Title Prompt: Lost at the Beginning
Dec. 6th, 2018 12:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanerontheinsideoriginal post
A followup to Lost at the Beginning
A bit of backstory here for an oc I’m introducing in the frankenau soon— @skyywalkerfen *waves*. Also, @ladyteldra you sent me another title meme that’s a pair to this after I’d already started, so I’ll probably do her return. I was going to write her ‘report’ to the Council, after a ten-year absence.
On the first day, Liura washes her face and looks up at her reflection in the dirty fresher’s mirror. I’m free. She turns the words over in her mouth without speaking them, rolls them over her tongue. They taste like… nothing.
She knows this lie-that-is-not. Her Master has no hold over her, and never did. Liura was never not free, and all her shackles were self-made. Or are. She’s only traded one set for another, and powerless uncertainty seems the crueler of her Masters.
She’s standing in a bombed-out shell of a building, washing her face over the leaky remnants of a dusty, grimy sink. What right has she to freedom, on a world where that very concept is a triviality lost to war and death and disease? She has never been anyone’s slave.
Nor is she truly able to help anyone, with what she is doing. Every effort she makes is a drop into a raging current. She’s only a passable Healer because there aren’t enough Healers here; which is to say, there are no Healers here. Not on this street, not in district, not in this particular city of modern ruins. The nearest hospital—reasonably intact, un-looted, deemed safe for patients—is hours away. Liura has the Force and a cobbled together collection of knowledge, and where all else fails, the Force will provide. It’s better than nothing, at least.
It’s achingly frustrating. Even a drop in a bottomless well is not nothing, Liura remembers, and yet she cannot make the words mean/i> anything in her head. They’re useless. She feels like—
nothing
—she’s been untethered and set adrift. But then, that happened long before she’d left the Order.
A bombed out hospital is better than nothing, she decides. It’s an… interesting idea, to put it diplomatically. Liura is, at least, not an idiot. Breaking a biohazard containment field, releasing gods-only-know what contaminants into the air, organic or carcinogenic-chemical—anything is possible. But she’s completely numb to the thought as she clambers into the still-standing structure over the wreckage, and makes her way around, assessing stability and just how much of a bare effort someone would have to put into this place to make it work.
Bless the bastards who put her in that mangled room in the hotel, there’s hot water for the shower. It’s sun-heated, in great big rooftop drums painted black. Liura sits under the stream that night for hours, shivering, contemplating the fact that she’d walked past several death traps, near-brushes with utterly lethal doses of tissue-sample fixing material (her head still aches, and her stomach is half-heartedly trying to crawl up her throat), and probably a broken growth-plate of flesh-eating bacteria. For a person who doesn’t really want to die, Liura thinks, she sure picked a strange way to spend her day. Honestly, being here at all is just asking for a crack at some new and improved superstrain of disease. Her immune system had not been without problems even back in the crèche.
Let it be said that I am many things, Liura thinks. An idiot, stupid, reckless—though she’s not sure about that last, since, after all, she wasn’t doing it for a rush—but she is also absolutely, numbly single-minded. Already, she’s turning over the problem of setting up the hospital again in her head. The damage isn’t nearly as bad as she’d expected, and what she needs won’t take that much effort to get.
She wanders a little ways outside her district the next day. Most don’t mind. Gossip says she’s a Jedi, a Healer. Liura knows they’re all aware of what she is: one person who can’t hope to help anybody. Some of them can probably even tell how young she is. But at the same time, she does help. She’s about to try to do more, if she can, if the Force knows anything like mercy.
As far as smugglers go, of all the ones of Liura’s personal acquaintance, Gorzo is her favourite. He’s as ruthless as he’s filthy-rich. He cuts an imposing figure, but the ostentatious hemming of his clothes in glittering metal is utterly tasteless. The feel of him in the Force never fails to draw Liura in on the prowl.
No matter what her vantage point, or how long she follows him, she never has to force a confrontation: he always knows exactly where she is. So even now, seated in lotus with an elbow on her knee and chin in hand some two storeys above him in a very effective sniper’s nest, Liura knows there’s a prickling in his back and his breathing’s gone a little bit deeper, preparing for a sprint in this heat. Too bad she can outrun Duros even in their natural gravitational conditions.
He’s still fucking terrified of her. That’s good.
