Part 7 – The Fury (En route to Tatooine)
Quinn was a private kind of man. He was so private, in fact, Vette couldn't really see him as more than part of the furniture, or perhaps a protocol droid. It came as a great surprise then, to learn he had family.
Lord Polaris was chattering away to the both of them over their evening meal, complaining about his own family. He was an only child (Vette could not have been less surprised), but had a multitude of cousins, second cousins, nieces and nephews. They were all insufferable, apparently. Vette nodded in all the right places as she ate and made hums of agreement every so often, which was more than Quinn seemed to be bothering with. The man looked dog-tired, and she watched him mechanically eat his food, his head low.
"Captain, have you got any family?" Polaris asked suddenly. "For some reason, I didn't think you did."
Quinn looked up, storm blue eyes drained but awake.
Vette sniggered. "Nah, Quinn just appeared one day, spontaneously created by the sheer force of Imperial patriotism. Or maybe he was built, like a droid?"
It had been meant as a joke, but the Captain narrowed his eyes and his lip curled. His posture stiffened, and he placed his fork back on his plate fussily.
"I have family back on Dromund Kaas." He said simply, stiff and not supplying more than that. Ven'fir tilted his head to the side like a curious puppy. It was an endearing habit of his, and it made him seem softer, and less likely to tear your heart from your chest. Having witnessed him do exactly that before, she shivered. That had been horrible.
"Family?" the Sith repeated. "Like what, a mother and father, brothers, a cat?" he prompted.
Quinn pursed his lips, looking uncomfortable. "My mother is a retired naval officer, and my father died when I was young. She remarried some years ago. I have one sister, and my mother despises all animals." He said, reluctantly.
Vette grinned. "I can see you as a cat kind of guy," she admitted, and the Captain shrugged, making even that action seemed poised. "I don't mind dogs either, as long as they're friendly." He murmured.
Polaris nodded. "You were on Balmorra for a long time. Did you see them when you were on leave?" he asked, seeming to assume the answer would be a positive. Quinn's mouth was a grim line.
"No." he said shortly.
"Oh. Why?"
The Captain's patience was running thin, but Vette didn't like him enough to rescue him.
"We do not get along." He ground out. "My mother is a hard woman to please, and my sister is busy with her work." He paused. "My apologies, my Lord. I do not wish to speak of this further."
He looked embarrassed and his eyes flickered to Vette in slight apprehension. The Twi'lek pretended not to notice. Did he think she would tease him about this?
If so, he was right. She shot him a sunny smile, and watched as his shoulders tensed, and he swallowed painfully. The officer rose, leaving half his meal unfinished.
"I think I will retire and get some sleep, if that's alright?" he muttered, clearing away his plate and robotically washing it, before stacking it neatly with the others. Most of them already had chips in the enamel.
He marched from the room like he was made of metal, stiff and awkward. Polaris frowned. "He's upset." He said, voice low. Vette snorted.
"Uh, yeah." She drawled. "Caught that, did you? There's some ammunition in the family thing, I can tell."
The Sith's frown deepened. "I don't know if you should poke at that, Vette." He said in a rare moment of compassion. "Looks like a sore subject."
Vette shook her head. "If he wants me to shut up, he can say so." She said simply, and Polaris seemed to agree. At least, he went back to his food and didn't argue further. He must have been genuinely concerned, she realised. Getting Ven'fir to ignore food for even a few minutes was a monumental task, not to mention obtaining the sheer quantity required to feed him. Vette was sure she was going to have to resort to smugglers and back alley dealers to get them supplies, as the Sith was obviously determined to eat them out of house and home.
Home.
She realised with a start that the ship had begun to feel that way. It wasn't there yet, it felt more like a comfortable hotel room right now, not really hers, but it was more than she had been used to in the last decade. She sighed, and heaped more food onto her plate before Ven'fir ate it all.
Life wasn't so bad, right now.
If life was good for Vette, it was quite the opposite for Quinn.
The conversation played on his mind, and he found himself penning a holo-mail to his sister. She was technically not his full sister, and she bore his step-father's name. He grimaced at the thought. The idea of having a step-father was not a terrible one, and the man was perfectly nice. It just made his family life seem that much more out of place, and therefore potentially embarrassing. He sighed, and hit 'send'. He always had got along well with her, despite everything that should have made sure they hated each other. He outlined what he had been up to, and asked the usual questions. He knew what he shouldn't bother asking, and stayed off topics of work. Those were sensitive.
