"Space Bound"

Chapter Two: I Play With Fire and Memories


"You naughty thing
Your ripping up the dance floor honey
You naughty woman
You shake around for everyone
You're such a mover
I love the way you dance with anybody
The way you swing
And tease them all by sucking on your thumb"

-Nickelback, "Something In Your Mouth"


Two standard months earlier...

.

The Republican guard named Lester stabbed Cad Bane in the ribcage with the end of his staff.

Five, thought Bane.

The sound of the impact ricocheted off the concrete walls of the cell in harmony to the guard's subtle chuckle at the prisoner's clenching of the jaw, determined not to make a sound. Just outside the cell, the other guards on duty watched with a cold enthusiasm, half as satisfied than from the last time Lester did such a thing, and thus, Lester would need to provide twice as much to achieve the same satisfaction from them again. And helpless in their own cells, the other prisoners turned away silently, knowing the sooner they reacted, the sooner they would be next in line.

"Tell me to stop, bounty hunter. Tell me you want it to be over," Lester said loudly.

Bane said nothing. In fact, he was even smiling a little. It was the last response they wanted from him, and no matter how deep they dug to get it, he could not face the humiliation of handing it over. He couldn't dwell on the here and now. He had to refuse to give them anything. That meant no squealing, no crying, no begging for mercy.

Another blow from the staff.

Six, he thought. He heard a crunching sound from his ribs. Bane remained silent, as he internally sorted through his vibroblade collection back in his Tattooine hideout, evaluating which one would look best cutting out Lester's stomach.

One of the other guards entered the cell through the open door. He brushed Lester aside and drew out his own staff. Bane didn't look up.

"They don't know what's good for them," the guard said coolly. "It's as if they don't care. As if they want to die." As the other guards watched, he raised his staff and smacked Bane upside the head, rattling open an older bruise.

One, he thought. Fresh, warm blood trickled down the side of his face and neck. The second blow made his skull feel as if it had cracked in two. The third half-blinded him and the room flashed a brilliant white. That hadn't happened since last week. Four, yet?

The newest recruit on duty, a Chiss with a soft Corellian accent, managed to clear his throat and step forward into the cell.

"Th-that's enough, Lester," he said, voice hoarse from lack of use.

"What do you think you know, kid?" Lester barked.

"But we were given orders from the Jedi," cried the recruit.

The guard snorted incredulously.

"The Jedi don't give a shit," the guard said to the recruit. "They care as much about us as these prisoners. They got a war to fight, and we're stuck down here with this scum. What's in it for you, anyway? Just get used it, okay? And then you'll learn to like it."

"But—but it's not right."

Grow up, kid, Bane thought. In spite of himself, he began to chuckle dryly as soon as the thought had crossed his mind.

Then Lester, eyes flashing, drove the staff into Bane's stomach and began dragging him up the wall, pinning him by his broken ribs. The mauled pieces of flesh still clinging to his back were torn off, spilling more blood from the open wounds. The other guards were smiling. At last, Lester was about to grant them satisfaction again. Bane gnawed on his lower lip and looked away from the cold gaze that was Lester's. This time, he was counting the seconds it lasted.

Three...four...seven...

He could not give in. If he gave in, he would have nothing left that was still his within these walls. Too many of the other inmates had done just that, and what profit had they earned from it? Nothing but life sentence and further humiliation. No, he wouldn't give them anything—anything.

Twelve...thirteen...

Something must have happened to him, because Lester smiled at that instant.

But even while Bane forced himself to dwell in those thoughts of strength and denial and not giving in, he knew that he was slowly failing. He was growing weaker with every hour-like second. The pain was incredible, a scorching tempest of fire. This was the longest he had had to count the seconds, and it was only going on longer and longer. He was being kicked, slapped, his bloody reflection dancing in Lester's pale eyes. It wasn't until Bane literally heard the cold metal of Lester's staff grind against his broken bones, scraping the splinters and drawing blood across his side, that nausea turned his stomach cold. The taste of blood and hot bile filled his mouth.

Then, when it was finally too much, Bane could hear the dreaded cry for pain escape from inside him. It made him sound like a child. A helpless, sick little child at the mercy of his tormentors in a back alley or on a bloodied kitchen floor. And they stole it. They stole what had still been his. Under the pressure, he had snapped. Even in his deafened daze, Bane was fully aware that the guards had found satisfaction again in Lester's latest accomplishment. Today? He had made the next prisoner snap and wail like a child. Tomorrow? More creative methods, twice as much effort, for the same amount of satisfaction.

