Chapter Text
The sight of a new analyst at Onlaut’s station sticks in Syril’s throat, irritating as a half-swallowed pill. Dedra had been correct—Hyne should’ve refused to allow anyone to commandeer that space until the Empire had concluded its investigation. Yet another circumnavigation of the rules. Another rip that upper management refused to mend, or, at the very least, a willful bending of their codes.
He takes a snap-quick glance at Dedra and finds she, too, is surveying the scene with a tight brow and pursed lips. Her disapproval shoves him into action. “Move,” he hisses at the offending newcomer, a fresh-faced, light-haired man with a bowl of turquoise noodles lying on his keyboard. Syril smells the artery-clogging salt in the air.
The man half-turns in his chair. He has the gall to fire back, albeit without vigor. “I just got here, sir,” he offers in protest. “I took this station fairly. If someone’s complained, take it up with—” his gaze slides to Dedra, to her tunic white as truth and her scowl cold as stuncuffs, and his argument melts away. Fear usurps the indignation in his eyes. Syril can’t help envying that reaction. Most at Preox-Morlana greet him with some iteration of chagrin or reluctance, but never with an acknowledgement of his superiority. Always with half-respect. To eliminate that, he thinks, he’d need a different uniform. He’d need her uniform.
“Am I in trouble?” the man asks her, his lower lip wobbling.
Dedra steps forward. Leans down. “That depends, doesn’t it?”
“On… on what?”
“On how badly you’ve contaminated the evidence.” When her eyes fall on the bowl of noodles, the man mumbles an apology and deposits it in the waste can as though it, alone, might’ve gotten him called in for questioning. He stands, looks from Dedra to Syril and back again, and then departs from the room at a pace that starts in a confident walk, and ends in a gutless sprint. They both watch him go.
“I can bring him back, if you need—”
She raises a hand. “If I find it necessary, I’ll call the troopers.” She approaches the desk and takes a seat in a chair that bears too many scratches and chips for her image to properly coalesce with it. His instinct is to offer her something better, but he has nothing better to offer. As it stands, she’s an emerald in a tarnished ring. But then again, isn’t he? Hasn’t he been a stone wedged into a crumbling artifact for the past several years, keeping himself polished as everything surrounding him rusts? He leans in, his eyes reluctant to stray from her. The first brushstrokes of a question that could paint his future swipe at the back of his mind. If today goes well, he’ll ask.
Her hands hover over the keys, her fingers rising and falling without pressing down. Reflected in the monitor screen, Syril sees a crease mar her brow. “This is an outdated system,” she remarks, irritation a cymbal crash beneath each syllable of the word. Out-date-ed. “I’m not familiar with it. Is there a way to access his records?”
Syril squints at the monitor and keys, wills his memory to spit up the information she requires. He doesn’t work in data analysis, but he assumes the programs on the machines are… similar, if not the same. “If you’ll allow me—”
He reaches down faster than she can pull away, and for the briefest of accidental instants—the final flash of a dying star—their fingers brush. Every logical thought vacates his head, opening a massive vacuum his body fills with a base, inflexible awareness of her warmth. Stripped of her gloves, her skin holds the softness of cherished sunbeams. The sort of gentle illumination that banishes tension from his being, that soothingly slides its fingers down his spine and leaves him with the most invigorating and deeply alien urge to shiver. He has just enough time to ink the sensation into his memory before she pulls back. The heat that had infected his body boils down to leave a scum of embarrassment.
“I—” he stammers, reeling, “That was—I, ah, hadn’t meant to—”
She pulls her hands into her lap, rests one atop the other with the one he touched at the bottom. The monitor might’ve learned to lie to him, but whether or not it is being truthful, he glimpses a light flush in her cheeks. He blinks. The blush vanishes.
“No need to dwell on it,” she says.
Oh, but he is dwelling on it. “I'm sorry.”
The hand that he touched twitches. The sound she makes trips into the chasm between a sigh and a huff. “The records,” she growls, her tone landing as a curative smack across the face.
“Right away. Just a moment, and I’ll—”
“Do you need help, deputy inspector? I’m happy to step in. Onlaut always said that machine only behaved for those it saw as its equal.”
Syril recognizes the voice without needing to look up for verification, but he looks up, anyway. Junior analyst Keeyla Mizrale peers down at him, her dark ponytail an inch too low to satisfy code standards, her smirk wide enough to promise that she witnessed his accidental indecency and intends to spread it like a virus through most of Preox-Morlana headquarters in the next several minutes. He repurposes his mortification as ire and tosses it at Keeyla.
“Don’t you have several outstanding data requests that you should be fulfilling, junior analyst?” Don’t you have anywhere else to be?
Her thin shoulders barely stir the fabric of her uniform as they shrug. When she speaks, Syril can tell she’s choking back a laugh. “I thought you seemed to be struggling, sir. Wanted to ask if there was anything I could do. As you know, our department values its tranquility.”
