A/N: Thanks for your patience. I moved back into college this weekend and quickly finished this chapter tonight, since I may not get to write more for the next few days. This Chapter is really more of an interlude, and I have the beginning of the next chapter started, as it was one of the first bits of the story that I wrote.
There was a long, brightly-lit hallway in front of her. It looked sterile, so unlike the grimy environments she was so used to. She had no idea where she was; this place was utterly unfamiliar to her. She wandered forward. She wasn't wearing her armor; she had nothing except the dress that hung off her small frame. She stumbled forward, looking over her shoulder, constantly checking to see that no one was behind her. Her breath was ragged. She continued on, down the length of the long hallway, a sense of urgency taking over her with each passing step.
She stumbled, grasping at the wall for support. She heard the sound of heavy footsteps behind her. She didn't bother looking over her shoulder to see who was following her. With awkward, forced movements, she tried to run away. Her body, wracked with fatigue and shaking from effort, only made it a few steps before collapsing beneath her. Using her arms, she desperately tried to crawl away. She felt strong hands grab her roughly around the waist, pulling her up off the floor. She fought, but her attacker was much stronger, and dragged her backwards. She clawed at the arms around her waist, but to no success.
She heard herself scream.
Torscha Lahiri's green eyes snapped open and she gasped for breath. Her whole body was shaking, and a sheen of cold sweat covered her all over. Blinking in utter confusion and horror, she fumbled around for her blaster, which she always kept by the side of the bed when she was sleeping alone. By the time she felt the cool metallic blaster under her fingers, she had realized where she was. She was in her cramped, rented apartment in Coruscant. She rolled onto her back, chest heaving. The images started to fade and her heart started to slow back down to a normal pace. She looked over at the chrono on the wall. It was the middle of the night, and she'd only slept for a few hours. She knew that she probably wasn't getting any more sleep tonight.
"Kriff," she muttered.
All hunters had nightmares, especially the good ones. The hunters who rarely failed, who made the job look easy, were successful every day because every night they failed. It drove them, and prepared them. Hunters had tried so many things to sleep without the nightmares. Some tried alcohol, others tried spice. Torscha personally preferred promiscuous sex and the occasional bottle of cheap, but strong liquor.
She pulled herself out of bed gracefully. The only thing she could do to easy away the dream was to train. It would reassure her that she wouldn't get caught, and that she could get away if she ever was. She pulled her long, limp hair, which had been hanging loose around her shoulders, into a messy bun, breathing deeply. Starting slowly, she stretched her muscles, which were stiff from sleep. Torscha was flexible, her skill set provided a necessity for it. First and foremost, she was an infiltrator, but as far as combat went, she preferred melee. True, she could fire a blaster efficiently, and probably with an above-average skill, but she wasn't about to win any awards for it. She was as good of a slicer as she needed to be, a decent pilot and even a makeshift mechanic or medic when the occasion called for it.
All of these were skills she'd picked up and developed out of the need to survive. While none of them had the refinement of professional training, they combined to create a cohesive skill set that proved advantageous for a career in bounty hunting. Untrained as she was, obsessive tendencies were already becoming evident in the nineteen-year-old hunter. Even the slightest mistake was able to set her on edge. She'd made far too many mistakes in the last job. She'd been off of her game; she had spent too much time on that dusty wasteland of a planet that her skills had begun to wane. Now that she didn't have the diversion of another person, she faced the facts about how that last job had gone.
She had taken too long on the door security, and on the elevator panel. She should not have needed the distraction her partner had created by lighting half of the room on fire; a hunter of her reputation should have been able to clear that room easily. Not one of those adversaries seemed to have been able to fire a blaster properly. She'd blamed her technology at the time, but now it was time to stop making excuses for her own shortcomings. This job had gone relatively well, but the performance she had given wouldn't be adequate for a higher-class job. Mistakes like that were how hunters got caught and killed.
