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The ship was celebrating around her.
“Sandro,” she said with masked urgency, placing a hand on the crook of his elbow to stop him as he raced past. Obediently, he stopped and turned, beaming smile grinning at her.
“What can I do for you, Gaya?”
Concerned that her tone might betray her, she took a second to find the right voice, the Gaya voice, before she made her request, “I was wondering if you have seen our favourite lieutenant on your travels?”
Sandro quirked his head at the question, then scrunched his face a little as he thought back over the events of the evening. There was something sweet and earnest about him, she thought, she could see why Ouannii liked him.
“No…” he drew out the word into another pause. “Actually, wait, I saw him after the Captain made him concede the ship, he was heading towards the engineering room.”
“Thank you, Sandro,” she said to him in a low voice, the one she normally reserved for getting what she wanted – and for winding up Croy. He looked a bit dazed, and she had already left him standing in the atrium when he called out “Ignite the spark!” after her.
“Light the fire.” she called distractedly over her shoulder. The great Gaya did not run, ever, but a pacey walk was allowed as she dodged through the throngs of celebrating passengers and into the corridors of the Halycon.
The engineering room wasn’t somewhere she frequented, but thankfully the ship was well signposted. She guessed having recently undergone strenuous renovations in dry dock perhaps even the crew needed some pointers on how to get around the ship.
She arrived at a sealed door and tried the handle. It was locked. She didn’t really expect her databand to work, but when she swiped it over the control panel she heard a click from within the mechanism of the door and when she tried the handle again it creaked open.
She stepped inside and closed it again behind her.
“Croy?” she called out into the echoing space. Pipes hissed and clunked around her, jets emitted steam at intervals and the whole place was soaked in a deep orange light from ancient, stubborn light fixtures that certainly looked like they hadn’t benefited from the ship’s time in dry dock. She called a second time, circling her way around the room. As she rounded a corner, looking for signs of life, they made eye contact.
He was sitting like a child hiding from a school teacher, crammed into a little space between the machines, legs draw up to his chest so that his chin rested on his knees. His face was blank, passive – wary. She didn’t offer him admonishment or condolence, she simply watched him, waiting for him to decide how this would proceed. At length he unfolded himself from the floor and rose to stand opposite her. He was slightly taller than her when he stood, she remembered from all the times she had reached up to run her hands over his chest or press against his shoulder to distract him, but right now he didn’t seem taller than her. Hunched in, defeated, he was a shadow of the pompous man who had puffed out his chest and rattled on about the Order.
“When the -” he stopped to clear his throat a little, but the damage had already been done; she had already heard in the thickness of his voice that he had been crying. “When the Captain saved the life of the passengers, she paid for it with mine. If I try to fulfil my orders the crew here will kill me, if I go back to the First Order the senior officers will kill me. I’m a dead man either way.”
He addressed this confirmation of his own imminent demise to the dusty concrete floor between them.
“Would you?” she asked curiously.
His eyes shot up from the floor. “Which?”
“Both, either, would you?”
He thought for a moment, gaze returning to the floor but this time with a glazed look that told her he wasn’t really seeing it.
“Kill the passengers; not really. Some of them are irritating, of course, but there are good, loyal ones there, ones who shared their meals with me and told me about their lives and their families. I protested for them to be spared-”
“I saw that.” she cut in, “Took quite the beating for it too…”
“The Supreme Leader can be,” Croy seemed to struggle for the right word, “commanding.” he eventually settled on, although she was sure there were a lot more choice words in his mind than this. “As for returning to the First Order, they have tried to end my life more times over the past few days than anyone else has.”
It wasn’t quite ‘no’ but she understood it, and he slumped back against a machine as if the weight of admitting his increasing disillusions had taken a physical toll.
