remarkably sharp as they exchange then needed information. They don’t even exchange farewells before they’re out on the streets again. The melody in the air is less powerful now, a hymn instead of an opera. He waits until they’re back on the ship to speak.
“So, your thoughts?”
They shrug, kicking off their boots.
“They’re soft, but they’ll do. I need to know what happened, and they’re my best shot at finding out. Even just one person who can give me straight answers about why…”
They grit their teeth and he nods, understanding.
Two days later they’re walking closer to temple, Aulat’s grip on his arm deathly strong as they work on adapting him to all strengths of her call when a bright wave washes over his vision and nearly lands him on his ass, strong enough that even Aulat stops and turns to look towards the temple, towards its source. Neither of them hesitate.
His head pounds as they race dizzyingly close to the entrance, sheer blocks from the maw of madness itself, but the source of the signal is obvious, still vibrating, pulsating, a font of hope and joy and untamed unbridled hate. When they turn the corner close to them their head snaps to look at them both, their smile filling with teeth. The little red astromech at their side beeps and they give it a gentle pat, stepping forward to focus on Aulat.
“I recognize you! You were a few years ahead of me! Master never liked what they did to you, thought it was a whole load of bantha shit. Probably would have adopted you if they’d let him.”
They flick a lekku over one of their shoulders, giving them both an assessing look.
“Neither of you’re a bandit, so I don’t think you’re the jare who sent the message. You other jetii who tracked it? You met them?”
He manages to shake from his shock, nod, his amusement growing along with his fascination. This strange little Twi’lek talks like a clone, blunt and honest, but their aura is that of a Jedi when he looks close, as bright as Aulat’s or Zashnu’s or any other’s.
“Yes, on the other end of the city.”
“Yeah, kinda figured, but they didn’t exactly leave any fuckin’ way to find them in the message so I thought reaching out might be my best chance and considering this place feels like I’m standing in front of a whole bunch of speakers just being near it…”
A shrug, then an outstretched hand. The hate that bubbles right alongside their other emotions breaks easily and neatly, simmers down to allow up an easy camaraderie.
“Name’s Gracie. Show me the way?”
He smiles, takes the hand.
“Gladly.”
That Which Is Experienced
Chickensssssssss.
Final Word Count: 5,054
———
It takes them longer than it probably should for either of them to get out of the bed. Ryan manages it first, after being drawn into a few more kisses and affectionate touches, a moth to the flame, and he when Ryan scoops him up to carry him out to the car, half an hour later. It’s not exactly something that happens with a high degree of dignity on his part, but by that point Ryan’s managed to find his painkillers and feed him two more with some water and crackers, so it’s not like he’s in the best place to argue over it.
They’re definitely toeing the line on ‘four a day’ but they’re criminals, who cares.
Turns out he does, when most of the next few hours haze out into bouts of sleeping with spotty memories of Ryan’s arms around him, accompanied by the occasional soft crowing or the rumble of engines. When he finally comes to anything resembling full lucidity again, he recognizes where he is, which is great, and not even a little bit of how he got there, which is less than great. Upside, Ryan’s sprawled in the bed beside him, arm thrown carefully over his waist like a big weird ice pack. He roots around a little bit in the covers, chasing after the hint of warmth always lurking somewhere deep within that chill, always calling to him like a siren song, and when he looks up again Ryan’s watching him with a smile. Because right, he doesn’t technically need to sleep. He just does sometimes because he likes to. He blinks up at him, Ryan doesn’t do the same back down.
“Hey.”
“Hey. Good to see you’re awake.”
That’s maybe not the best sign.
“Time’s it?”
He watches Ryan’s eyes flicker over his shoulder to where the window is, watches the gears turn.
“Little past noon? We’ve been back in town about four hours. Had time to get a really loose pen set up for the new family member. It’ll be fun getting him acclimated. You’re welcome to come sit with me while I work on it if you think you can handle it after lunch?”
Maybe it’s because it’s been a little while since he’s actually gotten to se the girls, maybe it’s because of the pain or the warmth or the fact that he’s actually somewhere he wants to be and not in anonymous country hell, but fuck the fact that Ryan’s holding him and talking to him gently and softly and back to normal again hits him like a wave. He chokes on it a little, blinks away tears and presses his face into Ryan’s collarbone, pretending the slur of the words is just the muffling of the fabric and not the sudden rush in his chest.
“I’m gonna sit in the girls’ pen.”
“That’s fine. You’ll be able to see me. We’ll be playing a little fast and loose here with usual introduction rules, but the girls are quiet enough that I think it’ll be okay.”
“Okay.”
Ryan presses a kiss to the top of his skull, pets a thumb gently across his ear. He doesn’t pull away, doesn’t move to stand, content to stay bundled around him. They’ve never done this before, shared a bed, not in all the time they’ve known each other, but somehow it fits, somehow they just match together in perfect synchronicity. He finds himself drifting again, not quite sleeping but content, the aches soothed by Ryan’s cool touch. He’s not aware of time passing again until Ryan gently cups his chin, encourages them apart.
“Let’s eat, yeah? And you could probably do with another pill.”
Sitting up makes his head throb, trying to stand even worse, so Ryan just scoops him up again, bundled in the blanket, and carries him out to the living room, setting him down in the soft couch warmed by the light of the wrought iron skylight. He doesn’t mind it in the least, feeling a certain weight in his bones, like managing on his own the last few days is suddenly catching up with him. He can see a little bit of the kitchen from where he’s sitting, hear it just fine, and it’s enough for Ryan to ramble aimlessly about introducing Scratch to the girls while he whips up lunch for them, the scent of it nearly overpowering after four days of boxed meals and canned goods. He’s not going to cry over his plate of grilled cheese, but he certainly comes close when Ryan tucks it into his blanket so he can eat it with his good hand. It’s laden with the herbs Ryan grows and the cheese is probably some weird shit he picked up at a market stall and it’s so fucking good.
He’s so happy to be here, to be back with people and things and sound and senses.
They eat their sandwiches in comfortable silence, basking in the early afternoon sun through the rose above, Ryan on the floor below him, and he barely has time to think once they’re done before there’s a fresh glass of water and a new pill being pressed into his hand.
“I didn’t really think about it but did you want me to get you some clothes that would fit you at some point?”
“Dunno where my keys are.”
Ryan shrugs, settling into the couch beside him and nudging him to finish off the glass.
“I broke the lock on the window of that safehouse to get into it, if you don’t mind me busting your door I could do that too. Can pretty much guarantee no one will be able to get into it after me unless they’ve got a battering ram.”
He has to take a second to breathe, throwing a half-hearted glare at Ryan.
“Can’t say shit like that. Not when I’m like this.”
Ryan just smiles at him, too-white too-sharp teeth against a too-dark mouth.
“Promise to make it up to you.”
He groans, half a laugh mixed in there.
“This is the reason I can’t be naked around anyone anymore. You think you’re funny.”
“You haven’t complained.”
“Ugh. Stop. Let me sit here until everything goes fuzzy and then take me to my girls. You can go break into my apartment and steal my clothes later.”
Ryan doesn’t disagree, though he does plant a playfully toothy kiss at the wrist of his good arm when hands the empty glass back, leaving just a hint of a dark stain. Fucking shameless.
He’s actually functional enough to walk on his own two feet when they finally stand up and go outside, the pain distant and blockaded, Ryan making a quick detour to deal with their dishes as he pretty much immediately just stumbles his ass over to the coop to see the girls, safety and propriety be damned. They seem suitably curious about the new noisemaker on the other side of the yard, but he’s enough of a distance away that it doesn’t seem to be causing too much mayhem. He settles himself down right inside the gate and tucks his slung arm up against his body, holding out the other for the nearest fluffy creature. It’s not exactly a shock when Crush, beautiful lady that she is, comes right up and plops down in his lap, content as can be. Lady, demon-spawn from hell, clucks at him from her spot beneath the mister and makes no attempts to move. Her crest is in her eyes again, the tie nowhere to be seen. Unsurprising.
The makeshift chicken prison set up on the other end of the yard looks like it’s mostly made out of leftover wiring from the coop, plus some slabs of plexiglass or similar, probably from when he was working on the house, to make it a little harder for he and the girls to see each other. He knows for a fact that Ryan doesn’t get hot, so he definitely didn’t need to lose his shirt before he came outside to start working on it again, but he’s appreciative all the same. He can just make out Scratch running around Ryan’s feet as he sets up perches and digs at the dirt to make a good place to set in a dust bath. Unsurprisingly, it seems like the two of them have already started bonding well, with Ryan occasionally reaching over to pet him or scratch his back and Scratch crowing up at him, delighted with the attention.
“So where did you buy him then Jer?”
His voice carries easily, the backyard quiet despite the distant rumble of the city. They don’t even have to raise their voices.
“There was a fair, drove to it. He was one of the show roosters and apparently he was bad at it and a baby, so they let me buy him.”
Ryan snorts, starts putting a layer of fencing above the original low fencing, wiring it together, making it higher, harder to get over.
“Of course you drove somewhere. It’s good that I came to get you, going around a fair all day is probably why you’re in such a bad shape now.”
That’s probably fair. He definitely feels worse today than he did before yesterday. He scratches Crush’s neck, listens to her coo. Ryan’s pale skin catches the light, the edges of his muscles shadowing as he works.
“It’s good to know that he was a show rooster though. It means he’s probably got a clean bill of health, and it means that I can probably track down the breeder to ask some follow-up questions before I take him to the vet. Still going to keep him under quarantine for awhile, but I think we’ll manage. The girls might not approve of a maturing rooster right away, but that’s what introduction pens are for.”
He starts bending the fencing over, making a little makeshift roof, a little rooster home instead of a prison, then plops down to pick up Scratch and pet him with the full force of his affection when he’s done.
It’s a good afternoon.
He dozes off a little in the coop at some point while petting Crush, wakes up half an hour later with Lady attempting to push herself into his lap as well, nearly dislodging the rightful possessor of his warmth, and so he has to resettle himself to hold both girls with only one arm. He can hear water moving, can see Ryan’s back as he hauls a bucket laden with rocks from one end of the pond to another, rearranging some of the plant life, no doubt wrapping up what he was doing when they were on the phone yesterday. It clearly doesn’t strain him, little does, but it does make his body stretch and shift in a mockery of effort, the bones beneath pressing against his skin in a way that nearly reveals their hue.
He swallows, turns his focus back onto the girls. Takes a breath through his nose. It’s a little unfair, the things that get him worked up with Ryan. They really shouldn’t. It always makes him a little more curious than it should, in a way that brings on even more dangerous thoughts. Thoughts of teeth and knives.
When he’s finally done for the day Ryan comes to get him, all wet jeans and pale muscles and just all around deeply horribly troublesome, temporary rooster home completed and dinosaur pond maintained, coop already taken care of the day before. He goes to lie down on the couch when Ryan helps him free of the girls and makes to strip out of his pants because frankly he’s going to overload something at this point. It’s not even necessarily on purpose. Ryan’s just like this.
God he’s so fucking happy he’s back to normal.
Ryan takes a shower, then gets his address and nudges him into the frankly oversized bathroom to take one of his own while he goes and raids his apartment. It remains an unpleasant experience while managing his bandages, something Ryan’s left gracefully in his purview with a shrug and a comment about having little idea how to bandage properly, but it gives him something to focus on while he cleans up, wrapping himself with the most comically oversized towel he’s ever had the grace to come across afterwards and debating internally if the stain on the side of the bath means Ryan’s dozed off and drooled on it before. Probably.
Then he takes his toweled ass right back to bed, claiming it as his own. Ryan doesn’t bother trying to make him get back up again when he comes back, just tosses him some pajama pants from the bag he packed so he can wriggle into them before unpacking the rest and laying them out on one side of the room for easy access. He also pulls out a tablet he found and hands it over with a proud little grin. He doesn’t have a TV in his room, probably because he doesn’t see the necessity, but he’s got damn good wi-fi throughout the house, and his tablet’s full of shit to do because he, unlike Ryan, is not old as fuck. He cradles it like a child and Ryan laughs at him, then flops down and settles in beside him. They watch a movie, something pointless and violent, then another, something that Ryan suggests offhand, much shorter and silent except for music, a comedy. It’s pretty funny, watching all the over-the-top expressions and exaggerated drunken stumbling, and Ryan snorts now and again in an vaguely fond sort of way. When it’s over, he tilts his head, like he’s thinking.
“Don’t think I’ve actually seen that since it was in theaters, now that I think about it.”
It’s rare Ryan talks about his past without prompting, and fuck he wants to ask. He tries not to make a big deal of it.
“Yeah?”
“Mhm. One of the last things all of us went to see together. Came out a few months before the draft, just after they said we’d join the war.”
It’s strange then. For a second, just a second, the man at his side doesn’t look like Ryan. He looks younger, clearer in the eyes, the type of straight-laced kid someone might see in an old black-and-white, like the one on the wall in the sitting room, the one he’s never gotten a good look at. The one he’s never tried to get a good look at. Then he shakes his head and it’s gone.
“Think I’m going to order out for dinner, got a preference?”
“Uh...I could kill for some tacos right now I’ll be real.”
Ryan laughs, and goes for his phone. They don’t watch another movie that night. They eat tacos in bed and Ryan takes longer than he should retrieving a book from the sitting room and they don’t talk about it. He takes another pill before bed and Ryan wraps an arm around him as he gets comfortable. He’s not dumb enough to think he stays there the whole night, but he’s there until he passes out and he’s there when he wakes up, and that’s enough.
