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The first voice was soft — Mitth’arm’inurei trying his best to be inaudible from the other side of the door.
“There's no reason to have a tribunal and you know it. He can’t handle a tribunal right now. Medical issues aside, the man just lost his brother. At least take that into consideration before you go chasing after political gain.”
The other voice, Mitth’urf’ianico, was sharp and clear. “He lost his brother through the same reckless, illegal maneuver that’s led to this tribunal. The family can’t let a transgression like this slide. He is directly responsible for the death of a Syndic and I’ll be damned if I let him skate by without facing the consequences.”
Ar’alani stood, grabbing the questis from Thrawn’s bedside table. It was cold from lack of use; she keyed it to play music — any music — loud enough to drown out the conversation outside. Thrawn watched her from the hospital bed, his face drawn and pale but expressionless, as if he hadn’t heard.
It was a classical symphony from the Csaplar Orchestra, the sort of thing Ar’alani had been forced to study as a child. She listened to the first few strains of the opening allegro, not sure exactly which composer this was, though she recognized the tune. It covered the voices outside imperfectly; she could still hear Thurfian and Tharmin arguing in low tones.
“—fragile mental health,” said Tharmin.
And Thurfian, in response, shot back something of which only, “—no more than he deserves—” was audible. Ar’alani tapped her foot, trying her best to focus on the music, and heard Thurfian’s voice rise above the string instruments to say, quite stridently, “Well, he should feel guilty!”
She grabbed the questis again, searching for something a little louder and more modern. She was scanning rapidly over the options when Thrawn reached out and grabbed her wrist, his fingers cold, his touch gentle.
“Don’t change it,” he said, voice raw from the injuries he’d suffered in the battle against the Vagaari. Then, when Ar’alani only met his eyes with a frown, “Thrass downloaded this for me. It was his favorite.”
Ar’alani studied his face, but he gave nothing away — he only stared back at her steadily, his features too weary to read for anything useful. She saw exhaustion there, but nothing else, and eventually she nodded.
She turned the music up before putting the questis down, sitting stiffly in the visitors’ chair next to Thrawn’s bed. Outside, the conversation between Thurfian and Tharmin was no longer audible, though she was sure they’d carry on for another ten minutes at least. Thrawn was silent, either listening to the music or lost in his thoughts, his eyes far away.
“No one will tell me what will happen when I’m discharged,” he said eventually. “I gather that means the tribunal is going forward.”
Ar’alani grimaced, but said nothing. She was under strict orders not to discuss it until Thrawn was back in good health — at which point, yes, he would go to tribunal, and she was certain the officers and family representatives there would do their best to shatter his nerves and send him straight back to the med center.
She’d sat through tribunals before, of course — hell, she’d even been on the committee for her fair share — and she’d been through them specifically with Thrawn, so she knew how they went. The officers gathered had carte blanche to say anything they pleased, and most of them took the opportunity with relish; anything cruel or vicious that could be said at a tribunal usually was, with the excuse given that the committee had to break the subject down in order to find the truth. They called it fact-finding; it amounted to little more than psychological torture, wherein the subject could do nothing but stand at attention in his dress uniform and take it quietly.
They’d never had better ammunition against Thrawn than they had now. Thrass was missing, presumed dead, and Ar’alani was certain that privately, Thrawn considered it all his fault. The military tribunal would do their damnedest to convince him he was right — and then, when the dust settled and they decided they weren’t interested in a more concrete punishment, they would expect him to return to duty as if nothing had happened.
Silently, Thrawn reached for the questis and Ar’alani handed it to him. It was disconnected from the InfoNet per the doctor’s orders — he didn’t want Thrawn catching sight of a news broadcast, thought it might impede his recovery. But he was allowed to keep the files he’d downloaded over the years.
The whole thing was a little condescending, in Ar’alani’s opinion, but perhaps it was for the best. Looking at the stark red bags beneath Thrawn’s eyes, she decided she didn’t really want him searching the InfoNet, either. He keyed something onto his questis and stared at it silently for a long moment; then, without looking up, he said,
“Admiral Woosk came to see me.”
Ar’alani resisted the urge to make a face; Woosk had never taken much interest in Thrawn before. She said nothing, waiting for Thrawn to go on, and after a moment, his eyes shifted up to study her.
“He was intentionally vague,” Thrawn continued, “but he told me ‘it’s always best to simply own up to one’s mistakes and make no excuses.’ This was the day after I was admitted. He wouldn’t confirm that I’m going to tribunal when I asked.”
He paused, waiting for Ar’alani to say something, but she couldn’t give him the information he desired anymore than Woosk could. Damn Woosk, anyway, for saying something like that — what was the point in keeping the tribunal a secret when top officers were visiting Thrawn and giving him thinly-veiled advice and warnings, anyway? Did they think he wouldn’t figure it out?
