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He supposed it was late at night, or whatever passed for night in the timeless void of hyperspace. He didn't keep a chrono – in his humble opinion, he had something much better - but meal call had been hours ago and most of the Hawk was asleep by now. Bao-Dur knew from experience that he would rarely be so lucky without a hard day's driving to precede it, and mid-transit, that was a gizka's dream. More efficient to cut out the middleman and work.
Motion bobbed in the corner of his eye, grey and familiar, and his remote beeped out a diagnostic. “integrity > safe range”
“Good to know,” he whispered back. “But I'd like to make sure there's no deeper damage. The couplings have been acting finicky and I'm not sure where the problem is. Anything else?”
“scanning // lifeforms – (grouping: inactive) = 2”
“Oh? That's unusual.” Apparently he wasn't the only one still up. Briefly Bao-Dur paused in his soldering, but the Hawk was as silent as she ever got - which was actually quite quiet, now that he'd finished the repairs on the hyperdrive. She'd taken quite the beating, but still had plenty of fight left in her.
Hm. Perhaps someone had just needed to use the head.
He returned to the tangle of old cables, inspecting them individually for breaks in the insulation. For a while, it was just him and the sounds of welding, shuffling wires, and the comfortable hum of an old, low-power thruster.
The base of his horns prickled.
He wasn't done with the section, but Bao-Dur powered off the solder anyway and listened again. Nothing.
But the quiet was abruptly too much so, and not in a way that felt comfortable to fill. His flesh hand hesitated on the soldering iron, then set it aside.
Something wasn't right.
He couldn't name it, a missed sound or a smell or just a feeling, but the old instincts were flaring up with vengeance. And that wasn't uncommon; stars knew how many nights had passed sleepless because his brain just couldn't forget that every rustling leaf could mean a Mandalorian patrol, every ticking coupling a bomb.
But his remote had told him someone else was active. His perception was a faulting thing, but droids didn't make those mistakes, not when you took care of them.
Cables forgotten, the Iridonian rose, knees spreading fractionally and shoulders tensing with anticipation. The night cycle lights ran on low power but the glow of his arm had been a steady companion for years, at this point familiar enough to work by on its own. The Ebon Hawk was newer ground to him, but not so new he didn't know the shadows it painted on the half-lit workshop – knew them well enough to spot the single ripple out of time with the repulsor's pulse.
His arm snapped out, and the base of his prosthesis registered resistance, ears hissing with the familiar crackle of a stealth generator shorting out beneath electrified fingers-
Atton skipped backwards, both hands flying up. “Hey, watch it, watch it!”
No weapons. Surrendering. Bao-Dur blinked rapidly, willing his heart to make the switch from hostile to teammate. It lagged stubbornly behind his brain, slamming hard and desperate against his ribs. Yet another thing he envied of droids.
Wrestling down the adrenaline, he inhaled deeply and frowned at his visitor. Atton looked harried, and not just for the jolt he'd received. The reek of sweat and stale beer was nothing new, and between that and the stubble that was halfway to a committed beard, Bao-Dur had doubts he'd hit the showers in recent history. But the bags beneath his eyes were a fresh feature and his scowl was all but permanently etched into his face. Or perhaps that was just the mien of a man caught out.
“Care to explain what you're doing?”
Satisfied he wasn't about to get throttled, Atton's hands fell. Immediately he was scrubbing at his arm, trying to pull off nonchalance while he worked out what was no doubt one hell of a residual charge. “Just passing through.”
“In a stealth field?“
“It avoids the stupid questions, doesn't it?”
Bao-Dur was not impressed. “Right now, it's creating more of them.”
“Look, I was trying not to wake anyone, alright? How was I supposed to know you were still throwing a party in here?”
He wasn't sure he bought that – particularly, that it wouldn't matter to anyone asleep whether he was visible or not. And it still didn't address what Atton was up to in the dead of night. But perhaps this wasn't just a nuisance. Most of the crew tended to stick to the areas they'd claimed, only wandering for necessities, but lately Atton had been even more reclusive than usual. This was the first time he'd seen their pilot since Korriban, and that was including three dinners.
Korriban had left him with questions. He hadn't been certain whether or not he was going to ask them – but he hadn't had an opportunity before now. And he wasn't going to manage sleep any time soon, not after this.
“You've been scarce lately,” he said.
“Big words from a guy who never leaves the garage,” Atton shot back, walking past him. He jabbed a button on his belt as he moved to leave; his glower deepened when nothing happened.
“You're not going to get anything more out of that,” Bao-Dur told him, watching with some amusement as the man mashed at the controls like he could substitute frustration for functioning circuits. “That was an EMP.”
“Great.” Glaring at the ceiling, or perhaps the back of his skull, Atton unhooked the gen and flung it to the floor. “That thing cost me four hundred credits.”
“Then you shouldn't have used it to sneak through your crewmates' rooms. But since you're here anyway, maybe you can answer something for me.”
