Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Hera had some questions for Saw Gerrerra.

Now wasn’t really the time for dwelling on them, not with the cacophony of alarms, shouts, and feet pounding on the deck as other Rebel fighters rushed past.

“Twelve minutes, Hera,” Kanan cautioned her. “We need to make a decision.”

A decision. Well, a minute ago, Hera probably would’ve chosen to leave the remaining Imperial captives in their cells, and the Empire would either come and rescue them or damn them by destroying the Rebel base with the captives inside. But now she was staring through the red rays of a laser gate at the seated form of Grand Admiral Thrawn, and that changed things a bit. At the other end of the cell bay, a different crew was ushering groups of three and four down the hall, presumably into their own small transports. She sighed.

“We can’t let him fall back into the Empire’s hands,” she decided. “We’ll take custody of him until Saw can re-establish a secure base.” She keyed her comm and Sabine picked up on the other end. “Sabine, go ahead and convert Kanan’s cabin to hold an Imperial captive. Secure everything you can, and move what you can’t into my cabin.”

“Already on it,” Sabine replied. “And you guys might wanna hurry. I know what the official evac countdown is, but… Let’s err on the side of caution.

If Thrawn could hear her, he gave no indication. The idea of having him onboard the Ghost made her skin crawl, but there was no other option.

“I still don’t see why Saw couldn’t deal with him,” Ezra muttered from Hera’s left.

“Can’t blame him,” Zeb grunted in response. “I don’t want to deal with him either.”

“Enough chit chat,” Kanan cut in. “We need to move. Zeb, you’ll be in charge of securing the Grand Admiral. We grab him and then make for the Ghost. Ezra, you make sure he doesn’t try anything on the way back.” A chorus of agreement met Kanan, and Hera suppressed a small smile. Nothing like a crisis to pull everyone in line—well, as in line as this bunch ever was.

She stepped up to the control panel and keyed in the access code Saw had given her for Thrawn’s cell. The ray shield blinked into nonexistence and Zeb and Kanan started towards where Thrawn sat on the cot.

“What—hey!” Zeb’s shout drew Hera’s attention just in time to see a human man slam his body into Kanan, knocking him back a step into Zeb. Kanan’s blaster was in the stranger’s hands.

“Back off.” The man’s voice was rough, an accent buried beneath the grittiness. “Leave the cell door open and leave with the rest of your Rebel friends.” The blaster, trained on Kanan's chest, made a convincing argument. The stranger also had the element of surprise; he must have been pressed up against the wall closest to the opening, out of immediate view and relying on the chaos of the evacuation to conceal his presence. Hera could hear Ezra fumbling for his saber and the blaster in its hilt.

“Put the blaster down,” Kanan ordered.

“Yeah, Imp. Put it down before I make you,” Zeb added darkly.

The man adjusted his stance, raising the aim from Kanan’s chest to his head. His hands were trembling slightly, but the look in his eyes indicated that it wasn’t hesitation that made them shake. He didn’t seem very swayed by the boys’ posturing.

Force, this was going to get them nowhere. Hera could see the way this man had put himself between her crew and Thrawn, who was still perched on the cot. At first, she’d taken Thrawn’s stiff posture as evidence of the rod up his ass that all high-ranking Imperial officials seemed to have. Now that the red glow of the ray shield was out of the way, though, she could see the way his skin was pale, drawn tight over the knuckles where he was tightly gripping the edge of the cot, the unfocused quality of his gaze, and the shallowness of his breath. Whatever Thrawn had gone through to get captured by Saw, he was hurt. And whoever this human was, he cared about Thrawn’s pain.

Hera stepped forward. “You have eight minutes before Imperial cruisers get within firing range.” The man’s eyes flicked to her, so at least he was listening. She took it as her cue to continue. “You can take your chances on whether they’d bother to search the base for surviving captives before destroying it, if you want. But I think we both know how the Empire usually handles these things—especially when they don’t know a Grand Admiral is being held here.”

“Who says they don’t?” The man countered.

“Who says they do?” It was a childish counterargument, but she didn’t need to convince him that the Empire was clueless. She just needed to plant the doubt in his mind. He didn’t reply, but the muscle in his jaw jumped as he clenched his teeth.

“Or you can come with us. We may be your enemy, but we’re far less likely to bomb you.”

Ezra made a doubtful noise that Hera hoped the man didn’t hear and wished, not for the first time, that anyone else on the crew was helpful with conflict de-escalation.

The man shook his head, as if to dispel the thought, and readjusted his stance. “Better dead than a captive,” he hissed.

Hera nodded to Thrawn, who was still motionless on the thin cot behind him. “Does he agree with that?”

A klaxon sounded in a short burst—five minute warning for the evacuation. It was early—something was going wrong beyond the walls of the cell block. Hera didn’t let it show on her face; whoever this guy was, he didn’t know about the schedule. Keep it cool, she thought.

The silence after the klaxon blast rang, and the man stared at the Ghost crew for a moment more before swearing and dropping the blaster to his side. Hera felt something in her chest untense slightly.

Kana stepped forward, snatching the blaster back. “Zeb, get the Grand Admiral. Let’s go.” Sabine tossed him an extra set of cuffs, which he wasted no time fastening around the unknown man’s writs and shoving him out of the cell in front of him.

Zeb was doing the same for Thrawn, who was worryingly compliant. Hera had heard that the Grand Admiral was a logical, unflappable person. Maybe he had seen the wisdom in Hera’s argument.

Then Zeb yanked the Imperial up from where he was seated and the man went abruptly, alarmingly pale before crumpling to the floor with a thud.

The human jerked against Kanan’s hold, shouting angrily at Zeb as another alarm blared through the PA system, drowning out their words.

“—didn’t mean to,” Zeb grumbled as the PA cut out. The stranger was still straining against Kanan’s hold, cursing.

“We don’t have time for this,” Kanan said. “We need to get to the Ghost, stat. Zeb, just carry him or something. Let’s move.”

Hera didn’t miss the way the other Imperial glared at Zeb as he scooped Thrawn—who appeared to be unconscious, ot good at faking it—- into his arms and following Ezra as the group made their way through the now-empty halls of the compromised base. Hera watched as the man grimaced as the Ghost crew broke into a jog, then pressed his lips together in a firm line. Maybe Thrawn wasn’t the only one injured.

Sabine was waiting for them at the airlock. “Just in time,” she said. “It’s getting ugly out there.”

“Chopper’s in the cockpit?” Hera asked.

“Yeah, he’s—woah…” Sabine’s head jerked around as Zeb moved past her, tracking Thrawn as they disappeared further into the Ghost. “The prisoner is Thrawn?”

“And company,” Kanan added grimly, guiding his charge through the airlock after Zeb.

“You said one prisoner,” Sabine said with a raised brow.

Hera sighed. “This life is full of surprises, I’m afraid. I need to get to the cockpit to get us out of here. Can you walk Zeb and Kanan through anything they need to know about our impromptu holding cell?”

Sabine nodded, and Hera followed her inside the Ghost.

Chopper grumbled at her as she sat down in the pilot’s chair. “Yeah, I know. Thanks for keeping the engine running for me, Chop.” The droid quieted, mollified, and started running through the decoupling process as Hera pulled up the radar. The cruisers were only about a minute from targeting range, far too close for comfort.

“We need hyperspace coordinates, Chopper.”

Chopper groaned about being underpaid, overtasked, and underappreciated, as per usual. Hera shook her head, electing not to remind the droid that none of them got paid (and if anyone was going to be paid, it should be her, because it really does seem like she has to do everything around here sometimes).

The bows of the Imperial ships loomed closer, as if to act as a counterpoint to Chopper dragging his chassis to calculate the hyperspace route.

“Any day now,” Hera reminded him. Chopper waved an arm dismissively, and made vague threats about how much electricity he would send Hera’s way if he wasn’t already scomped in to the controls. After another moment of complaining, he told her to punch it. The bow of the closest Imperial cruiser warped, elongating and curving for just a moment as the Ghost rocketed into hyperspace.

“You cut that close on purpose,” Hera said, sliding out of the pilot’s chair once she was certain that the ship was stable and on a good course. Chopper told her she couldn’t prove anything, and it didn’t matter anyways if the crew all congratulated her for another miraculously narrow escape. He warbled out the familiar refrain of “underpaid, overworked, and underappreciated” at Hera’s back on her way out of the cockpit.

Hera found the crew in the lounge, gathered around Sabine. The Mandalorian girl was perched on the edge of the sofa, datapad in hand. Zeb was yelling at her while Ezra knelt on the floor, doubled over in laughter, and Kanan observed with crossed arms and the expression that meant he found something very amusing but was determined not to let it show.

“Do I even wanna know?” She asked Kanan, raising her eyebrows.

“Not in the slightest,” he replied while nodding. Hera snorted softly at her husband’s antics, then leaned over Sabine’s shoulder to examine whatever had sent her crew into a tizzy.

The datapad had apparently been rigged to surveillance cameras installed in Kanan’s cabin. In the top left corner read the words “Baby Monitor,” and in the top left was a running timestamp. Hera watched as Sabine rewound the footage with the swipe of her finger. On the screen, Kanan directed the human Imperial officer into the cabin with little issue, even uncuffing him after exchanging a few words. Zeb followed, and Hera had to suppress a wince as she saw him accidentally knock the Grand Admiral’s head into the doorframe—and none too gently, at that. There was no sound, but she saw the human snarl something at Zeb and advance toward him. Whatever response he received apparently did little to appease him; as soon as Zeb set Thrawn down on the bed, the human stomped down on Zeb’s exposed toes with the heel of his uniform boot. Then, as Zeb bent down in pain, the human punched him squarely on the side of the head. Even on the datapad, lipreading, she could make out the words, “And how the kriff do you like that, you little—” followed by something that Hera was probably better off not knowing.

Ezra, who had just caught his breath, devolved into another cackling fit of laughter.

“It’s not funny!” Zeb protested.

On screen, Kanan was fastening the cuffs around the man’s wrists; interestingly, he didn’t seem concerned with resisting Kanan or escaping the improvised holding cell. Instead, he seemed to be focusing his energy on spitting—literally—at Zeb. Honestly, Hera was a little impressed at the compressed rage this guy had. Kind of like Chopper, actually.

“So,” Hera cut in before Sabine could rewind the tape again. “Where does that leave us now?”

“Well, Kanan’s room makes a pretty good improvised cell. I put up a couple of cameras so that they can’t pull any surprises. There’s one in the ‘fresher, too, but I haven’t activated that yet.” Probably for the best, Hera thought. The look Kanan gave her—a mixture of exasperation and a little bit of pride—told her that she wasn’t alone in thinking that. “I was able to plant a few mics in the room before you brought them in, but I haven’t fully synced those up with the datapad yet, so we won’t have audio monitoring for a while. I also didn’t have enough time to figure out how to partially lower the wall, so we’ll have to be extra careful whenever we bring in supplies to them.”

Kanan leaned over to set a hand on Sabine’s shoulder. “Good work, Sabine. Without your help, we wouldn’t have been able to get them out of there.”

“Why did we have to take them?” Zeb asked. He had slouched down next to Sabine, apparently over his irritation at being embarrassed. “I didn’t even think that was common practice for us Rebels to do.”

Hera shot a glance at Kanan. That was something she was going to need to confront Saw about, but she didn’t know how much of her speculations she wanted to share with the Ghost crew. She also knew that Saw wasn’t one to take prisoners in the first place, which was another issue entirely. “I’m waiting to hear back from Saw and some of our other Rebel commanders, but what we know for now is that we’re holding on to them until Saw’s people can recoup and find another base. Thrawn is an extremely powerful resource for the Empire, as we all know. Just keeping him out of Imperial hands is worth the trouble, and Saw knew that our crew would be up to the task.”

Zeb puffed his chest out at the subtle appeal to the crew’s pride, but Ezra’s expression tightened. “Yeah, well. I can think of an easier way to keep Thrawn from helping the Empire—permanently.”

“Ezra,” Kanan scolded. “You should know better than to just throw a blaster at every problem you have.”

“Could use my lightsaber instead…” Ezra muttered. “But fine. Even if we don't kill him, I don’t know why Saw let him and that other Imp live.” Sabine patted Ezra’s knee in solidarity.

“I know that Thrawn has been responsible for a lot of horrible things on Lothal,” Hera said. “And I am sorry to you—to all of you—that I’ve allowed someone who has brought so much strife to our lives to come onboard our home. But trust me, I believe that this is the right choice.”

Ezra sighed, but the slump of his shoulders told Hera that she had won him over—for now, at least. He shot her a reluctant smile and nodded. “We trust you, Hera.”

The rest of the crew echoed the sentiment, and she didn’t bother trying to tamp down the warm golden glow in her chest.

“Alright, everyone. Let’s try to get some rest. We’ve had a long day and we’ll need to make a supply run to account for our new passengers once we drop out of hyperspace.”

The lounge cleared out, and Hera shot her husband a smile. “Thanks, babe.”

“Back to your place, then?” Kanan teased. “I seem to recall that someone gave my cabin away to a couple of Imperials.”

“Like you aren’t in my room all the time, anyways.”

Kanan’s hand was warm and comforting as he rested it on her shoulder, squeezing gently to release some of the tension.

“This is why I love you,” Hera said.

“Not the only reason, I hope.”

Hera hummed in contemplation just so that Kanan could feign offense as they stepped inside her cabin.

“We need to talk about Thrawn and the other prisoner.” Hera stepped out of her flight suit, rummaging through one of the compartments to find a comfortable pair of sleep pants.

“I’m a little distracted right now.”

Hera threw a pair of pants at Kanan’s face without bothering to turn, partially to deny him the satisfaction and partially to hide her blush. “Seriously, Kanan. Ezra has a point—we may not like it—”

“We don’t like it,” Kanan cut in.

“—but Saw has never had an issue with adding a few Imperial deaths to his casualty list. So why wouldn’t he kill Thrawn, who has been a thorn in the Rebellion’s side as soon as he stepped onto the scene?”

“I’m assuming you already have a theory?”

“I mean, look at the condition they’re in, Kanan. Thrawn was injured to the point of being unable to stand. He passed out. I know we haven’t been putting Thrawn through his paces physically, but he wouldn’t be where he’s at in Imperial Command if he was delicate. And that other one…” Hera shook her head, mystified. “He looked to be in better shape, but he was still struggling to keep up when we were heading back to the Ghost.”

Kanan nodded thoughtfully. “While we were back on Saw’s base, I assumed he was just putting up a token amount of resistance to being captured. But in my cabin, when I was re-cuffing him, I got a better look. Most of it is covered by his uniform, but there’s some spectacular bruising on his neck, going down below the collar, and the side of his hand also bruised and swollen. He could have some broken bones at least. He was favoring that shoulder, too. I thought he was twisting away from me and the cuffs, but he could’ve been trying to relieve pressure on it without saying anything.”

“And he’s in better shape than Thrawn is. I mean, Kanan, they’ve been mistreated at best under Gerrera’s care. Likely denied medical treatment, too; I know supplies are stretched thin, but we always have bandages and wraps to spare.” Hera sighed, sinking down next to Kanan on the bed. “There’s no love lost between our crew and the Grand Admiral, that’s for sure. But all the signs point to…”

“Torture.” Kanan said into the empty space between them. “You think Gerrara kept Thrawn around to extract high-level information.”

Hera nodded miserably. “And whoever that other Imperial is. He’s not high ranking, but he’s clearly Thrawn’s subordinate. He could have been leveraging him against Thrawn… I can’t control Gerrara, but I also can’t abide by torture. Torture, Kanan!”

“I know, love.” Kanan rubbed soothing circles over her back. “I know. I don’t like it either. Whatever it is we do next, I’ll be here to help you figure it out.”

Hera sighed and tipped over to lean against her husband. “I love you.”

“Love you too, babe. How about this: you get some rest while I write up a list of supplies we need, including medical supplies for our…guests. When we drop out of hyperspace, you can look over the list to make sure I didn’t miss anything. Sabine and I will grab whatever we need in port so we don't have to worry about Ezra and Zeb starting any shenanigans.”

Hera groaned appreciatively. “That sounds amazing.”

Kanan chuckled. “Alright, then.” There was a moment of quiet, and then Kanan said, “Do you think Sabine really put a camera in the ‘fresher, too?”

Hera laughed. “I don’t doubt it. Doesn’t she scare you sometimes?”

They dropped out of hyperspace after the shortest hour of Hera’s life. She was tempted to just dock the ship in her bedclothes, but the fact that she would have to walk past the transparent ray shield—and the Imperials behind it—to get to the cockpit gave her just enough motivation to get dressed. There was a well stocked station just off of the hyperspace lane, so they wouldn’t have to burn fuel going in and out of the atmosphere. It was also simpler to dock at a station—no worries about landing close enough to a city but far enough to avoid violations, then finding transport into the city and back with all the supplies. Thank the Force for small mercies.

Sabine and Kanan had been needled into letting Ezra come with, and Zeb had plans to go off on his own for personal supplies. It wasn’t a guarantee that they’d fly under the radar, but at least she knew Sabine and Kanan would get the actual supply on the list, not a flat crate of WhizzPop cans and Star Wheatie boxes that Zeb and Ezra had brought back when she’d asked for protein bars and electrolyte drinks.

She nearly tripped over Chopper on her way down the corridor to her cabin. He was perched menacingly outside of Kanan’s cabin, staring at the Imperials within. He’d assured Hera that he would watch the captives while the crew rested and report any attempts of escape, coupled with a few menacing crackles of electricity from his manipulator arms. Hera tried not to stare through the barrier at them—even if she couldn’t prove that Saw had been torturing them for information, something had to have happened in their prior captivity. The least she could do was not openly stare at them like animals on display.

She’d watch them on the datapad in the privacy of her own quarters instead.

It still didn’t sit right with her that she had prisoners onboard. They did awful things on behalf of the Empire, but being stripped of their autonomy and held prisoner was something that struck a little too close to home for her.

The human man didn’t seem to be doing much of anything. As Hera scrubbed back through the footage, catching up on what she’d missed, she could see that he’d been in the same position nearly the whole time they were in hyperspace: sitting on the floor with his back to the bunk Thrawn lay in, legs tucked up to his chest, eyes on the door. Keeping guard, apparently. There were a few times when his head began to dip forward or back as he nodded off, but he shook his head each time, clinging to consciousness. Every ten minutes or so, he stood up and held his hands up to Thrawn’s face, then reached beneath the Grand Admiral’s uniform tunic and kept his hands there for another minute, then finished the cycle by holding the inside of his wrist to the underside of Thrawn’s chin. It was awkward with the cuffs on, and it took Hera a few moments to realize he was checking the other’s vitals. Breathing, heart rate, and temperature, maybe? Each time, he stood up with difficulty, Hera noted, pitching forward into a kneel before swinging his left leg forward and standing up. Something wrong with his right leg, then, given how he’d had trouble running earlier.

Hera wondered what sort of leader Thrawn had to be to inspire such loyalty among his subordinates. She didn’t really see anything all that special about him, other than a condescending attitude, grating voice, and smug face. Then again, he was a formidable enemy, which meant that he was a formidable ally to those on his side.

She did a cursory search on Grand Admiral Thrawn, hoping to find something on the human in his orbit. Most of it was unhelpful—military articles and political pieces. He was a hot topic in the capitol when he wasn’t laying waste to small towns on Outer Rim planets, apparently. Ironically, it seemed most of the Empire’s bureaucracy shared the Ghost crew’s disdain for the Grand Admiral, if for different reasons. Then, in an image buried in a news report covering an Imperial Navy event in Coruscant, she saw him. Well, them, actually, Thrawn and the human officer standing side by side. They both looked supremely uncomfortable—healthier than they were now, certainly, but far more out of place.

Hera’s eyes flicked to the caption below, identifying them as Commodore Thrawn and… Ensign Vanto.

She squinted at the rank plaque in the blurry picture. That was an ensign plaque, sure enough. She was fairly certain that his current plaque indicated he was a commander now, though. That meant that either this Vanto had advanced extremely quickly, or something else was up.

Well, she had a name now. Time for a little more digging.

The crew was gathered back in the lounge, which had become their unofficial briefing space. Kanan had suggested that they go over what they knew before they chose someone to bring the supplies to the Imperials.

“So, I’ve found out who our second prisoner is: Commander Eli Vanto, aide to Grand Admiral Thrawn. From Lysatra—that’s a planet in Wild Space—and a family deep in the commercial shipping business,” Hera said.

“I still don’t know why this matters. He’s an Imperial. What else do we need to know?” The time off the ship seemed to do little to calm Ezra’s stormy mood towards Thrawn’s presence.

“Well, he’s a well-connected Imperial. At first I thought Saw kept him around because of his connection to Thrawn, but Vanto is a wealth of knowledge in his own right. He was passed up for promotion multiple times. There’s a huge jump in his history—he stayed an Ensign up until Thrawn became Commodore about a year ago before being skipping a rank straight to Lieutenant Commander. His promotions are the opposite of Thrawn’s; the faster the Grand Admiral progressed, the more it seemed they slowed Vanto’s career.”

“Again, this matters why?”

Hera sighed, but before she could speak, Sabine cut her off. “Commercial shipping, right? The name Vanto is familiar. I must have heard of his family’s business. In general, commercial shipping has gone down since the Empire started encroaching on Wild Space regions and setting up checkpoints on all the major routes, but most companies are still successful. Vanto’s already passed his minimum service requirement, so he could have left at any time and gotten a job with his family.”

”Exactly,” Hera said. “I don’t think Vanto is really committed to the Empire. They don’t value him, and from what I can tell, he didn’t even get promoted until Governor Pryce realized she could use him as a way to get into Thrawn’s good graces.”

“He’s staying because he likes being Thrawn’s aide,” Sabine concluded. “Ezra, it’s important because this guy knows as much as Thrawn does—maybe more—but he isn’t loyal to the Empire like the Grand Admiral is. Hera, you’re a genius.”

It was nice to be appreciated. She could see Chopper’s point.

“I get wanting to see the best in people, but I dunno if this guy’s got what it takes to be sympathetic to the Rebellion, Hera. He’s pretty wound up.” Zeb ran a hand over the spot Vanto had punched his earlier, smoothing the fur down.

“We have to try,” She insisted. “It’s a long shot, but imagine the pay off.” She logged the crew’s varying reactions to that. Some, like Ezra, would be harder to convince, but they’d see it her way soon enough.

“I think you should be the one to go in first, Hera,” Kanan said. “Sabine will be busy with working on the audio syncing out here, so she’s not an option. I was the one who dragged him in there, so he probably isn’t my number one fan right now. Vanto’s already shown he doesn’t like Zeb, and—no offense, Ezra—but I don’t think he’d take well to Ezra’s anti-Thrawn attitude.” Ezra looked pleased, if anything, to have his disdain for the Grand Admiral addressed.