Liura doesn’t bother to hide her grin. “Selling that shit to people who have barely have anything to pay with?”
Gorzo turns around and grins back up at her, sickly sweet. “Oh, come on. You know you can’t help them, Little Miss Patron Saint of Lost Causes. I can, though. Make them forget their pain, let them go in peace.”
Liura raises an eyebrow at him. “Taken up a new religion, have you? Your next shipment is timed to land after this load runs out, isn’t it. Half of them will die shivering in the sewers.”
Gorzo shrugs. “I wouldn’t know a thing about that.”
“Of course.”
Liura detaches herself from the fire escape and vaults over the rusted railing, landing and taking the bastard down with her in a brutal roll. Probably sprained something of his, if she didn’t break some bones.
“Does Gardulla know you’re skimming off her profits?”
Gorzo freezes under her, trapped in a lock that’s probably painful. His men aren’t shooting, either, which means they’re smart enough to know they’ll hit their boss first and her—just maybe. Then again she did just dive off a roof in an arc worthy of a jai’galaar, so perhaps they’re less smart than simply not dumb.
“I’ll let her know, shall I? I’m sure her pet would appreciate a nice fresh snack,” Liura says softly, leaning in close to his ear and completely enjoying the taste of his fear in the Force. “One as well cared-for as a rich man, in this galaxy. I’ll bet you’re just delicious.”
“What do you want?” Gorzo rasps, and Liura is yet again reminded what a genuine pleasure it is to work with this bastard.
She gives him her list, and a commcode, and a code for a secure digital mailbox for good measure. “Beg, borrow, steal, or give me the name of someone who can get the items you can’t.”
“In exchange for what,” Gorzo still has the balls to ask, and Liura doesn’t quite laugh at him, but it takes an effort.
“Not dying in a sarlacc’s maw?”
She knows what he’s getting at, though. Blackmail is an acceptable way of ensuring business gets done, but not that much more than once. Her previous engagements with smugglers or bounty hunters were less about blackmail and more about mutual assistance, or sometimes just petty revenge. But he must know that she’s got as much to her name here as anyone else on this Force-forsaken world.
Liura sighs. “Fine, I guess—watch yourself around the Celanon spur. There’s been some weird shit in that area. If you get flagged down by Judicial and they order you to stand down and be boarded—they’re not Judicial, you will lose your cargo, and maybe part of your crew.”
Those bright red eyes snap up and focus on her with razor-sharp intensity. “Li, if you have a way to collect more tips like that, they’d be worth a lot more than this list.” Then he flashes a wide, wild grin. “But I already knew that one.”
Liura knows she’s not imagining the whiff of arousal laced with fear in the Force as he saunters off. That man’s kinks are going to get him killed someday, she thinks, with just a touch of fondness. Not that she’s one to judge, not when her own tastes probably skew far left of ‘safe’, but Gorzo isn’t exactly careful. He’s of the school of thought that says planning and precaution take away from pleasure, but he’s otherwise mostly quite intelligent.
Only mostly. Having a soft spot for a Jedi-trained child with too many jagged edges that doesn’t even need a lightsaber to rip out somebody’s throat—that doesn’t fit into any sense of smart that Liura can imagine. She’ll have to thank him, all the same, for giving her a hint of how to survive this fucking pit that the Senate calls ‘acceptable living standards’, and dismisses with ‘it could be worse’—like that makes it easier for the starving kids and shuffling corpses in the streets.
For now, though, she needs a functional terminal with Holonet connection, and maybe a friend in Judicial wouldn’t go amiss.
Gorzo sends her five different contacts within the next month. For a moment, Liura stares at the screen and wonders what in the entire fuck she’s supposed to do with homing missiles and seismic charges—that’s a hell of a set, by the way—and then realises that she’s just facilitating an exchange between two different smugglers bringing her medical supplies and construction materials for the repairs.
“Oh, fuck you,” she spits at her screen, then takes a swig of the local, utterly wretched rum and thinks about it. There… really isn’t another way. It’s either both of those things, or neither, and she needs both.
Fine. But she is going to own Gorzo’s arse for this shit.
And everyone else’s, for that matter.