They fall pretty easily into a system after that. Ryan goes out, does jobs or whatever else he needs to, comes back with food sometimes and sometimes just with whatever scraped together heap of his body is left. Half the time it’s not even his car he’s returning with, the soft blue Tornado left somewhere it wasn’t going to be bled all over to be picked up later. He finds out that Ryan’s garage, which he never really bothered with beforehand, doesn’t technically have space for two cars despite outwards appearances. It has space for the Tornado, should it ever need to be stored away, along with a few shelves of things that make it clear that a lot of the repair and upgrade work has been done by Ryan himself, but the other half is all tarps and plastic lining, speakers screwed into the walls that he can plug his phone into to have something to listen to while he heals up, should his injuries still be particularly messy by the time he makes it back home. He finds him there more than once, poking at some flayed-off part of himself like that’ll make it knit together faster, the stench of concentrated copper nearly overwhelming but never escaping the cool concrete confines. Every time when it’s all said and done, Ryan bundles up whatever is soaked through the worst and throws it out, replaces it, then goes to pick up his car if need be. It’s remarkably self-aware for someone who seems allergic to the concept of stairs.
It’s also a little disheartening, in its own strange way. Ryan puts effort beyond effort into caring for him, for the girls, for Teddy and Scratch, but when it comes to himself he’ll sit happily on concrete and plastic until the black-stained length of his femur layers over again with tar and a false mockery of flesh, effluvia gushing out around him. He never interrupts, never makes himself known, these seem like quiet moments, moments just for Ryan, but they always seem so melancholy. He does his best to make it better otherwise, making haphazard dinner with what little energy he has, offering up another movie for them to watch, offering just himself as a point of warmth and comfort when they’re laying together, something along those lines.
He wishes there was something he could do, but he knows what Ryan wants most right now is for him not to push himself like he did by going to the fair. He’s still feeling the ripples of that even days afterwards. So he just keeps doing what he does best, and soaks in the way he can make Ryan laugh.
Ryan keeps working, and he keeps trying to get better.
All in all it really shouldn’t come as a shock when someone breaks the door down about halfway through the week.
It’s a sturdy door too, it’s pretty fucking impressive they get it on the first try. They’re standing in the kitchen and Ryan looks hopelessly to the ceiling, muttering something about how he knew he needed to check those hinges. Then he pats away the flour on his hands, asks him if he’d mind staying in the kitchen for a minute, and leaves the room.
And okay, here’s the thing about this. He’s never actually seen Ryan fight. They’re coming up on a year of knowing each other, and they’ve just never been in a scenario where it’s been relevant. Ryan decided long before they met that he wouldn’t work with the crew, and for the first six months they knew each other they just chatted when they crossed paths, occasionally fucked. Since then they’ve just added hanging out at the house into the mix. Sure he saw his blasé interactions with cops on the news, but that was always over by the time he came to pick him up. It’s never been a particularly conscious form of separation, but it’s always been there.
This though, this is different.
He leans out of the archway just enough to see into the living room, to see the thugs currently trampling their way into the house, Ryan moving to interrupt them.
Ryan’s never quite moved like a human. Enough to pass sure, but there’s always been something just a little off, just this side of too-sudden, eerily reminiscent of puppetry, every movement at a pace just beyond what it should be. Now he moves like a predator, like there’s something else entirely moving his bones rapidly out of sync with the rest of him, too fluid, too eager to feast. He can feel the ferocity of the movement in the air, and it’s clear the thugs can too.
Two of them open fire, clean shots that hit him right in the torso.
He barely twitches, just keeps on moving. The scent of copper hits the air, far too strong. Even from his angle, he can see everyone in the group suddenly tense and realize just who they trespassed upon.
“Oh fu-“
The rest duck out of the way, bolt to cover, but that one doesn’t quite manage, not with Ryan’s hand closing around his throat, crushing it with a meaty pop. Someone’s shitty trigger discipline lets loose a spray of fire into the wall, some at Ryan but most not, and he makes the executive decision to duck back into the kitchen and see if he can knead bread one-handed.
There’s a lot of screaming in the next few minutes, and a lot of really wet crunching.
His attempts at kneading are not going well. It’s really fucking hard to do with one hand. He gives up after about ten minutes of limited progress, washing off his shame in the sink. He leans back out into the living room. There’s no one in it anymore, just some mangled meat that used to be people. He can see puddles from where Ryan oozed onto the glossy wood, the soft carpet of the rug. He steps out, goes to nudge one of the piles with his foot, and that’s when the last thug comes careening back out of the hallway, freezing at the sight of him. And then there’s Ryan. Ryan, who is dripping viscous black from a dozen different holes, including one punched right through his cheek, and who wasn’t standing at the man’s shoulder mere seconds before. When he talks, black comes out like tar around his tongue, slipping around his teeth and out through the jagged gap, down his frowning lips.
“Don’t appreciate trespassers y’know. Going to have to replace a whole hell of a lot of my flooring, and that shit takes time. Not to mention having to clean up your greasy carcasses.”
The thug spins, stumbles, trips, falls, scrambles to get back to his feet even though there’s nowhere to go but further into the slaughter, never taking his eyes off of Ryan. Ryan laughs, a bubbling wet sort of sound, smiles. His teeth are still gleaming white.
Then he darts forward, no indication of movement other than that he suddenly is, his hand wrapping around the thug’s thigh, seemingly gently if not for the fact that now the man’s wriggling like a fish on a hook, unable to get free, his hands clawing for purchase on the viscera slick ground.
“So, let’s discuss what you’re doing in my home, yeah?”
The thug swears at him. Ryan tilts his head, his cheek healing up as he thinks. Then his hand tenses and the thug screams as his thigh becomes little more than ground meat.
“Let’s try again. Why are you in my house.”
It’s not a question this time. The thug knows better than to hem and haw.
“One of the boys saw the Fake who’s face’s all over the news get driven up here! Thought it’d be good money! Saw his guard leave! Fuck!”
Young crew then. Didn’t know any better, didn’t see Ryan come back with groceries an hour ago. Bunch of idiots. What a waste. It’s clear Ryan’s thinking the same thing.
“Anyone outside of this little bunch here?”
“No! We didn’t know the fucking Vagabond would be here! We just thought it would be some fuckin’ safehouse or some shit!”
“Hm. Well, thank you for your honesty.”
He lets go of what’s left of the thigh, reaches up instead. The thug screams, but it’s not like he’s going anywhere. It’s over with one more wet crunch. Ryan looks up to him, vaguely apologetic, then looks down, and the apology turns to amusement. He turns around.
“I’m going back to the kitchen.”
“Jeremy.”
“Fuck off.”
“Jeremy.”
“Go to hell, I’m going back to my bread.”
He’s much better at one-handed kneading when trying to work off some very particular frustration, who knew?
Ryan still laughs at him when he comes back, showered and freshly off the phone with a cleaner, bemoaning the loss of yet another one of his good shirts. He tells him it’s very normal for people like them to be attracted to violence and that there’s no shame in it. He doesn’t feel like explaining that it’s only like a quarter of the violence and the rest is just him, he doesn’t need to get into it, not now, not ever. They finish making the bread together and he hangs out by the oven when Ryan goes to cheerily greet the cleaner and their crew, letting them handle the remains. They don’t need to know he’s here. It is interesting that they seem to know Ryan to a degree, enough to know to tell their crew to simply mop up the worst of the black sludge and not bother trying to rinse the stains out. He pays them dutifully and waves them out, then comes back to sit with him, examining his phone as they wait for the timer to ding.
“Need to order new flooring again, always such a hassle.”
“Not the first time?”
He shrugs, half-hearted.
“Teddy ate a foot last time, so we’re technically running a better success rate this time around, and I know how to replace my own damn floor, but getting it shipped in takes time and I know some of it definitely stained. And I liked that one rug too.”
Aww, he’s pouting. But wait.
“Teddy ate a foot?”
Ryan looks up at him over his phone, lifts an eyebrow like he’s surprised that he’s surprised.
“Yeah. Idiot slipped and landed in the shallows. Nearly right on him. Bit right through the ankle. Bled out in the yard long before I realized he was there. Neighbors probably would have called the association if the General didn’t have the world’s ugliest crow. Probably thought it was him.”
There’s so much to process in that statement. First of all, fucking Christ as if he needed more proof that Teddy is an actual fucking dinosaur that Ryan just has living in his backyard. Secondly-
“Ryan, we’re internationally wanted criminals. Why are you worried about the association.”
“I’m still a legal homeowner Jeremy. Keep up.”
The timer dings. He gives up, writes the whole day off entirely. It’s for the best that way.
No one else assaults the home. Ryan orders new flooring, pays extra to get it there a little faster, frowns at the black marks that somehow managed to stain even the sealed and coated wood. It’s genuinely hilarious. They curl up on the couch and look at new rugs, a few different recipes for more bread. Ryan decides the rest of his jobs can fucking wait until his house is cleaned up, and he’s not complaining there.
He barely even realizes it’s been a week until a phone rings in the middle of helping Ryan finally plaster over the bullet holes in the wall, having completed the adventure of finding matching paint the day before. He’s never letting Ryan go alone to a hardware store again, he gets distracted way too easily. He somehow came back with even more plants. He doesn’t even realize it’s his phone at first. He just thinks something’s ringing, but to be fair, he slept badly and took two pills less than an hour ago.
“That’s you Jer.”
“Oh.”
He hasn’t used the cheap phone he got since he used it to call Ryan. It’s just been sitting plugged in on the table and he has to put everything down to go get it.
“‘Lo?”
“Jeremy! Where the fuck are you?!”
It takes him a second to register that the voice is Jack. It takes him another to register that her voice is frantic. He looks over at Ryan, who stops working at the plaster to look back at him, curious.
“Uh...Los Santos?”
“How the...Jeremy why the fuck aren’t you at the safehouse? Why didn’t you call one of us? We just got a call from your pick up telling us that there was no one there and that one of the window locks was busted. It had been nearly forced off its fucking hinges Jeremy!”
“Well I mean yeah, s’not like he had a key.”
Ryan’s head drops, his shoulders shaking in a valiant attempt at holding back laughter. He has no doubt his face is showing every single bit of it. He shrugs, even though Ryan isn’t looking. It’s just a fact. There’s a lot of spluttering on the other end of the line.
“We thought you’d been kidnapped!”
“I mean, you called me so clearly not.”
Ryan can’t actually hold back his laugh this time, the sound bright and echoing into the high rafters of his home. He feels an idiot grin burst across his face, his heart reaching out and clawing that sound close, greedy for all it can receive. The phone against his ear verges on icy.
“Jeremy...Are you still...with whoever picked you up?”
“Well yeah, he didn’t want me where I could hurt myself by being an idiot alone and besides he busted the door on my apartment getting me clothes so it’s not like I’m staying there right now.”
Jack sounds physically pained.
“Jeremy.”
“Don’t worry about it Jack, m’safe here. It’s already been a week, I’ll heal up and then drop by the penthouse. Talk to you later!”
“Wait wait J-“
He hangs up, frowns at the phone when it almost immediately starts ringing again.
“Ryannnn.”
He laughs at him again, holds out his hand. It crushes easily to pieces in his grip.
“Take it this means you’re staying longer than a week then.”
“If you’ll have me.”
Ryan grins, scoops him up and carries his protesting form to the kitchen. Apparently they’re done plastering for now.
“Y’know I’m not a good barometer for when you’re healed right? Might keep you around longer than I should.”
He shrugs, settling in on the counter as Ryan goes fishing for a pan.
“Sucks to be me I guess.”
Ryan rolls his eyes at him, affectionate and warm, and when he holds out his arms again he comes easily, lets himself be dragged in and kissed in the afternoon sun, pan and all.
They are home.
That Which Is Found
Because the original vanished from the face of the earth.
Final Word Count: 5,005
———
This is not the worst he’s ever been injured, he wants to make that very clear. There was that time he had to dive out of a crashing plane when he was in his twenties and stupid and he didn’t really get the whole parachute thing and broke like four bones when he landed and he just curled up in his apartment and was sad for a few months when that happened.
This is cruel and unusual punishment, for reasons that have no actual fact behind them.
So he has a few bullet wounds in his right arm, they’re neat little through-and-throughs in the meat from the 9’s the cops were carrying, it’s fine. So he crashed his bike, he was wearing protection, all he has is a mild concussion and some road rash. And yeah he doesn’t remember anything past that and waking up here, but he doesn’t have anything else that speaks of greater wounds, he’d feel it, so there’s no reason he couldn’t have just bunkered down at home and not in the middle of wherever the fuck he is now.
He actually doesn’t know. All he’s got to go on is a note in Jack’s familiar shitty handwriting reminding him to not get in trouble that looks like it was probably stuck to him before he was hauled out to this place.
He doesn’t need this mother hen bullshit.
He says as much to the air above the couch that he’s sprawled on before he decides that he’s going to take a nap.
He wakes up the next morning and hurts, so he takes two of the pills that were left in a bottle for him and goes back to sleep for a few hours until he feels better.
When he feels ready to get up again he explores, finds nothing outside but flat fucking land and a few sporadic trees giving the area around the grounds some nice shade. He watches for twenty minutes and not a single other car even comes close to appearing in his line of sight. Inside the house there’s no TV, no phone, no anything, completely off-grid. There’s some old-ass books and a vinyl record player, that’s it. The kitchen is full of canned foods and box-mixes, there’s some money bundled up in the back of a few cabinets, the usual set-up. This has to be one of Geoff’s weird safehouses, one of the ones he talks about retiring to someday with Jack to live out their weird old person dream.
It’s his own personal hell, trapped alone with nothing to do and no one to talk to. He’s going to fucking scream.
Further exploration reveals an old truck in the garage, though someone’s taken the keys off the hook by the door and hidden them somewhere, probably at his tormentor’s behest, so that’s his next mission after finding clean clothes to change into, and a shower. That one’s easier, even if it takes a bit of digging to find a pack of shirts in the drawer that’s actually close to his size and getting into the shower when he’s got bandages to look after is a pain. Upside is that he finds a sling in the oversized medkit under the sink, so that’s his arm pretty much set. And again, his road rash is nominal at best, he’s fine, this is bullshit.
He microwaves something from a can and starts looking for the keys.
Between sleeping, eating, and a few hours of just laying on the ground cursing his general existence, it takes him three days to find them tucked up on top of the empty fucking fridge. He nearly pulls something celebrating. He still doesn’t know where he is and it’s not like the truck actually has that much gas, but baby steps. It still takes him until the next day to get out of the house, but that’s semantics. He needs freedom, even if that freedom is picking a direction along the long empty dirt road and driving until he finds literally anything. He will take being found by a weird country cult. It would at least be exciting.
