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“Zero, are you in there?”
Glancing up from where he’s stretched out on the ancient dusty couch they’d salvaged and brought home to the base at some point early on, Zero answers Blue’s uncharacteristically timid call with: “Yep. Why, you need me for something? I thought the kids were finally all — ”
“Oh, all asleep, and looking downright performatively innocent and peaceful and adorable while they’re at it, the wily little kriffers, as if they weren’t raising seven kinds of hell half an hour ago. Can I — can I come in?”
Zero frowns. Blue has, to the best of his knowledge, never asked permission to enter any room before in his life. “If you’re asking whether I’m decent, the disappointing answer is that I currently am, but could arrange not to be pretty quick, if you’d like. Of course you can come in, Blue, it’s just the rec room.”
“Ah. Right.” The door slides open and reveals the familiar gangling figure of Blue. He’s standing up very straight in a way that makes his ill-fitting clothes drape off him not unlike a scarecrow. Some primal satisfaction curls in Zero’s gut at the realization that Blue is wearing one of Zero’s own undershirts, beneath one of Aava’s old jackets, which is still too broad across the shoulders to fit him properly but makes for a kind of neat cropped look due to their height difference. In needing to rebuild a wardrobe from scratch and in lieu of a tailor, Blue has let necessity be the mother of fashion reinvention by means of hand-me-downs, and whatever else he can put together that doesn’t make him look like a twelve-year old drowning somewhere inside his father’s suits. This has sent him down an unexpected sartorial path — away from his previous stance of ‘demonstratively, youthfully business casual, as imagined through the lens of a man whose father unironically and regularly wore a top hat’, over towards ‘slightly frayed goth (with sportswear elements)’. The resulting overall look is… well, Zero is uniquely not in a position to be an objective observer here, he really couldn’t say. The things it does to him to see Blue wearing fishnet sleeves is surely between him and the Force and no one else needs to know about it. He lives in trepidation of the theoretical day that Blue asks Aava to teach him about eyeliner, for fear of what he might learn about himself.
After squaring his shoulders with grim purpose as he walks in, Blue then stops dead just inside the doorway, looking vaguely nauseous. Clutched in his hand is a holodisc.
“Hi,” Zero says, unfolding his legs from where they’d been crossed at the ankles and getting up to walk over to him. “You okay? You’re looking a little peaky.”
Blue blinks hard at him a couple of times, before what Zero said seems to sink in. “Oh. No, no, I’m fine, it’s nothing like that. It’s just, I, uh… have something for you. To give you. A gift. For you. As — a present.”
“...alright?” Zero prompts after a while to encourage him to elaborate, when nothing more seems forthcoming. He glances at the holodisc Blue is holding as the most likely object of interest, but feels a little at sea. Blue’s face is fixed and expressionless and doesn’t provide much in the way of guidance, so on balance it’s probably not a sex thing. “Is it, um… here, or should we…?”
Seeming to startle back to himself, Blue gets a hunted look and scans the room like he’s looking for escape routes. Thrusting the holodisc into Zero’s hand, Blue says abruptly: “I — made you something. Unfortunately it’s bad and stupid and a terrible idea in the first place, but Aava threatened me with grievous bodily harm if I didn’t give it to you after all this, so here it is. You can listen to it, if you want to. Or not. Or you could just throw it away. That would probably be better. But it’s up to you, it’s… it’s yours. Ok, bye, I urgently need to go check on, er, something stupendously important but previously unmentio — ”
“Oh no, you don’t,” Zero says, grabbing Blue’s wrist with the hand that isn’t cradling the holodisc to his chest to keep him from slinking out the door, as he was clearly angling to. Absurdly, his heart has started racing in his chest. Blue looks every inch a man faced with the walk to the gallows yet determined to be brave about the whole thing, but doesn’t resist when Zero marches him over to the couch and makes him sit down.
“Just — just make sure to stop it after the first track, please. I’ll explain later, but… trust me on that one, at least,” Blue says dismally, leaning his cane against the side of the couch and then sitting perched on the edge as awkwardly and solemnly as any kid at the funeral of a great-aunt they didn’t even know, surrounded by muffled sobs and dry bread rolls.
Keeping a watch on Blue out of the corner of his eye to make sure he doesn’t bolt, Zero pops the holodisc out of its cover and into the banged-up old-as-the-hills holoset that Blue had salvaged a few scavenging trips ago and made a project out of fixing up alongside Neph. He starts the first of the two audio tracks the disc contains.
Almost from the first, it’s clear that the piece is nothing at all like Blue’s other music. An uncharitable soul might put this down to a lack of availability of the sufficient number of stringed instruments to replicate the sheer brazen cacophony that is the Synox and Friends theme tune; a piece of music that dares to ask that timeless question: what if hell is real, and it’s where all the cellists end up? The only strings in this composition are that of one violin, accompanied by a piano.
The violin comes in first, long wistful notes winding their way into the air, a sort of plaintive lonely call that hangs unanswered and unresolved like a shiver until the piano joins in, bright and buoyant and irrepressible, pulling the mood up with it.
It isn’t just the change in instrumentation, though. There’s an honesty to it, a lack of intention to impress, an earnest awkwardness — Blue plays the violin to a level that is not at all unpleasant to listen to, but he also doesn’t have any touch of genius for it as he does for most things he continues to pursue over the long haul. His tolerance for not feeling immediately, spectacularly good at something is almost zero, so his skills tend to follow in a boom or bust pattern according to his early aptitude for any given short-term obsession he gets caught up in. Zero had personally witnessed Blue’s definitive declaration that the violin was not for him. He had done this by means of chucking one out a third story window, accompanied by obscenities, as well as a few frustrated tears that Zero had gamely pretended he didn’t see, because at the end of the day there truly is no shittier thing in this world than being fourteen years old and desperately trying to hold on to any kind of dignity while your voice cracks on you like that.
