Archive of Our Own

Thrawn’s hair was disheveled, his uniform still stained with days-old blood. Faro was waiting for him when he emerged from Bridger’s cell in the brig, and for a moment, she got to see his face and posture when he thought no one was looking: the stress lines wreathing his eyes, the dead-blank expression of weariness. It reminded her of their mission to Batuu — the day Vader almost snapped, when he’d corralled Faro and Thrawn into the cockpit of a shuttle and menaced them there.

Privately, Faro had thought Thrawn looked small and brittle that day. Now, only when he was alone, he looked the same. 

Then he looked up, caught sight of her, and like a single ripple speeding across the surface of a river and leaving calm water in its wake, Thrawn’s entire countenance changed. His shoulders straightened and his features changed subtly, hardening into something nearer to confidence and control. By the time he reached Faro’s side, he was the same old Thrawn again.

Almost. His hair was still disheveled, all product washed out by sweat, his temples matted with dried blood. His uniform was still stained, the sleeve torn wide open and held together with a garish quick-stitch. Faro’s eyes flicked down to the uneven rust-colored patch over Thrawn’s ribs, nearly a foot wide. 

“How’s the prisoner, sir?” she asked. 

Thrawn almost scowled. “Industrious,” he said. Faro could hear a metallic clanging noise from inside the cell as Bridger tried to escape. She turned her attention back to Thrawn.

“And you?” she asked. 

He tried to step around her, but Faro blocked him. She put a hand out, but stopped centimeters away from his chest, afraid to touch him.

“Your eyes are dim,” she told him. She lowered her hand slowly, skipping his chest to touch his ribs through his uniform. It was a light touch, as gentle as she could make it, but she saw Thrawn’s jaw tighten as if suppressing a wince. “How bad is it?”

“Fine, Commodore,” said Thrawn firmly. He made no effort to push her hand away, but he glanced down at it with a cold look in his eyes, and it was only Faro’s years of harrowing military experience that kept her from pulling back. 

“I checked with medical,” she told him. “You haven’t been there for treatment.”

Thrawn said nothing. His face was closed-off.

“What did you do?” Faro asked him. 

For a moment, she thought he would just ignore her. She remembered the strange creature the Jedi had summoned, its tentacles bursting through the bridge and wrapping around Thrawn as if it knew exactly where its target would be standing. She’d heard the crack of bones snapping, and in an instant she was transported to her days in the Onderon Task Force, when she’d hidden under a ledge with her sniper rifle and watched a Rebel crush an innocent skymouse under his boot. Even now, the memory left a sour taste in her mouth — a taste that connected straight to her nervous system and ignited a deep, long-lasting sense of disgust for terrorists like Bridger. 

She cast a hard-eyed glare over Thrawn’s shoulder, toward the brig. 

“I treated it with nanodroids,” he told her gently. Faro’s eyes snapped back to him.

“You did what?”

“There was no time for surgery.” His voice was even, his tone casual, the same way other men discussed breakfast (and the same way Thrawn discussed battle plans). “I located a nanodroid kit and injected them myself.”

Faro’s mind raced. She looked down at Thrawn’s torn sleeve and realized for the first time that it was cut, not ripped — he’d sliced through it with his vibroblade so he could inject the nanodroids without taking his tunic off and injuring his ribs further. 

“But who supervised the surgery?” she asked.

“I did,” said Thrawn simply.

“You stayed awake?” 

The question came out sharper than she meant it to, and Thrawn closed his eyes, a subtle, tired wince making his facial muscles flex. Faro lowered her voice. 

“No anesthesia?” she asked. 

Thrawn shook his head, a tiny movement from side to side that seemed designed to answer her question without causing a headache. Faro stayed quiet for a moment; she’d seen nanodroids in action on the battlefield just once before, to save an injured trooper. Before the anesthetic kicked in, he’d nearly gone mad with pain; he could feel the nanodroids crawling through his blood vessels and knitting his bones back together with no care for how it impacted his nerves. 

“I needed to stay awake,” said Thrawn, his eyes still closed and his voice matter-of-fact. “There was too much to be done. Still is.”

Faro didn’t answer him right away. She studied his face, then stepped closer and gently touched his ribs again. “Open your eyes, sir?” she requested.

Thrawn did so, his lids heavy. His eyes were dimmer than before.

“May I?” asked Faro, tugging at Thrawn’s sealing strip. Something flickered across his face too fast for Faro to read, but he inclined his head. She opened his tunic, tried not to flinch when she saw his blood-stiff undershirt underneath. The scent of copper and something else — something alien, not found in human blood — filled the air. Faro slipped her hand beneath Thrawn’s undershirt as best she could and felt his ribs; she could see livid bruises everywhere she looked, some caused by the nanodroids and others no doubt left behind by the purrgil. 

“Good thing there was only one of them,” she muttered.

“Mm,” said Thrawn in agreement. A quick glance upward showed Faro that he’d closed his eyes again, but this time it seemed different — his face more relaxed. He was leaning into her touch, she realized, not flinching away.