He finds signs for a livestock fair instead and decides to go there because he’s literally never lived outside a city in his life and he can’t actually think of any sort of livestock he’s ever actually seen up close in real life other than a very particular subset of fuzzy chickens. There’s some farms north of the city and all, but he can’t think of any he’s ever actually seen.
It’s a fucking great time. He has a blast, and it’s probably not just the drugs saying that, considering it takes him an hour to drive out to it past where he sees the first signs and he’s feeling pretty fucking sore by the time he gets up and walking around. Not enough not to, but enough to feel suitably coherent. The people showing off their animals are weirdly happy to talk to the blatant city kid who wants to learn about their giant ass cows or whatever and even if he retains basically none of it, it’s interesting to see what these people consider the cream of the crop for their weird ranch-beings. He even gets to pet a pig at the little area separate from the actual entrants, a big momma one who had a load of little babies scrambling around her belly, feed some goats who try to take his fingers off on the process, which is awesome. He buys a hat at the vendors with some of the cash from the wad he stuck in his sling, a nice warm jacket that he throws awkwardly over his shoulders despite the fact that it’s really not that cold out. It’s well into the afternoon by the time he’s wondering if maybe he should ask someone where precisely this is, since the name of the actual fair didn’t help any. It’s mostly chance that he’s looking around for the appropriate person to ask these sorts of weird questions to when he spots a familiar sort of feathering from one of the batches of cages and finds his curiosity enough that he wanders over to look.
There’s a whole batch of them, all groomed and plucked in a way that he’s never actually seen before, mostly sitting pleasantly in their cages. It looks like they’ve already been judged for the day and he wonders distantly how the two he knows would do when he realizes one of them is staring dead at him. He blinks, turns his focus to that cage in particular.
The resident inside isn’t sitting like the others, rather standing as close to the wire as it can, all shiny black feathers and careful grooming. He wanders a little closer, trapped in this weird staring contest.
Then it spreads its wings and fucking crows at him, loud and startling enough that he jumps back a little.
Little fucker looks smug.
“Scratch, stop that! No one thinks you’re funny!”
He looks away to notice someone coming over, smudged a bit with dirt across their face and ragged overalls, pockets stuffed with seed and god only knows what else. Familiar outfit, unfamiliar face. He wonders if people who own chickens are just the type to dress like that. They give him a crooked smile, fingers playing with the edge of a patch on their leg.
“I’m sorry, he’s maturing right now, thinks he needs to show everyone up.”
“S’fine, I know some folks like that. Think he might just be feeling antsy.”
“It’s his first fair. We thought he was trained well enough for showing but I guess not. Maybe next year.”
Their hand flickers halfway up from the patch towards the braid hanging over their shoulder, like they want to run their fingers over it, but stops instead to readjust their name tag. Nervous habit probably. The name tag says Zel.
“And if he stays the same?”
“Then he’ll probably just stay at the farm, hopefully some of the hens will take a liking to him.”
He looks back to the cage, thinks about the two he knows, about the Crush and her proper lady demeanor, Ladybug and her rambunctious menace. Thinks about their caretaker, how he’s been these last few weeks, how off and quiet and distant, as much as he smiles and laughs and plays along. Something happened, between one day and the next, and he hasn’t for the life of himself been able to figure out what.
“Could I take him off your hands?”
Out of the corner of his eye he can see how Zel blinks at him, taking in his five-day beard, his healing bruises under the brand new hat and jacket, the sling holding his arm close to his body.
“He’s a show rooster.”
“Doesn’t seem like he’s doing a very good job? And looks like they’ve already been judged, so I mean I guess you could keep him around for next year and hope he improves, or I could just take him.”
He fishes the wad out from his sling, waves it a little for emphasis as he shifts his attention back to the proper person. It’s as satisfying as it always is to watch their eyes go wide at the bills. He likes having illegal amounts of money.
“I, uh, I’ll have to go check?”
“That’s fine.”
They’re remarkably quick, bolting down to the end of the row of cages to flag down one person, then dart off to another, then back. He shifts a little bit while he waits, chasing away the nagging pain. Standing still sucks, same way sitting for an hour in the car sucks. The rooster—Scratch they called him?—crows a little bit at being taken off the pedestal of attention for a minute, so he makes a few loose hand gestures at the cage that he vaguely remembers Ryan doing whenever he was playing with one of the girls. It’s remarkably effective in terms of drawing his eye, at least until Zel comes back over.
“Can I ask why?”
“My uh...”
Boyfriend? Fuck buddy? Weird undead mercenary crush?
“Friend. He has two hens and he was telling me that one of them has been getting broody lately after they lost their rooster a year back, and the other one reminds me a lot of this one. I think he’d make a nice addition to the flock, and better that than you guys putting a prayer on his chances of straightening out after he finishes maturing.”
He thinks that might be better than whatever they’re expecting, because they relax a little, then very quickly walk over to the cage and unlock the cage door, transferring the little black rooster quickly into his hold, mostly hidden by the fall of his jacket, along with a bag of seed they produce from one of their pockets. He tosses them the whole wad as best he can with a suddenly very mellow rooster tucked in the crux of his good arm and they scramble a bit to catch it, surprised by the sheer amount of money now in their hands. They stare at him wide-eyed for a minute, then very quickly stuff the whole thing into their overalls when he lifts an eyebrow. Smart kid.
“Don’t...make a big deal out of it? When you leave? Try to be cool. Layla and Paul say it’s okay and it’s their flock but I don’t think we’re supposed to be selling our chickens here, just showing them.”
Awesome. He’s committing crime even at some weird country fair. Other than whatever crime is probably associated with that bundle of money.
“Will do. His name was Scratch?”
“Yeah, like Old Scratch. Because he’s a fuckin’ devil.”
He laughs a bit, feels his newfound prize wriggle before settling back into his warmth, pliant and easy in the dark hide of his jacket.
“Thanks, I think he’ll fit in fine.”
He waves farewell, then remembers the original train of thought he had in this building. He stops, midway through his turn, then thinks of a better way to ask his question that doesn’t sound weird as fuck.
“Sorry, quick question. Do you know anywhere near here that I could buy a phone? I broke mine.”
Or lost it, or something. Doesn’t matter, it’s actually true. Part of the reason he’s dying. Zel gives him directions to the closest town which has a little outlet mall on its outskirts that can help him, then waves him off for real. He ducks out with as much ease and confidence as he can muster, pulling on all his tricks of bullshit to smuggle this little fucker right out the front gate. Which works, somehow. And the little shit remains copacetic all the way into the truck, where he has to be bundled into the jacket and put in the backseat for his crimes. Driving with only one arm is already hard enough, he doesn’t need a bundle of feathers trying to hang out in his lap.
The town’s only about twenty minutes away, and a quick skim of the glove compartment reveals another bundle of cash and a knife, which is great. He leaves the key in the ignition and just yanks the fob off the ring when he ducks into the store, grabbing a card of prepaid minutes and another of data along with the cheapest phone he sees, silently blessing small towns for hanging onto their ancient chain stores. The cashier’s even nice enough to hook him up with a box from a shipment of smaller items and some newspaper when he mentions his new passenger, giving him some advice on how to transport the little fucker back home when he gives her a quick explanation of his plight, minus the obvious criminal bits, when he makes an off-hand joke about the state of his new jacket and she gives him a look despite herself. He thinks he nails her estimation of him somewhere between rich MMA weirdo and traveling hipster, and he’s more than happy to let her think that.
Stabbing some holes in the top and sides of the box is difficult, but he’s nothing if not experienced in the many different handlings of knives, so he’s able to manage alright, and he’s able to use his hand in the sling to assist in shredding the newspaper halfway decently to throw in the bottom, so that’s a success. His new companion’s more than happy to transfer into the box in the passenger seat as well, which makes life a whole lot easier, even if he has to more or less drop him in.
He’s exhausted by the time he actually pulls back into the driveway in front of the house an hour and a half later, awkwardly shuffling the box inside before tipping it over and laying down beside it on the kitchen floor, the bag with the phone shit and seed still looped on his wrist. Scratch saunters out like he’s been given a limo ride through cloud nine, and not what was undoubtedly a weird and wild mess of a thing, then cocks his head to stare down at the body beside his traveling palace.
They stare at each other for a minute before Scratch spreads his wings out and crows at him again, then wanders off to examine the rest of the kitchen as he groans.
“I think you and I are going to get on like a house on fire.”
He manages to drag his corpse back off the ground after a few minutes, leaving the bag of seed open on the floor for Scratch as he stumbles to the bottle of painkillers and swallows a few with a handful of water, then makes it to the couch, sitting heavy in its cushions and staring at nothing in particular until he starts feeling something roughly resembling human again.
He wants to take a nap. A nap sounds good. But he needs to figure out the phone first. That’s a thing he needs to do. Soon as he remembers how hands work.
It takes well until the sun is setting for him to finally get the phone set up. He almost manages to get up and moving and fed with something from a box out of the cupboard, along with a bowl of water for Scratch, who has taken up residence on the dining room chair. He doesn’t actually know anyone’s numbers, but it’s not like he’s an idiot, so he’s got his contact list saved in about fifteen different ways just in case his phone dies for various reasons and he can’t get a new one.
Like his crew torturing him by moving him to country hell.
Once the thing’s set up—with a pretty damn good connection too why is there nothing in this fucking house—he calls Jack, then calls again when there’s no answer, then texts a series of debatably obscene things and calls again.
The sigh on the other end when it finally clicks speaks to years of long-suffering.
“Jeremy, how did you get a phone?”
“I drove to the nearest city because you left me with nothing to do.”
“I know for a fact there’s both music and books there. Also you’re injured, you should be sleeping. A lot. And not even remotely driving. Are you taking your painkillers? Those aren’t the kind you drive on.”
“I’ve been shot worse.”
There’s another long pained sigh, then a shifting of fabric that he recognizes as her turning to look over the back of the couch at the calendar that’s tacked to the fridge. She does this whenever she feels the need to shame them or make fun of them or generally just make a point. There’s highlighter colors so everyone can see how long it’s been since the last time they fucked up.
Purple’s on there a lot.
“You got shot by the cops, crashed your bike, caught it on fire, and then got dragged around half-conscious until we could stick your ass on a plane with the goods and get you out of town less than a week ago Jeremy. That’s pretty bad on the scale of things. The only reason you’re moving as much as you probably are is because we found the strongest painkillers we could find for you which, I’m going to say again, you should not have been driving on. Those are the four a day max type things Jer.”
He’s had three today, he’s fine. Also apparently some of his road rash might be burns, that’s a thing.
“Jack. Jackie. Jacqueline. I’m dying. I’m going to die. You’ve left me in hell.”
“Only one of those is my name.”
“Jack.”
Oh there’s that sigh again. New record. He wonders if she keeps them tallied.
“A week. You need to survive a week more there. That’s all I need you to do. You really ballsed it up spectacularly here buddy, they’ve still got your face up all over town. Give us a week to cool down the people we need to cool down and you can finish fixing up back home. You know how this shit works.”
“I’m going to kill someone.”
“That sucks. See you in a week.”
And then she hangs up on him. Because she hates him. He didn’t even get to ask her where the fuck he is. He whines a bit at the screen, debates his options. If Jack says no, the others will probably say no too, if for no reason other than to hold it over his head, the jerks. Pretty much anyone in the crew is out. Well, at least he has someone to complain to.
He tilts over his shoulder to look at where Scratch is settled, points a finger.
“Stay quiet.”
He actually preceeds the call with a text this time, though considering it’s barely coherent he’s not sure how useful it is. He tries though. It only rings a handful of times before it clicks, though there’s almost instantly the distinct echo of speakerphone, the splash of water growing a little fainter.
“Are you aware your face is plastered on nearly every surface in downtown right now?”
He groans, sinks back further into the couch, trying to melt his body into it. Ryan’s laugh is tinny and distant but god he craves it, wishes it wasn’t so rare as of late.
“Yeah. I fucked up, I got shot. I’m so bored. I’m dying.”
“That so?”
There’s the heavy splash of something being dropped into the water and he shuts his eyes, letting his memories of days spent sitting in Ryan’s backyard paint a picture of what he’s doing. Water moving and speaker means he’s in the habitat, probably checking over the heaters, the temperature, the markers for pH and all the other things he doesn’t understand. Splashes mean he might be reupping the little darting fish that exist as part of the big behemoth’s diet, or checking the various plants that make up the deeper end’s greenery. It takes a lot of love to keep the whole thing running, and he thinks sometimes that Teddy gets that. He’s certainly remarkably okay with Ryan’s tactile nature for something he’s not entirely convinced isn’t a dinosaur.
“I don’t even know where I am Ryan. I had to drive an hour and a half to get this phone and get it set up because the only thing in this fucking house is old ass books and music. It’s vinyl. I’m not suited for vinyl. And when I called Jack she just told me off for driving while on painkillers because I’m still fucked up from my fuck-up. Cabin fever’s gonna get me, I’m going to be living in the bathroom shouting about how there’s shit in my attic by the time they send someone for me next week.”
“Shit, that bad huh?”
He doesn’t even need to think about it.”
“I can feel it in my skin. This shit might be great for them but I’m ready to start breaking shit just to have something to do. I’m so close to just trying to go back alone, drugs be damned. Just keep driving until I get somewhere good.”
There’s silence for a few seconds, even the splashing dies down. It’s actually enough that he pulls the phone away from his ear to make sure the call didn’t get dropped. He’s just putting it back when Ryan’s voice comes through, clear and no longer echoed. His tone is off, discolored. It’s the one he uses when he lays down rules, the one that is playfully unerring, but there’s something fragile about it, something weak right through the center.
“Jeremy, I’m going to come get you so you aren’t an idiot and hurt yourself further, okay? That work for you?”
He blinks up at the ceiling, confused.
“You don’t know where I am though. Do you know where I am?”
“No, but you’re calling me, which means you have a signal. Send me a pin. I’m assuming the phone you bought can do that.”