Atton stopped like his power had been cut, Slowly, almost casually, he pivoted back around. Blue light reflected in his dark eyes. “This is about Korriban, isn't it.”
When Bao-Dur didn't deny it, they hardened. “Look. I'll put up if you need the reassurance I'm not here to murder Meetra in her sleep. But I didn't sign on for an interrogation and I don't owe you jack. We clear?”
“That wasn't what I wanted to ask.” Bao-Dur studied the human before him – lanky, louche, the picture of a smuggler if he'd ever seen one. “You were a soldier?”
“That a surprise? Find me any guy our age who wasn't one; I'll wait. It happens when the whole galaxy brawls it out for a decade.”
“I thought you said you were older than me,” he pointed out, more for the sake of scorekeeping than actually caring.
“Not that much older,” the pilot groused. “Do I look like the witch to you?”
“I'm not an expert on human features, but no. She takes better care of her hair.” Reliable as any I/O, Atton raked a hand across his head, grumbling an epithet that was neither understandable nor needed translation. Bao-Dur chuckled. “But I have to admit, I can't really see you as the type to follow orders.”
“Shows how much you know, then.”
He turned the idea over. In the few months he'd known him, he'd seen more insubordination from Atton than his entire Republic tour combined, and he truly did not understand why the General put up with it. That said... for all of the whining, and the frankly embarrassing way he handled himself around the General, he'd be the first to present a unified front when outsiders were involved. And as much as he seemed to disagree with Meetra's decisions, Bao-Dur couldn't remember a time where the man hadn't fallen into step anyway.
“Maybe you're right,” he allowed. An unlikely soldier, perhaps, but the framework was there. “But the lip?”
Atton shrugged. “I got into trouble once or twice, but you learn pretty fast to keep the running commentary inside your head unless you've got a thing for scrubbing out fuel pipes.”
“Hm. Sounds like it didn't stick.”
“I'm not in uniform now, am I?”
“No, but if you were with the Republic once-”
Atton cut him off. “If we're really gonna do this, give me a minute. I was in the middle of something.”
“You never did explain what that was.” The Zabrak frowned. It was impossible to tell whether Atton had come in from the main hold or the cargo bay, but he had seen where he'd made to leave, and there was nothing in that direction but the aft dormitory. “What do you want with Visas?”
“What, still think I'm out to shank someone? I'm not gonna wake her up, don't worry.”
That was far from reassuring, especially when he'd found the man in stealth. “Those things aren't mutually exclusive.”
“Yeah, they're not.” Atton glared at him, challenge writ clear, and Bao-Dur decided it wasn't worth it. He couldn't imagine what he was up to... but if nothing else, there was a witness now. The man was foolish, but he wasn't stupid.
And besides, if Atton was going to take someone out, he'd be on the other side of the ship.
“I'm not getting involved.”
“Smart.” And he was off; visibly this time, but just as noiseless as he'd come in.
He was gone for long enough for Bao-Dur to doubt he was coming back. If that was how he was going to be, then that was the end of it, bar some sensors he clearly needed to install the next time they restocked planetside. He had no especial love for their pilot, not when they'd met and certainly not after what he'd overheard. He'd just felt – it had been familiar, too familiar, in the way that had smoldered in his chest and his phantom arm for near on a decade, and maybe he'd owed it to himself to acknowledge that.
Maybe it was because he'd been at Malachor too.
He'd wrapped up his inspection and was just beginning a routine tune-up on his remote when the aft door slid open and Atton stalked back in, this time with a bottle in each hand.
Murmuring an apology to his oldest friend, he screwed the access panel back into place. “Where'd those come from?”
“Smuggler's hatch in the Miraluka's dorm. The last owner kept this bird stocked and I'm not having this chat sober.” He thumped both bottles down on the workbench, hard enough that Bao-Dur worried for cracks. “Your choice how you wanna do this.”
Bao-Dur had always been more inclined to tinkering than drinking; having tried both, he preferred to busy his thoughts than unspool them to circle him in muddled repeat. He malfunctioned enough as it was. But Atton's hackles were still up, so he accepted the peace offering for what it was and took the first sip. The alcohol was unobtrusive, a decent Tarisian ale.
He raised the bottle in toast, but Atton merely scoffed and knocked back a deep gulp of his own. From the smell of it, he favored something harder.
“Yeah, I was Republic,” he eventually grunted. “Same as you.”
Words clamored against Bao-Dur's teeth, a sudden tide of vehemence he had to bite back. It cooled only slightly when Atton rolled his neck and added, “at first, anyway. What about it?”
At first. He wasn't ready to touch the other half of it, not unless he wanted a shouting match fit to wake the rest of the ship. He respected the crew more than that.
The same as him, though – that was more than he could take. Perhaps this had been a poor idea after all.
He felt his remote circling him, the familiar hum of his thrusters and the echo of that energy in the Force, and matched his breathing to his orbit. “I was curious where you served, that's all.” Atton still had the look of a man scanning for traps, and he offered his own first. “I was with the 12th Engineering Division out of Iridonia.”