Zero, not used to his new employer’s exposed-nerve-twitchy disposition yet at that point, had tentatively told him: “Hey, maybe this is none of my business, and it’s kinda not my field anyway so what do I know, right, but… that didn’t sound bad to me. You’re being a bit hard on yourself here.”
“No, I made too many mistakes, there’s no point in pursuing this any further, it’s over,” Blue had said dismissively, trying to hide a sniffle with a haughty toss of his head as he gathered himself. “I don’t have time to wallow in frivolous mediocrity anymore. Forget it, let’s just move on to things that actually matter.”
Zero had decided that arguing this with someone who just lost both of his parents and had his whole life turned upside down with it… was probably not the right call, even had Zero felt like he had any call to even try back then, when he’d known Blue for only a few months and was mostly there for the paycheck anyway. Later he had gathered that the violin had been the late Lady Wrengan’s idea in the first place — seemingly mostly on the logic that if the kid was not going to have friends or a willingness to sleep, he might as well have a hobby. (Zero recognized the pattern readily because it had been the same logic his dad had operated on, during the parts of their childhood where they moved around a lot. His ideas of wholesome childhood pursuits had run more towards extra garotting practice and video games than producing rich person vanity musical prodigies, though, for which Zero is grateful. He’s not sure where his self-image would be today if he’d been a tuba guy growing up.)
That had all been playing other people’s music, though, and despite the uncharacteristic restraint in evidence, this is still recognizably Blue’s creation. The melody is oddly entrancing. It’s stripped-down and simple, the steady, mellow tones of the violin providing a base for the lighter, more playful patter of the piano to shimmer over. Somehow it brings to Zero’s mind the feeling of standing by a window and looking out at the rain as twilight falls — watching from somewhere safe and warm while night comes washing gently over the sky.
Even without having heard the piece before, Zero can pick up on the mistakes that sneak in — the audio setup isn’t perfect, there are mismatches in timing here and there between the instruments, a less than perfect note from the violin, musical half-stumbles the same way Blue’s knee sometimes makes his gait awkward for a few steps before he finds his rhythm again. During the whole song Blue keeps his eyes fixed on a spot on the wall, his jaw clenched so tight that looking at him is enough to give a man a sympathetic headache. His hands are folded and resting together in his lap in a way that might have looked placid, if not for the way his knuckles whiten with the strength he’s using. He winces visibly at every false note, but otherwise keeps completely still in a way Blue normally never is.
Zero stands spellbound, wrapped up in the melancholy magic of it entirely. It’s good, is the thing. It’s full of small mistakes and clumsiness, and it’s good. It fills his head and his chest and it sounds like Blue — like some part of Blue he’s never heard before, and that finds resonance in a part of himself he hadn’t, either.
He couldn’t tell you how long it lasts, but is semi-startled back to the real world at the very last note, where the violin strikes out false and sharp, a stab to the eardrum. A moment later there’s the sound of Blue going, “...fuck,” and then Aava, in the upper end of her register and audibly at the end of her patience and possibly sanity too, going: “Blue — Blue, Adnau Wrengan, if you delete that file and ask me to start over again so help me, I will do such violence to your puny little frame that no coroner will be able to figure out which end is your — ” and then the clip ends. Mechanically, Zero stops the player before it starts in on the second track, like Blue had asked.
There’s silence in the room for a long time. Zero is still standing there in the middle of the floor, mutely, hands slack at his sides.
Blue clears his throat and gets to his feet, walking over to hover closer to Zero. “So, uh. Well. Yeah. That’s it. That… that’s the whole thing. It occurs to me now that I never gave the piece a name or anything, so, ah, let’s call that your privilege, if you want to. Name it, that is. Or it doesn’t have to have a name either, of course, if that doesn’t matter to you.”
Supernova shit is happening in Zero’s head. He wonders idly if his helmet has bluescreened to match his mind.
Without a response, Blue’s chatter keeps itself company with increasing desperation. “I’m sure you’ve gathered already, but this is the thing I’ve been slinking away to work on recently, the malfunctioning shield generators were just a convenient cover story. Apologies for being so, um, distracted, but I wanted it to be a surprise, and I couldn’t risk showing my hand. Aava helped out a lot. Did you know she plays the space keyboard? Not to professional standards or anything, of course,” he says dismissively, because at the end of the day he is Blue, still, “we won’t lose her to any offers of becoming a full time concert pianist or anything any time soon, but, well, I was briefly an indifferently talented student of the violin about a decade ago, so it’s probably just as well our skill levels aren’t that far removed from one another, anyway. I’d… I’d give you something better if I could, but even getting all the instruments into the base without tipping you off was hard enough, and trying to learn an instrument I might be more, um, more naturally suited for seemed speculative at best and wasteful at worst. The kids…” He grimaces. “I let them think they contributed with a percussion track to keep them busy and out of the way, and then Aava was a real bitch about it and made me edit a version with it left in. That’s the second track, obviously. Probably wear some kind of hearing protection before you try listening to it, though. Oh, and if you manage to hear a triangle or a flute in the middle of the whole pandemonium, that’s Neph,” he adds, nervous ramble briefly derailed by a moment of bright semi-paternal pride. “She’s the only one on beat and somewhere close to the right key, I might add. Though I also think there’s much merit in her more experimental approach in places too, she’s an admirably multifaceted performer already.”
