aboard the oblivion, pt 3
Dec. 16th, 2018 06:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catwif3rating: t
word count: 2600
fandom: star wars (post rotj, rebels-inspired, entirely oc-centric)
summary: flare is not okay
originally posted 3/21/16
================================
flare doesn’t like this moon. there’s something strange about it in the force, something that glows warmly, something– there’s something she has to find.
no
that’s not her job anymore, she doesn’t have to find anything if she doesn’t want to. doesn’t have to track down this disturbance to the (likely very powerful) force-sensitive to hand over to her masters. she doesn’t have masters any more.
so she stays in her cabin and takes sweet'n'sour apart for the. how many times is it now? it doesn’t matter. she’s making him better. she might have pulled him out of an imperial refuse pile and he might still be rusty and battered and patched together but he has quickly become the only one she can trust. when sweet'n'sour talks to the other droids on the ship, flare knows they’re telling the truth. they always lie to her. people are easier. people she can just reach into their heads and see.
except. yes. she has to be more careful about that. that’s the reason they have to be on this moon, because they need more people. because flare wasn’t careful and they– are all so weak, so fragile, most of them have no shields to speak of, she doesn’t have to press so hard. yes.
someone knocks on the door. flare starts, nearly panics, so sure that this time– where is her lightsaber, she needs it, she can get them through the door before they manage to hack it open–
her room comm chirps, the little green light flashing in the wall.
“flare,” captain moryne’s voice echoes through the room. flare considers whether she believes it is actually vyrr. most other people wouldn’t be able to override to talk into flare’s room without her pressing the button to accept the call. so, possibly-to-probably actually the captain. flare doesn’t go to reply. she has to get this connection patched, get sweet'n'sour put back together, now, fast.
“we’re about to get out of here, if you have no other objectives here,” vyrr’s voice continues. “we have five new crew. please try to be gentle with them, they perform better if they last more than one voyage.”
the comm clicks off. flare dismisses it. vyrr is probably correct (if that was vyrr). she’s not leaving yet, though. it’s not time. they’ll either take off anyway or they’ll wait for her to get back to them. no, she’d told them to make a sweep through the sector for new crew. they’re not done with that. they can continue on their own.
until it’s time to go.
the force will tell her.
the ship rumbles to life around her, and for a moment flare screams into life alongside it, she is the ship, it’s trying to eat her whole–
she’s back in her cramped cabin. she solders the connections to sweet'n'sour’s neural networks back together with the force, too panicked to wait for the iron anymore. put the array back into place, plug it in, where is that screw, oh, thank the stars, there; make sure his pincer arms are seated correctly, his i/o arm is there, yes, yes, hurry. close him up and let him boot back up– the repulsors fire and sweet'n'sour floats to life for her once more. his dangling claw-armatures click up and down as he runs diagnostics. his red optic flashes: he is alive again. flare’s nails screech against the miniature probe droid’s dome as she clutches him, examining him closely to make sure– he’s still hers. the others haven’t corrupted him while he was off.
“i’ll fix you again later,” she assures him. sweet'n'sour clicks his acquiescence to this plan.
flare yanks her tunic back on and gestures to sweet'n'sour to follow her. she’s still tying her sash as she gets out the door– no. no. no, she has to go back. she needs her lightsaber. it’s not safe, nowhere is safe. where is it.
right,
it’s under her pillow, where it should be. flare tucks it into her sash and stalks back out. she has to keep a weather eye on these astromechs, or they’ll probably finally fly them all into a star. it’s this fuck-damn cult of theirs, and of course they’ve gotten every other droid on the ship converted. all of them but sweet'n'sour.
on some level flare is sure that the droids want no such thing and that there’s not a problem at all. but the doubt is always ready to creep back in, and it’s better to be prepared.
she can feel it the moment they break orbit, less a physical sensation (the oblivion is too powerful to let them feel the insignificant drag of a moon that still needs artificial gravity and atmosphere enhancers to be habitable) and more in the sense of life around them fading away.
wait.
the.
something is not right.
the sense she’d had before, from the moon, is still here. it won’t go away. flare isn’t sure what they want from her. should she track it down or. is that how the empire will find her again. no, the empire doesn’t matter; lord vader is dead. there is no one there any longer with the power to keep her. only grasping politicians and half-trained adepts screaming to be sith.
no.
it will come to her eventually. she can be patient. the anomaly will reveal itself. it always does.
flare goes back to her room. locks the door.