His mother hadn't replied to his last message, but he had not expected her to. She was busy being a socialite, something she had never gotten to experience in her youth. The life seemed to agree with her, and some part of him had hoped she would have perhaps become softer with her newfound happiness. It had not been so, and he had almost been glad for Balmorra.
He felt a yawn coming on, and his jaw strained as he did so. He was exhausted, but he wasn't finished yet. He sighed, and rubbed his eyes. He felt thin and stretched, trying to do too much on too little sleep. He yawned again and got ready for bed, the routine calming him and making him look forward to an early night and warm covers. Tomorrow would be better. He would fix things tomorrow, and be productive. With that fragile, wobbly promise in his mind, he managed to send himself off to sleep.
Vette liked sleep. She liked sleep a lot, especially when it was deep, uninterrupted and followed a good meal. She didn't often get that feeling, and she relished it when she managed to hold onto it.
She was less therefore than pleased to be woken only a few hours after her head had hit the pillow. She awoke groggily, not sure what had made her stir, but aware something must have. She blinked in the darkness, and slowly her brain filtered information through. Thinking was a slow process, but like light was on in the small bathroom that joined onto the crew quarters. A lone figure was in there, the door only half shut. She levered herself up on her elbows, watching. Quinn, still in his sleeping clothes, was leaning over the sink, his head bowed. His undershirt was stretched over his shoulders as his arms supported him.
Even his sleeping clothes were long sleeved and covered almost as much skin as his uniform did. Vette wasn't stupid. He didn't like being touched, hated showing skin and the one time she had gotten close to his neck to tend to a cut after a fight, he had all but smacked her hand away. That went beyond fussiness and being a prude. She frowned, watching him breathe deeply and rhythmically. He was calming himself, she realised.
He took a shuddering breath and ran some water, tiredly splashing his face and neck, a shiver that didn't look like it was from cold running down his spine when his fingers met the junction between shoulder and jaw.
She heard him sigh and murmur a soft, tired curse to his reflection. He looked terrible, tired and weary. She was struck when she realised she had never heard him swear before now. He turned to leave, and Vette quickly feigned sleep. She listened to him turn out the light again and pad back to his bed, his footfalls quiet and slow. A rustle of sheets and then all was silent, and eventually his breathing evened out and he slept once more.
Vette lay awake, her mind churning.
Quinn suddenly felt like a person.
It was an odd feeling, and one that made her mind skew. He had nightmares, he woke up in the middle of the night and did breathing exercises in the mirror to calm down. He didn't like to show skin, and his sleeping pants were at least a size too big for him and far too long. He didn't get along with his family.
All this, for some reason, made her sleep addled brain see him in a different light. He was still annoying, fussy and she didn't like him. But he was a person now.
Somehow, that changed things.
The quiet hum of the ship was the perfect counterpoint to the stillness of meditation for Ven'fir. Mirialan had never been comfortable with total silence, feeling claustrophobic and uncomfortable when faced with the deafening heaviness of peace weighing down on him, pressing into his ears and his lungs like wool. His eyes were closed, his hands rested in his lap as he knelt on the floor, a cushion under his knees.
Keeping still had always been a challenge in his youth, and the soles of his feet still bore raised scars from a biting leather crop. He breathed deeply, senses both muffled and keenly aware of everything around him.
The hum of the engines was first, and quickly settled into a background bass that beat steady in the back of his mind. Then came the workings of the machinery that kept his ship together, kept air in their lungs and the deathly cold of the vacuum just a few meters away from snuffing them out. It beeped a stable rhythm over the engines, a calming addition to the noise. The taste of the filtered air hit the back of his throat, carrying with it the scent of military grade cleaning fluid, fresh paint and the undercurrent of metal and oil. A hint of the meal they had shared a few hours ago lingered in the air.
Goosebumps on his skin. He liked it cold, if only to make the eventual warmth more pleasant.
He felt the odd void of Too-vee, powered down and static in the corner of the galley. No Force flickered around the droid, just emptiness.
Vette's presence was fresh, like a sweet-scented spring breezes off a mountain, flighty and bracing. She was energy and electric, the flickers of her signature only slightly muted as she slept. She was a cold stream, fast flowing and deceptively banal. She carried flecks of gold in her eddies.