Zero says nothing — finds he can say nothing, yet.
Wringing his hands anxiously, Blue continues: “We had to get most of the work done while you were out hunting down bounties and things of that nature, of course, that’s, er, that’s partially why it has taken so long to record. And first I had to write the damn thing, which — I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how hard it is to get a moment’s peace and quiet to do anything uninterrupted in this karking place. I used to think the Synox and Friends production team was a cross between a madhouse and a circus, which only shows my state of appalling naivete at the time as to what raw chaos actually looks like. I would’ve had it ready for your birthday, but I know you don’t like making a big deal out of that, so I thought… maybe not for that. I didn’t want you to think it was merely to — because I felt like I had to, as if it’s an obligation or something. Aava told me I overthink things, but I’d say she’s the one who chronically underthinks, if anything. I — I wanted to get it just right. You deserve it being just right.”
Zero continues to say nothing. He can’t seem to stop.
“The sheet music is on there too, saved in a couple of different formats, if you’d ever want to look that over. You can, uh, you can do whatever you want with it, all of it. Anything you’d like. You can make however many ghastly remixes you wish, and I won’t say a bad word about any of them. Or you could even simply throw it away, if you’d like. It’s yours. I made it for you.”
Zero, much to his own chagrin, still says nothing. Blue, too, grows quiet, silence hanging over the room like a fine cool shimmer in the air.
“Y’know, if we’re speaking candidly here, just between me and you, Zero and Blue private line time like the old days, I, ah, I really find myself wishing you’d say something,” Blue finally says, meekly.
Zero turns his face to him and puts up a text scroll saying ‘Processing… Processing…’ on his helmet screen, with a progress bar at about 75% and slowly rising beneath it.
This seems to mollify Blue’s jittering nerves only a little, but he nods jerkily and says: “Oh, right. Okay. Take… take your time. Unless you’re about to tell me you really hated it, in which case I’d like to ask to be excused to go walk through the mountains until I find an ocean to throw myself in and never return. That would be kinder. If Aava agrees to be my next of kin after the fact, you can give your response to her instead, if you really need it off your chest.”
Helpless to express himself in any other way, no matter how badly he wants to, Zero lets the progress bar tick up another few percent.
“It’s the fucking up the last few notes, isn’t it,” Blue says dolefully, clearly not paying attention. “I ruined the whole thing. You’re right, of course you’re right, I shouldn’t have given it to you before I could make sure perfection was — that only goes to show why you should never trust Aava’s opinion on anything, she said… but, you know, then again, evil magic space witch, I might have seen that one coming, shame on me, frankly. I should have known she was just trying to get out of going through a thirty-seventh take. Big mistake to get complacent and believe her, just because I was feeling a little…”
“Not ruined,” Zero finally manages to get out, but his voice is so rough and gravelly that the words come out as an unintelligible growl, judging both by how it sounds to his own ears and Blue’s voice rising to a near-panicking squeak at the end as he says,“Uh, didn’t catch that, buddy, what were you, um, what was that again?”
Zero clears his throat and reaches up to undo the seals of his helmet, lifting it off with practiced movements and letting it drop onto the couch somewhere; he doesn’t look away from Blue to figure out where. “Not ruined,” he repeats, his voice sounding softer without the helmet filter, and clear now. “You haven’t ruined anything, Blue. Stop tying yourself into knots before you hurt yourself.”
“Oh,” is all Blue says, his shoulders slumping in relief from where they’d been keeping his ears nice and warm the moment before. “Oh. Well, that’s good, at least.”
Blue’s skin is flushed a bright hectic pink everywhere it’s visible, from the dip between his collarbones peeking out from under the edge of Zero’s undershirt right up to his hairline, and his breathing is quick and constricted. If he gets any more wound up, he’s going to pass out from not being able to take in any air.
Meaning tries to assemble itself bit by bit in Zero’s brain into clear, coherent segments that could be expressed in words. Blue had done this, had picked up an instrument he’d once thrown out a mansion window in a rage over not being immediately genius-level talented at — just to make something for Zero. He’d played his way through something he’d written while thinking about Zero, slightly awkwardly, slightly haltingly, imperfectly and doggedly, until he got to the end, and then he’d finished recording and editing it and brought it to Zero. And stayed for the whole thing, even as he’d clearly been ready to jump out of his skin to make a quick retreat the whole time.
Zero fits his hand to the fragile nape of Blue’s neck as if it could shield him from all harm and pulls him close so he can press their foreheads together, tightly. He wishes like hell he could simply… beam everything he’s feeling into Blue’s head like this, but since that’s not really how that works even if they could have implant to implant communication like ganks do amongst each other, he kisses him instead, long and dwelling.
“Soooo — is this a good sign, or…” Blue says, a tentative grin spreading over his face.
“The best,” Zero says hoarsely and cups his stupid perfect beaming little freckled face between his palms so he can kiss him absolutely everywhere his mouth can reach, drinking in Blue’s relieved laugh like it’s the kind of expensive booze none of them can afford anymore and hell, Zero prefers it to any other vintage the rest of the galaxy could possibly present him anyway; it goes straight to his head in a way even a whole bottle of Cassandra Sunrise could only dream of. Blue turns his face up to him easily to welcome the tender onslaught, his hands settling on Zero’s hips. His eyes are wide and hopeful, like that day in the desert but without all the blood. Zero says: “It was — you’re… I, uh…”
“I wanted to write you symphonies,” Blue says quietly. “I mean to write you symphonies, one day. But, ah. That might take some time. This was the best I could do for now. Call it a raincheck.”
