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It had been years since Atton Rand had last had the pleasure of walking the streets of Nar Shaddaa. When he’d left, he hadn’t really intended on coming back; when he’d left, he was trying to find something, anything to do with his life that wasn’t what he was doing then. But he’d managed to get bored with everything he did with his life afterwards, and half-forgot why he had ever wanted to get off of Nar Shaddaa in the first place. The past few years, Atton had wanted nothing more than to get back to Nar Shaddaa, and never quite managed it.
When he finally managed to get to a place where he could even set a course for Nar Shaddaa, he hadn’t figured it would be to go looking for Jedi. He had thought that part of his life was over.
Of course, he’d thought the corpse-looting part of his life was over, too.
“I suspect there are better ways your time could be spent,” Kreia remarked from the door of the cargo hold. Though she spoke to Kalani, barely seemed to notice that there was anyone there besides them, the pointed note of disapproval in her voice still made Atton bristle. Or maybe it was because she didn’t seem to notice him. He wasn’t sure, really.
Kalani didn’t even look up from the suit of armor she was inspecting for damage, something that pleased Atton immensely—now let’s see what the old witch thought of dismissal. “We don’t have much money, and the ship won’t refuel itself,” she told Kreia mildly, her soft, light voice barely lifting high enough to be heard over the rumble of the engines. “We’re going to keep any really high-quality items for ourselves, but we have to raise funds somehow.”
From the pile of component parts Bao-Dur was sorting out with his floating droid and the little rolling trash compactor (Atton didn’t care what anyone said; that droid had been responsible for their ship getting jacked somehow, probably by colluding with that Jedi, Atris’s, Handmaidens), the Iridonian nodded, and said nothing. He’d been the one who had first started stripping the valuables off of the mercenaries they’d killed back on Telos. The looks on the Handmaidens’ faces when they started moving that stuff from the shuttle to the Ebon Hawk had been priceless, almost worth getting stuck in another force cage, almost worth Atton’s having to deal with Kreia rooting around in his head. Almost. Not quite.
“I should think that any of it would fetch a decent price, where we are going,” Kreia argued, “and that there are others who could perform this task.” Yeah, definitely thought Atton, Bao-Dur and the droids were just furniture. Figures she’d blackmail him and then turn around and ignore him whenever she didn’t need him for something; just like a Jedi.
“Yes, but a closer inspection will give us a better idea of what they’re worth.” Kalani tore her gaze away from her work long enough to look up at Kreia, her slanted brown eyes gleaming earnestly. “It’s less likely we’ll get ripped off this way.”
Kreia hesitated, and Atton saw his opening. “And don’t forget we need food, too,” he said, his voice tinny and sharp to his own ears, though no one else seemed to notice a difference. “Not that I’d expect you to understand, seeing as you seem to get along just fine on blood and the screams of your victims.”
“Ha!” Kreia laughed derisively, tossing her head. “I shall leave you to this task, then, and not stay where I am not wanted.” Her focus now razor-fine upon Kalani again, she added, “Seek me out when you are finished. There is much we must discuss.”
Well, that got Kreia out of the way. Now, to deal with the incredible amount of loot they’d amassed on Telos. Atton honed in on some of the blasters they’d picked up. There were plenty of weapons dealers on Nar Shaddaa who’d pay good money for high-quality blasters, so long as they were in good shape. Yeah, they’d keep a few of them for themselves—Atton had been looking for a replacement for the low-yield blaster he’d smuggled onto Peragus for a while—but sell off a few of the good ones and they’d be flush with credits for a while.
…Unfortunately, Atton didn’t seem to be able to find any high-quality blasters. Just the pistols the Republic Army issued to new recruits, and a couple of rifles. And there was something else, too.
“What?” he asked tersely, after a few seconds of the hairs on his neck prickling. It wasn’t exactly hard to know when a Jedi was looking at you, if you had the right training; even when they weren’t trying to dig around in your head, there was a certain degree of intensity in their gaze that wound up being uncomfortable. Kalani’s was intense enough that it almost felt like she was trying to dig in his head, even if Atton knew she wasn’t. And if she hadn’t been with the Jedi for a while, well, maybe there were things that just stuck.
“I wish you two would get along better,” Kalani muttered, only the barest hint of reproach in her voice, but it still stuck like a knife in his ribs.
“Tell Kreia to lighten up,” Atton shot back, not looking at her (‘Remember, all of you; it is more difficult to resist a mind probe with sustained eye contact’), “and maybe we’ll get along better then.”