She felt the blood pulsing through her muscles as she warmed them up. In the patch of light cast onto the floor by Coruscant's night lights through the open curtains, she stretched her legs, first one and then the other. Once she felt sufficiently stretched, she began working each of her muscle groups in turn, abdominals, thighs, calves, back, arms. She paid special attention to her right leg, which had been injured on her last solo job on Ord Mantell. It had given her the tell-tale limp that, to a trained eye, would have given away her secret identity.
She became agitated, thinking about how she had lost the security of her double-life. She'd caved under pressure and had lost a lot of her reputation. She became too restless for the mundane muscle toning that usually helped put her mind at rest. She padded silently to the other side of the one-room apartment and pulled out her vibrosword instead. It glinted in the golden light of the city outside. She went to the center of the room, which provided several square feet of space, seeing as Torscha had minimal furniture considering her situation. She closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths. Then she let all her anger, her frustration and her panic out in a string of elaborate and ferocious movements of her blade, cutting down imaginary enemies with speed and precision.
A long while later, exhausted from physical exertion, she dropped her blade to the ground with a clatter. Gasping, she let herself collapse onto a sitting position on the ground. Tears streamed down her cheeks and she curled into a ball on the floor.
XXX
One Month Later
The sun glinted off the surface of Slave I as it glided down to a landing platform, high above the surface of Coruscant. Boba Fett had an acquisition in his cargo hold, a list of potential jobs and enough credits to keep him steady for the next several months. His reputation was building up again more quickly than he had expected. The last few jobs had brought him off-planet, to Byss and Ord Mantell. Most of the jobs he was getting were still tracking smugglers and debtors, but they were getting to be higher in profile and frequently more dangerous.
Once he was safely landed, he powered down the ship's flight engines. He sat back in the pilot's chair, running a hand through his thick, black hair. He took a deep breath, then pulled on his cowl and put his helmet on over it, blinking as his eyes adjusted to looking through his HUD. It was mid-afternoon, a perfect time to bring in his latest catch. On Ord Mantell, he'd caught up with the leader of a counterfeiting racket who had gotten into the business of creating fake passes into secured areas of a large manufacturing corporation, presumably for the purpose of corporate espionage.
The leader himself hadn't put up much of a fight, but he'd been well-guarded. Not as well as the gang he and Torscha had taken off the radar, but enough to give him a much-welcomed challenge, and some much-welcomed profit. He consulted his data readouts in his HUD to ensure that he knew where he was going before getting up and heading down into the cargo hold.
His prisoner was alive, and held, unmoving by common, energized restraints. He was a mastermind, not a martial artist, which meant that he would be easy to take in. He wasn't going to have to be sedated and brought in unconscious like some of Fett's other prisoners over the past month. That Byss job had been rather nasty. A group of enforcers had gone rogue and their previous boss had wanted them eliminated before they sold gang secrets to enemy organizations. It was a mission of ambiguous morality to say the least, but most bounties were affairs of questionable morality at best. Fett consoled his personal sense of justice by noting that these enforcers probably had it coming anyways, and that he was just in it for the money regardless of the real motive behind it.
In that job, nothing had gone right. His targets were not at the expected location, and so he'd had to backtrack halfway around the planet to gather some intel. While doing that, he'd inadvertently started a bar brawl, accidentally wandered into a red-light district and had been solicited, and had nearly lost a boot in a mud hole. Once he'd actually found his targets, taking them out was easy. They provided little actual trouble, as their main game was usually intimidation and street fighting, fronts that didn't work on the relatively hardened and well-trained Boba Fett. The fight hadn't gone exactly as he'd planned, but it had worked out in the end. He had cursed himself later for not realizing that nothing in bounty hunting ever really went as planned.
Wordlessly, he reattached his jetpack to his back. He had no intentions of using it, but it made for a good impression. He wanted to be as intimidating as possible, so that maybe he'd get hired again. Word had already started to spread about him and his skills in the bounty hunting field. He had moved up on the unspoken hierarchy of bounty hunters.
