Chapter Text
Eli Vanto sat in the officers' mess of the Chimaera, mindlessly poking his fork into a cold portion of nerf steak. Conversations buzzed at the neighboring tables—the usual mixture of gossip, complaints about superiors, and retellings of the latest HoloNet broadcasts. An ordinary evening. Ordinary noise. Ordinary life aboard an Imperial Star Destroyer.
Nothing ordinary about it, of course.
The datapad lying next to his tray blinked quietly with an incoming message. Eli glanced sideways at the screen. An official notification from the Imperial Navy: a promotion order. Not to him. To Thrawn.
Grand Admiral.
Eli reread the line three times, even though he had understood it the first time—he had always processed data quickly; it was his strength, one of the few he allowed himself to acknowledge. His fingers instinctively gripped the fork a little tighter.
Grand Admiral.
He leaned back in his chair and stared unseeingly at the bulkhead across from him. Somewhere deep within the ship, the generators hummed steadily. A sound you get used to in your first week aboard and stop noticing in your second, but which somehow seemed deafeningly loud right now.
He ought to have felt pride. And he did feel it—somewhere down there, beneath the layers of everything else. Of course he felt it. He had seen how Thrawn made his way toward this—step by step, victory by victory, each time turning the impossible into the obvious, into an of course, how could it be otherwise. Eli himself had been part of that path. A small part, but still.
Small.
That, perhaps, was the crux of the problem.
He remembered their first days at the Academy. He remembered his own annoyance—quiet, shameful, stubborn. The Chiss who had dropped into his life out of nowhere, upending all his plans, dragging him away from the cozy path into supply logistics—supply logistics, just think, how modest his ambitions had been—and casting him into the maelstrom of something completely different.
Back then he had been angry. Then he stopped. Then he began to understand.
Understanding Thrawn—that was like deciphering a cipher without a key. No, not quite. It was like watching someone solve ciphers you hadn't even noticed. You thought you were facing just a wall, but he saw a door. You saw a collection of random events, and he saw a system, a pattern, a story.
It was mesmerizing.
It was exhausting.
Eli exhaled and finally pushed the tray aside. He had no appetite, and it was foolish to pretend one would appear.
Grand Admiral.
The first non-human in the history of the Empire to receive this rank. Eli could imagine how it had been received in High Command. He could imagine the pursed lips, the pointed glances exchanged, the polite venom in their congratulations. He had seen enough of it all during his years serving alongside Thrawn to form an accurate picture without even being present in person.
And he wasn't present. Of course. He had found out from the dispatch. From the general dispatch.
Stop it, he told himself. This is petty, and you know it.
He knew. But knowing doesn't always help.
The problem wasn't that Thrawn had received a promotion. The problem was the distance that this promotion demarcated—a distance that, to be honest, had always existed, but was now officially codified, stamped into the Imperial registries and tables of organization.
Commander Eli Vanto, aide.
Grand Admiral Thrawn.
Funny, if you thought about it. A Lysatran boy who had dreamed of a quiet career in supply depots, and a Chiss exile—no, not an exile, it was always more complicated than it seemed—who had redrawn the map of the Outer Rim and forced the Emperor to take notice of him.
Eli remembered a moment—one specific moment—that he would later replay in his head more often than he should have.
It was after the business with Nightswan. Thrawn had been standing by the observation viewport on the bridge, the lights of distant stars reflecting in his eyes—red, non-human, terrifying to most people, but long having become to Eli simply… his eyes. Thrawn's eyes. He had been saying something about strategy, about the next step, about how rebel cells were connected to one another like threads in a web, and how by the vibration of a single thread one could find the spider.
Eli had listened. And at the same time, he had thought of something else.
He had thought about how Thrawn never looked tired. How his voice never trembled. How his confidence was neither a mask nor bravado, but simply a way of existing, as natural as breathing. And he had thought about how he himself, beside Thrawn, would always look… not dull, no.
Normal.
Ordinary.
Sufficient—but only in a functional sense. Competent enough to be useful. Observant enough to notice what Thrawn pointed out for him to notice. Loyal enough to be trusted.
Sufficient.
He wanted to be something more than sufficient.
Not once—not once—had he heard contempt from Thrawn. That had to be acknowledged, and Eli acknowledged it. Thrawn did not demean. He did not condescend. He did not treat him like a tool—though, to be completely honest, Eli sometimes wondered where the boundary lay for Thrawn between a valued aide and a valued resource. Thrawn appreciated his capacity for data analysis, his knowledge of Wild Space, his skill with numbers—appreciated and utilized them. Utilized them masterfully, precisely, and efficiently, just as he utilized everything around him.
There was no cruelty in this. There was… geometry. Every element in its place. Each one—in the position where it was most effective. Thrawn did not think in terms of friendship and affection—or perhaps he did, but differently from how Eli thought, differently from how any person from Lysatra would think, where relationships between people were warm, simple, understandable.
Or did he? There had been moments. There had been.