“Can you tell me which day it will be?” Thrawn asked, his voice flat.
Ar’alani hesitated, then shook her head. He was silent a moment.
“I’m not sure I have access to my uniforms,” he said finally. “They were all on the Springhawk, last I heard. No one will tell me if they’ve been moved.”
This, Ar’alani decided, was probably in the safe zone. “Your cabin was cleared out shortly after you were admitted here,” she said. “Not because you’ve been removed from command—” Although he probably would be, at least temporarily. “—but because they had a new mission to attend to. Mid Captain Ufsa’ma’kro was placed in charge, and I’ve heard he saw to your possessions himself. Everything you had there is in storage now; you’ll be given the key when you leave.”
Thrawn absorbed all this without saying a word in response. His eyes were fixed on the door and his head was cocked; uneasily, Ar’alani wondered if his hearing was better than hers, if he could still hear the conversation going on outside.
“They’d tell me if they found him,” Thrawn said.
His voice wavered and gave out, making it sound like a question. Ar’alani shifted uncomfortably in her chair as Thrawn hacked out a painful-sounding cough, covering his mouth with one hand and grasping his throat with the other. He rubbed his shoulder when the worst of it was over, his chest spasming with suppressed coughs; he wouldn’t meet her eyes.
They wouldn’t tell him, she suspected. If they found Thrass — alive or dead — they would keep the news to themselves until after the tribunal. Then, as his commanding officer, the duty would probably fall to her. But it was a moot point, she knew. The likelihood that Thrass had survived had already been calculated and dismissed; Thrawn would find out after he was released that the Mitth family had already declared his brother dead.
She looked down at the questis Thrawn had dropped on the mattress next to him. Blinking up at her from the screen was a report she’d seen a million times before, one of several Thrawn wrote for her during the weeks the humans were on the Springhawk with him. Everything he knew about Outbound Flight was included in that report; she could see that some of it was highlighted, as if he’d picked through it again and again, using the limited information available to him in an attempt to track the ship down.
She took a deep breath and looked up, studying Thrawn’s face, the lines of exhaustion beneath his eyes.
“Admiral Woosk was wrong,” she told him, forcing him to look at her. “Don’t own up to any mistakes. Stay confident. You did everything right, and you know it, so don’t let them convince you otherwise — and maybe you’ll convince some of them that you’re right in the process.”
She watched the exhaustion give way to anxiety as she more or less confirmed that he was going to tribunal.
“Have you talked to a psychiatrist?” she asked, her voice gentle. Thrawn threaded his fingers together, clasping his knees to his chest.
“Every day,” he said, fighting against his own face in an attempt to stay neutral. “He calls me uncommunicative.”
Ar’alani said nothing to that, privately certain that the psychiatrist was right. “I’ve talked to your doctors, too,” she said instead. “They said you’re even-tempered, patient, highly intelligent, cooperative. They said you help them out a great deal by playing cards with the other patients and keeping them calm.”
This seemed to relax him a little, though only slightly. Ar’alani knew only too well that he wasn’t accustomed to praise from his superiors, and she suspected the doctors hadn’t mentioned any of this to him directly.
“For what it’s worth,” she said, scooting her chair a little closer to his bed, “your lead doctor, Ulra’nas’sara, has filed a plea for leniency on your behalf. I can’t let you read it now — maybe after all this is over — but I can quote a little of it to you. She calls you ‘possibly the sharpest and most honorable officer the Ascendancy currently has in its ranks.’”
Thrawn didn’t react to this; perhaps, Ar’alani thought, she’d gone a bit too far, especially when she saw his face darken a little. For someone so used to reprimands, he probably thought she was fabricating praise to make him feel better — a miscalculation on her part, and one she wasn’t sure how to correct. They sat in awkward silence, with nothing but the Csaplar Orchestra to fill the room.
Ar’alani did her very best not to jump when, a moment later, the door to Thrawn’s room opened with a gentle click. A nurse stuck his head in the door, with Tharmin hovering over his shoulder.
“Visitor for you,” the nurse said, letting Tharmin in. Ar’alani stood, ceding her chair to the Syndic and grabbing Thrawn’s questis off his bed to turn the music down. Tharmin entered, his stride confident but his smile hesitant, and stood near Ar’alani’s chair rather than sit.
There was a white cord knotted over the rising sun crest on his shoulder, a symbol of mourning in the House of Mitth. Thrawn’s eyes went to it at once; his face froze.
Ar’alani could tell that, for the next fifteen minutes, Thrawn didn’t hear a single word the Syndic said.