They were wrong. He would not snap twice. He would not be weak again.

The staff finally fell back, and Bane collapsed to the floor, blood dripping down his back. The corners of world snapped out of blackness. Outside, the guards were watching impatiently.

Thirty seconds. That was thirty seconds, he thought.

The guard next to Lester grabbed the staff and was about to try it for himself, when the Chiss recruit said loudly,

"Jedi coming back!"

The two guards left Bane to sit in his cell alone. Footsteps sounded from above, descending, as the door was sealed closed again. As Bane watched two Jedi Knights appear from the other end of the hall, approaching Lester and the others, he leaned over into a painful fit of coughing.

"What's happened?" one of the Jedi asked.

"What do you mean, sir?" Lester asked, saluting.

"The prisoner is injured and bleeding," said the Jedi. He pointed inside the cell. "Can't you see that? Tell me what's happened here."

"He tried to attack the new kid here, the Chiss. He was choking him and it took all of us to pry him off, and, I suppose, in the heat of things, some of us were panicking, and got carried away. You know how it gets with those kinds of criminals."

"Is this true?" one of the Jedi asked the recruit.

After looking back and forth between the Jedi and Lester, he finally said,

"Y-Yes. That's right."

Bane smiled to himself. Good. The kid was learning.

Six plus four plus the thirty seconds. That makes forty more for you, Lester.


Cad Bane rose from his chair. But before he could so much as set down his glass, he heard a deep, gurgled chuckle from behind him. He turned around and faced what he had known was inevitable the second he stepped inside Hawke Noth.

"Do mine eyes fail me, or is that my old friend Cad Bane standing with his back to me?" a Boltrunian voice hollered out. Gasta was rolling around in his seat, taking in the view of all his winnings from the sabaac game. His belly spilled over into his lap, and he patted it almost proudly as he guzzled down his drink, leaving specks of it behind on his chin.

Just as he had expected. Gasta had not changed since their last meeting. The Duros bounty hunter froze in his tracks, glancing down at the flashing rainbow of shadows on the floor, and his hand inched the edge of his duster away from his holster. He also felt his back pocket for another treasure, which was a reminder of his most recent visit to Hawke Noth Cantina.

"Relax, relax. I don't want anything from you today," Gasta was saying, smacking his lips.

"I assume you want me to say the same thing about you."

He glanced down at Gasta's table, which was decked with a heap of credits from the game of sabaac. After he had ordered a second Thruris Stout, Bane sat down across from the Boltrunian in a vacant chair. One by own, the surrounding pairs of eyes became interested in the latest arrival, now the latest sabaac opponent.

"I just want to see how my old friend is doing," said Gasta. "Where's he run off to. Where he's headed."

"Funny that you should be curious about my predicaments, or at least, pretending to be curious."

"Why shouldn't I?" Gasta smiled as he leaned back in his chair. "In fact, in the near future, I may even pick up our business propositions again."

Cad Bane discarded the last round as his Thuris Stout arrived on a metal tray, and the sabaac droid began shuffling the cards for a two-way round. He tipped his hat a few degrees to the side, forming a horizontal shadow over his eyes against the cantina lights that shifted to a dark indigo pattern.

"How about I ask the question, now. Do you intend on continuing this until the end of our little round of sabaac, or are you ever going to call it quits?" asked Bane.

"Continue what?"

"Playing the game in which I don't plan to kill you."

Gasta stopped. Then, after a speedy recovery, he laughed and guzzled down his Membrosia.

"I don't think you understand, Cad Bane. My brothers and I have this whole block under our control. I know what's going on downstairs and across the street and, as of now, across the table. You can't touch me here. If you do, you know what's going to happen. And last time? Last time, I was just playing nice."

"I'm sure of it," Bane said coldly.

Bane did remember the last time. The last time the Boltrunians had hired him to carry out one of their seemingly small but mildly significant dealings on this very system. After he had finished the job, he returned to collect his payment only to discover Gasta Corrino and two of his brothers had bailed to the Outer Rim, and thus got out of handing over the money. Embarking on a chase would have not only cost him expenses he couldn't afford because of the lost payment, but risked angering several Corrino allies.