“I’d be more comfortable with two of us in there,” Hera said. “They’re injured, but I don’t want to underestimate them. And I’ll need help carrying in some supplies.”

They sat in silence for a moment before Zeb spoke up. “Maybe I can try again? If I bring in supplies, this… Vanto person may warm up to me a little.”

Hera doubted it, but there wasn’t really a right answer anyways. “Sounds great, Zeb.” He returned her smile hesitantly. Hera knew Zeb wouldn’t usually feel guilty about applying blunt force to a few Imperial heads, but when she and Kanan had shared their suspicions about Saw’s treatment of their prisoners, she could see the unease in the Lasat’s eyes.

Vanto’s eyes narrowed when he saw them in the corridor, but he didn’t stand. Hera wasn’t sure if it was due to his injuries and exhaustion or his general dislike of the Ghost crew. Regardless, Hera still paused before keying the laser gate open. “Commander Vanto, right? May we come in? We have food, medicine, and clean clothes for you and the Grand Admiral.”

“Can I say no?” Now that Hera knew that he was from Wild Space, the drawl was easier to parse from the roughness that obstructed most of his voice. He shook his head irritably before Hera could answer, waving his hand sarcastically at the ray shield. “Be my guest.”

It was as good as they were going to get. Out of sight of the prisoners, Chopper deactivated the shield, and Hera and Zeb stepped through, reactivating it behind them.

“I, uh. I got you a cot. Probably more comfortable than the floor, right? We weren’t expecting to have two people so…” Hera felt a surge of fondness for Zeb. Maybe the Imperial wouldn’t appreciate it, but she could see the slight droop of his ears, the sincerity in his voice, the nervousness of his rambling; for all his immaturity and brutish tendencies, Zeb was secretly a sweetheart.

Vanto didn’t thank Zeb, but he didn’t punch him again, either. He got to his feet awkwardly, masking the injury to his ankle but clearly uncomfortable, and nodded towards the space right next to the bed. “You can set it up there,” he rasped.

Hera moved closer to where Vanto was standing as Zeb set up the cot. “With your consent, I was hoping to check you and the Grand Admiral over. We noticed that you both sustained some injuries.” A scoff at that. Hera soldiered on, “You and Thrawn could clean up in the refresher and then I’ll look you over.”

“Sure,” Vanto said amiably. “I’ll just drag my unconscious commanding officer into the locked refresher, strip him, toss him in the sonic shower, which I hear is great for any fractured bones he may have, and it’ll be all good again.”

Hera felt her stomach drop. She’d assumed that Thrawn was just resting, recovering from fainting earlier, but—

“Wait, wait,” Zeb said. “He’s not just asleep?”

Vanto scowled. “He hasn’t woken up since you yanked him up and then slammed his head into the hatchway.” He advanced towards Zeb, stabbing a finger into his chest, menacing despite his unsteady gait and small stature.

Zeb’s ears folded back further, defensive and guilty. Hera couldn’t blame him; if Thrawn had been unconscious this whole time, his injuries could be more severe than they’d expected, and if the refresher was closed then Vanto would have had no access to water for the past couple of hours. She stepped between the two of them, gently urging Vanto’s hand down with gentle fingers on his wrist. “Commander, we didn’t know. You both seemed clearly exhausted. The refresher was also supposed to be open; Sabine must have bumped the lock when she finished clearing it out. There’s potable water from the sink for whenever you need it, and there’s a water shower as well as a sonic.”

Vanto glared at her for another moment, then deflated. “Fine. But Thrawn needs medical attention more than I do.”

“We’ll do our best to take care of you both,” Hera assured him. She reached for his cuffs, telegraphing the movement, and unlocked them before she stepped over to type in the code for the ‘fresher. Vanto brushed past her, grabbing the spare set of clothes from her arms as he passed. After a moment, she could hear the water running in the shower.

“It’s not your fault, Zeb,” she assured her friend quietly. “They were in rough shape before we even got there. You’re trying to make up for it.”

Zeb sighed. “I know. I just… I don’t like it, Hera. Everyone on this ship has always been here because they want to be.”

“If they weren’t with us on the Ghost, they’d be in captivity under Saw’s… questionable hospitality. Or dead.”

Zeb snorted. “Way to lift the mood.” She followed his gaze to where Thrawn was laying on the mattress. She could see discoloration and slight swelling over half of his face beneath a faint layer of grime. Saw probably wasn’t keen on letting his Imperial captives run up the water bill, she thought darkly. Still, the most difficult thing was that she didn’t really know what Thrawn was supposed to look like. Was he paler than usual? Flushed? Hera was more familiar with the presence of the ships he commanded than the man’s actual form. Still, she could hear a whistle in his breathing that probably wasn’t normal, and sections of his uniform were marred by blaster bolts and streaked with what must be blood. Vanto seemed upset about Thrawn’s lack of consciousness, but not panicked. Hera resolved to follow his lead. He was the resident Thrawn expert onboard.

“Do you want to grab some more blankets?” Hera asked Zeb. “I should be okay here on my own. Vanto seems cooperative, at least for now, and Thrawn’s not going to be launching an attack any time soon.”

“If you’re sure,” Zeb agreed. He seemed eager to be out of the cabin, away from Thrawn—and likely from Vanto, who didn’t seem the overly forgiving type, at least when it came to Thrawn. The ray shield lifted as he walked through, then reappeared in his wake.

“How do you do it? Biometric coding?” The ‘fresher door had opened quietly, and Vanto was observing the ray shield with mild interest. His voice still rasped, but it sounded marginally better. Hera wondered if Saw had even given him and Thrawn any water.

“Nothing that fancy, I’m afraid. Chopper’s right outside, controlling the door panel.” At the mention of his name, the droid rolled briefly into view, a spark of electricity crackling at the end of his manipulator arm. Vanto nodded, curiosity seemingly sated for the moment.

“Do you have medic training?” He asked as he lowered himself onto the cot. Hera noted that he seemed to be keeping his left arm as still as possible. She would make sure that she at least checked out the arm, right leg, and the bruising Kanan had mentioned, which was clearly visible now that he wasn’t in the high-collared Imperial uniform.

“More field medicine than anything formal, unfortunately, but it’s been enough to get us by. Is there anywhere in particular you want me to start?”

Vanto tilted his head and seemed to consider her for a moment. “I’m okay, for the most part. My shoulder was dislocated, but I managed to pop it back in. I wouldn’t mind you taking a look at it, though.”

That explained how heavily he was favoring that arm, then. “Can you remove your shirt for me?”

In the middle of removing the Imperial’s shirt, Kanan knocked on the door jamb. “Zeb sent me with blankets and tea.” If he was bothered by Hera undressing another man, he didn’t show it. “Need any help?”

“Almost got it,” Hera replied. Vanto’s eyes were shut, breathing steady in a way that implied it took all his concentration.

His shoulder was red and swollen, but at least wasn’t still dislocated. Someone had moved it back into place, at least. There wasn’t much more Hera could do for it, aside from providing a sling and ice. Kanan set the blankets down beside Vanto and started rifling through the aid kit for the pouch with the bandages and chemical ice packs.

His back was less severe, though it looked worse. Hera could see raw marks amidst the bruises, the kind that came from shock prods and stun batons. She shelved her irritation—really, did Saw not see how this brought him down to the Empire’s level?—and dug out a small container of salve. “This is a topical analgesic with a low concentration of bacta in it. It doesn’t work wonders, but it’ll make these feel a little better and hopefully kickstart the healing process.”

Vanto nodded in understanding, tensing as Hera applied the gel.

In the end, Vanto had a sprained ankle, fractured two of the bones in his hand (“Tell your Rebel friends not to grind my hand into the deck next time,” he’d said flatly), and was spectacularly dehydrated. Hera also suspected that he’d strained his vocal cords while yelling at Saw’s people, but he didn’t comment on it and Hera could tell that the extended focus on him, while Thrawn lay unconscious just behind him, was beginning to wear on his patience. They’d wrapped, splinted, and immobilized what they could, but it was clear that their meager medical supplies could only do so much.

“Here, last thing,” Kanan said. He waggled a bottle of anti-inflammatories at Vanto. “Safe for humans and Pantorans.”

Vanto furrowed his brows, but took the bottle, giving the label a brief glance. Hera caught the faint frown he gave it, but whatever he was thinking, he kept to himself. He held the bottle between his knees and screwed off the cap.

“Alright.” Kanan said as the Imperial officer tapped out three of the pills. “Talk us through what we can do for Grand Admiral Thrawn.”

“Nothing, not with the supplies you have right now,” Vanto said, swallowing the pills with a grimace. He looked at Hera. “But you already suspected that.”

“Really, nothing,” Kanan echoed sarcastically.

“If Thrawn were Pantoran, sure, some of this stuff would help. Really, you don’t know?” His gaze flicked between Hera and Kanan’s faces, then sighed. “His eyes glow red. It’s kind of hard to miss.”

“I thought maybe he had a condition or something,” Kanan muttered. Hera resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Sometimes he sounded just like Ezra.

“What is his species, then?”

Vanto shook his head in answer. “Knowing the name wouldn’t help any; you won’t find any others of his kind in Imperial space. I can tell you that what works for us—,” he nodded at Kanan, “—usually just makes him sick, if it has any effect at all. The safest bet is pure bacta.”

“Pure—you couldn’t buy pure bacta on Coruscant, much less from somewhere in the Outer Rim!”

Hera nodded in agreement with Kanan. “He’s right. We can get medicine, but it’s just too hard to source bacta. It might as well be made of credits. Aside from private hospitals and the Imperial facilities that produce it, you just can’t find bacta that hasn’t already been mixed with something else.”

“You could always release Thrawn into the care of a hospital,” Vanto pointed out. Kanan opened his mouth to say something, but Vanto cut him off, holding up a hand. “You won’t, I know. You’d rather him die on your ship, in your care, than to risk the Empire recovering us.”

The comment stung, but she hid her reaction as he turned his attention to Hera. “You were counting on me knowing that, I bet. Doing first aid and bringing me tea while my commanding officer struggles to breathe behind me, building the guilt up so that I’d give in... It’s kriffed up, just so you know.”

Hera felt her face heat a bit under the officer’s intense stare, but she didn’t break his gaze. “I didn’t know his condition would be this bad,” she admitted, “But yes. The pressure was intentional.”

“What’s he talking about, Hera?” Kanan asked.

“Your captain is using me to get the location of the Imperial refinement facility in the Outer Rim. You confirmed that, by the way,” Vanto indicated Kanan with a lazy wave.

“There isn’t an Imperial refinement facility in the Outer Rim.”

“Not one that you can find,” Vanto countered. “As the leader of your cell, you must have been informed that there was a covert refinery in your region, Captain Syndulla. Cargo freighters carrying shipments of kavam and alazhi bacterial colonies, harvested Vratixia renanicus, or ambori fluid would stop at a planet and refuel, then disappear off into space. You knew what they were making, you just couldn’t figure out where it was.”

Kanan glanced at her, and Hera nodded.

“Well, I don’t know where it is either,” Vanto said. “If I did know, I would’ve told you if you’d just asked instead of trying to manipulate me. I know Thrawn’s condition better than you do.”

She had to accept that Vanto was being honest. If he knew, he would have told them. He’d been subtle about it, waiting until Kanan or Hera were distracted by his injuries or the medkit, but he hadn’t stopped looking over his shoulder at Thrawn’s unconscious form.

“I’m sorry, Commander Vanto. I was relying on you knowing where the facility was, but we’ll adjust our plans. We can find another way to treat Grand Admiral Thrawn.” She didn’t know what that other way would be, but regardless of what Vanto thought of her and the Spectres, they wouldn’t stand idly by while someone died on their ship, on their watch. Kanan’s hand brushed her elbow in a subtle show of support.

“I’ve already thought of another way,” Vanto said. “I may not know where the facility is, but I know which route the freighters are most likely to take when they leave. If I give you what I know, do you think you can take it from there?”

Hera nodded. “I think you’ve heard that we have some experience hijacking Imperial ships. You can trust us to get the bacta that Thrawn needs, Commander Vanto.”

“And that the Rebellion needs, I’m sure,” Vanto said, but it lacked any real bite. Hera saw the slight smile, the way he untensed just a bit, and the relief in his eyes. Maybe she hadn't needed to pressure him like that, but she was glad that she had been correct in betting that Vanto’s loyalty to Thrawn was stronger than his ties to the Empire.

Kanan led the way out, pausing to flash her a discreet thumbs-up where Vanto couldn’t see it. Hera let the surge of fondness chase away the lingering guilt she felt and smiled back. Time to prep the crew for another mission.

Chapter Text

Thrawn knows he’s dreaming, because it had already been raining when he and Lieutenant Commander Vanto arrived at the festival.

It’s an important detail to remember, he knows. There’s something else, skirting at the edges of his mind, but Thrawn doesn’t force the thought forward. It will come in due time.

In his dream, the air is warm and dry. Beneath their feet, the reddish-brown gravel makes shushing noises with each step. Behind them, the pale gold light of the evening sun warms Thrawn’s back. Dark blue-grey clouds cluster on the horizon, threatening the rain that Thrawn knows will come later. Eli—Come on, Thrawn, ‘Lieutenant Commander Vanto’? We’re on leave. I’m happy about the promotion, don’t get me wrong, but you act like we haven’t been living out of each others’ pockets since we met—Eli has his face turned away from him, attention focused on the gathering clouds. From the back, Thrawn can see the way his hair turns up at the ends; if he grew it out, Thrawn knew that it would form loose curls. Without the length, though, it just curls gently up like the boughs of the hardy pyzylo trees that grow near Csilla’s equator.

Thrawn opens his mouth to tell him this, but is interrupted when Eli speaks.

“That’s my favorite color,” Eli says, eyes fixed on the approaching storm. The growing wind whips his words back to Thrawn. Eli had told Thrawn this their third week at the Imperial Academy, when he was miserable with homesickness and the crushing pressure of their peers’ exclusion. But in Thrawn’s dream state, it makes sense that Eli would say it again, though he needs no reminding. Eli turns to face him, half of his face in shadow and half lit up in the light of the sinking sun. This image is memory, Thrawn knows. He revisits it often. The sunlight shows the details of Eli’s iris, a pattern like the shadowed criss-cross of roots burrowed into a brown forest floor.

Eli’s hand closes around his wrist, warm and dry like the air around them. This did not happen in Thrawn’s memory, but he finds himself strangely grateful that it happens in this edited dream. “Come on. We’re going to be late.”

Eli leads Thrawn down the road by the wrist. It had been a mile walk to the festival grounds from Eli’s home, though the flat path made it an easy walk, and the conversation—Eli explaining the cultural significance of the various elements they may see that night, the foods he was looking forward to, the proper bartering process if Thrawn wanted to purchase something—made the walk feel even shorter. In this dreamscape, there’s no words exchanged as they walk.

In the dusk, a shape moves across the path, from one grassy field to the next. A mid-sized feline, its tawny coat an exact match for the rolling grain field it appeared from—a saracal. On their first day of shore leave on Lysatra, Vanto had taken them to a museum of natural history and they’d lingered in the feline exhibit for nearly an hour. There was a cultural significance that Vanto had explained, too, but the memory eludes him. I should know that, Thrawn thinks. It’s important. Both the surety and urgency of the thought startle him, but even if he does know the species’ name, it eludes him at the moment. No matter. They watch in respectful silence as the animal pauses at the edge of the path, assessing the pair. It lashes its twin tails and flicks an ear, a graceful movement accentuated by the darker tuft of fur sprouting from the tip. Then it slinks into the harvest field, barely disturbing the grains as it goes.

Eli turns then and says something to him, but it’s lost in the sudden noise as the festival unfolds before them.

This, too, feels important. Thrawn cannot shake the sense that he’s missing something vital here, but Eli’s already facing forward again.

The sun sets fast on Lysatra, and it’s properly dark now, which makes the cheery glow of the yellow lights strung between stalls more prominent. In the distance, thunder cracks. Eli tugs him into the throng of masked people and performers. Just like in his memory, they’re mostly human—a few other species are there, but no other Chiss. It doesn’t seem to matter that Thrawn’s skin is a deep indigo or that Eli’s is a glowing brown, though; plenty of the festival-goers have painted their skin in solid or patterned colors. Eli is explaining what each choice means over the din of music and conversation. Thrawn has to crowd close to him to catch the words.

They pass a stall laden with wooden masks and Eli lifts two off of their pegs, handing one to Thrawn. He notes the divergence between dream and memory.

Here, there was no extended haggling, no abashed explanation that usually people carve masks for friends, but Eli had lost his years ago and hadn’t had the time to ask anyone to make him a replacement. He had explained that someone had to choose your mask for you. Eli had spent the time searching for a specific mask he’d apparently already had in mind for Thrawn. On the other hand, Thrawn—lacking the same cultural context Eli had—had spent several long minutes agonizing over the array of carved animal faces, hoping that he wouldn’t find some way to inadvertently offend his friend by choosing an animal with lackluster symbolic significance. Finally, Thrawn had settled on selecting one for aesthetics.

It was the same as the one Eli was wearing now in the dream—and, thinking about it, looked like a stylized representation of the saracal they’d encountered. Eli leaned up and slipped Thrawn’s mask onto his head. He tried to remember what it had been, but his mind was growing fuzzy, the lines between what had really happened and what was his dream beginning to blur together.

A pair of children run between them, forcing Thrawn and Eli to part briefly. They hold streamers in their small fists, the bright ribbons glinting in the string lights above and stretching out further than is logically possible. Thrawn turns his head to watch them pass and startles at the sudden closeness of Eli in front of him. As he leans up to Thrawn’s ear, their masks bump together with a pleasing, hollow sound. Eli shouts, still barely audible over the din. “I’m starved, let’s get some food!”

Thrawn’s nod is lost as Eli turns away from him, winding through the crowd. They pass a stall that sells live fish the size and color of Thrawn’s little finger, a stall selling handcrafted folk instruments, and one full of a rainbow array of quilted fabric.

At one point, Thrawn almost loses track of Eli as a group of performers whirl by. Their bodies are mostly obscured by the long Novea costume they’re in, a wood and fabric construct ten people long. The performers wear stilts that fold and unfold, allowing them to move in an undulating motion through and above the crowd. It looks a little like a Corellian Glider, with a long body and narrow beak, but entirely silver-white. It’s the mythical representation of death on Lysatra, Thrawn knows; the central figure of the festival they’re currently celebrating. Tonight, it’s just performers in a costume. In the stories, it’s the being that bears souls to the afterlife and guides each year to its death so that the new year can begin.

The three-horned head of the Novea twists to regard Thrawn, tilting in consideration, before resuming its twining path through the crowd.

The promised rain finally begins to fall in the slow, heavy way that it does on Lysatra. A credit-sized drop splatters on the crown of Thrawn’s head. The sensation is surprisingly pleasant, as he remembered it. At this point in the season, even the rain was warm; by the time they reach the stand that Eli guided them to, they‘re both soaked. Eli speaks to the vendor as Thrawn stands by. When he reaches out to hand the vendor their payment, Thrawn absently notes the way that the water has turned the light hair on Eli’s forearms a shade darker, plastered to the skin. It’s nice, and he’s smiling beneath his mask when Eli returns to him with their prize.

There’s nowhere to sit that isn’t already taken up by families or couples, so Eli nudges Thrawn over to an area between stalls without much traffic. At the mouth of the alley, he can see the Novea prowl by, its beak cracked slightly open as its head swings back and forth, swinging, searching. The stillness of this alley needles at Thrawn, the unlikely quiet of it, like a loose thread in an otherwise well-made fabric of his dream.Before he can pursue the thought—tug on the thread, as it were—Eli hands Thrawn the tray, pushes his mask atop his head, and picks up one of the fried balls of cornmeal batter. A puff of steam escapes it as he tears the ball in half, offering one half to Thrawn before realizing that his mask is still in place.

“Here,” Eli says. “Let me get that out of the way for you.”

His fingers are warm like the rain as he tilts the mask up, freeing Thrawn to eat. The dough is almost too hot on Thrawn’s tongue, faintly sweet, and outshone by the sensation of Eli’s elegant fingers brushing crumbs from his lower lip.

This almost certainly did not happen, Thrawn thinks, I would remember this if it did. He thinks he can almost remember that Eli had laughed at him and handed him a napkin. Eli had never touched Thrawn’s lips before, and probably never would.

He feels—something about that, but whatever it is, it’s lost to the sound of Eli explaining what each of the dipping sauces are made of and which are his favorites. There’s giddiness in his voice, which makes sense; Eli had been talking about the Lysatran foods and drinks he’d been craving for nearly two weeks leading up to their shore leave. Eli slides a hand under the tray so that each of them has a free hand to eat with and grins up at him. The rain, still coming down slowly, is collecting on the edges of Eli’s mask and wetting his hair, slicking it down but still not managing to tame the ends.

“Which one do you want to try first?”

Thrawn chooses a light yellow jelly, and it’s sweet and a little tart and clings slightly to his tongue. Eli dips his in a reddish, creamy sauce that Thrawn knows is his favorite, tangy and smoky and just a little spicy. There’s enough in the two cartons for them to try each of the sauces, but Eli only samples one or two to confirm he still has the same favorite. Thrawn knows to avoid the plain red sauce in the middle—no one should ever use redfruit sauce, it destroys the flavor of the other sauces and you can’t taste anything else afterwards—but picks his way around the rest of the offerings. The sweet ones are better, he decides, though the caramel is too thick. He returns several times to the bowl containing Lysatran honey and, when Eli doesn’t launch into a lecture on having manners, finds he prefers to dip the fried meal in the melted butter first, then the honey.

“I’ve missed this,” Eli says after swallowing. “I’m glad I get to share it with you.”

The rain keeps falling, soaking Eli’s hair a darker shade of brown. There’s something about the way it falls—too slowly, almost—that rubs unpleasantly across Thrawn’s mind. He finds himself irritated at the discordance, creeping in and corrupting this perfect memory. He knows that he cannot have the good changes, the feel of Eli’s skin on his, without the bad changes, the sense of wrongness. And yet.

They’re done before the food has a chance to get soggy in the rain and then they’re moving again, through heavy drum beats and the building tempo of rainfall. The darkness is crowding in on them, made heavier by the rain that’s long since plastered Thrawn’s shirt to his skin and his hair to the nape of his neck. Thrawn knows the night is drawing to an end as the stalls begin to clear out and the crowd begins to thin; still dense in the center, where Eli is bringing him ever closer, but wicking off at the fringes.

Thrawn catches Eli’s arm and pulls them to a stop. They’re at the center of the festival grounds now; a bonfire taller than Thrawn is burning brightly.

