Chapter Title: Blaster

Series Title: Unlikely Brothers

Author: Obi the Kid

POV: Dashen (Tannerlin is 11, Dashen is 17)

Chapter Summary: Dashen's determination to not carry a blaster as a weapon backfires on him.

Summary: A series of non-chronological stories taking place in the world of my OC's Dashen and Tannerlin.

Rating: PG

Characters: Dashen Lesedi and Tannerlin Vai (Jedi)


Take the blaster. You'll need it. Those people play nasty.

I listened and I blew it off as another of Colton's ridiculous attempts to get me to carry a gun. I didn't like guns and I didn't see a real reason to carry one. I'd never had a scrap that I couldn't get out of…eventually…without the use of a blaster, so why weigh myself down with one?

Answer?

I wasn't looking after me on this trip; I was looking after Tanner too.

Follow-up answer?

I'd found a scrap that I couldn't get out of without a blaster.

Follow-up to follow-up answer?

I'm an idiot.

So, the guy I'd lifted the gold pendants from had a bit of an issue with those items leaving his personal space. My client – Zacheus - the one who'd sent me on this journey, had said, no worries! Piece of cake and all that crap. It was a piece of something all right. What my client didn't tell me is that the guy he'd sent me to take the pendants from was his cousin – a part-time business man and also a part-time gangster.

Nice.

Not that I hadn't fallen into domestic disputes in the past as part of my line of work, but normally it's a lot less eventful than what this scene was becoming.

Gangster Boy, aka Yanis, not only had the blaster that I now craved, but also had it aimed in a direction that didn't sit well with me. At the head of my eleven-year-old brother. He'd grabbed Tanner as soon as he'd tracked us down, which had taken all of ten minutes by the way. Something else my client had failed to tell me, Yanis was fast and smart. He held Tanner by the throat. I held his pendants by the index finger.

The man's green scaly skin rippled with excitement at the idea of having me cornered while also defeating his cousin at the game of thievery. His orange eyes crept from Tanner to me, as he fanged a smile with much-too-long razor sharp teeth.

"Drop the gold, thief, and ya boy won't be hurt."

Uh huh…sure. Wasn't that a standard line of that all bad guys used when they had their victim's back to the wall? Give me what I want and all will be well. Right? Yeah. In one of those perfect holovid worlds perhaps.

I responded with the standard and clichéd, "Let him go first, then you can have your gold back."

He laughed at me. Also a cliché. This wasn't going well.

"Seems ya got more to lose than me, thief. I can smell that this boy ain't no thief, so ya's draggin' him along for another reason. That means ya want him back in one piece, heh?"

That would be preferred, yes. But I'd rather find a way for a double win here. Safe brother and I got to keep the lute. This was a big money run for me. My client was paying triple the going rate for a normal job. Money like that was hard to pass up, especially when you needed it. What I needed most right now however, was Tanner's undivided attention.

"What do you think, Mouse?" I said.

Tanner's voice was small and strained as he spoke past the arm cutting into his throat. "I think you should have brought the blaster that Uncle tried to give you."

"Yeah, sure. But you know me, kid. And I know you too."

I glared hard at him, trying to get him to understand. Yanis squeezed Tanner's throat harder. "Ya can pass all the secret looks ya want, thief. The boy ain't leaving vertical and breathin' if I don't get my gold."

"Secret looks? I glare at the kid all the time." I did it again and saw Tanner's brown eyes give one long blink in return. He got it. And we had one shot. One shot for him to use his slowly growing Force ability to try and distract Yanis long enough for me to do something heroic.

"Ya got one minute. Then, I shoot off the boy's ears."