As his commanding officer — or the nearest thing he had to one — it was Ar’alani’s job to check Thrawn out of the hospital a week later, when he was finally, tentatively, declared fit for duty. She met his doctors in the lobby of the med center outside the private room they’d given him; down the hall, she could see Thrawn in a glass-walled waiting room with a series of other military patients, all of them in lightweight hospital-issue pajamas. Some of them were watching a holoprojector in the center of the room; one or two were reading, but no one seemed inclined to speak.
Thrawn himself sat with his knees curled up his chest and his chin resting on his hand, listlessly playing cards with an agitated-looking young soldier. Ar’alani was watching them from afar when Ulra’nas’sara appeared at her elbow.
“That’s Midshipman Wesk,” Ranass said. “Post-traumatic stress disorder; goes off like a firecracker at the slightest provocation. Your senior captain’s been keeping him calm for weeks now; we’ll be sorry to see him go.”
Through the glass, Wesk leaned away from the table with a triumphant smile and gathered up his cards.
“I can’t tell,” said Ranass, “if Thrawn is letting him win or if he’s genuinely bad at cards.”
Ar’alani kept her opinion to herself. She turned away from the waiting room and the damaged-looking men and women inside, her fingers tightening around the bag in her hands. “I’m here to check him out,” she said.
“Of course,” said Ranass. “Right this way.”
She led Ar’alani only a few steps further, to the desk in the center of the lobby. The datawork was already loaded and waiting for them, leaving Ar’alani to scan through each doc and sign it with the light-pen provided for her. She glanced over the medical charts, noting the recommendations for further treatment — both physical and psychiatric — as well as the various diagnoses either set forth in stone or proposed as possibilities.
The damage to Thrawn’s throat, these reports said, was not permanent, but would require a great deal of time and work to recover from; he may lose his voice periodically until the healing regimen was completed, and possibly these bouts of voicelessness would continue off and on for the rest of his life. Under the psychiatric section, there were only a few brief notes, each one dashed down in bullets: Uncommunicative/private, as Thrawn had already told her; anxiety + grief possible; post-traumatic stress disorder not likely; and finally, a word Ar’alani didn’t recognize, alexithymic. She hovered over it, eyebrows furrowed, and felt Ranass lean over her shoulder to take a look.
“The subclinical inability to process or identify one’s emotions,” Ranass explained. “He shows marked dysfunction in that area, Admiral. He gets along well with others and seems to know what’s polite and what isn’t, for the most part, but he’s severely lacking in emotional awareness, social attachment, and interpersonal relations.”
Ar’alani grimaced, but signed off on the last form. “What causes it?” she asked.
There was a brief silence, as if Ranass didn’t understand the question. “I suspect he was born with it,” she said, taking a step back from Ar’alani and glancing at the glass-walled room where Thrawn had just started a new card game with Midshipman Wesk. “For some people, it’s caused by a brain injury, depression, or some developmental disorders, but we don’t have any indicators toward those in Thrawn. Childhood trauma and neglect are also possibilities, but he’s given us very little information to work with.” She glanced back and must have seen something concerning on Ar’alani’s face, because she stepped forward again and put a comforting hand on her arm. “It’s not that he doesn’t have emotions,” Ranass said. “It’s simply that he doesn’t know what they are or how to identify them. As an example, when the psychiatrist was here—”
“Should you be telling me this?” asked Ar’alani, her face stiff.
“You’re his commanding officer,” said Ranass, looking surprised at the question. “His medical records are open to you. Some would say it’s your responsibility to know.”
She paused, perhaps waiting for Ar’alani to argue, and then went on.
“When the psychiatrist did his initial information-gathering session, he asked Thrawn to explain the circumstances that led to him being here. Quite a stressful story, you can imagine. When Thrawn got to the end of it all — the loss of the ship, the Syndic’s disappearance — he lost his voice rather suddenly. He couldn’t answer any more questions; when the psychiatrist kept trying to talk to him, he started to cry.”
Ar’alani tensed at that, her face warming. She glanced through the windows at Thrawn, who was talking quietly to Wesk, looking bored and distant.
“Nothing dramatic,” Ranass told her. “In fact, the psychiatrist told me later he almost wanted to make a photographic record in case he ever publishes a paper on Thrawn’s condition. There were tears, but…” She gestured to her face, making a stony expression. “No emotion. You see, he’s quite capable of physically describing the symptoms of an emotion — a fast heartbeat, for example, or tremors, or a rush of blood to the face — but he can’t seem to diagnose the emotion causing them.”
Ar’alani said nothing; she tried not to project her disapproval for the topic, but suspected some got through nonetheless.