“They rescued me when I was a boy,” he told her, taking his uniform hat off with one hand and using the other to scrub over his face. “I was stolen from my parents when I was very young by a street gang on my home planet. They made me steal for them, sometimes harm people in subtler ways that only a child could manage without being caught: poison, arson, the like. Then one day in the marketplace a stormtrooper asked me if I knew anything about a gang that was running a series of heists on a particularly wealthy street and I knew it was my captors he was referring to. I told him I would help him catch them if he promised to help me. I wanted to become a mechanic. He agreed, and when he arrested them he told me he could make me better than a mechanic, and I was shipped off-world to the Academy with only the highest opinions of the First Order and the good they could do.”
Gaya knew he had to have a reason for his commitment, and now that he had drawn for her an image of a scrawny little boy rescued by a stormtrooper, she could almost see him still, hiding here in an engineering room, finally discovering that his heroes were not actually heroes at all.
Suddenly he straightened up and pulled his hat back onto his head, making his ears stick out in a way that she couldn’t help but find slightly endearing.
“What are you doing now?” she asked, confusion bringing her back from her momentary distraction.
He heaved a breath. “I, Miss Gaya, am going to face my death like a man, not cowering in a backroom waiting to be caught.”
He began to stride past her towards the door through which she had entered, but she caught his arm, an echo of how she had stopped Sandro earlier. He paused immediately; a thrill always went through her every time the grandiose Lieutenant complied with her demands without so much as a raised eyebrow.
He was closer to her than she had expected, his face hovering above hers, while her hand still rested on his arm.
“You never asked why I came to find you, Lieutenant.” she was surprised to hear herself using her more seductive voice, she certainly hadn’t intended to, but something about Croy always seemed to bring it out unbidden.
He seemed to sway closer to her, the orange light above their heads throwing strange shadows across his pale face.
“Why did you come to find me, Miss Gaya?” he asked obediently, but with a voice like gravel.
They stayed stuck fast, swaying towards each other, when a pipe hissed loudly nearby. They both started and jumped apart from each other, at which point Gaya realised just how close they had been; a few more inches and everything might have changed.
But it hadn’t, and now Croy was looking anywhere but at her as he straightened his already straight hat, a nervous movement she recognised from all the time spent flirting with him during the voyage.
“The First Order won’t have you back and you can’t exactly stay here” he still wasn’t looking at her. “But the Resistance will offer you protection in exchange for intel.”
This got his attention.
“My team and I are leaving tonight, we will be travelling to the Resistance base to report on what has happened here, we can take you with us. You can start a new life there. If you want it?”
He considered her offer for a moment that felt like an eternity, before he met her eyes and nodded slowly and firmly.
She couldn’t fight the smile that crept across her face.
“Good. Now, what do you have on under that uniform?”
“Pardon?” he squeaked, the ears protruding from beneath his hat rapidly turning crimson. Oh, she was going to miss flirting with him.
“Come on, what do you have underneath? Do you have an undershirt on?”
He stammered incomprehensibly which she watched with unveiled amusement. Sensing she was laughing at him, he steadied himself and answered her. “Only an undershirt, plain white, standard issue.”
“Alright, lose everything but the undershirt, I will send Sandro up with some civilian clothes.”
She was about to leave him to it when temptation offered her a more enticing option. Deciding he might actually combust if she were to follow through with her idea, she settled for a tamer version of her original intention.
His ears were still a little red when she turned back to him, and she wondered idly how red they could go - how red she could make them.
She met his eyes and held them, even though she could sense he was flighty and ready to dart away at any second. She took a pronounced, confident stride towards him, right up so that his lips were inches from her own. She heard him swallow. Reaching one hand up, she watched as he struggled to keep his eyes from dropping to her lips, something in her stomach twisting tighter each time he failed. She briefly entertained the thought of letting her rising hand press against his face, pulling him down to her, but she had a mission. She pushed his ridiculous hat back off his head and ran her fingers through the tousled hair it had hidden. His eyes shut briefly at the contact.
“Only the jacket and trousers still to go.” she wasn’t in the least surprised by how breathy her voice sounded this time. His eyes shot open as he processed her words, and she let out a little laugh at the mix of anticipation and panic in them.
She turned away and strode off, calling over his shoulder to be ready by the time Sandro arrived. She knew he would, he always did as he was told.