“watch that, sweet'n'sour,” she says. he will keep an eye out for her while she works. sweet'n'sour is the first friend flare has ever had.
she opens up the hypernet connection, checks all four of her encryptions for low-priority work, and starts looking through postings for freight to haul or work for mercenaries with a lot of guns. then she checks over the new bounty postings, committing them to memory.
.
.
.
waking up is like clawing her way up from drowning in tar. flare emerges gasping, panicking. reaching desperately to find out whether anyone has gotten the drop on her and to fend them off– but there is no one. the hypernet is still open, but not necessary, because they’re planetside again. flare tries to stop panting; showing weakness like that is unacceptable.
the comm beeps again.
flare stares at the flashing green light, sure that this–
this just happened, right?
“sweet'n'sour. status,” flare rasps. it’s like speaking through sand. she’s sore from the durasteel floor. the feeling is still there and despite deciding on patience, she feels like she’s going out of control. she’s burning up, she has to find the source.
sweet'n'sour confirms that according to most records of reality, she has neither gone backwards or forwards in time, merely lost track of it. unacceptable.
“flare,” vyrr’s voice filters through.
'it’s not her this time,' the comm says in a whisper of static. flare stares harder at the green light, letting it burn itself into her sensitive retinas. sometimes the comm is letting her know. sometimes it’s lying, too.
“if we can get enough people here, we can take that job you were talking about last week, if you’re still interested or it’s still available. let me know. and whether you want to negotiate for it or if i should.”
the light keeps blinking. flare stops breathing. it can’t pick up on her that way.
“… that’s all, sir,” vyrr’s voice says. the comm clicks off. flare holds her breath a moment longer.
which job was vyrr referring to? was it the racketeering or the raiding gig? it depends on which vyrr it was– the real one (flare is pretty sure) would be talking about the raiding. flare only fed the false information to the fake.
everything has become so much more complicated lately. since she left the empire, yes, but even before that, really. it’s a struggle to keep up with it all.
flare goes back to her mess of datapads. then she gets up again and goes to dig out her stashes of flimsiplast notes from under the bunk, the cache in the top-rightmost corner of the room, the panel in the floor right in front of the fresher. one, two, three, two, three, one, putting the code back together. sweet'n'sour looks on with unblinking red optic. flare will get the job together.
there is no ‘night’ or 'day’ on the oblivion, even planetside. flare has viewscreens she could activate to keep an eye on everything the ship’s sensors could pick up (it had been a week or two’s worth of project to reroute all that data to her cabin), but she can’t do that right now– once the cycle turns again, maybe, and they stop letting the sensors look back at her through the viewscreens.
flare pieces through her notes as fast as she can, until she’s as sure as she can be that she knows what they need to do. she carefully hides everything back where it was, then sets up the perimeter traps and alarms at the vents and the door.
“sweet'n'sour. come with me. i need you to keep the rest of them off my back.” sweet'n'sour drifts closer obediently, taking up point at her six o'clock to cover her blind spot. flare palm-locks the room behind them. certain operations must be conducted at the bridge, not from one’s secure base.
they don’t have enough people for a fully-manned bridge anymore, of course, and in port it should be mostly empty, even if they are all still on orders to remain with the ship– and they should be, flare is quite sure she said she didn’t want anyone leaving on these visits other than those assigned to–
she doesn’t know the people touching things in the pilot’s array. there’s a crewmember she thinks she knows, human, part of the original crew, with them, they’re obviously supposed to be be here; maybe-vyrr said they had new people (so, maybe real-vyrr?)–
but she doesn’t know them, and the flare in the force is entirely instinctive, a challenge, because–
both of the new ones have turned, whirled to face her before she’s taken more than a step into the room. tension screams through the space between them, and it’s only vyrr’s words echoing (“try to be gentle with them”) that keeps flare from pulling her lightsaber.
