Vau didn't know what he expected when the Kyrimorut contingent met them in deepspace. Coupling the larger ship to the Ønskedrom meant a faster jump. And certainly made more sense than multiple smaller transports.

Still, he felt his heart flutter in his throat when he saw the trooper stationed at the other other side of the seal-hatch.

"This way, Sergeant," he said stiffly.

Vau nodded just as awkwardly in response.

Stepped aside for the Wookies and his partner to go through first.

"Be a shame if somebody got left on the other side during decompression, wouldn't it. Lousy coupling, faulty valve. No more useless cling-ons hanging around the homestead."
"Trooper, you're going to want to watch yourself," he growled low enough he thought the exchange to go unnoticed.

"Or what?" Atin demanded, his head tilting. "Gonna write me up? Put me on notice?"

"Why the fek are you here?" Vau challenged instead. "Don't you have a wife at home and a little boy to raise for your vod?"

"I'll do my part putting vode back in charge of their fates," he threw back. Stuck out that jaw that made Vau itch to take the pup down a notch or two.

"LADIES…" they were interrupted. "If we could get this little jaunt underway?"

The cool eyes they shot at each other made it certain that any truce between them would always be temporary.

"I thought you were cool with Sergeant Vau now," Kom'rk hissed at Atin as he followed him deeper into the hold.

"It seems like there's an expiration on it every time I make my peace with him hanging around. The longer he's gone the more I hope he's not coming back."

"Lousy attitude."

Atin shrugged. Bad-ass attitude and chip on his shoulder deeper than the scars Vau had put on him. "Write me up."

Apparently Atin wasn't the only one feeling the strain. When Kom'rk went forward he heard the sounds of a fabulous row between the former cuy'val dar and the citizen military veteran. He glanced behind him and felt his stomach churn as Atin just gestured as if to say I told ya so.

"Can it. Lover's quarrel."

"You're fekking kidding me. He's shagging the blue-hair hottie?"

Atin should have remembered the big female Wookie was hard-core team-Vau. She boxed the back of his head.

"My apologies. He's making sweet, gentle, affectionate love to the blue-hair hottie?"

The Skyriiwook response didn't bear repeating in mixed company. Meaning came across loud and clear, though. Topic was off-limits.

Clear as transparisteel.

Even if the chick riding shotgun watched Vau carefully. They all piled into the mess later to share the evening meal. When she cleared her throat at him and lifted those brows in a meaningful gesture he openly bared his teeth and growled at her.

Which, you know, just rosebuds blooming into shabla romance.

.

"You don't have to be afraid of him, ma'am," Atin offered helpfully when he sought out N'Dara after spying her huddling in on herself in the window ledge. "I've known him a long time."

"You're one of the ones he loved," she told him.

"I believe he loves you, as much as he is able," the RC told her.

She cocked her head at him. "He tells me so. Does he tell you?"

"You'd have to understand the way it is between us. It doesn't matter, but we're never going to be exchanging soft, fuzzy words. Which is fine. I can't think of anyone I'd want them from less." He shot his brows up. Shook his head like he was palsied. "I just meant to reassure you that you're safe here. Safe with him."

"Why would I doubt it?"

"You know, where he's—-um-—dangerous."

"So am I. So is Enn. So are you and your father and, I imagine, most of the beings associated with this enterprise."

"Except Ny."

She knew that name. Knew Vau respected the scrappy little freight jockey.

"Don't judge too quickly, trooper."

"Trust me. I grew up with him. I know his moods." And he couldn't quite peg this one. Still… "He's going to do his best to be everything everybody needs of him."

She sighed happily. "He's always been that for me. From the second he stopped trying to kill me, he went straight to saving me."

"He's the one who rescued you?" Atin asked. He knew a few of the NULLs had seen some video of her captivity. Knew Vau had demanded no copies of it be made, no mention of it to follow, and for the digi-trail to be destroyed. No one else would ever watch those holorecordings. "When the Trannies-"

"I escaped on my own. But some wounds predate even hell."

"I hear that. That man made our lives hell. And some of us owe our lives to it. Just as some of my scars prove that I'm tougher than the devil."

"He'd be proud of that."

"I know it. I didn't mean it as praise, you understand."