There were those instances when Thrawn would pause—barely perceptibly, for half a second—before giving an order that placed Eli in danger. There were those times when he explained his plan in more detail than required—and Eli understood that the explanations were not for efficiency, but for him. So that Eli would understand not only what to do, but why. As if it mattered to Thrawn that Eli see the whole picture. As if he wanted to share.
Or perhaps Eli was engaging in wishful thinking. With Thrawn, one could never know for sure.
Grand Admiral.
Eli looked at the datapad again. The message hadn't gone anywhere. White letters on a dark background. A fact—stark, indisputable, irreversible.
Thrawn had risen to the pinnacle of the Imperial military hierarchy. Higher still was only the Emperor's throne. And Eli—Eli had risen along with him, at arm's length, in the slipstream of his career. Close enough to feel the heat of the engines. Not close enough to steer the ship.
It isn't fair, he thought, and immediately checked himself.
No. It was completely fair. That was the whole problem.
Thrawn deserved this rank. Every insignia, every code cylinder on his tunic, every ounce of respect and fear he inspired. Eli had seen how his mind worked—had seen it closer than anyone in the Empire—and he didn't have the slightest doubt: Thrawn was the best. Not one of the best—the best. And acknowledging that fact required no effort from Eli. What required effort was something else.
It required coming to terms with the fact that his own worth was defined—and would always be defined—in relation to Thrawn. Commander Vanto, aide to the Grand Admiral. Not Commander Vanto, period. Not Eli Vanto, a man who was worth something in his own right.
Now that isn't true, said an inner voice, and, characteristically, that voice spoke with a soft Chiss accent. You underestimate yourself, Eli.
He smirked. Even in his own head, Thrawn addressed him formally.
Though no. Not always.
There had been one time—one single time—when Thrawn had called him simply by his first name, without rank and without that polite distance of his. It was on Bakura, after they had miraculously escaped a trap set by smugglers. Eli had been injured—nothing serious, a glancing burn from a blaster bolt—but there had been a lot of blood, and he remembered sitting slumped against a wall, for some reason trying to calculate in his head the probability of reinforcements arriving in time. A habit. A nervous one.
Thrawn appeared beside him—silently, as always. Dropped to one knee. Inspected the wound. And said:
— Eli. Do not move.
Just Eli. Without Commander. Without Vanto.
His fingers—long, blue, cool—touched the skin near the wound, checking the depth of the burn. The touch had been light, precise, clinical. And at the same time—no. Not entirely clinical. There was a care in it that Eli could not explain away by tactical necessity, no matter how hard he tried.
— I'm all right,— he had said then. — It's a scratch.
Thrawn looked at him. Red eyes—unreadable, luminous, close—lingered on his face a second longer than was required to assess a wounded man's condition.
— Yes,— Thrawn said. — I know.
He said I know, but didn't pull away. And for several more seconds—five? ten? Eli hadn't counted, though he always counted everything—they were simply there together, in the dim corridor of the Bakuran base, and the silence between them was not awkward.
Then Thrawn rose, and everything returned to normal.
Eli picked up the datapad and stood from the table. The mess hall was beginning to empty—the shift was ending, people were dispersing to their quarters. He would go to his room, too. Review the reports that Thrawn—Grand Admiral Thrawn—had asked to be prepared by morning. Go to sleep. Tomorrow would bring a new day, new tasks, new enemies of the Empire who would need to be outsmarted, outmaneuvered, destroyed.
And he would be at his side. As always.
Because—and this Eli could admit to himself, here, in the quiet of the emptying mess hall, under the steady hum of the generators—because there was nowhere else he wanted to be.
Not because his place was in Thrawn's shadow. But because beside Thrawn, the shadow didn't feel like a shadow. Beside him, everything became sharper, clearer, grander. The world gained structure and meaning. And Eli—Eli gained structure and meaning too. Not the aide. Not the assistant. Not that guy with Thrawn.
The one Thrawn chose.
Out of all the people in the Empire—out of thousands of ambitious officers, hundreds of brilliant analysts, dozens of those who could have stood in his place—Thrawn had chosen him. And kept choosing him. Day after day, year after year, promotion after promotion.
Perhaps that was the answer to the question Eli was afraid to ask aloud.
He walked down the corridor of the Chimaera, his footsteps echoing hollowly in the emptiness. The ship lived its nocturnal life: dimmed lights, distant voices from behind closed doors, the flicker of control panels.
Outside the Grand Admiral's quarters, he slowed his pace. He didn't stop—he never stopped, that would be too much—but he slowed down. Not a sound came from behind the door. Maybe Thrawn was asleep. Maybe he was studying another piece of art taken from another enemy ship. Maybe he was standing by the viewport looking at the stars, his scarlet eyes reflecting their light, thinking about things Eli couldn't even begin to imagine.
Or maybe—maybe—he was thinking about Eli, too.
Presumptuous, Eli thought, and walked on.
But the smile that touched his lips was warm. Lysatran. Real.
Tomorrow he would say congratulations, Grand Admiral. Say it in an even voice, a professional tone, with perfect subordination. And Thrawn would nod—with that short, precise nod of his—and, perhaps, let his gaze linger on him for a fraction of a second.
And that fraction of a second, as always, would be enough.
Enough.
No. More than enough.