Force Smuggler - another quick thank-you for an enthusiastic response! But fun for who? Kyp? Jaina? The other characters? Or the audience...?
"Vess isn't a bad guy, really," Alema Rar said, standing beside Anakin in the detention-block corridor, as the former Emperor's Hand stepped back down inside his cell.
Vess Kogo didn't react. He just turned and sat silently in the empty space, framed by the angular geometry of blank Imperial bulkheads, looking at the deck grating rather than the doorway.
Anakin shrugged. The armoured hatch slammed shut.
The Imperial agent had seemed sullen during the whole march back from the airlock, but Anakin hadn't felt much like asking anyone to elaborate. Once the emotional reunion was over, Jaina had abruptly taken charge, deciding that Kogo needed to be locked back in his box before the rest of them filled each other in on what they'd been doing, which was a short way of saying that discussing time-travel issues in front of an Imperial spy wasn't something she approved of.
She was also using the pause as an opportunity to change out of her borrowed Imperial flight gear and wash the smell of TIE Fighter cockpit out of her hair, while Jacen, Kyp and Lowbacca were visibly confused by what was going on, so Anakin, Tahiri and Alema Rar had been the ones who marched their prisoner back off.
Whether a detention block would hold an Emperor's Hand was something Anakin wasn't completely confident about, but Kogo hadn't simply blasted his way out when Jaina needed rescued, and Anakin suspected that failure represented a real limitation on his ability, rather than the last throw of his TIE Pilot cover-story, so hopefully he was more-or-less secure. Durasteel walls and heavy-duty lock-circuits were probably hard to brute-force with kinetics, especially with Fiver monitoring the security relays to trigger Kogo's stun-cuffs if he tried anything dumb. A sharper, subtler Force-user, someone like Jaina or Aunt Mara, might be able to figure a way past, but Kogo was a blunt tool, optimised by Palpatine for frontal problem-solving - his manoeuving was mostly about getting in position for an attack-run, and he didn't seem particularly good at lateral thinking or non-destructive tactics.
"He helped me out for a bit when I was separated from Jacen," the Twi'lek girl continued, following Anakin back down the corridor to the security lobby. She'd shifted out of the curvaceous strut that she'd been performing when she arrived aboard, and the switch into her own slender body-language made her look a lot more like herself, her black ensemble becoming just another entry in the line of provocative catsuits she'd always seemed to favour.
"Yeah, well," Anakin shrugged. "He saved Jaina from being brain-fried by his own demented droid, so we're going to let him stage a breakout to get rid of the other Imperial idiots in there." He jerked a thumb at the hatch of the cell holding the other Imperial officers, as they stepped past, and out into the lobby.
"Kato?" Alema Rar asked, lekku lifting in surprise. "Shame. I kinda liked that droid."
"Courtesy of the Jedi Order's favourite Yuuzhan Vong weapons-biot project," Anakin answered, nodding at Tahiri, who was waiting in the lobby, leaning on the computer console, with Kogo's stolen polearm propped beside her.
"Hi," Tahiri said, with a flash of a smile, as she pushed off, and stepped up to him, t-shirt swaying round her hips. "I like that description. You really don't want to get in the way when I'm annoyed about something."
Anakin just grinned back, his girlfriend taking a fist of his own shirt and running her free hand through his unkempt hair as she drew him down into the kiss.
After that, there was just a long, wordless moment of perfection, though once he could think about anything beyond the taste and movement of her lips and tongue, the bounce of her blonde hair, and the sensuous glide of her body against him, he was amused to realise that Alema Rar's pose and mood had shifted into jagged irritation.
"Do you two do that just to kriff with me?" Alema Rar inquired.
"Nahh, we're like this with everyone."
Tahiri smiled at Anakin, and her fingertips tapped the toe-sized stub of yorik-coral hidden in the tousle at the back of his neck, just above his collar - a Yuuzhan Vong restraining-bolt, socketed into the top of his spine when he'd been captured with her on Yavin, it seemed strange that he'd once planned on getting it removed, but she was the only person in the New Republic who really knew how to, and it didn't seem worth asking.
Good boy. "So. Now we go and find out what Jacen's been up to, and where he picked up Kyp? And then we see if anyone has an improvement on your idea of how we're going to get back home?"