“Then perhaps your department should’ve kept a closer eye on your missing colleague. Your department might’ve averted this crisis.”
Dedra’s head snaps up. She pivots her attention to Keeyla. “You worked with this man?”
Keeyla’s smile slips a centimeter or two; Syril has her attention, but Dedra has her dread. “I… not directly, no.”
“You claimed he worked in your department.”
“He did. Does.” Keeyla’s smile flattens, sours into something dread-dripping, something fearful. She crosses her arms, straightens, tries to plaster over her clear apprehension with a translucent brushing of bravery. “We weren’t—we weren’t close, or anything.”
With the fluid grace of water surging over rocks, Dedra rises to stand in front of Keeyla. Syril notes that the junior analyst has a handful of inches on her, but Dedra’s confidence more than compensates for the height she lacks. Analytically calm and enchantingly emotionless, she towers over Keeyla while glancing up at her.
“That wasn’t the question,” she says. Her head tilts, her eyes narrow, and her voice drops to a whisper that layers intimidation over intimacy. It’s an intricate, measured thing, her tone—like stitching piping along a seam. “I asked if you worked with him. But your choice of words has piqued my curiosity, junior analyst. What was the nature of your relationship with Onlaut? Were you aware of his plans to leave Preox-Morlana?”
Keeyla’s fingers drum a nervous, silent tune against her upper arm. The eye contact she holds with Dedra teeters. “I had no idea he wasn’t going to show up. I hadn’t even noticed he was gone.”
Dedra gives a condescending little hum, and Syril’s heart—for reasons foreign and incomprehensible to him—shudders with pleasure. “I find that difficult to believe.”
“You shouldn’t. It’s true.” Keeyla’s fingers drum faster, faster, at a pace her feet might carry her down the halls if Dedra weren’t circling her, increasing the gravity on her through intensity alone.
Dedra leans in, her plush lips a distance from Keeyla’s ear that fills Syril with a thorny, envious longing. “Is it?” she hisses. “In the short time you’ve been here, you’ve interrupted my investigation and exhibited an intimate knowledge of Onlaut’s workspace and personality. You referred to him in the past tense although you claim to not have noticed his absence, which implies you’d been anticipating his departure. Yet, every word you’ve spoken has been in attempt to convince me otherwise.”
Dedra comes to a perfect stop in front of Keeyla, steel-solid, smirking, sparkling, the very image of polished power to outflank everything and everyone in the room. Syril has the sense of witnessing something sacrosanct, a natural phenomenon—a light show that fills the sky with undiscovered colors, with beauty in defiance of description. It’s moving, he thinks, simply to sit and watch. To submerge himself in the ethereal purity of Dedra pursuing order.
Keeyla takes one step to the side, then another. “I… have a… meeting,” she offers shakily, the leaf-green of her irises wilted, trampled. “I have to go.” Then she follows in her colleague’s footsteps and walk-run-sprints out of the room, casting a single, terror-eyed glance back at Dedra before vanishing.
Sensing an opportunity to be of use, Syril springs to his feet. “Should I go after her?”
Dedra shakes her head. “My forces have locked down the building.” She again takes a seat in front of the monitor, and Syril returns to her side. When she frowns, his soul deflates. “Have you brought up the records?”
Ah. Probably, he should have been rectifying that issue instead of submerging himself in the majesty of her interrogative tactics. “I didn’t want to continue in your absence,” he tells her, which is, in an adjacent, non-shameful way, the truth—he can’t imagine lying to her. He leans down carefully, takes painstaking note of his hands, and her hands, and all the ways they might brush or touch or meet. But his predominant master is justice, and justice will not be served by him holding Dedra Meero’s hand.
She is standing so, so close. Her presence has a strange effect on constants he’d previously taken for granted, like gravity and oxygen. He feels heavier and lighter all at once, breathless and energized, twitchy and assured and illogically hot. His fingers depress the keys and click through report screens, rebelliously crying out for hers all the while, and he takes a quiet breath to anchor himself in reality. At last, he manages to pull the data from the jaws of his own relative cluelessness.
“Here,” he tells her. “The inquiry records for this station.”
She does not thank him; she doesn’t need to. Any task he can complete for the good of the Empire is a task he’ll complete without requiring commendation. He fancies he can feel her manipulating the energy of the room as her eyes sweep over the green dots pressed into the screen’s black background. Feeds off of the atmosphere as she synthesizes text into a theory, synthesizes it into the Empire’s next move.