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The party on the ship had been raucous; passengers had been partying like there was no tomorrow (after all, there almost hadn’t been), crew had been celebrating surviving another dangerous day on the starcruiser, Ouannii and Sandro had been doing some sort of intimate thing in the corner and Raithe had had to be trailed away forcibly from a female bar tender. Gaya had been the only sober one, not her preferred role, and as such became the only one rounding everyone up to leave.
They had been no more useful once on the ship than they had been on the starcruiser; with a Resistance loyal pilot to steer them to their destination, they saw no need to stay alert. Raithe was already passed out on the floor, Ouannii was drifting in and out of sleep on a bench, but it was Sandro she needed. Grabbing him by both arms as he came back from the small onboard refresher, she held him facing her with both arms to get his attention.
“Where is our passenger?” she asked, enunciating each word carefully.
“Ah, um, oh yes! Here he is, ahh…” Sandro began kneeling on the floor, knocking at the metal.
After a few tries he hit on one that reverberated like a ringing bell, then he slid a slip of metal from his pocket and wedged it between two of the boards. It levered the panel enough to lift off, and a second later a person appeared, clambering out gracelessly and scrambling to his feet in front of her.
If she didn’t know it was him she would never have recognised him.
Above his standard First Order issued shoes his long, pale legs stretched to meet beige cargo shorts which were clearly several sizes too big, held up at the waist by a slightly dangerous looking contraption made of leather and rope. The white undershirt he had mentioned was there, tucked into the shorts, she guessed perhaps to assist with holding them up, and over it he wore a garishly bright multicoloured shirt embellished around the body with palm trees. His head was hatless, she fervently hoped it was still lying on the engineering room floor where she had left it, and she noticed with a jolt that he had left his hair as she had mussed it several hours before. He, or Sandro she supposed, had also acquired a pair of glasses, squarish and thick framed, they made him look bookish and unassuming. Nothing remotely resembling the First Order officer he had been not very long ago.
But at the same time it was still him. His ears still stuck out slightly in an endearing sort of way, his eyes still followed her like he was a compass and she was North, he was still wringing his hands nervously while pretending he wasn’t, although without the leather gloves to hide it it was much more pronounced. His left hand shot up, reaching to straighten a hat that wasn’t there, then dropped again on meeting only his hair. He smiled sheepishly at her, knowing she knew what he had been intending to do.
“I rather think this new look will take some time to get used to.” he joked quietly.
“I like it better than the last one.” she shot back. His smile widened slightly, and he shifted his weight from foot to foot.
There was a scuffling noise behind her.
“He needs blindfolded” Raithe’s voice growled out. She turned to see him on his feet again, and was surprised to note that Sandro and Ouannii had already left; she hadn’t noticed them go.
Raithe shoved a ream of fabric that could comfortably fit around a humanoid head into her hand. “I’ll let you do the honours.”
He shot Croy a dirty look and sauntered off down the hall towards the refresher.
Croy looked slightly affronted when she turned back and she stifled a laugh. It was such a familiar expression from their days on the starcruiser that even in his new, surreal outfit it still made her laugh, and she was surprised to find that that familiarity brought some comfort too. She was beginning to realise she didn’t know where Croy the First Order Lieutenant ended and where Croy the man began.
“Don’t worry about him,” she reassured, “he’s slow to forgive, but it won’t matter soon anyway.”
“It won’t?” Croy asked, eyebrows raised.
She was surprised at his confusion.
“Of course, you won’t see him again after tonight.”
He was silent for a moment. She knew what he was going to ask next, and she knew he already knew the answer.
“So I won’t see you again either?”
He had asked it quietly, but earnestly, no staring at the floor this time, he was looking right at her, and she felt like he was looking straight into her soul.
She shook her head.
He looked away, nodded once, then looked back at her.
“In that case, I owe you thanks. You have rescued me from seemingly unavoidable death, given me a chance at a new life, made me look like this…” he glanced down at the palm trees at adorned his shirt with an exaggerated look of horror. She laughed obligingly.