“oh– um, c-commander, i’m sorry–” the crewman stutters as he follows his charges’ attention and notices flare.
flare snaps her hand out to the side and he shuts up quickly as the press of the force knocks him back a few steps. he is unimportant.
they are the feeling. two. both strong enough that they should have been picked out of the academies, as flare had been. neither of them must have attended. the togruta, besides the obvious, is too old. perhaps the human was from a planet lacking in such facilities. probably neither of them have been trained at all.
“…i’m guessing that you must be flare,” the togruta says, too calmly by half. flare can’t read him well; he has some sort of rudimentary shields (nothing compared to the other inquisitors in training, she could get through easily)–
the girl, though–
she is even more of an open book than force-nulls, spilling, bleeding emotion into the air, fear/surprise/awe/worry-interest-bittersweet-something… it is that last emotion that catches flare off-guard, because she’s not entirely sure what it even is.
“are you okay?” the girl asks, stepping towards flare with hands held up empty before her– oh, far away from the blasters she’s carrying, good, but flare could take care of those faster than she could use them.
are you okay, what does that mean, flare has never understood what that phrase was supposed to mean. why is she asking that. what does she know.
“ohhhh boy,” the togruta says.
“hey, it’s okay, i didn’t– mean to scare you?” the girl says, looking up at flare with wide, unusually vibrant green eyes,
how does she know, she shouldn’t know about the panic that is flare’s constant companion, she’s learned how to bury that so far into anger and action that even her trainers hadn’t been able to tell anymore, you couldn’t let them know you were afraid–
“how did you get that,” flare hisses, “you shouldn’t– be able to find that– you are untrained, you have no skills–”
“oh, wow, rude,” green-eyes says.
“we might not be as formally trained as all your former-imperials, but we got hired because we’ve got skills,” the togruta adds.
“you got past my shields,” flare says, and it comes out half-screech, half-cough in the thick dry pain of her throat. is this an attack? no, no, she can’t feel the force in it…
both of them stare at her, obvious confusion radiating from the girl. the crewmember is edging out the lower exit of the bridge; he still doesn’t matter.
“i what? look, lady– commander? i didn’t mean to offend you, you just– seemed really on edge, that’s all.”
flare stares at her, probing in the force– she seems sincere. flare glances at sweet'n'sour anyway. he’s not as good with organics as the droids, but she trusts him more than anything else in the world. sweet'n'sour confirms the impression: somehow the girl inferred the fear in a way nobody else during flare’s career as an inquisitor has, or she circumvented flare’s shielding without even knowing it.
“hey, so, this has been great, but i don’t want to get in the way of the ship’s captain, so, we can just, y'know, get out of here, if you’d like?” the togruta says.
flare breathes, buries her weaknesses in anger, opens her eyes. green-eyes takes a sharp, flinching step backwards. the togruta shifts his stance– attack or flee, unclear.
“i am not the captain of this ship. i am not the commander. i am simply in charge,” flare says, grinding the words out carefully.
“right, excellent. nice to meet you. really we can just be on our way, if you don’t need us for anything–”
flare finds herself curiously unwilling to part with them. she never cares much about the living components of her ship; these two should just be another cog in her machine. but their untapped potential calls to her, as she’s been trained to seek it, even as it presents a new type of potential threat.
“… you are dismissed,” flare says, reluctantly. the togruta tosses off a cocky salute that would have gotten him so many kinds of punishment duty in an imperial academy. they run into the crewmember and communications-officer glib on their way out. glib sidles his way onto the bridge in front of the other three, hovering.
“everything all right, ma'am? you need i should teach the newbies a lesson?” he offers. unlike what his name implies, glib says what is on his mind straightforward. he’s hardly ever replaceable when the impostors start taking over.
“that will not be necessary,” flare says. “you are dismissed.”
“yes, ma'am,” glib says. “you want a glass of water or something? sounding pretty rough, there.”
when was the last time– oh, stang. nearly two days ago. fuck, she’ll have to program sweet'n'sour to avoid this kind of oversight. she’s just been so busy. it would be stupid to die of thirst while subverting a hundred other threats.
“yes, that. and then no one but captain moryne is to enter the bridge until i clear it again.”