Oh shit, he didn’t even think of that. Why didn’t he think of that? Probably because of the drugs. Has he eaten? He should eat.
Ryan lets out a fond breath across the line, which is funny because he knows for a fact that he doesn’t actually need them.
“Yes, you should eat something. And drink some water. Let me get everyone here squared away and I’ll come get you.”
“I don’t think I’m super close to you Ryan. Shit’s all country out here.”
He feels the need to make that point. The smile in Ryan’s voice sounds a lot more firm this time.
“We live on an island Jeremy, it’s going to be an adventure either way. Don’t worry about it. Money really isn’t a concern of mine, I don’t know if you noticed. I’ll see you soon.”
Second time he’s been hung up on today, though he’s much less annoyed about this one. Still takes him a few minutes to find the energy to get up off the couch and go make one of the boxed meals from the cupboard, fiddling with the phone until he manages to send Ryan a pin of his location. He feels better after eating, after having a few glasses of water, but the exhaustion is still pretty fucking prevalent so he rights the box and drags it into the bedroom he’s been sleeping in, tucks it into the corner, then goes back for Scratch, who looks remarkably unimpressed by him all the way up until he makes his intentions clear, and then takes to pecking his fingers the first few attempts at lifting him until he can get him properly hooked under his arm. Jackass.
At least he settles just fine when he’s in the box and the lights are off.
Then he collapses back into the bed and stops existing for the foreseeable future.
The next thing he’s aware of is fingers pressing gently into his scalp, soothing and familiar with only a ghostly hint of warmth. He’s distantly aware of the sound that escapes his throat, pushing sleepily into the touch, seeking comfort, seeking another. He hates being alone. The voice that whispers into the air around him is soft, doing its best not to disturb him too badly as it rouses him.
“I think you’re more fucked up than you let on J. Most bullet holes don’t require a sling.”
He just whines, tries to melt a little further into the hand as it rubs a spot just over his ear, chasing that scrap of heat. He recognizes the soft chuckle that rattles through the touch.
“Don’t worry, I told you I’d bring you home. I hope you don’t mind living with me for awhile.”
That sounds great actually. He loves Ryan’s house. Oh that reminds him.
“Present, f’r you. Box.”
He feels the touch lessen, attention drawn to looking around the room, then pull away completely as he gets up to look, the weight leaving the bed beside him. He hears the sound of stuttered breath and giggles a little dozily, still amused by the little things that Ryan does.
“H’s name’s Scratch. H’sounds like a d’flating party b’loon.”
“You bought me a rooster.”
“Y’needed one.”
“You bought me a rooster because you remembered I didn’t have one.”
He seems stuck on this. It takes a lot of effort to sit up, to open his eyes and squint at the corner he put the box in. Ryan’s kneeling by the box, his hand inside no doubt gently checking over Scratch’s sleeping form. He’s dressed different from usual, jeans and a simple blue flannel, old and worn and marked with faded black stains. In the shadowy moonlight, his eyes shine.
“Crush’n’Lady’re my babies y’know, at this point. I’ve come over’n played with’m enough. An’ I know Crush loves me s’much as I love her’n I think Lady does too, so m’allowed to do things for them’n you. Dunno about Teddy, but he’s old’n weird.”
He shakes his head, trying to get the sleep out of it, ignores how it makes the pain pulse a little. When he reaches out for Ryan, he comes willingly, sliding onto the bed to take his hand.
“Y’ve been so sad lately Ry. I know y’think I haven’t noticed but I have. Y’were all good, hung out with me all day wearin’ that eyesore holo shirt, remember? I made fun of it an’ y’haven’t worn it since an’ I thought it might’ve been me but y’would know I was teasin’ an’ so then s’not me but if s’not me then I dunno how to fix it an’ I just...I don’t want you t’be sad anymore.”
He’s getting himself worked up, he knows he is, he’s shit at keeping himself handled when he’s half-awake and still fairly medicated, Michael once said that anyone interrogating him would just need some kickass drugs and a good pillow to get him to spill, but he can’t help it, not when this person he cares for so fucking much is staring at him like he’s something precious and beautiful. Ryan squeezes his hand, so gentle, always so gentle, so full of that strength no regular human would ever have, reaches up his other and brushes away tears he hadn’t even noticed were falling.
“I forget sometimes, how perceptive you are. I forget that we started playing our games because of you, because you were having as much fun as me and were clever enough to work around the rules as much as you played by them.”
He sighs and god he sounds so fucking old. His smile flickers and for a second it looks so pained and he hates it, more than anything. Ryan shouldn’t seem like he’ll break apart at the smallest touch.
“I don’t dream often, and even when I do I’m always aware I’m dreaming. The night of that day I...had a bad one, as it were. It rattled me, more than usual. I’m not used to dealing with these sorts of things around others and I took it out on our time together, I’m sorry.”
It doesn’t feel like enough, doesn’t feel like the whole of it, but the smile steadies a little, firms around the corners. It’s soft and small and sad, but for the first time in weeks, it feels real. He lets go of Ryan’s hand to reach up and touch it, reassuring himself as Ryan tilts into the touch, chasing his warmth.
“I enjoy being around you Jeremy, more than I think you could ever know. Don’t doubt that. You remind me of what being human is.”
Fuck, he’s already crying, that was just the extra knife in the chest. Ryan laughs, weak and wounded, when he says as much, then gently presses their lips together, tasting like copper and home.
It’s all he could ever need.
That Which Is Found
Final Word Count: 5,005
———
This is not the worst he’s ever been injured, he wants to make that very clear. There was that time he had to dive out of a crashing plane when he was in his twenties and stupid and he didn’t really get the whole parachute thing and broke like four bones when he landed and he just curled up in his apartment and was sad for a few months when that happened.
This is cruel and unusual punishment, for reasons that have no actual fact behind them.
So he has a few bullet wounds in his right arm, they’re neat little through-and-throughs in the meat from the 9’s the cops were carrying, it’s fine. So he crashed his bike, he was wearing protection, all he has is a mild concussion and some road rash. And yeah he doesn’t remember anything past that and waking up here, but he doesn’t have anything else that speaks of greater wounds, he’d feel it, so there’s no reason he couldn’t have just bunkered down at home and not in the middle of wherever the fuck he is now.
He actually doesn’t know. All he’s got to go on is a note in Jack’s familiar shitty handwriting reminding him to not get in trouble that looks like it was probably stuck to him before he was hauled out to this place.
He doesn’t need this mother hen bullshit.
He says as much to the air above the couch that he’s sprawled on before he decides that he’s going to take a nap.
He wakes up the next morning and hurts, so he takes two of the pills that were left in a bottle for him and goes back to sleep for a few hours until he feels better.
When he feels ready to get up again he explores, finds nothing outside but flat fucking land and a few sporadic trees giving the area around the grounds some nice shade. He watches for twenty minutes and not a single other car even comes close to appearing in his line of sight. Inside the house there’s no TV, no phone, no anything, completely off-grid. There’s some old-ass books and a vinyl record player, that’s it. The kitchen is full of canned foods and box-mixes, there’s some money bundled up in the back of a few cabinets, the usual set-up. This has to be one of Geoff’s weird safehouses, one of the ones he talks about retiring to someday with Jack to live out their weird old person dream.
It’s his own personal hell, trapped alone with nothing to do and no one to talk to. He’s going to fucking scream.
Further exploration reveals an old truck in the garage, though someone’s taken the keys off the hook by the door and hidden them somewhere, probably at his tormentor’s behest, so that’s his next mission after finding clean clothes to change into, and a shower. That one’s easier, even if it takes a bit of digging to find a pack of shirts in the drawer that’s actually close to his size and getting into the shower when he’s got bandages to look after is a pain. Upside is that he finds a sling in the oversized medkit under the sink, so that’s his arm pretty much set. And again, his road rash is nominal at best, he’s fine, this is bullshit.
He microwaves something from a can and starts looking for the keys.
Between sleeping, eating, and a few hours of just laying on the ground cursing his general existence, it takes him three days to find them tucked up on top of the empty fucking fridge. He nearly pulls something celebrating. He still doesn’t know where he is and it’s not like the truck actually has that much gas, but baby steps. It still takes him until the next day to get out of the house, but that’s semantics. He needs freedom, even if that freedom is picking a direction along the long empty dirt road and driving until he finds literally anything. He will take being found by a weird country cult. It would at least be exciting.
He finds signs for a livestock fair instead and decides to go there because he’s literally never lived outside a city in his life and he can’t actually think of any sort of livestock he’s ever actually seen up close in real life other than a very particular subset of fuzzy chickens. There’s some farms north of the city and all, but he can’t think of any he’s ever actually seen.
It’s a fucking great time. He has a blast, and it’s probably not just the drugs saying that, considering it takes him an hour to drive out to it past where he sees the first signs and he’s feeling pretty fucking sore by the time he gets up and walking around. Not enough not to, but enough to feel suitably coherent. The people showing off their animals are weirdly happy to talk to the blatant city kid who wants to learn about their giant ass cows or whatever and even if he retains basically none of it, it’s interesting to see what these people consider the cream of the crop for their weird ranch-beings. He even gets to pet a pig at the little area separate from the actual entrants, a big momma one who had a load of little babies scrambling around her belly, feed some goats who try to take his fingers off on the process, which is awesome. He buys a hat at the vendors with some of the cash from the wad he stuck in his sling, a nice warm jacket that he throws awkwardly over his shoulders despite the fact that it’s really not that cold out. It’s well into the afternoon by the time he’s wondering if maybe he should ask someone where precisely this is, since the name of the actual fair didn’t help any. It’s mostly chance that he’s looking around for the appropriate person to ask these sorts of weird questions to when he spots a familiar sort of feathering from one of the batches of cages and finds his curiosity enough that he wanders over to look.
There’s a whole batch of them, all groomed and plucked in a way that he’s never actually seen before, mostly sitting pleasantly in their cages. It looks like they’ve already been judged for the day and he wonders distantly how the two he knows would do when he realizes one of them is staring dead at him. He blinks, turns his focus to that cage in particular.
The resident inside isn’t sitting like the others, rather standing as close to the wire as it can, all shiny black feathers and careful grooming. He wanders a little closer, trapped in this weird staring contest.
Then it spreads its wings and fucking crows at him, loud and startling enough that he jumps back a little.
Little fucker looks smug.
“Scratch, stop that! No one thinks you’re funny!”
He looks away to notice someone coming over, smudged a bit with dirt across their face and ragged overalls, pockets stuffed with seed and god only knows what else. Familiar outfit, unfamiliar face. He wonders if people who own chickens are just the type to dress like that. They give him a crooked smile, fingers playing with the edge of a patch on their leg.
“I’m sorry, he’s maturing right now, thinks he needs to show everyone up.”
“S’fine, I know some folks like that. Think he might just be feeling antsy.”
“It’s his first fair. We thought he was trained well enough for showing but I guess not. Maybe next year.”
Their hand flickers halfway up from the patch towards the braid hanging over their shoulder, like they want to run their fingers over it, but stops instead to readjust their name tag. Nervous habit probably. The name tag says Zel.
“And if he stays the same?”
“Then he’ll probably just stay at the farm, hopefully some of the hens will take a liking to him.”
He looks back to the cage, thinks about the two he knows, about the Crush and her proper lady demeanor, Ladybug and her rambunctious menace. Thinks about their caretaker, how he’s been these last few weeks, how off and quiet and distant, as much as he smiles and laughs and plays along. Something happened, between one day and the next, and he hasn’t for the life of himself been able to figure out what.
“Could I take him off your hands?”
Out of the corner of his eye he can see how Zel blinks at him, taking in his five-day beard, his healing bruises under the brand new hat and jacket, the sling holding his arm close to his body.
“He’s a show rooster.”
“Doesn’t seem like he’s doing a very good job? And looks like they’ve already been judged, so I mean I guess you could keep him around for next year and hope he improves, or I could just take him.”
He fishes the wad out from his sling, waves it a little for emphasis as he shifts his attention back to the proper person. It’s as satisfying as it always is to watch their eyes go wide at the bills. He likes having illegal amounts of money.
“I, uh, I’ll have to go check?”
“That’s fine.”
They’re remarkably quick, bolting down to the end of the row of cages to flag down one person, then dart off to another, then back. He shifts a little bit while he waits, chasing away the nagging pain. Standing still sucks, same way sitting for an hour in the car sucks. The rooster—Scratch they called him?—crows a little bit at being taken off the pedestal of attention for a minute, so he makes a few loose hand gestures at the cage that he vaguely remembers Ryan doing whenever he was playing with one of the girls. It’s remarkably effective in terms of drawing his eye, at least until Zel comes back over.
“Can I ask why?”
“My uh...”
Boyfriend? Fuck buddy? Weird undead mercenary crush?
“Friend. He has two hens and he was telling me that one of them has been getting broody lately after they lost their rooster a year back, and the other one reminds me a lot of this one. I think he’d make a nice addition to the flock, and better that than you guys putting a prayer on his chances of straightening out after he finishes maturing.”
He thinks that might be better than whatever they’re expecting, because they relax a little, then very quickly walk over to the cage and unlock the cage door, transferring the little black rooster quickly into his hold, mostly hidden by the fall of his jacket, along with a bag of seed they produce from one of their pockets. He tosses them the whole wad as best he can with a suddenly very mellow rooster tucked in the crux of his good arm and they scramble a bit to catch it, surprised by the sheer amount of money now in their hands. They stare at him wide-eyed for a minute, then very quickly stuff the whole thing into their overalls when he lifts an eyebrow. Smart kid.
“Don’t...make a big deal out of it? When you leave? Try to be cool. Layla and Paul say it’s okay and it’s their flock but I don’t think we’re supposed to be selling our chickens here, just showing them.”
Awesome. He’s committing crime even at some weird country fair. Other than whatever crime is probably associated with that bundle of money.
“Will do. His name was Scratch?”
“Yeah, like Old Scratch. Because he’s a fuckin’ devil.”
He laughs a bit, feels his newfound prize wriggle before settling back into his warmth, pliant and easy in the dark hide of his jacket.
