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[hold out your hand, hunter says.
she's standing naked in the middle of the refresher in their base on taris, back rigid, chin up, defiant. taris was messy; she's got rakghoul bile in her hair and chance's blood, where she tried to patch him up until the transport came, beneath her fingernails. he made her help. she'd have done it anyway. she's not a monster, and he only ever used her programming when he thought he had to.
not like hunter.
teeth bared, she smiles. but you told me not to move.
we could have done this the easy way, you know. but you have to make it difficult for yourself. hunter sighs. onomatophobia, legate. hold out your hand.
she lifts her right hand to chest height, palm up.
that's a good girl. now let's get you cleaned up, shall we?
when hunter activates the panel freezing water pours from the showerhead and knocks the air from her lungs like a suckerpunch. she stays standing, though, keeps her arm raised. she can't not.
if you don't trust me, she says, just tell ardun you think i'm a traitor and be done with it. why bother with all this?
traitor? hunter laughs. he'd just like you more. he has this thing about redemption, you know? so noble. bullshit, of course. but noble.
an upturned wineglass in her palm, quickly filling with water. heavy. she tries to balance it, hand shaking. what about you? her teeth chatter from the cold.
me? i couldn't care less. if you're lying, eventually you'll get sloppy and break cover. otherwise, you'll just break. the glass rings, high and sweet and ear-piercing, with a flick of a fingernail against it. fun for me, in either case.
she grits her teeth.
now- walking away, hunter's almost out of the 'fresher but then turns back toward her- onomatophobia. don't move until i get back, hm? and keep your hand steady. wouldn't want you to cut those pretty feet on broken glass.
for one hour and thirty-eight minutes she thinks of murder and her fury keeps her halfway warm. still, she's bitten clear through her lip and her feet are frost-white and numb by the time the door opens again. the water shuts off.
much better, hunter says. come on, then.
she can feel her muscles relax, regains the ability to move. she upends the glass and it falls, shatters on the tile and she walks through it, unflinching, leaving a trail of crimson footprints behind as she stalks past.
i don't give a fuck- she snarls, spits a mouthful of blood onto hunter's mirror-polished boots- what you want.]
Someone's shaking her.
Her eyes fly open but still she can't move, pinned on her side with arms pressed in close and a heavy weight across her lower legs. Tensing, she gathers herself, ready to burst outward, to escape-
"Hey-" a familiar voice in her ear- "hey, hey, it's okay, wake up-"
She goes limp at the same time Theron lets her go.
"Another nightmare?" When he slides his arm from under the pillow and rolls onto his back beside her she sits upright, kicking the tangle of blankets to the floor beside the bed.
(Away from the base, the lack of scrutiny compared to Odessen lets them share a bed- she can't be perceived as playing favorites, and the gossip in the Alliance is just as vicious as it ever was in Imperial Intelligence; a few of the inner circle know, but only a few. On Odessen they steal time when they can, on her ship or, quietly, in her office, or once, after they'd spent a particularly dull meeting spelling increasingly explicit messages into each others' palms beneath the table, against the wall in the War Room supply closet.
On the handful of nights in the last month when they've been shipboard together they don't have to rush and he doesn't have to leave; he inevitably ends up curled around her when they sleep. She's… adjusting to it. She likes it, she thinks.)
"Sort of." She runs her tongue over her teeth- no blood- and glances down at her feet. No blood there either, no glass, just the usual assortment of scars. "An old memory. Not a pleasant one."
He frowns up at her. "I know you told me not to wake you, but you've been shivering like we were still down on Hoth for the better part of two hours. Are they always this bad?"
"Not always. I've been trying a thought suppression technique on Valkorion recently. It walls him off when I'm awake, mostly, but when I sleep-" she sighs. "He likes to go exploring, and he's not the only nasty thing back behind that wall."
"I can only imagine." He turns his head to kiss her hipbone. "And I thought I was a restless sleeper."
She drops her pillow on his face. "Very funny."
"Mmph," Theron mumbles, batting it away, "was a joke. Do you want to talk about it?" He sits up beside her. The patch on his back- they'd nearly made it clear of the Star Fortress' shield generator before it blew, but the explosion sent chunks of molten shrapnel flying in all directions and one caught him between the shoulder blades; on the plus side, the fire must've warmed Hoth by at least three degrees- is halfway unstuck. She presses it back down.
"No. But seeing as how ignoring them is working so terribly well so far, I suppose I should. First, I need to shower." The chill's just illusion, a nightmare augmented by Valkorion's power, but she's learned well enough with him in her head that things that aren't real can still hurt her just as badly as Hunter ever did. "I'm guessing it's probably too much to hope for hot water."
"Only a few minutes' worth, sorry. Enough to get clean."