Zero cradles Blue’s hands in his and lifts them to his face, kissing each of them in turn — the insides of his wrists, his palms, the backs of his hands, his knuckles. Blue’s breathing is quickening again, but this time clearly for very different and much more pleasurable reasons than near-blackout levels of nerves.
Keeping one of Blue’s hands near his face and moving the other to rest over his own heart, their fingers entwined, Zero looks at Blue for a while.
“I wanna fuck you until it’s so good you cry,” Zero says eventually, lips pressed against Blue’s pulse point at the wrist. Blue makes an unreproducible sound that manages to convey just how in favor he is of this idea, and presses in close.
“Yes,” Blue says fervently, as Zero releases his hands to wrap his arms around him properly instead. “Yes, I love this plan, it has my full and unreserved support — hang on, wait, not in here, though, Aava will, seriously, for real, actually kill us if she walks in on us one more time. I could see it in her eyes that she was speaking the truth on that one, last time.”
“Good point,” Zero concedes, and sweeps a very smugly grinning Blue up in his arms so he can bridal carry his lanky twig-limbed ass all the way to their room.
——
“So, just out of interest… how much do you owe Aava for this?” Zero asks afterwards, out of breath and with his nerves still humming with leftover pleasure.
“Oh, everything short of an actual firstborn. She has admirable instincts for negotiation when she cares to, I’ll be working this favour off for months,” Blue says, where he’s lying relaxed and naked and warm and perfect in Zero’s arms. He turns his face to gaze at Zero, bumping his nose to Zero’s muzzle. On a happy sigh, he adds: “But who cares even a little, it was kriffing worth it.”
“Glad to hear it,” Zero says, kissing his forehead, then the corner of his jaw, his neck, chasing freckles with his lips all the way down to his collarbone. Blue tilts his head to bare more of his throat with a blissful fucked-out sigh when Zero licks the salt off his skin, still hungry in a lazy sort of way for the scent and taste of him even after glutting himself on nothing else for hours.
Zero burrows his face against Blue’s hair and keeps breathing in the smell of sex, and Blue, and Zero’s own scent on Blue — which still makes him feel a little out of his mind, even with all the rounds they just went — as his pulse settles down.
Even more so than usual, Zero’s grateful they’ve got their own room, with an ensuite refresher all to themselves and everything, far enough from where the kids sleep that noise doesn’t carry except under extraordinary circumstances. (The extraordinary circumstances usually being Zero tilting his hips just so or curling his fingers exactly right for long enough, but at least Blue has started to reflexively stuff a pillow over his face to dampen the worst of the sound whenever that happens. Never let it be said they can’t adapt to changing circumstances.) One of the good things about the old military mountain base they’ve settled themselves in is that they have plenty of room. The place was built to house a group significantly larger than their motley crew, and is sturdy enough to survive even the kids’ Force-powered roughhousing.
Blue makes a contented noise, and fumbles to pull the covers up to better cover both of them. The bed they share is so many steps down from the luxurious vastness of Blue’s old bed on the Bluebird that you could have a lethal stair fall down to it if you don’t watch where you put your figurative feet, though Zero has slept in many, many worse places over a strange and troubling career, and Blue is still in his mid-twenties and does fine as long as there’s a pillow for his leg, so it doesn’t bother either of them as much as it probably should. Truthfully Zero would sleep on the floor without any padding if that were the only way to have Blue wrapped up in his arms the whole night, but that’s the kind of disgracefully soppy besotted truth he can’t acknowledge to himself too often, or he’d be good for nothing except staring at a wall in despair, and then Aava would have to kick his ass until he could be useful again and it would be a whole thing.
Speaking of… Zero makes a mental note to do something real nice for Aava, since it sounds like she’s been doing some truly outstanding bullshit wrangling behind the scenes for the last few weeks, at the very least. Next time he’s out on one of the bounty jobs that are mostly what keep them afloat financially these days, he’s buying her anything she wants — short of the pony she keeps sarcastically requesting, because they need another element of potential chaos running around like a hole in the head.
He feels a little guilty, sometimes. Now that Blue’s here, bitching about everything every day and paradoxically sweetly asleep in Zero’s arms every night, Zero basically has everything he needs in this safe-ish place he and Aava built together.
There are the kids; if you’d asked Zero a couple of years ago if he were the kind of person to settle down and have children eventually, he might have laughed in your face. Even if he’d had the inclination, it wasn’t exactly a lifestyle compatible with his line of work. But having had the flock of children dumped on him unceremoniously, already hatched and running around, as it were — seeing that sea of tiny welcoming faces turned to him when he’s coming home from a job, or when he’s teaching them to fight, feeling a tug on his clothes and glancing down to a completely fearless demand for piggyback rides or a hug… it awakens a protectiveness in him that he’s only felt the like of once before in his life, and with it a sense of purpose that’s as good as joy, most days. Zero’s not one for recreationally pondering the big questions in life the way Aava or even Blue tend to, but the thing is that even if he were born into this galaxy for any grander purpose than to make sure no one messes with any of the people currently tucked under his wing, he doesn’t care to know about it. He’s got his hands full as it is, for one.
