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The first time Mak'ro kissed Thalias, she laughed at him.
He didn’t really know what to do with that at the time, so he just kissed her again, which only made her laugh harder, and him so flustered that she had to gently sit him down on the edge of the bed, half naked, to soothe his nerves.
It's not you, she said, fond and still laughing. It‘s just— I never thought we'd end up here, is all.
He's not entirely sure why he thinks of it now — knocked on his ass on the bridge of an enemy ship, his right knee bent the wrong way and hurting like all hells, looking up at Ivant, who’s standing over the corpse of Mak'ro’s would be murderer, charric in hand — just that maybe he's having that same thought:
I'd never thought we'd end up here, is all.
"Can you stand, sir?" Ivant asks, the worry on his face in stark contrast to how steady his hands are around the still smoking charric. Mak'ro barely bites back his own laugh.
Alarms blare across the bridge, their cacophony only punctuated by the banging against the main hatch. The rest of the Grysk strike team trying to break through, undoubtedly to finish their comrades' botched ambush. Ivant doesn’t waste time on waiting for an answer, already crouching down to thread an arm under Mak’ro’s shoulders, eyes never leaving the hatch as he pulls them both back up with surprising strength.
Mak'ro grits his teeth against the pain shooting through his leg when he tries to put pressure on his knee. “Stand, yes,” he says, strained but honest, trying to shove his pride past his duty as the officer in charge. “Walk on my own, not really.”
Ivant shoots him a glance, assessing, eyes cataloging his expression the same way Mak'ro has seen him run through equations faster than his questis can keep up with. “Copy,” he nods and tightens his grip. “I got you, sir. Just lean on me.”
Mak'ro is surprised by his own lack of hesitation to do just that, to let Ivant take the lead. But they’re moving before he’s got any time to mull it over, weaving through bodies and blaring consoles to make their way towards the escape pod at the far edge of the bridge. Ivant’s hold on him never wavers, all of him focused, sure under the pressure of command in a way that makes Mak’ro wonder, not for the first time, what trials he’s gone through back in Lesser Space.
Mak’ro didn’t trust him one bit, back when Ar’alani foisted him and Vah'nya off into his care. Insisted, in fact – even after she made him swear to keep them hidden, to keep them safe from the imminent clutches of the Ascendancy’s long brewing civil war – that allowing an alien on board the Springhawk would be nothing but a distraction, an infestation the same way allowing the Aristocra to meddle in their affairs had been.
Ar’alani didn’t much cared about his opinion, so Mak’ro soothed his nerves by running Ivant through drill after drill after drill, throwing anything from complex tactical analysis to rounds in the dojo at him, shortening his rest periods to the edge of legality, barely giving him time to scarf down a ration bar between shifts, until finally, two weeks in, Mak’ro found himself with a very angry sky-walker in his office.
Are you done being petty? Vah’nya asked him, hands on her hips, and for a moment Mak’ro was back at Sacher’s rematching ceremony, shifting awkwardly from side to side as she told him, eyes ablaze, to stop being a coward and ask Thalias out.
He’s not Chiss, he doesn’t belong here, Mak’ro answered, scoffing at the notion of his own cowardice. I’m just making sure he won’t get any of us killed.
He watched Vah’nya’s eyes go distant for a moment, shoulders rigid, as if she was remembering something she rather hadn’t. In the end she fixed him with a hard stare and told him, and what indication has he given you that he wouldn’t rather die in any of our steads?
None, Mak’ro had to concede, if only in the privacy of his own mind.
By then he’d already seen it, after all, the glaring similarities Ivant showed to—
The bridge hatch gets blown off its hinges with a deafening BANG before Mak’ro can finish that thought, rattling the deck so hard he feels it vibrating all the way up into his skull.
“Frost,” he gets out and then Ivant is already shoving him back against the escape pod with one hand, using his own body to shield him while somehow managing to keep his other hand steady enough to pick off the first two Grysk storming onto the bridge.
Mak’ro bites back another curse as the sudden lack of support sends new shockwaves of pain through his knee, but he keeps himself upright enough to grab the pod’s main lever and unseal it while Ivant lays down cover fire. He knows that it can’t be more than a couple of seconds for the pod’s hatch to open but it feels like an eternity, stray bits of laser fire searing into the wall beside them too close for comfort. The only constant is Ivant’s back pressed into his shoulder, solid and warm, shielding him—
Ivant jerks back against him just as the hatch finally swings ajar.