Kalani didn’t say anything in reply, but Atton could practically feel the frown she was shooting his way. Oh, well. So long as it got the old scow out of the room, he didn’t care too much if Kalani approved or not. The less time he had to spend around Kreia, the better, after that…
“You surprise me.”
He already knew how hard a time he was gonna have keeping focus when those two women were alone together, how his mind would stray…
Start with two. Add ten and three and six, minus one. Start with seven, plus ten and eight, plus-or-minus five. Start with nine…
“Well, this one’s shot to hell,” Kalani said after a while, sighing sharply as she held a breastplate up to the cargo hold’s dim light, letting it pass through several holes in the steel. “I don’t think there’ll be any patching it.”
That little droid of Bao-Dur’s beeped out something, and Bao-Dur himself looked up from his work, immediately shaking his head upon seeing the damaged breastplate. “No, the support structure’s too badly damaged. Besides, I don’t think that would have fetched a high price even if it was intact.”
“Oh? Why’s that?”
“Most of the holes are from grenade shrapnel, but at least one—“ Bao-Dur pointed out one of the smaller holes in the lower right-hand side of the breastplate “—was caused by a blaster bolt.”
Kalani followed to where he was pointing, and grimaced as she stuck a couple of fingers through the hole. The way her eyes widened, she looked very young, all of a sudden. “Yeah, I can see it now. This stuff must be really cheap; it’s not like we had any heavy firepower on our side.”
Atton rolled his eyes (They weren’t talking about Kreia anymore, after all). “Gotta love cheap mercs,” he remarked, slapping the latest (cheap) blaster he’d been looking at back down on the pile. “Cost a fortune to hire, go down like amateurs, and you can’t even get any good stuff off ‘em once they’re dead.”
Kalani wrinkled her nose at him as she tossed the breastplate onto the scrap pile off-handedly. “Do you have a lot of experience with cheap mercenaries?” she asked pointedly, and the air of disdain in her voice would have been a bit more believable if she wasn’t fidgeting with the high collar of her worn-out, old army officer’s jacket.
Of all the things he could have thought of, Atton thought, carefully, of a couple of bar fights he’d gotten into with out-of-work mercenaries on Nar Shaddaa. It was easy for him to pull up a grin as he replied, “Nar Shaddaa’s crawling with them. I’ve locked horns with a few.”
“Yes, you look like someone who goes around picking fights with hired guns.”
Before Atton could respond, their “I am definitely not a ship-stealer” droid broke in, chirping and beeping excitedly. Atton could only make out about half of it; it was kind of hard not to pick up some Binary when you were in the army, but it wasn’t like he’d ever made a concerted effort to learn the language. It was something about the ever-growing pile of scrapped armor, but Atton wasn’t sure about the rest.
Whatever it was, it drew a startled laugh from Kalani’s throat, a soft, almost unbearably sweet sound. “No, T3, we’re not going to use any of that to make repair parts for you. None of it’s of a good enough quality for that.”
“It won’t break down properly after all the damage it’s taken, anyways,” Bao-Dur advised.
Kalani leaned over and pressed her small hand down flat on top of the droid’s ‘head.’ “We won’t use any repair parts on you that we didn’t get from an actual droid merchant, I promise.”
The droid—T3—made some sort of low-pitched noise that Atton could only assume was meant to communicate reassurance. Kalani drew her hand away and—
She was smiling. Actually smiling. Not that taut, anxious not-smile she’d worn when Grenn was taking them into custody, and not the thin, humorless smirk that had shown up when they went to ‘talk’ with those Exchange thugs back on Citadel Station. A real, genuine smile, and she couldn’t have looked less like the worn-out war vet she had seemed like when they met.
And she was smiling at that droid, and… and Atton came to the sudden realization that he had much, much bigger problems than what Kreia had dug out of his head if he was seriously feeling jealous of a rolling trash can.
Atton didn’t have long to meditate on his jealousy of a rolling trash can (Whether this was a good thing or not, he had no idea). Bao-Dur was saying, his voice just barely rising over a whisper, “It almost makes you wish we were back to pulling valuables off of dead Mandalorians, doesn’t it, General?”
Her smile turned hard and brittle. “Almost,” Kalani replied, in a voice to match the smile. “Their armor must have weighed a ton; it was hell to haul around, even with the Force.”
Atton stared at the two of them in turn, his eyes narrowing.
He’d figured Kalani for a soldier when they first met back on Peragus; the army tats on her arms were kind of hard to miss. (Her swift, fluid gait had set off alarms in his head whose origin it had taken him too long to remember.) That she was a general wasn’t too much of a surprise. Her name had rung a bell, and when he had had some time alone on Citadel Station, Atton had gone digging through old news records until he had found what he was looking for. General Nuna. Mass Shadow Generator. Malachor V. Yeah, he had good reason to remember the name.
