Loaded for Wampa

Chapter 2 –

A blurry thought floats just out of reach. Torian can almost track its progress: the twirl and zip of flight like a medical probe returning to base.

He needs to shoot it down.

"Kid?"

Torian blinks hard and stares at the comm in his hand. The image breaks apart, comes back together, static loud and grating: Gault looks more concerned than Torian has ever seen him, though annoyance is still the Devaronian's predominant expression.

"What's up? You two okay?"

Torian thinks about it. "Drunk?" Was that supposed to be a question?

"Kid, you're at a cantina."

oOoOoOo

The Imperial medical shelter is just that: shelter, a windbreak with a roof. It's the only outpost for what feels like parsecs, pure white nothingness spread out all around them like the vastness of space.

The medical droid is studiously ignoring them, its attention fixed on the horizon. Morro is staring somewhere seemingly beyond that, her arms folded across her chest. Torian watches her six, waiting. The harsh red-black color of her torso armor against the endless white reminds him of a cauterized wound.

He notices a new, deep dent along the back of her left leg plate, where one of Reneget Vause's minions tried to hamstring her with a vibro-axe. That was before she punched the Gamorrean in the head and kicked a bloody divot of flesh off his face with her boot blade. Torian makes a mental note to assess the damage to her kit back on the ship, out of the cold.

If they make it back.

The speeder sputters and stalls again. She turns to look at it, moving only her head, her expression inscrutable with her helmet on. The specific incline of her chin tells Torian she's ready to shoot it.

His stomach growls, cutting off anything he might say; the sound is loud in the sudden silence. She digs out their rations and hands a nutrition packet to him without looking away from the speeder.

"Eat. Try to stay warm. This might take a while." Her voice is the warmest thing around.

He nods at her, even though she isn't looking at him. "Vor'e."

He knows better than to argue with her. The speeder isn't dealing well with the temperature change. None of them are, really. He no longer feels the perpetual shiver of his body fighting off the cold seeping through every joint in his kit, but whenever they stop moving the shiver becomes a shudder and a sharp hunger sets in along with profound exhaustion. It's sudden, like being hit between the eyes with the butt of a rifle.

He takes off his helmet, feeling the deep chill cut against his ears, his eyes, and hunkers down, making himself a smaller target for the wind. He eats quickly, watching her as she coaxes the speeder back to life again. She always whispers to it and he can never quite make out what she's saying: if she's threatening the speeder with death or cursing its parentage or promising it a warm oil bath at the end of their journey, he's never sure.

He's not even sure what he's eating, freeze-dried something that tastes like nothing, but he finishes half of it, saving the rest for her. When he finishes eating he becomes aware of the disconcerting sensation of his sweaty hair trying to freeze on his head.

The speeder coughs and trembles when she kick-starts it again, leveling out to a low shudder that finally holds. She climbs off of it gingerly, the cant of her head telling him she's restraining herself from giving it an extra kick just for good measure.

She takes off her helmet and rubs at her face. The dark thermal hooded mask she wears beneath her helmet covers her head and obscures all but her eyes and the bridge of her nose. It's a new addition since Hoth, but her stark appearance in the mask always reminds him of Dromund Kaas: watching her approach the campsite near the Sith spawn's cave, that instant jolt in his gut of knowing, the certainty it was her without ever having seen her face.

He looks up at her now. "Time for a drink?"

He wants to lighten her mood. She's seemed sad and far away for days. Or maybe she's just as cold and tired as he is.

She looks down at him. Her full, undivided attention makes his heart jump and then beat faster, thumping loudly in his chest. She makes him nervous. Maybe nervous isn't the right word for it. His fight or flight response has always been set on fight by default. With her, he often feels like prey frozen by the gaze of a predator: a mouse pinned to the ground by the shadow of a hawk, too weak to fight, too stupid to run.

Combat helps. Fighting distracts him from his body's reaction to her, makes him focus, and there is a lot of combat following her around, as if she brings her own war with her wherever she goes. Downtime is when he gets into trouble; the ship is where he gets into deep trouble: her flirting is as subtle as an ion-cannon when they're together on the Mantis. It doesn't help that she often has a predatory smile when she looks at him, as if she's going to eat him alive.

He's determined to be more than just a snack.

Now she squints at him like she's thinking, the color of her eyes reminding him of leaves and trees and vibrant green growing things against the barren, frozen wasteland that is Hoth. Then she bends and pulls a flask out of her boot with a flourish, presenting it to him. Ta da.

He must look surprised, or disapproving, or maybe she's reading too much into his expression, which feels frozen along with the rest of him. She gives the flask a meaningful shake. "It's full. I just came prepared." She tosses it to him.

He catches it one handed, feeling the weight of it. The flask is shiny and silvery, engraved with an initial in the center: T.

Torian does his best not to frown at it, tipping the engraved side towards her, head inclining in wordless question.

She tilts her head the opposite way, peering at him. "Trace?"

That's what he thought. "Gault?"

She nods. "Back when he was trying to get on my good side. Mako's too; he gave her one." She gestures at the initial. "She got the M."

That makes sense, a little. Gault refers to the two women collectively as Team Morko. As in Team Morko took me down on Tatooine. Whoops, you didn't hear that from me, kid. Don't tell Dad. I mean Mandalore. Tracey will get in trou-ble.

He shakes the flask and the Devaronian's voice out of his head. He looks back up at her. "Saving this for a bad day?"

She shrugs. "Not a good one." She keeps looking down at him, head tilted. Expectant. He knows a challenge when he sees one.