“I’m staying with you. The night isn’t over,” Eli assures him. There’s something about the words that catch against the inaccessible knowledge of the thing that Thrawn needs to remember.

For the first time in the dream, Thrawn finds himself able to find the words and speak them. “It nearly is.” He doesn’t know what that means, exactly, but it feels true.

Eli’s lips thin, and he covers Thrawn’s mouth with the palm of his hand. “The night isn’t over,” he repeats. “Stay with me, Thrawn.” There’s an urgency to his voice that makes Thrawn nod. He doesn’t think this happened, either. He wonders if that makes this exchange more or less important.

A long stilt spears the ground between Eli and Thrawn. The performers pilot the Novea over their heads, then seamlessly fold the stilts to half-height, then fold all the way, then halfway again. It looks like a perfectly fluid sine wave even from this close. The head swings around again, nearly clipping the gathered crowd. It cocks its head, angling an eye at where he and Eli are standing, and cracks its silvery beak open.

Eli shouts something beneath the roar of the thunder and rain and crowd. Thrawn isn’t sure if it’s at him or at the Novea, but it pivots away as smoothly as it came, and Eli quiets, satisfied.

The rain is pounding down now, sizzling where it hits the bonfire that blazes on unhindered. Eli slides his mask back down and nearly melts into the crowd. They’re passing something around, and Eli takes one for himself and presses another into Thrawn’s hand. With a sharp crackle, the tips ignite. They’re sparklers, hissing and burning bright enough to sear Thrawn’s eyes if he looks at it for too long.

“Come on,” Eli says, waving his sparkler at Thrawn in a bright circle. “Let’s dance!”

Thrawn’s feet are inexplicably sore, though he knows that they shouldn’t be; he spends all day on the Chimera on his feet. He’d like to go back to Eli’s home, to shower and change and lay in Eli’s bed, listening to the rain pound on the roof overhead and the soft, quiet breaths of Eli sleeping on a spare mattress beside him. But Thrawn can hear the grin in Eli’s voice beneath the mask, and he so rarely asks things of Thrawn.

Thrawn holds out his hand to Eli, palm up, and allows himself to be dragged closer to the day-bright light and music of the band before the bonfire.

Chapter Text

Kanan squinted at the small stack of flimsi Vanto had given Hera. She was still in his cabin—the holding cell—talking over the plan with a holomap of the shipping lanes in a sector not too far from here. Vanto’s handwriting wasn’t bad, per se. It was just slanted, with all the characters crammed a little too close together and too-wide gaps between each word.

“Is that even Aurebesh?” Ezra asked from where he stood at Kanan’s elbow.

“Apparently.” Kanan tried not to let too much irritation leak into his voice. Ezra already had a big enough chip on his shoulder without Kanan adding to it. Still, it would have been nice if Vanto had at least acted apologetic about his handwriting. Instead, he’d aimed a grin at Kanan that was more like baring his teeth and said, “You could always let me have a datapad,” which they all knew wasn’t going to happen. Petty bastard.

“Could you ask Zeb and Sabine to come to the lounge?” He asked Ezra. “I think I’ve got the gist of it, and Hera should be done ironing out the details in a few minutes.”

“Sure thing.” Kanan was sure that Ezra would get the rest of the crew in the most chaotic way possible, so he’d budgeted in some time to allow them to squabble some of their energy out. He wasn’t as good as Hera at this whole interpersonal thing, but he knew a few tricks.

And speaking of Hera’s way with people… He sighed, staring blankly at the sheets in his hand and letting his mind wander. He wasn’t a big fan of the way she’d tried to trick Vanto into giving up the coordinates of the refinery. It wasn’t directly harmful, but he and Hera always seemed more likely to disagree when it came to where the Ghost crew fit into the Rebellion. While he chose what to do based on whether it required them to set their morals aside to achieve a goal, Hera tended to judge the acceptability based on whether or not people would get hurt.

And whatever bond Vanto had to Thrawn, they’d all agreed that if Vanto had to pick, he’d choose the Grand Admiral’s wellbeing over the Empire’s. He’d probably been planning to hand over the information, anyways. Vanto was lying to them—Kanan felt it in the Force when the Imperial had claimed not to know where the factory was—but he also knew that Vanto had been honest when he’d said that the information he was giving the Ghost crew now would’ve been available if Hera had asked outright.

He’d tell Hera about it later, and they could decide together if they wanted to push Vanto on it. Whatever reason Vanto had for hiding the location—duty, loyalty, doubt that the Spectres could succeed—Kanan quietly agreed that stealing a shipment probably had a higher chance of success than storming what Vanto had identified as the Karrasto Refinery.

Zeb’s screeching and three sets of footsteps heralded the team’s arrival, breaking Kanan out of his reverie. He adopted his ‘I’m not going to say anything but knock it off’ expression, which worked more often than not, and levelled a glare at the trio as they burst into the room. Zeb had a slash of orange paint over his forearm and knuckles, likely from the paint can that Ezra was trying to keep out of the other two’s reach.

“Give it back, jerk,” Sabine yelled. “You know those cans are expensive, and I know you’re too broke to pay me back.”

“I’ll show you what’s broke,” Zeb snarled, swiping at Ezra.

“If you break it, you’re replacing it, Zeb!”

“I have tons of credits,” Ezra protested.

“I’m not breaking the can, I’m gonna break the kid.” Zeb finally managed to pin Ezra’s wrist to the deck, leaning down to pry it from his grasp.

Ezra cackled and depressed the nozzle, coating the Lasat’s neck in orange. The volume of the shouting match pitched upwards, with Sabine yelling at Ezra for wasting her paint and Zeb making dire threats against a variety of Ezra’s limbs.

“Can you all cut it out,” Kanan yelled. The tangle of Spectres shot him guilty looks, as if they just now remembered that he was the one who asked them to meet him here. There was never a time where he’d ever truly regret taking in the ragtag group that was his family, but sometimes the nonstop bickering and chaos could be a bit much, even for him. He pinched the bridge of his nose in exasperation. “Ezra, apologize to Zeb and give Sabine her spray paint back. And whoever gets paint on the ship gets to clean it and explain to Hera why it’s there—even you, Zeb.”

“But I’m the victim here,” Zeb protested.

“We’re all Ezra’s victims, Zeb. It’s what makes us a team. Let him up.”

Whatever Ezra had started to protest disappeared in a wheeze as Zeb used the hand planted on his abdomen to push his considerable bulk upwards. Sabine snatched the can from his limp hand and shook it threateningly, but didn’t push it further.

“Now that we’ve all decided to behave like adults,” Kanan said, “Is everyone ready to go over the plan?”

“The Plan” was mostly broad strokes. The way that Vanto explained it, the Empire had hidden its tracks by ordering the raw materials to be delivered to a tiny station that was little more than a few docking bays and a fueling area. Imperial pilots assigned to Karrasto would be waiting there to pilot the ship from the station to the refinery under the guise of having specialized knowledge of the region. It was, apparently, common practice in hard-to-navigate areas, which was the definition of the system Karrasto was hidden in. The entire system was difficult to navigate; twin suns, several planets that would have been drawn together by their gravity wells long ago if not for how fast they were travelling—thus making their orbits unpredictable—a thick asteroid belt, and the remnants of a dust cloud that had caused strong solar winds and instrumental interference for the past twenty or so years.

“The only navigational hazard this place is missing is a black hole,” Sabine scoffed in disbelief. “How could the Empire even be able to build anything in those conditions?”

“No clue,” Kanan said. “But it’s easier to build in dangerous areas if you don’t value the lives of your workers. I wouldn’t be surprised if slave labor was a big part of the answer to that question.”

A somber mood fell over the table at that.

“So if the shipping companies actually need these specialized pilots in order to get to the refinery, how are we going to get in there?” Ezra asked, poking at a map that showed the system in question.

“Well, we aren’t. We’re going to ambush one of the outgoing shipments before they can jump to hyperspace.”

The Empire also relied on contracts to ferry the manufactured bacta out into more accessible Imperial spaces, where it could be dropped off at any number of bases and distributed to their medical facilities and anyone who had enough credits. It also meant that the Imperial pilots stationed at Karrasto Refinery wouldn’t be able to leave the system and give away its hiding place. From the way Vanto described it, it was the best location for pilots looking to retire with a large bonus; three years tucked away in the Gystal System with isolation pay and they’d be out of the service with enough money for nice place on an Inner Rim planet—maybe even a Core World, if they were careful with their finances. Money really can buy anything, Kanan supposed.

“There’ll be a small window of time between the Imperial pilot disengaging from the freighter and the hyperspace jump. We’ll use that moment to board, and take the bacta tanks. From there, it should be a clean jump into hyperspace,” Kanan explained. It sounded easy enough. He just hoped that it would be that simple in execution, too.

“I still don’t really get why we’re doing this,” Ezra said. “I mean, I’m not trying to be a stick in the mud. But since when did we start trusting Imps? And also going on supply runs for them? We only have so much money and we’re spending it on fluffy blankets for fascists. Now we’re risking capture so Thrawn can take a bacta bath?”

Zeb and Sabine looked at Kanan expectantly—they, too, had their doubts, even if they were more willing to follow his lead.

“It’s not just about Grand Admiral Thrawn,” Kanan said. “I know it looks like that, and trust me, there have been plenty of times where I’ve wished that he’d just disappear from the galaxy altogether. Thrawn’s the payment we’re making in exchange for the intel that Commander Vanto is giving us—intel that will secure us a source of bacta that will save lives; Rebel fighters’ lives, the lives of civilians caught in the crossfire of the fights we bring to their planets, and people who are being subjected to Imperial tyranny.”

Also, Kanan thought, Thrawn would die without it. Kanan had been monitoring the Grand Admiral in the Force. His thoughts were impenetrable, a Klein bottle that sent Kanan in loops whenever he tried to parse the man’s emotions or thoughts, but he could still sense the Force signature. It had been a dull, but steady, glow when he was brought onto the Ghost. Over the past hour, though, it had started fluctuating. Not frequently, but it would flicker to something more faded. He still had time, but without medical help, Thrawn would die. As much as Kanan disliked the man, he liked the idea of being responsible for his corpse even less. Would they release it into space? Bury it planetside? Burn it? Was there some religious or cultural practice Thrawn followed that would give them instructions; if he did have burial preferences, would they even know?

Ezra picked at a loose thread on his sleeve, still scowling. “I get it, I guess. But I don’t like it. What if we just take the supplies and keep them all for the Rebellion? Vanto can’t do anything about that.”

“Well, he can keep quiet about where the other shipping lanes are.” Hera stood in the hatchway, with Chopper right behind her. “Shockingly, he doesn’t seem to trust us any more than we trust him. Once Thrawn is seen to, Vanto has agreed to give us his predictions for the other places where the freighters emerge before entering hyperspace.”

Kanan nodded at her in greeting, reaching out to her in the Force, a self-soothing habit that he’d never tried to break. She shone brightly, exuding satisfaction and a sense of quiet determination. Whatever conversation she’d had with their captive, it must have left her feeling confident about their upcoming mission.

Beyond Hera was the presence of Vanto, pressing up against Kanan’s consciousness, and—wow. He was more than worried; he was bordering on terrified. Kanan withdrew from the Force, momentarily overwhelmed by the strength of the man’s emotions. Hera shot him a concerned look, but he waved it off.

“We just finished going over the broad strokes of the plan,” Kanan said. “Perfect timing.”

Hera stepped over to the holomap, panning over to an area on the near side of the asteroid field. “This is where Vanto says the cargo freighter should be before the jump. Now, this is a civilian ship, so there may be some security, but it probably won’t be as heavily guarded as the targets we usually hit. That also means that we’ll need to pull our punches a little bit—these aren’t Imperials, they’re just people trying to get by. Stun settings only.”

Behind her, Chopper grumbled something disparaging and waved a manipulator arm irritably, but Hera continued on. On the display, the map was replaced by a rotating 3-D model of a standard cargo freighter.

“Our mission is to get as much of the cargo as we can. Our best bet is to transport it directly from their cargo bay to ours through the airlock. Once it’s onboard, we’ll take a hyperspace lane out to a safe place to contact General Sato and pass the supplies off to the Rebellion for distribution. Any questions?”

Kanan followed Hera out of the lounge once she dismissed them, trailing behind her until they reached the privacy of her cabin, running through the best ways to bring up Vanto’s crushing anxiety. Even without actively reaching out in the Force, he could feel the roiling emotions skirting against his mind.

“I think Thrawn is getting worse,” Hera announced after the hatch swished closed behind them.

Kanan frowned, pulled from his train of thought. “How so?”

Hera flicked on the datapad, handing it over to him. Vanto was perched on the edge of the cot facing Thrawn. He had his uninjured hand clasped around one of Thrawn’s, head bowed until it was nearly touching their joined hands. Through the now-operable audio relay, Kanan could just make out the words. “Stay with me,” Eli was saying. “Just for tonight. You can make it, I know it, you’ve made it through worse. Stay with me.” There was tension written in every line of Vanto’s body. He repeated stay with me like a mantra, interspersed with the occasional insult or encouragement. The blatant display of vulnerability made something twist in Kanan’s gut.

He glanced up at Hera, whose face was grim. “He started pretty much as soon as I was out of sight. Thrawn’s breathing is getting worse, too. I could hear it when I was in there with them. Vanto has a hell of a sabacc face, but he was struggling to focus at the end—he could hear it, too. Probably couldn’t hear anything other than Thrawn’s breathing.”

“I can’t make sense of Thrawn in the Force, but Vanto’s an open book right now. I can barely reach out without being bombarded by his anxiety.” Kanan scrubbed a hand through his hair. “I just—I want to make sure this operation is safe for the crew.”

“Nothing’s ever safe,” Hera reminded him. “Not for us.”

“I know,” Kanan said, reaching out to clasp Hera’s arms gently. “But I can’t go into this knowing that there’s a higher risk than usual for any one of us. Do you trust him?”

He watched her glance at the datapad, eyebrows drawn together at the sight of Vanto, curled over Thrawn, uncharacteristically lax in his unconsciousness. “I think that some people can fake this sort of thing, but Vanto isn’t one of those people. Force knows what Thrawn’s done to deserve this level of loyalty, but he’s got it regardless.”

Kanan nodded. “If you trust him, I trust you. That’s good enough for me.”

“You know,” Hera laughed, a sardonic edge to her tone, “I don’t think I ever would’ve believed that I’d be here rushing into a mission to save Grand Admiral Thrawn’s life.”

“Me either.”

Hera sighed, leaning forward to bury her face against Kanan’s chest. “What if we dock with the Phantom instead, just in case? We can leave someone here to cover us with the Ghost’s arsenal in case something goes wrong.”

“Excellent thinking, love.” Kanan placed one hand between her shoulder blades and kneaded the base of her skull with the other, smiling when he felt Hera melt into him.

“This has been the most stressful day,” she mumbled. Kanan agreed, though he declined to say anything and continued to soothe Hera and give her a moment to breathe before they launched into the next stage of their plan. He couldn’t help but admire her persistence. No matter how tight of a spot they found themselves in, Hera was always able to work them out of it one way or another. Kanan did his fair share of problem solving too, but there was something special about being able to ease Hera’s worries. She did so much for the crew, after all. And Kanan loved her.

“We still have… forty two minutes until we’re out of hyperspace. Want to lie down?”

A chirp from the datapad curtailed Hera’s response. “Ugh,” Hera groaned. It was a little funny how easily Hera griped behind closed doors, and how well she kept it together in front of the crew—Zeb and Ezra, at least, did enough complaining for all of them. She peered at the screen, then frowned. “It’s the surveillance video from Vanto and Thrawn’s cell. I requested it right after we got them onboard, but honestly, I don’t even want to look at it now.” She heaved a sigh.

“What if I check it out, and you get some rest?”

Hera pulled back just enough to raise an eyebrow at him. “Aren’t you tired, too?”

Kanan waved her off. “I have an endless supply of cosmic energy to keep me energized.”

“Then why is our caf budget so high?”

In reality, Kanan wasn’t sure he could rest with Vanto’s anxiety prickling at the edges of his consciousness. He wondered if maybe the guy was an Imperial super weapon optimized against sensitive, kind-hearted Jedi.

“Seriously,” Kanan said, “I’ll be fine. And someone has to review this footage. Maybe there’ll be something in here that we can use.”

Forty minutes was not enough time to watch the full tapes, so Kanan skipped around on instinct. The first few days of their capture displayed Vanto and Thrawn in a manner that was probably closest to their usual behavior. Thrawn spent most of his time seated on the edge of the cot or laying on his back with his hands folded across his stomach. Eli was a restless blur of energy, his pacing looking almost comical on the sped-up footage. They were given two small rations a day, enough to keep them from starving but likely to keep them uncomfortable and malleable. Kanan frowned at the thought.

Saw’s people came for Thrawn midway through the second day. Thrawn had gone willingly, seeming not to offer any resistance at all. Vanto crossed his arms and said something, though the words were lost to the tape, but did little to prevent them from taking Thrawn. He seemed worse in the Grand Admiral’s absence, though. He paced for a bit, then sat on the now-vacant cot, paced again, sat. It went on like this for the first hour. After two hours had flickered by on the timestamp, Vanto had grown visibly more distressed. He slammed the flat of his hand against the panelling closest to the ray shield and seemed to be shouting down the hallway. The next hour, more pacing, sitting, and pacing again. His hair was disheveled from the amount of times he’d run his hands through it, occasionally tugging sharply before letting go of the strands as if to keep himself focused.

Kanan flexed his hand, trying to suppress the sense of… recognition he felt, looking at Vanto. He imagined being stuck for hours in a cell, knowing the Empire had their hands on Hera, or Zeb, or Sabine—hell, even the first time he’d met Ezra, he’d been sick at the thought of the kid in the Empire’s hands. But Grand Admiral Thrawn and Commander Vanto were Imperials; just because Kanan could relate to the worry in Vanto’s body language didn’t mean that he had to agree with the man’s moral stance.

They brought Thrawn back in after four and a half hours, stumbling slightly as he was hurried along between two of Saw’s fighters. They keyed open the ray shield and shoved Thrawn inside, causing Vanto to rush forward to catch the man before he fell instead of rushing the open gate. Not a bad tactic to keep in mind, if not for the way that Vanto stumbled beneath Thrawn’s considerable height and weight before the Grand Admiral got his feet back under him.

Kanan watched as Vanto guided him back down to the cot, crouching down to ask Thrawn questions and gently rearrange Thrawn’s hair.

The next time they came in to take Thrawn for questioning, Vanto pushed himself bodily between Thrawn and Saw’s Rebels. Thrawn placed a hand on his shoulder and said something, but Vanto shook his head and shoved the Rebel in front of him in the chest. Kanan winced as the Rebel drew a blaster and stunned the Imperial at point-blank range. Thrawn reacted quickly, catching Vanto beneath the arms before he could hit the deck. He spoke to the Rebels, gathering Vanto in his arms, clearly intending to lay him on the cot before he left. One of the guards shook their head, and Thrawn’s expression morphed from placid to stormy displeasure, the most expressive look Kanan had ever seen on the Grand Admiral’s face. Thrawn turned away from the guards anyways, Vanto in his arms, only to be jabbed in the side with a stun baton from the other Rebel. His muscles locked, driving him to the ground, Vanto tumbling from his grasp. Kanan winced at the impact. Thrawn snapped something at the guards, moving forward to pick Vanto up again. The one with the stun baton dragged him backward by the collar of his uniform, away from Vanto, and shoved the baton beneath Thrawn’s chin. His hands flexed, but Thrawn still didn’t strike the Rebels. He rose smoothly from his position on the floor and followed the Rebels out.

Vanto woke a few hours later and immediately stumbled over to the ray shield. He slammed his palms against the hollow surface, assaulting the panels near the shield. When he got bored of that—or more likely, when his hands were too sore to continue—he shifted to kicking them and shouting. It was no wonder that he’d barely had a voice at all when the Ghost crew grabbed him earlier today.

Four more days went like this. They were given short rations, not enough to keep them from going hungry, and no more water with their rations after the third day. Vanto would resist the guards when they came for Thrawn; Thrawn would attempt to get the unconscious Commander to the cot and fail; Vanto would wake up and pace and scream and hit the cell walls and, on a few occasions, curl up tightly in the corner with his hands threaded through his hair; Thrawn would return, more battered each time; Eli would hurl insults at the Rebels while urging Thrawn toward the cot.

Kanan felt a little sick. The question of why Vanto cared so much about someone seemingly so uncaring still hung in the air, but there was no denying it now, if there ever had been. Kanan considered what an aide position entailed and decided that it was entirely possible that Vanto and Thrawn were just inseparable; perhaps first from professional necessity and then by routine.

The fifth day was the worst, because this time Thrawn was either unwilling or unable to stand to meet the guards when they came for him. Kanan had judged Vanto slightly for trying the same thing four days in a row with unsuccessful results, but apparently he was wrong in that. The guards were clearly expecting the same tactic today as in past days; when Vanto rushed at them, the same one as always—the one on the left with the blaster—fired a lazy shot at him. Vanto dodged it, closing the already tight space and colliding with the Rebel. He pulled him to the floor, gripping his wrist and smashing his hand against the deck until the blaster skittered from the Rebel’s grasp.

The one armed with the stun baton swung it down in an arc at Vanto, who rolled until the Rebel he’d tackled lay between him and the baton, absorbing the blow. Distracted, he didn’t notice that Thrawn had come up behind him, grappling the weapon from his hands. Vanto dispatched him with a stun blast, then they dragged both unconscious men to the side of the cell.

Kanan had to admit that Vanto was good at hand-to-hand; after all, he’d disarmed Kanan the first time, too. But he was underfed, dehydrated, and exhausted—and no match for the six fighters that stormed into the cell to subdue them. Vanto managed to stun two as they came through the entryway, but the third ducked around the bolt and shoved Vanto against the wall. The fighters split, one forcing Thrawn against the right wall with yet another stun baton and three manhandling Vanto to the left wall.

Vanto fought ferociously, and Kanan took a moment again to briefly thank the Force for Hera’s diplomatic skills. He wasn’t sure, but he was pretty sure he saw Vanto sink his teeth into one of the Rebels’ forearms—probably the only time Vanto paused from whatever he was shouting at the guards.

The real struggle didn’t start until Thrawn collapsed to his knees on the far end of the cell. The fighter standing above him was holding the baton against the back of his neck, sending electricity through the Imperial officer. When he flicked it off, Thrawn fell to all fours, only to be caught squarely in the ribs with a boot.

