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The issue with vampires, was at first glance they were pretty hard to tell apart from Sith. Their eyes could glow red, they had massive amounts of strength, they could enthrall people, they mostly avoided sunlight. The big difference was that one set liked to lounge on thrones drinking blood from goblets made from the skulls of their enemies, and the other set was medically required to drink blood on a regular basis.
Theron had gotten pretty good at telling them apart. He could spot a Sith easily, even if they were pretending to be a vampire. A vampire pretending to be a Sith was less of his problem, but still easy to identify.
Revan was both.
It shouldn't have been possible. As far as he had ever heard, the Force and vampirism were completely mutually exclusive.
And yet there had stood Darth Ranty, clearly using the force.
The person claiming to be Revan hadn't taken his mask off, so Theron never got a look at his face. He'd never heard of a vampire being able to infect someone without biting them...but apparently this mess of a situation was due to get even weirder.
Theron knew what these symptoms were. If he'd had a proper medical station, or even had an hour or so to get himself loose to go find a proper medical station, he might have been able to stop it. In theory the infection was reversible right up until it killed the victim.
He didn't have that time. Or supplies. And there was shit all his implants could do about it.
All he had was just enough time to be really pissed off about it.
"Theron. Theron we don't have time for you to be dead. Get up."
He wanted to lodge a complaint about that entire sentence.
"This would be a lot easier if you would open your eyes." Cipher 9's voice went hazy for a moment, and then there was blaster fire.
It smelled like burning flesh and Theron was suddenly aware of being so hungry that it felt like his whole abdomen was trying to turn inside out.
"Theron!" the Cipher snapped her fingers in front of his face and for a moment Theron wanted to bite at them. He almost did, but he managed to control himself at the last second.
This was bad.
Everything about this was bad.
The Cipher was probably smart enough to figure that out on her own, so Theron shoved himself off of the table instead of saying anything. If he hadn't been temporarily dead he would have been able to break out on his own, and some strange overly prideful new instinct wanted to insist on that.
Instead he just shook out hands that he knew should feel injured and landed on his feet lightly enough that it made his stomach twist. His bruises should have bruises, at this point. Instead they were just...gone.
Rapid healing. Useful, but not worth the price.
"Thanks," he said. "We need to get out of here before the whole camp boils up. You got what you came for?"
The Cipher stepped back to give him space, shooting him that just-this-side-of feral look of hers she had sometimes, usually only for a moment before she pulled back into that carefully controlled Imperial blankness. "I just retrieved it. Now I'm going to extract it from this mess."
Theron knew exactly what she was implying, he could all but taste it. He chose very consciously to ignore it because it stirred up some sort of territorial dominance instinct that he had approximately just this moment's worth of experience in dealing with. It wasn't a natural thing.
Plus, she was a spy. If she hadn't taken the chance to get some good information and sow some discord among the Revanites, he'd eat his boot.
She didn't wait for him to respond, thankfully. Instead she just started moving.
If he ignored the hunger, Theron was good to move with her. Even if he had been as injured as he should be, he would have been able to keep up.
The biggest problem that every person they killed, he had a stronger and stronger urge to launch towards them and...ew. He was not going to bite anyone. He was definitely not going to bite a corpse. He was going to keep under control until they got back to a base and he could rustle up some synthetic blood. This was a pirate base, there had to be vampires haunting the place.
He managed to keep it together up until the door.
Mostly.
Not enough that he remembered what an issue sunlight would be until the Cipher was grabbing at him with way more strength than she should have been able to manage, strapping some sort of shield generator onto his arm.
She changed the settings quickly.
Not quickly enough for him to not notice the setting she changed it from. There were plenty of reasons to need to block differing types of light with shield tech.
There was only one reason to block that exact wavelength.
He met the Cipher's eyes for a moment, fighting back a haze of red in his eyes just in time to see a glint of gold in hers.
"Can you hold on until we get out of the base?"
"I'm going to need to keep it together for a lot longer than that."
She eyed him, then shrugged. "Just until outside."
Theron didn't bother to answer.
It wasn't easy to get out of the base without gnawing at someone, but he managed it. Even if his vision was pretty much crimson tinted by the time they passed the gates.
He was hoping it would recede. Instead, the further they got, the less he could see. All he wanted to do was turn around and--okay nope. Gross. Not going to.
The Cipher pulled them into a cave system and he barely noticed, until she was unbuttoning her jacket and tugging the collar away from her neck.
Theron ended up several steps closer to her, struggling to control his breathing, before he even knew that he'd moved. "Not funny."
"You need to feed."
"No."