He takes a pull from the flask. The liquid is so cold it has thickened, a silky bite of icy coolness becoming a burn that spreads in his chest. The sudden warmth is welcome but he knows it's deceptive, dangerously so. There's a kick at the end he's not expecting. He swallows against it, managing not to cough.

He exhales the icy burn in a rush, steam pluming around his face. "What is this?"

She smiles at him. It's slight and fond, the smallest movement of her lips beneath the mask, her eyes brightening with warmth and crinkling at the corners. It's the first genuine smile he's seen from her in days. The sight of it makes his chest burn hotter than whatever he's just had a shot of.

"Corellian rum."

"Always have Corellian rum in your boot?" He already knows the answer to that; he'd have noticed if she did.

She shakes her head and doesn't elaborate, but she does come closer to him. She crouches down, facing him, and takes the flask back, the durasteel of her gauntlets brushing against his armored knuckles. She pulls the edge of her mask down, a cloud of steam escaping when she exhales.

He never forgets what she looks like, but he does sometimes forget exactly how pretty she is, under the bucket, the mask, the paint, all of the layers she keeps between herself and the world. Seeing her bare face (her bare anything) in the field is rare. It is one of the reasons he trusts her implicitly: being armored is a given to the Mando'ade, the first tenet of the Resol'nare.

Gault has an endless running joke (mostly with himself) about how she never takes off her armor. Torian thinks the Devaronian either has a terrible memory or just doesn't pay attention – he himself has a distinct recollection of every time he's seen her out of armor, piece by piece, like the slowest, most excruciating striptease.

Now he notices her lips are chapped, and there's a bruise on her chin, fresh and purple. The scar across her eye socket is livid in the harsh light reflecting off the snow, freckles emerging out from under the faded paint beneath her eyes like distant stars.

She sips deep from the flask, closing her eyes, lashes long and dusky against her cheeks. He watches her, struck by how different she looks with her eyes closed and the mask occluding everything but the heart of her face: all lips and eyelashes. She looks defenseless, which she isn't. Not at all.

She exhales the burn of the rum in a long sigh. Her features instantly relax. He realizes how grim she's become on Hoth: all teeth, carrying the weight of the planet on her jaw. She smiles at him again, and this time he can see all of it, how the upward curve of her lips transforms her face into something more than pretty.

He almost misses her question.

"How are you holding up?"

"Jate." When she keeps looking at him, expression unchanging, he translates: "Good."

"I know it's been rough. I also know you can handle it."

"Wouldn't miss it."

She smiles at him more, the movement of her lips distractingly sensual, the scar tissue across her eye bunching with the motion. Mesh'la. Beauty that is tempered, like beskar.

She hands the flask back to him, interrupting his thoughts. "Just don't let me run you into the ground."

He takes another sip to put his mouth where hers has been, compulsively; the lip of the flask is warm. He can't possibly feel the rum's effects yet, but his heart is on fire.

They pass the flask back and forth in a companionable silence while the running speeder hums next to them. Then he tries to return the flask to her and she shakes her head.

"Finish it."

He cocks his head at her, questioning.

"Go ahead. If I have any more I'll crash us into a glacier."

He holds her half the rations out towards her. "Should eat."

"I'm not hungry."

He stretches the open nutrition packet out farther, curling the flask in his other hand into his chest. "Trade?"

This smile is smaller, but fonder. "Torian." The way she says his name is like a touch against his face.

He doesn't trust his own voice to respond to that, so he says nothing, looking at her.

"You need a hat." She glances at his hair as if she wants to run her fingers through it to demonstrate, but doesn't.

"Sweat too much." He keeps holding out the packet until she takes it.

She just looks at the rations. He watches her, flask flat against his chest piece, until she takes a tiny bite of the freeze-dried whatever-it-is, chewing extra thoroughly and staring at him as she does it.

"Happy?"

"Lek."

She gestures with her chin at the flask until he takes another sip.

He watches her eat while she watches him drink. Ordinarily he likes watching her eat – she has a good appetite, and he doesn't know where she puts it all – but since they've been on Hoth she's lost weight like she's melting. Now she chews mechanically, watching over his left shoulder in between bites.

The idling speeder makes an ominous choking sound. She narrows her eyes at it, as if daring it to stall again. It doesn't.

She finishes the food. He finishes the flask. The heat of the rum spreads through his chest, into his limbs, along with a potent, persistent buzz that hums in his blood. When he hands the empty flask back to her he feels the buzz spreading to his lips. They're moving, saying something.

"When we've got a minute, I want to talk."

He does. He's wanted to talk to her, really talk to her, ever since they met Blizz, ever since Slam Streever called her darlin'. Maybe without the rum, he would've kept quiet.

She peers at him and then reaches up and out to hold her hand against the speeder's fender.

"We've got a couple. What's on your mind?"

He shakes his head. "Out of the cold."

She gives him a small, warm smile. It's like a present. He holds the promise of that smile in his cupped hands.

"Okay. You can buy me a drink."

oOoOoOo

"Kid, you're at a cantina."

Torian grabs ahold of Gault's words with both hands before they can float away again. He wordlessly points the comm towards Morro. He waits.

"What do you do to that woman? Wait, don't answer that."


Mando'a translations from mandoa dot org:

Vor'e

Thanks

Mando'ade

Children of Mandalore

Resol'nare

Six actions, the tenets of Mandalorian life

Mesh'la

Beautiful

Beskar

Mandalorian Iron

Lek

Yeah