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After escaping the Imperials by the skin of their teeth, Hera and the Ghost crew returned to Atollon having agreed that Cham, Gobi and Numa would be staying at Chopper Base (Cham had given a fondly exasperated roll of his eyes on hearing they’d named it after Hera’s beloved astromech) until they’d found a way and a place to regroup the resistance on Ryloth. Physically exhausted, with a nagging sense of guilt over having been forced to destroy the ancestral Syndulla mansion so her father wouldn’t be taken prisoner as a result of a mission she felt she should never have gone on, Hera returned to her cabin, removed her flight suit, threw on a comfortable vest and shorts combo and collapsed into her bunk. Sleep would prove evasive, however.
A sharp cheekbone deliberately brushing against her lek. A voice caressing her ear cone with soft, sinister silk. The ends of her lekku curling involuntarily in response. Glowing, piercing red eyes that even now lurked behind her eyelids, in the dark.
Hera turned over on the mattress, scrunching up her eyes and pressing her head further down into the pillow to try and ward off these deeply unwelcome intrusive thoughts. Normally a master of compartmentalisation (little though she liked to admit it, she knew she’d inherited the capability for detachment she’d resented in Cham from him), she found she could not shut away the visceral feelings unleashed by the casual, almost carelessly possessive manner she and her family’s heritage had fallen into the long, tapered hands of an Imperial Grand Admiral.
As a beautiful Twi’lek woman, Hera had become accustomed to being objectified and looked at with either lust or contempt, depending on the particular brand of speciesism she was dealing with. She’d learned to see and use male desire and human prejudice as advantages to exploit. And the pure xenophobic loathing displayed by Captain Slavin was water off a Nautolan’s back. But Thrawn’s attitude was new and unsettling, a mixture of fascination and admiration, and from a fellow alien, of a race she’d never heard of or encountered before. Her stomach roiled as she remembered the heart-stopping moment she’d turned round and found herself face to face with an exceptionally tall, blue-skinned man with the most unnerving and yet strangely beautiful pair of monochromatic eyes. It had taken all she had to keep her composure and pretend to be a servant in the face of that crimson stare. He’d known who she was the moment he’d seen her of course, and his subsequent questioning and stunning of Ezra had merely been the actions of a predator who’d decided to play with his food before devouring it. Hera’s blood boiled at the memory of the the self-satisfied smirk on his face as Ezra had crumpled to the ground, like a scientist whose hypothesis had been proved correct, with the two rebels as the subject of his experiment.
An alien willingly serving the Empire at all, much less in such a high-ranking position seemed a contradiction in terms to Hera. Remembering the disdain with which Slavin had treated her, and his failure to see her or her family totem as possessing even an iota of value, she felt her curiosity rise. Surely Thrawn had not risen as far as he had without experiencing such prejudice himself? He must have risen through the ranks, Hera knew, for no more how talented a strategist he was the Empire would never have allowed a non-human to jump straight to the top. How could he help those who undoubtedly despised him crush those most like him? Hera thought she could now understand some of the interest she held for Thrawn, as she found herself wanting to know more about him, what motivated him, and not purely as a way of rooting out an enemy’s potential weaknesses. And if the events on Ryloth were anything to go by, they would need all the help they could get. Hera did not delude herself that they had won a real victory; they had escaped and thwarted the prisoner exchange because Thrawn had allowed it, to learn more about them, the same reason he’d taken what she’d come to the house to get.
Her thoughts returned to the loss of her Kalikori and finally, there rose in her chest a feeling she was comfortable with: anger. He would put it in a place of honour, he said, as if this was a signal honour being paid to her instead of the blatant theft that it really was. For all the analytical ability that had allowed him to see through her, identify her, and strip her down to her core, Thrawn failed to understand that by taking it for his own, it was diminished, stripped of all true meaning; what represented generations of history, memories and love to her would be nothing but blocks of painted wood on his ship. Hera felt strangely comforted by the thought, feeling that he hadn’t truly stolen what was important to her after all.
Still, it bothered Hera that an extension of her was in his possession, for him to look at, examine…touch…whenever he wished. A not unpleasant shiver ran through her at the thought of those long, elegant fingers (which, she recalled with strange clarity, had nearly brushed hers as he’d placed his hand over the top of the chair she’d been sitting in) running over each block, tracing the patterns on them (Hera tried not to think of what other patterns closer to home those fingers might dance along) trying to figure out their meaning, and she silently berated herself for being unable to suppress physical and emotional responses to this enemy that ran against what she should feel as a rebel towards an embodiment of the galaxy’s oppressors.
As Hera’s overwhelmed mind finally wound down and prepared to slip into sleep, which she now feared would not give her the respite and rejuvenation she craved, she couldn’t have said if she was more annoyed that Thrawn had her Kalikori…or that the Kalikori wasn’t her.