“yes’m!” glib says brightly. he does not salute at all when he leaves.
flare thinks she prefers it that way.
word count: 2600
fandom: star wars (post rotj, rebels-inspired, entirely oc-centric)
summary: flare is not okay
originally posted 3/21/16
================================
flare doesn’t like this moon. there’s something strange about it in the force, something that glows warmly, something– there’s something she has to find.
no
that’s not her job anymore, she doesn’t have to find anything if she doesn’t want to. doesn’t have to track down this disturbance to the (likely very powerful) force-sensitive to hand over to her masters. she doesn’t have masters any more.
so she stays in her cabin and takes sweet'n'sour apart for the. how many times is it now? it doesn’t matter. she’s making him better. she might have pulled him out of an imperial refuse pile and he might still be rusty and battered and patched together but he has quickly become the only one she can trust. when sweet'n'sour talks to the other droids on the ship, flare knows they’re telling the truth. they always lie to her. people are easier. people she can just reach into their heads and see.
except. yes. she has to be more careful about that. that’s the reason they have to be on this moon, because they need more people. because flare wasn’t careful and they– are all so weak, so fragile, most of them have no shields to speak of, she doesn’t have to press so hard. yes.
someone knocks on the door. flare starts, nearly panics, so sure that this time– where is her lightsaber, she needs it, she can get them through the door before they manage to hack it open–
her room comm chirps, the little green light flashing in the wall.
“flare,” captain moryne’s voice echoes through the room. flare considers whether she believes it is actually vyrr. most other people wouldn’t be able to override to talk into flare’s room without her pressing the button to accept the call. so, possibly-to-probably actually the captain. flare doesn’t go to reply. she has to get this connection patched, get sweet'n'sour put back together, now, fast.
“we’re about to get out of here, if you have no other objectives here,” vyrr’s voice continues. “we have five new crew. please try to be gentle with them, they perform better if they last more than one voyage.”
the comm clicks off. flare dismisses it. vyrr is probably correct (if that was vyrr). she’s not leaving yet, though. it’s not time. they’ll either take off anyway or they’ll wait for her to get back to them. no, she’d told them to make a sweep through the sector for new crew. they’re not done with that. they can continue on their own.
until it’s time to go.
the force will tell her.
the ship rumbles to life around her, and for a moment flare screams into life alongside it, she is the ship, it’s trying to eat her whole–
she’s back in her cramped cabin. she solders the connections to sweet'n'sour’s neural networks back together with the force, too panicked to wait for the iron anymore. put the array back into place, plug it in, where is that screw, oh, thank the stars, there; make sure his pincer arms are seated correctly, his i/o arm is there, yes, yes, hurry. close him up and let him boot back up– the repulsors fire and sweet'n'sour floats to life for her once more. his dangling claw-armatures click up and down as he runs diagnostics. his red optic flashes: he is alive again. flare’s nails screech against the miniature probe droid’s dome as she clutches him, examining him closely to make sure– he’s still hers. the others haven’t corrupted him while he was off.
“i’ll fix you again later,” she assures him. sweet'n'sour clicks his acquiescence to this plan.
flare yanks her tunic back on and gestures to sweet'n'sour to follow her. she’s still tying her sash as she gets out the door– no. no. no, she has to go back. she needs her lightsaber. it’s not safe, nowhere is safe. where is it.
right,
it’s under her pillow, where it should be. flare tucks it into her sash and stalks back out. she has to keep a weather eye on these astromechs, or they’ll probably finally fly them all into a star. it’s this fuck-damn cult of theirs, and of course they’ve gotten every other droid on the ship converted. all of them but sweet'n'sour.
on some level flare is sure that the droids want no such thing and that there’s not a problem at all. but the doubt is always ready to creep back in, and it’s better to be prepared.
she can feel it the moment they break orbit, less a physical sensation (the oblivion is too powerful to let them feel the insignificant drag of a moon that still needs artificial gravity and atmosphere enhancers to be habitable) and more in the sense of life around them fading away.
wait.
the.
something is not right.
the sense she’d had before, from the moon, is still here. it won’t go away. flare isn’t sure what they want from her. should she track it down or. is that how the empire will find her again. no, the empire doesn’t matter; lord vader is dead. there is no one there any longer with the power to keep her. only grasping politicians and half-trained adepts screaming to be sith.
no.
it will come to her eventually. she can be patient. the anomaly will reveal itself. it always does.
flare goes back to her room. locks the door.
