Originally written on Tumblr for the prompt: 6. "Is there a reason you're naked in my bed?". The holonovel synopsis in here was lovingly provided by andveryginger.
As one of the most dashing and daring rogues to ever hit hyperspace, it took a lot to take Corr Baize off guard. However, ever since picking up this void-damned passenger, he'd found himself in that state over and over again. This time, took the rhyscate however.
"Is there a reason you're naked in my bed?" He asked what he was beginning to realize was the least proper Jedi in all of Republic space.
Rena Kesyk was going to be the death of him yet. She looked nonplussed, even as her bosom heaved and Corr felt himself—
"Balkar, what the hell is this?" Theron's startled shout had climbed a few octaves as he dropped what he'd assumed had been a datapad filled with reports onto his lap as if the tiny device had burned his hand.
"I believe its title is Hyperlanes of Desire," Jonas answered smoothly.
"You said you were giving me something to keep me from getting bored!"
"Well, you don't sound bored to me anymore. Mission accomplished."
"This is not what I asked for," Theron's voice still sounded strangled, even to his own ears, "I specifically said I wanted reports, intel, not… your filthy holoporn!"
"Correction: It's called erotica, and it's a best-seller right now."
"I don't care what it's called—I need real reading material. Otherwise I'm going to go insane and break out of this place."
"You're in traction, you dolt," Jonas rolled his eyes. "You're not going anywhere."
Theron narrowed his gaze at the floor-to-ceiling window of the hospital room, trying to gauge the exact amount of force needed to shatter it so he could scale his way to freedom, broken legs be damned. "You don't know that."
The heavy sigh his occasional partner let out said otherwise. "Look, the doctor's orders are pretty specific. You're supposed to rest. No work for a week."
It had only been a few hours since his admittance, but Theron could already feel his once razor sharp mind starting to wither away. Cooped up in this tiny room for a week, forced to be still and listen to drivel on the closed circuit HoloVision of the hospital? He'd be absolutely useless, his finely honed skills blunted like an old vibroblade left to rust.
"And here I thought you were going to be a good friend for once and sneak me some reports or analytics to crack."
"Yes, because the definition of true friendship is getting myself brought up on charges of espionage for smuggling top secret information because you don't know the definition of the word relax."
"You're a spy, espionage is your job." Theron glared as he crossed his arms in what definitely wasn't a petulant stance. "And besides, it's your fault I'm stuck like this."
"I don't remember asking you to leap out that fourth-story window—you did that all on your own."
"You said Snidak was getting away!"
"Yeah, but I meant like, call us a cab for a high speed chase. Not leap directly into oncoming traffic." Jonas shook his head. "I swear, Shan, you're going to be the death of me."
"I'm pretty sure your CoD is going to be listed as Bothan Nether Rot."
That earned a baleful look along with a snapped response. "And maybe a week of forced rest will force you to think twice next time before being an idiot—oh wait, I forgot who I was talking to!"
If Theron didn't know any better, he'd say Jonas almost looked offended. He ignored the niggling feeling in his chest that he was sure wasn't anything related to guilt, and instead just glared petulantly at his fellow agent. "Fine. Can you at least break into patient storage and get me back my slicer spike? I can bypass a few firewalls and get the reports myself if you're so squeamish about getting caught."
"I'm going to have to pass."
"You're going to pass?"
"Yeah, as fun as it is having you try to tempt me into a life of crime, I have a date with that little Nautolan secretary from this afternoon."
"That's Snidak's main henchwoman," Theron said flatly.
"And she feels really bad about her part in all of this. Emphasis on the bad." Jonas gave him a wink, and Theron had to fight down his urge to gag. "I'm negotiating the terms of her surrender. It'll probably take all night."
"I take back everything I said about you being a good friend."
"Just doing my part to secure the safety of the Republic." Jonas gave a jaunty salute before turning on his heel and walking out the door. "I'd say don't wait up, but I guess you have nothing better to do, huh?"
"Damn it, Balkar!"
"Read your porn, Shan. You'll thank me later."
Unable to move from his restrictive position, Theron could only glare at Jonas's departing back, muttering a few choice expletives until he was left to stare at nothing but the bland walls of the hospital room and the innocuous looking datapad on his lap. It was currently displying the risqué cover art of a very buxom Jedi practically bursting from a set of very impractical robes, arms wrapped around a roguish smuggler that had apparently misplaced his shirt somewhere in the realm of reality, if those rippling muscles were anything to go by.
He nearly flicked to the next page, but caught himself just in time and turned the holonovel off in a fit of disgust at himself. There was no way he was going to give Jonas the satisfaction of winning this ridiculous argument. Theron had been raised by Ngani Zho, the Jedi Master who had practically raised every member of the current Jedi Council. He had been trained to withstand several forms of torture, and had the rigid trained mind of the Republic's best intelligence officers. He could conquer a little boredom without resorting to Jonas's filthy taste in literature.