They're bunked on his shuttle, not hers, and she looks around the room for the door to the refresher, spots it next to the desk and pushes herself up off the bed. "I need heat. Clean's secondary. Do I have time before we launch?"
"I think so." He rubs his eyes. "Miot's taking us up at 0600 and it's-" he looks up at the monitor in the corner of the room, reaches up for her hand to try to pull her back down- "half past three. You should sleep, though. It's going to be a long day."
"I've slept enough." She shakes him off. His quarters, like the rest of the shuttle, are compact, and she crosses the room in three steps and pulls the door open. One hand on the panel, she dials the temperature to maximum. "Get me a cup of caf?"
Theron nods, reaching down beside the bed for his pants and shirt. "One cup, black, coming up. Then we'll talk?"
"Then we'll talk."
When he leaves the room she sits down, cross-legged, on the floor of the 'fresher. The water's scalding. Eyes closed, she turns her face into the stream, lets it run over her until she can feel her skin flush and the memory of cold leach from her bones.
She gets three minutes of warmth before the pressure fails.
It takes Theron another minute to come back with the caf. She hasn't moved, steam still rising in slow tendrils off her body, and she reaches up to take the cup from his hand.
Later, after they talk, she drinks a second cup in the cockpit while Theron goes over maps with Miot. The two of them are handling the route, the logistics of getting up from the surface to the Star Fortress without getting their asses shot off by the orbital station's turbocannons, and she's happy to let them do it. For all of her boasting, piloting was never her strongest suit. The Sullustan, on the other hand, flies the shuttle even better than Theron does, and Theron can pilot the damn thing with his implants.
They can do this.
The trial run was one thing, getting into the EPHEMERIS unit. The shield bunker was another thing- on Hoth, at least, they could get behind it where the turrets couldn't target; she doesn't know how they'll manage the damned canyon on Alderaan or worse, Nar Shaddaa, where the bunker's built straight into the wall. On Hoth, with help from the local resistance, it went down easily.
Today, they take down the station's Exarch.
They can do this.
She wakes Lana, curled on a cot at the back of the shuttle, at five o'clock- Lana needed the rest, much as she swears she doesn't- and they spar, hand to hand, to prepare. She needs the close combat practice. Fighting exarchs, from what she can tell, is a lot like fighting Jedi except exarchs don't believe in things like mercy or surrender or fairness or-
Okay, maybe it's more like fighting Sith.
There's a reason (or ten) why she doesn't like to fight Sith. She remembers so many years ago, running scared from Jadus on the Dominator, the Dread Masters in her head, Revan-
Revan? Pathetic. The keenest military mind of his generation- the words drip like acid off Valkorion's tongue- destroyed by his weak-blooded descendants and a Force-blind spy.
She turns and Lana's frozen, fist arcing through the air, Valkorion standing behind her with his arms folded across his chest. "Defeated, not destroyed. Revan chose to let go, unlike some people I can think of."
Revan was a failure. You, on the other hand… I am not finished with you, and there is far too much at stake for me to abandon my last hope of bringing my children to heel.
She snorts. "I should throw myself into the Sun Generator just to spite you."
Even if you were serious, which you are not-
"Are you so sure of that, old man?"
The ghost in her head walks behind her, silent. When she turns again she sees him in profile, staring unblinking at Theron, who's turned the co-pilot's seat around to watch as she and Lana practice. She was about to counter Lana with a tricky maneuver that would have left the other woman flat on her back, and she can tell by the grin on Theron's face that he's noticed it.
(He ought to have. He missed the dodge in training two days ago and ended up with her boot across his throat.)
She hates Valkorion's smile. In the years she's carried him in her nothing good ever happened when he smiled like that, lips peeled back from his teeth in corpselike mockery of a gesture he probably hasn't really meant in a thousand years.
Right now, he's smiling at Theron.
"You touch him and I swear I'll-"
So angry, little Cipher. I was merely calling your bluff.
When time starts to flow forward again she misses the counter. Lana pulls her strike short just before it catches her in the neck.
They prowl the hallways together, she and Lana, like twinned shadows. Lana strikes from the front and she from the flank and they make short work of the skytroopers that patrol the halls of the sprawling station as they make their way, inexorably, toward its heart.
"You're tense." Lana gestures, lofting an exploding droid toward the forcefield blocking the ramp to the generator level. Pieces of jagged metal spray across the corridor as the barrier sparks and fails. "Did you not sleep?"
She picks off the soldiers as they march up the ramp, one by one, with a series of evenly spaced shots. Skytroopers are strange that way, shaped like sentients but their behavior purely mechanical, moving ever forward even as she piles their companions at their feet. Eight shots later, the last one falls. "Is that a polite way of saying we were too loud?"