“It feels alright to me,” she said. She didn’t pull away yet; she watched Thrawn’s face and saw no hint of surprise. “I’ll chalk the dimness up to blood loss, sleeplessness, malnutrition, a general sense of stress and exhaustion — am I missing anything?”

A ghost of a smile touched Thrawn’s lips. He pulled his undershirt down, forcing her hand away, and started to seal his tunic again. Faro’s mouth went dry as she watched him. A strange feeling coalesced inside her chest, like a drop of rain so cold that it fell into a lake and slowly froze everything around it. 

She grabbed Thrawn’s wrists impulsively but gently, stopped him as he dressed. He went still at her touch, looked down at her curiously, didn’t move. 

“Commodore?” he said.

Faro blinked at the sight of her fingers wrapped around Thrawn’s wrists — human skin against bruised Chiss-blue. “Sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to…”

“It’s quite alright.”

Still, he didn’t pull away, and Faro didn’t let go of his hands. Now Thrawn was blinking, too, as puzzled by Faro’s behavior as she was by her own. She could sense his thought process, knew that he was taking some time to observe her, giving her a moment to get control of herself — and once his time limit passed, he would prompt her to move.

She didn’t let him get that far, and she didn’t let herself question her instincts.

“Come here,” she said, leading him over to a bench set into the bulkhead nearby. Thrawn followed without question, and sat down when she guided him to, and didn’t move away when she sat down next to him, so close that their thighs touched. He looked down at her, his signature open-minded curiosity warring with exhaustion on his face.

Faro pulled Grand Admiral Thrawn into a hug.

“Oh,” said Thrawn, his voice soft and muffled against her shoulder. It wasn’t a perfect hug — he’d put his arms up by instinct, as if warding off an attack when she pulled him closer, and it took him a moment to extricate his arms and return the gesture. As soon as he did, Faro just pulled him closer again, until her arms were wrapped around his chest as tightly as she could manage without hurting him, and she could feel his heart beating against her own. 

Thrawn’s hands settled on her back, palms flat, touch light, as if he was out of practice. Faro could feel an awkward line of tension in his body, weariness battling with uncertainty — or maybe it was just a natural reservation, an innate need to hold part of himself back. 

“It’ll be fine,” Faro told him, firm and confident. She felt Thrawn freeze slightly, process her words, cautiously relax against her. The events of the last few days crowded against each other inside her mind: the purrgil attack, the jump to hyperspace, the momentary panic when it seemed like everything had gone wrong.

The look on the Jedi’s face when the starlines collapsed and he realized only one purrgil made it through. The TIE Defenders zipping silently through space, taking the survivor down; the safety doors cutting through its tentacles, leaving Thrawn injured but safe on the bridge floor. The troopers coming through with the ysalimiri, taking Bridger’s powers away now that he wasn’t busy keeping the oxygen inside the ship.

Everything had gone fine, and Faro had no reason to believe their crew’s competence would run out now. She felt exhaustion take over Thrawn’s frame, felt him all but collapse against her, his eyes closed, stress and injury cresting and dissolving. 

“How the hell are you still standing?” Faro muttered.

Thrawn made a soft sound — a humorless laugh — and then suddenly his fingers tightened in her tunic and he buried his face in her shoulder, so she couldn’t see his expression. Faro made no attempt to look; she held him, her throat so tight she felt for a moment like she couldn’t breathe. She thought again of the nanodroids, of Thrawn’s crushed ribs and damaged organs and the fact that he’d just fixed himself and kept going, never pausing to sleep or eat until all his men were accounted for — until the Jedi was imprisoned and the Chimaera was back on track. She heard Thrawn take a ragged breath, and then, with a sigh she felt more than heard, he pulled away.

“Thank you, Commodore,” he murmured, avoiding her gaze. He combed his fingers through his hair rather than look at her. He seemed better — not quite up to speed, not yet, but better.

“Don’t thank me,” Faro said. She bumped his shoulder with her own, watched Thrawn pause and lower his hands slowly, as if he didn’t know what to do with himself. “Go get some sleep,” she said. “And change your uniform — we’ll be back to Coruscant before you know it, and you don’t want to face the Emperor in bloody clothes.”

Thrawn shook his head slightly. “He’d like that.”

He probably would, Faro thought. She gave Thrawn a wry smile and was relieved to see him give her one in return. They couldn’t undo Bridger’s damage, really; they could fix the scars left on the Chimaera, but they couldn’t undo the casualties, and neither of them would ever forget their time spent crawling through collapsed passageways, pulling out the bodies of the dead. There were some things you couldn’t fix.

But you could cope with them, certainly. Faro could cope with them because she had a commanding officer who was competent and a natural leader, who would protect his crew and take as much of Faro’s burden as he could. As she helped him to his feet, she hoped Thrawn understood that he had the same in her.

And she thought he did. He met her gaze just briefly before he walked away, his hand lingering on hers for just a moment too long.

His eyes were brighter now.