"I do." She nodded as if in agreement. "I do. Mean it as praise. I understand that you don't. But to me? That devil reached into the dark and crushed every demon who haunted my dreams. He's my guardian angel, I think. Or an angel of deliverance, perhaps."

"Demon and devil suit him better, to my ways of thinking. And not just mine."

"More than one person at a time has been wrong before," she countered blandly. Tipped her head to rest her cheek on her bent knees. "I believe gods, devils, and those they serve have always found dogmas that countered their very existence. What beats one may bring another to a place of light."

"Nothing light about that one."

"Except his beautiful eyes." She sighed. "He has the saddest eyes. And Mirdy just the opposite—like all the joy in Vau dances in that sly face."

"No argument there. Thought for a long time that thing was the only thing he'd love."

"If you think I'd be insulted to be counted as one of the few, I'm not. It may suit, that the gruesome already called him. I thank God for it, if that's the truth of it. Few could stomach the scars I've bared him."

"You're not damaged goods, you know. You don't have to settle for Sergeant Vau. There are plenty others who would see you and reckon you beautiful. Scars or no scars."

Mird came gamboling up, chirping happily and offering a jaw-full of gold grasses dotted with seed heads.

"We're all monsters, Sergeant," she told Atin, rising and dusting the seat of her plates. "You think you can see so much because you have perfect vision, but tell me what you'll do if that world goes dark?"

He just regarded her.

The ruined hand fluttered toward the sky streaking past. "I've been in the total darkness."

"And what did you do?"

"Waited for my eyes to adjust so I could see him when he turned back for me."

.

"Tell me again the words to say I'm sorry," she begged him when she tracked him down.

She knew commands for the hunting animal now. Oya, Mird! Find Vau! had worked just like a charm.

He looked up from the datapad where he worked. Focused in on her with surprise in his expression.

"You owe me no apologies."

"Still. I'd like the words and I'd like to explain myself."

"Ni ceta," he told her.

Vau went to his knee, took her hand in his, and kissed the knuckles.

"Ni ceta, cyar'ika. Ner petir. Ner kar'ta."

She tilted his head up so that he would meet her eyes. "I didn't come for your words of sorrow."

"I didn't make it easy for you, leading you here into this mess. I… I didn't know he'd be with them. It still bothers him, the way I raised them, and I never know how he'll react to seeing me."

"Did he break your nose?"

Vau shook his head. Rose. Bent his lips to her brow.

"He damn near broke my heart. He was the only one of his four-man squad to survive Geonosis. Last man standing. I've been there. Haar'chak, I've been in those cetare. It never gets easier."

"I'm the only one to walk away from the battlefield where I was taken down. I can't find any of my men. In all the hells we've cracked, in all the worlds where you've bloodied and bruised your body searching for men who weren't Sev… none of them are mine," she told him.

He nodded. "It's one hell of a burden."

"Do you pray?"

He shook his head. "My family were religious. My mother a zealot who abandoned her family and her sanity to escape into religious practices. My father's cruelty couldn't touch her there and the priests made it worse. Encouraged her, that she was a good, submissive, obedient wife. Servants ran the home. Servants he bought and paid and ordered until the house ran like a military outpost. And him god-king over it."

"And you were stuck there, just a little boy."

"They were young when I got them. You don't understand what it was like. They'd been raised in tubes. Raised to die for a cause they didn't believe in. Some of the instructors, they made them rally to that flag. Some of us wanted more for them, wanted better… we made them men who would survive what war throws at a being."

She nodded. "Tell me you love me again."

"I love you, N'Dara."

"And if I wanted to say it to you, the way I would if I'd joined your people the first time you asked?"

He turned, pulled his 'pad to him and quickly flashed the stylus across it.

Ni kar'tayl gar darasuum

"Nee..." he prompted her. Waited for her to say it with him. "Kkkkat- tay- LEEEERRR daaa-Rahhh- soom."

It made her smile. Made something in his stomach clench when she tried to say it again, say it on her own, after him.

He couldn't speak through the lump in his throat.

"I apologize for being harsh with you. I recognized who it must be. And instead of supporting you and bolstering you I wanted something else for you. It was wrong of me, to expect it and to demand it, when I should have reached out and felt how you were feeling."