“watch that, sweet'n'sour,” she says. he will keep an eye out for her while she works. sweet'n'sour is the first friend flare has ever had.
she opens up the hypernet connection, checks all four of her encryptions for low-priority work, and starts looking through postings for freight to haul or work for mercenaries with a lot of guns. then she checks over the new bounty postings, committing them to memory.
.
.
.
waking up is like clawing her way up from drowning in tar. flare emerges gasping, panicking. reaching desperately to find out whether anyone has gotten the drop on her and to fend them off– but there is no one. the hypernet is still open, but not necessary, because they’re planetside again. flare tries to stop panting; showing weakness like that is unacceptable.
the comm beeps again.
flare stares at the flashing green light, sure that this–
this just happened, right?
“sweet'n'sour. status,” flare rasps. it’s like speaking through sand. she’s sore from the durasteel floor. the feeling is still there and despite deciding on patience, she feels like she’s going out of control. she’s burning up, she has to find the source.
sweet'n'sour confirms that according to most records of reality, she has neither gone backwards or forwards in time, merely lost track of it. unacceptable.
“flare,” vyrr’s voice filters through.
'it’s not her this time,' the comm says in a whisper of static. flare stares harder at the green light, letting it burn itself into her sensitive retinas. sometimes the comm is letting her know. sometimes it’s lying, too.
“if we can get enough people here, we can take that job you were talking about last week, if you’re still interested or it’s still available. let me know. and whether you want to negotiate for it or if i should.”
the light keeps blinking. flare stops breathing. it can’t pick up on her that way.
“… that’s all, sir,” vyrr’s voice says. the comm clicks off. flare holds her breath a moment longer.
which job was vyrr referring to? was it the racketeering or the raiding gig? it depends on which vyrr it was– the real one (flare is pretty sure) would be talking about the raiding. flare only fed the false information to the fake.
everything has become so much more complicated lately. since she left the empire, yes, but even before that, really. it’s a struggle to keep up with it all.
flare goes back to her mess of datapads. then she gets up again and goes to dig out her stashes of flimsiplast notes from under the bunk, the cache in the top-rightmost corner of the room, the panel in the floor right in front of the fresher. one, two, three, two, three, one, putting the code back together. sweet'n'sour looks on with unblinking red optic. flare will get the job together.
there is no ‘night’ or 'day’ on the oblivion, even planetside. flare has viewscreens she could activate to keep an eye on everything the ship’s sensors could pick up (it had been a week or two’s worth of project to reroute all that data to her cabin), but she can’t do that right now– once the cycle turns again, maybe, and they stop letting the sensors look back at her through the viewscreens.
flare pieces through her notes as fast as she can, until she’s as sure as she can be that she knows what they need to do. she carefully hides everything back where it was, then sets up the perimeter traps and alarms at the vents and the door.
“sweet'n'sour. come with me. i need you to keep the rest of them off my back.” sweet'n'sour drifts closer obediently, taking up point at her six o'clock to cover her blind spot. flare palm-locks the room behind them. certain operations must be conducted at the bridge, not from one’s secure base.
they don’t have enough people for a fully-manned bridge anymore, of course, and in port it should be mostly empty, even if they are all still on orders to remain with the ship– and they should be, flare is quite sure she said she didn’t want anyone leaving on these visits other than those assigned to–
she doesn’t know the people touching things in the pilot’s array. there’s a crewmember she thinks she knows, human, part of the original crew, with them, they’re obviously supposed to be be here; maybe-vyrr said they had new people (so, maybe real-vyrr?)–
but she doesn’t know them, and the flare in the force is entirely instinctive, a challenge, because–
both of the new ones have turned, whirled to face her before she’s taken more than a step into the room. tension screams through the space between them, and it’s only vyrr’s words echoing (“try to be gentle with them”) that keeps flare from pulling her lightsaber.