“Thanks, I think he’ll fit in fine.”
He waves farewell, then remembers the original train of thought he had in this building. He stops, midway through his turn, then thinks of a better way to ask his question that doesn’t sound weird as fuck.
“Sorry, quick question. Do you know anywhere near here that I could buy a phone? I broke mine.”
Or lost it, or something. Doesn’t matter, it’s actually true. Part of the reason he’s dying. Zel gives him directions to the closest town which has a little outlet mall on its outskirts that can help him, then waves him off for real. He ducks out with as much ease and confidence as he can muster, pulling on all his tricks of bullshit to smuggle this little fucker right out the front gate. Which works, somehow. And the little shit remains copacetic all the way into the truck, where he has to be bundled into the jacket and put in the backseat for his crimes. Driving with only one arm is already hard enough, he doesn’t need a bundle of feathers trying to hang out in his lap.
The town’s only about twenty minutes away, and a quick skim of the glove compartment reveals another bundle of cash and a knife, which is great. He leaves the key in the ignition and just yanks the fob off the ring when he ducks into the store, grabbing a card of prepaid minutes and another of data along with the cheapest phone he sees, silently blessing small towns for hanging onto their ancient chain stores. The cashier’s even nice enough to hook him up with a box from a shipment of smaller items and some newspaper when he mentions his new passenger, giving him some advice on how to transport the little fucker back home when he gives her a quick explanation of his plight, minus the obvious criminal bits, when he makes an off-hand joke about the state of his new jacket and she gives him a look despite herself. He thinks he nails her estimation of him somewhere between rich MMA weirdo and traveling hipster, and he’s more than happy to let her think that.
Stabbing some holes in the top and sides of the box is difficult, but he’s nothing if not experienced in the many different handlings of knives, so he’s able to manage alright, and he’s able to use his hand in the sling to assist in shredding the newspaper halfway decently to throw in the bottom, so that’s a success. His new companion’s more than happy to transfer into the box in the passenger seat as well, which makes life a whole lot easier, even if he has to more or less drop him in.
He’s exhausted by the time he actually pulls back into the driveway in front of the house an hour and a half later, awkwardly shuffling the box inside before tipping it over and laying down beside it on the kitchen floor, the bag with the phone shit and seed still looped on his wrist. Scratch saunters out like he’s been given a limo ride through cloud nine, and not what was undoubtedly a weird and wild mess of a thing, then cocks his head to stare down at the body beside his traveling palace.
They stare at each other for a minute before Scratch spreads his wings out and crows at him again, then wanders off to examine the rest of the kitchen as he groans.
“I think you and I are going to get on like a house on fire.”
He manages to drag his corpse back off the ground after a few minutes, leaving the bag of seed open on the floor for Scratch as he stumbles to the bottle of painkillers and swallows a few with a handful of water, then makes it to the couch, sitting heavy in its cushions and staring at nothing in particular until he starts feeling something roughly resembling human again.
He wants to take a nap. A nap sounds good. But he needs to figure out the phone first. That’s a thing he needs to do. Soon as he remembers how hands work.
It takes well until the sun is setting for him to finally get the phone set up. He almost manages to get up and moving and fed with something from a box out of the cupboard, along with a bowl of water for Scratch, who has taken up residence on the dining room chair. He doesn’t actually know anyone’s numbers, but it’s not like he’s an idiot, so he’s got his contact list saved in about fifteen different ways just in case his phone dies for various reasons and he can’t get a new one.
Like his crew torturing him by moving him to country hell.
Once the thing’s set up—with a pretty damn good connection too why is there nothing in this fucking house—he calls Jack, then calls again when there’s no answer, then texts a series of debatably obscene things and calls again.
The sigh on the other end when it finally clicks speaks to years of long-suffering.
“Jeremy, how did you get a phone?”
“I drove to the nearest city because you left me with nothing to do.”
“I know for a fact there’s both music and books there. Also you’re injured, you should be sleeping. A lot. And not even remotely driving. Are you taking your painkillers? Those aren’t the kind you drive on.”
“I’ve been shot worse.”
There’s another long pained sigh, then a shifting of fabric that he recognizes as her turning to look over the back of the couch at the calendar that’s tacked to the fridge. She does this whenever she feels the need to shame them or make fun of them or generally just make a point. There’s highlighter colors so everyone can see how long it’s been since the last time they fucked up.
Purple’s on there a lot.
“You got shot by the cops, crashed your bike, caught it on fire, and then got dragged around half-conscious until we could stick your ass on a plane with the goods and get you out of town less than a week ago Jeremy. That’s pretty bad on the scale of things. The only reason you’re moving as much as you probably are is because we found the strongest painkillers we could find for you which, I’m going to say again, you should not have been driving on. Those are the four a day max type things Jer.”
He’s had three today, he’s fine. Also apparently some of his road rash might be burns, that’s a thing.
“Jack. Jackie. Jacqueline. I’m dying. I’m going to die. You’ve left me in hell.”
“Only one of those is my name.”
“Jack.”
Oh there’s that sigh again. New record. He wonders if she keeps them tallied.
“A week. You need to survive a week more there. That’s all I need you to do. You really ballsed it up spectacularly here buddy, they’ve still got your face up all over town. Give us a week to cool down the people we need to cool down and you can finish fixing up back home. You know how this shit works.”
“I’m going to kill someone.”
“That sucks. See you in a week.”
And then she hangs up on him. Because she hates him. He didn’t even get to ask her where the fuck he is. He whines a bit at the screen, debates his options. If Jack says no, the others will probably say no too, if for no reason other than to hold it over his head, the jerks. Pretty much anyone in the crew is out. Well, at least he has someone to complain to.
He tilts over his shoulder to look at where Scratch is settled, points a finger.
“Stay quiet.”
He actually preceeds the call with a text this time, though considering it’s barely coherent he’s not sure how useful it is. He tries though. It only rings a handful of times before it clicks, though there’s almost instantly the distinct echo of speakerphone, the splash of water growing a little fainter.
“Are you aware your face is plastered on nearly every surface in downtown right now?”
He groans, sinks back further into the couch, trying to melt his body into it. Ryan’s laugh is tinny and distant but god he craves it, wishes it wasn’t so rare as of late.
“Yeah. I fucked up, I got shot. I’m so bored. I’m dying.”
“That so?”
There’s the heavy splash of something being dropped into the water and he shuts his eyes, letting his memories of days spent sitting in Ryan’s backyard paint a picture of what he’s doing. Water moving and speaker means he’s in the habitat, probably checking over the heaters, the temperature, the markers for pH and all the other things he doesn’t understand. Splashes mean he might be reupping the little darting fish that exist as part of the big behemoth’s diet, or checking the various plants that make up the deeper end’s greenery. It takes a lot of love to keep the whole thing running, and he thinks sometimes that Teddy gets that. He’s certainly remarkably okay with Ryan’s tactile nature for something he’s not entirely convinced isn’t a dinosaur.
“I don’t even know where I am Ryan. I had to drive an hour and a half to get this phone and get it set up because the only thing in this fucking house is old ass books and music. It’s vinyl. I’m not suited for vinyl. And when I called Jack she just told me off for driving while on painkillers because I’m still fucked up from my fuck-up. Cabin fever’s gonna get me, I’m going to be living in the bathroom shouting about how there’s shit in my attic by the time they send someone for me next week.”
“Shit, that bad huh?”
He doesn’t even need to think about it.”
“I can feel it in my skin. This shit might be great for them but I’m ready to start breaking shit just to have something to do. I’m so close to just trying to go back alone, drugs be damned. Just keep driving until I get somewhere good.”
There’s silence for a few seconds, even the splashing dies down. It’s actually enough that he pulls the phone away from his ear to make sure the call didn’t get dropped. He’s just putting it back when Ryan’s voice comes through, clear and no longer echoed. His tone is off, discolored. It’s the one he uses when he lays down rules, the one that is playfully unerring, but there’s something fragile about it, something weak right through the center.
“Jeremy, I’m going to come get you so you aren’t an idiot and hurt yourself further, okay? That work for you?”
He blinks up at the ceiling, confused.
“You don’t know where I am though. Do you know where I am?”
“No, but you’re calling me, which means you have a signal. Send me a pin. I’m assuming the phone you bought can do that.”
Oh shit, he didn’t even think of that. Why didn’t he think of that? Probably because of the drugs. Has he eaten? He should eat.
Ryan lets out a fond breath across the line, which is funny because he knows for a fact that he doesn’t actually need them.
“Yes, you should eat something. And drink some water. Let me get everyone here squared away and I’ll come get you.”
“I don’t think I’m super close to you Ryan. Shit’s all country out here.”
He feels the need to make that point. The smile in Ryan’s voice sounds a lot more firm this time.
“We live on an island Jeremy, it’s going to be an adventure either way. Don’t worry about it. Money really isn’t a concern of mine, I don’t know if you noticed. I’ll see you soon.”
Second time he’s been hung up on today, though he’s much less annoyed about this one. Still takes him a few minutes to find the energy to get up off the couch and go make one of the boxed meals from the cupboard, fiddling with the phone until he manages to send Ryan a pin of his location. He feels better after eating, after having a few glasses of water, but the exhaustion is still pretty fucking prevalent so he rights the box and drags it into the bedroom he’s been sleeping in, tucks it into the corner, then goes back for Scratch, who looks remarkably unimpressed by him all the way up until he makes his intentions clear, and then takes to pecking his fingers the first few attempts at lifting him until he can get him properly hooked under his arm. Jackass.
At least he settles just fine when he’s in the box and the lights are off.
Then he collapses back into the bed and stops existing for the foreseeable future.
The next thing he’s aware of is fingers pressing gently into his scalp, soothing and familiar with only a ghostly hint of warmth. He’s distantly aware of the sound that escapes his throat, pushing sleepily into the touch, seeking comfort, seeking another. He hates being alone. The voice that whispers into the air around him is soft, doing its best not to disturb him too badly as it rouses him.
“I think you’re more fucked up than you let on J. Most bullet holes don’t require a sling.”
He just whines, tries to melt a little further into the hand as it rubs a spot just over his ear, chasing that scrap of heat. He recognizes the soft chuckle that rattles through the touch.
“Don’t worry, I told you I’d bring you home. I hope you don’t mind living with me for awhile.”
That sounds great actually. He loves Ryan’s house. Oh that reminds him.
“Present, f’r you. Box.”
He feels the touch lessen, attention drawn to looking around the room, then pull away completely as he gets up to look, the weight leaving the bed beside him. He hears the sound of stuttered breath and giggles a little dozily, still amused by the little things that Ryan does.
“H’s name’s Scratch. H’sounds like a d’flating party b’loon.”
“You bought me a rooster.”
“Y’needed one.”
“You bought me a rooster because you remembered I didn’t have one.”
He seems stuck on this. It takes a lot of effort to sit up, to open his eyes and squint at the corner he put the box in. Ryan’s kneeling by the box, his hand inside no doubt gently checking over Scratch’s sleeping form. He’s dressed different from usual, jeans and a simple blue flannel, old and worn and marked with faded black stains. In the shadowy moonlight, his eyes shine.
“Crush’n’Lady’re my babies y’know, at this point. I’ve come over’n played with’m enough. An’ I know Crush loves me s’much as I love her’n I think Lady does too, so m’allowed to do things for them’n you. Dunno about Teddy, but he’s old’n weird.”
He shakes his head, trying to get the sleep out of it, ignores how it makes the pain pulse a little. When he reaches out for Ryan, he comes willingly, sliding onto the bed to take his hand.
“Y’ve been so sad lately Ry. I know y’think I haven’t noticed but I have. Y’were all good, hung out with me all day wearin’ that eyesore holo shirt, remember? I made fun of it an’ y’haven’t worn it since an’ I thought it might’ve been me but y’would know I was teasin’ an’ so then s’not me but if s’not me then I dunno how to fix it an’ I just...I don’t want you t’be sad anymore.”
He’s getting himself worked up, he knows he is, he’s shit at keeping himself handled when he’s half-awake and still fairly medicated, Michael once said that anyone interrogating him would just need some kickass drugs and a good pillow to get him to spill, but he can’t help it, not when this person he cares for so fucking much is staring at him like he’s something precious and beautiful. Ryan squeezes his hand, so gentle, always so gentle, so full of that strength no regular human would ever have, reaches up his other and brushes away tears he hadn’t even noticed were falling.
“I forget sometimes, how perceptive you are. I forget that we started playing our games because of you, because you were having as much fun as me and were clever enough to work around the rules as much as you played by them.”
He sighs and god he sounds so fucking old. His smile flickers and for a second it looks so pained and he hates it, more than anything. Ryan shouldn’t seem like he’ll break apart at the smallest touch.
“I don’t dream often, and even when I do I’m always aware I’m dreaming. The night of that day I...had a bad one, as it were. It rattled me, more than usual. I’m not used to dealing with these sorts of things around others and I took it out on our time together, I’m sorry.”
It doesn’t feel like enough, doesn’t feel like the whole of it, but the smile steadies a little, firms around the corners. It’s soft and small and sad, but for the first time in weeks, it feels real. He lets go of Ryan’s hand to reach up and touch it, reassuring himself as Ryan tilts into the touch, chasing his warmth.
“I enjoy being around you Jeremy, more than I think you could ever know. Don’t doubt that. You remind me of what being human is.”
Fuck, he’s already crying, that was just the extra knife in the chest. Ryan laughs, weak and wounded, when he says as much, then gently presses their lips together, tasting like copper and home.
It’s all he could ever need.
Brothers
Mishuk gotal’u meshuroke, pako kyore - Mando’a phrase, ‘Pressure makes gems, ease makes decay.’
Other Important Mando’a
———
The gauze presses down tighter than it strictly needs to, dragging a yelp from his throat. His current torturer doesn’t even hesitate in his rant.
“Can’t fucking believe you, this is the third time. Are you trying to get blown up? Is this punishment? Are you torturing me? You have to be torturing me, there’s no other reason you would pull this stunt for the third fucking time and insist that it’s fine because it worked again. It’s not going to keep working.”