He’s got purpose, he’s got Blue, he’s got Aava, and between the three of them Zero’s the one who gets to go out into the world for short jaunts most often, being both the least immediately recognizable at the simple change of an outfit and a helmet, and the one with the most immediately breadwinning-friendly skills as long as you know the right channels to tap into. There’s always someone in the galaxy who wants someone else dead, and won’t ask too many questions as long as you help them make that dream come true. So he even gets to unwind with stunning acts of no-strings-attached violence every now and then and get paid for it, just like old times.
Zero’s doing pretty good these days, honestly. Dodging the full vengeful retribution the Empire can bring to bear could be a lot worse. (Had been a lot worse, without Blue. Thinking about that time still makes him feel like an icy breeze brushing the back of his neck, even now.)
It’s hard to believe this is everything Aava might have wanted out of life or out of freedom, though. The fact that she’s seemingly never gotten to have much of anything she wants out of life, so at least she’s used to it, doesn’t seem like much of a consolation. That whole ‘peace is a lie, there’s only passion’ thing would be cold kriffing comfort to Zero, at least, but then he and Aava are wired kind of differently at the end of the day. She doesn’t seem unhappy or anything, exactly, but then her base expressed state of being is more or less ‘huskily bored’ even in life or death situations; it can be hard to tell sometimes, when she doesn’t feel like showing her hand.
Or maybe being unhappy is like, a good thing for Sith? More fuel in the phenomenal cosmic powers tank, strife for the magic strife engine? Zero understands using harnessed emotion to give you an edge in combat, but the idea of then keeping that energy around in the rest of your life instead of shrugging it off when its immediate use is spent, as if it’s a snack to save for later… sounds like hell.
So. Definitely pretty much anything she wants, short of a pony. That, at least, Zero should be able to provide.
“Hey, Zero,” Blue says, shaking Zero out of his thoughts.
“Yeah?”
“You wanna do the spreadsheet now?” Blue asks muzzily, and Zero smiles helplessly.
“Sure,” he says, brushing some of Blue’s hair away from his forehead. “I’d say this qualified as spreadsheet material.”
“Oh, wonderful,” Blue says earnestly, his eyes slipping shut on him even as he’s clearly fighting to keep them focused. He tilts his face into Zero’s touch, the arm slung over Zero’s waist tightening languidly. “I… mmmn, that’s nice, don’t stop… it’s gonna have to wait until tomorrow, though, ‘cause I’m pretty sure I’m about to fall the fuck asleep, I’m sorry to say.”
“Tomorrow, then,” Zero says, continuing to run his fingers oh-so lightly over Blue’s face in aimless caressing patterns, tracing out all his features with tenderness until nowhere’s left untouched by it. It always makes Blue calm down in a way little else can. Zero loves these quiet stolen moments more than almost anything in the world, getting to lie there and softly stroke Blue’s face and hair and watch as it lulls him to sleep. There’s some strange and primal satisfaction in it, in being able to give him that — in being the cause of it, in knowing it’s his hands that have made the safety and peacefulness that settles over Blue’s live wire of a body. Like the brush of his fingertips have the power to make Blue look that way, as if he’s never known a moment’s unhappiness in his life, and never will.
(An ex had once told Zero, when they amicably decided to go their separate ways: ‘Don’t get me wrong, you’re a great guy and I’ve had a lot of fun, no hard feelings on my side. But you only have two gears — so hands-off and considerate it starts to get lonely after a while, or so hands-on in devotion it feels like you would make your way into my lungs and do my breathing for me if you could. And unfortunately that just ain’t my thing. I hope you find someone else one day whose thing it is, though. I bet there’ll be people who find that stuff the hot kinda freaky and intense.’ In hindsight, she might have put her finger uncomfortably close to some real shit there.)
Blue snuggles up to him with a sleepy snuffle. “Mmmhm, tomorrow.”
Normally Zero would happily let Blue drift off like that and then check out himself once he’s seen him settled, but there’s a small kernel of unease in Zero’s stomach, untouched by the pleasant post-coital haze that has overtaken every other part of his body. The idea of being alone with it while Blue is right there but unreachable makes a distant panic rise in his throat, so he can’t help but to say softly: “Blue?”
“Hm?” Blue’s eyes barely manage to slip back open enough to look at him, but with a valiant struggle he’s blinking quizzically. “Something wrong?”
“There are so many things I wanna say to you,” Zero says quietly. “I just… never have the words.”
“That’s alright,” Blue says, turning his face to kiss the tips of Zero’s wandering fingers, and then nestling his cheek comfortably into the palm of Zero’s hand, unheeding of the chill of the metal. “As always you underestimate yourself, though. You’re incredibly eloquent, for anyone who knows how to listen. People don’t appreciate devotion spelled out in blood as much as they used to in this day and age, but hey, that’s their loss, not mine, we don’t have to suffer under the galling lack of vision of our times if we don’t want to.”
Zero chuckles and runs his thumb down the bridge of Blue’s nose. “I guess… thanks. Is what I meant to say before. For the song. And everything. It was… it was good. I liked it.”
Blue stretches lazily and traces his fingers over a fresh hickey on his collarbone, eyes self-satisfied and half-lidded over it in a way that always makes Zero’s libido sit up straighter, with the same energy as someone absolutely about to eat a third slice of cake while loudly protesting ‘Oh, but I couldn’t possibly’, no matter how many orgasms in he is. “That’s great to hear, but to be honest with you I took the liberty of thinking of it as heavily implied. Like I said, you’re very eloquent to anyone who bothers to listen. Downright loquacious, even, in your more effusive moments.”