Soldier, Jedi, general; all that, Atton expected. But when you implied that a Jedi general had been looting Mandalorian corpses alongside her men… Yeah, that was unexpected.
And at no point did Atton intend to ask about that. He was perfectly content just trying to figure out on his own if they really meant what he thought they meant. The past was the past, and they were all much better off keeping this conversation firmly focused on the present, Atton most of all. He could live with unsated curiosity—or maybe there’d be another news report he could unearth that would tell him what he wanted to know.
But, damn it, she was looking at him, and seeing a moment of unguarded curiosity for what it was.
“My command was often short on supplies in the waning years of the war,” Kalani explained. She was fidgeting with her jacket again, at the frayed patch where her rank insignia should have been. “Eventually, our only reliable means of obtaining new munitions was to take them off the dead. I was almost always in the thick of the fighting, so it just made sense to start stripping down the corpses myself.”
‘Short on supplies’ was definitely a state of being Atton was intimately familiar with. During the Mandalorian wars, his unit had been short on supplies from day one. For the next eight years, Atton had been far more regularly in contact with corpses (in varying states of decay) than he had either expected or wanted to be. But the commanding officer getting in on the act, too? That was new. In Atton’s experience, the commanding officer usually made themselves scarce when it came time to loot some corpses, especially the ones who’d been dead long enough to start bloating. And afterwards…
“What did he even do to get our CO mad enough to kill him?”
“Don’t know, don’t care. All I know is that we’re supposed to take anything that might be valuable off of him, and take them to the commander. Make sure you don’t miss anything, or it might be just me stripping down you both.”
Afterwards was much the same.
An alarm started going off somewhere in the ship. Kalani started to get to her feet, her brow furrowed, but Bao-Dur beat her to the punch. “I’ll see what it is.”
“Should we drop out of hyperspace?” Kalani asked sharply, and Atton noted, with some irritation, one thing she and Kreia had in common: the ability to make someone feel completely and utterly shut out of a conversation.
“I’ll let you know,” Bao-Dur told her. “It doesn’t sound like it’s coming from the engine room, at least.”
“Well, let me know if you need any help.”
“I’ll do that, General.”
With that, he left, the two droids following after him. That left Atton alone with their fearless leader, a situation that managed to please him slightly more than it put him on edge. “So,” he started, before she could say anything, “you’re not new to the whole corpse-looting thing, then.”
Kalani took a pair of vambraces out of the pile of armor and started looking them over. “No,” she murmured, almost absently, though there was an unmistakable thrum of tension hidden underneath. “Like I said, we were always short on supplies by war’s end. We were short on credits, too, and much of the time we were nowhere near a Republic supply route. It was either rob corpses or start stealing from the closest civilian population. I don’t like stealing,” she added quietly, almost as an afterthought.
Atton raised an eyebrow at her. “You don’t like stealing, huh?” His voice practically dripped skepticism. “What about all that stuff I saw you lifting out of Atris’s cargo cylinders?”
At that, she stiffened. “Well,” Kalani said with a high-pitched, almost squeaky timbre to her voice, “Atris did hijack our ship. And she kidnapped T3. If she really wants me to track down the other Jedi for her, then she ought to donate some of the things she isn’t even using to the cause.” She exhaled sharply, her nostrils flaring. “None of what I took related to the history of the Jedi. Knowing Atris as I do, it may be months before she even realizes any of it’s gone.”
Well, this was definitely a side to her he hadn’t seen before. “Sure.”
“I’m being serious!”
There was a history there; she was practically screaming that history in the tense set of her shoulders and the too-bright sheen in her eyes. What curiosity he might have felt, Atton forced back down where he didn’t have to hear from it. But still, he found himself pointing out, “You haven’t seen her in a long time. People can change a lot in ten years.”
The woman who had appeared in the holorecording T3-M4 had picked up on Telos bore little resemblance to the woman sorting through looted armor now. For one thing, Atton was pretty sure that woman wouldn’t have been lifting stuff out of the home of someone she had history with, apparently out of some sort of grudge. That woman from ten years ago probably would have just wanted to throw down with somebody she had a grudge against; Atton wasn’t sure what other sort of impression he was supposed to take away from Kalani just driving her lightsaber straight into the center stone when the council told her to hand it over.