“Doubt we crossed paths, then. I didn't see any ground deployment.”
“That doesn't mean we never shared the same battlefields.” He knew for a fact they'd shared at least one.
“Maybe. But I was a fighter pilot. Closest I got to you guys was transport jobs – you know, the assholes who dumped you off in the middle of hell and waved good-luck as we pulled out.”
He raised a brow at Atton's tone. “I didn't hold it against them. The pilots were in just as much danger as as we were.”
“Yeah?” The other man studied him. “Well, I'll give you this – those birds weren't elegant. Get a full crew packed in there and they steered like a blindfolded Gran. You try skimming a Mandalorian air patrol with those specs. Give me an A-Wing any day.”
”I wouldn't know. I was lucky enough to be rolled into the tech corps early on.”
“I'd say they were lucky they found you. You'd have been wasted in infantry.”
Malachor loomed before him, its surface splintering beneath his fingers. Wasted indeed.
Atton must have picked up on something in his expression, because he held up his hands. “Wasn't what I meant,” he said, in a rare moment of concession, and gestured loosely - first to the workbench and then the blast scaffolding that still wasn't ready to come down. “You do decent work, that's all. Would've been a waste to lose it in the meat grinder.”
“It almost happened enough times. The back lines still saw plenty of action. We were armed the same as anyone else.”
“Didn't say you weren't. There was nowhere to hide out there - even the big cruisers were fair game for the Mandalorians. Still, I figured pretty early on that I'd rather be in an Aurek than with the shock troops.”
“I can't blame you.” Bao-Dur glanced up, wry. “But it meant you didn't get much experience with stealthed hostiles sneaking up on you in the night.”
“Look, I'm sorry, okay?” Atton huffed irritably. “Didn't realize you were going to start having flashbacks. Is that what this is about? Payback up front?”
“You and the General are the only ones aboard this ship with any idea what it was like. You can't blame me for being curious.”
“I mean, I can. I don't know what you're looking for, but I can tell you right now that I don't have it.” He tipped his bottle back and blew out a breath, side-eyeing Bao-Dur around the glass. “You deal with that often? I didn't take the Mandalorians for stealth. Thought they liked to run in with their dicks out. Honor through overwhelming firepower, or something stupid like that.”
“Are you actually asking, or are you just trying to figure out how I caught you?” Career soldier or something worse, Atton's wounded ego made for a steady bet. Quite literally, ever since Mira had joined the crew.
“You're the one who brought up the war, not me.” The pilot made a reasonable pass at neutrality; he would have gotten away with it if he hadn't been compelled to add “I'd think I make less noise than a Mandalorian” right after.
“You're very quiet, don't worry. But the Mandalorians didn't smell like they'd been thrown out of a cantina.” At the time, Bao-Dur hadn't been able to tell what had changed to drive his guard up, but the longer they talked, the stronger his impression got.
Atton swore beneath his breath, and Bao-Dur raised a brow. “Don't ask questions you don't want the answers to.”
Atton scowled at him. He really did look a mess – drawn thin with lack of sleep, and there was a Selkath's chance on Tatooine that this was his first drink of the night. “That wasn't the question I asked, wiseass.”
“So you do want to talk about the war now?” Atton's only response was to cross his arms, and Bao-Dur sighed, wondering why he'd brought this on himself. “I guess it's another reason to be glad you weren't on the ground. It was built into their armor, even the recruits. Typically they'd use it for scouting or guerilla operations, but you couldn't take anything for granted.”
He studied his scattered tools. Organizing them in his mind's eye kept the memories at arms' length. “On Nazzri, when the offense broke down and the call went out to retreat, we were waylaid by what looked like a few harriers. They weren't bold enough to meet us directly, but someone was setting traps along our route and they detonated a pass we needed to cross to reach the the extraction site. The captain didn't like our odds of climbing in those conditions, so she had us dig in while she radioed in another evac. Turned out we'd been surrounded the entire time; they just wanted an ear on the Republic lines before they started killing.” He closed his eyes. Focused on the remote's hum, and not the screams. “We were completely exposed. The droids had barely begun with the trenches, and there wasn't time to switch them back to combat protocols. We had a company and a half when the order came to fall back. When the transports arrived, there were twenty-six of us left.”
Nazzri wasn't the worst of it. Dxun burned eternal in his mind, hotter than ever as the Ebon Hawk flew for Onderon. The corpses, and the grim arithmetic that made it so hard to justify the primal joy that lit his veins at every fallen Mandalorian. The dead Republic that piled around each one had kindled two fires on that moon.
But Nazzri was the first time Bao-Dur had thought he was going to die. He'd had time enough later to acquaint himself with the feeling.
Atton swirled his drink. “Nazzri, huh. Had a friend who lost an eye there. Some nerf-brain tripped a landmine and damn near wiped out his whole squad. You'd think if you're gonna lose body parts, it could at least be your own fault.” He snorted. “Shoulda quit then.”