“I bet you say that to all your bodyguards.”
“Oh, you know. It’s a crowded field. Gotta keep you all sharp and motivated somehow.”
Zero strokes his foot up and down Blue’s skinny shin under the covers. In response Blue moves easily so their legs twine together more intimately. It’s nice. “You must have pulled some real project management magic on this, if you’ve been working on it that long and had the whole gang involved. I haven’t heard a peep from anyone.”
“You’d better not have, because that would mean a deal for a week straight of Ice Cream Nights up in flames for breach of contract,” Blue murmurs darkly. “And I owe them fixing up and upgrading the holoset until they can play their inane little games on them, but that shouldn’t be the work of more than a few hours. It’s all well and good, appealing to grand ideas and feelings and ideals, but in the end I find that it’s always the promise of tangible material reward that makes the great wheel of the world go around with the least amount of squeaking. Depressing, but true.”
It’s beautiful, really, to watch Blue make good use of the manipulative skillset he’d honed to get ahead in the brutal dog-eat-dog world of Imperial politics, in service of the only task more perilous and daunting: convincing a group of twelve children to all do something, anything, without choruses of complaints or at least fifteen rounds of heated negotiations first. Always heartening to see a man reconnect with his hobbies and interests.
Zero is forced to concede: “You’re certainly teaching them a lot about the way the world works.”
“If Aava covers the space magic and made-up-sounding cosmic nonsense, and you take the punching and stabbing, I’ll be the introduction to realpolitik. Between the three of us you’d be hard pressed to come up with a better curriculum to help them get ahead in life.”
“Oooh, we are going to kriff these kids up so bad, aren’t we,” Zero sighs. It’s not like it’s news, and this is probably just about the best outcome that could realistically have been hoped for, considering where the kids started out, but he feels like it bears mentioning sometimes anyway. As the three adults in the room — nominally, sometimes, in Blue’s case, perhaps, but still — they really are trying their best. It’s just that all their bests are pretty weird.
Philosophically, Blue says: “I mean, for real, to be sure, I think that’s all but inevitable, really. Worse so than anyone else raising children in the vast and tragic history of the world, though? I wonder, sometimes. It seems to be a process only the rare few can walk away from looking pretty. Too bad Synox isn’t here, really, since at baseline he’s the only one who actually enjoys imparting, I don’t know, life skills to the upcoming generations. Knots and knife work and… starting fires and such. Though only in constructive, educational, wholesome ways, which rather takes all the fun out of it as far as I’m concerned.”
“Is this about him not letting you hold a knife during that one Junior Troopers meeting, after you — ”
“No, no, that’s all in the past and better left forgotten, I’m not the kind of man to hold grudges.”
Zero outright guffaws and squeezes him tighter to him for a moment. “Wow, that’s the biggest kriffing lie you’ve ever told, Blue. Holding grudges is like, your very favourite thing, right after caf and mind games.”
“Caf, mind games, and you, in ascending order, don’t be spuriously modest here. But ah, you’re right, you know me so well. I’ve elected to let go of this particular grudge, though, so my point still stands.” Blue looks pleased to be held tightly, but also a little wistful around the edges. “I miss him, sometimes. Synox, I mean. He has this way of standing there looking handsomely boring and immovable and like everything’s going to be sorted out and OK in the end that’s… very reassuring.”
“Like the world is a sensible place and can be made to act accordingly? Yeah, he does give off that vibe. Which for my credits made him the craziest one out of all of us. You included.”
Blue rolls his eyes and kisses the underside of Zero’s jaw. “Har har.”
Unlike Blue and Aava, who both like to wax nostalgic about it sometimes as one of the few things they agree on, Zero does not miss Synox, exactly — not any more than he misses working for the Empire as a whole, however indirectly. But during his desperate search to track Blue down when he’d fallen from the always-treacherous ledge of Imperial grace and been imprisoned, Zero had found reason to infer the firm-but-fair-to-his-own hand of the Commander in the relatively gentle treatment Blue had received. And that’s the kind of debt a man can’t easily pay back, even given a whole lifetime to do so. Zero does owe him, if they ever cross paths again. The fact that Synox would probably rather die than receive repayment from an acknowledged traitor to the Empire — no matter how many times Zero pointed out that hey, it wasn’t the Empire signing his paycheck, he doesn’t see the breach of contract anywhere here — is barely a consolation.
The reason for which Zero would take on nigh on any debt stretches comfortably against him and says: “You know what, it… was good, working on music properly again, on a smaller sort of scale. Even though Aava is an asshole and armed Dar-Yen with maracas, a tambourine, castanets and a snare drum. Four arms, anger issues, and he can levitate three drum sticks with his magic brain-whatever-it-is powers and bring them down with frankly upsetting force. I wasn’t joking when I said you should put on something to protect your hearing before you listen to that cut, in case you were wondering.”
“Appreciate the warning.”
“A matter of basic sentient decency, frankly, even if I weren’t as personally fond of you as I am. Well. They seemed to have a lot of fun, anyway. I think I might have earned a few points there, which was sorely needed after the whole ‘no, I’m not giving you all robot arms like Zero’s, and for the last time the medical droid doesn’t do non-essential amputations so stop bothering him about it'-debacle last week. I think they think I’m slightly less uncool now, I’m scraping it back. Come to think of it, you could do some of your — sets, is that the right nomenclature, have I got that right? for them. I’m sure they’d love that.”
