Work Text:
Keyword: Onomatophobia.
He’d always thought it should be painful, or at least uncomfortable when the codephrase took his mind over, but it felt like nothing. One moment his body responded to his own commands, and the next it simply didn’t, as if the loss of control was as natural as breathing. The familiar, numb dread he’d been free of for over a year flooded back into him like icewater. The tension in his shoulders went slack while his heartbeat shot up to a frantic staccato that he could hear even over the roar of the battle around him, the only part of him still acting under its own volition. He’d been so sure that he was free. But that was always the crux of his life, wasn’t it? He didn’t know who held the leash this time - he never heard orders at all - but felt his hand obey whatever silent direction it had received, smoothly unhooking his blaster from its holster while he stared helplessly into the wide, nervous eyes in front of him.
No.
She was young, barely an apprentice, he would have guessed, and held a lightsaber as if it was partly unfamiliar to her. As if she still couldn’t fully believe that she would have to use it in a real fight.
Run, he tried to shout at her, but his mouth and throat were no more responsive than his limbs, and his face remained an impassive mask. His arm raised the blaster. He should never have come to Tython. He should never have stayed in Imperial space at all, never gotten involved with Sith politics again. Faceless Imperial soldiers flooded past them over the ruins of the temple grounds, leaving nothing but scattered, robed corpses in their wake. None of them would stop him. He was doing the right thing, after all. Serving the Empire.
Please run.
He fired, and the scent of burning flesh filled his nose and throat. The girl crumpled to the ground, lightsaber clattering still unused from her hand, her empty face mirroring his around the smoking hole between her eyes. He wanted to scream, but only heard himself laugh coldly, lips drawing back into an empty, false grin of their own accord. The girl's body and the crumbling temple behind her swam in his darkening vision, and he thought he might be falling.
He couldn’t breathe. It was dark, and he couldn’t breathe, and the screams and sounds of blaster fire were gone, replaced by a sudden, smothering silence. He couldn’t breathe, but he heard himself gasp for air too loudly for the quiet around him and realized, distantly, that his body must have been his own again. He clenched and unclenched his empty hand, to be sure, and felt it obey him. His blaster was gone. He couldn’t breathe. The air was still and free of smoke, and he saw the small, multicolored lights of a wall console a short distance from where he sat. He fixed his eyes on the blinking lights and tracked the familiar, complicated pattern, counting the blinks and watching them fall in and out of sync with each other while adrenaline lanced through his veins aimlessly, and his heartbeat resonated in his throat. He felt lightheaded.
“Khatte?”
A sliver of soft, blueish light bisected the room, dimly illuminating his quarters, and he flinched, eyes still fixed on the console. It did nothing to stop his mind from replaying the images it had conjured. His old codephrase had woven itself into his dreams in any number of inventive ways since he had broken its hold, and he couldn’t be surprised that it had finally managed to bleed into the most recent crop of nightmares. It would almost have been a welcome change, if it didn’t feel like a sick, mocking reminder that in reality, nobody had forced him to do anything on Tython. There was no invisible hand pulling the strings, nobody to blame but himself for his part in the wholesale massacre the attack had become. He might have saved a handful of lives by being there, once the battle was finished, but he doubted it came anywhere close to the number he had killed. They weren’t even his enemies, not anymore, and he’d still killed them.
Freedom had sounded appealing before he had it, but it turned out that with no mind control and no Keeper, he simply sought out new masters and new atrocities to commit on his own, like an abandoned droid still trying to fulfil its only purpose. The only difference was that now he could look back on the smoking trail of broken lives behind him and be sure that he was the only constant. He wasn’t sure whether to laugh at the irony or scream at himself.
“Agent,” the low voice came again, oddly insistent, and he realized belatedly that it was directed at him.
“Yes, what is it?” he asked the silhouette in the doorway. He automatically kept his tone clipped, neutral, a canned response that betrayed no distress and invited no further conversation. It had never worked on Vector before and was unlikely to start now, but it was a difficult habit to shake.
“We don’t mean to intrude,” he said, “but we heard shouting. Are you well?”
Something inside him recoiled at the hint of sympathy in Vector’s tone, and he wondered how much he’d said and how far it had carried. Sometimes the ship felt too blasted small for so many people with so many secrets.
“Can’t you just feel my aura or something and get your answer?” he groused, more haltingly than he'd intended. He'd developed the ability to do a convincing impression of someone not in the throes of a nervous breakdown, as long as he didn't have to do it for long, but Vector needed to leave. Even if he could afford to be that vulnerable with anyone, and by some miracle it never came back to bite him, Khatte knew well enough that he had done monstrous things. He fully deserved to be haunted by them.
“Yes,” Vector said, instead of leaving, “but we thought a more human approach would be appropriate here. If you’d prefer, we’ll jump straight to describing the colors of your trauma next time.”
“I had a dream, that’s all. It happens. I’m fine.”
