Well, here we are again, me a mess, and y'all reading these one-shots that I've cobbled together. The first few installments make sense with the story for this OC (of whom has taken over my sketchbook lmao), but contain vernacular that is no longer in use with what i'm building up thus far, so for my own comfort and as a reminder to myself, these go together, but not. They aren't entirely consistent with one another, and i wrote the first six while trying to stay in the literary groove of things. So thank you all for reading this! There are quite a bit of you if what stats tells me and I couldn't be happier that there is someone, or a lot of someones, who have taken time out of their day to read my shit show one-shot collection! SO! THANK U! Now, ONWARDS!

Ezra was made to serve. Failure was not an option, only victory, only efficiency, and every order she was given was carried to the very letter. She was a puppet hung by thick ropes. She was suffocating.

She couldn't afford to care.

The memory of home had begun to fade into the background. Originally, that was all that had kept her going. What was she running on now? She'd never be allowed back; she wasn't a person. Not anymore. She was a thing; broken and remade into a bloody wreck. It didn't help that she was 'officially' dead.

But, she was silent as the grave in her savagery. In her decay.

This wasn't failure, this wasn't even a minor setback. She'd completed the job, not as requested, but it was still done. After all, there's a huge level of futility in whining over how someone died. They're dead, nothing more can be done beyond that. To even try was to commit an atrocity...you could never be too sure of just who had come back in the place of your loved one.

Her-stolen-ship had experienced an...Unforeseen accident, leaving her stranded with no way to verbally communicate with her superiors and only the light of her distress beacon to keep her company. Well...that and the horribly scarred ecosystem along with its primitive peoples.

She'd been out here for a while now, though time was hard to keep in the long days and even longer nights, scrounging the poisoned, violated land for her meals and watching as all things around her were eaten away by maggots and rotted by the golden light of the sun this planet orbited. The planet was dead. Little vegetation could survive in a soil so acidic and radioactive. The water was poisonous, and the animals were mangy. The locals were a hardy, cannibalistic species who toiled in the compact, rock-like sediment for barely edible roots from their difficult births to their too-soon deaths. They didn't even know that there was life beyond the blanket of their blazing sky.

They did once, but their own past ambition killed them all in one fell swoop, leaving the survivors with a limited and corrupt gene pool.

She could see the last village over the horizon, the disfigured, sun-burned faces of children poking their too big heads on their too small bodies out of the flaps of their rotting mothers' tents to squint in the dying light at her small camp. Ezra had found out early on that it was best if she stayed with the scents of death. The village was full of it. Other scavengers hated the putrid stench, and though it made her nostrils burn with the sickly sweet decay, it was safer for her to be this close.

The last adults were dropping like the flies that burrowed and vomited their eggs into their deadened flesh and the children wouldn't be too far behind.

It was sad, but inevitable.

This planet was so harsh that not even the empire would bother with taking anything from its lifeless husk. There was no spark here, no energy of life. It was dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.

She refused to be dead.

Sleep was difficult. Had been for a long time. When she was finally able to slow down her racing mind and heart enough to even get on the brink of deep sleep, she would wake up not an hour or two later, the phantom spray of blood thick against her face, neck, chest and arms. There was always a deep, gut twisting sadness churning over in her chest, stuttering her hearts...

So, she didn't sleep except to take short naps when she couldn't hold her head up anymore.

The danger of the ravenous people over the hill didn't even phase the Galran woman. They were weak with physical deformities and starvation; she was at least three times the largest adult's size and surviving on nutrient packed, bland MREs.

The longer she stayed here, the worse the empty feeling in her gut became. The more insistent the buzzing static in her brain, the more maddening the crawl of her skin got. Inactivity had never been kind to her.

Her fur had begun to fade from its deep violet. She didn't know if it was because she was in desperate need of a shower or from the harshness of the sun. The sun. Goddess, she hated day-dweller settlements and empires. The suns were harsh and unforgiving, nothing like the dark blanket of the sky she had grown up with and even less like the soft orchids and violets of Galra ships. A faded and torn memory tugged at the edge of her mind, telling her that her mother had grown on a nightmare planet similar to this one.

After the first few days, Ezra only ventured out in the day for emergencies. If she did go out, she was always draped in the lightest wraps she could find to protect her final vanity from the environment. Just because she was without true free will, didn't mean she had to look like shit. The unfiltered light also necessitated a pair of tinted, bulky goggles to protect her sensitive eyes from the day. It didn't matter how many times she'd complain about it, and she'd never stop; Ezra hated the sun. And sand. It wiggled its horrible way into all of the joints of her legs and pitted the smooth surface during sandstorms; of which she now avoided in the safety of her hastily dug hole.

Her regulation body suit had been ripped to shreds during her previous assignment; an event she didn't want to linger on for too long, and the rags she had thrown over her body were half of what was left of her uniform and about three-fourths the coshtan* civilian's outfit she'd been forced to wear for her-now dead-target's comfort. Undercover work wasn't her absolute forte, but it was incredibly fun.

She'd taken to wrapping her ears in cloth she'd stripped from her undercover civvies to protect them from the biting sand. The protective fur lining the edges of her ears, meant to keep snow out instead of rock granules, was absolutely useless in this environment. Their height was a flaw for once.