Closing his eyes, Theron let his mind focus past the dull confines of the hospital room, and instead repeated the old lessons from his childhood back to himself. He recalled the long hours on Monastery mastering concentration techniques under the Order of the Sacred Circle. Before he was even six years old, he'd learned to ignore all pain, focus past any distraction. There was nothing he couldn't do if he only put his mind to it. A simple week recovering in a hospital bed was nothing. After a long while, he felt a familiar sense of calm settle over him, the antsy, restless feeling practically melting away. When he opened his eyes again, he was sure that several hours had passed since he had entered his meditative state. He glanced at the chrono on the wall, wondering exactly how long he had been meditating.
Three minutes.
Three. Minutes.
Three. Min. Utes.
Theron's eye twitched involuntarily, and he turned the holonovel back on. He had to do something or he was going to snap and stage a minor revolt. Custom spike or no, Theron was still a damn good slicer, and at its heart, a holonovel was just a fancy datapad with data already pre-installed on it. He just had to peel back the programming and get at its core. It would take longer, but as long as the device had network capability, Theron would still be able to eventually access the SIS database and get some damn work done.
He flicked past the cover to the next page, and couldn't help but pause as his eyes scanned across the teaser text for the novel:
She met him on the mining planet of Mustafar, a rough and tumble smuggler picking up cargo for a run. They thought it was just a tryst, and now, spotting one another across a crowded room, they find themselves fanning the flames of passion that sparked so many moons ago.
He was pretty sure he couldn't sprain anything rolling his eyes, but decided to try and focus on his actual task at hand. If he remembered correctly, the network nodes in this model of datapad could be accessed if he could expose the underlying architecture. It would have been infinitely easier if he still had his slicer spike, but a good spy had to use the tools at hand. Unfortunately, the only tools he had were his hands, and so he kept poking at the buttons on the holonovel, trying to remember the backdoor sequence to break the encryption locking the device down to just the current text it had preloaded on it.
This gave off the impression that he was actually reading the damn thing, when really he was accidentally turning the digital pages in his attempt to unlock the device's inner workings. As the text flew by, he couldn't help but pick up snatches of the story here and there. Corr was the stereotypical smuggler, more interested in money and living the high life, his brash exterior supposedly masking his insecurity, which were only highlighted by the ravishing Rena. It was obvious that the author of this book had never met a Jedi in real life, as Rena barely resembled any of the individuals of the Order that Theron knew, and seemed like she had been plucked from the pages of Heroine 101. Subtly sarcastic, infinitely beautiful yet mystifyingly adept at the art of seduction — somehow embodying everything and yet nothing at the same time.
Obviously the very fictional Corr found her captivating — well, maybe she was in her own way. Even if it was completely unrealistic for two polar opposite characters to keep falling into each others' arms over and over again throughout the years, like two stars forever caught in each others' orbits. Constantly pushed apart by duty and circumstance, but still pulled together in the end. In a way, it was kind of fascinating, even if it was unrealistic.
Surely by the third time they'd saved each others' lives, their flirting more obvious than a bunch of lovestruck teenagers, the lovers would finally cut to the chase and just admit their feelings for each other. But no, Corr had to try and act like an idiot, pushing her away because he wasn't good enough for her or the Jedi Code and five million other contrived reasons. Never mind that wasn't how the rules of attachment worked (Theron would know, thank you), but it was obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that Rena was crazy about him.
They'd already fallen into bed like four times now, not that Theron was really that invested in the sex life of two fictional characters or anything (although he was going to have to remember to try out page 196 at a later date, that was definitely creative), but he had already put this much time and effort into reading the stupid thing, so as far as he was concerned those two idiots had better damn well run off to the stars by the end of this tripe. He was reading this ironically, of course. His HoloNet idea had turned out to be a bust, and the only alternative was watching the paint peel from the walls. It wasn't like he needed to know how everything turned out, or if Rena would save Corr from the bounty placed on his head by Rakur the Butcher.
(She did.)
By the time he flicked over to the last page, which had involved some secret marriage ceremony performed by a ship's droid, it was dark out, and dinner had come and gone. His curiosity satisfied, Theron was able to slip into an easy sleep. He consoled himself over his wasted day with the knowledge that he'd figure out some other method of getting onto the HoloNet in the morning. Jonas had left him an entire stack of holonovels, surely one of the other ones would be easier to crack into. And then he could get some work done.
By the time the week was up, Theron had worked his way through the entire stack of lurid literature, but not a single one had been hooked up to the wider HoloNet. Jonas's doing, apparently. Stupid jerk had guessed Theron's plan before he had even thought it up and had tampered with them all so they could only be used for their intended purpose. Of course, if he said anything about said tampering, that would tip Jonas off that Theron had looked at the devices, and there was no way he was going to let anyone at Heorum Complex know that he'd spent an entire week doing nothing but reading romance novels. He'd never hear the end of it.
It was a dastardly plan, one that Theron fully intended to get back at his fellow agent for at some unspecified point in the future. Especially considering the fact that the smug bastard had been right, and the damn things were kind of… entertaining. Sure sometimes the prose was a bit awkward, the plots recycled, but it was the different execution of each that was somehow interesting. It didn't hurt that at the end things always seemed to turn out okay for the protagonists.