"You balance me. You're never in the wrong with me," he promised her.

Oh, that made her grin.

He did the only thing he could to counter that kind of insufferability. He kissed her senseless.

Waited until she couldn't think, until her body arched up toward his, rocked against his desperately, her eyes already unfocused.

And he smiled down at her.

"Apology accepted."

"You are… I just hate you," she murmured, her lips against his.

He smirked. "We'll be dropping out of hyper before long. If you want a shower or sleep now's the time."

Her heavily lidded eyes caught some light and sparkled in the reflection of it.

"Oh!" she remembered as he took her hand and led her to the bunk assigned to them. "Where would Mirdalon have gotten grain?"

"Come again?"

He paused in shucking plates.

"He had actual branches of some kind of grain-crop. I put them in my bag. He brought them to me."

Walon Vau could have sent that strill into hyperspace to decompress and dissolve as he snapped plates back in place and went to hunt down the beast. Or anyone who knew what the hell N'Dara was talking about.

.

A fekking homesteader transport.

Complete with stalls below for livestock and farm-making. Heavy equipment still in-place.

"Where the hell do you boys find these things?" N'Dara asked, amazed.

Kom'rk shrugged. "Mereel made a call. It's kind of handy, you know. If they don't want to come back to Mandalore we'd be able to get them up to speed on the nav-computer and send them out past the outer rim to start over."

"I can't imagine how much cred your father must have if he'd be willing to buy this and then turn it over to people he doesn't even know."

"Right thing to do, right? It's not like it's personally owned and earned credits we're spending."

Vau made a loud noise of objection and Enacca and Rundyyyshk both joined in, the one pounding on the wall of the stall where the strill had nested and his partner howling while she reached to cover N'Dara's ears.

"Fine!" the woman objected, shoving away from them. "Keep your secrets!"

"If you marry Mereel you'd never have to worry about earning another dime for the rest of your life," Kom'rk offered.

"Why can't I marry Jaing? Is he out of favor?"

"He wants to be a bounty hunter when he grows up."

Vau snorted. "No risk of that, then."

Enacca's deep-throated rumble sounded her agreement. Then she gestured to the nest.

"Couldn't tell you. You breeding, Darrie?"

"What!?"

"Mird likes babies. Gotta figure if it's building a nest there's somebody got one cooking-"

Just like that he was going to have to apologize again. She slapped his shoulder- - uselessly- - and flounced away.

"Moody is a symptom, isn't it?"

"She can't have babes of her own," Vau told them. "I shouldn't have said anything. I wasn't thinking."

Enacca made a mournful face and the echoing sentiment from Rundyyyshk sounded like sad yeowling. Even Mird made a squeak that timed itself to sound like disapproval. Enacca bitched at Vau the whole time she moved out of the lower level to hunt down her friend.

"Shab, Sergeant. You spend too much time on this thing and you could probably offend everybody who actually likes you!" Kom'rk guffawed.

"This is why I work solo," Vau reminded himself- - and anyone listening- - on his way up the gangway at a jog.

.

"My turn?" he asked when he tracked her down.

"Enacca isn't into Rundyyyshk like that," she scolded him. "She wants to stay partners, friends. You shouldn't make those kinds of jokes in front of them."

"What! What? No. Don't… Don't explain." He glanced over his shoulder. "He wants more?"

"He has expressed desire in pursuing at least a friends with benefits option. She's really really pretty, Vau."

"So you've said." He looked troubled, though. "Still…"

"Stay out of it."

"I just don't want him putting any pressure on her. You said yourself, their grove is like a bunch of meddling old women."

"Oh. Yeah. You should definitely lead with that at the next fire-meeting. I'll have them pencil you in on the itinerary."

He flipped her off.

"Do you know any of these unit code names?" he asked, sending her a data dump. "I got a communique on my way up here to eat crow. Again."

"Not necessary. Not between us. Isn't that what you told me?"

"I've told you a lot of things."

"I listened to that one."

"Because?"

"Because I love you."

"That's my girl," he cooed. Blinked those gold eyes in pleasure as she leaned up to stroke her fingertips along his scalp while she studied. He'd volunteer to be her displacement activity any day of the week.