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Theron would be willing to admit that his record for badly-handled one-night stands is... not great.
And that's discounting the much messier disasters his few attempts at real relationships have tended to turn into. He prefers not to think about those at all.
But this?
This is a whole new level.
The ghosts of a half-dozen ghosted lovers return to jeer at him. He isn't sure how a sith might respond to getting blown off by a guy he'd just, well, that, and he really doesn't want to find out.
So he tries very hard not to.
Lana, damn his luck in over-perceptive partners, took approximately five minutes to figure out that she'd become his sith-shaped social shield, and probably far less than that to decide that this, whatever this was, was not going to become her problem. She'd smoothly extricated herself from his evidently embarrassingly transparent attempts to keep her between him and her fellow sith. The glance she'd shot him managed to convey both cool disapproval and an implicit message of, “whatever you've done, sort it out yourself.”
Which was. Fair.
Kriff.
Theron did not sort it out.
Theron threw himself into any task he could find, avoided eye contact somewhat more assiduously than he normally avoided blaster bolts, and invented excuses to flee like a craven coward any time he found himself alone with the man.
By the second day of awkward excuses and quick escapes, the sith has apparently had enough.
Theron is halfway past him, out the door of their hideout's tiny camp-kitchenette with his caff still brewing on the crate behind him, when he's neatly clotheslined and shoved back against the wall.
“Stop it,” says the sith, from well within Theron's space. His voice is low. He radiates fed-up-ness from every line of his body.
“Stop what?” Theron asks, playing for time.
It hadn't been a particularly hard shove. After the early days of stepping lightly and testing the boundaries one toe at a time, half-expecting a crushed trachea or a lightsaber through the chest at any moment, it wasn't anything he could interpret as an attack.
And he hadn't.
Somewhere during the last few weeks, his subconscious had stopped tagging the body in front of him as a potentially imminent threat. Which it isn't-- probably-- but blurring lines like that gets guys like him killed.
And he'd done a lot worse than blur them.
As it is, when the sith's hand tightens at his chest, fingers catching at the strap there, and the man leans in closer until their noses are almost touching, Theron finds his pulse kicking up for all the wrong reasons.
“Hiding,” says the sith. “You're being ridiculous.”
Theron has some personal rules about fraternizing with coworkers and mission partners.
They go, “don't.”
It's never a good idea.
He did not, formerly, have any rules about fraternizing with sith, because who the hells would be that stupid?
Him.
Apparently.
Somehow he's now managed to do both, and it had been. Easy. Shockingly easy. So much easier than not doing it. That night things had just happened, one after another, and he had not stopped to think about any of them until after.
Then he'd thought about them a lot.
He'd especially thought about the parts which he most especially needs not to be thinking about.
The parts which had been so horribly, terribly... not terrible.
The ones which have since had every cell in his body pricking to anticipatory attention every time the sith so much as comes within his line of sight, or even just stands in the same room.
Kriff.
There is so much wrong with him.
Theron clears his throat, looking for an easy escape, and only finds a very solid, very irritated sith.
“Do we really need to do this?” he asks more plaintively than he'd intended.
Those bright, angular eyes tighten dangerously.
“Evidently.”
Which Theron takes to mean that they probably wouldn't have, if he hadn't made this so damned weird.
Great. Just, great.
“Ok,” he says, “ok, look, the-- uh, the thing. That we did.”
He watches from uncomfortably close range as one painfully sardonic brow lifts. The sith's mouth twists around the start of something. Stops. Makes a different shape, then seems to think better of that, too. “Yes?” he says at last. He looks more cautious than irritated now. Theron has no idea how to interpret any of it.
“It just. It shouldn't have happened. I shouldn't have done that.”
The sith watches him for a while, as though waiting to see if he's done.
“Alright,” he says, when they're both mostly sure that he is.
“Right,” Theron repeats.
They stare at each other a while longer. Theron swallows. The sith's hand is still fisted loosely in his shirt. Theron tries very hard not to think about what else it had been fisted around, not so long ago.
Then the hand falls away.
That's. Good. Exactly what he'd been going for. Not at all disappointing.
...Also not as helpful or as head-clearing as it could have been, because the sith is still standing there, much too close, heavy presence still pressing Theron into the wall like something physical.
He shifts awkwardly. Tries to squash down the dozen contextually terrible impulses reminding him that physical had actually been good. Great. Extremely pleasant.
The sith's eyes flicker over him, and Theron once again curses the proclivity for perceptiveness in his non-choice of partners.
“It isn't a good idea,” Theron says, into a conversation which is supposed to be over, and using the entirely wrong tense.
“That's reasonable,” the sith says, in an ambiguous sort of way which might have meant anything. He sways a touch closer, a seemingly unconscious movement that has Theron's head tipping back against the wall.
Theron swallows. “Reasonable. Right.”
“Sensible.”
“Mm.”
Those eyes flicker over him again. This time there's nothing unconscious about it. The sith edges closer very deliberately. Theron feels distinctly stalked.
And disturbingly disinclined to run.
He could. There's still space. He could make more of it.
“So that's that,” Theron doesn't say.
“I should probably get back to work,” he entirely fails to add.
He's not sure which of them reaches out first, but he's got fingers hooked in the sith's belt before the gap closes, and the culpability is mutual.
“This is a bad idea,” Theron comments, throat working under a mouth which is doing something potentially visible far too high up his neck, because he feels like he should mention that.
“Terrible,” the sith agrees amicably, and presses closer.
It's all the same, Theron rationalizes later. It's the kind of mistake that's bad to make, but making it again, after? It doesn't add anything. Doesn't change anything. Damage done.
Maybe it's better this way.
They can work it out. Get it out of their systems.
The sith will get bored. Theron will get distracted. By the time this improbable partnership ends, preferably without him bisected on a landing pad somewhere, it might be like it never happened.
Theron absently presses a thumb against the bruise at his neck, just to feel the fading sting, while his eyes drift over the in-progress decryption.
It'll be nothing, he tells himself.
(It never is).
It'll be fine.