He, too, stares at the screen and reads. The history encompasses a wide range of planets in the Mid-Rim and Interior, but he can’t find a concrete variable to join them. The ones he recognizes have vastly differing climates; their sizes are disparate; Preox-Morlana has a presence on exactly none of them. In all likelihood, this could well be a list of places Onlaut had intended to settle after hastily departing Morlana One, but—no, there must be more to it than that. He squints, thinks harder. Some of the names sound almost familiar, a tune with indefinable lyrics. The first one, the most recent of Onlaut’s searches from just a few days prior, hadn’t he…
“The thefts,” he breathes in a wispy murmur, almost to himself. He feels her look at him but, with soul-strangling effort, holds her to his periphery. And the memories focus now, sharpen in his view—broadcasts over a period of months that all decried the same sin: stealing technology from the Empire.
This is undoubtedly Onlaut’s inquiry history. It is also undoubtedly a list of Imperial bases that have suffered mysterious, sudden losses. Had whomever was in charge of monitoring employee searches lifted a single finger with the intent of doing their job, they might’ve noticed the too-coincidental-to-be-coincidental chain of requests for information. Might’ve alerted the proper authorities. Naturally, they hadn’t. Naturally, the maintenance of order has remained his continual mess to tidy; well, him and...
Syril is not a believer in random happenstance, and judging from her determined expression—vengeance pulling her lip into a snarl and prickling invaluably in her eyes—neither is Dedra. He expects her to issue him another order. Welcomes it. In fact, his every cell hums with longing for her to use him. For her and the Empire to make use of him, in all the ways Preox-Morlana does not and never will. Anticipation douses him in oil and strikes a match, depresses a button on a detonator and waits for an explosion. He’ll do whatever she asks. Be whomever she wants. It occurs to him in a flighty, running droplet of realization that he has never given himself over to anything or anyone so thoroughly in a such a brief shred of time.
He stares at the back of her head, choking on marrow-deep supplication. Her blonde hair is highlighted with a tasteful peppering of red and blue from the refracted lights. He stands behind her as the skin of his knees itches for him to drop to the miserable tile. How can I be of service to the Empire? How can I be of service to you?
Her pale fingers curl into a fist, forming an infuriated ball of snow against the keyboard’s colorless night. Then, smooth and graceful as ice hardening over rock, she stands, spends a moment erasing the slight wrinkles in her tunic and repositioning her belt, and walks away from him.
Syril hadn’t known a dream he’d held for less than an hour could collapse as hard as one he’d upheld for the better part of his life. Nonetheless, the newfound distance between them is ruinous. It is a monstrous thing that might cleave him in half, might shred him to ribbons with its claws. Stunned, he gulps down a few wheezy lungfuls of beeping, clacking, caf-stained air, his every cell on the verge of combustion. He throws himself after her.
“Wait!” he shouts. She sweeps through a set of tall double-doors, and he just manages to catch them before they latch shut. He tries again, increases his pace and volume until he’s both yelling and going at a thigh-burning, chest-squeezing jog. Keeyla and the rest of her analysts would cover their mouths and snicker at him. He doesn’t care, he doesn’t care, none of it matters as much as Dedra matters or means what Dedra means, and if she could only see—
Desperate, he fastens a sweaty hand around her shoulder. Makes her go still in the middle of the buzzing hallway. Eliminates her options until she has no choice but to face him. To consider him.
“Wait,” he repeats, in case his previous exclamations had escaped her notice.
Once in a good while, they’ll get a storm on Morlana One that sends the company town quivering down to its shoddily constructed foundations. A storm that makes the braided metal of the docks whimper as it struggles to hold its grip in the tumultuous waves, a storm with lightning and thunder that lights primal, fight-or-flight torches in the brain of every surface-dwelling being. When Dedra looks up at him, she does so with one of those storms in her eyes; one of those civilization-leveling rainfalls that threatens to reduce him to nothing more than a decomposing lump on the sea floor.
“That’ll be all, Deputy Inspector Karn.”
No, he won’t accept that. Cannot accept that. “I can offer further assistance,” he says. “As a Preox-Morlana employee—”
“Preox-Morlana made this mess,” she tells him in a low hiss, the mess of Preox-Morlana fanning out all around them in dirty uniforms and clunky boots and woefully lax principles. “The Empire will clean it up.”
“I—I want to help you. I want to see this through. Someone has to bring him to justice—”
Her jaw works. Her eyes flash. She moves closer. “You’ve said it yourself. You’re a Preox-Morlana employee; evidence places this case under Imperial jurisdiction. I suggest you resume doing whatever it is that you do here, before I change my mind about informing your superiors that you were of service to the Empire today.” Lightning strikes ground in her glare. Fire blazes in her porcelain cheeks. Thunder rolls incandescently from her mouth, sinister and succulent. “Let. Go.”
At first, his topsy-turvy brain thinks she’s speaking in metaphor. Let go of this case. Let go of this investigation. Then he regains awareness of the literal world, of his hand on her shoulder; there’s nothing metaphoric about his grip. He releases his hand from her body. Briefly, he wonders whether that’ll be the only time his fingers graze the glorified wool of an ISB tunic.