That was roughly one standard year ago. And now, in all honesty, however many allies the Corrino's had did not matter to him in light of what had been lost. That was not just a guaranteed payment, but a stain on his reputation that could only be washed away by Boltrunian blood.

Because no bounty hunter worked for free. It was against the lifestyle.

He held up his hand and took a sip from his drink. By now, he could not even hear the music in the background. The fiery dance of the Lethan Twi'lek was a faded memory, because in this moment, all he wanted was blood. To right a wrong in his ledger. This was professional work, after all.

"What do you expect me to do? Do you want your money?" Gasta snapped.

"You should know, out of all of them," Bane answered, "it's not just about the money, is it. There are many other games to play, and I suggest you start learning the ropes. Because I, too, am a professional."

Bane took another card and looked at his hand. He knew Gasta was cheating, of course. The whole deck had been rigged. It was an old trick that originated on Florrum and had become quite contagious ever since the start of the Clone Wars. Unfortunately for Gasta, it was a gambit that had already been used on, and used by, his opponent in this circumstance. The last time Bane had played against a sabaac opponent who pulled off the same trick, he had won solely on one giant leap of faith.

Which sounded like a hell of a fun time right about now.

Bane did not look up, but he could feel the eyes of the Boltrunian fixed on him, which were overflowing with the poisonous certainty of one last victory for the night. As he reached for his glass, Bane slipped a card from his back pocket in his lap, which he then drew back with the deck. Then once he had made a discard, Gasta almost immediately drew his own card. It was the signal Bane needed.

So bringing that sabaac card from his last stay on Hawke Noth had paid off in the end.

"By the way, I hope you know when your brothers are arriving to help you, well, stay out of trouble."

"I don't need my brothers to whip someone like you," Gasta snarled in reply. "No open Shift. The betting round is up."

"Eight-hundred," said Bane.

His quote-unquote old friend laughed.

"What's the matter with you? One grand."

"All right, then, I double."

"Make that three thousand."

The bystanders exchanged murmurs between each other.

"Four thousand," Bane said. He added a card to the Shift.

"You're gonna have to do better than that."

Once more, he added to the Shift. The droid took out the dice. Gasta stared down at the identical numbers. Bane was able to take his next sip of Thuris Stout with much more calmness that time, as Gasta's action was only further evidence of the hand he had dealt himself. Not to mention, it would not take such a big leap of faith to actually win this round. This, too, was an old trick of the trade. Bane once learned it from a fellow named Greedo out on Tattooine.

"Five thousand," Gasta cried out, and he reached for the Shift. The droid announced it was closed. Gasta hissed in agitation.

"Call. Negative twenty-three," said Bane.

The Boltrunian couldn't speak at first. The pieces of his elaborate puzzle that were reflected in his eyes crumbled like dry sand.

Bane leaned back in his chair and finished off his Thuris Stout, letting it burn all the way down his throat. He propped one leg up on the table.

"The game is cover, Gasta. Time to pay up."

"You…you cheated." Gasta had never sputtered like this before.

"You were just too goddamn occupied."

"Why, you were planning this from the start…"

It happened so fast. Gasta rolled out of his chair. It crashed behind him. He reached for his blaster, cursing in gurgles. Bane kicked his chair away from the table and lowered his deck of cards, revealing a drawn blaster hidden behind it and aiming at a Boltrunian chest. Gasta stopped. He blinked, once, at the barrel in front of him. Nobody who was watching breathed or made a sound, as in the background, the music carried on without a care. Bane fired into Gasta's chest three times before the blasts drove the Boltrunian backwards. Gasta fell in a heap to the floor, cracking the chair in two underneath him. He twitched exactly five times, then his eyes rolled back in his sockets, and they hung open.

The corner of the cantina became eerily silent. With every millisecond that dragged by, the realization of what had just been done sank in and melted like ice. However, it did not last long. As the music carried on, and the majority of those present cared as much about the sound of the three blasts as how many stimulants they had consumed in the hour, the crowd of bystanders disassembled back to normality. The Duros bounty hunter rose from his chair, put away his blaster, and called over Gasta's butler droid, who had stood idle in the corner as the only non-living witness.