Bao-Dur didn't need to guess what that meant. They'd all lost people.
“Nazzri didn't go well for any of us. The early campaigns were... difficult.” As if any words could sum up two years of despair and defeat, of an endless blood investment that only paid out pittances despite how much of themselves they fed to it. How many of themselves. All the empty spaces in the 12th's first roster, every face he still remembered and more of them he couldn't. How little all of it had meant in the end. “There wasn't much hope to go around until Duro.”
“Yeah. I was at Duro. Don't know if I can call what I saw there hopeful.”
It hadn't been hope, for Bao-Dur. It wasn't that kind of victory. But it had been something different – a chance to make the Mandalorians hurt as much as they did.
He didn't know why he'd thought Atton might understand.
“You weren't a latecomer, then. What made you join up?”
Atton shrugged. “They made it sound like the thing to do. Patriotism and glory, all that scrag. It's pretty cozy, looking out at the war from the center of the galaxy – or at least it was before the Mandalorians started closing in. Me, I just needed a paycheck. Wanted to make something of myself, maybe.” His liquor-tinged laughter was a bitter thing.
“You're from the Core?” Bao-Dur asked, with a fleck of genuine curiosity. Atton hadn't struck him as the type.
“I'm a Rimmer through and through. Thoroughly broken in. I haven't been home in years - if I'm lucky, they think I'm dead.”
“At least home still exists for you, somewhere.”
There was that chuckle again, bleak and familiar. “It really doesn't.” He settled back, slowly shaking his head. “Not sure why you're writing off Iridonia, though. It flipped a few times during the wars, sure, got hit as hard as anyone else. But they're building back alright. Healthy enough smugglers' market, at least.”
“I wasn't originally from the homeland,” Bao-Dur corrected, unimpressed with the pigeonholing. “We had colonies before the wars. I was raised on Nagara.”
“Huh. Never heard of it.”
The Zabrak's fingers clenched. Glass creaked dangerously; he'd forgotten he still had the bottle of ale. There were plenty of features he could build into a prosthetic, but sensation wasn't one of them.
He moved to set it down, then changed his mind and the trajectory with it. The taste was bittersweet, and warm as a spent energy cell on the way down.
“No,” he breathed. “I guess you wouldn't have.”
“Hey, if you want news on the Rim, Alderaan is the last place to get it. We knew something was happening, but they didn't really name names, you know?”
Alderaan, huh. Bao-Dur eyed the man across from him. Found the burn of alcohol to be the steadiest thing in the room.
He really hadn't intended to drink tonight.
“Our colonies were going dark one by one. Tens of thousands dead, and for what? Glory? It was butchery, nothing more.”
Atton spat his agreement. “Glory didn't have a damn thing to do with what happened out there.”
“The Mandalorians preyed on us for years.” That shadow had hung over most of his childhood, grimmer with each year, until all that was left of talk of the future were plans to flee and he was watching the rust-orange plains of home smear into hyperspace, bound for Iridonia in the only bid for safety his family had left. He remembered the conversations that hushed when a young Zabrak approached his elders. The packages from extended family that stopped coming, and nobody would tell him why. One of his distant uncles had been a mechanic, and was charmed enough by news of his something-over nephew taking an interest to send old parts and simple schematics when the trade shuttles made their rounds. Bao-Dur had hoped to someday meet him for years after he'd lost the chance to.
It was a fearful order they'd quailed under. A hopeless, enraging one, once he was old enough to understand it. And only on the cusp of his adulthood had the rest of the galaxy noticed, and offered any chance of fighting back.
“If the Republic had mobilized earlier, things might have been different.” Maybe it wouldn't have changed anything. Maybe Cathar and Serroco still would have been scoured. But he knew the Mass Shadow Generator would have never have come to be. “But at least Taris drove them to act.”
“Tell me about it.” Atton scoffed. “The Republic couldn't be assed until the Mandalorians were on some senator's doorstep. We'd heard the rumors, everyone did. Suddenly they've got hold of the story, and they're selling it to us like an army's sprung up overnight and it's our sworn duty to protect our, oh, what was it – our fellow galactic neighbors. Hah. Like it hadn't sat there feasting on the Outer Rim for a decade.”
Bao-Dur put down the bottle before he could break it.
He was right, of course. Echoing something he already knew full well. He'd lived the results of that complacency, and it was crueler than Atton would ever know.
But. He could resent the Republic quietly, in unvoiced thoughts and the small hours of the morning, and that was... it was. History, more fixed regrets that wouldn't change anything. It was counterbalanced enough by triumphs and pain and shared blood to rest stably in his mind, if never comfortably.
To hear it from someone who'd gone much further than bitter musings set something else guttering to life. Bao-Dur gripped the scaffolding, hauling himself up to his full height.
“And so you turned on us?”
Atton paused. Dark eyes met his, sharp and assessing, and bare fingertips drummed against the butt of a holster.