It seemed that his one-time partner had made out well on their shared job too. From what Fett could tell of his occasional scans of the holonet for news, was that she had gotten a few jobs of a similar scale to his own. She, however, had elected to stay on-planet, or so it would seem. Nothing said it outright, but he suspected that she'd taken the data-retrieval job that he'd turned down. It seemed like the natural choice for her, as she obviously had superior skills as an infiltrator.
He didn't speak to his acquisition, and the acquisition didn't say anything either. Fett shut off the energy field that kept the prisoner at bay, and snapped energy binders onto his wrists instead. There was a wistful look in the acquisition's eyes. He was doubtlessly one of the many legitimate businessmen who had delved into illegitimate business in order to make a few dollars on the side. But whatever his personal story was, Fett didn't want to know.
He led the acquisition out of his ship. He stopped to pay his docking fee, recognizing the dock officer as the same one who had been on-duty when he'd first returned to Coruscant. "Where's your better 'alf, eh?" he asked, his accent thick.
"What!?" Fett snapped, losing his composure for a moment.
"Your better 'alf… the real elegant dame you had with you last time you docked in this part of the city," he replied. "Couldn't forget a ship like that, or a girl like that either."
"Uhhh… I… Er… I work alone," he replied, escaping the conversation quickly. He pushed his acquisition roughly past the dock officer. Fett could hear the acquisition chuckle under his breath. "Quiet," he warned.
XXX
"The bounty hunter, Boba Fett," announced yet another pretentious major domo. These slimy majordomos were becoming far too common in his life.
Fett led his acquisition along like a trained bantha and unceremoniously turned him in. There was something monotonous about bringing in acquisitions. Clients and their associates treated it with such ceremony, while most hunters just wanted to get paid and get back to their lives and on to the next job. Fett was no exception. For right now, he didn't have an immediate need for the cash, but it would be nice to have some savings, just in case. After all, he would never know in advance if he needed to replace his armor or even his ship. He didn't want to end up in the same position as his previous partner, needing to catch a ride from someone else. He never liked to live in someone else's debt.
The reward was substantial. He was certainly making his way in the universe. Promises of more work, and more rewards followed, and Fett acknowledged the offers of future contracts with few words. Most people thought him odd, but they were probably right. He was never much of a social man; he was practical. He only did what he absolutely had to.
Unlike his work for the Hutts, Fett was not obligated to stay for any length of time. This wasn't Tatooine, where Hutts ruled everything. This was Coruscant, where everyone had places to go and people to see. Collecting and dashing was expected, and even encouraged. It kept money flowing and kept the flow of business running. He left as soon as he'd gotten paid.
The streets of Coruscant were a very interesting place. In the right places, they could be exotic and exciting, and in the wrong places, they could be equally exciting, but certainly more dangerous. Fett wasn't worried about the danger. He was a skilled fighter, better than almost anyone else. He didn't have to push his way through the crowds. Most people, intimidated by the armor, made room for him to pass. He didn't make himself the center of attention. Instead, he kept his head down and made his way to his ship as quickly as possible.
He trudged up into the cargo hold of his ship. He was hungry and was already thinking about what he wanted to heat up for dinner. Closing the cargo bay door behind him, he pulled off his jetpack and helmet. Something was off about the ship. It wasn't that anything was misplaced, it was just that there was a different smell in the air, one he couldn't quite place. His intuition pinged and told him that there was something wrong. A quick visual scan told him that nothing was in the cargo hold, so he crossed the space to the steps up to the cockpit. As soon as he reached the steps, a gas filled the small space.
Fett had no way of getting away. He coughed his way through the gas. His senses told him that this was just a basic knockout gas. His legs gave way beneath him as the world began to spin. He fumbled with the pouches on his belt, looking for a stim. His vision grew blurry, and he struggled on the floor. He tried supporting his weight on one arm as he struggled with the pouches on his belt, but he felt again and again. His eyes felt heavy and he fell into darkness.
A/N: Please take a moment to use the lovely box below to leave a review. I'm still giving out treats to all reviewers. I like replying to my reviewers too, so don't be shy!