Mak’ro smells it before he can fully twist around to look – the acrid scent of laser fire burning itself through fabric to sear into skin.
Yet, even with smoke rising in angry black plumes from his shoulder, Ivant doesn’t make a sound. He barely seems to allow himself a sharp intake of breath, charric still held perfectly level. It’s only his eyes that give him away, the flash of surprise in them bursting into fury, volatile like a breacher missile bursting acid against a ship’s hull.
Mak’ro reacts on pure instinct then, years of service and finely honed combat skills translating into grabbing Ivant by the back of the neck like a whisker cub and hauling him into the escape pod before throwing his own weight against the hatch to slam it closed and start the decoupling sequence. There’s another damn moment of eternity where, embarrassingly, Ivant has to catch him before his knee can buckle and help him into one of the seats, then frantic seconds of strapping themselves in. Finally, as angry shouting echoes through the hatch, the pod detaches with a thud-thud, thrusters firing.
And everything goes quiet, all at once.
Mak’ro feels the weightlessness grab onto him, the muscles in his leg quivering as he tries and fails to compensate for the upwards movement. Ivant kicks out his own legs to hook their ankles together and keep him in place. The light of the Grysk ship fades out, the edges of Ivant’s face going fuzzy in the yellow haze of the pod’s emergency lamp. For a long second all Mak’ro can focus on are the harsh intakes of their breath ricocheting around the small space.
Then he remembers the laser burn on Ivant’s shoulder, glowing red like a beacon in the infrared, and snaps, maybe a bit too harshly, “Mid Commander.”
“Sir?”
“Your shoulder,” Mak’ro says, gesturing.
Ivant frowns for a split second, then seems to finally notice that he’s still actively smoking and immediately pats a hand over the smoldering fabric. “Sorry, sir,” he says with a wince, tensing a little. “I made a right mess back there, didn’t I?”
“Never mind that,” Mak’ro huffs. “Are you alright?”
The tension leaves Ivant immediately. “Just a graze,” he says and then, to Mak’ro’s surprise, he laughs. “Nothing to worry about, sir.” He shrugs, grins. “Thrawn and I weren’t even out of the Academy yet, first time we got jumped.”
Mak’ro barely suppresses his own wince.
Thrawn.
It's not the first time Ivant talked about him, of course. But he tends to keep his time with his former commanding officer close to his chest, only seems to talk about him by accident, small anecdotes slipping past his lips like he just can't help himself. Whatever life he led back in Lesser Space seemingly so tied to Thrawn’s that it’s impossible to untangle now, impossible to speak about unless it's mentioning him in the same breath.
He never looks happy, after those slip ups. He never laughs about them.
Mak’ro knows that type of sadness well, that remorse. He’s seen it often enough in Thalias and Sacher, when they think he’s not looking. Remembers catching them talking once, unaware he was within earshot, huddled together at that window in their living room that Sacher had always been so fond of because its view over the city reminded her of a starship’s viewport.
Do you think Thrawn's happy where he is, he heard Sacher ask back then. Do you think he made friends?
Thalias didn’t answer for a long while, just held her closer.
Makro lets out a sigh in the privacy of his own mind, feeling his knee throb. He made a valiant effort not to think about Thrawn, these past fifteen years. Not to consider all the could-have-beens, or that silly notion he had those first few weeks after he watched Thrawn walk to his exile — that he should have gone with him, that he shouldn't have left his commander’s side.
Regret, he always felt, was unprofessional.
Then, of course, Ivant got dropped onto his ship.
And he moved like Thrawn, and talked like Thrawn, even with that accent of his, and had, on the very first shift Mak’ro allowed him on the bridge – when they were running from a Grysk battle cruiser with half a hyperdrive and even less of their electrostatic barrier – navigated them through an asteroid field no one had ever made it out alive of, making impossibly fast calculations and keeping a focused calmness that left Mak’ro feeling like he was back standing behind Thrawn's command chair, thinking, he'll get us out of this, he always does.
At the pod’s center console a light flickers on, its blue rapid-fire blinking spelling out the Springhawk’s acknowledgment of their location. A second later the pod rattles as the ship’s tractor beam latches on to them, dragging them safely home. Ivant’s ankles stay locked with his, keeping the pressure off his knee.