“Thought you'd understand more than anyone else,” he said. Metal dug into Bao-Dur's flesh hand. Beneath the other, it bent. “It wasn't the Republic who saved us back in the Wars, and it sure as shit wasn't the Council. Revan was the only reason we didn't end up dead or in chains. When she came back from the Unknown Regions... I was a soldier. When she told us to jump, I said “how high.”” He took a swig. “Turned out the answer was pretty kriffing high.”
Bao-Dur regarded him with all the ice of Telos's poles.
“I've changed my mind. Maybe freelancing looks good on you after all.”
“Chew spice, hornhead.”
“If I did, I'd own up to it. Coward. Just following orders has never been a real excuse.”
“Oh, like you have room to talk?” The traitor rounded on him, steady on his feet despite the smear of a slur trailing his words. “It wasn't orders, it was loyalty. I've seen how you act with your General. What would you have done if Meetra had gone red? If massacring the friendlies wasn't all she asked you at Malachor V?”
Half of him wanted to deck Atton Rand right there. The other half was reeling from the blow he'd struck first.
In absolute terms, the choice was obvious. The Sith had been monsters. But to strip the hindsight away from it - of what Revan and Malak would become, of what he'd learned about himself. If. She wouldn't have done it, and it wasn't worth weighing, not for those reasons. She hadn't; he knew her then, and he knew her now. But for him. For the Bao-Dur on the bridge of the Beacon, overlooking what was to be his greatest work. If the General had given him another order...
No. He wouldn't have gone. Not out of integrity or fear or betrayal. He'd just had nothing left to give.
The prosthetic mount dragged heavy on his shoulder when Bao-Dur shook his head. “Malachor ripped the fight out of me.”
“Yeah,” Atton said, voice tight. “I know the feeling.”
Did he? Did he really? The anger pooled in his chest like cryo-gel, cold enough to burn and rendering it difficult to breathe. “If you did, you would have crawled back to Alderaan,” he hissed. “There'd been enough destruction. The galaxy didn't need what you did.”
His home would still be standing without men like the one across from him. The Mandalorians had taken too many of his people, but it was Malak who'd bombed Nagara to rubble.
And Atton had the gall to stay silent. To look away. It was more than he could handle. Bao-Dur seized the smaller man by the shoulder and spun him to stare him in the eye. Cheap alcohol burned in his nostrils. “Well?”
“What, you think I'm gonna say you're wrong? Frak them all. I'm a deserter, not a loyalist.”
He didn't even have the decency to fight, even though the muscles beneath the padded leather had gone promisingly taut. The Zabrak set his jaw. “Funny, because that's not why the cave said you left.”
Calloused fingers jammed into the soft of his wrist. His grip went slack against conscious input, and Atton twisted backwards, out of his reach. “Right, because you know me so crinking well now, huh?” He slammed his drink on the workbench, his eyes like durasteel. “I left because they were gonna take me and ship me to the same hellhole they sent my targets, the ones whose throats I didn't slit myself. They wanted Dark Jedi more than they wanted assassins and loyalty didn't mean scrag if I was a better asset brainwashed.”
“Dark Jedi?” He'd pieced together that Atton had been an interrogator for the Sith, but there was a wide gap between that and apprenticeship. Had he been a Force-user before Meetra had taken him under her wing, lying in wait all this time? Energy gathered in his repulsor arm. “What are you talking about?”
“Seriously? You're this pissed that I went Sith and you don't even know what I did?” This bout of laughter was the worst yet. “Now that's just frakking hilarious. Fine. Let's go for broke. You really wanna know where I served during the war, techie? Elite forces, Jedi Hunter division, operative JV-52.” He flashed a grin, toothy and sick. “I'd say I'm at your service, but I retired early and the orders on this boat never came from you anyway.”
It was almost incomprehensible. That Atton was capable of it, or that he could. “You killed Jedi – but why?” The Iridonian's voice rose. “The Jedi were the ones that saved us!”
His remote drifted closer. “human + zap?”
“No, they weren't. Don't you get it? The Revanchists, the war heroes, they all turned. Maybe you didn't see it because the one you worshiped was the one exception to the rule. Maybe it was 'cause everyone who wasn't already halfway Sith ended up on Malachor's surface when you pulled the plug and you shut your eyes real tight at everything after that. But all the Jedi that were ever worth anything were on our side. The ones I was breaking in were the ones that counseled further observation while the Rim burned down. We didn't turn on our saviors. It was us and our saviors against the worthless hypocrites who couldn't be assed to fight for you or me or every kriffing species the Mandalorians drove extinct, but got real sanctimonious once a few red kybers got involved.”
And there it was. The hate. Not where he kept it, but he recognized the taste of it all the same.
Of course Bao-Dur had felt rage towards the Jedi Council. What sentient in his situation wouldn't anguish how the galaxy's protectors could let his people suffer so? It just... hadn't mattered anymore, when the Revanchists had joined the war effort. The Jedi had ignored them and dithered and then they'd come to their aid, and they finally started to win, and the Mandalorians were finally bleeding for every life they'd stolen and nothing else had mattered.