*dreamwidth-based migration note: I'm not sure this is actually applicable to the larger au, and had my doubts even as I wrote it. That's the trouble, though, with building an original character on their own and then slipping them into other self-contained works—they tend to mutate significantly. Is she or isn't she herself anymore, that is the question.
ladyteldra said: Title Prompt: Lost at the Beginning
A followup to Lost at the Beginning
A bit of backstory here for an oc I’m introducing in the frankenau soon— @skyywalkerfen *waves*. Also, @ladyteldra you sent me another title meme that’s a pair to this after I’d already started, so I’ll probably do her return. I was going to write her ‘report’ to the Council, after a ten-year absence.
On the first day, Liura washes her face and looks up at her reflection in the dirty fresher’s mirror. I’m free. She turns the words over in her mouth without speaking them, rolls them over her tongue. They taste like… nothing.
She knows this lie-that-is-not. Her Master has no hold over her, and never did. Liura was never not free, and all her shackles were self-made. Or are. She’s only traded one set for another, and powerless uncertainty seems the crueler of her Masters.
She’s standing in a bombed-out shell of a building, washing her face over the leaky remnants of a dusty, grimy sink. What right has she to freedom, on a world where that very concept is a triviality lost to war and death and disease? She has never been anyone’s slave.
Nor is she truly able to help anyone, with what she is doing. Every effort she makes is a drop into a raging current. She’s only a passable Healer because there aren’t enough Healers here; which is to say, there are no Healers here. Not on this street, not in district, not in this particular city of modern ruins. The nearest hospital—reasonably intact, un-looted, deemed safe for patients—is hours away. Liura has the Force and a cobbled together collection of knowledge, and where all else fails, the Force will provide. It’s better than nothing, at least.
It’s achingly frustrating. Even a drop in a bottomless well is not nothing, Liura remembers, and yet she cannot make the words mean/i> anything in her head. They’re useless. She feels like—
nothing
—she’s been untethered and set adrift. But then, that happened long before she’d left the Order.
A bombed out hospital is better than nothing, she decides. It’s an… interesting idea, to put it diplomatically. Liura is, at least, not an idiot. Breaking a biohazard containment field, releasing gods-only-know what contaminants into the air, organic or carcinogenic-chemical—anything is possible. But she’s completely numb to the thought as she clambers into the still-standing structure over the wreckage, and makes her way around, assessing stability and just how much of a bare effort someone would have to put into this place to make it work.
Bless the bastards who put her in that mangled room in the hotel, there’s hot water for the shower. It’s sun-heated, in great big rooftop drums painted black. Liura sits under the stream that night for hours, shivering, contemplating the fact that she’d walked past several death traps, near-brushes with utterly lethal doses of tissue-sample fixing material (her head still aches, and her stomach is half-heartedly trying to crawl up her throat), and probably a broken growth-plate of flesh-eating bacteria. For a person who doesn’t really want to die, Liura thinks, she sure picked a strange way to spend her day. Honestly, being here at all is just asking for a crack at some new and improved superstrain of disease. Her immune system had not been without problems even back in the crèche.
Let it be said that I am many things, Liura thinks. An idiot, stupid, reckless—though she’s not sure about that last, since, after all, she wasn’t doing it for a rush—but she is also absolutely, numbly single-minded. Already, she’s turning over the problem of setting up the hospital again in her head. The damage isn’t nearly as bad as she’d expected, and what she needs won’t take that much effort to get.
She wanders a little ways outside her district the next day. Most don’t mind. Gossip says she’s a Jedi, a Healer. Liura knows they’re all aware of what she is: one person who can’t hope to help anybody. Some of them can probably even tell how young she is. But at the same time, she does help. She’s about to try to do more, if she can, if the Force knows anything like mercy.
As far as smugglers go, of all the ones of Liura’s personal acquaintance, Gorzo is her favourite. He’s as ruthless as he’s filthy-rich. He cuts an imposing figure, but the ostentatious hemming of his clothes in glittering metal is utterly tasteless. The feel of him in the Force never fails to draw Liura in on the prowl.
No matter what her vantage point, or how long she follows him, she never has to force a confrontation: he always knows exactly where she is. So even now, seated in lotus with an elbow on her knee and chin in hand some two storeys above him in a very effective sniper’s nest, Liura knows there’s a prickling in his back and his breathing’s gone a little bit deeper, preparing for a sprint in this heat. Too bad she can outrun Duros even in their natural gravitational conditions.
He’s still fucking terrified of her. That’s good.
Liura doesn’t bother to hide her grin. “Selling that shit to people who have barely have anything to pay with?”