Vanto thrashed, headbutting the nearest rebel and twisting one arm free, trying desperately to get to Thrawn. Then the Rebel with Vanto’s arm still in her grasp twisted and pulled. Even from the low-res footage, Kanan could see where the shoulder deformed as the joint came out of the socket. He fell to his knees, eye level with Thrawn. Kanan could see the pure rage written across Vanto’s face. He gritted his teeth and pulled something from the boot sheath of the guard nearest to him. He spun the it in his hand and plunged the vibroknife into the shin of the guard he took it from.

The stun baton jammed against Vanto’s back aligned perfectly with the bruises and burn marks they’d noticed when Hera was treating him. Kanan was losing track of whose hand was in Vanto’s hair, pulling his head back before slamming it against the deck; whose foot was raised and then stomped on his hand—no doubt casing the fractures—whose hand was holding the baton- as Vanto shook uncontrollably on the ground. The guard hovering over Thrawn had rolled him over and was kneeling on the ribs they’d just kicked, holding Thrawn’s face and forcing him to watch Vanto.

They didn’t release Thrawn until Vanto was crumpled, unmoving, on the floor. Thrawn rolled over onto his hands and knees and paused, body wracked with tremors or a cough. He tried to stand and nearly fell, colliding heavily with the wall of the cell, a hand pressed to his ribs. None of the Rebels made a move to help him as he made his way shakily over to Vanto and crouched next to him, the motion made stiff with pain. He pressed his fingers to Vanto’s wrist and throat before threading his arms beneath the human and heaving him up. For a moment, Thrawn just stood there, swaying slightly, before he turned toward the cot.

He was two steps away from finally laying Vanto down when the guard slammed the live baton into his side.

It seemed that, like the Ghost crew, Saw’s fighters had wised up to the mutual vulnerabilities that Thrawn and Vanto were to one another. They used that knowledge in a different way, though, clearly focused on wearing Thrawn down mentally with their increasing violence against his aide and whatever they did to him during those long sessions away from the cell.

Kanan turned the datapad off with a sick feeling in his stomach. He glanced at Hera, curled on her side, feet dangling off the edge of the bed so she wouldn’t get the sheets dirty.

The corridor between Hera’s cabin and his was quiet. Through the fluctuating red of the ray shield, he could see Vanto keeping vigil over Thrawn. He didn’t notice as Kanan settled with his back against the bulkhead across from the shield. Kanan took a deep breath to brace himself, then eased down his walls and reached into the Force.

Vanto’s presence was overwhelming, as it had been earlier, but instead of shying away, Kanan opened up to it. He knew why Vanto was worried. Thrawn had sustained severe injuries in the cell, not to mention whatever they were doing to him during the interrogations. There was guilt layered beneath that, guilt at not being able to keep Thrawn from them and… something else. Kanan moved past it. He didn’t need to know the specifics to attune himself to Vanto’s feelings. There was a deep mire of exhaustion sapping away the Imperial’s energy and stability; too many nights of restless sleep on the ground of the cell in Saw’s base.

Kanan breathed rhythmically, forcing himself to stay calm in the face of Vanto’s sustained panic. He’d been panicking for almost a week, since they’d been taken; had hidden it when Thrawn was around, but now his commanding officer was unconscious in yet another cell, slowly worsening as his broken ribs shifted, he bled out internally, labored through a collapsed lung, or worse. The only hope he had rested on the shoulders of a group who were allies with the same people who had tortured and injured Thrawn in the first place, and—

Kanan breathed out and pushed against Vanto’s mind, willing him to calm. The Ghost crew would pull off the mission, and Thrawn would be dunked unceremoniously in a vat of green goop, and he’d come out just as blue and unsufferable as before.

When Kanan opened his eyes, Vanto was looking straight at him. His hand was still wrapped around Thrawn’s, but he seemed coiled ever so slightly looser.

“Like gentling a nerf,” Vanto rasped. His voice held no malice, just a hint of humor, though Kanan trusted his sense of Vanto in the Force more than his ability to correctly identify the man’s tone.

“A little more complicated,” Kanan replied, “but similar in principle.”

Vanto snorted a laugh, then turned back to face Thrawn. Kanan groaned as he stood and stretched, feeling his joints creak. He should stretch more—maybe as a mediation exercise with Ezra. They’d been spending too much time cooped up in the Ghost.

He almost missed Vanto’s quiet, “thank you, Kanan,” as he moved down the hall.

Kanan crouched over the controls, trying to keep his head out of the way as Ezra and Sabine squabbled over the pack of droid poppers. Chopper warbled in nervous indignation at their carelessness, threatening to zap them both if they didn’t put the satchel down.

“When are we gonna get out of this thing?” Zeb groaned. The Phantom was a lot smaller than the Ghost, and the Lasat was nearly folded double. Kanan echoed his sentiment; as soon as they’d dropped out of hyperspace, all but Hera had piled into the Ghost and detached while the Ghost maneuvered back into the asteroid field, concealing the ship.

It had only been fifteen minutes, but it definitely felt like longer. If he wasn’t so assured of Vanto’s sincerity, he would’ve thought that this was a new method of torture, conceived by the worst minds in the Empire.

“I’m literally the demolition expert,” Sabine hissed. “If anyone should have the droid bombs, emphasis on bombs, it should be me.”

“Well, I should get at least some! You can’t hog all of them,” Ezra whined.

Kanan held up a hand as a contact on the radar began to move. “Guys, quiet down. I think we’ve got something.” Ezra and Sabine turned their attention to crowding the screen, peering at the moving speck amidst the cluster of asteroids. They watched quietly as a freighter emerged from the field of debris. As Vanto had described, the craft cleared the edge of the asteroid belt and paused. A few minutes later, a small single-pilot craft detached from the hull of the freighter—the Imperial pilot.

“Alright, Spectres,” Kanan said. “Hold on.”

He jammed the throttle forward, swooping towards the cargo ship and bringing it alongside the airlock as quickly as possible. The biggest risk here was that the ship would jump before they could board, but with a muffled clunk and pneumatic hiss, the Phantom sealed itself to the cargo ship.

“Okay, let’s move,” Kanan ordered.

“Finally,” Zeb groaned, opening the airlock and unfolding to his full height. He unslung his bo rifle, holding it at the ready as they advanced down the hall. Kanan and Sabine would take control of the cockpit while Ezr, Chopper, and Zeb would find the cargo bay and start loading the bacta into the Phantom’s stowage.

“It’s too quiet,” Sabine said after a moment. Her voice echoed in the empty corridor as she swiveled to look behind them.

“I know,” Kanan said grimly. “Let’s keep our eyes open.”

The door to the cockpit whooshed open, revealing the sole occupant: a droid pilot.

“Intruders detected,” the droid intoned. “Launching intruder protocol phase one: disabling power to life support systems.” There was a sudden absence of noise as the air systems abruptly cut off.

“Uh,” Kanan said, edging back to the doorway.

“Launching intruder protocol phase two: activating security droids.”

Kanan assembled his lightsaber and swung it at the droid, slicing off the droid’s head and the top half of the chair it sat in. As soon as he did, though, the displays on the control panel lit up re, sounding a klaxon over the ship’s PA system.

“It says it’s locked down,” Sabine read off the displays. “Smooth move, Kanan.”

Kanan groaned. “Save it for the debrief, Sabine. Zeb, Ezra? Maybe hurry it up,” Kanan said over the comms. “This psycho droid is trying to kill us by cutting the life support.”

“We noticed,” Zeb replied. “It just dropped like twenty degrees here!”

“We have another problem, too,” Ezra said. “The bacta is locked away in these shipping crates. There’s no way they're gonna fit through the airlock to the Phantom.

In the background, Kanan could hear Chopper’s impatient grumbling.

“We’re heading to you to help,” Kanan said. He and Ezra turned the corner and skidded abruptly to a stop. In the hallway before them were a contingent of KX security droids. Five sets of glowing white optics swiveled towards them.

“Droid poppers would be helpful right now,” Kanan said, readying his lightsaber.

“I only have one,” Sabine said. “Ezra stole all the others.”

“Well, use the one, then!” The nearest Security droid was lumbering towards them, a hand grasping at Kanan’s face. He rolled out of the way, sweeping the saber upwards and cutting off its arm.

Zeb’s voice crackled over the comms. “Some help would be nice—it’s getting damn hard to breathe in this cargo hold.”

It’s getting hard to breathe everywhere, Kanan thought with uncharitable levels of frustration. “Kinda busy!”

Sabine rolled the armed EM grenade into the droids’ midst. It crackled before arcs of electricity shot out, disabling all but the droid that Kanan was currently fighting. He ducked under the droid’s next heavy swing and sliced through its midsection, stumbling a little when the blade cleared the metal torso.

The air was definitely thinner, and Kanan’s breath was clouding in front of him. Sabine was shivering, likely experiencing the cold even beneath her helmet. They couldn’t stay here much longer.

In the cargo hold, Ezra was leaning woozily against the wall while Zeb rubbed furiously at his arms.

Only Chopper was unaffected—which, he groused, was what he was trying to tell them. He waved his scomp link at the control panel for the loading bay doors. Of course no fragile organics would be able to pull off such a maneuver, so he forgave them for overlooking it, but they could pile back into the Phantom and Chopper would vent the loading bay. He’d already verified that shipping containers were compatible with the Ghost; Hera could lock on to the container and pick him up.

“That’s a great idea, Chop. Alright, you heard him. Chopper, stay on the line if you need anything.”

Chopper said he would not need anything; this could have been a one-man mission if they didn’t always insist on doing things together with maximum inefficiency.

“He’s pushing it,” Ezra wheezed on their way back to the Phantom. “Stuck up little droid…”

“Stuck up little droid who’s currently the key to pulling off the mission,” Sabine said.

“Spectres, I’m bringing the Ghost around now,” Hera said. “Dock the Phantom and then we’ll grab Chopper and the bacta. Nice thinking, buddy.”

“Sometimes I wish I’d never learned Binary,” Ezra muttered, just loud enough to hear over Chopper’s boasting.

Kanan decoupled from the airlock, glancing at the scanner. A moment later, he’d pulled up alongside the Ghost and another hiss announced the airlocks’ seal. “Hera, looks like Chop just opened the loading bay doors.” Two cargo containers and a variety of smaller detritus spun away from the freighter, pulled out by the pressure differential. “Think you’ll be able to grab one of those containers?”

“Not with how rapidly it’s spinning. Chopper, could you stabilize one—the one closest to me, if you can?”

Chopper posited that maybe he had already done enough work, what with all the planning and mission saving and bay door opening he’d been doing.

“Then one more task shouldn’t be too much for you, if you’re so capable,” Hera challenged.

Kanan could see the astromech’s jet flare up as he flew over to the container Hera had indicated. Carefully, Chopper braced himself against the side of the container and began to push opposite of its spin, eventually bringing it to a near halt.

“Perfect as always, buddy,” Hera praised. “Okay, let’s pick this thing up and get out of here.”

Kanan ushered the crew down into the Ghost proper. The ship shuddered slightly as it magnetically locked onto the cargo.

“Secure lock,” Hera announced over their comms. “Chopper, come in through the Phantom. As soon as you’re aboard, we’re making the jump to someplace we can get the tanks out and bring them inside.”

Kanan found Vanto in the same position they’d left him, curled protectively over Thrawn’s prone figure. When he noticed Kanan standing beyond the ray shield, he twisted to face him. Kanan didn’t miss the way that Vanto’s new position blocked most of Thrawn from view.

It was easier to navigate around Vanto’s signature in the Force now that Kanan had familiarized himself with it. Beyond the roiling ball of Vanto’s emotion was Thrawn’s impenetrable mind—still present, but fading.

“Good news: we got the crate of bacta. Your intel was good. We’re making our way to a habitable moon where we can get a tank out and bring it in for him,” Kanan said, nodding at Thrawn.

Vanto radiated relief, though his expression didn’t change. He seemed almost beyond it, and Kanan remembered how little he’d seen Vanto eat and sleep in the past week he’d been in captivity.

“Thrawn is our priority right now, given his condition, but as soon as he’s taken care of, we’ll make sure you have something to eat and give you space to rest.” Kanan paused. “Thank you for helping us.”

“Did I have much of a choice?” The question was sarcastic, but he just sounded tired.

Kanan shook his head. “You’re right, we’ve put you in a tight spot. But I appreciate it anyways.”

“Twelve tanks,” Hera breathed, her voice slightly awed. “I’ve never seen this much in one place before.”

“Twelve karking heavy tanks,” Zeb wheezed, straining under the weight of the glass and bacta. Kanan would have agreed with him, if he wasn’t busy just trying to keep the tank from shattering on the ramp into the Ghost. Chopper was waiting by Kanan’s room to drop the ray shield, and Kanan vowed to deconstruct him into a pile of scrap if he made them wait outside with it while he took his time opening the shield.

Whether he picked up on Kanan’s thoughts or was just pleased with his performance with the Karrasto shipment, Chopper was blessedly prompt.

“I’m never doing that again,” Zeb said, leaning over slightly and panting. Kanan mopped the sweat off of his brow and made an emphatic noise of agreement.

Vanto was hovering over Thrawn, working on the fasteners of his uniform tunic.

“I can help.” Vanto’s head snapped up as Zeb came towards him, glaring. The Lasat held up his hands non-threateningly. “I was just gonna lean him up while you took his shirt off.”

“Fine,” Vanto said curtly. Kanan kept half an eye on them as he worked on opening the tank so they could submerge Thrawn.

The room was quiet, save for the uneven rasp of Thrawn’s breathing, as Vanto carefully worked one arm of the jacket off, then the other. Thrawn was left in a thin white undershirt. There was old blood soaking through it in places, stuck to his skin around where a blaster bolt had singed through the shirt and skin. Even if Kanan dropped what he was doing and helped, it would be difficult to lift Thrawn’s torso and arms, then pull the shirt off without furthering any injuries that Thrawn already had.

Wordlessly, Zeb pulled a pocket knife from his pocket and handed it, handle-first, to Vanto. He took it without meeting Zeb’s eye and began carefully cutting away the fabric along the side seams. Kanan watched as he paused—it was barely a second, just the tensing of muscles in his arms. To be fair, Kanan didn’t think he’d want to be undressing an unconscious ally under the scrutiny of his captors, either. Vanto huffed a short breath through his nose and eased the fabric up, pausing to carefully unstick it from the injured areas.

Zeb inhaled sharply. “Karabast.” Vanto flinched slightly as Zeb spat the curse out, but didn’t comment, just bunched the fabric around Thrawn’s neck and, with Zeb’s help, pulled it over his head.

The whole span of the Grand Admiral’s torso was painted in bruises a deep violet color, concentrated more densely around his left side—the side Kanan had seen the Rebel guard kick him. Some areas were marred further by the same raw burns that patterned Vanto’s back, and the skin around the blaster wound looked swollen with the first stages of infection. It wasn’t new; that sort of thing would have been easily preventable by Saw’s people, if they’d given even the bare minimum of medical care to the Imperials. Kanan clenched his hands, unsure if the anger he felt was Zeb’s, Vanto’s, or his own.

Vanto was working Thrawn’s boots off now, the motion awkward with one hand. Zeb’s eyes were still glued to the mottled mess of Thrawn’s skin, hands clenched tightly.

Kanan stepped forward, shoulder to shoulder with Vanto, and started sliding off the other boot. The urge to apologize to Vanto curled in the back of his throat, though he didn’t know what he was apologizing for. Saw’s actions? Thrawn’s state of injury? The fact that Vanto, who clearly wanted the Ghost crew as far from them as possible, was being forced to let them undress Thrawn?

His throat clicked as he swallowed, opening his mouth to fill the heavy space between the three of them.

On the bed, Thrawn shifted slightly.

Vanto didn’t notice, busy removing his socks and laying them across the boots, but Kanan watched as Thrawn’s eyes opened into narrow slits focused solely on Vanto. His lips moved, but no sound came out.

As Vanto raised his head, he caught Thrawn’s hazy gaze and lurched forward to the head of the bed. .

“Thrawn.” Eli’s voice was suffused with relief. “Hey, stay with me. We’re getting you some help.”

Thrawn struggled to sit up, hissing out a pained breath as he did so.

“Nuh uh,” Vanto scolded. “You’re not moving, Sir.” He pushed Thrawn gently back to the bed.

The Grand Admiral said something else, too low for Kanan to catch. Eli bent his head closer to Thrawn’s, brows furrowed in confusion, but he nodded. “Yeah, it’s dawn,” he agreed easily. “So just let me take care of this, okay?”

His eyes were fighting to stay open, and now that Thrawn was somewhat awake, Kanan could feel something adjacent to exhaustion and pain radiating off of him. Still, he made one last attempt at moving, this time trailing his fingers over the tips of Eli’s hair. It was a familiar gesture, but the sudden flush on the back of Eli’s neck and ears suggested it was an unusual one. Thrawn said one more word—audible this time, but nothing Kanan knew the definition of—before his eyes slipped closed again.

Vanto stared at him for another moment, scanning his face for any signs of consciousness.

“Help me with his belt,” Vanto commanded softly. “I won’t be able to get it with one hand.”

Kanan nodded, recognizing the olive branch for what it was.

“The latch is on the inside, so pull it towards you a bit with one hand and open it with the other.” Kanan was suddenly aware that Vanto was, like Hera or Thrawn, a leader—at least in a professional capacity. He knew the mess of emotions inside of Vanto right now, but only through the Force. As he followed the Imperial’s directions, he focused on the steady tone and clear explanation the man gave. Kanan glanced at Zeb, who was starting to shake off some of his shock, and felt abruptly glad that Vanto was an aide and not in charge of anyone the Rebellion had to fight. For all his rage and blatant displays of emotion while in Saw’s captivity, he knew how to keep it tightly locked away when needed.

Vanto hooked his fingers into the waistband of Thrawn’s uniform pants and guided them down his legs as Kanan pulled them from the hems. More spectacular bruising and swelling snaked down his legs and ankles. It shouldn’t have surprised Kanan, but he felt his chest tighten all the same. Thrawn looked a lot smaller, asleep on the bed and divested of the Imperial uniform that he usually proudly wore. Vanto scrubbed a hand down his face.

“Zeb, if you’d move him to the bacta tank.” Vanto rocked back on his heels, shifting to the side to stand up on his uninjured ankle as Zeb did as he was asked.

Kanan sealed the tank as soon as Thrawn was inside, encased in the bacta. He fussed with the keypad, setting it to sound an alarm if there were any complications detected and distracting himself as he let the knot in his chest loosen to a reasonable amount.

He turned to tell Vanto that they’d leave to fetch him something for the Imperial to eat, but he was already sprawled on the cot, sleeping soundly for the first time in days.

Chapter Text

The barracks at the Royal Imperial Academy weren’t much better—or even different—than Eli’s quarters at Myomar. Anyone who came by to inspect their room would see a stark, utilitarian room even barely large enough for its two occupants. The top bunk was a little messy, but the bottom bunk was nothing but a mass of blankets and a very miserable, pale looking Thrawn.

“You look like shit, Sir,” Vanto says. Thrawn barely twitches at the words, burrowing slightly deeper into the mound of blankets.

“Shit. I do not know this word,” he says. He sounds like he’s having a rough time, too, his words slurring slightly together in a manner more suited to lilting Sy Bisti than Basic.

“Yeah, well,” Vanto says, kicking off his shoes at the door, “it’s not one to be repeated in polite company.”

Thrawn nods, just barely. “And you are impolite company. So I say it around you, and this is fine.”

He scoffs a little laugh, mock-offended at Thrawn’s insinuation. “It’s rude to point it out like that, but sure. What’s your baseline temperature, usually?” Vanto is pushing the covers away from Thrawn’s face, wielding a thermometer.

“Your instruments are useless with me,” Thrawn says, blindly grabbing for the blankets.

Vanto sighs. He can’t entirely tamp down the flare of irritation; in the back of his mind, he thinks of the exams to study for and an essay he needs to to write and the fact that he’d gone straight to the commissary after classes to get supplies to nurse Thrawn back to health, so now he wouldn’t have time to go to the gym before it became flooded with bigoted cadets that Vanto wouldn’t risk interacting with alone.

“You did an intake physical so that they would have records on you in Imperial Standard. I know because I was there. Translating.” Vanto presses the thermometer to his roommate’s forehead. Thrawn hisses out a breath at the contact, which Vanto ignores, continuing, “So you can tell me what they documented your temperature as, or I can waste more time digging up your medical records.”

The thermometer beeps and flashes the reading, and Eli hums. “36.3 degrees Standard. A little higher than the average human temperature.”

He watches Thrawn’s face carefully, cataloguing the way his jaw flexes, then goes lax. He’s been learning to read Thrawn better and better, and this looks almost like defeat. “This is… higher than the average temperature for Chiss. In Imperial Standard units, our temperature is closer to 35 degrees.” Thrawn paused to take a pained breath. “The more accurate place to take external temperature measurements is beneath the chin.”

Eli grimaces, filing the information away for later use. The Chiss ran cold, apparently. He runs the thermometer again, this time in the area Thrawn indicated, and reads the results aloud—37.2 degrees. He didn’t think Thrawn was faking it, exactly, but when Eli felt his forehead earlier, he hadn’t felt like he was running a moderate, edging towards high-grade fever.

“Walk me through what fever reducers are gonna work for you?” Eli asks. He crouches down to Thrawn’s eye level—not that Thrawn knows that, since his eyes remain stubbornly shut.

“I merely need… rest,” Thrawn mumbles.

“Yeah, I don’t think so.” Eli rummages through the bag, emptying it out in a pile of the various bottles and boxes. Whatever they don’t use, he’ll just return later. “So I’ve got naproxen,” he begins. “That’s usually what I use.”

“This will kill me.”

Eli raises his eyebrows. “Like, kill-kill, or ‘feeling worse’-kill?”

“There is little difference,” Thrawn replied. His voice had a rough edge to it, like he’d been coughing.

“Okay,” Eli says, drawing out the word. There’s a moment of silence, punctuated by the sound of pills rattling against their bottles as he searches for another option. “What about Pasrin?”

“If you wish to dispose of me quickly, then certainly.”

Eli bites his lip, smothering either a heartfelt sigh or a hysterical laugh. Okay, so Thrawn was both experiencing a very real fever and being utterly dramatic about it. The behaviour was so out of character, bordering on absurd, that Eli couldn’t bring himself to be too mad. Still. “Would you like to tell me what won’t kill you, then?”

Thrawn opens his eyes a sliver to glare at Eli, who says, “I’m trying to help, you know. I’m stuck with you as an aide. The Supply Corps, which I’ve planned to be a part of for years now, is no longer an option for me. So you can stop acting like a spoiled youngling and tell me what helps, or we can go through this all over again the next time you inevitably get sick.”