“And that justified turning around and bombing your own planets? That justified murdering Jedi who were too young to have ever had the choice to go to war? You became the Mandalorians. Some would argue you were worse; they just stopped you earlier.”
“You think you need to tell me that? I don't even know what I was thinking at the time. I got real good at shutting that shit out, at telling myself what I needed to hear to keep going. And eventually I didn't have to tell myself anything at all.” Atton gripped his temples with one gloved hand. “There was probably a point where I thought Revan had the right of it. Then it was just revenge and fuck everything else. And then it wasn't even that, and it's not my face in the mirror anymore and I still don't care as long as I can bring them down and make them scream.”
...Because nothing else had mattered.
Bao-Dur said nothing.
“My eyes used to be brown, you know?” Atton dragged the hand away to gesture at himself. “Most of that crap wore off a few months into Nar Shaddaa - probably the only time that moon ever cleared someone up. But the eyes never went back. It's like – proof. A reminder. I can walk away but it's still in there, every time I...”
He trailed off, frowning into the mouth of the bottle.
Neither of them said anything for a while. His remote whistled a repeat query, and Bao-Dur waved him down. ”Not this time.”
The Atton he knew from the day cycle would have had a crack at the ready, collusion or conspiracy or whatever droid-hating slander frothed in his brainpan. The Atton that crept about the ship at midnight hunting oblivion barely looked up.
“'Cause that's the thing,” he muttered, more to his drink than to him. “Even the heroes turned out to be bastards. Give a Jedi the balls to go to war and suddenly they've got a taste for it, and if you cross your fingers real lucky and remember not to breathe too loud, they might not pin you to the wall and cut you down you for kicks. We would've been better off if they'd all been at Malachor, up close, gettin' a real good look.”
Bao-Dur leaned forward on the balls of his feet, eyes narrowing to crescents. “Just what are you saying?”
“Dead or just broken in like you two, it doesn't matter. As long as they frakking stopped.”
And he couldn't refute that, could he? He wanted to. Had been about to, on autopilot, before the words landed in his head. Even as he railed against the sheer brazen callousness of it, as little as he wished Malachor on anyone and that was the only reason he'd been fool enough to pity Atton in the first place, the truth of it echoed in the dead spaces he carried with him.
Malachor had gotten him to stop. Made him see exactly what he'd turned into, reflected in a planetary storm through a bridge window and in a hundred thousand screaming deaths at the press of a single button. The hate was still there but he couldn't keep riding it, not with the lurid picture of just where it had driven him burning every time he dared to close his eyes.
Meetra had stopped. It had shattered her as much as him, and he wasn't going to dare to think of it as a form of salvation, not yet and not ever. But Revan hadn't stopped. Malak hadn't stopped. And so Atton hadn't stopped, and neither had Karath or Derred or Mon Halan.
If only the whole damned galaxy had taken a look at itself and stopped.
Bao-Dur considered Atton, really considered him, and wished he didn't understand. But he wished for enough hopeless things as it was.
He tapped a short sequence into his shoulder, and the crackling charge dissipated harmlessly.
Nothing for it but to keep moving.
“After you left... that place showed me Malachor.” Now Atton glanced up, tense but maybe a little surprised for the brief second before his expression flattened out. “Everything was the same as it always is. The fleets assemble. The Mandalorians rip into us. We start to lose, and I know what's coming. Even then, the first time, I knew. Except this time, the General never gave me the signal. She spoke to me... just told me that it was my choice.”
It was what he'd always known. It was his responsibility to be the one to unleash what he had built with his own hands.
The alcohol dulled the edges of the thought, but not enough to the point where it didn't cut. If it ever got there, he couldn't remember it.
His remote bumped into him with a strident ”no”, and he released the fists he hadn't realized he was clenching. His remaining palm sported rows of half-moon crescents, freshly branded but well-worn.
He wrapped it around the bottle of ale, just to give his fingers something else to do.
“The Mandalorians had to be stopped. I don't have the right to pretend I'd do anything differently. I didn't then. What good would saying no to a fantasy have done?”
Even if all it meant was not having to experience it one more time. To hear the sound of death in its totality, more deafening and hollow than he'd ever known it. He wouldn't shirk the reminder.
There had been a choice once, but he'd made it long before that day.
““bao-dur” = good”, his remote insisted. He smiled wanly and reached out to touch his oldest friend. Imagined the familiar grooves beneath a hand that had once felt things.
Atton twirled his bottle again. Only a splash remained to swim around the glass.
“I wouldn't read too much into anything you saw there. Korriban was screwing with us. Dark side energy, or some old Sith trap. It doesn't mean anything.”
“I know you don't believe that.”
“What, because we're such good friends?” The other man's voice was flatter than the glass fields of Serroco. “It's the truth.”
“Only in objective terms.” He didn't want to drag this out, but honestly. “Korriban was twisting the knife. Knowing that doesn't ease the sting.”