Gorzo turns around and grins back up at her, sickly sweet. “Oh, come on. You know you can’t help them, Little Miss Patron Saint of Lost Causes. I can, though. Make them forget their pain, let them go in peace.”
Liura raises an eyebrow at him. “Taken up a new religion, have you? Your next shipment is timed to land after this load runs out, isn’t it. Half of them will die shivering in the sewers.”
Gorzo shrugs. “I wouldn’t know a thing about that.”
“Of course.”
Liura detaches herself from the fire escape and vaults over the rusted railing, landing and taking the bastard down with her in a brutal roll. Probably sprained something of his, if she didn’t break some bones.
“Does Gardulla know you’re skimming off her profits?”
Gorzo freezes under her, trapped in a lock that’s probably painful. His men aren’t shooting, either, which means they’re smart enough to know they’ll hit their boss first and her—just maybe. Then again she did just dive off a roof in an arc worthy of a jai’galaar, so perhaps they’re less smart than simply not dumb.
“I’ll let her know, shall I? I’m sure her pet would appreciate a nice fresh snack,” Liura says softly, leaning in close to his ear and completely enjoying the taste of his fear in the Force. “One as well cared-for as a rich man, in this galaxy. I’ll bet you’re just delicious.”
“What do you want?” Gorzo rasps, and Liura is yet again reminded what a genuine pleasure it is to work with this bastard.
She gives him her list, and a commcode, and a code for a secure digital mailbox for good measure. “Beg, borrow, steal, or give me the name of someone who can get the items you can’t.”
“In exchange for what,” Gorzo still has the balls to ask, and Liura doesn’t quite laugh at him, but it takes an effort.
“Not dying in a sarlacc’s maw?”
She knows what he’s getting at, though. Blackmail is an acceptable way of ensuring business gets done, but not that much more than once. Her previous engagements with smugglers or bounty hunters were less about blackmail and more about mutual assistance, or sometimes just petty revenge. But he must know that she’s got as much to her name here as anyone else on this Force-forsaken world.
Liura sighs. “Fine, I guess—watch yourself around the Celanon spur. There’s been some weird shit in that area. If you get flagged down by Judicial and they order you to stand down and be boarded—they’re not Judicial, you will lose your cargo, and maybe part of your crew.”
Those bright red eyes snap up and focus on her with razor-sharp intensity. “Li, if you have a way to collect more tips like that, they’d be worth a lot more than this list.” Then he flashes a wide, wild grin. “But I already knew that one.”
Liura knows she’s not imagining the whiff of arousal laced with fear in the Force as he saunters off. That man’s kinks are going to get him killed someday, she thinks, with just a touch of fondness. Not that she’s one to judge, not when her own tastes probably skew far left of ‘safe’, but Gorzo isn’t exactly careful. He’s of the school of thought that says planning and precaution take away from pleasure, but he’s otherwise mostly quite intelligent.
Only mostly. Having a soft spot for a Jedi-trained child with too many jagged edges that doesn’t even need a lightsaber to rip out somebody’s throat—that doesn’t fit into any sense of smart that Liura can imagine. She’ll have to thank him, all the same, for giving her a hint of how to survive this fucking pit that the Senate calls ‘acceptable living standards’, and dismisses with ‘it could be worse’—like that makes it easier for the starving kids and shuffling corpses in the streets.
For now, though, she needs a functional terminal with Holonet connection, and maybe a friend in Judicial wouldn’t go amiss.
Gorzo sends her five different contacts within the next month. For a moment, Liura stares at the screen and wonders what in the entire fuck she’s supposed to do with homing missiles and seismic charges—that’s a hell of a set, by the way—and then realises that she’s just facilitating an exchange between two different smugglers bringing her medical supplies and construction materials for the repairs.
“Oh, fuck you,” she spits at her screen, then takes a swig of the local, utterly wretched rum and thinks about it. There… really isn’t another way. It’s either both of those things, or neither, and she needs both.
Fine. But she is going to own Gorzo’s arse for this shit.
And everyone else’s, for that matter.
*dreamwidth-based migration note: I'm not sure this is actually applicable to the larger au, and had my doubts even as I wrote it. That's the trouble, though, with building an original character on their own and then slipping them into other self-contained works—they tend to mutate significantly. Is she or isn't she herself anymore, that is the question.