Quinn was almost drowned out by Vette. His presence felt like embers, the last dregs of a blazing fire whose intensity was only matched by its hazard. The fire had been snuffed out and now lay cooling, a comfortable warmth that was slowly being smothered by an aloof, creeping cold. His presence was wound tight like a spool of wire and razors, something dark covered by a thin veil of unassuming blandness. Underneath even that was a roiling ball of energy, emotions passing by each other too quickly for him to pick up on, but the drowning feeling he got was unpleasant.
Ven'fir could feel his own signature all over the ship and the two people who lived in it. He felt a flare of possession. It was all his. He had never really had anything that belonged only to Ven'fir, and not House Polaris.
This was his. His own. Something tugged at his chest, and a fierce sense of possession bloomed inside his stomach, hot and ticklish. He wanted more. The feeling of ownership was intoxicating, and the ease of taking was addictive.
He breathed out through his nose, his meditation turning to a perverse daydream. He stood on the bridge of a colossal Imperial dreadnought, blur-faced Imperials bowing to him, a sea of stars visible out of the panoramic windows, just waiting to be claimed. His armour was impenetrable, his sabres were by his side and the Force was his servant. His family cowered as they looked on, his mother sour faced and cowed. His instructors were inexplicably present, witnesses to the glory they said a filthy alien would never achieve.
He saw Vette behind him, smirking and confident, dressed in the finest battle armour and her hands on gleaming twin blasters. She was at his side, his enforcer and his loyal subject. Vette looked haughty and perfect, powerful in her stance and his stomach lurched with that feeling again.
He barely had the time to wonder what was missing from this vision of might before the dream shifted. Tones of blush and shadow took over his vision, an image in the third person coming to him. He was in a hazy room on some unnamed planet, a dying red sun visible from an arched stone window and shedding crimson light onto the sandstone and the diaphanous, translucent fabrics hanging around the windows.
He felt like a voyeur as he watched a man with his green colouring and tattoos panted on the bed, his skin shining with moisture, and his expression carnal and ravenous. His eyes blazed deep Sith amber as he fucked into the body beneath him, it's pale skin flushed, dark hair feathered over its forehead. The sound of metal was incongruous with the softness of the bed, and the sight of straining cuffs around slim, pale wrists was enough to make him lose his breath. The body under his arched into him with shamelessness that would never be seen in the waking world, a breathy litany of begging, filthy moans falling from lips that had been bitten plush and red. Dark lashes brushed pink cheeks, fluttering. One green skinned hand was wound in dark hair, the grip keeping his lovers head forced up to face him as he gripped onto the sable strands painfully. He watched as the grip went lax and the hand moved to a pale throat, wrapping around it with sinful ease, and beginning to tighten. A low, desperate moan fell from the man so utterly conquered by the figure on top of him, and Ven'fir watched passively as his double squeezed harder and moved his hips at a brutal pace, encouraged by the lovely thing writhing beneath him.
He glanced at his face and he would have stopped breathing had he ever started. His double's expression was predatory and frenzied, his eyes wide and intense, his lips pulled back from his teeth like a wild animal. The dream-self used the body until he was satisfied, and his lover voiced no words other than husky murmurs of 'more'. His double stuttered and seized, his back arching and teeth biting into his lip hard enough to draw blood as his body seized with a wave of utter sensation, his hand holding his lover in place long enough be beyond the point of pain. Blue eyes opened and gazed adoringly upwards, unguarded and reverent. It would be burned into his mind forever, he decided, this image of a man looking up at the god who was ruining him so gloriously, and worshipping him with every second of adoration.
With a start, Ven'fir was back in his quarters, the noises of the ship coming back to him. He was breathing heavily, and there was perspiration on his brow. He felt hot and wound tight, and he ached. Breathing out a shaky breath, he rolled his shoulders and stood up on shaking legs, intent of retiring as fast as he could, while the memory of that dream was still fresh.
He grinned to himself and he removed his loose robe, dropping it carelessly over the back of his desk chair. The dream had been a thoroughly pleasant one, and the thrill of power and possession was still thrumming in his veins. His eyes glowed a baleful amber as dark, warm thoughts invaded his mind, and he succumbed to them eagerly. His mind was occupied only with its own pleasure, and nothing else was distracting enough to pull him from his desires.
It didn't matter if the real thing was a disappointment; he had this for now.
Dark temptation presented itself like a lover, and the young Sith eagerly embraced it.