“Well, trust me on this one - as the local expert on Sith torture techniques, I can tell you there's not a damn speck of good that'll come from sitting on it. It's meant to get into your head, to find the cracks and shove its hands in there until you break. You keep mooning over it, you're just doing their work for them.”
For a moment, Bao-Dur weighed the other man. What it meant for him to know that as he did. What kind of blood he bore on his hands. And then the moment passed, and he decided that it really might be for the best to leave it be. He wouldn't forgive it, but he couldn't forgive himself, either. Not for what he'd wrought and not for what he'd felt. Hate had made animals of them both.
“Then I suppose neither of us is doing a very good job.”
Pulling up from his slouch against the workbench, Atton snapped his hands outward. “If this is supposed to be the part where we talk about our feelings, I'm out.”
“I'd rather not.” But there was still the question that had dogged his mind ever since he'd heard the illusion challenge Atton with his past. One last betrayal from the Republic, perhaps enough to drive a broken soldier into the arms of the Sith. It was a dust mote on the weight he already carried, but here, now, it asked to be asked. “Do you blame me?”
Atton squinted at him. “For what? This conversation? Take a guess.”
It would have been easy to take the bait. Bao-Dur didn't. “You nearly died at Malachor. I don't know everything, but I overheard that much.”
The pilot didn't have an immediate answer. His boot tapped out a rhythm against the floor that brought to mind the old catch in the hyperdrive.
“I don't hold it against Meetra anymore,” he finally said. “And if I don't blame her, then I can't blame you. It was just – it was war. People die. I coulda died anywhere. Maybe I should've died there.” He snapped his mouth shut, scowling at the bottle. “I didn't, that's all that matters.”
That was at once the bleakest truth and boldest lie he'd ever heard. But Bao-Dur supposed there were worse answers.
“How do you do it?” Atton abruptly asked him. When Bao-Dur stared, he waved around the garage as if the vague gesture cleared something up. “You know, this. The steady mechanic gig. Your head's screwed on pretty straight, all things considered.” Bao-Dur blinked at him, and Atton grimaced, hiding his face in his drink. “Don't gimme that look. You're the one who started this.”
“It's flattering you think I have an answer for you, but I could ask you the same thing.”
Atton snorted into his bottle. “You hit your head on something when I wasn't looking? If you mistook me for a guy who has his shit together, then I really can't help you.”
“It wasn't any further off the mark than yours.”
“Well, I've got a mean cocktail recipe that'll put you out too hard to dream, but then you gotta deal with waking up next morning.”
The following lull was forlorn enough that Bao-Dur felt compelled to try and answer the question anyway, for what little that was worth.
“I tried to undo what I did,” he began, haltingly. “In anger, I built weapons of mass destruction – it seemed right to turn my hands to protection instead. Planetary shields instead of superweapons. The Republic kept me as a contractor during the Civil War, but there wasn't much interest afterwards. Too little left. Nobody who was still interested in planetary defense could afford the upkeep, much less the development costs. That was how I ended up on the Restoration Project.”
“I didn't bother with that. Maybe you can pay back a planet with interest, but it doesn't work like that on my level. Everyone I worked over is just dead. If they're lucky. And if they're not lucky, and they're still out there? Then I don't wanna find 'em, because where I brought them wasn't the kind of place I could talk them down from now. Wouldn't know what to say, anyway.” A lopsided frown pulled at his features. “Kinda cheap to think I could make up for them with... handouts, or whatever. Didn't see the point.” The silence stretched out until Atton looked at him askance. “It help at all?”
“It did help, for a time. It was... calming, to walk Telos and see it change. To think these dead places could someday come back from what we did to them.” He couldn't stop the scowl that dragged down his brow. “But when Czerka moved in, when it fell apart, I was back where I started. And now with Peragus, and the Telos Project verging on collapse... I think it was worse, to have a glimpse of peace and then remember how the galaxy always works.”
“Not always.” Bao-Dur looked up; Atton's expression had turned sheepish. “I mean, hey, look. It's pretty rough out there, I'm not gonna argue that. But if there weren't exceptions, I don't think you or I would be here now.”
He knew immediately what Atton meant. It was hard not to, when the source had resonated in his soul for months. A complete circuit, humming with energy and potential, when he'd been running on low power for years. “The General was always a special case.”
“I'll give you that, techie. You sure know how to pick 'em.” He tipped the bottle only to find that its bounty had run out. He frowned; like an alcoholic guided missile, his gaze landed on next closest drink in his vicinity. “You gonna finish that?”
Bao-Dur had mostly forgotten about the ale, but the sheer audacity compelled him to take another swig. “You gave this to me.”
“We all make mistakes,” Atton drawled. Huffing, he settled back against the wall. For all the liquor he'd put away, he didn't seem any duller than he usually did – more animated, maybe. “Where'd you find her?”
“I was assigned to her flagship towards the end of the war. They promoted me once I started developing... major weapons.”
“Was she always... so...?” Atton's hands drew pictures incomprehensible to any but himself.