That's what his life is like now, Mak’ro supposes, as he allows Ivant to take his weight. What it’s always been, perhaps.
Before and after Thrawn.
Living with the ghost of him, till he's one himself.
He just isn't sure if it’s caught up to Ivant yet, the fact that he too now lives in the after. He couldn't fault him if it hasn’t. It took Mak’ro nearly half a decade to come to that realization himself.
“Why are you here?” he finds himself asking, despite his better judgment.
Ivant frowns at him. “Because you wanted me on the survey team, sir.”
Mak’ro huffs out what could pass as a laugh. Right. He already halfway forgot about that, on account of being ambushed and shot at. He should never have made a habit of leading these surveys himself, Thrawn’s legacy be damned.
“No, I mean here,” he clarifies. “The Ascendancy.”
Another frown. “Grand Admiral Thrawn sent me to help push back the Grysk, sir.”
“Yes,” Mak’ro says, a little exasperated. The title stings somehow. Hearing Ivant say it when he never could. “I know that. But why did you go?”
“Oh,” Ivant says, then adds as if it was obvious, as if he expects Mak’ro to understand, “Because he asked me to go.”
“Don’t you want to go home?”
Ivant’s face goes blank, then cycles through a rapid fire of conflicting emotions too fast to fully grasp. Mak’ro picks out anger, guilt, a melancholy too grand for his age. A longing more befitting for a simpler time, a kid looking up at the fast expanse of stars, at galaxies unexplored. Thrawn he never really learned to read like that. It's the one thing that sets Ivant apart, at least – he wears it all on his sleeve, out in the open for everyone to see.
“It’s not really home anymore,” Ivant says at last. “Lesser Space. It’s never really been–” He breaks off, looks away like he’s realized Mak’ro’s seeing too much. “Home’s never been a place for me.”
Mak’ro thinks of Thrawn, and watching the back of his head, for the very last time, as he walked onto that damn shuttle that took him away, and says, unable to help himself, “Then why didn’t you ask to stay with him?”
Ivant smiles, like it’s obvious, like he understands all those things Mak’ro’s tried very hard not to think about these past fifteen years. All those regrets Mak’ro carries, despite his very best efforts to leave it all in the past.
“Because he asked me to go,” he says again.
He never thought he’d inspire loyalty in anyone, Thalias told Mak’ro once, incredulous, as they were tangled in bed together, the last place he ever wanted to think about Thrawn. Can you believe that?
The pod rattles, then sags for a moment as the artificial gravity of the Springhawk’s hangar presses them down into their seats. Ivant slips his boot beneath Mak’ro’s before it can hit the floor, feathering the impact.
And suddenly Mak’ro thinks about adopting Sacher and how by the time he brought her home she’d gotten rid of any trace of her time within the sky-walker core except for that one beat up and dried out set of graph-markers, and about the way Thalias looked the day he asked her to marry him, and how they got drenched in the rain as they said their vows, and how she insisted they leave a seat empty between Borika and Ar’alani because she never managed to snuff out the hope that Thrawn might simply walk back into their lives one day. And just as suddenly he misses their little cramped flat on Naporar, where Sacher’s room still lies untouched, box of graph-markers on her bedside table, and Thalias’ favourite mug still sits drying on the rack collecting dust, because he washed it out for her before they left to fight this damn civil war, just so she could have it fresh should they ever make it back.
And he wonders, not for the first time, what it would have been like if there was no after.
If Thrawn would have found a home to miss, too, had he stayed.
Somehow, looking at Ivant now, Mak’ro doubts it.
“Well,” Mak’ro shrugs, as their pod sets down in the hangar bay, blurs of familiar blue faces scrambling past the tiny viewport. “It’s–” he gestures, vaguely. “Big. You know. The Ascendancy. Not that bad of a place to find a new home.”
Ivant blinks at him, as if surprised, then huffs out a laugh. “Yes,” he says, and Mak’ro sees Thrawn in the lines of his smile. “I’m starting to see that.” He shrugs, wincing ever so slightly as the movement pulls at his shoulder. “Though I think for now I might start with the Springhawk, if you don’t mind me staying, sir.”
“Eh,” Mak’ro says. “We’ll see about that.”
Once more, Ivant laughs.