Heaven help me I've moved on from drabbles and one shots to a proper chapter'd story. I've also written an OC. Yeah I feel about fourteen right now but I refuse to be ashamed of myself because there is really no other way to explore Gregor without an outside character. It's going to be a bit fluffy, as much as I can manage anyway, but this is me we're talking about so expect unpleasantness, moral greyness and discomfort in at least equal measure to anything positive.
If you'd like you may check out chapter 32 on my semi-ongoing drabble epic Intergalactic South for a bit of background but it's not necessary. I will be trying to update at least once a week on Fridays. If there's going to be a massive break between updates I will let you all know. So please, enjoy, give feedback if you like and thanks!
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with LucasArts, The Walt Disney Company, Cartoon Network or anyone of any significance. I own none of the characters except for Thena and will not profit in any material way from this work.
Now:
His blood pounds through his skull with a rush like a salt storm, scouring everything before it and leaving behind a patina of adrenaline and the stannic iron fuzz on his tongue that he remembers more clearly than the faces of his pod-brothers. His muscles clench and twitch in tiny micro-spasms. He had meant what he said to the diminutive colonel. He had been born for this; bred for this. Every nerve in his body pulses with the long denied pleasure of the fight. The white-grey haze of his life to this second is gone; washed away in a gorgeous tide of red and aggression. He feels the abrasive crunch of windblown salt on the armor plates of his back as the shuttle lifted higher. Ten seconds, fifteen at most and it would clear the range of the droids' blasters. He needs to buy them those seconds. He aims and fires without thinking or even consciously seeing, lost in the electric sensation of battle.
Yes, whispers a feral version of his own voice in his head, those, shoot those containers. Rhydonium.
Gregor realizes he is smiling as he squeezes the trigger.
Rhydonium is stabilized for transport by combining the relatively inert saline form with a gel accelerate. When it explodes it does so in fiery gobbets. It sticks to whatever it touches; the oxygen feeding the flames until they burn hotter than a blast furnace. One of the super-destroyers is turned, briefly, into a walking torch, its headless body picked out in violet fire as it lurches forward before the heat sets its fuel reservoir alight, vaporizing it and everything else in a three meter radius. The dust on the ground begins to burn: then the rock beneath. The Rhydonium and the silicate substrata, liquefied by the heat, runs over the edge of a sunken loading platform like a waterfall in hell. The particulates in the air begin to burn and for a moment the salt haze dissipates in the wind created by the blaze. In the instant Gregor can see this awful city. He starts to laugh but then the fire eats up his air and he coughs. His hind brain makes him take another breath but the heat sears his tongue and closes his throat. He tastes the sweet-sharp chemicals of the burning Rhydonium, like a peat bog mixed with a fuel refinery, spiced by unimaginable heat. The battle-haze keeps him calm and firing even without air for another seventy three seconds. Then the red haze goes black and sears the consciousness from his body.
-wait your return. The fragment of a phrase buzzes annoyingly in his brain. It whispers over his face and lands twitching under his left eye. He raises a hand to brush it away. It's not a phrase. It's a brine fly. He watches it buzz up and away to the ceiling, silhouetted for a moment in the horizontal shaft of lift from round dormer high above. The air is dusty, as always, but cool, almost cold against his skin, tasting more of iodine than salt and nothing at all like fire.
Gregor sits up, ignoring the stinging pull of the skin across his hands and forearms. He must have gotten too much sun, wandered home and fallen into one of the strange fever-dreams that he often has when he's worked too many shifts. But these aren't his walls. His bunker of an apartment has cheap permacrete sheeting on the walls. These, as best he can make out in the semi-dark of the room are rubbed tadelakt, pigmented a rich blue-green; the room makes him think of being submerged in a tropical sea. The mattress under him is the same thin industrial grade matting he sleeps on but this one has been padded with several cushions and bolsters. The thin blanket is also softer and finer than what he normally used, woven with cream and brown chevrons.
Clearly, this is not his apartment and yet he feels no alarm waking up here. It's familiar somehow, safe. He stands and then sits quickly back down again, yanking the blanket across his lap as a small, irritated seeming female ducks through the curtained doorway. She's speaking over her shoulder to someone rapidly, in a language he doesn't know. A breezy laugh sounds from the other side of the curtain followed by the scuff retreating footsteps. The irritated girl huffs and turns to look at him, jumping back half a meter when she realizes he's awake. Gregor frowns, remembering in an unpleasant rush whose house he's in and finds his voice, though it seems hoarser than he remembers it.
"Thena, what am I doing here?"
She pales, black eyes narrowing.
"Recovering."
Her temper brings out the Ocsin accent, making her roll both 'r's in the word. Gregor feels a familiar, pleasant twinge in his gut at the sound of but ignores it as the rest of his memory returns. He feels the surface burns across his neck and hands and grins wildly.
"So I wasn't dreaming."