Yes hovered on the tip of his tongue, but that wasn't really truth, was it? Bao-Dur chewed over his answer. “She was always inspiring, but I think she's grown. She was exhausted by the end of the war. We all were - the kind that made it difficult to see what we were fighting for. She was no less of a leader then, but there's something to her now that I don't remember seeing on the Beacon. A sort of peace she carries with her.”
“The glow.”
So he hadn't gone slightly mad. “Like she's hooked herself up to a positron capacitor.”
“It's never there when I look straight at her, but when I catch her out of the corner of my eye...” Atton shrugged. “Nice to know I wasn't hallucinating that, at least.”
“Is that why you're always leering at her?” he teased.
“...Let's go with yeah.”
“Nothing to do with your chances?”
“Kriff off.” Atton rolled his eyes. “Never had 'em to begin with,” he muttered, less sullenly than Bao-Dur might have thought. “She's too good for scum like me.”
The Zabrak glanced towards the direction of the navicomputer, towards the only point of living energy in the Force that called out to him, and felt the General deep in sleep.
The pilot – the spacer, the soldier, the Sith - he wasn't wrong. But with the kind of person Meetra Surik was, Bao-Dur wasn't sure how much that mattered to her. Malachor weighed on her dreams as heavy as it did his own. (Never mind that he had conceived the Mass Shadow Generator from nothing, had presented it to her when she had no real options left.) It was presumptuous of him, but he liked to think that it was common scars that had drawn her to him, past the wall of machinery he surrounded himself with. Common scars that had led her to show him the Force - to seek peace past the hatred, one laborious step at a time.
Maybe they were all like that. Trapped in the past, reliving a single moment in time, and only now learning how to live for anything else.
“She cares for us anyway,” was what he said in the end.
“I don't know how the hell she does it.” Bao-Dur turned back. “Just... taking everyone she meets onto her shoulders. Everyone who asks for it, even some who don't. She was running, and then she turned around and decided to deal with – everything.” His voice was nearly wondering. “And now it's like she won't stop 'til she's put the whole galaxy back together with her own two hands.”
“Yeah.” Every time he witnessed it, it filled something in him that he hadn't realized still had the capacity to hold. Not until the day he'd poked out of his covert shelter to investigate a shuttle crash and found the past crumpled in a heap at his feet.
“I'm never gonna be like her. I'm just not that kind of guy. But I figure I can at least help keep her from burning out. And maybe that's good enough for now.” Atton sighed through his teeth. “It beats the drinking, anyway.”
“We're drinking now.”
“Nah. I still know my name, so this is nothing. I could still fly the Hawk alright; I don't start karking up anything important until about two shots past the point where I can't see straight.”
Bao-Dur eyed the empty bottle, freshly drained of something he was quite sure was stronger than ale. “Please don't.”
“Relax, she's on autopilot anyway. I sleep sometimes.”
Sometimes. Not now, but maybe in the young hours of the morning, if they'd earned it. Bao-Dur hummed. “I think you got it right, though.”
“Me, right about something? That's a first. Is your personal moon recording this?”
“remote – (“atton” + orders)”
He smiled again, small, but genuine this time. ”Off the record, I'm afraid. And not on the drunken piloting, because I'll weld you to a bunk before I let you crash another ship. Just the General.”
“Well...” In Atton's mouth, the word stretched out several extra syllables. “If I can only have one or the other, there's worse things to be right about.”
Wasn't that the truth. “It's a dangerous thought, but sometimes I wonder if she can fix what Telos couldn't.” Or what he couldn't, had never been able to. “Maybe it's as simple as getting another set of eyes on the problem, or finding someone with the strength to change things. And if what we broke is something that can't ever be repaired... she makes it a little easier to carry either way.”
“I don't know about fixing anything,” said Atton. “But what we're doing now... it's gotta be worth something, right?”
There was something plaintive there, crouched in a crack at the end, as desperate and sincere as Atton never was. Bao-Dur found that for once, he believed it.
“That's my hope.”
That for once in his life, he could do something for the right reasons, and have it mean something to the galaxy. It was a fragile hope, but even that was more than it had been in years.
Atton nodded absently, his eyes somewhere else. Bao-Dur was intimately familiar with that look and knew, just like that, that their conversation had overstayed its welcome. He waited anyway, but nothing more came, and eventually he bent down and began to gather up his tools.
The shared silence wasn't comfortable, exactly. But it was a little less desperate, a little less angry. If nothing else, it had ceased to be the kind of silence haunted by cloaked butchers a while back, and Bao-Dur would take what he could get.
He wasn't sure how long they stayed like that until Atton yawned. A series of audible cracks broke the workshop's low thrum as the man limbered up and stretched, swaying slightly as he did.
“Well, hey. If I ever figure it out, I'll tell you.”
As he made to leave, Bao-Dur held out his bottle. He'd meant to hand it off – if nothing else, it might get Atton to stop prowling the ship for the night. But Atton surprised him by reaching out to clink his own against the glass.
“Likewise.”