Thrawn regards him for a moment more before closing his eyes in defeat. “Do any of the medications have the active ingredient dexylhyraphine?”

“Dexylhyraphine,” Eli repeats as he digs through the assorted medications at his feet. He unearths a palm-sized bottle of neon blue liquid that claims to be, contrary to its hue, tangerette flavored. “Uh, here. It’s liquid form, not a pill. Is that okay?”

Thrawn doesn’t answer, but he does swing his legs over the side of the bed in order to arrange himself in something resembling a slumped approximation of the seated position. Eli had never seen him so miserable. Abruptly, Thrawn’s hand shoots out, closing around the emptied commissary bag. Eli doesn’t bother to hide his wince as Thrawn heaves into the bag.

“Well,” Eli says into the misery and vomit tinged space between them.

“I think,” Thrawn says shakily, “I feel like shit.”

“I’ll bet,” Eli says, fighting a grin. Thrawn opens his mouth to reply, but is cut off by another wave of nausea. Eli inspects the back of the bottle, reading through the dosage recommendations and avoiding looking at Thrawn as he empties the contents of his stomach. He suspects that Thrawn will not appreciate it if he stares, so he leaves the man to suffer in as much dignity as Eli can afford him. Instead, he twists the cap off of the fever reducer, pours out a dose, and presses the medicine into Thrawn’s hand once he seems to be able to catch his breath. He takes the bag from Thrawn’s limp fingers. “Okay, bottoms up. Let’s see if you can keep medicine down.”

Eli ties the bag, tosses it in the garbage bin, and pulls out the bucket of cleaning supplies from beneath the sink. He dumps the supplies out—he’ll deal with that later—and brings the bucket over to Thrawn. “If you get nauseous again, you can throw up in this,” he says. “I’ll rinse it out, if needed.”

Eli looks up at Thrawn. His hair is a wreck, the usually perfect strands sticking in every direction and plastered to his forehead by a light sheen of sweat. Eli can see the faint wrinkles of his chapped lips. His cheekbones seem more pronounced by his pallor, and there are shiny half-moons beneath his eyes from exhaustion. He looks… a little lost. Imperfect. Real. A far cry from the proud Chiss of myths, or the self-assured demeanor that Thrawn often exhibits.

He sighs and grabs a glass from his desk, filling it with cool water from the tap. “Okay, here’s the plan,” Eli says with all the confidence afforded to him by taking care of numerous sick family members. Thrawn drags his gaze from the little cup of medicine to Eli’s face, seemingly with difficulty. “I’m gonna prop you up with your pillows, and you’re gonna sit there and drink your medicine and some water.”

Thrawn frowns, but offers no complaint as Eli helps heft him into a recline. His head lolls forward, the cool, damp skin of his cheek pressed against Eli’s neck. “You are hot,” Thrawn mutters. The ticklish sensation of his words makes Eli shiver as he adjusts the pillows behind Thrawn. He has to wrap his arms around him to reach the bedding behind, and it feels oddly intimate, like a parody of an embrace with Thrawn’s weight slumped against him.

“So are you,” Eli replies. He hopes the awkward pause was concealed by Thrawn’s clearly less-than-lucid state and the shifting of the pillows. When he leans Thrawn back, he’s propped up by the mound of pillows. His eyes are half-lidded, the ruby glow from them dimmer than Eli has ever seen it before.

“You have done this before,” Thrawn observes. Eli hands him the glass of water, then doubles back to make sure Thrawn’s fingers are actually curled around it, and he won’t spill it as soon as Eli looks elsewhere.

“Yeah,” Eli confirms. “In the countryside, there’s no use going to a med center with something like a cold or flu. You just kind of learn how to take care of your family—siblings, cousins, whatever—until it blows over. Take a drink.”

Thrawn raises the water to his lips, and Eli ignores the trickle of water that escapes the corner of his lips as he downs the whole glass.

“Woah, okay, don’t chug it,” Eli chides. “You’ll make yourself nauseous again.”

“Chug,” Thrawn repeats. “Slang for, to drink quickly.” He shrugs, the motion lifting the whole stack of blankets swaddling him. “I was parched.”

Eli refills the water and perches on the edge of Thrawn’s bed, typing out a request to Medical to be excused from classes tomorrow, for both Thrawn and himself. He doesn’t ask for permission, but Thrawn shimmies his legs to the side so Eli has more space to sit, so he takes it as his go-ahead. He runs his fingers over the topmost blanket. It’s plush, softer than Eli would’ve expected—it’s too lush to be issued from anywhere, even if Thrawn pulled some weird lieutenant strings to get extra-nice bedding. So, Thrawn, who never spends money on anything, has bought an extravagant quantity of blankets. Something about this makes Thrawn, too, soft, less aloof.

He glances up to see Thrawn’s eyes tracking him, seeming to be barely clinging to consciousness. “What are your other… caretaking customs?” He rasps.

Eli considers Thrawn thoughtfully. “Well, most of it is looking after the physical stuff—medicine, food, staying hydrated, that sort of thing. I guess it’s also common to keep the other person company, to make sure that they aren’t getting worse, and to make the time pass more quickly. A lot of times, I’d end up telling my cousins stories.”

This catches the little bit of attention Thrawn can muster. “What kind of stories?”

“Usually Lysatran folktales. Sometimes, if they were older and able to pay attention well enough, I’d read a book or find stories on the holonet.”

Thrawn stared at him, blinking slowly. “The Chiss immune system is typically robust enough to withstand the common illnesses that seem to afflict populations on this side of ‘the Tangle.’” Thrawn halts, as if the single sentence has drawn all his energy. Eli can hear the air quotes around the common term for the region of unnavigable hazards that separates Wild Space from the Unknown Regions. He assumes that Thrawn has a different word for it; he’s never said what the Chiss call it, just said the Basic word with such disdain that Eli has to conclude that he disapproves.

“As such, we do not have such customs. I have never been told a folktale while ill.”

Eli smothers a grin. Thrawn was much more subtle when his brain wasn’t slowly roasting from a fever. Still, he proceeds as if he doesn’t notice the barely masked plaintive cry for company. Being sick is brutal, and there’s no reason to twist the metaphorical knife.

“I was planning on sharing a traditional Lysatran story with you, but if I’m imposing…”

Thrawn, content to play along—or at least to not call Eli out—nods. “It is of no consequence to me,” he says. “If you must, I would not be opposed to hearing one of these tales.”

Ha. Got him. “I’m gonna take your temperature again first, and get some tea going,” Eli says. “And then it’ll be storytime.”

Thrawn tilts his head up slightly to allow Eli to press the thermometer to the hollow of his chin. His eyes are restless, peering up at Eli through his thick lashes as if scanning his face for something. Eli has the sudden, absurd urge to brush his thumb over the glossy fan of lashes. They’d be so soft.

The beeping of the thermometer drew Eli from his thoughts. “37.0. That’s still pretty high, but it’s going down, which is good.”

He sets the thermometer on their small shared bedside table and fills the electric kettle, setting it to boil. Thrawn continues to watch him. It was unsettling at first, the feeling of being under constant scrutiny. It still is, sometimes, but after Eli had snapped at Thrawn a few weeks ago, and Thrawn had replied that he truly meant no harm, he just wanted to be able to assimilate into Eli’s society, he just kind of accepted it. Eli wasn’t even really accepted in society, and he was born here; Thrawn, utterly exiled from his people in an alien culture, had it far worse than Eli did. So he accepted being studied like a particularly exotic animal in its natural habitat and didn’t hesitate to ask Thrawn for space when he needed it.

“You make tea often,” Thrawn rasps quietly.

Eli waits to see if a question will follow while he changes out of his uniform; sometimes Thrawn has a particular point, and sometimes it seems he just needs an audience for his observations. When none comes, Eli replies, “I do. Also, usually you’d say, ‘you often make tea,’ instead of ‘you make tea often.’”

Thrawn makes a noise that Eli could almost swear is a sigh. “Why is that?”

Eli considers this while he hangs up his uniform tunic. “There are a bunch of really precise rules in Basic that are hard to keep track of. It’s one of the reasons why it’s so easy to subconsciously pick up on who grew up speaking Basic and who didn’t. So in this case, ‘often’ is an adverb of frequency. Those are the ones you want to put as close to the verb as possible. You may have mixed it up with an adverb of time, which goes at the end of your sentence but describes when something happens, not how often.”

“A needlessly complicated language,” Thrawn says. He shifts beneath the covers, inching across the bed until he is curled with his shoulder against the wall, making more space for Eli on the bed.

Eli drops a tea bag into the drink and tries not to miss the beautiful, fragrant canisters of loose leaf tea he’d enjoyed at home. “And your language isn’t? Complicated, that is.”

”It is beautiful,” Thrawn says wistfully. “The complexity of it adds to its value; it is intricate. Your language is simply messy.”

Eli chooses not to reply. Despite gentle needling, he’s never been able to pry out what the Chiss language is called, much less hear Thrawn speak it, so he’s in no place to judge the beauty or lack thereof. Instead, he hands the mug of tea to Thrawn, who wriggles an arm out of his cocoon to accept. Eli thinks that he likes this rumpled version of the Chiss, grudgingly accepting of help and a little chattier than usual. It made him feel like the past month and a half of mutual suffering hadn’t been for nothing; maybe it required a flu to get Thrawn to reveal it, but they were closer now than they’d been before.

The thin mattress barely dips beneath Eli’s weight as he settles into the space that Thrawn had made for him. Thrawn waits until he’s settled in to close his eyes and tip his head back. Eli takes this as his cue.

“One hundred cycles had passed since great Novea had chased the barren season from the land, leaving in its wake a sea of ten-petalled blossoms on the shuura trees that stood in the farmers’ fields. Now, the year had been gentle, and the branches of the trees were bowed from the weight of their fruit. Across the land—”

“The blossoming of shuura trees marks the beginning of the Lysatran year,” Thrawn interjects.

“Uh—right,” Eli replies, a little thrown. He hadn’t mentioned that to Thrawn, but it stood to reason that the man had done a quick holonet search of his aide’s homeworld.

“So this story takes place in early spring, when the shuura harvest begins.”

Eli nods, realizes Thrawn has his eyes closed, and says, “Yeah,” aloud.

“Are all Lysatran tales so invested in agricultural cycles?”

He almost says Well maybe if you let me talk, you’d find out. But Thrawn wasn’t being rude, exactly. He was lacking the context that any Lysatran child would have; if anything, asking questions was probably his way of active listening. Instead, Eli says, “Most of them are. The ones that aren’t are usually still centered on the natural world. We had a tough time with overuse of our resources at one point in our history, way back. Balance with our environment is ingrained in us even as kids so that we don’t have those sorts of problems again; usually, that shows up in the stories we tell. Like this one.”

Thrawn nods once, delicately like it pains him, and Eli scoops the bucket up from the floor and places it in easy reach in case he starts feeling nauseous again. When he doesn’t follow up with other questions, Eli continues where he left off.

“Across the land, farmers began to prepare for harvest as the shuuras turned from green to red—except for one. Though his trees swelled with fruit, they refused to change color and ripen. Distressed, he went to the grove and asked the trees why they would not release their fruit, in accordance with the proper cycle. The trees told the farmer that they would not allow their shuura to ripen until the protests of the voce birds, who nest among their boughs.”

“Do your trees usually speak to you?” Thrawn asks.

“Only in the stories,” Eli shoots back wryly. “Do the trees on your homeworld talk to you?”

The corner of Thrawn’s mouth curves up as he says, “Very rarely.”

There’s a little flare of emotion in his chest at the joke. Thrawn never jokes with anyone else, but this is the eighth time he has made a humor-comment (because they’re rarely ever true jokes) in his company. It makes ELi feel warm. Still, Eli rolls his eyes—at the Chiss and at himself—and powers onward. “So, the farmer walks to the river, where the voce birds hunt for fish in the daytime, and asks them what troubles they have, so that he can see that their problems are solved. The voce birds tell him that they will not convince the shuura trees to ripen their fruit until the complaints of the woodland trees are addressed. The farmer promises that he will hear what the woods have to say, and travels to the outskirts of his tract, where the ribbon snakes live and the field turns to forest. He stands among the shash and dalo trees and asks to hear their complaints, so that he may address them and appease voce birds and the shuura trees.”

“This sounds like the beginnings of a legal proceeding.”

Eli suppresses an actual sigh this time. He didn’t mind answering Thrawn’s occasional question—and Thrawn asked a lot of questions—but his story seemingly sparked the man’s curiosity beyond the interest that queue etiquette and Imperial protocols did. This would be a very broken up story, then. “I mean, in a way it is. If I were telling you this story in Sy Bisti, I’d probably choose to translate tract as nikihalu, which has the connotations of sole ownership—and sole responsibility. To become a landowner on Lysatra, you have to sign a contract with the land itself guaranteeing that you’ll be responsible for maintaining good farming practices and not causing damage to the land. A state official signs on behalf of the land, obviously, but it’s a way to legally hold people accountable for their property.”

He pauses for a breath and to give Thrawn a moment to ask a follow-up question. When none comes, he says, “Now, if I can continue?”

“I do not wish to aggravate you,” Thrawn murmurs, easing his eyes open a crack, and Eli feels the building frustration dissolve all at once.

“You aren’t,” he assures Thrawn, mostly truthfully. “I just know that the story usually sounds better all at once. Or, mostly at once. And I want you to be able to rest.

Thrawn nods, and Eli flashes him a reassuring grin before launching back into the story. “The woodland trees tell the farmer that a stranger has come among them, and has upset the balance of the land. The woods part for the farmer as he walks, and lead him to the site of the stranger’s first crime: the slain body of a grazer.”

He catches Thrawn’s questioning glance; without waiting for him to ask, he explains, “Hooved herbivores; kind of like a griff or Alderaanian deer.”

At his nod of understanding, Eli continues. “The creature had been dead for some time, but the stranger had not come to collect its pelt or meat or to perform the rites of gratitude. When the farmer saw this, he felt sorrow for the loss of life. His tears fell on the animal’s coat, and the land saw that he would weep for a life he did not take. The animal’s pelt shifted beneath his hands and became a coat he could wear; when he put it on, he would take the form of the grazer.” Eli was getting into the flow of it, now, the easy joy of telling someone else a story that he knew so intimately.

“Wearing the coat, the farmer deftly navigated the woods and found the stranger that had upset his land. As he drew near, he began to take off the coat so that he could speak to the stranger; before he could, however, the strange hunter raised his rifle, and his shot pierced the pelt of the grazer.”

Thrawn’s mouth twitched, pulling down into the briefest of frowns. “This seems unfair,” he says. “And a horrible ending to a story.”

“Don’t worry,” Eli laughs. “It’s not over. The farmer wakes up the next morning in his bed.” He shakes his head, reaching for the semi-formal cadence of the folktales that slipped away whenever he answered Thrawn. “The coat protected his human form, and the farmer returned to the forest to beseech the trees again.”

He launches into what some anthropologists called the “Rule of Four,” which was the traditional pattern of Lysatran tales for there to be a motif in the middle of the story, usually repeating four times. Each time, the farmer wakes, goes to the woods, cries over the body of another animal that the stranger hunted for sport, and seeks the stranger out. He tries to approach with swift wings, with stealthy scales, and, finally, with strength. As Eli begins the last repetition, he notices the way that Thrawn’s breathing has gone suspiciously steady, his hand curled loosely around the mug of tea.

He considers stopping, but the process of storytelling is oddly soothing. He feels a little homesick, but more in a nostalgic way and less in an I’ll die if I don’t feel bark beneath my palms way. Even though his voice is beginning to get a little rough from the nonstop talking, he continues to round out the story. He explains the dread that the farmer felt when he finally found the corpse of a saracal, and pulls on his own experience of the time he’d found one of the beautiful animals slowly returning to the ground—of natural causes, fortunately—on the edge of his family’s property to add color to the story.

The penultimate scene is of the farmer, wearing the saracal’s coat, tearing out the stranger’s throat. It’s a surprisingly savage scene for a Lysatran tale, but it fits the severe crime of wasteful killing and disrespecting the land. The scene always changes a little; it’s mostly oral tradition, and Eli isn’t the only one to downplay the violence for younglings or to lean into the gore at a campfire. For Thrawn, gently sleeping, he chooses the simpler, more peaceful route.

As many folktales do, it ends on the upswing; balance having been restored, the shuura trees are convinced to allow the fruit to ripen and the farmer makes a fortune with the harvest earnings. It’s both a heroic tale, with the just farmer prevailing, and a cautionary one—if you mess with the land, you’re liable to face the lawful equivalent of getting mauled by a wild animal.

By the time he’s done, his voice is nearly as rough as Thrawn’s was earlier, and the chrono has ticked over from late afternoon to early evening. When he swings his legs off the bed, the Chiss doesn’t stir. He stretches, popping and rolling out the joints that are stiff from sitting awkwardly on Thrawn’s bed.

He checks his datapad—thank whatever deities are out there, there’s a notice from Medical granting Thrawn and Eli temporary excusals from class and exams until Thrawn’s recovery—and clicks the electric kettle on again.

Barefoot on the dormitory floor, gazing at Thrawn’s sleeping face with the slow roil of water in the background, Eli feels—for the first time in months—grounded.

The kettle clicks off, and Eli pours himself a mug of barley tea. He plucks the mug out of Thrawn’s lax hand and raises an eyebrow at the lack of reaction. He sets it on the bedside table and grabs the medicine that’s still sitting there. Eli had been too focused on just finding something that Thrawn could use, but now he sees the little illustration of a sleeping lothcat. He can’t stop the smile this time. Nighttime fever reducer. Well, Thrawn needed the rest anyways.

Eli picks up his mug and cradles it to his chest. The steam and scent envelop him and he lets himself feel, just for a moment, like he’s found himself a second home.

Chapter Text

Ezra kinda thought that having Imperial captives onboard would be more exciting, especially one that had been as much of a pain as Thrawn.

He groaned and rolled over on his bunk, sitting cross-legged with the datapad balanced in his lap. The plan to have one person “on watch” at all times to make sure that the prisoners weren’t plotting had seemed cool when Kanan first proposed it, like being a spy. In reality, it was boring. Thrawn would be healing in the tank for the next day at least, and Vanto had passed out as soon as they’d gotten the bacta on board and hadn’t woken up yet.

The chrono, when Ezra had checked it hopefully, said that he would be on watch for the next three hours. He stifled a groan. This would be so much better if he could listen to music to pass the time, or talk to Sabine, or something. Unfortunately, his earbuds were lying in a tangle on the small nightstand, which meant he’d have to climb down and get even closer to Zeb’s deafening snores, then climb all the way back up again…

At least he’d had the presence of mind to snag a box of snacks from the galley before retreating to their cabin. The brand was in some language he didn’t recognize, but there was a picture of cheese on the front, so he assumed that was what it was supposed to taste like. It didn’t, but it was still pretty good, and it left a powdery residue that stained his fingers a vibrant green. He popped another cracker in his mouth and, since Hera wasn’t around to scold him, licked his fingers clean.

A slight movement on the screen drew Ezra’s attention. The human Imperial had woken up, sitting in a similar position as Ezra was in now. He watched as the man stretched awkwardly, glancing around the cell presumably to orient himself after sleeping for, like, fourteen hours. Ezra checked the directions Kanan had left on the datapad for when the Imp woke up. Step one: ask him about food. Well, Ezra was starting to feel restless anyways.

He shoved a last handful of crackers into his mouth and shimmied down to the ground. Ezra winced as he landed with a loud thud, but Zeb just turned over and continued snoring. Nice. He grabbed his headphones from the tabletop and shoved them in his pocket on the way out.

Ezra trailed his fingers over the wall as he made his way down the passageway towards Kanan’s cabin. He missed Lothal, but the Ghost was home to him too, now. He liked being able to feel the hum of the engines through the walls, like a pulse. He dropped his hand to his side when he got to the ray shield, peering through the red light to catch a glimpse of the prisoners inside. The human one—Eli Vanto, if Ezra had to address him by name—seemed to be in the middle of cracking his bones. Like, all of them. Ezra just stared for a moment, repulsed and slightly impressed as the man twisted his head one way, then the other; rotated his uninjured shoulder until a hollow thunk sounded; pushed his shoulder blades together to produce a series of audible pops, straightened the elbow not in the sling; rolled each wrist, and then propped one ankle on the opposing knee, pushing down until the joint popped.

“How are you doing that,” Ezra said

Vanto glanced over at him, seemingly unsurprised at his sudden appearance. “It’s normal,” he said blandly. He flexed one of his feet upwards, producing another series of pops that made Ezra grimace.

“That’s the furthest thing from normal I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen a lot.”

The Imperial shrugged with one shoulder, pulling his legs back onto the cot. “Were you here for something, or just to criticize my joints?”

Ezra fought down an embarrassed flush. He’d totally forgotten that he’d come down here to ask Vanto about food. “Yeah, actually. Hera said we need to feed you, so I’m supposed to ask if there’s anything you’re not able to eat.”

“Anything you can eat, I assume. Kind of a dumb question—you, me, and half of the crew are all human, aren’t we?”

Ezra scowled. That’s what you get for trying to be nice to an Imp. “Sure, but that doesn’t mean you couldn’t have allergies, or… or like religious food restrictions or something.”

Vanto leaned forward, suddenly grinning. “So you and Sabine Wren are human. I’d assumed so, but there are a handful of species that look really similar, so I wasn’t entirely sure.”

“Wh—You tricked me!” Ezra cried.

“You wouldn’t’ve told me if I just asked,” Vanto said. He didn’t sound even a bit apologetic.

“Food,” Ezra growled. “What do you want.”

“I’m not a picky eater,” Vanto said. His manner—now that he wasn’t trying to sneak information about the crew—was a little gentler. He spoke in an odd way, like half the time he wasn’t sure which vowel he wanted to use until the last second. Ezra wondered if that was just Vanto, or if there was a whole sector of people who had that accent. Ezra tuned back in from his own thoughts, but Vanto had paused for a moment, considering. “Something kind of bland. I haven’t eaten a whole lot recently, and not a lot of it has been exactly flavorful.” Irritation laced his words, but he didn’t aim it at Ezra. “Uh, maybe something warm, if you’ve got it. High in protein would be nice too. Is that specific enough?”

“Yeah,” Ezra said. “I’ll be back in a bit with that.”

“Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere.”

The galley was a mess when Ezra got in there. He knew that everyone just assumed he was the messy one, because he was the youngest, but Ezra had been on his own for long enough to know that some things, like dirty dishes, were easier to manage if you actually cleaned up after yourself every once in a while. The sink was full of dirty plates and cups, despite the Ghost having a fully functional sonic dishwasher, and someone had left a plate on the counter to “soak.” Ezra nearly called the whole thing quits, hungry Imp be damned, after he had lifted the plate and dirty water had splashed across the counter and the front of his shirt. He settled for putting on his headphones and loading the dishwasher as noisily as he could, finally revealing the frying pan at the bottom of the sink.

