Work Text:
Ravi is sixteen years, two months and nine days old when his luck goes south.
He stares at the stone in his hand for only a moment before instinct kicks in and he shoves it into his bag. A few datapads, a snack or two, a pair of socks; all piled on top. Precaution, though not perfect. Not much to arouse suspicion if he's searched. The best he can do on short notice. If they're watching, he is lost regardless, but there's a hope left that he's been quick enough. He worked hard to learn those high marks, after all.
Quick steps. Casual steps. There's a few hours before his next class and while Ravi doesn't like to wander aimlessly, he's taken care over the past few years in the Academy to vary his routine enough that this may not flag his profile. The stone burns at the bottom of his bag but he doesn't hurry. One caf from a stall he's been known to frequent, a bit of window shopping, twenty eight minutes at a run-down arcade cadets are officially prohibited from visiting. He passes trash receptacles, one on every block, but resists the urge. His own garbage is guaranteed to be inspected daily, but it's possible that these are as well.
Steps wind him to a small park. On a given day, they might anyway; he genuinely likes it here under normal circumstances. It's quiet, thick trees blocking the noise of the city, and unremarkable enough that he rarely sees another soul. In the middle, a saucer of water making its best efforts at a pond.
Ravi searches in his bag for a datapad, slipping the stone up his sleeve in the process. Datapad inspected idly, returned to the bag. He bends down to the pebbled shore, allowing his contraband to drop into his hand.
He can only risk a glance. Flat, grey, unremarkable aside from the well-worn channel through the middle. Ravi runs his thumb along the path that another thumb has travelled many times before, and then skips it across the surface of the pond.
Four skips. He could do better, but he can't risk the attention.
There are many things that can disqualify an aspiring agent from field service. Test scores, obviously. Personality. Some are simply missing that certain something which makes them utterly unremarkable when it matters. Ravi has, of course, never had cause to worry about any of these things.
Test scores can be improved. Personality can be adopted. Being invisibly boring takes a bit more work, but no one makes it far in the Academy without a drive to do the work. A soulmate, however - that is the single thing that will doom even the most spotlessly promising career in Intelligence.
Having a soulmate means the end of ambition. It won't get you drummed out, of course; you could still be a Watcher. A Keeper. Working your life away at massive terminals that don't have the tendency towards wandering. But if you aspired to the true goal - and that was always fieldwork, no matter what the instructors claimed, that was it. The end. Today it was a stone, tomorrow, a piece of evidence that needed to be planted on the right target and was now sitting in the pocket of some no-name lieutenant on Balmorra.
(Or it was socks. Ravi isn't quite sure whether that story is true or apocryphal. He leans towards the latter, due to the fact that it's passed down dutifully with a suspicious lack of detail. They tell it all the same, huddled together in those well-placed cubbyholes so conspicuously and conveniently located between the sweep of security eyes. A cadet, one of the best, acing every test and on track for Cipher. Until, and this is always rendered with a hushed tone, the socks. Until the day that one pair of socks in the drawer came back unlike they'd been tucked in in the first place, victim of a temperamental dryer she'd never used. Her roommate had, though. Is it worth it, they discuss - back then it was only speculation, really, something that happened to other people. Would you give up the dream if it meant forever?)
If he was not a top-rated cadet of the most prestigious military academy in the entire Empire, he supposes this would be romantic. There is someone out there that is truly meant for him. Yesterday he had been a whole, today he is guaranteed to be but one half. Whoever that worrying thumb belonged to was the person that would make him happier than anything else in the galaxy. It's certainly the subject of all sorts of popular media, in every permutation. Blockbuster holonovels, sweeping Sith operas. But hardly anyone has them these days anyways; Ravi had simply assumed he was one of those fortunate souls.
Unfortunately, it turns out he was simply a late bloomer.
It's mercifully slow for the first few years. Ravi wonders whether that means something - whether they're not as connected as they should be. Or maybe the guy is just a minimalist. What he gets tells him nothing of the man.
After the stone, it's a piece of dusty wood. He burns it in a flash grenade exercise, a speeder ride away from wandering eyes.
Then, a sticky unwrapped candy at the bottom of his pocket. He eats that, though it ends up earning him a warning as he chews it determinately in the halls and again when he surrenders his uniform jacket to the laundry.
The day before graduation, it's the empty wrapper for a fruitgel. A brand that they don't sell, as far as he can tell in what extranet searches he can risk without arousing suspicion, anywhere in Imperial space. He holds it at eye-level, studying the cheap packaging.
"Well, kriff."
He does wonder in the years that follow what mark he leaves of his own. Before the first intrusion, Ravi was reflective; now he's obsessive in cataloging his own life. There should be something missing. That's how it works. For every fruitgel wrapper - and there are more, after the first. Whoever holds the other half of his soul eats terribly - there should be a sock. A stick of gum. A flimsi full of doodles. Some part of himself that wanders the galaxy in someone else's pocket.
There isn't. Not once, not as far as he can tell. In Cipher Nine's service to the Empire he loses first his faith, then his mind, then finally his loyalty; but somehow, not a single pinch of pocket lint.
The agent that lands on Rishi is a different man than the one that entered the academy on Dromund Kaas fifteen years before. That Ravi would have been offended by Lana Beniko's clumsy attempt to hijack his ship with his own slicing routines, but today's Ravi is only tired. And sweaty.
"Sure the cult's dangerous, but it's the humidity that'll kill you, right?" Vector doesn't answer, just stares at him thoughtfully. His friend is an odd man, though Ravi will allow that having thousands of bugs as your soulmate might do that to a person.
Lana chooses to ignore him as well. The safe house isn't much, barely more than a terminal and a few cots shoved into a corner. A discarded fruitgel wrapper that's just barely missed the trash.
"My associate is already in the field. He's on an encrypted frequency, I'll patch you through." She presses a button on her datapad and he frowns as the information streams across his visual implant.
His encryptions aren't as good as he thought, if a Republic agent he's never met is already using them. When he meets this Theron Shan, they will have such interesting things to discuss.