She gave him a hard look, calculating, then smirked. "You know that you can't infect or enthrall me, so what's the risk?"
"Probably not something you should be admitting there."
The Cipher shrugged. "You're not an idiot, Theron. Or at least I assume you aren't. You might be, if you try to leave here while two seconds from a bloodrage. Just lasting this long is a testament to your control, but even you can only hold on for so long."
"Then leave me here and go grab some blood bags."
"Theron," she chided, not bothering to even try to counter that.
She didn't really have to. Theron was already running through scenarios in his head.
He'd be back at the Revanite base before she even left the island.
"So knock me out or something," he offered. "Neither of us are going to be able to keep control if I start...you know."
The Cipher just looked piercingly at him for a moment, then reached out for him. "This is one of the only times you're going to be able to lose control safely, so lose it."
Theron wanted very much to pull back. To keep control and assess the situation.
Instead the hunger surged in the back of his head and he couldn't have stopped himself from closing that last bit of space with all the willpower in the world.
It didn't come up again before they left. They dealt with the Rishi situation, he got back in contact with the SIS and had a massive argument about whether he needed leave to appropriately adjust or not (solved by pointing out that he'd gone rogue to deal with Revan's mess once and he would do it again), and stocked up on synthetic blood.
He kept the Cipher's light shield. They were five seconds done with being infected by traitors. No way he was going to just assume that they'd gotten all of them. A defective light shield on Yavin would be a death sentence.
Theron just hoped the Cipher was as cautious. Yavin was covered with crystals that emitted the exact wavelength of light that would set her off into a shapeshifted rampage. There wasn't anything he could do about it, if someone sabotaged her shield. Not without risking message interception. He'd just have to assume she was just as cautious as he was. Maybe more. She had to be, to have lasted this long.
It was probably why she wasn't bringing up Theron's situation. He wasn't naive enough to assume she wouldn't use it if the opportunity presented itself, and he sure as anything didn't expect any secrecy from Lana, but it wasn't public knowledge, at least.
By the time they were arguing about potentially spying on the Imperials, Theron was pretty sure it was never going to come up.
Which of course meant that not even a few hours later the Cipher was barging into his tent. No manners, no 'can I come in', no awareness that maybe two confirmed spies shouldn't be appearing to meet in secret. None of that. Just in the tent and, "According to a little ghost, a certain disease originated from a very specific Sith ritual meant to infect minions with the ability to harvest life force from thralls. Turns out certain natures aren't quite as contradictory as we thought."
"Subtle." Theron snarked, mind running as he tried to reassess everything that Revan (not Revan?) had done.
It was close to a few theories he'd already heard about this. Not that out there at all, really.
"You trust the ghost."
"It's a ghost."
"So no then."
She shrugged. "It explained some things and was cryptic about the rest. I thought you should know what I got out of that."
"Helpful, unless it was lying."
"It seemed to believe in everything it said."
Theron tilted his head back, sighing, "We're on a planet full of dark force ghosts, some of them are probably crazy."
"This one was lightsided. Said it was Revan."
Theron snapped his eyes up to hers. She didn't look like she was lying.
Unfortunately she also didn't elaborate, instead she was looking at the edge of an empty synthetic blood bag peeking out of his pack. "That can't be appetizing"
"It's really the only option." She probably wasn't lying about the ghost thinking it was Revan, he decided. Whether or not she'd told Satele, though...it could be some sort of trap. Trying to put a rift between the SIS and the Jedi? Or trying to make it look like he was colluding with an Imperial Agent. They were close enough to the do or die moment that if she was going to make a move, now was the time. And this whole mess of an infection probably made anyone who knew about it willing to assume the worst about Theron. There was a lot of misinformation out there, and even people who should have known better tended to fall for that sort of thing easily.
"Not the only option," the Cipher said, voice just this side of a purr.
Theron's eyes snapped to her and she smirked, tilting her head in a way that exposed her neck just a little bit.
He resisted the urge to throw something at her. That would be childish. And also was probably what she wanted. "Not hungry, thanks."
The Cipher heaved a sigh. "Well, your loss."
"Not really."
"You're so mean."
"If you didn't already know that then that's really your own fault."
She laughed. "That's a lie. You make a very convincing nice person, you know." She stepped back towards the wall of the tent, grinning at him. "If you fancy a snack, come find me. Otherwise, I'll see you at the debrief."
Theron pulled in a long breath, standing exactly in place for long enough to let her leave. He didn't know exactly what her hearing radius was, but it would be better than the average human's.
As soon as he thought enough time had passed, he tossed himself at his pack and dug out a filled blood bag.
In the distance, he heard her laugh.