Her tube of paste was halfway gone. She'd have to make some out of the harsh, plasticy plant life if she didn't want her teeth to rot. MREs were only supposed to be a temporary thing, they didn't clean the mouth as tough textured rations did or actual food. MREs also called for a dangerous and ridiculous amount of water. She was never meant to have even gone to a desert planet; the empire recognizes that their troops do have limitations. Scaled belly and hard, reptilian build didn't matter much when Ezra had a very wealthy amount of fur. Water was to keep herself from dying of heatstroke during the day. Even the shadow that her hole in the ground had wasn't enough to save her from the blistering temperatures.

So, after the protein bars run out, which she was rationing to the best of her ability, she'd have to go for a while without food, eating every three or so rotation cycles. She'd done it before...but that didn't mean she had to like it. But, even during the event where she'd had to practically starve herself to survive, water had been plentiful...

To get her mind off of her situation, hoping beyond hope that she would be found and picked up from this barren hell, she studied the locals in closer detail than what her precursory, daytime glances had told her.

They were neither nocturnal nor were they sol-dwellers; they woke when their exhausted bodies would let them, and went out without care. She soon realized it was because the adult generation was blind while their children were not; the time of day didn't matter much when you were blind and had skin tough enough to make an ion blaster look like a toothpick in terms of damage. The elderly were eaten the moment their backs were turned. The only warning she'd had of that happening was a short, gurgling scream before she rushed from her half-buried tent with an energy rifle in hand. 'Maybe those giant sand worms have begun to attack'.

If only.

Ezra was no stranger to gore, having been dealt a niche in life that made her bosom buddies with death, but the level of savagery they utilized to tear into their elder was...For lack of a better word, disturbing.

While the cubs, if they could even be called cubs, were naturally curious as all children were. However, any wandering from the tents got them a good thrashing and long strings of those whispering, raspy curses. Not a true language anymore, then. Children were protected by blind parents with scary senses of smell and hearing even though the parental unit must know that they, too, would one day be eaten by their children.

They had bowed legs, bulging eyes, bent backs, bumpy heads, and snaggled, gap-toothed, grotesquely curled mouths. The mangy fur on their heads and backs was the color of the empty dirt around them, but their skin was a mottled and faded green, suggesting that there were once forests on this planet that had provided them camouflage and shelter.

A relatively normal baby had been born sometime during her stay; she'd seen the pregnant mother ambling about with her shoulders hunched protectively over her protruding belly. Had wondered when she'd have her cub and what it must be like to give birth without anesthetic.

Ezra knew of its birth only because she found it's still cooling corpse outside of her tent by the time the sun had fallen not the day after observing the crag-like form of its bitch of a mother. The dark bruises around its eyes, nose and throat were stark against the rich green of their skin, tiny hands curled against its tiny chest, tiny feet limp, tiny tiny tiny.

She'd cursed and cried and snarled as she dug a fire pit to burn the infant in. Not only were they all deformed, they were all monsters. Even the most savage apex predator did not kill its young. These stupid, horrible primates destroyed what was perfect and innocent, smothering it in the midst of its quiet cooing and helplessness and placed it in front of her sealed tent for her to find. As a peace offering or warning or religious rite, she wasn't sure. She wouldn't bother with finding out, either. She was done with the natives, and would watch them no more.

The ghosts of this planet were haunting her. She could feel their mournful gazes and grasping hands in the early hours of morning.

Ezra packed up camp that night as the sun set, her grey-clad form bathed in the dying light of the day. She threw her supplies in the cockpit of the escape pod, attached ropes to a petrified piece of wood she'd found about half a mile away, and hauled ass at full speed for about two miles to the West to keep her eyes from the rising sun that she, unfortunately, could not avoid. Sand grinded in the gears of her prosthetics, the sound of which she ignored in favor of focusing on regulating her mechanic breaths.

The whistling silence of the hollow land grated on her fraying sanity and a baby's strangled cries followed her in the dark.

That death shouldn't have bothered her as much as it had, she'd been ordered to kill children before, but this...seemed senseless...

This planet was getting to her. It had to be.

The sanded husks of what Ezra supposed had been vehicles poked up from the hardened dirt every now and then. Broken, flaking spires of twisted metal were scattered in clusters, monstrously huge rib cages and comparatively minuscule skeletons littered the landscape in grotesque piles. It all told her what she already knew; this planet was fucking dead.

She had to get off.

The camp she set up by time the next sun had started to rise was in one of the larger rib cages, her tent nestled in the space provided by the joint where blackened ribs met charred vertebrae. The bright violet of her distress beacon was her only light this time. The thickly cloying stench of decay wasn't here; fire would only bring the desert's beasts to her meager defenses and from what she'd seen in her rapid descent (a.k.a. violent crash landing that she didn't think she'd live through), these were animals one wouldn't want to tangle with. She doubted they could fit one of them into the boundaries of the Emperor's gladiator ring. That was the largest of the many scattered throughout the reaches of the empire.

So, she would sit, and she would wait for her masters to send a retrieval.

It would be a waste to let such an investment die from dehydration or starvation on some backwater planet, after all.

*coshtan is just a shitty substitute word i came up with on the fly for cotton lmao.