“And thank you for, um…” he seemed to have lost confidence, coughing a little to cover it. “for before, on the starcruiser, talking to you was, it was um….”
He muttered something unintelligible. She asked him to repeat it.
“It was the highlight of my day.” he said quickly and almost aggressively, such that it took her a moment to detach the message from the delivery and make sense of what he had said.
When she did, it made her pause. She knew he was attracted to her, she had been counting on it for her deception, but she had never intended to make him attached to her. The knowledge that she had seemingly done so brought up a range of emotions in her; pride at being so effective in her seduction, a degree of guilt at tricking him, and hidden deep down a little bit of regret that it could never have ended differently.
A million things she could say and would like to say swirled through her, but in the end she decided professional composure was what they both needed.
“I hope your new life in the Resistance is a fulfilling one.” she said it over him like a prayer.
“I hope you get what you’re chasing.” his was something darker than a prayer, his voice scraped over the words and the look in his eyes set her on fire from the inside. It felt like the world had flipped upside down in this tiny ship in the middle of space. For their whole acquaintance she had been the one seducing him, now it felt dangerously like the other way around.
He swayed towards her, as he had done earlier that evening in the engineering room and many evenings before at dinners and events. She discovered to her own surprise that this time, if he were to attempt to close the diminishing gap between them completely, he would find no objections from her.
Just as it was starting to look inevitable that something was about to change irrevocably, Croy pulled back. Straightening up, he marched over to the bench in a movement that spoke of his First Order training even through his nonsensical attire.
He looked at her expectantly, and she realised he was waiting for her to use the fabric she in her hands to blindfold him. She had forgotten it was there.
She felt off kilter as she walked towards him, the magnetism between them drawing her in. It had always been there, it was part of the reason she had so enjoyed seducing him in the first place. But here in the middle of space far from either of their responsibilities, their real lives, it felt different; tangible and real, something they could almost have had.
She stopped in front of him, all the things they couldn’t say hovering just out of reach.
“I hope I see you again.” he said quietly and deliberately, meaning laced through every word.
“I hope you do too.” It was the best she could give him, the most she could concede. She did seduction, she didn’t do emotions, and this was proving to be some dangerous combination of the two.
Before she could lose her will to do it, she wrapped the blindfold carefully around his head so that his eyes were completely covered and tied it securely at the back of his head. Then she gave him a rude gesture, just to see if he could see it. By his complete lack of reaction she concluded that he could not.
With his eyes covered, the power that he had wrestled from her through his show of genuine emotion was hers once more, and it gave her the confidence to repay it in another way. Her hands moved to her three stacked necklaces, and she lifted the one closest to her heart. As carefully as she could, she detached one golden shape from its intricate frame and held it up to look at it in the light. Over the crest of the diamond she could see Croy’s expression; peaceful, trusting, sad around the edges.
He jumped when she touched his hand and she realised she probably should have warned him, but it would have broken the moment and she couldn’t risk that, she knew it was only the stillness and poignancy that was giving her the courage to go through with this. She unfolded the fingers of his hand and placed the flat, golden diamond carefully into his palm, then she closed his fingers around it and moved his hand towards his pocket. He seemed to understand, as he slipped his hand into his pocket and when he withdrew it again the shape was gone.
She sat down on the bench beside him, carefully so as not to startle him, and they flew in a sad sort of silence the rest of the way to the Resistance base.
When they landed, Croy was quickly whisked away for interrogation. The deal he had been offered required he immediately surrender any tactical information he had on the First Order. She knew it wouldn’t be much, he was hardly a big fish, but she hoped it was enough to earn him passage to a new life here.
Resistance soldiers flanked him on either side, partially to prevent escape and partially to keep him going the right direction, blindfolds were hardly conducive to ease of movement. She didn’t ask to say goodbye to him, it would have revealed to much. Although from the look in General Organa’s eyes when she turned back after watching him being led away, she had the distinct feeling her request would have been granted had she asked it. As it was, her fingers played with the missing space in her necklace, as her eyes watched him leave into his new life.