He ignores her hissed 'what' too. Slowly he reaches up to run a hand over his cropped hair and along his jaw. The hair is disheveled and his chin is roughened with some re-growth but he's a long, long way from the shabby dishwasher he had been. He's a clone, a commando, a captain. He still can't remember everything but the fragments he does have are less confused. He jumps up, wrapping the blanket around his hips, shoving away the dizziness and all but skips around the room. He remembers not to skip at the last minute because he thinks it's probably undignified thing for a commando to do. He settles for pacing instead. The sound of her voice stops him short
"I liked it." Now it was his turn to say 'what.' Thena is staring at him oddly, pressed into the corner of the room nearest the door, the one farthest from him. She seems pale, even for her.
"The beard. I liked it. Why did you shave it off? Was it those Mandos? Did they cut your hair too?"
"The who?" He starts to walk towards her because she's speaking so quietly it's hard for him to make out what she's saying. He stops after one step when she flattens her palms to the wall and flicks her eyes toward the curtained doorway. She's scared. He doesn't know why but he's got a nasty suspicion it's got to do with him. He stays where he is and repeats his question. She swallows and continues, voice still frustratingly soft and a little shaky.
"The Mandalorians, the people who gave you that armor and the guns, did they get you in some scheme to steal that shuttle?"
"I didn't...they weren't Mandalorians. It was a Republic Colonel... I didn't really catch his name. I'm a clone. A clone commando. They needed to get back to Courascant and they couldn't do it without my help. The little colonel got cut off from the rest of the squad. I got him out and held off the clankers long enough for them to get away."
An awful thought occurs to him.
"They did get away didn't they?"
It was more difficult to read an Ocsinin's expression than it was a human's; the completely black eyes hid a great many expressions and they had fewer facial muscles than base-line humans. Thena, however, was only three-quarters Ocsin and her face is fairly expressive, black eyes or not. At that moment she is frowning at him in a way that, combined with her bizarre nervousness, pricks his temper.
"Well did they?" She flinches. He hadn't meant to snap like that but the past day -or was it days-has left him feeling raw.
"Yes, the shuttle got away." She whispers, eyes narrow and angry. It's an improvement over scared. He takes a couple of deep breaths and asks as calmly as he can with the happy-adrenaline still doing victory laps through his brain:
"Where's my gear?"
She hesitates, chewing on her lower lip. He barely stops himself from stepping closer to her. His rediscovered, semi-feral commando side is growling that he should get in her personal space and make her tell him. Can't let these civvies steal my armor, my skin, again, hurry up and get it back, come on, what's the hold up? He chokes that part of his brain into submission. Shut-up idiot, you scare her too badly she won't give up anything and she's two thirds ready to run as it is. The inner commando grumbles but accedes the point. Gregor asks her as nicely as he can but there's still an edge to his voice that makes her press her fingers against the wall again.
"Where is it, Thena?" She snaps at him, eyes wide, lips pulled back from her slightly-sharper-than-human teeth.
"Downstairs. In the kitchen. I had to hide it. Borkus was sniffing around here for you."
"Did you tell him I was here?"
"I did not. What is going on Gregor?"
She stares at him, plainly bewildered, scared and now she sounds hurt. His gut twists again, with guilt this time. He doesn't want to listen to it. He wants to get back to that cold clarity of the fire fight. This is too complex; a minefield of conflicting emotions. How is he supposed to exist like this? How do people feel so many contradictory things at once? He's glad to be alive and whole and knowing who he is, afraid that Borkus or his even more loathsome brother-in-law would somehow find and stop him, worried about how to return to the Republic and his proper life. And now Thena's been added to to it all.
He doesn't know how to untangle the mess of emotion that has him wanting to simultaneously hide from her, impress her, fuck her senseless and ignore her until she goes away and stops threatening his equilibrium.
Instead he grabs his skull in his hands, breathing as deeply as possible through his mouth; avoiding the warm female smell of her in the tiny room that's distracting and uncomfortable and fantastic all at once damnit. He can't have her here. He has to remember the rest of who he is and get off this force-forsaken rock and he can't concentrate on that if she's here being distractingly pleasant smelling, not to mention scared which is badly making him want to protect her. That she seems scared of him is helping even less. He makes himself act calm, drops his hands neutrally to his sides, makes his voice steady and politely commanding.
"Can you get me my body glove? I can't get down to the kitchen in a blanket."
She inhales audibly through her nose and doesn't move. It looks like she's working herself up to say something. He cuts her off before she manages to form words. Cuts her off before he totally loses control and either throws himself at her feet and begs her to stop acting like he's going to hit her, or he grabs her by the arms and shakes her until she does as he says; before he does both.
"Thena please."
His voice is gentle, pure non-threatening-dishwasher and occasional short order cook-Gregor rather than tough-no nonsense-commando CC-5576-39. She's still for another moment then turns and leaves the room on almost soundless feet. Gregor stays as he is but allows himself a sniff at the fading scent of her now that she's safely out of arm's reach.
Chapter 2: We are going back in time to see a bit more of how Gregor and Thena got here.