He lifts his hand to make any number of rude gestures and gets what feels like the remnants of his shirt to the face for his troubles. He grumbles, hazy with pain.
“I fucking hate you. Where’s your bedside manner?”
“It died in the tubes. You really think anyone with any semblance of that shit was going to end up in this hellhole? Now roll over, I need to get the burns on your back. Try not to jostle yourself too bad, you have another head injury. Your fifth this year, by the way. Because you stuffed a grenade into a close-proximity clanker hold for the third time and just expected it to turn out okay.”
“You’re the worst medic.”
“And yet you’re still alive despite my best efforts.”
He does his best, stuffs his face into the pillow. They’re out of bacta again, out of needles, all they’ve got is gauze and some mixes from the locals, plants that loosen the corners of his awareness, make it a bit easier to drift. It could be worse. He bites his tongue and lets their medic patch him up, grumbling away as he always does. He’s going to be stuck in this fucking cot all night, he just knows it.
“He the worst off?”
Shit, the old man’s here too. When did he get here?
“Yeah, some burns, another bang to the skull. Put a good dent in his bucket. He’s making a bad example for the shinies.”
“Good thing none of us are stupid enough to rank him up then.”
He makes a noise of protest, feels the old man’s hand press to a spot against his shoulder, somewhere he’s not fucked up. No gloves, skin-on-skin. Fucking cheater. Whatever words he’s going to say get lost somewhere underneath the familiar sweep of endorphins. He huffs into his pillow.
“I’ll send someone in to make sure he doesn’t try to wander off. He could use a quiet night for once.”
“You could too.”
“We all could.”
There’s a rustle, then a long enough silence for him to think the old man’s left them again.
“You should’ve downplayed it some more. He’s going to be up all night going over us again.”
“He needs to know for the reports.”
“His reports are half rancorshit anyways. As long as I’m still breathing, no one cares how much.”
The old man thinks they don’t know, thinks they can’t hear the words, but there’s no hiding them, not really. Not when he repeats them over and over, every time someone’s badly wounded, hunched at bedsides as they wait to see if eyes will open again. He’s fine, he’s conscious, no one needs to worry.
Fingers tap his arm, gloved, indicate he can resituate himself however he finds comfortable. He sits back up, looks around the darkened tent. It really is just him in here, everyone else got bandaged up and sent out.
“You say that, but this shit is worrying. You’re no good to us if you’re always getting hurt. Gunners like you know how to handle all the big guns, we wouldn’t have anyone out there taking down whole rows of clankers in a single sweep if you got stuck in bed like this in the middle of a campaign.”
“You’d have several others. Like...four, five maybe.”
“You’re missing the point.”
He’s not, but he’s not going to say that. He knows, he knows precisely what the issue is, it’s just that it makes no sense, and so he’s not going to bother with it.
“Look, I’m tired, can we do this whole shit some other time when I’m properly medicated?”
“Shiv.”
“Tyr, leave him be.”
His savior in stripes, finally.
“Kest, he needs to get this shit handled.”
“You find me a mindhealer that specializes in clones, we’ll talk. Until then, go deal with Effy. He’s trying to take off his bandages to show off his, and I quote, ‘badass new scar’ to some of the locals, and Burn’s too busy handling some other shit to deal with him.”
The clatter of the medic quickly grabbing a handful of things and ducking out of the tent is amusing, to say the least. He settles in a little more, groans as it pulls at some of his burns.
“Y’know, I’m pretty sure in terms of people to keep an eye on me, Blue’s next on the list for ranking. Don’t need an LT to watch over a lowly trooper.”
“If there’s one thing you aren’t Shiv, it’s lowly. And I think we both know that Blue would let you slip out in a heartbeat, he’s only your sergeant because the rest of you would kill Draft within the first week.”
That’s true. He watches as Kest drops his bucket on the cot two over, strips out of his armor with a familiar efficiency. He yanks his shirt off too, then starts shoving the cot next over up against his. There’s a fresh outline on his skin, the beginnings of new ink, but that’s less important at the moment.
“Kest, I promise I’ll sleep.”
“Yeah, I’ll believe that the day it happens. Now get comfortable or I’ll call in the rest of your squad and they’ll bury you here. Judging by the fact that you look like a Jedi training dummy, I assume you don’t want that.”
He groans, but shifts over a bit anyway, turning onto his less scorched side. It’s a tight fit even with the two cots, considering neither of them are cadets, haven’t been for several years, and this isn’t the field where there’s plenty of room for a handful of clones to settle as they see fit, crammed on top of not enough blankets with too much risk to bother stripping out of armor, but they manage. They wind up with their arms pressed together, just a strip of contact, just enough to be soothing. Kest’s bigger than he is, bulkier in a way that speaks for both genetics and training, a commando if ever there was one, and the heat he puts off is more than enough to make up for any lost by the shifting of it all. They’ve done this a thousand times, with themselves and others, some genetics-deep thing that insists that this person with their skin against yours is familiar, is safe, is known, and it’s nice now even if he won’t admit it. He thinks sometimes that there were probably attempts to curb it with the first batches, probably attempts to curb a lot of the behavior that can be traced back to their base template, some more successful than others, but he wagers they probably stopped when they realized nothing cooled troopers or cadets down faster than being pressed in tight together, shoulder to shoulder, knowing all was well as long as that contact remained.
Kest wraps the hand of the arm not pressed together around his skull, uses it to drag him in until their foreheads are touching, gentle, the soft kind of kov’nyn.
“This is precisely why I’m here. Go to sleep. If the locals are right, some of your burns should at least feel a bit better in the morning, and your head should be improved anyways. Doesn’t seem to have rung you too bad, despite what Tyr said to the old man.”
“He should have said less to him.”
“Yeah, he probably should have.”
Not arguing. He sighs, lets the dual points of comfort drift him off. He doesn’t dream, doesn’t know if that’s something he’s capable of doing, there’s just comfortable darkness that takes the pain away, and when he opens his eyes he’s exactly where he fell asleep, but Kest’s pulling away and there’s someone else flopping into his space, much less efficient, all loose limbs and easy power. He feels delight curl up in his core.
“Vod’ika, the fuck’re you doing here?”
It’s amazing, how easy he smiles. His calloused hand is different than the rest of theirs, a completely separate code, different training, but it still registers as familiar as it settles on his side, as the pain that was nipping at the edges of his mind suddenly vanishes as if it never was.
“Honestly? We were dropping off supplies and happened to hear that there was a campaign happening here. Couldn’t help thinking that there was no way in hell a shitty place like this didn’t have Gamma in it, and we were only a system over, so we found a ride. Seems like we missed it though.”
So there’s definitely a stolen ship nearby with a questionable degree of legality to its name, that’s fun. Out of the corner of his eye he can see where Kest’s gone, having a conversation all his own with another broader figure, like he always does whenever they cross paths. He hums, letting the whole of it slide.
“Old man’s convinced you’re tracking us somehow.”
“Nah, just keep ending up where the action’s the ugliest, and that usually ends up being where you guys are as well. Ry thinks I’m unlucky.”
“S’cause you are.”
“Hey, I come all this way to check on you and this is the thanks I get?”
“I’m going back to sleep vod’ika.”
“It’s morning.”
“Back to sleep.”
He manages a few more hours before he’s woken by Tyr very nearly shoving him out of the cot, already talking as awareness snaps back into his head.
“Well past a reasonable time to be up soldier, let’s get a move on. We’re packing up to move out, so you need to go get your kit settled. Faster we get you starside, faster we can get some bacta on you.”
He rolls to his feet with a groan, everything a little fuzzy, catches the tail end of a familiar jumpsuit ducking out of the tent, off on his next adventure no doubt. Tyr’s still talking.
“Ori’vod found some needles in the ship they stole while vod’ika was here keeping you company, came out of a medkit, and it looks like those plants actually did some good. I figure as long as it doesn’t come up, old man doesn’t need to know about anything but the plants. Think you can manage that?”
“Such confidence.”
“Make it through our next campaign without getting hurt, then I’ll show you confidence.”
He doesn’t, of course. Or the one after that. He’s got a knack for injury, and Gamma never comes out the other end of a fight unscathed. It’s not a death wish, despite what the others think, but he doesn’t have a good way to explain it.
How are you supposed to explain the pervasive feeling of knowing you should be dead already?
It kicked up awhile back and it’s fucking with his reaction times, that’s it, that’s all there is. He’s always been the one to get into scrapes, he’s been doing it for six years with Gamma, ever since he told his commanding officer precisely where to shove his orders to pull out and leave civilians to die, just a shiny barely into his first missions. He’s never been good at leaving things well enough alone, and that tends to stick him right in the middle of it, the problem is that now there’s an extra half-second where there didn’t used to be, that fraction of a moment that he needs, when death comes flying in his face and his brain says oh this is it before the rest of him kicks into gear and says the hell it is.
He imagines if he dreamt he would probably dream of the moment he was meant to die, probably in the muck on some far off hellhole, but he doesn’t and so he’s got no way to logic himself out of it. He just needs to keep pushing forward and hopefully it’ll either resolve itself or it’s going to fuck him over royally at some point and that’ll be the end of it. A bit dark, but it’s what he’s got to work with.
The irony is that he’s actually one of the most likely to survive any of the stupid shit he pulls. It’s the joke of Gamma, the older you are, the higher your survivability is. Survive a year? You’re doing well. Survive two? Congratulations, you’re stuck, you’re part of them now, full of individuality and opinions that any other company would squash in an instant, something that runs deeper than haircuts and ink and painted armor. No one in Gamma’s special, not enough to get pulled for one of the fancy squads, but they’ve all got something, and this is what he has apparently. A history of fuck-ups and a bone-deep knowledge that at some point not that long ago, he was meant to die, just another identical face lost amongst the millions already forgotten.
Nothing worth explaining to the others, nothing worth getting himself stuck over. Just keep on being a makeshift thing made up of jagged edges wrapped haphazard in armor and grins, playing the game of faking it until it all sorts itself out one way or another.
“Shiv, look at buir.”
He glances over from where he and Vy are settled on and against some crates they just offloaded, taking a break while most everyone mills about, enjoying what seems to be a moderate fucking temperature for once. They’re interacting with a full on corps this time and it’s a stark reminder of just how little their mess of troopers is, never quite the amount it’s meant to be even with the constant influx of shinies deemed wrong in some fashion, their ranks always lacking, their casualties always too high, the officers and Jedi looking down on them even if the other clones do their best not to. The ones in this corps are trying real hard, though their General hasn’t done shit to hide his disapproval of their muck-thick war-beaten armor, their scars, and their extremely worn out level of not giving a fuck. It’s not their fault really, they’re fresh off a shorter mission, not a full campaign for once, but one that dropped them in waist-deep mud and vicious humidity, and it left them all not really trying hard to mask that they want nothing to do with any of this. He still keeps finding dried Force-only-knows-what in his armor whenever he puts it on or takes it off for fuck’s sake, he just wants a break and a deep clean.
The General on the other hand looks like he’s never been on the other side of the Core, all pristine robes and high nose, and he’s clearly not enjoying standing as close as he is to the old man. The old man is doing his damndest to not make his opinions on that obvious. It’s the funniest thing he’s seen in months. He sucks in a breath low through his teeth so he doesn’t break into a viciously loud kind of laughter, then reaches out and nabs the corner of Hix’s plate when he wanders past, nods down to the show. Smiles are always a bit terrifying on that fucked up face, nexus do that to a person, but the way his eyes light up is more than worth it. Hix glances back at him, then around.
“Spread the word?”
“Faster the better.”
“Got it.”
He trusts the other gunner to handle spreading the word, let the men have something fond to look back on if this particular partnering of forces goes the way it looks like it will, nudges Vy a bit with his leg. They watch in fascination as the old man slowly winds tenser and tenser, trapped between the Jedi General and his shiny commanders with no way out. No doubt that behind his bucket, he’s all teeth, biting back words he desperately wants to say. The Jedi’s none the wiser, going on and on and on.
“Ori'buyce, kih'kovid. Give him a good shake and see what rattles out.”
Vy snorts in response, settles further into the dirt, tilting his head back to watch down the busted line of his nose. Hard to believe he’s only been around a little more than a year, considering how easy he’s melted in with the worst of them. His youth only ever really comes out in the little things, the way he adapts, the way he seeps in along their cracks and fills them in without anyone expecting him to. He’s going to be better than them all one day, or he’s going to kill them. For his part, he’s kind of excited to find out which.
“Buir’s going to punch someone if no one rescues him.”
“He deals with us all the time, he’ll survive. And if not, Burn’s got him.”
He leans forward enough that Vy can see where he points, closer to where the conversation is happening where there’s a cluster of Gamma’s lieutenants, passing off well like they’re doing requisition checks aside from the glances they keep shooting to the old man. Burn’s angled out, just enough that he can duck over quickly if needed. He can see the others in Gamma around them, all doing their best not to make a big deal out of how they’re watching the old man slowly die inside. Hix is nothing if not efficient.
It actually gets to the point of twitching fingers before the Jedi finally ends the discussion. The old man ducks out immediately and Burn practically bolts from where he was already stepping over to lead him to a reasonable distance until he’s sufficiently unlikely to get in trouble again. Someone jeers, loudly. The shinies glance around, surprised, but Gamma’s already going back to their business, entertainment gone. He kicks his feet a little, scans to see if he can figure out where the rest of their squad went.
“Hey did you hear there’s vrelts in the city we’ll be sweeping through?”
“Vrelts? Vy we aren’t even near Corellia.”
“Yeah well, apparently it was a pretty big smuggling hub before the Seps bombed it. Some people weren’t too careful about their infestations. Some of the corps troops were talking about it when we were offloading.”
“Mmh. Shit, we’re going to have to make sure everyone clears out wherever they sleep. Don’t need more people in Gamma with Hix faces.”
“I think vrelt faces would look even worse than nexu faces honestly. At least he’s still got all of his bits, you don’t keep your bits if vrelts get at you.”
He looks down at Vy, still leaning forward. Vy looks back at him.
