She's small, she thinks. Much too small. And her gun is much too big. It shouldn't matter, she berates herself, the Anzati taught her better than that. But somehow, it does matter. It matters because her bones are sticking out of her skin and she hasn't eaten for days, because the work she's doing barely covers the dingy room she's renting.
She should be ashamed of herself. She is Anzati and Anzati can survive anything. She survived years on that miserable planet, with that miserable woman. She survived the creaking pirate ship, living off stale bread and rotting fruit. She survived her skull being cracked open, watching her own blood drip down off the surgical table, she survived the antenna in her head.
They promised it would make her a better warrior.
Maybe there, in the emptiness of the desert, that had been true. But Coruscant is no desert, the lower levels are no solitary ship, soaring alone through the galaxy, and the antenna picks up every signal, every wave, and she's not trained to survive the flood of data that barrages her every day, not trained to fight in the tight alleys and the towering high rises. Her enemy was nature: the sun and the dust and the cold and hunger and pain. The city is a new enemy, and she doesn't know how to fight it, not yet, and its costing her.
She grits her teeth, feeling the city's filth between them, and hoists the gun up anyways. Her tired body protests, and she knows that her movements are eating away at her, burning away her muscles because there isn't anything else left to burn. It doesn't matter. She has to survive. She trains the rifle on the back of the old Mandolorian helmet that bobs up and down, in and out of her line of sight.
She shoots.
She misses.
She's never missed before.
Florrum was, all together, an unpleasant planet.
If the never-ending dust storms, merciless lack of shade from the blazing sun, and geysers that shot out burning sulfur weren't enough to dissuade even the most hardy of explorers, then the enormous compound full of blasters, stolen starships with top-of the-line weapons systems, and not to mention pirates, definitely was.
And yet, there she was, limping through the god-forsaken desert, half-destroyed boots dragging through the dust, black-nailed right hand cradling what felt like a badly broken left arm. The smell of burning stung her nostrils as she walked, and she couldn't tell if it was from the aforementioned sulfur geysers, or her badly charred hair, curtesy of the same explosion that had broken her arm.
She really had known, she berated herself, that the mission was a bad idea from the beginning, but some part of her (and she damned what ever part it had been) just couldn't turn down a request from Jango's kid, no matter how stupid and far fetched it had been. And now, she was stuck trekking across Florrum, Jango's ship in ruins some miles behind her, and, in front of her, the man that she never wanted to ask for help again.
He'd betrayed her, and it hadn't come as a shock so much as an annoyance. The man really owed her, she thought to herself, after all they'd been through together.
The sun beat down, burning against her back as she continued her painful journey, her destination hazy and small in the distance. It was gonna be a damn long walk to the compound, she thought, and her injuries weren't going to help. And so, to pass the time, she decided, she was going to figure out exactly how much that bastard owed her.
She didn't think she'd ever forget the first time she'd met Hondo. She was young, too young, probably, but then again, who hadn't been? It had been one of her first missions with Jango after heading out on her own. She'd been so eager, so excited to impress him, show him how much she'd improved since leaving his crew. She'd wanted him to be proud of her. She remembered staying up the night before, polishing her rifles. She remembered the new holsters that she bought, knowing that it was a stupid move, that they'd chafe and give her blisters, but she'd looked so good in them, so polished and professional, she hadn't been able to resist.
She remembered how she'd walked onto Slave I, face set, eyes steely and cold. She'd nodded to Jango. He nodded back, and excitement had risen in the pit of her stomach at the greeting. It was so odd, remembering it now. No one made her feel that way anymore, but she supposed that was a good thing. Blind idolization had its downfalls, after all.
Hondo Ohnaka had been a wild card. He'd come out of nowhere (although there had been rumors involving one of the Hutt families, but no one could ever remember which one, or how they'd been involved), and in under a decade cultivated one of the deadliest and most effective pirate gangs in the outer rim. Jango had talked to him once, he'd said, but never met him in person. Still his new iron grip on the outer rim's spice routes made him their best bet for getting through them unscathed, and Jango was willing to take the risk that he wasn't as friendly as he appeared.
Jango had nothing to worry about. Ohnaka had greeted them with gifts and food, spiced rum and festivities. He hadn't started wearing his green goggles yet, Aurra remembered, but he'd already acquired a substantial amount of monkey lizards.
One of the vile things had peered down at her from his shoulder, the first time she saw him, striding out of the dust and heat as if he owned it (which, technically, he did).
"Friends, welcome!"
His accent was thick, and the Language and Regions aspect of Aurra's antenna told her it was a mixture of Huttese and an obscure Weequay dialect that it was never able to place. Jango, clad in his full Mandolorian armor (and Aurra had to credit him for that, the heat was almost unbearable in just her jumpsuit), reached out for a handshake, but Ohnaka went in for a full embrace, and Aurra had to once again give credit to Jango for not reacting with surprise or violence, as she would have. The two descended into pleasantries, the outer rim kind, in which the two parties exchange meaningless words to deduce the extent to which the other could be trusted. The monkey lizard on Ohnaka's shoulder bounced up and down, riding the movements of his shoulders as he waved his hands around, extravagant gestures accompanying his side of the conversation.
She couldn't exactly remember the names of her companions during that particular job. There was a Trandoshan, whom she was pretty sure had been Bossk, the other two had been younger kids, under Jango's tutelage, most likely forgotten because they'd died soon after, not uncommon in her line of work. She did, however, remember standing there in the hot sun with them, watching Ohnaka's every move as he spoke with Jango, her eyes flicking between him and the group of pirates he'd brought with him. Their eyes mirrored hers, both parties looking for any signs of betrayal, the slightest movements that could indicate a blaster or a knife being drawn.
For a moment, their eyes met. He said nothing, didn't even address her, but the corner of his mouth tilted upwards in a smirk, and he winked in what he clearly thought was a charming manner. Winked, as if she was some back alley schutta, and not a respectful bounty hunter with a 50,000 credit capture reward after only three years of working solo. She didn't show any outward sign of acknowledgment, but her temper threatened to get the better of her, and she remembered being proud of herself for not charging forwards and disemboweling the sleemo right then and there.
She never spoke to Ohnaka during that first, brief stay on Florrim. Weather it was due to her immediate loathing of the man, or if they'd simply never crossed paths, she couldn't remember. Nonetheless, she came away from the mission with one conviction: she hated Hondo Ohnaka; she didn't trust him, and, as much as she could, she was going to avoid crossing paths with the pirate.
She disliked him from the start. There was something about him, something untrustworthy in his eyes and in his movements, something staged about his kindness and welcoming that put her on her guard. He was reckless and superfluous, overly daring, disrespectful. Jango said it was most likely due to his newly acquired wealth and power. Aurra was convinced that it was because he was an idiot. Idiots didn't survive in the outer rim, and she expected his overconfidence to lead to an early death. She was honestly surprised when he lived to the next year.
She wished he hadn't lived to the next year.
The sun continued to sting against her back, and she continued to limp through the hot sand, cursing herself for not sticking more strongly to her convictions.