No one would ever get him to admit it aloud, but Theron was, to his own chagrin, possibly a bit of a sucker for a good romance. He was apparently all about watching two consenting idiots fall in love—regardless of species, gender, and everything in between, it didn't matter—just as long as after fighting against all the odds they ended up together. And a dedicated slicer with access to all of the trashy literature the HoloNet had to offer could download practically an entire library onto a single dataspike. Of course, it was easier to read them on the sly through the HUD on his ocular implants, fed by a discreet spike. No one around him would be the wiser.
At least, that was the plan, until many years later when a curious Jedi picked up the thin cylinder he had accidentally left out overnight. Which apparently was one of the unseen hazards of cohabitation.
"Uh, Theron, you forgot your…" Grey squinted at the writing etched on the side of the spike. "S.P.O.R.T.S.?"
"Uh, yeah." He'd frozen in the middle of pulling on his jacket, one arm awkwardly hanging loose as he missed the sleeve. "You know me. I'm all about those… sports."
She looked puzzled as she rolled the innocuous little cylinder in her hand. "I've never seen anyone download any Huttball games. Isn't easier to watch them live?"
"Yes, but, uh," he swallowed nervously, "if I were watching Huttball that'd be true."
"Oh," she said, blinking innocently at him, "I didn't realize you were such a fan of…" She trailed off, and began to frown again as she stared at the cylinder more closely.
"Yeah, I can't get enough of that…" He paused, trying to think of an appropriate lie, which was always easy when he was facing down some evil tyrant, less so when it was the woman he'd shared a bed with nightly. "…sportsball?"
"I just noticed this looks like an acronym."
"Uh, it is. It's an acronym for…" His mind was blank. This wasn't supposed to happen, he was a professional. He could think of something. Anything. Just words. He only needed to say words. "Some Perverse Or Reasonably Tame Stories."
Except that. That was what it actually stood for. Damn it, what was wrong with him? This was like the time that Rena Kesyk caught Corr Baize with his loaded dice he had been cheating the Hutts with. Except they were fictional characters and that situation made sense in context, Theron was just hiding his dirty literature stash from his girlfriend.
"Wait, what?"
"It's not sports." He sighed and sunk into the chair. It was all coming apart now. His carefully guarded secret, kept safe for all of these years, exposed because he forgot to stow away his custom dataspike filled with the cheesiest erotica the HoloNet had to offer.
"Oh… kay?" She looked a little concerned and somewhat timidly handed him the cylinder. "Here are your not-sports. I think?"
He accepted the dataspike and absently stowed it away in his pocket, still melodramatically clinging to the chair. It took him several moments before he looked up sharply. "Wait, that's it?"
"What's it?"
"No third degree? No wanting to see what's on it?"
She gave him a funny look. "Do you want me to see what's on it?"
"No, I—you're not curious?"
Grey shrugged. "You are acting rather strange this morning. I'm curious about that."
"Oh," he paused and thought it over a second, "I just kind of assumed I'd be mocked endlessly about it."
"Theron, I would have to know what you're talking about first to even begin to comment on it."
"I like romance novels." He'd meant for it to be a simple bold statement, but instead it came out all in one breath, each word tumbling over the next.
"Okay," she said, "and?"
"And?" he asked incredulously. "I confess one of my biggest, deepest, darkest secrets and all you can say is 'and'?"
"That's your deepest, darkest secret? That you like to read books?"
"…one of them," he said lamely. "And they're very racy books."
She cocked her head to the side, as if trying to figure out some great mystery. "That sounds kind of normal to me."
"I—it's not!"
"Are you sure?"
"Yes! You can't tell anyone!"
"If that's what you want," she said carefully, drawing the sentence out. "Your secret is, uh, safe with me?"
Theron was reasonably sure she wasn't actually mocking him. He thought. At least, not about his secret obsession with romance novels. She was possibly mocking him for being a bit melodramatic about this whole thing. Which when he thought about it for a few seconds, was probably fair.
"You're not going to make fun of me for being a hopeless romantic?"
"When we met back up on Odessen, you told me it felt like destiny." She graced him with a knowing half smile, lightly running her fingers through his hair, mussing up his perfectly arranged style. "If you being a 'hopeless romantic' was supposed to be a secret, it's your worst kept one yet."
The grin he flashed her was more sheepish than he would have let anyone else see. "Okay, I see your point. Although, if Lana ever finds out about this…"
"I can pretend your 'sports' are mine if that helps?"
"I knew there was a reason I liked you."
"Just one?"
"Oh, I can think of a few more reasons." His arm circled around her waist and pulled her into his lap, earning a small squeak of surprise. "If you're willing to listen."
Her lips brushed against his softly before she broke away, cheeks turning the slightest shade of pink. "I suppose I could be persuaded."
"In fact," Theron said, unable to repress the wolfish grin, "there's something on page 196 of Hyperlanes of Desire you might be interested in."