“He was still capable of writing, of course, even if he couldn’t speak,” Ranass continued. “We suspect that’s a bit of a psychosomatic problem, by the way. The conversation went on for a while via questis, but the psychiatrist ran into a bit of a wall when he tried to ask Thrawn why he was crying. Thrawn said he didn’t know and claimed to be feeling nothing negative at the time; he admitted to some embarrassment over losing his composure, but nothing more.”
“I see,” said Ar’alani. She rolled her shoulders, trying not to show how uncomfortable she was with this information. Luckily, the doctor wasn’t watching her; her eyes, like Ar’alani’s, were focused on Thrawn.
“As you can see, his instincts are good — his default mode is toward kindness and respect, and he treats everyone here with patience and dignity. Most of the nurses aren’t as patient with Wesk as Thrawn is,” Ranass said. “If given enough time and support, I think he’ll become one of the most loved commanding officers in the Fleet.”
Ar’alani raised her eyebrows and Ranass shrugged, making a face to indicate that she knew how unlikely it was that Thrawn would be given time or support. She gestured for the questis and Ar’alani handed it to her, waiting quietly while Ranass approved the datawork.
“I’ll go get him for you,” Ranass said.
Left alone with her thoughts, Ar’alani tightened her grip on the bag she’d brought with her. She watched as Ranass ducked into the glass-walled room, saying something Ar’alani couldn’t hear. Thrawn stood slowly, speaking a while longer with Midshipman Wesk — saying goodbye, Ar’alani suspected. He shuffled his deck of cards into a neat stack and handed them to the midshipman before he left.
He looked the same as always, Ar’alani thought as he walked toward her. The same confident grace in every step, the same imperious angle of his chin. At the same time, he looked irrevocably changed. His skin was pale, his cheeks hollow, the lines beneath his eyes a little more pronounced. The pajamas they’d given him hung off his frame, making him look like he’d been underfed.
Ar’alani took all this in without letting it show on her face. When Thrawn stopped before her, she held the bag out to him and said, “Ready to go home, Senior Captain?”
He studied her face for a moment before taking the bag, glancing down at the civilian clothes she’d packed for him to change into. She hoped she’d picked something he would like, but there was no hint of either approval or disapproval on his face.
She waited in the lobby while he changed, returning in clothes Ar’alani had selected from the nearest Fleet Exchange the day before. She’d chosen them for comfort and warmth, but they looked good on Thrawn — certainly fit him better than the hospital pajamas he’d been wearing before. He looked a little self-conscious as he approached her, though she couldn’t explain why; she’d seen him in civvies plenty of times before.
“Ready,” he said quietly, stopping at her side. Ar’alani put a hand on his arm, guiding him toward the door.
“Then let’s go,” she said.
There were three stages to any tribunal. Thrawn would go before the review board first, a humiliating process where his actions would be picked over by a group of officers in non-command positions, some of them younger and lower-ranking than Thrawn. In Ar’alani’s experience, a case like this would garner at least fifty volunteers, some of them eager to participate, others only there to watch. Most would be people Thrawn knew; all would be reporting his every word and minute reaction to their families.
Next, he would face Ar’alani, who as his commanding officer was expected to belittle him for at least forty-five minutes; she intended to do nothing more than call Thrawn into her office and stamp the paperwork sending him to tribunal while the necessary witnesses watched from the sidelines.
After that, the real agony would start. She glanced at him as they left the hospital, Thrawn narrowing his eyes against the sunlight reflecting off the snow. He scanned the parking lot and headed toward her rented speeder before she could point it out; she remembered how he’d acted at the Academy, when he’d been accused of cheating — how he’d tried to explain himself and then shut down, staying hopelessly silent while the officers decided his fate.
He’d gotten better since then, she knew. He’d learned how to look and sound unaffected, and he’d heard almost everything before. She’d seen other soldiers break down at tribunal; one had started crying when his family representative called him ungrateful, which was an insult Thrawn had borne without reaction at least six times.
This time would be different. She could feel it in her bones.
She climbed into the speeder next to Thrawn and turned on the heat before turning to look at him, forcing an expression of relaxed happiness on her face.
“It’s good to see you,” she said.
He didn’t smile back at her.
“Well,” said Ar’alani. She thought of all the things she needed to address, all the things she had to do to prepare him for what he was about to go through. She took a deep breath and tightened her fingers on the steering yoke.
“Well,” she said again, with false brightness, “where do you want to eat?”
Thrawn looked sideways at her, eyebrows raised. Ar’alani raised her eyebrows right back.
“I’m buying,” she said.
She wasn’t, by military doctrine, permitted inside the review board. She was there before Thrawn went in; she fussed with the medals on his dress uniform, keeping a professional, almost brusque air the whole time, and quizzed him on what he would say. When a pair of enlisted men escorted Thrawn inside, all she could do was watch.