Dedra takes a long, cold step back. Then another. Another. When she stops, so does his breathing.
“Forget this happened, Syril,” she orders him.
Then she turns sharply on her heel and walks away, her chin high, her back rod-straight, her hands interlocked in perfect form. The only acquiescence she makes to any hypothetical emotion is an uneven, jerky twitching of her fingers—the fingers on the hand his had brushed.
Standing with his chin high, his back rod-straight and his hands interlocked in perfect form, Syril waits until he can no longer hear her footsteps to begin trekking back to his station. He passes Keeyla’s vacant chair and Onlaut’s masterless, outdated machine. He does not smell the souring flavor of cooled broth in the air near the waste can, or feel the stickiness of dozens of dubious, distasteful stares.
It takes him longer than he’d like, but he eventually tracks down a window with a half-decent view of her shuttle. Preox-Morlana moves through its daily cycles around him, but he, glued to the sight of her—Dedra Meero, an Imperial star shooting slowly across the planet’s dull midnight sky—refuses motion. At one point she pauses to give a fluid glance up and over her shoulder, and a thrill barrels through his chest. Logically, he knows she cannot see him. Not from this high up. Not from behind this rain-stained, cloudy glass. Illogically, he smiles.
Even after her shuttle crawls through the clouds, his smile remains.
She remembered my name.
***
Motion sickness, memory, and malaise conspire greedily in Syril’s gut, and he finds himself grateful he hadn’t bothered with a morning meal. Even if he’d wanted to eat, he knew he’d find that Coruscant hadn’t become less cost-prohibitive in the years since his unceremonious departure. Indeed, the price of coming here had been high. It had taken nearly a month’s worth of his pay to cover lodging in a no-frills hotel, plus the extortionate round-trip shuttle fare from Morlana One, plus the degradation of having used not one, but two company-allotted “leisure days” at which he typically scoffed.
Certainly, he might’ve stayed there, with her, and eliminated one of those expenses—and taken advantage of a few free meals. No-charge bowls of cereal, at least. But that food and housing came with a price he found himself entirely unwilling to pay—the promise of hobbled confidence and shrill-voiced reminders of a past he’d done everything in his power to sever himself from. So he parted with his credits and spent the night dreaming with his eyes wide open, feeling strangely adolescent in the knowledge that while he’d outgrown his childhood bedroom, he’d never outgrow the dreams that kept him alive inside those beige walls.
And as he stands now beside a tall column outside a building he’d sever one of his limbs to enter, he blinks the cloudy morning from his eyes, smooths nonexistent flaws from his tailored suit jacket, and waits. Examines every emotionless face that glides past, fierce and unnoticing. He took up his post before the suns rose, so, theoretically, she should pass him. He isn’t quite sure what he’ll do if she doesn’t. He’d planned so meticulously for success that he hadn’t spared a fraction of a thought for failure. His head swims as the suns creep higher. The morning traffic’s symphony reaches a crescendo. What will he do if she’s not here? He cranes his neck and looks, for the billionth time, down the walkway.
The city-planet stops spinning. All the analyzing and squinting and wordless inquiring he’d done before that moment is rendered meaningless in a glance. He’d know Dedra Meero anywhere. He knows her as intimately as he knows himself, knows the sound of his blood rushing in his ears or the puffy sigh that slides through his wet lips. She’s lingered in his veins from the moment they met, a healing virus, a restorative fever. Even laying eyes on her now—all her perfectly straight lines and scrupulously measured movements, steps that ring with the cherished order of the Empire—feels like a privilege.
Something stirs in the cavern between his ribs as he watches her. Inspiration? Envy? Devotion? Desire? The word for it hardly matters, as it pushes him to move regardless. As casually as he can with his whole self slowly melting—which is to say, not casually at all—he backs his way out onto the promenade and lodges himself in her path.
He stops. She stops.
Her eyes aren’t a pure blue. They have a flush of green in them, rimming the black of her pupils and bleeding gently outward. He hadn’t seen that on Morlana One, but under Coruscant’s opaque gray cloud cover, the detail unveils itself to him. That tiny observation proves enough to scour oxygen from his lungs—she is near-incinerating in her realness, her tangibility. Standing between her and the Imperial Security Bureau headquarters, he has never been so drowned in a pool of unfettered wanting. And he does; so absolutely, so completely. That’s why he's here. He knows that she wants, too. That their wants rhyme. If he could only make her understand…
Make sure they remember your name. If they don’t remember that, how can you expect them to remember you?
“Syril Karn,” he reintroduces himself, then waits for her answer like a grenade with a pulled pin.
Her expression shifts, slipping from neutrality to an indignant, beautiful surprise. “I know who you are. What are you doing here?”