“Tyr giving you weird medical shit to read again?”
“I’m not answering that.”
“You know we have access to other things.”
“Like buir’s pad of docs? Or Draft’s tacky holonovels? I’d rather read something useful.”
“You can talk shit about Draft’s garbage all you want but don’t knock the old man’s pad, that thing’s our good luck charm.”
The pad was a gift from a civilian family, loaded with docs that go far over his head and definitely over the old man’s too, things about rights and laws and important things that will mean something if this war ever fucking ends. It’s several models out of date, probably illegal in some fashion, and has survived two crashes, one ship infiltration, six full long haul campaigns, and getting shot through the old man’s pack more times than any of them can count. He reads it whenever they have any decent amount of downtime, banging his scarred old head against a wall of jargon until something hopefully breaks through.
Their stubborn old man, a martyr to the end.
He shoves himself off the crate, makes a show of stretching. Something pops in his shoulder and it sends a shiver of longing through his muscles. Fuck he needs a decent bed. Just one. Just for an hour.
“C’mon, let’s go tell someone about the fucking vrelts.”
They find someone to tell. He muses, after, that words are hard for clones, sometimes. He thinks it’s because Basic isn’t what’s meant to be rolling off their tongues, that the words they’ve snatched up as their own from the chants and the first teachers and disseminated through millions of voices over more than a decade are what strike as more natural, Mando’a bleeding right alongside their abandoned genes at the end of the day. He knows Gamma knows more than most, uses more than most, their language as much born of vod’ika’s ever-increasing connection with the past he had stolen from him as it is of the civilians they come across, words in Ryl, Huttese, Durese, a hundred little phrases lifted from a thousand other tongues, anything to make communication even just the tiniest bit easier, to make the scared people they come across just that little bit more at ease, too much time spent going native, fitting things in where Basic was lacking or ill-suited, phonetics heard often enough to roll off the tongue as if said a million times before. It’s come in handy so many times, in the field and even just amongst each other, as soothing as touch in ways.
Kest’s bright cursing degenerating quickly into an ugly mesh of languages calls to that sensation, guttural and messy and the exact thing they’re all feeling as the old man makes it clear that yes, he’s aware of the vrelts, and yes, it’s going to be an issue for them and them in particular because, as Gamma always is, they’ll be the ones sweeping the dirtiest most dangerous sectors of the husk of this city, sector by sector, and who knows what the fuck has been multiplying in those shadowy corners. He actually gets loud enough to draw some of the eyes of the corps’ shinies, all clearly confused by this bulky tattooed lieutenant as his profanity slips straight past what sounds like the beginnings of a few very rude Rodese slangs and right into the shifting dark tones that he could only have learned from one source. Skive gets him between the plates with an elbow, and that does well enough for quieting him down.
The old man’s never learned much language, hears it just fine but doesn’t speak it any, uses the kid and the other one where vod’ika and ori’vod fit just fine, and sometimes he wonders if it has to do with how tired the old man is, with how much his years have worn him down. He’s got to be up there for oldest clone.
Right now, he looks so fucking tired with the lot of them.
“Sooner we get our sweeps done, sooner we can leave it to the corps to do the final checks and get some rest in. This is the closest we’re getting to a break. We aren’t dealing with villages and we aren’t dealing with an unholy fucking climate for once. You lot can handle clearing out a few fucking klicks of buildings, can you not?”
And easy as that, Gamma snaps to attention.
“Sir yes sir!”
“Good, dismissed, go do something the hell away from me for a few hours. We’re starting tonight, because nothing’s ever simple.”
Force, the troopers from the corps that are paying attention look so confused. It’s the little things.
He sleeps for three hours against a box because they’re bunking wherever they can in the city, and the only things set up here are the necessities, then loads up and hauls out with the rest of his squad, staring a long night of hunting in the face with a familiar exhaustion as the transport skims out to the city limits. Draft kicks him in the shin to keep him awake until they get offloaded, jostles him when they’re standing around the teeming maw of the city edge, lets him spit and curse and wonder aloud how the fuck he of all clones managed to find love when he’s the worst kind of person with a frustratingly easy acceptance. The Seps are going to be set deeper in, but they need to clear their way in anyways, skimming through abandoned and occupied building alike, and there’s no reason to let their usual bickering end now. Every family that could evacuated when the bombs dropped and those that remain are more than happy to accept the help they have to offer, especially when Gamma’s there to soothe them however they see fit, separate from the corps trawling the brighter sections. Most of what they have to deal with is crumbling and ashen, empty and haunting and enough to make them all tense and waiting. There’s a few criminal elements still lurking around, but they’re smart enough to clear out by and large when they see the familiar white armor come through. It’s a grueling trek, klick after klick of backtracking, of routing around and double-checking and the occasional burst of a fight, hemmed in on all sides by tall buildings or the charred remains thereof. By the time it’s finally time for their squad to call it, finding an abandoned upper floor to bunker down in, he’s ready to collapse. He doesn’t even hesitate when Draft gestures to the section of floor they find that’s relatively clear, the rest of their squad looking for places of their own as the two of them toss down their blankets and collapse on top of each other, barely bothering to toss their buckets nearby. Sleeping in groups and off the ground should keep the vrelts away, and the familiar warmth is enough to knock them both out for a sufficient amount of hours.
They do this for a week before the Jedi joins them. They shoot an unholy amount of Seps and clankers and ugly little face-eating rodents alike, getting right into the worst of it when he deigns to join Gamma’s ranks, frustratingly pristine robes standing out amongst their ash-caked plate. There’s no families now, far less of the criminals that are smart enough to run. Every building that isn’t empty is a building that lights up with blasterfire. He hates that it’s better than some of the shit they’ve had to do recently. He wonders bitterly if the Jedi came to Gamma because he’s bored of the empty sectors his corps are no doubt sweeping, nowhere near as busy as the ones Gamma’s been stuck with.
At times like this, he wonders if this is how the old man constantly.
The Jedi waves his hand and the door that was sealed shut crumples easily. He shifts his shoulders like he’s expecting some kind of awe at that but there’s almost immediately shots through the doorway and they all have to dive for cover, the Jedi’s flash of green blocking some of the fire. The urge to roll his eyes is enormous, but he fights it down, focuses on the mission. The sooner they get this cleared, the sooner they can find somewhere to sleep. Blue calls an order over the comms and he dives forward, unleashing a line of fire that crumbles the wall behind their attackers’ heads. That’s more satisfying than whatever the Jedi’s doing.
It’s nice being the one holding the big gun.
When they bunker down that night, they actually find somewhere for the ten of them to crunch together, the Jedi leaving to find somewhere else, hopefully somewhere with vrelts. They don’t get that lucky, but it’s a nice thought to have, especially when he’s got Charge snoring in his fucking ear like a monster.
The Jedi shuffles through Gamma for the next three days, successfully annoying the hell out of every other squad if the chatter as they overlap is anything to go by. He hasn’t seen the old man since before they got into the city, but he imagines that he’s getting pretty close to blowing his lid. For all that the old man complains about his recklessness, vod’ika’s trained, and a keen tactical mind besides, exceptional in the kind of guerrilla tactics that would serve them well right now, split apart as they are, much better than this arrogant fuck they’re stuck with. He says as much from where he’s picking over a dead Sep for some detonators because hey, they aren’t using them anymore, and gets a handful of grunts of agreement back, the others skimming for similar pickings. It’s probably disrespectful and they’re probably not supposed to do it but it’s habit picked up from running on a constant lack of supplies, giving whatever they can to civilians, and it’s not like anyone is going to stop them anyways.
He wonders sometimes, what having vod’ika with them constantly would be like, having ori’vod, but at the same time he doubts that would be possible. Ori’vod’s a Sith after all, a criminal, and the Republic generally frowns on that, not to mention the fact that they’re both sort of war criminals after vod’ika ran off with ori’vod and occasionally goes against whatever the Republic is doing that’s morally questionable. He never follows that train of thought further, because having vod’ika without ori’vod would mean vod’ika still being a Jedi, still being trapped, and the thought of that is nestled right up alongside that feeling of lingering death, so he tries to ignore it.
An hour later, the Jedi joins back up with them. And then he doesn’t fucking leave. He doesn’t move back out to a different squad like he has been, he just sticks around, working with them, being annoying. It’s suffocating. It goes on for two days, and there’s nothing they can do because those days are almost completely filled with fighting and they’re all exhausted. They want this to be over.
And then, like magic or the Force or whatever the fuck, it is. Someone in the corps kills the head Sep and the news spreads fast, the rest scattering to the wind. They all drop their buckets down by their blankets and sigh at the thought that they can finally get some actual sleep, finally hand their sectors off to the corps because this means their sweeps are done, this means they finally get that almost-break the old man was talking about. No more dealing with this Jedi, no more fucking vrelts. He’s so tired of it all.
“I’m going up as high as I fucking can in this building, see if I can get some air that isn’t ashy for once.”
The others groan, well on their way to sleeping, and he’s more than happy to let them, wandering through what probably were all sorts of offices and apartments and drug hives until he finds stairs and stairs and more stairs, having to hop over some and scramble over a bit of wreckage until he gets as high as he can go. It’s still pretty fucked up, but it’s better. He can almost see the skyline. He can see how this place might have been pretty once.
“Do clones really need alone time?”
“Fuck!”
He stumbles, nearly eats it against a raised bit of bombed out flooring. The Jedi followed him up, of course he fucking did, not a moment of peace from the good General. He glares, clenches his fists and bites down on his tongue to avoid the immediate urge to say all manner of things. He’s not hidden by his bucket for once, so no doubt they show on his face, but at least he’s not saying them. The sheer amount of smug condescension on the Jedi’s face sort of makes him wish he didn’t bother.
“You all think you’re remarkably subtle, don’t you?”
That surprises him because no, none of them do. They’re Gamma, they don’t have to be subtle. No one cares. He doesn’t say that though, just rolls his eyes. He thinks the message is pretty clear anyways.
“My troops respect me at least, as someone with a higher rank than them.”
He bites down the urge to laugh in disbelief. Of course they respect the Jedi, they’re all shiny, they don’t know any better.
“You lot though, the Force around you may as well be a big sign telling me precisely where to stick it. Every second I’m around you, no matter how low in the rankings you are, you all act as though I’m something you scraped off your boot. I’d heard about Gamma Company before this mission, where they send all the broken clones they can’t ship off for menial labor or decommissioning, but I didn’t realize the command structure had broken down this badly. It’s almost comical.”
Decommissioning. That’s what he called execution. Gamma’s clones, the ones they couldn’t court-martial, the ones that were still useful, so they couldn’t just get rid of them. It feels like ice sinking over his body.
“I thought it was just that your Company is so separate from the rest, you aren’t connected to a corps or even a regiment of your own, you just go to wherever you’re told to go, but I think I have it figured out after watching your squad these last few days, after listening to you, talking about your vod’ika when you think no one’s listening, about the way he’s trained. You aren’t surprised by the Force, because you’ve seen him use it, plenty of times if the way you act is anything to go by. And there’s no reason why any Jedi would keep their interactions with any troopers under wraps unless it was particularly shady, which means that either you are interacting with a Jedi somehow in an illegal fashion, or you’re interacting with a Sith, or perhaps one of the traitors who ran away.”
Cold, cold cold cold. Everything in him is frozen. They’re idiots, morons, mir’osik, of course the Jedi would notice something was wrong, he’s so fucking up his ass about his own powers. Gamma interacts with Jedi more often than most clones ever see them but that’s no reason for them to be so thoroughly desensitized, as fed up as they are with his shows of strength. But why would they be surprised by some measly lifting, some flashy jumps? When their vod’ika is angry the air around him feels like a void, a living thing waiting to eat the stars. When their ori’vod walks the world wilts beneath his feet, turns to rot with the slightest touch.
He’s suddenly so purely deeply glad that the latter only really ever comes up in conversations when they’re talking to him, when they’re teasing vod’ika, when they’re teasing Kest. The Jedi would know, if there were two. The Jedi prowls closer, all cruel ambition and smiles. He’s still so fucking clean. He spits their word like a curse.
“So here’s what we’re going to do, you and I, if you don’t feel like getting the lot of you court-martialed and decommissioned for treason. You’re going to tell me all about your vod’ika, what he looks like, the name he goes by, how he usually interacts with your company, anything that can help find him. Your Captain will probably be decommissioned for not bringing this to anyone’s attention, but the rest of you are under his command so you should be able to ride past it if you’re lucky. You might even get a promotion.”
He doesn’t actually think about what he does next, which is probably why he manages it. One second the Jedi is standing over him, grinning and thinking he has all the cards and the next he’s stumbling away and cursing and clutching his head and fuck his hurts too, but that doesn’t matter because the Jedi is turning back to him and spitting about all sorts of things and the sound of the blaster he usually keeps strapped to his hip echoes through the air like the tolling of a bell.
The Jedi slumps, a hole burning neatly between his eyes.
His head screams.
He drops to his knees, slamming his hands into his skull, pressing into the sides, trying to block out even a hint of the pain. He sees red, his vision narrowing into nothing but a tinted field of agony, and he’s pretty sure he screams in time with the sound.
Then it’s like something snaps, and everything stops. No more pain, no more anything. It’s just quiet, suddenly.
And then there’s the thundering of panicked footsteps as his squad slams up the stairs into the room and takes in the sight. He looks back, slow, and he can see Blue’s face as the first through what could charitably be considered a door, Draft at his side. He can hear the others brought to a sudden halt behind, Vy’s crooked face going tight and sharp where it’s poked up behind the first two when Blue’s does that complicated thing it does when it shuts down and he spins, quickly and quietly firing off commands for the others to lock down the floor, no one in or out.
“Few last hidden Seps, looks like. Shiv’s hurt. Scan the lower levels, go in pairs as you can. Draft, Vy, stay with me.”
A beautiful lie. No one else sees the room. Blue leaves Vy standing at the door, shocked but not running, not screaming that one of their troopers just shot the fucking Jedi. Blue circles around, takes his chin firmly and redirects his gaze so they’re staring at each other, so he’s got nowhere else to look. He can hear Draft coming over, checking over the body.