A quick inspection of the fridge revealed a half-empty carton of nuna eggs, some Ferroran spinach that needed to be used sooner rather than later, and a loaf of bread. Good enough. Vanto was a prisoner, after all, and the Ghost wasn’t a restaurant.

Cooking was kind of fun for Ezra, not that he’d ever admit it to the Ghost crew. Part of that was because he didn’t want to seal his fate as the crew’s cook, but also because they probably wouldn’t get it. A handful of his few remaining memories with his parents involved crowding in the kitchen, learning Aurebesh at the table with his mom while his dad cooked, or helping to wash the vegetables for meals while his parents taught him about what made a balanced meal. Maybe they were gone, but Ezra was still here, carrying on their memories and lessons.

And, apparently, using them to cook for an Imperial officer.

Ezra tried not to be too upset about it as he dropped the spinach in the pan. He considered the salt shaker, then sprinkled some in with a shrug to himself. Vanto had asked for bland, but it was just salt, and if the Imp was as dehydrated as Kanan had claimed then he’d need some extra sodium.

Kanan knew a lot about the Jedi way, a lot more than Ezra did. And Kanan seemed to be treating the Imperials decently. He knew that having prisoners onboard unsettled the whole crew, and Ezra usually felt the same way as the rest of the team. Imperial rule had taken so much from them, though. Thrawn specifically had caused significant losses to the Rebels’ efforts to shake the tyrannical fist of the Empire. If anything, being taken prisoner was kind of what they deserved, wasn’t it?

The wilting greens offered no answers, so Ezra pushed them to the side of the pan and cracked a couple of eggs. While they sizzled, he rooted through the pantry, looking for the boxes of broth he knew they kept stocked. He poured some in a bowl and set it in the microwave to warm.

There was some stuff Kanan and Hera were avoiding telling him outright. They thought he was just a kid, seeming to constantly forget that he was part of the fight against the Empire too, that he’d seen more than he’d wanted to—even if he wasn’t as old as the rest of them, he’d still been a part of the resistance in some small way for his whole life. That’s why he didn’t need them to make the connection between the dehydration, injuries, and hunger for him. Obviously, Saw hadn’t coddled Thrawn or Vanto. Then again, how could he have? Supplies were always short. There were cities across the galaxy that suffered from a lack of medical supplies, tainted water supply from industrial carelessness under the Empire’s relaxed regulations, and entire harvests taken from farmers—harvests that communities relied on to feed themselves—at the last minute to provide for the Core Worlds or the ever-growing military. Vanto and Thrawn were a little uncomfortable, the same way that victims of the Empire were. So what?

And yet, it didn’t feel wrong to be looking after Vanto. It even felt kinda… right. Like the Force couldn’t distinguish between normal people suffering or the guy who was a part of the regime that was causing all the misery in the first place.

Kanan said that the Jedi had been peacekeepers and humanitarians before the Clone Wars started, that they had helped everyone regardless of politics, species, or system. It was just so hard to accept that people could participate in something so wrong and still have rights.

Ezra turned off the burner and dropped the food next to the toasted bread on the plate—plasti, thank you very much, he didn’t trust Vanto with any of the nice plates—and considered it. He searched through the fridge again and found a green pearberry. It was a little soft, but it hadn’t turned brown inside yet. He sliced it and added it to the spread. There, basically everything a human could need.

He balanced the plate on the bowl of broth while digging out the code cylinder that Chopper had printed for them (along with an expletive-filled rant about how he was more than just a doorknob, thank you very much, he was a war veteran and deserved to be treated with a lot more respect than they gave him). Vanto had moved while Ezra was in the galley. He glanced up from where he was checking the control panel on the bacta tank.

“Stay over there,” Ezra said. “You can come grab this after I reactivate the ray shield.”

He half expected Vanto to rush the door anyway, but he stayed where he was, one hand settled over the curved glass of the tank as if to reassure himself that it was really there. Once the red barrier flickered back to life between them, Vanto approached. Ezra caught a glimpse of the surprise on his face at the sight of the food before his expression returned to that oddly neutral look. Maybe he hadn’t expected Ezra to actually bring him anything back. No, that wasn’t it. Maybe he didn’t think Ezra knew how to cook? Or that the Ghost would be stocked with actual food? Who knew what assumptions an Imperial would make, anyways. Maybe he was expecting Gartro eggs topped with gold foil or whatever they did for Imperial Commanders.

“Thanks,” Vanto said. He seemed… genuine. “This is a lot.”

“It’s not that much,” Ezra protested on instinct. The corner of Vanto’s mouth ticked upward, briefly. Ezra was starting to learn that, while he was good at eventually smothering his reactions, his initial reactions were actually pretty transparent for a second or two.

“Still,” Vanto said, “I didn’t think you’d take the time to actually make food. It’s been a while since I had something that was actually cooked, not just reheated.” He frowned at the plate and bowl, seeming to reach the conclusion that he couldn’t pick both up with only one free hand. He sat down on the floor in front of the ray shield, moving the plate to his lap and using the side of the fork to cut off a piece of egg.

Ezra waffled for a moment, then sat down across from him with his back against the wall. He was on prisoner watch duty for a while still, anyways. At least this way he could actually talk to someone, since the rest of the crew was asleep.

It was weird to be at eye level with the Imperial. From this close, Ezra could see the way his hands shook and wondered, for the first time, how long it had actually been since he’d last eaten. He opened his mouth to ask, but instead asked, “What’s a saracal?”

Vanto glanced up at him, puzzlement written across his face. “It’s an animal native to Lysatra.”

“What kind of animal?” Ezra knew a lot about Lothal’s flora and fauna, but the species from other planets were cool to learn about, too. It seemed like a safe enough starting point.

Vanto glanced back down at the plate, where he’d stacked a layer of cooked Ferroran spinach on top of the toast. He added an egg to the toast before answering, “They’re mid-sized felines, usually found in wooded areas. Sometimes they hunt near the treelines of wooded areas, though.”

“Like Lothcats?”

Vanto shook his head in disagreement while he finished chewing. “Bigger. And their faces aren’t as flat, either. Shorter tails, too. I’m not describing this well—you’re probably better off pulling up a picture of them on the holonet.”

Ezra pulled out the datapad and navigated to the holonet browser. While he worked, he asked Vanto, “So they’re common on Lysatra?”

Vanto answered between bites. “Not anymore. They used to be, centuries ago, but they’ve been dwindling for a while. There are conservation efforts, of course—huge acreages of land have been cordoned off in their natural habitats, preventing industrial agriculture and mining companies from encroaching on their territories. Without those protections, they’d probably be extinct already.”

An image of the saracal was loaded on the datapad. Vanto was right, their faces were more elongated than a Lothcat’s, but their bodies were kind of the same shape. They had huge ears with little tufts of fur at the tips. “Endangered species,” Ezra read aloud. “Play an integral role in the control of populations of small mammals and avians that threaten crops.” He glanced up at Vanto, who was currently drinking the broth from the side of the bowl, for confirmation.

“That’s accurate, yeah. Ecologically, they’re vital to farming. They’re also culturally significant. Lysatra has no shortage of myths and folktales, and saracals play roles in each of them. Whether you believe the myths or not, the stories about saracals are used to teach us about balance between people and the land from an early age.”

Sitting cross-legged on the floor in one of Kanan’s faded shirts and a pair of loose pants, talking about the fauna from his homeworld, Vanto seemed almost normal. If it weren’t for the glow of the ray shield between them, Ezra may have even been able to forget that the man was an Imperial Commander. His voice—nowhere near as wrecked as it’d been when he’d come aboard the other day, when it had reminded Ezra of when he’d gotten Genzi flu and lost his voice for a week—was accented differently from the nasal drawl of most Imperials, and the cadence of it was pleasant.

Ezra knew that his goal had been to see if he’d be able to connect with Vanto. He just didn’t think that he’d actually succeed.

“So…. Why did Thrawn ask you about them?”

He hadn’t realized how relaxed Vanto’s posture had been until it stiffened, his expression shuttering.

“Kanan heard him say it,” Ezra continued. “Before he passed out again.”

“I don’t know what Thrawn’s thinking half the time. Maybe it was the code phrase that will incite me to begin the hostile takeover of your crew. Maybe it’s because your Lasat buddy smacked his head against the doorframe really hard and now he has brain damage. Maybe it’s because your Rebellion,” Vanto bit out, “tortured, starved, and denied medical care to a prisoner, to the point where he was on the verge of death as we were putting him in that bacta tank.” He took a steadying breath. “So, sorry. I don’t know why he brought up a random creature from my homeworld when he woke up. You’re welcome to ask him yourself when he wakes up.”

Ezra felt suddenly, unexpectedly, absurdly guilty. He wanted to say… well, he wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sorry for asking; he still wanted to know. Maybe for pissing Vanto off?

“If you don’t have any other questions,” Vanto said, standing up. There didn’t seem to be a second half of that sentence—at least, not one that Vanto was willing to say aloud. Instead, he returned to his post by the bacta tank, pointedly not looking at Ezra.

Wordlessly, he opened the ray shield, grabbed the dishes off the floor, and reactivated it as he left.

“Sabine. Wake up,” Ezra groaned, shaking the Mandalorian by the shoulder. She lazily pushed his hand away again.

“Go away.”

He sighed, resisting the urge to drag her off of the bed. “It’s your turn on watch, come on.”

Sabine rolled over to face him, cracking one eye open. “I will pay you so much money to cover my watch,” she said.

“How much money?”

“Like… ten credits.”

Ezra shook her shoulder even harder. What a joke. Ten credits. Ezra was broke, but he wasn’t that broke.

“Fine, fine, fine,” Sabine groaned, grabbing his wrist in a decidedly un-sleepy way. “Ten credits and I’ll paint one of your helmets, no charge.”

“And I get to choose the design?” Ezra pressed, considering.

“Yeah, sure.”

Ezra considered the deal briefly, then nodded. “Deal.”

He turned to leave Sabine’s room. “Wait!” She called.

He turned back to look at her, just her face visible from the mound of blankets. “Can you bring me a cup of water?”

He rolled his eyes. This crew, honestly.

The box of green crackers was long finished, which was probably for the best, since Ezra was starting to feel kind of sick from how many he’d eaten. Aside from having no snacks, he was back where he’d started: curled up in his bunk, watching Vanto on the datapad. After he and Ezra had… talked, Vanto had gone back to moping by the bacta tank. He’d moved around some since; stepping into the ‘fresher, stretching, and tidying Thrawn’s discarded uniform from the night before. Ezra watched him fiddle with the Grand Admiral’s rank tab for a weirdly long time.

Ezra was just beginning to queue up music through his headphones when Vanto spoke. His voice was pitched low, clearly not intended for anyone but himself. He was leaning over the bacta tank, one hand splayed over the glass.

“You’re in so much trouble when you wake up,” he said. Through the bacta, Ezra could make out the murky outline of Thrawn. “Like, so much trouble. You think you’ve seen me mad before, but you don’t even know how pissed I am at you.”

Ezra frowned at the datapad. Weren’t Vanto and Thrawn supposed to be like friends? Or coworkers, at least? Her and Kanana had seemed pretty certain that Vanto liked Thrawn. They wouldn’t let the rest of the crew see the cell tapes—they said it was bad enough that they’d seen it, and that even Imperial prisoners deserved dignity—but from what they’d described, Vanto was willing to fight for Thrawn. So why would he be mad? Was the Ghost crew wrong?

On the screen, Vanto sighed, leaning over so that his forehead was resting on the cool curve of the glass tank. “This was a stupid plan,” the man said. “And I told you that. You’re just too proud to admit when you’re wrong.”

A plan? Ezra frowned at the screen. Getting captured by Saw’s Rebel cell seemed like a pretty risky plan, and if the Ghost hadn’t picked Thrawn and Vanto up, they’d be dead for sure—not just from injuries, but because the Empire did destroy the station Saw’s base had been on, like Hera had said they would. Ezra was no tactician, but that seemed like a pretty big lapse in judgement.

Well, whatever the original plan was, it didn’t seem like it was in any danger of progressing, not with Thrawn unconscious and submerged and Vanto curled up on the far side of the tank, trailing his fingers across the glass, Ezra would tell Kanan and Hera about it when they woke up.

In Kanan’s quarters, Vanto had begun speaking again. His tone was more vulnerable than Ezra had heard it before; even when the man had been pissed off at the crew earlier, the rage in his voice had created a sense of distance between them. Now, though, he just sounded a little tired, a little lonely.

“This is worse than when you got sick at the Academy,” Vanto said. “And that was awful. I still think it was Jast or one of the other cadets, not just regular food poisoning. You were sick for a full week, right in the middle of our mid-term exams.”

Ezra hadn’t even known that the Royal Imperial Academy admitted non-humans. Thinking back on it, he’d never seen a non-human at any of the various military academies he or Sabine had infiltrated.

Vanto swallowed, tapping a rhythm against the glass. “I know that I should probably feel really vindicated right now,” he said with a soft laugh, “but really, I just feel tired. Maybe if you were awake to hear me say ‘I told you so,’ but right now, it just… I didn’t want you to get hurt. I couldn’t just stand there and watch you throw yourself into harm's way again and again, alone. I’m doing my best, but I’m not like you. And you aren’t here to pull another trick and get us out of this.” He sighed. “You scared the shit outta me, Thrawn.”

Vanto lapsed into silence, continuing to tap rhythmically against the side of the tank.

Ezra had hoped that he’d say a little more about whatever the plan was, not just ramble on. Even if it was clearly knocked off the rails now, Vanto didn’t seem to be content with staying in the cell. He didn’t say anything else, though, just continued tapping away on the glass.

Ezra fidgeted with the edge of his blanket. There was something that he could try, even if he’d never done it with a sentient before. And the more he knew, the more he could tell Hera, right?

Ezra set the datapad to the side of the bunk and laid back. He exhaled, relaxing into the mattress, and extended his senses in the Force towards Vanto’s. He’d been practicing this, though usually on the animals he connected with. Vanto’s mind was, unsurprisingly, more complex than a lothcat or purrgil’s. Still, Ezra could feel how the stress and tiredness had worn down his mental defenses, leaving his mind open. The thoughts were blurry, like Ezra was watching his thoughts through bleary eyes, but he was able to wade further into the slow-flowing stream of Vanto’s thoughts. He focused on the plan that Eli had mentioned, slipping further through his mind.

A scene unfolded in Vanto’s mind and Ezra turned towards it, fighting against the current of the Imperial’s thoughts. Other images flickered past, threatening to break Ezra’s focus. A wide, grassy plain bordered by a grove of densely flowering trees. Vanto dropping a cup of water and two painkillers on Thrawn’s desk and ordering him to take them. The familiar way that birdsong rolled over the dewy fields. A bright yellow quilt folded at the end of his childhood bed. A sense of incredulity at the price of a pair of the world’s most uncomfortable uniform pants.

The fragments pulled at him. If he didn’t follow the memories now, he’d never be able to find them again. But, no—they weren’t what Ezra was looking for anyways. He ignored them and pressed deeper, closer to the memory until—

“Sir, I don’t like this,” Vanto was saying. He was looking at a man whose back was towards him, fiddling with a holotable in the midst of several projections—Thrawn. Ezra felt a coil of anxiety twist in his stomach, an echo of Vanto’s own feelings in the memory.

“This is the best path forward,” Thrawn said. “The Rebellion has become increasingly elusive. We will make no progress unless we can draw them out.”

“Why do you even care so badly?” Eli asked. He spoke respectfully, but frustration burned through his chest and in his fingertips. “You’re willing to—”

The memory blurred, watery, the voices distorting as Ezra scrambled for a grip. Whatever this conversation was, he could figure out the plan, he knew it. It felt like he was being pushed away, deeper into the current, but he focused more intently, grabbing hold again.

“It is necessary,” Thrawn repeated. Vanto was in front of him now, looking down at Thrawn’s bowed head as he typed away on a datapad. “A warrior will not find victory without taking risks.”

Vanto placed his palms on either side of the datapad and leaned over Thrawn. “There are a million ways this could go wrong,” he said firmly. “You don’t understand the storm that’s brewing on Coruscant right now. This is not the time to be taking risks.”

Thrawn leaned back to study Vanto’s face. “I will make the best decision,” he said. “And if that is to seek out the Rebels on my own, then so be it.”

Ezra’s breath stuttered at the onslaught of feeling that radiated from Vanto in the memory. “What’s best for who? For you? For the Empire? How is getting captured by dangerous extremists supposed to be in service to—”

The memory broke off again, dissolved, the force of Vanto’s emotions ejecting him back into his own body. His ears rang faintly, and he would have liked to get concrete evidence. Now, though, he knew that Thrawn had meant to get captured by Saw.

Ezra wriggled off the top bunk. Hera and Kanan were probably awake by now. He walked down the hall, the ray shield casting a red glow across the hall, reflecting off of their door. Ezra hesitated. Eli was standing up, just on the other side of the shield.

“What did you do,” he asked Ezra flatly. His voice is devoid of inflection, like he can’t even muster the energy to express emotion, but his eyes burned.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ezra lied, resisting the urge to shrink against the far wall.

Vanto shook his head. “I felt you in my head, kid. Whatever you’re looking for, you won’t find that way.”

Ezra’s face flamed with unexpected embarrassment. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he repeated. He rushed to Hera’s door and keyed it open. Vanto’s gaze fell on him like a physical weight as he escaped inside.

“Way to knock,” Kanan chided. He was pulling on a shirt, his hair loose from sleep. Ezra could hear the water in the ‘fresher running and could see Hera brushing her teeth through the open door.

“I found something out about Thrawn and Vanto,” Ezra blurted. “They weren’t captured—at least, not unintentionally. It was all part of some plan Thrawn cooked up to find out more intel on the Rebel cells.”

Kanan frowned. “That’s troubling, but why would Commander Vanto willingly give that information up?”

“Oh, uh…” Ezra scrubbed his hand over the back of his head. “He didn’t, like… tell me. I sorta found out on my own.”

“Ezra,” Kanan said warningly. “What did you do?”

He withered slightly under the combined gaze of Kanan and Hera who had, by this point, come to stand by Kanan’s side.

“I just connected with his mind,” Ezra said. “You know, like I’ve been practicing.”

“Ezra! You’ve been practicing on animals. Non-sentients. Not people!” Kanan chided.

“I don’t see what the big deal is,” Ezra snapped back, defensive. “It’s not like I hurt him.”

“You can’t just enter people’s thoughts without consent!” Kanan threw his hands up. “Using your powers to violate someone’s mind is not the Jedi way.”

“How is it any different from convincing a stormtrooper to let us pass by unnoticed?” Ezra could hear how both he and Kanan were getting dangerously close to yelling at each other, could feel the way the tips of his ears were hot with anger and embarrassment, but couldn’t seem to reign himself in. Kanan was always talking about the Jedi way. Maybe there was a reason that he was one of the last Jedi, though. Maybe “the Jedi way” needed an overhaul.

“When we do that, it’s a necessity that helps us avoid casualties. There was no reason to read Vanto’s mind and violate his trust. It’s invasive and unnecessary.”

“I’d say having a secret plan sounds like a pretty good reason to me,” Ezra replied.

“Guys,” Hera cut in, her voice rising above Kanan’s response. “Kanan, what’s done is done. We work with the new information we have.” Kanan frowned, but didn’t object. “Ezra, Kanan’s right. I’m no Jedi, but Vanto and Thrawn both have already suffered enough at the hands of Saw and his cell. Few people have defenses against Jedi powers. He’s already a prisoner, injured, and alone. Despite that, he’s been proactive in his cooperation with us.”

“He punched Zeb in the head,” Ezra argued, unable to help himself. “And so what if he helped us get the bacta? He benefited from that, too.”

“He didn’t, actually,” Kanan said. “Vanto agreed to only use enough bacta to stabilize and heal Thrawn, and the rest will go to the Rebellion. He’s obviously still injured. His mind has probably been the only place that feels like it’s his, and you tried to take that from him.”

“He’s been more helpful than we would’ve expected an Imperial prisoner to be,” Hera said softly. “I know you have your doubts, and we do too. We’re not letting his willingness to pass along intel blind us to the fact that he’s our enemy. Still, if we reply to his assistance with animosity, we reduce the chances that he’ll help us in the future. And like Sabine pointed out, Vanto could be a great asset to the Rebellion.”

“Fine. I get it,” Ezra muttered. “I just wanted to help.”

Hera walked over and laid her hand on his shoulder. “I know, Ezra. Thank you. I know that the Ghost crew means a lot to you, and you didn’t mean to do any damage. But there’s more than one way to get the information we want.”

Now that his anger had mostly fizzled out, Ezra just felt guilty. He nodded, not meeting Hera or Kanan’s eyes.

“I’m gonna go check on how Chopper’s doing in the cockpit,” She said. Ezra didn’t miss the look she shot towards Kanan before she left.

There was a beat of awkward silence before Kanan sighed and sat back down on the edge of Hera’s bed. He patted the space next to him.

“He did punch Zeb in the head,” Kanan acknowledged into the tense air between them after Ezra sat down. “It was pretty funny.”

Ezra couldn’t stop the laugh. “Yeah.” He curled his legs up onto the bed, hugging his knees to his chest. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not the one you should be apologizing to,” he replied. “But I get it. You want to know stuff, and you think that trying to use the Force to get it is the best route. It’s never that easy, though.”

“It was weird,” Ezra admitted. “There was so much going on. It’s like I became Commander Vanto. Everything, from the scratchy uniform to the feeling of not eating yet that cycle to the urge to take Thrawn’s datapad away from him and make him look at me…. I know it’s Vanto’s memories, but they felt like mine.” He paused. “There was other stuff too. I think that he’s lying to us. I saw him give Thrawn some sort of pills, but earlier he said that none of the medicines we had could help, since he’s a different species.”

“I don’t doubt that he’s hiding some stuff from us. It could be that some medicines work and others don’t, and he doesn’t want us to be able to use that information against them. But knowing how panicked he was, I think it’s more likely that the only medicines that work with Thrawn’s biology—or the only ones Vanto knows work with his biology—are for minor inconveniences, not major injuries. You didn’t see Thrawn—which isn’t a bad thing—but he was incredibly injured from his time in Saw’s captivity.”

“Really?” Ezra frowned. “I thought he was just hungry and thirsty, you know; maybe a little bruised up. I’ve been captured, too, and it’s never been that bad.”