“oh– um, c-commander, i’m sorry–” the crewman stutters as he follows his charges’ attention and notices flare.
flare snaps her hand out to the side and he shuts up quickly as the press of the force knocks him back a few steps. he is unimportant.
they are the feeling. two. both strong enough that they should have been picked out of the academies, as flare had been. neither of them must have attended. the togruta, besides the obvious, is too old. perhaps the human was from a planet lacking in such facilities. probably neither of them have been trained at all.
“…i’m guessing that you must be flare,” the togruta says, too calmly by half. flare can’t read him well; he has some sort of rudimentary shields (nothing compared to the other inquisitors in training, she could get through easily)–
the girl, though–
she is even more of an open book than force-nulls, spilling, bleeding emotion into the air, fear/surprise/awe/worry-interest-bittersweet-something… it is that last emotion that catches flare off-guard, because she’s not entirely sure what it even is.
“are you okay?” the girl asks, stepping towards flare with hands held up empty before her– oh, far away from the blasters she’s carrying, good, but flare could take care of those faster than she could use them.
are you okay, what does that mean, flare has never understood what that phrase was supposed to mean. why is she asking that. what does she know.
“ohhhh boy,” the togruta says.
“hey, it’s okay, i didn’t– mean to scare you?” the girl says, looking up at flare with wide, unusually vibrant green eyes,
how does she know, she shouldn’t know about the panic that is flare’s constant companion, she’s learned how to bury that so far into anger and action that even her trainers hadn’t been able to tell anymore, you couldn’t let them know you were afraid–
“how did you get that,” flare hisses, “you shouldn’t– be able to find that– you are untrained, you have no skills–”
“oh, wow, rude,” green-eyes says.
“we might not be as formally trained as all your former-imperials, but we got hired because we’ve got skills,” the togruta adds.
“you got past my shields,” flare says, and it comes out half-screech, half-cough in the thick dry pain of her throat. is this an attack? no, no, she can’t feel the force in it…
both of them stare at her, obvious confusion radiating from the girl. the crewmember is edging out the lower exit of the bridge; he still doesn’t matter.
“i what? look, lady– commander? i didn’t mean to offend you, you just– seemed really on edge, that’s all.”
flare stares at her, probing in the force– she seems sincere. flare glances at sweet'n'sour anyway. he’s not as good with organics as the droids, but she trusts him more than anything else in the world. sweet'n'sour confirms the impression: somehow the girl inferred the fear in a way nobody else during flare’s career as an inquisitor has, or she circumvented flare’s shielding without even knowing it.
“hey, so, this has been great, but i don’t want to get in the way of the ship’s captain, so, we can just, y'know, get out of here, if you’d like?” the togruta says.
flare breathes, buries her weaknesses in anger, opens her eyes. green-eyes takes a sharp, flinching step backwards. the togruta shifts his stance– attack or flee, unclear.
“i am not the captain of this ship. i am not the commander. i am simply in charge,” flare says, grinding the words out carefully.
“right, excellent. nice to meet you. really we can just be on our way, if you don’t need us for anything–”
flare finds herself curiously unwilling to part with them. she never cares much about the living components of her ship; these two should just be another cog in her machine. but their untapped potential calls to her, as she’s been trained to seek it, even as it presents a new type of potential threat.
“… you are dismissed,” flare says, reluctantly. the togruta tosses off a cocky salute that would have gotten him so many kinds of punishment duty in an imperial academy. they run into the crewmember and communications-officer glib on their way out. glib sidles his way onto the bridge in front of the other three, hovering.
“everything all right, ma'am? you need i should teach the newbies a lesson?” he offers. unlike what his name implies, glib says what is on his mind straightforward. he’s hardly ever replaceable when the impostors start taking over.
“that will not be necessary,” flare says. “you are dismissed.”
“yes, ma'am,” glib says. “you want a glass of water or something? sounding pretty rough, there.”
when was the last time– oh, stang. nearly two days ago. fuck, she’ll have to program sweet'n'sour to avoid this kind of oversight. she’s just been so busy. it would be stupid to die of thirst while subverting a hundred other threats.
“yes, that. and then no one but captain moryne is to enter the bridge until i clear it again.”
“yes’m!” glib says brightly. he does not salute at all when he leaves.
flare thinks she prefers it that way.