She was still standing there an hour later when they escorted him back outside, his head held high and his back straight. His eyes, she saw with some relief, were dry.
“Dismissed?” she asked him, glancing around for the legal team that had been there earlier to make sure Thrawn signed to say he understood his charges.
“Yes,” said Thrawn, a line appearing between his eyebrows. “Released for the day.”
He looked confused, like he didn’t know what to do with himself. Ar’alani understood perfectly; he had no living quarters here, no ship to return to, no mission to attend. She glanced back at the chamber he’d just come from, and then back at him, noticing for the first time that his hair was damp with sweat.
“Do you want me to find out what they decided?” she asked.
Thrawn’s eyebrow twitched. “No need. They’re sending me to command review,” he said. “With you, I assume.”
“They told you?” Ar’alani asked, surprised. “In there?”
“It was the first thing they said.”
She’d known they would, of course, and she’d already decided how she would handle it — but she’d never heard of a review board telling the subject their decision outright, only to continue grilling them for a full hour. Fury bubbled up inside her, and she found her eyes drawn back to the chamber door again and again. The review board had only the thinnest excuse for the type of bullying that went on in there, and in Thrawn’s case, they’d thrown it out the window right off the bat, essentially telling him they had all the facts, had made their decision, and were going to torture him anyway.
She felt the ghost of a touch against her wrist and turned to look at Thrawn, unable to wipe the frown from her face.
“I assumed you were my ride home,” he said. Ar’alani made a concerted effort to get her face back under control.
“Of course,” she said. “The Mitth family has a hotel room set up for you. I can take you there right away, if you want.”
He nodded, but Ar’alani suspected it wouldn’t matter to him where they went. She cast one last look at the chamber door before nodding back and leading him away.
“Give me a rundown,” she said as they walked. “What did they say?”
For a moment, he didn’t answer. He reached up, wiping the sweat from the back of his neck, and then clasped his hands behind his back as if unaffected.
“They led me through the events of the last several weeks, the Vagaari attack in particular, with a series of pointed yes-or-no questions,” Thrawn said, his voice even. “Occasionally they asked me to expand upon a particular subject. No more than a sentence or two each time. It was typical for a review board; several loud interruptions. I was under the impression they weren’t very interested in my answers.”
Ar’alani felt her lips twist, a sour taste flooding her mouth. “No, probably not. Or rather, they were interested, but only so much as they hoped you would give them further ammunition. Verbal missteps are the bread and butter of review boards." She hesitated, questioning the wisdom of the first anecdote that came to mind, and then decided to tell him. "Once, I was present when a pair of midshipmen went up for review for drunkenness on duty; one didn’t drink for religious purposes, but the other spiked his beverage at a company party without telling him. Do you remember that incident? You were at the same command at the time.”
Thrawn inclined his head.
“Well, frankly, it made no sense to send the first midshipman to review,” Ar’alani said, lengthening her stride a bit in anger. “He was a victim in this scenario. But they sent him to review anyway, and he handled it well — except when they asked him why he drank the spiked drink. They refused to believe he hadn’t known there was alcohol in it; he stayed firm, but at one point he misspoke and said the other midshipman ‘forced’ him to drink, when really, of course, he was only somewhat pressured; the other midshipman didn't physically force his hand. You can imagine the ruckus that caused.”
“All too well,” Thrawn said.
“Especially because there were suspicions about the other midshipman’s motivations,” Ar’alani continued. She glanced sideways at Thrawn, studying his face. “And especially because his would-be victim was some nobody from a provincial, highly religious family on Rentor, and the midshipman who drugged him was Ufsa family blood.”
“Yes,” said Thrawn, his voice modulated. “I remember.”
Ar’alani eyed him a moment, hoping for something more, but Thrawn seemed disinclined to take her prompt as a jumping-off point.
He was silent all the way to the hotel.
There was a full week between Thrawn’s review board and his command review with Ar’alani, and on the third day, she returned to his hotel room and set a questis down on the table before him. He hesitated, dressed casually in the same civilian clothes she’d bought for him when he was discharged from the hospital, and then set down his tea and picked the questis up instead.
She watched his face darken as he read.
“There’s no getting out of it,” Ar’alani said, cutting off his argument before it began. He held the questis a little farther away from him and tilted his head, as if that might change the orders written there. Finally, without any change in his expression, he turned off the questis and returned to his tea.
“May I?” Ar’alani asked, gesturing to the empty chair across from him. He nodded and Ar’alani took a seat, straightening the hem of her uniform trousers as she crossed her legs. “I’m supposed to escort you,” she told him. “Standard procedure.”