Zero chuckles. “Because they’re kids with terrible taste who love any old noise as long as it’s loud enough? Is that the implication here?”
“Hey now, I’ve made a point of being nice about this all night, don’t go putting words in my mouth now, I’ve been doing so well,” Blue laughs.
“Mhm, you have,” Zero agrees, curling his arm more firmly around him and kissing him softly on his smiling mouth.
Blue says airily: “There are so many more interesting things for you to put in my mouth, after all.”
“Well, I wasn’t gonna say it, but…”
Incredibly, there’s some heat in the look they exchange after that, though it’s definitely not going to translate to another round tonight. The spirit is not only willing but chomping at the bit, and yet regrettably the flesh is in desperate need of some hours of sleep before it can get up to anything about it. Well, Blue’s flesh is, anyway. Zero would consider it a skill issue, except that he can barely keep up with Blue’s reawakened libido as it is with mechanical assistance and fine-tuned control of his nervous system. He should probably thank his lucky stars for every advantage he’s got to work with here.
Through a yawn, Blue says: “I’m serious, though, I think they’d appreciate a dance party. They really were having the time of their lives, putting their twisted little hearts and souls into producing noise and some excited jigging around that I was assured was dancing, thank you very much. And that’s more your scene than mine, I’m big enough to admit it. I could help you set up some lights and stuff, though, if you’d like. We could use something on the horizon for them to look forward to, to help calm the masses whenever we have a… difficult week, morale-wise.”
“Always planning ahead, huh. Schemes within schemes. Now there’s the Blue I know.”
Blue gestures with a conspiratorial hand. “Ice cream and circuses, my friend. Ice cream and circuses. That’s the age-old trick to keeping a population happy. It’s easier to be fun than loved, if you cannot be both.”
Zero snorts. “Oh, Darth Spachiavelli, is it?”
“Certainly. He’s never been more relevant.”
“For the record — as far as I’m concerned, you’re both fun and loved, you don’t have to settle for one or the other.”
Blue’s mouth twitches up at one corner, his ears turning faintly pink. “I bet you say that to all your, um…”
“Hubristic boytoys?” Zero suggests, and Blue splutters an indignant laugh and squirms around in Zero’s embrace to be able to pinch his waist in retribution. “Pains-in-my-ass? Aged-out nerd boy kings?”
“I hereby officially retract everything nice I’ve ever said about you, I was clearly not in my right mind at the time, there’s gotta be some kind of insanity plea I could go for,” Blue grouses while audibly fighting not to crack up, pretending at wriggling out of Zero’s hold and beaming when Zero easily reels him back in.
Zero grins and carefully holds Blue’s head in place so they’re nose to muzzle, eye to eye. “Partners?” Blue’s eyes soften at that, and flutter half-closed when Zero gives him another kiss, this one lingering and sweet. He strokes his fingers down Blue’s flushed cheek as Blue bites at his lip afterwards. “Nah, I only got one of those, you’re getting it all to yourself. You’ve kind of cornered the market.”
“And I’m very glad to hear it. I’m a busy man these days, I don’t have the time to go around killing the competition.”
“Literally?”
“Hm. Again, these are your words, not mine, and I couldn’t possibly comment further without my lawyer present. I nominate Neph for the role, personally, I think she could get me off for murder, easy. So you are willing to be my co-conspirator in disco, then, is that what I’m hearing?”
“In disco, and in pretty much anything else you could throw at me at this point, I’m very sorry to say, even if that isn’t my genre any more than yours. We could totally put something together, though, it’s a good idea. It’s… kinda hard to bring variety into their days in this place, every little helps.” A thought strikes him, and in the full knowledge that he might be creating a monster here, he adds: “Hey, you know what might be fun? We could put on a little musical or something, let them actually, y’know. Participate in something, feel like they’re part of it.”
“You, my friend,” Blue says, one finger tapping lightly against Zero’s chest, his eyes glittering in a way that says Zero has created a monster, and yet he cannot bring himself to regret it for a moment, because a Blue in the radiance of a brand new scheme is the cutest monster he knows, “you are a kriffing visionary, and never let anyone tell you otherwise.”
“I try,” Zero says modestly.
“Not my usual style at all, but hey, I can always branch out. Never let it be said I’m a one trick varactyl, I’m always the first in line to reinvent myself when circumstances call for it.”
“Just… at least try to keep it under nine acts, huh. Or at least include an intermission, for the sake of everyone’s bladders.”
“Hmmmm,” Blue says, too lost in creative reverie to even pretend to be listening.
At least the availability of stringed instruments remains limited, Zero reasons. That should limit the potential damage to be wrought as well, surely. Surely.
“Much to think about,” Blue concludes dreamily. Resting his cheek against his hand on the pillow so he can contemplate Zero more comfortably, Blue adds after a while: “You are aware that I love you very much, yes?”
Zero smiles. “Mhm. I took the liberty of thinking of it as heavily implied.”
“Keep talking like that, and I’ll do a lot more than imply it,” Blue says, with the syntax of a threat and a look in his eyes that still makes Zero’s heart do absurd things in his chest.
“Oh nooo,” Zero says, brushing a few stray strands of hair out of Blue’s face. “That’s me sleeping with one eye open from now on, that’s for sure.”