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The end of the war meant a great many things; freedom, hope, joy. But to Gaya’s surprise it also meant an unexpected amount of tidying up. Bases and vehicles that had been used for years, nearly decades, couldn’t decommission overnight. And so, despite the war ending quite some time ago, she was still doing the rounds singing for the Resistance troops.
Spirits were much better now, but there was a new undercurrent of impatience. Ordinary people who had given up their day-to-day to serve were keen to get back to their lives and their families, and who could blame them? So an opportunity to watch the renowned Gaya perform was highly appreciated as a means of keeping troops motivated for carrying out the safe but seemingly rather dull task of decommissioning.
Raithe had booked her a gig in a place she had never been before. The planet was mountainous, probably near uninhabitable. The base had once been a Rebel one, then recommissioned for a second run as a Resistance base. She hoped fervently it would never need to see a third.
They had made the journey faster than expected, she wasn’t due to sing until tomorrow, meaning their fortuitously quick travel had earned her an evening off. Once she would have dressed in her best and headed out to drink the night away, but, while she still very much enjoyed a good party, she had come to appreciate the indeterminable value of an evening spent relaxing in comfortable clothes, watching a trashy romance holovid or drawing, a passion she rarely had time to pursue.
Raithe had gone, to find a bar most likely, which left her alone on their ship. Ouannii and Sandro had long since left, gaining success with their own group and cementing their love for each other by starting a family together. She was pleased for them and visited as often as she could, but she couldn’t help missing the days when they were all younger together, even cast against the shadowy backdrop of war it had been a beautiful time in her life.
The doors of the ship hissed open with a mechanical whirring and she moved to the back of the ship and down the ramp to investigate.
“Oh! Sorry, I didn’t know anyone was… Gaya?”
It was only a Resistance mechanic, beige overalls and floppy hat, tool box in hand, probably sent to do some maintenance on the ship.
She looked down at her outfit; lose fitting, soft and comfortable - definitely not the usual Gaya look.
The mechanic probably didn’t mind though, and besides, they were probably well warned about not being overly familiar with their clients anyway, a mechanic in a Resistance base was sure to serve their fair share of war heroes.
“Tis I,” she joked lightly, “If it’s alright by you I’d like to stay in the ship tonight, but if you need me to move for you to work on something just say the word.”
The mechanic was still staring at her dumbly, but she was used to that. She took his silence as agreement and turned to head back to her relaxing evening in her ship.
“Gaya.” he said again. This time his voice connected with something in her, like a key sliding into a lock.
She spun around slowly to face him again.
He looked older than the last time she had seen him, granted she probably looked older too, and while she was certain that she looked worse for it, he seemed lighter, freer. His hair was long and shaggy in a way that would never have been allowed in his previous life, so long that it protruded in wide curls at the base of his neck, pressed flat against his skin by the mechanic’s hat. Even though they were partly obscured by his hair, the hat made his ears stick out in a way that was achingly familiar. There were smudges of grease on his face, and beneath them she could see an open expression.
His free hand moved towards his right side pocket and she knew immediately what it was going to produce.
As she foresaw, his large hand, more tanned than she remembered, lifted a small, golden shape from his pocket. Emotions swirled through his eyes faster than she could read them.
Led by the same instinct that had guided her thus far, she reached up to the neckline of her blouse and pulled the chain of the necklace out so that the space where the missing piece should be settled over the top of her shirt. She had long since stopped wearing the three necklaces, too many people asked questions about the missing piece. For a while it had been fun inventing increasingly ridiculous stories about what had happened to it, but after a while Raithe had become a bit too curious and she had stopped wearing it so prominently. She had removed the other chains, leaving only the one with the missing piece, which she wore hidden by her clothing whenever her neckline would allow it. She could never quite admit to herself why she couldn’t let go, now she seemed to be face to face with the reason.
“It’s good to see you again…” Croy trailed off, his greeting ending up sounding more like a question.
“It’s good to see you again too.” she affirmed.
A sweetly awkward smile cracked across his face, and she let her own mirror it, her feet leading her down the ramp towards him.