Tanner'd never forgive me if I let him wander around the galaxy with no ears, so that couldn't happen. I glared once more at my brother and blinked slowly. In the split second that followed, his face clenched in concentration as a nearby rock levitated and then began moving in our general direction. But, you see…Tanner, being young and practically untrained, well, his aim wasn't quite up to speed just yet and instead of the rock pelting Yanis in the face as hoped, it smacked him in the knee instead. The good part of all of this was that although the aim was off, the velocity behind it was strong and for a brief second after being tagged in the leg, the big man's eyes floated downward. I took that tiniest of windows, dived forward, ripped the gun from Yanis' hand, saved my brother and got away with the gold! Hero of the day, right? Ah, well…no. Not quite.

I did dive forward. I did rip the gun from his hand…and knocked it right into his other hand. I didn't save my brother and I didn't get away with the gold. Well…time for plan B. The most prevalent of the pendants in my hand was large, decently heavy and hung on a long, pricey chain. I swung it into the face of Yanis, hitting him square in three of his closely-set four eyes, grabbed Tanner, dropped most of the remaining pendants and got the hell out of Dodge. Surprisingly, Yanis didn't fire at us. Instead he picked up his gold and shouted a warning.

"Don't need to keel ya, thief. I know my cousin arranged this play. Oh, and look there see?"

I turned in the direction he pointed and the last thing I remember was a fist the size of a bolder flying towards my face. My very next memory was of Tanner sitting over me with a hand pressing something red, round and frozen over my eye. That something smelled like raw meat. And that's because, why? It was raw meat! I slapped it away.

"I prefer my bantha steak well-done, thank you."

Tanner retrieved the frozen patty and slapped it back onto my face.

"It's helping the inflammation, or do you want your right eye to swell shut?"

"That bad, huh?"

"It was one of Yanis' henchmen. He was about nine feet tall and four feet wide. He knocked you cold, took that last pendant out of your hand and walked away. I think he was belly laughing all the way home. Does this mean you don't get paid for the job?"

I sighed and relented with the icy steak, allowing Tanner to keep it settled over my eye. My face felt like someone had squeezed it in a vise, the right side in particular.

"Not only don't I get paid, but it'll be a while before Zacheus hires me again."

"At least you're alive."

"What color is my face?"

"What color isn't your face?"

"Oh. Right. Never mind. Where are we anyway?" I'd determined I was on the floor in a large room. Beyond that, who knew?

"In a hold room waiting for our transport home. I bought the steak from a local vendor. We have about twenty minutes." Tanner briefly paused to think about something. Then he abruptly stopped thinking about that same something and spit it right out.

"You should carry a blaster."

I should be a mind reader. That's exactly what I figured he would say to me after this ordeal. But I couldn't agree with him. Despite what had happened – what had almost happened – carrying a weapon like that just wasn't who I was, or who I wanted to be.

"Sorry, Mouse." I sat up and took over steak holding duties. "No can do."

Not to my surprise, there was no argument about the issue. Tanner knew me well enough by now to know when I honestly meant what I said. This was one of those times and I appreciated him letting it go without a battle. The whole blaster thing…carrying one meant that I'd have to be prepared to kill someone with it if or when the time came. I wasn't much for death, either on the receiving end or the giving end.

I got my feet under me and stood; a bit wobbly, but vertical. Those twenty minutes had to be up soon. I was ready to get home.

A bell sounded as the spaceport's paging system announced the next interplanetary transports on schedule for boarding. Planet of Terra; town of Kaolin– home – awaited in about four hours time.

Tanner supported me to the spacecraft and to a seat in the back. Good, less chaotic back there. I could snooze in relative peace; which I did, all the way home. Zacheus would get the bad news tomorrow. Right now, all I wanted was my bed and another frozen animal patty for my black and blue face. Oh and maybe a new line of work. At seventeen, was I already too old for this? I mean, it wasn't just me now. I had another counting on me too. And in that regard, living past seventeen would seem to be important.

Those were big time worries for the now, but I'd have to worry on them later. My ego hurt. My head hurt. My money belt hurt – running damn close to empty at the moment.

Sleep would solve everything. It always did. I hoped for good dreams. I just hoped those dreams didn't try and convince me to start carrying a blaster.

They did.

Huh.

Good thing I don't listen to my dreams.


The End