“Standard procedure for patients released from the psychiatric ward,” Thrawn corrected her, his face still unreadable. "I was released from general hospice."
“It’s just a check-up appointment, Thrawn,” Ar’alani told him, keeping her voice gentle. She reached for his hand and he took a casual sip of tea at the same time, moving out of her reach. “It’s mandatory after any traumatic event.”
He shot her a dry smile at that. “First time they’ve bothered with me. Why now?”
She only stared at him, unsure what to say. Her eyes darted down to his shoulder, where the white mourning knot was conspicuously absent. He caught her staring and his smile disappeared.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
She watched his features twist from one emotion to the next, each too subtle and fleeting for her to identify it. He raised his cup of tea to his lips and let it rest there so the steam obscured his face.
“I’m fine,” he said.
“Fine isn’t an emotion,” Ar’alani said. “How are you feeling?”
For a long moment, he said nothing. Then, silently, he set down his cup of tea and slid the questis toward him, turning it back on. His fingers tapped over the screen rapidly, ignoring the light-pen attached to the side, and then he turned it around and propped it up so she could see.
Thrass’s death notice.
Ar’alani read it silently, her face pinched. It made no mention of Thrass’s birth name, his home planet, his surviving relatives. As for cause of death, it said only that he’d been killed in the line of duty — and, at the very bottom of the notice, below the dates for a memorial service that had already passed: Any criminal charges will be announced pending the conclusion of military tribunal.
She looked up at Thrawn, his face unreadable.
“You don’t know what you’re feeling, do you?” she said.
His expression didn’t change. He turned the questis back around, scanning the death notice. She watched his eyes soften, but when he glanced back up at her again, the only emotion she could read off him was confusion.
“Numb,” he said.
The psychiatrist’s office was ten times smaller than the medcenter across the street; the sign read ‘Mental Health Services’ in white block letters, large enough for anyone driving by to read it. Ar’alani saw Thrawn frowning up at it as the two of them passed beneath on their way to the door.
He’d been in the hotel gym when she arrived to pick him up. It was eight in the morning, and he’d been down there for four hours, according to the concierge; the front desk had been watching him ever since he asked them to unlock the door before the gym was officially opened. He’d taken a quick shower before he left, but there was something about him — an exaggerated weariness in his posture, perhaps — that made him look as though he’d come directly from battle.
“You’re not supposed to be working out yet,” Ar’alani told him on the drive over, her jaw tight. “You’re on limited duty. Don't make things worse for yourself.”
He’d stared out the window, not impressed by the reprimand. “A little sparring practice won’t strain my throat,” he said.
“Four hours of sparring practice,” Ar’alani corrected him, and neither of them had spoken a word after that.
She checked him in at the front desk. The waiting room was small and empty, with only four chairs for guests, and Thrawn was ushered through a locked door immediately after scanning his ID card. He didn’t look back at her as the nurse led him away. Fifteen minutes later, with his vitals taken and a general admittance questionnaire filled out, Thrawn returned and sat quietly next to Ar’alani until he was called back once again.
For the next hour, Ar’alani sat in the waiting room alone, her stomach a ball of anxiety, her hands closed on a questis she couldn’t force herself to focus on. She was hyper-conscious of the receptionist across from her, whose eyes seemed continually pulled to Ar’alani’s white uniform. Possibly, she’d never seen anyone so high-ranking on escort duty before.
She checked her messages, many of them related to the Vagaari and Outbound Flight. She only glanced up again when the locked door swung open again and Thrawn stepped out, his face contorted into a scowl.
“Hi,” said the receptionist, catching Thrawn’s attention before Ar’alani could ask what was wrong. “Can I set you up for another appointment?”
Thrawn angled his head her way briefly and said, “No.” He turned to Ar’alani and raised his eyebrows; after a moment, she stood, but she didn’t walk with Thrawn to the door. She went to the front desk instead.
“Set him up for an appointment,” she said. She glanced over her shoulder at Thrawn, who hadn’t moved; he still stood in the middle of the waiting room, glaring at the floor. “If you need a different psychiatrist,” she said to him, “now’s the time to say so.”
“Ah, he won’t be able to switch, I’m afraid,” said the receptionist with a shake of her head. “We’ve only got two on staff, and Pell’ark’sana is booked full.”
Ar’alani stared at her, swallowing a few choice words, and forced herself to nod. She was dimly aware of Thrawn exiting the building without her and nearly went after him, before reminding herself that she was his ride back to the hotel. He couldn’t leave without her.
“Nine o’clock, one month from now,” the receptionist said, typing it into her questis. “Does that work?”