He’d meant it to be a dismissal, but whatever his aura was doing, it must have been concerning enough for Vector to ignore his hostility completely. He stepped fully into the room as though Khatte had invited him in and let the door slide shut behind him. His black eyes were as unreadable as ever, but his brow was furrowed, whether with worry or frustration at Khatte’s reticence was difficult to say. The room was thrown back into shadow, aside from the blinking lights, but neither of them needed more than that to see, and it was better than worrying that someone else would walk by. It was bad enough that Vector had. Khatte had made up his mind a long time ago that if Kaliyo ever caught him in this state, he would have to throw her out of the airlock.
“I don’t need help,” he snapped as Vector impassively sat down at the edge of the bed. It seemed distantly odd that he was still there at all. Ordinarily, he avoided any interaction with Khatte that was likely to lead to a true confrontation, but he appeared to have set that policy aside.
“You’re hyperventilating,” he replied with a level of patience that was maddening, “We can taste your distress in the air; heavy and sharp, a rainless electrical storm. We would feel… irresponsible, leaving you like this.”
I’m not your responsibility, he almost retorted, but couldn’t get the words out; he felt his composure slipping away again. It didn’t matter. Vector wasn’t leaving, and Khatte wasn't even certain that he wanted him to. He felt strangely distant from his own body, and couldn’t shake the irrational fear that if he tried to control it any more than he already was, it would stop obeying him again.
“Agent, focus on breathing. Try to match ours, if you can.”
The concise, clear directions caught at his scattered thoughts, seemed to pull part of his mind back into order. That was something he could do. As long as he had instructions, as long as he was following them, there would be no reason to take control away from him. That hadn’t always been true, of course, but Vector was so wholly unlike Hunter that the thought barely entered his mind. He watched the rise and fall of Vector’s chest beneath his overcoat, listened for each inhale and exhale, trying to synchronize his own breaths with them. It took what felt like minutes of jagged, shuddering gasps until he managed something like evenness, but Vector only waited, patient and impassive. The frenetic sense of immediate horror faded to a hum in the back of his mind, not absent, but something he could manage. In its place was a cloying, uneasy weight in his chest that had become almost comfortably familiar.
“Khatte, we understand your caution, but you can talk to us – to me.”
He didn’t want to talk, he already knew it wouldn’t help. But Vector was still looking at him as though he deserved pity, and Khatte needed him to understand that he was wrong.
“They were practically children,” he said at length, loathing the faint, unsteady wetness in his voice, “Jedi or not, they weren’t a threat, they didn’t need to…” His throat closed painfully, and he stared resolutely at the console lights, blinking his eyes furiously when they started to blur into each other. “You were there, you saw it. You’ve been here long enough to see what I do.”
He half expected to endure some inane words of reassurance – or worse, justification – but Vector was quiet. He didn’t respond at all, until Khatte finally looked away from the blinking lights and glanced over at him to see if he had even heard. When he did, Vector caught his gaze as if he’d been waiting for it.
“You do as much as you can with the power you have,” he said, something in his expression uncompromising despite his gentle tone, “It will not always be enough. It wasn’t this time. That doesn’t mean you are solely responsible, or that the effort is meaningless.”
“Doesn’t it bother you, what happened? Does anything?”
“We are… not unaffected. What occurred at the temple was an atrocity, and it was not easy to witness, even if we had less of a direct part in it. Not only the lives lost, but the destruction of all the knowledge and culture such a place represents, even one so opposed to the Empire’s ideals... it goes against everything we stand for, both as a diplomat and as Dawn Herald. We’re still connected to the nest, however, even if only distantly. The regret we feel, and the grief, is only a part of the song. The nest shares in it, and we in turn receive echoes from a thousand others. There is no single state of being.”
“Must be nice for you.”
“It is. We aren’t meant to exist in isolation. Kilik or not.”
Vector’s hand closed gently over his shoulder, smoothing his fur where it was still standing on end, and he almost jumped. It suddenly occurred to him that he couldn’t recall the last time he had allowed himself that kind of casual touch. Not since Intelligence was dismantled and he quietly became a traitor to the Empire behind the backs of his entire crew, Vector included. It had made him more paranoid than he already was, and he and his shipmates had all spent a hellish amount of time since then in the emptier parts of the outer rim, trying to stay out of each other’s way in their own corners of the ship. There were never any serious conflicts between them, but there was little in the way of real camaraderie either; none of them could afford to trust each other that much. They certainly didn’t trust Khatte, even though he was on friendly terms with most of them, and they were right not to. It made for an environment that felt at once too crowded and desperately lonely.
Too wrung out to think about the propriety of it, Khatte shuffled sideways, dragging along sheets that were tangled around his legs, to press more of himself into Vector’s side. When he wasn’t shoved away, he turned his face into the crook of his neck and let out a sigh, relaxing into the comfortable warmth of another body. Vector still smelled human, for the most part – Khatte had never been able to detect Kilik pheromones by smell, even in the hives themselves – but there was a faintly warm, dusty scent over his skin that was alien, but not unpleasant. He waited for a moment, then pressed a kiss to his throat, then a second, letting the tip of his tongue rasp lightly over the same spot. He reached up to tug Vector’s scarf aside before a hand closed gently but firmly over his wrist, and he paused.
“Something wrong?” Khatte asked, his words muffled.