"Five thousand credits from his account," he said. When he was back on the road again, he would find a way to make Gasta's brothers compensate for the rest he was owed.

His ledger was clean. No more stains. After all, they were professionals.

And five-thousand could buy her out for the entire night.

As Gasta's carcass was dragged away, and the droid handed him his sabaac winnings, Bane glanced back up at the Lethan girl. The three, as well as their companions, had long finished their dance and were in the far back corner of the cantina, which was the area of Hawke Noth with drapes for closets, the queen-sized bed in a back room for the more unique proposals, and which always carried a heavy perfume aroma. It went without saying that if the rest of Hawke Noth did wonders mentally, this one carried out the physical coverage.

Once he had made it through the sea of tables and the crowd of males around the platform, Bane approached the owner and handed him one-fifth of his winnings. The owner looked up. He had sky-blue eyes, a hooked nose, apple cheeks, and matted brown curls on top. Disgusting.

"What is your price for the red Twi'lek? The Lethan?" asked Bane.

"It depends on how long you're asking. A standard hour is five hundred credits flat."

"They're rare, aren't they? At least, that's what I've heard."

"Let's just say you're a lucky one. She's usually sold out before one AM."

"Where did you get her from?" Bane could not help but slip in. It was worth a shot, and by asking the previous question, it was also subtle enough.

"That," the Human said with a quirky smile, "is not for the customer to know. Traders' secrets, you know the drill."

"I have a tight schedule," said Bane.

"I'll send her over to your place in twenty minutes."

"No, even better. I'll take her there myself."

"And for how long?"

He did not hesitate in his answer.

"The entire night."

The Lethan girl had seen it all happen from where she waited with the others, who had retracted to a new form of business promotion throughout their corner of the cantina. The Human turned to her and, as he murmured something in her ear, unhooked the chain fastened to her neck. In response, she blew a large, sarcastic kiss to him and stepped out from the entrapment of drapes, sheets, and the smell of heavy perfume.

Cad Bane glared hard into her face as she lifted her head and made the first eye contact with him. And it made him remember something. Something he couldn't see or hear or taste or touch. But he didn't know what he was supposed to be remembering.

Without the slightest showing of hesitation, the girl approached him, gnawing at her lower lip and playing with the corner of her headdress. Bane did not take his gaze off her. She must have been taught to do that. She must have been told to walk in such a way that was a poor excuse of a homage to seduction and easy elegance. Nothing she could do now could change what he would do next.

"Just one second, girl," said Bane, and he held up his hand. "Before you get started, you have to answer something that's been driving me up the wall."

The Lethan cocked her head, like a curious infant, and asked, while cracking a wide smile,

"What make you think I got answers?"

He inched closer. She smelled of greasy makeup and heavy perfume. Her face was shadowed in the lack of light that was this area of the cantina, darkening her features. Her demeanor was calmer than he had expected it to be.

"I've seen you before. I'm sure you would remember and I'd like to know."

"I knowin' you," she giggled quietly. "You're Bane, Cad. Best hunter out there since the Fett lose his head. If you seen me before, means you pay for me before."

"I never remember their faces, if you must know. All I see is money."

"What kind of work are we asking tonight?" she asked, leaning in closer.

Well, well, yet another professional with all the tricks up her sleeve. This was his lucky night.

But he never answered her question. Instead, he asked,

"What's your name, girl?"

"Blythe, Bane Cad."

"You're coming with me, Blythe. I have a small apartment in Happyface."

The human watched from his corner as the bounty hunter took his girl outside the cantina, and he saw one of the sickly-green ones try to slip away for something to eat, and he yanked her backwards by her chain and threw her in to the crawling hands of the Weequay males, and they paid for her in full while stripping her down for a long night in Hawke Noth Cantina, but not one tone-deaf ear would tune in to the sound of her cries, and not one haughty eye would look down.


He had been right. She was fire. She was the flames that with every raging cycle of growth demanded all the more toxic a fuel. From the second he shut the apartment door behind him, there was no doubt that this girl took her profession quite seriously, only playing the sort of games in which her surrender was inevitable but pleasure to approach. She tore off his duster and he unbuckled his belt, leaving it on the floor. She grabbed his shirt, he rolled off her clothes, and somewhere in there his hat had fallen off. Before he could anticipate her next move or the next strategy to rack up his knowledge of her physical elements, he was buried against a tangle of bed sheets, and her front was completely exposed to however he wanted to make use of it. As the night's first round of being forced in and forced out drew to a climax, the Lethan let not one sound out of her mouth. She was silent in the darkness, her sharp cheekbones and glossy lips reflecting the streetlight out the nearby window.