“I’ll make sure it does,” Ar’alani said. “Thank you.”
The receptionist gave a perfunctory smile and handed her something — Thrawn’s ID card, Ar’alani realized as she took it. She turned it over in her hands, staring at the outdated photo from when he’d graduated Taharim, barely out of his teens.
“He left this behind?” she murmured, tracing his name with her thumb.
The receptionist’s smile didn’t falter, but it grew a little more sympathetic. “Most people get pretty flustered on their way out.”
Ar’alani said nothing to that. She tucked the ID card into her pocket and pushed the door open, squinting briefly in the bright winter sunlight. Around the corner of the building, she saw Thrawn, waiting not by the speeder but at an outdoor seating area. He was perched on the edge of a picnic table, his arms crossed and his eyes far away; as Ar’alani watched, another soldier approached him, speaking quietly, and Thrawn reached into his pocket and handed the soldier a stick of tabac.
She approached him quickly, interrupting him as the other soldier bent down for a light.
“I didn’t know you smoke,” she said to Thrawn, her eyes narrow.
He didn’t glance her way, keeping his lighter at the end of the soldier’s tabac stick while the other man took a deep breath in. Thrawn only pulled away when the end of it was smoldering. He stood silently, without saying goodbye to the other men gathered around the table, and walked with Ar’alani to the speeder.
She handed him his ID card before they got in, watching his face carefully so she didn’t miss the flicker of surprise and anxiety as he realized he’d walked away without it.
“I take it things didn’t go well in there,” she said.
Thrawn took his ID card, his thumb sliding up absently to cover his own name and face. “The psychiatrist knew him,” he said. “She worked with him. Years ago. On mental health reform.”
Ar’alani tried desperately to keep her face blank; she could feel something swelling inside her throat, had to repress the urge to touch him, to pull him into an embrace. Instead, she said nothing and only watched him, waiting for the fragmented sentences to come together.
“It didn’t go through,” said Thrawn heavily, still looking at his ID. After a long moment, he seemed to realize what he was doing and blinked, sliding the card into his breast pocket. “The reform,” he clarified.
“Why not?” Ar’alani asked, her voice soft. He blinked again, rapidly this time, and stared at the speeder in something like confusion.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t ask him.”
There was a long silence. Ar’alani ran her thumb over the edge of the speeder’s starter key, focusing on the catch of the teeth against her skin. She could tell him to ask the psychiatrist instead, if he wanted to find out, but she didn’t say a word; somehow, she knew he never would. When his next appointment came, if Ar’alani couldn’t escort him again, he would either call to cancel or simply never show.
She unlocked the speeder with a sigh. Cognizant of her uniform and the witnesses at the seating area not far away, she compromised with her own desires. Instead of hugging him, she reached out and touched him, wrapping her fingers around his forearm just beneath his elbow.
His jaw clenched. She could feel the cords of muscle tensing beneath her hand a moment before he jerked away.
“It’s just a handshake,” Ar’alani said, her voice coming out more pleading than exasperated. Thrawn turned away from her; he slipped into the passenger seat of the speeder and stared out the window, silently waiting for her to get in. She crossed her arms over her chest, debating with herself for a moment, and then walked around to the other side and started the engine.
When she glanced at Thrawn, ready to either defend herself or apologize, she saw that he was trembling.
“I’m not going back,” he said.
The tribunal itself was open to the public, but the stands were filled with Mitth family members who crowded out the lower-ranking officers and enlisted men who might have wished to attend. Ar’alani scanned the crowds and saw only one person who looked out of place — a hardy-looking civilian woman in her sixties or seventies, her face lined and her eyes hard. Her clothes were cheap and worn, making her stand out all the more.
She didn’t mean to stare — truly — but as the tribunal wore on, Ar’alani found that this civilian woman had somehow become her focal point. Instead of staring at Thrawn, she stared at this woman, barely hearing anything said to Thrawn as the tribunal wore on.
She heard the harsh tones of the Aristocra and Supreme Admiral, but scarcely noted their words. She registered, faintly, the men and women who testified in Thrawn’s defense; her own testimony was rote, delivered automatically; she couldn’t be sure she hit her mark.
She looked at Thrawn only once — and briefly — when Syndic Thurfian told him in no uncertain terms that regardless of the tribunal’s decision, he would forever be considered responsible for Syndic Thrass’s death in the eyes of the Mitth family. Thrawn’s face was like stone.
“It was your actions which led to his death,” said Thurfian, emphasizing each word with a bang of his fist against the desk. “It was you who sent a civilian into battle. It was you who allowed a civilian to do what you know was your duty while you turned tail and attempted to cover your tracks. It was you who ordered him onto a doomed ship and gave him the impossible task of landing it, and it was you who sentenced him to a death more horrid and painful than anyone can imagine. You are responsible for his death, Mitth’raw’nuruodo. No one else.”