Kanan shook his head. “I know, but even though the Empire lacks pretty much any morals, they still tend to pull their punches when they capture a kid. Thrawn, on the other hand, is one of the Rebellion’s greatest enemies, and Saw… well, you saw what he was like on Geonosis. It’s very likely that Thrawn could’ve died if we didn’t get him medical care. I’m not a doctor and Thrawn’s not your average patient, but it looked like he had internal bleeding at least. Painkillers wouldn’t have been enough to deal with his injuries.”

“No wonder Vanto was so stressed,” Ezra said. “Even after everything, I could feel it in his head.”

Kanan chuckled. “Well, you’re unusually empathetic, even for a Jedi. It’s easy for you to connect to most things through the Force. And Vanto seems to feel things pretty strongly. I can see how that would be overwhelming.”

“Understatement of the year,” Ezra groaned. “I thought I was gonna throw up from nerves before we shoved Thrawn in that tank.”

“Maybe we should add some passive mental defense techniques to your training,” Kanan said. “I could use a brush up on them, too. Vanto’s not the only one in the galaxy who seems to naturally project his emotions into the Force.”

Ezra could sense a story brewing, so he said, “Oh yeah?” and settled further into the bed. Hera seriously had the comfiest mattress.

Padawan stories were the coolest, mostly because it reminded him that Kanan had been where he was once, too. Most of them were tales of how he bumbled through training and how his Master always had to pull him out of scrapes. Ezra wrapped a blanket around himself as Kanan began telling him about the time that he went to an ambassador event, only to end up throwing up on one of the decorative plants after sensing how nervous the main performer was that night. Apparently, the plant he threw up on had particular cultural significance; somehow, Kanan’s Master managed to convince the delegates that her Padawan had meant no offense and was merely ill. As soon as she did, Kanan had thrown up again, this time from a combination of both the singer’s nerves and his own fear of ruining the event.

Ezra woke up in Hera’s bed with a dry mouth and sweat beading on the nape of his neck. He fought his way out of the hot tangle of blankets, yawning. Hera or Kanan must have taken over the prisoner watch while he slept.

When he stepped into the hall, he was met with the red glow of the shield closing off Kanan’s room. Vanto was inside, sitting cross-legged on his cot. He’d apparently dragged it over to the bacta tank where Thrawn slept.

“Hey,” Ezra began lamely.

“Here for another round of mind reading?” Vanto asked. There wasn’t much bite to his words, just a resigned exhaustion that made Ezra feel worse.

“Actually, I came to say sorry,” Ezra said. He sat down in the hallway, mimicking Vanto’s posture. “I don’t like the Empire, and you work for them. I don’t like Thrawn, either. But that’s no excuse to spy on your memories.”

Vanto was quiet for a moment, then shrugged the best he could. “Kanan came by earlier and explained some of it to me. I’m still upset, but I’m willing to forgive you.” Ezra grinned, but paused as Vanto held up a finger. “If you agree to owe me one.”

Ezra rapped his knuckles against the floor thoughtfully. “Okay,” he said. “A small favor.”

“We’re square, then,” Vanto said.

That was a new expression. Ezra wondered what it must be like, to be someone so individual and then try to conform to the Empire’s rigid uniformity. “I think we got off to a bad start,” Ezra said. “My name is Ezra Bridger, and you may know me from my daring acts of heroism across the galaxy.” He heard Vanto huff out a laugh and took it as a sign to keep going. “I’m from Lothal, and I like droidpop and nature.”

“Nice to meet you, Ezra Bridger,” Vanto said. His smile was still a little reserved, but he seemed willing to give Ezra a second chance. “I’m Eli Vanto, from Lysatra. I also like nature. I’m not picky about music, but I’ve been into researching the history of wreckpunk recently.”

Ezra tried to align the image of an Imperial Commander with the concept of the jumbled music of instruments made from ship wreckage, and failed. He was learning that there was more than meets the eye to Vanto.

“It’s nice to meet you, too.”

Chapter Text

As the time Thrawn was set to wake crept closer, the members of the Ghost crew wound tighter and tighter. Her Hera had already broken up two fights between Sabine and Ezra—one of which had started as an argument between Ezra and Chopper—and Zeb had left the reefer open by accident, which resulted in most of the dairy goods spoiling, which of course caused yet another argument when Ezra gave Sabine a bowl of cereal with the bad milk.

Hera felt like she was too busy putting out the crew’s fires to even start to worry about Thrawn.

“You look tired,” Vanto noted as she brought over a portion of what she and Kanan had managed to scrape together for breakfast from the wreckage of the reefer. He didn’t complain about the bowl of hot cereal with fruit and cup of juice, though he hadn’t complained about much since coming onboard. She did recall both Ezra and Sabine complaining about the food on the various occasions they went undercover in the Empire. Between bad food on Imperial ships and little to no food in Saw’s base, maybe he genuinely felt he had nothing to complain about.

Ah. He was still looking at her.

“Well, the Rebellion never sleeps,” she answered lamely. He raised an eyebrow, unconvinced, and she conceded, “Everyone’s a bit high strung. We never really intended to have you or Thrawn onboard.”

Vanto nodded in understanding. “Fair enough. I wouldn’t want to suddenly have to keep you and Kanan contained without warning.”

“Such flattery,” Hera said dryly, though she did notice how he’d compared Thrawn and himself to her and Kanan. Was it just because he saw them as the closest in age, and the closest to relate to? Zeb yelled from down the hall and she suppressed a wince, choosing instead to close her eyes and breathe a sigh out of her nose. When she opened her eyes, Vanto was grinning. Not in a mocking way, but something genuinely amused and a little sympathetic. Hera caught herself wishing, once again, that the man wasn’t aligned with the Empire. His personality just seemed so incongruent with the Imperial views he represented as aide to a Grand Admiral.

“Enjoy your breakfast,” Hera said, cutting herself off from that train of thought. “We’ll be back in a few hours to help get Thrawn out of there.” She nodded to the bacta tank behind him.

In the lounge, the crew was clustered around the holotable. The symbol of Fulcrum was already slowly spinning in the center; Kanan had taken the lead and was filling Kallus in on what they knew—or suspected—so far.

“Vanto’s family is rather uninteresting to the ISB, so I wasn’t able to find much on that,” Kallus was saying. “The Vantos own a Wild Space shipping company. It’s a large operation for the area, but nothing in comparison to some of the Core Worlds’ companies. Most of their ships and computers are old, with barely enough data storage to keep flight logs for more than a month. It appears they experience the typical issues with piracy, but nothing about them stands out.”

Hera wondered how Vanto ended up as an Imperial Commander with such a tame background. Surely having a family and a career path laid out for him would have been enough of a safety net to keep him from joining the Empire to begin with.

“Now the relationship he has with Thrawn is more… intriguing. There are always rumors between aides and their officers, but Thrawn and Vanto have fallen under scrutiny in particular. It could be as simple as xenophobia combined with the fact that Vanto hails from—in the eyes of many—a lesser background. It also could be that Thrawn has only ever had one aide, and Vanto refuses any offers of promotion that would take him away from Thrawn’s side.”

Chopper warbled something accusatory and at least slightly vulgar about their… closeness.

“Indeed,” Kallus replied. “At one point, those in Coruscant who stood against Thrawn attempted to have Vanto taken from him through a mix of politics and military maneuvering. The attempt was brought to a halt by the Emperor.”

An uncomfortable silence settled over the group. “They have friends in high places,” Kanan said finally.

“Thrawn does; enough to keep hold of his aide, at least. Vanto, not so much.” Kallus sighed. “Still, Vanto is a threat in his own right. He may be easy to underestimate, particularly when overshadowed by Thrawn, but he’s proficient in most forms of combat and is extremely intelligent. Worse, he’s likable. It’s easy to let your guard down around him. If he was ever interested in leaving Thrawn’s service, the ISB would have courted him heavily.”

Hera knew they were all struggling to reconcile their experiences with Vanto with the information Kallus was giving them. She forged ahead. “Do you think he’d ever be an asset to the Rebellion?” Hera asked. She had her own opinions, regardless of Kallus’s answer, but she respected his input.

His derisive snort was answer enough. “If you can convince Thrawn to join the Rebellion first, sure.”

The way Kallus presented it, Thrawn and Vanto’s relationship was largely one sided. At most, Thrawn wanted a capable aide—one that was smart and shrewd, as Kallus had suggested—and didn’t want to bother with the inconvenience of getting used to a new one. Before, Hera would’ve believed that Thrawn only retained Vanto for so long out of convenience. Vanto’s loyalty and the way Thrawn treated him on the security tapes, however, told a different story.

“We suspect that Thrawn got captured by Saw intentionally,” Hera said. “Were you able to find anything that might support that?”

Another sigh crackled through the comms. “Figuring out what the Grand Admiral is thinking or planning is difficult. If his capture was intentional, he either told no one or only told Commander Vanto who, as you well know, is beyond my reach. Discovering what the other flag officers intended for him, however, is much easier.”

“The other officers? What do you mean?” Zeb asked.

“It shouldn’t surprise you that Thrawn has plenty of enemies within the military and political spheres of the Empire,” Kallus said. “I have good intel that shows that they believed Thrawn to be imprisoned on Saw’s base when they fired on it.”

“They tried to kill him,” Kanan muttered in shock.

Ezra leaned closer to the table. “But why would they do that? Isn’t he supposed to be one of their best officers?”

“Jealousy and bigotry can drive people to do more than you’d expect. Thrawn is skilled, yes; he also has the favor of the Empire, a high ranking position, and his own fleet—all as a non-human from the Unknown Regions.”

“Why does he even work for them?” Ezra groaned.

“What, you want him to work with us?” Zeb asked.

Ezra wrinkled his nose in distaste, but before he could reply, Kallus cut in. “I may have more time than usual, but I don’t have that much time. I’d prefer if this conversation stuck to business, not bickering.”

“I’m not sure we have anything else for you,” Hera said. “Is there anything else we should know?”

“I’ve shared all I’ve managed to gather,” Kallus replied. He paused, then said, “If you do get a confirmation as to the nature of Thrawn and his aide’s relationship, would you let me know?”

Hera felt her eyebrows raise. “Sure,” she agreed, sharing a puzzled look with Kanan. “Any reason why?”

“Yeah, why’s that?” Sabine challenged, a teasing edge to her grin. “Wanna know if he’s available?” Hera saw Ezra and Zeb both shoot her a look—Ezra’s disgusted face, Zeb’s unreadable—but Sabine just shrugged and mouthed an innocent, ‘What?’ in answer.

“No,” Kallus said curtly. “Vanto isn’t exactly what you’d call my type.” Sabine and Ezra glanced at each other. He has a type? Ezra mouthed to Sabine. I guess, Sabine replied, grinning. Kallus continued, unaware of their gossiping. “It’s a topic of… hot debate. Out of my own curiosity, I’d like to know how many credits I would have won or lost on this particular bet.”

Hera tried to imagine Kallus betting with other ISB agents. It was hard to picture, but if she focused on the way his voice softened slightly when talking to Ezra or Sabine and how Zeb had described their interaction when they were stranded together, she could piece together a fuzzy image of how he’d be if he were slightly less wound-up.

“Will do,” she agreed. “Thank you for the updates, Fulcrum.”

“Of course,” Kallus replied. “Fulcrum out.” The image flickered and disappeared, ending the holocall.

“So,” Hera said into the silence that followed. “A lot to work with there.”

“You can’t seriously still be thinking of trying to turn Vanto,” Zeb groaned. “You heard Kallus, and we’ve seen it ourselves. The guy’s way too attached to the Grand Admiral to ever consider the Rebellion.” He rubbed over the place where Vanto had hit him just a few days earlier for the crime of injuring Thrawn.

“Well,” Sabine cut in. “I don’t know if that’s entirely true.” She glanced up from the datapad she was typing on. “The Thrawn thing, sure, yeah. It’s kind of…. Anyways. What Kallus said about his background made me remember something. Look at this,” She instructed, flipping the screen around to show the crew. “Any of you recognize it?”

Hera squinted at the image. It was clearly the logo on the side of a shipping crate, the Aurebesh symbol for V superimposed over a stylized planet.

“I’ve seen that before,” Zeb said. “Dunno where from, though.”

Hera nodded in agreement. “Many crates in the first shipment of supplies for Chopper Base had this logo on it.” Chopper warbled in agreement, listing the sorts of goods that had been inside: radios, lightweight clothing, rations, equipment for indoor farming in a desert climate. It had been destined for Cantonica, which explained how the supplies had been suited for the hot, sandy planet of Atollon. But it had originated from…

“Dhandu?” Hera said incredulously. “That’s all the way across the galaxy.”

Sabine nodded. “And yet, every so often we get more crates with this logo, usually with expensive or hard to source supplies. And other bases get them, too. I know because AP-5 ranted to me about the inefficiency for, like, two hours one time. And guess which planet Dhandu is near?”

“Lysatra,” Ezra exclaimed. “That’s Vanto’s homeworld. We talked about it.” Hera bit down a smile at Ezra’s enthusiasm. For someone who hated the Empire, he sure did seem to warm up to Vanto quickly. She thought of what Kallus had said about his personality and agreed that, even if unintentional, it was a force to be reckoned with.

“And let me guess,” Zeb said. “We’re supposed to believe that the V stands for Vanto?”

Sabine rolled her eyes. “I know you’d hate to believe that your Imperial recruit would miss something, but it does stand for Vanto. These,” she waggled the image of the shipping crate, “are supplies taken from Commander Vanto’s family business.”

“Well, Kallus said that their ships were really shitty,” Ezra said. “Maybe they’re just an easy target.”

Hera frowned, inspecting the image. “No,” she said. “There would be no way to tell that they’re carrying the cargo that was exactly what the Rebellion needed. The Vanto shipping company has to have at least some Rebellion sympathizers. The piracy claims are likely for insurance or a cover story, either by the pilot or the company itself, but these supplies weren’t stolen by the Rebellion. They were given to us.”

“Imagine if your son joined the Empire,” Kanan mused. “Maybe for the training, or for the money. But instead of promoting or coming home, he gets stuck in a dead-end job and attacked—literally and figuratively—by the people the Empire favors the most. Would that be enough to convince you to aid the Rebellion?”

Hera shrugged a shoulder, smothering a smile and burst of warmth at the way she and Kanan seemed to be thinking along the same lines. “Depends. If the Empire has begun encroaching on Lysatra the same way it has for Lothal and so many other planets, that could also brew discontent.”

“The real question is, does Commander Vanto know?” Sabine asked.

“And if he does,” Kanan continued, “What does Thrawn know about it?”

There was a moment of silence. Chopper broke it with a very colorful description of what he thought of Thrawn’s character—he’d never forgiven the man for the destruction of the Syndulla estate—and said that if Thrawn knew, he would have used Vanto’s family connections to uncover the location of Chopper Base.

“I don’t think Commander Vanto is as unreachable as Kallus says he is,” Hera concluded. She didn’t voice the other half of what she was thinking, not in front of the whole crew, but Kanan caught her eye and tilted his head, assessing her. She didn’t think Thrawn was as untouchable as they’d first assumed, either. He didn’t have many weak points, and he was the definition of calculating. But Hera couldn’t get the image out of her head of the way he’d held Vanto in Saw’s cell. Maybe they just hadn’t had the right approach before.

“Why don’t we go over the plan for getting Thrawn out of the bacta tank one more time,” Kanan suggested.

Hera nodded, grateful for the segue. There was little else that she could say now to persuade or dissuade the crew of Vanto’s potential. It was best to let the idea settle for a bit.

“We’ll have Sabine in the cockpit, making sure we’re steady on course and ready to answer any transmissions that come in. Ezra will be in the Phantom, tailing us. In the unlikely event that Thrawn escapes, I don’t want him to have access to a detachable craft with a hyperdrive.” Sabine and Ezra both flashed her thumbs up.

“Chopper, you’ll be on door duty.” This was, as expected, met with a grumble about never getting the glamorous jobs. Hera raised an eyebrow. “Well, you’re not tall enough to help get Thrawn out of the bacta tank, so tough luck, buddy.” He shook a manipulator arm at her threateningly, but offered no other objection.

“Kanan, Zeb, you’ll be with me in the cell. Kanan and I will pull Thrawn out, and Zeb will keep an eye on Vanto and stay ready in case Thrawn tries anything.”

Hera appreciated that they waited for her to finish speaking to start bickering about who had the best and worst assignment. The arguing was comforting, in a way; familiar.

“Hera,” Kanan called. “Can we talk for a second?” The crew was too embroiled in their argument to notice as they slipped down the hall. Kanan waited until the door of Hera’s quarters closed behind them before speaking.

“I know that you’ve thought this through, more than any of the rest of us have,” Kanan began, resting a warm palm on her shoulder. “But I feel like you’re operating on a pretty big what if right now, and we have no clue what we’re going to do with Thrawn and Vanto if we can’t convince them to join our side.”

Hera frowned at him. “You don’t think I can pull it off?” She challenged.

Kanan grimaced. “I’m not saying you can’t. If anyone can, it’s you. It’s just that there are a lot of other people who are good at this sort of thing who, you know. Think it’s a stretch.”

“Kallus only sees it from one side,” Hera said, shaking her head. “He’s too focused on Thrawn’s success and rank to see Vanto as the key he is—not just to the intel we want, but also to Thrawn.”

“And you really want to work with him?”

Hera made a face at the thought of working with Thrawn—no, she didn’t, there was too much bad blood there for an easy resolution—but forged ahead. “It would be worth it just to get him out of the Empire’s hands.”

Kanan drew her closer, resting his chin on the top of her head. “I trust you.”

Hera looped her arms around his waist, relaxing into the embrace. “I know.”

“Why are you so convinced this will work?” He asked.

Hera grinned. “Let’s call it a hunch.”

Vanto had agreed to let Zeb check him over while Kanan and Hera began running the program that would bring Thrawn out of stasis, but even with the distraction, Kanan seemed tenser than usual. Hera could chalk it up to the stress of having a Grand Admiral plotting against the Rebellion on their ship. It was more likely, though, that he was picking up on Vanto’s emotional state.

She waited until Zeb had moved on to checking Vanto’s sprained ankle before kicking Kanan lightly to get his attention. He glanced up at her, meeting her raised brows with a questioning look of his own. “All okay?” She mouthed, angling her head away from Vanto’s line of sight. Kanan’s expression cleared, and he nodded slightly before inclining her head towards Vanto. Hera had known Kanan for a long time, and she could count on one hand the number of times that someone had thrown him this out of sorts. If he said he was alright, though, she trusted him.

She was broken out of her thoughts by a loud clang on Zeb’s side of the berthing.

“Hey,” Zeb growled. “I’m trying to help.”

“Where, exactly, did you say you got our medical training from?” Vanto snapped back. He was hunched over defensively on the side of Kanan’s bed, one hand wrapped tightly around Zeb’s wrist and holding it away from his ankle.

“Everyone in the Lasan Honor Guard gets field training,” Zeb said. “I need to touch your ankle to see how swollen it still is.”

“Well, don’t grab it like that.”

“How do you want me to grab it, then!”

“I want you to not grab it at all!” Vanto said, voice rising in volume to match Zeb’s.

“Boys,” Hera snapped without thinking. Both heads turned towards her, wearing identical chastened expressions. She’d probably just said that because their bickering was so reminiscent of Ezra and Zeb’s. She had time to unpack it later. “Zeb, please be gentle. Commander Vanto… suck it up.”

She turned back to the control panel and tried to ignore the thumbs-up that Kanan flashed her.

“Just don’t kick me,” Zeb muttered, his tone lowered.

“No promises.” Despite the words, Vanto’s tone held no heat. Hera kept an eye on them as she and Kanan continued working, noting the way Zeb carefully tested the swelling and flexion of Vantio’s ankle before rewrapping it—something that was difficult for Vanto to do himself, with only one hand—and moving on to check his shoulder.

The bacta tank emitted a series of beeps indicating that it had gone through the unlock cycle.

“Ready?” She asked Kanan.

“Ready.”

Hera keyed open the latch and hefted open the curved glass top. Beneath, resting in the bacta, was Thrawn. Hera felt a shiver of unease at seeing him so close, the knowledge that he was the cause of all of their worst failures and was currently at the heart of her home, surrounded by her family. He was their prisoner, but they were also vulnerable. She hoped, fervently, that they had made the right decision.

Kanan was dipping his arms into the tank to gather Thrawn up and out of the gel-like substance. Hera waited until he’d gotten his hands under Thrawn’s back before she worked her arms beneath the Imperial officer’s thighs. “Careful for the oxygen mask,” Hera reminded Kanan. Together, they lifted him up and out of the tank, shifting over to lay him on the cot that they’d cleared off. The thin sheet of protective plastoid crinkled as they laid Thrawn’s body down.

“He’s a lot heavier than he looks,” Kanan said, wiping off the small bits of bacta that clung to his skin. Hera smiled faintly as Zeb complained in the background about their easy dismissal when he’d had to bring Thrawn all the way onboard from Saw’s base. She checked the hose that connected the breathing mask to the oxygen tank, making sure it didn’t get twisted anywhere when they’d moved Thrawn. It was a morbid thought, but the last thing they wanted was to have gone through all the trouble just for Thrawn to die from suffocation at the end.

He’d start breathing on his own once they took the mask off, of course, but he’d also wake up. Hera wanted at least a little control over when that would be.

Kanan had already begun a visual sweep, noting that the abdominal bruising—and the internal bleeding that had caused it—had cleared, along with the other various bruises, electrical burns, and cuts.

Hera gently cleared residual bacta from Thrawn’s closed eyes, careful not to scrape him with her nails. It was disconcerting, being this close to him without being subjected to his analytical stare or amidst the stress of an operation. The bacta clumped his short, thick eyelashes together as she wiped them a second time. She startled a bit as Kanan glanced sharply away, at Vanto. She followed his gaze. Vanto was staring at the place where Hera’s fingers were brushing against Thrawn’s skin. His face was blank, fingers hanging loosely by his sides, but his shoulders were a tense, aggravated line.

She caught Kanan’s attention and raised an eyebrow. He mirrored her expression, then refocused on Thrawn. “Removing the mask,” he announced to the room.

For a moment, it seemed that nothing happened. Hera had just enough time to doubt whether Thrawn would be like most other species who woke naturally when the oxygen mask was removed. Then his eyes snapped open, fixing Hera with their red glow. Before she could speak, Thrawn’s hand flashed out, wrapping tightly around her forearm and tugging her close with a speed and grace that, for someone who had just come out of a days-long sleep, was startling. Hera could feel Kanan’s tension, but he didn’t interfere. He trusted her to handle this.

“Eli Vanto,” Thrawn rasped. “Where is he?”

“He’s here,” Hera said calmly. Thrawn’s hand tightened further, seemingly without thinking. “He’s safe,” she added. Thrawn’s eyes narrowed.