The taste of her inside of him was delicate but audacious, fragile but excited. A poison that did not know how to kill. He responded the only way he knew how, which was to become the most aggressive of predators. And she let herself be the victim, to give in and surrender by second nature. It was the first time in several months that Bane felt in full control of a situation, and after hiding in the shadows because someone else was holding the reins, it was suddenly a feeling indescribable in all its worth. But no one would ever hear him say that. Instead, he filled her with him until she tasted him, she breathed him, and he was the only being in her existence.

When Bane could breathe again, he was lying on the bed with his back against the wall. The Lethan had one hand over his and the other gently cradling the tip of her lekku. Now that they had slowed down, he could see her face better as more lights from outside the window streamed in through the shades. In spite of however many layers of makeup she had on, she was beautiful. He was about to speak, but she cut him off.

"Buy me for whole night?" she asked, as if for clarification. Once he had made a short little nod, she added, "Let me know when you're ready. Go get a drink, or bring a friend over, don't matter."

No matter how much the thoughts were appealing, there was something he couldn't get off his mind. It seemed as if every time she so much as looked at him or spoke, an old memory stirred. Bane despised how it felt like a deep itch or bruise that grew worse with each second but was impossible to locate on one's body.

Certainly once he found out where in the hell he'd seen this girl before, it would leave him be.

"Sure, sure, but before that, there's something I still want." He slowly drew up his breath and propped his elbow up against the pillow. "You need to tell me where I've seen you before."

He noticed the spot where she had gnawed her lip had turned pale.

"Bane Cad. Bane Cad." She said his name over and over, as if it soothed her tongue to say it. "Seen lots like you. Lot paid for me."

"What about those brain-tails of yours. They got to have something."

"Maybe. Why need to know?"

"I don't like the inability to pinpoint a face or a name," he grumbled, half to himself. "But it was a long way back, whenever it was."

She looked up and pulled back her hand, beginning to stroke one lekku.

"Long way back...?" the Lethan echoed. She touched his shoulder and her hand felt like ice.

"What?"

"Hey. Maybe I did. Seen you, I mean. If it was long way back..."

So he had seen her. Not in Hawke Noth, not even on Coruscant, but somewhere else. It was coming back to him.

Duro, a vile and lonely rotten little planet…the town was full of grown-ups faces and black figures, all larger than life.

"Keep going," he said.

"Did I seen you. If it was long way back," she whispered. She tried freeing her left arm out of the sheets. "Maybe I was just dancing. You know where it was?"

"The Duro system. There were a lot of folk there. I can't rightly recall why."

She gently lowered her eyelids, and then peeled them open.

"It's your eyes. I saw them. No change at all." She hesitated, thinking.

Bane almost smirked, wondering which side of that coin could be taken as more of a compliment—the fact that it was one pair of eyes out of countless others that made him unforgettable to her, or that they had not changed at all. Either way.

"Everyone was so tall, I mean, too big, right, Bane Cad?"

An image sharpened in his mind, as if from hundreds of broken little pieces, a shadow approaching out of a heavy rain.

A little red girl with a pair of lekku was talking to him, something about a favorite animal to have as a pet one day. A black figure yelled from a high platform, and took the little red girl away from him. She was crying and laughing at the same time.

"Oh, I see," she finally added. "You and I was just kids, then."

He sat up straight and folded his hands under his chin. Now to some degree he knew why he could remember her. Though why such a distant childhood memory was still this sharp was beyond him.

He and the little red girl had met a few days before. One morning they chased each other around the large platform until they were tired, and then they played a game in the sand. Some sort of game in which he lost and he didn't like losing, but the little red girl couldn't care less whether she won or lost, and he hadn't understood that about her at all.

Blythe spoke up.

"I know that day, too. That was day, I think, never saw family again."

Dammit. Now getting a little personal, are we, he couldn't help but think. But testing the waters of sentimentality, especially at this point...it was irresistible.