He ceded the floor to the Supreme Admiral, who delivered Thrawn’s sentence in even tones. It was depressingly lenient after the hell they'd dragged him through. He would receive no demotion nor dock in pay; he would return to physical therapy and remain on limited duty until his healing regimen was complete. His ship, the Springhawk, would remain in the hands of Mid Captain Samakro until further notice, and when Thrawn’s regimen was over, he would receive new orders at once.
The bang of the gavel dismissed them. The crowds dispersed. The Council filed out one by one.
Thrawn, Ar’alani, and the civilian woman remained. Ar’alani watched, unmoving, as the old woman stood slowly, her pale fingers gripping the rail before her, and stared down at her only remaining son. Thrawn met her eyes, his head turned away from Ar’alani so she couldn’t see his face; neither of them said a word.
After a long silence, the Kivu matriarch turned and left.
“It’s nothing I haven’t heard before,” Thrawn said that night in his hotel room. There was an open bottle of liquor on the table between them, and he’d disabled the alarms and opened the windows so he could smoke. The tabac stick dangled between his fingers now, neglected ash drifting off the end of it.
“I heard it at the review board,” Thrawn continued, his voice hoarse and dull. “And the hospital.”
“They blamed you at the hospital?” Ar’alani asked.
He rubbed his throat, not seeming to notice what he was doing, and shrugged. “They framed it differently. Trying to guess how I felt.” His eyes were fixed unseeingly on the bottle of liquor, and they didn’t shift in the slightest when he gave a humorless snort. “They weren’t wrong. I could have prevented it.” He paused, maybe waiting for her to argue with him — but Ar’alani didn’t think so. She got the impression he was gathering his thoughts. After a long moment, he flicked the ash off the end of his tabac stick and raised it to his lips. “I could have stopped him,” he said, exhaling smoke. “Or I could have gone myself.”
His voice was flat, emotionless. Ar’alani couldn’t read his face.
“You could have,” she said eventually. “But it would have been the wrong choice. And he wouldn’t have let you.”
He said nothing to that. Between them, his questis blinked to life, displaying a message from General Ba’kif that he banished without reading it. He took another drag on his cigarra and shook his head.
“Did she talk to you at all?” Ar’alani asked, her grip tightening on the glass of liquor before. “Your mother?”
Again, he shook his head. “I didn’t know she would be there,” he said. He finished his cigarra but kept it burning, reaching into his tunic for a new one. Ar’alani stayed his hand.
“It’s bad for your throat,” she said.
He froze beneath her touch, his face a wooden mask, and then nodded, putting the stick of tabac away again. His voice had been hoarse since the tribunal; it had gone out three times since then, every time she tried to have a conversation with him. When Tharmin had called earlier, Thrawn’s voice had gone out completely, leaving him unable to speak.
He sighed through his nose, trading the cigarra for the bottle of liquor. He poured himself a measure of it and drank deeply, not meeting Ar’alani’s eyes but not necessarily avoiding them either.
“Still feeling numb?” she asked him.
He stared at her over the rim of the glass and let the alcohol rest on his tongue for a moment before swallowing. To her surprise, he shook his head.
“I’m not numb,” he said, his voice unreadable. “It’s just…”
His lips moved, but no sound came out. Ar’alani watched the column of his throat shift once, twice, as he swallowed against a sudden sharp pain in his esophagus. He turned his head away from her, covered his face with the back of his hand. The stubbed-out cigarra was still between his fingers, staining his skin with tabac as he coughed.
When the coughing subsided, he took another drink and shook his head.
“Voice gone?” Ar’alani asked him.
He cleared his throat and nodded. His face was placid but tired, his features composed and giving nothing away. She remembered what the doctor had told her when she checked him out — how he started crying when asked about Thrass, but his expression never changed, and he couldn’t tell the psychiatrist whether he felt angry or anxious or sad.
She remembered how he’d jerked away when she tried to touch him two weeks ago and how he’d stared at his ID card, covering his name and face. Slowly, forcing the words out against her will and desperately hoping he’d say no, she asked, “Do you want me to leave you alone?”
He stared into his liquor glass, not meeting her eyes, and cleared his throat again. She watched his lips part as he tried to speak. It came out as a scratchy whisper, pained and raw.
“No,” he said. And then, with effort, “Stay.”
She studied his face, trying to read the emotion there. He studied her back, his eyes flickering from the frown on her face to the line between her eyebrows and down to her shoulders, which were slowly starting to relax.
She wondered what emotion he saw in her.
She herself wasn’t sure.