Blue seems fully awake again now, and Zero would feel a little guilty for that, except that the comfort of Blue’s familiar sharp gaze calmly meeting his own is washing away the remaining unease that had niggled at him. It can be hard to tell with Blue, sometimes, but Zero thinks he probably picks up on it, because he studies Zero for another while and then, when Zero doesn’t say anything more, adjusts his head on the pillow again and says: “It was my mom who took me to my first proper concert, by the way. Did I ever tell you that? In hindsight I think it was probably because the nanny was down with something and no one could be bothered to make the call to get a replacement on such short notice, granted, but still. Best day of my life at the time, and for a long time after. I remember every moment of it. I’ve never listened to that symphony again, just in case that ruins it.”
Blue certainly talks all the time — incessantly, some might say; excessively, some definitely have said over the years and with some justification, though Zero’s never minded it himself. He likes hearing Blue’s voice, and simply tunes out whatever it is he’s talking about when it gets too much until it’s like the comforting background hum of a radio. But you have to listen really closely for a long time to realize how little Blue ever says about himself, with any kind of truth. He’s the master of the trick of chronically oversharing without ever actually sharing much of anything. This being so, and with the insatiable hunger he always has for the hidden-away corners of Blue’s soul he gets to have all to himself, Zero keeps quiet and listens now, hands stroking slowly over Blue’s skin while he speaks.
“She saw how much I loved it, I think. I don’t know how, she didn’t really know me very well, we didn’t spend that much time together even then. But then again she was my mother, and they’re supposed to be able to know these things, I guess. In the speeder on the way home she told me… she said something like ‘It’s okay to like beautiful things. Everyone needs some way to unwind. It’s fine to love these things, as long as you remember that at the end of the day they’re irrelevant. Don’t get distracted.’”
“How old were you?” Zero asks, with a sneaking suspicion the answer is going to be upsetting.
“Hm? Oh, four or five, I believe, and absolutely insufferable about it, I’m sure.”
Zero sighs. “Well, yeah, I know I’ve had to tell you this many times before, but it bears repeating: your family was weird as fuck, dude.”
“Isn’t every family, once you look at it closely enough? I’ve gathered enough blackmail in my time, I should know.” If Blue were inclined to be cruel, he might point out that Zero hasn’t spoken to his sister for close to fifteen years now. Over the years Zero has grown to realize that while it’s not like Blue doesn’t have a mean streak in general, he usually doesn’t intend for it to come out in their relationship. At his worst he can be self-absorbed and thoughtless and neurotically shitty in a whole heap of other ways that can almost be more hurtful than malice might have been, but when the door to the rest of the world is closed and it’s just the two of them there’s only been one time he meant to truly wound. And honestly, under the circumstances and with the set of assumptions he’d been working from, Zero can’t really begrudge him that one.
“Some more so than others, but yeah, I guess you have a point.”
Blue picks at a particularly threadbare section of the sheets — damn, Zero has got to remember to pick up some new bedclothes next time he goes out on a job, he keeps meaning to. New clothes for the kids come first, of course, the little kriffers keep growing like weeds every time you turn your back on them for half a second. But Zero would really like to be able to bury his face in the sheets and only smell Blue, without the underlying faint hint of old mildew that even multiple rounds in the sonic washer haven’t been able to get out completely.
“Credit for your thoughts?” Zero says.
Glancing at him, Blue says, in the tones of a confession: “Sometimes I catch myself wondering if they’d be proud of me. Which is a stupid thing to wonder, because I already know they wouldn’t be, of course. They never were. But especially now, when I’ve managed to become a multidimensional failure in ways they couldn’t even have conceived of as possible at the time. Not only did I not build on what they left me, I lost the whole shebang. The title, the patents, our whole house — the very name, as far as most of the galaxy cares. Plunged back into even deeper obscurity than when I found it.” He trails off, looking like he just realized he maybe went a bit deeper with that than he’d meant to, and makes an admirable show of rallying by waving a dismissive hand and adding: “Well. That’s the thing with gambling high; you gotta accept the stakes when you lose, too. Excelling at being the family disappointment is a kind of achievement, if you look at it from a certain angle. More of a rakish vibe than what I was going for initially, but I can work with it. Just have to continue to update my fashion choices accordingly, this is all extremely salvageable.”
Zero watches him — the fall of his hair over the pillow, the troubled set of his eyebrows, despite the levity and bravado he tries to force into his tone, his thin shoulders — almost desperate with tenderness. It lives in his chest like a wild thing, like something that comes savagely alive under the moon. He says: “I don’t know if this makes any difference with that at all, but… Blue, you know I’m proud of you, right?”
The sheer space deer-in-the-headlights wideness that comes over Blue’s eyes at that makes Zero ache from the depths of his soul to the tips of his fingers. He wraps Blue’s suddenly very still but unresisting frame up in his arms, cradles him so close and strokes his hair as he feels his shoulder grow damp. Blue slowly, wordlessly winds his arms around him in turn and holds on tight as he trembles.
“I’m so glad you’re here, you little nerd,” Zero whispers into Blue’s hair, and Blue laughs a little wetly and tucks his face into the curve of Zero’s neck.
— — —
“Hey, Aav’ — ” Zero begins.
“Uh-huh,” Aava says, not even looking up from her book as she extends a hand holding a tightly-written piece of flimsy. “Here’s my list of demands. I mean, my wishlist. And between you and me, it’s the least I karking deserve. We had a violin string snapping incident where I had to talk him down from the ledge of hysteria for one and a half hours. There isn’t enough tastefully sultry lingerie in the galaxy to make up for it, but I’ll have some nevertheless, if you don’t mind.”
Zero grins, taking the flimsy and giving a lazy mock-salute with his other hand. “You’ve got it, ma’am. Anything for you.”