“Shiv, I need you to tell me what just happened. We can fix this but I need you to tell me.”
He loves Blue, his batchmate who’s got everyone in the galaxy convinced that he’s nice and quiet and definitely didn’t disobey sixteen different kinds of orders to blow up a ship full of clankers within his first week out of the tubes just because he felt like it, and fuck if it doesn’t feel like he’s letting him down right now, staring at those sharp eyes that have been right beside him for all sorts of trouble, stripes or no, and being unable to find his fucking tongue. He swallows, gasps around what he thinks might be sobs, tries again.
“He...He was threatening vod’ika. He heard us talking, figured it out. Wanted me to rat him out...said...said the old man would get killed if I talked. Said he’d get us all killed if I didn’t. Blue he was going to kill buir and vod’ika and he didn’t know about ori’vod but he’d find out and, and-“
The hand on his chin vanishes the same time four gloveless ones press in, Vy and Draft touching panicked attempts at soothing to his face, his throat, anywhere they can find a bit of skin or even just seep warmth through his unarmored layers. Blue stares down at him and he stares right back, hiccuping around emotion he can’t handle, emotion he’s never had to deal with before, never felt before, watching those dark dark eyes as they process everything faster than he could ever hope. He’s never known another clone with eyes as dark as Blue’s, and he’s never been able to tell if that was genetics or personality. The breath he pushes out feels like the stamp on the end of a report, the all-clear, and he feels the vise clutching his chest loosen just a fraction.
“Okay, okay. I need to clear some things up, and then we’re going to handle this, got it?”
He crouches down, peels off both of their gloves, grips his wrist. One of the hands splits from his face to grapple with his other one, clutches his hand, and the points of contact stabilize him more than he could hope. Blue flicks his eyes around the room, thinking.
“Did it seem like he’d told anyone? Any of his corps?”
“No. He wanted to show off. Wanted me to tell him everything I knew. Didn’t think much of me. Ambitious.”
“Was there a struggle?”
“Think I got him in the face. Kov’nyn.”
Blue’s smile is thin and cruel, but his nod is firm.
“We heard it, but just confirming, only the one shot?”
“Yeah.”
“Good, okay. Vy.”
The hand holding his and the hand pressed to his pulse both tense.
“Get to ground level, we passed the squad Kest was with just before we bunkered down, Tyr was with them. They should be a klick or so east, find them in person, no comms. Get them both, tell them Shiv got himself rung and needs Tyr to look him over and I need to talk to Kest. Don’t get seen by any of our squad, or anyone else if you can help it, they don’t need this on their heads. This stays between us, got it?”
There’s no hesitation, even though Vy’s still so new, even though Draft’s such an obtuse fuck at times.
“Yes sir.”
“Of course.”
The tense hands leave. The two still gently at the back of his head and under his arm shift a little, carefully helping lift him at a gesture from Blue. He wants to help, wants to get his weight under him to make it easier on Draft, but he can’t make anything seem to work, his limbs only twitching as he tries to force them to function. Draft slings him a little better over his shoulder, carefully hauls him to rest against one of the sturdier walls. He can hear Blue moving the body out of sight behind them.
“Think I broke something.”
“You’re fine. It’s fine.”
It’s not. He knows. It’s nice that Draft’s trying to make him feel better, grumpy ass pessimist that he is usually, with his backup plans for his backup plans and a heart buried somewhere underneath. He stops talking though, because what else can he say? Something broke in his brain, and now he’s useless.
Blue sits on the other side of him when he finishes hiding the body elsewhere, side to side, gripping his hand again and forcing him to stay grounded. His voice is low and even, but it isn’t cold.
“You did the right thing. He wasn’t a good Jedi. Jedi don’t threaten to kill people.”
He’s not so sure, but it helps anyways. He’s still trying to get a handle on the crush of emotions that keeps threatening to overpower him and the words help. They sit like that for twenty minutes, just breathing, until Vy suddenly appears at the door, silent as a knife in a ribcage, trailed quickly by Kest and Tyr who manage to be a little less quiet, but still pretty damn close. They take one look at him, at his face, and then very neatly shove his squadmates aside to check him over. Vy lingers at the door, scanning over the room, listening down the stairs for the others just in case, always so alert, always waiting. His face is drawn and just this side of furious and he’s suddenly reminded of the reasons why Vy’s in Gamma, the things he couldn’t keep quiet about.
Maybe, he thinks a little hysterically, the Jedi’s lucky that he shot him before Vy did.
The first person to finally break the silence is Tyr, unsurprisingly.
“He’s in shock. This isn’t another head injury, what the hell happened that put Shiv of all people into shock?!”
He makes a sound that he thinks might almost be a giggle, and it looks like it breaks Blue’s mean little heart. Kest tilts him, lets him rest his head against his shoulder. It’s uncomfortable with the pauldron, but the head against his is nice. The Jedi’s dead, he’s safe, they’re all safe. Maybe if he keeps saying it, it’ll be true. The endorphins of contract crash against the swirl of emotions and he’s drowning, he thinks.
Blue crosses his arms, bites his fingers into his plates. He doesn’t lift his voice above its usual quiet. Somehow, it still feels like it fills the room.
“Apparently the Jedi followed Shiv up here when he came up here to try to find some fresh air after we finished clean-up. He threatened him to try to get him to tell him about vod’ika, told him we’d all die if he didn’t talk, and the old man would die if he did. We were downstairs, heard the shot and the screaming, came up to see Shiv on the floor and the Jedi dead. The three of us were the only ones who saw, the others are on the other floors looking for Seps. They don’t know the Jedi’s up here.”
He can feel Kest winding up beneath him the more Blue talks, all protective and possessive in a dangerous miasma of instinct. He thinks if he could move his hands he’d like to press them to the ink beneath the armor, to remind himself that one of those little designs represents him, the same way each mark represents anyone their lieutenant lets into his heart, ownership that they aren’t allowed to have that he’s given himself anyways. He thinks of that outline from not so long ago, a curling dark sort of thing, stolen off cracked flesh and twisted three degrees off. He wonders if it’s complete now.
“Is it still here? The body?”
“Yeah, hid it in what used to be a side room.”
“Can we get it down to ground level?”
Draft snorts, rough and ugly.
“We can throw it out the fuckin’ window.”
“No, it needs to look like it died closer to the ground. Can we get it to the ground?”
“Blue rounds up the others, sends them to patrol the block while we get it down, yeah no problem. Did anyone see you?”
Vy shoots him a glare and Draft raises his hands, easy as can be.
“Then that’s what we’ll do. Blue gets the others to do a patrol, he’ll helm it, the two of you will stay behind to help Shiv down because he got his head rung again by a few leftover Seps. When they’re gone, you two will take the body down, leave it in a building that another squad already cleared out, be quick about it but don’t leave it too close. The more vrelts the better. Tyr and I will get Shiv downstairs after everyone’s cleared out and then go back. Did anyone in your squad see the Jedi follow Shiv up here?”
Blue shakes his head, still clutching the edges of his plate.
“No, we thought he’d finally fucked off.”
“That’s the story then. He fucked off last night, you dealt with some leftover Seps, did a quick patrol, and then slept in shifts to make sure nothing bad happened. Tomorrow you’ll pass off your sector the way we’re supposed to, we’ll meet back up with everyone, and we won’t talk about this again until we’re somewhere very far away and Shiv is functional again. Sound like a plan?”
And it’s somehow as simple as that. Blue breaks comm silence to gather the men on a lower floor, Draft and Vy hauling his still-useless body down that far to reassure the others that he’s fine, just fucked himself up, nothing unusual. They all go down to patrol and he’s passed off like so much meat, his squadmates scurrying off with the dead General in their arms, his lieutenant and his medic setting him into his blanket. His blaster is back against his thigh. He finally finds his voice as Tyr gives one last check of his pulse. His tongue feels thick in his mouth.
“M’sorry I caused shit again.”
“Shut up. You just beat the rest of us to the punch. You’ll be fine, causing me all sorts of grief by tomorrow. And here I was thinking you were going to make it through this one without getting hurt.”
His voice doesn’t quite crack with that last sentence, but it does its best. He clears his throat, drops his wrist.
“Get some sleep. You should feel more like yourself in the morning.”
He’s gone before he can even blink. Kest pats his head a little, an odd reminder of how much bigger he is than the rest of them. He wonders, distantly but not for the first time, just what sorts of things he saw before he came to them, a commando in his prime, his armor still wet with blood.
“We’ll deal with this, don’t worry. Jai’galaar may not be our Jedi but he’s still our vod’ika, and that makes him ours. Rikre is his riduur, and that makes him our ori’vod. Aliit ori’shya tal’din. We won’t let them down, and we won’t let you down either. That Jedi threatened them, and you dealt with him. It’s something to be proud of. We won’t let any of this come back to us, it won’t come back to our buir, we’ll all be fine. You’re safe now. Now, go to sleep.”
Somehow, he does.
He sleeps, and he dreams.
He dreams of a blockade that never was, a ghost of a mission that failed, a punishment that didn’t fit the crime. He dreams of Draft screaming obscenities and endless words at his side, dreams of staring down smug soulless eyes set into a broad Besalisk face, the sense of horrible revelation before the first shot punches through his shirt and into chest.
He wakes up gasping, barely managing to pull away from the others and get to a corner of the room before he’s vomiting out what little remains of his rations, heaving until it burns. He feels a broad hand set against his back, against the armor he’s still fucking wearing, and that snaps him back to bright and clear reality as fast as can be.
“Careful, careful. You’ll need to get checked out by Tyr when we get back but you looked like you got hit pretty hard last night. Not surprised that you’re nauseous. Might not be great to stand right now.”
“Yeah...Thanks Taye. I’ll...I’ll sit back down.”
He thinks he worries Taye a bit, sitting quietly on his blanket until it’s time enough to wake the others, to move out. The distance of his mind and body from yesterday is gone, he can stand and move on his own, but everything is still thready and off, still a little awkward. He still feels the rush of things, the fear, the gratefulness, things that he’s felt before but suddenly now with such force that they keep knocking him on his ass. He’s happy when they pass off to the squad the corps has transferred now that they’ve apparently got nothing better to do, fighting down the obscene urge to cry when they get up to a flat enough rooftop for the larties to swing down and pick them up.
Tyr drags him away from the others the second they land back at base, shoves him into a cot and gives him something that puts him under again and this time, this time he doesn’t dream, and he’s so fucking happy about that he could scream.
He wakes up to the sound of a voice, murmuring, over and over again.
“Ni kyr’tayl gai sa’ad, Shiv, Hix, Prattle, Dance, Day...”
He tunes out the voice, wondering what in the actual fuck Hix’s squad did if all of them are apparently injured, waiting until it dies off into a minute of silence to groan and make about opening his eyes, playing like he just woke up. He flicks his gaze around like he’s trying to get a look at his surroundings before focusing on the voice, on the old man.
“What are you doing here? Don’t you have a whole company to go bother?”
“I would, but Tyr’s been on my case about exhaustion.”
He breathes, registers the smell of the sludge the old man calls caf. Considering the sound it drags out of the old man, apparently it shows on his face.
“Want some?”
“That’s not a cure for exhaustion.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll sleep when my company stops getting themselves blown up.”
Hix is a man after his own heart. With another groan, he pushes himself up. The old man doesn’t stop him.
“We get to sleep this time?”
“Seems like. That Jedi went missing after he left your squad, so they might send a few of ours back in to look for him, but that’s only if they’re really feeling the need to fuck us over, give us flak for not keeping a closer eye on him. He’ll turn up eventually, the fucker.”
He blinks, locks down on any of the emotional urges before they can swell.
“Caused some shit for you too then?”
“And then some. Haven’t seen one stuck up his own ass like that in awhile.”
He nods, manages a smile.
“It was pretty bad. I’m sure he found some hole to do whatever the fuck Jedi do to celebrate. Breathe or something.”
“Pretty sure they might just get drunk like the rest of us.”
The both of them jump, turn to look at Vy standing in the tent entrance. He nods at the old man.
“Buir, Kest was looking for you. Tyr’s orders or not, you need to sign off on our lists.”
The old man sighs, stands, taking his sludge caf with him. He looks soothed though, reminded of his place both in the ranks and in their standing. He wonders if that’s why they sent Vy, the only one who doesn’t hesitate to call the old man that to his face.
“Alright, he at the ops tent?”
“Yeah.”
Vy watches him until he leaves, then carefully closes the flap and darts over to him, pressing something into his hands. He looks down.
It’s the Jedi’s saber.
“Vy, what...”
“It might come in handy, and it’s not like he’s using it anymore. You’ll find somewhere to hide it.”
He presses their foreheads together, staring him down.
“If something like that ever happens again, if you need help, just call me. I don’t want you to have to deal with that alone again. I’ll strangle a Jedi with my bare fucking hands if I have to.”
It drags a startled laugh from him, and the sound soothes Vy more than anything, given how quickly he bolts back out into the fray with a smile. He tucks the saber in his pack, crammed in between rations and flares and anything he can disguise it with. He feels its added weight and tries not to be soothed by it.
The corps find the Jedi, his face half-eaten by the vrelts. It’s decided that due to his youth and arrogance, some leftover Sep or criminal took him by surprise. No one ever thinks that it might be a clone, with a stolen saber resting against his back.
Gamma moves on. They get stuck on a planet with bugs the size of his head for not keeping track of the Jedi. The corps goes back core-side. They see vod’ika again, laugh and fight with him, chat with ori’vod, listen to his stories.
His dreams don’t stop.
His reaction time improves.
Death isn’t just haunting those half-seconds anymore, it’s chasing after him with every step, every breath, every action. It breathes down his neck, skitters along his spine whenever he hefts his pack. It buzzes in his ears whenever he looks at his vod’ika, watches him dart along with a flash of blue, feels it pulse inside his head. It’s his constant companion, and the others stop worrying. He doesn’t let them worry, he can’t.
Something broke in his head that day, he’s not wrong.
He’s just waiting to see what it was.