"You remember what that platform was for?" he muttered.

"Hey. Didn't come here to talk, remember?"

"If I have you the entire night, it makes no difference to me. I'll pay as much as I want to. Now, you've said too much already. Let's finish it."

She didn't speak.

"I said, go ahead and finish it."

Now that he had a stronger image of the little red girl's face again, the memory was even sharper than it was earlier that night. He couldn't leave it full of holes, empty, and without reason. He had to remember. She had to tell him. Because that day, for some reason, stuck out in his memory. Something significant had happened to him that day or the day before or the day after. Something important he had long-forgotten, a treasure stuffed into the far back of a drawer. Unless it turned out to be the very opposite of a treasure. Which, considering what he did remember of his childhood, could be more likely.

"The platform," Blythe said slowly, "that where they auction us off. Times hard back home. Parents give me up to pirates on Duro. Sold there, some place on Ryloth for pirates. Pirates taught me dancing if them could make money off me."

"How old were you?" he asked.

In response, Blythe forced him back down until his head rested on the pillow. She played something on her choke collar and began to rock back and forth, gently at first.

"Just a kid, I said. Five, six, seven. But, no one cares about that. Right?" She let out the same giggle from before, and Bane not for the first time decided that all whores, pretty-faced or not, could never be trusted with someone else's life. Not for ten million credits could they be trusted.

"You're right, Blythe," he chuckled. "Absolutely no one cares about that."

She tangled up her leg in the bed sheets and rolled on top of him, sweating. On to round two.


On the rusty little planet called Duro, in one of the many cramped and dirty towns where vile rogues hid from the sunlight, where fatherless children desperately beat on their mothers so they could afford another fix, where moisture ate away at the homes families couldn't afford to repair…on this world, a tattooed, rusty, cargo ship landed on the surface. Tall, fat figures emerged from inside, clothed in foreign robes that began at the chest and ended at the ankles. The figures opened up the cargo hold, and they set their goods in divided groups, organized by age, health, and color. Within the next week, the foreigners made themselves comfortable in the neighborhood while announcing a big sale on the weekend. When the day arrived, a crowd gathered at the platform in the town center. Some husbands, tugging down at their shirts to hide a beer belly, dragged their sore-ridden feet out from the all-night bars and fished through their pockets for cash—other ones raced home to alert their still-sleeping wives and snatch up some legit credits to use. Still other miscellaneous folk came regardless of how full, or how empty, their pockets were.

As the tall, dark figures pulled out their accounts, checked over the goods, and cracked their knuckles for the start of their payday, a handful of the smallest and skinniest goods trailed to the back of the group. Their skin colors were unnaturally pale, their lekku frail and hanging like rags, faces pink with premature diseases. One of these youngest, a little red girl, drifted farther away than the others and returned to the spot she had picked as her own play place for the past few days. In her mind, it was the perfect place: a round sandbox with walls almost as tall as her. She had always wanted to throw something into the sandbox, but she didn't have anything.

Then her friend came along. She had begun playing with him at this spot ever since she got here. He was a little blue boy with red eyes. When he arrived, he let her have his piece of clay he had been trying to form into a ship, but it always turned out to look more like a planet instead. She was happy to play with it and he was happy to watch her. She asked him things as she played, and he answered if he knew how.

In the distance, there came the sound of shouting from the crowd around the platform. One voice rang out over all the others, and there was a light applause along with some drunken bickering. An older girl, but a skinnier one, wailed softly from the top of the platform amidst all the noise, and only the little red girl and the little blue boy were the ones who would hear her. No one else would.

The little red girl gasped when one of the tall, dark figures began to approach them. Then a tall blue figure, with eyes just like the boy's, took him away and boxed him on the side of the head, yelling things. She cried and was taken back to the group of the ones like her, and she wondered why her parents didn't come back for her like they promised they would when the tall, dark figures took her on their ship.


Revision Note:

Added a bit more to the interrogation scene to better flesh out the characters. The biggest change in this chapter is Bane's motive to kill Gasta Corrino. Instead of an anonymous 'history' between them, I gave him a solid reason to put his life at risk by committing such an act. Also added additional dialogue to Bane and Blythe's conversation that I thought was missing and needed to make it more real and thorough. Other than that, more details, dialogue, and a general clean-up.