But the hard edges had been sandblasted away in general, or so it looked like to Atton. Beyond that, he could make guesses, but only guesses. Anything deeper would have meant asking questions, would have meant risking being asked questions. He could obfuscate, he could change the subject, he could lie, but Kreia had pried his past out of his head. If Kreia didn’t wind up telling her, it was only a matter of time before Kalani would figure out some or all of it herself—
“I know that, Atton,” she said, very quietly, running her fingernails back and forth across the vambrace in her lap like she was scratching at flesh. “But I like to think that there are some things about her that haven’t changed.”
—and even if that attitude was a dangerous one to have, Atton still found himself nodding, because he knew, he thought he understood it. He understood wanting to believe that something hadn’t changed, or wouldn’t change, or didn’t have to change if you didn’t think about it too much.
(“They’ll break you, you know.”
His hands were quivering at her throat even then, but even with her voice so weak—she’d worn herself out on screaming when he’d started on her montrals, every last bit of Jedi training failing her in that instant—he couldn’t shut her up, couldn’t even tear his eyes away from her bloodied face.
She smiled, her mouth curling up hideously through the pain that rolled off of her in waves. “You know that they will, don’t you? I saw it in your mind—you’ve heard rumors about troops disappearing, and now you know why. When they find out, they’ll break you.”
His mouth unstuck. “Shut up.”
“They won’t give the option of joining the Academy on Korriban, of proving that you can still be loyal of your own accord. A Force-Sensitive who has been trained as you have… They’ll want to be sure. They won’t take any chances.”
“Shut up!”
“They will break you, completely and utterly, until even the most distant dream of freedom is dead inside you, and you don’t recognize what you see in the mirror.”
Even as his hands snapped shut around her neck, she was still smiling, still whispering inside his skull, but he silenced her, at last.)
Add two and three and five…
It was a dangerous attitude, but Atton wasn’t one to talk. And it would probably be better if they changed the subject, which had absolutely nothing to do with it. “I didn’t think you’d wanna go to Nar Shaddaa first.”
Kalani looked up from her work, tilting her head slightly. “What do you mean?”
Not for the first time, Atton got the strong impression that she was playing dumb to avoid asking a question she didn’t like. He wouldn’t have minded so much if she wasn’t so obvious about it. Or maybe he would have minded more if she was less obvious about it; as with many things, he wasn’t certain. Either way, he frowned at her and asked pointedly, “Didn’t you Jedi have an Academy on Dantooine?” It was common knowledge by the time Malak had Dantooine bombed that the Jedi had a base there; there wasn’t any risk in revealing that he knew about it. “I thought you’d want to head there first.”
“No.” The answer came too swiftly, and even Kalani seemed to realize it, because she winced, and shot a stab at an apologetic smile his way. “Like you said, Nar Shaddaa is a good place to lie low, and we really do need to get our bearings. And there’s the fact that it’ll be harder to get rid of all of this—“ she swept her hand around the piles of parts, armor, weapons and scrap metal in the cargo hold “—on Dantooine without questions being asked.” Kalani tugged on her jacket collar. “I didn’t know Zez-Kai Ell very well,” she admitted plainly. “I did know Vrook, and our relationship…” Her mouth twisted in a markedly bitter smirk. “…Well, I’d rather speak to someone I have no real history with first.”
“I got you.” Atton knew plenty of people he would have loved to never have to speak with again, and it wasn’t like he cared too much about dredging up a bunch of old Jedi, anyways (To be perfectly honest, he wouldn’t mind it if she just decided not to look for them at all; a gathering of Jedi sounded like the last thing Atton wanted to be a part of).
“So…” Her voice cut the silence sharply after a few more minutes of sorting through salvaged munitions. “…You’ve spent a lot of time on Nar Shaddaa, haven’t you?”
Now, here was a safe topic. “You bet.” He grinned easily. “I know Nar Shaddaa inside and out. Anything you need, I know how to get it—though your Jedi master might take a while to dig up.”
Kalani laughed suddenly. “That’s good, because I’ve never been to Nar Shaddaa in my life. I’m glad there’s someone here who knows what to expect.”
She was smiling again. At him. No, forget smiling; she was beaming. She practically glowed when she smiled like that, her face lighting up like a star.
There were several things Atton would have liked to do. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d cared so much what someone thought of him, couldn’t remember the last time he had felt anything at all when someone smiled at him. He wasn’t even sure how much he liked the idea of feeling something when she smiled at him. But the only thing he actually could do was to do exactly what he’d done on Telos, when she’d finally stopped looking dead-eyed for good, when he’d first noticed that glow: smile back at her like an idiot, while thinking I am so fucking doomed.