“I’m right here.”

At the sound of Vanto’s voice, Thrawn’s grip relaxed, his hand falling away as he drew himself fluidly into a seated position and twisted to face Vanto. His expression didn’t change, but the tension in his body unspooled at the sight of his aide. Hera filed that away for later consideration. She took a moment to inspect the pale outline Thrawn’s grip had left on her arm—it was slowly returning to normal as blood flowed back into the area—before returning her focus to Thrawn.

It seemed that, now that he had confirmed Vanto’s presence and well-being, Thrawn was content to act as though he’d never been worried at all. He scanned the small room, gaze flicking over Zeb, Kanan, and Hera in turn. If she didn’t know any better, she’d think that he’d barely registered Vanto at all.

The distance between the two of them felt orchestrated. Hera couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but a glance at Kanan told her he felt the same. There was something about the way that Thrawn gave Vanto no more than a cursory glance, or that Vanto seemed utterly uninterested in checking on his commanding officer, that felt rehearsed. If Thrawn’s first words hadn’t been Commander Vanto’s name, if she hadn’t seen the way Vanto ferociously defended Thrawn, she might have been fooled. This was the side that the Imperial Navy and ISB saw: cool, even cold, professionalism.

“I see that we’ve been passed into your… care,” Thrawn said after he’d assessed the surroundings. Insinuation curled around the last word, though it was hard to determine if his tone was judgemental or simply disapproving.

“Well, returning you to the Empire isn’t an option,” Hera replied. “Unless, of course, you would have preferred that we left you in Saw’s holding cells…” She trailed off, shrugging. Neither of the Imperials knew what Kallus had shared; that the Empire had, as Hera predicted, bombed the base without regard for who may have been inside—or, perhaps, because of who may have been inside.

Vanto was quiet—taking his cues from Thrawn, Hera assumed—while the Grand Admiral absorbed the implications of her statement.

“The base is destroyed, then,” He said, still betraying nothing in his tone. Hera nodded, watching for Vanto’s reaction. It didn’t disappoint; his spine stiffened, his brows drawing into a furrow before smoothing back over. More anger, though, than surprise. So Ezra had been right when he said that Vanto suspected some sort of threat against Thrawn.

“It is,” Hera said. “They’ll regroup, find a new base, and begin operating again. It takes more than that to take us out of the fight.”

“What, then, is your plan for Commander Vanto and myself?”

Hera tried not to show that even she didn’t have the answer to that question. Instead, she said, “Well, for now, we’ll give you both the space to clean up.”

“There are some extra clothes in the cabinet below the bunk,” Kanan added. They’d been content to allow Hera to be the spokesperson, and while she didn’t mind it, the support was a relief. “They may be a little tight, but it’s better than nothing.”

Thrawn inclined his head, but didn’t comment further. Chopper lowered the barrier. Hera stepped out first, as they’d discussed. Of the tree of them, Hera would be the easiest to physically overpower. She was a hell of a fighter, but so was Thrawn, and Hera’s experience was better served in a pilot’s chair than in hand-to-hand. Zeb followed close behind, leaving Kanan to bring up the rear, ready to use the Force to push Thrawn or Vanto back if either of them made a move for the door.

He didn’t, though, merely stood as they left in a way that Hera could’ve called respectful.

Hera wasn’t sure what effect Thrawn’s company would have on Vanto, whether it would stabilize him or make them both more volatile; whether Vanto would soften Thrawn, or if Thrawn would harden Vanto against the Rebellion. She thought back through everything she’d learned in the past few days—Vanto’s unwavering loyalty, Thrawn’s determination to minimize the damage done to him, the way they seemed to have to actively resist falling into the gravitation of one another’s company—and smiled to herself. Call it a hunch.

Chapter Text

Thrawn’s last clear memory was of the Durkta Imperial Outpost. A solitary outpost on one of Durkteel’s moons, essentially unguarded, manned by a skeleton crew at the edge of the sector that they suspected Saw Gerrera operated out of. The perfect bait. He made sure the right people knew where he was going and let them speculate as to what drove him to visit such a secluded outpost; not that the Rebels would really care about the why. They’d only care that their enemy was exposed. Thrawn was counting on it.

The plan was simple: Thrawn would visit the base, the Rebels would attack, and he’d stumble into captivity. They’d sweep his ship and find the standard tracker in the cockpit, and if they were good, they’d find the concealed one buried in the wing. They would be giddy with their successful capture and lulled into security by finding and disabling the trackers on the ship, so they would neglect to search Thrawn himself. The emitter that he’d had tailor-made to fit inside his rank plaque would go unnoticed. Thrawn had studied Saw’s tactics, he could see how it would all unfold.

He knew, also, that the time spent in Saw’s custody would be unpleasant. The man was an extremist, fanatically dedicated to the Rebellion. He wouldn’t kill Thrawn or stoop to negotiating with the Empire, but he would try to extract the information that he held as a Grand Admiral. He would try waiting, first, to make Thrawn easier to break, but Saw was not known for his patience. It would be a day, two at most. Ample time for Commander Faro to track the signal, alert the necessary back up, and take Gerrera’s base and all the data it held.

When Thrawn arrived at the Imperial outpost, he’d been greeted by the outpost commander and guided inside to begin the inspection that he’d claimed was his reason for visiting, as expected.

And there was Commander Vanto, the buzzing fluorescent lights catching on the waves of his hair as he nodded along to something one of the technicians was saying. Commander Vanto, who had agreed to stay behind and attend a Coruscant event in Thrawn’s stead as he went on this undercover mission. Commander Vanto, who Thrawn had not planned for in any of his mission calculus; who was now as exposed to Rebel violence as anyone else at the outpost was.

“Grand Admiral Thrawn,” he greeted when he caught sight of Thrawn, rigid in the doorway. “I came early as you requested, to ensure the outpost was cleared of any non-essential personnel.” His voice was calm and Thrawn was reminded suddenly that Eli was a very, very good liar. Thrawn had never expected that skill would be turned against him.

Unable to do anything else, Thrawn just nodded in acknowledgement, gesturing for the others in the room to be at ease.

“Shall we begin the inspection, Sir?” Eli’s gaze was steady and remorseless despite his deliberate disobedience.

“Of course. Commander,” he said, turning to the base commander, “My aide will accompany us as we conduct the inspection. Please, lead the way.” As they walked, Thrawn mentally replayed their previous encounter in his mind. He and Eli had argued relentlessly until Thrawn had finally snapped and pulled rank, a tactic he’d resorted to only twice before, and ordered Eli to remain behind.

As the outpost commander paused to use his code cylinder on one of the doors, Thrawn leaned down to speak in Vanto’s ear, not bothering to mask his anger. “You’ve disobeyed a direct order, Commander Vanto.”

“I think you’ll find that I’ve done no such thing,” Eli replied, matching his tone, “and I even told you before I left. If you’d had an issue with me arriving ahead of you to clear the base of potential casualties, you should have said so at that time.”

By the time the Imperial officer had turned around to wave them genially through the door, they’d put a respectable distance between themselves and looked—hopefully—like they weren’t in the middle of a serious debate over insubordination.

Over the sound of the base commander prattling on about quotas and manning, Thrawn strained to remember the exact verbiage he had used: “You will not accompany me to Durkta Outpost. That is an order, Commander. Do you understand?” He should have known when the defiance in Eli’s eyes had only sparked higher, should have known when his response was neither yes or no but instead, “I won’t accompany you to Durkta. I’ll leave tonight.” At the time, Thrawn had thought that the response indicated his intent to travel to Coruscant. In retrospect, he could clearly see the way Eli had taken advantage of the loopholes in his order.

He would not accompany Thrawn to Durkta, he would leave that night and meet Thrawn at the outpost.

“It is about the spirit of the order,” Thrawn hissed when they had another moment of distraction. “You know full well that this is not what I meant.”

“You said that orders are about the wording,” Eli snapped back.

“In the Ascendancy,” Thrawn replied, growing increasingly frustrated.

“Which is where you’re dispatching me to,” he said. “Soon, if the increasing number of random lessons in Cheunh and CEDF protocols are anything to go by. I’m just practicing so that I don’t make you look bad when you pass me off.”

Thrawn pressed the tip of his tongue to the seams of his teeth, forcibly keeping his jaw unclenched. This was a tired refrain from one of their most hashed-over arguments, but he was kept from replying as the commander swiveled his attention to them once more.

Eli wasn’t protesting his departure from the Imperial Navy, or even from Lesser Space. He had grown more and more unsettled by Imperial tactics as his knowledge grew from the vague beliefs held by backwater planets to a nuanced opinion borne from experience and training. Thrawn knew privately that Eli’s allegiance to the Empire was tenuous at best. As soon as the Empire began to threaten Lysatra, it would snap. Already, seeing what was happening to similar planets had nurtured the dissonance Eli felt. They both knew that soon, Eli wouldn’t be able to stay; they knew, too, that the ISB would not allow someone like Eli to leave.

The source of the argument was Thrawn’s choice to stay. Eli’s morals blinded him to the fact that a strong, despicable ally was still an ally; the lesser evil between the Empire and the Grysk. Eli argued that Thrawn had developed tunnel vision and that the Empire wouldn’t be the savior that Thrawn thought it would be for the Chiss. And around and around they went, with Eli doing his best to wear Thrawn down and Thrawn refusing to budge.

He was broken out of his ruminations by the commander saying, “You indicated that you wanted a tour of the barracks as well, correct? I will say, many of the funds have not found their way to our little moon. I fear you may find the accommodations lackluster, though… perhaps you could put in a word for some of the smaller bases to receive funding for renovations as well.”

“Let’s see what we’re working with,” Eli replied with a winning smile, apparently impervious to Thrawn’s mounting frustration.

“Perfect,” the man replied. “If you’d be so kind as to wait a moment while I ensure this block is clear of any residents…”

As soon as he rounded the corner, Thrawn grabbed Eli’s wrist, holding him in place as he leaned down to look him in the eye. “You will leave. Now. You will board whatever ship you came in, and you will fly out of here.”

He noted the way Eli’s eyes widened in surprise at the sudden proximity, and Thrawn knew that he was pushing the boundaries of the behaviour Eli expected of him. Still, he refused to back down.

“I won’t.” Eli held his gaze. “If you’re so determined to throw yourself into danger, you’re not doing it alone. If you really think I’m just going to leave you behind, you don’t know me at all.”

Thrawn knew they weren’t just talking about the incoming Rebel attack anymore. He couldn’t deny, even in his frustration, that Eli looked resplendent in his resoluteness, his gaze unwavering and his shoulders set in defiance.

“I won’t be able to keep you safe,” Thrawn replied. Something in Eli’s stance softened.

“I know that.”

“I will still do my best,” he promised.

The corner of Eli’s mouth turned up. “I know that, too.”

What little food and water Saw’s people gave them was clearly laced. Not that Thrawn blamed them. If the roles were reversed, he would do the same. And yet.

His chest ached with every breath. At this point, the drugs were almost a relief, something to muddle the pain that radiates through his body. He couldn’t tell if it was affecting him more strongly than Eli because of his biology, the torture, or because Eli had been splitting their rations unevenly, always giving Thrawn the larger portion. Every time he brought it up, Eli acted like he had no clue what Thrawn was talking about. What Thrawn did know, despite the drugs fogging his mind, was that it had been far longer than the two days’ wait he’d anticipated.

“You have a lot of enemies, Thrawn. In the Navy and here.” Eli didn’t say I told you so, but he recognized the topic from their previous arguments. And, knowing Eli, the seeming absence of anger was more likely just well-hidden, simmering until the situation was stable enough for him to finally process his feelings. Thrawn couldn’t help but admire his compartmentalization. “A lot of people would celebrate if you just… disappeared. Karyn will come through, though.”

Thrawn smothered his irritation at Eli’s use of Commander Faro’s first name, but didn’t comment. Despite his best efforts, Eli was slowly accruing a myriad of injuries. The list would be shorter if he didn’t throw himself at the Rebels every time they came to collect Thrawn, but he couldn’t blame Eli. The few injuries Eli did have made a sense of guilt settle in the pit of Thrawn’s stomach; he couldn’t imagine what he would feel if the roles were reversed.

Eli suffered through the indignities of captivity silently, at least while Thrawn was here. He could hear the growing roughness in his aide’s voice every time he left, and—to his exhausted amusement—had heard more than one Rebel complain about the racket that Eli apparently made in Thrawn’s absence. The only comment he made was that the last time his scalp had felt this grimy, he’d just won a round of mud wrestling, and even that was just so he could launch into a story to distract Thrawn from the pain.

“How about a love story?” Eli asked, curling the word ‘love’ comedically. Thrawn had been sitting stiffly on the edge of the cot, pondering his stale, unwrapped ration bar and staunchly ignoring the dryness of his mouth. Eli sat beside him, cross-legged on the floor. He was more cheery than usual. Thrawn had come to realize that the more dire the situation, the more aggressively positive Eli became; a contrast to Thrawn’s own steady temperament through highs and lows. In this situation, having someone like Eli by his side was more of a boon than he’d be willing to admit. He closed his eyes and tried not to picture Eli pinned under the Rebels’ stun batons, tried not to see him falling from Thrawn’s grasp again and again and again.

Instead, he asked, “A real one? Or another Lysatran excuse,” doing his best to inject the question with faux-disdain.

They’d had plenty of time to discuss the differences in their cultures, conversations which stretched back to the early days, when Thrawn had plied Eli for any information he had on the Chiss and had first been introduced to traditional Lysatran storytelling. It had taken longer for Thrawn to reciprocate with his own culture—much longer, years until Eli’s persistence paid off—but one of the key differences was the way they portrayed romantic elements. While Eli’s people focused on leading lives in harmony with the land, getting by with only what they needed, the stories Thrawn grew up with were lavish. The import economy of Csilla, along with the frigid climate, lended itself to appreciating indulgence—at least in the Families and within the civilian world.

As a result, Lysatran love stories always seemed to circle back around to a love for the land instead of passion between the couple, and were nowhere near as detailed as the Chiss’ tales of romance.

They’d argued about it, once, or what passed as an argument between the two of them—Thrawn, momentarily distracted from the acquisition forms he was supposed to sign, and Eli, perched on the end of his bed, not bothering to look up from his holopad as he bickered with his commanding officer while arranging the next day’s schedule. He’d only dropped the argument when Eli said that Thrawn could share a Cheunh love story so that they could decide whose was better.

“A real Lysatran one,” Eli teased back. Thrawn hummed tiredly, and Eli began to regale him with a folktale that, as usual, began with a landowner noticing something wrong with their harvest and going into the woods to investigate. Thrawn wondered idly if this trend of wandering into a forest without any prior planning had anything to do with the lack of any truly large predators on Lysatra.

Surprisingly, the story had a Chiss variant that Thrawn was familiar with. It happened from time to time; at some point in the past, the people of Lysatra had indeed met with Chiss travellers, and their interactions spawned stories in both cultures. Eli knew of this—Thrawn had once let it slip that he was familiar with a tale that Eli had not yet shared, and the man was bright enough to work the rest out from there—but he assumed that the Chiss versions were tamer. Thrawn had done little to disabuse him of the notion, and he wasn’t going to start now. Instead, he did his best to relax and allow Eli’s words to carry him away from the aches of his body.

He was an excellent storyteller, despite the way his voice occasionally broke from the dryness and strain. Thrawn could vividly picture the sunlit glen where the landowner—a farmer in Eli’s culture; a local official in Thrawn’s—stumbled upon the body of an unconscious Chiss, hidden from all but the keenest eye by flowering leba vines. He wondered idly what it meant that Eli’s version of the story focused on how the man looked strong and fit, whereas Thrawn had grown up hearing of the Chiss’s beauty and fine features. How, when describing the way the Lysatran tore their clothes to patch the Chiss’s wounds, Eli described the sturdy clothes of a workman and not the fine robes of an aristocrat. What different cultures they came from, and how surprising it was that the Ascendancy would be fixated on glamor and social status while the Lysatrans prized functionality and capability.

Thrawn cracked his eyes open a sliver. Eli’s hands were resting loosely in his lap, his head tilted back slightly as he spoke. The soft curls of his hair were matted with sweat and grime, and dark circles emphasized the hollows of his eyes. And yet… the inexplicable urge to reach out and bury a hand in his hair, to run the backs of his fingers along the crests of his cheekbones, to touch the constellations of freckles that dotted his skin was as present as it had been in recent years. He had noted the gradual rise in the frequency that his eyes strayed to his aide, that his skin tingled with the need to feel, that his heart rate kicked up a notch when looking at Eli. Thrawn knew what that meant, of course. He wasn’t an idiot. He also knew that lying to himself about it would only allow his feelings to take him by surprise later.

Thrawn let the urge fill him, roll through him, distract him from the pain and discomfort of their current situation, and did his best to let it go.

It would be unwise, he reasoned, to allow himself that comfort while in the hold of the enemy. It would be unwise for him to allow himself that comfort at all, with the eyes of the Emperor and the ISB and the Imperial Navy all trained on him, and the fate of the Ascendancy resting on how well he performed for them.

“Sir?” Eli clicked his fingers in front of Thrawn’s face, earning him an irritated glare. “You in there?”

“My apologies. Please, continue.”

Eli narrowed his eyes. “I just wanna make sure you’re paying attention. This is important, you know.”

Important? Yes, Thrawn supposed so, as important as any of the stories Eli divulged, whether about Lysatra or just his day on duty; important personally, but hardly enough to warrant such a response. Sluggishly, his brain turned over the words and the look of concern-meets-irritation on his friend’s face.

“Of course,” Thrawn replied. “I’m listening.”

He was listening now, at least, puzzling through the statement and trying not to feel irritated at the slowness of his own thoughts. Eli was just telling him a story, and—ah. Telling. Eli was telling him something as best as he could under the uncertain extent of surveillance.

A story centred around a Lysatran human and a Chiss, clearly meant to be representative of them. The romance? Not that, obviously, don’t be ridiculous. Something else. Thrawn flicked through the elements he knew of the story in his mind: the discovery of the Chiss, the Lysatran’s efforts to rouse him, his ultimate success, their eventual bonding ceremony. It was unlikely Eli would be interested in the marriage customs within the Ascendancy, so it had to be something else.

Eli was at the point in the story where the Chiss had been brought back to the Lysatran’s homestead, and either his version did not contain the intimately detailed scene of the human gently cleaning the dirt from the Chiss’s skin, or Eli had elected to skip over that part. Instead, he was talking about the man’s confusion over why the Chiss had fallen into a deep sleep.

“The farmer was unable to wake the stranger, despite his best efforts,” Eli was saying. “As he meditated on a solution, he could not stop his mind from wandering to the state he found the stranger in. He was unsure if it was from a mystical nature, beyond his understanding, or something explicable; a reaction to the unusual fauna of Lysatra, the result of an injury, or, like, a natural part of the alien’s life cycle, or…” Thrawn caught the sudden drop from the typical story-teller cadence into something more Eli and, finally, it clicked.

“A healing coma, perhaps,” Thrawn suggested. “You mentioned in the story that he was deeply injured.”

Eli’s eyebrows had climbed sharply at Thrawn’s words before he nodded. “Or a healing coma. Of course.”

“Some cultures have legends about those on death’s door slipping into a state similar to hibernation, slowing the damage and allowing the body to heal.” He managed to make the comment sound passably offhand, but he saw the understanding glow in Eli’s eyes. And the story continued.

Clever, bright Eli. Thrawn had, of course, been lectured in depth about the dangers of not divulging his health and biological information to Eli. It seemed he’d been right, and Thrawn’s stubbornness could have left Eli in the dark on how to administer medical aid if it reached that point. If Thrawn was being honest, pain that curled through every part of his body indicated that “reaching that point” was not as ludicrous a possibility as Thrawn had once believed it to be. And yet Eli—remarkable, intelligent, radiant Eli—had found a way around it without revealing any information that Thrawn was reluctant to share. A handful of the stories about Chiss that Eli had told him in the past held some kernel of truth, and this one was no different. It was still something of a medical mystery, but it was well-documented that Chiss held the ability to slip into a coma-like state if their bodies were under enough stress, slowing the blood flow and internal processes to allow the body to maximize the energy put towards recovering from potentially life-threatening injuries.

Thrawn hoped that his exhaustion dampened the way he was gazing at Eli, because he knew that even without the external factors—the drugs, the deprivation of basic necessities, the exhaustion, the vigorous rounds of “questioning”—he likely wouldn’t be able to hide the besotted expression on his face.

If miracles were real, Eli would simply think that his commanding officer was a bit high.

He listened patiently as Eli finished out the story, continuing to note the differences between the two stories and keeping an ear out for any chance he could provide Eli with additional accurate information.

“So, what do you think?” he asked.

Thrawn made a noise of consideration. “Lysatran weddings involve a lot of dirt.” He was gratified to hear Eli’s laugh, raspy as it was. “But if I were the farmer, I’d skip straight to the tea, I think.”

He was referring to the final round of the tale, where the farmer had spooned barley tea into the Chiss’s mouth, prompting a miraculous recovery. Unsurprisingly, Eli had lingered on the symbolism of a piece of Lysatra entering the Chiss, attributing his recovery to the properties of the planet, and said nothing of the inherent romanticism of feeding a partner. For the best, really. The story was old, likely old enough to be from the time before overtaxing the land led to extinctions of various crop species—a subject Thrawn was well familiar with thanks to Eli’s frequent conversations-turned-lectures on environmentalism—including a barley strain similar to Vratixia renanicus. It was likely that using bacta or a similar substance was what stabilized the Chiss in the story, bringing him out of the coma.

Eli nodded, seeming to come to the same conclusion. The gears were visibly turning in his head, and Thrawn felt a rush of appreciation as he considered the resilience of Eli’s mind.

“I’d’ve tried other stuff if I were the farmer,” Eli said. “Something easier to get than bacta.”

Thrawn sensed the hidden question: if they did manage to escape, and Thrawn had fallen unconscious, was there anything else Eli could do to heal him? He considered for a moment, though he already knew the answer. Even with the medical equipment that was used to treat Chiss in the Ascendancy, they rarely used any medications; instead, they stabilized the condition of the patient and only interfered when needed, letting the healing process run its course naturally. Any of the medications offered in Lesser Space would be risky—they could have no effect at all, or worsen the symptoms.

“I wouldn’t,” Thrawn said in answer to the silent question. “Though it is hard to source, bacta is highly sought after for a reason, after all. It’s remarkably effective on nearly all species.”

“Fair enough.” Eli tipped his head back, gazing up at Thrawn. He took a silent moment to appreciate the certainty in his gaze. “We’ll get out of this,” he said. His voice was firm, resolute, and as always, Thrawn couldn’t help but believe him.