(She'd worried Lana would disapprove, remembering that first lecture after Yavin. Instead, when she and Theron walked into the mess hall on the night after that first party- there wasn't any food on her ship and by nightfall they'd burned off the whiskey and were starving- they found Lana and Senya sitting together.
Lana, silent and smirking, lifted her hand, and Senya scowled and set a credit chit in her open palm.)
Theron's back on the shuttle but he's guiding them through remotely, slicing into the system when he can, so the comm channel's wide open; there's a muffled snort on the line before he mutes his transmitter.
"Too-" Lana's saber comes around, taking the head neatly off the knight at the back of the pack- "Oh. No, that wasn't what I meant at all. You just look tense, and with your misstep during practice-"
"I'm fine."
"The Emperor's been meddling again, hasn't he? I thought I felt a presence earlier."
A click in her ear- Theron, unmuting. "She had another nightmare, too."
"No one likes a tell-tale, Theron." She turns, snipes a probe droid off the corridor above before she shoulders her rifle. "I am fine, except for you two nagging like dormitory matrons. I keep waiting for someone to tell me my sheets are crooked or I haven't washed behind my ears."
"Two hours of compulsory meditation, then scrubbing the floors with a toothbrush. Ah, memory." Lana's tone is light but her smile's forced. "Is Valkorion-"
"Forget Valkorion. He wants me alive, for some unfathomable reason, and I can manage a few bad dreams until we take down Arcann and Vaylin." Until. It's always until, never if. "And it was recitations and polishing the senior students' boots, by the way. The Academy wasn't much for meditation. Force-sensitives all got shipped off to Korriban."
Something's coming.
Heavy footsteps ring on the metal gratings, all in time with each other, and she and Lana freeze in place. She holds up one finger and switches on her stealth field. Pressed against the wall, they creep down the ramp into the light and heat radiating from the Sun Generator just as another squad of white-armored troopers march past, flanking a figure clad in gold-and-silver plate.
They can do this.
Go? They mouth the word, then both nod. Lana leaps to the front of the pack, and she drops the two at the back before they can turn.
By the time the guards are dead the Exarch's fled, the coward, and they stalk him through the control rooms, destroying all the equipment they come across and pulling shields off dead knights to protect themselves from the worst of the radiation. The technology's dangerous, too easy to sabotage and too hard on the workers who run the reactor, and they'd all agreed in the planning meetings that it wasn't worth salvaging; unlike on Zakuul itself, though, there are no civilians on the orbital station.
When they are done, this place will burn.
They catch him on the last platform, working frantically on a console as the generator crackles and spits flame in all directions, and he turns, igniting his lightsaber. "Outlander," he snarls at her, "If I'm going to die, Izax take you, you're coming with me."
As Lana engages him she slips back into stealth, gets behind him and goes low as the Sith goes high, and their blades slice into him in unison.
"No," she says, "I don't think so."
He turns in a fury but she's already dodged away and Lana binds him with lightning, slowing him as he pursues. She gets two poison darts into him before he even gets near and when he finally closes with her he raises his arms, lifting his saber to bring it down on her head-
This time, she doesn't miss the counter. She pivots, ducks behind, brings her heel down on the back of his right ankle and sinks her knife into his left hamstring through a gap in his armor, twisting until he screams. He staggers; she twists it again, ripping it free. He hits the ground hard, armor clattering.
Lana's on him then, lightsaber flashing through his breastplate, and after her third strike, he stops moving.
"One down," she says, launching a grenade at the console. The smiles they give each other are feral. "Five to go."
She kneels next to the body, pawing over the man's broken armor- they need the exarch's seal to open the locked door at the back of the platform- until she sees it, in two pieces, on his gloves, pulls them off and throws them to Lana. "Get the door open before this thing blows. Theron, tell Miot we're ready for extraction."
"On our way." In the background, Miot says something Theron's transmitter doesn't pick up. "Aft hangar- it's… um. Up to the docking level, then right. Two minutes."
"Don't be late. It's getting hot in here."
"I'll be there. Be careful, okay?"
Just as she's about to answer, Lana unseals the door. They dive into the lift and when it gets to the top level they run and run and run until they hit the hangar, the first waves of radiation from a dying sun-in-miniature lapping at their heels. The shuttle's there already, the loading ramp coming down and Theron hanging onto one of the hydraulic struts, holding out his hand toward her.
Grip locked, his fingers wrapped around her wrist, he hauls her up onto the ramp and pulls her in close as Lana clambers up beside them. He grins at her. "We did it."
"We did."
She waits until Lana goes past before she kisses him, just for a moment before the ramp starts to close, and with the heat on her back as the Star Fortress burns she's finally warm for the first time all day.