Alema Rar raised her eyebrows, presumably at the news that Anakin had been working on time-travel, but she didn't bother to ask. Perhaps she was just feigning her surprise.
She just fell in step behind them as they headed down the frigate's corridors, as if she'd like to be a part of their shared silence.
Being part of a larger group of youthful Jedi Knights again, with everyone navigating round everyone else's quirks, was at least a pattern they were used to, Anakin reflected - disconcertingly reassuring, after the craziness of several days trapped twenty years in the past and trying to stay out of the way of Grand Admiral Thrawn. The fact that they were aboard a stolen frigate, mostly dressed-up as Imperials, didn't seem to make much difference any more.
And while they hadn't yet offloaded the Imperial garbage in the cell block, deciding that the TIE Fighters were the right mechanism to dump them was starting to make things simpler, allowing them to plan ahead.
Anakin was still pretty confident that the first priority was getting back to where they ought to be. On the other hand, there were an increasing number of indications that the timeline was already spectacularly karked - the fact that his brother had apparently been running around the Galaxy for a while, coupled with the disorienting presence of a teenage version of Kyp Durron, and the fact that Kogo had already run into Alema Rar.
"You're tense," Tahiri smiled, running her arm up his. But there wasn't any disapproval in her voice, and they only needed to look at each other to continue the conversation.
"Yeah. And?"
"Oh, nothing."
The hatch slid open, and the three of them arrived in Ravelin's main briefing room - a soundproofed space with a circle of high-backed chairs around a cental table, and no other furniture except a caf dispenser, which reminded Anakin of pretty much every other committee space he'd ever been in that wasn't fitted out in expensively bespoke pre-Empire style - the temporary Council chamber at the secret Jedi base, the offices in Cantham House and the Old Executive Building on Coruscant, and even the spice-cartel boardroom on the Hutt freighter Starmaster. The furniture even looked like it came from the usual supplier, with a disinctive keyhole-shaped cutout in the middle of each chair's shoulder-rest.
Jaina and Jacen were sitting a seat apart at the far end of the table, with Lowie leaning against the wall behind them. His sister had changed back into her Rogue Squadron coverall - but without her weapons belt or jacket, she looked like she was on a caf break before some maintenance work. Jacen had swapped his Imperial disguise for a simple grey jumpsuit, with the sleeves rolled up and the front unfastened to reveal a khaki undershirt. A diagonal brown bandolier for his lightsaber, which he'd probably borrowed off Lowie, completed his transformation back into the brother Anakin remembered.
Kyp was sitting unobtrusively a quarter-turn around the table. No longer blending in with Jacen and Alema Rar's disguises, he simply looked like a younger version of himself, teenage prototype of the vaguely disreputable Jedi Master who had tried to seduce both Anakin and Jaina into joining his rogue faction. Kyp's clothes were stylishly cut in midnight blue and iron grey, but had been knocked out of shape by his habit of sleeping in them for several days in a row, and his dark hair was long and loose for the simple reason that he rarely bothered to get it cut. Durron picked up most of his bad habits as a teenage political prisoner in the spice-mines, Aunt Mara had once told Anakin, though he wasn't sure how she'd feel about being proved right.
Anakin sat down at the opposite end from his siblings, while Tahiri fetched herself one of the stack of specially-prepared Tusken hubba gourds that Fiver had placed on the hot-shelf of the caf dispener - her Tatooine upbringing had given her a militant preference for freshly-ground Jawa Juice in proper Dune Sea style, and she flat refused to drink the Imperial caf from Ravelin's galley, which she described as smelly mud.
Her green eyes danced across the room to him. I hope you realise it's only because I love you that I stoop to using freeze-dried Jawas.
She'd actually brought back two gourds, perching on his lap and handing him the other one. That was part of their dance - Anakin privately shared Tahiri's view, but Jaina and Jacen would object more directly if he collected one for himself.
My sister dopes the stuff with whiskey, and Jasa is a practicing masochist.
Alema Rar got herself an ordinary caf, and completed the circle, giving Kyp an encouraging smile across the table.
"We ready?" Jaina asked.
"I'm guessing you haven't-?" Anakin began, and the look in her eyes confirmed that she'd been waiting until they were all in one place. "All right. Let's start from the beginning."