“We…” Vector paused, seemed to take a long moment to consider his wording. “We don't think this is wise, at the moment.”
Khatte huffed, pulling back just far enough to look at Vector disdainfully without losing contact.
“You’re giving yourself a lot of credit, don’t you think? Whatever damage you think you could possibly do, you know I’ve been through worse. Some of it on purpose.”
“We don’t doubt you, but all the same. You surround yourself with a radiation that burns and freezes, like a cold star with no life left to give; it would burn away its own core if it could.”
“You know I haven’t got the faintest idea what that means.”
“It means no.”
As blunt as the words were, Vector sounded less annoyed than amused, and he moved his hand from Khatte’s shoulder to wrap his arm fully around him. Khatte let his head fall back onto the thick folds of the scarf, accepting defeat as gracefully as he could manage under the circumstances.
“Another time, then?” he risked.
“Another time.”
He hadn’t expected the certainty in Vector's response. There had been… something between them, months ago, amidst what was by all accounts an ill-advised visit to a Kilik nest, that he was still unsure how to categorize. He mainly remembered it as a haze of pheromones and warm, yielding skin under the pads of his fingers that still came back to him some nights, on rare occasions when he wasn’t plagued by nightmares. But then they had returned to the ship, and he had never pursued anything further or even tried to discuss it. Vector had seemed equally content to leave it at that, and Khatte had tried to file it away like any casual encounter. It had been the responsible thing to do. He enjoyed cultivating a reputation that suggested otherwise, if only for the obvious distress it caused his superiors, but Khatte mainly avoided getting overly involved with anyone he had to see on a regular basis. More so if he had to live with them. It was easy enough to find an outlet elsewhere if he wanted one; for all most Imperials claimed to find aliens repulsive, enough of them had a strange way of showing it once they thought nobody who mattered was watching.
He’d never quite forgotten it, though. There had been a strange, too-easy intimacy between them, the kind he normally considered a pure liability and stayed well away from, and the memory had buried itself at the back of his mind, out of the way, but persistent. He had blamed the pheromones- even if he couldn’t smell them, their effects on him had been obvious- but here he was in the sterile, filtered air of his own ship, still pressed into Vector’s side as if he belonged there, and it felt nearly the same.
He was quiet for a while, exhaustion flooding back to him as the last dregs of panic receded. It brought a dull ache to his muscles that, these days, was present more often than not. He let the pain settle into background noise. Vector didn’t press him for further conversation, and he hardly thought about it when he started speaking again of his own accord, the same thoughts he’d been turning over for weeks falling out of his mouth as if they had been waiting for a captive audience.
“I didn’t really think about it, not until we were already storming the temple grounds. I did a lot of things in Intelligence, because they were necessary. You learn to shut it out, or tell yourself it’s justified. I don’t even know if it was, anymore, but you have to think that in the moment, don’t you? Nobody wants to think that everything they’ve done is just... It becomes a habit after a while. But this... it was just another Sith power play from the start. No greater purpose, no benefit to anyone but a handful of power-hungry egomaniacs. I knew that. I should have stopped it.”
“What do you think you could have done?”
“I don’t know.”
He let out a frustrated sigh and pressed his face harder into Vector’s scarf, wishing he could bury himself in it and never resurface.
“I think some of them were younger than I was when I joined Intelligence,” he said, more to the scarf than to Vector, “and I was… I was too young.”
“How old were you?”
“No older than sixteen. Probably a few years younger, but I told them sixteen and nobody ever proved otherwise, there were no records to check. They can’t tell the difference with aliens anyway.”
“You don’t know your age?”
“Not exactly. It doesn’t matter, it’s not like they have office parties in Intelligence. If I told you a number at some point, I made it up.”
He winced internally, feeling suddenly exposed. He’d always taken a macabre sort of pride in being unbreakable under torture, and he was certain that once he was thinking clearly again, he would be mildly horrified to discover that even a facade of genuine affection was enough to have him blithely discussing his past like it was common knowledge. Had any of his past interrogators thought to offer him a cup of tea, apparently, the Empire would have fallen years ago.
“This won’t always work, you know,” he said, as if it would gain him back any control over the situation, “you can’t just… fix me, if that’s what you think you’re doing.”
“We know. But we’re glad that this time, we could help.”
“It’s just going to happen again.”
“We know. We’ll still be here.”
“Whether I want you here or not, apparently.”
“You’re right, of course. We shouldn’t have intruded, you’re always so open and honest about your problems. We’ll leave, if you’d prefer.”
“No,” Khatte said too quickly as Vector shifted against him, and grimaced at himself. “All right, you’ve made your point.”
He turned to press his face firmly back into the scarf, refusing to add the indignity of yawning onto the rest of the exchange. He was impossibly tired.
“We won’t take offense if you fall asleep on us,” Vector said, resting his chin against Khatte’s head easily, as if Khatte draping himself over his shipmates like a wilted plant and pouring his heart out to them was a normal occurrence, rather than an unprecedented moment of weakness that would under no circumstances be repeated.
“Good,” he said, “I’m going to.”
If Vector said anything in response, he didn’t hear it.